spock
Well-known member
That transits indicate motives, not outcomes isn't common knowledge much less common agreement, but I think there are good reasons for considering it. One of those reasons is a combination of observation and logic. If a specific outcome is predicted to coincide with a specific transit it should coincide with it every time it occurs, otherwise we have no way of knowing when the prediction will 'come true' and when it won't. But if that condition is met it follows inescapably that when we're born the future events in our lives are already determined. That contradicts not only what we think we know about reality but also free will. Do we really suppose that a person about to say “I do” is incapable of doing otherwise because the wedding was preordained? But it doesn't contradict free will to assume that there are certain transits that regularly coincide with a need that motivates us to try to find a mate or to make a change in an existing relationship. This assumption also makes sense of the well-known fact that not every transit coincides with an (external) event. If transits time motives rather than outcomes we shouldn't expect it to. We might feel the above-mentioned need but for any of a number of reasons be unable to satisfy it. Similarly, during a transit of Mars in hard-angle aspect to its natal place a person might spend several weeks looking for a new job but due to personal shortcomings, economic conditions or any number of other reasons be unsuccessful and for the time being give up and remain where he's at. Astrologers normally wouldn't call that 'an event' but it seems to me the effort is, in fact, a kind of event and, more to the point, an indication of a more directly and consistently predictable inner event, the urge that motivated the effort in the first place. Conclusions of this sort are also a product of observation and logic. When I was first studying transits and noticed that many of the events that did coincide with a given transit appeared to be in some sense “the same thing” it seemed to me that what made them seem the same was that they occurred for the same or similar reasons. Those reasons are of course what I now call motives or motivational structures, the predictable inner events that sometimes (but not always) eventuate in an external event that's the only kind of development that most astrologers recognize as 'an event'.
Further evidence that not only do transits work, but that they work more or less as described above, comes from cognitive developmental psychology, particularly the work of L.S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), whose reputation and influence has waxed greatly in recent decades. Like other developmental psychologists Vygotsky posited a sequence of periods, each more or less of a piece from beginning to end, each distinctively different from the preceding and following periods. Theorists largely agree on when these periods begin and end, and those boundaries, which by implication are the transitions between periods, coincide with hard-angle age transits, transits of planets to their natal places which occur at about the same age for everyone. Vygotsky's scheme differs from the others in that it not only includes relatively long 'stable periods', which coincide with the periods between transits, but also the relatively brief 'critical periods' connecting them, which coincide with the periods of transits. His description of the general form of the latter is strikingly similar to the way astrologers describe transits. They begin imperceptibly, gradually building up to a peak of intensity in the middle of the period, then fade out just as gradually and imperceptibly as they began. The critical periods in his scheme include the Crisis at Age One (Sun conjoining its natal place, the first Solar Return seen as a transit), the Crisis at Age Three (Jupiter opening square its natal place), and the Crisis at Age Seven (Saturn opening square its natal place). His contemporary Jean Piaget saw a transition between 18 and 24 months (the first Mars Return), by implication a transition at 7 (pretty much all developmental theorists see a turning point at this age), and a transition at about 11½-12 (the first Jupiter Return). The key point is this. Vygotsky explains that the cause of developmental change is that during each critical period new motivations emerge which drive development during the ensuing stable period. So Vygotsky felt that what's specifically predictable about [what we call] transits is motivations.
Seeing transits as periods during which certain motivational structures come to the forefront also means we might after all be able to make sense of how something like astrology could work, which up to now has been extraordinarily difficult. But we can't explain how a cow could jump over the moon, either, because it can't. You can't explain what isn't possible. But it's not impossible in principle to explain an astrology which predicts not events-in-the-world but motivations. In recent decades the science of chronobiology has made tremendous progress in understanding how biological clocks, particularly the 24-hour variety, function. Various developments occur at specific times during a given 24-hour period because the organism always "knows" what time it is throughout the cycle. It knows the time not because it always knows where the sun is in the sky but because it has a master molecular clock located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Particular genes make particular proteins which as they accumulate inhibit further production until they degrade to the point where the inhibition is relaxed and protein production resumes. This cycle takes place over a period of about 24 hours, and where we are in the cycle at any given moment is 'what time it is'. The alternation of light and darkness (and perhaps heat and cold) is arguably the basis for the evolution of the clock, but it's the clock itself, not the sun's position, that for the organism tells time. However, that clock is reset daily at sunrise, when long wavelength blue light is prevalent, which strikes 'opsins' sensitive to that wavelength, which in turn resets the molecular machinery back to zero. Thanks not only to developmental psychology and adult life cycle theorists such as Daniel Levinson (Seasons of a Man's Life) and Gail Sheehy (Passages) (who see turning points in the late teens and early twenties, the late twenties, the late thirties and early forties, etc.) but also observations of astrologers that agree with those of non-astrologers (most notably the late twenties transition we call the Saturn Return), there is good evidence that human rhythms exist which correspond not only to the periods of the Sun and Moon but also to the periods of the planets. I suggest that these, too, are instances in which life has used these extremely regular, stable astronomical periods as the basis for the evolution of recurrent, timed biological processes, including those that we term 'psychological'.
