Become Your Own Astrologer: Write Transit Stories with the Outer Planets
In “Become Your Own Astrologer: Think Seasonally,” I talked about the importance of thinking seasonally when figuring out which transits to prioritize. The transits that are going to be most important to you either involve outer planets that are making a major aspect to planets in your chart or involve the lord of the year.
I mentioned a couple of resources that are useful for figuring out which outer planet transits are relevant to you, but how do you actually go about figuring out what season you’re in?
In this post, I will focus on outer planet transits and use my chart to walk you through the process of figuring out what transits you’re experiencing using my Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac and the Personal Transits Calculator on Astro Seek.
Acquire a List of Your Current Outer Planet Transits
The first step to figuring out what transits are most important is to acquire a list of the outer planet transits you’re experiencing.
You can also acquire a list of transits for free on Astro.com by going to Extended Chart Selection, the Special tab, and selecting Transit Calendar for 3 years.
Extended Chart Selection, Astro.com
I prefer to use my Honeycomb planner because I like to be able to draw on things with pen, and I find the formatting of the chart easier to read.
In my planner, the Outer Planet Natal Transits chart is on page 24.
Find the Slowest Planets
Outer Planet Transits Chart from Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac
In my planner, the planets are presented in order of speed with the slowest (Pluto) at the top and the fastest (Jupiter) at the bottom.
As you can see, the list of transits each planet is involved in gets longer as you move down the page.
This is because the faster moving planets have more opportunity to make aspects than the slower moving planets.
Jupiter is like a hyper-social entrepreneur at a networking party. Over the course of this year, Jupiter makes 18 aspects, which is like having 18 conversations at the party.
Pluto, on the other hand, is like the introverted engineer who is coping with being dragged along by her boss by drinking in the corner. Over the course of the same year, Pluto only makes three aspects, or 3 conversations with the planets in my chart.
Because Pluto moves more slowly—or, extending the metaphor, is more selective in the people she talks to—the conversations she has are longer and deeper and more meaningful than the ones Jupiter has.
Jupiter transits are important, but they are relatively short lived compared to Pluto’s, so they don’t have enough time to become truly seasonal. They’re more like vacations.
If I just consider the length of transits, I will look at Pluto transits first, and I will only consider Jupiter transits if I don’t have any more important transits going on.
In this case, I have 3 transits involving Pluto, 3 involving Neptune, 2 involving Uranus, 6 involving Chiron, and 9 involving Saturn.
23 transits in all.
Personally, I find it difficult to think about more than three seasonal transits at a time, so I will be narrowing this list down quite a lot.
I will begin by disregarding the Chiron transits because I don’t work with Chiron very much in my practice.
This reduces the list to 17, but that’s still way too many. We need to narrow it down some more.
Find Transits Involving the Sun, Moon, Chart Ruler, and Angles
Transits involving the sun, moon, chart ruler, and angles are most likely to touch you deeply.
Transits to the sun and chart ruler involve your sense of self and your basic vitality.
Transits to the moon involve your emotional health, home, and family.
Transits to the angles involve some of the biggest topics in your life—your relationships, career, personality, and home.
In my chart, focusing on just these points reduces the number of aspects we’re working with considerably, especially since the sun is my chart ruler. That means we’re working with one less planet than usual.
We are now looking at only 7 transits:
Pluto square the MC
Uranus sextile the sun
Uranus square the moon
Uranus square the AC
Saturn square the MC
Saturn conjunct the moon
Saturn opposite the AC
I would like to get this list down to three or less if I can, so we will try to reduce this list some more.
Find the Most Difficult Aspects
Not every aspect planets make to each other is the same. Returning to the networking party metaphor, some people are easier to talk to than others, and some conversations deal with easier topics than others.
Conversations with Pluto are always going to be difficult, and even the most difficult conversations with Jupiter tend to feel light-hearted (at least, at the time. You might disagree about how light-hearted things are later when you’re nursing a Jupiter-inspired hangover).
But it is possible to get Pluto talking about subjects that are relatively light-hearted, and it’s possible to have a difficult conversation with Jupiter.
The easiest way to figure out the nature of the contact between the planets is to look at the aspects they’re making.
Sextiles and trines are likely to be light-hearted conversations.
Conjunctions, squares, and oppositions are likely to be more difficult.
We all like to have good times, but when we’re working with stories, we want drama. Conjunctions, squares, and oppositions are most likely to see the planets flipping the table (or dancing on the table, in the case of Jupiter).
If we only consider conjunctions, squares, and oppositions, we’ve gotten rid of the Neptune/sun sextile, but we still have 6 to deal with:
Pluto square the MC
Uranus square the moon
Uranus square the AC
Saturn square the MC
Saturn conjunct the moon
Saturn opposite the AC
Fortunately, we have one more filter to apply before we have to start making hard choices.
