Wearing the world lightly

From the moment of birth, your body is the vessel that determines your interface with life.

How the world treats you is often determined not by the fullness of your humanity but by the attributes of your body: its perceived abilities, its gender, its race, its size, its appearance. Under capitalism, the body becomes the first and primary battlefield. In astrology, the 1st house speaks to this embodied reality, reflecting how ease or difficulty in movement through the world is shaped not only by the self but also by systemic power structures. The 1st house doesn’t just describe who you are, it describes how you move through the world.

All the other houses in the chart are described in relationship to the 1st. When our understanding of the 1st house is distorted—if it is shackled to the myths of capitalism—the self becomes a product rather than a presence; something to be packaged, optimized, and sold. Identity is no longer a lived experience but a performance dictated by market value. Who you are is no longer something to be experienced by others, but something to be signaled through your purchasing decisions.

Subverting the 1st house isn’t just about reclaiming your presence; it’s about disrupting the demand for legibility and refusing to be flattened into something marketable. It’s the act of slipping through the cracks and intentionally unsettling the gaze that seeks to define you.

The key distortion in the 1st house is the body as a commodity, rather than something sacred. Health itself is treated, under capitalism, like something that can be purchased through solutions to problems (often caused or exacerbated by capitalism’s demands on the body), rather than cultivating health in a holistic sense that prevents problems from occurring in the 1st place. Subversion here begins by rejecting the idea that the body must conform to external standards of worth or utility. The 1st house reminds us that embodiment is sacred and unique, not a project to be fixed, and that individual health is public health.

The traditional significations of the 1st house—constitution, vitality, and presence—tell us as much about the physical experience of being as they do about the spirit inhabiting it. Mercury rejoices in the 1st house, indicating that you have the ability to shape-shift, decode, and reframe reality through your presence alone. Capitalism knows this, and is threatened by this, and thus works tirelessly to separate us from our bodies and our selves.

The body is a battlefield, as we’ve established, because our physical form is the first thing capitalism weaponizes against us. Real-life examples of this include labor expectations (the 40 hour work week as both a triumph of unions and an unreasonable access point to a living wage), desirability politics, ableism, gender discrimination, violence against trans folks, racialization, and medical exploitation—not to mention the myriad intersections of these phenomena.

And, at the same damn time, the body is an access point, and therefore our key to shifting reality. Language, identity, embodiment, the unseen ways the body is constantly receiving and processing information are all practices in fluidity, and through this, we gain access to different realms of power.

Mercurial Realms of Power

As I mentioned before, the first house is the entry point to the chart. It’s where you step into existence, where you became physically separate and perceivable: the moment of your birth. The body is not just a static thing, though; it’s a gateway to other realities. Mercury rules over crossroads and liminal spaces—basically, any in-between place where transformation occurs. The body is also one of those places.

Mercury, in typical form, offers us a variety of loopholes, ways to resist while also complying maliciously in the face of fascism: masking, mimicry, tone switching, and quick adaptation can all act as a survival strategy and a way to subvert power.

Disclaimer: subverting capitalism is not for perfectionists. You will have to get your hands dirty, make imperfect action, and engage directly with the institutions and systems you wish to dissolve. Subversion, in this context, is not for those who aspire to a more morally perfect version of anti-capitalism. It will require you to hold many conflicting truths at once, and even embody them, so buckle up and get into your body.

Queering the Binary of Identity

Mercury is nonbinary in every sense of the word, and rejoices in the 1st house because Mercury understands that who you are and how you appear are not always the same thing. This is a key lesson in masking as both a tool of oppression and a tool of subversion.

Masking for survival includes things like neurodivergent masking, code-switching, and professionalism. These are all modes of interacting with power structures in order to create safety for yourself, especially if your body or your identities place you in an “other” category within the particular power structure you’re interfacing with. Neurodivergent masking is a survival mechanism under capitalism which basically involves “acting like a person,” which is to say, outwardly conforming to the behavioral and/or social expectations of the environment you find yourself in. Changing your tone, body language, or behavior in this case is a strategic choice to avoid being penalized or ostracized or humiliated in a social setting. Similar, but not identical to this is code-switching, a method employed to navigate power structures, but most specifically, racist power structures and white supremacy. In a very Mercurial fashion, this involves changing your language, dialect, syntax, or vocal expression.

Professionalism is a set of standards within capitalism that are rooted in white supremacy and exist to make us compliant with capitalism’s expectations. The forced performance of politeness, “corporate speak” devoid of emotional vulnerability, dress codes that feel like costumes, and (often unspoken) social norms are all ways of signaling that you are compliant; you know the rules, and you follow them like a good little worker.

Under capitalism, even the trickster must put on a costume and dance for their dinner. Mercury may be employed for nefarious purposes, but they also have access to deeply powerful methods of subversion.

Masking works as a subversive strategy as well as a survival strategy because if capitalism forces us to perform for survival, Mercury can use that same logic against it. The subversion here is masking to infiltrate, to confuse, to redirect power, and to guide the uninitiated through the process of waking up to capitalism’s insidiousness.

Being the trickster in the system is about the ability to blend in, get close, and then disrupt. This strategy has been employed to dismantle leftist spaces from the inside out, mostly through online discourse, and I think it’s high time we turn the tables on that. As the current US administration becomes increasingly hostile toward queer and trans people, the ability to “hide your queerness in plain sight” is an excellent Mercurial subversion of capitalism’s standards. This concept is why I’m okay with being read as heterosexual, even by other queer people, simply because I am a woman who is married to a man.

