What if Mercury Retrograde isn't here to disrupt your life, but to help you reclaim something you've lost along the way? From October 24 through November 13, 2026, Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio invites us beneath the surface, bringing uncomfortable questions, inconvenient truths, and opportunities for profound transformation. In this special episode, astrologer Christopher Renstrom explores the deeper meaning of this retrograde, why Scorpio's relentless pursuit of truth can become a powerful force for healing, and how revisiting the past can help us recover parts of ourselves we've left behind. Through fascinating historical stories and personalized horoscopes for all 12 zodiac signs, Christopher reveals how to navigate this season with greater awareness, courage, and a willingness to face what's ready to be brought into the light.
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🎬 IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR:
00:00 – Mercury in Scorpio: Communication, Hidden Truths & the Power of Speaking Up
10:38 – Ida Tarbell: How Mercury in Scorpio Exposes Secrets & Fights for Justice
26:28 – Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio 2026: Revisiting the Past & Uncovering Uncomfortable Truths
44:35 – Aries Horoscope: Vulnerability, Intimacy & Difficult Conversations
52:13 – Taurus Horoscope: Relationship Tensions, Criticism & Learning to Listen
01:02:54 – Gemini Horoscope: Communication Breakdowns & Taking Responsibility
01:15:38 – Cancer Horoscope: Emotional Healing & Navigating Difficult Relationships
01:24:30 – Leo Horoscope: Facing a Reckoning with Home & Family
01:35:57 – Virgo Horoscope: Personal Growth, Communication & New Perspectives
01:47:03 – Libra Horoscope: Owning Your Mistakes & Embracing Your Whole Self
01:57:16 – Scorpio Horoscope: Why Others May Not Want to Hear Your Truth
02:08:05 – Sagittarius Horoscope: Family Secrets, Ancestral Patterns & the Past
02:18:20 – Capricorn Horoscope: Misunderstandings & Revisiting Past Conversations
02:26:27 – Aquarius Horoscope: Career Changes, Life Transitions & New Beginnings
02:35:50 – Pisces Horoscope: Changing Your Perspective & Rethinking Your Future
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Transcript
Hello, my name is Christopher Renstrom, and I'm your weekly horoscope columnist here on Astrology Hub. And this time, I wanted to talk to you about Mercury turning retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio on October twenty-fourth. Mercury will be retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio until November thirteenth.
The Meaning of Mercury
Now, let's talk a little bit about Mercury. What does Mercury represent in astrology? We often think of Mercury as being the planet of communication, the planet of messaging, the planet of the way that one thinks, and that's exactly what Mercury is. But the way that we communicate, the way that we think, the way that we interact with other people isn't necessarily just verbal.
We can interact or communicate through wild gesticulations and gestures, or we can communicate with something like rolling our eyes and a sigh. We can communicate by not saying anything. We can communicate by listening really earnestly to every word that the other person has to say. All of this goes to say that Mercury changes the way that it communicates, changes the way that it messages according to the zodiac sign that it's traveling through.
So basically, when you look at astrology and Mercury, there are 12 very different ways that Mercury can communicate. So how does Mercury communicate when it's traveling through the zodiac sign of Scorpio? Well, seriously, okay. We know that when Mercury is traveling through the zodiac sign of Scorpio, it's going to be very serious about the way that it communicates.
It's going to choose its words very succinctly and very particularly, and there might even be a little bit of an edge to them. But there's a little bit more going on than just that. Scorpio, yes, can be very penetrating in the way that it asks questions and wants to get to know about the truth. Usually a Scorpio Mercury will assume that the person isn't telling the truth right off the bat and will engage in many conversations as if there are things that are not being spoken, not being talked about, and the Mercury in Scorpio will listen for those. But Mercury in Scorpio isn't always a buzzkill and doesn't always talk to people as if they're cross-examining them like a Spanish Inquisitor.
Mercury in Scorpio also has a very sardonic wit. They can be extraordinarily funny. They're the ones who come up with those penetrating lines that no one else can think of, that take just a moment to absorb and then you have to just burst out laughing. They can be an incredible study of people and of character, particularly people's foibles and the things that people don't want to talk about. So Mercury, when it's traveling through the zodiac sign of Scorpio, is going to change its general overall flavor.
And the reason why I say that is because Mercury rules the zodiac signs of Gemini and Virgo. These are mutable signs in astrology, so that means that they're very changeable. They're very accommodating. Now, what do I mean by changeable and accommodating? Well, these signs, Gemini and Virgo, can be changeable in that they go from subject to subject.
They're, like, talk- telling you about one thing, and they're like, “Oh my God, wait, no, I suddenly remember this other thing that I have to tell you about that you need to know about right now.” Or they can be talking very earnestly with someone, and then all of a sudden it… the mood changes, and it becomes more, um, uplifting or more light, and they can change their mood, uh, accordingly.
They can change the way that they communicate accordingly. So changeable means basically being able to talk about different topics, maybe all at the same time, and also in their different moods, in their different atmospheres in which things are being discussed. Now, when I bring up accommodating, and that, uh, that shows up really kind of more with the Virgo, although it shows up with the Gemini as well.
Mercury is accommodating in the sense that it is trying to help the other person out. Okay? Uh, the other person might be, uh, very confused about what they're trying to express, and so Mercury will try to help them to, uh, explain themselves. Maybe, uh, ask them questions or, or suggest words that might be of help.
Or maybe the other person is really angry and flustered, and so Mercury will become more supportive. It will become more listening. It will let that person vent. Or maybe the person isn't saying anything. Then the Mercury might bring up leading questions or maybe even a fun fact to sort of break the ice and get the other person talking.
So there is a changeable and an accommodating quality usually that we find with Mercury, especially in the signs that it rules, Gemini and Virgo.
Mercury in Scorpio Explained
So what is Mercury going to be like in Scorpio? Well, the first thing is Scorpio is a fixed sign and not a mutable one. So Mercury, when it's in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, is going to be very deliberate in the way that it speaks.
Uh, Scorpio being ruled by Mars and Pluto, its modern ruler, doesn't have much patience for things that are superficial or silly. And so Mercury in Scorpio might be sort of like, “Get to the point,” or, “Cut through your silliness,” or, “Your, your, you know, we're talking about something that's very serious here, so you need to be able to focus and talk about that.”
Okay, so there can be a sort of very penetrating, uh, flavor to the Mercury in Scorpio because it wants to get to the bottom of things. Mercury in Scorpio is very much a truth seeker, but the truths that it's seeking are more often than not truths that people don't want to talk about. Maybe it's a secret, maybe it's something they feel guilty about, maybe, um, it's an anxiety or an insecurity that they don't want exposed.
And Mercury in Scorpio has a sort of like, “You can talk to me about that. We can talk about this.” You know, so there's a trustworthy quality to it, but it's not gonna be in sort of like, um, a, a comforting Cancerian way of like, “Why don't you tell me your woes and difficulties and do you want some ice cream while we talk about this?”
No, the Mercury in Scorpio is like, “Go ahead and tell me these things. Uh, the, you know, what you went through was very difficult. It was, uh, very hurtful and painful, and you have a right to feel these things.” So Scorpio's gonna wanna talk about the things that most people don't wanna talk about. But Scorpio, even though it may not be the most comforting of the water signs, it definitely is going to be very vigilant, very focused on what happened that went wrong and that you are right to feel what you feel, whether that's outrage or fear or even trauma.
And then Scorpio, because it's got a Mars quality to the sign, it's ruled by Mars and Pluto—Pluto brings out the penetrating, let's get to the bottom of this quality. The Mars brings out the advocacy. It says, “Yeah, you were hurt. Yeah, you have a right to be pissed off. Yeah, you were traumatized. You know, so let's go and do something about it.”
Now, the let's go and do something about it might be like, let's sue people, or, you know, let's, uh, uh, bring them to justice. But it may also be like, let's go on this journey together so that we heal the trauma so that it doesn't become this domineering force in your life. Let's, let's face these aspects that we don't like, and let's re-own, let's repossess, um, things that were taken away from us when we went through a difficulty.
You know, maybe we lost our joy. Maybe we lost our autonomy. Maybe we lost our belief in ourselves. Maybe we lost ourselves, and we're nothing but this pain and the trauma. A Scorpio, and particularly a Mercury in Scorpio, is going to say, “I'm gonna hold your hand, and we're gonna make that descent down into the underworld, and we're gonna face that, and we're not going to let that overrule your life.
We're not going to let that, uh, dominate your life from now on. You're not going to be left a broken person. You're not gonna be left, uh, someone who was hurt terribly and cannot function. You're going to go and reclaim those things for yourself.” And again, maybe you do it through the justice system, or maybe if the justice system isn't available, or this is more psychological than it was, uh, dealing with physical or injury or harm, then this is about reclaiming those parts of your psyche that have been lost to the experience.
So this is where Mercury in Scorpio can get very penetrating, and it can get very deep, and it will often champion those who feel like there is no one who champions them. It often champions those people who feel guilty about having been victimized, who blame themselves for wounds or pains or difficulties that have taken place.
And Mercury in Scorpio says, “No, you're not to blame. But what can we do to recover you from this abyss so that you can live the life that you are meant to live?”
Hi, friends. Mercury retrograde is almost here, coming up on October 23rd, this time in the deep waters of Scorpio. Now, Mercury retrograde gets a really bad rap. Technical issues, communication mishaps, but I'm here to tell you that you don't need to fear Mercury retrograde. In fact, it can be a really beautiful, reflective, and productive time if you know how to harness the energy properly.
This is exactly why we created a free guide with horoscopes for all 12 signs for this Mercury retrograde period. In this free guide, you'll also get information on what is Mercury retrograde, what does Mercury govern, the nuances of this upcoming period, as well as horoscopes and insights for all 12 signs.
You can get yours for free today at www.astrologyhub.com/mercury, and I hope it's a helpful companion for the weeks ahead. And now, back to the episode.
Ida Tarbell
Now someone who I always think of when I think of Mercury in Scorpio is the investigative reporter Ida Tarbell, uh, who was a key figure in the Gilded Age and the early 20th century. Indeed, she kind of becomes the model of investigative reporting. Now, Ida Tarbell was a Scorpio, and Ida Tarbell also had her Mercury in the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
So as I tell the story of Ida Tarbell, I want you to think of the themes of Scorpio as I talk about her life. Now, Scorpio's ruled by two planets, as I said before, Mars and Pluto, and you're going to hear some Plutonian themes at first. Okay, Pluto is the, is the planet that's named after the Roman god of the dead.
And so Pluto, in Roman mythology, rules over everything that's buried under the Earth. That can be corpses, and that can be ruins, uh, that can be, um, people who have departed underneath to the underworld, but it can also be riches. Indeed, our word plutocracy, which means the moneyed class, comes from the word Pluto, because Pluto ruled over things like gold and silver and precious metals and diamonds, as well as oil, which we refer to nowadays as being black gold.
The other thing that I want you to listen for is the Mars theme as we talk about Ida, that idea of championing the underdog, of, of advocating for people who cannot advocate for themselves. Now, Ida Tarbell was born in 1857, just a few years before the beginning of the Civil War. And when Ida Tarbell was 14 years old, her father was put out of business by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Now, Tarbell's father was one of many small oil producers who was working in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, and these were all people who were kind of like running their own oil pumps, their own oil refineries, and they were all wiped out financially in the 1870s by, uh, John D. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller had entered into a series of secret deals with the three major railroads that were servicing that part of the country, and railroads, uh, were the only way that oil producers could transport their oil at the time. So the 32-year-old J.D. Rockefeller crushed his competition, and once Rockefeller had crushed his competition in Cleveland, he would go on to do the same thing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York.
Basically, what was going on with the crushing of the competition and taking over of the oil industry is essentially the Gilded Age version of today's tech bros. Oil was the 1870s version of AI, and there was no denying that oil was the future of America. So Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company not only wiped out its competition, it became the only oil producer in America.
And I want you to really absorb that. The Standard Oil Company wasn't the leading oil producer in America. The Standard Oil Company was the only oil producer in America.
Almost 30 years later, and we have to remember that's a Pluto theme right there. Things can go underground for a long time and then emerge several years later, maybe even decades. So almost 30 years later, Ida Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism here in America with her 19-part series that was published in McClure's Magazine, and the series was called The History of the Standard Oil Company.
And the series ran from 1902 until 1904. These articles exposed the dirty dealings that Rockefeller had been involved in. Not only had he monopolized the railroads who were going to transport the oil, but he had worked out a series of rebates and kickbacks with the railroad companies that also profited him in turn.
So as I said, these articles that Ida Tarbell published in McClure's Magazine brought down John D. Rockefeller, and they broke up Standard Oil's monopoly. It was by doing slow, tedious, painstaking work. I mean, remember, this is before the digital age, okay? So you can't just sort of like Google and look up these facts and figures and things.
You had to go to libraries. You had to get access to papers, to offices. You had to track down people who were going to talk to you. So it's by doing slow, tedious, painstaking work that Ida Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents. These documents were supported by employees, lawyers, and candid conversations with Standard Oil's most powerful senior executive at the time, whose name was Henry H. Rogers.
Now, what's interesting about Henry H. Rogers is that it was Mark Twain who had introduced, or rather reintroduced Tarbell to him, because Henry H. Rogers happened to be an old friend of Ida Tarbell's father, who had been wiped out by the Standard Oil Company. Rogers, who engaged in a series of interviews with Tarbell, was under the impression that Tarbell, being a woman, was writing a flattering puff piece about him.
And so that's what led him to be so candid about the past and to actually even boast about some of the strategies that was used by the company to squeeze out the competition. All of this, of course, appeared in print. Ida Tarbell helped usher in that age of political, economic, and industrial reform that would become known as the Progressive Era in the United States of America.
Not only did Ida Tarbell's history of the Standard Oil Company lead to the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly itself, the printed articles led to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Ultimately, what happened to Rockefeller's, uh, Standard Oil is that it was broken into baby Standards.
I don't know how many of you, um, remember Ma Bell. When Ma Bell got broken up into baby Bells, well, that was the same thing that happened with Standard Oil. It was broken up into baby Standards, which include ExxonMobil and Chevron today. Now Rockefeller, even though he had engaged in dirty dealings, was also known as a great philanthropist.
And so Rockefeller, being a great philanthropist, was deeply stung by Tarbell's investigation. He referred to her as “that poisonous woman,” but also told his advisors not to comment on the series or any of the allegations. Many of the people who worked for Rockefeller wanted to go and smear Tarbell and to, and to run her name through the mud, you know, in, in the papers and publications.
