Contracts, text messages, ex messages, and shopping for electronic devices: astrologers tell us to steer clear of such activities when Mercury appears to reverse course in the night sky, going from east to west in “retrograde” motion. (It isn’t actually moving backward; it’s an illusion created by the fact that Earth and Mercury go around the sun at different speeds.)

The astrological theory maintains that during these phases, which occur three or four times a year and last roughly three weeks each, Mercury, which rules communications, undergoes a kind of symbolic reversal, throwing the domain of its influence into disarray. In an era when we’re reliant on the accurate transmission of meaning and data from one place to another, when everything we say or post or send is so open to misinterpretation and bad-faith reading – on social media, on group chats, on Slack – a whole discourse has sprung up around Mercury’s supposed effect on the tech that’s closest to our hearts.

You may well know all of this already – thanks to the discourse that's sprung up around Mercury, you're probably more familiar with it as an astrological entity than a physical planet. You may have come across Mercury-retrograde merch on Etsy (like a T-shirt that reads, “Not while Mercury is in retrograde”) or shared Instagram memes about it with your friends. Mercury retrograde has become a sort of astrological celebrity of the digital era, edging out sun-sign astrology – the position of the sun at the time of your birth within the 12-sign zodiac and the basis for most horoscopes – for pop-culture dominance.

Before I began looking into its origins, I knew of Mercury retrograde, but I had no real idea if the concept was new or not. Unfortunately, I use the term “Mercury in retrograde” when interviewing superstar astrologer Chani Nicholas, who gently points out that that is grammatically false – “Mercury retrograde” is correct. How did Mercury, which has been there in the sky all along, reinvent its public image so spectacularly? Or does Mercury only appear to have become newly popular, the way it only appears to move backward?

The answers are neither out in space nor buried in the digital realm, but found in the age-old tendency to study and interpret the sky above our heads, seeking to explain the inexplicable. Astrology is often dismissed as unserious and unworthy of academic study; its central tenets – our place in the world and where we’re going – are concerned with feelings and predictions and ephemeral states. But it’s for precisely these reasons that astrology and, increasingly, Mercury are looked upon to help us make sense of a world that seems to make less and less of it.

Mercury retrograde’s recent history is intrinsically digital. Many astrologers have pointed to a video that Taylor Swift did with MTV in 2014 to account for its sudden leap into the mainstream. “Everything is going to be completely wrong and messed up and miscommunicated. Your phone will break, or you’ll send a text message and it won’t get to the person it’s supposed to go to,” Swift explained. MTV promoted the video on social media with a GIF flashing bright, glitchy colours behind a short, looping clip of Swift saying, “Hella in retrograde!”

Kate Trgovac, the founder of IsMercuryInRetrograde.com, which provides a simple yes or no answer to the question, says she created the site in 2009 but started seeing an uptick in traffic in mid-2011. The timing suggests Swift’s interview just helped fan the flames of an astrological obsession that had already taken hold. Several early adopters were Real Housewives. In February 2013, New York Housewife Bethenny Frankel tweeted, “Is Mercury in retrograde or something? Bc I am having a shit day.” She was right; it was. In the wake of that very phase of Mercury retrograde, known as the “shadow period”, one of Frankel’s West Coast counterparts, Kyle Richards, tweeted the same question, following it up with “I need to ask @BravoAndy to please never again shoot the Reunion when Mercury is in retrograde #RHOBH.”

"How did Mercury, which has been there in the sky all along, reinvent its public image?"

Bravo stars might have more reason than most people to feel that the patron planet of the internet has interfered with their well-laid plans; the series relies on its stars taking their drama off-screen and to their social platforms, where they engage directly with their audience, a situation tailor-made for miscommunication. That connection between tech, entertainment, and Mercury also might explain why, as celebrity culture has increasingly morphed into influencer culture, more and more of us might come to feel like a Real Housewife at the end of her tether over what people are saying about us in the comments.

