The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 365, titled:
Transits in Astrology: An Introduction to Timing
With Chris Brennan and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on August 25, 2022
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Mary Sharon
Transcription released August 26, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to the Astrology Podcast. In this episode, Leisa Schaim and I are going to be talking about the timing technique known as Transits in Astrology, and doing a deep dive sort of introduction and overview to the technique that’s going to be very detailed in order to give you probably the most detailed overview and introduction to the technique that is available out there anywhere. So, thanks for joining me. Hey, Leisa.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey, Chris. Glad to be here.
CB: Let me read the data for those who are curious. Today is Wednesday, August 17th 2022 starting at looks like exactly 11:00 AM in Denver, Colorado. This should be episode 365 of the Astrology Podcast. And this is an episode that I’ve been meaning to do for many many years now and you and I have been talking about doing for quite a while. And I’m excited to finally do it, I feel like it’s finally time now that we’re 350 episodes into the podcast to do what is probably the most important timing technique in astrology.
LS: Yeah, transits are pretty much I would say the first timing technique that most astrologers learn after just birth chart placements.
CB: Yeah, it’s pretty much one of, if not the main timing technique in astrology. And one of the things that’s unique about it is that it’s one of the few timing techniques that’s used across almost all major traditions of astrology, both from ancient to modern astrology, as well as from Eastern Astrology in India and other areas as well as in the West, and the use of astrology from the Middle East and Europe and everywhere else. It’s a pretty ubiquitous concept and the reason why it’s used by so many traditions of astrology is because transits relate to where the planets are actually at in the sky right now, and it relates where the planets are in the sky right now to events happening on Earth or events happening in your life at the moment. So it’s relevant in terms of the experience of life at a specific moment in time from moment to moment, and can be used as a sort of continuous timing technique in that context.
LS: Right. And it’s not like a symbolic timing technique, there are several, probably more than several symbolic timing techniques in astrology. Things like annual perfections or secondary progressions, where with annual perfections you’re moving one sign per year or with secondary progressions, it’s equating approximately one day to one year of life. So those are moving time symbolically through the chart. But transits are actually unique in that it’s just what’s going on right now, and you can compare it to what’s going on for you right now or for the collective right now.
CB: Yeah, and I think that’s really important because then it’s less abstract because it’s not a symbolic technique, it’s just literally where are the planets at the moment and how is that relating to your life both in terms of sometimes internal events where sometimes transits can describe passing or transitory emotional states like being really irritable on one day or being really happy and optimistic in another in a way that stands out. But also, transits can relate to concrete external events that happen in a person’s life also, like getting married or getting a new major job or becoming famous or making a new friend or what have you. All of these are types of external events and experiences that transits can speak to and can sometimes even predict.
LS: Yeah, and I think even compared to birth charts, most people learn birth chart placements first when they first get into astrology. But I think even compared to that, transits are a more immediate way to kind of see, does astrology do something or not. Right? Because it’s immediate feedback in your life rather than say, “Well, is that the kind of person I am?” I feel like it’s a little bit more concrete and direct oftentimes of sort of corroboration or not.
CB: Yeah, because when somebody reads an interpretation or even if they go to an astrologer to get interpretations of what their birth chart placements mean, and especially if some of those are character-based, some of that can be somewhat subjective in terms of whether it lands or doesn’t land or whether certain character traits are truly part of the person’s character or personality or what have you. Versus with transits because it does relate to, you know, did a specific event that matches the archetypal meaning of this transit happen on this specific day, and it’s given us a relatively narrow objective timeframe to determine if that event did occur or not. There is something that’s more objective about it and more measurable in some sense.
LS: Yeah. And I know that you just mentioned that it can be event or it can be like a passing feeling or something. I think it’s important to sort of emphasize that point because while some transits do reflect actual events in your surroundings, some are– it’s not that they’re totally subjective, but they can be more internal states because it is talking about how it’s affecting your birth chart. So sometimes it’s an internal state, sometimes it’s external events. It can kind of go both ways, sometimes either or both.
CB: Right. All right. So really the important point right from the start from a technical standpoint is that transits relate to, as you already said, the positions of the planets in the sky, and you relate those back to where they were in your birth chart or in the birth chart that you’re studying. The premise is that the birth chart sets up certain potentials, and this is sort of like the foundation or the natal promise you might say that certain things are promised to happen in a person’s life from the moment they were born at some point in the future. So then the question becomes, you know, when will those events take place? Or when will that natal promise be delivered in some way? And part of the answer to that is that will happen when certain planetary alignments come up in the future during the course of the person’s life at certain fixed periods or certain predictable even predetermined periods since all the planetary movements are predetermined long ahead of time. But those events will manifest when certain transits happen during the course of a person’s life.
LS: Right. And that’s kind of related to, you know, right now we’re going to be talking about how it impacts certain natal charts, whether it’s a person or company or what have you. And we’ll also touch later on the collective. But usually, you’re comparing it to a specific birth chart. And one of the reasons why that awakens that at that time or impacts that at that time during timing techniques and transits in particular we’re talking about today is that not all of the placements in a birth chart– you learn what all the placements mean initially when you first get into astrology, but they’re not actually all equally active all at the same time. There’s sort of a baseline in which you can kind of understand your chart in terms of who you are but there’s also potentials within the birth chart to manifest certain events or manifest certain things in certain areas of life. That’s the kind of thing that the transits are awakening.
CB: Yeah. And so here, for example, let me just share a copy of my birth chart on the screen. There’s just my birth chart, which is just a snapshot of where the planets were exactly at the moment that I was born at the exact time and exact city and location of my birth. That’s the alignment of planets then, but what happens is that all of the planets kept moving forward after that point. And at different times, certain planets move faster or slower and at certain points, some of those planets will return back to where they were when I was born and that’s an important turning point or an important transit, or different planets will form other types of aspects or alignments or you might say configurations with where they were in the birth chart. And that’s essentially what a transit is. So the term ‘transit’ comes from the Greek word [epembaucis 00:08:50], which means to step upon or to walk across something. Just like how the most easy way to visualize this is if you imagine over the past few years, for example when there’s an eclipse let’s say in the middle of the day, the Moon will move across or walk across or step upon the face of the Sun. And during the course of an eclipse over a few-hour timeframe, you literally watch the Moon sort of walk in front of the Sun from our standpoint, and that’s a transit in some ways of the Moon over the Sun. But all of the planets can do that. And we’ve seen that at different points as well. For example, sometimes during a Venus-Sun conjunction, you’ll see Venus walk across the face of the Sun and obscure the Sun at a certain point. That’s where the concept of transit comes from, is this idea of planets aligning and walking across each other’s paths from our vantage point.
LS: And so, some of the things that transit show are for instance when certain areas of life are more active than others because they’re literally transiting through that area of your chart. It can also show why at certain times there’ll be different qualities going on in the same area of your life. So at one point, say there’s one transit that makes things really serious in that area of your life, and then at another time, there are other transits that make things particularly nebulous and kind of distinctly different from that earlier period. And that’s part of why that is, is different transits with different qualities going through that area of your chart.
CB: Right. That’ll be one really interesting thing that we’ll get into in terms of different planets have different meanings, and when they move into different sectors of your chart, they’re going to import those meanings into whatever sector of your chart is represented. And then different sectors of your chart represent different areas of your life, oftentimes following for example the significations of the 12 houses which represent 12 different areas of life with their own unique meanings. Like, the first house represents the body, the fourth house represents the home and the parents, the seventh house is relationships, or the 10th house is career. At different points, you’re going to have planets moving through those sectors of your chart and that’s going to be when those areas of your life become activated or become more of the focal point because there’s planetary activity taking place in that area of your life.
LS: Yeah, and I think many people get into astrology kind of curious about like, “Oh, what does this say about me? What are the planets in my chart and things?” But I actually find that transits are a little more illuminating because alternatively, some people get into astrology going like, “Why is this certain thing happening in my life right now?” Right? That often draws people to astrologers to say like, “Explain why I’m having this kind of time in life right now.” And transits can very much do that and I think they can be very validating in that respect.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Of the different phases and it provides an explanation for, you know, sometimes there’s events that come completely out of nowhere that can happen. And that represents oftentimes transits acting as a trigger, which shows the activation of certain potentials at certain discrete or specific moments in time like a specific day or sometimes a specific hour or minute. But other times, we all experience different phases or different seasons of our life and that can also sometimes be represented by slower-moving outer planet transits that aren’t usually aligned to happen only on a specific day but instead they’re things that take place gradually over the period of many days or weeks or months or even years.
LS: Right. Yeah. So inner planets tend to move more quickly, outer planets more slowly, we’ll get into the specifics. But another thing that transits can do is show areas of life that are not particularly emphasized in your birth chart suddenly become more so at certain times in your life. And that’s, for example, if transiting planets are moving through a house or an area of your chart that doesn’t have natal placements. And so it’s not quite… You know, empty houses are not completely empty, it doesn’t mean that nothing happens in that area of your life. But it is true that if you have more of a concentration of Natal planets in a certain area of your life that will be more active for you than average. And so, say transiting planets or moving through an empty natal house, then suddenly that area of life will be more active than usual for whatever reason, depending on the specifics of that transiting planet.
CB: Yeah, and that’s really important point because students often early in their studies have that question of, you know, “If I don’t have any planets in a house, does that mean that that area of my life isn’t important or that nothing is going to happen in that area?” For example, if a person has their seventh house without any planets in it, sometimes they might get worried and think that they’re not going to have relationships or something like that since the seventh house is the place of marriage. And usually astrologers will respond and say, “No, if there’s no planets in a house, then you just look to the ruler of that house and how it’s situated in the chart.” And that’s true to a certain extent in terms of just looking at natal signatures or what the natal promise is, but the other part of the answer that question is actually, even if your chart is empty in a certain sector of it in the natal chart, at different points in your life planets are going to move through that house, and that’s going to be when that area of your life becomes more active and more prominent. And that happens pretty much for everybody at certain points. Like one of my recent favorite transit examples was Britney Spears. Britney Spears was born with Libra rising and Aries in her seventh house. Aries is the seventh whole sign house and there’s no planets there nataly. But interestingly just this year, the planet Jupiter moved into the sign of Aries. And so it moved into by transit her seventh house and then she got married not too long after that. Let me put up a bi-wheel to show you. So here’s her chart on the inside, and then on the outside is where the transiting planets are today. Over the past few months, Jupiter has been transiting through the sign of Aries so it’s been in her seventh house. Jupiter is the planet of growth and optimism and expansion and generally good things since it’s the greater benefic. And so when Jupiter goes into her seventh house, she gets married or you know, has a permanent ideally long-term relationship begin at that point.
LS: Yeah, that’s a nice straightforward example. I like that.
CB: Yeah, because sometimes all transits are pretty straightforward things like that and it’s good to break it down and think very basically from the start, and we’re trying to build things up from the very basic standpoint here and then we’ll get more complicated because transits, well, it’s one of in some ways the most basic timing techniques. It does have different more advanced applications that we’re going to get into during the course of this as well.
LS: Mhm, yeah.
CB: All right. Anyway, the final point in this section is just that transits primarily relate back to the natal chart as the route chart. So the natal chart sets up the basic premise or the basic foundation of a person’s life, and then the premise is that you’re then looking at the movements of the planets after a person was born from that point forward and relating them back to the placements in the natal chart itself.
LS: Right. Because it’s kind of for people who don’t know astrology at all, sometimes there’s a misconception that surely all the planets transiting at the same time don’t affect everyone the same way. And that’s actually true, they don’t. There is a collective component but by and large, we’re looking first to how does that impact your actual foundational chart, your birth chart. And that will be different for everyone.
CB: Yeah, because it differentiates one of the criticisms of astrology. If a sceptic or if somebody only knows Sun sign astrology as the premise that the world is just broken up into 12 groups or 12 signs and that you’re only talking about the Sun sign, and that that would be true for everybody that was ever born in for example, late October or early November, everybody has the Sun in Scorpio. But there’s different people that are born on different dates and different years. And in addition to the natal charts of those people, the alignments of those people being different, and everybody’s birth chart, being born on a different day or a different year is also going to affect your experience of different transits which are going to take place at different times in a person’s life as well.
LS: Right. Right. So the same transit’s going to impact different people in very different ways in different areas of their life.
CB: Yeah, and transits are one of the things just that personalizes astrology in general in terms of greater differentiation beyond just the basics of Sun sign astrology.
LS: Mhm.
CB: I meant to show an animation of my chart when I showed it earlier, just to further demonstrate even though it’s belaboring the point a little bit, but just to visualize this because we’re going to be looking at bi-wheels a lot here. So just to reiterate that, this is my basic birth chart, which is the alignment of the planets or a snapshot of the planets at the moment that I was born with the Sun at nine Scorpio, the Moon at 24 Aquarius, the Ascendant at 17 Aquarius and so on and so forth. But then what I want to show for the video viewers is another bi-wheel where my birth chart is on the inside, the transiting planets are on the outside, and we can see since I have the outside date set to the same day I was born. But here in Solar Fire I’m going to animate it and move the chart forward one day. And we can see that the Moon has changed signs and it moved from Aquarius into Pisces in the bottom left corner. So the Moon moves pretty fast, it changes signs every two to three days. If you just keep moving the chart forward by days, you start seeing all the planets in the outside wheel starting to move forward sometimes more quickly and sometimes more slowly, and eventually change signs. For example we see on November 14th, Venus moved from Sagittarius into Capricorn. And then, a few days later on November 16th, Mars moved from Capricorn into Aquarius. So each time, basically every day you move forward, there’s different planets that are moving at different rates around a person’s chart. And they’re moving into different houses or different sectors of the chart. And then occasionally, what will happen is that a planet will catch up to and will, let’s say, initially conjoin sometimes the degree of where another planet was when the person was born. For example here on November 20th, the planet Venus reached eight degrees of Capricorn, which is the degree where my natal Jupiter was at eight Capricorn when I was born. And that’s a specific planetary alignment of a transiting conjunction of transiting Venus to Natal Jupiter. All right. So the birth chart sets up the foundation, and then transits always relate back to the birth chart itself.
All right, so let’s move into the next section where we talk about how transits can be applied and what they apply to. What’s important here to talk about first is how transits can be used in order to study the past, the present, or the future. They can be used to study all three of the times or all three of the different times. So the first starting point that we’ll start with is that you can look up the transits for where they’re at in the present, and where the planets are at in the sky right now. And the basic premise or the basic principle is that the alignment of the planets right now will describe some facets of your life as you’re experiencing it in the present. What’s interesting about this is that this basic premise, or this is one of the basic hypothesis of transits, and it’s something that you can actually test to see if it’s true by literally observing if the alignment of the planets and what those alignments are supposed to mean symbolically as they relate to your birth chart, if those interpretations are actually true and do actually describe something about your life right now.
LS: Right. So it really is immediate feedback like we were talking about a bit ago. You don’t have to wait, you don’t have to say, “Well, this transit in two years.” You just say, “What’s happening right now? How is that impacting my birth chart in particular? And what do I notice either internally or externally that’s going on in my life at the moment?”
CB: Right, exactly. Let’s give some examples, just some hypothetical examples of different types of transits. So let’s say for example that the transiting… One hypothetical example is if transiting Mars conjoins your natal Mercury on a specific day and you get into a major argument with somebody, for example. Let me find, I have a little diagram for that one just to visualize this for those watching the video version. So let’s say a person’s natal Mercury is at like 25 degrees of Gemini, and let’s say that’s where it is in their birth chart when the day they were born so that makes that 25 Gemini a sensitive degree for especially communication or the topic of communication for them in their life at 25 Gemini because their natal Mercury was there when they were born. Then let’s say today in the sky, the planet Mars comes up and it reaches the exact same degree at 25 degrees of Gemini. So that would be a transit of transiting Mars in the sky right now to natal mercury. And Mars itself symbolically represents anger, arguments, fighting, conflict… In ancient astrology it even represented war, which is like a large-scale type of fighting. So when the planet that represents fighting conjoins the planet in your birth chart that represents communication, it can indicate something like a verbal argument. That would be one thing you could see and test if that coinciding of a planet in the sky in the present, if you see that transit happen in your chart, does coincide with some sort of verbal argument. That’s a very simple one.
LS: Yeah, it can be that straightforward. And that can come about in a few different ways. That can be, for instance you’re talking to someone and suddenly they become very kind of vigorous about arguing with you about something. That can also be something like you’re talking with someone and you notice before it quite happens, you’re quicker to anger or you’re quicker to feel offence or things like that, whether or not that actually comes out of your mouth that way frequently at will. So those are the couple kind of ways you can notice it either in your environment or within yourself.
CB: Yeah. In some instances, it can be like an internal feeling that you’re more irritable or you’re more prone to arguments on that day, and then you actually get into an argument on that day partially as a result of something that was initially coming from an internal feeling, which is one scenario of a sort of internal transit that becomes an external transit. But other times there can be an external event, like you run into somebody on that day that’s being particularly aggressive or pushy or argumentative with you quite independent of anything you’re doing. And then they end up getting into argument with you and that ends up negatively affecting you and making you more irritable or making you more angry because of this external influence. That’s more of an external experience of a transit but it’s also something that happens, there’s always two sides of the coin. Either scenario can take place under a transit in some instances.
LS: Exactly. And so again not to belabor the point, but it’s important especially if you’re new to astrology, this kind of thing is why it’s not the case that your birth chart is the only thing that’s important, you know? You get used to learning your birth chart placements and such, but it doesn’t mean that you are always 100% of the time the same exact kind of person in every environment on every day, etc. And this is part of why, because you have these transiting influences that at certain times color the otherwise foundational chart there.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So even if you have certain placements in your birth chart and certain alignments of planets, or let’s say combinations of planets that indicate certain things or give you a proclivity towards certain types of character traits or personality traits or even actions or events in your life and let’s say that you don’t have other types of alignments, that doesn’t actually matter hugely because all of us will experience some of those alignments at some point in the future. Sometimes transits give you the opportunity to experience certain you might say even birth chart placements in some sense, but instead of having them baked in your birth chart for your entire life, you just have those transits for a temporary period of time that is transitory.
LS: Exactly. That’s a really good point, it’s something that I really appreciate about transits frequently even though I’ve been thinking about them for a long time. I still appreciate that as transits move through different signs or make different aspects with your own chart, you kind of get a little feeling for what it would be like to have that more permanently in your birth chart. You know, it’s just going to be a transitory experience for you personally, but you can kind of get a sense of like, “This is what it would be like for me to have this permanently in my birth chart.” I actually really like that part because at least it can lend itself to empathy for different types of people in the world and what it would be like to be a different kind of person. It’s like what it would be like if you just froze that transit and you always had that, and you kind of get a sense of, “Oh, some people have that in their birth chart and that’s their filter.” Anyway, I really appreciate that part for kind of lending empathy to different experiences of life and different types of people.
