Jupiter

Jupiter governs expansion and belief — where you grow and overreach. It spends about 12 months in each sign and takes 12 years to go round the zodiac, so its sign is shared by everyone born in the same multi-year window rather than telling you about yourself.

Speed decides what it can tell you

Jupiter stays 12 months in a sign

12 months per sign — the window in which everyone shares this placement.
12 years for a full circuit of the twelve signs.
Cohort Too slow to distinguish you from your peers.

This is the part most readings leave out: a placement this slow describes a generation. Useful for context, useless as a personal trait. Work out your own chart →

How often it turns back

Jupiter goes retrograde every 1.09 years

399 days between one retrograde and the next — the synodic period, the time it takes to line up with Earth again.
1.09 years between loops. That does not divide evenly into a calendar year, so the dates drift and some years have none at all.
Apparent not real. Nothing reverses direction — Earth overtakes on the inside of the track and the planet appears to slide backwards against the stars.

Expansion, belief, luck and where you were overreaching is what the tradition attaches to it, and the retrograde is read as that turning inward. The motion itself is a perspective effect and has been understood as one since Copernicus. Every Jupiter retrograde by year →