0:00 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
0:45 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
1:31 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
2:18 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
3:04 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
3:54 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
4:41 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
5:26 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
6:14 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,
7:02 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
7:47 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
8:38 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
9:23 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
10:14 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
11:04 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
11:52 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
12:40 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,
13:28 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
14:14 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.
15:03 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
15:55 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
16:41 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.
17:30 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,
18:16 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
19:06 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
19:52 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
20:38 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
21:26 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
22:17 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
23:07 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
23:54 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
24:44 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
25:31 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
26:20 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
27:09 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,
27:59 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
28:45 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
29:30 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
30:17 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
31:02 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
31:49 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
32:40 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
33:37 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.
34:23 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.
35:08 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.
35:55 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
36:44 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
37:30 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
38:17 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
39:05 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
39:51 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,
40:41 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
41:31 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,
42:18 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,
43:04 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--
43:50 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,
44:36 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
45:24 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
46:16 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
47:07 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
47:57 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,
48:46 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
49:32 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
50:18 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
51:05 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
51:53 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,
52:38 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.
53:24 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
54:12 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
54:59 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
55:44 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
56:34 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
57:24 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
58:13 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
58:59 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
59:46 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
1:00:38 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
1:01:25 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.
1:02:11 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.
1:02:59 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
1:03:47 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
1:04:40 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
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