Astrology sometimes gets a little top-heavy intellectually, and yet it’s as much about the seasons of the human heart as it is about insights and theories. Steven's books speak to your head. Trying to keep that precious balance, here’s a song that captures the feeling of each planet – something that’s aimed straight for the heart. 

What follows is the story behind the project. Enjoy! 

• Your home – and thus your parents – is represented by the 4th house. The 3rd house refers to siblings. Who are your aunt and uncles? They’re your parents’ brothers and sisters. Thus your aunts and uncles are the “3rd house counting from the 4th house,” which is the 6th.

As you can see, the basic idea behind derived houses is simple. Don’t let that blind you to the miracle it represents. The fact that it works at all – that it’s not just some kind of crossword puzzle we play in our heads – is actually kind of astonishing. There are layers of internal consistency behind astrology’s wheel of houses that hint at depths of meaning that resonate with some fundamental twelve-fold mystery of the universe.

If that weren’t true, derived houses wouldn’t work.

That‘s a truly fascinating subject, but it’s not the one I want to pursue in this essay. I just want to use derived houses as a springboard for exploring a troubling area of astrological inconsistency and confusion – and hopefully finding a way through it.

Our road toward that trouble starts off with a seemingly innocent question about aunts and uncles. Say your interest is more specific. Say you want to know what house represents your aunt on your mother’s side. She’s your mom’s sister, so you would just count three houses starting with the house of your mother, right? Many traditional texts would say that your mother is symbolized by the 10th house – which is the 7th house counting from the 4th house. The idea is that the 4th house represents your father, so his wife – your mom, at least back in the old days – had to be the 10th house. 

First, a bow in the direction of the astrologers who have led the renaissance of traditional astrological techniques over the past three decades. They revealed something I didn’t know:  traditionally, there were two ways of calculating the Part of Fortune, one if you were born at night and another if you were born during the day. The day-version of the Part of Fortune is what I grew up with, even though I was born at night myself. Back then, that version was all we knew about.

One more point before we get rolling. While traditionally the Part of Fortune was viewed as a lucky point connected with pathways to material success and health, my approach to it is less predictive and more evolutionary. To anyone familiar with my attitude toward astrological matters, there’s no surprise there. My apologies in advance to those traditional astrologers because what I plan to explore in this newsletter will probably sound somewhere between weird and heretical to them, starting with me not being at all concerned with any distinctions between night births and day births.

By the way, sometimes the term “Lot” is used rather than “Part,” and occasionally the Part of Fortune is simply called “Fortuna.” As I understand it, its roots lie in Arabic astrology, where there was an extensive system of these “lots.” As I recall, there was even a “Lot of Melons.”

Perspective: you might find yourself at a wedding. Even if you’re full of bright hopes for the couple, naturally in the back of your mind are the ominous words “fifty/fifty.” Those are their chances of them actually staying together. When it’s our turn to toast the happy couple, we may not mention that statistic, but everyone today knows that something like half of all marriages end in divorce. 

But, hey, that means that half of them don’t! And given human realities, isn’t that a miracle? Those are the kinds of relationships that I want to celebrate in this newsletter.

Here’s a far smaller question: what will AI mean for astrology in particular? I don’t know the answer there either, but I’m asked about it quite a lot, so for what they are worth, here are my thoughts. 

I see both positive and negative potentials as AI transforms the way we practice our craft. And transform it, it will – the one certainty is that, barring a total collapse of civilization, artificial intelligence is here to stay. We have to learn to live with it. I also believe that if we, as a society, are successful in coexisting with this new technology, that success will not rest on technological breakthroughs. It will rest on cultural, social, and legal decisions. More about that in a while.

What I plan to do as I explore this explosive topic with you is to bounce back and forth between pro-AI perspectives for astrology and negative ones. If you love AI, I’ll say some things you’ll hate. And if you hate it, I will say some things you’ll love. In the end, my aim is not to act as if I know the answer and arrive at some phony thumbs up or thumbs down bottom line – that would be nothing but an empty gesture, as if I were approving or disapproving of gravity. Again, I don't know where all of this will lead. All I know for sure is that AI is not going to disappear. We just have to learn how to live with it.

And please – no mean emails. 

Right on schedule, Mars was returning to where it was on the day I was born. I was embattled and ready to kill somebody if only my body were coordinated enough to pull it off. Welcome to the infamous “Terrible Twos.”

In broad terms, Mars takes twenty-six months to return to a given zodiacal degree – just over two years in other words. Due to several factors, the cycle is somewhat variable. One of those factors is that, in common with the rest of the planets, Mars’ orbit is elliptical – it speeds up when it’s closer to the Sun and slows down as it gets further away. Ditto for Earth, of course – and we’re watching Mars from our own careening planet, so our perspective is always shifting. Because of retrograde motion, sometimes Mars makes not one but three conjunctions to its natal position. All of those wild cards complicate the timing. It’s a mess, but say twenty-six months, give or take two or three months, and your timing of Mars returns will be more or less on target. My own first Mars return, for one example, occurred after only twenty-three months and ten days. The bottom line is that you have to look it up. 

Questions such as those are what keeps astrology from growing stale, but knowing how to ask them involves more than just keeping an open mind. Sometimes it’s about discovering something “up there” that we simply were not in a position to notice any earlier. Would it be fair to criticize 16th century master astrologer John Lilly for failing to include Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in his interpretations? Obviously not – no one back then even knew that those three planets existed. Still, they were certainly “above” – and if our basic astrological theory holds true, then down here below, we were affected by them. 

Little did he know it, but William Lilly in fact died with Uranus making a station on his natal Pluto. 

Still, missed opportunities are actually huge events. It’s just that they are often disguised as nothing at all. Imagine walking right past a hundred dollar bill lying on the sidewalk while looking the other way. Imagine feeling too tired to go to the party where your future soulmate is waiting for you. 

Nothing happened? Ask your guardian angels . . .

There’s a problem though – ostensibly, what we call evolutionary astrology only dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. I was born in 1949. How could I have been “remembering” something that hadn’t been invented yet?

Last May, I taught a class in Athens, Greece, primarily for students in my school. There were many signs and omens that I had some unresolved karma with that country so I approached the trip with some nervousness. I don’t want to be too personal in this essay, but if you want the deep background, go to forrestastrology.center and search for one of my “Master’s Musings” blogs from June 2025 called “What Greece Meant To Me.” The upshot is that there is much indirect evidence from various sources that, in a prior lifetime, I was a Gnostic Christian in that region of the world in the first or second centuries, C.E. 

True or not, the problem still remains: how could I have experienced anything like evolutionary astrology almost two thousand years ago? At first there seems to be no rational support for such a notion. But as strange as it may seem, I have come to believe that a Gnostic in the Roman Empire culture of the second century C.E. would actually find much that was familiar in the work that we contemporary evolutionary astrologers are doing today, at least at the philosophical level.

Naturally as they go through life, such “time twins” will simultaneously experience almost the same transits and progressions. Because of that astrological similarity, we would expect many parallels in their lives – and in fact, we often do see exactly that phenomenon.