CB: Right. Because somebody that was born nataly on the day of a Mercury-Mars conjunction, some of those character traits that might come along with that might be, you might be more argumentative in general, you might just be more direct or more blunt and your style of communication. You might like a little bit of verbal sparring or other things like that, or maybe even using curse words or something in a way that feels more natural to you or comes more naturally to you than it might somebody else. And that can be a birth chart placement that a person experiences and grows, and is some sort of core part of their personality that they come to terms with and experience in different ways during the course of their life, but it’s still something that’s kind of like a recurring theme or something that sticks with them throughout their life. Versus if you experience that as a transit of transiting Mars conjoining your Mercury, you get to experience that for a few day period of what that might be like if it was built into your birth chart.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So I think it’s actually good to… I mean, that happens somewhat naturally but I think it’s good to actually consciously notice that as transits go around and appreciate that.
CB: Right. All right, let’s give another hypothetical example. Let’s say you were born with the planet Jupiter at 15 degrees of Virgo, right in the middle of that sign. And then the transiting Moon someday comes up and it moves through Virgo and then it goes through the middle degrees of Virgo and exactly conjoins the degree where Jupiter was in your birth chart at 15 degrees of Virgo. And the Moon moves very fast so it’s only going to be in that degree for like an hour or two basically, but this might be a transitory experience of just having emotionally like a very positive or very optimistic day in which you have a good day and things are looking very bright for you for a period of time, or that there’s some particularly brief but transitory positive experience of luck or good fortune that occurs to you during that time window.
LS: Right. That’s another good example where it could be coming from either direction from internal experiences or from external things. For instance, if the Moon is transiting right over your Jupiter during a certain part of the day then you might indeed have just better luck; you might have people who are just giving you opportunities, you know, even small ones more readily than at other times, or people are more cheerful with you. Alternatively, you could just wake up that day feeling better than usual. You’re like, “I don’t know why, but I woke up in a good mood.” And then you kind of carry that forward into your day, and because of that your experience of your day can be more positive because your internal state has already kind of oriented that way temporarily more than usual. That is particularly true with those really brief Moon transits.
LS: Yeah, so there’s some transits by inner planets that are quicker and more brief and therefore tend to be a little bit less important most of the time because they happen more frequently, versus there’s some outer planet transits that are much more slow and happen much more infrequently in a person’s life and also take longer to occur. And so therefore, they may be more important or the gravity of those situations may be more serious than shorter transits basically. Another thing about this one is that in this hypothetical chart, let’s say Scorpio is the Ascendant and Sagittarius is on the second house of money and finances. So Jupiter is the ruler of the second house of money and finances. So let’s say when transiting Moon conjoins Jupiter, it’s a very quick transit so it’s like a low-level event. But maybe the person finds like $20 lying on the ground. So there’s a very brief stroke of luck that occurs over like a one-hour period. That’s kind of a positive event that happens on that person’s day, but for the most part it’s probably not something that’s life-changing or life-shattering per se.
LS: Right. And extending that a little further, in this particular chart if it was Scorpio rising then that Virgo would be the 11th house of friends and groups and the social sphere. So say, the Moon was briefly transiting over that Jupiter, maybe it’s your friend who suddenly lends you money that day. And so it connects those two houses in your chart that the Moon is going over the ruler of the second placed in the 11th. So it’s always connected to your actual birth chart in terms of how you experience it, because you can’t get rid of your birth chart, that’s always the foundation. So, yeah. [crosstalk] And kind of the flip side of that Jupiter one, you know, the Moon transits, they’re not super important in the sense that they’re not lasting, but they can still impact you in a way that’s kind of striking and colors even your one day. I had the flip side of that Moon-Jupiter example happen not that long ago, where I woke up and to the Moon was exactly to the minute on my natal Saturn when I woke up for the day. And I swear just that whole day, I was like, “I feel like Saturn all day.” [laughs] So it can be like that, it’s not something that’s gonna affect you for a month or even a week but it can still be striking in the moment as it’s passing through that region.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And sometimes there can be other confounding factors when there’s multiple transits lining up on the same thing, and then the Moon moves in there. Sometimes that can act as a trigger of the little domino piece that knocks over a whole sequence of other dominoes. And we’ll come to that more later. Let me give one last third hypothetical example. Let’s say we have a chart with Taurus rising and let’s say the degree of the Midheaven is up there in the 10th whole sign house around let’s say 10 degrees of Aquarius. And then let’s say that transiting Saturn, which is a very slow-moving planet, comes up and conjoins 10 degrees of Aquarius so that it conjoins the degree of the Midheaven in this person’s chart. And then let’s say hypothetically that they get fired from their job or they get laid off. Saturn archetypally is a planet of contraction and sometimes that can mean loss or suffering an obstacle or a setback of some sort. The Midheaven and the 10th house more broadly represents one’s career, one’s social standing, and one’s overall life direction, and sometimes one’s vocation or work. So having transiting Saturn moved through there and hitting a sensitive point in the 10th house could mean a challenge or an obstacle comes up and one scenario could be losing one’s job for some reason.
LS: Definitely. I actually had that transit and that exact thing happened. You remember that? [unintelligible 00:05:49].
CB: All right, that was the one store.
LS: Yeah.
CB: You were not super pleased about that.
LS: [laughs] I was not super pleased. Yeah. So we could go further into that transit but yeah, it tends to be either a pinnacle or contraction. And in my case it was a contraction, but then therefore pared down my work situation such that I eventually moved towards astrology kind of in a semi-forced fashion.
CB: Yeah. Sometimes Saturn closes one door in order to open other doors later on, and it becomes a constructive thing in the long term, even if it’s experienced as a loss or a hardship in the immediate present short-term.
LS: Right. If you’re thinking about Saturn transits in particular, they’re longer and it represents things that take long time anyway. And so those are typically things where you experience at a certain way in the moment, but you may have a different perspective as time goes by.
CB: Yeah. So super important point is just to start paying attention to your transits and where the planets are now on a daily basis and seeing in what ways that informs your experience of the present. And you’ll start seeing some really interesting things as you do that.
LS: Mhm.
CB: All right. So moving into the second time, you can also take transits and use them in order to go back and study the past. What you do here is you look up important dates and important periods in your life in the past that have happened to you already at some point during the course of your life, and then you see what transits were occurring during those timeframes and if those transits accurately described the events that occurred in your life at that time. This is a really interesting and fun thing to do especially early in astrologer’s studies is to just look back in the past and see how the transits played out with previous events. It’s a great way to learn what certain transits mean and to get a sort of crash course in how certain transits have played out for you already in your own personal chronology.
LS: Right. Because you can’t look forward– I mean, you can look forward but you can’t experience the future quite yet and you might be waiting around to be like, “Oh, this transit happens for me in five years but I don’t really know how that’s gonna play out yet.” But you can look back in your past. It’s especially useful if you either have kept journals, or you have searchable emails or some sort of records like that. I mean, you can still do it of course without that, but those are particularly helpful tools to use in this process. And also just notable events in your life that you remember from the past, just look up in the ephemeris or in your software what transits were happening at that time. Especially if you can localize it to the day. But even if it’s like a month or something, you can see what combination of transits were happening at that time, and how were they impacting particular areas of your birth chart. That can be just fascinating. I mean, I feel like I’ve mostly exhausted that at this point but every now and then I think of something else and look it up and I’m like, “Wow, that’s so cool.” Because it will always match really strikingly. So yeah, you can spend a while doing that. And that’s a great way to learn early on before you’ve experienced all the transits in real time that you’re watching.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then obviously, you have a lot more to work with if you’re working with your past chronology of like, you know, 20 years or 30 years or 40 or 50 years or however long you’ve been alive at that point, you’ve got a lot more data to go back and study compared to if you’re only paying attention to the present, you’re just talking about the current day or the current week or the current month or the current year, even if we’re talking about the year being the present and in terms of what outer planets transits you’re experiencing. That’s still a much more limited data set than if you’re looking at the past 30 years of your life and all of the major events and turning points that have occurred for you up to that point. For example, you could go back and using that Saturn transit example, you could go back and look at that time when you got fired from your job or you got laid off and see what the transits were. And if you see at that point that transiting Saturn was exactly on the degree of your Midheaven at that time, that in and of itself becomes a really impressive example from your own history of how transits can work out in practice. And that gives you useful data to start learning as an astrologer because then sometimes once you’ve developed those past experiences, you can apply that to other people. For example if you start sitting down with clients or friends or family, and you see that they have a certain transit that’s happening to them right now in the present, you might be able to then draw on your own personal experiences and say, “Well, when I had this transit 10 years ago, this was what happened to me.” And it may not work out precisely that way for you, but at least you know a certain archetypal range of experiences that are possible from that transit at that point.
LS: Yeah, definitely. This is really useful to do for your learning process if you’re learning astrology. It can also additionally be useful in terms of more contextualising your own experiences. For instance, typically especially earlier in our lives, we tend to take everything personally, you know? We don’t really have a stepped-back look in terms of like, we experienced this and we had a certain range of emotions around this event. And it’s really interesting to look back and apply the transits to what we’re going on. It kind of gives you an outside perspective in addition to how you felt at the time, like, “Oh, that’s what was going on at that time. That makes a lot of sense.” I, at least personally, I’ve felt that that’s useful sometimes to kind of give you a sense of like, of course this type of thing should have been happening at that time even if at the time I wasn’t pleased about it.” Yeah, I think it’s useful for that, too.
CB: I’m impressed that you’ve learned to stop taking things personally. [Leisa laughs] I myself, have not learned that. But I think I understand what you mean abstractly.
LS: It gives you a double consciousness. It gives you your personal experience and it also gives you the astrological look, which can be a little bit more objective sometimes.
CB: Yeah. Another way is that on the podcast, there’s this recurring thing we talk about it like #AstrologerGood, which is like something terrible happens in your life but when you look at it with astrology, the alignment of the planets at that time describes the event so well that you’re so impressed almost intellectually that the astrology worked so well in describing it that you’re not even mad at the event itself happening in some level, or at least you’re just momentarily sort of impressed by the astrology.
LS: Right. It can make you laugh rather than only grown or something. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great way. It’s again, a kind of a double consciousness of understanding something intellectually as well as experiencing it personally.
CB: Yeah. So astrology, and especially transits, becomes a way of being able to intellectually step outside of your life for a moment and get a different perspective. Which is a weird experience because we don’t usually have that experience of stepping outside of our own lives very often and being able to look at it truly objectively, but that’s one of the most bizarre and striking things about astrology especially when you’re looking at transits and events in your past is it truly does give you more of an objective view of some events that have happened to you up to this point.
LS: Yeah, exactly. Of course you can apply this to your own life, but I’ve found it also very striking when I’ve talked with people. Typically a lot of clients will come– if you’re doing client work or even just talking with a friend about their chart– a lot of them of course will want to know what’s coming up in the near future. But sometimes you do talk about something that happened in the past. And I’ve been kind of struck by how simple but healing that can be sometimes, like say if someone had a really difficult experience at some part of their life and then you say this is what was going on at that time. It’s not that that always makes it all better for everyone, but it can be. It can really be like, “Oh, of course that kind of thing was supposed to happen,” rather than it was random. I think that can go a long way to make people feel like, “Oh, this thing wasn’t random. It didn’t just target me, it was just the natural cycle of this planet through my chart.”
CB: Yeah. Well, and you and I have a long-standing debate about this and I don’t know if your views have changed. But for me, I see that the alignment of those major transits with specific important events and turning points in a person’s life as imbuing our lives with a greater sense of meaning and purposeness and orderliness that implies that things are more deliberate and sort of faded or just the opposite of random and meaningless but instead there’s something else going on and there’s some sort of pre-existing narrative that we’re born into that we play out. And there’s something that’s kind of interesting and reassuring about that to me. I don’t know where you’re at with that at this point or if your views have changed.
LS: Yeah, no. I think pretty similar at this point. It’s not to say that that makes everything better if you do have a hard time, but there’s still something to be said for it not being like, this is random, you know? Because random can sometimes seem to equal meaningless not necessarily for everyone. But yeah, it can go that way. Because it’s like, “Well, why did this happen?” There’s no reason. There’s nothing you can point to to say why did this happen. And therefore, it’s like I’m just being randomly targeted by the universe, you know? [laughs] Versus like, “There’s something about this orderly cycle of these planets orbit that goes through these particular areas of my chart. That said, I should be having this type of experience roughly at this time.” Yeah. And so there’s something– it’s not to say it tells you exactly why that is, but it does at least say there’s something orderly about it.
CB: Yeah. What’s freaky about it is it goes beyond the initial sort of unsettlingness of the birth chart itself, which is just like a snapshot of where the planets were when you were born can indicate something about your personality or your character, or even some events and circumstances that will happen at some point in your life during the course of it. Because transits takes that one step further, and it starts showing that pretty much all of the subsequent major events in your life to the extent that they coincide with a major transit, that also describes that event to some extent. One of the things you have to realize is even those transits themselves were predetermined, because the movements of the planets and the orbits of the planets are something that’s so fixed and so predefined based on gravity and based on the rotations of the planets, that we can predict exactly where the planets will be in five or 10 or 20 or even 100 years. So it means that from the moment you are born, every transit that is ever going to happen to you during the course of your life from the moment of birth until the moment of death is something you could already chart out theoretically at any point that you wanted to look at it during the course of your life. You could look it up in Ephemeris or in a piece of software and know exactly where Saturn will be in your chart in 30 years or 40 years or 50 years or what have you.
There’s some limitations in terms of the number of calculations that you can do and the amount of data that is to process and go through as well as other things about transits being contextual based on where you’re at at different points in your life. So they may not make as much sense if you’re attempting to look at something like 50 years in the future, even if it does in fact describe some events accurately that will take place at that point. Anyway, the point is just that transits, because they’re based on planetary movements, are all predetermined in some way. And that has some really interesting philosophical implications.
LS: Right, it’s kind of like a clockwork universe. It’s part of tracking the metaphysical structure of the universe or the structure of our lives. I think that’s what it does. You know, you fill in the context in terms of what’s actually going on in your life at that point, but you can still kind of map the infrastructure, I guess, at any given point in your life.
CB: Right. All right, I think that brings us to the third thing you can do with transits, which is that you can use transits in order to look at things that are coming up in the future. So it’s not just the present, it’s not just the past. But the premise is that once you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve taken those previous two steps, and if you’ve established that transits are accurately describing not just events in the present and your present experience of life, that there’s a correlation between the sky and the Earth in the present moment or between the sky and your life and subjective experience of events, and if you’ve also established that major events in your past have coincided with major transits also at the same time, then by extension you can also take that information and look at what transits are coming up in the future and what planetary alignments are going to happen to your birth chart at certain fixed or certain specific periods in the future. And then by extension, those planetary alignments should actually tell you some things that are going to happen in your life in the future that haven’t taken place yet.
LS: Right. For instance, you can map out the next year or so and say what parts of this coming year are going to be impacted by certain, or will coincide with certain qualities in different areas of my life? How long will those last or how quickly will they move on to a different area and that sort of thing. You can also look further ahead, but as we were just saying, you lose a little bit of the context because you kind of need to know what you’re doing at that point and then you can kind of piece together the specifics a little bit more of what those planets might represent. But even without, you can still say, “This area of my life will have this certain quality to it, or this combination of qualities at this certain point in time.”
CB: Yeah. Like, if you’re having that Saturn transit through the 10th house and it says that you’re going to have an obstacle or setback in terms of your career at that specific points in time like 30 years in the future, you may not know the context yet because you don’t know what specific job you’re gonna be having. You just know you’re gonna have that experience primarily, especially if we’re just looking at that one transit in isolation of some sort of career setback at that time. And then once you get there 30 years later, you know that you’ve had that job for two or three years at that point, but then there was this unexpected change in the economy and they had to downsize and you got laid off or what happened and that was the specific manifestation at the time. But that may have been a transit that you saw coming and you had a general archetypal understanding of many years or decades earlier.
LS: Right. Yeah, and it is important to emphasize the archetypal nature because there can be a combination of qualities, it won’t always be just the one thing. There can be, for instance in that example, a setback with regard to career or being let go from a job or that kind of specific. It can also be you just have to work harder for some reason in the area of career for that two and a half to three years when that’s transiting your 10th house. It can be you’re working with someone older at that point for some reason, that would also be like a Saturn archetype. There can be a variety of things that go along with each individual transit.
CB: Yeah, and I think we’ll get into the archetypal nature of prediction later in this. But anyways, this ability to take transits and project them out in the future and have them accurately predict or anticipate certain trends or certain events or certain experiences, whether they’re subjective or objective in the future that have not occurred yet, this is the reason why transits becomes one of the main timing techniques in astrology. Because it really raises the question and it raises this really tantalizing possibility, you know, just as a basic premise if you’re just coming into astrology new, which is like, “If that works, does that give astrologers some ability to see into the future?” And you know, the answer to that is yes. That’s why transits then become one of the most interesting and important techniques that astrologers use on a regular basis.
LS: Right. It’s surprisingly simple once you do learn how to track them, and then you can learn lots of other techniques that are more advanced. But honestly, most astrologers even if they do know lots of events techniques, pretty commonly track transits, you know, at least as one of the things they’re doing. It’s basic, it’s simple, but it does reflect reality.
CB: Yeah, it’s a very powerful and effective timing technique. It’s probably the most powerful or effective one, even knowing other timing techniques that can do some very interesting and very useful things. All right, that’s that section. Why don’t we move into a little section here talking about how to calculate transits next.
LS: Mhm, sounds good.
CB: All right. We like to do it old school initially and at first, and what I usually recommend is one of the first ways that’s really good to learn how to look up transits is to get a copy of an Ephemeris– either a print one or a digital one– and learn how to use an Ephemeris because an Ephemeris will show you how the planets move and it will allow you to look up the transits at any given date in the past, the present, or the future. So yeah, you got an Ephemeris relatively early on, right?
LS: Yeah, I did. I got multiple, actually. Yeah. You can use software, which we also do, but it can be a good thing to start with an Ephemeris because it shows you what is actually happening. It also shows you not just at a glance for the day or for that week, but you can look forward and backwards with ease. It’ll also show you when the planets are doing something different than their usual rate of motion, since some of them go retrograde and that will impact how long for instance they stay in a certain region by sign. So, it is good to start with that to know what you’re actually working with before you kind of let computers do it for you.
CB: Yeah. First things first, get a copy of your birth chart because you need to know your birth chart of course as your reference point for what transits you’re trying to look up to and how they relate back to the natal chart. There’s free websites, astro.com is probably the best one. There’s also some newer ones like Astro-Seek that are good for looking up your birth chart and calculating it correctly. There’s also software that you can get, for example for Windows, the software programme that I use and that we’re going to use at different points during the course of this episode is called Solar Fire from alabe.com. You can use the promo code AP15 in order to get a discount on that software. If you use a Mac, then there’s similar software that’s made by the same programmers or was made by the same programming team at some point called Astro Gold, and that’s pretty good for calculating birth charts and transits using software on Mac. For that, it’s the same thing, use promo code ASTROPODCAST15 for a 15% discount on that. For apps if you have a phone or a tablet, for both Android and iPhone we use Astro Gold on our mobile phones basically in order to calculate birth charts and transits. Astro Gold’s a great programme for that.