Lord knows they had enough money to go and do this. But it was Rockefeller who said to them, “Not a word. Not a word,” he said to them. “Not a word is to be said or printed about that misguided woman.” What's interesting about Tarbell and Rockefeller, even though they never met in person, was how much respect the two of them had for one another.
Rockefeller was indeed impressed by the investigation that she had done, and it could even be said that she had pricked his conscience about what had gone on. He certainly would not allow people to go and tarnish her name, which of course is something which is done almost daily, on a daily basis nowadays.
At the same time, Tarbell, um, very sensitive to the fact that her father had been destroyed by Rockefeller and that, that, that her work could be read as retaliatory or getting back at Rockefeller. She took great pains to be absolutely factual. Everything that she wrote was backed up by evidence and by footnotes and indices which followed, uh, the articles.
Actually, the articles are published in a book, and there's a very long amount. Th- there are very many pages noting every single one of these pieces of evidence. She wanted to be fair. She wanted to be impartial. But she also wanted to call into account, okay, this person who had done this damage to so many people, and in her view, also damaged the way that business could work in America.
She very much believed in business in America, but that business should benefit society and not just exploit it. Indeed, in her writing, and she wrote many articles following this. She was always able to see both sides of a situation. Um, she would decry Mussolini, for instance, decades later as a horrible, as, as a horrible despot.
But at the same time, she also acknowledged what a winning personality he had and how ch- charismatic he was. So she wasn't just dumping everything, you know, into the negative, you know, pile. She wanted readers to decide for themselves by hearing the facts, by learning the history of what had gone on, usually much of it hidden, that she wanted her readers to decide for themselves what, what they thought about what it is that she was writing about.
They wanted… She wanted them to decide for themselves what it is that they were reading. So Ida Tarbell also earned the epithet “muckraker” from her articles, and she earned this epithet from no one other than Theodore Roosevelt, who applied it to her and a couple of other investigative journalists who were very popular and well-read at the time.
Now, the term muckraker, and remember muck is basically mud, or it can, it can even be worse. It can even be caca. Okay. So, uh, muckraker, uh, basically comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which describes a man with a muckrake. Just think of a rake, like raking leaves in a garden, who is forever clearing muck, whether it's, uh, mud or caca from the floor.
So what Roosevelt said is, “The man who never does anything else, the man who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muckrake, speedily becomes not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces of evil.”
I find that so funny coming from Theodore Roosevelt, who's a Scorpio. Was known for a lot of muckraking and busting up of, of monopolies. But in any case, this statement of his, which I just absolutely adore, um, this statement of his about investigative journalists has been echoed by US presidents to this very day.
Ida Tarbell, as I said before, was born under the zodiac sign of Scorpio, and she had Mercury in Scorpio in her own birth chart. And Mercury in Scorpio clearly played a very prominent role in her horoscope. Mercury in Scorpio rules investigation. Mercury in Scorpio rules over things like, I don't know, finding the only copy of an obscure book in the New York Public Library that winds up providing the key piece of evidence that exposes a corporate juggernaut.
The book that provides the single stone in David's sling that takes down Goliath. And that's indeed what happened with Ida Tarbell. She went and found this, uh, this obscure out-of-print book somewhere in the New York Public Library, and it b- and in this book, it talked about all of the secret deals that had been made between Standard Oil and the, uh, railroad companies.
So this is the sort of thing, this, this leaving no stone unturned, of burrowing down into the depths, of, of getting into the details and the weeds and showing that incredible fortitude and patience. You know, these are qualities that, that we, uh, see in the Mercury in Scorpio. As I said, it's fixed, it's resolute.
You know, it's as resolute as a bloodhound on the trail of a fugitive from justice. It's a water sign, so… And, and this isn't something that's often really, uh, associated with Scorpio, for instance. Uh, but water is emotional. We know that water is emotional. It's very sensitive. It's drawn to the things of the past, to secrets, things that are hidden or invisible.
But with water, you also get patience. You know, you, you, you get a patience. You get a waiting for something to emerge or a muckraking enterprise in which you keep raking away at that muck patiently but with great deliberateness, with great industry. You are going to uncover what it is that you're looking for.
Now, what it is that you're looking for may expose or what it is that you're looking for may ultimately prove to be a fallacy. People with Mercury in Scorpio won't try to twist it to fit the truth. If they were looking for something and they find out ultimately that what they were looking for was a dead end or a fallacy, someone with Mercury in Scorpio will be the first to admit it.
They will say, “Okay, this wasn't what I thought it was.” There's no attempt to try to bend or twist or turn it into something else. People with Mercury in Scorpio are used to the underworld. They're used to excavating, to digging for, looking for things that are hidden.
Uh, they're used to following the, the, the frailest trail of clues, and they're used to finding and then discarding if the thing that they're looking for didn't turn out to be something that was viable or didn't turn out to support the point of view or the truth that they were seeking.
Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio
So how does Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio work?
Now, Mercury retrograde is basically regarded, as most people in society, as a bit of a nuisance. Uh, Mercury, because it orbits the Sun so closely, uh, will turn retrograde three times a year, you know. And so that's why people are like, “Didn't we just get out of retrograde? I can't believe we're going into retrograde again.”
Okay, so this is why it feels like Mercury's always, like, in and out of retrograde. It's because its orbit is inside the Earth's orbit to the Sun. It's very close to the Sun, and so it, uh, turns retrograde three times a year. Now, when I say it's often referred to as a cosmic monkey wrench being thrown into the smooth operations of our daily lives, that's because M- Mercury, which rules over buying and selling and all transactions, as well as your to-do list and the things that you rely on, like cars, phones, and computers, those things are apt to go bust during the period of time that Mercury is retrograde.
So Mercury kind of like is a bit of a prankster, kind of like fiddles around with the, uh, smooth operation of our daily life and makes us go, “Ugh, my coffee maker isn't working today.” You know, and which Mercury's response would be, “Well, you know, you need– you knew that you needed to get a new coffee maker a long time ago, and now it's finally collapsed, and, you know, get off of your butt and go buy that new coffee maker.”
Okay, so, so that's Mercury's way of sort of keeping us on our, our feet, keeping us in the game. But something that I noticed over the years that I've been practicing astrology, 'cause I always thought, you know, at first it just… Because the, the planet changes or reverses its direction, so it acts in a way that's contrary to the way that it normally behaves.
Like if Mercury moving forward in the sky is about, um, sealing the deal, when it's retrograde, it's a deal going south or, or, you know, not holding up, or maybe you bought a lemon. So that's essentially what a retrograde can mean for any planet that turns retrograde. Uh, as a quick note here, the Moon and the Sun never turn retrograde.
Everybody else turns retrograde. But what I kind of observed over the years is that a retrograde is actually a prolonged stay in a zodiac sign for a planet that's turned retrograde there. So in other words, where Mercury would have typically been like maybe two and a half weeks traveling through a sign, it's in and out, you know.
When it turns retrograde, you add another two weeks to that. So what happens is that where Mercury would have sort of breezed through Scorpio, for instance, it's in Scorpio for a long period of time. And so you really get a very strong resonance or a very strong understanding of that Mercury in Scorpio feel. And this is where I think that idea of sort of, you know, retrograde being contemplative or reflective actually comes from. The planet is made to stay there for a longer period of time than it normally would. It's kind of like being sent to your room as a kid.
You know, it's a time out and you're there, you know. And essentially, that's also what's going on. But I think it also incorporates the other elements of the retrograde, which is acting in reverse or having difficulty with it. For instance, something that I've often seen with a Mercury retrograde… Okay, now this is not a case study.
This is purely anecdotal. You know, I don't sit down with my charts and, like, number how many times I've seen it. So I really wanna make that clear. This is just something that's anecdotal, something that I've observed, um, is that Mercury retrograde can show up with, uh, learning challenges, with speaking challenges, and it could be for a variety of diff- different ways.
Uh, Mercury retrograde might show up if you were raised in a household that spoke one language, and where you were going to school spoke a different language. And so there can be a kind of, you know, how do you, you know, work with these different languages that are going on at the same time? Uh, they can…
It can show up with learning challenges. It can, uh, show up with speech challenges, anything from a stutter to maybe having taken a long time to start speaking as, as a kid. And it can also deal with challenges in school, not only with studying, but with how you get along with peers and the people you went to school with.
Okay. Now, there's a little bit more going on than just the challenge. Remember how I talked about how it's a prolonged stay? I think what happens because there's a challenge or difficulty or the planet isn't easy to work with right away, it teaches you how to work with that planetary energy in respect to your own horoscope.
You know, you may have several people who are just sort of like, um, you know, “I have a very fast eye on a very fluid Mercury, so I can talk a mile a minute,” and things like that. And you might've been the person who couldn't talk a mile a minute, who, you know, maybe stumbled over your words or was very shy or withdrawn or something along those lines.
Well, with that retrograde Mercury in your chart, you had an opportunity to study the way that other people spoke or interacted, you know. And it might've begun with feelings of being left out or, or not being smart or as good as them. But over a period of time, you would've found your own way to master those abilities.
You would've given greater value, um, and greater meaning to words, communication, interaction than perhaps someone might in which those, um, abilities come easily. Okay? Uh, so that's something that I've also seen show up with the Mercury retrograde, that there can be a deeper appreciation for words, for communication, uh, that there can even be an ability to mimic because they've been studying people for such a long period of time.
But something to keep in mind with the retrograde is that it is a prolonged stay of the planet in that sign. Where, uh, Mercury and Venus can be very quick in and out of, of signs, um, they spend a longer time in that sign. And so the theme of Mercury, the theme of Venus in a sort of like Alice in Wonderland through the looking glass way becomes more pertinent and becomes more important for us to understand.
What a retrograde also does is that it gets you to go back over the terrain that you just traveled through. Okay, so it's like, let's say you just, uh, you know, traveled through, uh, a field, you know, and you get to the other side of the field, and you're ready to go on and to the grocery store or something like that. I don't know. One of my… I think I'm channeling my childhood or something like that. Back in the day when we had fields.
But anyway, um, maybe you travel through a field and it leads… And it's a shortcut, it leads to a street, and it takes you through the grocery store. And maybe you get to the grocery store, and you pick out the things that you want, and you're gonna go and pay for them, and you reach in your pocket, and there's no money there.
And you're like, “Oh- oh my goodness,” you know, “There was money there. I, I had enough money for this, this, this soda and gum,” you know? And, and so the clerk's like, “Well,” you know, and he's like… And you're like, “Well, I, I think I might have lost it, you know, on the way here. Let me go and retrace my steps.” And the clerk's like, “Well, I'll keep your, your pop and your gum here, right here on the counter for you,” you know?
And so you go back and you retrace your steps. You walk through that field. You're like, you know, “Where did that $5 bill go?” You know? Yes, back when those things cost $5. But anyway, um, “Where did that $5 bill go?” You know, and you go looking, and whatever. And, and you retrace your steps and you find it, and you're like, “Aha, okay.”
And then you go and you're satisfied because now you can get your soda and your gum. But that's what a retrograde does. It gets you to travel back over, uh, a s- ground, territory that you were just traveling through, but now you're looking for something. You're looking for something because you lost it.
You're looking for something because you skipped a step. You're looking for something because maybe you made a decision to leave behind something that's very valuable, and now you want to go back and retrieve it. So a retrograde teaches us to travel back over the territory that we just, uh, traveled over in search of, okay, like, let's bring up the coffee maker thing.
You know, you're like, you wanna use your coffee maker, and it's Mercury retrograde, and your coffee maker stops working, okay? And you're like, “Ugh.” You know, and so maybe you go and look for the other coffee maker that you bought a long time ago, or maybe it's, you have to fiddle with it and, and, and things like this.
Maybe it's just jammed. Maybe you have to, like, clean it. Maybe, whatever, and then ultimately you're just like, “Ugh, I have to buy a new coffee maker.” Well, you have to go back, you know, to the store. Maybe it's the same store where you bought that coffee maker, and you have to buy a new one. It's, it's something that should've been done all along.
But I don't wanna make it literally about the coffee maker. What it is is that it gets you to travel back over your day-to-day routine. Like, you knew weeks or months ago that you had to get a new coffee maker, and you kept putting it off and kept delaying it. You know, and now's the time when you actually have to do it.
That can also be part of a retrograde. So a retrograde can be a period of time where the planet acts, um, in a way that's opposite to itself. A period of time where you contemplate or reflect of, on the planet because it spends such a long period of time in that zodiac sign. Okay. Or it's a period of time where you go back over traveled ground to retrieve something.
Uh, that can be an actual object, or maybe that's a talent or a skill. Maybe it's a friendship. Maybe it's an association. You know, you retrieve something, uh, that maybe had been treated too casually the first time you had gone through. Um, maybe you're adding up a column of numbers, and you keep getting the wrong answer every time.
Then you have to go back over the numbers to figure out where you went wrong in your addition. I mean, that's for those of you who insist on doing it and just don't pull out a calculator. But, you know, back in the day, you know, when I was a math student, you know, you, you were made to go back over your work to find where, where that had gone off.
Or it's something that we do in our texts and emails where, you know, we need to read or reread these days because we, maybe we'd left out a word or, or the spellcheck spelled it in a funky way, and we don't wanna send it and maybe offend someone or, or, or something along those lines. So this is what a retrograde can do.
Uh, it's retracing, it's reflecting, and it's really sitting with the energy of the planet in that sign. So what can we look for to understand or to sort of judge different decisions or crossroads that we face during the period of time that Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio, which is from October 24th until November 13th?
There are three things that I want you to sort of listen for or to look for during this period of time. The first is uncomfortable questions. Okay, questions that you may be asking that make other people uncomfortable, or they might be questions that other people are asking that make you feel uncomfortable.
So the idea of uncomfortable questions is something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is inconvenient truths. Okay? That is truths that we know are true, but this is the worst time to acknowledge that they're true. Okay? Maybe that comes up in conversation. Maybe that comes up in a confrontation.
Maybe that comes up in an indictment. You know, maybe that comes up with, you know, that zinger that your sibling brings up, you know, from childhood. You know, that horrible thing that you did that you find yourself like, “Ugh, I did do that. I have to admit to that.” Okay. So inconvenient truths is another thing that muckraking Mercury in Scorpio may bring up during this period of time that it is retrograde.
And finally, something that I want you to keep in mind in your conversations, in your dealings with people, as you're dealing with uncomfortable questions or inconvenient truths or things that are coming up, I want you to keep in mind the difference between expose and gotcha. All right? And this was one of the reasons why I really wanted to share the story of Ida Tarbell.
