♃ Jupiter

Jupiter is the sage of the chart. It governs growth, luck and meaning.

Jupiter at a glance

• ArchetypeThe Sage
• Governsgrowth, luck and meaning
• RulesSagittarius (traditionally Pisces)
• Cycleabout 12 years
• Keywordsgrowth, luck, faith, abundance
• In the bodythe liver and thighs

What Jupiter means

Jupiter is where you are given room. Growth, generosity, faith, and the working assumption that there is more of something than there appears to be.

It is the traditional benefic, which the older books meant literally and a modern reading does not. Jupiter enlarges whatever it touches, and not everything is improved by being larger.

It is also what you would teach if somebody asked, and where you are generous without being asked.

When Jupiter is the hard part

Excess is the same faculty as abundance and no chart can tell them apart. Jupiter's house is the traditional first place to look for overdoing it, and the last place anybody thinks to check, because it tends to feel like their best quality.

And faith is not a plan. Jupiter's optimism carries a life a long way and then hands the bill to Saturn.

Its cycle, and the ages it lands on

About twelve years, near enough a year to a sign, which makes it the friendliest cycle in the chart to check against your own life. Your Jupiter returns at roughly 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72 and 84.

Line those ages up against your own history before deciding whether it means anything. That is the honest way to test a cycle, and it is exactly what this app's Jury does with ten of them at once, against a measured base rate.

Can you see it?

The third brightest thing in the night sky after the Moon and Venus, and it shines steadily rather than twinkling, which is how you can tell a planet from a star with no equipment at all.

Four of its moons show up in ordinary binoculars, strung out either side of it and visibly moved by the following night. Galileo saw them in 1610 and they ended the idea that everything went round the Earth.

What retrograde actually is

Roughly once a year, for about four months. From the outer planets on, retrograde stops being an occasional event and becomes a normal condition: Jupiter spends about a third of its time apparently going backwards.

Which is worth keeping hold of whenever a retrograde is described as a disruption. A planet that is retrograde a third of the time is not describing an unusual state of affairs.

Jupiter also touches

travel, higher learning, religion, publishing, generosity, the big picture.

A question to sit with

Where could you afford to believe in more room than you think you have?