So get your birth chart first, then get a copy of an Ephemeris. If you want to get a printed Ephemeris as a book, which I would definitely recommend, I’m a big print book fan and there’s something about being able to flip through the pages of a printed Ephemeris. It’s super useful and super quick. The one we recommend is called The American Ephemeris 1950-2050 at Noon. That’s the one we usually recommend as a printed one. If you want to get a free online digital PDF Ephemeris, then you can get that from astro.com, just Google astro.com ephemeris and it’ll come up with a page where you can pull up an Ephemeris for any year, basically in the past century or even centuries in the future or the past. I have an image from astro.com ephemeris from the PDF that I can show just to give an example. This is an Ephemeris from the astro.com ephemeris that shows the planetary positions for the month of August 2022, which is the month that we’re in now. At the very top, it shows the symbols for the planets and then on the left side it shows the days of the month and the days of the week. And then basically what you do is just look at the intersection between those rows and columns if you want to look up the positions of the planets. For example, right now it’s August 17th so on the left column, we look up the 17th. And then if you want to look up the planet Venus, we look at the Venus column and see where that intersects, and we see that Venus is at roughly six degrees of the sign Leo today. And that tells us where the planet Venus is today. But then by extension, you then also realize that it shows you also where Venus was earlier in the month, that it shifted from the sign of Cancer to Leo on about the 12th of the month, and you can see where it will be later this month. So, you can track the movements of Venus and what sign and what degree of each sign of the zodiac that the planet is during the course of a given month. And then you can see that it’ll do that for all of the other planets. So for the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, etc. An ephemeris is just a sort of an analogue way of tracking the movements of the planets and to be able to track transits and understand how the planets move.
LS: Right. Yeah. Especially if you’re not yet familiar with the cycles of the different planets and the kinds of movements they do, it can be good to track them in the Ephemeris at first in particular in order to not be surprised.
CB: Yeah. I actually did a whole episode on this, episode 304, I did with Patrick Watson and you can Google that. It’s just titled How to Read an Ephemeris. Patrick and I went through the whole process of reading an Ephemeris and what it’s good for and different things you can do with it in detail. But for our purposes, we’re primarily just using it to look up transits. And that’s what it can be really useful for here, so we would recommend it relatively early on in your studies. What you want to do when you’re using the Ephemeris to look up transits is that you want to compare what sign and what house placements different planets are transiting through in your chart at the time. And just compare them where they were in your birth chart. One of the ways you could do this is by printing out a copy of your birth chart from someplace like astro.com or wherever, and then just write where the transiting planets are for the day or the time period that you’re studying outside the wheel of the chart itself. So if I went to astro.com and just printed up this copy of my birth chart that has the wheel and has the planets on the inside, I would just take a pen and write outside the wheel where each of the planets are in the individual signs. And that’s going to tell me where they are in the individual houses in my chart at the present moment in time, as well as if they’re close to the exact degrees of any other planets in the chart.
LS: Right. Yeah, and so the different houses they are moving through are going to depict what areas of life that these qualities are going to correspond to at that time. We primarily use whole sign houses so if you don’t already have a preferred house system, you can try starting with that as the default. That’s also particularly nice to track because whole sign houses mean an entire sign is equal to an entire house in your chart, meaning a whole area of life is what the houses are. And so you can pretty neatly track the transits as well because when they shift signs, they also shift houses, if you’re using whole sign houses.
CB: Right. Yeah. So in an Ephemeris, you can see how quickly the planets move through a sign, which is really useful. You can see when planets slow down and station retrograde or direct. When a planet stations retrograde it starts moving backwards in the signs of the zodiac rather than forwards. You can also identify exact alignments between planets based on the degrees of the planets. This happens, for example, when two planets conjoin in the same degree of a sign. For example when the planet Venus lines up and meets the same degree as the planet Jupiter in the same sign of the zodiac, that would be a conjunction or an alignment of those two planets. You can also look at when planets are aligned on the exact same degrees in different signs by different aspects. For example, the Trine is when two planets are exactly 120 degrees away from each other in the zodiac. So you can look up and identify when the planets formed those type of aspects or configurations as well. Yeah, just lots of things you can do with the Ephemeris. This is basically the raw data in Ephemeris that a software programme will depict graphically in graphic means. We’re starting here with the Ephemeris just that way you know how other charts essentially are generated.
LS: Exactly. Yeah, it’s good to know what it’s actually doing before you’re kind of told and you might miss some details.
CB: Right. All right. That’s the basic, the hard way, basically, like trudging up the snow both ways sort of old school style way of tracking transits by using an Ephemeris. It’s a little bit inprecise. But in terms of visualizing transits, let’s go into a new section talking about that for a few minutes.
LS: Okay.
CB: All right. As I said earlier, astrologers usually visualize transits by drawing them around the wheel of a birth chart. Usually this involves putting a basic birth chart in the middle then drawing the planets outside that wheel. One of the ways that you can do this, as I said, is printing up a copy of your chart from astro.com and then drawing the planets around it. But they also have, when you cast your chart on astro.com, there’s actually a cool little button up in the top right corner where it has a plus sign and it says With Transits. And if you click that, it will recalculate the chart but then it will draw the planets and where they’re at in the sky on the current day around the outside wheel of the chart in green. So we can see my chart now visually, but then in the outside wheel we can see that Mars is at like 27/28 degrees of Taurus in the sky right now in the outside wheel. Or Saturn is at like 22/21 degrees of Aquarius on the left side. Or Mercury is up there in the top right at 22 degrees of Virgo. So, that becomes a much quicker and easier way to visualise transits by having the computer generate the transits on the outside wheel.
LS: Yeah. It can be good to kind of do both early on and start with the Ephemeris, but then when you actually see it pictured as transits around your chart in software, then you can get a better visual understanding of what’s actually happening. The Ephemeris will give you the motion long-term or if anything’s going to change direction and so forth, but you can actually see it more illustrated by doing that around the wheel.
CB: Yeah, and in most software programmes, this is also demonstrated or visualised using a bi-wheel, where for example in Solar Fire, here is my chart again on the inside. And then on the outside there’s a secondary wheel that just shows the positions of the planets in a secondary circle. And here, it’s a little bit more clear and it’s a little bit more distinct because they’re larger and it has the degrees written on them, as well as the signs next to each of them so you know precisely where each transiting planet is in the outside wheel. And you can kind of visualise not just what houses they’re moving through in your chart but you can also kind of visualise how they are in relation to certain planets in your birth chart at the same time.
LS: Yeah, and it’s especially nice to do that in software like this because you can actually animate the transits in addition, not just put them on the outside of the wheel.
CB: Yeah. In Solar Fire if you go to the Animate by Wheel feature when you select a natal chart, it’ll give you this little dialogue on the top right corner that allows you to animate if you click the animate button. And then you can select under Step By what increment of time if you want to move the chart forward or backward based on seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. So I’ll select days. And then if you click the Forward button, every time you click the Forward button it will move the transits on the outside wheel forward by one day, while keeping the inside wheel of the birth chart itself fixed or stationary.
LS: Right. That’s a super useful tool. If you just want to see where the planets are transiting compared to your birth chart next week or even like a few years from now, you just click the year three times and then you have the transits for three years from today. It’s pretty useful.
CB: Yeah. You can even press the play button and it’ll move them forward at a day and just keep moving them forward. So you can actually visualise rapidly which days and weeks and months taking place over the course of a few seconds or a few minutes, and then you really start to get a sense at that point of how some of the inner planets move very quickly unless they station retrograde and start moving backwards. And some of the outer planets like Saturn, for example, move very slowly.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. Practically speaking, that’s super useful. Different astrologers have different layouts. Sometimes some layout styles will put the aspects in the middle, or they’ll create an aspectarian which will show you what transits are going exact at different times. It’s really a matter of what software programme you’re using and what settings you’ve created or what have you. But there’s different styles. But generally speaking, that’s the basic layout for most studies of transits. It’s birth chart in the middle, and then transits, and then outside bi-wheel basically. And what’s interesting about that is that that approach actually goes back potentially like 2000 years, because there’s been some ancient astrologers’ boards that have been found. Some of them just show a basic- It’s like a chess board that has a birth chart wheel like a wheel or a zodiac on the chessboard. And then the astrologer would take one of these out for a consultation and they would use little stones that represented each of the planets in order to visually depict a person’s birth chart. This seems to have been a pretty common practice in the ancient world in order to do chart readings. But there was one of these boards or possibly two of them that had been found, where it wasn’t just one wheel but instead there was one wheel in the middle and then there was a second bi-wheel on the outside. And one of the things that the astrologers may have used the second wheel for was to study transits, so that they would use stones for the birth chart in the middle wheel, but then they would use other stones to show where the planets were in the sky for different transits.
LS: Yeah, that’s really cool. That goes back so far. I still want one of those astrologers’ boards, even though most of my consultations are over Zoom. But I would do them in person for that if I get the astrologers’ boards.
CB: Yeah, I’m working on it. One of these days that’ll be a YouTube video at some point when I get that together. All right. So basically long story short, animating the chart in Solar Fire or Astro Gold or any of the other programmes that do that because it’s becoming a pretty standard thing that you can do in most software programmes and even some websites at some point, it basically just speeds up and it makes the process more precise of what you’re doing when you use an Ephemeris. Both methods are equally useful, it’s good to learn how to do both. But ultimately, most astrologers will end up just using the software to speed it up and to make it more precise.
LS: Right. And in case it’s not clear why that would be more precise, the Ephemeris is very useful for seeing the motion over time but as Chris said, it’s set for noon, for instance, the one that we have, so it’s not showing especially the quicker moving transits like the Moon where they are precisely at a certain moment in time, it’s just a snapshot once each day. It’s good for some things, and then the precision of the exact moment is good in software or websites like that.
CB: Yeah, because the Ephemeris will just show you where the planet was either at the start of the day if you’re using a midnight Ephemeris, or at the middle of the day if you’re using a noon Ephemeris. It’ll tell you basically where it was at the beginning of that day and then you’ll have to jump 24 hours to the next day to see where it was at the start of the following day. It doesn’t show you the in-between in an Ephemeris, whereas a software programme you can animate it by hours or minutes in order to see exactly when certain transits will occur.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Speaking of that, that’s actually another really good thing to use that I always recommend that people start with and use regularly when they’re first learning transits, which is the personal daily horoscope that astro.com has. If you go to astro.com, you go to, I believe it’s their daily horoscope which they sometimes call their personal daily horoscope. Once you enter your birth data, it’s going to actually tell you which transits are going exact during the course of that day. It’ll highlight one specific transit and it’ll tell you when that goes exact. For example it says that transiting Venus is sextile my natal Chiron and my birth chart exact at 11:37 am today on August 17th 2022, and then below that it says other transits occurring today; Mercury trine Mars exact at 2:03 am, Moon opposition Pluto exact at 0048 so 12:48 am, Moon trine Jupiter exact at 1315 so that’s 1:15 pm, or Moon opposition Saturn exact at 2:27 pm. So it shows all of those short-term transits, it also tells you about some long-term outer planet transits that are happening just below that such as Uranus opposite Saturn, Chiron trine Venus, Jupiter sextile Chiron, etc. This is super, super useful because it will tell you– basically it’ll calculate all those transits for you. You can also click on them, especially if you pay for their extended daily horoscope. I think there’s some days like Thursdays it gives it to you for free, but you can click on each one and it’ll give you actually an interpretation of that transit usually from Rob Hands’ book, Planets in Transit.
LS: Yeah, I also really recommend using this especially early on. I paid for the extended version early on. It just gives you a really nice snapshot of the transits, it gets you used to looking at what transits are going on at certain times. And even now, I don’t watch it nearly as often on astro.com these days but occasionally I will. I look and I’m like, “Oh, right, I forgot about that transit but that’s happening right now.” So it’s actually really useful whether you’re beginner or otherwise, although definitely for beginners it’s useful.
CB: Yeah. Because sometimes when you’re just trying to eyeball what your transits are on a given day using an Ephemeris and based on your memory of your birth chart placements, or if you’re trying to eyeball it even with a bi-wheel, you may overlook some. That’s one of the reasons why sometimes programmes like this or websites like this calculate and give you a list of what transits are close by or are occurring that day can be super useful because there may be some that you overlook.
LS: Exactly.
CB: All right, we’re taking a little bit of a break. I did want to mention really quickly the Patreon for the Astrology Podcast. So, this is a long basically workshop that we’re doing that we’re putting out there for free on Transits. And if this was in the past like 10 years ago or what have you, this would literally be like a workshop that people would probably fly out to a conference and spend an entire day going through with us, or even potentially like a weekend or something like that. But because of how things are set up with the podcast, what I do with the podcast is I record these free lectures and workshops and teachings on astrology, and put them out there for free. And the way that I’m able to do that is a bunch of listeners and supporters have actually signed up for my page on Patreon, where they voluntarily donate like $1 or $4 or $10 or whatever each month, in order to help me to keep doing this work and in order to help me to pay for editing and some of the other things that I need to do in order to produce these episodes. So if you’re enjoying this content on my channel, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/astrologypodcast. And in exchange for becoming a patron you’ll actually get access to different bonuses like early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings of different episodes, a monthly auspicious elections report that Leisa and I do where we tell you the four most lucky dates in the coming month. We also have exclusive episodes that are only available for certain patrons, and there’s even an option to get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. Those are some of the benefits and there’s a number of others. So if you’d like to support this work, if you enjoy this episode and you want to kick us a few dollars, then consider going to patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
All right, let’s go ahead and resume where we left off. Now we’re going to move into a section talking about sign-based versus degree-based transits. Basically, transits are measured both by sign as well as by degree. And this is primarily a spatial distinction, right?
LS: Right. Yeah. For instance when the Sun, which takes a month to go through a sign and then approximately a year to go all the way around the zodiac, when for instance it comes back to the sign where your Sun was when you were born, that’s a recurrence of the transit by sign. Now, we could celebrate our birthdays all month but typically we celebrate it on one day, which is when the transiting Sun comes back to the exact degree of where our natal Sun was when we were born. And so that’s one specific degree out of 30 degrees of each sign.
CB: Yeah. So to give a demonstration of the most important birth chart to go back to my birth chart, I think.
LS: [laughs] You’re so freely sharing your birth chart.
CB: I think we all agree the most important birth chart. So I’m going to animate the chart in the bi-wheel again for those listening to the audio version. Visually, we see my chart on the inside. Up at the top of the chart we see the sign Scorpio is my 10th whole sign house, and that we see my Sun is at nine degrees of Scorpio. I’m going to animate the chart, and we see the Sun on the outer wheel on the right top side of the chart. It’s at like 20-something, 25. It’s at 24 Leo today but I’m gonna move it forward, I’m gonna move the Sun forward at an increment of one day every time I make a click basically, and we see that the Sun moves forward at about one degree each day over the course of a year. So it’s pretty regular, pretty reliable. That means that the Sun takes about one month to move through each of the signs of the zodiac. What we’ll see as I keep moving is that eventually later in October, the Sun is moving through the sign of Libra and then it will ingress or move into the sign of Scorpio at about October 23rd this year. So the calendar date or calendar month of October 23rd at about 4:00 in the morning, we see the Sun move from 29 degrees of Libra into zero degrees of Scorpio. That means the Sun by sign has returned back to where the Sun was when I was born in the sign of Scorpio. So we would say that that’s a sign-based transit of the Sun coming back to my natal sign or a sign-based conjunction since a conjunction is either when a planet is on the same degree or occupies the same sign.
So as a sign-based transit, the Sun is going to be in the sign of Scorpio and therefore I’m going to be experiencing that transit of the Sun returning back to its natal sign all the way from October 23rd until about a month later. The Sun will move through the sign of Scorpio during the course of the month, and then eventually it’ll leave Scorpio around November 21st/November 22nd when it moves into Sagittarius. So the entirety of this transit of Sun going through Scorpio then would be a sign-based conjunction of the Sun. However, there’s also an exact degree-based conjunction when the transiting Sun returns back to exactly nine degrees and 36 minutes of Scorpio, that’s when the Sun returns back to the exact degree of my natal Sun’s position. And that would be the exact degree-based transit of transiting Sun conjunct my natal Sun, which we also know as basically the moment of the solar return, or in more generic language we know of as the day of a person’s birthday. So a person’s birthday is literally usually when the transiting Sun returns back to where the natal Sun was on the day of a person’s birth or pretty close to it. That’s one of the funny things about transits, is that even in normal society for people that don’t even have any real conception or understanding of astrology or of transits, we actually use transits anyways in our normal life when we talk about things like birthdays, which is simply a transit of the Sun coming back to where it was when you were born.
LS: Yeah, exactly. And while you’ll sometimes hear for instance people say, “What’s your birthday season?” Like, if it’s the same month that you were born or the same sign in which your Sun was when you were born, you only have one actual birthday day. Now, just to make the specific distinction, sometimes because the astrology since we celebrate birthdays on the exact date that we were born, sometimes the transiting Sun returns to the natal Sun either slightly before or slightly after astrologically. So occasionally, your solar return can be the day before or the day after. But that’s essentially what we’re celebrating nonetheless.
CB: Right. That’s really important in terms of just tracking transits. And both of them are important, because for example when it’s Scorpio season and the Sun is moving through that sign, there is something very specific about the quality of that part of the year for you when your Sun moves back through the sign that it is when you were born. And that’s generically sort of a conjunction of the Sun with your Sun by sign. But then there’s something that’s more intense and more acute about experiencing your actual birthday and there’s something that does feel special about that, and a little bit more pointed or more intense in terms of experiencing that exact transit on the day that you were born, when the Sun comes back to the exact degree that it was in at the moment of your birth essentially.
LS: Yeah, exactly. Both of them are important, the sign-based transits and the degree-based transits. They just typically become more intensified when they get exact by degree or close by degree.
CB: Yeah, that’s one of the things that we really emphasize and like to distinguish is that you need to pay attention to both sign-based transits as well as degree-based transits but that degree-based transits will be more intense, oftentimes more important than the sign-based transit. But there can still be a quality of things being activated even when you’re talking about sign-based transits so it’s important not to overlook those. This is something that we’ve tried to revive from ancient astrology because in modern astrology, most transit theory is almost entirely degree-based. Which makes a little bit of sense in the sense that that tends to be when the most important event happens is around the time of an exact degree-based transit, not just of a conjunction but also other aspects like the trine or the square or the opposition or what have you. The exact transit is usually very close to the most obvious manifestation of an event. But in reality in ancient astrology, they would also pay attention to the whole sequence of events starting and ending when this planet first ingresses into the sign and then the whole sequence of events ending when the planet departs from that sign. And when looked at within that broader context, you can actually see much more about the circumstances surrounding things than if you’re only paying attention to the exact degree-based transit.