The answer to Mercury’s popularity may lie in its own personality. In astrology, the characters of the planets are taken from the figures they are named after in classical mythology. In Roman myths, Mercury – his Greek equivalent is Hermes – is a son of Jupiter (Zeus to the Greeks) and a mischievous messenger god.

Anne Ortelee, a charismatic astrologer in New York, describes Mercury to me with a level of animation and detail that makes him feel very alive. “Mercury likes us,” she tells me, “because his mum was a nymph who lived among humans and then his dad was, you know, God. And so he is the messenger of the crossroad. You know, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger!’ says Mercury. But also, well, ‘I’m gonna give you a message.’ ”

I also find Ortelee’s theory of “his” rise during the age of digital communications – since Mercury is a persona as well as a rock in the solar system – compelling. “We are entering the Age of Aquarius,” Ortelee tells me. “There’s a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, where the solar system moves backward through the zodiac. It takes 26,000 years to go backward through the whole zodiac.” Now, she says, “we’re leaving the Era of Pisces and entering the Age of Aquarius. Mercury is exalted in Aquarius; he loves Virgo and Gemini, but he loves to be in Aquarius – because he is visionary, he’s flying high.” In other words, a combination of his own personality and a new era in astrological timekeeping makes Mercury the ideal foil for our contemporary zeitgeist. His time is now.

So the astrology explains the astrology. Mercury retrograde is a celebrity on social media because he’s the god of messages. It’s a little bit of a feedback loop. But when we try to stand outside astrology, to observe Mercury’s history without taking into account its self-definitions, there’s no equivalently neat narrative to be found.

As Chani Nicholas tells me, the so-called history of Mercury retrograde is as old as the planets in our solar system, since “how a planet appears in the sky is the information that astrology is built on.” These cosmic conditions are simply part of Earth’s reality, as much as heat comes from the sun and tides move in relation to the moon. Human societies have interpreted these stars in myriad ways. Before developing their famous Long Count calendar, for example, the Mayans appeared to use Mars’s synodic period – the interval between its retrograde motions – as a basis for counting time.

As for the kind of astrology most commonly discussed on the internet, Nicholas Campion, author of the multivolume A History of Western Astrology, says that its roots can be traced back to cuneiform tablets made in Mesopotamia in the present-day Middle East. By the fifth century BCE, he explains, scholars had codified the heavens into a 12-sign zodiac system, which blended with Greek thought over the next several centuries, mixing mythology with Pythagoras’s and Plato’s visions of the cosmos as ordered by mathematics and, in the latter, the work of a conscious creator.

Campion squeezes in a call with me before giving a lecture at University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where he directs the Sophia Centre – “the only academic centre in the world to deal with cultural relationships with the sky and the cosmos.” White-haired and kindly, he explains that while many ancient texts noted its apparent retrograde motion, none interpreted Mercury retrograde as a harmful influence on Earth. Campion points out that the second-century astronomer Ptolemy mentioned retrograde motion briefly, but only to explain that each planet’s influence is strengthened when it moves west to east and “loses strength” when it is in retrograde.

"Mercury retrograde is a celebrity on social media because he’s the god of messages"

Some astrologers looking for a deep historical tradition for Mercury retrograde point to William Lilly, the 17th-century political adviser who released his blockbuster Christian Astrology during the English Civil Wars and thought retrograde planets suggested unexpected returns (like a runaway horse, in one case) rather than disaster for everybody. Campion, however, says that that connection is erroneous: “Mercury retrograde could sabotage an astrologer’s ability to answer a precise question but did not have the widespread significance it does now.”

