Astrology Articles by April Elliott Kent, from BigSkyAstrology.com

I don’t know if this is your experience, but I find that a client usually comes to me for the first time because they’re at a critical turning point, a “crisis” in their life. It’s usually very easy to pinpoint the source of the crisis with eclipses. I just map out the solar and lunar eclipses for the year, figure out where those points fall in the client’s chart by house placement and hard aspect to natal planets. Then I backtrack 18 years, at 4.5 year intervals. These will show me years where the client was receiving conjunctions, squares, and oppositions from eclipses to roughly these same areas of their chart.

At that point, I have easy reference points for exploring these issues in more depth during the reading. Then I calculate secondary and solar arc progressions, transits, and the solar return chart for the year; almost invariably, the configurations in the chart receiving the most emphasis from eclipses will also show a lot of important activity in all these charts. Fairly quickly, the main themes for the year emerge and provide a solid framework for a reading.

This is a fairly conventional way of working with any kind of cycle, whether it’s cycles of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, progressed lunar phases, anything. For me, what makes eclipses especially appealing as a cyclical tool is:

They’re really easy to use. If a client comes to me and says, “When will I find a relationship?” It’s a fairly simple matter to say, “Well, when were you last in an important relationship?” – find where the eclipses were, and work with 4.5 year periods from there. The 9 year opposition part of the cycle seems especially strong.
Secondly, of all the tools we use in prediction, eclipses are the least subtle! People notice their effects. They have a kind of bare bones, brass knuckles sort of immediacy about them.
Finally, eclipses show where crisis is occurring and how it’s related to past events, in a way that can reveal to your client just how far they’ve come in dealing with a particular issue in their life. That can be extremely helpful and validating when your client is in “Why do I keep making these boneheaded mistakes?” mode.

Eclipses move clockwise through the chart, unlike progressions and transits, which move counter-clockwise. And because solar eclipses usually occur in opposite signs in a given year, they will very often fall in houses of the chart that directly oppose one another. So in interpreting eclipses in the houses, I’m working not with twelve individual houses so much as six teams of houses, or house axes, directly opposite one another.

The size of the houses in your chart vary, of course, depending on where you were born. If you were born extremely north or south of the equator, generally one or two of these house axes will be quite large while the rest are quite small--so that progressions, transits, and—yes—eclipses spend more time transiting the large houses than the small ones. On average, though, you can count on eclipses falling in a particular axis of your chart for about 1 ½ years at a time.