What Are Transits? The Sky Against Your Chart

Two charts, one comparison

A natal chart records the sky at one moment and never changes. The actual planets carried on, and today they are somewhere else. A transit is the angle between a planet's current position and something in your birth chart: Saturn is currently opposing your natal Sun, or Jupiter is crossing your Ascendant. The reading comes from combining what the moving planet does with what it is touching. Nothing about this requires the planets to affect anything. It is a comparison between two sets of positions, and what an astrologer adds is an interpretation of the pattern.

• Where the planets are right now

Speed decides everything

The single most useful thing to know about transits is that the fast ones do not matter much and the slow ones do. The Moon completes a full circuit in under a month, so a Moon transit lasts hours and describes a mood at most. Mercury, Venus and Mars move quickly enough that their transits pass in days. Saturn takes about twenty-nine years to go round. It can sit on one point in your chart for the better part of two years. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are slower still. When people describe a transit that reorganised their life, they are almost always describing one of the slow ones.

• What Saturn means in a chart

The ones people actually notice

A few recur predictably because they depend on orbital periods rather than on anything personal. The Saturn return arrives at roughly twenty-nine and again at fifty-eight, when Saturn comes back to where it sat at your birth. The Jupiter return happens every twelve years. Around forty, several slow transits tend to arrive together, and that is one of the more interesting things astrology has to say about why that decade has the reputation it does. None of these predict events. They describe periods that a great many people report as significant. That is a weaker claim and a more honest one.

• Saturn through the houses
• Your solar return chart

What a transit cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what will happen, when, or to whom. This is the point at which a great deal of astrology overreaches, and the overreach is worth naming plainly: a transit describes a period with a certain quality, not an event with a date. Two people with the same Saturn transit will have entirely different years, because a transit meets a life already in progress and the life supplies most of the content. Anyone offering you a specific prediction from a transit is claiming considerably more than the technique supports.

A reasonable way to use them

Look backwards first. Find a slow transit that was exact during a period you remember clearly, and see whether the description matches what that time was actually like. That is a much better test than reading a forecast, because you already know the answer and cannot be led toward it. If the fit is poor, you have learned something useful about how much weight to give the technique. If it is good, you have a vocabulary for a period you already lived, which is genuinely the most this can honestly offer and is not nothing.

• Current planetary positions

Common questions