Understanding retrogrades

What tradition reads in it

No planet ever truly moves backward. What you are seeing when Mars or Venus appears to slip into reverse is a trick of perspective, the same one you feel when a train passes you on the next track over: it is moving forward, yet from your window it seems to glide backward. Earth and the other planets circle the Sun at different speeds, and when their paths line up, the planet being overtaken (or the one overtaking us) appears to double back against the field of stars, trace a small loop, then carry on. The astronomers of antiquity noticed this, and it is exactly what earned the planets their name: the wanderers, the ones that roam. Astrological tradition turned that loop into a language. If a direct transit is like a road you travel, a retrograde is the moment you retrace your steps: to double-check, to mend, to understand something you crossed too quickly the first time. Robert Hand, in Planets in Transit, reminds us that a retrograde transit passes back over the same degrees as the direct one: the same question, asked two or three times, each pass more inward than the last. Nothing stops; everything is revisited. Each planet keeps its own tempo. Mercury, closest to the Sun, stations retrograde often and briefly: three times a year, three weeks at a stretch. Venus and Mars are rarer and leave a deeper mark, their loops returning every eighteen and twenty-six months. Past that, the rhythm changes character: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto each turn retrograde once a year, for four to six months depending on the planet, nearly half the year for the most distant ones. These long retrogrades are collective, gentle, almost imperceptible day to day: everyone moves through them at the same time, and it is mostly when one touches a precise point in your own chart that it finds a personal voice.

The rhythm

Three families of tempo. Mercury stations retrograde three times a year (four in some years), for about three weeks each time. Venus turns roughly every eighteen months for some forty days; Mars, about every twenty-six months, for ten weeks or so: these are the most widely spaced loops, and therefore the ones you feel most. The slow planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) go retrograde every year, for four to six months depending on the planet. The farther out the body, the more of the year its apparent loop occupies, and the more its passage simply blends into the background.

What it touches, element by element

• Fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius)

  Fire signs feel a brake set against the impulse: rarely comfortable, but it is often right here that projects gain their depth.

• Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn)

  Familiar ground for earth signs: review, consolidate, finish what has been dragging on. It still asks you to let some things come undone so they can be rebuilt better.

• Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius)

  For air signs, the re-reading runs through words: conversations picked back up, ideas turned over, connections clarified again.

• Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces)

  Water signs sense the loops before anyone else: something in the air folds inward, and the inner life breathes a little easier there.