Time in motion: transits, retrogrades and the solar return

Your chart is a photograph: the sky of your birth, fixed once and for all. The real sky has never stopped turning. When one of today’s bodies passes over a point of your chart, or forms an aspect with it, that is a transit.

On the wheel, today’s bodies sit on the inner circle, facing the birth chart. To read them, look at what each one meets. An inner body at the same degree as a birth body, within 3°, touches it: that is a conjunction, the most direct transit of all.

On the figure, a line between the two circles, when there is one, marks the tightest transit of the day. The inner circle changes from day to day; the chart never does.

Not every body passes at the same pace. The Moon touches a point for a few hours; the Sun, Mercury and Venus, for a few days; Mars, for a week or two. These fast transits color a day or a week.

Jupiter stays one year in each sign, Saturn two and a half years, Uranus seven, Neptune fourteen, Pluto up to thirty. On a single point of your chart they work for months, sometimes years, and often pass over it several times: they are the ones that draw the great periods of a life.

The length depends on the body that passes, never on the body it touches. From fastest to slowest: the Moon, then the Sun, Mercury and Venus, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

A transit is read in three questions. Who is passing? The transiting body tells the kind of period: Jupiter opens and expands, Saturn structures and calls for responsibility, Uranus frees and shakes things up, Neptune inspires and dissolves, Pluto transforms in depth.

How? Through the aspect, counted as on the night of the aspects: the distance in signs, then the degrees, within 3°. Same sign, conjunction; two signs, sextile; three, square; four, trine; six, opposition. The trine and the sextile ease things; the square and the opposition put you to work.

Suppose Saturn at 20° Virgo, and the Moon of the example sky, at 21° Sagittarius. From Virgo to Sagittarius, three signs: a square, 1° from exact. Needs (the Moon) learn structure (Saturn).

Where? First on the birth body that is touched: the Moon means needs; Venus, bonds; the Sun, the direction you give your life.

Then in the house the transiting body is crossing. A transit is always placed in the houses of the birth chart: find its degree on the wheel, then read the number of the house where it falls. That house gives the area at work: house 2, money and resources; house 7, partnership and associations; house 10, career and public standing.

In the example sky, house 10 opens at 4° Gemini. The day Saturn reaches 21° Gemini, it is crossing that house, right opposite the Moon (21° Sagittarius, in house 4): career asks for structure, and home claims its share.

Seen from the Earth, a planet sometimes seems to slow down, stop, then move backward through the zodiac: it is retrograde. It does not truly turn around: it is an effect of perspective, like a train you overtake that appears to slide backward. The Sun and the Moon are never retrograde; the slow planets are, for several months every year.

The result: a slow body often passes three times over the same degree of your chart. A first time moving forward: the matter opens. A second time moving backward: it is taken up again, reread, reworked. A third time moving forward again: it concludes. A slow transit is a story in three chapters, never a single day.

Each body takes a fixed time to travel around the zodiac: the Moon 27 days, the Sun one year, Mars 2 years, Jupiter 12 years, Saturn 29 and a half years, Uranus 84 years, Neptune 165 years, Pluto 248 years. When it comes back to its birth position, that is its return; halfway, facing that position, that is its opposition.

Hence the appointments everyone lives at the same age. Around 12, the first Jupiter return: a fresh momentum that comes back every twelve years. Around 14, the Saturn opposition: adolescence measures itself against the rules. Around 29, the Saturn return: the time to build a life of your own. Around 42, the Uranus opposition, half of 84: the need to reinvent yourself.

Once a year, around your birthday, the Sun returns to the exact degree it held at your birth. The chart drawn for that moment is the solar return. It runs from one birthday to the next and is always read with the birth chart, never in its place.

Its Sun: the house where it falls, in the chart of the year, gives the central area of the twelve months. In house 7, partnership and associations; in house 10, career and public standing.

Its Ascendant: look at where its sign falls in the birth chart; the house that sign holds there is the one the year wakes up. In the example sky, house 10 opens in Gemini: a year whose Ascendant falls at 15° Gemini brings career and public standing forward.

Now cross the two tools. The solar return gives the climate of the year: its central area, the house it wakes up. Transits give the dates: the weeks when a slow body reaches a point of the chart. You read the year first, then place the transits inside it.

One rule holds the whole structure together: the transit says when, the birth chart says what. Nothing is activated that is not already in the chart. Saturn over the Sun of the example sky, in Taurus and in house 9, does not ask for the same thing as over a Sun in Leo in house 5: same body, different ground.

You can read a chart, and read it through time. Next night, the last one, you will cross this reading with a second zodiac, the zodiac of the stars.