Progressions

Your chart, moved forward

The birth chart moved forward on the oldest rule in the book: a day for a year. What it is actually used for is the progressed Moon, which changes sign every two and a half years and marks out phases of a life.

Required.

Optional. Without it the progressed Moon is approximate.

Town or city, and the country.

Any date. Leave blank for today.

Where this sits

Progressions are the slow layer. Transits are what the real sky is doing to your chart this week, and a solar return is the picture of one year. A progressed chart moves at a degree a month, so it describes a phase rather than an event, and nothing on it changes quickly enough to be a forecast.

The arithmetic is exact and the fraction is kept: age 30.5 is 30.5 days after birth, not 30, because rounding to whole days would move the progressed Moon half a degree, which is a fortnight of progressed time.

Start from your birth chart

Progressions run off your birth details. Cast and save your chart and it will fill this form in for you.

Cast your birth chartSolar return

Questions about progressions

The four that come up most.

  • The birth chart moved forward on the rule of a day for a year. The chart cast for the 30th day after you were born is read as describing your 30th year. It is one of the oldest predictive techniques in the Western tradition, in use since Ptolemy.

  • On the symbolic argument that one turn of the Earth on its axis stands for one turn around the Sun. There is no mechanism behind it and nobody serious claims otherwise. The reason it is still used is the progressed Moon, which moves at a rate that happens to track phases of a life usefully.

  • Because it is the only body that moves fast enough to matter. In progressed time the Moon covers about a degree a month and changes sign every two and a half years or so. The progressed Sun moves roughly a degree a year, so it changes sign about once every thirty years, and the outer planets barely move at all.

  • For the progressed Moon to be accurate, yes. The Moon moves around half a degree an hour, so a missing time can put the progressed Moon out by half a sign. The houses cannot be computed without one either. The progressed Sun and the outer planets are unaffected.