I was happy to learn that many students and community members in our school have discovered LILA (which is pronounced LEE-la, by the way.) In case you don’t know, it’s a cell phone based astrology app that I’ve been working on for almost eight years now. I’ve written most of the text and the astrological approach is mostly mine while I’ve depended on other people’s skills for the marketing and technical side of the project. The whole idea for LILA originated with two people who have become dear friends: Linnea Miron and Ricky Williams. (For those of you who follow NFL football, yes, it’s THAT Ricky Williams.)

Central to the app is the idea that everyone has “a strongest planet.” I’ve heard that questions are emerging in our FCEA community about how to integrate that concept into the astrological approach that we teach. That’s what I want to try to clarify in this edition of Master’s Musings. 

(In case you have no idea what I am talking about, go to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and enter “Lila Astrology.” Alternatively, check out our website at lilaverse.app. In the app stores, you can download a simple, stripped down version of LILA for free or pay $9.49 a month for the full version.)

THE BACK STORY

For most of my professional life, I’ve been my own boss. With the advent of the LILA project and our school, both happening in 2018, all that changed. Suddenly I was faced with something I’d never had to deal with before: teamwork! (Unsurprisingly, the Moon was progressing through my 11th house.) Mostly, that’s been a great experience for me. All of you know how lucky I am with our wise and wonderful FCEA team. The LILA tribe is extensive and it has been good to me too even though what we are doing is very different. 

Anyone who knows my work will recognize my voice and my approach to astrology throughout much of the writing in LILA – with one exception: the strongest planet. That was 100% Ricky’s idea. I didn’t disapprove of it, but it never would have crossed my mind to include it. As all of you know, I put a lot of emphasis on what I call the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant. Now, in LILA, there’s reference to the primal quad, where we add the strongest planet to the mixture, pretty much as the fourth leg of the table. I know that’s confusing some of our FCEA students.

I have a lot of positive things to say about the strongest planet concept, and it’s definitely deep in LILA’s DNA. Still, at this point, we have no plans to integrate it into the FCEA curriculum. The system we teach works fine as it is, plus adding the strongest planet would involve completely re-doing all of our teaching materials from the ground up. As you know, we’ve never presented the FCEA approach as “everything in astrology.” Instead, the FCEA method is a lean machine that gets you as quickly and efficiently as possible to the heart of the matter with a client. Other approaches to astrology work too, but when we try to integrate them into our FCEA methodology, they only tend to muddy the water, create redundancies, or simply take up time that would be better spent going more deeply into the core material. 

Cutting to the chase, as I mentioned I’ve been learning a lot about teamwork. Some of that is about learning new things from different people. But naturally, a big part of that process lies in learning how to compromise. LILA’s strongest planet function covers both of those bases – it’s a powerful technique that I am still learning about, and it’s also a bit of a compromise on my part.

Let me tell you a little more about how the strongest planet works in LILA.

ASTRODYNES

The Church of Light was incorporated in Los Angeles on November 2, 1932. It was an extension of the Brotherhood of Light, which dates back to 1915. Its purpose was to preserve and promote the spiritually-oriented astrological work of C.C. Zain (a.k.a, Elbert Benjamine, a.k.a, Benjamin Parker Williams.) Zain created a weighted system for determining the relative strengths of the planets in a chart. He called the system astrodynes. Ricky got interested in Zain’s work and began his efforts to incorporate it into LILA – with mixed results, at least initially.

From my perspective, Zain’s astrodynes simply did not work reliably. For example, they gave Jupiter as my own strongest planet. That felt plausible to me – it’s conjunct my Sun, so it’s in a strong position and I do identify myself as a “Jupiter type.” But then there was my partner, Michelle, for whom the Moon emerged as her most powerful astrodyne. That didn’t feel right to either one of us – but for me the real corker was how the astrodyne system gave Venus as Michelle’s weakest planet. That was simply crazy. She’s been a successful professional painter all her professional life, plus she has a Libra Ascendent, which makes Venus the ruler of her chart! 

Like the rest of us, Michelle is a complicated human being, but anyone who knows her, along with knowing anything about astrology, is going to quickly think of Venus when they think of her. 

