How to Handle Mercury Retrograde in 2024

Don’t let a Mercury Retrograde 2024 throw you off balance. Discover effective strategies to navigate communication and travel challenges.

Mercury Retrograde 2024

If you’re familiar with the term “Mercury retrograde,” odds are you don’t have good feelings about it. “Oh, no, not again!” is the usual reaction to learning that one is coming up.

Take heart! It doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Mercury retrograde is not a freak occurrence, much less the world’s end. It’s a regular phenomenon that happens three or four times a year. We can’t stop it, but we can understand and work with it. Read on for how.

Do you already know how a Mercury retrograde works? Scroll down for this year’s details.

What Does Mercury Retrograde Mean?

First, the technicalities: Mercury is retrograde when it looks from the Earth as if it’s traveling backward. That’s an optical illusion, of course, and happens when Mercury’s orbital speed changes compared to Earth’s. It’s the planetary equivalent of speeding up on a highway, passing a car, and seeing it fall far behind after you in the rearview mirror.

How This Works:

When Mercury is retrograde, the areas of life it governs do not play by the usual rules. Anything related to communication and travel requires extra attention. This includes phones, computers, electronic devices, mail, cars, public transportation, and commutes.

Our information flow is always a casualty. Messages go astray. Misunderstanding, confusion, half-truths, and deception are rampant. Both sides of a conversation may use the same words, but the words may not have the same meaning at all. Or expectations and assumptions may differ.

Vehicles of communication also misfire. Anything with inherent instability hits the breaking point. Technology malfunctions. Websites and networks go down. Programs stop working. Tasks that should be ordinary turn into a gauntlet of error messages and trouble-shooting.

Getting around is also a challenge. Traffic snarls. Travel gets delayed. Buses don’t arrive. Cars break down. Detours pop up and complicate your route.

What should you do?

Postpone launching major projects, signing major contracts, and buying big-ticket items if possible. (You may not have complete or accurate information; the subject or purpose may not be what you think it is.) Double-check fine print, backup your data, and allow lots of extra time when you’re on the road.

Watch for opportunities for a do-over, which may initially show up as un-raveling or restructuring. Mercury Retrograde is also an excellent time to investigate and research, finish old business, clean up paperwork, and get in touch with people you haven’t talked to in a while. Pay attention to who surfaces from the past, in person or in thought. Their reappearance could help tie up loose ends or resolve lingering business. Organize and prepare so you’ll be ready to move ahead when Mercury does.

What about Mercury’s shadow?

The shadow is the stretch of the sky between the degree where the retrograde will end and the degree where it will start. Mercury enters the shadow of the retrograde when it reaches the degree to which it will eventually return. After the planet stations direct, it travels through the shadow again.

Does this matter? The hype this phenomenon enjoys on social media would make you think so. You may find that matters that pop up in the shadow come up again for revisiting during the retrograde. Beyond that, though, the shadow’s importance is only hype.

Think about it: if you add the shadow time to the weeks of retrograde, Mercury would have a retrograde impact for most of the year. So… don’t sweat the shadow.

Mercury Retrogrades in 2024

First, the details. In 2024, Mercury is retrograde:

January 1, stationing direct at 22 Sagittarius;

April 1 – 25, going from 27 – 15 Aries;

August 5 – 28, going from 4 Virgo to 21 Leo and

November 25 – December 15, going from 22 – 6 Sagittarius.

Look for effects before and after these dates. Communication and transportation matters usually start slowing (or growing complicated) a couple of days before a retrograde begins. On the day of the retrograde station (when Mercury appears to be motionless, as it appears to change direction), it can feel as if time has stopped altogether.

The Same Sensation Returns When Mercury Stations Direct

Communication and transportation matters don’t suddenly speed up once the retrograde ends. Give the planet time to get moving again. Wait a few days after Mercury stations direct before resuming business as usual.