Here’s perhaps the most famous of these “time twin” tales:

An ironmonger named Samuel Hemming was born on the same day as the English King, George III – June 4, 1738. They apparently looked very similar and there were many parallels in their lives. Hemming opened his business on the same day that George was crowned king. They married on the same day. They both had the same number and genders of children. They were sick at the same time and they both died on the same day – January 29, 1820 – of similar maladies. 

Stories of this sort are fairly abundant. As I was preparing to write this newsletter, I was poking around the internet and followed a link (astrologerpeg.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/time-twins) to a woman who bills herself as “Astrologer Peg.” I don’t know her or what her sources are, but her site mentions that she studied with Noel Tyl, which is a good credential.  In any case, I got two particularly dramatic versions of these “time twin” stories from her. I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but I have no reason to doubt it – again, tales such as these are actually very common.

Traditionally, Jupiter brings luck, and there’s some truth in that notion – with a few provisos. First, what exactly do we mean by luck? During a big Jupiter transit, maybe someone wins a large pile of money. They feel lucky. Everybody calls them lucky. But how happy are they a year later? Did that money actually bring them joy? 

Well . . . possibly.

Not to rain on Jupiter’s parade, but one secret with “luck” lies in actually knowing what is good for you. The first obstacle we must overcome in achieving that goal is that everybody thinks they are already there! We all know luck when we see it, right? I mean, how would you feel if you won that lottery? Are you going to give that money back? 

Put on your wisdom hat – and you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter if you didn’t have one. Something deep inside you knows that money can bring troubles as well as joy. It’s just hard for us humans to remember that. We get dazzled by glitter sometimes and mistake it for gold. And of course it’s not always about money. There are many other Jupiter “glamours” in this world, ready to beguile us: fame, sex, power – even being widely touted as “a deeply spiritual person.” Every one of those traps can breed attachment and blindness.

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Please give it a try. There are some more step-by-step details below, but the offer is simple and straightforward. If you like it, feel free to share the link with your friends too – the link will work for anyone who has it and we are eager to spread it as widely as possible.  

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What can I possibly say? 

Here, we are entering the realm of electional astrology – the art of choosing the right time to take an action. Astrologically, time weaves an ever-shifting labyrinth of red lights and green lights, but the lights are more often red than green. Bottom line, the odds are long against the happy couple who chose Saturday for their wedding having randomly picked an astrologically encouraging moment. I don’t want to lie to them, but I don’t want to scare them with the truth either. Ever the artful dodger in situations such as that one, I’ll often simply say that I haven’t looked into it, which is generally the reality – I’m not a walking ephemeris. Then I quickly dance away into a fog-bank of congratulations and well-wishing.

There are deeper waters here. Let’s say that this couple had actually chosen a totally rotten time to get married – Venus is retrograde in Aries in the 12th house squaring Saturn while the Moon is heading for a final opposition to Uranus in the 7th house. Does this mean that their marriage is doomed? Astrologers who say that kind of thing are simply revealing their inexperience. A lot of factors go into a happy marriage. Some are indeed astrological, and some are in the more obvious categories of love, maturity, and basic sanity. My main point is simple: those virtues can defeat a dreadful wedding-day chart. 

Going further – and limiting ourselves strictly to purely astrological factors – a good wedding chart is only one piece of the whole picture. In my experience, the actual synastry between the two charts dwarfs it in importance. I’d rather marry someone under the Wedding Chart from Hell than, for example, to marry someone with whom my chart made no significant aspects. 

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The surprise for me is that despite my initial attitude, those sweet psychic tendrils of human connection seem capable of heart-to-heart piggybacking over computer screens. I was wrong and I admit it.

Still, there is much to be said for a hug. There’s much to be said for eye-contact. There’s much to be said for idle chit chat and just getting to know each other in a human  way. Vibes come through with a lot more multidimensional punch when two people are in the same room. I do miss all of that primeval bonding. 

My old apprenticeship groups were very tribal. Lasting friendships formed. There were affairs. A marriage or two happened. There were conflicts, along with some inappropriate behavior that had to be handled. There were tragedies and there were deaths – and even those kinds of sorrows bond people together. That’s all part of how we create community. I believe that every one of us learned a lot from those human experiences, especially when we all peered at them together through the lens of astrology – and maybe sat around later over a glass of wine yacking and gossiping about them. 

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In this short essay, my intention is to put the personal meaning of the nodes shifting signs in the spotlight. Since we’ll all be experiencing some of this energy collectively, it will impact the positives and negatives of the wider world too.

As always, we start by underscoring a point that is really the bedrock of evolutionary astrological theory: the south node of the Moon represents the gravity of old habits which are holding us back, while the north node symbolizes the remedy that can liberate us. In my own work, I view the soul cages represented by the south node as problems and challenges that originated in prior lifetimes, although other philosophies can be made to fit too. In any case, as the late, lamented astrologer and my dear friend, Michael Lutin, once put it, “the north node is the meeting and the south node is the bottle.” If you know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous, Michael really covered the essence of the point in those thirteen words. 

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As ever, with massive astrological changes such as this one, it’s helpful to take a long-term perspective. Uranus was discovered in 1789 – and marked the (very Uranian) overthrow of the rule of kings along with the birth of scientific inquiry,  even when it violated religious dogma. That didn’t happen on a single day! Similarly, Neptune was discovered in 1848 and it  marked a massive change in the scope of human imagination and human spirituality – again, that’s something we can see clearly in retrospect, but not something that happened the very minute Neptune was found.

In exactly the same fashion, the human discovery of the true extent of our inner world – our Plutonian unconscious mind – unfolded over a generation or two. Still, the astrological signature of the event itself dates to the physical discovery of Pluto back almost a hundred years ago. 

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In my own chart, Mars is in the spotlight in many ways, starting with the fact that I’ve got Scorpio rising which makes Mars the traditional ruler of my chart. It’s also sextile to my Mars-ruled Aries Moon, which deepens my reactivity to it. Mars itself lies in Aquarius, in my 3rd house (Placidus) and in a conjunction with my late-Capricorn Mercury.  Mercury and the 3rd house are both about communication, so those two features reinforce each other, and that’s the dimension of Mars that I want to explore in this newsletter. 

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The trouble is that in this case, B does not equal C. Houses and signs are not the same. They do overlap in meaning, as we will see. They are far from unrelated. But if you treat them as if they were interchangeable, your astrological work loses focus. Still, this is a painfully common error among astrologers. Even though many of those books I mention contain useful perspectives in other areas, when it comes to this issue they are the culprit. 

Learning to avoid this pitfall is not hard and it will take your work to the next level.

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As ever, astrology’s Achilles’ Heel is bad birth information. With someone you know, you can often sense that something is off in the chart. With strangers, you’re much more vulnerable.

Four billion copies of her books are in print. She is often described as the best-selling author in history. Her play, The Mousetrap, is the longest running one in the world, having opened in London on November 25, 1952 and still going strong as of this writing. 

