The Planets
The function each body is assigned, and what it looks like in a reading.
Ten Functions, Not Ten Influences
The planets are the part of a chart that stops it describing a twelfth of humanity and starts it describing a person. Ten bodies, each assigned a function, each sitting in a sign that describes the manner in which that function operates.
The tradition does not claim these bodies cause anything. They are read as a set of ten categories for sorting a temperament — motive, emotional need, thinking, attraction, drive, and so on — with the sign supplying the style.
Learn what each governs and a chart becomes legible. Mercury in Virgo is not a personality; it is a way of processing information, and that is a far more useful thing to know about somebody.
The Luminaries
The Sun and Moon are called the luminaries and carry more weight than anything else in the chart, which is why they are learned first.
The Sun describes what somebody is ultimately driving at — the central motive, the direction returned to when nothing is forcing them elsewhere. It is the slowest of the placements to show itself, and the one a person tends to grow into rather than display.
The Moon describes what somebody needs in order to be alright. The emotional baseline, what settles and what unsettles, how they react before composing a response. It is the private layer, and almost nobody sees it except the people who live with them.
The Personal Planets
Mercury, Venus and Mars move quickly enough to differ between people born in the same month, which is what makes them personal rather than generational.
Mercury governs thinking, learning and explaining — how information gets in, gets processed and gets back out. Venus governs what somebody is drawn toward and how they behave once they are in something. Mars governs pursuit: how they go after a thing, and what they do when it resists.
Mercury and Venus are both constrained by orbital geometry to sit close to the Sun, which means each is always in your Sun's sign or within a sign or two. Mars is outside Earth's orbit and under no such constraint — it can be anywhere at all.
Jupiter And Saturn
These two sit between the personal planets and the generational ones, and the tradition reads them as a pair of opposing pressures.
Jupiter expands. It is assigned growth, opportunity, confidence and excess, and it spends about a year in each sign — long enough to be shared with a cohort, short enough to still say something.
Saturn constrains. Limitation, structure, discipline and time, two and a half years to a sign. It is the placement traditionally associated with the things that are difficult and that produce something precisely because they were difficult.
The Outer Three
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto move so slowly that they describe a generation rather than a person, and reading them as personal traits is the commonest structural error in beginner chart work.
Uranus spends about seven years in a sign, Neptune about fourteen, Pluto between twelve and thirty-two. A placement shared by everyone born across a decade is not distinguishing you from your contemporaries.
They become personal in three specific cases: when one sits in a particular house, when one aspects a personal placement closely, or when one sits on an angle. Absent those, the sign alone is cohort information.
Retrograde Motion
No planet has ever reversed direction. Retrograde motion is an optical effect produced by two bodies moving at different speeds — the same appearance as a slower car sliding backwards as you overtake it.
In a birth chart, a retrograde planet is read as a function that operates inwardly before it operates outwardly. Mercury retrograde at birth, which about one person in five has, describes a mind that processes internally before producing an answer. It is a style, not a defect.
Transiting retrogrades are a separate matter and considerably more over-interpreted. The tradition's actual claim is modest: a period better suited to review than to initiation. Nothing in it prohibits signing a contract.