Harry Styles photographed by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue December 2020

Mercury-Hermes is classically depicted in myth as a clever, fleet-footed, youthful and androgynous character, who traverses the boundaries of the upper and lower, inner and outer worlds. As the god of messages and of the mind, he is always at work, passing notes through our neurons and networks. To go retrograde, then, for the planet of the busy traveller, is to delay, disrupt, deviate or re-route him from his path. With his first turn of the year taking place in Aquarius, an air sign that challenges norms and champions the unorthodox, if there were ever a time to think outside of the prescribed, proverbial box, or to expect the unexpected, this would be it.

The influence of a retrograde on Aquarian Mercury can radicalize the trickster, redefine the revolutionary, extol the exile, and interrogate the gender binary. Truth-telling becomes all-important, while the truth itself becomes more abstract, elusive and fractured. And language, the domain of Mercury-Hermes, can quickly run amok into a Tower of Babel-esque confusion of tongues. The soothsayer and the conspiracy theorist separated only by shades of difference; omen and delusion cut from the same cryptic cloth. The Uranian gifts of foresight and technology, and the Saturnian love of solitary work, together can produce a special kind of genius and inventor. They can also breed, er, extralegal activities, a Pandora’s box of unwanted surprises; can pull us downward into the underbelly of the internet, social media and Big Tech; or upward into the weird otherworlds of outer space.

During this Mercury retrograde period, allow for the usual hiccups and frustrations, and do your best to have patience. But also consider it an opportunity to stretch your brain and your perception in new and innovative ways (maybe for some this would be a great time to delve into astrology, which is ruled by Aquarius, and has so much humanitarian potential!). It is a time to look inward at the parts of ourselves that feel strange, alien, or cross boundaries, and think about the ways those very things might lead us into the future and shape our communities. To paraphrase astrologer Dane Rudhyar—during this time, look upward—if you understand the language of the sky, then the sky will speak to you. For the next few weeks, the winged messengers are slowing down and changing direction; what messages are they carrying for you?