Transit

Meaning

A birth chart is fixed: it keeps the sky of one moment. The sky itself keeps moving. A transit is a planet’s present position read against that fixed chart. When a moving planet reaches a sensitive point of the birth chart, a planet or an angle, by one of the aspects, tradition reads that the theme of the natal point is stirred by the nature of the moving one.

Speed decides how long a transit lasts. The Moon crosses the whole chart in about four weeks, so its contacts colour a few hours. The Sun, Mercury and Venus go round in about a year, and Mars in about two. Jupiter takes about twelve years, Saturn about twenty-nine, and Uranus, Neptune and Pluto take a lifetime or more. The slow planets linger near one degree for weeks or months, so their transits are read as chapters of life rather than days.

A transit describes a climate, not a fixed event. Saturn crossing the natal Sun is read as a season of effort, structure and taking stock; Jupiter on the same point as a season of growth and opening. How a person lives it depends on the whole chart, on choices and on circumstances. Many astrologers read transits as invitations: a good time to start, to finish, to rest or to build.

In practice

• The Saturn return: Saturn comes back to its birth place around the age of 29, and again around 59. Tradition reads it as a coming of age, a time to keep what is solid and let go of the rest.
• Jupiter on the Midheaven: often read as a time of visibility, when work and reputation have room to grow.
• Through the houses: a slow planet crossing a natal house brings its tone to that area of life for a while. Saturn in the 4th house, for example, turns attention to home and roots.
• A station near a natal point: a planet that stops and turns there stays close for longer, sometimes for months. Its transit window holds several exact passes.
• Fast planets as timers: when a slow transit is already in force, the Moon, the Sun or Mars crossing the same point often marks the days it is felt most.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology reads transits, gochara, counted from the sign of the natal Moon rather than from the Ascendant. Its best-known transit is sade sati, Saturn’s seven and a half years across the sign before the natal Moon, the Moon’s own sign and the sign after.
• Numerology gives a similar timing layer through its personal years: a cycle that moves over a fixed birth number, as the planets move over a fixed chart.
• Human Design also follows the planets’ daily passage through the 64 gates, read against the gates of the bodygraph.

Origin and history

Ancient astrologers already watched the planets pass over the places of a birth chart. In the Tetrabiblos (2nd century), Ptolemy adds these passages to the directions he trusted most for timing, as a way to find when a promised theme comes to life. In the twentieth century, transits became the main timing tool of Western astrology, helped by printed ephemerides and later by software. Robert Hand’s Planets in Transit (1976) set out a reading for each planet’s transit to each natal point and was widely used.

How Ulune calculates it

• The sky of the chosen moment is cast with the Swiss Ephemeris, in the tropical zodiac, with the true node and the osculating Lilith. The moving bodies are placed in the birth chart’s houses.
• The transit table lists the moving Sun to Pluto, Chiron, the two nodes and Lilith against the same natal bodies and the four angles. It keeps the five major aspects: conjunction, opposition, trine, square and sextile.
• The orbs are the birth chart’s: 8°, and 6° for the sextile; to an angle, 6° for the trine and 4° for the sextile. Each row says whether the aspect is applying or separating, and gives its exact moment.
• The calendar works your transits out on your own device: your chart is never sent anywhere. It follows the Sun to Pluto, Chiron and the North Node, and shows the slow ones as periods within 1° of exact.
• A square to the Ascendant is also a square to the Descendant. In the calendar such a pair is shown once, under the Ascendant, the Midheaven or the North Node.