Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

My darlings, you are in for a treat. This episode is an exert of a two- and half-hour long conversation I had with the fantastic astrologer, Chris Brennan of The Astrology Podcast, and it’s all about the Mercury shadow. And we’re still very much in it—le Retroshade.  

If you want to hear this whole podcast, you can listen to it wherever podcasts are heard, or even better yet, go to the YouTube channel of The Astrology Podcast, and watch it there because we have visuals. You might want to watch along. Enjoy!

Jessica: We need to talk about the shadow.

Chris Brennan: Yes. That’s another—

Jessica: —because the people need to know. Oh, is that like a separate topic? Is that—shall we do that separate?

Chris Brennan: No, we should do it. This is a perfect time to do it.

Jessica: I think it’s perfect. I think it was Lisa Stardust who popularized it. Maybe she didn’t create it. Maybe I just learnt it from her, but the term Retroshade, which I like so much better than shadow.

Chris Brennan: I have only heard this—been hearing this for the first time over the past few days, and I saw you use it. I saw one other person on Twitter mention it, and I really like it, so it’s a Retroshade.

Jessica: It’s great. Retroshade. It’s perfect.

Chris Brennan: Okay.

Jessica: I mean, listen, nothing, nothing—and I’m not a grammar police person, but nothing bothers me more than someone saying Mercury is in Retrograde. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to read it. It is the most annoying grammatical error, and it is so Mercury Retrograde to have such a basic grammatical error be so popularized. So, to me, Retroshade is like the opposite of that. It’s like a really fun word play situation that actually means something and is accurate. So down with Mercury in Retrograde—up with the Retroshade.

Chris Brennan: Okay. So always say—don’t say in Retrograde, just say Mercury is Retrograde or Mercury is direct, which is what it is when it’s not Retrograde.

Jessica: Yes.

Chris Brennan: So shadow periods. So we talked about the—it’s like there’s three phases in the Mercury Retrograde cycle itself, but if you break it down there’s actually something more like five phases. 

Mercury goes Retrograde when it does the first U-turn, and it turns from moving direct to moving Retrograde and moving backwards. And that period of Mercury moving backwards for three weeks is the Mercury Retrograde itself. And then eventually that ends when Mercury does another U-turn—it stations direct and begins moving forward again. 

But starting in the—I believe it was in the 1980s. I tried to research this at one point, and what I was able to figure out, and what most of the older astrologers told me is that the first astrologer who coined the phrase was an astrologer named Roxana Muise, started talking about and coined this concept of the shadow period, which is the period leading up to the Retrograde. Which is like the pre-Mercury Retrograde shadow period where it starts moving through the degrees that it will later come back to—later, during the course of the Retrograde is the beginning of the shadow period. And then once Mercury stations direct, there is a period of time after it stations direct where it’s coming out of the Retrograde and it’s still retracing the steps until it leaves the point that it eventually—that it originally went Retrograde at, and that’s the post Retrograde shadow period. Is that roughly—have I—it sounds really complicated. I’m not sure if I’m mangling that.

Jessica: No. I don’t think you are at all. The way I always think of it, which I feel like you’re more technical than me, so tell me if I’m wrong, but Mercury when it’s in its Retroshade, it’s pre Retrograde Retroshade, what it’s doing is it’s slowing down. You start to see evidence of its movement being less giddy-up oriented. And then it goes Retrograde where it appears to be moving backwards—it moves backwards through the zodiacal degrees. And then when it hits its post Retroshade, basically, it’s retracing its steps through the zodiacal degrees. And, so, the Retroshade is over when it moves beyond the degree it was when the Retrograde began.

Chris Brennan: Yes. Exactly. I like that. That’s perfect.

Jessica: Okay. Okay. Thank you very much.

Chris Brennan: And to visualize this, even though this is becoming a lost concept, unfortunately, but there’s this thing that astrologers used to use called an ephemeris—

Jessica: —Ah, excweeze me, people don’t use the ephemeris anymore? Can I just say for the record, I never leave home without it. I have an ephemeris in almost every room of my home.

