If your social media feeds are anything like mine, you may have noticed an uptick in the number of people complaining about the planets lately. Mercury, it seems, is in retrograde. To adherents of astrology, this means if your relationship is on the rocks or your boss is being a turd or your neighbor changed their HBO password without telling you, blame Mercury.
Broadly, “Mercury in retrograde” refers to the position of the planets as we orbit around the Sun. About four times a year—including April 9 to May 3 of this year—it appears from our vantage on planet Earth as though Mercury has reversed direction and is moving backward instead of forward. This is an illusion. Toby Smith, senior lecturer at UW’s Department of Astronomy, compares it to passing a car on the freeway: from the faster car’s perspective, it appears as though the slower car is driving backwards.
The consequences of this reversal are significant, says BB Madga, an astrologer, psychic medium, and energy healer who happens to be my neighbor. “People should expect problems with communication during this time,” she says. “Also contracts, agreements, documents, books, manuscripts, term papers, deeds, leases, wills, listening, coding, speaking, reading, editing, learning, researching, negotiating. And that’s just the start of it. I wouldn’t buy a house right now.”
Magda, who conducts tarot readings on Instagram and YouTube, is a very modern-day practitioner, but people have believed that the cosmos impact life on Earth for millennia. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and Chinese all had belief systems founded on the cosmos, and contemporary Western astrology is based on Hellenistic and Babylonian traditions. In the US, its popularity has waxed and waned for at least the past century: In the 1920s, astrology was used to predict stock market highs and lows. In the ’80s, Ronald and Nancy Reagan employed an astrologer in the White House. Today, you can buy crystals, tarot decks, and other witchy tchotchkes in such new age shops as Urban Outfitters and Walmart.
But what does the science say? Is there any evidence that the movement of the planets affects us down here on Earth?
“Categorically, no,” says Smith. “Mercury in retrograde has no more effect on you than the cars that you pass on the road.” Indeed, studies of astrology have never shown it to be more accurate than pure chance. This includes a 1985 double-blind study published in the journal Nature, in which 28 esteemed astrologers from Europe and the US were asked to match astrological charts to psychological profiles. Surprise—they could not. Other studies have replicated this, and as NASA put it, “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates.”
Still, it persists. A 2014 poll found that up to 45 percent of Americans believe that astrology is science — and that number is on the rise. When I asked Magdalena if she would still believe in astrology if she were faced with evidence that it doesn’t exist, she said, categorically, yes. And, in some ways, it’s easy to see the appeal: Astrology is something to believe in. Perhaps we could all use a little bit of that.
But there’s a danger in this thinking. Subscribing to astrology—letting it tell you when to sign a contract or buy a house or who to date—means giving up your power, something we don’t have enough of as it is, as we are too often constrained by socioeconomic forces beyond our control. The reality is, where and when you are born does have an impact on your life—just compare your own circumstances to those of someone born in Syria. But that’s because of resources, and history, and centuries of geopolitics, not because of the position of the sun at the moment of your birth. Sure, astrology gives people something to believe in, but when you let anything control you—whether astrology or religion—it also takes something back.
