Forward & Back: A Love Letter to Mercury
As a Mercury lover, I’m glad to be writing this during Mercury Retrograde, a season often bemoaned and even feared by some in the astrology community. I have long held that this fearmongering is a bit too much, and would like to make my case that all movement forward requires a few steps back, an upward trajectory must proceed a downward turn, energy coming in waves. But also explore the true importance of Mercury in our lives, as this is no small planet to reckon with.
So let’s explore the archetype of Mercury, the planet of movement, and its interesting dance across the sky and our lives, a dance we’d do well to enjoy. And maybe, just maybe, we can even become a bit more comfortable with the occasional retrograde retreat as well.
MERCURY THE MYTH
If you are new here, I always start by grounding the planetary archetypes in the oldest records we have of the planetary myths, that being the astrology of ancient Mesopotamia. Mercury was associated with the god Nabu, a scribe and a scholar. He ruled writing, wisdom, and rationality. Yet his name meant “herald” and he was also seen as an oracle figure, offering clear prophecies and divine messages. This is not unlike the Mesopotamian moon god Sin, a scribe and oracle figure as well, an association possibly made by the ancients because Mercury seems to have similar phases to the Moon and transits in front of the Sun in the same way.
Worship of Nabu came later in the ages of Babylon, increasing especially after the rise of Marduk (Jupiter) as king of the gods, who was then identified as Nabu’s father. This placed clear communication, thought, and inspired messages as the direct descendent of embracing our life force and self-sovereignty. Yet it seems that Nabu even began to eclipse Marduk in popularity eventually, his cults spreading into the Levant and Egypt, the literal “crown price” of the pantheon becoming equal to or surpassing the king. To note is that Mercury transits were understood by ancient Babylonian astrologers to affect the literal king’s heir. Mercury is thus the child that must be protected and cared for if the father’s lineage, Jupiter’s influence, is to be realized and continued forward.
Nabu also was connected with heavy rainfall and floods, a good thing in ancient Mesopotamian agriculture, and thus too his influence meant prosperous agricultural harvests and financial abundance. This could be why, even in modern astrology, Mercury rules the stock markets and literal marketplaces. Also to note that in ancient Chinese astrology, Mercury was similarly connected to the element of water.
Of course later within Greek and Roman pantheons, Nabu becomes Hermes and Mercury, some of the few gods who can travel between the underworld, our world, and the god’s domain, and who acts as a psychopomp, a guide to recently departed souls leading them to their final resting place. This is a specialised role that few other energies can assist in, and we’ll explore below why that might be.
Mercury the Planet
And let’s look at the actual planet of Mercury for just a moment. It’s the closest planet to the Sun and can thus be hard to see during the day as a result of this closeness, typically only being visible from Earth as either a “morning star” during morning hours or an “evening star” during twilight based on its current orbital path. For centuries astronomers even argued if Mercury was one or two planets thanks to its irregular orbital pattern that made it seem to “jump” in the sky quicker than a single planet should. (It’s not surprising then that Mercury also rules Gemini, the zodiac sign of twins.)
Thanks to this closeness to the Sun, Mercury is also the fastest planet in the solar system, fully orbiting the Sun and thus making a full Mercurial year in only 88 Earth days. Yet although it travels quickly in its orbit, Mercury turns so slowly that a “day” on Mercury lasts for 176 Earth days, or a full two Mercurial years. This means that one half of the planet experiences daylight for an extended period of time, which is extremely hot thanks to the Sun’s closeness, while the other half of the planet is in pitch black, and then they switch for another orbit around the Sun before a full day can be completed. This might be hard for us to understand, but years move quicker than days on Mercury. Let’s remember that.
Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system (excluding the dwarf planet Pluto) and has a surface that closely resembles the moon, full of rocky craters, extensive planes, and no atmosphere. It also appears to have ice at its poles, kept in place due to a lack of axial tilt, but to be noted there is water on Mercury just like those ancient astrologers seemed to have assumed. Relative to its size, Mercury has a very strong magnetic field but which is also a bit leaky, with its field at times reaching out in magnetic “tornados” that are a third the planet’s radius. This planet is small but powerful, uninhabited yet oddly alive.
Mercury the Energy
So now with this information in hand, let me lead you down a path to what I hope is a broader understanding of the planet Mercury.