LS: Exactly. We use both in that way. So, considering a transit as the transit through the entire sign, but just that it becomes more intensified as it goes more exact by degree. And different astrologers kind of think about that differently. That’s why you’ll hear for instance some people talk about like, “Oh, what orb do you use for transits and things like that?” They’re basically saying how close does it need to be by degree for you to think it matters. And so our particular approach is counting it both by sign and by degree.
CB: Yeah. To give an example of that, when you’re talking about the Saturn return, for example. The Saturn return is when Saturn comes back to where it was when you were born. The first Saturn return occurs between the ages of 27 and 30, roughly. So let’s imagine that somebody was born with Saturn right in the middle of the sign Libra, so let’s say about 15 degrees of Libra in their birth chart. We would say that the Saturn return roughly speaking begins as soon as transiting Saturn comes back to and moves into the sign of Libra. So it comes back to the sign where you were born, that’s the beginning of the transit. Then at some point when Saturn gets to about 15 degrees of Libra, you have the exact Saturn return. And that’s the most acute part or the most intense part of that transit where the most important events will probably take place. But then the transit itself is not fully over until Saturn departs from Libra, which doesn’t occur, you know, takes like three years for that entire transit. Whereas the exact degree-based transit may be much shorter or much briefer in duration, or may only happen two or three times, you know, one time or three times over the course of a year.
LS: Exactly. That’s an example of how we think about transits. It’s basically the entirety from the first time that the planet enters that sign until the last time it leaves that sign. It was important to state that way because sometimes it will retrograde back and forth between two signs. And then it will become the most exact when it’s returning by degree which means either [clears throat] some of the more important events may happen at that time and/or you may just feel qualitatively the specific qualities of that planet’s transit most acutely at that time.
CB: Yeah, for sure. There’s some programmes like Archetypal Explorer that I really like that depict some of these transits on a graph, and it shows you when the exact transit is occurring but it also gives you kind of like a range where it’s still in effect. For example, here’s to my chart, this is a transit timeline from archetypalexplorer.com where it shows on a graph for example the Saturn conjunct Moon transit that I’m having right now since my Moon is at 24 Aquarius, and Saturn right now is at 22 Aquarius. It shows that transit having gone exact in early July. And then it’s starting to move away because Saturn is moving away from that exact degrees, so the graph starts dipping or going downwards. But we can see that it’s still in effect in August because it’s still within a few degrees of exact. Or there’s other transits there like Uranus opposite Saturn, which it shows two peaks of because there were two exact hits during the course of 2022. But it remained very close within just a few degrees during the entirety of the year so the transit graph never really fully drops off, because the transit’s remaining very close so that it’s almost constant as a background transit in some sense.
LS: Yeah, exactly. I actually really like this depiction visually and I’m not even a particularly visually oriented person. But I like that in particular how it shows that multiple influences are still happening. And then it does show when they become exact, but it also shows that they don’t disappear when they’re past exact. It kind of shows how much they’re still in the picture and for how long. So yeah, it’s a really nice visual depiction of your transits.
CB: Yeah, and the other thing is that it shows like you said, even though we’re trying to simplify things by talking about individual transits in isolation, in reality you’re always having a lot of different transits at different points. This is just showing outer planet transits like major outer planet transits that I have going on right now, but even with that we can already see 1, 2, 3, 4 different outer planet transits that are major outer planet transits that I’m experiencing during the course of this year, and that some of them are like overlapping or going exact very close together at different points in time. Like Saturn conjunct Moon, Saturn square Mercury, Uranus opposite Saturn, Saturn square Saturn and so on and so forth. So all of those are indicating different things about different parts of my life but the overlap of them is showing that sometimes there’s multiple important things that are happening in your life at the same time or roughly around the same time, which then very much fits in with our human experience and makes sense of our human experience, which is that it’s very rarely ever just one thing that’s happening, but sometimes especially during an important nexus of time in your life, there can be five different things that are super important that all happen at once. And part of the reason for that is that sometimes you have these major transits that will overlap at the same time.
LS: Right. I really like that visual depiction. And also similarly to the astro.com transit reports, it will kind of remind you of like, “Oh, I forgot I was still having that transit, that it hasn’t gone away.” You may be more focused personally on like one or two, and then you’re like, “Oh, there’s a third one still hanging out there.”
CB: Right, for sure. So that was outer planets, but then you can also display inner planets that happen much more quickly and much more frequently, those inner planet transits. This one’s showing transits of the inner planets Mercury, Venus and Mars to natal planets in my chart. Some of those are spread out like it shows around Monday the 15th, the transiting Mercury sextiled my Saturn exactly. And then a few days later around the 17th which is today, transiting Mercury trined my Mars. And so those are separate discrete transits that are spread out by a few days but then later on we can see some inner planet transits that are happening on the same day. Like on the 19th, that transiting Venus will square my natal Sun, and that transiting Mercury will sextile my Mercury on the same day. So, that’s actually an interesting thing because sometimes that can really help you when you start seeing in the future a bunch of transits overlapping all around the same time period that can clue you in that there’s an important turning point in your life that’s coming up at that time. And when you start seeing a lot of transit activity in a person’s chart, that’s when you know something important is coming up.
LS: Right, exactly. So while we may be thinking about them one at a time, yeah when more of them coalesce, it tends to be a more active period whatever is going on for you.
CB: Right. And of course, the thing that gets a little tricky about that is if you really study everything pretty closely, if you start putting in all of the planetary transits, you start realising that there’s kind of a lot of things going on at the same time. So here is a few months timeframe for me just showing outer planet transits like Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. But if I start adding in other planets like Jupiter, all of a sudden we get another line that’s thrown in there. If we add Mars, we see a bunch of little transit lines of like Mars making exact transits over the course of the month. If we add in Venus, then we get a bunch of other little lines. Yeah, basically it starts getting really complicated if you add in all of the planets. At some point what we’ll have to talk about and deal with as one of the complications of transits is that it can get kind of complicated and hard to deal with the amount of data that you have to process at some points, and also sorting through and determining which transits are going to be more important and which ones are going to be less important. But initially at least you should be aware of that there can be a lot of transits going on sometimes, versus there can be other times when there’s not as many transits going on.
LS: Agreed.
CB: Yeah. All right. So, that is sign-based versus degree-based transits. That is that, we’ll come back to some of that later I think with some demonstrations. The next thing we need to talk about is the length of transits, which is that some transits are really brief and others have a longer duration. That’s something that we demonstrated already a little bit there in the Archetypal Explorer graph which just shows them graphed and it can show how some inner planet transits are really quick and how outer planet transits are real slow. But it’s something that’s worth emphasising that different planets have different orbital speeds, and will move through the signs of the zodiac at different times. This was a diagram that StellaGraphia made for me from Reddit that just shows a natal chart on the inside wheel. And then it shows where the different planets will move how far through the signs they’ll move during the course of one year, and how some of the inner planets like the Sun and Moon, and Mercury and Venus during the course of a year will go all the way around the zodiac by the end of the year. Whereas there’s other slower-moving planets like Mars, for example, that will only get, let’s say in this instance, about a third of the way through the zodiac. It’ll go through a third of the signs of the zodiac during the course of a year. Or Jupiter which will only go through about one sign of the zodiac over the course of a year. Or Saturn which will only go through maybe a third of the zodiacal sign during the course of a year.
LS: Right. There’s a pretty big disparity in how long the transits last, how long they’re in influence for ranging from the beginning of the Moon which is only unassigned from two and a half to three days until it moves to the next sign all the way out to Pluto transits which can be anywhere from 12 to 31 years in a sign. So there’s pretty big differences in terms of how long the planets will be hanging around one area of your chart, or even a natal planet at certain times.
CB: Yeah, and this is something that I try to illustrate sometimes, for example in the monthly forecast episodes, one of the images that Paula Belluomini illustrates for me is a planetary movements calendar which shows where each of the planets start at the beginning of the month, and where they end up by the end of the month. So it just shows you what signs of the zodiac they’re going through– and this is helpful as a visualisation once you know transits, because then you know what sectors of your chart or what houses the transits are passing through during the course of that month.
LS: Right. Yeah. And so it’s good to get a sense of how long these lasts because for instance if you say, “Oh, the Moon is in a certain sign,” that’s not groundbreaking. You may have small effects from that particularly if it goes over a natal planet in your chart. But it’s not groundbreaking because it moves so quickly, it will be in the next sign within about two and a half days. Versus, say you have one of the outer planets hanging around a natal placement. That could be there for several years, even close to you know, going back and forth close to the same degree. So that’s really important to keep in mind because they have different levels of impact, you know, because of that.
CB: Yeah. So generally speaking all other things considered, slower-moving outer planets tend to have more impact than faster-moving inner planet transits. Partially due to frequency, and partially due to just the length of time that you experience an outer planet transit compared to an inner planet transit. There can be some exceptions to that and some caveats to that rule; like when inner planets station retrograde, that can really elongate those transits. And there’s other timing techniques known as like Time Lord techniques that can help to identify when certain planets are going to be more important than others. And sometimes with those techniques that can tell you that a certain inner planet transit is going to be way more important than it normally would be. But that being said all other things aside, outer planet transits tend to be longer lasting and more impactful than inner planet transits.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: All right. Again, I also want to show an animation. So a couple of years ago in August of 2020, this was an animation that Hugh Tran made of the planetary movements calendar that Paula and I put together. It just shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and then it actually animates them and moves the planets through the signs of the zodiac so you can actually see their movement over the course of a month. This is August of 2020 that we are animating this for, and you can just see how the inner planets they tend to move through the signs over the course of the month relatively rapidly, whereas the outer planets for the most part are just staying pretty stationary in terms of the sign of the zodiac that they started in versus the sign of the zodiac that they end the month in.
LS: Yeah, that’s a really nice animation because you have visual depiction of what’s actually going on there. So you can see some of them are just not moving much at all, some of them… Especially you can see the Moon most rapidly moving around and then the other ones somewhat slowly but moving after that.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s pretty good when it comes to length. It did mention retrogrades, which is that planets can slow down, change direction and start moving backwards. This can sometimes cause like an inner planet transit normally, for example transiting Mercury, it will usually pass over and conjoin a natal planet in your chart very quickly over the course of a day so it’s a very brief transit. But if transiting Mercury does that, if it conjoins one of your natal planets but then shortly after that, Mercury can slow down and station retrograde and then do a U-turn, at which point it’ll come backwards and it will back up or walk over and conjoin that natal planet in your chart a second time. And then eventually Mercury will slow down and station direct and then it will go over that planet a third time. For that reason, retrogrades can be really important because they can elongate and intensify transits that otherwise might have been shorter in duration.
LS: Right. Sometimes that can be pretty dramatically so. Like for instance as we’re recording today, in three days Mars is going to go into Gemini by transit. But it’s going to have an upcoming retrograde and because of that, while Mars normally takes about six weeks to transit through each sign, it will instead be in Gemini for seven months which is quite a big difference than usual. That’s what those retrogrades can do, they can really elongate those transits either by sign or by degree depending on where they’re hitting specifically in your chart. Same thing with Venus retrogrades and Mercury retrogrades. The planets further out like Jupiter in outward, those do go retrograde. But they’re retrograde for so long that it kind of is just part of their natural rhythm versus say a Venus retrograde or a Mars retrograde really changes the length of time that it’s in a certain sign.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Although even outer planet stations, if an outer planet stations very close within a degree of a natal planet near a chart of an aspect– an exact aspect with the natal planet– then the stations will tend to be important like putting an exclamation mark next to the transit.
LS: Right, exactly. Stations are simply when from the vantage point of Earth it looks like the planet is slowing down to change direction either forward or backward. That’s what it means when a planet stations, and it’s kind of just temporarily sitting in one spot longer than usual. And that’s why you have an extra emphasis on that energy, both in general and especially so if it’s actually in close aspect to something by degree in your chart when it does that.
CB: Right. Here’s an illustration that Stella made for me of the upcoming Mars retrograde transit, where Mars is going to be retrograde in the sign of Gemini from October 30th through January 2nd. And so we can see that it’s going to station retrograde at 25 degrees of Gemini, and then it’s going to retrograde back and station direct at eight degrees of Gemini. So that’s going to highlight that range of degrees from about eight Gemini to about 25 Gemini, because anybody that has natal planets either in that range of degrees in Gemini from eight to 25 or anywhere in one of the other seven signs that make an exact aspect of a sextile, square, trine, or opposition in the same set of degrees and the other signs, that aspect to that degree range, those are going to get activated by that Mars retrograde three different times.
LS: Right. Yeah, exactly. And then that’s especially so if you actually have a planet at eight degrees of one of those signs or 25 degrees of one of those signs, and even more so if those are actually eight degrees or 25 degrees of Gemini itself because then you get an actual station by conjunction on a placement in your chart. So that’s part of how you know if the retrograde is going to be particularly important for you compared to some other retrogrades.
CB: Yeah, so that’s true of Mars retrogrades, that’s true of Mercury retrogrades, and that’s actually the reason why some Mercury retrogrades are more important than others for people and they fit. More of that classic Mercury retrograde symbolism is it tends to be when you have a natal planet that’s closely aspected by that retrograde, that’s when you’ll tend to experience it a bit more acutely compared to other Mercury retrogrades.
LS: Absolutely.
CB: So for example, this is one that Stella illustrated from where Mercury went retrograde in Aquarius and then it retrograded back into Capricorn between January 14th and February 3rd. And it went retrograde at 10 degrees of Aquarius and then it stationed direct at 24 Capricorn. So it was activating that range of degrees in those two signs as well as the same range of degrees in seven other pairs of signs based on the other aspects.
LS: Right. And if you’re just getting used to looking at transits, that’s why for instance they don’t always keep moving at the same motion through the ephemeris like we were talking about earlier. Because of the occasional retrogrades, they can move between two signs sometimes depending on what degree in the first sign they go retrograde at.
CB: Right. Yeah, so that’s a good reason why it’s really important to get an Ephemeris or start working with the animate feature in a software programme in order to really start to learn how some of these different planetary cycles work, because that becomes very crucial as a basic foundation for understanding transits.
LS: Right. It is also important to note at this point that the Sun and the Moon are the only placements that do not go retrograde by transit.
CB: Right. All of the other planets do go retrograde at some point with different frequency like Mercury goes retrograde three times a year. But the Sun and Moon do not ever turn retrograde, those are the only two celestial bodies that we use in astrology in terms of the planets at least that don’t.
All right. So let’s move into the next section where I wanted to talk a little bit about degree-based transits and orbs. So, returning back to the sign-based versus degree-based distinction, astrologers generally agree that the experience of a transit is the most acute when the transit reaches the exact degree that it was in in the birth chart. For example, when Saturn returns back to not just the exact sign but the exact degree of the birth chart, somewhere around age 28 or so. However, there’s some disagreement or there’s some ambiguity over when exactly a transit begins and what orbs to use, which are the different ranges that astrologers use for when an aspect or when a transit becomes operative. So, yeah, it goes back to the ambiguity of orbs. In our approach as we said earlier, a transit begins when it becomes configured to a natal planet by sign but then it grows more intense the closer it gets to an exact aspect by degree. So generally speaking, when a planet is within one degree of an exact transit, that tends to be the most potent time in that transit. But even once it’s getting within two to three degrees, things can still be really operative or really intense. But that one degree range does seem to be the peak of intensity when it’s either one degree on either side, either applying or separating.
LS: Definitely. And while we do pay most attention to first the sign and then the degree, because we do pay attention to close aspects by degree, that can occasionally cross the sign boundary. So mostly we’re looking at transits through a single sign and then when it gets the most exact within a few degrees, and especially one degree of the actual natal placement, however, say something is transiting at the very very end of one sign. If you have a placement say in the first degree of the next sign, that will probably still be something that you start to feel because it’s close by degree. So we’re using both of those.
CB: Yeah, especially if it’s within three degrees even if it’s across a sign boundary.
LS: Right.
CB: And sometimes for certain outer planet transits that range can even be a little bit wider?
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: This is one of the reasons why we like Archetypal Explorer again, because it plots the transits on a graph. For other programmes like astro.com, it tends to focus on and tell you what the operative range is based on when it’s within one degree of orb. So it’s gonna give you a wider range of when that’s operative for a more narrow range when it’s an inner planet where it’s going to be within a degree pretty quickly and then it’s going to move out of that. Whereas for other outer planet transits, it’s going to be within that one-degree range over a longer period of time. So it’s going to give you a wider window of when it’s operative.
LS: Right, since they move so slowly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. There’s other astrologers that use different transit ranges especially for outer planets. I think Richard Tarnas uses orbs that are 15 degrees for conjunctions and 10 degrees for squares. There’s a lot of debate and differences of opinion different astrologers use different orbs. But for the most part generally speaking, I think if you just adopt the view that the transit begins when it goes into a sign in which it’s configured, but then it gets more intense the closer it gets by degree, that you can’t really go wrong with that because it doesn’t completely sidestep the issue of orbs, but it makes the ambiguity of orbs in the tradition make more sense because you realise that it’s a much wider range than people sometimes realise.
LS: Right. Yeah. And that sidesteps a little bit because it also says it’s actually important that it’s entered the sign where you have a natal placement regardless of where you’re in the sign.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. All right. So, aspects. We’ve mentioned aspects a few times, we did want to clarify that we use the five major aspects for transits; which are the conjunction, sextile, square, trine, and opposition. Which are respectively by degree at zero degrees is the conjunction, 60 degrees is the sextile, 90 is the square, 120 is the trine, and 180 is the opposition.
LS: Right. So by sign, that would be for instance two planets in the same sign would be the conjunction, three signs apart would be the sextile, four signs apart would be the square, five signs apart is the trine, and seven signs apart is the opposition.
CB: Right. Some astrologers incorporate the use of minor aspects like the inconjunct or the semi-sextile or quintiles or other things like that, but for our purposes we’re going to focus on just the major aspects here because that’s all we use in our approach. But you should be aware that there’s other astrologers that sometimes use other aspects for transits or incorporate other aspects as well.
LS: Right. Which you did do an episode about at some point?
CB: Yeah, the episode on Minor Aspects with Rick Levine. All right, let’s move into another section where we’re going to start getting into the more technical stuff of interpretation and things like that now that we’ve gotten some of the basic technical stuff out of the way. I want to start this section first by talking about the different types of transits. So the first type of transit or the first category is a transiting planet making an aspect to a natal planet by sign. And then the second one within the same category is a transiting planet making a aspect to a natal planet by degree. So that’s basically everything we were just talking about here in that previous section based on the five major aspects and the distinction between sign-based aspects and degree-based aspects. The third type of transit that I want to mention is when a transiting planet moves through a natal house, which- So for example if transiting Saturn moves through the first house, or if transiting Jupiter moves through the 10th house, the entirety of that transit of that outer planet moving through that house is a specific transit of a sort just because you may be experiencing different events and circumstances in that area of your life based on that transit moving through that house for the entirety of that transit.
LS: Right. And that’s regardless of whether you have natal placements in that house or not. Of course it is usually more impactful if you do, but even if you don’t the transits still matters so that there’s a certain transit going through a certain house of your chart because that’s coinciding with a certain quality or combination of qualities during that time in this particular area of life, whatever that house represents.
