The First Phone Call from Heaven, written by Mitch Albom, is something of a spiritual read and it is about people who receive calls from heaven after a kind of channel opens up. The Synopsis: “The First Phone Call from Heaven tells the story of a small town on Lake Michigan that gets worldwide attention when its citizens start receiving phone calls from the afterlife. Is it the greatest miracle ever or a massive hoax? Sully Harding, a grief-stricken single father, is determined to find out. An allegory about the power of belief–and a page-turner that will touch your soul–Albom’s masterful storytelling has never been so moving and unexpected.”
It is a ghostly narrative with a focus on meaning and having faith without proof, and so there are some powerful messages to take away from the book. It takes us on a journey of hope, wonder, and amazement. Then back to feeling let-down, filled with skepticism, doubt, and disbelief. There is also a backstory of Alexander Bell, the inventor of the telephone interwoven in the story. What flowed throughout this tale was the real connection between Hermes (Mercury) the god of communication: telephone, e-mails, letters, the ruler of interpretation, commerce, and Hades (Pluto) the ruler of death the underworld and forbidden realm.
Hermes/Mercury helps us get unstuck psychologically; the god carries our psychological lives into the realm of Hades. The winged God also rules over the crossroads in our lives and can help point us in the right direction. Many people consider that it is our thoughts, mind, and knowledge that links us directly to our soul. And it is through the use of words that we are able to uncover our complex natures. It is a language that connects us to the deeper parts of our being, and Hermes is said to have also invented the alphabet. In astrology, Mercury governs information and is an important aspect of our environment and everyday life. If anything important happens we’re informed and it is of prime importance that the message reaches us.
The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby’s birth, a couple engaged, a tragic accident on a late-night highway and most milestones of the human journey good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of ringing…
Mercury (Hermes) is thought to be the conductor of souls between this world and the next, Also known as “the divine escort of souls” and the intermediary between humans and the other side. When others entered the underworld, they could not leave. Yet, Hermes was free to move between the place of dead souls and the earth. No other God could travel as deep in the underworld as Hermes.
Two years before he invented the telephone, Alexander Bell yelled into a dead man’s ear. The ear, and eardrum and related bones had been carved off by Bell’s associate surgeon, so that Bell, then a young education teacher, could study how the eardrum carried sound. He attached a piece of straw to it; put a piece of smoked glass on the other end, and placed a funnel on the outside. When Bell yelled down the funnel, the eardrum vibrated, moving the straw, which marked the glass… If sound could vibrate an electrical current the way it did a straw, then words could travel as far as electricity. All you need is one sort of mechanical eardrum on each end. A Cadaver’s Skull had sparked that insight. Thus the dead were already part of the telephone, two years before anyone saw one.
Hermes the god of boundaries and boundaries crossed, acts as a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. We use our minds for logic, insight, knowledge, and understanding. Hermes acts as a guide for souls in and out of these dimensions and is symbolic of the mind’s ability to travel deep into the unconscious and to the repressed contents, psychic conflicts that are buried within. Astrologer Liz Greene says that Gemini (Mercury ruled) people are very adept at exploring the deeper unconscious when they apply themselves, and not all Geminians are as superficial, light, and airy as we are led to believe.
They have the ability to explore all the nooks and crannies of the psyche which even the most astute Scorpio may miss in this respect… For this reason Hermes Psycopompos correlates with the field of psychotherapy, and some of the best and most successful psychotherapists I know are born under a Mercury ruled sign.
Hermes was a trickster and this also links in with some of the themes in The First Phone Call from Heaven as he was the god of thieves and mischief-making. This heavenly tale also has something of a Mercury-Neptune influence with its details about the afterlife being peaceful, and the need to have faith that we will see our loved ones again in this other-place. The book’s twist and turns, even if a little predictable near the end, leaves the reader with a feeling of what really matters in life. My own father died when I was 19 years old and I wouldn’t mind a phone call from heaven just to hear his voice again.
Mitch Albom is actually a Gemini (ruled by Mercury). Albom’s Mercury is opposite Neptune in Scorpio giving this love of mystery, occult subjects, conspiracy and lies, and the hidden aspects of death. Albom also has Sun square Pluto signifying self-development through Hade’s world of the dead, obsessions, and transformations. Mitch is a also sports journalist as well as a writer and telecommunications man.
Nothing Edison did with the telephone came close to inciting the original hysteria Bell inspired, until, perhaps, 1920, when Edison told a magazine that he was working on a device that might let people one day speak to the dead. “I believe that life like matter, is indestructible,” he said. If there are personalities in another existence this apparatus would at least give them a better opportunity to reach us.