Ida Tarbell did investigative reporting, okay? And it was in order to expose, and it was in order to enlighten, and it was in order to basically right a wrong, okay? And she was really deliberate. I mean, she writes about this. She talks about this. She was really deliberate about the way that she approached professionally her work on the history of Standard Oil, particularly because her father was involved, and her father was basically ruined as a result of it.
And so she really made a point of staying as objective as she possibly could and letting the facts speak for themselves. You know, she would put the facts in line and order. She would put them into a story, you know, but she also included where you could go and read this for yourself. So that exposing of what was going on was also done in the spirit of enlightening, of making things better, of bringing about an improvement of something that, you know, had been done wrong and had caused a lot of damage, and getting the people who had done it to own it, you know, to, to, to be accountable.
What she did was different from what we see go on a lot in society right now, which is what we call the gotcha. You know, “I caught you.” I, you know, um, I, I, I, you know, “Gotcha in this interview. I got you with the way that you fumbled these facts. I got you with way, with the way that you twisted this,” or, you know, I'm, I, I, “I know that, you know, you're hiding something, and I'm gonna find out about it and expose it in a, in a shameful way.”
You know, there's a difference between the two of them, and both of them are very much to be taken to, into account when we talk about Scorpio. Does Scorpio sometimes have its gotcha moments? Yeah, you bet they do, you know. And they may even revel in it, you know? It's like, “Your family jewels are dangling from this stick.
I gotcha,” you know, type of thing. I mean, they could do that. But also, what Scorpios can also do is to expose something that is a wrongdoing, something that was kept secret, and in what I was sp- talking about before, healing it, or making it better, or working in a progressive movement way of reform. You know, business is good, but business can be corrupt, so let's take the corruption out of business and make it good because it benefits society, and it benefits you as a person who's working in a business.
And let's get rid of the corruption. Let's get rid of the people who really aren't doing business. They're doing grift, or they're exploiting other people, or they're sitting, setting up ways to destroy them in business because competition… You know, and they call it competition, but that's not healthy competition.
That's dominating a market, and that's making people do what you want to do. And that is force, and that is not empowerment. And so, you know, if, if a gotcha is in service to that, then that's not a good thing. So there are many things to take into account when we think about truth. You know, are we exposing in a good way or in a way that's aimed at shaming?
The way that we think about facts, are we looking at facts dispassionately? Remember that Pluto is the god of the dead. He weighs the souls in the scales in the afterlife, and he looks at what you really did, not at—the excuse, not the way you're twisting it to make it sound like something else, Pluto or Anubis, who was his Egyptian version, is looking at it quite dispassionately.
You know, that's what the scales were there for. And if you were nasty and horrible, you were thrown into the belching pits of Tartarus. Or in the case of Anubis, I think it's a hippopotamus, you know. Or you were released to heaven or the Elysian Fields. So even though you can twist the facts and make them show up in different ways and things like that, at the end of the line, and when we're talking about Scorpio with Pluto at, at, as its ruler, there is an end of the line that's going to be judged.
And so it may happen, you know, with your knowledge or it may happen when you're standing there at, at the end of time. But these things add up. And these things don't stay buried forever. And this is something that Mercury in the zodiac sign of Scorpio takes very, very seriously and even champions.
Now let's go ahead and talk about Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio and how it affects each of the 12 zodiac signs.
Aries
If you're born under Aries or you have Aries rising, Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is going to be a bit of a complex experience for you. First of all, Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is traveling through that part of your solar chart that pertains to sex, death, and other people's money.
I know that always sounds like an early 1980s rock band, or punk band rather, um, and I rather love that it does, okay. But these are areas that sound a little bit random, but also really intense, okay. So the thing about the eighth house is it deals with topics that are usually taboo topics, the things that we don't really discuss at the dinner party.
Although it can be said that some people do discuss their sex lives at a dinner party, you know. But if you ask them about money and how they make it or what they owe, they'll suddenly fall very silent. Or people may even talk about their sex lives in order to cover some other things that are going on with them sexually, like maybe, uh, they tend to be very unfeeling or predatory or, uh, hurt or exposed or…
There, there's bound to be some sort of past dealing with sex and sexuality, uh, bound to be some sort of past dealing with money and the way that it was spent, uh, where you were ripped off or what you owed or what you ran away with, or something along those lines. And of course, there's always death, with—which is really something that we're not going to, um, uh, talk about at a dinner party unless it's a, a, a dinner party that's hosted by doulas or something along those lines.
So these are heavy subjects, um, and these are topics that are—were seen for many, many years as being taboo. Nowadays, they're talked about a little bit more freely, but when you press around into the more darker corners or the more personal corners, you can still see people getting uncomfortable ar—around those issues, getting uncomfortable around those topics.
So when you have Mercury retrograde in Scorpio going through this part of your solar chart, then that means these topics are going to come up in conversation, okay? And, um, where it would've just been… Had, had Mercury been direct, it would've passed through this period of time, you would've, um, had these conversations.
Maybe it's about a conversation about, um, debt management. Maybe it's a conversation about, uh, how you just don't feel sexually connected to any—to someone anymore, or you might have intimacy issues or trust issues. You might have just had that conversation and, and come to terms with it and moved on, you know, in the two and a half weeks that it took, that it normally takes Mercury to go through Scorpio.
But because it's retrograde here, it's almost like the con—conversation gets s—caught on a snag. It's, it's snagged in, in some way. Um, a conversation that you thought would've been very revealing or very sensitive or very comforting or, um, you know, where you trusted that person gets caught in a snag. It doesn't go in the way that you, uh, anticipated.
Now, how could that happen if you're born under Aries or Aries rising? People born under Aries or have, have Aries rising are kind of what I call the superheroes of the zodiac. Whether it's Superman or Spider-Man or Wonder Woman or Phoenix, okay, you, you, you fly to the rescue. You come to the rescue of people in need, people who are going through a very troubled or a very difficult time.
Um, and what you usually do, what w—what your usual approach is, is to get them to buck up, to power through, or if you're running into the burning building to rescue the baby, you emerge with baby in hand and pass it to, uh, the grateful mother and go on to your next, uh, adventure, your next, uh, uh, heroic feat, okay?
People with Aries sun or Aries rising don't really stick around for the conversation or the thank yous or the gratitude or the, “Well, I actually had three babies. Can you go back in and get the other two?” You know, they don't really stick around for that. They, they, they wanna power through someo—s—a situation that's difficult.
They wanna rescue someone from a difficult situation, and they're not really that concerned with staying there longer than it takes to take care of the problem or the issue at need. So with retrograde Mercury in Scorpio, there are going to be circumstances that force you to stay here longer than you want to be.
You know, uh, maybe the conversation that you felt, you know, was resolved lickety-split and quickly, you know, the other person isn't buying it. They wanna know more about it. They're asking more questions. They're being more probing, and you're finding yourself sort of maybe suddenly on the defensive or questioning what you just said or maybe getting even annoyed at them for poking around there or something along those lines.
So these may be things that show up with Mercury retrograde in Scorpio. Or maybe someone that you're talking to is maybe talking to you about a delicate issue. Maybe it's a health matter or an emotional matter, something that might, you know, really resonate with you as being weakness or a sign of weakness.
And being born under Aries or having Aries rising, you don't like to talk about weakness. You don't like to talk about things like needs. You don't like talking about vulnerability, and maybe this person is pressing you to talk about it, and you find yourself, you know, cornered in some way. And maybe during this period of time, it is a period of time where you might be able to say, “Well, my finances are a bit of a mess, and, and, and moving from credit card to credit card is costing me more than it should, and maybe, maybe I should see a financial advisor, you know?”
Or, or maybe the person's like, you know, uh, or, or maybe the person's talking to you about lovemaking and, and you're like, “Well, I thought you really liked everything.” And they're like, “Well, I was wondering, you know, if we could maybe be more intimate.” And you're like, “Huh?” You know? So, so there might be thi—or maybe you're saying that to the person, you know.
So, so, so the Mercury retrograde in this part of the chart is going to be bringing up emotional or financial situations or predicaments that aren't immediately solved. It's not about the rescuing. It's about the staying there for a while and discovering and sharing and being there for someone in a way that's different that you've been there before.
You know, you, you might have run into the burning building and rescued them, and maybe this person really wants something more out of that relationship that they have with you. Or maybe they're going through a situation that you can't take care of that speedily or that you can't take care of that quickly.
And so this makes you sort of stay there and maybe face your own inability to, to take care of it in the way that you always took care of it. And maybe it's not about taking care of it. Maybe it's just about being there with the person. So these are things to think about. These are things that may come up during the period of time that Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
Taurus
If you're born under Taurus or you have Taurus rising, this period of time that Mercury is retrograde in your opposite sign of Scorpio may be a period of time where you're feeling very judged, very sort of raked over the coals, and found wanting by your partner, whether it's a romantic partner or a business partner or a creative collaborative partner.
Mercury retrograde in Scorpio, especially because it's opposite your sign, can make you feel very much like there's a scorecard that's being kept. You know, like, like the person is looking at you and sort of like, “Hmm.” You know, and you're kind of like, “Well, what was that about?” You know? And it's like, “Oh, nothing.”
You know? And then you hear about it later in a fight. You know, “You're always cutting me off,” you know, “You're always disagreeing with me. You're a, a, you're such a sto—a stubborn Taurus. You have to do things your way, and you never listen to an alternative.” And you might be like, “I listen to you all the time.”
And that person is like, “No, because I have a time-stamped record of when you didn't listen to me last time. You know, it happened on May 17th at 3:30 in the afternoon, and then it happened again on June 1st at…” You know, the person just sort of like rattles off this long list of, of indictments where they caught you, you know, being stubborn or resistant or overruling what they had to say or, or, or just being altogether difficult or something along those lines.
And so when you're born under Taurus or you have Taurus rising, are you fixed in the way you do things? Yeah, you are because you feel like the way that you do it is right. You know, I mean, come on, that's, that, that's why. You know, uh, can you be stubborn? Yeah, because you're not a big fan of change. I mean, you'll change if you have to change or revisit something.
But we live in a world which is full of change, where people wanna, like, change things up all the time. And as a Taurus or a Taurus rising, you know, you're gonna be like, “You're just making up stupid-ass stuff to do.” Excuse me. But it's kind of like you're making up, you know, silly things to do. You know, that's a waste of my time and a waste of my money, and this has always worked before, so we're gonna stick with this.
You know, and so Taurus has good reason to be, uh, stubborn. Taurus has good reason to be resistant. Taurus has good reason to do the things in the way that they want to do them. Taurus, of all the earth signs, is really a sign that's very much involved with providing and with sheltering. Actually, all the earth signs are like that.
But Taurus takes it on a very sort of turf or territorial level. I think that that's what I'm trying to communicate to you. It's your job to provide. It's your job to have the roof over the head. Uh, it's your job to be the shelter that people run to. You know, you are the Rock of Gibraltar, you know, and that's what people who are born under Taurus or have Taurus rising see themselves as, okay?
So if you're providing a roof over the head and a bed to sleep in and food on the table and things like that, you know—then how about a little bit of gratitude? You know? How about a little bit of like, “Thank you. I really appreciate it,” or, you know, um, “I brought you flowers because you're always, you know, putting food on the table, and I brought you flowers, and thanks, and gratitude,” you know, and, and not, you know, being made to feel like you're taken for granted, you know.
And the only thing that Taureans resent more than being taken for granted, although they will really try not to say that because they're very proud of their ability to provide, and to shelter, and to nurture, okay, to build. Um, the only thing that they're gonna resent more than being taken for granted in that way is someone bitching about it, okay?
Is someone complaining about it, you know. I—if someone's kind of like, “Well, you always get your own way,” or, you know, “You provide the food, but it's always the food you like,” or, you know, um, “Yeah, you put a roof over our heads, but, you know, we have to live with all the furniture you like. What about some of the things I like?”
Or, or something like that. As a Taurus, you're kind of like, “Hey, you know, I, I bought this. I made this available. Show a little gratitude,” you know, and it can become like that. And then when someone starts keeping a scorecard, you know, notation of all the times you were difficult and, and, and, and resistant and, and making you want to, you know, uh, confront it and, and, and acknowledge it, that could really get under your skin.
So this can be a period of time in which the muckraking, uh, capacity of Mercury in Scorpio, made more so by its retrograde, can really get on your nerves, and can make you feel very judged, uh, can make you feel very used, uh, can make you feel very taken for granted, and can actually make you feel really angry.
You can actually start to see red. It takes a lot to get a Taurus or a Taurus rising to see red. But once, uh, someone born under Taurus or Taurus rising sees red, you are like a stampeding herd of bull, okay? Or, or a herd of cattle, okay? You, you will, you will trample anything down in front of… in, in front of you.
And so the question that you need to ask yourself when you're getting defensive, when the deflector shields go up, um, is probably not in the moment. Take some time away, you know, to think about it. Go for a long walk, take a time out, you know, something along those lines. And really ask yourself—not so much if it's true or not, because the truth lies in between.
There's gonna be elements of truth and elements of exaggeration or of just resentment coloring what the person is saying. But ask yourself where this person is coming from, okay? Why are they saying this? Why are they feeling this way? W—instead of why are they feeling this way, why are they saying this?
That's a good one. What is it that they're feeling? What is it that they're communicating? And it's really hard in conversations like this to not take it personally. I mean, how can you not take it personally when someone's talking about your person? Okay. But, but it's, uh, but it's a benefit in, in conversations like this to not take it personally, to ask yourself what the other person is seeing, where they're coming from, and to listen to it.
Oppositions are not easy aspects in astrology, okay? They, they… Mmm, and, and it's because they want nothing to do with one another. It's, it's the nature of an opposition to split, to get as far away from you, or planets in opposition to get as far away from one another as possible. I mean, the best that you can hope to experience if you have two planets opposite in your own chart is that you spend some time with one planet and some time with the other planet.
But you can't do both planets at the same time. That's, that's how an opposition works. You know, it's either night or it's day, okay? Uh, you don't have day in your night or, or, or, or night in your day, okay? It's, that's, that's basically how, how it works. So that was the original symbolism of, of it. And so, um, but with an opposition, it also gives you distance on a situation.
You know, you're not in conjunction. You're not on the same page. You know, where, where it's like not only are we on the same page, but we need to be on the same page. You know, it's not only the experience of being on the same page, but, uh, uh, a—assigning a value to being on the same page. We absolutely have to be, you know, think alike, talk alike, you know, look alike.
What a crazy pair, 'cause they're cousins. Identical cousins. Okay. But anyway, um, it's not that. When you have an opposition, you have distance, and you can take that distance, particularly this period of time when Mercury is opposite your sign, and you can have a disposition to ask yourself, “What is this person communicating?
