By the time you wipe the sleep from your eyes on Monday morning, Mercury will have stationed retrograde. This season, Mercury crunches to a halt in a square with Pluto, the planet of overturning rocks to inspect the earthworms and beetles that normally stay subterranean.
Mercury will be retrograde from September 26th 10:10 pm PT until October 18th 8:17 am PT. While Mercury retrogrades tend to be pretty on brand for disrupting travel, scrambling technology, cancelling appointments, and dropping Zoom calls, they offer fruitful periods of review.
In a society obsessed with forward momentum and productivity, it’s actually kind of subversive to go purposely backward for a while. Pay attention to what comes up for a second glimpse: what is clamoring for you to trod back over (and over)? How might you define productivity differently if you become less focused on linear advancement? How can you make real room for slowing down?
Efforts to decelerate are validated on September 29th when the Sun trines Saturn. While Saturn rewards those who work their tushes off, it’s also a planet that charts a gradual, sustainable course. This is a welcome moment in the week that encourages you to stabilize your efforts, weigh your short term gratification against long term goals, and take the rest (and help) you need.
Around the same time, Venus forms sumptuous, dizzying angles to both Neptune (on September 29th) and Jupiter (September 30th.) Venus in Scorpio enjoys a certain level of debauchery at the best (and worst) of times, and with these accomplices in the picture, there will be a tug to heed more corporeal (even hedonistic) impulses.
Hedonism has a negative slant nowadays — likely because it stalls all that productivity we demand from ourselves — but this term historically finds its root in the Greek word for “sweet” (hedys).
What’s wrong with centering a little more sweetness in your life? Do you trust the authorities that made “pleasure” a dirty word? How might your own days flow differently if you didn’t defer your bliss to some chimerical finish line, but found a moment to enjoy yourself every day?
Your horoscopes are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. You’ll know which one resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, and leave the rest. If you want to share this work, please credit the source by quoting it and providing a link to this post and website. Thank you for your support and for spreading the work around. We really appreciate it and you.
The following horoscopes were written by Thea Anderson and Eliza Robertson.
Aries & Aries Rising
At the beginning of the week, your dialogues stall under the weight of your backtracking, backpedalling, and mental instant replays. Sometimes you have to hear yourself echo the same request over and over to realize how much it means to you. Sometimes you have to rewind a fight in your head to understand how you strayed off-path.
Over the next few weeks, you trace over the seemingly minor conversations, promises, and pledges made in the midst of mutual good feeling. Whatever negotiations were innocently glazed over now warrant deeper investigation. These conversations could require more than a little patience as you graze across a thorn or two.
Support arrives midweek, with you feeling confident in the containers that house your exchanges. Yes, you’re crawling into the archaeological dig site of your most cherished unions, but you’re also able to trust the ropes, pulleys, and friends enlisted to tug you up again.
As the week continues, you’re initiated into the azure depths between you and another. There’s an urge to relax into the entrancement of your collaboration, even if outside reality tries to puncture the mood with its obligations and relentless thrumming of time.
Do revel in the sweet pith of this moment, in your inner chambers and gardens, but tie a whip of kelp around your waist so you can haul your way to the surface again.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Taurus & Taurus Rising
For the next few weeks, you place a feather on the scale to identify which parts of your daily grind require some lightening. In a culture that demands we rest only when our bodies stutter under the weight of our overworking, it’s kinder on your body (and actually more cost-effective) to preempt burnout with healthy pauses for review.
The trick behind equilibrium is realizing that it is constantly in flux, constantly balancing and unbalancing. There’s a call now to do something different, to initiate changes that reorient your work and health flows to supporting your body as a vital and pleasure-seeking animal — not a machine.
What if you didn’t interpret your body’s needs as limitations, but helpful signposts that point out safe and self-loving boundaries? What if your work itself needs a fence pegged around it, and not your pleasure or play?
