I want to begin by thanking every brave veteran of our 306 master classes. I am looking forward to our next one which begins on Monday, January 13th. Without what I’ve learned from them, I would not be able to write this little essay. This one is about “something I knew, but didn’t know I knew” – at least until I’d spent many hours helping our most advanced students expand their astrological chops.

As many of you are aware, our format in the master classes involves everyone looking at the same new chart each week. The charts are all invented – they’re not famous people. The students receive them in advance along with fictional biographies for each character. One week we’ll look at a birthchart, another week we’ll look at current transits and progressions for that same invented person. Late in the program, there’s always a synastry as we imagine two of our fictional characters falling in love. For efficiency’s sake, with the t’s & p’s and the synastry,  we stick to birthcharts we’ve already studied, so we can skip that step.

The underlying idea in the master class is that each student needs to be ready for anything with that weekly chart – just like we need to be fully prepared to talk about anything and everything if a client is coming to sit with us.

We meet on Zoom for seven sessions. Students are required to attend at least four of the seven class sessions in order to pass. The FCEA is wonderfully international, but that does create some scheduling challenges. By alternating between an early-morning and a late-afternoon US West coast starting time, we make class times as accessible as possible for different time zones. Each time, either Catie or I propose a series of questions about the chart-of-the-week. The questions could be technical or they could be something we say in human terms. What about that Jupiter square Saturn? Or how would you counsel this person in terms of career direction?

I then reach into a hat, draw the name of a class member, and that (heavily perspiring) person takes it from there. Nobody knows when the fickle finger of fate is going to point in their direction. In a typical meeting, five or six people are called to stand in the spotlight. Most of the students take ten minutes or so to do their presentations, then I make some comments and usually ask some follow-up questions.

As a system, this format has worked really well. In designing it, what we were up against was our usual enemy: the clock. Ideally, each student would present a full, integrated analysis of a chart – something that would take at least an hour and probably longer. With a dozen or so people in the class, there just wasn’t enough time for that. The math didn’t lie: seven sessions times ninety minutes is only ten hours or so. On top of it, part of the teaching is me commenting on each student’s work – that’s where the “master class” dimension comes into play. And that takes time too.

That’s where our tricky method enters the picture: each student has to be ready to present a full chart analysis at any given moment – they just don’t know in advance which part of the chart they’ll be asked to discuss or even if “today is their day.”

We keep it friendly and supportive, of course – we’re the FCEA! But you can probably see why I referred to the brave veterans of our 306 classes at the beginning of this essay, not to mention their perspiration. No matter how nice we are to each other, it’s still a high pressure situation.

All in all, I’ve been delighted with the performances of our students. By the time they complete 306, they are well on their way to being graduates of our school and every one of them is worthy of that honor. They’ve mastered the technicalities. They are capable of representing the best of evolutionary astrology. They can carry the flame forward, and for that I can only thank them.

For those triumphant students, the only thing that lies ahead is practice, practice, practice. They’ve internalized the nuts and bolts of our system. Now they need to find their own  voices.

In listening to the presentations of these students, I realized that there was one consistent piece of advice that I could give most of them – something that would help their future clients to follow what they were talking about more easily. It was the “something I knew, but didn’t know I knew” that I referred to at the beginning of this little essay. More to the point, it was also something that was often missing in our students’ presentations.

That missing piece is my subject here. I am calling it planetary on-ramps.

GETTING ON THE HIGHWAY

We’ve all either been behind the wheel or riding shotgun when the time comes to join the hurtling traffic on a crowded freeway. We accelerate up the on-ramp hoping for a hole in the screaming mass of moving metal. Often it’s a nail-biter. When it comes to actual driving skills, merging with speeding traffic is a high-stakes test, something far more challenging than just cruising down the highway. That’s why we breathe a sigh of relief once we actually settle into the flow with the rest of the cars and trucks.

Cutting to the astrological counseling room . . .

There you are in the middle of a reading. You’ve done a good job of presenting an integrated view of the client’s Sun, Moon, and Sagittarian Ascendant. You’re about to scream up the on-ramp to their chart-ruling Jupiter. What are the first words out of your mouth? They better be good. You’re about to set the tone for a fresh, major chapter of your presentation.

You understand Jupiter. You’ve burned the midnight oil in your FCEA studies. Intellectually and conceptually you are prepared. Your client is intelligent and open-minded –  but pig-ignorant when it comes to what Jupiter signifies. How do you get that part of the conversation off on the right track? How do you make sure that the client’s mind is attuned to Jupiter’s wavelength? 