Where are they coming from? What's going on with him or her or them, you know, that I'm not getting?” And that's the miracle of the Mercury in retrograde in Scorpio being opposite you. At first, you're going to feel defensive. It's opposition, okay? And you're gonna want nothing to do with it. That's what we feel like towards someone who opposes us.
You know, it's like, “I want nothing to do with you then,” you know? Um, but if you can take the time to really take in that distance, that space, that breathing room that's being introduced right now—then the conversation goes from who's right and who's wrong, who's judging and who's being judged, you know, and the retaliation that will ensue, to maybe reaching out to that person and asking them, “What's going on?
What are they feeling?” You know, “Is that the way they really see you?” You know? And that gets the person to sort of calm down, you know, to sort of be like, “Well, not all the time, and, you know, only when you're like whatever.” And that leaves room for conversation. You can hear the changing of it. It's, it's very rare when someone's gonna be like, “Yes, that is the way I see you, and I hate you.”
You know? Like that… I mean, it's rare because you're not really gonna stay in a relationship with someone like that. But if someone's like, “Well, well, not all the time,” you know, then you find out what they've been carrying around, you know, the truth that they're holding, the truth about you that they're holding.
You know, it may not be a truth about you that agree—that you agree with, but it's a truth about you seen through the eyes of someone else, and that's always worth exploring. That's always worth reaching out to, and that's always worth contemplating and reflecting on. Because that gets you to take accountability in the way that you feel like taking it, and then beginning a conversation, and beginning a way to sort of bridge that gap.
And that's how oppositions can work in your favor. And that's the way that I would advise working with the Mercury retrograde in Scorpio during this period of time.
Gemini
If you're born under Gemini or you have Gemini rising, this period of time when your ruling planet, Mercury, is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, it's gonna be somewhat problematic for you. Now, the reason it's going to be problematic is because Scorpio forms a natural quincunx to the zodiac sign of Gemini.
Okay, a quincunx is what I call a sort of postmodern aspect in astrology. It's not one of the Ptolemaic aspects. It's not a conjunction. It's not an opposition. It's not a square, a trine, or a sextile. A quincunx is a mismatch. It's a wrinkle. It's, it's the relationship of non-relationship. It's two zodiac signs that are struggling to sort of understand one another, but they're not going to succeed in understanding one another, and so they wanna quit one another, but they don't feel comfortable quitting one another, and so they go and re-engage again.
Kind of like a wrinkle, that the more you try to smooth it out, the more it gathers into a wrinkle again. And what makes it so exasperating is that you're talking to someone who usually would get it or usually would understand it, but they're just not getting it. And so, you know, that's when people are like, “Okay, I'm gonna stop talking.
It's just we're not… Or we're just going around in circles.” Or you're a Gemini or you have Gemini rising, you can't just quit a conversation. You can't just like, “Okay, I'm not talking,” or whatever. The… If you're Gemini or Gemini rising, you will go around in circles again and again and again and again because you have to talk things out.
If you have your differences, if you have your disagreements, if someone's not happy with you, you have to talk things out. Um, if someone, you know, has this idea of you and you don't agree with that idea that they have of you, then you have to talk that out. I mean, Geminis have to talk out their differences.
This is what they really do. So during this period of time when… And it is your ruling planet in Scorpio, and what that means is that you have some identification with what's going on with this party who's not getting it. Okay, so what do I mean by you have some identification with this, this person? Uh, you're probably friends or you're colleagues or you're neighbors.
You know each other. Um, and typically, um, you can talk things out and, and you can come to an understanding and, and, and maybe you even, you know, you're so close that you have a sort of shorthand with one another and, and, and a way of talking in which it's very clipped or very quick or, or very abbreviated.
You know, in which other people are like, “You guys, when you get together and talk, it's like your own language and I can't follow it,” you know, type of thing. Well, suddenly it's caught on a snag. It's not translating that way. It's, it's, it's almost like, you know, if you remember you were a kid and you were playing a game with your best friend, and it always turns out a certain way, it's whatever.
And then all of a sudden one day you're playing this game with your best friend and they start crying, and they never wanna play with you anymore, and they leave the sandbox. You're kind of like, “What did I do?” You know. But it's kind of, you know, a flashback to that that's going on here. You, you know, you thought you were getting along with someone, or this is the way we've always talked, or this is the way we've always been with one another, and then, you know, the person just shuts down, okay, in that sort of Scorpio way.
And just d—you know, they're not gonna start crying or anything like that. They're just gonna freeze you out. That's what Scorpios do. So, you know, and, and it's kind of like, “Well, what did I say? What did I do?” You know, and maybe the response you're getting is, “You know, you know what you said. You know what you did.”
And you're like, “No. No, I don't really.” “You're not just faking it?” “I'm not faking it. I really don't know what I said.” “Oh, that's what you always say when you…” Okay, so all of a sudden there's this kind of like we're not communicating, and the more you're trying to s—tell the truth, you know, which is, “I'm really not getting it,” the more that this person isn't believing it.
They're not believing that you really mean it, or they're not really believing that you're saying it. And maybe they're bringing up things from the past that, um, you said or you did or, or comments that you made about someone else that n—they now feel that you believe about them. You know, so there's gonna be a little bit like you're cornered, you know, with this energy, you know, where you're being called to accounts, where you're being made to see, um, what you had done or to, uh, hear again what you had said.
And your reaction may be like, “Well, that's being taken out of context,” or, “That was all part of the game,” or, “This is what we do,” or, “It wasn't really serious.” And the person that you're talking to is deadly serious about it, okay? And they're like, “Uh, no. This is what you said and this is what you did. And, and this isn't going to, um, fly anymore.
I don't know if I want this to fly anymore.” So th—so this is a period of time where there's a real rupture, and it's one of those rare periods of time where you might find yourself really being hit with something between the eyes out of the blue. Uh, it's really unexpected. It's really taking you by surprise, and it's coming from someone, you know, that, that, that you trusted or someone that you had a way of being with or that you had this rapport.
Now, as a Gemini, uh, you're rarely caught off guard for long, okay? If you're Gemini, Gemini rising, you're rarely caught off guard for long. You can– like a cat, you always land on your feet, and you can find a way to twist and turn in midair and land on your feet. But that's not what this is about, okay?
If you're caught in something, even if you're caught in something which isn't anything you said or did, but this person is bringing up as an example of things that you've said and done before, and you might be like, “Well, that's got nothing to do with us. That's what I said.” It's, it's still gonna catch you in something, and it's going to bring about that inconvenient truth aspect of the retrograde Mercury in Scorpio, okay?
You're dealing with Scorpio energy here, so you can't talk your way out of it because the Scorpio's just going to, like, you know, say, “Well, what do you have to say about this piece of evidence and this piece of evidence?” And th—you know, they're just gonna start taking… So it's, it's best to quit while you're ahead.
Don't try to outrace and don't try to outmaneuver, and that's kind of the point of Mercury being here. When you outrace or outmaneuver, it's your way of winning without winning to that person's face, you know? And Scorpio's a zodiac sign which is really focused on you not getting away with anything if you pulled something before.
Okay, so this is kind of like taking responsibility, but it's deeper. Because this is an associate, this is a colleague, this is a friend, this is someone that you're close to. This is a buddy. Okay? You wanna know where it went off track. Okay? And so this is going to be very challenging to you as a Gemini with– or, or a Gemini rising.
Because people with Gemini or Gemini risings can sort of turn it into a conversation, which can become a debate, and then they can sort of like start telling the person what they should be thinking or what they thought or the words that they used or, you know. It, it begins with kind of like, “I kind of agree with what you're saying, but don't you think, you know, because you've shared with me that you have an insecurity about this, that maybe it's your insecurity that's coming out right now, and that's what's going on right here?”
You know, Geminis will do that, okay? And, and it's all part of like, how do I get out of being cornered? Which is a reflexive instinct for people born under Gemini or Gemini rising. But Scorpio energy is saying, “Sit still and hear this.” Okay? It's, you may get squirmy, you may get restless, you may not wanna hear it, you may wanna deflect it or turn it back on me, but I'm not going anywhere.
I'm a Mercury in retrograde. I'm here for a while, and so I want you to take this in. You know. So that maybe that is a long conversation, or maybe it's a conversation that's cut short abruptly, but it stays with you. You know, it's something that you go over again in your mind again and again and again.
Because the Scorpio energy is saying, “Stop, look, and listen, and absorb. Take this in.” This isn't about guilt. This isn't about shame. This is about something that's always been treated casually, but now it's serious, and you need to tune into how serious this is. You know. And, and so it's not about getting– you know, finding the quickest exit or the quickest escape.
It's sitting with it. And what's good about this is that it brings forward in you qualities that people don't often see. Uh, people born under Gemini or Gemini rising can be sort of interviewing, uh, in the way that they talk, or very light in the way they talk or, or, um, you know, streaming through things and, or, or, or the buddy that you talk to, or, “I've got five, you know, uh, I've got five minutes,” and so the other person has to sum up the conversation in five minutes because you're walking from here to there.
That can be a very Gemini or Gemini rising thing. So this is gonna leave you with something to really think about in your interactions with people, and it's gonna leave you really questioning yourself, do you give people proper time to talk about what's going on? Do you give them space to really talk about what's going on?
Do you really hear them, you know? Or do you just play back what they said? Uh, so this can bring consciousness in, in an area of life that you're very at ease with. I mean, that's kind of the point of a quincunx, is that it creates something that doesn't flow in the way that it should. That's why I describe it as a wrinkle.
You know, it's… Imagine getting your shirt back from the dry cleaners and that wrinkle's still there, okay? Like, the whole point of the dry cleaners was, like, all the wrinkles come out, you know, and there it is. And so that's what a quincunx does. And the wrinkle isn't a problem to, to be solved or something to be resolved.
It's something to work with, okay? It's something to take away and work with. It exists as a creative dynamic, or it exists as maybe a reforming dynamic. You know, reform, if you reform something, you're not going and solving a problem. You're looking at a situation that's problematic, and you're being more progressive with it.
Like, what can we do to address these concerns? You know, that's basically what reformers do. You know, like in religion, if there's a reformist movement, it's because the religion had become too stringent and too doctrinal, you know. And so now there's a reformation to make it more open, to make it more… get it maybe back in touch with its original, you know, religious values or to make it open and welcoming again.
So that's what's going on here. It's not a problem to be solved or a question that you're going to answer or a change in your behavior that you're supposed to just make, you know, and which you could do cosmetically. But it's meant to get you thinking about your interactions, not only with this person, but with people in general and the way that you are with them, you know, um, emotionally or in business or as a companion or as a neighbor.
And so what it will do is bring about more depth and more profundity, and it might also make it easier for you, where you don't have to twist and turn so much, uh, so that you land on your own two feet. Maybe you can just be on your own two feet and walk beside this person in your life.
Cancer
If you're born under Cancer or you have Cancer rising, this period of time that Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is going to be a very profound and illuminating time for you. First of all, Scorpio is a water sign, just like Cancer is a water sign, which means that any planet traveling through a water sign, be it Scorpio or Pisces, forms an automatic trine to you by sign.
A trine is basically unconditional support, okay? When a planet is traveling through a zodiac sign that trines your own, you're seeing that planet in its most supportive way towards you. It's going to be supportive of you emotionally. It's going to be supportive of you financially. It's going to bring good things.
If you're dealing with difficult things or difficult times, it's going to help you to cope with those difficult things or difficult times in a way that doesn't wound you or in a way that doesn't break you. It's there in your corner to help you go, go through a difficult time like that.
And chances are, with Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, you're probably going through somewhat of a difficult time, a difficult time with someone whom you care about very deeply, or you might even be going through a difficult time with your child, or a difficult time with your creativity, or the way that you, uh, pursue your creativity or express your love.
There's a difficulty that's here. Now, again, it's a trine, so this isn't something that's going to traumatize you. It's not something that's going to harm you. But it is a period of time that's not going to be– that's not gonna turn out in the Cancerian way that you want it to turn out. People born under Cancer or who have Cancer rising are very optimistic.
They're perhaps the most optimistic of all the water signs because it's the zodiac sign that's associated with summer, the season of abundance here in the Northern Hemisphere, where astrology, Western astrology, originates. So for you, being born in the season of abundance, you see abundance in your life.
Things have a happy ending. Things turn out for the best. You know, nothing so horrible can be said or done that, you know, you can't, uh, make amends over a good meal or a bottle of wine, or even a bowl of ice cream. Okay, so, so there's a nurturing quality to Cancer, which is beautiful. We all need nurturing in our life, and we need support in our life.
But sometimes, if you're born under Cancer or Cancer rising, you wanna bring that nurturing, or you wanna bring that support into areas where it's not translating to the person, where the ending might not be happy, or the period of time is really grueling, or it's very difficult. It's almost like you sort of wanna kiss, um, a cut or wound to make things better, but that's not the way to do it.
The way to do it is to be with that person through this period of time. And I think that that's what Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is getting you to do. You don't have to have the answers. You don't have to make the person feel better. But if you hold their hand, if you stand next to them, that is a beautiful thing.
This is one of the most beautiful things about Scorpio. People born under Scorpio or who have Scorpio rising or Scorpio moon even, will stand with you at the abyss, and they will stand there next to you at the abyss. They won't try to rescue you from it, take you away from it, explain it away, or anything like that.
They will stand with you during a critical or even a cataclysmic time in your life, and they will stand there with you because they get it, and they wanna be there for you while you're going through this sort of a situation, and they're not going to abandon you, and they're not going to leave you.
And so when you have Mercury retrograde in a zodiac sign like Scorpio, you're not going to leave any more than you're gonna try to kiss the wound and make things better. You're gonna be there with that person. And being there with that person through whatever they're going through, showing the patience, showing the fortitude.
Maybe you're raising a kid who's a real pain in the ass right now, you know, who's like, you know, making life really, really difficult, okay, for you. And what happened to, you know, my beloved Rosie? You were such a wonderful child, and now you're just this hellion. You know, Scorpio doesn't give up on people like that.
It stands by them, and it tries to understand that b—dark passage that they're going through, um, to the best of its ability. And so this is something that you can key into during this period of time. But it's also about owning your own darkness. In other words, owning your own fears or insecurities or anxieties as you go through this kind of a passage right now, and letting that be all right.
You know, not, uh, treating them like, you know, like they're treasonous or treacherous, that they're, that, that they're things to be ashamed of or, or feel guilty about if you feel doubts or anxiety or, or even like you want to flee or leave a situation. You know, you may have to leave a, for a period of time, like 15 minutes or a day or maybe even a week or something like that, just to sort of get things back in order again so that you can, you can come back.
