Timeline:
Mon, Dec 12
☿
Mercury enters pre-retrograde shadow
6:26 am ET
♑︎ 8°08’ ♑︎☉ ✱ ♄
Sun sextiles Saturn
1:12 pm ET
♐︎ 20°41’ ♒︎
Wed, Dec 14
☉ ☐ ♓︎
Sun squares Neptune
12:10 pm ET
♐︎ 22°40’ ♓︎
Sat, Dec 17
☿ Δ ♅
Mercury trines Uranus
4:37 pm ET
♑︎ 15°28’ ♉︎
Notes:
I woke up sick the morning after the Full Moon, which seems appropriate after an amped-up first half of Sagittarius season, which reached its peak last Wednesday with a tense, energetic Full Moon in Gemini.
It’s not unusual to crash after a Full Moon, especially after a particularly intense one. On top of that, I found myself wanting to soak in the tub throughout the week (as you recall, Neptune stationed direct the weekend prior, which might have found us wanting to be in or near water).
As such, I am feeling tired and a little burnt out, so I am going to keep it relatively brief in comparison to the massive post I wrote last week during the Mercury-Jupiter square, which was all about big ideas and expansive thought.
Mercury has been in Capricorn for almost a week now. In this sturdy earth sign, Mercury can help us focus and get down to business. Venus also ingressed into Capricorn last week, which could help with fiscal discipline, setting boundaries, and getting in touch with what matters most. Venus is the planet of love and value and Saturn, which rules Capricorn, is the planet of boundaries and discipline, so Venus finds herself acting in a Saturnian manner in this cardinal sign.
Mercury enters its pre-retrograde shadow Monday morning at 8°08’ Capricorn. It will station retrograde on December 29 at 24°21’ Capricorn, then it will move backwards, retracing its steps until it stations direct on January 18 at 8°08’. It will clear its post-retrograde shadow on February 7 at 24°21’ Capricorn, the degree of its initial retrograde station.
Calling it a “shadow” sounds ominous, as if we are staring down the abyss that is the retrograde to come, with all its stereotypical mishaps around tech, communications, and transportation.
But it isn’t that big of a deal when Mercury enters its pre-retrograde shadow: it simply means that Mercury is entering the span of the zodiac in which it will be moving retrograde. It means that there's something going on now that we will have to revisit a little on down the road. I like to think of planetary retrogrades simply as a period where a planet retraces its steps.1 Yes, the stereotypical Mercury retrograde things can come up (and it can be quite annoying and inconvenient when we have to retrace our steps because we missed certain details on the initial passthrough), but retrogrades are primarily a period of review, reevaluation, reconsideration, and recalibration. This could be super helpful with Mercury in a sign like Capricorn, which can help us attend to matters thoroughly and responsibly. Retrogrades can be good because they allow us extra time to work with a planet in a given sign.
On Monday afternoon this week, the Sun in Sagittarius will sextile Saturn. This is a nice, supportive aspect, and you probably began feeling it over the weekend. The Sun is about light and vitality and Saturn is about discipline and structure, so this sextile will help direct our energies in a responsible, organized manner. Mercury and Venus are currently in Saturn’s sign of Capricorn, so there is already a Saturnian get-down-to-business kind of vibe in the air.
In the middle of this week, the Sun’s square with Neptune will go exact (around noon Eastern Time on Wednesday). This can be quite inspirational, but it could throw things for a loop and disrupt our best efforts at bringing structure into our lives. Our minds and values might want us to get serious with Mercury and Venus in Capricorn, but our vital core might reject such strictures. Come midweek, we might want to simply throw our plans out the window and go on a dreamy Sagittarian adventure. Don’t worry: with the Sun about to join Mercury and Venus in Saturn’s earthy domicile, we will have plenty of time to bring structure into our lives in the weeks ahead.
This is the final full week that Jupiter will be in Pisces. This is a special time, as it will be the end of the time that Jupiter (the traditional ruler of Pisces) will be copresent with Neptune (the modern ruler) in the sign, as Jupiter (which has been moving direct for a few weeks now) will re-enter Aries next Tuesday after having retrograded back into Pisces in late October. Jupiter typically stays within a single sign for about a year, but Jupiter’s stay in Pisces was special in that it was broken up into three parts, with it being in Pisces at various points this year and last, splitting its time between the signs of Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries. This final period in Pisces (which began on October 28 and will end on December 20) should bring closure to what Jupiter’s three-part act in Pisces has been all about for us.
Soak in the last of this copresence while you can. The last time Jupiter and Neptune were copresent in Pisces was the mid-1800s. Jupiter takes about 12 years to travel through the zodiac and conjoins Neptune about every 13 years, but it’s extra rare for the two to conjoin in their shared domicile of Pisces, which happens every 166 years.2 Neptune takes about 165 years to travel the zodiac, so it will be over another century-and-a-half before the two are together in Pisces again.
Later in the week, Mercury will trine Uranus, which will go exact on Saturday, which could bring innovative ideas and sudden flashes of insight. This is the first of three times this aspect will form during Mercury’s retrograde cycle, so this trine could clue us into major themes of the cycle. Capricorn is a fairly conservative sign with a penchant for established traditions. Mercury in Capricorn likes to go with ideas and methods that are tried and true, but Uranus likes to disrupt old ways, so this trine might be about innovating and renewing traditions that have been with us, but which are in need of a reboot.
A year ago, when planets were traveling through Capricorn, particularly with Venus spending an extended period in the sign, I got really into doing spreadsheets for my personal finances, but it became very onerous and I couldn’t keep up with it. This year with Mercury spending an extended period in the sign, I’d like to revisit this work, but try to find ways to streamline the process so I can sustain the practice throughout the year. With this Mercury-Uranus trine happening in these two earth signs, there is this theme of returning to things that have worked in the past, but innovating them to carry them into the future so they can have staying power. Capricorn, which is ruled by Saturn, is about building things that can endure.
