Transits vs. Progressions

[Jim Eshelman]

Transits and progressions do not work the same. They collaborate pretty well, and the old (pre-solunars) standard practice was to look, interactively, at transits and progressions - with the relative importance of each being debated over the years. It has become solidly established IMHO that, when it comes to discerning overt events, transits easily win - especially because in the category of "transits" we include solar and lunar returns! But even simple transits to natal planets are more likely to show concrete events all by themselves, perhaps nailing 70-80% of all significant events without further help.

But this doesn't mean they capture best all the important developments in one's life.

Cyril Fagan is responsible for what IMO is the best articulation of the difference between transits and progressions. We might be able to improve on his language (his way of describing this), but not on the core ideas. I don't know how early the Tropical astrologer Cyril Fagan sorted this out in his own head and practice, but it came to a head in print in an early 1940's article, "The Incidents & Accidents of Astrology" published as a research bulletin by the American Federation of Astrologers. I've never seen a copy of this: I'm relying on Fagan's rearticulation of this here and there in his "Solunars" series and Gary Duncan's confirming summary to me in person.

[Jim Eshelman]

Fagan's premise was simple: Progressions refer to INCIDENTS. Transits refer to ACCIDENTS.

This wording, at first, might confuse because it's not exactly how we use these words conversationally. It is correct usage etymologically, though. Conversationally, incident is defined (using Dictionary.com for convenience) as "an individual occurrence or event" or "something that occurs casually in connection with something else" (something incidentally or "just happening" in the course of a longer story). Accident doesn't have too different an interpretation, except that we tend to lean it negatively: If it's a good event, we have to say "a good accident," and the it seems awkward, whereas one doesn't need an extra word to specify "a bad accident" - we tend to think that's what the word means. At root, accident tends to mean about the same thing as incident with only slight differences, incident tending to be more of "something just happened" whereas accident is more "something unplanned or unintentional or unexpected happened."

By etymology, the words are obviously connected: They are identical words (connected to a root meaning "fall" or "befall") except for an in- or ac- prefix. This is the key to Fagan's technical usage. The Latin prefix in means "in" or "on." Ac- means "to" or "towards." An incident befalls you from within. An accident falls toward you.

Fagan, therefore, distinguished progressions as showing incidents in the sense of something that arose from within us. a natural, fully expected unfolding of the natal pattern in the same way that (say) puberty is a natural, fully expected consequence of being born: It happens in its own right time, but the fact of it happening was innate to us as a developmental step of who we are, from the moment of birth. (I often find "innate" a friendly and more expressive term than "incident" when talking about progressions.)

He then distinguished transits as showing accidents in the sense of something "falling toward us," or seeming to come at us from the environment around us, rather than seeming to arise from inside of us.

In the Sidereal Landmarks I summarized these as follows:

• Natal planets reflect an individual's inherent nature, needs, and potential.
• Progressed planets reflect developments in that inherent nature.
• Transiting planets most often are experienced as reflecting external circumstances interacting (causatively or responsively) with the personal actions or conditions reflected by aspected natal planets.

The bottom line of this theory is that progressions reflect the timing of expected, developments from within, something innate unfolding: experiences arising from things within us. Transits reflect interactions with things outside of us.

Over the decades, it has become more commonplace for people to understand that there is no hard line between things that arise from "something inside of us" vs. "something outside of us." There is no hard line between the two. From some philosophical perspectives, there is no difference between events on the inside and events on the outside. From a simple psychological perspective, one often can't tell the difference between our experiencing an event vs. experiencing our reaction to the event. (I don't think astrological events are objective: They just feel that way.) All this confuses the simple distinction when one thinks it all the way through; and yet, in practice, clarity is often given by setting our expectations that the progressions (by themselves) are showing ONLY things that were expected eventually to arise developmentally from who we are, while transits show things that most often seem to arise from our interaction toward or expression of ourselves into "what's outside of us."

[Jim Eshelman]

I think the idea is clear enough in practice and is correct. I find Fagan's wording inconvenient at times, but exactly on point at other times. For example, in communicates well to say that such-and-so a development is incidental to who we are. Even in casual, conversational language, this is understood to mean something that simply (even predictably) happened in the course of our larger story.