CB: Yeah, and for those watching the video version here’s the diagram that shows some of the basic significations blending some ancient astrology and some modern astrology as applied to the 12 houses and what those different sectors of life mean, and what topics or areas of life might be activated when different planets transit through those sectors of your chart.
LS: Right. So if you’re just getting used to looking at transits or tracking your own transits, there’s a bunch of different things you can be looking at. And it’s not only transits to your own natal placements, those will be very important. But at any given time, all of the planets are transiting some particular house in your chart– a bunch of different houses in your chart, usually. And so those are things to always watch even if you don’t have a natal placement there.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I used that example of Britney Spears a month or two ago getting married when transiting Jupiter is moving through her seventh house, for example.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: Or we used an example of you said you got fired once when transiting Saturn moved through your 10th house. But then we were talking about both of those as being discrete specific events, but there was actually a build-up to both of those events, probably when Jupiter first moved into her seventh house, or when Saturn first moved into your 10th house, and then there was a sort of cascading sequence of events that occurred after that in the person’s life that affected that area of the life as the planet continued to move through that house. So that’s one of the reasons why, especially for us using whole sign houses, we really pay attention to a transit lasting for the entire duration of moving through the sign, because it’s going to be activating the topics associated with that house for as long as it’s transiting through that sign.
LS: Right. And so, you know, sometimes at different points especially if it’s a longer transit like a Saturn transit where it’s two and a half to three years through a sign, you can notice different facets of the qualities of that planet through that topical house. For instance, I don’t usually like to use my chart as an example but since we were talking about the Saturn hitting the Midheaven thing, that would be something like Saturn going into the 10th house and going, “I’m pretty bored at my job, I don’t really want to do this for the rest of my life. I’m kind of interested in astrology, I’m doing that on the side,” and gradually that being a process. And in that particular process, that also led to me not being as engaged with work, which can be a Saturn process through the 10th as well because it’s a withdrawal. You know, you’re withdrawing your energies because you’re concentrating them. That is a Saturn thing oftentimes. And so of course then that led to me getting fired for the only time in my life. But then the follow-through of that was then as it receded as a transit, that led to like, “What am I going to do next?” And down the road gradually and step by step fashion, that led to me actually going towards being self-employed with astrology. But that was just a part of the process. So you can see different stages kind of as that transit goes especially if it’s a longer one, say like Saturn on or Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, all of those are longer transits. Jupiter is still a year, but it’s no longer than a year.
CB: Yeah, that’s really important because basically while transits can sometimes as we said be discrete singular events, they’re oftentimes also describing a sequence of events that extend over a longer period of time. Sometimes for, you know, Jupiter transits an entire year, for Saturn transits it can be two to three years or what have you. And it’s important to be open to and be aware of both types, both scenarios, because otherwise it could be easy to overlook something if you’re trying to go back and study your past chronology and you’re just looking for singular events and whether a transit that was exact on a specific day exactly coincided with an event versus realising that that Saturn transit may be related to an entire time range that lasts for two to three years. And then you know better what to look for in terms of where their major career obstacles or contractions that happened during that timeframe.
LS: Right. And that goes back to one thing we were saying early on, which is that some transit things can be external events, but sometimes they’re also internal processes that can sometimes be linked to an eventual external event. So you have to kind of look for both, especially in the longer ones.
CB: Right. All right. That’s the third type of transit, is just transiting planet and the entire period that it’s moving through a natal house. The fourth type that I want to mention is when a transiting planet exactly aspects the exact degree of one of the four angles; which are the degree of the Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant or IC. Those are four very powerful and very pivotal and very personal parts of the chart, the exact degrees of the angles. And for us because we’re using whole sign houses, those four degrees can kind of float around the chart, but roughly coincide with the first, 10th, seventh, and fourth houses.
LS: Right. And so when a planet hits those pivotal points, often things come to a head in some fashion with that transit depending on how pivotal the particular transit is that we’re looking at. But still, that’s going to be a really sensitive point just like if it was a transiting planet was reaching the degree of a natal planet in your chart. It’s equally important and possibly even a little more so when it hits the exact degree of an angle. Those are kind of the most prominent little points around the outside of the chart in the four directions.
CB: Yeah. I had used the hypothetical example before of a Taurus rising chart and somebody that has the Midheaven around 10 degrees of Aquarius. So we would say the entire transit of Saturn in the 10th house of career would be as soon as Saturn moves into that sign and it would end once Saturn departed from that sign. But around the timeframe when it hits the degree of the Midheaven, that might be really critical turning point for that transit or a most acute or intense part of that transit when it conjoins the MC exactly.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And it can be the most acute, it can also sometimes be more apt to have an outward event associated with it when it hits that degree versus just transiting through the house somewhere. Yeah, it’s usually pivotal in some fashion and often external as well.
CB: Yeah. And then another thing that you have to also pay attention to or be aware of is that sometimes when you’re using especially whole side houses as we do, the degree of the Midheaven doesn’t always fall in the 10th whole sign house. So what happens in those instances when the degree of the Midheaven falls in a sign other than the 10th whole sign house is that the 10th sign still retains the primary meaning of 10th house significations of career and reputation or overall life direction, but the degree of the Midheaven will import some of those 10th house significations into whatever other whole sign house that it falls in, and then it will double up with those significations. So for example in my chart, the degree of the Midheaven I have Aquarius rising, Scorpio is the 10th whole sign house, and then the degree of the Midheaven is at five degrees of Sagittarius. So it imports 10th house significations and doubles up or overlaps them with 11th house significations in Sagittarius. So what happens, for example is that when let’s say an outer planet like Saturn transits through Scorpio, it goes through my 10th house and it only activates 10th house topics for the two to three-year duration of that transit. But then immediately after that when Saturn moves into Sagittarius, it moves into my 11th house and it starts activating 11th house topics. But then when it conjoins the degree of my Midheaven, it’s also going to activate 10th house topics at the same time. So you’ll see a doubling up and there’ll be a mixture of like in this instance, career and friend significations since 10th house is career but 11th house is friends.
LS: Right. And the same thing for the IC. You know, it can float not just in the fourth whole sign house but in whole sign house system can float to say the third or the fifth or occasionally further if it’s a really extreme geography where you were born. In those cases in terms of transits, that can mean an extension in some way of the time in which those topics are more, you know, there’s more going on with those topics. So if the Midheaven was say in the 10th whole sign house, then it would just be the transit of the 10th through which you would experience those career related transits. But if it’s the whole 10th whole sign house and then you have your Midheaven slightly after that or slightly before it, just a bit of a longer transit that can still impact those particular topics.
CB: When what? Say that part again.
LS: So if the Midheaven for instance– or the IC– but say the Midheaven is either in the ninth or in the 11th in whole sign house chart, then you still have the transit of a planet through the 10th whole sign house, which will be about career. But it will extend the time further that those topics will be kind of at the forefront of your life in some way because it will additionally transit your Midheaven either slightly before or slightly after the 10th house transit.
CB: Yeah, and that’s really a crucial point that’s super important for outer planet transits and that can sometimes confuse people when they’re first learning whole sign houses or they’re trying to compare whole sign houses versus quadrant houses like placidus, is that they’ll see both working and they’ll not be sure to go with one or the other. And it’s because there can be this overlap and especially with transits that can extend the period in which you’re getting similar significations based on the houses falling in slightly different places but both still working in some way.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, that is the fourth type of transit which is transiting planets aspecting the exact degrees of angles which is especially important for the conjunction but also applies to the other aspects; the square, the trine, the opposition, and the sextile. So the next or the fifth type is when a transiting planet conjoins a transiting planet in a natal house. I’ve seen this coincide with events and important turning points in a person’s life. And it’s more important if it’s doing it around or in a close aspect to a natal planet in a person’s chart, but sometimes even just two transiting planets meeting up and conjoining in a natal house in a person’s chart can actually indicate something important about that house or that part of the person’s life.
LS: Right, because it’s still activating that topic for the duration of the actual transit through that house. And so if there’s more than one transit happening at the same time in the same topical house and then they can join in particular, it kind of triggers something about that topic at that time.
CB: Yeah. For example, recently around I think August 1st we had a Mars-Uranus conjunction in the sign of Taurus. And I noticed for some people that Mars-Uranus conjunction activating that specific house in a very distinct way with the nature of that Mars-Uranus conjunction of something surprising happening or something sometimes upsetting or disruptive happening in that house of the chart at the time.
LS: Right. Yeah, definitely. So it combines two different transiting planets significations and brings them together during that shorter period of time when they conjoin.
CB: Yeah, and whatever the nature of those two planets are and whatever the nature is of their combined meeting or mixing together, the ancient astrologers would call it a blending together when two planets are coming together in the same sign like you’re mixing paint, whatever the nature is of those two planets being combined is what will manifest archetypally in the area of life represented by the house. All right, so technically lunations like New Moons and Full Moons as well as eclipses fall under this category or under this rubric. And that can sometimes be the most important instance of this type of transit of two planets meeting up in a specific house in a person’s birth chart. We’ve done two entire workshops at this point on transiting eclipses falling in the different houses in a person’s chart in previous episodes of the podcast, which I’ll mention later when I’m going to mention other resources. But that’s an important one. Also, sometimes there can be outer planet conjunctions like a couple of years ago in 2020 at the very end of it, we had a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in the sign of Aquarius. So that was a major outer planet alignment. Or earlier in 2020, there was an alignment of a bunch of planets that lined up in Capricorn. And that was a major conjunction that coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, for example. Like, January of 2020 was a Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and then March and April of 2020 was a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn and aquarius. And for some people, that affected them in very particular ways that were represented by the houses that those planets aligned with in their chart.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Sometimes those are striking moments. It’s also important to note even though we’re focusing a little bit more right now on the actual transits themselves and not the whole cycle, but some of these transits they are related to an entire cycle. For instance the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that you just mentioned, that’s going to be a longer entire cycle of those two planets meeting and that can be important in other ways. So this is just actually one piece of it that you’re looking at when you’re looking at the particular transit through a certain house. We’re not really belabouring the rest of the cycle today, but you should know that that’s also connected to larger cycles.
CB: Right. Yeah. And then another type of transit, this is like the sixth type of transit at this point, is when a transiting planet stations retrograde or direct, which intensifies the exact aspect. So when a planet stations retrograde or direct, especially if it’s very close to an exact aspect with a planet in your natal chart, that can be an intensification of that transit in addition to elongating it since the retrograde draws out a transit and makes it longer than it would otherwise be.
LS: Right. That’s essentially a degree-based transit but intensified further. So it’s hitting a certain degree in your chart, but then it’s sitting there for a little longer than usual. So it’s making more of an impact with whatever the significations are of that planet and the natal placement that it’s hitting in your chart and the house that’s transiting through. Those will all be a little louder at that time, you’ll feel the more strongly.
CB: Yeah. So basically this last point just applies to any of the previous ones because a transiting planet when it goes retrograde it elongates any of the above transit type that we’ve talked about.
LS: Definitely.
CB: I’m trying to see if I have… I do have an illustration of… This is the planetary movements for 2022 that Paula Belluomini made, and it shows where the planets start in the signs of the zodiac at the beginning of the year and where they end up by the end of the year. I wanted to mention it just because you can see when different planets go retrograde, because they do a U-turn. They’re moving forward in the zodiac at first, which is the normal motion of the planets that they go most of the time, which is in counterclockwise order starting with Aries, then through Taurus, then Gemini, then Cancer, so on and so forth. But occasionally what happens is if you watch them from a bird’s eye view, what happens is that they slow down in the zodiac and they do a U-turn and they start walking backwards against the order of the signs of the zodiac. They start going clockwise. But then eventually they do another U-turn and they turn forward and start moving forward again in the normal order of the signs and the degrees.
LS: Right. And since they’re going backward, it should maybe be mentioned just for a moment that typically that often coincides with you going back over the territory you just reversed in that topic in your life, because it’s literally walking back over the degrees that it already went through when it was direct. So it’s typically like a review of something that you just did, or of some experience that you were just having.
CB: Yeah, it’s a return back to something. It’s revising something. It’s revisiting something that you thought was finished. So in Mercury retrogrades it’s famously things that can be frustrating like that, where you do something. For example, I’ve famously during Mercury retrogrades I’ve talked about in the forecast of like gone out and bought a laptop at the beginning of the retrograde. And then there’s been something wrong or it breaks and then I have to go back and return it and I have to get a new laptop, but then that ends up opening up a whole sequence of events where things end up taking longer and I have to go back and do things over again that I’ve already done because there were errors along the way or there are things that needed to be corrected. But usually by the end of that transit, most of the time or some of the time at least, you come out stronger because the second time you’ve had to do something, usually you do a better job of it the second and third time than you did the first time because you’ve had some experience with it going into it the second and third times.
LS: Mhm. Or you may just change your mind about doing something or how you’re going to go about doing something. So yeah, it’s just some sort of revision to whatever you were doing the first time in that same area.
CB: Right. All right, so those are the different types of transits. In terms of the interpretation of transits and different resources for understanding what transits actually mean… So once you know when a transit will happen and you’ve established all the technical stuff that we’ve just been talking about for most of this, the next question obviously is how do you know what it will mean? How do you know what the specific transit will mean in your life? There’s a number of books and websites that write out interpretations for all possible transiting aspects or all transiting planet combinations. The most famous one that’s used by I think the majority of astrologers at this point in the world today is a book by an astrologer named Robert Hand, which is titled simply Planets in Transit. This is just the classic reference book. It’s a thick book. It’s really a big book, because he goes through systematically all of the major aspects and all of the planetary combinations, and he gives delineations or interpretations of every possible transit for the most part.
LS: Right. So that’s something you could start with if you’re first getting started in understanding what transits might even mean, it’s a good guidebook.
CB: Yeah, it was written in the mid 1970s and it became the standard book. It’s one of the top five books that every astrologer has in their bookshelves, or certainly was for a very long time. It’s a little bit dated at this point and even Robert Hand’s approach to astrology has changed quite a bit in the past 50 years. So he supposedly is in the process of writing or has written a revised version of that book that’s supposed to come out at some point in the near future, which we assume will replace or kind of supplant the old book. But until that time it’s a good book to use, just with the understanding that it’s primarily like a modern more psychological approach from the 1970s prior to the revival of ancient or traditional astrology. And so one of the things that will be nice hopefully once this new version that comes out is Robert Hand was one of the pioneers in helping to revive ancient astrology so he’s supposed to integrate some of that ancient astrology wisdom with some of the wisdom from modern astrology to create more of a synthesis, which is a little bit more typical of where astrology is at today in the 2020s.
LS: Yeah, I think we’re all looking forward to that. I heard that he was struggling with requested cutting down the amount of pages, which I think any astrologer or writer of any sort struggles with if a publisher is telling them to cut down what they’ve already written.
LS: Okay. Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Another really good resource for transit interpretations is astro.com and their personal daily horoscope and their extended daily horoscope, which we showed a little bit earlier where we showed how you can go to astro.com and pull up your personal daily horoscope and then it’ll tell you not just which transits are going exactly that day or which long-term transits you have that are active in your chart that are within a degree, but if you click on them, it will also give you interpretations. And those interpretations are actually drawn mostly from Rob Hand’s book, Planets in Transit.
LS: Right, right. That’s again another good way to start out in understanding what transits are actually happening in your chart, and then how to interpret them. There is a little bit of a limitation in that it’s gonna highlight the ones that are closest to exact and so it won’t always tell you, “Hey, all these other transits are happening, too.” But it’s still a great resource that will tell you lots of them.
CB: Yeah, for sure. You do have to… It will only give you interpretations for some of them, or I don’t know if it’s still the same where it’s only on Tuesdays or Thursdays that it gives you interpretations for all of them that you can actually click on, and then it gives you this delineation from Robert Hand. But if you buy their extended daily horoscope or extended personal horoscope which is like a subscription, then it does allow you to go forward and backwards in time and to click the little calendar button, and then jump forward to any day. And then it’ll tell you what your transits are on that day and what’s going on.
LS: Right.
CB: That’s one of the more useful paid upgrade subscriptions that I could recommend to most astrologers and I still pay for myself to this day, just because it’s useful for tracking the transits and getting a little interpretations to remind you what certain things are supposed to mean or just what one astrologer’s perspective is on how that transit could manifest.
LS: Right. It will also tell you really hopefully the times that they go exact, and so that’s really nice. If you’re not still living in the place where you were born, you can click something like specify the reference place, and then you can put in the reference place you want for the actual exact timing of the transit going exact. So that’s useful to know, otherwise it’s going to give you the specific times they go exact in your birthplace.
CB: Yeah. All you have to do is– let me see if I can show this– but if you just go to the personal daily horoscope and then you scroll down to the bottom of it, there’s a section that says Timezone and Reference Place. So you click that to set your reference place for your current location. That way, it’ll give you all the transit times in your timezone. I would also recommend setting it when you go there to what your preferred house system is, because it will default to placidus. For example, for us we want to use whole sign houses and so they’ve recently integrated a way to do that when you also set the timezone and reference place.
LS: Yeah, I really like that.
CB: The other thing about the exact times as well, it’s good to know the exact times that a transit goes exact during the course of a day. For most of these, it’s just like a rough… It’s not necessarily that the exact event is going to happen exactly at the time that that transit goes exact, especially for outer planet transits because sometimes, for example this has transiting Mars opposite my Midheaven on Monday August 29th at exactly 2:13pm. But that transit is so slow-moving that really it’s going to be operative for the entirety of that day at least when it comes to that Mars transit at least.
LS: Right. Yeah, absolutely. So the exact time sometimes things coincide right then– more typical of the inner planets, more quickly-moving planets, but not even all of the time those. I mean, it’s interesting to know the exact times to see if something does in fact happen right around that time, and sometimes it will, but it’s not to say that, “Oh, that transit didn’t do anything,” if say something happened later that day or earlier that day. It’s still really really close to exact. So that’s something to keep in mind for sure.
CB: Yeah, or with some transits if they’re moving really slow, the event can happen the day before the transit goes exact or the day after or what have you. You have to be aware of the orb issue and aware of how fast the planets are actually moving. But at least when you have the exact times, you know when it’s exact to not just the degree but also the minute, and then you can kind of approximate or extrapolate from there how much longer before or after that transit is still going to be active or still going to be very close to that same degree in minute.
LS: Right. Yeah, exactly. But the outer outer planets don’t pin it down to that exact time at all, because those are going to be hovering around this vicinity for a much longer time. I would say with the inner planets, they often do eventually something noticeable within the day. You know, some of those outer planets, the actual outer planets like Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, those can be there for a few years very very close to the placement. So it is interesting to watch when they do go very Exactly, but exact for that can be more like okay, it’s exact within this few day or week range because it moves so slowly from that degree point.
