I would like to recount one of the most gratifying astrological transit
readings I have ever been able to delineate. A friend was visiting me in
Vermont in middle-late September of 1994.
She was in the midst of a difficult yet transformative period (so what else
is new, that's what we always seem to be saying; maybe its because people
only ask when they are having difficulties). The previous spring she had
taken a golden parachute and left her job in biotech marketing. At first
it was like a paid vacation, but now she was beginning to get nervous about
finding another job. She also wanted to leave Boston and was putting her
condo on the market there. I was intimately familiar with her chart, as
we were lovers at the time, but I hadn't looked at it in a few weeks. She
was in the midst of Saturn crossing her Mars. Her natal Venus and Mars are
conjoined at three degrees and six and a half degrees Pisces respectively.
In addition, her natal Uranus is almost exactly opposite her Sun, at 18
Capricorn, so the transiting Uranus Neptune conjunction had come exact on
that axis in late 1993; precipitating her leaving her job. Now transiting
Mars had just crossed her natal Uranus and was almost exactly opposite the
Uranus Neptune conjunction, still close to that axis. Saturn was moving
retrograde, as were transiting Uranus and Neptune.
It had been difficult for her a few weeks ago, but now as we talked on that
fall afternoon she was feeling particularly agitated again. I suggested
we go for a walk. About fifty yards up the road from my house there was
a square mile of land which had once been an estate with a subtly but deliberately
planned Victorian pastoral landscape garden of fields and woodlands. It
was a magical place and walking up there often soothed my nerves. As we
walked out the dirt road with a row of maple trees along one edge she was
going on about how agitated she felt and how it had hit her all of a sudden
just an hour ago. Why was it happening now? "Why am I feeling this
way right NOW?" She asked. We had turned onto a farm lane which ran
up into the property and were climbing gently up onto a huge east facing
hay field which formed the highest part of the estate. It had become dusk
and just as she asked this I looked up and saw the full moon rising over
the ridge of mountains to the east. I started to explain at the same time
the answer unfolded and revealed itself to me in my own mind.
"Well, see the full moon," I said. "Its not yet perfectly
full. It will be tomorrow. When it is perfectly full, it will be exactly
opposite the Sun. The Sun moves about one degree a day. On the Equinox,
September 22nd, it will change signs and move into Libra. So tomorrow, when
the Moon is perfectly full, on September 19th, the Sun will be three degrees
before the end of the previous sign, at 27 degrees Virgo, and the Moon will
be at 27 degrees Pisces, because the perfect full moon must always be exactly
opposite the Sun. The Moon makes one cycle of 360 degrees in a little less
than thirty days, so in one day it moves about twelve degrees. Thus, today
we see the about-to-be-full moon rising twelve degrees before that point,
at about fifteen degrees Pisces. See that star. The one that you can just
barely see, just above the Moon now; the only one you can see in the sky.
That is Saturn. Saturn has been crossing your Mars. We have talked about
it a lot, that sense of your own drive to do things being held back and
thwarted. Today, with the (almost) full moon joining Saturn it is bringing
more energy to that transit than at any other day of this month. In the
last hour, as first Saturn, and now the Moon have been rising - that is
they have been conjoined by the Transiting Ascendant - you have felt
that energy most acutely." We watched the Moon rise higher and Saturn
grow brighter as they rose, but as the vision of their menacing beauty climbed
higher in the sky, leaving the horizon behind, she did feel better and the
internal crisis passed.
What I liked most about this particular bit of transit interpretation was
that it was done without the use of a chart, or computer, or any abstract
tool beyond the sky itself. For me it represented the first time (in this
lifetime?) that my knowledge of astronomy and astrology had come together
to so explicitly reveal the unseen abstract reality underlying our experience
just by looking directly at the heavens. It seemed to illuminate for me
how astrology must have been understood and practiced by the ancients. It
also made explicit, in a way which I have only recently begun to articulate,
how the transiting Moon, and even the transiting Ascendant, can intensify
and focus a larger transit onto one brief period of time.
Jim Fournier
June 29, 1996 2:30 p.m.
Just as I finished this the phone rang. It was Karen, who is the subject
of this piece. She is living in San Francisco, working for another biotech
firm. I have seen her from time to time, but I hadn't spoken with her in
several months. She said my number just popped into her head.