by Steven Forrest

Beware! Beware! Mercury will be retrograde from July 7 through the last day of the month! I’ve found that Mercury doesn’t even have to be retrograde for it to be blamed for every minor misfortune, miscalculation, and misunderstanding that might arise.  Say “Venus retrograde” or “Jupiter retrograde,” and you get a blank look. But utter the fearful words, “Mercury is retrograde” and the blood drains from people’s faces."

For some reason, this little piece of technical astrology has lately entered the popular imagination just as deeply knowing that you are a Gemini or a Taurus. And, to people who only know a little bit about astrology, Mercury retrograde spells trouble.

Ask any experienced astrologer, at least one who does not require mood stabilizers, and you are likely to hear a more nuanced attitude: “Mercury retrograde is a real phenomenon – but don’t sell your earthly possessions and join a doomsday cult because of it.”

Keep some perspective, in other words.

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Cutting to the chase, that softer, more nuanced attitude reflects the realities of my own experience with Mercury retrograde.  And I’ve had a lot of experience with it too – and so have you. It is not a rare event. Mercury goes through a retrograde period about three times each year, remaining retrograde for an average of a little over three weeks each time. At any given moment, in other words, there is about a 1-in-5 chance that Mercury is going backwards.

The rest of the time, you have to blame yourself for forgetting to mail the check, missing the anniversary, misplacing your cell phone, or spilling the olive oil on your laptop.

Mercury rules over communication in general, so quite fundamental to the “standard model” of Mercury retrograde is the idea that misunderstandings – that is, errors of communication – abound. “Let’s eat, grandma!” gets heard as “Let’s eat grandma” – and you wonder why everyone is giving you a hard look.

Still in the communication miscues category, we hear about letters being lost in the mail or inexplicably delayed.  Sent emails fail to arrive.  Epic spellcheck fails abound.

Anything electronic seems susceptible to Mercury’s baleful influence as well. It is best not to buy a new computer or a new cell phone at such a time, if you can possibly avoid it – although the reason that your old computer or cell phone just crashed can be laid at Mercury’s doorstep as well.

Never book an airline flight under Mercury retrograde, unless your luggage has expressed a desire to put Timbuktu on its bucket list.

The list of warnings goes on.

You probably sense a certain dismissiveness in my attitude here. That does  not entirely reflect my experience – only maybe half-reflects it. The described effects of Mercury retrograde in all those categories are real and demonstrable.  It’s just that its influence is so often hyped; there is nothing reliable about it on a case-by-case basis.

A March 14, 2019, article in The New York Times was titled, “Mercury Is in Retrograde. Don’t Be Alarmed.”  As such reporting goes, the piece was mildly sympathetic to astrologers – although the term “pseudoscience” made its presence felt. It also contained the patently untrue line, “In fact, studies have shown no correlation between the behavior of planets and of people.”

But that’s not my story here. I only reference the article to demonstrate what a big deal Mercury retrograde has become. The editors at the New York Times felt it warranted a story.

About my “patently untrue” remark a moment ago . . . some years ago I came across an article about Mercury retrograde on the Internet. Foolishly, I failed to note the source, even though I copied the piece itself onto my hard drive. I’ve used the article for years to assuage the fears of clients who were cornered into having to make some big move during a retrograde period. My apologies for quoting it here without attribution. My experience suggests that the facts it describes are substantially accurate and could be easily reproduced:

"According to figures from the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the percentage of late flights into and out of La Guardia Airport during the past three summers rose to 24.6 during retrograde periods from 22.8 during non-retrograde periods.

What's more, during the past three years, claims of mishandled domestic baggage rose to 5.44 per 1,000 passengers during months when Mercury spent more than half the time in retrograde from 5.38 per 1,000 in months when the planet was not in retrograde. That works out to one extra lost bag per 15,000 passengers."

Two comments: first – so much for the erroneous idea that “studies have shown no correlation between the behavior of planets and of people.” Somebody mishandled those bags!

Second, if you do wind up having to fly during a Mercury retrograde period, it does not mean, "Kiss your luggage goodbye." Unless you are the one unfortunate soul out of the 15,000 passengers, you will be teeth-brushed and decked out in fresh undies just fine the morning after your arrival.

Here is a vexation the angels in heaven face every day: astrology works, and more and more humans are beginning to see and accept that fact. But humans always seem to want to use astrology for the wrong purposes. Astrology can indeed pull off a few party tricks. But what it really does – and what its true purpose is – connects far more deeply with our soul-journeys than it does with our prospects for losing our luggage, crashing digital devices, or anyone misunderstanding us and putting poor grandma on the barbecue.

When any planet is in retrograde motion, it is going back to places it has already been. Mercury correlates with information in general. Information which you already have is called memory. 1+1+1 = 3: so one term for the purpose of Mercury retrograde is going back and reviewing your memories.

A nostalgic trip down memory lane? It could only be just that, and no harm done. But imagine a man in mid-life. His father was always distant, while the son felt unloved and unwanted. Dad died seven years ago. During a Mercury retrograde period, the planet passes over the man’s fourth house Saturn – a planet that often represents the father. Something prompts him to get out an old family photo album. He finds himself gazing at a picture of his father – but seeing him for the first time through his adult eyes. Previously, his memories reflected the perceptions of the boy who felt so unloved.  Now, what he senses in his father’s eyes – even though they are just the images of eyes in a photograph – is a lost soul, afflicted with depression, and probably feeling very unloved himself.

This man’s response to Mercury retrograde has been perfect. He has just gone back into the stored memories of an earlier time, and reviewed and revised them in the light of his present-tense wisdom.

