Mercury direct, warmup to Venus retrograde

Dear Friend and Reader:

Mercury stationed direct this weekend. I know it’s been a frustrating time for many people — or at least it was till Mercury changed directions. This retrograde seemed to have more psychological complications than technical ones, though I’ve heard plenty of the usual stories of both.

If you’ve come out of this with your car and computer running and a little cash in your pocket, count yourself lucky. We now have about three weeks of Mercury re-crossing the degrees where it was retrograde, which is called the second echo phase (commonly known as the shadow phase). We will still have remnants of the retrograde effect, but that is not the point: the point is we have a third opportunity to explore the same mental territory that we’ve been going over for the past six weeks, and get it right this time, and if not right, then improved, clarified, solidified and worked out for the best.

You can expect one or two agreements or decisions made during the retrograde to need to be re-thought through, worked out and refined. Decisions are rarely final in any event; this refining is part of the creative process.

Just as we wrap up one retrograde, we begin another.

Venus is in the last degree of Pisces. This week she moves into Aries where we will experience a rare-enough Venus retrograde. What is interesting about her current position is that she’s in the degree where she stations direct on April 17. Venus turns retrograde in Aries on March 6, and direct April 17. But the retrograde goes one degree back in to Pisces, to right about where Venus is now. So we could say that the Venus echo phase begins now — that is the stretch of time wherein Venus occupies a degree where she will be retrograde later in the year. When Venus or any other inner planet reaches that point, we get the beginnings of the retrograde effect, which many have already been seeing in the form of people from earlier times in your life showing up now.

Venus retrograde in Aries brings up some of the most compelling themes of our culture, such as narcisissm. I mean this partly as a personality phenomenon and partly as a disease (but I think the disease aspect is much more complex than something that can be expressed by one phenomenon, Mercury retrograde in Aries). The personality phenomenon is a lot easier to grasp: the way that the idea of ‘self’ is so often exalted at the expense of everything else. I think that this is the direct product of advertising and ad culture, where we must be the Army of One or we ain’t signing up.

What’s really interesting about this retrograde is the way that it reaches past the self concept into something entirely different, which is the last degree of Pisces: a degree of character formation, of access to the greater layers of potential beyond the thing we normally think of as ‘self’ and dipping into the fertile waters of prime creation.

Today is the first quarter Moon. At the moment Luna has just squared Jupiter in Aquarius and is square the Sun and Nessus and the lunar nodes, and tomorrow soon make squares to Nessus, Chiron and Neptune, also in Aquarius. Mars is in the last degreees of Capricorn, getting ready to move into Aquarius later in the week, right around when the Sun reaches the midpoint between equinox and solstice. That is Imbolc, and I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

Thanks for tuning in.