Chris Brennan: Every room? Yeah, because you never know when you’re going to need one, and you just need to start reaching and…

Jessica: I need one all the time. Get an ephemeris. The internet does not give you everything. Buy books, guys.

Chris Brennan: Books from a bookstore, which for some of our younger listeners, unfortunately, we have to define as well, which is a place that you go to where you can purchase books in physical format.

Jessica: This is very Mercury though.

Chris Brennan: Do you mark your ephemeris, or are you a no mark astrologer?

Jessica: No marks.

Chris Brennan: No marks. Okay.

Jessica: No marks on my ephemeris. My ephemeris is like—no, no, no, no. Never. I would never.

Chris Brennan: Sacrosanct.

Jessica: Sacrosanct. Thank you for that word. Yes, never. I have pieces of paper in my ephemeris that I’ve written on, and I’ve stuck in there, but I wouldn’t write on the ephemeris.

Chris Brennan: Okay. So—

Jessica: —Do you write in your ephemeris?

Chris Brennan: I mean, yeah. I don’t want to admit that now, but yeah. But the positive thing about it is now I have, like going back 20 years now, I have like old ephemeris’s where I was like, “And then I’m going to have this transit of Pluto in the year 2020,” and it’s really funny and interesting to see what I was looking forward to or what I was having trepidation about much earlier in my studies. 

And it’s sometimes just a good way to go through and see—you know, here’s an image, for example, of an ephemeris, and this is digital, but some of my ephemeris’s will kind of look like this where I’ll take a highlighter and highlight certain dates. 

Jessica: Oh.

Chris Brennan: Yeah, I mean, there’s different ways to do it, and it’s a little easier sometimes if you’re doing—if you go to astro.com, you can get a printable ephemeris for a year, and so you can mark that up—print it out and mark it up, and it doesn’t really matter. But there’s different ways to do it. 

One way you can do it is by highlighting ones where it’s hitting something important in your chart by degrees, so just so you know that degree range is important. Another one, what I’m sort of demonstrating here is more just using an ephemeris to identify the shadow periods.

Jessica: Mmmm. Yes.

Chris Brennan: So if we look at an ephemeris here, we see that in October of 2020, on around the 14th, 13th/14th of October, Mercury and the Mercury column turned Retrograde. And it turned Retrograde at 11 degrees of Scorpio. Then for the next three weeks, it moved backwards. So instead of moving forward through the degrees, like zero, one, two, three, four, five, Scorpio, it started moving downwards. So it went from eleven degrees to nine degrees, to eight degrees, to seven degrees of Scorpio. Eventually, it goes back into Libra, and then eventually, it stations direct three weeks later around the third of November at 25 degrees of Libra. So that gives us two sensitive degrees. One of them is where the degree that Mercury stationed Retrograde at 11 Scorpio. The other sensitive degree is the one that it stations direct at at 25 Libra. 

Jessica: So I noticed that you’re saying 25 degrees, but it’s 25 degrees and 55 minutes. I personally would call the 26th degree. Do you call it a 25? I would even say that at 11, 40, when it went Retrograde, I—40 is right around where I start to round up. Not consistently; I’m a little inconsistent about that, but I’m curious about how you engage with that. You called it 25, was that an accident, or is that actually how you see it?

Chris Brennan: I mean, there’s a difference between cardinal, like ordinal numbers or something like that, which I often mix up, so I usually do just say 25 in this instance, since it’s at 25 Libra. But you’re right that it’s basically 26. Because it’s 25, 55, so it’s basically 26 degrees, or you could say the 26th degree.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, and I think—I’m really glad that—to pick this apart with you because I think it’s really important for people to hear that both of us are very competent and experienced astrologers, and there’s different ways of doing it. And also, there’s like an evolution of our own process as practitioners of how we even engage with something as fundamental as notating a degree. 

Chris Brennan: Right.

