Haha, Very Funny… The Mercury Return

28. Oct, 2009 0 Comments

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Photo by Nate Ritter (cc)

I’ve been an irrepressible joke-maker today… after a friend commented on it, I of course joked that I should go read my horoscope. Which I did… like Molly, I keep a subscription to astro.com’s Personal Daily Forecast, since my own things sneak up on me. And lo, my Mercury return arrived late last night!

I’ve never thought of it as a particularly witty moment before, but if my brain is turned up to 11 right now, that would be a natural side effect. So what exactly does a Mercury return entail, anyway?

Any planet has a return when it comes back (returns, eh?) to the same point it occupies in your natal chart. The frequency of this depends on the planet and the speed with which it moves; the infamous Saturn return only comes around every 29 1/2 years, Jupiter every twelve, Mars comes back approximately every other year, and Venus rolls around about every eleven months.

Mercury comes back to the same place in the chart every 10-11 months, so we get a return every year, and occasionally two. However, if Mercury stations and retrogrades near your natal placement, you can have three Mercury returns over the course of just one month. The first, when transiting Mercury passes over your natal before stationing (coming to a standstill), the second when it retrogrades and backs up over it again, and the third when it turns direct and begins moving forward again.

For example, if your natal Mercury falls between 21°38′ Virgo and 6°13′ Libra, the most recent Mercury retrograde period between September 7-29, 2009 was part of this triple-decker return for you. The placement varies with each retrograde period, and the application varies depending on the sign and house of your natal Mercury, but these are unusually important returns when they occur.

Mercury rules the mind, mental activity, and the process of generating, collecting, and distributing information; so any Mercury transit will involve those themes. My Mercury falls at 29°43′ Libra, so my return was just after 11pm PST last night (yes, it’s an anaretic degree, and I have natal Merc retrograde besides… Mercury and I have a strange relationship on all fronts).

Here’s the snip of my astro.com horoscope (text is from the venerable Robert Hand’s Planets in Transit):

So today I endeavor to capitalize on all this brainpower and not fritter it away purely on comedy and “idle chatter”. That being said, I can’t resist a little… I’ll spare you the guacamole-related tangent I was off on this morning, but I leave you with the most recent version of my favorite funny standby, Prairie Home Companion’s Joke Show.