But it is for her murder mysteries that Agatha Christie is best known. Her work practically defined the genre. Her vain Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, with his waxed mustache and his brilliant deductions humanized the infallible “Sherlock Holmes” archetype. Poirot is the only fictional character ever to be given an obituary in The New York Times, after Christie killed him off in her 1975 novel, Curtain. That’s some indication of the popularity of her work. Her delightful Miss Marple, who was at least as brilliant as Hercule Poirot and a lot more charming, made it safe for older, middle-class ladies on both sides of the Atlantic to have a formidable gleam of mischief in their eyes, along with garnering some respect for their well-tempered intelligence and insight. Anyone can say “don’t underestimate me.” Miss Marple’s irrefutable wisdom made that honorable sentiment irrefutable.

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As ever, when a planet makes a station – in other words, stands still, about to turn retrograde or direct – its energies become very focussed and intensified. For that reason alone, October promises to be a very Plutonian month. On top of that, when a planet is the final degree of a sign – often called the anaretic degree – there’s an underlying sense of urgency to it. When you were in school, remember the way you felt the night before final exams? When it comes to studying, that meant it was now or never. That’s the feeling of an anaretic degree. With Pluto making its station in 29 degrees 38 minutes of Capricorn, we’re all in exactly that position – here comes our final exam.

This event isn’t just about “history” happening – it will have personal meaning for you too. Everything in the sky does. But everyone on Earth will be experiencing this radical intensification of Plutonian energy simultaneously. In other words, it’s not like a transit that hits one person very directly and misses someone else. This one is for everybody. As always, some of us will do well with it and some of us will do poorly. If “poorly” wins, it bodes ill for the whole planet. 

Don’t despair – surrendering to despair is simply one of the soul-cages dark Pluto offers everyone. 

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Once we give astrology a chance to prove itself, its efficacy simply can’t be denied. 

Just this week I did a reading for a woman who teaches breastfeeding. Her chart shows a Cancer Midheaven. Chance? I just got a sad message about an old friend who died before her time. Saturn had just touched her Ascendant. Chance? As any astrologer knows from experience, the list goes on and on. All you need is an open mind. Give astrology the opportunity and it proves itself to you – or to anyone. In the right hands, it never fails. 

Many intelligent, thoughtful human beings disbelieve in astrology. I wouldn’t shame them for that. They come by their disbelief innocently. Some of it is just what they were trained to parrot from an early age, at least if they wanted to make A’s in 6th grade science class. Some of it is that strange shibboleth that we call “common sense.” After all, the premise that the planets “control us” does seem implausible – they’re millions of miles away, so how could they possibly affect anyone? Why would they? And so forth. 

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My firstborn book – my first published book to be precise – was The Inner Sky, which came out in August 1984. That’s forty years ago this month. Some of you older readers have seen your child turn forty. I suspect that’s a sobering moment – or at least one that really puts you on the map in terms of the aging process. It’s similar with books. When The Inner Sky was born, I was just thirty-five years old. Now I’m seventy-five. Knowing the book is now five years older than I was when I wrote it rings some deep bells in me.

I’d signed the contract to write The Inner Sky – and collected half of my $10,000 advance – in summer 1981. My progressed Moon had just risen into the 7th house. Solar Arc Uranus was squaring my lunar nodes, while transiting Uranus was finishing up a conjunction with my Ascendant. My chart was locked and loaded for some big, empowering changes, in other words. I dived into the writing process which took a couple of years. I wrote the whole thing on a manual typewriter and eventually mailed a thick stack of paper to the publisher – that’s how long ago all of this was. Just to be clear with any of you younger folks, on the day I finished writing The Inner Sky I’m pretty sure there were no mastodons grazing outside my window. The saber-tooth tigers had finished them off. 

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Rather than labeling trines – and the Grand Trine itself – “lucky,” I prefer the word “easy.” Those two words don’t mean quite the same thing. Grand Trines do open doors and they can definitely roll out red carpets for you. That’s easily demonstrated. Do those doors and red carpets lead to good places and copacetic outcomes? Yes, sometimes. We won’t be completely dismissing the idea of simple good fortune in connection with this aspect pattern – we’ll just be looking at it a bit more cautiously. We must always recognize that like everything else in astrology, your own choices, be they wise or foolish, are always part of the equation.

Let me start with a true story. This is an edgy one about a client of mine from many years ago. I’ll call him Johnny. For the sake of confidentiality, I’m going to be vague about the specifics. I want to make sure that no one would recognize anyone involved unless they were part of my life “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” 

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At age eleven, Robert lost a leg when he was hit by a car. He told me that his childhood ended that day. 

The year I was born – 1949 – he was in Zurich, Switzerland, studying psychology with Carl Jung and in analysis with Jung’s wife, Emma. 

He was the author of many books in a Jungian psychology vein, three million of which were sold. Most of them were on my bookshelf years before I met him. They never got dusty.

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When I was born, the doctor told my mother that she had a B-vitamin deficiency and that it was probably exacerbated by the fact that she was breastfeeding me. To correct the problem, he recommended that she drink a pint of Guinness Stout every day. It’s true that Guinness Stout contains Folate, which is a B vitamin necessary for the production of some of our genetic materials. The trouble with the theory is that a pint of the stuff provides only 3.2% of our necessary daily dose, which means we’d need to drink thirty beers per day to stay healthy – the devil is in the details, in other words.

Mom followed the doctor’s orders, which was no hardship for her. And, since I was breastfeeding, naturally that meant that I was following them too, albeit in second-hand fashion. Before I was three months old, I had drunk a lot of Guinness Stout via my mother. Without knowing it, I suspect I had quietly qualified for Irish citizenship.

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As you explore what the astrological community is saying about the Jupiter-Uranus alignment, you’ll encounter a lot of ideas about what it means for the world as a whole. As many of you know, that’s called Mundane astrology. I remember as a teenager seeing that word for the first time and thinking it must mean boring  astrology – and I have to say, my early reading experiences in the field often backed up that misinterpretation! But of course the term is based on the Romance language words for “the world” – mondo, mundo, or monde, depending on where you’re doing your listening. I have to say that at the Mundane level, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is incredibly powerful. It always leaves its fingerprints on the headlines. 

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In any case, before I go any further, let me reassure you that this newsletter will be about astrology – in fact a very serious branch of astrology. It won’t just be me strolling down memory lane. 

Please indulge me for a moment though. It’s December 1969. I’m twenty years old and watching TV with my parents, who were actually pretty cool. Python comes on doing a skit about a man returning a dead parrot to a pet shop. A hilarious argument ensues about whether the bird is actually dead or not, when it quite obviously is. I have tears of laughter running down my cheeks, while my parents are baffled – and probably concerned about my mental health. 

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As we contemplate Pluto’s in-and-out entry into Aquarius this year, the Internet is dishing up a smorgasbord of predictions ranging from a progressive optimist’s wet dream down to a post-Apocalyptic landscape of extinction nightmares. I believe that either of those visions, and much lies in between, could potentially come to pass. Consciousness interacts unpredictably with a wide field of probabilities and possibilities. One of them will surely happen. Which one? The point is that you are not an inert ingredient in that question. We don’t need to chew our fingernails and hope for the best, but rather to keep our eyes and hearts focussed on the higher ground and how to get there. 

