Understanding Mercury is “Elemental”
Many people know their signs, but it’s a good bet that even people who don’t know one sign from another know something about Mercury retrograde, if only due to its coverage in the non-astrological press, and often in major print media. They are all of a piece: tonguein-cheek, know-it-all articles about the retrograde such as one that appeared in the New York Times on March 14, 2019 edition, headlined “Mercury is Retrograde, Don’t be Alarmed.”
The point of that article was, of course (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) that those silly astrologers don’t understand that Mercury moving backward is an optical illusion. This is of course, not terribly true, as there is hardly a first-year astrology student that doesn’t know this fact, but let’s not dwell on that. The important thing is that astrologers compare what is going on up there in the heavens to what is happening down here on the ground, so observation is the basis for what they say about it.
As the planet of communication, the most noticeable things that go wrong during a Mercury retrograde period have to do with the obvious: phone calls don’t connect, letters show up a week late, websites (and sometimes even large chunks of the Internet) go down, machinery seems to become cranky. And travel? Forget it. Stay home!
Aside from Mercury’s version of Murphy’s Law (?anything that can go wrong will go