Jessica: This is why astrology is like the divine naval. It takes us—

Chris Brennan: —Well, because everybody is self-taught, and sometimes you’re using the same materials, but you’re sitting with them for years on your own, and sometimes people develop funny idiosyncrasies just due to that. 

I remember the first time I met an astrologer was a few years into my study. And I was in casual conversation, very excited to meet this guy at a metaphysical bookstore in Denver, and I started talking about my Chiron placement, which I referred to as Cheiron [sp], and he stopped the conversation. He was like, “Hold on a second, what did you just say?” And that was my first time meeting another astrologer. 

So sometimes that happens when you meet with other astrologers, but that’s why it’s good because sometimes it’s—there’s this give and take that happens, and I think that’s always been the case historically. If you go back a thousand years, any time you put two astrologers in the same room together, they start talking and sharing techniques, and you can see it influence the history of astrology as soon as different astrologers from different places interact.

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. To that end, we are having such a meta time because we’re talking about Mercury, which is talking about talking. And talking about ideas and talking about ideas of Mercury, which is just—it’s like part of my brain is just like, “Are you noticing this?” Because it’s just so meta. 

The other thing is when I was first taught astrology, I was taught by a Jungian astrologer, who was—actually I learnt at a college level in the mid-1990s or the early 1990s, I guess it was. 

Chris Brennan: In Montreal?

Jessica: In Montreal, Quebec. I went to a place called New School, which was part of Dawson College. This teacher taught Jungian psychology, and then he was also an astrologer privately. So in the New School where I went, he taught astrology from a Jungian perspective. And that was my first formal study, and I was like 17/18 when I first started learning. 

But what he taught me—this is on topic for Mercury, I promise—was that there is power in the symbols, and that learning how to write with a pen or a pencil the symbols was part of the magic of astrology. And so, what I learnt to do instead of the highlighting of the ephemeris—because, of course, he was a Capricorn with a Scorpio Rising, so he was like this deep, intense, penetrative, these are the rules, follow the rules, and I loved it—is I write out my transits, and I—you can see I have a highlighter and all that kind of crap—I write out my transits and all of the dates of them in whatever notes I need to on paper, in part because I was trained with this idea that the very process of writing astrological statements is—it’s an energetic power. It’s like a way of engaging with astrology. It’s like the spiritual side of Mercury. 

And, so, I would also say to people who are like, “I can’t afford to buy a ephemeris,” or “I don’t like books,” writing things out, having a place that is dedicated for you to write out your transits, your natal aspects, your astrological musings, I think is a form of kind of like almost—it’s kind of like the wrong word for it, but prayer to astrology. It’s like bringing energy and attention to astrology, which is a very Mercurial process, but it’s worth saying since we’re talking about this stuff.

Chris Brennan: Yeah, totally. Because it could also—you got to use—you got to learn how to write your glyphs, and that in of itself is like bringing material form to the language of astrology, a bit like learning how to write the language of Mercury trine Neptune and then writing down the date or what have you. That’s super crucial.

Jessica: It is crucial. And I feel like a lot of times when people are learning of off like the internet, blog posts, meme astrology, all this kind of stuff, when you lose the layer of being able to read the language and write the language, you are losing out on comprehension. And Mercury teaches us that is true—that there are many layers of comprehension, and being able to read and speak in a language is one. 

I can speak certain languages a little bit, but I can’t necessarily read them, and that shows in how I speak in them. And, so, I think that this is true of astrology as well. Which is kind of to your point about us being translators, right. We have to be able to have a comprehensive understanding of the language in order to effectively translate what we’re perceiving, what we’re learning.

Chris Brennan: Yeah, totally. So, everybody, that’s a good recommendation. I always forget that. But that’s what I did at first was I learned how to write the glyphs, and that was always one of my first steps. 

But people do sometimes—I have met people that five years into their study don’t know how to do that and don’t realize it’s a thing. So everybody listening should definitely, square one, learn how to write the glyphs.