We all know what to wish for: world peace, justice for all, a sustainable environment, and so on. I agree, but I'm not going to harp on those obvious things. You already know them. Let’s go a little deeper into the real astrological mysteries here.

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Luis sent me an interesting question in December. Here are his words:

You have already devoted a book (The Night Speaks) to dismantling the “scientific” objections to Astrology, which I translated, with greater or lesser artistry. Perhaps it would be good for you to devote at least one newsletter to dismantling the religious objections to Astrology. 

Let me begin responding to Luis by saying that religious objections to astrology are far from universal, even within the Judeo-Christian framework. I’d also like to say that those Judeo-Christian traditions are what I will mostly be talking about here, although as we explore Old Testament issues, they overlap with Islam as well. Generally speaking, the Asian religious traditions have been friendlier to astrology than the western ones.

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What’s going on? Why is everything so crazy? Astrologically, it’s a tough, multi-dimensional question. Certainly Pluto’s last gasps in Capricorn have a lot to do with it.

But then there are sunspots . . .

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Most traditional cultures were very aware of the Summer and Winter Solstices. The noon-day Sun would have reached its highest or lowest point in the sky. The days would start getting longer or shorter. All that is fairly obvious even to a casual observer, so our ancestors figured it out long ago in prehistory. I suspect that knowledge of the Equinoxes came a little bit later – again, no one knows the date because it all happened such a long time ago, but noticing that night and day were of equal length and that the Sun now rose or set due east or due west seems slightly less self-evident than the “return of the light.” 

Anyway, those four points – the two Solstices and the two Equinoxes – became the skeleton of the yearly calendar in every culture, not to mention the basis of the western Zodiac. They divided the year into four quarters – what we came to call the four seasons. Pretty much universally around the world, those four transition points were marked by festivals. Whether that was to please the gods and goddesses, or just because people like parties, is hard to say. 

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Those of you who have been following Pluto’s patchwork transition know that it has already been in Aquarius once. That was for just 39 days, starting on March 23rd, 2023, whereupon it retrograded back into Capricorn, where it remains today. But on October 10th, Pluto turns direct and heads for the Aquarian frontier again. It crosses the line on January 20th – only to return once more into Capricorn on September 1, 2024 before definitively entering Aquarius 78 days later.

The push-pull you can feel in that long recitation of dates is not just happening up in the sky – it’s happening here on Earth too. “As above, so below” strikes again. The back-and-forth in the heavens is echoed here on planet Earth.

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Thinking back, maybe I should have titled that keynote address “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality (or trying to.) It’s not always easy! In my twenties, I wrote my first astrology book – one that never saw print. It was basically a statistical study attempting to prove astrology in a scientific way. If you’re interested, I spoke of it in a bit more detail during that NORWAC talk. I bring it up here because one of my (many) rejection letters from publishers contained a line that I’ve been wrestling with ever since: “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric and I suspect it will remain that way.”

Yikes! Do we actually “resemble that remark?” Sad to say, the answer is often yes. There’s no shortage of silly ego-flattery in pop astrology – telling people what they want to hear and neutralizing any desire in them to improve themselves. Often such astrology encourages people to blame their problems on everyone else or on their “bad aspects.” In every case, it’s “me, me, me” – and that’s the definition of egocentricity.

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Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.

Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.

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Here’s a quick review for anyone who’s not been studying evolutionary astrology for very long. The Moon’s nodes are really the heart of the system. The south node represents unresolved karma that has ripened – that means that it’s time to deal with it. The good news is that you are ready. Meanwhile, the north node suggests a powerful, effective antidote to those old, outdated south node patterns. Here’s where it gets sticky – that south node behavior comes up pretty much automatically, while reaching the north node always takes serious effort.

Want a quick reality check? Back on December 22, 2021, the south node crossed into Scorpio. Maybe you’ve noticed some dark Scorpionic karma ripening everywhere since then? For one obvious example, just two months later, Putin invaded Ukraine. To borrow a metaphor from J.K. Rowling, in classic Scorpionic fashion, suddenly “the Death Eaters” were among us. Of course, the Moon’s north node entered Taurus simultaneously – notice how difficult and far away peace has seemed since then, both for the world and very probably for yourself too? But of course, peace is the eternal cure for war. Once again, reaching the north node is always a struggle – and we need to struggle as if our souls depended on it, because they do.

On October 10, after four months, Pluto reverses course and turns direct, but it’s still in Capricorn when that happens. It only reenters Aquarius on January 20 of the coming year. 

Even then, we’re still not in the clear. On September 1, 2024, Pluto crosses briefly back into Capricorn a second time. That will only be a quick goodbye kiss – just forty days later, it enters Aquarius solidly. After that, it won’t be finished with Aquarius until early 2044 – and it won’t touch Capricorn again until February 28, 2254. 

Complicated? Yes indeed – and that complexity will be echoed in the headlines, not to mention in your own head. 

The roots of these changes in my lifestyle actually go back a little further than Covid. Late in the previous decade I saw Pluto and Saturn bearing down on conjunctions with my Sun, plus the progressed Moon about to enter my 12th house. Many astrologers would have suggested that Fear might have been my best strategy, but that’s not how I live with the planets – I feel that  they’re up there to guide me, not to scare me. I saw that to head off danger, I needed to make some changes. I was turning seventy. Maybe it was time to travel less. The planets asked me that question – I answered it in my own way with a big Yes.

At that time I had half a dozen apprenticeship programs going around the world, each one meeting once or twice per year. I took those responsibilities seriously, so I gave a couple years’ notice on ending them. Around the same time, with Catie Cadge and Jeff Parrett, I began to lay the groundwork for my online school – the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology. In January 2020, I did my last public program before the Plague struck – it was a synastry class in Palm Springs, California. We had over a hundred people signed up – and something like thirty of them dropped out, many citing “the flu.” That was my first inkling of what was to come.

As I lay there in my bed nursing my sore throat, my Scorpio mom came in and asked me if she could get me a book to read. I asked her for an astrology book. I think she was a little surprised, but she didn’t have a problem with that – I was blessed with an open-minded family. A couple hours later, she returned with a paperback. It was silly Sun Sign astrology aimed at the sorts of teenagers who weren’t destined for careers in rocket science. I won’t name the book because I try to avoid blaspheming against other astrological authors, but it was truly terrible. I devoured it anyway. I could tell that there was something real going on behind the obvious pandering and stupidity. If I were a fish, I’d have been toying with the worm, not quite sure if I was actually going to chomp down on it.

In for a penny, in for a pound – I finished that book and asked my mom for another one. This time she picked a winner. She brought me one of the dozen or so books that have actually changed the direction of my life. It was called Write Your Own Horoscope. The author was one Joseph F. Goodavage. I never hear anyone refer to it today – as a contribution to the astrological vocabulary, it’s mostly forgotten even though it was actually the first astrology book to sell over a million copies.

