Mercury Retrograde February - March 2026
Caduceus, staff of Hermes
It’s Mercury retrograde time again! Before we get to the details, I’m hyping my astrological Moon class at Press Coffee on Wednesday, March 4th from 4-6 pm! I’m collaborating with Dawn Frary, who will be discussing the symbolism of the Moon in Tarot. Here’s the link to the class description, which includes the link to register for the class on Dawn's site:
Let’s look at the dates for this Mercury retrograde:
Mercury entered their* shadow on Wednesday, February 11 at 4:12 pm CST at 08°29’ Pisces
Mercury stations retrograde Thursday, February 26 at 12:48 am CST at 22°33’ Pisces
Mercury stations direct on Friday, March 20 at 2:32 pm CST at 8°29’ Pisces
Mercury exits their shadow on Thursday, April 9 at 6:42 am at 22°33’ Pisces
Is there anything that has been coming up since February 11 that seems to want to be reworked, rearranged, revisited, revised or refined? We have several weeks to parse all of this symbolism for ourselves, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have an inkling of a clue immediately.
Mercury retrogrades impact everybody differently, let’s explore some of those ways.
You may have planets or points in the area of the Mercury retrograde, this time between about 6° Pisces through about 24° Pisces, or in that same area of any of the other mutable signs of Gemini, Virgo, or Sagittarius. This is because Mercury in Pisces will be squaring or opposing those planets or points in the other mutable signs.
You may have planets or points in one of the Mercury-ruled mutable signs of Gemini or Virgo, and you may feel these retrogrades impacting those planets or points due to that rulership. Since Mercury is retrograding through the mutable sign of Pisces this time, there is an added emphasis because (as we just pointed out) Mercury may also be squaring or opposing those planets or points in the mutable signs of Gemini or Virgo.
You may have angles located in these two Mercury-ruled signs, and it may be in that area of life where you feel this impulse toward reworking, rearranging, revisiting, revising, or refining; again, this is due to rulership, and again due to their aspectual relationship to Pisces - the square or opposition. Incidentally, often if you have an angle in Gemini, you will also have an angle in Virgo, since these signs are 90° away from one another, and angles are often around 90° away from one another (90° is the the square aspectual relationship), so you may feel it in two areas of your life if that is the case.
It may be that Mercury is retrograde in your natal chart, meaning that you were born during a Mercury retrograde, and perhaps the times that Mercury goes retrograde feel completely natural to you, and not at all disruptive.
It may be that you have natal Mercury at a very high declination along the ecliptic, known as “out of bounds”, meaning that your Mercury expression is unbounded, doing wtf it wants, when it wants, and Mercury going backwards or forward don’t make you no nevermind, as they say in Lee County.
Or perhaps you are very Virgoan, or your natal lunar phase is gibbous, or you have a lot of 6th house planets, meaning that you may naturally want to revise, rework, refine, or rearrange things in general, and Mercury retrograde feels like a time when everybody else is finally on your revising and refining tip.
While some folks seem to think that everything can go haywire during Mercury retrograde, we can’t blame Mercury retrograde for everything! If you want to proceed with caution during Mercury retrograde for whatever reason, it’s best to focus on Mercury-related topics, as these are likely what is wanting to be revisited, revised, or refined at this time. Some (but not all) Mercury related topics include:
Communication (receiving and delivering: listening as well as talking/writing)
Naming, articulating; that which articulates the primary creative energy and renders it intelligible
Curiosity, open-mindedness, wonder, seeking out the interesting
Making mental connections
Mentally present in the now
Multiplicity
The negotiator between the conscious and the unconscious mind
Signs, symbols, omens, and messages
Writing, literature, wordplay, storytelling
Virtuosity
Guardian of the thresholds, go-between, boundary crossings
Do any of these topics jog something in your life that seems to be popping into your awareness, possibly wanting to be revised, refined, or revisited?
