Happy New Moon in Taurus, today's Solar Eclipse and Mercury Retrograde
Tomorrow Mercury goes retrograde following the first of two solar eclipses of 2023.
Hello lovely people,
I hope this newsletter finds you well on April’s New Moon. Did any of you have a go at making Nettle and Wild Garlic soup inspired by the recipe in my last newsletter? If you did, please share your experience in the comments below or tag me on socials.
As a write to you on this sunny April day, there’s a lot of upheaval going on in the heavens with Mercury going into Retrograde tomorrow and the first Solar Eclipse of this year happening today! I’ve had a lot of questions about these astrological events from my Moontime Tribe so this newsletter is dedicated to both of these phenomenons as well as today’s New Moon.
Mercury Retrograde
You may remember from school Physics lessons having to come up with an allegory to remember the names of the planets. My rather strange one was ‘Marvellous-Vera-Enjoys-Making-Jam-She-Uses-Nice-Plums’ which has stuck in my head for the last 24 years! Nevertheless, it’s helped me remember the order of the planets in their distance from the sun and here ‘Marvellous’ stands for Mercury. Mercury takes a mere 88 days to orbit the sun (remember Earth takes 365 days which is why we measure our years by this number).
On an almost quarterly rotation, Mercury goes through a three-week-long retrograde cycle when the planet appears to stop, switch direction, and move backward in the sky — appears being the operative word, because retrograde motion is actually an optical illusion. Although the planet isn’t actually traveling in reverse, it just looks that way from our vantage on Earth.
Source: https://www.thecut.com/2023/04/mercury-retrograde-april-2023-dates-what-to-know.html
In Roman mythology, Mercury is the Roman messenger God of commerce, communication, travel, and transportation which are areas of our lives (with technology now thrown into the 21st Century mix) which are typically considered to be at risk of going awry during this time.
When does it happen?
There are 3 times this year when Mercury will appear to be moving backwards but the one to mention in this edition of Moontime Musings is:
21 April to 14 May: The first retrograde of the year will occur under the Taurus sign, but we may start to feel the effects of the pre-retrograde shadow that occurs before the transit happens from as early as 7 April. The post-retrograde shadow will last until 31 May.
Source: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/mercury-retrograde-2023-dates
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