Secondary progression

Meaning

Secondary progressions let the birth chart unfold slowly. Each day after birth stands for one year of life: the sky of the 30th day after birth describes the year that begins on the 30th birthday. The planets of those first weeks, moving on from their birth places, become the progressed chart, read against the birth chart.

Progressed planets move slowly. The progressed Sun advances about one degree a year, so it changes sign roughly once in thirty years, and each change is read as a new chapter of identity. The progressed Moon moves about a degree a month and goes round the whole zodiac in about 27 years, crossing a house every two years or so. Mercury, Venus and Mars move a little; the outer planets hardly move at all in a lifetime.

Where transits describe the weather that comes from outside, progressions are read as inner growth: how a person matures, what they become ready for. Their aspects last long, so each describes a season of development rather than a day.

In practice

• The progressed Moon is followed most often: its sign and house show where feeling and attention go for a couple of years. Its return to its birth place, around the age of 27, is read as an emotional coming of age.
• The progressed Sun changing sign marks a shift in style and purpose. Each of its aspects to a natal planet stays within a degree for about two years, read as a time when that planet’s theme matures.
• A progressed planet turning retrograde or direct is read as a lasting change of direction in its area of life.
• The progressed angles: the Ascendant and the Midheaven move about a degree a year, and their aspects to natal planets are read as turning points in self-image and in vocation.
• With transits: many astrologers read a progressed aspect as the theme of a year, and a transit to the same point as the moment it comes to the surface.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology times life by planetary periods, the dashas, rather than by a progressed sky: each period is ruled by one planet, in an order set by the Moon’s place at birth.
• Numerology follows a similar slow unfolding through its life cycles and pinnacles.

Origin and history

The equation of a day with a year is old. In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet hears: “I have appointed thee each day for a year” (4:6, King James Version). In astrology, the method is often credited to Placidus de Titis in the seventeenth century, whose Tabulae primi mobilis (1657) did much to spread it, though he may not have invented it. It became the most widely used progression in twentieth-century Western astrology, simpler to work out than the older primary directions.

How Ulune calculates it

• Ulune uses secondary progressions, a day for a year. The progressed moment is the birth moment plus as many days as the years lived, counted in tropical years of 365.24219 days.
• The progressed sky is cast with the Swiss Ephemeris, in the tropical zodiac, with the true node and the osculating Lilith. The progressed bodies are placed in the birth chart’s houses.
• The progressed Midheaven moves at the Naibod rate, 0°59′08″ of right ascension a year of life, the Sun’s mean daily motion, added to the birth sidereal time. The Ascendant and the Vertex are drawn from that progressed Midheaven at the birthplace, with the chart’s own house system (Porphyry inside the polar circles).
• The table lists the progressed Sun to Pluto, Chiron, the nodes, Lilith and the four angles against the natal ones, by the five major aspects, with the birth chart’s orbs: 8°, 6° for the sextile, and to an angle 6° for the trine and 4° for the sextile.
• Each exact moment is found in the progressed sky and turned back into a date of life, to the second. A pass that never comes within 1′ of exact is dropped.
• A progression needs a birthplace; without one, Ulune does not cast it.