Refranation

The fuller picture

Coley set the definition, and older writers including the practitioner this glossary follows spell it refrenation — worth knowing, because searching one spelling misses half the literature. One planet is applying to the body or aspect of another and, before it arrives, it turns retrograde. The aspect never completes, and the promise the chart appeared to be making goes with it.

The test is the station, and this is where most readings of refranation go wrong. A planet that is merely crawling is slow, not refranating. What has to happen is that the planet actually turns, and it has to turn before the aspect would have perfected. The schematic figure in the source puts Venus at 18° Leo two degrees from the trine of Mars at 20° Sagittarius, and Venus stations retrograde before she gets there.

What makes refranation its own thing, and not a variant of the other two ways an aspect fails, is that nothing intervenes. In a prohibition a third planet gets in the way. In a frustration the target commits itself elsewhere. In a refranation there is no third party at all: the planet that was doing the approaching stops and reverses. Read on a person, that is somebody changing their mind about a thing they were actively pursuing, not somebody being blocked from it.

Our own detection of this is an approximation and you should know its shape. We look for a planet already moving at under fifteen per cent of its mean daily speed while applying, and treat that as evidence it will station before perfection. That misses in both directions. A planet at ordinary speed today which stations in four days — Mercury six degrees off an aspect, still moving over a degree a day — goes undetected entirely. A planet that is merely slow and never stations gets reported as a refranation when nothing of the kind happens. The Moon and the Sun are excluded, since neither turns retrograde.

There's a related failure that isn't refranation, and it shows how narrow the retrograde test is. An aspect can close, stall and widen again with no station at all, purely because the faster planet's daily motion decays as it runs towards a station and drops below the slower planet's. One historical figure in the source turns on exactly that: a conjunction is claimed and quantified in the printed delineation, and on the corrected cast the two planets close to about one degree forty-four minutes and then separate. Neither a station nor present slowness is visible at the moment of the chart. Only carrying both motions forward reveals it.

One consequence of the definition is that refranation is treated more gently than its neighbours. A planet that turned back can turn again and re-engage, so where a refranation and a perfection path are equally weighted our engine returns an uncertain rather than a flat no. Prohibition, frustration and a void Moon keep the strict rule, where the denial wins the tie.