Extreme Expressions: Both Sides of Mercury Retrograde
Sure, things can get dicey, delayed, and downright frustrating during Mercury retrogrades - but is there a more supportive side to the Communication Planet’s celestial moonwalk to be considered? Is there perhaps a potency it offers that (in typical Mercury retrograde fashion) you don’t hear about? One that contrasts against the universally-lamented and unnecessarily-feared deficiencies it’s famous for?
To answer those questions, I’ll pose another:
DOES THE POPE SHIT IN THE WOODS???
Of course there’s upsides to consider when it comes to looking at the effects of Mercury retrogrades; so in honor of Black Women’s History Month, I’d like to offer a brief examination of Phillis Wheatley’s birth chart, which illustrates how there is often a Remarkable Good to match the Chaotic Bad side of any given Mercury retrograde coin.
If you’ve somehow managed to duck and dodge all mention of (or fear mongering around) Mercury retrograde, you might not be aware that it’s a 3-4 week period where Mercury gets closer to Earth in its orbit, making it appear as though it’s slowing down and moving backwards relative to our vantage point from this Pale Blue Dot we terrestrials call home. The topics that Mercury represents - like information processing, logistics, communication, travel, trade, and technology - tend to come up for review, repair, replacement, revision, and redirection during these times; and those processes are often catalyzed by frustrating events such as missed flights, deleted drafts, lost phones, broken screens, miskeyed data, misplaced documents, and misunderstood messages. Put simply, these retrograde periods force us to follow Mercury’s lead and slow down because comms get wOnKy and confusing (which - if I can direct your attention back to the “Does the pope shit in the woods?” portion of this essay and toot my own horn for a second - makes my decision to use a nonsensical idiom as the segue-of-choice into this explainer on Mercury retrogrades not only horn-tootin’ hilarious, but impressively apropos …*holds for applause*).
Ok fine, maybe I’m taking it a little far with the self-congratulation, but that’s probably the most important hallmark of all retrograde planets - extremes. It’s an energy that requires course correction and reconciliation. We get the very “best” and the very “worst” of what that planet represents. There can be a scarce energy of not having or being enough and an excessive energy of taking things too far and overshooting the mark. For some, being born during Mercury retrograde can manifest as being mute, dyslexic, or having other speech and language processing issues or delays, such as aphantasia or difficulties with reading comprehension. For others, it can mean talking at an exceptionally young age or possessing intellectual and artistic gifts such as synesthesia, perfect pitch, or hyperlexia. The point here is that retrograde planets manifest in the extreme on both ends of the spectrum, not just at a deficit.
The birth chart and remarkable life of Phillis Wheatley’s not only illustrates how Mercury retrogrades act as markers of all types of extreme events and experiences related to communication and writing, it also happens to have a number of striking parallels to the astrology of this month - which, to be honest, made me geek out, considering I knew nothing about her chart before deciding to write about her for this month’s mail club letter. To paint a quick picture of the similarities (for anyone nerdy enough to be interested), March features a Mercury retrograde, Mars entering Pisces, Jupiter stationing direct in Cancer, and a South Node eclipse in Virgo. Although we don’t know the precise time or location of her birth, we do know that Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa on May 8, 1753, when Mercury was retrograde, Mars was in Pisces, Jupiter was in Cancer, and there was a South Node eclipse just just a few days prior. Coincidence? Maybe. Astrology proving that everything is about attention and alignment? ABSOLUTELY.
Anyhoo, the overwrought smear campaign against Mercury retrograde might lead you to assume that, since she was born during one, Phillis Wheatley was doomed to a life full of struggles and challenges related to things like learning, writing, and expressing herself. And now that you know retrogrades gives us a both/and of challenging and supportive energy, you might’ve anticipated me saying that that assumption wouldn’t be entirely wrong. So let’s zoom out to see how the dichotomy of extremes in her life comes into focus…
Phillis was sold into chattel slavery from West Africa and purchased by enslavers in Boston who, after noticing her aptitude for learning, would eventually teach her how to read and write (and, undoubtedly, fancy themselves benevolent for it...because white supremacy is nothing if not delusional and dead-the fuck-wrong). She became a gifted poet and used the plight of enslaved African-Americans, the immorality of slavery, and the necessity of liberation as the main thrust of many of her works. While her situation was exceptional in every way (as it was widely illegal for black people to read and write), her status as educated didn’t preclude her status as black and enslaved. So on the flip side of the extreme Mercury retrograde coin, Phillis had to follow in the steps of other black authors of time who took to signing off on their writing with “Written by Herself”, so as to demonstrate and document that she wrote her poems in a world where most white people didn’t believe black folks were capable of reading, much less writing. She would go on to achieve arguably her greatest, or at least most notable, accomplishment of becoming the first African-American woman to publish a book. But, as if to satisfy an unspoken Mercury retrograde prerequisite of balancing the polarity of one exceptional event with the historic circumstances of another, she was only able to get her book published after being brought before a tribunal of white enslavers who forced her to prove that she had, in fact, written all of her poems - something that her demonstrably less capable white counterparts would never have to endure, despite too many of them having the writing skills of a concussed baby.
As ever, context is what matters most when it comes to navigating or analyzing an astrological transit. The extreme circumstances that could be indicated in the birth chart of someone born during a Mercury retrograde in 2026 will look categorically different from the lived experienced of a black woman who was also born during a retrograde and, in many ways, risked life and limb just to become literate. Similarly, being born under that specific transit doesn’t mean you’re destined to become an iconic poet who ends up on a stamp. Shit, stamps and the post office as we know it might not even exist in a decade or two if we play our cards right and completely dismantle the imperialist project that is the United States of America. So I don’t want you to get caught up on gaming out specific outcomes, per say. I want you to look at the experiences of Phillis Wheatley and the ways in which her natal Mercury retrograde manifested in spectacular fashion on both ends of the astrological spectrum in order to glean a more robust, well-rounded understanding of everything that is possible - beyond the normcore interpretations of missed emails, returning exes, and broken phones - whenever Mercury retrogrades through our corner of the cosmos.
