In this video, astrologer Ada Pembroke explains secondary progressions using the example of her progressed Mercury.

Transcript

Hello friends, my name is Ada Pembroke. I'm an astrologer and storyteller. And in my Patreon community, one of my patrons asked me a question about secondary progressions. And I thought that instead of answering the question in our private discord community where only my patrons would be able to see it, I thought that I would make a video where I address the question so that maybe it can help other people. So if you find this video helpful, please let me know by liking and subscribing to my channel.

Defining Progressions

Alright, so business, what are secondary progressions? Secondary progressions are an astrological technique that helps you to see the way that humans grow and change over the course of a lifetime.

They are a little bit like transits in that they are a way of working with the way that planets move over time, but instead of watching the place in the sky where the planets actually are, the time that we're working with is symbolic time.

And the way that secondary progressions work is we take the movement of the planets from the first 90 days of the human life, we stretch those transits out. Then we map them on to the first 90 years of a person's life--100 or 110 or 120, however long a person lives. So one day in the first 90 days of human life matches one year of a planet's movements with progressions.

It takes the moon two and a half days to move through a sign by transit, so it will take about two and a half years for the moon to move through a sign by progression.

What are progressions used for?

I mentioned that they are ways of mapping human growth. The way that I like to think of progressions is that they're like the rings of tree. As a planet moves, you are adding the qualities of that planet's changes to your chart.

A good example of this is that most of us who live long enough, will experience Mercury (the planet of the mind and learning) moving through signs that represent each of the elements.

How Mercury Evolves Through Progressions

So, for instance, I was born with Mercury in Aries, which means that I was born with a fiery Mercury, a fiery intellect. Because I was that way when I was born, and that was the way that I was conditioned when I was young, that's my default mode. That's the innermost ring of my tree. That is my core. You have to drill down all the way to the very center of the essence of who I am before you start to chip away at that Aries expression of mercury.

But when I was five years old, my Mercury went into Taurus, which is an earth sign, and all of a sudden that fiery energy, that spontaneity that is so core and so default in my nature entered kindergarten. I entered a environment where suddenly my impulsive learning style and my impulsive nature had to conform to a new program. It was uncomfortable for me. I was one of those kids who was constantly getting up out of my seat and running around, and my kindergarten teacher had to patiently tell me to sit back down and continue doing my what I considered to be very tedious work. But, eventually, I got to a place where the pragmatic skills that they teach you in school, the need to sit down, be quiet and be still need to be grounded, the need to be practical and the need to plan your work ahead and make sure that you're turning things on in on time, all of these basic earthy practical skills that you need, started to become actually authentic parts of my nature, as Mercury moved through my Taurus.

And then... I believe my Mercury went into Gemini when I was in graduate school. When Mercury moved into Gemini, it joined my progressed sun, which was and still is in Gemini. Suddenly, I started to take on a more intellectual quality to my thought. I started to go back a little bit to the curious and frenetic way of thinking that I was born with. Instead of being fiery and impulsive the way the Aries is, I went broad, and I followed my curiosity.

I had been identifying as a writer for a long time. My sun, my sense of identity, had been in Gemini since I had been 12 years old, and that was around the time that I started to identify as a writer, but I felt like, in many ways, my mind caught up to where my sense of myself was. My skills, my ability to communicate as a writer, caught up with my identity as a writer. There was a simpatico between my identity and my actual skills.

Then, when I was in my 30s, my Mercury moved into the watery sign of Cancer. And one of the things that I'm learning as Mercury moves through cancer is how to bring emotion, empathy, feeling connection with other people, and emotional authenticity into my work.

So that uses the movements of Mercury to kind of explain to you how the mind learns different skills and integrates them into the model of the personality, into the way the mind works.

The Natal Planet Is the Core of Your Identity

I am still fundamentally--like I've said a couple times now--fundamentally a fiery person, fundamentally an impulsive person. I was asked this question about progressions maybe 15 minutes ago, and now I'm sitting in front of the camera answering it. And when I'm done recording, I'm gonna put it right up on YouTube without any editing, because that is my nature. That is my fundamental mental process, my creative communicative process, my communicative nature.

But I also have the skills that I learned when I was in elementary school, the practical skills, the ability to show up on time, the ability to plan ahead, the ability to remember to bring things when I'm when I'm going places. I don't need to remember my lunch when I go to school anymore, but when I go out, when I go shopping, I need to remember my reusable bags, these kinds of things. These are things that I learned during my Taurus time.

And I still carry with me my Gemini in curiosity and my interest in storytelling and research that I developed when Mercury was in Gemini.

And when Mercury moves on into a fire sign later in my life, I'm going to be bringing all of the emotional things that I have learned from Mercury's time in Cancer.

Progressions Expand Your Identity

One of the things that I think is most important to understand about progressions is that they are like gifts that we pick up over the course of our lives. They might be intellectual gifts, communication gifts, if it's our Mercury. They might be gifts that help us to expand our sense of identity if we're talking about progressions of the sun.

I was born with a taurean identity, my sun is in Taurus. And when I was very young, I identified as someone who was always outside. I was always laying on the grass looking up at the clouds. I was a grounded, earthy kid who collected bugs and needed to be out under the sun all the time. But when my son moved into Gemini, I became bookish. And I never stopped having that basic taurean quality. If I don't get outside every day, I start to get a little bit crazy. But I became a person who became identified by my interest in the written word and my interest in communication. I started to write, even when I wasn't assigned to write in school.

How to Make Progressions Less Intimidating

And they can be intimidating, because they're difficult to calculate, but you can find free software that will calculate your progressions for you. I like astro-seek.com, and also astro.com for calculating progressions, or you can use an ephemeris. You can mark out the first 90 days of your life. I have an Ephemeris where I have numbers next to each day for the first 90 days of my life to tell me how old I will be when I experience the day of those transits as progressions.

But I don't think that progressions need to be scary. Honestly, I like them because I like the ability to see the root prediction, the seed of the personality in the natal chart, the thing that becomes our basic imprinting, but I also like progressions because they allow you to grow beyond the acorn, to see how a person--assuming they are allowed to live long enough--is able to grow into that oak tree. You can look at the progressions for somebody who is 85 or 90 or 95 years old, and you can see the beautiful state of their soul when they have grown to their full height and their full power.

And I think that that is an absolutely beautiful thing.

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