What will it mean? That’s not really up to Saturn, it’s up to you. There are ways to be in harmony with this energy and ways to get into trouble with it too. All that is what I want to explore with you in this newsletter.

Then there’s the minor problem of there being about a million of them! Last I heard, something like 14,000 of them even had names. To avoid being overwhelmed, many astrologers who use asteroids limit themselves to what are often (erroneously) called “the big four.” They’re not actually the biggest, they’re just the first four to be discovered – Vesta, Ceres, Juno, and Pallas. Hygiea is actually more massive than Juno by far and, if size matters, it should be in that quartet instead. Juno just happened to be the third one to be discovered, but it only squeaks into the Top Twenty as “heavyweights” go.  

The more massive an asteroid is, the more powerful it is astrologically? That tempting notion makes a degree of intuitive sense, but I doubt it’s true. That’s because astrological experience teaches us otherwise. Pluto’s mass, for example, is relatively tiny – only about one 400th the mass of Earth – and vastly less than Jupiter or Saturn. Yet woe betide the astrologer who ignores Pluto! 

The school may be about teaching “the Forrest method,” but its operations are not really centered on me personally. Tutors carry most of the teaching load. And they’re great – all of them have studied intensively with me, and all of them are warm-hearted, caring, and wise. Right from the beginning, I wanted to make sure that the FCEA would become an institution which could live on beyond me. I also wanted to make sure that it felt warm and human despite being conducted online. That’s where our team of tutors comes in – they’re constantly interacting with the students.

We still feel like the school is very much in start-up mode. Being nominated for “Favorite Astrology School” in the awards ceremony at the big ISAR conference in Denver in late August was a happy surprise – not that it was so surprising that we were nominated, but that it happened so soon. We’ve not really done much publicity.

• Above, in the sky, the Sun is the gravitational center of the solar system. 
• Here below, on earth, it is the gravitational center of your head. 

On both levels, the Sun’s job is to hold the planets in their courses – and by “the planets in your head,” we mean all your contradictory, paradoxical needs, drives, and values. Being human is complicated.  We’re pulled in so many directions, torn between appetites and integrity, pleasure and productivity, and so on. Still, you get out of bed in the morning and you have a sense of who you are. You have an identity. There is reasonable continuity in your life. That’s the Sun at work, with its “gravity” coalescing you into one reasonably coherent whole.

Heading sunward toward the center of the solar system from the august realms of the outer planets, we cross the asteroid belt and enter a far more frenetic zone. Like a carousel that's drunk one more cup of coffee than it should, Mars, Venus, and Mercury zoom frantically around the Sun – and around our charts. They’re powerful triggers, but what they actually trigger are those bigger developmental themes that were signaled by the slow moving bodies. Right there, we see one of the bedrock practical principles of working with planetary transits: the distinction between the fast bodies and the slow ones, so beautifully punctuated by the asteroid belt.

The progressed Sun is the Evolving Self. As it moves through the chart, ever so slowly the lessons of life make it through our thick skulls and become part of what we are. We change at the most fundamental level.

Of all the things the progressed Sun can do, the most important ones are when it switches from one sign to another or from one house to another. A close second would be when it forms a conjunction with a natal planet, followed down the “poker hands” of the rest of the aspects. Any one of these events is virtually guaranteed to change the direction of your life. 

Where will that process eventually lead? Who knows? It’s easy to say that the choice is yours, and that is mostly true. But it’s not really quite that simple. As you master evolutionary astrology, you begin to have a kind spiritual superpower. And with that power comes certain ethical imperatives. If someone is drowning and you are the only person who can swim . . . well, you see where this is going.

Do you have any particular astrological sensitivity to those degree areas – say, the Sun in 19 degrees of Scorpio (an opposition) or the Moon in 19 degrees of Aquarius (the square)? If so, is the karmic wave about to break for you? Is something huge and fated about to happen?

Maybe. Maybe not. Read on.

Every 18.5997 years – that is just a little over every eighteen years, seven months –  the  transiting nodal axis completes one cycle through the Zodiac. The south node returns to zero degrees of Aries, in other words. Another way to express this is that the lunar nodes spend about a year and half passing through each sign. 

In my experience, don’t count on these nodal transits to correlate reliably with anything big. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’ve seen them pass pretty much unnoticed and I’ve seen them rock people’s’ worlds. For an example of the latter, Will Smith’s natal Moon lies in 21 degrees 8 minutes of Scorpio. When he lost his temper and hit Chris Rock at the Oscars last March, the transiting south node was in 22 degrees 2 minutes Scorpio – bull’s eye, in other words, smack on his Moon. The south node was conjunct it and north node opposed it – in that very emotional moment. What kind of unresolved Scorpionic karma was welling up from his psychic depths? Was he hitting Chris Rock or some ghostly figure from the past?

Whatever the answer, that edgy, Scorpionic moment will mark his public image for the rest of his life.

While pregnant with Sol, Linnea asked me one of those simple-sounding questions that sends you spiraling into questioning your basic understanding of the universe. Little Sol is a Gemini. Linnea wondered if he was a Gemini because he was born on June 1st, or the other way around? Was he born on June 1st because “he was already a Gemini in his soul” even though he hadn’t gotten around to being born yet?

I love questions like this one. They are so subversive, and what they subvert is my favorite target of them all: the dominant paradigm. Like it or not, we live in perhaps the most materialistic age humanity has ever experienced. That doesn’t only mean that everybody is out looking for money – avarice is definitely part of it, but materialism runs far deeper than that. Ultimately it is the core belief that we are nothing more than these bodies of flesh and bone, living in a push-and-shove, cause-and-effect universe, awaiting our expiration dates. Delete magic. Delete meaning. Delete miracles. 

Those were hard words to read at the tender age of ten or so! The worst part was that they sort of halfway fit me, at least back then. Famously, far worse than a lie is a half-truth – they can be far more seductive. I doubt I was the first person to be hurt by that kind of pigeon-holing pop astrology. Somehow I think it planted an aspiration in me that I would be among the last.

Bantam Books publishing The Inner Sky naturally opened a lot of doors for me. Miraculously, even though the book came out nearly forty years ago, I still believe pretty much every word I wrote in those pages. What I regret is not something I wrote, but rather what I did not write. And here it is in a nutshell: If it were not for that vending machine and its depressing message about Capricorn, I might never have become an astrologer. For all its many flaws, I cannot escape the fact that silly Sun Sign astrology gave me a start on the life I live today. I should be more grateful to it, whatever damage it might have wreaked upon my developing psyche. Even though that little packet about Capricorn was rigid in its delineation of my nascent personality and discouraging about my fate, it contained enough kernels of truth that I was intrigued. 

As I suspect is also the case with many of you, the seeds of my interest in astrology had to fight their way into my life through the tangle of religious, cultural, and scientific barbed wire. For me,  that was amplified by me being an academically promising little boy in the strait-jacket culture of the late 1950s. Worse, for astrology to take hold of my imagination, the smattering of wisdom in that 25-cent packet had to fight against its own pandemonium of obvious errors. Looking back, it is a miracle that astrology won. 

