Mercury in astrology: how a person takes things in and says them

Never more than a sign from the Sun

Because Mercury's orbit sits inside the Earth's, it can never appear more than about twenty-eight degrees from the Sun. A natal Mercury is therefore always in the Sun's sign or one beside it, and at its farthest from the Sun it shows as a morning or evening star for a few weeks, then swings back. Its path around our zodiac keeps pace with the Sun's: about a year, with loops.

Why Mercury retrograde comes around so often

Three times a year, four in some, Mercury appears to move backward through the signs for about three weeks. Nothing reverses. Mercury's orbit is the inner, faster one, so about every four months it overtakes the Earth on the inside, on the near side of the Sun, and as it does its usual eastward drift against the stars runs westward. Three overtakings come to about 348 days, short of a year, so each year's spells start two to three weeks earlier than the last, and now and then a fourth fits in.

About one person in five is born with Mercury retrograde. In a chart it is noted and read: the taking in and the saying often run on a delay, with the answer arriving in the car afterward. In every bodies table on this site, natal, synastry, transits and current planets, a retrograde body carries the ℞ mark after its sign name; the abbreviation stands for retrograde.

Taking in, then saying

Reading, listening, noticing, and then the sentence that comes out: Mercury is the handling, not what a person thinks about (that is the Sun and the houses) but how it goes in and comes out. By sign it says the manner: a Mercury in Virgo reads the whole email before replying and corrects the date in the subject line; a Mercury in Aries replies to the first paragraph before the second has loaded.

Mercury's house, and its day in the horoscope

By house, Mercury says where the talking and reading go. A Mercury in the 7th thinks out loud, to one person, and does not know what it thinks until that person has heard it. A Mercury in the 12th works it out in a notebook nobody sees and arrives at the meeting with the conclusion only.

Mercury's transits last a day or two, so it is read here each day with the other fast bodies: today's words and errands against the natal chart. It passes every natal planet about once a year, oftener where a loop lands, and each pass is over in days. During a retrograde spell it can cross the same natal degree three times, forward, back and forward, the one case where a contact stretches to weeks.