That's okay, too. But this period of time isn't just a dark tunnel. Scorpios experience dark tunnels as periods of transformation. You know, the ruling planet is Pluto, the modern ruler of Scorpio, which really holds value in ordeals and the transformations that arise from them.
And that's what's going, what you're going through right now. And so let's say you're parting ways with someone. Make sure that you, that you part ways in a way that you can live with. You know, um, maybe you're being there for someone and you're feeling like you're being trampled on or, or, or taken for granted. Bring the grace into that period.
The person may not be taking f—you for granted at all. The person might be going through a hard time and they're lashing out at someone, and you're the someone that they're lashing out at. And sometimes you just have to be strong and take that. This is, uh, something that Scorpios are very familiar with.
It's a fixed sign. Sometimes you just have to take it, and that's what's going on during this period of time. You know, you're not gonna be broken down by it or destroyed. You'll get through it. If anything, you'll become more loving and even affirmative. I mean, there will be a period of time in which maybe the most loving thing you can do is to draw the boundaries or say, “I'm not going to take that anymore,” or something along those lines.
You know, to say things that you could never imagine yourself saying, but saying and taking responsibility for what you're saying. That's another thing that Scorpio brings to the table with this, is a responsibility for your emotional actions and that there are repercussions, and Scorpio really studies those repercussions.
Lord knows because they've had to pay the price of those repercussions so many times in their life. And so this is a period of time in which you'll find yourself being stronger than you thought you would be normally. This is a period of time in which you're being loving in a way that you didn't know if you could show that love during something that, you know, really, tested you in so many different ways.
And what you're going to get as a result of this is a strength and a fortitude, which you might have always had, but you've never had to draw upon until a time like this. And so even though this can be difficult, and even though you're protected during this period of time, you will emerge from this Mercury retrograde in Scorpio stronger and more resilient and more compassionate than you have ever been before.
Leo
If you're born under Leo or you have Leo rising, this period of time when Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is gonna be a period of time in which you will be dealing with a reckoning. You will be facing a reckoning, and this reckoning probably has to do with home and family. Now, that sounds pretty heavy, reckoning.
Okay, and maybe even a little bit judgy or something along those lines, and that might be the way that you feel during this period of time. Scorpios and Leos really do have a very strong bond with one another. It can be difficult and challenging at times, but they really do stand by one another, even during the periods of time when they think they've absolutely had it.
And I think it has something to do with the darkness and the light. Being born under Leo or having Leo rising, you live in an orb of light, which makes perfect sense because your ruling planet is the Sun. Now, for those of us who live in the world, you know, we see the Sun is rising, and it hits noon, and then the Sun sets, and then it's nighttime, right?
But when you're born under Leo or you have Leo rising, it's always daytime because you are the Sun. The Sun doesn't set on the Sun. The Sun doesn't experience night, you know, in itself. The Sun is light. It lights the night, and lighting the night is lighting the day. And so this is what people born under Leo or who have Leo rising do.
They bring the light, and they bring the heat, and they bring the life force. This is something that you take very seriously. Okay, you see yourselves as mini suns that are running around the world and making the world a more lit and more beautiful and more vivacious place. And so a big problem that people born under Leo or Leo rising can have is their relationship to the dark.
All right, um, I think one of the words that's used nowadays is shadow. You know, and a shadow is, by the way, created by light. More often than not, during the day, I mean, the Moon– a full Moon can cast shadows too, but more often than not, it's during the light of day and, you know, you can look around and see your shadow with, with the Sun behind you.
Now, we can experience shadows at night. A full Moon will cast a shadow, but we more often than not experience shadows during the day, during the light of day. And so a shadow isn't light, all right? And that's kind of a key to understanding this period of time when Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
Scorpio's modern ruler is Pluto, okay. Pluto was the, named after the Roman god of the dead. Pluto rules over the underworld. There's no light in the underworld. You know, fish that live in caves don't have eyes. Moles scratch their way through the earth, and they don't have eyes. There's no need for eyesight because there's no light.
Other senses are instead amplified and evolve to become more primary than something like sight. So when you're born into Leo or you have Leo rising, you may find yourself confronted, because Scorpio forms a natural square to your sign, by things that you see as dark, or things that you don't really want to talk about, and things that are kind of making you annoyed that they're being brought up.
These issues are probably going to deal with home and family during this period of time, and maybe even your own father. Uh, this might be a period of time in which information comes to the surface about your father or either of your parents that you never knew before, that suddenly, um, maybe casts them in a darker light than they had been cast before.
This might be a period of time in which you're facing Lifetime TV dramas in which, you know, your siblings are accusing you of things, or your kids are coming home for the holidays and bringing with them all the grievances on how you failed as a parent. Or this might be a period of time in which your parent just, you know, sort of sees you as, uh, as embodying all the dark things of themselves.
So you may be projecting shadow, or you may be having people's shadows projected onto you during this period of time. And as a Leo, as a child of the light, you're not going to like it. You're not going to like it one bit. You don't even like it if you're airing a grievance towards someone that you care about because you want it to be okay and all right.
You know, you're born under the Sun. The Sun is your ruling planet. The Sun rises on a new day. I mean, you know, you can be like, “I feel this grievance against you, but we're, we're good, right?” And what happens when the other person says no, we're not? You know, that's kind of a Scorpio response because Scorpios and Scorpio energy is going to be as true to its emotional life, which can be very sensitive and relate to wrongdoing, you know, rejection, uh, being treated poorly, um, being ostracized in some way or, or being the person that you run to.
Uh, Scorpios are the person that people run to when they're going through their dark times, but once they're on the other side of the dark time, they want nothing to do with the Scorpio. That's part of the dynamic that can exist between Leo and Scorpio. Leos will often say around Scorpio energy, “You just see things so darkly.
You know, why does it always have to be so dark or such a bummer or so grim?” You know, and Scorpios may look at Leos and be like, “What is this Pollyanna universe you're living in or, or this eternal child thing, this radiant special me? Grow up and deal with these things.” And I mean, th—these can become almost evergreen or classic arguments and debates.
But during this period of time with the, uh, Mercury retrograde in Scorpio at the bottom of the chart, which is literally the underworld point of the chart, this is a journey to the underworld, or the underworld is journeying up to say hi to you, you know, during this period of time. And, and it's… things are being brought to account.
It's a time of reckoning. Now, it could feel a bit judgy during this period of time. Um, and, and if it does, I would, um, advise you to sort of lean into your fortitude. You know, lean into listening to what's being said. I think a tremendous waste of time would be to get defensive. Now, that's really hard.
When things are being brought up about our personality or our actions, uh, that we're not particularly proud of or, or we don't even recognize, and they're brought up in such a, you know, dark and, and incriminating way, you know, we're not exactly going to be like, “Tell me more.” You know? We're gonna get defensive.
We're gonna wanna explain things. We're gonna wanna be Leo, which is, roar, louder than the other person in the argument, or just pick up our things and leave, you know, or something along those lines. But, but this Mercury retrograde is beckoning you to stay, to listen to the inconvenient truth, to, to weigh in the balance uncomfortable questions.
You may feel like the person is out to get you, but maybe what they're really trying to do is grow past something. Maybe they're trying to make peace with something. Maybe something in childhood. Maybe it's a relationship dynamic. Maybe it's something in your friendship, but they're trying to make peace with it.
They're trying to quell what's a restless grievance, and they may need you to be there. It might start with taking the blame, you know, but taking the blame might evolve into you being a witness or helping them understand something about themselves, that they really need your recognition. They really need your memory of what transpired, or they really need you acknowledging that you said or did the things that you said or did, you know?
And that's a service. That's a service to someone else, which isn't always easy to do if someone's coming at you, as I said, with a grievance. Uh, but when you do that with someone, that begins to take away the pressure of the grievance. Remember the story of Androcles and the Lion? Androcles is a slave, and he sees a lion one day roaring in pain in the jungle and everyone flees, but Androcles doesn't.
Androcles recognizes that the lion's in pain, and he comes up to the lion and he plucks the thorn out of its paw, and the lion looks at him with gratitude and disappears, and that's it. You know, until Androcles, being a slave, a Christian slave, is being fed to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, and the first lion that comes bounding forward is the lion that Androcles had pulled the thorn from.
And so the lion, um, uh, recognizes Androcles right away, and of course, Androcles is not devoured by the lion. And that's kind of what happens when we recognize the pain and the wound, and when we pluck the thorn. There can be gratitude and relief, and it becomes reciprocal. So perhaps this is a story of recognizing, um, where someone close to you had been wounded or had been carrying a grievance for a very long time, and removing that thorn.
You know, not having the answer, not explaining it away or getting defensive. Having the courage to remove the thorn, getting the person's gratitude, and perhaps one day there may be a period of time in which you need that reciprocated from the very same person or maybe from someone else, and that person gladly is there for you to remove the thorn, to help you face something about yourself in which you're frustrated or angry or very, very hurt, you know.
And that person gives you solace, and that person gives you comfort. So this is the way that I want you to think of the Mercury retrograde in Scorpio. You may not be hearing things that you wanna hear. They're probably things that you need to hear, but also take your own time in owning them and absorbing them because they're not meant to incriminate or to hurt.
They're meant to heal or even provide a piece that's been missing from a puzzle. A, a puzzle that's, that's remained without this piece for far too long a period of time.
Virgo
If you're born under Virgo or you have Virgo rising, this period of time that your ruling planet Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is going to be a very enlightening period of time for you. It's gonna be more than enlightening. It's actually going to be progressive. It's going to help you to improve in ways that you never really imagined improving before, and this is the reason why.
Scorpio's a water sign, and you're a Virgo. You were born under an earth sign, and so the relationship between these two signs is one of a sextile. It's not a trine. That's, that would've occurred if Mercury were traveling through Taurus or Capricorn, two zodiac signs which share the same element as you, but it's a sextile.
Sextiles are complementary. Earth and water are complementary. Think of, um, I don't know, uh, sure, um, planting a seed in the ground. Uh, you just don't sort of plant a seed in the ground. You plant a seed in the ground, and you water it, and by watering the seed that you planted in the ground, it grows. And so it is the nature of earth and water together to grow.
And so this is going to be a growth period for you. Now, what we're focusing on here is Mercury, the planet of communication. Mercury is also the planet of transactions. Buying and selling is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury was originally a planet that was associated with the scribe, the person who took down the king's words in court, who kept a record of everything that had been talked about, everything that had been bought, everything that had been sold, everything that happened in the day-to-day life of an early empire or civilization.
So with Mercury traveling through Scorpio and being retrograde in Scorpio, this is going to bring out the elements of the story that I shared with you about Ida Tarbell, where she was an investigative reporter. Now, this doesn't mean that you're suddenly going to become an investigative reporter or anything along those lines.
You know, although you might take up a research project during this period of time, but when are people born under Virgo or Virgo rising not working on a research project? But anyway, what it means is that it's actually going to bring up more of the elements of what she faced while she was writing her history of Standard Oil.
And as I mentioned before in the story, Ida Tarbell's father had been financially ruined by J.D. Rockefeller. Now, were all the oil operators ruined by J.D. Rockefeller? No. They were, they were bought out by J.D. Rockefeller.
He gave them stocks in his company, and many of them went on to become very wealthy men. But Ida's father would not be bought in that way. He refused to basically bend the knee or take the blood money, um, in that regard. And his business partner, his business partner committed suicide over the whole thing that had gone down with the, uh, Standard Oil Company and the railroads.
So Ida Tarbell's father was very embittered, and he was very angry, and that's something that could easily have bled into her character, and in fact, it did. She had anger about what had gone on.
So she had seen the ruin that this had caused to her father and his business partner and to other people in the community, how they had been cowed, how they had been broken.
And so, yeah, there was going to be a ferocity that she brought to that situation. But at the same time, at the same time, she took that Mercury in Scorpio seriously. If she was going to write about this history, it had to be impartial. If she was going to tell the full story, it wasn't just going to be a story of uncovered secrets.
It was also going to include J.D. Rockefeller's philanthropy, which she also wrote about extensively. She wanted people themselves, the readers themselves, to balance for themselves, to judge for themselves what was being told in this story. And so it was being done as an exposé, but also it was being done as a way of reforming society, of reforming business.
And that might be something that you're also facing nowadays. Now, again, that doesn't mean that you're, you know, reforming something or anything out of the, uh, anything along those lines. You might be, you know, and if that's indeed the case, then this would be, you know, talking to that spirit. But I think what we're really talking about here is the idea between exposé or exposure and gotcha.
Okay? There may be things that you have grievance about in your life right now, and they may be very real reasons for having that grievance, and this is something that pr—probably got, um, reinforced during the period of time, the long period of time that, uh, Saturn was opposite you in Pisces and that Neptune was opposite you in Pisces.
There, you know, y—and, and, and even the last year and a half, you've gone through, uh, South Node traveling through Virgo. So I mean, when you stack it up, Neptune opposite your sign for 13 years, Saturn opposite your sign for basically the last two and a half years, and then followed by a South Node going through your sign for the last year and a half, yeah, you might have a lot of grievances.
You might have a lot of things that you're really angry about and upset about, and ways that you feel helpless, you know, to maybe change or do something about. Well, what's going on now during this period of time with Mercury retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, is that you're going to be discovering your voice.
You're going to be discovering that you have agency, that you have an impact on the lives of the people around you. And this is outside the home. This can be colleagues. This can be people that you work with, people that you socialize with, even the way that you represent or even broadcast or communicate in society.
Maybe you have a podcast or, or something along those lines. All right? But, um—what you're going to be feeling during this period of time as you try to work through your grievances, maybe you're talking about your personal grievances, or maybe you identify with the grievances of other people and you're advocating on their, on their, um, behalf.
You know, you're representing them in some way. You need to be asking yourself during this period of time, are you bringing heat or light to the situation? Okay. Bringing heat to the situation is anger and rancor, and that's the gotcha. You know, that's the, you know, “I caught you in this. Uh, you twisted the facts.
You were outwardly lying, and I gotcha. I caught you in this, and I'm going to shame you. I'm going to make you feel guilty and bad, and, and I'm going to…” You know, like if you ever saw Game of Thrones where the, uh, nun woman walks behind, you know, the fallen Cersei, you know, with a bell. I think she's ringing a bell or something, and she's like, “Shame, shame.”
Or she's banging a gong or something like that. You know, Cersei's meant to walk through the city with cut hair, and it, it's kind of a Game of Thrones version of being, you know, tarred and feathered or something like that, you know. To shame… You know, it's not that, okay? I mean, you can go in that direction if you want, but it's not gonna bring about the reform that you seek in your life.
