That’s right folks. Tomorrow is another Mercury retrograde. Chances are you’ve been feeling that wiggly shadow period already, which began on December 12th, just in time to bollix your credit cards before last minute shopping. This year just wasn’t going to let us go without a fight.
The earlier retrograde through Taurus was one of the first times I actually acknowledged the hit from drunken Mercury. I was traveling. Late flights. Missed appointments. Lost items. Connecting flights halfway across the continent from origin and destination points.
September’s dance through Libra to Virgo and back to Libra was a bit different, though. Yes, both office and cell phone experienced spectacular foul-ups as Mercury made that outside turn, but there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong that didn’t.
Which got me to thinking about our general dread of these wobbles in the apparent position of the innermost planet.
I preface this by again saying that I am not a professional astrologer, though I am comfortable to say I’m a competent amateur by this point. What follows is a personal observation and not studied lore to be found in the works of the revered and ancient Chaldees.
I think I was first introduced to astrology in a monthly column in the McCall’s magazine my mother subscribed to. It was a long time ago, and memory is hazy, but I recall that she read it, and on occasion commented, though I think her older and more Christianized self might deny that. In any case, I found the articles frequently missing the mark, and can say the same for the daily newspaper horoscope. I don’t even remember these mentioning the influences of the planets, the houses, or anything beyond a random “weather report”.
Obviously, this is because they have to be generic. The people reading the entry for Scorpio are not all going to get a winning lottery ticket next Thursday. It’s a fact that everyone born with the sun in Scorpio- with the possible exception of twins born seconds apart, will have had different placements of the planets, houses, and other significators, because they were all born at different points in space and time.
On this chart time spirals out from center, so the one closest to the hub is the one that began at the end of December 2021 and the one next to the outside ring crossing from Capricorn back into Sagittarius will end the coming year.
You can see that the beginning and ending of retrogrades are also moving backward as time goes on. The Gemini retrograde of 2022 starts in Taurus in 2023.
This image is called a Flower Chart, and is generated by the free Plantedance software available for the Windows platform.
So while “Mercury in retrograde” is a generic ill omen, it really comes down to how it behaves in your personal chart. That is, it’s how Mercury relates to the specific and unique positions of the other planets that make up your birth horoscope, and the transit positions of those planets as they are now.
If you don’t have a personal birth chart, go get one. It’s not enough to say you were born with the sun in Scorpio. Nor is it adequate to observe that your moon was in Aries and Aries was your rising sign. There are five more classical planets out there up to something, not to mention the modern trans-saturnine ones, and all those wibbly-wobbly asteroids, dwarfs, and centaurs. And you need to know which House that sun was in, so there’s actually a couple of registers to keep track of, before we even get to the elements, triplicities, decans, rulerships, aspects, exaltations, falls, and everything else in the Great Big Book of Astrology that is missing from the newspaper forecast.
Small wonder that most of us who are serious about astrology at least once in our life spend the not insubstantial amount to have a professional personal chart done. It’s not the positions, which may be simple enough with an app on the phone, but the interpretation of all those interwoven threads of influence. I respect the professional astrologer and the fees they charge because going deep is a complicated process, even with software. While the heavy lifting of making the chart is now done by computer, the subtleties required to read the chart still demand a practiced mind that frequently will still need to consult a number of reference texts, and synthesize the multiple factors into a cohesive whole.
That drunk Mercury is going to plow through like a bowling ball around three times a year.
But armed with your own personal chart, you may be able to minimize the trouble he gets up to while meandering through your skies. The basis of predictive astrology is to build that fundamental picture of who you are, who you could be, and why you might be that way, from the stars at your birth, and then compare that to the ever-roving heavens at the moment you are interested in. For our purposes, this is the next couple of weeks while Mercury is being a sotted ass.
This is what the professional astrologer does. They look at the influences as of now, and interpret them in regard to a birth chart. If your sun was in Scorpio at birth, it’s influence is greater when it returns to that sign each year. That’s why most of us seem to experience things more intensely around our birthdays, or at least that’s the theory. When the planets (which include sun and moon) come back around to where they are during your birth, this is called a return. Your Solar return is your birthday. It happens every year. Your lunar return happens once a month, and is the day when the moon has most influence on your chart. The rest of the planets (including drunk Mercury) have returns at differing times due to the size of their orbits. The Saturn return, for example, is about every 29 years, and consequently is seen as a sign of major life changes. Pluto and Neptune have orbits so long that their returns only influence things like nations and institutions that have longer lifespans. You and I will never see them again.
