An optical fact before it is an astrological one. It changes how a planet delivers, not whether it does.
A retrograde planet is not moving backwards. Earth, on a faster inner orbit, overtakes the slower outer planets, and from here they appear for a few months to slide backwards against the stars, exactly as a slower car appears to move backwards when you pass it. Vedic astrology reads the appearance as the meaning: a planet that was retrograde at your birth still delivers everything it owns, but inward, late, or on the second attempt rather than in a straight line. Rahu and Ketu are always retrograde, so they are never counted in this.
Every room a retrograde planet owns or occupies, with arcs from each owned house back to where its owner stands. In this chart Saturn alone is retrograde.
Retrograde motion is a viewing artefact with a completely ordinary cause. Earth orbits faster than Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, so a few times a year it catches and passes them. During the pass, the outer planet appears against the background stars to stop, slide backwards, stop again, and resume. Mercury and Venus produce the same effect on the inner side when they swing between us and the Sun.
No planet is doing anything different during a retrograde. The word describes where you are standing, which is why the ancient term is vakri, crooked, rather than anything about reversal.
Jyotish takes the apparent motion as the significance. A natal retrograde planet is still fully able to deliver what it owns and what it signifies. What changes is the route: results tend to arrive inward rather than outward, later than the obvious timeline, or on a revisit rather than a first pass.
Read practically, that is a planning instruction rather than a warning. If the planet that owns your career house was retrograde at birth, the reading is not that the career fails. It is that the straight-line version of it, the one where you ask once and get an answer, is the version to stop waiting for.
A natal retrograde is also a different thing from a transit retrograde. The Mercury retrograde that gets mentioned three or four times a year is a passing sky condition affecting everyone at once. A natal retrograde is a permanent feature of your chart, and it is the one that describes you.
The interesting number is not how many planets are retrograde but how much of the chart they touch. Each retrograde planet reaches every house it owns, plus the house it stands in. One retrograde planet owning two signs already covers three rooms, and two retrograde planets can easily account for half a chart.
The Sun and Moon are never retrograde. Rahu and Ketu are always retrograde, which is a permanent property of the nodes rather than a finding about you, so a well-built reading leaves them out of the count. Having nothing retrograde at all is itself somewhat uncommon and worth knowing.
It means the planet appeared to be moving backwards against the stars at the moment you were born, because Earth was overtaking it. The planet still delivers everything it signifies and everything it owns. The difference is in how: more inwardly, later than expected, or on a second pass rather than a first.
No. It is not a strength score, it is a delivery style. Some traditions read a natal retrograde as extra strength on the grounds that the planet is closest to Earth during the pass, which is astronomically true. The practical reading is simply to expect the results by a longer or more internal route and to plan for that rather than be surprised by it.
Yes. The lunar nodes always move backwards through the zodiac, so their retrograde flag is a permanent property of what they are rather than anything specific to your chart. That is why they are excluded when counting the retrogrades that actually describe you.
The Mercury retrograde people talk about a few times a year is a transit, a passing sky condition affecting everyone simultaneously. A natal retrograde is fixed at your birth and stays in your chart for life. Only the natal one says anything about you specifically.
Read end to end the six units give you more guidance than anyone keeps. Deduplicated it comes to eight rules, ranked by how many separate places each one came from.
Every placement, dignity, degree, retrograde flag, D-9 position and aspect on this page, including the worked example, is computed by the AstroMedha Vedic engine from birth details. Nothing here is worked out by hand.