Figure Out Where You Are in the Plot of Each Transit Story
All 6 of the transits I selected represent big themes for the year, but not all of them are immediately relevant anymore. Some of them represent plot lines that are essentially over.
In order to figure out which transits are still relevant, it helps to know when the transit is exact.
This is because most (not all) outer planet transit stories are like three act plays that structure themselves around three exact aspects between the planets involved in the transit.
ACT 1
The first time the aspect is exact introduces the plot of the story and the characters that will be involved.
ACT 2
The second aspect brings those themes forward again. If we have learned something from the first act, we have had time to equip ourselves for what happens during the second act. Otherwise, the drama tends to be more intense, almost as if the planet is raising its voice trying to get its point across.
ACT 3
The third exact transit brings the conclusion of the story. We find out if the story is a comedy or a tragedy. Have we triumphed against the odds, or have we been run over by the Fates’ shiny new Miata?
To figure out when the aspects are exact, you can use a planner, but transits are rarely neatly contained in a year, so I like to look up the exact dates of the aspect using Astro-Seek’s Personal Transit Calendar.
Look for Transits Whose Stories Are in the First Act
I am most interested in transits that are in their first act. The first exact aspect has already been made, but the second hasn’t been made yet.
I prefer to focus on aspects that meet this criteria because it allows me to have the most agency in my work with that planet. I can use the 5-YEAR MEMORY BOOK METHOD to see what was happening the last time the aspect was exact to give myself some clues about what kind of story I’m in, so I can focus my magic and self-improvement work on preparing myself for the next time the transit is exact.
Using this method, I was finally able to reduce the number of transits I’m working with to 2, which is very reasonable:
Pluto square Midheaven
Saturn conjunct the Moon
Tell Your Story
Once I have the dates, I use my planner to look for things that happened that are relevant to the themes of the planets involved.
If you are new to astrology, you can use the following keywords to help you recognize the themes of the planets:
Jupiter - Personal growth/investment,
Saturn - Setting boundaries, hard work, maturation,
Uranus - Individuation, blasting yourself out of corners you’ve painted yourself into,
Neptune - Raising your vibration, dreaming about the future, making art,
Pluto - Psychological work, healing, burning bridges.
If you really want to dive deep, you can incorporate the themes of the houses and the planets that rule the houses the transits are happening in, but you can still get a lot of information by focusing on the planets, and that’s what I’m going to do.
Because this post is already quite long, I’m going to focus on one example.
Pluto Square the Midheaven, Astro-Seek Personal Transits Calendar
Example: Pluto square Midheaven
First Exact Aspect: February 20, 2021
Themes: Death/endings/transformation (Pluto), Career/fame (Midheaven)
I left Discord communities I had founded and Tumblr and Twitter (I gave up 6000+ followers),
I wrote a blog post called “Rethinking the 11th House,”
Ring light camera stand came in the mail (representing a new beginning with video in career).
By far the most significant and memorable event on that list was leaving Discord, Tumblr, and Twitter. Choosing to leave those platforms was heart wrenching. I’d invested a ton of time and energy into them, and it meant walking away from friends and over 6000 followers. As a writer, walking away from a community like that felt like dying, but I knew it was time to go through a major transformation, and I wouldn’t be able to change the way I needed to on those platforms.
One of those changes was rethinking the way I do community, as represented by the post on the 11th house. That post represents a major change in my thinking. Instead of focusing on finding a place for myself in the astrology community, I started to think in terms of adventuring parties in tabletop RPGs. How can I, as an astrologer, work with people who have common goals but different skillsets?
Lastly, the ring light camera stand represents a revolution in my work. Until I left Tumblr and Twitter and started focusing on Instagram, I preferred communities where people interacted with avatars and didn’t show their faces. Places like that are important because they allow people whose physical bodies don’t match their self-concept to present a picture of themselves that feels comfortable to them, and it gives others the ability to try on different identities in order to find one that fits. Like many Pagan content creators, I write with a pen name, but I am in a time in my life when I need to make my voice heard, and the connection between my face and my voice feels important to me.
Together, I see these elements as representing a story in which the old way of doing my career is ending, and a new way of doing my career is beginning.
You Have a Story. Now What Do You Do With It?
Looking forward, I see that the next two acts in the play will happen within ten days of each other in mid-October.
Pluto is the planet of death and rebirth, but I want to be careful not to jump to the rebirth part when there is dying left to do.
Between now and October, I am focusing on grieving what I lost when I left my old communities and making sure I’m not holding back on necessary changes. Usually, the sooner changes are made, the more gracefully those changes can be made.
I am also slowly, carefully investing in building new communities, specially communities where I show up as myself and make alliances with people who are different than me.
But I need to remember that this is a Pluto time, which means that I am going through a journey through the underworld. I travel with hope, but I won’t be surprised if the next few months are a dark time for my career.