In modern astrology, Mercury is often first and foremost associated with communication, how one likes to communicate, and more recently with technology, as one of tech's goals has often been to facilitate better or faster communication. Think how we’ve moved from landline phones to video calls, written letters to instantaneous text messages, from written encyclopedias to Wikipedia or now even AI chat bots. How we communicate drastically affects our lives and it is no small thing for Mercury to rule.
But this is the first little point I’d like to make, because it’s not actually communication itself that Mercury cares about, but information. Scribes don’t record just for fun, and an oracle shouldn't speak just because, but rather there must be something worth sharing, recording, writing, or saying. Communication is the byproduct when there is something to be said. The herald must have something to herald before they set out on the journey. Mercury thus has no time for hollow social media posts and text communications written by ChatGPT - communication without substance is ultimately meaningless.
So what then constitutes information? Of course knowledge and wisdom would fall under this, all of the mental faculties, as well as news and facts and figures, for sure. But emotions are also information. The body also contains far more somatic information than we realize. And there may even exist pre-cognitive or psychic information that we can’t rationally know, yet somehow we do seem to know. Even now neuroscience is proving that human cognition is not as cut and dry as we used to believe, and that our brains are processing far more than just rational ideas or even sensory inputs.
So here is my next point, that Mercury cares about information, but it’s not just cognitive information. It’s all information, the knowable and the unknowable. Remember Mercury contains water, has many similarities to the Moon, and has an irregular orbital pattern - this is not a straightforward, pure facts sort of planet. As we saw, the Hermes and Mercury mythic archetypes travel into all the planes of being, the underworld and the realm of the gods beyond our comprehension, showing that this planetary energy is not kept within our current human plane of understanding. I suggest that we all resist any depiction of Mercury that stops at mental or cognitive processes, because to do so is to negate the truly deep sources of knowing that are available to us all.
So let’s take a little intermission: What are you aware of right now? What are you not aware of right now? How do you know what you are aware of?
Thus let me make two more leaps, the first being from the importance of information to the importance of consciousness. The Sun, I believe, rules our discernment and conscious interaction with the world, while the Moon rules our intuitive faculties and unconscious interactions with the world. Mercury’s closeness to the Sun and its similarities to the Moon place it between the two archetypally, and I believe the bridge between both is simply consciousness. Known or unknown doesn’t matter, our whole existence is simply an expression of consciousness.
This leaves Mercury not solely as a purveyor of communication or information, but of the very essence of existence itself, because without consciousness, none of this - our lives, our realities, our sense of self - would exist. This is maybe best encapsulated in proposed holographic models of reality, that not even matter truly exists, but that we are all making this universe real through our shared conscious experience of it. For this reason I actually consider Mercury to be one of the most important planets in our charts, and maybe that's why I’ve saved writing about it for nearly last. Without our ability to experience consciousness, we would simply cease to be.
But here is my final leap, for even consciousness has one more step to go, and that is that even consciousness may simply be an expression of energy in motion. Thanks to physics we understand that a table isn’t actually solid, but rather a bunch of very quickly moving molecules that create the illusion of solidness. This applies to consciousness too, for what is consciousness but a bunch of very quickly moving frequencies of energy that create the illusion of a unified thought, belief, or being? Consciousness is energy in motion, and energy is all there truly is.
So too then we must conclude that Mercury rules not just consciousness, but the energy or frequency of existence, whether that results in consciousness or not. Often when I give channeled readings to people, I am shown waves of color or light and I have come to understand that in these waves I’m witnessing someone’s “frequency” or pure essence before incarnating. There is the knowing that these waves of energy remain, regardless of what we may or may not do during our lives, and that we will return to these waves once we are done. But also that these frequencies and energies are what determine so much of our lives, and to be more in alignment to these frequencies would radically change how we experience our lived realities.
Mercury doesn’t ask us what we want to say, what we believe, or what we feel, but rather what is our energy? Truly stop to ask or feel into this question: what is your energy? How does your energy like to move? And in what way is the energy of your being moving now?
This is also why Mercury is the child of Jupiter in the old myths, because to know and own one’s energy requires a level of self-sovereignty and even expansion of self that Jupiter assists us to achieve. But so too if we learn how our own energy moves and align ourselves to that, we are sure to be rewarded in a Jupiterian like fashion, abundantly and sometimes quite quickly. And as Jupiter rules collective energy and cycles, a Wheel of Fortune always turning, so too do our little lives have cycles of energy, Mercurial and erratic as they may be, but they are ours to experience outside of the grand turning of time.
