Hexagram 35, Progress

The figure

Earth lies underneath, three broken lines, wide and open and ready. Fire rises above it. Put those two together and you have the oldest picture there is, the sun coming up over the land at the start of a day. The light climbs, the ground warms, and everything that was hidden in the dark is plain to see.

That is Progress. Easy, visible forward movement, the kind that happens when the conditions are right and nothing is standing in the way. The earth has only to be there, open, when the light arrives.

Progress is paired with Hexagram 36, Darkening of the Light, which is this figure turned upside down, the sun going under the earth at dusk. Dawn and dusk, side by side in the book.

When it comes up in a reading

When Progress answers your question, the way ahead is open. Things that were stuck are moving. People are saying yes. Doors you had stopped knocking on are opening by themselves. This is the hexagram of the rising morning, and the guidance is mostly to get up and walk into it.

I say mostly because there is a particular way to carry this. Progress happens in daylight. Everything you do while the sun is up can be seen, so do things that stand up to being seen. The advancement the book has in mind is the kind a loyal servant earns from a fair ruler, by doing good work in plain view and being noticed for it. Rise the way the sun rises, steadily and in full sight, and the ground will keep warming under you.

Something I have watched over the years is that people trust an easy season less than a hard one. The easy one feels suspicious, as if the bill is coming later, and in my experience the bill only comes if you waste it. Use the open road while it is open. Make the calls, send the proposals, have the conversation you have been putting off, because the light will not stay at this angle forever.

And take a moment to ask where you are actually heading. Forward is a good direction, but it is still worth knowing what is at the end of the road before you arrive there at speed.

As a birth hexagram

If Progress is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you carry forward momentum. Your life tends to advance. Opportunities arrive and you happen to be standing in the right place to take them, often enough that other people call you lucky and you have learned to just smile at that. It is partly luck and partly that you keep yourself ready.

You work in daylight. You like to know what you are doing and where it is going, and you do not mind being watched while you do it. Recognition finds you. Promotions, invitations and acknowledgement tend to arrive when you are doing good work, and people want to be near your momentum, so partnerships and alliances form around you without much effort on your part. Your gift is that you advance through work that deserves to be noticed. The work builds your profile for you while you get on with it.

The shadow is losing yourself in the climb. When the rising becomes the whole point, you can arrive somewhere impressive and have no idea why you wanted to be there. The question Progress puts to you across a life is what you become as you rise. Advancement that leaves you kinder and more useful is the real thing. Advancement that leaves you puffed up is just altitude.

At maturity you have risen a long way and kept your integrity on the way up. The positions, the recognition and the responsibilities all turned into something that was useful to other people, which is what the rising sun is for.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Progress, look at where it sits before you read anything else. The lower lines are the start of the matter, first light, the advance barely begun and possibly doubted by the people around you. The middle lines are its heart, the sun well up and the work being seen for what it is. The upper lines are its end, full noon, and the question of whether you have pushed the advance past the point where it was still wise. The moving line then changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to do that step by step.

Across the traditions

Fire and Earth each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The Chinese Astrology section's Yin and Yang page covers the light and the open ground that meet in this figure. In the tarot I put Progress next to The Sun, for the obvious reason that both are the sun coming up and both are about being seen in a good light, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

If the road ahead is open right now, what would you do today that you have been waiting for permission to do?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.