Jessica: Yes, absolutely. When I taught astrology, when I had beginner classes—I mean, I’m no fun as a teacher. I’m just like, “You didn’t study. You didn’t do your homework. Go home.” I used to be such an asshole about it because that’s how I was taught. And, again, when I was taught, Solar Fire existed, computers existed. I didn’t have access to computers. It wasn’t a thing. So I learned astrology, I learnt how to do the math, to cast a chart. And you can imagine with my Mercury how long that took me and how many errors I made; it was awful. 

Learning how to do manual calculations—I believe in it. And I don’t believe in doing it, to be clear. It’s a stupid waste of time. But I do believe in learning it because it grounds you in what astrology actually is. Understanding that it’s not just pressing buttons and going to astro.com and having someone tell you the math. It’s knowing the steps, I think is a really valuable—I take issue when people kind of are like, “I value astrology. I learn from astrology. I center astrology, but I don’t want to learn the basics.” I feel like that’s like, well then, how much do you really respect it? It’s a craft. It’s an ancient craft. It deserves some measure of respect. So I know I sound like a poster child for Capricorns, so I apologize. I apologize, slash, also, I am what I am.

Chris Brennan: That’s all right. I like it.

Jessica: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Chris Brennan: I like it. But, yeah, like a baseline of that of learning the astronomy, even if you don’t go all the way and calculating charts on your own or observing the astronomy outside each night in order to calculate the chart or whatever, is just getting some basic familiarity with the ephemeris, and that’s one of the easiest ways to identify the Retrograde periods and to identify the shadow periods.

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Chris Brennan: Mercury stations at, let’s say, 11 degrees of Scorpio. It goes Retrograde in October, and then it stations direct at 25 Libra in November. So those two degrees are important, sensitive degrees that we apply to the shadow periods. Because what the shadow period is is, if we back up to September, like late September, around the 23rd, as soon as Mercury hits 25 degrees of Libra the first time, that’s when the shadow period starts because that’s the degree that Mercury will later Retrograde or return back to when it stations direct in November. 

So that’s why the shadow period begins at that point because from that point forward, Mercury is moving through degrees and moving through parts of the zodiac that it’s later going to return back to. So it starts opening up usually a series of events or a set of circumstances that, even though it may not seem like it at the time, it seems like you do something during that time, and it’s done, and then you move forward. Several weeks later, you sometimes find yourself coming back to that thing, just like Mercury itself returns back to those degrees of the zodiac weeks later.

Jessica: Yep. Agree button. Agree. Agree. Agree.

Chris Brennan: Okay. So that’s the pre-Retrograde shadow period. And then the post Retrograde shadow period is that we can see Mercury stationing direct and starting to move forward again in early November, starting at 25 degrees of Libra. And then it’s moving forward from late Libra into early Scorpio all the way until about November 19th or so when it hits 10 or 11 degrees of Scorpio—that was the degree that it originally stationed Retrograde at. 

So once it reaches back to that degree it’s stationed at, from that point forward it’s going to start moving through degrees that it never got to, and that’s why it’s the end of the shadow period. Because it’s not really sometimes until you get to that point that the whole situation is fully wrapped up and there’s a nice little bow on it. But sometimes there’s still clean up that continues to linger through the shadow period after that point. Do you—is that kind of how you interpret it as well, or is that—I’m not sure if I’m…

Jessica: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. The 25th degree of Libra, that moment in the first time, in the Retroshade pre, Mercury formed a square to Mars which was Retrograde in Aries. And what’s happening the next time it happens—what was that, the fourth of November?—is Mercury will be forming a square to Saturn. Couple of dudey dude dudes. Such masculine, archetypey—although I have an argument for these planets not having masculine archetypes, which is for another conversation. But to see Mercury squaring—I’m sorry, opposing. It was opposing—Mercury opposing Mars and then Mercury squaring Saturn, to me, that is worth noting because, again, we’re not just seeing these things existing in a bubble. We need to understand that it might of felt like something at that first Retroshade moment, that September day of the 22nd, that it might have felt like something happened that was kind of like sudden or surprising or just how you dealt with anger, how you expressed frustration. And then there’s going to be consequences because it’s Saturn. 

