Echoes: Remembering September 2022’s Mercury Retrograde
September 2023 Paid Subscriber Exclusive: A Mercury Retrograde Tracker!
September’s exclusive item for paid subscribers is ready! If you start a paid subscription between now and the end of September 2023, you will receive by email a spreadsheet that provides the dates and degrees of all the Mercury Retrogrades from 2020 through 2030.
In the past, I made something similar for myself by harvesting the dates year by year from We’Moon and Llewellyn’s planners. However, in the course of editing Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces earlier this year, I finally learned how to run reports for planetary ingress and retrograde dates in Solar Fire, a software program that I’ve had since 2015.
Using Solar Fire, I ran the Mercury Retrograde dates for 2020 through 2030 using Pacific Standard Time/Pacific Daylight Time. At this point, the bulk of my Substack readers seem to be in the western United States, where I am as well.
I then assembled the dates and degrees in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The point of going all the way back to 2020 is that you can use the spreadsheet to see what happened the last time a current Mercury Retrograde affected the same house of your natal chart.
Why do you need a Mercury Retrograde tracker?
I have Libra Rising, so most of the current Mercury Retrograde in Virgo falls in my chart’s 12th House of Secrets. As Mercury stationed this past August, I noticed myself feeling drawn to weird online rabbit holes with a paranoid mindset.
I then remembered that last September’s Mercury Retrograde was also in my 12th house, and I got caught up in weird online rabbit holes with a paranoid mindset then too. During that go-round, a bunch of people on Reddit and elsewhere were stirring the pot about various cataclysmic events that were purportedly going to take place on September 23, 2022. When the day came and the world remained still standing, I was very angry and embarrassed that I had wasted my time reading that garbage. Well, after all, the 12th house is also the house of self-undoing.
Get this — the pot is now being stirred regarding September 23, 2023! Even people who should know better are in on it this time! Just, no! Thanks to my Mercury Retrograde tracking reminding me the last round of it was baloney, I am not going to fall for it again!
Today I searched r/conspiracy on Reddit and found claims regarding September 23 pertaining to several years, not just 2022 and 2023. It’s true that there is an equinox each year on approximately September 23, and all of the solstices and equinoxes are times of increased energetic intensity. However, there are two solstices and two equinoxes every year — have a sense of perspective!
What’s really going on here?
I can actually see how some people would want a big, dramatic crisis to happen this month. I think there are a lot of unresolved emotions and damaged personal relationships in the wake of the various disruptions associated with COVID-19, and I can understand the desire for a world event sensational enough to decisively clear the air about all that.
You don’t necessarily get what you want just because you want it, though. Life doesn’t always give you closure, no matter how much you might think you deserve it.
In spite of all the craziness, I remember the 2022 Mercury Retrograde in my 12th house had a positive side too. I listened to “Echoes” from Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii on YouTube and was fascinated with the haunting music amid the evocative scenery of the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in Italy.
I also got into researching Londinium — London when it was under the rule of the Roman Empire. Although my own ancestry is not from that area, reading about ancient history was a reassuring counterpoint to anxiety about current events. Whatever the world is going through now, it has already survived a lot!
Miscellaneous brain candy
If you don’t have any real problems to be sad about, this is really sad: Alex The Honking Bird, a cockatiel who parodied pop culture phenomena including Hamilton and Harry Potter, died before he could parody Alex Jones.
Since July, I’ve been meaning to write up my idea for solving the problem of literary cancel culture. Rhyd Wildermuth’s compelling reminiscence of his date with a man who sincerely claimed to be a bat lands right in the middle of the issues I’m trying to corral. Wildermuth sets up a contrast between Bat Guy and arch-conservative Matt Walsh, noting that people are pushed to pick one of these two extreme positions. If I had to choose between living in Bat Guy’s world and living in Matt Walsh’s world, I would choose to live in Bat Guy’s world — but, ouch, what a choice!