The slow sky
The great cycles
Five very slow planets, like the hands of a giant clock. Drag time and watch when they meet: from there, tradition says, a cycle begins again.
The sky of the world
What period is humanity going through
The words of these years
Two simple ways to read the slow planets: a thermometer of the decades and the seasons we are living in. Touch the curve to move through time: the whole page follows you.
The world thermometer
When the slow planets gather in one part of the sky the curve rises: in tradition these are times of crisis and rebuilding. When they spread out it falls, and times are calmer. It is the «cyclic index» of the French astrologer André Barbault, computed here on the true positions.
The seasons now
Each slow planet stays in the same sign for years: it is the background climate of the period. The bar shows how far along the way we are.
How to read it
Why they are slow. The farther a planet is from the Sun, the longer it takes to go around the sky: Jupiter twelve years, Saturn twenty-nine, Uranus eighty-four, Neptune a hundred and sixty-five, Pluto two hundred and forty-eight. The last two don't complete a lap even in a lifetime.
What a meeting is. When two hands overlap, astrology says a new cycle begins between the two forces they stand for. Its name is conjunction, and the date here is the exact one, computed from NASA ephemerides.
Why they sometimes go back. Seen from Earth, planets now and then seem to move backward (retrograde motion): that is why a meeting can repeat three times in a year. On the dial you can see it: the hand wobbles.
And Neptune with Pluto? They meet about every 492 years: last in 1892, next in 2385. Between 1900 and 2100 it doesn't happen.
History and tradition, not predictions. The dates are true astronomical calculations; the meanings are those astrological tradition gives to these meetings, to be read as a way of looking at decades, not as an oracle.