Progression
every reader
What the tradition reads
A progression advances the birth chart forward symbolically rather than tracking where the planets actually stand today, and the tradition's dominant method, the secondary progression, moves the chart forward one day of actual planetary motion for every year of the person's life, so that the progressed chart for someone's fortieth birthday shows the sky exactly as it stood forty days, not forty years, after they were born. Because the Moon moves roughly thirteen degrees in a single day, it is the fastest changing point in a secondary progressed chart, shifting sign every couple of years and giving the technique much of its usefulness for dating the general mood of a particular stretch of life, while the outer planets barely move at all across an entire lifetime of progressed days. A separate method, solar arc direction, advances every point in the chart by a single shared number of degrees for every year of life, equal to however far the progressed Sun has moved, producing a chart of positions the sky never actually held at any moment, a difference the tradition marks clearly even though both methods are grouped together as progressions.
The story
Wikipedia's own account of progression technique names no single origin for secondary progression or solar arc direction, and this entry follows that source rather than repeating an older, unverified history. What the tradition sets out clearly instead is a small family of related methods built on one basic move, advancing the birth chart by some rate other than real time, of which secondary progression, a day for a year, and solar arc direction, a degree for a year matched to the progressed Sun's own movement, are only the two most used. Tertiary progression takes one day after birth as standing for one lunar month of life, and quaternary, or minor, progression takes one lunar month after birth as standing for one year, scaling the same logic to a faster clock. Converse progression runs the same rates backward from birth, a day or a lunar month before birth standing for a year or a lunar month of life. A further symbolic arc method abandons the day for a year principle altogether, advancing the chart by a rate fixed for its own reasons, one day for twelve years to track Jupiter's cycle, say, or one month for thirty years to track Saturn's. Despite this variety, secondary progression and solar arc direction remain the two forms practising astrologers use by far the most, the rest surviving as specialist tools within one small family rather than as rival mainstream methods.
Written from
Corpus key glossary:progression.