Transit

Definition

A transit is simply where a planet (or a fixed star, or another chart factor) is in the sky right now, read against your birth chart. As the planets keep moving, they pass over the fixed positions in your chart and, astrologers say, light those positions up. The Greek term for this is epembasis — "a stepping upon" or "a walking through" — which Crane glosses as a planet walking through a sign so that your natal positions are affected.

In Tradition

From the Hellenistic, Arabic-Persian, medieval Latin, and modern Western traditions alike, transits are treated as the most widely used way of timing — the idea being that a moving planet stirs into life whatever natal planet, point, or angle it touches. All these eras share a three-part picture: the contact builds (applying), peaks (exact), then fades (separating). The modern psychological school adds a reading of transits as developmental arcs, but keeps the same underlying mechanism.

In Practice

An astrologer takes the planets' current positions from an ephemeris (a table of where the planets are) and compares them to your birth positions, watching for contacts that are still building, usually within an orb — a margin of closeness — of about 1-3°. Fast movers (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars) bring brief triggers lasting hours to weeks; slow movers (Jupiter through Pluto) mark long chapters of months to years. When a slow planet turns retrograde near a sensitive degree, it often crosses three or even five times, stretching the arc out. The houses involved — both the one being touched and the one the moving planet sits in — show which areas of life are stirred, and the kind of contact (conjunction, opposition, square, trine, sextile) colours how it tends to feel.

Historical Origin

The Greek term epembasis is attested in Hellenistic technical authors. The doctrine of transits is treated at length in Crane's *Astrological Roots: The Hellenistic Legacy* for the Hellenistic line, carried through the Arabic-Persian tradition by Abu Ma'shar and Bonatti, and given its modern Western form in Hand's *Planets in Transit* (1976) and Forrest's *The Changing Sky* (1986).

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From transitus, "a going across" or "passage," describing the movement of a planet across a significant point in the chart..

Further Reading

• Joseph Crane, Astrological Roots: The Hellenistic Legacy
• Robert Hand, Planets in Transit
• Steven Forrest, The Changing Sky