Where is the on-ramp? 

• Maybe you say, from the evolutionary perspective, the big questions with Jupiter are how have you been underestimating yourself? How have you sold yourself short? Where have you been settling for too little?

See what happens when you open with those familiar words? Instantly, the client’s mind is set on the right questions. Their mental radio is tuned to Jupiter’s channel. You’ve set the correct tone. With those leading sentences, you’ve established a context for everything that will follow.

For each planet, we can create similar “on-ramps.” In each case, there are many possibilities. In a moment, I’ll make a suggestion for each one of them – but, remember, these are just suggestions. You can certainly come up with others and I encourage you to do that.

Nothing that follows will sound new or surprising. It’s all stuff you’ve heard before, much of it back in the 100 courses when you were learning the astrological basics. The point is that these verbal “on-ramps,” even though they reflect astrological theory, are really about the art of astrological counseling – which is always about building and maintaining a linguistic bridge of rapport, connection, and mutual comprehension with our astrologically-naive clients. Think of these on-ramps as a way of holding your clients’ hands as you lead them into the deep dark forest of astrological symbolism.

Let me reiterate that memorizing and using the “on ramps” that follow is a good starting point, but there are many others waiting to be created – or already lurking in the various FCEA teaching materials that you’ve studied.

SAMPLE ON-RAMPS

With the Sun, you might open by saying, “Taking care of the Sun is the secret of sanity. Make a priority of the basic values we’re about to explore and you’ll feel centered, grounded, and confident that you are on the right track in life.”

With the Moon, you might open by saying, “Taking care of the Moon is the secret of happiness, well-being, and maintaining a generally good mood. Meet the needs that we are about to discuss and you’ll beat back the blues every time.”

With the Ascendant, you might open by saying, “Following the path of your Ascendant helps you align your outer life with the actual intentions of your soul. It helps you “get your act together,” in other words. It helps you become the person whom you were always actually meant to be. 

With Mercury, you might open by saying, “Mercury is the messenger of the gods. It’s about helping you find your true voice. More critically, it’s about a set of perceptions – things you need to focus on learning – in order to get there. And then there’s the Grand Prize: when you speak with your true voice, people will really listen to you.”

With Venus, you might open by saying, “For you, certain kinds of people are like triggers or catalysts for your evolution. Here’s how to recognize those people – and how to avoid the ones who’ll just waste your time, or worse.”

With Mars, you might open by saying, “Mars is the god of war – and there is one virtue that warriors esteem above all others. That’s courage – and where Mars lies, you’re going to need it! In this area of life, you’re getting a crash course in assertiveness. You can be the hunter or you can be the prey. The choice is yours.”

(We looked at Jupiter earlier in this essay.)

With Saturn, you might open by saying, “Saturn often gets a bad rap, but it’s not really  bad – it’s just hard. And there’s a big difference. We are going to look at a place where you were born with a blockage, but that doesn’t mean you have to die with it too. The Great Work of your life lies in making a big breakthrough here. You can succeed, but it will require relentless effort and self-discipline. And it’s worth it.

With Uranus, you might open by saying, “Who would you be if you had been born with a different mother or father? More generally, think of all of the external forces that have shaped you – and maybe misshaped you. Uranus is the guardian of your true individuality – and a place where you will have to fight your way to the kind of true self-knowledge that’s the only path to real freedom. It’s also a place where you’ve probably gotten a lot of well-meaning bad advice, and that’s a problem we’ll need to straighten out.”

With Neptune, you might open by saying, “Neptune is the god of the sea. What it really means is the sea of consciousness itself – the sea into which we dive when we meditate or dream. When it comes to spirituality, everyone’s path is different. Here’s yours – here’s your doorway into the mysteries.”

With Pluto, you might open by saying, “Pluto is the lord of the underworld” – also known as, “the god of hell.” It’s a place where you’ve been hurt, maybe in a past life, maybe in the present one, maybe in both. To heal the wound, there’s a hurt place that you need to see clearly in yourself. It’s also a place where, if you get it right, you can claim your true power.”

WHY ARE THESE ON-RAMPS SO MISSION-CRITICAL?

If we open our discussion of each planet with these kinds of simple “on-ramp” statements, our clients’ attention is instantly aimed in exactly the right direction. They know precisely what we are talking about and they mentally file everything that you are about to say under the correct headings. 

You’ve successfully set the right tone and they are now ready to absorb the details of their evolutionary strategy.