Now let’s get a picture in our mind of the nature of a retrograde; the retrograde nature is that of slowing down and going back over some ground that you have already tread. When we say that Mercury entered their shadow, that simply means that at that point of entering their shadow (this time at 08°29’ Pisces) that is the degree that Mercury will retrograde back to. If we revisit the metaphor from the prior Mercury retrograde of the car reversing, we can visualize more adeptly. Let’s say you’re driving down the street, looking for a parking space. You drive past an open space, thinking that you see another open space a little closer to your destination several parking spaces up the street. When you pull into that second space, you look up and see that there is one of those little “don’t park here/out of order” hoods on the meter. So you pull out and reverse back to that first open space that you initially drove past. The hooded meter point at which you stop and reverse is the retrograde degree point. The parking space that you initially passed and eventually reverse back to is the shadow degree, or station direct point.
After you park and get out to go about your business, you eventually will return to your car to pull out of the parking space and drive forward again back up the street that you had reversed down, this time going forward toward the hooded meter parking space once again. That is similar to when Mercury will be going direct after the retrograde, going back over the patch of road which you have already traversed twice, and will now go forward over again a third time. So that little patch of road between the first open parking space that you initially passed and the hooded meter parking space where you stopped and reversed back to the initial space where you eventually parked is the area that Mercury will be traversing three times total: once forward, once backward, and once more again forward. When Mercury goes forward past the degree point where the hooded parking meter is, that is the point that we say Mercury leaves their shadow.
Can you see why the symbolism of a retrograde is about going back over things - all of the “re” words, such as re-do, revise, revisit, refine, reconsider, etc?
Now let’s look at the sign that Mercury will be traversing: Pisces. Mercury is stationing retrograde and direct in Pisces. Pisces is the last sign of the Zodiac, which I believe lends it some seemingly contradictory significations. It is the beginning of the end and also the end of the beginning, the womb state between worlds. Even though like all of the Zodiac signs, the significations of Pisces can be viewed as a spectrum, with Pisces it is as if we see the strengths and challenges existing together as one, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where on the spectrum these significations lie - in the more sustainable, life-affirming strength area, or the less-sustainable, life-negating challenge area. Perhaps this is due to the sign itself being the last sign of the Zodiac, presenting as both that confusing womb state from where all life begins to form, as well as the point of transcendence, Nirvana, or Moksha, all terms for the freedom from Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. Let’s list out some Piscean significations, and see if you can imagine into them, exploring how they may show up either in a positive, life-affirming way, or in a more challenging, life-negating way. This confusion of significations is summed up pretty well in the constellation of Pisces - two fish swimming in different (but not quite opposite) directions, yet connected by a single string attached to their tails. There are no clear answers to be found in this Zodiac sign it seems. Good luck on your journey through Pisces, Mercury!
Some Pisces themes are:
No boundaries
Wholeness, Universality
Truth is relative
Capacity to embrace, accept, and understand
Intuitive
Compassionate, boundless sympathy
Weak-willed, easily led and influenced
Selfless, goalless, drifting
Sensitive, emotional, yet capable of harshness and coldness
Escapist tendencies
Sensitivity to suffering
Idealistic, longing, yearning
Dissatisfaction, disillusionment
Artistic, poetic, visionary
Fantasy, imagination, expressive, free-flowing
Romanticism, suffering, vulnerable
Longing for spiritual experiences, transcendent worlds
Addictive behavior (mistaking substances for transcendence)
Strongly instinctive, passive reactions
Can you see how interwoven these Pisces significations can become, and the capacity for transcendence as well as delusion inherent in most of them? Let’s break just one of them down, and see how it can express; let’s say, Sensitivity to Suffering. We can see that if somebody has a strong sensitivity to the suffering of others, it could motivate them to do something to alleviate this suffering, organizing food drives, sponsoring a refugee family, doing something that is of service to those who are suffering, all of which can be thought of as a form of spiritual transcendence. On the other hand, this strong sensitivity to the suffering of others could become so burdensome for somebody else that they may be unable to move beyond the experience of suffering, and consequently they may sink into helplessness and harbor delusions about the world as only a place of suffering that nobody can do anything about.
