To get a general sense of how you will experience a transiting planet as it moves through its current sign, compare it to your personal planetary order.
If you list every planet, the North Node, and the Ascendant and Midheaven in degree order, and note the aspect it will receive from the transiting planet, you can see at a glance how easy or difficult this transit is likely to be for you personally.
Every transiting planet aspects these points in the same order, every time, though the aspects are different depending on its sign.
For example: Great Britain’s Prince William is a guy with a lot of planets in cardinal signs. How have transiting Uranus and Pluto in cardinal signs impacted him? Let’s take a look at Uranus in Aries.
Here is his personal planetary order, and the aspects each point has or will receive from Uranus while it’s in Aries. Challenging aspects are indicated in red, flowing ones in blue. (I consider semi-sextile aspects a bit difficult, but let’s be charitable and call them neutral – we’ll make them green.)
| Natal Placement |
Aspect from Uranus in Aries |
|
|
|
| Sun 0.06 Cancer | square |
| Jupiter 0.29 Scorpio | quincunx |
| Uranus 1.29 Sagittarius | trine |
| MC 2.25 Scorpio | quincunx |
|
Marriage (4/29/11): Uranus 2.39 Aries |
|
| Moon 4.57 Cancer | square |
| Mercury 8.58 Gemini | sextile |
| Mars 9.12 Libra | opposition |
|
First Child (7/22/13): Uranus 12.30 Aries |
|
| North Node 13.19 Cancer | square |
| Saturn 15.30 Libra | opposition |
|
Second Child (5/2/15): Uranus 17.54 Aries |
|
| Pluto 24.09 Libra | opposition |
| Neptune 25.32 Sagittarius | trine |
| Venus 25.39 Taurus | semi-sextile |
| ASC 27.26 Sagittarius | trine |
Not surprisingly, this has been an action-packed cycle for Prince William, with many challenging aspects from Uranus to his natal planets and angles. Usually, outer planet transits (from Saturn through Pluto) that make a series of dramatic aspects to the natal chart point to in major life events.
In this case, there have been three joyful but completely life-changing events for him so far, most recently the birth of his second child. (Interestingly, his daughter was born as Uranus at 17.54 Aries opposed his natal Saturn; when William’s mother died in 1997, transiting Saturn at 19.35 Aries was opposing his natal Saturn.) As with Saturn’s transit in Aries in the late 1990s, Prince William will look back at the Uranus in Aries years as an era when his life changed irrevocably–but this time, it seems, more happily.
The points in your chart at the earliest and latest degrees are critical, because they describe how a transit begins and ends for you. Watch the Moon as it moves through each sign for 2.5 days each month; do some Moon signs flow better for you than others? Start out rough but end happily? Compare each Moon’s sign to your personal planetary order, and see if it helps you gain a better understanding of your relationship with each sign.
© 2015 April Elliott Kent
