Mercury Retrograde: Coming to a Standstill

Mercury turns retrograde on July 8th, meaning that it appears (it's actually a trick of our earth-based viewpoint) to go backwards in the sky. Mercury retrograde has quite the reputation, being blamed for everything from travel disruptions to missing emails, but this is a simplistic, and externalised, form of astrology, the kind that makes non-astrologers scoff and dismiss. Like anything in astrology, how Mercury retrograde affects us depends on our own natal chart, our own natal Mercury and where the retrograde transit falls in our chart. Over the next week or two, I'm going to publish a series of articles looking at the different ways Mercury retrograde might manifest and how you can relate it to your own chart.

First, the basics. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and can never be more than 28° from the Sun in a natal chart, showing us immediately that the way we perceive and understand the world around us is fundamental to who we are, to our sense of self and the journey we make through life. Mercury takes eighty-eight days to orbit the Sun and moves through the entire zodiac in approximately one year, just as the Sun does. This includes two or three retrograde periods when it appears to move backwards because of its relative position between the earth and the Sun. Well known as the planetary symbol of the mind and communication, in astrology Mercury symbolises how we make connections, how we perceive and understand the world around us. In our natal charts, it shows us what we know, what we want to know, how we learn it. Mercury is an energy of exchange and so it rules business, trade and travel, anything where energy is moving. And herein lies the reason for many of the superficial manifestations of Mercury retrograde, because Mercury retrograde means that usually speedy movement has slowed down, gone backwards.

Mercury is often seen as lightweight or superficial, a vehicle for more interesting ideas and understanding. Its concern with the conscious mind makes it less interesting perhaps to the depth psychology which informs much of modern astrology. In our patriarchal society, the conscious mind and our ability to reason tend to be given the highest importance, so that Mercury can become a vehicle for the way that we honour our intellect whilst rationalising and hiding away from our emotions and our deeper self. Ideally, of course, Mercury shows us the path to using our intellect more consciously, as a tool for our deeper understanding rather than a way of avoiding it. I often find that when doing natal chart readings, I don't seem to discuss Mercury symbolism explicitly very much, except that it informs and energises the reading as a whole. We wouldn't be able to do astrology readings without Mercury's ability to translate symbols into language and exchange our ideas about them with others. Perhaps Mercury is so fundamental, we take it for granted.

As well as slowing us down, what retrograde energy does with any planet it to turn the planet's energy inwards. It is expressed more subjectively, more covertly perhaps, internalised to form part of our inner experience rather than our outer circumstances. And of course, a retrograde phase is a good time for anything beginning with re- - revising, reviewing, reconsidering. Just like anything in astrology, we can look at the symbolism and decide how to make it work for us, instead of seeing it as against us. Rather than getting frustrated with travel delays or our mobile phones not working, we can use this time to look back at how far we've come, what we've achieved during the direct phase and how we might need to change our trajectory to stay on course. Mercury retrograde is mental downtime, a necessary phase to allow us to renew our energies, mental and otherwise. We live in a world in which "onward and upward" is the prevailing philosophy, so its no wonder we sometimes struggle with Mercury retrograde.

And of course, there are all sorts of interesting ways of taking this deeper, which I'll be looking at in my next post.