As for the actual effects of different transits there's simply a lot that we don't know and much of what I do know, or think I know, is included in the article linked below, which I won't regurgitate here although I will abstract from it some key ideas. One is that events, even if seen as possible outcomes of predictable astrological effects rather than as the predicted effects per se, are not instantaneous things that occur at a specified time and place but processes that take place over a finite period of time, with complex events constituted by briefer events nested as episodes within the periods of longer duration events. Hence a scientist, over a several year period during his late thirties and early forties (Uranus opposite Uranus and Neptune square Neptune, the Midlife Transition) experienced a transformation in his beliefs and his sense of what's possible in the world. Over a several month period within that longer period, as Saturn went over his Asc (or as I prefer to put it squared his Nonagesimal) his identity changed, to that of professional astrologer. During a Mars square Mars timed episode within the longer period of the Saturn transit he put an ad in the yellow pages as an astrological consultant and made arrangements with another astrologer to refer clients to one another. As a result his daily routine changed. He now took phone calls, made appointments or referrals, met with clients and erected and studied charts in preparation for meetings with clients, activities which manifested and made more immediate his newly emergent identity as a consulting astrologer. His Saturn-timed identity change made sense in the context of the longer Uranus and Neptune timed shift in orientation, and in turn was a more immediate manifestation of it. The Mars-timed initiative made sense in terms of the Saturn transit and was, again, a more immediate manifestation of it. (A subsequent Mars transit coincided with his decision to move cross country to a different city, where he entered the local astrological community as an established professional.) If asked when he had turned professional as an astrologer he probably would have cited a single moment within these multiple level transitions, perhaps the moment when he called to put an ad in the telephone yellow pages, or the moment his first professional consultation began, but that's because we tend to perceive and insist that major turning points or events happen at a specific time and place, which isn't actually the case. This collapsing of extended processes into significant moments can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. I once asked an astrological acquaintance, who I knew had had a number of love affairs, which I had previously observed often begin and end during hard-angle transits of Mars to its natal place, what if anything had happened during a particular transit. He studied his ephemeris and did some calculations, checked his diary and said, "That would have been about 3:00 in the afternoon of such and such date. I was out chopping wood. After a sufficient interval I approached the subject again in a different way. Did anything significant happen during March of such and such year: "That's when my affair with Marcy started."
Finally, transit patterns enable us to account for personality. If a given configuration says something about what the person who has it is like, what's the connection between that configuration and that fact? How did the person come to be that way? For instance, I have Saturn and Mars at 24°53' and 27°06' Cancer, respectively. What does this mean? It means that every time Mars transits conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place it also transits conjunct, square, or opposite natal Saturn. During Mars/Mars hard-angle transits matters tend to come to a head with regards to our daily routine, including not only what we do throughout a normal day but also who we interact with. Mars/Saturn transits essentially time periods of inhibition during which we're more than usually aware, but not necessarily in a fully conscious sense, of the consequences, particularly the social consequences, of whatever we're thinking about doing. Now imagine the developmental consequences of always having the turning points in these two rhythms coincide. Every time I feel the urge during a Mars/Mars transit to resolve issues that have been bothering me, that I now can't ignore, a simultaneous Mars/Saturn transit is causing me to feel inhibited, which presumably not only keeps me from doing some things but even more likely gives a characteristic shape or psychological spin to what I actually end up doing. Year after year, transit after transit, a set of propensities, a personality pattern, builds up. Dealing with the same issues won't necessarily cause people with the same aspect (and pattern of simultaneous transits) to develop the same specific behaviors, but their characteristic responses to situations, even though different, stem from the same recurrent psychological challenges. Behind different coping behaviors we may find the same thing being coped with, for instance an exaggerated fear of humiliation. One person might cope with such a fear by being evasive and hard to pin down, so that he can never be shown to have been wrong, whereas another might go to exaggerated lengths to eliminate errors, to avoid being wrong.
In this way we can use the transit dynamics implicit in the aspects in the natal chart to make sense of personality. Rather than expecting a Mars conjunct Saturn, or a Jupiter square Sun, to magically confer the qualities we associate with it, we can see those qualities developing over time via the patterns of simultaneity resulting from that particular natal setup. The natal chart has other timing implications as well. If Saturn and Uranus cross the Ascendant (i.e., square the Nonagesimal) at the same time at age 25 in a given person's life, it means that at birth they were the right distances from each other and from that point to arrive together at it at that age. There are many such timing statements in the natal chart. This takes natal-indicated traits out of the realm of the magical by relating them to the predictable effects of transits. These transit effects can be understood as psychodynamic functions. What Freud called the ego, Jung the persona, Erik Erikson industry vs. inferiority and Abraham Maslow esteem needs are what we call the Saturn rhythm. Just as different colors are different wavelengths of light, the Freudian ego/Saturn effect has a characteristic temporal wavelength. It's a psychological effect that comes to the forefront at 7⅓ year intervals. (The Jupiter rhythm corresponds to the Freudian id.)
I hope this post and the article below help answer some of your questions.
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