The other major aspect that Mercury will form three times during its retrograde cycle will be a sextile with Neptune, which will go exact for the first of three times on December 24. This sextile could help bring our dreams down to reality, helping us move toward them in a grounded manner. This sextile could also bring imagination and poeticism to our thinking and speech, or help bring the spiritual and the intellectual into greater harmony.
Next Wednesday is the winter solstice, which is when the Sun ingresses into Capricorn, followed by a New Moon in Capricorn about 36 hours later. Since we had a Full Moon last week, the Moon is now waning. It’s time to reap and distribute the fruits of what we’ve accomplished this lunation cycle, which began with the New Moon in Sagittarius on November 23. As the Moon wanes, it’s a time to wind down, turn away, and reflect. It’s not a time for plowing forward, initiating things, or getting wound up, though we might feel the compulsion to do so given the various other energies present right now. We will have plenty of time to start afresh with this upcoming lunation cycle, which will begin with the New Moon in Capricorn on December 23. We will be in a Balsamic Moon phase during the solstice, so we could find ourselves in a restful, reflective mood as we shift from one season to the next.
This week, up until the solstice, the Sun will travel through the final ten degrees of Sagittarius, which corresponds to the Ten of Wands tarot card, to which Joan Bunning assigns the keywords, ‘overextending,’ ‘burdens,’ ‘and ‘struggle.’ This decan is ruled by Saturn, the planet of restriction, so it’s a good time to think about how we can lighten our loads, if such is an option.
That’s it for this week. Here’s to this final stretch of Sagittarius season before the return of the growth of the light!
Correction: in the caption to the chart of the Mercury-Uranus trine, I originally wrote, “When the second Mercury-Uranus trine happens on January 8, Venus will be in Capricorn in aversion to both Mercury and Uranus.” This was in error. Venus will be in Aquarius, not Capricorn, on January 8. On top of this, Venus will only be in aversion to Mercury in Capricorn, not Uranus in Taurus. The caption has been updated to reflect this correction.
A couple weeks back, Mercury squared Neptune, which might have felt like a Mercury retrograde. I wrote about this last week:
Mercury-Neptune aspects can have a Mercury retrogradey feel. The second half of last week in particular reminded me of Mercury’s retrograde earlier this year in Gemini. In the second half of the work week, I found myself, again and again, charging forward mindlessly and then having to backtrack. Mercury in Sagittarius isn’t very detail oriented in the first place, so the square to Neptune might have brought some trouble for us, leading us to overlook details in a foggy haste. With the Mars-Neptune square in the mix, we might have found ourselves feeling like we were being pulled in multiple directions, or that things were flowy, but also somewhat chaotic and nonlinear. I had a hard time keeping focus and retaining things in my short-term memory because I was daydreaming, so I would often find myself moving ahead and then immediately forgetting what I was doing. It felt a lot like playing whirlyball in a room with a fog machine.
Since I wrote this, I have been speculating about the differences between a difficult Mercury-Neptune transit and a Mercury retrograde. I was reminded of the most recent Mercury retrograde, which started in Libra and ended in Virgo. Toward the beginning of the retrograde, I was assigned a very big task at my day job, where I had to pack up a very big order with hundreds of SKUs and thousands of individual pieces, which took multipe workdays to complete. I was pissed that this happened during a Mercury retrograde and I expected things to go very awry. But the task, to my surprise, while tedious and frustrating, went relatively smoothly. It might have been an unprecedently large job for me, but over the years of doing this work I have developed a methodology to ensure accuracy, which involves a lot of double- and triple-checking. (It probably helped that it was Virgo season and that there was no pesky Mars-Neptune square to deal with.) The retrograde, in this case, didn’t show so much as fuckups, but simply as a lot of going back and forth. I was pretty sharp and on-point during the time, and I made sure to be very careful knowing that Mercury was retrograde. I don’t think this is a task I could have done during the Mercury-Neptune square a couple weeks back, which found my head up in the clouds. With the Mercury-Neptune square, I had to backtrack because I was daydreaming and losing my train of thought. With the Virgo-season Mercury retrograde, I simply backtracked because doing so was part of the task, hammering home the fact that Mercury retrogrades are simply symbolic representations of us having to retrace our steps.
Note that all the retrogrades that we had in 2022 started in air signs and ended in earth signs. This upcoming retrograde, which begins on December 29 and ends on January 18, will be entirely in the sign of Capricorn, which means that we will begin 2023 with Mercury retrograde. It’s notable that 2022 began with Mercury in its pre-retrograde shadow, which Mercury entered (interestingly enough) on December 29 of last year, exactly one year prior to Mercury's upcoming retrograde station.
I am trained in Hellenistic astrology, so I use traditional rulerships and thus consider Jupiter to be the ruler of Pisces, but I think that Neptune’s association with Pisces is quite fitting and I find the Jupiter-Neptune copresence in the sign to be quite poetic and uplifting.
Love it I have to go back and read the last 2, I was highly distracted and all over the place and after reading this makes more sense why…
Thank you for the forecast for this week! So much seems to be coming into focus for me and at the same time, new things are going out of focus. The last decan of Sagittarius being associated with the ten of wands really hit home as I have my natal Venus there square my natal Saturn and I seem to be always doing chores! With five kids, the chores are never done--for example: my kitchen is like a 24/7 restaurant and although I swish and swipe my bathroom everyday, it always has a point in the day where it looks like a gas station bathroom! 🤣two boys, a toddler, and a seven year old who always misses the trash and is afraid of flushing--that card really hit home for me! Thank you!!