When we look at the November 4th, we’re going to deal with consequences. So when we think about the election, I’m like damn, we should have really looked at what was going on politically and socially, even in the President’s Twitter feed, on and around the 22nd of September to see some sort of consequence come the 4th of November, which is a really particularly important date, of course, in US politics.

Chris Brennan: Right. So here’s the chart, for those watching the video version, where Mercury here it’s direct. It’s not Retrograde yet. But once it gets to 24/25 degrees of Libra, we know from looking at the ephemeris that that’s the degree it’s later going to Retrograde back to, so it’s going to come all the way back to this degree several weeks later. 

So if we keep animating it and moving the chart forward by days, we see Mercury move into Scorpio. And then in early October, it starts slowing down, so it starts moving slower than it usually does, and all of a sudden, it stops at this certain degree, which is 11 degrees of Scorpio or the 12th degree of Scorpio, as Jessica would say, right? 12th degree. Is that correct?

Jessica: Yeah, I would. Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Brennan: Okay. 11 degrees of Scorpio or 12th degree of Scorpio, and it’s stops at that degree. And that’s one of the things that’s really important that’s maybe worth emphasizing of why Retrogrades, especially stations, are important. Because usually Mercury, it moves at like a degree or two a day, so usually it hits a spot in the zodiac or a degree of the zodiac, and it just keeps moving. And it’s only there for like a day, tops. But what happens during a Retrograde is Mercury slows down, and then it just sits at that degree for several days, basically, or almost a week, basically, just sitting there at 11 degrees of Scorpio, right.

Jessica: Mmmm. Yep. Yep. Another interesting thing about Retrogrades that are really important is that when we have a Retrograde, that means we’ll often have multiple transits between Mercury and any given planet, usually an outer planet, hit multiple times in a short period. Which is unusual with the planet Mercury. Mercury has to be Retrograde for that to occur. Ditto for Venus and Mars. So that’s another thing to really watch out for. It doesn’t happen in every Retrograde, but it’s certainly—I think it has happened in this one, or it will have happened in this one, eh?

Chris Brennan: Yeah. That’s a really good point. So that’s one of our ways of characterizing what the Retrograde is going to be about is a or number one, what sign of the zodiac is it taking place in. So in this instance, it’s taking place in Scorpio, but that’s going to be different qualitatively than, for example, there was a Retrograde in Pieces earlier this year. But then the second, what planets are configured to Mercury, especially when it stations Retrograde, and it’s just sitting at that degree, especially outer planets seem to be really important in characterizing, as you were saying.

Jessica: Yep. Yep.

Chris Brennan: But then also, it sets it up, so it’s not just in this instance. For example, it’s opposing Uranus, which is at nine degrees if Taurus when it stations there at 11 degrees of Scorpio. So it’s holding that opposition for quite a while, which is something Mercury doesn’t normally do. Its aspects are otherwise usually very quick.

Jessica: Yep. Yeah. And that’s a really, really important transit. Mercury opposite to Uranus has already occurred, I think, on October the 19th. It happens the 15th, and then it will happen again, or it happened again on the 19th, I’m believing.

Chris Brennan: So the first one was October 7th, so that’s when it first opposed at nine degrees of Scorpio to nine degrees of Taurus while it was still direct. And then, let’s see, it stations Retrograde in October 13th, and it goes back to nine Scorpio and opposes Uranus again around the 19th. Yeah. Okay.

Jessica: Okay. And then it’s going to happen one more time. I think we get another hit.

Chris Brennan: Yes. So after Mercury stations direct in Libra, it eventually comes back into Scorpio, and then it opposes Uranus a third time here. It looks like November 16thish.

