We all know that retrogrades are bad right?
Laptops explode and planes fall out off the sky and that’s only Mercury.
Our love life becomes catastrophic when Venus goes backwards and we fight all and sundry when Mars does.
And don’t get me started on the really big ones.
At least 90% of the comments related to retrograde planets are negative, often in the extreme, but my researches over 50 years have led me to conclude that at least 90% of the stuff written in the name of astrology is bullshit. Pure and simple.
The main reason for this state of affairs is that people are not speaking from their own experience, they are simply regurgitating the opinions of others.
Whether these opinions are sourced from another twenty something’s horoscope column or from twenty century something Vettius Valens is irrelevant.
They have not been tested by their own experience. They can’t have been because most of them haven’t lived long enough to have those transits in their own life or had the time to properly research them in the lives of others.
There are hundreds of articles on my site detailing the devastating and life changing power of Pluto transits.
As I approach the end of my 7th decade, I have lived through two separate major transit periods of Pluto to my Sun, Moon and Ascendant. No one lives long enough to experience three.
The square aspects occurred during my 20s, the conjunctions in my 50s and 60s.
So I am well placed to delineate them.
But what is this retrograde phenomena and how does it actually work? What is its purpose?
It goes without saying that all the planets are moving forward all of the time, so in terms of our solar system, progress is continually occurring.
But because we live on a planet that is also orbiting our Sun, these other ones appear to be going backwards at times from our perspective.
Naturally we relate everything to ourselves, so we find it hard to understand that the retrograde periods are in fact progress.
The most challenging transits are of the last four, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Because they last for a year of more, the outer three aspecting any of our placements will always contain a retrograde period, 90% of the time Saturn’s transits do as well.
So why do they last so long and why are they so hard?
We are all born at a certain moment so we naturally identify with that moment and the entity that we are and have been.
Every moment since our birth, the Universe is asking us to adapt to new moments and different experiences in order to grow and become more rounded human beings. This is what it wants.
Movement and impermanence are what life is. We might not like it, but that’s just tough. In order to survive we have to adjust. It’s a simple fact of life.
Darwinism is not rocket science.
We all think we can do this adjusting thing, but we also don’t really register how much we have to change in response to things. We want to get by with a few tweaks that don’t really change us. So if we are to have tough transits, we want them to be over so we can get back to “normal” life as quickly as possible.
We don’t really want to change, just to pay lip service to the idea of it.
This is why we hate retrograde periods so much, because this is when the Universe says, no you’re not going to get away with it that easily.
The years 2016 – 17 saw transit Pluto conjunct my Moon.
I had been in a dysfunctional, non intimate marriage for many years. We were only together for the sake of our two kids and a shared business that we were both passionate about.
The kids had grown up and left home the previous year. Looked at from any logical perspective, it was time to end it but triple Capricorns are not known for abandoning a situation just because it’s difficult.
With Pluto reaching my Moon for the first time, my ex met up with someone that she’d had an affair with 30 years previously and driven by her dreams of a new future, filed for divorce.
When the other person turned down her advances, she had a breakdown but continued with the divorce proceedings.
I recognised that the marriage had ended, that was not a problem but the prospect of having to sell our house was troubling. The thing that was hardest for me was acknowledging that the business inevitably had to end (it was run from our home and renting premises for it would have been financially untenable) and I would probably have to retire from my work as a therapist.
So I resisted this call from Pluto and tried desperately to hold onto what was left of the business. As an astrologer, I knew that this was particularly dumb, because I knew that resistance was futile, but I tried it anyway.
I managed to get away with it in a half hearted, unsatisfactory fashion, but Pluto must have its way so it came back to finish me off. The retrograde period occurred during the summer and autumn of 2017.
At that point, Pluto came back at me with a series of incidents which forced me to finally come to terms with the end of my 10th (career) and 4th houses (home) to go with my 7th (marriage)
I retired in December 2017 as Pluto was finally emerging from the transit. At the age of 63, I was literally facing an abyss of unknown depth.
I had no pension provision, naively expecting to carry on working into my old age. I realised that the only option available to me was to do much more work as a consulting astrologer.
I had been an astrologer for 40 years, but that had been almost entirely research focused. I would have one or two client consultations a month, but now realised that I was forced to use my passion and vocation to provide an income.
I began to advertise my services for the first time ever and this started to bring a response, many people observing that they didn’t realise I was available for readings.
Every transit happens for a reason. It’s not just a cold and unfeeling Universe out there handing out harsh punishments just for a cosmic joke.
Transits are the cosmos’ way of realigning us. They point out (often in no uncertain terms) that the way we have been operating in the past is not the best way for us for the future and require us to change in order to move forward.
Each planet has a different modus operandi. Pluto’s is the most traumatic, often simply destroying everything by razing it to the ground and leaving us with nothing, in order to force us to find a completely new life.
We are all creatures of habit. Even if we recognise the need for deep and powerful change, most of us are not inclined to enact it unless forced to do so.
