retrogradus

The term "retrograde" comes from the Latin *retrogradus*, meaning "moving backward." It has several applications across different fields

Retrograde, in its essence, has always been about a counter-movement, a defiance of the perceived natural order, a turning back when everything else charges forward. If you think about it, the concept mirrors a type of resistance that appears in many forms throughout human understanding. It’s a theme that crops up across cultures, disciplines, and history. From the ancient skies to the rhythm of a melody, from the flow of blood to the movement of time itself—retrograde means rebellion. It's a concept as old as storytelling itself, embedded in myths, oral traditions, and even the technical language of philosophers and scientists.

Imagine standing in a bustling city square in the days of Babylon. People looked to the heavens and charted the stars, only to notice that sometimes a planet—say Mars, bright and red—seemed to be moving backward. It didn’t make sense to them. What cosmic mischief could explain this? To those ancient star-watchers, Mars's retrograde motion signified more than just a celestial oddity. It became an omen, a sign of disruption, a warning to kings and empires that what seemed forward-moving progress could easily reverse. And perhaps that was the first cultural touchstone of retrograde: a shift in the heavens was a mirror of the shifts on Earth.

Fast-forward a few centuries, and Greek thinkers wrestled with the same problem. Ptolemy, a mathematician and astronomer, proposed his famous geocentric model, adding circles within circles, trying to explain the strange retrograde motion of planets in the sky. These loops, or *epicycles*, became a symbol of retrograde within the structure of the universe itself—an acknowledgment that even in an ordered cosmos, chaos, and backward movement are inevitable. Retrograde wasn't just a physical phenomenon; it had philosophical depth, an acceptance that sometimes the universe spirals, flips, and confounds.

But retrograde wasn’t confined to the stars. It was heard in music too. If you look at music theory, you’ll find this backward movement in the form of retrograde inversion—a melodic line played in reverse order, shifting the listener’s expectation, creating tension, complexity, and sometimes unease. It’s a compositional technique that exists to remind us: not all progress is linear. Sometimes to move forward in sound, we have to go back. The concept of retrograde within music has this timeless resonance, where even the most structured forms, the symphonies and fugues, must eventually confront their inversions.

Take this further into the realm of medicine, where retrograde motion isn’t just symbolic but literal. Retrograde amnesia erases the recent past, leaving the older, distant memories intact, forcing the mind to move backward before it can inch forward again. Or think of retrograde blood flow, a reversal in the body's circulatory system, where vital fluid moves against the normal current, creating potential chaos within the body's otherwise well-ordered systems. Even here, within the veins and synapses of human life, retrograde reveals itself as a counterforce, a push against the flow of time, the flow of life.

Speaking of time, what about the physics of it all? In our modern understanding, retrograde seeps into theories about the universe itself. Time is supposed to move forward—an arrow, an irreversible force. Yet some interpretations of quantum mechanics allow for retrograde, for time to, in certain conditions, move backward, throwing the concept of reality into disarray. The question of entropy, the so-called “arrow of time,” insists that order decays into disorder, yet the very notion of time’s reversibility in a microcosm—think of the famous quantum paradoxes—suggests that maybe, just maybe, the universe has its retrograde moments. Maybe it, too, spirals back as often as it propels forward.

But what’s truly fascinating is how this backward motion ties into the evolution of human culture. Take Taoism’s Yin and Yang—two opposites that exist within each other. The retrograde motion is the essence of this philosophy: it’s the belief that forward motion contains the seeds of its own backwardness, and vice versa. In Eastern philosophies, retreating is often seen not as defeat, but as a strategy, a means of harnessing backward movement to gain momentum for future action. Lao Tzu wrote about this principle of yielding, the soft overcoming the hard—retrograde, in essence, as a survival mechanism.

And across the ocean, in the myths of the Norse, retrograde appears again, this time in the form of Ragnarok. The end of the world was not simply a forward march to destruction. It was cyclical. The gods’ doom would lead to a rebirth of the world, new gods rising from the ashes. The Vikings, like so many others, understood that progress was never just forward—what dies is reborn, what retreats returns. It’s the very fabric of their cosmology, a perpetual retrograde loop where destruction is necessary for creation.

In modern terms, think of retrograde as a metaphor for social movements, for cultural revolutions. Think of all the moments in history where a society, a culture, takes a step back, seemingly regresses, only to later leap forward. The Renaissance, after all, was a return to the classical knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome. The art and philosophy that blossomed during that period came not from pushing ahead into the unknown, but from turning back, from revisiting the past and bringing it into the present. Sometimes, to advance as a society, you need retrograde steps—a return to roots before you can grow.

And Wittgenstein would have appreciated this point. His idea of language games, where meaning is contingent on context and use, might suggest that even our words and concepts—retrograde included—are defined by their positions within larger systems. Retrograde as a concept doesn’t stand alone; it’s only understood in relation to progress, to motion, to time. In different contexts, across different cultures, retrograde becomes something new—a game piece, a move within a larger framework of understanding.

So, whether it's planets that defy their usual paths, melodies that dance backward, blood that flows against the current, or time itself that challenges its linearity—retrograde is always present, lurking at the edge of our perception. It’s the universe’s way of reminding us that nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.