Transits and Retrogrades

The chart is a photograph of the sky at the minute you were born, and it stays that way for life. The planets kept moving, and every time one of them passes a planet or an angle in your chart, something in you is touched. That is a transit, and it is how astrology describes the weather of a life as well as its character.

What a transit is

A transit is a planet in the sky today forming an aspect to a planet or an angle in your birth chart. Saturn passing over your natal Moon, natal meaning the one in your birth chart. Jupiter opposite your Sun. Uranus square your Ascendant. The five aspects on The Aspects page are the same ones I use here, with tighter orbs, because a moving planet is only exact for a short while and the effect is strongest near the exact degree.

The speed of the planet decides how long it lasts. The Moon crosses your whole chart in about 27 days, so a Moon transit is a mood that is gone by the weekend. The Sun gives you a few days. Mars a week or two. Jupiter and Saturn can sit on a point for months, especially when they turn retrograde and cross it three times. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto take years, and those are the passages that change a life rather than a week.

How I use them in a reading

The chart shows the shape. The transits show what is moving now. When I write a reading I build the natal chart first and read it on its own, because that is who you are and it does not need the current sky to make sense. Then I lay the transits over it and look for the slow planets touching the personal ones. That is where the client's present circumstances usually sit, and more often than not they have already told me about it in the intake without knowing they were describing a transit.

I treat a transit as a question the sky is asking, never as an event it is announcing. Saturn crossing your Sun asks you whether the job is the right one, and it keeps asking until you answer. The people who do badly under a hard transit are usually the ones who refuse to hear the question. The lesson starts as a whisper, and nobody enjoys what it sounds like by the time it is shouting.

The Saturn return

Saturn takes about 29 and a half years to go round the zodiac, so it comes back to the place it held at your birth around the age of 29, again around 58, and for the long lived a third time near 88. The first Saturn return is the end of the first draft of a life. Whatever you built in your twenties gets tested, and what was not built on anything solid tends to come down. It is the age when people marry, divorce, change careers, have the first child or finally leave the town they grew up in. I have watched it in dozens of charts and I have never seen it pass quietly.

The second return, around 58, is gentler and deeper. The first asks what you are going to do with your life. The second asks what it was for, and it hands you the elder's chair whether you feel ready or not.

The Jupiter return

Jupiter takes about twelve years, so you have a Jupiter return at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60 and so on. Where the Saturn return tests, the Jupiter return expands. It is a year of doors opening and the horizon widening, and the small print is that Jupiter also expands appetite and overconfidence. The best Jupiter years I have seen were spent saying yes to the right things rather than to everything.

The outer planets passing through

Uranus takes about 84 years, Neptune about 165 and Pluto about 248, so only Uranus comes back to its birth place within a long life, near 84, and the other two never do. Along the way they form slow aspects to their own natal positions and to your personal planets, and those passages mark the big turnings. Uranus reaches the opposite point from where it sat at your birth somewhere around 40 to 42, which is the astrological explanation for the midlife upheaval everyone recognises. Neptune squares its own place around the same age and Pluto squares its own place somewhere between the mid thirties and the late forties depending on the generation. Together they are why the years either side of 40 can feel like being renovated with the family still living in the house.

A transit from an outer planet to your Sun, Moon or Ascendant, your Rising sign, is a passage of two to three years. Uranus wakes you up and breaks what was stuck. Neptune dissolves and asks you to trust what you cannot see. Pluto takes something down to the foundations and rebuilds it. All of them are work rather than doom, and the people who meet them willingly come out the other side with a life that fits better than the one they went in with.

What a retrograde actually is

A retrograde is when a planet appears to move backwards through the zodiac. It does not move backwards. Nothing in the solar system reverses. What you are seeing is the effect of Earth and the other planet travelling round the Sun at different speeds. When a faster planet overtakes a slower one, or Earth overtakes an outer planet, the slower one seems to drift backwards against the stars for a while, the way a car you are passing on the freeway seems to slide backwards though it is still moving forwards. Then the angle changes and it appears to go forwards again. The moments where it appears to stop and turn are called stations.

The Sun and Moon never retrograde, because the Sun is what we go round and the Moon goes round us. Everything else does, on its own schedule. Mercury turns retrograde about three times a year for about three weeks each time. Venus about every eighteen months for about forty days. Mars about every two years for two to two and a half months. Jupiter is retrograde about four months of every year, Saturn about four and a half, and Uranus, Neptune and Pluto about five to six months each. The outer planets spend close to half of every year retrograde, which is why I do not treat an outer planet retrograde as news.

A retrograde period is a time of review in the department that planet runs. The energy turns inward, and things from the past come back for a second look. It is useful weather for finishing, mending and reconsidering, and poor weather for launching.

Mercury retrograde without the panic

Mercury retrograde has become a punchline, and I would like to take some of the fear out of it. Three weeks, three times a year, is nine weeks out of every fifty two, so you have lived through dozens of them and you are still here. Mercury rules the mind, communication, travel and the small machinery of daily life, so a retrograde shows up as the email that goes astray, the meeting that gets moved, the contract that needs a second read. Read it twice, back up your files, allow an extra ten minutes, then get on with your day. It is also the best three weeks in the quarter for picking up a conversation you left unfinished or finding the thing you lost in March.

The shadow period

A retrograde planet covers the same stretch of sky three times. It passes a point going forward, backs over it going retrograde, then crosses it a third time once it turns direct. The weeks before the retrograde station, while the planet is first crossing the ground it will later retrace, are called the pre shadow. The weeks after it turns direct, while it is crossing that ground again, are the post shadow. In my experience the matter a retrograde raises is often not settled until the planet has cleared the post shadow. If the retrograde itself felt like nothing happened, the shadow is usually where it did.

A date in your own time zone

A transit becomes exact at a single moment, and that moment falls on different dates in different parts of the world. When I give a date in a reading it is in the client's own time zone, wherever the client lives now, named in the document so it can be checked against a calendar. Never universal time, and never my own Perth time unless the client happens to live here. A date you cannot check is a date you cannot use.

Watching the live sky

These pages are the reference. The daily posts are where the sky actually moves. When a planet turns, I write about it on the day, as in the posts "Saturn has turned around", "Venus is walking backwards" and "Venus turns around this afternoon", and every Monday "The Week Ahead" walks all twelve signs through the coming seven days across astrology, numerology and Chinese astrology. If you want to learn transits, follow the posts for a few months with your own chart beside you and notice what you felt when a planet crossed something of yours. You will learn more from that than from any book.

Which Saturn return are you closest to, and what did the last one take with it?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.