No-one is going to step off the edge of a cliff without knowing whether there is a safety net or that they’ll be plunged to their doom like Wile E Coyote. So Pluto creeps up behind and just shoves us over the edge.
I was shoved straight into heaven. Because as a result of my being forced to advertise my services on astrotwitter, I met my future wife and soulmate. I experienced real love for the first time in my life and within a year I was on the other side of the world and engaged to be married.
I realised that I have mentioned my personal story in articles before, but I’m doing so this time to make the point that without the retrograde period of my Pluto / Moon transit, all this could not have happened.
If I had found a way to carry on my old career, I would have been still in the UK living the same 12th house Capricorn experience that I’d had for the previous 63 years, albeit in reduced circumstances.
So retrograde transits are essential. Without them we would not be able to go forward properly.
Any outer planet transit has a number of different phases. You can’t always know exactly when the events associated with them are going to happen because they may be specifically triggered by eclipses, full moons or the transits over similar points by the faster movers, but they are likely to roughly follow this pattern.
Phase One is the first hit when the transiting planet makes its first aspect to your personal placement (I allow an orb of one degree).
This is invariably the strongest part of the whole experience, not least because for most people (particularly with Uranus or Pluto) it comes as a shock. We are travelling along as normal, then bang, we are hit by a ton of bricks.
Phase Two is as the transiting planet moves forward past our placement when we begin to feel as if we are coping with the experience and adjusting to life after it.
Phase Three is when it stations and starts to head back towards us again and this fragile confidence begins to feel misplaced.
Phase Four is when it retrogrades back over our placement bringing events and experiences that make us realise that the whole thing is going to require a deeper and more considered response in order to get past it.
Phase Five is the period when the transiting planet has dropped back behind our placement and we are really having to do the seriously introspective work to understand how we need to fundamentally change in order to deal with the new world order.
Phase Six is as it starts coming forward again as we tentatively start to put in place the personal adjustments that the planet had required of us from the start.
Phase Seven is as it passes our placement for the last time and we begin to realise that the experience is coming to an end but it also contains reminders of the necessity to keep to the new resolve and not look back.
Phase Eight is once the planet has moved out of orb for the final time and we are able to properly assess the whole experience and integrate it into our new life.
These phases are not all of equal length and intensity.
It maybe that the transit planet stops while still in orb of the placement and the retrograde period comes fairly soon into the experience and the introspective period lasts longer.
Or that it comes right at the tail end of the period. If this is the case, the idea that we have learnt all we need from the experience is stronger and the retrograde period would come as more of a shock dragging us back to something we believed we had got past.
This was indeed how my latest experience played out.
Pluto has been conjunct my Ascendant since the beginning of 2022.
I always felt that it would confirm all the changes that had happened with the past transits, while adding some of its own for good measure.
Pluto stationed on my Ascendant for the first time and my Mum passed away. I had been anticipating this to happen at some point over the period of the transit, as she was 92 and in a care home, but she had been in relatively good health until she contracted Covid and a month later she was gone.
It felt that this was the biggest thing that Pluto could throw at me, because as well as the grief and the loss, my visa situation in Australia meant that I couldn’t return for the funeral.
The introspective period that came early in the transit with Pluto heading backwards made me reflect that my need to come back to the UK at all had dissipated and my growing love of all things Australian along with exasperation with the politics back home, increased my resolve to take full citizenship.
So as it came forward to reach my Ascendant again at the beginning of 2023, there was a strong sense of me cutting ties with my past.
It was as if I felt I needed to do this in order to fully live my new life.
While any transit to the Moon is naturally going to focus on emotional and security issues, one to the Ascendant is going to be more physical. I had become aware of growing health issues that needed tackling and at the age of 68, the realisation that if they weren’t seriously addressed, the next phase of my life would be much more difficult.
So I put myself on a diet and regular exercise programme that has seen me lose 25 kilos but also feel much better physically, mentally and spiritually.
By the time Pluto passed ahead of my Ascendant at the end of February on its tentative journey into Aquarius, I felt that I had learnt all I needed from the experience and was all set for my new world order.
And despite knowing that it would come back for another go at me throughout the second half of the year, I believed I was ” over it “.
The changes that I had gone through and set up were significant and powerful but not enough for Pluto’s purposes.
There were still deeper hidden emotional connections to my past life that had to be relived through in order to be finally severed. And the last retrograde period brought them up.
My inheritance was not resolved until last week. This did not surprise me because it was the final part of the transit but also that I have a naturally cynical view of solicitors who will do absolutely everything they can, including losing emails and pretending to lose their own staff in order to delay payment for as long as possible so as to maximise the interest they receive on the estate funds.
But over the summer I received some particularly malicious contact from my ex, that threw me off centre for a couple of months.
As Pluto stationed exactly on my Ascendant I realised that there were things that I thought I’d dealt with in relation to her, but really hadn’t. I was just trying to paper over them.
