Mercury Retrograde Aquarius: Re-Visioning Society

Mercury stationed retrograde on Saturday at 26 Aquarius 29’. Mercury retrogrades happen three times a year and last for about three weeks each. The current retrograde, in the universal fixed air sign of Aquarius, could be more intriguing than the norm, for reasons I’ll discuss below. But first, an important reminder.

Astrology has entered the pop culture to the extent that many people have at least a surface notion of what Mercury retrograde symbolizes. When the planet of mind and communication appears to move backwards through the zodiac schedules get disrupted, communication gets dicey, and technology gets weird.

But Mercury retrograde periods serve a deeper purpose than convincing us to slow down, think through what we’re trying to say, and spend less time plugged in to our devices. These scheduled disruptions in our daily routines give us an opportunity to cycle down, zoom out, and watch how our minds work.

So much of our thinking and communication on a day-to-day level is automatic, by which I mean habitual or generated by subconscious energies we are not fully aware of.

By disrupting our normal mental routines, Mercury retrogrades give us the chance to become more conscious of what’s happening beneath the surface of consciousness. They enable us to identify patterns of thought that may have worked in the past but are no longer appropriate to where we are now.

Mercury retrogrades often bring people and patterns from the past into the present. In so doing, they remind us that we are not the same now as we were then. This opens up a window of opportunity where we can consciously choose new thoughts. We can correct our thinking and we can choose to change our minds. Because our habitual thoughts have so much impact on our future experience, letting go of long-held beliefs or opinions that no longer serve us changes our lives for the better.

Mercury in Aquarius – The Big Picture

The current Mercury retrograde begins at 26 Aquarius 29' - within one degree of the United States' natal Moon and two arc minutes from the U.S.'s Pallas Athene. Mercury returns to direct motion on February 20 at 11 Aquarius, with Saturn conjunct the United States' natal South Node (karma and gifts of past lived experience).

The Moon symbolizes the people in mundane charts; Pallas is the goddess asteroid of clear-seeing and calm rationality. As we stand on the cusp of the 2,160-year Aquarian Age, I believe this Aquarian Mercury retrograde is designed to bring about a serious re-evaluation on the part of the people regarding fundamental questions of society, such as:

• Who are we?

• What do we care for?

• Who gets to decide how much freedom we should have?

As the last of the three air signs, Aquarius is the sign of universal mind. On an individual level, Aquarius at its best symbolizes the mind open to the wisdom of the Cosmos. This is a futuristic, visionary mind oriented to the fact that everything is interconnected and focused on innovating new paradigms and solutions that uplift humanity and create a better, fairer world.

Aquarius is operating from its shadow side when its ideas become more important than the hearts and bodies of the people affected by those ideas. This is the realm of ideologies and propaganda, where those who do not subscribe to the groupthink are silenced, dehumanized, rounded up and exiled to the work camps.

Eric Francis, one of my astrology mentors, has written a lot over the years on how the Leo-Aquarius axis symbolizes the relationship between the individual and the group. In his recent piece On the Cusp of the Aquarian Age, Francis distinguishes between groups and masses.

“If people are not individuated, that is a mass, and not a group,” Francis writes.

I would define people who are individuated as those who have done a certain amount of spiritual and mental work. Individuated people are capable of discernment and of making their own decisions and value judgments based on their inner authority.

“Masses are dangerous,” Francis writes. “It is mass-thinking that is responsible for the insanity of religion, of cults, of wars, of holocausts, and of many of society’s worst problems. Mass consciousness means that people are not thinking for themselves. They are letting others think for them. And we certainly see plenty of that in the lower vibrations of Aquarius.”

The groupthink in our society certainly hit new highs (or lows) in 2020. But the events leading up to the January 30 Mercury station indicate we may be in for a serious course correction.

Those of you who don’t rely on the mainstream media or social media influencers for your news sources have undoubtedly seen some of the evidence suggesting the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was rigged. As symbolcomms notes in this collection of election fraud proofs:

“The quantity and transparency of fraud is beyond debate. You won’t be able to read all of these proofs, it would take months to do so. The only way to not see fraud, is simply not to look.“

Choose Your Conspiracy

First published in 1980, Marilyn Ferguson's book The Aquarian Conspiracy predicted the coming Internet and social media age. Ferguson was a brain/mind researcher who was interested above all in self-awareness and personal transformation. Her thesis in The Aquarian Conspiracy was that as more and more people engaged in the work of becoming individuated, we - as as species - would begin to transform our world into an Aquarian world of abundance and fairness. She surmised this would happen through invisible, non-hierarchical networks of awakening minds focusing their attention on better outcomes for all.

There was a moment, in the early years of the Web, when Ferguson's prophecy seemed to be happening in real time. Soon enough, however, the mega-media conglomerates and the Silicon Valley startups we now call Big Tech recognized the vast potential of the Internet to increase their wealth and gain control over the masses. For those who couldn't code, access to the Web was quickly restricted to commercial portals and additional tariffs were levied on the users of these portals.