No one reforms their behavior or changes their behavior because they've been shamed into it or guilted into it. Shame and guilt both plant the seeds of rancor and of anger and of resentment. No one's consciousness is really raised through shame or guilt. That's done through a conscience, you know?
That's done through, you know, asking moral questions and seeing yourself as whether you're bringing heat or light to a situation. When you bring light to a situation, then you're an illuminating figure. You're someone who is illuminating the conversation. You're adding something to the conversation.
Maybe you're adding to it by listening, by hearing, by providing facts, by letting the facts stand on their own and letting people discuss them and talk about them. This is something that the Mercury retrograde in Scorpio can do. Scorpio's often identified with, you know, just seeing the worst in people or the worst in life, and that comes from its association with the underworld.
But Scorpios are also great performers. Remember that Pluto is the modern ruler of Scorpio. It's the planet of transformation. So Scorpios are transformers, and it's not just they transform in their own lives, but especially with Pluto in Aquarius nowadays, Scorpios are transformers in society itself.
They're there to show society how to be a better society, and you can't be a better society if you ignore the muck. Okay? Now, you can't spend all of your time muckraking, you know, which might be a tendency during this period of time, you know, of like, ugh, going over those grievances and everything that's wrong.
But what you want to do is that you want to be more alchemical in your approach. You want to take the dross or the muck, and you want to transform it into something golden. You want to transform it into something illuminating. And so you have an opportunity to do that during this period of time that your own ruling planet, Mercury, is retrograde in Scorpio.
Maybe you do it by revisiting a situation. Maybe you do it by being a mediating figure. Maybe you do it through a piece of writing or a piece of communication. Or maybe you provide the piece of information that someone was looking for, that they needed in order to answer a problem for themselves, in order to put something to rest.
Whatever it is, you are a mouthpiece, either for your own grievances or the grievances of other people. But what you wanna do is not stir the pot. What you want to do is be an illuminating figure. You want to expose what has gone on, but you also wanna show the way to make it better. And if you embrace this progressive spirit of the retrograde Mercury in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, I think that you will find the experience to be both transforming and uplifting.
Libra
If you're born under Libra or you have Libra rising, this period of time that Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is going to be a bit of a befuddling period of time for you. You're not gonna like some of the things that are coming out right now. Uh, some of the accusations or some of the things that are being said, maybe some of the grievances or some of the things that you're being confronted with.
But what Mercury in Scorpio is going to insist on is that you own your own muck. All right? So remember that muckraking is something that Mercury in Scorpio is all about. But during this period of time, the insistence is going to be that you own it. Now, that isn't own it like, you know, here's your shame, here's your guilt, here's your life sentence of all the evils that you've done or anything like that in your life.
What's important with owning one's own muck is that it makes you more holistic as a person. It makes you, I don't know, I guess the simplest way of, of saying it is it makes you more of a person. It makes you more real. This is something that people born under Libra or who have Libra rising can struggle with. Yours is the only zodiac sign that's not a creature, okay?
It's not an animal and it's not a person, okay? It, it's not a fish, it's not a crab, it's not a creature that's half man, half horse or a woman that's half woman with wings of an angel. It's scales. It's an instrument. It's an inanimate object. And what can happen when you're a human person born under an inanimate object is not unlike what can happen when you're a person who is born with the expectations to live an ideal life.
Not ideal as in idealized and naive, but ideal as in circumspect, as in embracing the best virtues of yourself, of being the best that you can be, not in an Aries sense of, like, be all that you can be, you know, like in the army or something like that, but the best that you can be in terms of your virtue, in terms of your goodness, in terms of your judgment of people and judgment of life.
Libra is also ruled by Venus, which means it's your job to bring beauty and love and lovely things into the world. And when given its druthers, someone born under Libra or Libra rising is going to want to see the beautiful. It's going to want to see the good and can get a little uncomfortable around the dark, the bad and the ugly.
And this is a period of time in which you may be experiencing that about you. Now, there was a period of time in astrology where Libra wasn't really recognized as a sign on its own, where it had been bundled up in the constellation of Scorpio. Libra does appear in the constellation of Scorpio, but, um, uh, right now as succinctly different signs.
But there was a period of time in which they were seen as one sign and Libras kind of got the Ophiuchus treatment of kind of being banished or left on the table as far as the zodiac signs were concerned. And that was remedied when Caesar corrected the calendar with the Julian calendar. But I'm not gonna go into a History Channel explanation of all of that.
But to this day, in Persian astrology, Libra is still referred to as the claws of the scorpion, um, because it was the claws of the scorpion that Caesar basically hacked off to re—align the sign so that it appeared as that constellation in the heavens. So there's always a little bit of Scorpio in a Libra, and always a little bit of Libra in a Scorpio.
It's kind of like that Reese's peanut butter commercial where it's like, you know, one person's walking with chocolate and the other person's walking with a jar of peanut butter, and they bump into each other and they're like, “Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter.” “Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate.”
And they discover Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Okay. So there's that kind of relationship that Libra and Scorpio have with one another. Although don't ask either of them to admit to it. Libra's like, “Scorpio's, you know, dark and always taking things so intensely.” And Scorpio's like, “Libra, that, that superficial dilettante sign that can't make up its mind.
Hmm, there's no Scorpio in there. I'll, I'll let you know.” You know, so, so there can be, uh, that kind of a dynamic that can exist. Nevertheless, when you have a planet transiting through Scorpio, and some of you people born under Libra are going to have planets in Scorpio, like maybe your Mercury, um, you have to sort of acknowledge and own the darkness of Scorpio.
You know, what I'm calling the muck, okay? And in a way, even though it annoys you, you know, the way that Scorpio turns things into, you know, you know, seeing the ugly side of people or their darker motives or their hidden agendas and, you know, not trusting people and, and delighting in, you know, exposing their feet of clay.
And this could really get under the skin of a Libra or Libra rising. There's a part of you that understands, at least intellectually, the Scorpio side of the argument because it has to be weighed in the balance. That's your zodiac sign. You have to weigh good and evil. You have to weigh, um, expensive and cheap, you know, to find the middle ground, to find the value because that's what the balance is all about.
It's discerning good judgment, and that's what happens with you. So during this period of time, you might be faced with some people pulling some gotchas on you, you know, um, who are, you know, holding you to account of things you said or things you did and airing grievances and pointing out that you're not the pure, nice person that you're supposed to be and, and all of that.
And as a Libra or Libra rising, you might be like, “Oh, God. Not that again. Okay, whatever.” You know, type of thing. But this is more than just negative attention. They're trying to bring your attention to a side of yourself that you may be distancing yourself from or have distanced yourself from. Maybe it's a side of you that, um, represents anger.
You don't like getting angry. Uh, maybe it's a side of you that, um, can get envious of someone. Maybe it's a side of you that can feel rejected. You know, Libras don't like those darker emotions, which is why, like a child with vegetables on their plate, they'll sort of scrape them onto Scorpios, you know, and Scorpios will come and dump them back on Libra's plate.
And that might be kind of what's going on right now. But it's in service to acknowledge your humanity, that, that having foibles or dark thoughts or dark feelings doesn't make you a bad person, and it doesn't tarnish who you are. It makes you indeed more relatable, more human, more accessible, more approachable.
And so there's a way that you can take what might be grievances or accusations that are being brought against you, and you can incorporate them into your life so that they improve your life rather than indict it, you know? And so this is something to think about while you're maybe being shown some of the more unsavory aspects of your character and being made to acknowledge and take responsibility for them.
But I think that if you bring about a sense of humor, and humor is part of humanity. You know, if you can, uh… If you have a sense of humor, if you acknowledge the humanity, if you say, “Mm-hmm. You know, this, this is me,” then it may not seem so indicting. It may not seem so horrifying. And the Scorpio, uh, energy in your life may not be chuckling, you know, at your humiliation, but rather laughing because you get it, and in joining you and greeting you and welcoming you and saying, “Welcome to the human race.
You're just like the rest of us.” And, and maybe you don't feel so lonely, or you have to be so uptight or, like, you have to stand for all these virtues anymore, that you can relax, that you can be a person, that you can, you know, whisper to me, “I really couldn't stand that person at all.” You know? That, that you can show a side of you that's unfair and a side of you that's like, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, retaliatory and, and angry at someone and that it's not going to destroy who you are.
This is one of the beautiful things about Scorpio. Scorpio insists that you see in the dark, okay? Scorpio, uh, that's because it's ruled by Pluto, named after the underworld. It insists that you acknowledge and accept parts of yourself that you might find unsavory. Because the more that you find them unsavory, the more likely you're going to project it onto other people and make them feel like that.
When you own your muck, you get to rejoin the human race, and those things that you thought were so horrific and, and bad aren't so horrific and bad, and that instead of being blotted out, you can accept them as a part of your life. And that can only become more liberating and more deepening and more enriching in the expression of who you are.
Scorpio
If you're born under Scorpio or you have Scorpio rising, this period of time when Mercury is retrograde in your sign, well, that Mercury retrograde is going to impact you more than most other people. That's because Mercury is traveling through your own zodiac sign. So if Mercury is the messenger, if Mercury is the planet that is telling it like it is, if Mercury's job is to communicate to other people, uh, back in the day, Mercury's job was to communicate the will of God to other people.
Um, so people would be looking to you for information, or for communication, or for approval, or disapproval, or something along those lines. You know, you gonna be used to, with Mercury going through your sign, as being the truth teller. You know, the, the person who tel- tells it like it is. But with Mercury retrograde in your zodiac sign from October 24th until November 13th, basically, um, nobody wants to hear from you.
Okay? I mean, I was trying to figure out a nicer way of saying it, but blunt—bluntly, that's what it is. Nobody's gonna wanna hear from you during this period of time. And this is something that you kind of have to think about. You know, why is it nobody wants to hear from you? You know, you're a truth teller.
You say what it is. You're very candid. You're there for them in their times of, of trial and tribulation. So why is it that all of a sudden nobody wants to hear from you? And the reason why people might be reacting to you as someone that they don't want to hear from is they may regard you as a spoiler right now, or they may regard you as someone who always sees things very darkly and very dimly, or they may even regard you as the gotcha person, the person who's going to trap them in something they said or something that they did.
And that refers to an earlier part of the broadcast when I was talking about the investigative journalist, Ida Tarbell, um, is that she got this assignment to write an exposé on Standard Oil and to show all the really awful things that Standard Oil had done, and they had indeed done them. But, and this was a personal choice of hers, because her own father had been a victim of financial ruination that had come from Standard Oil, she insisted that this tell the full story.
In other words, it wasn't just going to be all the blights and the blots and the horrible things that Standard Oil did. It was also going to be about the philanthropy of J.D. Rockefeller, all the good that he did. It was gonna be about business, uh, how business could be corrupted, and how business could be reformed.
So she was going to tell the whole story and make a point of taking herself out of it. She was in a perfect position to do a gotcha on J.D. Rockefeller, and she l—she had all the facts, she had all the receipts, as we say nowadays. She had all the information, and she had him pinned to a board like a butterfly in a butterfly collector's gallery.
Okay? Absolutely. And she could have made him, you know, look awful, like, like complete shame, rained shame down on him. But she didn't, because she recognized a whole person, okay? And she recognized that he had started out at 32, and that he had grown since. None of this was meant to take him off the hook.
She's still a Scorpio. Scorpios never let anyone off the hook. But it was also in service to the other Scorpio faculty, which is telling the whole story, dreck and all, warts and all. So the muckraking, which Theodore Roosevelt accused her of, you know, which was basically, you know, uh, bringing out the worst in things and then, you know, pillorying someone on it and, and rejoicing in it.
She said when she responded to it, “He doesn't understand what I did. What I'm doing is I'm showing the whole story, and it's not sensational. This is impartial.” It… I mean, I think it was like 12 to 9 articles. I don't remember at this point. But, you know, that… I mean, it was painstaking what she did, but she was holding up a mirror, a glass, to really business in America, in which the story of J.D. Rockefeller was like a parable, okay?
It was about J.D. Rockefeller, but it was also a learning moment. That's what she was doing with it, and that's what she sought. And that's something where you may find yourself in a similar situation right now. Are you doing a gotcha in people's lives, or are you exposing, but not in an exposé way, but exposing in an enlightening way?
Are you helping people to understand parts of themselves that they don't wanna see, or parts of themselves that they don't want to deal with? This is a really important, uh, thing right now, you know, where we are in our society, where it's not muckraking, it's muck-throwing. You know? It's almost like a pie fight with muck, you know?
Or a food fight where people are just, you know, throwing it at one another and, and, and reveling in it. I don't think anyone's really reveling in it, but it's kind of like poison oak or something. Once you start scratching it, it spreads over everything, and I think that that's what's going on. You have the presence of mind, you have the presence of experience, which is wisdom, of being a Scorpio or Scorpio rising, where you can speak truth, but can you find a way to do it that's not adversarial?
All right. Ida Tarbell did it in a way that was not riling up the masses. She did it in a way where the masses could judge for themselves what had gone down and what kind of people that they wanted to be, what kind of business that they wanted to countenance here in the United States of America. Which is why her article helped usher in the progressive, uh, period, which is a period of reform, which is never static.
You never reform once and that's it. You go through a period where you reform and things go off track and go awry again, and then you try to reform, but you do it in a timely manner. You do it to address the concerns of the day, and that's kind of what's being shown up here with the Mercury retrograde in your, in your zodiac sign right now.
It's interesting that in the solar chart, um, where you put the sign that you're reading for in the rising sign position, um, Mercury rejoices in this part of your solar chart. So you are saying things that need to be said, that need to be heard, but it's either coming out in a way that people don't hear it, you know, or in a way in which people have been biased against you because they've always heard it as something gloomy or negative or critical or whatever.
So you have an opportunity here to own your words, and you have an opportunity here to own your intent. But it has to be more than intent. We can have great intentions, but good intentions, as they say, pave the well—way to hell. You have to show something for it. You have to have the words that go with the intent.
You have to communicate something which is reforming or progressive, something which acknowledges the dark side of a topic or a situation. Does more than acknowledge it. It, it, it, it excavates it, it brings it up, it puts it on hold, but it also retains the humanity of it. You know, people aren't just forces of evil.
They had childhoods once. They're still human beings like everyone else, even though they might be caricatured through their deeds or caricatured through their representation in media. And as a Scorpio, because you understand that so fundamentally, this is where the Mercury retrograde is getting you to reflect on your words, to own your words, to really think about your intent and then your objective.
