Transits — gochar

Measured from the Moon

This is the first thing that surprises people coming from Western astrology. Vedic transits are generally counted from the natal Moon sign — your rashi — rather than from the Lagna.

So "Saturn is transiting your 8th house" means the 8th sign counted from your Moon, not from your ascendant. Some practitioners read from the Lagna as well, and a few from both. If you encounter a transit reading that contradicts another, check which reference point each used.

The cycles worth knowing

The Moon transits a sign in about two and a quarter days, completing the zodiac monthly — too fast for anything but daily prediction. The Sun takes a month per sign, a year for the cycle.

Jupiter takes about a year per sign, twelve years for a full cycle. Saturn takes about two and a half years per sign, roughly twenty-nine and a half years for the cycle — the Saturn return.

Rahu and Ketu take about eighteen months per sign, moving backwards, eighteen years for the cycle. Mars, Venus and Mercury move quickly and are used for finer timing.

Jupiter and Saturn carry most of the weight in transit reading, precisely because they are slow enough to describe a chapter rather than a mood.

The classical transit positions

Traditional practice regards Jupiter transiting the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th or 11th from the Moon as favourable, and the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th or 12th as less so. Saturn is read as demanding in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 12th from the Moon, and favourable in the 3rd, 6th and 11th — the upachaya houses, consistent with everything Level 2 established.

There is also a system called ashtakavarga that scores transits numerically per planet and house. It is genuinely useful and beyond this level.

Why transits alone predict little

Transits are shared. Everyone with the same Moon sign has the same Jupiter transit at the same time — that is roughly a twelfth of the population having an identical prediction, which is exactly the problem with sun-sign horoscopes.

What makes a transit meaningful is whether it activates something the dasha has already made live. The tradition treats the dasha as primary and the transit as the trigger. A favourable transit during an unrelated dasha usually passes unremarkably.