The Planets and What They Stand For

In astrology the word planet covers ten bodies: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Each one is read as a different appetite or function, and the sign it stood in when you were born is taken to colour the way that function behaves in you.

Why the Sun and Moon are on the list

The word planet comes from a Greek term for wanderer. To anyone watching the sky without a telescope, nearly every light holds its position relative to the others night after night, and a small handful do not. Those few movers were the planets, and the two brightest of them were the Sun and the Moon.

Astronomy has long since sorted the objects out properly. The Sun is a star, the Moon is a satellite of the Earth, and Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Astrology kept the old grouping because the grouping was never a claim about physics. It was a list of the things that move against a fixed background, and the meanings were attached to the moving. Astrologers usually call the Sun and Moon the luminaries, meaning the two lights, to separate them from the rest.

The fast group

Five of the ten move quickly enough to differ between people born in the same season. They are called the personal planets, because they vary from one individual to the next rather than across a whole generation.

• The Sun spends about a month in each sign and stands for what you are pulled towards: the central drive, the thing you keep trying to become good at. It is the placement everybody already knows, because a date on its own is enough to find it.
• The Moon crosses a sign in a little over two days and covers all twelve in roughly twenty-seven. It is read as the reflex layer: what you need in order to feel settled, and how you respond before you have had time to think about responding.
• Mercury covers thinking and talking: how you take information in, how you sort it, how you hand it back out. It never appears more than about twenty-eight degrees from the Sun in the sky, so it always falls in your sun sign or one of the two beside it.
• Venus stands for taste and attraction: what you find pleasant, what you count as worth having, how you make yourself agreeable. It stays within roughly forty-seven degrees of the Sun, which keeps it within two signs of your sun sign in either direction.
• Mars takes about six weeks to cross a sign and stands for action and appetite: how you push, how you argue, what you do when something is in the way of what you want.

Because these five change signs in days or weeks, two people born a fortnight apart can share a sun sign and match on nothing else in the group. Most of the variety between one chart and another comes from here.

Jupiter and Saturn

These two sit between the quick bodies and the distant ones. They are sometimes called the social planets, because they mark out the stages of a life rather than a mood or a generation.

Jupiter goes round in about twelve years, so it spends roughly a year in each sign and comes back to its starting position at around ages twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six and forty-eight. It is read as expansion: where you are generous, where you overreach, where you assume things will work out. The same placement gets credited with luck and blamed for excess, which are often one behaviour described from two distances.

Saturn needs about twenty-nine years for a full circuit, which works out at roughly two and a half years per sign. It stands for limits, structure and the cost of things. The point where it returns to the position it held at your birth, usually somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty, is known as the Saturn return, and the tradition treats it as the moment the arrangements you made in your twenties get tested for whether they can carry an adult life.

The distant three

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are too faint for the naked eye and none of them was known to older astrology. Uranus was found in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930. All three move slowly enough that everybody born within several years of you shares the placement.

• Uranus takes about eighty-four years to circle the Sun, near enough seven years to a sign. It is read as disruption and independence: the break, the refusal, the sudden change of direction that nobody saw coming.
• Neptune needs about a hundred and sixty-five years, or fourteen years to a sign. Its territory is everything with soft edges: imagination, longing, illusion, the wish to dissolve into something larger than yourself.
• Pluto takes roughly two hundred and forty-eight years and moves unevenly, because its orbit is far from circular. It can sit in one sign for twelve years and in another for more than thirty. It stands for power, compulsion, and the sort of change that does not let you keep the earlier version of yourself.

This is why a placement such as Neptune in Scorpio describes a cohort born across fourteen years rather than a particular person. Astrologers only treat the distant three as personal when they land close to something fast, such as the position of the Sun, or the point of the zodiac sitting on the eastern skyline at the minute of birth, known as the ascendant.

Putting a planet and a sign together

The working formula is that the planet is the verb and the sign is the manner. Mars is the act of pushing. Mars in Libra pushes by negotiating, Mars in Aries pushes by going first, and neither version is the correct one. A placement called difficult is usually just a function doing its job in a style that costs something.

Two further layers change the reading, and both belong to a full chart rather than to a single planet: which of the twelve segments of the sky the planet fell into, called houses and taken to stand for areas of life, and the angles the planets make to one another, called aspects. Neither can be worked out without a birth time, because both depend on the Earth turning.

What the tradition is actually claiming

These meanings are inherited, not measured. Nothing about the planet Mars causes anyone to lose their temper, and the associations grew out of centuries of myth, borrowed symbolism and repeated observation rather than testing. The sensible way to hold them is as a vocabulary: ten headings that happen to divide a personality up along useful lines.

Taken that way the list is worth learning, because the divisions are shrewd ones. Wanting something, chasing it, enjoying it and explaining it are four separate capacities, and most people are noticeably better at some than at others. Where the tradition overreaches is in the step from description to forecast. A planet sitting in a sign will not tell you what next month holds.