Are you stirring the pot or are you helping people to understand a very difficult situation? Scorpios have a Mars side to them where it's kind of like, you know, “Well, I've always been a battler and, and I've always been a fighter, and that's what I am.” And that's great, but this retrograde is asking you to be more than a fighter.
It's asking you to be an advocate, but it's also asking you to understand in the people that you're against, to recognize their humanity, to see them as more multidimensional than a caricature, and to communicate that. So there might be a period of time where you have to own what you said.
You have to own what you did. And as a Scorpio, you might be like, you know, “No, I never will,” but the better thing would be to own it if you want that validity, if you want that respect, that can be some of what this retrograde may also bring is owning some of the things that you said that maybe you shouldn't have said.
But guess what? We live in time where we mature and grow. What we said 10 years ago isn't, you know, shouldn't be held up against us as a, as a testament to our character now. That might've been where we were 10 years ago, and you grow and you change, and that's being a human being and not, you know, a timestamped email.
So that's stuff to think about, and also how you message, and are you messaging in the best way possible, in the most educational way possible, in the most reforming way possible? Can you leave be—leave behind a us versus them, you know, type of thing, and reach out across the aisle? That Scorpios, once committed to doing that, they are inexhaustible in the way that they build those bridges.
Sagittarius
If you're born under Sagittarius or you have Sagittarius rising, Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is taking place in a very sensitive angle of your own solar horoscope. It's taking place in what we call the 12th house. The 12th house is a very complex house, and usually painted in very dark colors. It's the house of self-undoing, and secret enemies, and incarceration, and, um, asylums, mental asylums specifically, you know.
And, and it sounds really quite wretched. It was actually also the house of slavery, uh, back in the day. And so that was also read in the 12th house. Like, if a king had his chart read, and there was a heavy transit in the 12th house, and it was before a battle, uh, the, uh, astrologer might say that the king would suffer defeat because the king would either be executed or made a slave, or his family made a slave.
So, so the 12th house had all these lovely associations. Nowadays, it doesn't quite mean that anymore. But what a 12th house can talk about is what I call… Well, I often refer to the 12th house in two ways. Either it's the house of the family skeletons or it's the epigenetics house, and this is how I'm using those terms.
The 12th house kind of accumulates everything that took place prior to you showing up in your family. So it's something that's been passed down through the generations. Uh, that might be a psychological condition or a physical condition. It might be a story, it might be a bias, it might be a trauma, but it's something that's been passed down through the generations that is going to have impact on you.
Either you, uh, pick up in this intergenerational story, and the story takes over your own life, or you break the curse, what's called the family curse, and you stand out on your own in some way. So with Mercury, which is a planet of communication and of news, retrograde in Scorpio, there may be information that comes to light right now which changes your understanding of that family history, that changes your un—understanding of the way that things had gone before, you know.
Or there may be a real curiosity in you in which you want to understand the family history, in which you want to understand what had gone before. Then again, what could be taking place during this period of time, um, is, is resolving what had always been seen as a fait accompli. You know, like maybe alcoholism was rampant in your family, and, um, so what happens is everyone who's born right now is gonna be an alcoholic, and maybe they all have become that, or maybe you've battled with that.
Or maybe something that was passed down through the family was, um, you know, a parent who ran away from the family and, and left everyone to fend for themselves, and maybe you're experiencing that in your own life, you know, like running away from something or something along those lines. What happens with a Mercury retrograde in Scorpio in this particular angle of your chart is that it's time to come home.
It's time to come back to this. This thing that maybe you don't wanna deal with, this thing that you don't wanna accept, a behavior that you saw in members of your family but you didn't see happening in yourself, but friends and loved ones are like, “Mm, I don't know. You kind of like have that same set of behaviors.”
You know, that sort of a thing. It's time to lay to rest these ghosts. It's time to lay to rest these restless spirits that feel like they, uh, they make you behave in certain ways. You know, that, uh, one can behave in a way that's, uh, compulsive because it's hereditary, or someone can be equally compulsive in trying to escape what was hereditary or what was the script.
And that can also lead you to live half a life because it's all about the escape and not about the acceptance of what had gone on, seeing that story in yourself and seeing yourself as empowered to make different choices. And that's essentially what's going on with this Mercury retrograde. Sagittarius is a zodiac sign that we often hear is of all about freedom.
You know, like, Sagittarians want their freedom, and they wanna live free and all these sorts of things, and it's very, very true. But that freedom comes from the idea of liberation, and what that, uh, goes back to is a Greek myth in which Saturn has consumed his children. Uh, he's been told that, uh, one of his children will grow up to overthrow him, and so as he, uh, as his wife Rhea gives birth to each child, he swallows them, and the children sort of linger in a limbo of his stomach, you know.
But one of them is secreted away. Um, Rhea actually, uh, takes a boulder and wraps it up in swaddling clothes and gives it to Saturn, and he swallows it, you know. And she sneaks Zeus or Jupiter out the back door, and he's raised on an island in, in, in the Mediterranean, uh, until he comes of age. And when he comes of age, he's going to go to battle with his father, and he's going to release his brothers and sisters.
His siblings are, um, Pluto and Neptune, as well as Hera and Demeter and Vesta. He's going to release his siblings from the belly of his father, and so this is where Jupiter is seen as a liberator. So not only does he overthrow his father, Saturn, as it was prophesied, but I think he gives Saturn a diuretic or something, or something that makes him vomit.
So I don't know, something like that. And Saturn vomits up, you know, the kids, and it, it, that goes sliding through the barf, you know? I mean, it's gods and mythology. What do you want, you know? And they immediately grow in years to their proper age. But anyway, um, yeah, he liberates them. It's not a glorious liberation.
But anyway, he liberates them, and, uh, Jupiter liberates his siblings, and he founds a new, uh, regime. He founds a new, uh, rule, and that's going to be the rule of the Olympians. And so in that respect, you know, uh, probably you're kind of like, “Okay, that's where freedom comes from?” Actually, yeah, that's where freedom comes from.
It's liberating from prisons. It's liberating from ignorance. It's liberating from incarceration. It's liberating from, um, behavioral patterns that might be counterproductive. This is what Sagittarius really seeks. So what often sort of gets transcribed in the description of people born under Sagittarius or Sagittarius rising is this freedom, you know, freedom from, freedom to be, and, you know, kind of like a prolonged adolescence.
But it's really about liberating, you know, liberating self from biases or ignorance and liberating other people from the drudgery of their, of their lives. And so that's something to think about with freedom. The reason I sort of went into that whole long, uh, story there is that that's what this Mercury in retrograde in Scorpio is in service to.
It's making you liberate those parts of yourself that have maybe been ghosts, uh, in the past. Those parts of yourself that because you didn't … You disowned them or didn't want anything to do with them, you disavowed them altogether. And so you live kind of maybe a life in which you keep repeating patterns and you don't know why, and it's because there's a whole part of you that you've denied or don't want anything to do with.
And so this period of time when Mercury is retrograde here, remember I said earlier in the broadcast, a retrograde could be traveling back over ground that you already traveled over. I think that that's kind of the calling to home that's taking place here. You're being asked to travel back over the ground that you already traveled over, maybe even travel back over ground that you had left or departed from, and that's what's going on here.
And so the Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is in service to you owning parts of yourself that maybe you don't like or maybe you don't identify with at all, but owning them in the pursuit of your own humanity, in the purpose of living a whole life and not a partial one. You may find when you own those parts of yourself that you feel have kept you down or go against freedom or, you know, you live a life of freedom of choice, not a life of circumstances.
Well, no one is totally free in their choices, and choices are often colored by circumstances and a chain of consequences that have preceded you. And you only liberate your choice by acknowledging and understanding what has come before. You only liberate and empower yourself with choice by understanding the consequences of behavior.
And when you own all of that, that becomes self-knowledge, and self-knowledge leads to self-awareness and ultimately wisdom, which is what your ruling planet Jupiter symbolizes in an astrological chart. It's that wisdom. And so take this period of time to travel back over the ground that you had already traveled over, that you thought you'd never see again, but which holds for you so many things that can enrich your experience and ennoble and uplift you as a person.
Capricorn
When you're born under Capricorn or you have Capricorn rising, the big question for you to ask during this period of time that Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is, did I hear that right? All right. Now, it's not, “Did I hear that right?” Like, “Did you call me something offensive underneath your breath, and did I hear that right and now I'm gonna have a brawl over it?”
No, it's not that at all. What it is is that you may have misunderstood something that has been said. Okay? Uh, you might have misunderstood that, uh, someone was saying something that was gloomier than it really is. You might have misunderstood that someone was saying something that was rosier than it really is.
Another thing that might be going on during this period of time is that you may be revisiting conversations, encounters, meetings from your past, anything from two weeks ago to 30 years ago, in which you will be asking the question, “Did I hear that right?” You know, “Is the whole reason why I'm feuding with this person based on a misunderstanding?
Was the whole reason that, um, I thought this person was in love with me based on a misunderstanding?” I mean, you know, it can go that way as well. So what's going on during this period of time is that you're setting the record straight. You're setting the record straight by looking at, by revisiting conversations, by looking up people from who knows when, you know.
And, and if it makes you feel better, you can just sort of say, “I'm doing ancestry.com,” or something like that. But, but the thing is you're going to have a real curiosity about did this person say what they really said? Did this person really mean what they said they meant? Did they really do what they really did?
And what's going to happen here is a bit of a reckoning where you will be revisiting conclusions that you made, judgments that you made, biases that you made, and you may be seeing them in a whole different light. Now, that could go for your angels as well as your demons, okay? The people that you have revered and respected and held up in high regard as angels might not have been all that.
And the people that you, you know, set yourself against, you know, because you w—had allied yourself to someone that you respected, so, you know, if they didn't like that person, you didn't like that person, too, you know. Y—you may find that there was bad blood or a misunderstanding or something that had taken place that, that you had gotten the story wrong, that there was another…
Either there was another side to the story, or you heard one person's version of it and bought into it hook, line, and sinker, and now the other side of the story is emerging, or more information is emerging, or maybe simply—I don't know. It could even be as simple as having outgrown a bias, having outgrown a judgment, having outgrown a feud.
Maybe you're coming to a time in your life in which it's like, “God, it wasn't that big a deal,” or, “I'm still upset over not getting the top cheerleading prize,” or something. I mean, like, you know, where you are letting go of those things. A lot of the imagery that's associated with Pluto, uh, which is a planet that's associated with transformation.
You know, one of the most popular, uh, symbols of transformation is, um, you know, a caterpillar cocooning and reemerging a butterfly. But you can also have the idea of a snake shedding its skin. Now, the snake sheds its skin because what's happened is that the body of the snake has outgrown the skin.
So the skin has to break and peel off because it hasn't kept up with the body of the snake. And that's kind of what's going on with you right now. That certain beliefs or the way that you understood things or reckoned things, they're not keeping up with who you are right now, and so you're shedding them.
And that might even go for certain associations or certain friendships or something along those similar lines. So the, the spirit of this Mercury retrograde in Scorpio that I wanna share with you is this idea of revisiting, of, of traveling back over the ground that you traveled over before. And when you travel over ground that you've traveled over before, that automatically means you know the way.
You know, you don't have to ask directions. You traveled over this ground and you know the way. You know how to get from here to there. But when you're asked to go back over it again, and we can all be annoyed, like, “Why am I repeating this? Why am I revisiting this? Why am I going back to this again?”
We may come to recognize that there was something that we took for granted or something that we found familiar that actually held so much more for us. You know, it's kind of like what can happen with our memories. You know, we remember growing up in a certain way and taking all these things for granted, and now in our modern world, we go back and look at that and we get nostalgic and we're like, “That was a better time,” and, “I wish I had really valued that time when I was younger.”
You know, these are things that really speak to the Capricorn soul, you know, because time is everything to a Capricorn. So this might be going on personally or spiritually or psychically for you, but it may also be affecting your relationships. Your relationships may be changing because maybe you're ready to hear the truth about certain things, or you're finally learning the truth about certain things.
That's not gonna make you switch allegiances and, you know, now the angels are demons and the demons are angels. What it's gonna do is introduce humanity to the story. You know, the decisions that someone makes at the age of 34 aren't gonna be the same decisions that they make at the age of 50. You know, they might be better, they might be worse.
But that understanding of experience and of time, that people change, that people grow, that history is fluid, it's not set, that there's always more to the story if you go and look for it, and that discovering more to the story isn't, you know, an aha moment, uh, in terms of, like, a gotcha moment and now you're the bad person.
Discovery could be understanding why the person did what they did, how circumstances might have pressed that on them, or how they might have made a very reckless or even an immature choice. So this is what the Mercury in retrograde in Scorpio is doing for you. It's filling out the stories. It's, it's giving you a broader picture, a, a more, uh, wider horizon or perspective to look at things.
And you may feel a lot of internal, uh, judgments and conclusions changing, but not in a horrible, debunked way. This is a sextile, not a square, not something disillusioning, like even an opposition. This is done in a way that's meant to promote growth in you, that you're in a place in your life where you can hear that story, where you can understand that story.
And part of you might be shocked, and part of you might be hurt, but you're not gonna be traumatized by it. If anything, you're going to come to appreciate on a deeper and a richer level the, uh, humanity and the history of a person that you regarded in one way or the other. You're going to embrace the human story, and not just the one that was reported to you.
Aquarius
If you're born into Aquarius or you have Aquarius rising, this period of time that Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is gonna be a bit of a conflicting time for you. That's because Scorpio is a fixed sign. Aquarius is a fixed sign. They're two different elements. Scorpio's water.
Aquarius is air. And so what that means is that they square one another. They have a 90-degree relationship to one another on the 180-degree circle, and so they form a square. This is a relationship which is supposed to be antagonistic or competitive or disagreeable and disagreeing. But that's not the only way that squares work.
As I practice astrology more and more, I mean, okay, do squares bring conflict? Yes, they bring conflict. Okay? But it's not conflict of one intensity. Okay? It can be a light conflict or a heavy conflict. It can be an unmoving conflict or a beating, beating one another over the head type of conflict. But the one that I sort of see emerging right here is that there are two conflicting worldviews.
There's the worldview of the Aquarius, which is your zodiac sign, and the worldview of Scorpio, and it's very different. All right? And it can be in conflict. Aquarians tend to see things more in, um, in a universal way or a big picture way, whereas Scorpios have a tendency to drill down on more of the specifics and the dirty details and things like this.
Both zodiac signs are in service to the truth, but the truth, um, that Aquarius seeks is the truth that sets you free. You know, that knowing things will, will set you free and broaden your horizons and, and fill you with light and understanding. Whereas Scorpios are like, you wanna know the truth because you wanna know that secret.
