Transits & cycles

Planetary cycle

Also known as: planetary cyclesorbital periodsynodic cycle

A planetary cycle is the time a planet takes to come back to the same position — in the zodiac, or relative to another planet or to its own place in the birth chart.

The simplest cycle is a planet’s round of the zodiac: the Moon takes about 27.3 days, Mars about 1.9 years, Jupiter 11.86 years, Saturn about 29.4 years, Uranus about 84, Neptune about 165 and Pluto about 248 years. Seen from Earth, the planets now and then appear to move backward (retrograde motion), which is why they cross some degrees three times.

In personal astrology the cycles of a planet against its own birth position matter: the transiting planet forms in turn a square, an opposition and another square until it returns to the same degree. This is how the Jupiter cycle (11.86 years) is counted, with returns around ages 12, 24 and 36, and the Saturn cycle, with returns around 29.5, 58.9 and 88.3.

A separate group are the cycles of planet pairs, measured from one conjunction to the next — Jupiter and Saturn, for example, meet on average about every 19.9 years. These matter especially in mundane astrology, which describes collective trends. In every case astrology reads cycles as a rhythm of themes, not as predictions.