It was winter. A bitter frost gripped the world outside, and every tree was dusted with fine rime, like the artificial Christmas trees lining supermarket shelves. Oh, listen to me… Mercury is in Capricorn, after all. No lyrical flourishes!
So, it was cold outside, and the fir trees were freezing. No, that still does not sound right… Of course: Mercury is retrograde, and I feel compelled to rewrite the same sentence again and again and again. I am not going to labour over every line of this post. Mercury will not let me polish the story to perfection anyway. I will simply tell you what happened.
Episode 1
In my natal chart, Mercury rules the 2nd and 3rd houses, so as it approached its stationary point, I expected events related to those areas. Unlike Uranus, Mercury is predictable, which made it fairly easy to anticipate which themes might be affected. My list included problems involving documents, transport and personal belongings. And that is exactly what happened.
The first signs appeared when Mercury had only just begun to slow down. The turning point came on 3 December, when its speed started dropping sharply. That very day, I found myself powerless on several occasions: my car could not make it up even a slight incline. Its tyres spun uselessly against the frozen crust of asphalt; the engine roared, groaned and lurched from side to side, but the car still could not conquer that modest slope.
Episode 2
On 13 December, when Mercury was close to its stationary point, I decided to buy myself a symbolic gift. Of course, making purchases at such a time is not generally considered a good idea, but I simply could not ignore an auspicious transit. The Sun, as the core of consciousness, was conjunct Saturn, the lord of time, and together they formed a harmonious aspect to Uranus, the planet of creativity and freedom.
I bought a titanium watch. That single purchase allowed me to combine virtually every symbol contained in the transit: a watch represented Saturn; titanium, Uranus; the gift itself, Mercury; buying it for my beloved self, the Sun; a popular designer brand, Jupiter; and a reliable Japanese manufacturer, Saturn once again. Yes, my dear reader, this is what astromagic looks like. Since this post is about retrograde Mercury, I will not delve any deeper into such techniques.
So, I was on my way to collect the watch. There was a traffic police checkpoint ahead. I had no doubt that all my documents were in order, and the likelihood of being stopped seemed negligible. Nevertheless, an officer waved his “magic” striped baton and gestured for me to pull over for a document check.
My papers were perfectly fine. The reason for the stop turned out to be a burnt-out headlight bulb that had unexpectedly given up two days earlier. The traffic officer walked around the car, noticed that the licence plates were badly worn and invited me to sit in the patrol car for a conversation. Under Russian law, illegible or worn licence plates can constitute a serious offence and may be treated as document tampering.
I had barely reached the patrol car when he said, “Here are your documents. We are letting you go this time, but you must correct the problem we pointed out.”
What an extraordinary turn of events! I had landed in a difficult situation centred entirely on a car and documents—pure Mercury symbolism—yet everything ended well. Mercury never ceases to amaze me, and I suspected its “surprises” were far from over.
Episode 3
Christmas and New Year shopping during retrograde Mercury is truly the most wonderful time of the year. Everyone is wandering through shops, buying presents for themselves and their loved ones. Naturally, we all want to choose something that will genuinely delight the people closest to us.
Do you think it is a good time to buy gifts? I do not. That is why I decided to purchase most of them before the “god of trade” turned retrograde.
My shopping trip ended with the loss of a pair of gloves that had only recently joined my winter wardrobe. I retraced my entire route, from the entrance to the very last place I had visited, checking every shop along the way, but the gloves were nowhere to be found.
The following day, I returned to the shopping centre to finish the purchases I had not managed to make—and a surprise was waiting for me. In one of the shops I had visited the day before, my gloves were returned to me.
“You simply failed to notice them there!” my dear reader may object. But I have something to say in response. While searching for the missing gloves, I returned twice to every shop I had visited, and the sales assistants all gave me the same answer: “You did not leave anything here.”
The situation was fascinating and closely resembled the previous ones: not only did a problem arise, but it was also resolved successfully. It was remarkable how precisely the astrological symbolism played out. Gloves are an item ruled by Mercury; as a personal possession, they reflected Mercury’s rulership of my 2nd house; and their loss and return embodied retrogradation and stationing.
Episode 4
The chain of events brought by stationary Mercury surprised me more and more, while new circumstances continued to gather around me.
I mounted my trusty car and set off on my errands. Remembering my earlier experiences, I sincerely hoped for clear roads and no traffic police anywhere in sight. What happened next, however, took me completely by surprise.
I was making a gentle turn into a courtyard when my car suddenly “slipped” and ended up perched on a concrete block half a metre high. How did it get there? By what miraculous means?! )))
And there it hung, wobbling on top of the concrete block like a rag caught in a tree.
Without going into the details of the rescue operation, I will simply say that I managed to save my faithful steed thanks to three passing heroes—the 3rd house clearly came into play. Strange as it may seem, the circumstances were remarkably similar once again: a tense situation from which I escaped fairly easily and without serious consequences, thanks to the intervention of third parties—the 3rd house.
How do you experience retrograde Mercury? What kinds of situations arise in your life?