But it did. 

“Ah . . . another sad example of dreaded Late-Stage Capricornosis,” I said to myself.  Let me explain . . .

Pluto entered Capricorn back in 2008 and it’ll be criss-crossing back and forth over the Aquarius frontier between March 2023 and November 2024. On April 1, 2022, it’s in 28 degrees 24 minutes of Capricorn – getting into the last degree and a half of the sign . . . hence my reference to the “late stage” of our current disorder. Those late degrees of a sign always have a special intensity. Picture a college dormitory at about 11:00 pm on the night before final exams. Naturally, you’ll be impressed by the scholarly zeal of the students. Every nose is buried in a book and will probably will stay that way until the wee hours. In much the same fashion, there was an Englishman who was going to be hung in the morning. Someone asked him how he felt about that. He said, “it composes the mind most excellently.” 

Stand back, in other words.

Pisces represents many possibilities, but among them, it is the sign of the mystic. That means that the doorway to a transcendent dimension of the Jupiter-Neptune alignment will be wide open for anyone who wants to pass through it. That perspective on the conjunction is what I want to explore in this newsletter. First, let’s talk about timing. At one level, it’s very straightforward: Jupiter and Neptune form a single perfect conjunction on April 12, 2022. The next one will not happen until March 2035. This April, the alignment happens at 23 degrees 59' of Pisces, then it  quickly fades away as Jupiter pulls ahead, crossing into Aries on May 10. That’s where everything gets a little more interesting. Jupiter makes it a third of the way into Aries, then seemingly changes its mind and heads back to give Neptune a final kiss. It retrogrades into back Pisces on October 27, making a station on November 23 at 28 degrees 48'. On that day, Neptune is at 22 degrees 40' – which means that the two planets are only about 6 degrees apart and in the same sign. By anyone’s standards, that’s a conjunction too, just not a precise one.

As astrologers, our computers take care of those details for us, so none of that has much practical meaning – at least until we start setting up Solar Return charts. I am sure that many of you have heard of the technique. In principle, it is a simple idea: we set up a chart for the moment that the Sun returns to its starting point and we begin a new yearly cycle. That “birthday” chart gives us insight into what lies ahead during the coming year. The trick lies in remembering that this “solar return moment” would only very rarely be the same as your actual birth time and date. If I had set mine up with my usual birth data – 3:22 am-est on January 6 – it would have been meaningless, almost more like a legal document than an astrological one.

A moment ago, I used the phrase “what lies ahead for us during the coming year.” No astrologer would be startled at such wording, but then the fun would begin. Astrology means so many different things to so many different people. A conventional astrologer might use a solar return  chart (often abbreviated as an “SR”) to predict the events of the next twelve months. Jupiter in the 2nd house? I smell money. Venus on the Descendant? You will meet someone  . . . There may even be some truth in those predictions, but as an evolutionary astrologer, my questions are different. For one thing, I believe that choices you make, wisely or foolishly, have a lot to do with the future you create. My aim is to empower you rather than “predicting” anything for you. For another, I think that the message of the SR chart – and really of all astrological symbolism – is ultimately about what your soul is learning, how best to learn it, and how to avoid wasting those evolutionary opportunities.

A retrograde planet is going back over ground that it has already covered, often re-thinking and re-framing it. That is one profoundly telling clue about the evolutionary meaning of retrograde bodies in general: they are always about the past. That is the key. As the great southern writer, William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” There is, in other words, no way to separate our personal history from our experience of the present moment. Ask anyone who has ever been betrayed – can they enter into a new relationship without that old ghost haunting them? Once burned, twice smart, as the proverb goes – although in the case of intimate betrayal, “smart” might actually mean “wounded.”

Venus retrograde may not be about those old betrayals, but that is certainly one possibility. Venus is, of course, the goddess of love. It is always about relationships, among other things. So let’s go with the “old betrayals” scenario for a while. We can use it to help us learn some principles that are more generalizable. 

These dates are, by the way, for the Mean nodes, rather than the so-called True nodes. I’ve always found the Mean nodes to be more accurate in the rare instances where there is any significant difference between the two forms at all. The dates I give are also based on the U.S. west coast – as ever, China and Australia are already enjoying tomorrow while we’re back here languishing in today. These are picky differences. In this newsletter, I want to focus on the bigger picture.

We are all responsible for the way we “inhabit” our birthcharts. That element of free will is absolutely central to my understanding of astrology. One dimension of that pivotal principle is that we are all free to blow it – free to let fear, bad social conditioning, or sheer laziness take a bite out of our lives. That’s true of you, me – and my client with the Moon on her Midheaven too. The fact that she “has a mission” does not mean that she will rise to it. Some personal “Moon work” must serve as the foundation of any gift she is eventually able to give to her community. That will require some effort.

My client has been born to play some kind of helpful, healing role in the lives of strangers. They don’t know it, but those strangers are counting on her.  If she does not rise to some approximation of her human potential, she will simply not be there for them. That means that her failure would create suffering for them. 

Here’s where everything starts to get really sticky. That possibility of failure confronts astrologers with an uncomfortable truth that we cannot escape or sweep under the carpet. To what extent is it appropriate that we confront this client with the responsibilities that we see in her natal chart? More is at stake here than her own spiritual well being – other souls are depending on her. Do we have an ethical right to say that? Do we have an ethical obligation to say it? 

Listen In!

Reality itself is the ultimate test for any theory. Much of the theory behind evolutionary astrology rests upon an acceptance of reincarnation, but how can we actually test any of it, let alone prove it? Our critics often make that exact argument and it is difficult to refute. Probably the best response we can put forth rests in the words of the Tibetan saint, Padma Sambhava, who once simply said, “if you want to know your past lives, consider your present circumstances.” The evidence of your prior lifetimes is, in other words, visible in your present life.  The stories we tell based on our analysis of the Moon’s south node and the planets connected with it echo in our daily lives today. That’s really the heart of the matter and our best response to our critics – but it doesn’t get even close to really proving the idea of reincarnation. 

And that circles us back around to our initial dilemma: our whole system rests on something that people have to take on faith – or not.

Listen in for more!

The last time I had a reading myself, it was actually with a Vedic astrologer. That was intentional. I knew that if I asked an evolutionary astrologer to look at my chart, my ego would get in the way. I’d be too busy “correcting” the person to learn anything. But Vedic – I know almost nothing about it, so I was able to simply listen. It was helpful, so long as I focussed on the plain English of what the astrologer was saying, and ignored the discordant astrological language. Me, a Sagittarian? Mister work-all-the-time Capricorn? Forget about it. 

Anyway, I am writing all of this because in this newsletter, I am going to jump into one of the bloodiest shark tanks in the whole chaotic, contentious astrological community – the question of which house system to use. There are at least a dozen different ways of laying out the houses of a chart, maybe more. When I was a young astrologer, I tried as many of them as I could find, naturally always using my own chart – and the realities of my own experience – as the acid test. Very little in astrology is ever totally clear cut – again, a chart is more like a dream than a computer manual. But during those early years Placidus houses won the battle for my heart and my mind. I’ve used them ever since, successfully, with thousands upon thousands of clients over the past fifty years. Nowadays, I rarely even consider other systems.

