♆ Neptune

Neptune governs dissolution and imagination — a generational placement. It spends about 14 years in each sign and takes 168 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

Neptune stays 14 years in a sign

14 years per sign — the window in which everyone shares this placement.
168 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

Neptune goes retrograde every 1.01 years

367 days between one retrograde and the next — the synodic period, the time it takes to line up with Earth again.
1.01 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.

Dissolution, imagination and the blurring of edges 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 Neptune retrograde by year →

Neptune in each sign

in Aries in Taurus in Gemini in Cancer in Leo in Virgo in Libra in Scorpio in Sagittarius in Capricorn in Aquarius in Pisces

Other planets

☉ Sun ☽ Moon ☿ Mercury ♀ Venus ♂ Mars ♃ Jupiter ♄ Saturn ♅ Uranus ♇ Pluto