Welcome to the spectacle that has captured human imagination for as long as we've looked up. The cauldron that stirs the solar eclipse is gathering speed now and ancient magic is afoot. We are one and all in the turbulent passage to its occulting new moon, the deep stultifying drawing out. All creatures fall quiet now, burrow and wait for the shadow to pass.

Eclipses are a dance of shadow and light, conjuring both. Replete with endings and beginnings, mayhem and magic alike, eclipses offer us a regular reset button that knocks us back on to our soul's path if we have been led astray.

It is 30 years today since Gen X lost our prophet to the weight the world had placed on him, stupid and contagious. Well ahead of the times he occupied as we all came of age in a world that appalled us with its judgements and dictates. It spawned an alternative culture that we still harbour beneath long sleeves under t shirts, tucked somewhere deep inside Gen X's painfully salty identity wounds.

Mere moments into Merc's retrograde wend through the Aries minefield and already the masks are slipping off. The first week of this regular renegade transit delivers secrets, lies and rippling revelation.

Welcome one and all to the circus that Mercury retrograde has become in our terribly modern culture that has lost its way. The one that appropriates pop astrology for its own ends while slavishly disregarding the deeper meaning of transit and planet, the greater cosmic choreography and the alignment required to maximise its mighty force.