How Mercury Made Astrology Famous

Well, actually the title should be, “How Mercury Retrograde Made Astrology Famous!” I guess if any planet were to make astrology, mainstream again, it would be Mercury. He is the most versatile and tricky of all Planetary Beings and the one we take most notice of in our information age (since He rules over everything connected to it).

Though snippets of Mercury’s retrograding mischievous fame (funny how fame always comes in the wake of wicked deeds), was already swirling through waves of the www and a few books on his retrograde antics had already been published for the astro-professional crowd; it was one particular day, in the late ‘90’s, while I was waiting in line at a bank (in a somewhat backward foreign country), that I was sure He (Mercury) had become a worldwide Superstar.

In this specific country, waiting in lines out the bank door was a normal occurrence; this though, was the first time I ever heard a bank teller, yell out, “Our computers are offline, it must be because Mercury is retrograde!” Now, maybe in California or Arizona or Denver (where New age terminology floats in the airwaves from the ‘60’s), this might not seem like such an exceptional experience; but where I was living, this just made my jaw drop.

I smirked and said to myself, “Ah, Mercury, you did it!” You brought Astrology back on the lips of mainstream conversation. I was proud in a way. Years of having to defend Astrology’s honor as a viable “language of the cosmos” (not the prediction whore it turned into in the Middle Ages or the pickup lines of the bar scenes), had come to an end. More and more article’s started popping up in mainstream magazines about the therapeutic psychological insights Astrology can provide, the archetypal dynamics they portray, and more and more people started approaching Astrology with less apprehension and superstitious fear.

I know some may think that the mainstream just hooked on to one more excuse to blame their computer glitches and lost mail on; one more excuse to be victims of imaginary, projected, outer-manifested tyrants. The truth though is, you first have to be in the mainstream mind, in order to change the mainstream mind, and Mercury found a niche. He knew how much we just love to blame things on other people, and He rode the waves of our victimization… right into Mind’s motherboard through our computer crashes, lost paychecks and e-mail.

Bravo! Mercury! The Cleverest of Clever Planetary Beings! Spokesperson for the Celestial Zodiac! Head Salesman of Universal Consciousness! Now, we can actually “talk” about Astrology (without being deified or shunned), now we can look into it (with Astrology’s new modern, “know your design, heal your life and yourself, look-at-your-belly-button”... stance), people can finally look into themselves (instead of prostrating themselves before Idols), and maybe just maybe, get a glimpse of this Mind Matrix we exist in, with a few cool Astrological tools in their bag of tricks.

Thought it was fitting to have an image of Mercury & Jupiter together, since the two have been "hanging out" since December 31, 2008, met up on January 18th again and will have their final "meeting" on February 23rd.

Dosso Dossi (Wikimedia Commons)
Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue
3rd decade of the 16th century