But I am going off-track, in a very Mercury retrograde fashion. The point I am making here is the transit of Mercury, even when it’s wobbly, must be assessed in regard to its relationship with the other planets, signs, houses, etc. and the planets, signs, houses, etc. in your birth chart.
For example, an image can be made filtering for everything expect ultraviolet light, or infrared light, or even radio and x-rays.
If we were to look with the unaided human eye, much of Mercury’s surface would be the same dull grey brown we see on our own moon.
By combining exposures from variable wavelengths, we get a final product that is often more detailed, and having a certain stark beauty.
For example, let’s roll back the clock to September of this year, at the fixed point of the Autumnal Equinox and look at the skies. In my latitude of about 30 degrees north, and situated in the U.S. Central time zone, under Daylight Saving Time, the sun enters Libra at 8:03 PM on September 22. Your location and time will vary, and this will mean that you are looking at a different Ascendant and the Houses will likewise change. I give my data for comparing charts if you have an app.
Overhead pesky little Mercury is at 29 degrees and 41 minutes of Libra, on it’s way back toward Virgo. It is in the sixth house, meaning it has influence on your day job, your health, and your domestic animals, among other things. It’s major aspects are a conjunction with the Sun, and an opposition to Jupiter. Ordinarily the conjunction with the sun would be a good thing and the opposition to Jupiter would be bad.
Mercury in opposing Jupiter, means that his usual expansive nature, in this case as it applies to communication and transportation, is curtailed. Yet as Mercury is retrograde it should signal the opposite.
But at this point Jupiter is also in retrograde. And just like in basic math, two negatives equal a positive, so we are back to the normal forward interpretation. Taking into account Libra’s balance, and Mercury in the Sixth House, we might interpret this as “don’t talk too much at work”. That’s a good maxim for any Mercury retrograde period. It also could be a caution about getting your prescriptions mixed up, or that your cat is meowing because the bowl really is empty this time.
The solar conjunction with retrograde Mercury is a sure indicator that your thoughts are going to be fuzzy for a few days, that it will be harder to concentrate, that you might forget things, so make notes, and jot things down on the calendar. I mean the paper one, since the app may get screwed up when your phone reboots. Electronic brains are subject to this as well as meat puppet ones. It will probably be the worst in a day or so when the sun passes Mercury going backward with a WTF look out the window.
These are some examples of the general tendencies that affect things on that day at that time, and are by no means absolute. Yet in addition to these, one must consider the synastry – which is a fancy term for comparing that time and space with the time and space you were born.
I choose not to publish my personal birth chart, here. It’s a fairly private thing. But for the purposes of illustration, I’ve picked someone from the list of famous people included in the software. He’s a majority stockholder in one of the world’s largest software companies. You’ve probably heard of him, but as I don’t want to get sued if a spybot finds his name, I’ll leave it to your imagination. For the record I did not create his chart, so I can’t say if this is even accurate or his real birthday.
If we limit our review here to what Mercury is doing and how it connects to the birth chart (on the outer ring) we see that it is sextile to the birthchart position for Uranus, and is in the birthchart’s Third House, which is the house of communication. This is a bad placement for this person’s drunk Mercury. As you might imagine Mercury rules this house, so stumbling and stammering are on the horizon. Likewise, as Uranus is a planet of change and evolution, and Mercury is about communicating change, it is probably not the best time to schedule a corporate press conference announcing Windows NC-17. He does so at his own peril.
And that is really the lesson for today, my lovelies, as we end an eventful and, for me personally, unpleasant year, we should take care to not over-react to drunken Mercury. If you have the knowing of the ways of the stars, and a handy pocket astrology app, you can tease out the raw exposure to the worst of his wrath, and decide how best to avoid it.
If not, a general and circumspect approach to issues involving communication, planning, and travel, is never a bad thing anyway.
Eventually he’ll sober up and head home, and nurse his hangover for around four months before he goes on another bender. At least he’s predictable.
I hope you found this enjoyable and perhaps helpful, and that my words weren’t tangled and twisted. I’ll be back in the new year with another article.