As the week continues, you’re beckoned into the fantasies you co-create with another. While reality is always worth coming back to, sometimes it’s good medicine to divulge your most ideal dream worlds, your best-case scenarios. Whispering your reveries to a trusted accomplice is a sort of conjuring — a way of letting your spells seep into the touchable, malleable world.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Gemini & Gemini Rising
Now and for the next few weeks, your attention ticks back to the pleasure pursuits of the past month. As the music dwindles and the flow of libations slows to a sticky sap, you examine what underlies the compulsion to socialize. Fun has its cost when you sacrifice your divine creativity for trivial distractions.
What do you really want to create? What deserves your revelry?
As Mercury backtracks from our point of view on Earth, you reach the threshold between what is merely gleeful and what is generative. If you get stuck or turned around, let your stream-of-consciousness take over. By scribbling or vocalizing your schemes, you decode the otherwise mystical process of production.
Your wisdom paths help in this respect too. Whatever you’re reading, whatever online courses you’re pursuing, whatever mystery traditions you’re spelunking — it’s all fodder for your creativity. Fertility manifests through many pathways, not all of them procreative. What are yours?
Meanwhile, the mundane requirements of your life could use some tenderness right now. By the end of this week, you find it in yourself to indulge your body with all the scented oils, confectionery, and foot rubs you need to recalibrate. There’s a time for trucking ahead and there’s a time for rose petal milk baths.
This is that time.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Cancer & Cancer Rising
Consider your first word as an infant, or the shorthand specific to your own family and upbringing. As you grow, your vernacular grafts to your unique path in life, but somewhere at the root of all that language, you detect a whiff of your roots: the way you wrap your mouth around certain vowels, or call it a sofa, couch, or chesterfield.
With Mercury now retrograde in the home center of your chart, you find yourself tracing back over communications with those you call home or family. Simple chats about household chores grow tentacular, and verbal misunderstandings seem to tarry at every corner.
Technology also tends to abdicate its usual functioning around Mercury retrogrades, and you may have the sense that your fridge or home printer possesses a knotty mind of its own.
That said, we’re entering the season where the veil thins between us and our beloved dead, and this Mercury retrograde could inspire you to comb your elders’ attics to assemble an altar or archive that honors the ones who came before.
As the week continues, your heart swivels to more creative or joyful pursuits. What would it look like for you to get sweeter with your modes of self-expression? If any blocks are preventing you from sharing your ideas in the raw, those inhibitions get gently loosened.
Be tender with the parts of you that don’t always trust your pleasure responses. While you may have to lower yourself into the jacuzzi with care, this is a moment to soften into the nooks of your life that bring delight and inspiration.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Leo & Leo Rising
Words are ephemeral by nature; their sound dissolves in the air as soon as you pronounce them. Yet they have a way of etching into other people’s brains, even finding new shapes and sizes there. As Mercury goes retrograde in your place of communication, there may be comments you can’t unsay or unhear.
There’s something timely about this double edge of transience and everlastingness. Memories are spongy by nature, and careless comments have a way of sporing new fears, but excessive self-censoring is not a solution either.
With Mercury backtracking in Libra, we’re reminded again of balance: finding the middle thread between choosing your words with care, and effacing your voice into a (supposedly) safer silence.
You can’t learn if you don’t make the odd glorious blunder.
As the week continues, your home or family life shifts into a palace fit for your revelling. There will be a suggestion of opulence, in spirit if not material delights, and you’ll be inspired by all manner of tactility and fragrance. Light your most sumptuous incense and build a throne of your silkiest, doughiest pillows.
Treat your tongue to something ambrosial, whether home-concocted or purchased. Alone or with your preferred co-conspirators: be transported.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Virgo & Virgo Rising
If your finances have felt foggy over the past couple weeks, it will take a few weeks more for those plumes of uncertainty to dispel. As Mercury inches backward over your accounts and balance books, payments could be delayed, crucial zeros omitted, and receipts too onerous to wade through.
Mercury retrogrades also present opportunities to unstitch ideas you’ve taken for granted. At this time in your life, how would you describe your relationship to material security? How many of your habits have been absorbed from role models or involuntary circumstances? To unweave the blocks, fears, and distortions, what is the first knot you need to loosen?