Jessica: 16th. Okay. There it is. So this is where—and this is something with the current Mars Retrograde, which is a different topic, but that’s something that I’ve—is a very important part of this Mars Retrograde as well. This Mercury opposition to Uranus, there’s the social implications and then the personal implications, but they’re both a little chaotic. 

And I think that the kind of component of Uranus as associated with individualism, and Mercury is also can be quite individualistic. It’s much more relational than Uranus is, but it’s always like, my ideas, my attitudes, what I think, what I say. And I think this opposition is—we’re seeing so much tension in the world around like, this is who I want to vote for. This is what I think. I don’t want to talk about politics. All of this kind of stuff is very activated. 

I also think Mercury opposite to Uranus is really good for hackers and people who want to push propaganda and people who like chaos because this is a transit that creates a lot of chaos and anxiety. Because Mercury and Uranus are both related to our nervous system in different ways and our thought processes. And, so, it speeds things up in such a way that it’s hard to keep track. 

And anyone with any kind of hyper-tension, anxiety disorder, ADD stuff is more likely to be kind of—it can get stimulated through these transits. Unless, of course, it hits your chart in a way that it makes everyone else speed up, so you’re like, “Oh, I’m calm now. Now I’m normal because everyone else is caught up with me.” So it can kind of go either way. Yeah.

Chris Brennan: Yeah. So that’s a really good point for people listening to this after, let’s say, November in the future because I think this is going to be my main Mercury Retrograde episode from now on. Just that there’s a whole range of significations that we mentioned at the beginning for what Mercury Retrogrades can coincide with, or maybe we just mentioned the significations, and we didn’t actually talk about what Mercury—

Jessica: —We didn’t. But we will.

Chris Brennan: Okay. 

Jessica: Okay.

Chris Brennan: Okay. So we got into the astronomy, and we forgot to define it. But let’s say there’s a range of significations that Mercury Retrograde can coincide with, but sometimes it gets narrowed down, and there’s more specific ones that tend to manifest when it’s configured to certain planets when it stations Retrograde. 

So this one is primarily characterized by Mercury opposite Uranus, and so therefore, we tick more of those Mercury/Uranus significations that have to do with technology, unexpected things coming up. Since it’s Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio, it’s unexpected disclosures, potentially, or, potentially, attempting to manipulate things with disclosures, more issues with technology. I’ve seen this Retrograde already being much more about the technological end that people sometimes talk about in Mercury Retrogrades, but it’s not always that emphasized. But this one it definitely is, I think, due to that opposition with Uranus. 

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. Also, let’s not skip over—so Mercury in Scorpio. Scorpio is associated with shame. And it does move into Libra, as we know, and Libra is a very relational, peace seeking sign. And I think it’s really important for us to also acknowledge that—and this kind of gets into what is a Retrograde on a kind of experiential level, and what is a Mercury Retrograde. 

Retrogrades want us—I always say the rule of Re’s. Review, reassess, reaffirm, recalibrate. It’s about reflecting back. And in order to really have consistent progress, we need to look back at what we’ve done, what isn’t working, what is working, and kind of let the wisdom of time inform us. 

And I think that when we’re looking at a Retrograde in the sign of Scorpio and Libra, especially in the context of what’s happening globally and certainly domestically, we all need to look at things that we have shame around. When we talk about the kind of ills and ills of the world, we are all complicit in them. We are all a part of it. We are all the benefactors of various things that are problematic. And it stirs up shame, and it stirs up resentments, and it stirs up anger. And it’s all very Scorpio stuff. 

I think that we’re already seeing it, and I expect us to see it throughout the Retrograde that this is a period where individual people are reflecting back on things that are hard to sit with, hard to acknowledge, and figuring out what their story is. And I think that the psychological implications of that don’t just stop with the individual psyche because society and community is made out of many individuals. And so, how we relate to calling each other in versus calling each other out, how we relate to making space for difference and for individual learning curves, how we step into humility—all of these things, I think, are a part of this particular Mercury Retrograde in these signs, in the context of the larger astrology in societal trends.