Every planet moves the same direction around the Sun, and none of them ever reverses. Yet several times a year, seen from the Earth, one of them appears to stop against the stars, drift backward for weeks or months, stop again, and resume. That apparent reversal is a retrograde, and the word means exactly that: stepping backward. It is a trick of vantage, the same one that makes a slower train on the next track seem to slide backward as yours pulls ahead.
For the planets outside the Earth’s orbit, Mars and everything beyond, the retrograde happens when the Earth overtakes them on the inside. We are faster, and as we pass, the line of sight to the outer planet swings backward against the far stars. For Mercury and Venus, inside our orbit, it happens when they overtake us, passing between the Earth and the Sun. Either way the retrograde is the moment of closest approach, which is why Mars burns brightest when it is retrograde and why Venus is at her most brilliant just before she turns.
Every retrograde is bracketed by two stations, the days when the planet appears to stand still before turning. A planet cannot reverse without stopping first. Moondark names the exact minute of each station and the degree, because astrologers have always weighed the stations more heavily than the motion between them: a planet standing still is a planet at full strength on a single point of the zodiac.
Mercury retrogrades three times most years for about three weeks. Venus retrogrades every eighteen months for six weeks. Mars, every twenty-six months for two months or more. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron each retrograde once a year for four to six months, so that at any given moment two or three of them are usually moving backward. This is normal weather, not an emergency, and Moondark shows it as such: a rose-colored glyph on the Now screen, and the whole passage a tap away.
What astrologers make of it varies by planet, and Moondark’s passage pages say so planet by planet. The common thread is review. A retrograde is read as a season in which the planet’s business is revisited rather than advanced: what was said is reread, what was built is inspected, what was wanted is weighed again. Whether that is the planet or simply attention paid, the reader decides. Moondark tells you where the planet is and which way it is going. It does not tell you what to do about it.