Still, we can perhaps find more useful language.

The matter is complicated by the (I think well-established) interaction between transits and progressions. Some significant event or life-development shown by transits alone or progressions alone might be easy to place in this dichotomy, but many events are shown by both of these, as well as mixed by having transits to progressed planets.

It's clear from various writings that, as early as the late 1940s, Donald Bradley had taken up Fagan's basic "incidents & accidents" concept and started to make it his own - put it in his own language. Over the years, this language came out a little differently here and there, which perhaps shows not so much evolving thought on the matter as evolving use of language (of which he was an able master). I think it serves us to trace some of this.

First, to show that he was thinking along the same lines, we have his article on suicide research. Here is a telling paragraph:

A fundamental of astrology is that the progressed chart shows "acts of self" while the effects of outside agencies are the province of transiting planets.

The wording is different, but the understanding is the same. I might question "acts of self" as too solar (though the wording played into what else he had to say in that part of the article), but this at least preserves the idea that he considered fundamental that progressions show things arising from within oneself and transits show interactions with "outside agencies."

A few paragraphs later, he confirmed his understanding of transits:

The very fact that transits are the key to the actual event of suicide tells us that while the tendency may be prominent in the horoscope of birth, the precipitation of the act is really the result of outside pressures.

Leaping ahead most of a decade, we come to Bradley's summation which started me down this track this morning, a summary from his article on tertiary progressions (posted in full in the Tertiary section of this forum).

[Tertiaries] should, as with secondaries, always be considered within the reference frame of both natal and transits, especially the latter. Most psychological or strictly "internal" events are sufficiently reflected in tertiary-to-tertiary aspects, but life's most interesting developments usually command involvement with outside agents, persons and forces, which means that transits will usually be found interacting with the tertiary planets.

As late as 1970, then, we see that Bradley thought progressions should always be considered in their interaction with both natal and transiting planets, especially the transits. Carefully reading this paragraph, we learn that he thought of progressed-to-progressed aspects as "sufficiently" showing "most psychological or strictly 'internal' events" whereas "involvement with outside agents, persons, and forces" (essentially the wording quoted from him above) required the involvement of transits.

In summary, his word choices for transiting planets and aspects included the effects of (or involvement with) outside agencies, persons, pressures, and forces. His word choices for progressed planets and aspects included "acts of self," and psychological or strictly internal events.

[Jim Eshelman]

From all of this, we might derive working "rules of thumb" for distinguishing aspects in and between different rings of astrology's traditional three-ringed (three-wheeled) circus.

• Natal planets: an individual's inherent nature, needs, and potential.
• Progressed planets: developments in that inherent nature: shifting internal pressures, conditions, and energies.
• Transiting planets: external circumstances, persons, or pressures.
• Transits to transit: shifting external conditions with only indirect relevance for us personally ("the world is this way at the moment").
• Transits to natal: outside pressures (persons, conditions) acting on (or interacting with) who we are and our innate needs.
• Transits to progressed: external pressures or conditions interacting or coalescing with internal pressures or conditions.
• Progressed to progressed: shifting internal pressures, conditions, and energies (primarily psychological).
• Progressed to natal: similar to progressed-to-progressed but seemingly anchored in something more real and substantial to us, i.e., internal shifting conditions or pressures engaging with what is permanently, fundamentally true in us.

I'm moved to distinguish that the entire "inside vs. outside" discussion involves not where something ACTUALLY arises - because there isn't a hard line between what we call "inside" and "outside" - but, rather, a difference in our perception. We tend (for example) to experience transiting planets as "things coming at us," but our own charts can't ever really show us anything but ourselves, so it's a matter of how we experience the world and, to some extent, our projections or setting up "the world" around us to act in such-and-so a way.

The only main exception I see to this is that transit-to-transit aspects in the foreground of solunar returns are highly personalized. It seems obvious that the angles of the solunars personalize the aspect, acting ironically as de facto natal points in the summaries above.