CB: Yeah, that’s really crucial. The other thing in terms of other resources besides astro.com– astro.com is just amazing so everybody really early in their studies should take time to explore that site as fully as you can. And it’s so vast that you’ll never actually discover everything that’s on astro.com because they’re constantly expanding and adding new things, but you should look at it because it’s largely very free. And you can do so many different things on astro.com. It’s actually amazing so you should familiarise yourself with that as much as possible relatively early on.
LS: Definitely.
CB: Besides that, other websites for transits that I use at the present time are archetypalexplorer.com. And when you pull up your transits in Archetypal Explorer, you can click on some of them. For example if I hover over this transit of Saturn square Mercury, it highlights it. And when I click on it, below that it will generate some delineations and it’ll take some excerpts of interpretations of what that transit is supposed to me. The first one is it’ll give some interpretations from an unpublished book by the astrologer Richard Tarnas that’s titled Notes on The Planetary Archetypes. And as far as I know, this is the only way to get access to those interpretations because the book hasn’t been published yet at the present time. So he’ll give you a general statement about it and then he’ll give you some positive qualities of that transit that are archetypal potentials and some negative or challenging ones, as well as some significations for each of those planets in general. So it’s hugely useful for understanding the transit from that perspective. And then on Archetypal Explorer, it also gives some interpretations from a second book titled The Archetypal Universe by Renn Butler who was I think a student of Richard Tarnas’s. It will similarly give some positives and some negatives as well as different characters and themes and shadow qualities and other things like that. It’s super useful as an additional resource for interpretations for different types of transits.
LS: Yeah, that’s really nice. I mean, while astro.com’s extended daily horoscope is very useful, the interpretations are much shorter than those at least in terms of not having two resources and it being fairly lengthy. So it’s more of just like, “This is what this means or what it could mean,” and then… Yeah, that gives a lot more options.
CB: Yeah. The only downside is that currently Archetypal Explorer, one, it’s a subscription service so you have to pay for it it’s not very expensive. But you can currently only save one piece of birth data, one chart in it. So you can really only do your own chart. Whereas one of the things that’s really cool and really useful about astro.com is you can save I think up to 100 charts for free on astro.com. So you can look up not only your transits on a given day, but you can also look up the transits of other people whose charts you’ve saved. And sometimes that’s actually how you really advance and accelerate your studies of transits, is by paying attention not to just what’s going on in your life and what transits you’re having, but also looking at what’s happening in the lives of people around you when they have important events taking place, and then looking up what transit is that they’re having at that time.
LS: Right. So you can put in charts for example for your family members, for your partner if you have a partner, for your friends, and then especially if they’re physically around you a lot of the time like if you live in the same place and are together more or less, you definitely can pay attention not just to actual events but just to the general vibe for lack of a better term. How do they seem that day? Do they seem more agitated? Do they seem animated? Do they seem tired? That sounds really kind of vague but honestly, it often does correlate and that’s a good way to start noticing how these transits can be expressed even when they’re not doing one specific particular thing.
CB: Yeah. And that’s super important because if somebody gets in a car crash, or somebody gets married or starts a relationship or loses their job or whatever, that’s really important data. You can also look at that with celebrities, of course, but with celebrities we usually only know their public life or we only know what’s publicly available whereas if you’re looking at the charts and the transits of people that you know that are close to you, you have greater access for potentially understanding the behind the scenes things that are happening in their life in addition to just some of the front-facing things.
LS: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a huge distinction in terms of actually being able to observe what the transits are doing versus just one occasional look at what’s going on in someone’s life. So yeah, most people I know have started with– especially if they get software later– most people have started with astro.com. In terms of saving up to 100 charts in a given account, I think you can save more if you pay, is that right?
CB: Yeah, I got them to do that years ago to add an add-on so you can at least pay to expand it. Because I know there were some astrologers that were setting up multiple email accounts that were… Unscrupulous astrologers that I knew back in the day named Leisa. I’m not going to mention your last names but they would set up multiple accounts.
LS: At that point you probably should get software. But yeah, you can do at least 100 in one account. So you can start storing a lot of people you know and that gives you a lot of wealth of data to kind of pay attention to in terms of watching what the transits do.
CB: Right. All right. Finally, you can search for other books on transits or other websites on transits, I’m sure there’s others out there. I know there’s a few others that we’re not mentioning here, but there’s a bunch of different resources. The two resources or three resources we have mentioned at this point also will tend to skew as I said, more towards modern psychological interpretations. So that’s one drawback you should be aware of when you’re studying your transits from places like astro.com is that it’s going to tend to focus more on internal manifestations and emotional states, versus talking about concrete external events. That’s one shortcoming of some of the current transit interpretations. But once you learn transits more and more yourself and once you observe transits that have happened in your life, that’s going to help you to learn more about what the concrete external manifestations of certain transits can be in terms of events. And then you can kind of add that to your own database in your head.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. And beyond that once you start thinking a little bit more for yourself as you learn about what the actual planetary significations are for each given planet, what the houses mean and so forth, you can start combining those yourself. And you can start a little bit thinking more for yourself in terms of transit interpretations as you better learn some of those significations on your own.
CB: Yeah, and sometimes you can discover new things about what certain planetary combinations or what certain houses mean based on an observation you made of a certain transit that happened in a person’s life or in your life at a period of time that coincided with an exact event. Sometimes you can discover new things or make unique observations that aren’t in the astrology books up to this point. And that’s actually how astrological research and the astrological tradition is constantly growing and evolving, just as the world continues to grow and evolve by astrologers continuing to pay attention to the correlation between celestial movements and earthly events, which is exactly how astrology got started thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt and other areas of the world, where astrologers for example in Mesopotamia would observe an alignment of the planets in the sky or some other celestial phenomenon like an eclipse or what have you, and then they would write down what the events were that occurred at the same time. Like if the king died or if there was a famine or something like that, they would write it on little clay tablets and then those eventually accumulated into libraries that kept being passed forward over the course of generations. And that’s eventually how astrology got more complex and became this whole tradition that it is today.
LS: Yeah, and it is more ideal for you as you go on. You know, when you first start out looking at transits, it is useful to use other people’s interpretations. But as you go on and learn more yourself, it is more ideal to make your own observations because yes, sometimes the specific things you notice are not in the books. Also, it’s just better to build up your own knowledge of what you’ve actually seen in practice versus what someone else has said that it’s supposed to mean. At least I personally think that that’s how you grow as an astrologer is just continuing to observe things over time more and more yourself. And then you can know where the source comes from; this definitely happened, I watched it happen, etc. So yeah, good building blocks, and then just keep observing on your own and learning what those combinations mean.
CB: Yeah. And this is the real empirical part of astrology and this is the part of astrology where it’s not just all abstract hypothesising or inferences or interpreting things purely symbolically, but this is the part of astrology where it’s probably almost the most down to Earth and practical in terms of astrologers paying attention to the correlations, the repeated sometimes continual correlations between celestial movements and earthly events and what actually happens when certain planetary alignments happen in the sky, and what takes place in a person’s life. And there’s something really important about that as an empirical process of how astrologers do research and establish things. And Transits is probably one of the best keys to that because it has such a concrete, practical side to it.
LS: Yeah, I agree.
CB: All right. Let’s go into the next section where in addition to those interpretation resources, we actually have a number of past episodes of the Astrology Podcast that would be really useful to help you broaden your understanding of transits and understand what specific transits will mean. You should definitely do some of the past foundational episodes from the series that we did on the Significations of The Planets, as well as the different episodes we’ve done done on the significations of the houses. For example, Episode 231 which is titled Significations of the Twelve Houses – Part 1: Houses 1– 6, as well as Episode 233 titled Significations of the Twelve Houses – Part 2: Houses 7–12. So that’s going to tell you all about what each of the houses mean in your chart and then you can directly apply that in terms of when certain planets move through that sector of your chart, what that’s going to mean and what sort of topics that’s going to activate in your life.
LS: Right. Right. And these are some other tools to kind of what we were just talking about a few minutes ago, start to build your own understanding and observations of what the transits are, and go beyond kind of cookbook that are already existing.
CB: Right. So there’s that. There’s also Episode 64, titled The Significations of the Seven Traditional Planets. That’s gonna tell you about what each of the seven planets mean, both in the natal chart, but also you can extend that to what those planets mean by transit. And more recently over the past year, I did an entire series where we did one two-hour episode on each of the planets. So you can see the Astrology Podcast YouTube channel, right on the homepage of that you’ll see a link to the planet series for each of those episodes. Aside from that, we’ve also done past episodes on transits specifically on certain types of transits, as well as in-depth workshops that we’ve done on some transits as well. There’s been two episodes on eclipses or on transiting eclipses so far, which are Episode 215 which is titled Interpreting Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Your Birth Chart, as well as more recently Episode 355, titled Transiting Eclipses in Astrology. And both of those are about how the topics of certain houses are activated when there’s a solar or lunar eclipse in that sector of your chart.
LS: We also have some Saturn returns episodes of transiting Saturn. Episode 24 pretty early on was Understanding Your Saturn Return. That one’s only on the podcast website, you said?
CB: Yeah, that one’s not available on Youtube yet, although I might be able to re-release it. I know that was a super early episode that we did, episode 24. But people can find it on the podcast website by just Googling Understanding Your Saturn Return. Or if you go to theastrologypodcast.com/episodes you’ll see our full list of episodes and you can find where those episodes are available.
CB: There’s also some other specific sign-based Saturn return episodes, episode 131 was Saturn Return in Sagittarius Retrospective where we went over different people’s charts especially on famous people’s charts who had Saturn in Sagittarius and whenever how that transit went for them, how the Saturn return went for them. Also, Capricorn episode 283, Saturn Return in Capricorn Retrospective similarly looking at how that transit went for different people who had Saturn nataly in Capricorn.
CB: Yeah, and even though those are primarily relevant for people that have Saturn in those specific signs of Sagittarius or Capricorn, or pretty soon here we’re gonna have to do one for Aquarius because they’re almost finished with their Saturn return here early next year in early 2023. But even if you don’t have those placements, we strongly recommend going back to check out those episodes because they’re very excellent demonstrations that contain a tonne of chart examples that show you how Saturn returns are interpreted in practice. And that’s actually a great template for understanding all transits because we show distinctions between sign-based transit versus degree-based transits. And we also show the specific manifestations of how to interpret the transit when it’s going through a specific house, or when it’s activating the natal potential of a planet in the birth chart.
LS: Right. It’s kind of exploring how does that same transit go, given all those different variables for different individual people on their charts. Yeah, so it is a good example of how to look at transits.
CB: Yeah. So the next one, I would check out Episode 197, which is titled Uranus Transits Through the Twelve Houses. That was a one we did back when Uranus first went into Taurus. But we used that as an instance in order to talk about different examples and take some examples from an audience during the live workshop where people shared their experiences of what it was like when Uranus transited through certain houses in their birth chart, and the different types of topics and themes that came up during the course of that transit.
LS: Right. Similarly, it makes it come alive a little bit more than just saying, “Oh, put together the signification of the planet in this house and it’s kind of what it should mean.” You can hear kind of more fully fleshed out how people actually had experiences corresponding to those transits.
CB: Yeah. Finally, one last episode I would mentioned is episode 153 which is titled Annual Profections: A Basic Time-Lord Technique, which is a lecture that I did showing you how to use another timing technique known as Annual Perfections. The reason why this technique is important is because it can allow you to more easily identify which transits are going to be more important in a given year of a person’s life. That can be super critical in terms of helping to narrow down which transits to pay more attention to versus which transits might be less important or less of a focal point in a given year.
LS: Right. We were mentioning earlier, especially when it was being visually depicted on the screen, how lots of different transits happen always at the same time sometimes more than others clustering together. But there’s always lots of different transits happening. And so I can’t really, you know, don’t have the time to get into it here in this particular episode but there are ways that you can narrow down. Not to say that the other transits will not be important, but some will be particularly focal at certain times.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So that technique, Annual Perfections, is something that I go into in a lot more detail in my book which is titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, which I would recommend checking out for learning how to do natal astrology and all of the basic intermediate and advanced techniques for interpreting a birth chart. But then it also goes into a couple of timing techniques, which are Annual Perfections and Zodiacal releasing. And then I also have a series of lectures in my online course on Hellenistic astrology at theastrology school.com. And I go into a whole nine-hour lecture on annual perfections, for example, in order to teach you how to use that technique and practice and teach you with a bunch of example charts, how to use it to narrow down the specific transits that are going to be more important to you. So I have both free offerings for those that are just getting started or can’t afford it on the Astrology Podcast, but I also have some more advanced paid offerings available on my course site at theastrologyschool.com. So people that are ready can sort of go to that if they want to get more advanced stuff with a lot more example charts than we’ve used for example in this lecture because we didn’t want to make it 20 hours long.
LS: Right, exactly. I also have a few one-off lectures that do involve transits or annual perfections or both on my website at leisaschaim.com.
CB: Awesome, okay. All right. So now we are in the homestretch and we’re in the final part of this workshop on transits. And so here at this point, I wanted to mention a number of miscellaneous points and final reflections on transits as we’re sort of wrapping this up and bringing it to a close. The first one is other techniques. So as you probably have guessed, unless this is very early in your studies or this is day one of your studies of astrology although I guess we’ve mentioned it already even if it is, transits are not the only timing meaning technique. It is one of the most ubiquitous techniques, it is one of the most straightforward and one of the most powerful and important timing techniques. However, it’s not the only timing technique that there is.
LS: No, it’s a pretty good and easy one to learn first. I would say most people learn it first as their first timing technique, and it remains important even when you learn other ones. But there are other timing techniques. We were just talking briefly about Annual Perfections, for instance, which can help you narrow down which transits are the most important and impactful, and which ones to watch more closely in a given year. There’s also other separate timing techniques; things like secondary progressions or Zodiacal releasing. And those operate relatively independently, so you can look at them. Also look at transits as separate timing techniques.
CB: Yeah, some of these techniques work together. Like, annual perfections and transits and perfections helps you to enhance some of the information from transits. Other timing techniques work somewhat independently and they might give you different information or tell you different things than transits do. But sometimes this can be really useful because ultimately what you want to be able to do sometimes is have a few different timing techniques that you use, because sometimes what will happen is you’ll see overlapping periods of importance and overlapping indications that are pointing to specific periods of time or specific moments in a person’s life that are going to be important. And oftentimes it’s by comparing and seeing overlapping indications indicating the same thing, that you can more reliably predict what’s going to happen in a person’s future.
LS: Absolutely, it’s kind of like cross-referencing your esoterica, so it’s like this one is pointing this way and also this one is pointing this way. You know, the more things you have pointing in the same direction or echoing similar themes around the same time period, the more reliably you can say that, “Oh, this is an important time period. Oh, this is a really important topic at this particular time.” So definitely learn transits first, probably, but they’re not the only thing to rely on. And once you do have several timing techniques under your belt, you can kind of use them in a more advanced fashion to say, “Yes, look at this.”
CB: Yeah, so the use and agreement of multiple timing techniques can make predictions more reliable on the one hand, so it’s good… You know, get Transits down first and then start exploring gradually other timing techniques as well. Different people will gravitate towards different timing techniques and adopt certain ones that they feel are more reliable in their personal practice. So each astrologer comes to different conclusions and adopts certain techniques that speak to them the most, which is fine and is part of the sort of customization of astrology. I do want to say there can be somewhat diminishing returns if you attempt to use way too many timing techniques all at the same time. Like, there is a certain point where if you’re using 10 or 15 different timing techniques, it just gives you so much data and so many different variables that a certain point it stops being as useful. So sometimes it’s better to get an overview and get introduced to all the different timing techniques, but then find like two or three maybe that really speak to you. And really hone your skills with those timing techniques and become really good at them, rather than just becoming mediocre or just sort of okay with basic knowledge of a bunch of them.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. Because essentially you’re identifying patterns is what you’re using the timing techniques for it. It’s like a middle ground of not using one but also not using all of the possible ones. A middle ground is good because otherwise you have too many patterns in front of you and it just becomes kind of counterproductive to what you’re actually trying to do, which is hone in on what’s most important.
CB: Right. Plus as we’ve shown, individual techniques once you really get into them– like transits, for example– can be very complicated, and learning transits and taking it as far as you can possibly go with that one technique really is a lifelong thing and it’s a lifelong study. So it’s good to figure out what you want to specialise in relatively early on, that way you can become as adapt to that or you can master that technique as much as possible, which is going to take a lot of work on your part and is going to take many years of study. So it’s good to focus a little bit of your energies like a laser beam a little bit rather than spreading yourself too thin.
LS: Yeah. You can start with just sampling early on, I would say. Or even later if you want to learn new things. But you can’t constantly look at 12 different timing techniques if you’re actually trying to do something with a chart. You can, casually, if you’re just trying to look at your own life and never do anything else with other charts. But typically speaking, you do need to narrow it down just to make it of practical use if nothing else.
CB: Yeah, it’s just about what’s practical. And also even, you know we all have limited periods of time or if you’re sitting down with somebody for a consultation for example, you’ve only got an hour or an hour and a half or two hours or what have you. So you’ve got a limited amount of time in which you can apply a certain amount of techniques in that period so you’re going to want to have your major standby technique that’s your primary technique or your primary techniques that you know so well and you’re so good at applying that you feel comfortable resorting to those immediately before going to the more obscure or esoteric ones.
LS: Right. Because it’s really about consistently enough using them to really pull out what’s most interesting or what’s most important out of those techniques. So if you look at lots of different ones at the same time, they could be saying every single day of the month is important in a different way in a different context. Which may well be the case, but it’s too much to keep in your head, you know, or talk about practically.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. And part of the purpose of the Astrology Podcast also is to give people that overview and that exposure to a bunch of different different techniques. And it’s like I’m systematically working my way through a bunch of them so that people can get that overview early on of all the different things that you could learn in astrology, and then eventually decide which ones they’re going to focus in on in particular.
LS: Definitely.
CB: All right, next point, next miscellaneous wrapping up point. Something I like to say is that in order to predict the future, you have to understand the past. So transits are often context-specific as we’ve talked about, and making predictions lies in projecting out the arc of the future once you’ve established the person’s current trajectory. Establishing a good chronology of past events in a person’s life is invaluable, is super valuable and super crucial when you’re attempting to make predictions. But also, it’s understanding past experiences of different transits of knowing, you know, if a person has this transit coming up in their life, looking back and seeing what happened the last time they had that exact same transit or something close to it? And then looking back to see before that, what happened the previous time they had that transit or something close to it. And just keep going back as far as you can go because what will happen is oftentimes you’ll start to see patterns and you’ll start to see repetitions of similar archetypal manifestations of certain transits in the past. And once you’ve established a pattern and you’ve seen how that’s played out for the person in the past, you can more reliably project that into the future and make a prediction about how that transit will go the next time it comes up in that person’s life.
