← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 203/235
Ease and tension
What it is
Ease and tension is a table and chart shown with a transit reading. For each day of the period it gives two levels, one for ease and one for tension, and names the transits that moved them most. It is worked out from the contacts the reading already records between the moving planets and the birth chart, with no interpretation added, so the same reading always gives the same table.
How each contact is weighed
Every contact in the period adds something to the days around it. How much depends on five things, multiplied together:
- The moving planet. The slow planets weigh most (Saturn and Pluto heaviest); the Moon weighs least, because it touches several points a day and would otherwise drown out everything else.
- The natal point. The Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant come first, then the Midheaven and the personal planets.
- The aspect. Trines and sextiles count as ease; squares, oppositions and quincunxes as tension; the minor aspects as lighter versions of each. A conjunction takes its nature from the moving planet — Venus and Jupiter bring ease, Mars, Saturn and Pluto tension, the lights and Mercury a mild ease, Uranus and Neptune a mild tension.
- How exact it gets. A contact that becomes exact counts in full; one that only comes within three degrees counts for about a third.
- How close the day is to the peak. The contact counts fully on the day it is exact and fades to nothing at the edges of its window, as it is applying and then separating.
Background contacts
When a slow planet meets a slow natal planet — Neptune trine natal Neptune, say — the contact lasts for months and is shared by everyone born around the same time. It is real, but it is background: it counts at roughly a third of its weight, so that it does not hide the faster contacts that actually make one day different from the next.
Levels from 0 to 5
A day's ease is the sum of its ease contributions, its tension the sum of the tension ones. Each is then shown as a level from 0 to 5 relative to the period's own busiest day for that quality: the day with the most ease is 5 for ease, and every other day is scaled against it. So the levels show the shape of the period — which days lean easy, which lean hard — rather than an absolute score. A 5 in a quiet week is not the same as a 5 in a crowded one.
Asteroids and declination contacts are left out. The table describes inclinations to work with, not outcomes.