Pi - A Revolutionary New Progression

How and why it works...

Last spring, almost 6 months ago, I began experimenting with a new idea. I had read about early progression techniques that astrologers used pre-computers when all we had was an ephemeris and a dream. I remember those days. It wasn’t always possible (time-wise) to construct an accurate natal chart with accurate transits and progressions; often, someone would approach an event to get a reading. You had to wing it. Back in the day (early 1990s), I was young and didn’t have the money for prohibitively expensive astrology software and a laptop; both were very new at the time. I had a paper pad with a blank wheel, an ephemeris, and a cardboard ascendant wheel. I would fill in the planets and the transits and look at the day-for-a-year progressions in my ephemeris. Sometimes, if there I had a time crunch, I would look at the ephemeris and let things pop out about the natal chart, look at the transits, and count forward to the day for a year's progression. One had to ballpark things a lot more.

Now I have fancy Sirius 4.0 astrology software that does all mathematical calculations for me. I’ve grown used to using transits, day-for-a-year progressions, and solar arc progressions as my meat and potatoes. As an astrologer, however, we run into occasional situations that can only be weakly explained by progressions and transits. I picked up the book “Secrets of Predictive Astrology,” by Anthony Louis to expand on techniques for my astrology class. I’ve been teaching the class for four years and felt like trying a few new things might be fun. We had done a stint on horary astrology. I bought a few new books on the subject to clarify and see if I was missing anything, which is how I found Anthony Louis’s new book.

In Louis’ “Secrets of Predictive Astrology,” he researched an astrologer who worked about a hundred years ago. This astrologer used an unusual progression of 4/7 to fill in information lacking in DFY progressions. I won’t go into this technique except to say that it got me thinking a lot about this logic. In the book, the logic presented was that four and seven are mystical numbers. I thought, well, actually, three is traditionally a more mystical number: Maiden, Mother, Crone and Father, Son, Holy Spirit, etc. While four is mystical in terms of four seasons and is important to Masons, it doesn’t have the same long and ancient connection to the Pyramids and the idea of the first stages of manifestation. This got me thinking: I should try putting the number 3 instead of the standard 1 for the computer to calculate as the number for the degree for a year.

The more I thought about the number 3 and the circle we use in astrology, the more I thought about the constructs of astrology. The wheel we use in astrology is not the actual sky; it represents the sky. It is a geometric construct of the