Mutable

Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces

The mutable signs close each season and hand it to the next. That is the part of the year when the weather cannot decide what it is doing, and the temperament follows.

Gemini adapts through information, Virgo through adjustment and improvement, Sagittarius through movement, Pisces through dissolving the boundary altogether.

They are the translators of the zodiac, and the ones most comfortable with a situation that is still moving.

What They Are For

Mutable signs handle change without distress and are the most useful people present when circumstances shift halfway through something.

They are also the natural mediators between fixed positions, largely because they hold their own positions loosely enough to see both.

A chart with no mutable placements can start and sustain and will handle a change of plan badly.

The Cost

Committing to one shape is genuinely difficult. A mutable sign will adapt to a situation that ought to be refused, and will adjust itself rather than insist the situation adjust.

The accommodation is often invisible even to the person doing it, which is what makes it costly. Nothing is being conceded dramatically; it simply keeps happening.

The corresponding pattern is a great deal of flexibility and a quiet uncertainty about what was actually wanted.

Two Mutable People Deciding

Both wait for the other. This produces an unusual and recognisable deadlock in which everybody is being accommodating and nothing is being chosen.

As with the other modalities, mutable signs sit at hard angles to each other, so the geometry and the behaviour agree.

What resolves it is usually a deadline, or a cardinal sign arriving and simply deciding.