The Planets Cycles of Time

Please forgive me for calling the Sun and Moon planets when we all know that they aren’t planets. All astrologers do this for the sake of simplicity and, anyway, you know what I mean!

Wherever the planets were when a subject was born, there are times when they return to the same place. Some of these planets move too quickly for this planetary return to be significant, while others move too slowly to return to their starting-point during the course of a human lifetime. However, even the slowest of them will move a sixth, a quarter, a third and, in most cases, half-way around the chart, sparking off events as they pass these tender spots on a subject’s birthchart. By the way, you will be pleased to know that you don’t have to own or understand a birthchart.

The Movements of the Planets

The Moon moves around the Earth every 27.32 days, while the Sun’s return is celebrated every year as a birthday. Mercury and Venus also land back at their starting-place roughly once a year, while Mars takes almost two years to get there. Jupiter takes about a year to work its way through each sign of the zodiac, and therefore returns to its natal position roughly every 12 years. Saturn makes its return approximately every 29.5 years. Uranus has an 84-year orbit and therefore makes a half- return after roughly 42 years, while Neptune, with its 165-year orbit, makes a half-return when the subject is around the age of 82. Pluto moves too slowly and in too eccentric an orbit to lay down any hard and fast rules about its aspects. The angles that a planet can make to its own natal position, or that any planet can make to any other, or to the ascendant or any other feature on a chart, are known as aspects. The major aspects are the conjunction, sextile, square, trine and opposition. For technical reasons which I won’t go into here, all these planets occasionally have slight variations in their orbits. Because the Earth and all the other planets orbit the Sun, there are times when we appear to be overtaking them. This apparent backwards motion of the planets is called retrograde motion. The Sun and the Moon never ‘go retrograde’.

The Planetary Cycles

Just for your information or for future reference, here are the planetary orbits in list form:
The Earth orbits the Sun in approximately 365.25 days (one year).
The Moon orbits the Earth in 27.32 days. Mercury orbits the Sun in 88 days. Venus orbits the Sun in 225 days.
Mars orbits the Sun in 1 year, 10.5 months.
Jupiter orbits the Sun in 12 years. Saturn orbits the Sun in 29 years. Uranus orbits the Sun in 84 years. Neptune orbits the Sun in 165 years. Pluto orbits the Sun in 246 years.
There is absolutely no need for you to memorize these cycles, but there are a few that will become familiar. A point worth bearing in mind is that these cycles affect everybody and do not depend upon a specific birthchart. If you mix with other _mas_etr_ao_nl_so_.gers, you will soon become used to the terms ‘the Saturn return‘ or the ‘Uranus half-return‘. So, this is what it all means.

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