A woman has fought a losing battle against her tendency toward alcoholism. Her psychotherapist happens to ask her about any happy memories she might recall about growing up. The first image to enter her mind is one of her mother convivially pouring both of them a glass of wine. The girl was ten years old at the time. She longed for her mother’s love and camaraderie. She can now almost hear her mother saying,  “Take, drink. This is my love for you.”

Therapist’s eyes and client’s eyes meet. Their unspoken Oh my God hangs in the air.  Suddenly everything is clear as bell – even though it was not clear at all to the child who was having a special moment with her dysfunctional mother. 

Meanwhile, Mercury is retrograding over the client’s Moon – which of course represents her mother, among other things.

We all live out our lives in the context of the flow of time. Memories are constantly being laid down, but they are almost never really objectively true. Always, inevitably, embedded in our memories are various distortions:  our interpretations, opinions, defenses, rationalizations, and misunderstandings about what was happening at the time.

And then those memories sit there in your head, gathering dust, unchallenged, just like books on a library shelf that haven’t been checked out since 1977 – books that might seem patently sexist or homophobic today, but which were unremarked in those long-gone days. 

Meanwhile, with each passing year, most of us are in the process of getting a little bit wiser, step by step. What would those old memories look like to us were we to consider them in the light of what we know now? That is the question that Mercury retrograde always invites us to ask.

The man in our first story now feels a kind of enlightened compassion toward his poor broken father. He no longer feels the weight of a burden he has carried since his childhood:  that he was somehow unworthy of his father’s love.  He knows that he was trying to get blood from a stone. And that insight liberates him.

The woman with the drinking problem comes to understand that she has been “thirsty” for a sense of genuine relationship with her crazy, dramatic, dysfunctional mother – something that alcohol came to symbolize for her back when she was ten years old.

These are dramatic, life-changing stories. Common sense tells us that they probably will not happen to each one of us three times a year. For Mercury retrograde to have this kind of major existential significance, two other astrological conditions must be present. 

• The first one is that Mercury is retrograding over a particularly sensitive part of your chart. 
• The second condition is that there something else of a major nature unfolding for you astrologically, probably something of a Plutonian nature, dredging up material from the psychic depths. That Mercury retrograde needs something to trigger. Think of it as a lit match. The results are more spectacular if you drop it in a dynamite factory.

Barring those conditions, what can a Mercury retrograde period mean for you? It will certainly not be nearly as earth-shaking, but it can still be important.

• The accountant decides to act on an uneasy feeling that has been niggling at him. He goes over some work he did on the company books a few weeks ago – and discovers a misplaced decimal point. 
• The musician plays back a recording just before it goes into production; the bass is too loud, and it’s sucking the life out of the vocal. Time for a re-mix.
• The chef notices that the cream has past its expiry date. There was a niggling sense that something was not quite right with that crème brûlée.
• The lawyer notices that the contract is missing one signature. She’s lucky – that could have undone the deal.

Mercury retrograde is all about sending our present-tense mind back into the dizzy, distorted world of memory – one that we all tend to mistake for reality until we take a second look at it from the mindful perspective of where we sit right now, in the present moment, full of the famous “power of Now.”

Lost bags? Computer crashes? Garbled communication?

Sure – they all can and do happen under Mercury retrograde.  Many of those problems can be avoided with just a little patience –  if you don’t really have to do it right now, why not wait a week or two until Mercury straightens itself out? There is a good chance that you would be fine anyway even if you ignored Mercury, but why walk out on thin ice just because it is “probably” thick enough to support your weight?

Going further, during Mercury retrograde times, it is imperative that you cultivate an attitude of trust and openness toward any uneasy intuitive feelings you might have. Go back and check things if they are bothering you even slightly. If you think that it is possible that you said something to a friend that just might have been misunderstood, ask him or her about it. There is no harm in being sure.

Maybe everyone decided – even though you did very clearly suggest that we all eat poor grandma – that, all in all, your virtues outweigh your quirks so we will just forget about this little lapse of judgment on your part . . .

Going further, there are whimsies you need to heed when Mercury is retrograde.  That is just the way your soul – or your unconscious mind – sometimes speaks to you. Any whimsy that draws back into the past should be taken seriously.  Something there is calling you; there is something you need to learn about what really happened, some memory that requires updating, something that requires re-alignment with present-tense truths.  Re-read old letters. Watch films you have always loved, but which you haven’t seen for many years. Visit places that were significant scenes in your earlier life.

Old photographs can be incredibly evocative at such times. We are fortunate to live in the age of photography. Who were your parents really when they were 29 years old and you were calling them “mommy and daddy?”  Look into their eyes – they’re staring at you right there in that old family album.

What about your ex-? Who was that person actually? (Probably not exactly who you thought . . .)

The great southern novelist, William Faulkner, said it best. “The past is not dead.  It’s not even past.” What we have been and seen and done lives with us forever.  Everything that ever happened is still happening right now. Even your past lives are in the mix, taking the form of present-tense attitudes, fears, and areas of overreaction and exaggerated sensitivity. These memories make you what you are today. You are their summation.

But what if some of those memories are false? What if, today, you would not see things as you once did? That, when you stop and think about it, is almost certainly the case. You are wiser now than you once were. Of course you would see things differently today.

By paying attention to Mercury’s retrograde periods, you might very well avoid a lost bag or a mis-directed check. There is nothing wrong with using astrology that way.

But what if you could also use it to know the true story of your own life?

It would truly be a “miscommunication” with yourself to miss that opportunity.

Let’s eat grandma, indeed.

-Steven Forrest

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