Early pay-to-play platforms like AOL were quickly overtaken by companies like Google and Facebook. These social media giants and their offspring gave us entertainment and search access (to an increasingly curated and restricted library of web pages) for free! All we had to do was agree to share some of our personal data with them.

(Remember when the mass media debunked the ludicrous conspiracy theory that claimed your webcam or phone camera could be used to spy on you? Or when they debunked the baseless conspiracy theory claiming that Google must be listening to you through your phone because the morning after you'd told your partner the plumbing needed to be fixed, your browser started popping up ads for local plumbing supply stores?)

Look, it's the nature of the Matrix to attempt to co-opt any innovations that could free us from our millennia of slavery.

We've all been brainwashed. We're all being used. The collusion between the deep state/military-industrial complex, the politicians owned by it, major media outlets such as The Washington Post and the The New York Times, and (more recently) Facebook is all a matter of public record.

As CIA Director William J. Casey famously said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is a lie."

When it comes to politics, we all know the system is rigged. (Which is probably one reason so many people looked the other way on and after November 3.)

We know the financial system is rigged, too. We know that the Big Tech overlords – who made billions of dollars from the Covid lockdowns while countless small businesses went bust – have been using our data to consolidate control of society for two decades now.

We know that our medical system is a for-profit racket run by the two-headed monster of Big Pharma and the insurance industry. We know we have been systematically poisoned by the same mega-corporations who own Big Pharma and the media since the day we were born.

And yet, encouraged by the relentless propaganda of the corporate media, its political puppets, and its legions of brainwashed users, we do nothing. Until now.

I suspect this is because most of us have felt powerless to change the world. We keep telling ourselves we’re OK living on the scraps of the rich and powerful. Even though our ration of scraps shrinks a little bit every year, at least we still get some. We’re better off than those people over there who are starving and dying, right?

The Aquarian Conspiracy

But what if the series of Saturn-Uranus squares in Aquarius and Taurus in 2021 were timed long ago to be a wake-up call for humanity?

What if a real insurrection was already taking place? Not the meandering January 6 photo-op “insurrection” at the Capitol, but a calculated effort by good men and women to take back America and the world from the psychopaths who have ruled it for so long?

We believe the Aquarian Age is meant to be a golden age for humanity, a time when we live in harmony with one another and with Nature, a time when everyone has enough and people are free to express themselves authentically, a new paradigm beyond the old slaves-and-masters game.

This new paradigm comes from within, from people who are waking up and saying, “No more shall we live on scraps while the global elites harvest our energy and get richer and more sadistic.”

It won’t be a Great Reset concocted by billionaire psychopaths but a Great Awakening happening because it’s time and because we as individuals have started to do the work of healing our trauma, expressing ourselves authentically – in a word, individuating.

I think we’re going to see more and more evidence of this global movement for freedom and abundance for all seeping through the mass media’s censorship barricades. In the meantime, we can do our part by continuing our own process of reclaiming our inner authority and reclaiming the sovereignty of our own minds and hearts.

Here are some questions that might help you profit from the 2021 Aquarius Mercury retrograde:

Questions about being an individual

• Who am I?

• What are my innate rights, if any?

• Can individuals enjoy freedom without trampling on the rights of others?

• What do I value most in life?

• What does freedom mean?

• Where did I learn (this opinion)?

• Who profits from me believing (this opinion)?

• Do my innate rights include the right to control another person?

• Am I willing to personally attempt to control someone I disagree with?

Questions about society

• Who are we?

• If “everyone says so” does that make a thing true? Do I believe everything other people tell me?

• Do I trust my own discernment more than I trust what other people tell me?

• Are all people good, or are some people mentally ill, psychotic, or sociopathic?

• If I knew someone was a sociopath and they were telling me to do something to a family member that might cause harm, would I do it anyway?

Questions about where my thoughts come from

• Are global mega-corporations and Big Tech billionaires more moral than the average person?

• Do they care more about helping people than, say, kindergarten teachers or nurses?

• Has the mainstream media ever lied about anything or colluded to cover something up before?

• Who owns the media?

• Who regulates what the media can and can’t say?

• Are politicians more moral than the average person?

• Why do some politicians get so rich?

We believe there are benevolent forces in the world that want us to be free, healthy, happy and at peace. We believe the time is now to wake up from the karmic wheel of needless suffering the Toltec shamans call "the dream of the planet."

But doing this will require many more of us to wake the f*ck up from our media-drugged complicity in our own destruction. We need to question all dogmas, not just the ones we're told to question by the NYT, Google, and the "influencers" we follow on social media. We need to declare ourselves as sovereign beings and take back the power of our minds to create our lives and our world.

Mercury retrograde in Aquarius is here to help us do just that. Are you game?