ALVEM

What are Progressions (Progressed Chart)?

Transits work with the real sky as it is right now; progressions use an entirely symbolic time scale instead: each day after your birth stands for one year of your life. The most common form is called secondary progression.

What "one day = one year" means

If you are thirty, the planetary positions of the thirtieth day after your birth are examined — the sky of that day is taken as the chart of your present "inner time". The method has been in use since the seventeenth century, and rests on a mathematical resemblance: the Moon advances roughly one degree in a day, and the Earth completes roughly one orbit of the Sun in a year (360°/365 days ≈ 1° per day).

The Moon and the Ascendant move most

Slow planets (Jupiter and beyond) barely advance in the few days after birth, so in a progressed chart they stay almost fixed. The real movement is in the Moon — because it moves quickly, the progressed Moon can even change sign. These are known as "progressed Moon sign change" periods and are generally read as an emotional or instinctive threshold.

The progressed Ascendant also advances slowly and can change sign over decades, read as an indication of how the outward face of a personality evolves in the long run.

Why the calculation is so delicate

Progressions are extremely sensitive to the birth time — an error of a few minutes can translate into a drift of several days many years later. For that reason progressions give unreliable results for charts with an uncertain birth time; the time has to be right first (see rectification).