If you’re just starting out in astrology and using planetary movements to inform your life, then learning to find your transits is crucial to success. Astrology can be a confusing field of study, filled with contradictory views and approaches. April Elliott Kent’s Astrological Transits: The Beginner’s Guide to Using Planetary Cycles to Plan and Predict Your Day, Week, Year (or Destiny) takes a clear and well-explained path to get you educated and using transits in your life with great success. In addition to basics, she gets more in-depth as the readers advance in their astrological knowledge.
To get started, learn more about your transits.
How to Find Your Transits
At the risk of sounding like a codger who prefaces every statement with, “In my day . . . ,” it used to be that every astrologer had a full set of planetary tables, called ephemerides, for at least the current year, and usually for the entire century. In fact, straddling two centuries as we do, many of us have two hundred years’ worth of ephemerides on our bookshelves. Even in this computer age, I recommend investing in a good old-fashioned ephemeris. You can buy them online for a reasonable price or check your local metaphysical bookstore for used copies. If you have an ephemeris, all you have to do is print out your birth chart, flip to the ephemeris entry for the current date, and draw the current transit positions around the outside of your chart:
If you prefer, you can calculate the current transits and generate a wheel with your natal chart on the inside and the transits around the outside. Any astrological software does this easily; calculate your chart and a chart for the current date and place, and create a biwheel with your birth chart in the middle. If you don’t have software, you can calculate your birth chart and current transits at Astrodienst:
1. Go to www.astro.com.
2. From the menu, select “Free Horoscopes,” then “Extended Chart Selection” under “Horoscope Drawings and Calculations.”
3. Enter or select stored birth data. Click “Continue.”
4. Under “Methods,” expand the drop-down menu labeled “Please select the type of chart you want.”
5. Under “Prognostic Methods,” select “Transits,” then “Natal Chart and Transits.”
6. Hit “Click here to show the chart.” The resulting chart shows your birth chart on the inside and the current transits around the outside of the wheel:
Not All Transits Are Created Equal
Transits behave differently for you than for your friends, family, or partner—because you are different people. You have different birth charts, with planets placed in different signs, houses, and aspects to other planets.
Imagine you’re at dinner with a group of friends. You’re the guest of honor, and throughout the evening your friends celebrate with stories about how they met you and adventures you’ve shared. Some of these stories are familiar, burnished and embellished over years of retelling.
But one friend tells a story that you don’t remember at all. Something about the two of you going to a club, many years ago, and meeting a couple of guys. Apparently, the one for whom she felt an immediate, passionate attraction ignored her because he couldn’t take his eyes off you. Years of resentment and insecurity came to a head, and soon thereafter, she entered therapy to deal with her feelings of inadequacy.
And you didn’t even remember that it had happened.
On the day of the ill-fated club adventure, transiting Venus was crossing Pluto in your birth chart, bringing together themes of affection, attraction, and deep emotion (and, in this case, a jealous female). As we mentioned previously, Venus moves quickly. Every year, it crosses your natal Pluto for a day or so; it’s not necessarily a memorable transit.
But for your friend, it was the other way around: Pluto was making an aspect to Venus. Pluto is the slowest-moving of the transiting planets, taking about 248 years to complete a cycle through the zodiac. Not everyone will experience Pluto transiting over Venus in her birth chart at all, and for those who do, the transit might take more than a year to unfold. During that time, relationships will be changed, and your style of relating to others will change, too. Pluto never leaves us unaltered.
In both cases, the symbolism of Venus meets that of Pluto. But a three-day transit from quick-moving Venus to Pluto simply doesn’t carry the same clout as a yearlong transit from slow-moving Pluto to Venus.
The effect of a transit is usually much more pronounced if it echoes an aspect in your birth chart. If you were born with Venus and Pluto in difficult aspect to each other, you are extraordinarily sensitive to this combination of planets and the themes it symbolizes. So when transiting Pluto connects with Venus in your birth chart, it’s as though a doctor is testing your reflexes with his hammer. Your reaction may seem a little extreme to an observer, but it’s because the transit is triggering every Venus/Pluto hurt and betrayal you’ve ever felt.
How to Use This Book
This book is designed to let you easily refer to a specific planet, a particular house of the horoscope, or important planetary cycles, including:
• A review of each planet’s symbolism • Identifying the ages when you will encounter important points in each planet’s cycle
• A brief description of transiting planets in each zodiac sign • An examination of each planet’s aspects to natal planets
• A description of what to expect when transiting planets are in each house of the horoscope
• Tables and worksheets to help you track and understand transit cycles in your birth chart
I’ve done my best to make the book user-friendly. You don’t have to be a professional astrologer to work with transits! In fact, every time you take note of a Full Moon or someone’s birthday, you’re working with transits. That said, you will certainly get more from this book if you have a basic knowledge of astrology, including how to read a chart to locate planets, houses, and aspects, and of the basic meanings of those things.
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Your birth chart is a snapshot of the sky taken at the moment and place of your birth, one that reflects your character, personality, strengths, and challenges. But the moment after that picture was taken, the planets moved on–some quickly, some very slowly. Astrologers call the moving planets “transits,” and by comparing their movements to your birth chart you can gain acomplete view of how best to prepare for challenges, meet opportunities, and stay grounded in a constantly-changing world.
In Astrological Transits, astrologer April Elliott Kent will guide you through the best ways to make the most of your birth chart. Learn how to make the most of good transits and harness and transform the energy of “bad” ones. You’ll also understand planetary cycles and anticipate your own transits. Finally, you’ll know how to read planetary return charts, work with planetary retrogrades, and use eclipses to recognize major patterns and turning points in your life.
If you are comfortable reading a birth chart, you are ready to move your chart into the future using transits. Instructions, tables, and worksheets will make tracking your transit cycles simple and exciting!
The post Getting Started With Astrology: Find Your Transits appeared first on Quarto Knows Blog.