Mercury Retrograde Madness
Updated: Aug 26
Mercury retrograde has a terrible reputation.
Apparently, he needed horns too .. 😏
Which seems fair.
At some point astrology collectively decided that one small planet should be personally responsible for every stupid thing that happens to us three or four times a year.
Forgot your password?
Mercury.
Package disappeared?
Mercury.
Someone misunderstood a completely normal sentence and turned it into a three-day argument?
The little bastard strikes again.
Hence the horns.
But Mercury retrograde is actually much more interesting than its reputation as the celestial department of minor disasters.
Mercury doesn't physically start moving backward.
It only appears to from Earth.
And that little detail contains almost the entire philosophy of retrograde.
Something appears to be going backward.
We hate going backward.
We're supposed to progress.
Move on.
Get over it.
Finish things.
Become better versions of ourselves, preferably by Monday.
But life has an irritating habit of refusing to move in a straight line.
We return to the same questions.
The same people.
The same ideas.
Sometimes even the same mistakes, because apparently once wasn't sufficiently educational.
And Mercury retrograde has traditionally become a time associated with exactly that kind of return.
Review.
Reconsider.
Rewrite.
Repair.
Reconnect.
And, importantly, finish.
Something you started before may suddenly become relevant again.
An abandoned project can make sense now.
A conversation that never really ended may come back.
An old problem can return carrying the piece of information you didn't have the first time.
That's the part of Mercury retrograde I actually find interesting.
Because we tend to treat unfinished things as failures.
But sometimes something wasn't abandoned because it was wrong.
It simply wasn't ready to become whatever it was supposed to become yet.
Going backward can be frustrating.
It can also show you what you missed while you were so busy trying to move forward.
Of course, sometimes Mercury retrograde really is just an email going to the wrong person.
There doesn't have to be a profound spiritual lesson in absolutely everything.
Sometimes you just fucked up the email.
But perhaps that's why the horned Mercury works so well.
We made him the villain because it's considerably more entertaining than admitting that human communication was already a disaster long before anybody looked at the planets.
Mercury retrograde just gives the chaos a logo.
And occasionally, while we're blaming the little demon, it gives us a reason to go back and finish what we left behind.
If you enjoy blaming Mercury for things that may or may not be Mercury's fault, you can find my Mercury Retrograde Madness design on Redbubble, available on all kinds of merch.
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