LS: And that’s something, you know, it’s partly having to do with how those planets are configured in your actual birth chart and the specifics of the individual chart as to giving some kind of constraints to how that transiting planet plays out, and kind of the pattern in which it aspects other things in your chart every time it makes that transit and so forth. It’s also not to say though, you know, it’s useful to additionally point out that they won’t always go exactly the same way. And because of reasons like Annual Perfections or other things like that where sometimes it’s more important than other times. So say the previous time you had a Mars transit through a certain house, Mars was actually activated as the most important transit to watch that year. But then some years later, it’s not actually activated for you in a more important way. And so you may have some similarities in the same transit because it’s the same planetary energies, it’s going through the same topical house so it’s activating the same topical themes. But it’s just to say particularly if you’d had a particularly bad transit one time or something, it’s not always going to replay the exact same way. I do find it fascinating how much the same transits can echo over time at different times, but they’re not always exactly the same. It’s something like “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” that kind of thing. It’s like that.
CB: Yeah. It’s tricky because there’s certain transits that will repeat, like Mars transits will repeat every couple of years roughly. And there can be certain similarities across timeframes but one of the things that’s going to be different every time you have a Mars transit is that some of your outer planet transits are going to be different. Because there’s certain outer planet transits that only occur once in a lifetime just because the planet moves so slowly. Pluto, for example, has what? Like, a two-hundred-and-something year cycle. So when you have a certain Pluto transit, once that transit is over, it’s going to last for a long time whatever that transit or event is, because Pluto is so far out and therefore moves through the signs of the zodiac extremely slowly from degree to degree. But that means that once you’ve had that Pluto transit and whatever event it coincided with in your life, you’re never going to have that exact same transit again in your lifetime. So sometimes that’s the difference between one inner planet transit of Mars that it recurs relatively frequently versus when that recurs later, but the outer planet transits are completely different for you at that point?
LS: Absolutely. A bunch of different variables can differ from time to time. It’s also your age or sort of life stage and your current life context; what’s going on for you, what’s already the baseline for you right now versus the previous time the transit came around? For instance I’m finally old enough to watch Saturn Transits repeat, which is actually really fascinating because it’s a 30-year difference. And so the topics are very similar, but your life stage is different. And so the specific topics that present themselves can be somewhat different even if they’re the same mix of themes.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. Anything else about understanding the past in order to predict the future?
LS: I don’t think so.
CB: Okay. Next question. Next miscellaneous talking point or discussion point; what is the purpose of having this information? So one of the issues that you may run into at this point in your astrological studies is you start thinking about issues about like fate and free will and prediction. And if you know what’s going to happen in the future, you have a rough idea of what’s coming up. What is the usefulness of that information and what are you supposed to actually do with that in either practical terms or in a broader sort of philosophical or religious sense, even? And different astrologers come to different conclusions on that point.
LS: Yeah. I think we share the idea that it gives you kind of reasonable expectations about what types of things you’ll be dealing with during a certain time period. And I find that helpful. It’s a little bit of a time map. It’s like a map of time instead of geography. And so it says, “During this particular time, you will be in some fashion focused on some of these themes. And in particular, your focus on these themes will have some of these certain qualities.” I feel like that’s useful just as a sort of roadmap of like, right, this is what to expect right now. Because sometimes it gives you… Even if you think about the fate and freewill thing for a minute, even if you can change that entirely– which you certainly can’t– you can’t say, you know, even if you think there’s some amount of freewill, the fact that those transits are already mapped out in decades centuries ahead, you can always look ahead. It does say that these transits will be going through these certain areas of your life and hitting these particular planets at particular time. So, there is something that’s fated to that. But I think it’s still useful to say, “What am I expecting for my next six months? Or my next 12 months, or my next 5 years?” You know, it kind of gives you a little lay of the land and then you’re like, “Okay, I can expect this,” right? And then you sort of work with the specifics as they come about. But I don’t know, I think that’s a little bit reassuring to kind of… Everyone likes a map when they go on a road trip, right? It’s like that.
CB: Yeah. I was just thinking of that analogy. It’s like when you look up the travel time if you’re going on a long distance car drive where you’re driving to a destination, and you look it up on Google Maps or some programme like that that tells you how long the trip is going to take, whether it’s a car or whether you’re flying to another city, how long is that flight going to take and how long you can have to be sitting on that flight doing whatever you’re doing on that flight. It’s nice having some expectation of the length of that trip versus sometimes if you don’t know how long something’s going to take or how long it’s going to last, that can actually feel really bad because it feels like it could last forever or something like that. Or it could be a permanent thing that you’re never going to get out of this phase of your life or what have you. When in reality when it comes to most things in life, a lot of things have set time periods of experience where it’s going to be like this is what we’re going to experience during this phase of our life, but it’s going to last all the way up until this specific point and then we’re going to move into whatever the next chapter is after that point.
LS: Yeah, definitely. It’s like telling you what season of life you’re in in some way, or many seasons as the case may be. And that’s a really good point in terms of how long will something last. Particularly if it’s a transit you’re not enjoying or something. But you know, there’s a psychological tendency sometimes for human beings to feel like if they’re experiencing something they don’t prefer, to feel like this is going to last forever, it’s always going to be like this. And I think that’s actually really helpful corrective, say, “It’s definitely not going to be like this forever. And this is around when it will end or at least around when it will dissipate in greater influence.”
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. I was thinking of another analogy just now and I lost it. But it’s like the length of a trip, seasons of life, or blank. Some other analogy like that?
LS: Those are good.
CB: Yeah. All right. I’ll see if it comes to me later. So moving into the next section, this brings up a lot of reflections at this point on the nature of prediction with transits and astrology in general. Obviously, we have to talk a little bit or at least we’ve mentioned a few times in passing the scope and the limits of astrological predictions, and the limits on certainty. Especially because astrology– Richard Tarnas, for example, always says that astrology is archetypically predictive rather than concretely predictive. And I think there’s something to that and I think I agree with him 70-80%. Because astrology, as anybody can tell, once you get into it we’re dealing with a system or a language that deals in archetypes and in symbols or symbolism. And that you’re taking the symbolism of the planets and what they mean, symbolically speaking, almost like an omen. And then you’re interpreting symbolically what that might mean in a person’s life. But there’s a certain degree of squishyness or a certain degree of malleability in terms of the specific way that that can manifest within the constraints of the archetype. So there’s a certain range of meanings or a range of ways that we might expect it to manifest. But when it comes down to the specific manifestation, there is some ambiguity in not always knowing the precise manifestation ahead of time, but instead you only know the symbolic or archetypal range of possible manifestations. And in that, I think it provides a little bit of freewill in some sense or a little bit of freedom, even if there’s broadly speaking some predetermination in knowing that this transit is definitely going to happen at this date or during this timeframe. That’s the predetermined part. And then the other predetermined part is that it’s going to be this range of possible manifestations, but the specific manifestation there’s some limitations on the part of the astrologer about always being able to know the exact specifics. And there’s something very important about that because it’s a sort of inbuilt limitation to astrology, because otherwise astrology would provide complete omniscience of knowing every single thing about the future all the time, and it doesn’t quite do that. What it can do is still remarkable and is still incredibly powerful and interesting and useful and there’s so many different amazing things about it, but there’s also some limitations that have to be recognised at the same time.
LS: Yeah, I would agree. And I think it’s interesting when you continue to learn astrology and you start learning other tools or techniques to try to even further constrain or narrow down the scope of, or the range of the possible meanings that a certain transit could manifest. But if you talk to people who’ve been doing astrology for any length of time, you still get surprised by the specific sometimes. You know, it’s like it’s in the realm of what you were considering would be possible. But it’s not always the same exact thing and so yeah, the specifics can still differ and can still occasionally surprise you even if you know the general area of what to expect.
CB: Yeah. That’s really important. Astrology doesn’t give you a crystal ball that shows you a movie of exactly what will take place in the future. But instead, what we’re realising at this point is we’re working with a symbol a system where you can see where the planets will be in the future at exact specific dates and then you could relate that back to the person’s natal chart, which will give you an idea of some possible manifestations or a range of different scenarios that could could occur that could be internal things that are happening with a person, they could be external things that are happening, or they could be some mixture of the two. And then you’re supposed to then sort of expect or state that range of possible manifestations. And it may or may not conform perfectly to what you expect. One of the instances for example that’s tricky is like times change, technology changes. Technically when I was born in 1984, somebody could have made predictions about what specifically I would be doing that would be archetypally correct in terms of my profession and vocation. But the concept of podcasting as a technology didn’t really exist at that point so an astrologer wouldn’t have been able to say some of the specifics of exactly what I would be doing career wise, even if they were able to predict archetypally some of the broad outlines of what my career would be and when some of my greatest career peaks would be. Those would be accurate as well, but it’s not until you got closer to the event that you understand contextually the trajectory of a person’s life as well as some of the context of different things like technologies and other things like that that are available to the person.
LS: Absolutely. And even just life circumstances, where has life brought this particular person to so far? And what are the range of options in their current context in terms of how these things could even be expressed versus not likely to be expressed? That really matters too and you can’t necessarily predict way way ahead of time because someone could change something major between now and then. Yeah, so it’s good to go in with realistic expectations, both if you’re learning astrology for yourself and also if you’re getting an astrology consultation because it really is like that. You can narrow things down to a degree that is surprising, I would say, that you would not know without using astrology, but it doesn’t tell you exactly everything.
CB: Yeah, that’s really crucial. This could be a whole episode in itself. We’ve done different philosophy episodes, there’s also lots of little sub points to that in terms of, for example, one research project I’ve been doing a lot over the past several years and had been getting into more and more and more is this discovery about how sometimes a transit will happen that looks like it’s a very important transit in the person’s life, and then it will come and go. And as far as the person is aware, nothing happened in their life. But then in retrospect later, many days or weeks or months or sometimes even years later, the person will sometimes find out that something important did happen that affected their life in a very profound or personal way but they just weren’t aware of it yet, because it wasn’t within their field of vision. That’s really tricky because it means sometimes the astrology itself is telling you that something important is happening that’s going to potentially affect or change your life at that time, but you may not be aware of it yet until later on if you ever become aware of it. That creates some real complications and some real challenges sometimes for researching some transits because you can’t always take for granted that it’s going to be immediately evident, because the other scenario for that that I see very commonly is that sometimes a transit will happen, the person will start something important, but at the time they don’t realise the significance of it. Because at that early stage, oftentimes in the early stages of something, we can’t recognise the full importance that something will have in our life until later on when it’s had time to grow and develop and mature into something more serious or more significant. Bbecause sometimes it can be a chance meeting of a new individual who you don’t think is important at the time, but then later it turns out that was the person that you later get married to or later start a major company with or something like that. Sometimes the immediate impact of a transit and the long-term implications are not going to be evident to you until years later.
LS: Right. And that kind of connects back to a point that we very briefly touched on earlier, which is that any transit is still just a smaller part of a larger circle, a much longer-term planetary cycle. And so yeah, sometimes the transit is simply indicating this first thing is happening. And it will be important in this particular area of your life. But it doesn’t show the entire development during just the one transit because that will keep going.
CB: Yeah, and we didn’t go that much but I did have a diagram for that, because it’s something we talk about a lot within the context of Saturn returns especially in some of those past podcasts. Where, for example, when Saturn returns back to the sign and the degree that it was in when you were born in your birth chart between the ages of 27 and 30, that is the ending and that’s the closing down of one 30-year cycle of your life, but it’s also the beginning of a new 30-year cycle of your life as well. And Saturn will then continue moving around the signs of the zodiac and will reach especially three critical turning points during the course of that cycle where whatever you start at the beginning of the new cycle, you’ll initiate certain themes and you’ll plant certain seeds that will then grow and develop and mature over the course of the next 30 years. And then about seven years into that when you reach the first Saturn square, and Saturn squares its natal position, you’ll see one of the first major developments and turning points with respect to whatever you started back at the Saturn return. Then seven years after that, you’ll reach the Saturn opposition 14 years after the Saturn return. And then you’ll reach the halfway point and another critical turning point in whatever the Saturn themes were. And the seeds that you planted at the beginning of the Saturn return will start turning into a full plant of some sort at that point. Eventually seven years after that, Saturn will reach its second square and you’ll reach the most mature phase of whatever that Saturn cycle is. And all of the themes that you initiated 21 years earlier at that point will reach full maturity. And then finally seven years after that, you’ll reach the second Saturn return and Saturn will return back to where it started, you’ll close down and bring to completion some of the themes of that 30-year Saturn period, but then you’ll also lay the seeds and the foundations for the next 30 years of your life. So, that’s one specific planetary cycle which is the 30-year Saturn cycle. But all of the planets are doing that to some extent just at different rates and with different meanings and levels of importance.
LS: Exactly. So if you’re watching a transiting planet through a sign through a particular topical house or to a natal placement in your chart, that still says some specific things that are important for you during that specific period of time. But it’s still just a piece of that larger cycle that will continue and develop in some ways. Even if you’re not kind of watching it inch by inch, it will gradually develop. That’s a part of what the transit is doing too, even though you only see a certain piece of it when you’re watching it just during a certain sign transit.
CB: Yeah, it’s like taking a slice. Because that’s what the birth chart is. Bruce Scofield said that he calls sometimes birth charts time slices, because you’re just taking a slice of time and you’re taking a snapshot and freezing it. But the issue is that the planets keep on moving. And in reality, especially when you’re looking at transits, if you were to think about time instead of being the singular discrete thing of the present moment in time, instead it’s like a snake that extends out where you have the past where you started, where you’re born. And then the snake kind of grows and emerges into the present, and then eventually it snakes out into the future as this long continuous thing which is your life, which is not– even though we experience it in just small slices of that snake, essentially, if you were to cut one piece of it in half which is the present, in reality the life itself is this long continuous thing.
LS: Right, exactly. So we’re talking about specific pieces of it at certain times but it’s actually much more holistic than that.
CB: Yeah. Similarly with the Saturn cycle, it’s like the Saturn time snake. And certain transits will experience a singular discrete event, but it’s usually tied in with the broader context of the Saturn cycle where you can see during the course of a 30-year Saturn cycle that there were actually other events that were connected to the event you experienced in the present, that either set that event up in the past or that will be cascading ripple effects of that event in the future that are still tied in with that specific cycle.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. So that’s something that’s very important, looking at transits within the context of broader cycles. Check out the Saturn episodes, especially for more on that. All right, fate and free will and also fatalism. One thing that’s very important about transits that we’re kind of getting to was, I think it’s becomes an ongoing struggle or maybe it’s an ongoing struggle for me, I don’t know if it is for other astrologers. But the delicate balance between knowing what transits you have coming up in the future, developing a pretty good idea of what you think it means… But especially if it’s a bad transit that you’re anticipating and that you’re worried about the potential some sort of negative event or circumstance having in your life, while it’s okay to develop a certain degree of a hypothesis about what you think it’s gonna manifest, it’s kind of important to develop some sort of healthy distance from it so that you’re not assuming or thinking that it’s certainly going to be some inevitable thing that will happen in the future. Because one of the tricky things about transits is because it’s so complicated. And because there’s so many different overlapping timing techniques in astrology, sometimes you can see something coming up in the future that’s like a singular transit. But by the time you get there, there’s so many other overlapping transits and other timing techniques that sometimes are more important that the event once you actually experience it can be much different, or it can be much less severe than you might anticipate or fear. And that’s potentially one of the downsides of astrology and of transits is that sometimes some people, depending on your temperament, you might become more pessimistic or fearful about certain placements in your birth chart or certain transits in the future. And while… Yeah, and it just becomes one of the things that you have to wrestle with and come to some terms with in terms of making sure that this is something that’s healthy for you, that’s useful, and it is not becoming something that’s harming you sort of mentally in some way, or that you’re not getting too hung up on it.
LS: Yeah, exactly. And that is a careful balance sometimes. You have to kind of focus more on the benefits of having a roadmap, rather than getting like overly obsessive about the specifics or what the specifics will be in the future, particularly if they haven’t happened yet. It can be interesting to see what the features look like down the road, but it is pretty easy on the other hand to start worrying about certain ones. Llike, “Oh, it’s definitely going to be this kind of thing. It’s going to be bad.” You don’t want to kind of go down that road too much. As much as possible, kind of keep an open mind even though you can think of certain possibilities. And I think, in fact that’s a good way to go about keeping healthy distance in some of these. Is like, don’t just think of the ways you think will most likely come about, like a transit will come about or what the specifics will be. But try to brainstorm. Like, given the significations of the planet and the house and any natal planets its aspecting, what are all of the possibilities you can think of? Not that you have to do that all the time but I think it’s a good exercise to sort of broaden just past your immediate assumptions of what it’s most likely to be. Because sometimes they really will surprise you. Because there’s so many things in the world to experience and they have to be signified by these limited number of placements and houses. And so sometimes because of that, it will be like the one thing you didn’t think of but still fits the symbolism will be the thing that happens and surprises you.
CB: Yeah. And it brings up other stuff about trying to do our best to control the things that are within our ability to control versus not trying as much as you can not to worry about the things that are outside of our control. And sometimes transits will describe events and circumstances that happened to us externally through no fault of our own. But other times, transits can sometimes describe events and circumstances that we bring about in our own life. And for that reason, I think it’s important never to adopt a complete sense of resignation or of fatalism that a certain transit has to manifest in a certain specific way. Even if we have a pretty good idea about how a certain transit will manifest, it’s probably always worth it to attempt to the best of our abilities to bring about the most constructive manifestation of that transit as we possibly can in order to ensure that we don’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy where we just assum something’s going to happen that it’s going to be the worst case scenario, and then we accidentally end up creating that scenario through our own self resignation. Whereas if we had only tried to apply ourselves and tried to change things or channel the energy in a way that was a little bit more constructive, that we could have had a manifestation of it in our life that was still archetypally appropriate that matched the transit in the sky with the event that occurred, but that just occurred in a much more mild or constructive fashion or positive fashion than it could have otherwise. Like, you know, you have a Mars-Mercury transit and you wake up really irritable and you just assume that you’re gonna get in a car accident that day. And then you do get in a car accident that day because you’re you’re driving too aggressively or you’re too worked up about something or something like that. Whereas maybe there was a scenario where you could have channelled that in a different way so that it didn’t have to have that specific negative manifestation per se.
LS: Yeah, I think that is a theoretical thing to be careful about. I don’t think the self-fulfilling prophecy happens that much in astrology, but I’m sure it depends on person to person. I think it’s just important to keep an open mind to what arises during certain transits and what topics are actually really important. If you see a transit coming up, for instance say there’s a transit coming up through your eighth house and it’s a longer transit– and there are actionable things and non actionable things in the eighth house, right? So as just a hypothetical example, you could say, “Well, I already know I need to sort out my tax situation,” or “I already know I need to sort out my credit card situation,” you know? What you cannot sort out ahead of time is whether someone passes during that time in your life because mortality also goes in the eighth house, but more actionable things do too. So it’s just kind of focusing on the things that you know are within the scope of your influence, and particularly things you know you already need to do something about, and then kind of tackling those while trying not to overly worry about the ones that are not within your control.
