Planet
Mercury
How the mind takes things in and hands them back.
- Speed
- two to three weeks in a sign, longer when retrograde
- Retrograde
- three or four times a year, for about three weeks
- Keywords
- thought · speech · exchange
Mercury is never far from the Sun (at most twenty-eight degrees) so it sits in your Sun sign or one beside it, and it describes the machinery of thinking rather than its content: how fast, in what order, out loud or not.
It rules both Gemini and Virgo, which are the same faculty pointed differently: naming the world, and correcting it. Mercury's retrogrades are the most famous phenomenon in astrology and the most oversold; the planet does not reverse, it only appears to as Earth overtakes it. What is fair to say is that the sky spends about three weeks going back over the same degrees, and reviewing is a reasonable thing to do with that.
Where to go next
Right now
Where Mercury stands at this hour is on the sky today, with every other body beside it.
When it turns
Whether Mercury is retrograde today, and when it next stations, is on the retrograde tracker, computed rather than copied from a table.
In your chart
Where it stood the day you were born: cast the chart. Free, no account, and it draws the whole wheel.