I also want you to recall that years move quicker than days on Mercury. This is a profound inverse of time as we understand and know it, and I think that is precisely the point. To pure energy, time is not real, as it too is just an expression of consciousness in this exact moment. If I haven’t already lost you yet, let me suggest that we exist outside of time and that we have the ability to adjust our experience of time. Our past and futures are not fixed, our present moment is the only energy we are actually ever experiencing. Mercury is not concerned with what was or what could be, only with what is here now, and it will let the energy that is present in this moment flow to whatever the next moment is, and so and so on. For all its quickness, Mercury is in no rush to leave this exact moment of presence. Its days contain years, and when we live in the eternal now, then years can pass quicker than a day.
The common phrase is “where attention goes, there energy flows,” which Mercury would agree with, though Mercury may be even more concerned just with the flowing of energy and the Sun is actually what gives attention to the flow, thus a reminder that we must bring our own conscious awareness to ourselves for any of this Mercurial energy to be fully expressed. Also to note is that your Mercury sign can only ever be in the same sign as your Sun or one sign to either side, thanks again to the planet’s closeness to our star. Seeing how close your Sun is to your Mercury may tell you how much easier it is for you to shine attention on your own energy.
But I think Jupiter would also add that “where energy goes, there abundance flows.” Knowing your energy, the way it wishes to move and be expressed in this world, is integral to living a conscious, expansive, and enjoyable life.
Mercury in Retrograde
So what then does it mean for Mercury to go into retrograde?
From an astronomical understanding, retrogrades happen when a planet appears to move backwards in the sky, thanks to how that planet’s and Earth’s orbits overlap. So just to be super clear, no planet ever actually moves backwards, that would be impossible as we know it, they just appear to do so from our perspective. So any retrograde is the result of us seeing a planet differently and from a new angle, not that the planet itself has changed at all.
And I think this is a key thing to understand about all retrogrades, they mark a time for us to take a step back and review what that planetary force has been up to in our lives recently. It’s like taking the Hanged Man posture in tarot, suspending movement and instead asking “what can I see more clearly during this time of stillness?” During a Venus retrograde we would ask what has been happening in our relationships with others and the world, while also maybe moving slowly to initiate any new connections or relationship changes. During a Mars retrograde we may review what actions we’ve been taking and what the underlying influences to those have been, while also being far more slow or intentional with how we react to the world around us.
But if we have concluded that Mercury rules our very energetic essence, a retrograde does initially feel quite daunting. Within every Mercury retrograde we get a mini chance to review our own energy and how it's being made conscious. If you’ve been consciously using your energy effectively and listening to where it wants to flow, then even the occasional bump in the road can be navigated with grace. But if you’ve been unconscious of how your energy is showing up in the world, you might get some stark realizations at this time.
This goes far beyond the normal Mercury retrograde fears of misaligned communications or one’s car breaking down or travel plans going awry (as movement through physical space is also ruled by Mercury). Of course all of these could happen at any time, but they bear extra weight during a retrograde because we are being asked to sit with how our energy feels in this disruption instead of continuing to act blindly. Did you write that email too quickly or was the content truly in alignment with who you are? Have you been neglecting some area of your life, like your car maintenance, because of other pulls on your attention? Why did you book that trip and why?
Mercury is also energy, and asking energy to slow down might be very counter intuitive to our go, go, go capitalist culture. I think we’d live in a much more aligned society if we could all just collectively slow down during Mercury retrogrades, because in essence we all have more difficulty accessing our normal “flow” during this time. Instead, making space to rest, reflect, and review our lives, choices, and current plans would be a far more beneficial use of our efforts than powering through and just hoping nothing messes up in the process. Good things can still happen during retrogrades - people get married, businesses get started, babies are born - and honestly I think it’s often a good sign of how true and aligned an event is if it can still succeed during a retrograde. I am one of those babies born during a Mercury retrograde, and truly think it’s a massive support to my ability to process ideas and energy very thoroughly, not just quickly.