All of Mercury’s 2024 retrogrades take place in fire signs, with one twist: the third starts on Earth and ends in fire. Mercury is comfortable in fire but also feisty and combustible. Even if trip-ups, misunderstandings, and do-overs involve real-world practicalities, the impact and reactions will likely be … dramatic. Expect high energy and passion, frenetic activity, volatility, and frustration, with people all too quick to anger. On the positive side, the fire retrogrades will deliver the gumption to go after snafus and blast through old business.

Note, too, that the last retrograde starts where the first one stops, suggesting a storyline that will go further back.

The Years’s Retrogrades

The first retrograde is really the ending of the one that took us out of 2023, when Mercury stations direct on January 1. This gives the New Year celebration the sensation of being suspended in time – not a bad place to be during a holiday. Wait a few days for matters (and time) to move along, which may not happen until January 6 or so.

The second retrograde, from April 1 – 25 in Aries, promises impatience, frustration, and a high likelihood of mishaps, malfunctions, and delays involving impulsiveness. In risk-taking Aries, this retrograde stretch will have the calm of colts breaking out of the corral and going every which way.

Ramping up the usual Aries tendencies, this retrograde also comes with exceptional volatility because it coincides with the Aries New Moon solar eclipse of April 8 – which itself comes with the exceptional firepower of Chiron, conjunct the eclipse as well as the U.S. Chiron.

One result: this retrograde promises to revisit and reset matters involving anger, aggression, conflicts (yes, war), excessive force, and the role of men and masculinity.

Mercury Retrograde 2024 Dates to Watch:

• Watch for information, communications, and confusion relevant to the Aries New Moon solar eclipse when Mercury crosses its degree around April 16.

• Clarity about your thinking, desires, relationships, and worth (self and financial) – or the opportunity to address these – comes when Mercury conjuncts Venus on April 19.

The third retrograde, from August 23 – September 15, going from Virgo to Leo, starts out analytical, evaluative, and nit-picky. There’s potential for criticism, fault-finding, cleaning up, reorganizing, and rectifying. Your thinking, at a minimum.

Mercury’s return to Leo on August 14 adds extreme drama to the high energies of a fire retrograde.

• Clarity about your thinking, desires, relationships, and worth (self and financial) – or the opportunity to address these – arrives when Mercury meets Venus (shades of April 19!) August 7.

• Retrograde Mercury reenters Leo on August 14, and the usual snafus and do-overs become high-energy and personal.

• Blow-ups and breakthroughs will fly when Mercury squares Uranus on August 18.

• Watch for opportunities to take action when Mercury sextiles Mars on August 24.

The final retrograde, from November 25 – December 15 in Sagittarius, culminates in the double whammy of Mars stationing retrograde in the fellow fire sign of Leo. Expect minds, conversations, and information streams to be more animated, impassioned, and inclined toward the theoretical (and self-righteous) than they’ve been during Mercury’s retrogrades this year.

Watch out for foot-in-mouth disease and intellectual superiority and for issues returning involving politics and policy, education, the media, and foreign affairs.

• Confusion and snafus could be especially challenging when Mercury opposes Jupiter on December 4.

• Fighting words and demands for limits and accountability fly off Mercury’s square to Saturn on December 7, as Mars hovers in his retrograde station.

• Watch for openings to the right relationship and money issues when Mercury sextiles Venus on December 13.

• Thoughts erupt into action (yeehaw!) when Mercury trines Mars on December 15.

Learn more about the cosmic messenger in Kathy’s Mercury Intensive.

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About the Author

Kathy Biehl is a professional astrologer with more than 30 years of experience. She has been translating astrology for the mainstream since high school and has a knack for combining humor and pop culture with her guidance. Visit EmpowermentUnlimited.net to sign up for her mailing list, listen to her forecasts, and book a session for her. Find her on Facebook at Empowerment Unlimited and the Astro-Insight Lounge and on YouTube at the Professional Aquarian Channel. Listen to her radio show Celestial Compass on OM Times Radio.