The planets

Ten, not eight

Astrology counts the Sun and the Moon among the planets because the old word meant anything that wandered against the fixed stars, and they were the brightest wanderers of all. It also keeps Pluto, which astronomy reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Both choices are older than the modern definitions, and the pages here say so rather than pretending the definitions changed nothing.

The positions are geocentric — where each body appears from the Earth, which is the only place a chart is ever drawn from. That is why Mercury and Venus never stray far from the Sun, and why every planet except the Sun and the Moon spends part of its time appearing to go backwards, as the retrograde page draws.

Personal, social and outer planets

Astrologers often sort the ten by speed. The Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars move quickly enough to differ between people born weeks apart, and are called the personal planets. Jupiter and Saturn, at about a year and two and a half years to a sign, are sometimes called the social planets, shared by people born within a year or two of each other. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto spend seven to more than thirty years in a sign and are read as generational, so their houses and aspects say more about a single person than their signs do.

Benefics, malefics and the two sects

Traditional astrology, which uses only the seven bodies visible before the telescope, sorts them another way. Jupiter and Venus are the benefics and Saturn and Mars the malefics: labels for the character of what each one signifies, not verdicts on anybody’s chart. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn belong to the day sect and the Moon, Venus and Mars to the night, while Mercury joins whichever side it rises on, before the Sun or after it. The dignities page scores each planet by the sign it is in, and the aspects describe how two planets are read together.

The planets and the days of the week

The seven old planets still name the days. English keeps the Sun, the Moon and Saturn in Sunday, Monday and Saturday; the other four days come through Norse gods matched with Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, which French shows more plainly in mardi, mercredi, jeudi and vendredi. The order of the week comes from the planetary hours, where each day belongs to the planet of its first hour.

The old order of the seven

Before the telescope the planets were ranked by how slowly they cross the sky: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon. Astrologers call it the Chaldean order, and it runs all through the tradition: the planetary hours count down it, the faces, the ten-degree thirds of each sign, are handed out by it, and the weekdays fall out of it. Greek astronomers first named the five planets by their look, Saturn the shining one, Jupiter the radiant, Mars the fiery, Venus the light-bringer and Mercury the twinkler, before the names of the gods took over.

Following the planets from here

Each card above opens a planet’s own page, with its path round the zodiac drawn out. For all ten at once, today’s sky lists where they are and the aspects between them, and the visibility page says which of them can actually be seen tonight. The conjunctions page lists the meetings of any two, the returns page works out when the slow ones come back to where they stood at a birth, and the transits page sets the planets of the moment against a chart.

Reading a planet in a chart

Every planet in a birth chart is read three ways at once: what it stands for, the sign it is in, which colours how it acts, and the house it falls in, which says where in life it acts. Each planet’s own page gives a worked example of all three, along with its rulership, its exaltation and fall, and how it moves.

What a planet stands for is the tradition’s vocabulary, not a force. Nothing on these pages claims that a planet does anything to anybody; they describe what a chart uses it to mean, and where it actually is.