You don’t have to employ subversion in the same ways I do, so I’m not suggesting you personally need to camouflage your queerness. You also don’t need to have a queer or otherwise marginalized identity in order to partake in subversion. The biggest key to wielding subversion correctly is understanding context. In some contexts, it makes more sense to be visibly queer or trans or neurodivergent or poor or what have you. In other contexts, it makes more sense to fly under the radar. Developing that type of situational awareness allows you to flex your Mercury muscle and enter different rooms (AKA gain access) with greater ease.

The same goes for neurodivergent masking. As someone who is autistic and also white, this is a type of masking I happen to have the privilege of turning off in many situations, if I so choose. The line between “normalizing xyz identity” and “exposing yourself to danger” is incredibly fluid and constantly changing, which is why I must emphasize the importance of situational context and a nuanced understanding of your environment.

Queering the very binary of identity scrambles the script capitalism relies upon: the body is expected to be legible—meaning easily read. It should be easy to decipher the kind of body you have ,and extrapolate from that the type of person you are, with only a cursory glance: you’re either productive or unproductive, man or woman, gay or straight, disabled or able-bodied. Mercury’s ability to be both and neither and something else entirely all at the same time is exactly the type of subversive confusion we need to be directing at oppressive power structures right now.

Chaos & Infiltration

As a Libra rising, one of my other favorite methods of subversion is playing the fool to reveal the truth. Using humor, satire, feigned ignorance, or straight up playing dumb can often come in hand when you need to expose contradictions within a power structure or organization. Sometimes there’s a benefit to people in power not knowing just how intelligent you are.

Remember that you get to have fun with this. Refusing legibility where it serves oppression is fun! Chaos magic is fun! Resisting categorization and orderliness while embodying nuance flies in the face of the black-and-white thinking which underscores white supremacy and capitalism. Mercury’s retrograde again? Take advantage of technological glitches by committing time theft for the greater good while you’re on the clock, or “accidentally” lose a file that throws a wrench in the corporate machine or slows down an oppressive bureaucratic process—only if you’re able to do so without jeopardizing your own livelihood, of course.

Benevolent infiltration through professionalism and code-switching—moving between different ideologies or spaces— can also be a method of securing valuable resources that are often gatekept or difficult to access. This is your friend who puts on their professionalism costume to work a corporate job with benefits, but uses their access to healthcare to help those in their community without the same access they have. Benevolent infiltration does run the risk of veering into saviorism, however—not all power structures need to “dismantled from the inside out.” Some of them you can just burn down from the outside.

Gaining access to institutional knowledge, power, or resources, and then redistributing them is the core of benevolent infiltration. Some more examples of this include:

• QTPOC occupying academia or government spaces to redirect resources to their communities
• Radical organizers taking positions in nonprofit or NGO sectors to funnel money and infrastructure to grassroots movements
• Mutual aid networks that bypass government bureaucracy entirely
• Consent-based economies (think gift economies, barter systems, lending libraries)
• Community land trusts that remove property from the speculative market
• Worker cooperatives that provide income without corporate exploitation

Moving between worlds with intention means choosing when and how to engage with institutions, when to disengage, and when to create newer, more equitable systems. This is a radical act in a capitalist society that demands total participation and engagement. Capitalism wants you to believe that opting out is impossible, but what if we only step in when it benefits the greater good, and step out when it doesn’t?

Take Hermes, patron saint of capitalist loopholes, for example: as a newborn, Hermes immediately stole Apollo’s cattle, disguised their tracks, and then lied about it with a straight face. Instead of smiting this literal baby, Zeus was so amused that he made Hermes a god of trade, thieves, and messengers. Hermes literally changed the rules of ownership by tricking Apollo into trading his own stolen cattle for a lyre. Instead of being punished, he talked his way into power, securing his spot on Olympus. Hermes embodies capitalism’s biggest fear: the ability to move through power structures and rewrite the rules.

The Gateway to Subversion

To work with Mercury is to embrace contradiction, to move between worlds, to refuse easy categorization. This is why Mercury rejoices in the 1st house—because the very act of existing, of stepping into the world in a body, is already an exercise in navigating power structures.

Mercury’s power is not in destruction for its own sake, but in disruption; not in rigid opposition, but in maneuverability. Capitalism relies on the assumption that identity and movement through the world are fixed and predictable and binary. Mercury dissolves these assumptions.

Subversion doesn’t always look like a raised fist. It can also look like a smirk, an intentional misinterpretation, a well-placed silence. It can be a refusal to clarify, a decision to blend in until the moment is right to disrupt. It can be the choice to take power’s tools and turn them against it.

This is why Mercury is the perfect gateway planet into a practice of subversion. The first lesson Mercury teaches is that nothing is as solid as it seems. Identities shift, realities bend, systems that seem immutable can be infiltrated and dismantled. The trick is knowing when to play along, when to slip through, and when to walk away entirely.

If capitalism demands obedience, Mercury whispers loopholes into our ears. And if capitalism insists that the world can only be one way, Mercury gestures to the crossroads and reminds us: There are always more paths than the ones we’ve been shown.

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