This thread – a great thread which has been around for a long time now – already offers argument and testimonial against the common notion that Mercury somehow doesn’t work well in Pisces. But allow me to add to it...
As a Virgo rising and Gemini Midheaven, my Pisces Mercury is of central importance in my chart. Just one degree off my descendant, it sits square to Saturn (within one degree), and Neptune (within nine degrees), making it the base of a wide t-square that winds up having real power in my chart due to it’s very close alignment with my angular cusps. To many an eye my Mercury is badly placed, and given it’s centrality in my chart we might think that would bode very poorly for my life.
And yet I’m an Ivy League trained PhD and a working professor. While it’s true that all academics focus on certain fields over others, and my smarts aren’t equal in all areas, I’m serious when I say that I’d put my raw intelligence up against anybody’s in the world. (Which I say, of course, purely for the sake of astrological inquiry and not at all out of some Arian boasting!)
I’m going to say that if the Piscean Mercury starts out essentially musical and metaphor-minded, in it’s great flexibility and (maybe more correctly) receptivity, it can be disciplined and trained, shown the ways of solid structure, empirical observation and hard analysis. Underneath these things, always, the Pisces mercury will be singing the universe to light, dancing endlessly through oceans of ambiguity and symbolism, synthesizing the component pieces to reveal the oneness of everything. But to communicate what it sees I think the Piscean Mercury can learn any language, including Logic, Rigor, Stuffy and Math (which at a certain level actually starts to look very mystical).
I really like what Oddity is doing just a few posts above this one. Great stuff! I’ve long wanted to write something about Gemini as the first sign of distinction/duality, and how that connects it so intimately with language. (Though it’s probably already written somewhere, by a real astrologer…) Language is only made possible in the act of distinguishing concepts, and distinguishing the squiggles and sounds we use to signify those concepts. The difference between “cat” and “cut” is only a slight squiggle in the second letter, but that distinction allows us to envision two separate concepts in our mind. And so, with each distinction, a whole system of language grows.
When we turn to Virgo, Mercury again is cutting, parsing out and making distinctions. Here the mind is less focused on the pure form of ideas, as it is in Gemini, and more on the practical. Science applied. But still, essentially, Virgo is making distinctions. Analysis is actually the act of taking a whole and parsing it out into smaller component parts. It’s the opposite of the Piscean/Neptunian impulse to synthesize and dissolve distinctions: to take component parts and see them as a whole -- a whole the sum of which is greater than the parts.
Looked at that way, Mercury’s basic nature seems at odds with Neptune, for sure, and as byjove and Oddity suggest, seemingly Jupiter as well. But why be satisfied to think the mind is working best when it’s dissecting and making distinctions, analyzing and bringing clarity to our language? Don’t our minds also and equally need to synthesize? To merge together? To create ambiguity in murky symbolism?
The Piscean mind is musical because music is symphonic. If you tear apart a symphony, or even a pop song, into it’s individual tracks and play them one by one, you’ve actually killed the song. Or at least reduced it to something less. The human mind analyses, yes. But the human mind also has to merge together in symphonic harmony.
The Piscean mind is sympathetic because the human capacity for sympathy is a dissolution of the mental space between us --- a momentary merging of our emotional lives. Yes, we are each separate individuals, with our own unique psyches. But we don’t actually exist in emotional isolation. The merest love, the merest friendship, or even just the involuntary twinge of pain we feel when we walk by somebody else in pain, reminds us of that.
Yes, we need clear language and sharp argument to spell a thesis out to us systematically. But we also need poetry – waves of symbols that merge together in ways we can feel but never entirely explain – to grasp why this or that thesis really matters in our lives.
Mercury in Pisces is of a different nature than the essentially distinction-oriented nature of Gemini or Virgo, but human life does require we have both, and balance, those mental natures. To my mind, it’s not actually about Mercury fitting “poorly” or “well.”
And again, I'd strongly suggest that whatever lack in rigor, structure, discipline, distinction-making or practicality we may think Pisces Mercury suffers from, it's well equipped to simply absorb that trait and make it a part of it's own nature.