Glossary: Planets in Detriment
NEW MOON IN VIRGO
The new moon is in Virgo, Mercury’s home sign, and Mercury is there too. Even though Mercury is retrograde, in domicile it’s still strong and able to be supportive. Since Mercury is about to go out of retrograde, it’s essentially stationing (i.e. not moving) right now. This new moon is not so extroverted, rather it would be an awesome time to do more private/reflective Virgoan activities like personal writing, crafting, gardening. research (especially on your own fascinations and obsessions), and reorganization. It’s a better time to digest what you have than to swallow something new. This moon is more disorderly than your usual Virgo new moon, so try not to get dragged into perfectionism; let yourself try things and explore. I often find that Mercury retrograde forces us on detours so that we can learn to enjoy being less goal-driven and less controlling of our time & how it’s spent. If you’re struggling to get something in particular done, why not just do the gathering and organizing part of it until Mercury goes direct and starts moving faster in a couple of days—or if there’s no deadline, you can wait until Jupiter makes a beautiful trine to Mercury on Sept 25th and see how much more easily it all comes together.
GLOSSARY: PLANETS IN DETRIMENT
In past newsletters I’ve discussed planets in their domicile, exaltation, and fall. Detriment is the final core planetary condition that tells us how comfortable and strong a planet is in a particular sign. Simply put, a planet is in detriment when it’s in the sign that is opposite its domicile or home sign. If we understand the signs as lands with natural resources, customs, and culture, a planet in detriment is in a foreign land that doesn’t have the resources that it needs to act out its core function. Imagine seaweed in the desert, or a lion in the arctic.
You’ll notice that the sign of a planet’s detriment is ruled by a planet that has a fundamentally opposite function. The sun & moon are both in detriment in Saturn’s signs of Aquarius & Capricorn (respectively); since the Sun & Moon’s core functions are providing light, growth, support, and representing the life force itself, of course they would struggle to live in the signs that belong to Saturn, the planet of restriction, resistance, death, boundaries, and austerity. Come to think of it, a lion in the arctic is very much a Sun in Capricorn image. There may not be lions in the arctic, but there are in fact Siberian tigers & snow leopards; adaptation is always possible.
The only planet in detriment right now is Mars in Libra. Mars’ home sign is Aries, where it can be direct, aggressive, extroverted, and create ruptures & severance. Libra is the home sign of Venus, concerned primarily with harmony, balance, fairness, and representing all possible perspectives. When we have something in detriment, we need to discover oblique or unorthodox ways of realizing that energy in our lives. When Mars is in its land of detriment it has to adapt and find a way to use Libran & Venusian resources to satisfy our need for action, self-assertion, anger, confidence, and passion. It’s one of the many ways (including retrograde planets) that we can discover non-normative ways of being that can liberate us from the dominant culture, with all its judgments and limitations.
The detriments of each planet are:
Sun in Aquarius Moon in Capricorn Mercury in Sagittarius & Pisces
Venus in Aries & Scorpio Mars in Taurus & Libra Jupiter in Virgo & Gemini
Saturn in Cancer & Leo
A BRIEF DEFENSE OF RETROGRADES
During the recent Venus retrograde I had a fundamental shift in how I feel about retrogrades that came in like a revelation. I had plans with friends, but in true Venus rx form, plenty of people canceled, everyone was tired or sick or anxious or just couldn’t come, and it ended up just me and two of my best friends cuddled up in my bed having deep & vulnerable conversations, feeling a kind of intimacy & love for each other that made me feel so fortunate to be someone who has cultivated non-normative relationships. It was so clearly a Venus rx moment and this wave of gratitude washed through me that Venus was in her state of reversal.
It wasn’t new information that made it revelatory, rather I felt a change in my relationship to retrogrades and the echo effect of the significance of that shift in how I look at astrology & how I feel about the future. If retrogrades are baseline awesome, as I’ve decided they are, then imagine feeling genuine excitement for the retrograde periods that are coming, seeing them as special periods of discovery that are for us, for radicals and anti-conformists, and queers, and punks. I ended up feeling like dozens of new holidays had been added to my calendar where before there were long red streaks of warning.
One thing that helped this shift along was that I had recently gone back and reread the part of my teacher Demetra George’s book Ancient Astrology Vol 1 where she discusses the traditional interpretation of retrogrades. A lot of Hellenistic astrology uses metaphors of governance and sociopolitical power dynamics that I think can be really useful for understanding our internal (and external) struggles.
“Ibn Sahl relates that a retrograde planet signifies disobedience, contradiction, and diversity or discord. This rebellious quality can be seen in the erratic visual movement of its retrograde loop… There exists some kind of hindrance or obstruction… which provokes rebelliousness against the norms of consensus behavior.”
Consensus behavior is that which perpetuates the status quo. If we imagine all of the planets in our chart are deities within us with a delicate balance of power, then retrograde planets are being dissidents, using tactics of disruption to demand necessary change. It may feel like random misfortune when retrograde events are happening, but what if the real problem is the way the “dominant” parts of ourselves are trying to silence and suppress the more radical, non-normative elements of our identities? Even the most anti-authoritarian people can be dictatorial about controlling their internal experience, rather than opening up to feelings and thoughts we don’t like, can’t handle, or fear.
The natal chart is the tool we can use to decode our own cosmology and the balance of power between our personal deities. Retrogrades are just one of many ways to discover the root of recurring struggles & events you’d prefer not to experience and change how you relate to them, or change the pattern itself. Trying to practice a more radical astrology partly means using our tools to decipher the messages of our internal dissidents and giving them voice, rather than suppressing our difference, our dissidence, and our rebellion.