This retrograde gave me the chance to work through them finally, and as soon as I did that it was almost as if a portal had opened and I was allowed to walk through it into a much bigger version of my new life.
Since being in Australia, I was living next door to my new in laws. This was very handy in many ways and my wife and I had made the house our own, but it wasn’t really our energy.
With Pluto stationing on my Ascendant for the final time, we received notice to quit the property. Powered by this transit, and instantly recognising that this sudden and unexpected shock was an important part of the necessary experience, within a couple of hours I had made arrangements to view another house the following day.
The new place was absolutely perfect for us and has so many features that allow us to lead our own best lives in the future.
What we didn’t realise at the time was the new landlord was showing this one for the last time. If no-one suitable applied as tenants, he was going to sell it.
Its as if this property had been hanging there, invisible to anyone else, waiting for me to walk through that portal and separate myself truly from my past in order to be able to see it and walk right into it.
So even though I felt I had made all the changes I needed to move on, I hadn’t really. The retrograde period brought up some horrible things but that was what gave me the power to make the complete break from the past that a Pluto transit requires.
Interestingly I have a client with her Sun at the same degree of Capricorn as my Ascendant who has had a very similar experience, certainly in terms of the timing of it all.
She is in her early 60s and has Cancer rising and the Sun in the 7th house.
I find that a lot of people with the Sun in this house have their lives dominated by the themes of their relationship partners. This certainly would be the case for her.
When she first contacted me in 2021, she detailed a dysfunctional situation with her 2nd husband who was a younger man by a decade or more and a Leo, whose own energy dominated her house and was in major conflict with her teenage son from her previous marriage.
I advised her that with Pluto coming to conjunct her 7th house Sun, a separation and divorce was inevitable over the next two years and it would make sense for her to take the initiative and start proceedings herself.
There were aspects of her husband’s chart that convinced me he was unhappy and about to take a younger lover anyway and that he may have already made some moves in that direction.
Divorce for a Cancer rising, 7th house Capricorn Sun would be going against everything she stood for and jumping off a security cliff, but to her credit she informed her husband that he had to move out during the first stage of the transit.
Naturally he resisted but she was firm enough (it was her house) and the divorce was completed within 6 months.
It really seemed that she had learnt everything she needed from the transit and responded accordingly with great courage and would inevitably reap the rewards of such an action.
Her relationship with her son and his own mental health improved radically and quickly once the ex was out of the way.
I do believe that any transit requires a particular kind of response from us. If we are ready and able to give it, we will get through the experience in a positive manner and emerge into a new beneficial situation.
If we resist its energy, it will keep on hitting us until we have no choice but to go along with its intentions but of course the amount of suffering we receive in the meantime will be much more and the end product is far less likely to be a healthy one.
This is the reason why we need to know what our astrology is requiring from us at any particular point in our lives.
She was very happy about her decision and the effect that it had had on both herself and her son, and remarked at how easy it was to do something that went so strongly against her habit.
I congratulated her that she had taken such profound and powerful steps at an early stage of a transit and told her that most people would not have been able to do that until it had been forced on them by a series of accumulating experiences over the two years.
In actual fact, I was wondering what the rest of the transit would bring. While she and her son were pleased with her move, the ex husband certainly wasn’t, and as he was a controlling person, I had the feeling that he might return in some way to cause problems for her.
A couple of months ago, as Pluto was retrograding onto her Sun, she contacted me to say that she was on the receiving end of abuse from her boss at work, who had a very similar energy to her ex.
I explained the above pattern around transits and she came to the conclusion that she had to leave the job that she’d been happy in for many years.
As it turned out, it was an office based job that while she was very good at, she had begun to feel dissatisfied that it was not fulfilling her creative side.
A few months previously with Pluto into the new sign, she had volunteered to arrange the flowers for a niece’s big wedding. She had enjoyed this experience so much and done it so well that many attendees had suggested that she take it up professionally.
Although around retirement age, as a Capricorn, she felt that she had many years of work left in her but if she was going to do that she wanted to spend the time doing something she loved.
So the Pluto retrograde, bringing the abusive experience from her boss, has pushed her to leave work and her plan going forward is to start a self employed wedding floral business.
So for her, like me the Pluto transit is not just a 7th house thing, the retrograde phase has pushed her to revolutionise her 10th as well.
She felt that by driving the divorce she had made the requisite changes to bring her a new life, but this was only half of the picture. The difficult experience provided by Pluto reversing back over her Sun might in the end prove to be the most powerful positive driver for her future life.
I can think of many examples from clients who have had similar experiences where they believed they had taken as much as they could from a major transit experience only for the retrograde phase to propel them back into difficulties.
With astrological guidance from myself, they invariably come to a greater understanding of what the Universe needs from them and how to proceed to a positive outcome.
But I can honestly say that without having lived through these different transit phases myself many times, I would not be in the position to give an understanding of what is required in my clients’ lives and to offer such guidance.
For Capricorn Research clients, retro is back in fashion.
Posted on 15th November 2023
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