Listen in for more!

People sometimes spend their lives looking for that kind of perfect love. They are humanity’s tragic romantics. Most of them die lonely. Pete Townshend of The Who released a song forty years ago that seemed to say it all – The Sea Refuses No River. That line, to me, represents one of the high points of rock’n’roll poetry, but it actually has very little to do with Venus. In actuality, his words are purely Neptunian, and not just because of the maritime reference. It is Neptune, not Venus, that loves people unconditionally. As most of us quickly learn, there is a huge difference between the way we imagine that God loves us and the ways our parents or our partners love us.  With parents and partners, while there may be sincere hugs and kisses, the package also includes a few eye-rolls and some disapproving looks, along with “helpful” lists of the myriad ways we might improve ourselves.

Venus doesn’t “love everybody” – that’s Neptune’s job. Venus picks and chooses, and that means some element of rejection must always be part of the process. Venusian love is personal. It is “me and you” stuff, not “me and the human race.” Sexually Venus tends to be binary, or at least it aspires to that condition.

Listen in for more!

When I was just an infant in diapers, Robert was studying directly under Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich. He was also in formal psychoanalysis with Jung’s wife, Emma. He’s known internationally as a “Jungian author,” which I suppose works as well as most labels do. There was a lot more to him than that, but instead of trying to “profile” him, let me tell you one of my favorite Robert stories. He used to travel to India pretty much every year. Once when he was about to present a talk there, he received a lengthy introduction in Hindi, a language which he did not speak. As he stepped up to the podium, he asked what had been said about him. He was told that he had been introduced as “an enlightened being” – which was kind of a shocker to him since he never spoke of himself in those terms. He inquired as to why such a thing had been said. And the man introducing him announced, straight-faced and serious, that the evidence was that Robert “didn’t eat much, didn’t say much, and didn’t do much.” 

It’s funny, of course. But it really did illuminate something deep about Robert A. Johnson. Beyond his piercing intelligence and his profound insights, beyond his public identity as a world-class intellectual, there was simply a kind of magical silence that radiated from him – a quality of sheer stillness. 

Enlightenment? Your guess is as good as mine.

Listen in for more!

Apart from a stint with Elle magazine a couple of decades ago, I’ve stayed away from that kind of popular astrology. I’ve instead made my own stand a little higher on the intellectual food chain – but, other than with my serious students and in my books, I’ve always tried to keep the welcome mat out for relative beginners. Those of you who have followed this newsletter for a few years know just what I mean. 

In this edition of our newsletter, I am going to break that pattern. I want to present an advanced subject. It may leave some of you scratching your heads, but I hope it has another effect. I hope it gets you interested in a subject that has been ignored for too long. The area I want to present, while it’s not a new discovery, is an area of astrology which is begging for more attention. As ever, it takes the community of astrologers, working over at least a generation, to come to anything like full understanding of anything new. No one astrologer can do it on his or her own. Going further, Tony Howard tells me that we’ve had some questions coming in about this subject lately, so maybe it’s in the air. In any case, welcome to the curious case of the “parallax Moon.”

Listen in!

Retrograde natal planets often scare people, as if something were wrong with being born with planets moving in that  “backwards” condition. Yet most of us have at least one of them, and often more. They are far from rare, in other words. And they aren’t some kind of high jinx in your chart either. They are just different from planets moving in direct motion. It’s sort of like being left-handed.

The overriding principle is that, first and foremost, there is nothing “wrong with” anyone’s chart, ever. The basic laws of the universe preclude that possibility. Your chart is perfect. It fits the needs and conditions of your soul like the proverbial glove. Retrograde planets, squares, oppositions, Mars, Saturn, and Pluto – all the “bad guys” – we need every one of them, and they can be “good for you.” That’s a philosophical point obviously, but understanding it is mission-critical, at least in the context of evolutionary astrology. (If you would prefer an astrologer who would describe you as doomed by some configuration in your chart, I can make some referrals.)

Hold your arm out in front of you and point your index finger straight up. Now look at your fingertip through your left eye, then through your right eye. Your finger naturally seems to jump back and forth against the background scenery. Look at Pluto against the starry background in March, then look at it again in September. It’s the same thing. Like your finger, it too has jumped backwards. That’s because in March, earth was on one side of its orbit, while in September it was halfway around, on the other side. That’s as if the distance between your left eye and your right eye were about 186 million miles – and that’s far enough to make Pluto seem to jump. 

Listen in for more!

Instead of calling it “good” when a planet is in the sign it rules, I find it is much more accurate to call it strong. But is strong the same as good? When a planet is in the sign it rules, they agree with each other. There is no friction. Their energy flows like a geyser, no questions asked. Conversely, when a planet is in the opposite sign – in detriment – it must deal with complexity and paradox – and that is not necessarily such a bad thing. Can we fight for peace? Ask Mars in Libra. Can questioning and doubting ourselves be a path to greatness? Ask Jupiter in Virgo. What about questioning our own beliefs from time to time? Ask Mercury in Sagittarius.

A while back, I made a video about this subject called The Grace in Debility. Click here if you would like to buy a copy of it. The video version is $15 and the audio only one is $10. In this newsletter, I want to tackle a very similar subject, albeit one that is not as widely known: the notion of planetary exaltation and planetary fall. It is not quite the same as rulership and detriment, but there are many parallels – including the widespread, unhelpful notion that exaltation is good news and that a planet occupying the sign of its fall automatically spells bad news.

As we just saw, when a planet is in the sign it rules, there is a very straightforward agreement between the two energies – Jupiter says “I feel lucky” and Sagittarius chimes in – “I bet there are no bears in that cave.” With exaltation, the situation is a bit more subtle. In essence, the sign has the effect of underscoring some specific potential strength in the planet – or similarly, of correcting one of its blind spots. The planet is therefore uplifted – “exalted,” if you will.

Listen in!

Anyway, from that long-haired point of view, the Age of Aquarius probably ended about fifty years ago . . . unless you bring up the subject among a group of astrologers. Then what you will typically see has very little to do with “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding . . .” Then what you will typically see is closer to World War Three. Opinions on the subject of the astrological ages tend to be trenchant – and the general thrust of them usually runs down the road of claiming that the Age of Aquarius is real enough, but that it is still way off in the far distant future.

I disagree. I think we are in it now. I think we have been in it for over a century already.

In this newsletter I want to make my case that the Age of Aquarius dates back to 1903-1905. 

Let’s start with Science Class.

Listen in for more!

How close is one-tenth of a degree? Here’s a way to visualize it in advance before you can actually see the real thing. Hold your arm straight out and stand your pinky-finger straight up. The span across your fingernail is about one degree.

One tenth of that. Close!

