The planets — who is doing the acting
Planets are the actors in a chart. Each one is taken to govern a particular drive, and the sign and house it sits in describe how and where that drive shows up. Astrology counts the Sun and Moon as planets, which is astronomically wrong and has been the convention for two thousand years; they are usually called the lights.
The first five move fast enough to be personal. Jupiter and Saturn take years. The last three take so long that everyone born within a few years of you shares them — they say more about a generation than about a person, and they matter individually mostly through the house they fall in and the aspects they make.
| Planet | Governs | Full cycle | What it is read as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | Self | 1 year | What you are trying to become, and what you are recognised for when it goes well. |
| Moon | Need | 28 days | What settles you, how you react before you have decided how to react. |
| Mercury | Mind | 1 year | How you take information in and hand it back — speech, writing, the shape of your thinking. |
| Venus | Value | 1 year | What you find pleasant and what you consider worth having. Closeness and taste both live here. |
| Mars | Drive | 2 years | How you push, and what you look like when you are angry or want something badly. |
| Jupiter | Growth | 12 years | Where things come easily, and where easy turns into too much. |
| Saturn | Limit | 29 years | Where you meet resistance and where competence gets built. The slow one that most people feel. |
| Uranus | Break | 84 years | Where you will not be managed, and where change tends to arrive suddenly. |
| Neptune | Blur | 165 years | Where the edges go soft — imagination, longing, and the things you would rather not see clearly. |
| Pluto | Depth | 248 years | Where things are taken down to the foundation before they are rebuilt. Generational as much as personal. |
Speed is the thing to notice
The rule that makes the table below useful: the faster a planet moves, the more it describes a mood; the slower it moves, the more it describes a chapter.
The Moon changes sign every two and a half days, which is why it is used for daily readings. Saturn takes twenty-nine years to come back to where it started, which is why its return around age twenty-nine has a name and a reputation.
Retrograde
A planet is retrograde when, seen from Earth, it appears to move backwards against the stars. Nothing is actually reversing — it is a perspective effect from two bodies orbiting at different speeds, the same way a slower car appears to slide backwards as you overtake it.
In a reading it is generally taken to mean the drive is turned inward rather than outward. It is not damage, and it is not a warning. Gori marks retrograde planets in your chart and will mention one when it is doing real work in an answer, and otherwise leave it alone.
If you would rather see it on your own chart than in the abstract — Gori computes yours and writes it out. Today’s reading is free.
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