Mercury Cazimis, a time when Mercury and the Sun are conjunct (very close), happen multiple times a year and can happen when the planet is both direct and retrograde. These are little “ah ha” moments, when the Sun is able to provide even more discernment to Mercury’s energetic flows, and I think they’re doubly potent during retrogrades. Here we’ve been sitting in slower and reflective energy, only to then get a burst of light and insight. Very powerful indeed.
But just to step back a moment, we can understand that energy moves, both scientifically and metaphysically. And with movement comes countermovement, with a rise in a wave comes the crash and fall, every rising sun must set and restart the cycle again. Why do we love the upward swing of building energy, but are so scared of the inevitable downward shift?
Both Gemini and Virgo, the zodiac signs ruled by Mercury, are mutable signs and rule that moment post-action when everything needs changing, reviewing, reimagining and resorting. Of course and interestingly enough, their axis partners, Sagittarius and Pisces, are ruled by Jupiter, another little link between these planetary forces, but also mutable signs in their own right too.
Energy that goes up must come down, the check that we wrote must be cashed, the actions we take have their effects. This isn’t to stop you from acting, but quite the opposite. Energy must move to be expressed, to be alive. To fear a retrograde is to fear the initial movements itself, and that is to fear life itself. Rather let us move and be in our own unique frequencies, to the best of our abilities, and know that when we need a little slowness and course correcting, the universe will lovingly provide us a time of retrograde to do just that. The energy can pause, regroup, and then soon enough we will be off again, changing and shaping the world with our energy once more.
Mercury in Your Life
Have I convinced you yet of the importance of Mercury? I do hope so. But at this point I’m sure you’re tempted to look up your natal Mercury placement, and obviously please do, but before you take anyone else's word (mine included) on how your energy operates, I would want you to consider this: even natal charts can not capture your vastness, uniqueness, or completeness.
Your energy is something so beautifully ineffable and profound, that the best we can do is speak in myth and metaphor through the planets and zodiac. The natal chart is a map to help see yourself a bit more clearly, absolutely, yet it is still just a map and a far cry from the actual shape and territory that is your life.
So yes, look at your Mercury placement to see how you might communicate, might move through your days, your preferred travel methods or even cognitive preferences. I do the same when I read another’s chart. But I’d also recommend taking time to sit within your energy without too many preconceived notions in your head. Take a moment, close your eyes, and ask yourself this:
What speed does my energy like to move at?
What texture is my energy?
What color or colors are most prevalent in my energy?
If I could compare my energy to something, what would it be?
Now remember, energy is malleable, changeable, and mutable. You are not a fixed being, and neither is your energy, which is why it’s so important that we each regularly check in with our energetic essences to see what’s here now.
But now that you have a sense of your energy at this moment in time, the next question is does my life reflect that? To live in alignment to our innate energy is THE radical act that makes beautiful and enjoyable lives possible. To stop pretending or being “okay” with something that isn’t truly ours forces us onto new paths and better experiences, yet of course it will often require change. You are the one who must decide to what degree you are willing to change and thus live in alignment with your energetic self, but I promise it is a worthwhile way to live.
We’d also do well to remember that Mercury is associated with The Magician card in the tarot, a card that represents intentional directed will in order to accomplish what we want in the world. But for the Magician to do his work, he must 1) know what he wants, and 2) know that he has what he needs, at least in this moment, to start the process. If ever you are in a place of tension or frustration or boredom with life, remember that you are the magician of your life, the creator and director of your own energy. What do you want? And how can you start moving towards it, even in the smallest of ways?
I do hope that within this love letter to Mercury, you’ve discovered that it’s actually a love letter to your own energetic role in this world. We would be a very boring world if your energy wasn’t in it, expressing in the exact way it wants to right now. So please my love, there is no greater work than to be yourself and to continue to erratically dance across our collective sky in the way you were meant to. We want and need you, now more than ever.
My energy still very much enjoys the role music and sound play in shaping our energies and daily experiences, so again I have made playlists to accompany this planetary archetype, found on both Spotify and YouTube Music. There is both a Mercury direct mix and a Mercury retrograde mix, though either can be listened to at any time, not just during a particular transit. If you need a reminder to move forward, then go direct, and if you need a moment to go within, then go retrograde. That’s how energy naturally flows, and so do you.
Wishing you all nothing short of pure energetic alignment.
l.
