The progressed chart in astrology shows where are you on your soul’s journey. It answers: how are you transforming with each year? Secondary progressions—also called a progressed chart—map your personal evolution over time.
Life is a journey and astrology operates the same way. Though each of us is born with planets in a fixed birth chart, we are shaped by outside influences like our environments, family structures, experiences and so on. The progressed chart is one way of tracking your cosmic evolution over time.
Think of the birth (natal) chart as your factory settings. This is the “fresh out of the box” model of you, and reveals your fundamental nature. The progressed chart maps your system upgrades. You wouldn’t run an old Windows or IOS when a far more advanced software was available, right? The progressed chart keeps you updated over time.
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A progressed chart in astrology is calculated according to the “day per year” system. In other words, one year of life translates into one day on the ephemeris. You can run a progressed chart using this calculator below, but we will explain how it works using an “old school” ephemeris—the essential map for every astrogeek!
Like we said, in a progressed chart in astrology, each day counts for a year of your life. Said another way, where the planets were on your first day of life is where they are in year one of your progressed chart. Stay with us here…
Let’s use our birthday of December 2, 1972 as an example. If we wanted to see our secondary progressions at age 3, we’d pull up a 1972 ephemeris and count three days from our birthday to December 5, 1972. We love the Swiss ephemeris that’s available for free at astro.com. Have your pick of 9000 years of them right here!
The only change here? On December 2, our birthday, the moon was in Scorpio. On December 5, the moon has moved into Sagittarius. Thus, at age 3, we had a change to our progressed moon. Sounds minor, but it’s not! The progressed moon is incredibly fundamental to casting these types of charts…more on that shortly.
Interestingly enough, it was at age 3 that our parents left the comfort of our grandparents’ home and moved the family into a house of our own. This felt like an abrupt and unsettling change—and was particularly stressful for our Sagittarius father. The Scorpionic security was replaced with a new sense of Sagittarian independence. We also began reading that year, which is in alignment with the bookish way of Sagittarius.
At age 5 (December 7, 1972) our progressed moon was still in Sagittarius. That year, our obsession was memorizing state capitols and countries across the world — instead of puppy and kitten posters, we had a giant map hanging on our bedroom wall! Hello, globetrotting Sag progressed moon.
Now, let’s jump ahead a few decades. In 2014, we turned 42. To find our current progressed chart we count 42 days from our birthday which takes us all the way to January 14, 1973.
All of the inner planets (the planets before Jupiter) have progressed to new signs:
All the outer planets, however, remain in the same zodiac signs they were in when we were born — although they have advanced along in degree. Unless your outer planets are at a late degree, they are likely to hover in the same zodiac sign for your entire life and never actually progress to a new one. That is because of their longer orbits through the 12 signs.
These are the main ones to watch when tracking secondary progressions in a progressed chart in astrology.
