IF YOU spilt wine all over your computer or signed a lease for a bedbug-filled apartment, relax! It’s probably not your fault; it’s probably Mercury retrograde.
The astrological phenomenon, which started Thursday and goes until October 9 is the hottest scapegoat in town, the juice cleanse of the cosmos, if you will.
According to astrological hawkers (and the flocks who follow them), the three periods each year when Mercury appears to be moving backward are total pandemonium, a time when the stars are liable to wreak havoc on technical devices, morning commutes and official documents.
Too bad it’s total nonsense. Mercury retrograde isn’t responsible for your train being late or your iPhone freezing-up, anymore than that black cat that crossed your path gave you bad luck.
And yet, belief in “Mercury retrograde” is getting stronger and stronger.
My social media feeds are filled with comments from otherwise logical, educated people who take the phenomenon seriously.
“Is Mercury still in retrograde?” one friend, a female writer in Brooklyn, posted on Facebook recently.
“Emails have been getting misplaced like a mofo over on my end.”
A business consultant friend in South Carolina says she won’t “sign official documents or finalise during a retrograde.”
Searches for the phrase “Mercury retrograde” more than doubled between 2004 and 2015, according to Google Trends, and retrograde survival guides have seeped from hokey astrology sites to mainstream websites like Elle, Refinery 29 and the Cut.
Believe what you want. Believe that Mercury has Harry Potter hexing powers, believe in psychics, believe in an invisible teapot circling the Earth. But don’t cancel plans with me because of some cosmic quackery or fill my Facebook feed with lame, annoying, pseudoscientific laments.
Columbia University astronomy professor David Helfand points to more pernicious problems. The growing popularity of astrology, he says, shares DNA with anti-science movements like anti-vaccination efforts and climate-change denial (though horoscopes are certainly less worrisome than a rubella outbreak).
“Magical thinking isn’t going to solve [our problems],” he says.
The origin of observing cosmic phenomena goes back thousands of years, when people thought the cosmos revolved around the Earth, long before Google. But Mercury never actually “retrogrades”.
It’s just an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth, like passing an all-stops train that appears to go backwards because you’re on an express train, moving so quickly past it.
The last time a planet had any affect on us, Helfand says, is when a chunk of rock that would eventually become Mars crashed into Earth and created the moon 4.5 billion years ago.
He checked: If it’s a bad time to sign important documents, no one told the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Japanese who surrendered during World War II or former US president Lyndon B Johnson when he signed the Voting Rights Act — all major events that happened during retrograde.
“That’s the whole point, right?” Helfand says. “Astrology has no physical mechanism to explain any physical effect. It doesn’t need to explain anything.”
So sure, it’s easy to blame being late to work on a mysterious space wind stalling your train. But when retrograde ends on October 9, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
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