Ricky agrees. We both knew that there was something to astrodynes, but we also knew that we could do better. He and I have begun tweaking Zain’s original astrodyne algorithms, putting more emphasis on rulerships, which his system mysteriously ignores. Eventually we expect to have a system that works better than the original. I want to be clear that we are not there yet. I’m writing these words in late October 2025. I’ll be meeting with Ricky and Linnea again in a month in order to implement some major changes to C.C. Zain’s astrodynes for LILA purposes. I want to be clear that what’s currently “under the hood” in LILA is Zain’s system, not mine or Ricky’s. It works – but not for everybody all the time. 

At the outset of this little essay, I mentioned that I was learning a new skill: teamwork. In all honesty, I would not have implemented the strongest planet algorithm into the public version of LILA yet. I don’t feel that it’s ready for Prime Time. I think it will be soon. If your current alleged “strongest planet” doesn’t feel right to you, I can almost guarantee that you’re right. Check again in a few weeks, and it will probably have changed – and ring a lot more true for you.

Meanwhile, Ricky and I decided to add a pair of new dimensions to the system, something that apparently C.C. Zain never considered.

ADDING SIGNS AND HOUSES

Let’s go back for a moment to Michelle hearing that the Moon was her strongest planet. By most conventional lunar standards, that statement is a real dud – she’s never had kids, she’s not a moody person, plus I do most of the cooking! But when I add that her Moon is in Aquarius, everything lines up better with who she actually is. I’d still not call her “a Moon person,” but Aquarius at least rings many of the right bells. An Aquarian Moon is of course an entirely different beast than one in Cancer or Taurus. That led us to a critical insight. In LILA – once your strongest planet is determined, it’s helpful to remember what sign and house it’s in. It may still feel off to you, but it will make more sense that way.

Ricky and I have taken that idea one step further for LILA. Just as we can weigh the planets to see which ones are dominant for you, we can do the same with your signs and houses. In adding those two additional pieces to the puzzle, we’ve left the realm of traditional astrodynes behind. You might, for example, find that Saturn is your strongest planet, but what if we then put Saturn in your strongest sign? (That might not be the sign that it actually occupies in your chart.) What if we do the same with your strongest house – we put Saturn there too? What you’ll get is a planet-sign-house combo that works pretty well as a super-quick summary of your chart as a whole.

Adding the strongest sign and house to the mixture is fresh territory. With no preexisting C.C. Zain formulas to muddy the water, Ricky and I set out to determine the relative weights of each sign and house in your chart. That’s all implemented in the current version of LILA and we think it’s working really well.

EXAMPLE

LILA founder Linnea Miron currently has Mercury as her strongest planet, as you can see in this graphic LILA screen:

Notice how Linnea’s Moon is a close second. That’s worth noting too. It gives you a more nuanced sense of things. Her mental focus (Mercury) has a lot of feeling, caring energy (Moon) animating it. And of course, there’s the question of whether Mercury will remain as her strongest planet once we tweak the planetary algorithm.

What about signs? Here are the relative strengths of all twelve signs in Linnea’s chart:

Pisces comes out on top, beating second place Capricorn by a wide margin. Now, putting two and two together, we’re thinking “Mercury in Pisces.” Let’s add the houses. Here‘s Linnea’s LILA screen:

With Linnea’s houses, we see it’s an almost three-way tie among the first, the second, and the tenth, with the first house “winning by a nose.” It’s helpful to take those second and third place symbols into account, but the bottom line is that LILA would summarize Linnea as “a Piscean Mercury in the first house.” 

And who is Linnea in real life? A leader in a spiritually-oriented information industry. 

WHAT ABOUT THE WEAKEST PLANET?

I’ve made no secret about my reservations regarding Lila’s strongest planet algorithm. In my opinion, it’s still a work in progress. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, what really triggered my biggest doubts was my Libra-rising artist-partner Michelle coming out with Venus as her weakest planet. To me, it was painfully obvious that by the simplest of astrological standards Lila was way off target there.

Here’s another example that makes the same point: me! Lila gives Mars as my weakest planet. Yet Mars co-rules my Scorpio Ascendant and is the dispositor of my Aries Moon! From the evolutionary point of view, it’s also the co-ruler of my Scorpio south node. My weakest planet? Give me a break, Lila!

There is a pattern underlying both of these examples: it’s the way Lila’s algorithm ignores the tremendous importance of planetary rulerships. There was a lot that was right in C.C. Zain’s thinking about astrodynes, but rulership was his blind spot.

