Retrograde Planets

Do you have retrograde planets in your natal chart? Have you been told that this means that the area of your life the planet represents is unlucky or dysfunctional? Before you decide that you’ll never be happy in love with a retrograde Venus, here’s the truth.

Retrograde planets were traditionally interpreted to be out of sync, confused and unable to express themselves directly. Nonsense!

The true meaning is that your planet is more inwardly focused, an introvert rather than an extrovert. If you were born with Venus in retrograde, you’ll express beauty and love in an inward manner. With Mercury in retrograde, you’ll consider information carefully and quietly, keeping your own counsel initially; while a Mercury direct might instead think out loud to digest information. It boils down to a difference in the immediate response to information — it doesn’t spell dysfunction.

However, most people have heard abut Mercury retrogrades only in terms of transits when all forms of communication, transit and technology go haywire. It’s no surprise, then, that people are dismayed when they hear that they have retrograde planets in their birth charts. Yet, all this really means is that from birth their energy in the area of life symbolized by the retrograde planet is expressed in an internal rather than external fashion.

These negative associations date back to the ancients, who when noticing that a planet suddenly stopped and then began back tracking thought it must portend a reversal in fate. Since the planet appeared to move backward, or against the cycle of nature, something terrible must be afoot. Even worse, the planet would move over the same part of the sky three times, as if being very insistent about something. When a planet is in retrograde motion, it is actually closer to us in the solar system, so it is brighter in the sky, another feature that convinced ancient astrologers that this event must be important.

With advances in science, we now know and understand that this seeming backward motion is an illusion due to our position in the solar system. It is no more unnatural and negative than the sunrise or the sunset.

What a retrograde does reveal, either by its natal position or by transit, is that it’s time to withdraw and reconsider. In other words, a retrograde is the perfect time to: re-do, re-flect, re-new, re-store, re-fresh, re-view things in the area of life the planet symbolizes.

See your natal retrogrades as places you have uncommon depth and an unusual gift; you were born with the ability to see certain areas of life in an entirely different fashion than most people. When transiting planets go retrograde, it’s a time for all of use to pause and reconsider what’s going on in our lives. It’s a natural cycle that allows us to come back into our lives refreshed, renewed and reinvigorated. In fact, it’s literally a blessing in disguise.