Blog posts and tweets about Mercury retrograde fantasize about a kind of technological anarchy so extreme that we’d have an excuse to hide from the devices that are supposed to connect us, but they speak the suffocating and reductive language of branding. What’s striking about the online commiserating during the retrograde period - the labeling of thousands of different experiences as one thing - is how un-Mercury it is how it narrows language and experience. But in the case of Mercury retrograde, it’s not clear how “magical” the thinking is. This is not to say that astrological belief is childish - L’Engle’s book is not - but that critiques of astrological thinking that assume it is opposed to science tend to ignore the “sort of” and “as if”: the radical utility of narratives that provide a sense of connection to a cosmic drama. There was something about this story that married a love of quantum physics and astrophysical theory to a witchy sense of cosmic magic it sent me not away from science, but toward it, suggesting that my relentless research, in my parents’ library and in the woods and streams of our farm, might matter, even though I was a girl. It’s not that I believed I lived in L’Engle’s universe, exactly. (For astrology bloggers, this is less a problem than further evidence of the planet’s wiliness - as if its dangerous power is drawn less from what the planet actually does or is and more from the story of our confused efforts to understand it.) Mercury told its story, anyway: To understand the illusion of its movement means to realize that we are not at the center of things, that there is a reality beyond the one we see. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory explained retrograde motion much more elegantly, but he kept it unpublished nearly until his death. Before that, Ptolemy constructed elaborate models in which the other planets spun around us like insane tops, and the models stayed with us long after the observations stopped matching the math. It took three millenniums to figure out that this was an illusion. From our perspective, Mercury appears to move quickly and erratically, so the ancients called it a messenger and a trickster. The astrological belief that Mercury retrograde leads to confusion and breakdown is inherited from the time before we understood that Earth is not the center of the cosmos. To put this in perspective: More Americans believe in astrology, or “sort of” believe in astrology, than believe that climate change is influenced by the burning of fossil fuels. In a 2012 survey, a third of Americans viewed astrology as “sort of scientific” and another 10 percent as “very scientific.” Belief is most prevalent among 18-to-24-year-olds but has markedly increased among 35-to-44-year-olds in recent years. The belief that the movements of celestial bodies govern our lives is more popular in the United States than it has been in two decades, according to a recent National Science Foundation report. Facebook and Twitter will clog with reports of appointments missed, important email sent to the spam folder, wars between nations, cars crashed and iPhones dropped in toilets, all followed by some version of the hashtag “#mercuryretrograde.” Advice from astrology blogs will arrive in unison: Back up your computer, expect miscommunications, don’t make agreements or important decisions and don’t sign contracts - and hide. For about three weeks, it will appear to move backward across our sky and will, according to astrologers, disrupt technology, communication and human concord. Eastern Time, Mercury will begin its first pass by Earth of the new year. Alvin Ailey is too, as are Bach, Basho, the Brontës, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kahlil Gibran, Michelangelo and 361 others, all cataloged in “The Gazetteer and Atlas of Astronomy.” The planet is a hot, fast, magnetic monument to earthly imagination. Shakespeare, John Lennon and Walt Disney are there. The poles, surprisingly, contain deposits of ice, but the rest of Mercury’s surface is rough ground, a record of the early years of the solar system, when the planet was pummeled by asteroids and meteors.Īll the craters are named for artists. During those long nights and days, temperatures drop to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit and rise to 800 degrees. It flies fast, orbiting the sun once every 87.97 earth days, and spins slowly, rotating only 1.5 times every trip around. The planet Mercury is small, not much larger than our moon, but dense, mostly a molten iron core with hardly any crust or atmosphere.
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