Mercury orbits closer to the sun than Earth does, which means the small planet travels much faster around the star, circling it in just 88 Earth days to our 365. The reason has to do with the relative positions of Mercury and Earth around the sun. But several times each year, that steady progression changes, moving from east to west instead. Most of the time, Mercury moves west to east relative to the stars in the night sky. Mercury in retrograde doesn’t mean there’s anything funky happening with the planet’s actual orbit it’s all about the way it appears to us in the sky, as a tiny white dot in the dusky hours after sunset and before sunrise, says David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the Open University, in England. But “Mercury in retrograde” is a real phenomenon, best explained by people who, like astrologers, think about Mercury quite a bit, but, unlike those astrologers, would never dream of blaming the planet for making them forget their keys: planetary scientists. And it achieved its modern-day, meme-like quality in the past decade, a story that involves, of all things, Taylor Swift complaining about Mercury’s supposed astrological chaos in an MTV clip from 2014.Īstrology is not a science. The belief that Mercury, in particular, can have some prickly effects is a fairly recent development, starting around the 1980s, according to a recent Harper’s Bazaar deep dive on the topic.
The idea that planets can influence people’s lives is a core principle of astrology, a practice of divining meaning from the cosmos that has been around for thousands of years, in various incarnations.
And they’ve laid the blame on Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, nearest to the sun. Or nothing seems to be going right, despite their best efforts. You’ve probably heard some version of the line, usually delivered with a sigh.