Retrograde

The fuller picture

The backwards motion is apparent, not real. Because we watch the other planets from a planet that's itself moving, each of them periodically seems to slow, stop, run backwards for a while, stop again and resume. The Sun and Moon never do it. In a chart the plain reading is that the matter is going back over itself: revisited, reconsidered, delayed, or returned to a state it had already left.

The tradition doesn't treat this as a switch with two positions, though. There are three states, because a planet about to turn back and a planet about to resume aren't in remotely the same condition. One older table of aphorisms puts each in human terms. A planet slowing towards its first station is like someone braced for trouble they can already see coming, or someone whose health is going but who might yet recover — the direction is bad and the hope is real. A planet fully retrograde is contrary and defiant, and at the same time dazed and anxious: impaired rather than actively hostile. A planet at its second station, about to go direct again, is someone who has begun to expect better, an invalid on the mend. The first and the third are near opposites, which is easy to miss because in both cases what we see is a planet barely moving. That table names its two authorities only by initials, those initials haven't been resolved, so the aphorisms are given here with no author attached.

Read as a flat debility, retrogradation loses most of its usefulness: backwards motion has a direction, and the direction is often the answer. In a question about someone shut away, a significator retrograde in the house of the confinement reads as getting out — the motion carries the person back out of the place holding them. Where two significators complete their aspect by retrograde motion, the aspect still perfects, and it perfects suddenly: retrogradation has changed the manner of arrival rather than the outcome. In a question about a journey, the traveller's own significator retrograde can mean something entirely literal — that he turns round and comes home before he's properly set out.

So a retrograde significator, on its own, settles nothing. Retrogradation appears in the older topical rule lists as one item in a run of debilities — combust, or cadent, or peregrine, or retrograde — and a list assembled like that is an instruction to look harder, not a verdict. Our standing position on conditions of that kind is that they weigh and never gate: if a chart can be cast it can be read, and a planet moving backwards is one piece of testimony to be set against everything else in the chart.

There's one specific way retrogradation stops a matter, and it has its own name: refranation, which older writers also spell refrenation. A planet is applying to the aspect of another, the aspect looks certain to complete — and before it does, the applying planet turns retrograde and withdraws. Coley described it in those terms. It's a different failure from an aspect broken into by a third planet: this is the party concerned changing their mind halfway. And here's the commonest mistake about it — refranation requires a station. A planet that's merely crawling is slow, not refranating.