The Inner Wheel:  a new look at interpreting secondary progressions

 

Introduction:  

Quite appropriately, given the nature of what we are discussing with secondary progressions, this book has been a long time coming.  It has been a gradual, slow, inexorable movement towards forming a new way of thinking about the progressed chart, pieced together through personal experience and those moments of unexpected grace that weave fragmented flashes of insight into a whole.  For this, I thank my clients and my students:  without their fearless exploration, and honesty, I would not have had the opportunity to ground my insights and ideas in practicalexperience.  They are my partners in this creation.

The method of progressing the natal chart after birth at roughly a day for a year, called secondary progression, has been taught for centuries.  It is not a modern astrological invention, though it was brought back into popular favour by the astrologer Alan Leo at the turn of the last century, and was quickly taken up by the astrologers of the time.  Leo was responsible for reinterpreting astrology for hisera.  Leo used secondary progressions primarily as a predictive tool, and though he described inner characteristics and states as related to progressed chart aspects (as above, so below, as within, so without) his main focus as an astrologer was not on inner development, but on outer results.  This was characteristic of astrology until the post-war revivals of the twentieth century.

Although secondary progressions are still taught in all the major astrological schools, their popularity has waned, and good information about how to interpret secondary progressions is thin on the ground. There are a number of good books out there, but most are focused on using progressions as a predictive tool. Many regard secondary progressions as a second cousin to the more obvious (and easier to notice) influence of transits on the natal chart.  It is popular to see the secondary progression chart as a kind of weak ‘under-chart’ that influences external things but isn’t terribly significant in the here and now.  The words ‘soul’ and secondary progression are rarely heard together—as if this weak little underling/echo of a planetary map couldn’t have anything remotely to do with something as powerful and life changing as the development of a personal spiritual truth.  

New students who have moved towards using thesecondary progression have done it cautiously and uncertainly.  The Moon has always been given great emphasis in secondary charts—mostly because, as representative of the current physical life on this planet, her movements in the secondary progressed chart are easily documented, and when she hits natal or progressed planets, or transiting planets hit her, we can often see concrete and observable results.  Her movement through a progressed or natal house often brings a distinct emphasis on what that house represents.   

But if the Moon is so active in secondary progressions, it stands to reasons that the other planets have an impact as well.  Just because they don’t move as quickly as transitingplanets, doesn’t mean that they have relinquished their symbolic power.  Outer planets, for example, are often completely ignored in progressed chart interpretations, because they don’t move as quickly as their inner cousins.  We will see later in the book how outer planets coming into exact aspect via progression are often some of the most intense times in life, particularly when they are aspected by current transits and/or other progressed planetary positions.  The outer planets act as a resonating core of the original imprint of the natal chart, as it moves forward in space and time.  The old way of splitting the chart ‘importance’ into inner aspects via progression and outer planets via transit is arbitrary folly, based on outdated practices which are oftencompletely irrelevant.  No surprise that the secondary progression is sliding out of existence as an astrological tool. We will demonstrate that the two are not exclusive of one another, but interactive.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here.  

I intend to make this book user-friendly, and hope it will be a guide for exploring a level of soul development which has previously been ignored.  The natal chart is the map of a soul’s potential, and where the transits are the ‘what’ which is effecting the chart, the secondary progressed chart is the ‘why.’  The progressed chart cannot stand on its own, to be interpreted separate from the natal.  It shows the gradual unfolding of the natal chart’s potential, the inner stirrings, hungers, and compulsions to spiritual development that bring the more observable aspects of transits to their proper interpretations.  Every astrologer has had the experience of waiting for (or sometimes dreading, if we’re honest) what dire things a ‘heavy’ transit of Pluto or Saturn might bring, and has been surprised when the dreaded tidal wave manifested hardly at all, or in ways that were gentle and positive.  In these cases, it is always the secondary progressed chart at work, guiding the outer, manifesting, planets to their inevitable conclusions, according to the larger dictates of the secondary chart.  Transits do not manifest in and of themselves, via the natal.  The secondary chart is the middle chart of meaning, the meat in the sandwich, the prism of the inner Self which determineshow and why the transit manifests in ‘real life.’  The natal chart is our core self,  our main imprint, but our secondary chart is our core self in spiritual motion. It is the natal chart come alive in the here and now, showing us the themes that are coming to the light, priming us for what is ripe for our knowing. The secondary progressed chart is where we take a bite of the apple.