On the Spiritus Mundi mailing list, Christopher Warnock often complains of the way in which Mercury retrograde seems to have been chosen as a New Age scapegoat: along with Luna Void-of-Course, it seems to have absorbed all the \u201cnegativity\u201d and malific influence that was (traditionally) ascribed to numerous planetary aspects and interactions.\u00a0 Although I have only a little more interaction with the New Age community than I have with traditional astrologers, I can definitely see this dynamic at work.\u00a0 Rufus Opus has talked about the magical \u201cstorms\u201d associated with bad astrological \u201cweather\u201d like Mercury retrograde in the context of his Hermetic practice.<\/p>\n
For myself, I have an interesting relationship with Mercury in general and the retrograde period in particular.\u00a0 You see, while I\u2019ve seen everyone else scrambling around me trying to deal with unanticipated communication, computer, and travel related disasters, I\u2019ve never personally experienced any difference.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never noticed periods of my magic backfiring, only to later discover that Mercury was running backwards.\u00a0 I kind of thought it might just be that New Age hooey.\u00a0 Specifically, I thought that people were just more self-conscious about the sorts of disasters they were already living with every day\u2014you know, just like I was.<\/p>\n
Then I discovered that I was born under Mercury retrograde.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
There are people in this world who can cast dispersions and invective upon anyone\u2014casually flinging about slurs of the vilest sort\u2014and others seem only to love them the better for it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve know people who could lie like breathing, and no one ever questioned them, or seemed to loose trust in them even after they were caught.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been close friends with several such people.<\/p>\n
I have never been one of them.<\/p>\n
A coworker once identified me as a fellow Dungeons & Player<\/em> by my careful word choice.\u00a0 I would attribute my passion for reading and writing to a greater share of credit for my speech patterns.\u00a0 Unfortunately, though, no matter how carefully I choose my words, people find ways to misunderstand me.\u00a0 Sometimes these misunderstandings are hilarious; more often, they\u2019re disastrous.\u00a0 When I communicate over the internet, it seems to be exponentially worse.\u00a0 Technology fails me with greater frequency than anyone else I know.\u00a0 All my cars have coolant leaks, and I\u2019ve been through more alternators than everyone else I know combined.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s this funny thing where I tell people the unvarnished truth and they just don\u2019t believe me.\u00a0 They might assume that I\u2019m exaggerating, joking, or outright lying.\u00a0 This particular brand of miscommunication has become so common that I\u2019ve come to use it to my advantage: my best \u201clies\u201d (stories I tell that no one believes) are the literal truth.<\/p>\n Now, I didn\u2019t get to where I am now without learning to compensate for these things.\u00a0 I got into a private liberal arts college, after all, where I\u2019m maintaining a 3.4 GPA, held down only by my B\u2019s in Ancient Greek.\u00a0 I have friends and lovers.\u00a0 These things take communication skills.\u00a0 But I definitely feel the effects of my retrograde natal Mercury in my daily life.<\/p>\n And when Mercury retrograde comes around for everyone else \u2026 well, I have to admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude:\u00a0 Welcome to my<\/em> life<\/strong>, fuckers<\/em>.<\/p>\n There is a lot of paranoia surrounding Mercury retrograde in the occult community.\u00a0 I frequently see admonitions to set aside the thaumaturgy for the duration.\u00a0 And I definitely used the last retrograde period for a much-needed break from my escalating practice.<\/p>\n This coming retrograde I intend to do the opposite.\u00a0 Mercury retrograde is where I live[1]: those conditions exist within me.\u00a0 Perhaps I will benefit from re-establishing my daily and devotional practices while the outer world is a fraction more closely aligned with my inner world.<\/p>\n 1 \u2013 There are schools of thought which say that I shouldn\u2019t work Mercurial magic at all because it\u2019s afflicted in my natal chart.\u00a0 That same reasoning would seem to argue that I ought avoid Hermetic magic altogether\u2014perhaps, taken to its logical extreme, any form of magic whatsoever.\u00a0 The fact that I can work effective magic implies that there is a flaw to this theory (or possibly just my understanding of it), but I still wonder what affect that has on my abilities. Through Christopher Warnock, I have learned of a Vedic practice known as planetary charity<\/a>.\u00a0 I will not be attempting it this round, but it\u2019s something I\u2019ve been considering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the Spiritus Mundi mailing list, Christopher Warnock often complains of the way in which Mercury retrograde seems to have been chosen as a New Age scapegoat: along with Luna Void-of-Course, it seems to have absorbed all the \u201cnegativity\u201d and malific influence that was (traditionally) ascribed to numerous planetary aspects and interactions.\u00a0 Although I have … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[24,149,160,170,203],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-astrology","tag-magic","tag-mercury","tag-natal-chart","tag-planetary-magic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-bN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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