Let’s do one more: Strongly instinctive, passive reactions. In a sustainable capacity, a person could have the patience to rely on their intuition and instinct, and be able to allow for things to happen, rather than trying to push the river as it were. In a less sustainable capacity, a person could get rushed along by the river, always simply allowing things to happen, losing themselves and their connection to their intuitive instincts in the process. So you can see that maybe some Mercurial refinement and revision could help us to tease out the more sustainable and the less sustainable expressions of Pisces, and this is how this Mercury retrograde could be of use to us in our lives at this time.
I do think it’s significant that Mercury is retrograding through Pisces, the sign that both Saturn and Neptune have recently egressed, both having moved out of Pisces for the last time, and into Aries for the duration, conjoining one another exactly at 00°45’ Aries on February 20. Mercury seems to be doing the final walk-through of Pisces for Saturn and Neptune, affording us the opportunity to identify what needs to be revisited, refined, and reworked before the deal can close. With Pisces, I don’t imagine we’ll come up with a very structured punch list of items, but do carry some mental painter’s tape with you to stick on any areas that you feel need revisiting, revising, or refining during this Mercury retrograde.
We can drill down even further into the meaning of this particular Mercury retrograde for each of us personally by looking at our natal charts:
What house or houses are being transited by Mercury during this retrograde? This is the area of life that this Mercury retrograde may be affording an opportunity for some refinement or revision.
What if any planets or points are located between about 06° and 24° Pisces or the other mutable signs of Gemini, Virgo, or Sagittarius in our charts? The significations of these planets or points may be asking for a second look - if Venus, our impulse toward beauty or connection; if Neptune, our experience of the mystical or with non-ordinary states of consciousness; if Mars, our impulse toward assertion, etc.
What planets or points are located at or near (within 2-ish degrees) of the station degrees of 8°29’ and 22°33’ Pisces, or at these same degree points of the other mutable signs of Gemini, Virgo or Sagittarius? These degree points are where Mercury will be slowing down and staying for roughly a week - a long time for typically fast Mercury to sit still! This planet or point in your chart will be even more emphasized than those that are simply in the path of the retrograde, who will be passed by three times, relatively quickly. If we go back to the parking space metaphor - our car will spend more time in the area of the parking space that we passed by initially and eventually reverse back to and park in, and the point of the hooded meter, where we stopped to park initially, and ended up putting the car in reverse to go back to the original parking space. The area of road in between the two open spaces will be passed over by our car three times, but will not experience the same length of time having our car present that the two open parking spaces will.
As you can see, astrology is one of those practices in which you can go as deep or as surface as you’re comfortable with, or have time for; the symbolic movement of the planets through your chart can be a nourishing way to reflect on your life and your experience in order to have a more clarified, peaceful, and meaningful experience of life. Since we are all living our natal charts every day, many of us will intuitively dial into the area of our chart and life that this Mercury retrograde is traversing, and reconsider something that is being highlighted for us. In other words, look into your chart if you have the time and inclination, but more importantly, trust your intuition on what is wanting to be revisited, revised or refined in your life and consciousness at this time.
*You may notice that I’m experimenting with using they/them pronouns for Mercury. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t gender the planets, but I’ve tried, and that doesn’t feel right to me, as I have the tendency to gender (and misgender) everything - people, animals, plants, rocks, etc. The planets are physical things out there in the Universe, and yes, in that context referring to them as “it” makes a little more sense, but especially in the context of astrology, the planets symbolize drives within our human psyches, and that makes me feel weird when I refer to a planet as “it”. The reason I’m experimenting with using they/them for Mercury, is because of all the planets, mythologically Mercury is the most non-binary of the Olympic gods. Literally the term “hermaphrodite” comes from the offspring of Hermes (Mercury) and Aphrodite (Venus). If we think of gender as a spectrum (and I do), I feel that Mercury leans slightly toward the more masculine side of the spectrum, but like in the area of a young boy who is not yet a grown man, or a “tomboy” type girl, who bats clean-up on her little league team and leads the league in triples. Mercury is also a trickster and can appear in any guise, and was the one god who could traverse the worlds - from the upper world of Mount Olympus, to the earthly world, down to the Underworld. Mercury as psychopomp was the guide of souls to (and occasionally from) the Underworld. So feel into these many facets of Mercury when you are contemplating what this Mercury retrograde could be affording you the opportunity to revise, revisit, or refine.