What Is The Foundation Of Prediction In Astrology?
Arguably the most powerful and useful aspect of astrology is its ability to accurately reflect one’s current and future psychological and experiential states.
One’s life is a journey. Whether one agrees with Shakespeare that this journey is “sound and fury signifying nothing,” more like a trip through Oz, or a spiritual pilgrimage might depend on your mindset and maturity (or your astrological birth chart).
Regardless of your final stance on your life’s progress, the two essentials about the life process are: one, it is not static but dynamic-who you are and what you’re experiencing can be vastly different in just a matter of two or three years-and, two, regardless of how good theories of psychological development are at defining life stages, they are never really powerful enough to truly reflect what you, as a unique individual, may be really going through at any stage.
It may be true that adolescence and mid-life might be crisis points for a good majority of us,however, crisis and transformation can strike at any time (outside of textbook definitions of when they are apt to occur).
The astrological birth chart-a portrait of the planets, houses, and zodiacal signs at the exact moment of birth-is a road map to your personal journey. As the pattern of the heavens at the moment of birth stays fixed and is frozen in time, the movement of planets is constantly dynamic relative to your birth chart. Like a cosmic mirror, it is this movement relative to your personal horoscope or chart that this invariably reflecting your changes, encounters, transformations, and experience of yourself in the world.
One of the ways to chart the dynamic movement of the heavens relative to the birth chart is through transits. Most astrologers agree that transits are the single-most important predictive factor in astrology.
Transits occur when planets make specific angular relationships to the positions of the planets in your birth chart. Transits are not isolated incidents but are happening all the time and correlate with the minor to life-changing incidents, maturation periods, psychological shifts, and transformations in our lives.
When planets transit important factors in your birth chart, they “light up,” ignite, catalyze or emphasize the energy and psychological factors associated with the factor being transited.
For instance, when Uranus is in the same position of the sky where Venus was at your birth, it is safe to assume that Uranus is going to make a significant, noticeable impact on the areas that Venus rules: romance, beauty, artistic inspiration, personal appearance, friendships, intimate relationships, and sex life, etc.
In addition, the transiting planet inflects the house, sign or planet in the birth chart being transited. In a very limited sense, Mars tends to energize what it transits, Jupiter tends to expand and elevate and add optimism, and Saturn is apt to negate, deflate, limit, depress, and render problematic what it transits, and so forth.
Transits are evident in three ways in our lives:
• They change perception. As one transiting influence dies down and another begins, what one focuses upon in the environment changes. If one imagines one’s life circumstance to be something like a figure-ground picture like the “vase-two profile” portrait from gestalt psychology, then something in the environment is foregrounded as the other elements recede in the background. A powerful transit has a tendency to foreground people, places, and associations that resonate with its essential meanings and patterns.
• They attract certain events, people, circumstances, and places into our lives. One might think of an archetype as being like a magnetic field surrounding us that somehow and mysteriously attracts people and events through which the archetype can manifest. Thus, if one is undergoing a powerful Saturn transit, one might attract Saturn-like figures in one’s life: mainstream cultural authority figures; polished, clean and efficient people who’ve never questioned their societal context; punitive, pessimistic, and negative influences, or teachers who enlighten us about the “school of hard knocks” side of life.
• They inflect and permeate subjective experience, mood, and inner dialogue. Finally, transiting archetypes appear to affect our stream of consciousness and interior subjective states. For instance, if one is experiencing a significant Uranus transit, it is more than likely that one will be feeling excited and stimulated by ideas and insights; the yearning to free one’s self from one’s current context might be peaking, and there may be a renewed sense of wonder, amazement, and astonishment about one’s subjective life.
Last updated on November 22, 2014 at 9:37 pm. Word Count: 736