Mercury stations retrograde in Scorpio

When Mercury stations retrograde in Scorpio, the planet of thought and speech appears to halt in Scorpio and then begin moving backwards through that sign. Seen from the Earth, every planet except the Sun and the Moon does this. The station is the stretch of days around the turn when the planet seems to stand still.

Mercury is the reasoning mind: how a person takes in information, thinks it through, remembers it and passes it on in speech and writing. It is the messenger between one person and another. It carries little character of its own and takes on the nature of the planets it meets. For that reason the old tradition counted it neither fortunate nor unfortunate: it could turn either way according to its company. In the kabbalistic reading it sits at Hod, the eighth Sephirah, which Astrocábala reads as perfection through truth. There it is the mind that looks past what pleases the senses, corrects their excesses and tells what is permitted from what is not.

A retrograde slows a planet's force and turns it inward. With Mercury, the mind goes back over recent ground. It reviews what was just said or decided, changes its mind, or returns to a matter it thought was finished. Read this way, the retrograde gives time to take in properly what went by too quickly.

The same slowing is often felt as delay: messages that go astray, appointments and travel that slip, miscalculations, breakdowns, private matters coming out, and plans begun as the retrograde starts that need correcting later. The slowing can equally steady a scattered mind and slow a process that has been running too fast. It makes people ask the extra question and check the work twice.

The station is the sharpest point of any transit. Where Mercury stations on or near a planet or angle in a birth chart, the effect is far more noticeable than an ordinary pass. A contact that would normally last three or four days can stretch to as much as seven weeks. It is then made exact three times: once forward, once backward, then forward again.

We think the popular fear of Mercury retrograde is much exaggerated, though some of its effects are real: misunderstandings make negotiation harder, timetables slip, and a very important agreement may be better concluded once Mercury is direct. What it raises usually starts to clear around Mercury's conjunction with the Sun and is mostly settled by the direct station, though some of it can run on a little past it. Flexibility serves it best; rigid plans are what it strains most.