Mercury retrograde, Eros and Hades

Dear Friend and Reader:

Mercury has been on its retrograde course for one day now and in six more days it will make another conjunction to Jupiter. The series of three Jupiter conjunctions is part of this retrograde story — they each have their own.

Photo by Sean Hayes.
Photo by Sean Hayes.

An intense thirst for knowledge, as well as the impetus to observe how things effect you on an intimate level, are two signatures that I am picking up on with this current retrograde.

Mercury is awareness. Jupiter brings in the wider world, that is, something bigger than us of which to be aware.

Added to that, Hades is retrograde in Gemini standing opposite Eros in Sagittarius. Hades is a very slow moving non-planet. It does not exist, except in the ephemeris. There are eight of these things that are used, but not commonly (called the trans-Neptunian points, as opposed to objects); and one or two others that exist and are used even less commonly).

Hades is about depth and working with stagnation. It represents things like mining. So, opposite Eros (a near-Earth asteroid), we have an image of going deep into the heart of the matter: a miner for a heart of gold, or iron or diamond…whatever you are mining for.

My partner and I have been having some pretty heavy conversations lately: it usually goes that way when you have a person with Mercury in Capricorn to butt heads against in matters such as philosophy. As with many people who struggle to understand one another, but come from different places, the discussions often turn to the origin of language itself. This is one aspect of the power of Mercury retrograde: to disassemble language is to attempt to rebuild it again using your own definitions, or, in the case of communication, a mutual understanding of each word.

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