Your evolving relationship with money delivers fresh insights in October. These nest eggs of information may arrive in the form of tricks, hacks, and facts gleaned from other people, but the wisdom could just as easily arise from the groundswell of what you already know.
As the week progresses, you’re cradled by the outstretched arms and words of your best friends, siblings, and beloveds. Not everyone grows into this world with an intact sense of belonging. If you’re still searching for yours, this could be a moment where you’re reminded, resoundingly, of the love you spark in other people. You are seen and adored, even if that tenderness is not always brandished.
For you and every human, love and health are interwoven. When we engage in a loving connection with another person, our stress diminishes, our anxiety abates, we heal faster, and catch fewer colds. Even if you trust the displays of love in your life, even if this love exists in a protected, tacit place, what happens if you verbalize it?
It can be vulnerable and exhilarating to lay yourself bare.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Libra & Libra Rising
Now and for the next few weeks: craft a net to catch your dreams and ideas. Whisper plans into voice memos. Scribble revelations onto takeout napkins. There’s much wisdom to be gleaned, yet plenty of it comes from trusting your own muscle memories and instincts. It won’t always be straightforward.
With Mercury retrograde in Libra right now, you may confront that unique frustration of feeling personally misunderstood. No matter how clearly you think you’ve expressed yourself, something is missed or reworked in the brain of your interlocutor. Even if everyone means well, memories tend to be pliant and subjective.
Yet you are uniquely armed with the skills to parse through the tangled speech and relocate your center. This may involve combing back over sent texts, or returning to the site of a disagreement to explore the terrain of what you both felt stung by.
Bounty finds you as the week continues. This abundance could be material in nature, or it could arrive in a flush of ideas for your next artwork, or the delicious opportunity to claim a day for your own pleasure rituals.
If your weekends have been cluttered with providing a chauffeur service for the young ones in your life, or organizing the house into a lesser ring of chaos, or cooking meals for others — see what it feels like to prioritize your own joy and wellness.
Is there a hot spring in your area inviting you for a solo day trip? Or simply a candlelit bath with essential oils? How would your life change if you stopped viewing pleasure as a luxury and instead recognized it as crucially remedial?
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Scorpio & Scorpio Rising
Now and for the next few weeks, your mission is to detangle the swarm of hunches, inklings, and dreams at your back. Information finds you from unseen places, but how do you know which instincts to rely on?
Consider your relationship with the dark. When you were a child, and the lights dimmed, what panic or jitters hummed in your body as you tried to soothe yourself to sleep? Or even now, after watching a psychological thriller, or if you’re facing a situation that keeps you in a state of vigilance: how do you know which sounds represent threats and what is simply a hush of breeze rustling the bedroom curtain?
The dark can feel bottomless with its dimensions, and your task is to find slowness here. To filter your night vision and spidey senses and assess what shadows from your own mind you can declaw through reason or even humor.
Nothing cleanses a room like a bout of laughter.
As the week continues, you’re beckoned right back into the pleasures of your own body. The ancient Greeks and Romans viewed bathing and self-pampering as ways to honor the Gods. Hippocrates, that founding paragon of western medicine, recommended daily baths and massage with fragrant oils.
What if you were to live like this for a day? What if you, like the ancients, filled your tub with salts, bay laurel, and lavender, and called it prayer?
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising
It’s easy to be swayed by the tidal tug of other people’s opinions. While you’re skilled at identifying (and trumpeting) your position on most matters, no one is totally immune to hive minds or mob mentalities.
You may even self-identify as an outsider or maverick, but whether you’re reacting against public opinion or in step with it, you’re still informed by the thrust of collective beliefs.
That isn’t a bad thing.
We live in community with each other, and the archetypes we share, the every-human experiences, like love and fear, help us translate and understand each other’s differences.
Still, miscommunications happen, and they could emerge over the next few weeks. The temptation may be to drill deeper into what you intended to say instead of taking a moment to back-float your way out of the social quicksand. It requires time and patience to understand where an encounter veered off course.