One of the earliest newspaper articles to feature Mercury retrograde in its modern incarnation contains a beautiful example of the self-fulfilling prophecy that’s embedded in the whole concept. Published in the New York Times Business Day section in September 1996 (when Mercury was direct, by the way, although it was probably retrograde when the article’s author, Edward Rothstein, filed his copy) the piece was subject to a correction a few weeks later. It read: “The technology column in Business Day on Sept. 30 about astrology enthusiasts who attribute technological mishaps to the motions of the planet Mercury misspelled the name of an ancient Roman architect who described planetary orbits by comparing them to ants crawling on a potter’s wheel. He was Vitruvius, not Visuvius.”

Much like Murphy’s Law, there’s a humour to the idea of Mercury retrograde that relates to its slightly circular logic. If it’s true that Rothstein wrote the piece during Mercury retrograde, his embarrassing mistake would seem to embody the very phenomenon it describes – perhaps as heavenly punishment for his hubristic sarcasm. Astrology has been maligned and neglected by academic historians precisely because it concerns domains of human experience (like love, communication, the unshakable feeling of bad luck) deemed by academia to be non-subjects.

Although Mercury retrograde has been observed for as long as people have been looking up at the sky, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the phenomenon became an explanation for things that go wrong. That’s what astrologer Joanna Martin, an independent researcher and student of Campion’s, discovered while she was doing her 2018 master’s dissertation on Mercury retrograde’s cultural history – apparently, the sole academic paper on the subject.

Martin found that in the United Kingdom, Mercury retrograde became popular during the so-called “traditional revival” of astrology in the early 1980s, when practitioners revisited medieval texts and techniques. In the United States, she has found evidence of oral traditions around Mercury retrograde from as far back as the 1960s and a spike in mentions of Mercury retrograde coinciding with the development of computers in the 1980s, especially in an American publication called Mercury Hour. A kind of printed newsletter founded by astrologer Edith Custer in 1974, Mercury Hour asked astrologers to write in with their problems, and their letters and the replies to them were published unedited. In this casual context – much more like an online forum than a scholarly journal – letter writers frequently complained about Mercury retrograde, suggesting perhaps that it was a more popular, informal kind of idea in astrology.

"Mercury is looked upon to help us make sense of a world that seems to make less and less of it"

Martin concludes that the idea caught on firmly in the era of social media, of which Mercury Hour was arguably an early form, not because Mercury has developed new powers but rather because vernacular discourse is where “invented traditions” – to borrow a phrase from the British historian Eric Hobsbawm – flourish. Hobsbawm used the term to describe practices with great contemporary meaning but little actual precedent: like the tartan kilts men wear in Scotland, which now seem like a celebration of Highlands identity but appear to have been invented by an Englishman in the 18th century.

Martin believes that Mercury retrograde is one such invented tradition, and invented traditions tend to generate origin myths for themselves. As one of Martin’s interview subjects put it in her study, “Mercury rules the internet and Mercury retrograde is an internet phenomenon, which is why it’s talked about so much on social media.” Out of the 75 astrologers Martin surveyed for her study, 34 percent thought that Mercury retrograde was “ancient”, while 20 percent thought that it was modern “with ancient roots.” Only 8 percent thought it was “modern.”

It makes perfect sense that a new tradition would develop to account for the travails of communicating via computers and smartphones every hour of our lives. With every passing year, more and more of our work and personal selves is funnelled through digital technology. Language will always fail us, whether spoken or written. No form of intelligence, human or artificial, has figured out yet how to solve that problem completely.

Moreover, it feels deeply correct that the history of Mercury retrograde has no single author. Was it the dawn of email that did it? Or was it the dawn of the Age of Aquarius? Is Mercury, the messenger, simply an automatic star on social media? Or is that the kind of logic loop designed to get us to believe things that aren’t true?

These strike me now as the wrong questions to ask. The evidence suggests that Mercury retrograde is both a totally modern phenomenon and just the latest efflorescence of one of the most ancient concepts that people have used to process their place in the universe. It is older than cultural time and also newer than the newest book could ever be, because it’s reincarnated every minute in the shared frustrations of millions of people online. Mercury is everywhere and nowhere: always in motion, delivering an urgent message, but too busy to explain.