In February 2013, New York Housewife Bethenny Frankel tweeted, “Is Mercury in retrograde or something? Bc I am having a shit day.” She was right it was. Several early adopters were Real Housewives. The timing suggests Swift’s interview just helped fan the flames of an astrological obsession that had already taken hold. Kate Trgovac, the founder of, which provides a simple yes or no answer to the question, says she created the site in 2009 but started seeing an uptick in traffic in mid-2011. MTV promoted the video on social media with a GIF flashing bright, glitchy colors behind a short, looping clip of Swift saying, “Hella in retrograde!” Your phone will break, or you’ll send a text message and it won’t get to the person it’s supposed to go to,” Swift explained. “Everything is going to be completely wrong and messed up and miscommunicated. Many astrologers have pointed to a video that Taylor Swift did with MTV in 2014 to account for its sudden leap into the mainstream. Mercury retrograde’s recent history is intrinsically digital. But it’s for precisely these reasons that astrology and, increasingly, Mercury are looked upon to help us make sense of a world that seems to make less and less of it. Astrology is often dismissed as unserious and unworthy of academic study its central tenets-our place in the world and where we’re going-are concerned with feelings and predictions and ephemeral states. The answers are neither out in space nor buried in the digital realm but found in the age-old tendency to study and interpret the sky above our heads, seeking to explain the inexplicable. How did Mercury, which has been there in the sky all along, reinvent its public image so spectacularly? Or does Mercury only appear to have become newly popular, the way it only appears to move backward? Unfortunately, I use the term “Mercury in retrograde” when interviewing superstar astrologer Chani Nicholas, who gently points out that that is grammatically incorrect. Mercury retrograde has become a sort of astrological celebrity of the digital era, edging out sun-sign astrology-the position of the sun at the time of your birth within the 12-sign zodiac and the basis for most horoscopes-for pop-culture dominance.īefore I began looking into its origins, I knew of Mercury retrograde, but I had no real idea if the concept was new or not. You may have come across Mercury-retrograde merch on Etsy (like a T-shirt that reads, “Not while Mercury is in retrograde”) or shared Instagram memes about it with your friends. You may well know all of this already you may well know more about Mercury as an astrological entity than a physical planet. In an era when we’re reliant on the accurate transmission of meaning and data from one place to another, when everything we say or post or send is so open to misinterpretation and bad-faith reading-on social media, on group chats, on Slack-a whole discourse has sprung up around Mercury’s supposed effect on the tech that’s closest to our hearts. (It isn’t actually moving backward it’s an illusion created by the fact that Earth and Mercury go around the sun at different speeds.) The astrological theory maintains that during these phases, which occur three or four times a year and last roughly three weeks each, Mercury, which rules communications, undergoes a kind of symbolic reversal, throwing the domain of its influence into disarray. Contracts, text messages, ex messages, and shopping for electronic devices: Astrologers tell us to steer clear of such activities when Mercury appears to reverse course in the night sky, going from east to west in “retrograde” motion.
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