Transits and progressions

What it is

The set of techniques by which a static birth chart is made to say when.

Transits are the simplest: the actual positions of the planets today, compared against their positions at birth. When transiting Saturn reaches the place Saturn occupied at your birth, you are having a Saturn return. When transiting Jupiter squares your natal sun, that is a Jupiter square.

Because the planets move at very different speeds, transits sort themselves naturally by significance. The moon's transits last hours; Saturn's last months; Pluto's can last years. The outer planets do the heavy lifting in modern practice for this reason.

Progressions are symbolic rather than actual. In secondary progressions, the most common method, each day after birth corresponds to one year of life: the sky on your thirtieth day of life describes your thirtieth year. Solar arc directions advance every point in the chart by the sun's yearly motion, roughly a degree per year.

Returns cast a fresh chart for the moment a planet comes back to its natal position — the solar return chart, cast for each birthday, being read as a forecast for the year.

Where it came from

Transits are as old as the tradition. Progressions developed later; the day-for-a-year principle has scriptural precedent that early astrologers cited, and the technique was systematised in the seventeenth century and after.

The Saturn return as a popular concept is much more recent. Saturn's roughly 29.5-year orbit was always known, and its return always noted, but its promotion into a widely recognised life milestone belongs to the late twentieth century and to popular astrology writing — it is now familiar to a great many people who have never read anything else about astrology.

How it is done

The astrologer lists the significant transits and progressions active in a period, weights them by the planets involved and the exactness of the aspect, and reads them against the natal chart's own themes. Timing is refined by when an aspect becomes exact, and by whether a slow planet stations and repeats an aspect several times over a year or two.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the technique is internally systematic and does most of the practical work in modern consultation. Most people who see an astrologer are asking about now, not about their character.

And we can say the Saturn return is the single hardest astrological claim to evaluate, for a reason that has nothing to do with astrology. The first Saturn return falls at about 29; the second at about 58.

Those ages land squarely on transitions that developmental psychology describes independently. The late twenties are when the extended adolescence of Western adulthood typically resolves — career consolidation, partnership decisions, children, the closing of some options and the seriousness of others. Around 58 to 60 comes another documented cluster: parents dying, children leaving, career trajectory settled, retirement in view, mortality no longer abstract.

So an astrologer telling a 29-year-old that this is a period of reckoning, of taking adult responsibility, and of discovering which of their twenties commitments will not survive, is making a claim that will be true of a very large proportion of 29-year-olds — for reasons of biology, economics and social structure.

This is not a trick, and most astrologers using it are not being cynical. It is a genuine confound: an astrological claim keyed to an age at which the described events actually happen. Any test would need to compare against a base rate that is already high, and no such test has been done.

We can say the general availability problem applies to transits. With ten bodies, the angles, and five or more aspects at working orbs, something is always transiting something. A practitioner looking for an explanation of an event that has already happened will find one, and a practitioner forecasting has a wide field of possibilities to choose emphasis from.

We cannot say the technique has been tested, because in any rigorous form it has not. Forecast accuracy would be assessable — sealed predictions, independent outcome assessment — and the same gap exists here as in horary.

Further reading

• Robert Hand, Planets in Transit (1976) — the standard reference, and useful for seeing how wide the interpretive range for any single transit is.
• Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Man's Life (1978) — for the developmental literature that the Saturn return coincides with. Dated and criticised, but the age-linked transitions it describes are the confound.