Hey, but what if it’s cloudy on the night of the 21st? Have you missed the whole thing? Do you have to wait another twenty years? Well . . . it’s both worse than that and better than that. The next Jupiter-Saturn conjunction occurs in October of 2040, but it’s a just pale version of this one – the two planets are much further apart (because of declination) and somewhat lost in the Sun’s glare. Twenty years after that one, they are at it again – but once more, conditions are similar to 2040. 

All of that is the “worse than that” side of the equations. What about “better than that?”  Tune in to this month's newsletter to hear more...

In an email exchange I had with Olivier this morning, he wrote glowingly about a section of my book, The Night Speaks. He suggested that I publish it as an article on my website. I’d come to the time of the month when I needed to be thinking of a newsletter topic, and, well – voilà, as they say in France. I put two and two together.

I originally published The Night Speaks in 1993, at the time of Uranus-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn. I wrote quite a lot about that epochal event in those early pages, but of course it was “pure astrology.” No one, myself included, really knew yet what the alignment would bring. I was writing about it in real time, as clueless as a newscaster “on the scene.”

In 2016, we brought out a new edition of the book. I added a “23 years later” perspective on what I’d originally written about the conjunction. That is the section of the book that Olivier Clerc was praising and asking me to share with a wider, current audience. He pointed out that many of my long-time readers who bought the earlier 1993 edition would not even know of this more-current version.

There was a second reason for me to offer these words again in this newsletter context. As a citizen of the United States here in late October 2020, I am of course nervously awaiting November 3rd and the results of our national elections. I do not know how they will turn out, so I can’t yet write a meaningful commentary on them.  The deadline for my newsletter comes earlier, yet I felt the need to say something relevant to this turning point in my country’s history. As I re-read this section of The Night Speaks, it struck me as deeply “current” in a kind of mythic, meta-political way.

So, thank you Olivier – and here is the “Update, 2016" section of the book. There are a few references to the longer, original historical analysis which appears in both editions, but I think you’ll be able to follow along without difficulty.

Naturally, as astrologers, we were curious about his chart, but his birth data was not available –  he and his four brothers had been dumped unceremoniously at a kill shelter at the tender age of two weeks. They had been picked up by the saints who run a no-kill shelter where it was “estimated” that they had been born “around May 8.”

Astrologers are often confronted with situations such as this one, where there is no time of birth available. After all possibilities for finding a recorded time have been exhausted, the final option is to undertake a rectification. Basically, one works backwards through astrology’s predictive techniques to come up with a chart that would have predicted events that have already happened in the person’s life. Rectification is a tricky process, fraught with risks of error. I have a resource on my website on this process and if you are listening to this as a podcast rather than reading, you can just go to forrestastrology.com and do a search for “rectification.”

Mercury, for one quick example, is related to our curiosity – and some degree of curiosity exists in more or less everyone. But obviously there are people who are driven by curiosity, and people who barely feel it at all. 

More to the point, what exactly are you curious about? Show me an article about human migration patterns as reflected in ancestral genetics or 19th century sailing vessels, and I will devour it. Seeing those same articles, you might skip to a piece about how to improve your golf swing – while I would have to be paid handsomely even to read the first paragraph.

Curiosity is clearly not a question of right or wrong. It’s more like different strokes for different folks. We all have Mercury in our charts, and we can make a few general statements about its archetypal nature. But what does Mercury actually mean for an individual? Who knows? . . . or rather, who knows – unless we give that Mercury a set of distinct motivations and interests by placing it in a specific sign. After that, we might give it an area of characteristic behavior by putting it in a house. Then we could further wire it into the larger framework of the birthchart by studying the aspects that it makes.

A planet in a specific sign and a specific house: for actual human beings, that is the ultimate indivisible quantum unit of astrological meaning. A planet alone is only a broad idea, about as “human” as a lecture on taxation algorithms.

Listen to the podcast for more!

Despite my books and my teaching, the bulk of my income and lion’s share of the hours of my working life are all about private astrological consultations. People contact me for recorded  readings, which I send them via MP3 files. Lately when I get such a request, I put them on the waiting list and I tell them that I “hope” to be able do one for them one day. The problem is that those recordings are booked at least five or six years ahead. 

In a few months, I will be 72 years old. At my age, making promises about anything that far in the future feels like tempting the Lord to offer me a little lesson in hubris, perhaps punctuated with a lightning bolt.

Listen in as Steve shares more about his future plans.

Even more fundamentally, is astrology about the stars or the seasons? To a Vedic astrologer, the sign Aries and the constellation Aries are the same thing – but not to a western “Tropical” astrologer, where Aries starts with the northern Vernal Equinox, which has actually drifted back into Pisces over the centuries.

To put it charitably, astrology is a “big tent.” To put it more pointedly, the many different branches of astrology contradict each other in fundamental ways. Inevitably, this reality leads to the question of which form of astrology is “the right one” – and there begins a slippery slope.

Listen for more about the history behind the book Under One Sky.

If you like retrograde planets, July is the month for you, in other words. It’s as if the cosmic carousel has reversed its polarity.

I wrote about the Pluto-Eris square in my March newsletter, which you can see here

I don’t want to repeat all of that material here, although it casts a penetrating light on what I want to explore in this piece. Suffice to say that the clash of Eris and Pluto is, to me at least, the heart of the matter when it comes to figuring out why the world feels so crazy now.

What I want to do in this newsletter is to have a look at what it means to see all of this retrograde energy happening now. All of the planets from Jupiter on out, with the sole exception of Uranus, are going backwards all at once, with Chiron trading off a retrograde condition with Mercury toward the middle of the month. The situation is not unprecedented, but it does catch the eye – and as ever, at least from the philosophical perspective of evolutionary astrology, the planetary gods and goddesses are giving us a few tips about where to put our feet next.

Listen in to learn more.

Morrison had died, probably in a bathtub, probably as a result of a heroin overdose, in Paris ten years earlier. That had put an end to The Doors, which had formed six riotous years earlier in Los Angeles.

Ten years gone, and yet Jim Morrison’s career was suddenly on a roll.

Looking at 1980, sales of every single Doors’ album had doubled or tripled compared to 1979. Joe Smith, the chairman of Elektra Records, said “No group that isn’t around anymore has sold that well for us.” The Doors’ magnum opus, The End, had been featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s hit film, Apocalypse Now, in 1979. The following year, a Morrison biography, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, by Jerry Hopkins, sold unexpectedly well. 

Jim Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida at 11:55AM-EWT on December 8, 1943. Even though he exited that chart in 1971, it seems that it lived on, even without him.

Listen to find out more.

Listen in to find out more.

In this March podcast, I will focus on a half a dozen of this month’s upcoming transits. I will use text taken directly from the two Elements books that are already available, The Book of Fire and The Book of Earth. I hope the words that follow support the kinds of good fortune that come from mindfulness for all of us – and I am also hoping to give you a sense of how these four volumes can work as a practical handbook of evolutionary astrology.

Enjoy!

Inevitably, as an astrologer, I’ve often wondered about why there are twelves steps, not ten, or some other round number. Could there be some interlock between astrology and these life-saving systems?

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