Harbingers!

Progressions*, or the day-for-a-year method of prediction that works eerily well, are one chart feature you will want to watch if you’re looking for major indicators of life change. The thing with progressions is that the call seems to be coming from inside the house, or, said another way, you’re internally motivated to change rather than externally, and yet… external things that coincide with the changes indicated by the progression still do seem to happen to you. Why? Seriously, guys, I have no idea, unless you want me to delve into some more metaphysical theories, but this isn’t the appropriate place for that.

Progressions are fascinating. If you are a person wanting to learn more about the function of progressions and you don’t know enough to be dangerous, I recommend Stephen Arroyo’s Astrology, Karma & Transformation, and there’s a chapter in there about progressions, so you don’t even need to read the whole book (but there’s so much good info in there I don’t know why you wouldn’t). If you are one who gazes at many charts and wants to know still-more, get Delineation of Progressions by Sophia Mason. I have many books on progressions, but hers is the one I revisit, frequently (her definitions of various progressions work really well).

What you won’t find in any book is what I already referred to: we don’t know why progressions work, just that they do. I bought many books thinking one would tell me, but have found that astrologers just take progressions in stride…because they work.

Things to watch you can see very easily with your own untrained eye using Astro.com, because it usually means major change (select natal + progressed chart):

• Your sun changes signs

• Your ascendant changes signs

• Your chart ruler changes signs

The sun changing signs thing: there are 30 degrees in every sun sign, and we count from 0 to 29 (I didn’t make the rules). So if you were born with your sun at 8 Taurus, well, when you’re 21(ish), you become a Gemini by progression, which means you’re still a Taurus, but a more curious Taurus, or one who’s worse at sitting still. The sun represents your mission in life in charts, so maybe at age 21 you decide to go to med school, or if you didn’t think college was important, suddenly you’re itching for book learnin’. Then your sun changes to Cancer at age 51 (maybe you move to a new location?) and to Leo at 81 (you suddenly decide to put on a one-man show?). If your sun is in a more assertive sign, like, say, Aries, and then you become a Taurus by progression, well, that takes the edge off it a little bit. Sun changing signs just means change. I noticed a lot of my friends became parents the year their sun changed signs, for example.

Your ascendant changes signs: remember, ascendant is how you behave without thinking, and depending on where you were born, your ascendant can rise for a long-ass time or not a very long-ass time, so you might have as few as 3 ascendant changes in a lifetime (less if something sad happens) or as many as 6 in a lifetime (Queen Elizabeth had 6 and when I looked at her chart I thought my software was broken. You do need to be extremely old to achieve this, obviously). Again, you still have the coloring and characteristics of your ACTUAL rising sign. It doesn’t go away (sometimes I wish mine would!). It just gets tempered by your progressed rising sign. Personal example: when I was Taurus rising by progression, I was waaaaaay more concerned about security and *stuff* (by which I mean things I owned back then) and then when my progressed rising sign changed to Gemini I stopped being able to sleep in and I also stopped caring about most vestiges of security in a traditional sense. Overnight. I'm a woman of extremes, though.

The ruler of your BIRTH CHART changes signs by progression: To a lesser extent, the ruler of your chart by progression is important, but the ruler of your birth chart changing signs is like lights flashing in the same way as the sun sign or ascendant sign changing by progression would be, once you understand how big these shifts are. This situation differs significantly from chart to chart (or person to person), because if you’re Cancer rising, this happens every 2.5 years, so you’re likely used to vibe shifts and it won’t register nearly as much, but for other rising signs it happens once in a lifetime, and still others it happens never. Take, for instance, Pisces rising: unless your Neptune is at 27 degrees or above and forward-moving, it will probably not change signs in your lifetime. If it is retrograde  at 27 degrees or will go retrograde by progression, it won’t change signs. The sign something is in colors the priorities of the things in question. Occasionally this can throw you into a fun identity crisis. Let me give you an example: someone who is Gemini-rising, therefore Mercury-ruled, and Mercury’s in Capricorn (ooo serious thinker!), and not retrograde, but they’re 52, and it’s JUST NOW changing to Aquarius. What that tells me: Mercury went retrograde shortly after they were born (both literally and by progression), then it went direct, and now it’s headed toward brand-new territory. You can expect to see some unexpected behavior out of this individual. At minimum. They might think there’s suddenly something wrong with them since so many of their priorities are different now, but you, the astrology wizard, will see what happened and be able to advise accordingly. It’s uncommon but far from impossible.

XO,

J

*I am talking only about secondary progressions in this piece. Planets changing sign by solar arc progression won't impact anything at all, unless the planet is the sun. Both secondary progressions and solar arc progressions are great predictive tools and I use them both. Differently, though.