CB: Yeah, even with mortality and stuff, there may be certain things if you knew ahead of time; like writing a will or getting life insurance or other things that are actionable items that could improve things for your loved ones or something if something were to happen even in the worst case scenario. Yeah, but I guess that’s an important point just in terms… There’s real tension in astrology and there’s no hard and fast answers and different astrologers that get to come to different conclusions about the extent to which you can change or control or manipulate certain things or the outcome of certain transits, and what is possible or what’s on you to try to do and how you can do things to change that, versus to what extent certain things are going to happen when they’re going to happen. And that the purpose is almost to come to some sort of terms or some sort of peace with that and not obsessing about it or trying to control or manipulate everything, which could be, you know, the other part of that can get a little bit weird.
LS: Right, exactly. Yeah. And that can be a whole sub theme on its own or sub discussion.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. So fate and free will, we’re not going to solve that in this little 10 or 15-minute segment at the very end of this very long episode. We’ll shelve that one for now, we’ll see if we come back to it in the future.
LS: Sounds good.
CB: All right. The next subsection, the last one of two, is mundane transits. That there can be general mundane transits that are happening in the world in general, or that are happening and that affect or quote-unquote affect, rather are reflected in society as a whole or that are impacting entire cities or nations or countries or what have you. And that are somehow describing the collective experience of different points in time. Right?
LS: Right. Right. There are actual charts beyond individual charts that you can track the transits on to, bigger entities like that like countries or so forth cities. But there’s also just, say, the Moon is in Sagittarius today, and that’s supposed to say something about the ambient atmosphere in general for everyone. Now, that’s obviously going to be transiting in a different area of each person’s chart and so there will be differences. But there is something to be said for the collective experience as well. Whether that’s just a change in emotional tenor overall or those sorts of things. It’s like, this kind of thing is supposed to be affecting everyone to some degree. And so, yeah, there’s two different- We’ve mostly focused on transits to individual charts today, and that really is where they will be most impactful individually. But they are also saying something about the collective experience simultaneously.
CB: Yeah. So this came up a couple years ago or the past couple of years, where of course there was that major outer planet conjunction of Saturn and Pluto that happened in January of 2020 and around that time, within that few-month time period, there was actually an alignment of a bunch of planets in the same sign in Capricorn, which included Mars and Venus and a bunch of different placements so that it was like one of those classic things that non-astrologers think about that they think astrology is about where there’s just like a lineup of planets in the sky or a stellium of planets at a crucial turning point in history. That’s kind of what happened around the time of the COVID outbreak or the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 and late 2019. That was something that the alignment of the planets kind of described there in Capricorn, especially of that intense Saturn-Pluto conjunction which only occurs every what? 40 years. The last one prior to that was around 1980-1981, which is very early towards the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. So, there are certain things like that affect large groups of people and that’s a specific branch of astrology known as Mundane astrology. And sometimes the Mundane astrology can set the tone for the world in general or for large groups of people, and then us as individuals our experience in life and trying to navigate our life within the overall context of some of those larger transits that are affecting the world in general at that time.
LS: Exactly. It definitely seems like sometimes compared to other times, the collective experience is much more impactful. So I would say recently certainly through the pandemic, that’s been a collective experience that was reflected by that buildup of planets that has impacted most people’s lives much more so than the years previous to that. There’s also the kind of experience where, say, your individual chart looks fine, there’s nice transits going on and so forth. But you happen to be living in a country that just started a civil war. That is going to be impacting your direct experience even if it’s not coming from your individual chart, because you live under the auspices of this larger entity which was the country you’re currently in. And so that has to impact everyone there.
CB: Yeah. Another analogy is just like, you know, what is the weather today? And if you go outside and it turns out that it’s raining and it’s kind of raining for everybody, that’s something we’re all collectively experiencing and having to deal with in different ways that that’s the context of that day for everybody in your city at that point. But then different people are going to deal with that weather or that overall context for the day in different ways and sometimes it’s going to impact them more positively or negatively for better or worse. There’s going to be one person who has an umbrella and therefore it’s not a big deal and they just go to work and that’s it. But there might be another person that doesn’t have an umbrella and they get caught in a downpour and they just get soaked. And that really impacts their day negatively in a much more significant way. Or there’s other people that are driving and they drive to work in the rain, and they just drive slower but they get there okay. Versus there might be somebody who it’s raining and then their car hydroplanes and goes off the road and then they get in a crash or something like that. So, sometimes the overall astrological weather can impact and set the tone for lots of people at the same time and give us a more shared experience that we’re all dealing with something, but it’s going to impact different people in different ways. The pandemic was kind of like that; there was a lot of people that died, there was a lot of people that got sick, but then occasionally there was other people that did fine. There was billionaires that got way more wealthy over time through investments or whatever, or there were some people who maybe through chance and circumstance ended up meeting the love of their life during the lockdowns or something just because they had to move back to their hometown or something like that. There’s different things that are going to affect different people in different ways, and that’s really important to keep in mind when it comes to talking about transits and talking about mundane transits and how the general effects sometimes the collective.
This brings up another concept, which is called the doctrine of subsumption. And it was originally… I remember reading about it, Rob Hand talks about it in one of his books and he attributes it to Ptolemy, but I don’t remember who first came up with the specific word or phrase of subsumption. But it’s the idea that each of our individual natal charts can be sort of subsumed under the major mundane planetary transits, or even higher level charts for collectives that we are as an individuals operating under. This includes maybe the chart for our city, or the chart for our country. For example, the United States has a birth chart for example, and each of us our birth chart is kind of nested within that overall country chart. And we’re having different experiences based on how our chart maybe relates to the country chart, for example, in different ways that can be better or worse. And it’s kind of nested sort of Russian dolls that are nested within one another, that there can be these higher level charts that are operating above ours that our charts are subsumed under in some way.
LS: Right, exactly. There’s always multiple of those going on at any given time, it’s not just only your birth chart. I think also about the example for instance of working at a company or for an organisation that’s been historically dysfunctional in some fashion. I don’t know how many of you have done that but certainly some people have. There’s this interesting experience where sometimes you think, “Oh, I can make a difference here, or I can make this different,” and there’s a company chart operating. And sometimes there’s something about that company or organisation’s chart that is perpetuating a certain dynamic, regardless of this individual people that come and go. Which is really interesting to sort of think about theoretically that happening, but it does happen.
CB: Yeah. And then different countries charts are themselves having transits to them, and are sometimes describing different things. I mean, there’s been countries this year for example that have been invaded by other countries. There’s other countries that are going through financial turmoil or other things like that. So the concept of transits is not just– even though our primary focus is studying it within the context of our own individual birth charts or the different individuals around us or what have you, you can apply transits to inception charts for companies or countries or other things like that so that it becomes a timing technique that can help to describe the unfolding of events and the life cycle of any entity that was born at a specific moment in time. Transits can be used to study the unfoldment of the life cycle of whatever that thing was for just about anything.
LS: Exactly. It’s also kind of this is why the sort of sceptical point of like; say there was a plane crash, not everyone on that plane had a birth chart indicating that that day, right? And it’s because of these larger charts. Or say, you know, you have fabulous things going on in your own chart but your country’s having trouble. Well, you’re going to experience part of that trouble. So yeah, that’s part of why astrology still works even when there are collective experiences like that. And it’s actually really good to remind yourself of. Because especially, I don’t know, speaking from the US perspective anyway, we’re often very individualistic. And birth charts are the most actionable thing to look at for your own individual, you know, what you can influence yourself. But it’s good to remember that we don’t exist only as individuals. And that’s the part of astrology that describes the collective experiences that we do have.
CB: Yeah. This is reminding me that you and I actually did episode 254 I think a few months into the pandemic back in 2020 and that was titled Misconceptions About Mundane Astrology in The Media. That’s a really good discussion about Mundane astrology and a little bit about the doctrine of subsumption and different things like that that people can go back and listen to for more detailed treatment of this topic.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. I think that’s good. Final section. So, transits are possibly the most compelling way to demonstrate the validity of astrology. And I think that’s one of the most promising things ultimately. It’s not the only promising thing about transits. Obviously, there’s a lot of cool implications, a lot of different interesting things you can do with it, a lot of very personally important things that are relevant about it. But one of the most interesting to me is in terms of demonstrating that astrology is a legitimate phenomenon, transits is one of the things that has the most potential to do that. And ultimately once people get into astrology, I think it becomes one of the most interesting and compelling things about it.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Because when you first look at your birth chart, there may be certain statements you can make or other people have made about what those placements are supposed to mean. And you can kind of say, “Oh, I think this kind of fits.” But it still can be a little subjective when it’s talking about you as a person as a whole, that’s a lot to talk about in one statement, right? But transits, again, you get that immediate feedback. You can keep watching them. It’s not just like a one time thing, where you look at your birth chart and say, “This is me. Is this me or is this not me?” But transits they keep going, you can keep watching them and see if they do eventuate with the types of things you would expect or not.
CB: Right. Yeah, so it provides a more objective measurement, as we said before, of did something occur or did it not, versus just what might be a more subjective and hard to distinguish. You know, character trait or character personality, statement about a person which is more, you know, sceptics for example bring up the issue of what is a subjective bias of– and I’m spacing out this specific word, but just the idea that people will-
LS: Confirmation bias.
CB: Confirmation bias. Supposedly like a personality statement given to a person that is said to be about them, that a person will tend to confirm it and more often than they’ll deny it. There’s counter arguments with that, because certainly you can make statements about a person that they will absolutely not resonate with at all. So, that argument even is taken too far oftentimes by sceptics. But something like transits, while there’s still some issues with the application, there’s some hidden challenges that come up especially for example that’s why I’ve been researching this issue of transits that coincide with an event but the person isn’t aware of it until sometime afterwards. That’s a major hindrance and obstacle to research of transits, just the existence of that phenomenon at all. But that being said, in theory, transits are one of the most objective ways to measure whether there is some sort of astrological phenomenon and whether there is, for some strange reason, a correlation between celestial movements and earthly events, which is my basic definition of astrology.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. It was definitely the first thing that really made me feel like astrology definitely worked. Having looked at my birth chart before that, I was like, “Yeah, this could kind of fit. I guess I could see that.” I remember at the time that I got fully invested in astrology, I was going through a pretty bad time, and statements that I was already making before I looked at the astrology before I kind of went back to look at it, I was like, “I feel like I’m going through hell, why is this happening?” And when I went and looked at my chart, I was like, “Okay, chart kind of describes me.” But I was like, “Oh.” Transiting Pluto was transiting exactly over my Sun that year and I was like, “Right, that’s associated with the underworld. Okay, I feel like I’m going through hell. That lines up.” And you know, it’s just one thing. Obviously, there were many more. But it’s that type of thing that can be a lot more striking and immediate in your experience rather than thinking about the overarchingness of who you are as a person and all your different facets, you know? So yeah, it was certainly the thing that made me definitely look into astrology more after that.
CB: Yeah. And it’s a thing where, for me, if a sceptic hasn’t looked into transits to see if the basic premise of transits is true, then I’m not really interested in what they think about the validity of astrology. Because it means if a person hasn’t looked into this piece of astrology, they haven’t looked into one of the most important and objective techniques that can be used in order to see if the premise of astrology holds up, which is that there’s a correlation between celestial movements and earthly events. The premise of astrology is not merely restricted to the concept of Sun signs that there’s something about our personality characteristics that matches the month we were born, it’s obviously much more complicated than that. Transits is that nice little middle point where you get into the full implications and the full actual practical applications of this weird continuous correlation between celestial movements and earthly events. That’s actually measurable and demonstrable in some way. Because you can look and see, “Did the transit coincided with an event or did it not?” If it did, then that means astrology works, and that has some really weird implications for the nature of the cosmos and the world we’re living in and everything else. And once you figure it out that it actually works, that astrology is actually a legitimate phenomenon and that it can do that, then the next question is how far can you take it? And how far can you take that basic premise and how far can you push the potentials of astrology in order to reach and truly understand what it’s capable of?
LS: Yeah, I agree. It’s kind of really that entry point to getting further into astrology because it definitely shows that astrology is certainly not just not about Sun signs, but also just not only about personality, you know? It really describes our worlds, both internal and external. And so yeah, I think that’s the kind of stepping off point as your, “What else does astrology do? That’s so fascinating.” Right?
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s something about time. It’s about time. It’s something about time having qualitative properties. It’s something about time, even though we experience it in slithers, being much more mapped out and fully flushed out ahead of time in the past and present and the future than we as three-dimensional beings are capable of comprehending on some level. Like, astrology gives us some weird glimpses into something about time that’s much more complex and interesting and sort of profound than we can even fully grasp, I think, on some level. But even just having that little glimpse into that for most astrologers is such a profoundly compelling experience. And the implications of that are so far-reaching and so interesting on a philosophical and spiritual and practical level, that how could you not want to study that and to sort of in some instances for astrologers, devote your life to the study of that phenomenon, and seeing just how far it goes and how far you can take it and what it says about the nature of the cosmos. It’s really an interesting mystery that I think all of us then sort of fall in love with in some sense and want to explore to its fullest extent.
LS: Right. It’s kind of like learning that something you just kind of took for granted as a basic singular thing that was an aspect of your life, i.e time, that time is actually much more multifaceted. It’s not just qualitative rather than neutral, but it has different qualities at different times, at different points in time. It also has different facets of quality emphasise for different people at different times and at the same time. And so yeah, it’s like suddenly finding out something like a really basic building block of our life experience is so much richer than it first appeared and it has all these different internal facets that you can just keep going and looking at. Yeah, so I think that is why it’s kind of the entry point to going further into astrology. Because it really does go beyond like, “Oh, I’m this type of person,” or even, “I have these different kinds of facets to me,” but it’s like, “Oh, no, there’s always different astrological things going on at every single moment.”
CB: Yeah, and when we talk about time being qualitative, it means that time then doesn’t just have duration or length like a clock on the wall doesn’t… You know, a clock on the wall describes the duration of an hour and how far through an hour you are, relatively speaking from the starting point to the endpoint that you’re halfway through the hour or so that means you’re 30 minutes into the hour or what have you. Time doesn’t just have length and duration, but that it has quality, that there’s different experiences of different points in time. And that those different experience of time at different points in our life, that you can actually describe them ahead of time, that you can describe the quality of the experience that a certain person is going to have at specific points in time during the course of their life. That, realistically speaking, practically speaking, shouldn’t be possible. But for some reason with astrology it is. And there’s something profoundly interesting about that that we’ve got to get to the bottom of, and that’s what we’re doing here both as astrologers and on the podcast and in this workshop. And hopefully we’ve given people a nice, detailed introduction to and sort of discussion of today.
LS: Mhm. So if transists are new for you, follow us down the wormhole. Yeah, it really fundamentally sort of introduces you to kind of a changed worldview, I would say at least in part, and understanding that these things can happen and can actually correlate with different experiences in your life and different qualities of time. So yeah, hopefully this has been a good introduction to those of you who are new to it, or sort of a an overview for those who are more experienced as well.
CB: Yeah. So we kind of made a decision because we wrote this outline earlier this year, most of it, and then we finished it up recently over the past few days because I really felt compelled or pushed to finish it and get this episode out finally now. It’s something we’ve been wanting to do for years and I’d been putting off and putting off because I wanted to do a complete comprehensive treatment of transits once we finally did it. And we decided to do more of a conceptual overview of transits because we realized how long it was going to take just to do that and just to do the overview and to use a few hypothetical example charts and diagrams and sprinkle in a couple of examples. So what we’d like to do is do a follow-up workshop and follow-up episodes on the concept of transits, where we go through different example charts in order to show different variations in practice of some of the different concepts that we’ve talked about during the course of this episode. So we’re hoping to do a part two at some point in the not-too-distant future on the podcast.
LS: Mhm. Look forward to that. We should be going over example charts. I also don’t know if you wanted to put a little of an open call for questions about transits to incorporate into that. Did you want to do that?
CB: Sure. I guess, because part of this is we want to do a Q&A about transits. So if people do have any questions about transits, specifically about transits and about the concept or technique of transits– we’re not necessarily talking about ask a specific interpretation of your birth chart or specific transits you’re having or what have you, but if people have good questions about transits that arose for you during the course of this episode, especially I’d recommend posting them in the comment section on YouTube below this video. And then we’ll probably take some of the best questions and incorporate those into a Q&A episode on transits at some point in the not-too-distant future.
LS: So if you had questions after listening to this, please let us know. Maybe we’ll be able to answer your question in the next one.
CB: Yeah. All right, I think we’ve done it. I think we’ve done the long-awaited Transits episode, Leisa. Thanks for doing this with me.
LS: Quite welcome, happy to be here.
CB: Yeah. So you have a website, I believe. You do consultations, you have lectures and other things?
LS: Yes. leisaschaim.com, so my name dot com. I have some lecture recordings there for sale. I do consultations nataly. They’re a little on hold right now while I finish up a waitlist, but if you add your email address to my mailing list which you can find at the bottom of the page on my website– that is actually the only place I’m going to announce when I have new openings because they are getting filled up too quickly. So mailing list people will hear when I have new openings, other people probably will not.
CB: Yeah. All right, cool. And your website is leisaschaim.com?
LS: Yes.
CB: Cool. All right. I’ll probably put a link to that somewhere. As for myself, I’m going to keep doing the podcast. Again, if you support this work, if you got something out of this episode or any of the other free content, consider signing up on Patreon to support this work and help me continue to do and keep expanding some of the work I’m doing on the podcast. If you want to learn more about interpreting natal charts, my main course that I teach is The Hellenistic Astrology Course where I take people from basic concepts of planets, signs, houses, aspects, up through intermediate concepts, and even into advanced ones including some timing techniques. You can find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com. And I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks a lot for joining me today, Leisa.
LS: Quite welcome. Thanks for having me.
CB: All right. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening to this episode, and we’ll see you again next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, shoutout to the patrons on our producers’ tier including Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issah Sabah and Jake Otero. If you like the work that I’m doing here on the podcast and you would like to find a way to support it then please consider becoming a patron through my page on patreon.com and in exchange you’ll get access to bonus content such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the month ahead forecast each month, access to a private monthly auspicious elections report that we put out each month, access to exclusive episodes that are only available for patrons, or you can also get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
The main software we use here on the podcast to look at astrological charts is called Solar Fire for Windows which is available at alabe.com, and you can use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we use a similar set of software by the same programming team called Astro Gold for Mac OS which is available from astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount on that as well.
If you’d like to learn more about the approach to astrology that I outline on the podcast, then you should check out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I traced the origins of Western astrology and reconstructed the original system that was developed about 2000 years ago. In this book, I outline basic concepts but also take you into intermediate and advanced techniques for reading a birth chart, including some timing techniques. You can find out more about the book at hellenisticastrology.com/book. The book pairs very well with my online course on ancient astrology called the Hellenistic Astrology Course, which has over 100 hours of video lectures where I go into detail about teaching you how to read a birth chart, and showing hundreds of example charts in order to really demonstrate how the techniques work in practice. Find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com.
And finally, special thanks to our sponsors including The Mountain Astrologer magazine which is available at mountainastrologer.com, the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at honeycomb.co, and the Astro Gold Astrology App which is available for iPhone and Android. You can find out more information about that at astrogold.io.