You wanna know that thing that someone's been hiding from you, um, that thing that makes them guilty or, or, or, you know, horrible or something along those lines. So, so the setting free can be, uh, two different capacities with Aquarius and Scorpio. Setting free is the, “Aha, now I know that you really were cheating on me,” moment of Scorpio, you know, when they get into their Spanish Inquisitor, you know, mode.
Or you can have the Aquarian like, “You know, we all rely one another, on one another on this planet. There's no other planet we can go to, so we must turn to one another and rely on one another and be—and embrace humanity, and that's the great truth, the truth of brotherly love, and that will set us free,” you know, type of thing.
Where the Scorpio's like, “Yeah, well, what about all these wars that are being waged?” and things like that. So it's a new… It, it's an eternal debate. You know, Aquarius will always see things more idealistically, you know, and, um, Scorpios have a tendency to see things more pessimistically. But what both hide is a closet side of themselves.
Aquarians have a closet cynic or a closet skeptic, and Scorpios, Scorpios have a closet optimist. So, so this also adds to the conflict that can take place between the two of them. Right now, if you're born under Aquarius or you have A—Aquarius rising, you're undergoing an extraordinary transformation in yourself and probably also your career, or at least your status in life right now, where you may feel like you're leaving behind something that has come to an end.
You've come to the end of the road with it. It's time to move on to something new and different. You could be a child who's moving into adolescence, an adolescent who's moving into adulthood, an adult who's moving into adult responsibilities, or an adult who's leaving behind the adult responsibilities because you feel like they no longer define you, uh, anymore, and that you want to travel a new and different road.
These are pivotal points, and these are important, uh, decisions that are being made. And we have a tendency to see these decisions of being larger than life. You know, like, either they're larger than we are, and so, you know, we're caught up in the grip of this decision, or we see them as so monumental that everything's riding on this and, and, and every little, uh, detail of that decision-making process matters and, and matters to the utmost degree.
But what's kind of lovely about this square is that it's not a true square that's taking place with you. It's not just Scorpio versus Aquarius, and, “Go at it, you guys,” you know, type of thing. The Mercury, which is retrograde in Scorpio, is ruled by the Pluto, which is now posited in your own zodiac sign.
Okay, so the Mercury in Scorpio retrograde has to speak to that Pluto in a way that that Pluto is going to apprehend and understand. So I think what's going on for you is that you're going through this transformation, and it's a big transformation. But we're dealing with Mercury, which is the god of small things.
Okay? Mercury's world is the world of common living. Okay? It's day-to-day life. It's, it's the shopkeeper that you talk to. It's the customer you have to deal with. It's the friend that you're catching up with. It's the loved one you're driving to their soccer practice. You know, it's your day-to-day world.
This is the world of Mercury. Mercury is all about the dots and connecting them. How they're read are done by other planets. But Mercury is getting from one place to another and connecting those different dots. So Mercury sees itself in the common traffic of everyday life. It doesn't see when you look above that, you know, those lines on the side of the mountain in South America really are a crow or show a spider or something like that.
You know, you could only see this from an aerial view, not in your day-to-day life. So Mercury is more the day-to-day life and something like Uranus, which is the modern rule of– uh, ruler of Aquarius, is the aerial view. And so what's happening here is that Mercury is making itself available to you in the day-to-day decisions that you're making in your life.
And so whatever transformation is taking place, it's taking place in bite-sized pieces. It's taking place in a way that you can absorb, uh, every one of these decisions that you are making. Now, this could take on a negative light, which is to be so involved in the details that you're paralyzed by them.
You know, that can happen when you become too absorbed in, in details. Or it can take place in a more enlightening way in which you see the way as being plotted out step by step by step. But with Pluto being in your sign right now, if you're an Aquarius or Aquarius rising, it's not easy for you to read the map.
You've got landmarks, but they're not the ones that we're familiar with. So you're finding your way. You really are going at things step by step by step, and that's a good thing. So what you're being asked to do is to move forward in your life, okay, with this Mercury, which is retrograde in Scorpio, to acknowledge the things that Scorpio wants to be acknowledged, which is that, you know, there is a human side to the perfect life.
You know, that we can idealize life in the way that, that that life is supposed to be, but there is still a thing called nature that we all have to contend with. And that the more that you acknowledge the nature of nature in your life, that it's not all just what's being planned or cerebral, that it depends on you being an active person in human life and human company.
You know, and the more that you embrace the humanity of yourself and follow the clues that are being given, and sometimes the clues make sense and sometimes they don't. As long as you do this, you're going to be an active participant in the transformation of your own life. But it's going to be slow and time-release capsuled, okay?
It's not going to be abrupt. It's not going to be Uranian. It's not gonna be sudden. It's going to be you in your day-to-day life. You discovering, um, higher purpose in the things that you do every day, which is not always where Aquarius puts its point of view. It tends to take a bird's-eye view of things.
But the more that you're involved in your day-to-day life and that you appreciate and treasure your day-to-day life, the more that the people that you meet will be the mouthpieces of the universe. You'll hear it in snippets of conversation. You'll hear it in advice being given. You'll hear it in, you know, a, a, a conversation that you take up with someone sitting next to you on the bus or something like that, that wisdom comes in small ways because Mercury, in the end, is the god of small things.
And small things can bring extraordinary and larger than life feelings of enlightenment and understanding.
Pisces
If you're born under Pisces or you have Pisces rising, this period of time when Mercury is retrograde in the zodiac sign of Scorpio is going to be a period of time when you are essentially changing thinking caps that you're wearing. Okay? You're changing the way that you think about things. You're changing the way that you approach things.
You're changing your perspective about life and where you're going in life. Now, this change in thinking caps, this change in thinking isn't going to be traumatic or catastrophic or anything along those lines. That's because Mercury is in the zodiac sign of Scorpio, which is a water sign, just like Pisces is a water sign.
In fact, any planet traveling through a water sign other than your own, that would be Scorpio and Cancer, is said to be in trine to Pisces. That means in total agreement. You get that planet's unconditional support. But at the same time, not all the zodiac signs that the planet is traveling through are going to be easy on you.
The planetary relationship might be easy. It might be positive. It might be supportive. Um, it might be upbeat. But the nature of the sign is also translated by light through that planet. Okay. Now, Scorpio has a different view of life in the world and love than Pisces does. Okay? Uh, Pisces has this tendency to be more romantic, uh, more in love with love, you know, more compassionate and humanitarian and really understanding and feeling for the suffering and, and, and the grief of other people.
And Pisces has a tendency to be more forgiving in the way that it looks at other people. Scorpio's not like that. Uh, Scorpio can tend to be more unforgiving. Now, they both come from a place of love and compassion, but Scorpio also believes that people, if they've done things that have been bad or harmful to other people, should pay that price.
Okay? Where Pisces would be like, “Well, you know, they had a difficult childhood, so of course they turned out that way.” Scorpio's like, “They had a difficult childhood, so they know better.” Okay? It's up to them to get over that difficult childhood and not be a horrible person to other people. So Scorpio will hold someone to accounts.
It will take into account, okay, that maybe they had difficult circumstances and things like that. But Scorpio has always powered through that and grown as a result of those journeys down into the underworld, and it expects the same of other people. Not other people do that. You know?
A lot of people actually avoid those journeys to the underworld, you know. Or people can be broken on the shores of disappointment or of heartbreak. But a Scorpio will not only power through, but it will resurrect. It will be reborn through that experience. And so when Pisces is like, you know, saying to the Scorpio, “But they were helpless over their circumstances or a victim.”
A Scorpio's looking at that Pisces with, like, zero sympathy and zero tolerance. Okay? Scorpio's ruled by Mars, so you power through something. And it's also ruled by Pluto. You transform as a result. People born under Pisces or have Pisces rising can sometimes have what I call a bit of the Blanche DuBois attitude towards life, okay?
I'm not sure if you're familiar with A Streetcar Named Desire, um, but Blanche DuBois is the lead character in that drama, and, um, she is kind of portrayed as being too fragile for this world. This is a figure that Tennessee Williams often worked with in his different plays, um, specifically through his heroines.
His heroines were either too fragile for this world, or they were just too hard for this world. They could also be very hardened, and they could also be very, you know, “We're gonna get through this.” The, you know, they, they could either be pure or bitchy, you know, type of thing. There's more to it than that because Tennessee Williams writes from a great depth of humanity, and the prose of his plays is absolutely poetic.
I mean, few people write with that beauty, uh, that Tennessee Williams writes with. He writes with a kind of Shakespearean, uh, uh, uh, music and rhythm, which is why a lot of times, uh, Tennessee Williams will be produced, for instance, in England rather than here in America because of that, that, that kind of understanding of the musicality of, of the language.
But Blanche DuBois has, um, fallen on hard times and refused to accept it, and, um, she's moving in with her, uh, sister, um, her younger sister, uh, Stella. And, um, she's kind of doing more than moving in. She's kind of, um, moved in for good type of thing. She's, she's not, she's not… She has no plans on leaving Stella's apartment.
And so, um, friction, uh, escalates between Stella, uh, and her husband, um, and, and, and Blanche, okay? And, and so, and this friction takes on sort of tragic consequences, uh, uh, during the, uh, during the drama of A Streetcar Named Desire. Um, but A Streetcar Named Desire is sort of famous for its ending, and, uh, its ending is that Blanche—who, you know, is a child of illusion.
You know, she even puts a Chinese lantern over light bulbs in the apartment, in Stella's apartment so, um, things aren't that, uh, garish. Okay? And, uh, and so they're made softer, they're made more romantic. Uh, she experiences brutality at the hands of Blanche's husband and, um, and so she's broken as a person, and she must leave this apartment, but that's also the time when her, uh, mental state breaks and, and she's actually at the end of the play being carted off to a mental institute or asylum.
Uh, they've arrived with a straitjacket, and she's being put into the straitjacket, and at first she panics and, and Stella sort of calms her down. And then she looks to the, uh, people who are taking her to this asylum and she's like, “I don't know you.” And they're like, “Well, my name's this and my name's that.”
And she's like, “But I don't know you. But that doesn't matter because I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” And so Blanche is led off, okay, to a mental institute. Um, and this is Tennessee Williams', uh, grieving over the loss of romance and how it, you know, falls under the, uh, rapacious force, the destructive force of sex and sexuality.
Uh, that's essentially where this is going, this play. And so Blanche is a fragile figure, a moth that's flown too close to the light and burned up. You know, she's too special, she's too precious, she's too delicate to live in a brutal world like this. Um, and the world of Stanley, who is the person who, uh, brutalizes her and represents brutal reality, uh, in the play.
This role was played in the film by, um, Vivien Leigh, okay? And Vivien Leigh was a very famous, uh, British actress. She was married for a period of time to Laurence Olivier, and she was an expert actress. Uh, she was known on the London stage, and she's known probably to most of us, if you're not familiar with the film A Streetcar Named Desire, she's known most famously as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, you know?
And Scarlett O'Hara is the opposite of Blanche DuBois, which is, of course, why Vivien Leigh wanted to do both roles, okay? Um, but, uh, Scarlett O'Hara is very feisty. Um, she's been brought up in the South just like Blanche was. She's spoiled just like Blanche was and still is, okay? But, um, and she will also fall upon, uh, challenging and difficult financial circumstances just like Blanche does.
But, um, Scarlett triumphs over them, okay? She steers her ship. She steers her life right into the storm of catastrophe, which is the Civil War. And she, uh, loses everything, you know? The film begins with her, like going, you know, “War, war, war. Why are we always talking about war?” You know, and she's living in Tara, you know, which is this beautiful plantation.
And, uh, you know, at the end of the first half of the film, uh, Tara is destroyed. You know, it's been laid waste by the, uh, Union armies, and it's destroyed what was this idol, this Garden of Eden built on the back of slaves, but that's happily ignored, you know? Is now laid waste, you know, at the end of the first half of the film, uh, where Scarlett is…
There is nothing, you know, and she's left weeping on the ground, okay? And at this point in A Streetcar Named Desire, that's when Blanche DuBois is led off in a straitjacket, and you know, that's the end of her. Um, but in this moment for Scarlett O'Hara, this is the moment of transformation, okay? This is the moment where she, you know, looks up from the ground, and there's soil on her face, and her hair is ragged, and she's a far cry from the lovely girl that we saw at the beginning of this story.
And she, you know, she hears echoing in her mind, you know, the voices of her father, and the voices of her neighbors, and the people she knew, and they're all going, “Tara, Tara, Tara,” you know? And, and Scarlett is hearing, you know, their voices, and she's crying, but all of a sudden that cry goes from despair to empowerment, to picking herself up again.
You know, she hears the voices of, “Tara, Tara,” and she swears she's going to rebuild Tara in that moment. And she pulls out of the ground a root or a vegetable, or maybe it's just a fistful of earth. And she, you know, holds that fistful of earth up to the sky and she says, “As God… With God as my witness, with God as my witness, I will never go hungry again.”
You know? And she cries this out, this moment of triumph, you know, that she will rise from the ashes, and she will build a new world based on her indefatigable spirit. You know, something that will not be broken.
And indeed, Scarlett goes on for the rest of the movie to not only rebuild, uh, Tara, but to become a businesswoman in her own right that doesn't need to be married to a man, and that she will take care… She will take control of her own fate and destiny and finances, all things that are very Scorpio. All right.
So it's very Plutonian, this transformation. So what's going on here with Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is that you're kind of putting down your Blanche DuBois thinking cap, if we will. You know, the thinking cap of Piscean illusion and, “I'm too fragile and sensitive for this world, and I feel all of this pain.”
You're kind of putting down that thinking cap, and you're putting on the Scorpio thinking cap. And it's fascinating because Vivien Leigh was a Scorpio, and she played both roles. And so you're going from Blanche DuBois, too fragile for this world, destroyed by rapacious sex and sexuality, to Scarlett O'Hara, who's going to be just as tough as any guy on this planet.
And she's not gonna be a victim, and she's not gonna rely on someone to come and rescue her, that God as her witness, she'll never go hungry again, and she will rise up from these ashes, and she will turn into the woman that she was meant to be. You know, she was raised to be pretty and silly and to, uh, be a wife to someone, and that was going to be it, and she ends this film as a new America, um, as a new woman in America, who is no longer going to be, um, a piece of property that is married to a man, that she's going to own herself, that she's going to own her own life, and that the ruins that she's rising from isn't to restore the past, but it's to embrace the future, wherever that future might lead.
And so this is essentially what Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is teaching you. This is what Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is showing you, that you're leaving behind the Blanche, and you're putting on the Scarlett, and that from this day forward, you will never go hungry again, either physically or metaphysically.