Your progressions

What progressions are

Secondary progressions rest on a symbolic equation, a day for a year, which astrologers were using by the seventeenth century, when Placidus de Titis wrote them up as secondary directions. Nothing in the sky is measured on the date itself: the chart is the real sky on a day shortly after the birth, and each day of it stands for a year of life. That is why the progressed Sun moves about a degree a year and changes sign about every thirty years, while the progressed Moon goes round the whole zodiac in about twenty-seven years and spends two to three years in each sign.

How it is worked out on this page

The page counts the years from your birth to the date above in tropical years of 365.24219 days and adds that many days to the minute of your birth, then works out the planets for that moment with the same astronomy as the rest of the site. The angles are not taken from that moment, because the sky turns once a day and they would go round the whole zodiac in a single year of life. Instead the midheaven moves on by the Sun’s arc, the distance the progressed Sun has travelled, and the ascendant is the degree that rises with it at your birthplace; some software uses the Sun’s average motion and lands a degree or so away later in life. The dates the progressed Moon changes sign, and the progressed new and full moons, are found by searching the ninety or so days after birth and turning each moment back into a date in your life. The lunation phases are Dane Rudhyar’s eight, each forty-five degrees of the angle from the progressed Sun to the progressed Moon.

Reading the page, with an example

Take someone born at noon, universal time, on 1 January 1990, and set the date above to 1 January 2026. They are thirty-six, so the page reads the real sky thirty-six days after the birth, on 6 February 1990. The Sun, at 10°48′ Capricorn at birth, has progressed to 17°26′ Aquarius: about thirty-seven degrees in thirty-six years, and into a new sign in their late teens. The wheel shows that on its outer track. The list of progressed planets gives each one’s degree and says how many have changed sign, the lane shows which sign the progressed Moon is crossing and the date it moves on, and the lunation section gives the angle from the progressed Sun to the progressed Moon and the phase it falls in.

Progressions beside the other timing methods

Progressions are easy to confuse with the other ways astrology follows a chart through time. Transits set the real sky on a date against the birth chart. A solar return is a new chart for the minute the Sun comes back to its birth degree each year, and profections give each year of life a house and a planet by counting signs. Secondary progressions use the sky of the days and weeks just after the birth instead, one day standing for one year. Solar arc directions, a separate method, move every planet on by the Sun’s arc; this page uses that arc only for the angles.

Limits worth knowing

The progressed Moon is the part most sensitive to the birth time. It moves roughly a degree for each month of life, so a birth time taken as midday can put it up to about six degrees out and move the dates it changes sign by up to about half a year; without a time the page shows no progressed angles at all. A clock time read in the wrong zone does the same harm, which is why the birth time is converted with the time-zone rules of the birthplace on that date, summer time included. Like the rest of the Western pages here, the positions are tropical.

What it claims

Progressions are read as slow inner weather: the progressed Moon’s sign as the tone of a couple of years, the progressed lunation as a cycle of about thirty years from a new start to a letting go. That is the tradition’s language, described here. The calculation is exact; what it is taken to mean is a way of reading, and nothing on this page predicts anything.