Analytical Techniques

Management of Measurement Constructs

Shadow Transits: A Hidden Forecasting Tool by guest astrologer Frank C. Clifford

Frank Clifford is an astrology writer, teacher and consultant living in London, England. He is Principal of the London School of Astrology. His work on Shadow Transits was featured in The Mountain Astrologer (Dec 2008) and can be found in his new booklet for astrology students and professionals, ‘Solar Arc Directions’, available postage free from his website www.flareuk.com

As a student astrologer, I never found secondary progressions to be particularly useful, especially once I discovered Solar Arc Directions and added these to my forecasting toolkit. And then I used to wonder if transits to Solar Arc directed positions ‘worked’ and, if so, were they any different from transits to natal positions? I searched but couldn’t find any literature on this. Fortunately, some years later my clients started to bring examples to me and, in 2004, I began to develop an additional forecasting tool that I named ‘Shadow Transits’.

In my experience, transits to directed positions in the horoscope work very well, but I was curious to know how they differed from transits to the natal chart. Is one more important than the other? Is it a case of either/or? Well, I discovered that not only is the transit to the directed position (what I call a Shadow Transit) as important as the original transit-to-natal event, it also has a strong link to the themes that came up and developed under the original natal chart transit. That may not be a surprise, but it has, in my practice, become a very useful tool and enabled me to discuss a past event with a client in order to help them draw parallels and gain some insight into the process currently unfolding under the Shadow Transit.