James, you conveyed this concept very well in words. I had never come across it before and now I will be thinking about it.

Thanks, James, I got it now. You are a great teacher, actually!

Still, I wonder what the rationale for such an approach could be - as well as for converse directions, for that matter.

michael and fleur... thanks! i appreciate the kind words..

michael - i think it has to do with our understanding of time.. we mostly think of it a particular way and we might be not really have a good understanding of time and how it works... i can only surmise on this as time is a mystery as i see it.. why do some people have premonitions or dreams that come true?? or why is it that some people have a memory of past lives?? just what is the past and the future exactly?? i know the easy answers, but maybe the easy answers are not the only answers?? maybe there are other things going on that we don't really understand, with regard to time?? so it is in this context that i think a person might want to consider converse transits... do they have some symbolic value in determining why something is happening in this moment in time??? i personally think they do...

fleur - thanks for the page from astro.com... personally i think the conclusion they come to on converse transits is too narrow a viewpoint.. ((Converse transits are meant to show pre-natal conditioning and reveal how our (karmic) past continues to influence the present time.)) while it might have some relevance, i think it is putting emphasis on a type of logic involving our concepts of time... i think if anyone is interested in converse transits they would be better off examining charts with this in mind... i have done this enough to know they have merit, although i haven't been looking at converse transit data for a number of years.... with this in mind, using an 830am chart for biden, i was curious to see what his transits were for both the inauguration date and the nov 3rd election date to bidens chart...

the chart below is converse transits on the outer wheel for nov 3rd 2020..
we see jupiter and sun in the first house rising - and remember, as the date moves from nov 3rd to jan 20- 2021 - converse transit of jupiter will be moving towards his natal ascendant and the venus-sun-mercury-mars positions the whole time.. on the other hand we see in the 7th house the nature of his opponent - trump, as represented by the converse transit of mars to his natal saturn position... this seems to be born out by the view on trump not conceding the election until sometime closer to somewhere in january... i think converse transits definitely have a lot of merit and symbolic value, but most astrologers do not use them...