By the end of the week, the most kind thing you can do for yourself is to truly and deeply rest. Responding to work emails from bed doesn’t count. Nor does forcing yourself to take your daily jog or spin class in your single hour of free time.
Rest requires flagging boundaries around your space and time and giving yourself an opulent swathe of hours to let your brain cells regenerate.
There’s nothing idle about the time you invest to revive.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Capricorn & Capricorn Rising
Yes, you could view Mercury retrograde as an inevitable fracas of technological and verbal SNAFUs. Or you could reframe the tricks and delays as invitations to dismantle your goals so you can better understand (and if necessary, revise) what sits at the pit of them.
Maybe your career goals have shifted, but you’re so focused on motoring through every urgent task that you forget to glance at the GPS and check if you’re speeding in a meaningful direction. Or maybe you’re someone who won’t stop of your own accord — not until your body forces you to.
And maybe that broken printer or last-minute cancellation is actually an act of grace, because unless someone reroutes the train tracks under your wheels, you’ll probably keep advancing.
Over the next three weeks, consider who or what receives the bulk of your time and attention, and measure this calculation against what you want to achieve or be known for. Do any parts of your day need adjusting?
As the week progresses, you’re encouraged to leave work early to devote time to the friends and groups who revitalize your energy. This moment brings a rare reenchantment with your siblings and sibling-friends, as well as your dearest co-conspirators.
When you allow yourself to imagine a more ideal future, who’s there with you? What dialogues and confabulations help you conjure this vision into a divinely earthbound reality?
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Aquarius & Aquarius Rising
You’re likely someone who’s known for their independent thinking, but all knowledge is built on a filing cabinet of other wisdom. Your worldview has been shaped by your teachers, guides, and caregivers, and every now and then, it’s good hygiene to interrogate the beliefs you previously took for granted.
For the next few weeks, the practice of unlearning or self-questioning helps you distill which bricks you build your temple or library on. If criticism is the spinal cord of the scientific method, and legit experiments actually require that hypotheses be falsifiable, then it might be worth questioning the precepts you’ve historically held as non-negotiable.
The problem arises when people confuse wrong for “stupid,” “bad,” or “unworthy,” rather than instructive feedback. Of course, it can be disorienting to disassemble the furniture of your worldviews, but like wiggling the wire of a clothes hanger down a clogged drain, it’s helpful to know what’s down there.
As the week swims on, you find yourself on a winning streak. Maybe your colleagues or higher ups are bestowing praise that helps you feel appreciated, or your professional roles finally feel like they’re replenishing your material and energetic stores.
Or maybe this time is more about unlocking the talents and skills that you didn’t even realize you possessed. Yes, Mercury is retrograde, but a splendid current is flowing through your professional life, perking your self-esteem and filling your chalice in the most wondrous and satiating ways.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.
Pisces & Pisces Rising
With Mercury now retrograde in the tangled wood of your collaborations, the next few weeks bring a labor of retracing the breadcrumbs between you and those on the other side of your exchanges.
If you share resources with another person or people, these paths could feel more snarled with undergrowth than usual, and any attempt to rush through proceedings could lead you, or someone else, to trip.
The same goes for your bids to scoop honey from other pots, such as funding agencies or banks. Your diligence arrives in the form of patience this week: in taking care to smooth every word of your request, even if it feels you’re slugging backwards.
And it might.
What treasures can be found along the retraced path? A trail through the woods can serve like a time capsule: as you pass by the same tree hollows or nests or creeks, your mind drops anchors of recognition. That’s why running and walking the same paths awaken involuntary chains of memory.
In this case, the memories you’re stirring have to do with your resources, those you share, and those you beckon from other bodies, and the stores you need to feel safe.
But it’s not all spreadsheets and grant applications. As the week continues, you’re invited to sprawl deliciously into the temples and wisdom paths of your becoming. Pour libations on the earth to praise your courses of study and spiritual pursuits. The ideas you’re channeling will have a way of rinsing back over you, nurturing your brain and thought processes in return.
This week, a newly retrograde Mercury backs up into a tight spot with Pluto. Discover your power moves with journal prompts + a guided meditation on the CHANI app.