Illuminating Reality

If you have friends or family who take Astrology seriously then you’ve probably heard the phrase “Mercury in retrograde”.  It’s typically used to designate a time when not to do certain things or be weary because of what the planet Mercury is doing, which by the term “retrograde” they mean Mercury is moving backwards.

First off, it never made sense to me that hunks of rock or gas giants orbiting the Sun would have some say in our lives, but the more important question that should be asked is “does Mercury actually move backwards at any time in its orbit?”  The answer is a resounding “no!”.

It’s a well established scientific fact that all of the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun in slightly elliptical orbits much like satellites orbit the Earth.  They are massive and they are in motion and cannot change that motion without a sufficient mass disturbing their trajectory.  Yet, Astrologers will claim that some planets will go backward in their orbits.  Why is this?

In ancient times, people looking up at the night sky noticed that the stars all moved together in the same direction.  Later we realized this was because the Earth was rotating and our viewing angle was actually changing over time.  However, they noticed that a few of these stars moved in less predictable patterns over the course of the years.  These wandering stars were dubbed “planets” by the Greeks and the name stuck centuries later.  But it took a heliocentric view of the Solar System for early astronomers to understand exactly why these planets were moving the way they do.

The trick was understanding that the Earth and the planets are orbiting the Sun and that the farther the planet is away from us, the longer it takes to move around the Sun.  For this reason as the observer moves around the Sun, the other planets will appear to change directions relative to the observer over time.

So to someone watching Mercury, which orbits much faster than the Earth, at a predictable time of year, the path of Mercury will appear to change, moving backwards a bit before moving again with the Earth – hence a retrograde motion.

So to recap, in ancient times people thought the planets actually changed direction, however scientific observation showed that this was in fact false and that they only appeared to change direction because of the observer and observed object being on mutually orbiting trajectories – old thinking proven wrong over time.  Yet to this day astrologers still refer to these planets being in retrograde.  This is of course why Astrology is to Astronomy what Alchemy is to Chemistry.

So the next time someone tells you Mars or Mercury are in retrograde, remind them that they’re working with bad information.