As Ricky Williams and I meet to rework Lila’s strongest planet system, we’re hoping to correct that glaring problem. Once again, stay tuned – and if any of Lila’s pronouncements about your strongest or weakest planets feel wrong, trust your feelings!

THE BIG PICTURE

In doing astrology, we are constantly battling to stay on top of a massive flood of information. If we set out to describe “everything” in someone’s chart, we would have to stay wide-eyed and yacking for weeks. That obviously won’t work. Strategic simplification is an essential part of our craft. Faced with mountains of astrological complexity, the mind longs for core statements that spotlight a person’s essence. Those kinds of root insights keep us on track. They help us maintain perspective. The most familiar way for astrologers to do that is with Sun signs – “she’s a Gemini.” That’s lightyears away from full power astrology, but that reduction is actually its main advantage, not a liability. Sun signs focus our attention on something pretty close to the heart of the matter and they telegraph it to us in just a few syllables.

LILA’s strongest planet system does almost exactly the same thing – or it will, once we get the planet scales up to the same standards as the ones for signs and houses. Sun signs divide humanity into twelve types. The strongest planet system divides us into ten. They both make a stab at answering the same question: if you could only know one thing about this person, what would it be? 

In the “primal triad” system I first introduced in The Inner Sky, a Virgo with the Moon in Aries and Pisces rising could be called “the helper with the soul of a warrior wearing the mask of the mystic.” Once again, in that single sentence a whole lot of astrological information is conveyed simply and clearly. This time it’s much more granular than any Sun sign – there are 1728 possible combinations of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant.

If we place the strongest planet in the context of a person’s strongest sign and strongest house, we do something very similar – in this case, there are 1440 possible combinations.  By using all three astrological dimensions, we are making a vastly more individualized statement about a person than if we just say “her strongest planet is Uranus.”

When Ricky first proposed adding the strongest planet function to LILA, his argument was that currently most of the astrological “typing” of people was sign-based – you’re such a Scorpio! That language works fine, but why not try a planet-based system? You’re so Plutonian! That works too. 

• And that’s really the heart of the matter. A planet-centered astrological system can complement a sign-based system. Each just highlights a different dimension of a person’s character and destiny. Often they overlap considerably too.

HOW TO WORK WITH THE STRONGEST PLANET

I have a fantasy. I hop in my time machine and set the controls for 1963 when I was just fourteen years old. There was no Internet back then, so I print everything that LILA would say to me about my strongest planet, I leave it somewhere where young Steve will stumble across it, and I quickly head back to hide out in the 21st century. (That’s Jupiter in Capricorn and the 2nd house, by the way.)

When my fourteen-year-old self learns that I have a potential for embodying Jupiter’s “star quality,” I would have snorted in disbelief. I was a shy, misanthropic kid. I knew I was smart, but otherwise I had very little confidence in myself. But then I poke a little deeper into that LILA material and I learn that none of that alleged star quality pops up automatically without effort on my part. With Jupiter in the 2nd house, I was going to have to prove myself to myself in order to earn that kind of confidence and maybe generate a little charisma. With Capricorn in the formula, that process would take hard work. It would depend on self-discipline, on me keeping my eye on the prize. 

Via my strongest planet, LILA would have given me the formula that I needed in order to rise to that “star quality” that seemed so unreachable to me back then. That information would have helped me, and helping people is always the point.

I’ve often said that no one really needs astrology. That’s easily proven – plenty of people live good lives without it, end of story. Astrology assists us though! No one needs weather reports, but they’re helpful too. When I was fourteen, I got my teeth into astrology and I never let go. A couple of decades later, LILA’s prophecy came true: I became something like a “star” in the field. 

Even without LILA to guide me, I did what LILA would have suggested and it turned out as LILA would have predicted.

The deeper point is that at several forks in the road I nearly derailed my life in various ways, almost taking paths that were not really mine. I got lucky or angels saved me or something like that. Again, we can all live just fine without astrology – but we live better with it! I would have been more sure-footed in finding the path to my destiny if I had known about my strongest planet and let it guide me.

That’s true for us all. That’s why I am happy to see the strongest planet system built into LILA even though here in late 2025 it is still a work in progress. Like everything else in our field, it can help you become your best self. It can fill you in about the gift that you can offer your community and your loved ones. It reminds you of who you truly are. 

And that’s why we do what we do.