Here’s a point that would be hard to deny – 100% of your past lives occurred in the past. I mean, we might go down the rabbit hole of wondering “what time itself is” . . . but in the end that line of inquiry just leaves people tongue-tied and staring into space. Maybe ultimately time is one of those “useful fictions” which allow us to communicate with each other – what the Buddhists would call a “relative truth” rather than one of the ultimate truths which always lie beyond the realm of language.

For our practical purposes in this little essay, let’s just stick to the helpful notion that the 20th century came before the 21st.

Here’s a second point that would be tough to argue against – history has often been unimaginably weird. For example:

Among the Lakota people, one’s status was increased by giving away one’s possessions rather than by accumulating them. Try explaining that to a Wall Street stockbroker.

There is some evidence that the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea didn’t make a connection between sex and pregnancy. Imagine high school there.

In Japan until the end of the 19th century, blackened teeth were seen as a sign of female beauty. In China for centuries, the same could be said for tiny little feet – hence the (dreadful) custom of foot-binding that would render a woman effectively immobile.

The list goes on. History is a real zoo, full of surprises and head-scratchers that none of us could easily imagine as we sit here a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Of course by the 23rd century, people will be looking back at us and marveling at how for a few decades people preferred staring at cell phone screens to actual human contact. We modern humans are no exception in the weirdness department. What kinds of south node signatures will those 23rd century astrologers be seeing when they’re faced with the unresolved karma of 21st century people who drifted into their phones instead of into each other’s eyes?

All of this leads directly to a practical dilemma that we all face as evolutionary astrologers. In creating the past-life nodal story, we are by definition framing a tale in an earlier historical context. If we don’t actually know some history, we might blunder – as, for example, did a US President talking about the good guys “taking over the airports” during the American revolutionary war. (There were of course no airports).

“There you were, a thousand years ago, way back in the Stone Age, dining on deep-fried Stegosaurus steaks straight out of the freezer.” One obvious advantage of knowing some history is that we won’t make mistakes like those. A client has no reason to assume that you, as the astrologer, should be an academic historian, but you will definitely come across more plausibly if you don’t show evidence of abject ignorance. The true disaster is that obvious historical errors might undercut the client’s capacity to take the rest of what you are saying seriously.

This goes beyond not looking dumb and losing credibility. There’s a purely positive side to knowing some history too. Its second benefit is the color, plausibility, and depth that such information adds to the story you’re telling.

Here are a couple of illustrations of what I mean:

• Maybe you see a south node in Sagittarius in the 2nd house squared by Jupiter – so you tell a story about your client once having been a Lakota who gave away everything. 

• Maybe you see a 12th house Capricorn south node conjunct Venus and squared by a 3rd house Saturn – and that leads to a story about being a Chinese woman a millennium ago hobbled by those bound feet.

As always, coming up with the nodal story – a process that is so central to therapeutic dimensions of the astrological work we do – is an act of creativity. In a sense, we are making up these stories. Ethically it’s important to make sure that the client understands that – we don’t claim to know the outward facts of anyone’s prior lifetimes. We just know their emotional effects – what they felt like, and what has been carried forward.

And we depend on a good story to get that feeling across to the client.

The bottom line is that, as astrologers, we start by burning the midnight oil in order to understand the basic methodology of nodal analysis. Then we color creatively within those lines – always making sure that every important element of the tale we weave is justified by the symbolism. 

We’re creative – but not too creative, in other words.

As we strive to pull an effective, convincing nodal tale together, a knowledge of history is like the difference between having a ton of money in the bank versus worrying about whether you can pay your electric bill this month. That’s because with this kind of knowledge you are rich in historically authentic images. They put words in your mouth – good words that amplify the impact of what you are presenting. Your stories have more punch and a few accurate, exotic details of the past enhance their verisimilitude for anyone sitting with you.

Plus you never blunder into talking about clients microwaving their Pterodactyl wings on their way to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

HOW TO GET GOOD AT THIS

To be a skilled evolutionary astrologer is to be a skilled storyteller. At least when it comes to the lunar nodes, those stories are all set in the past. To succeed there, you certainly don’t need a degree in history. It’s not nearly so hard. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that for most of us, the process of absorbing this kind of knowledge is actually fun. Much of it comes down to reading books and watching movies. I’d be surprised if you’re not at least half way there already, just from your education – not to mention books you’ve already read and the films, documentaries, and television shows that you’ve already seen and enjoyed.

For many of us, reading an interesting tale about some juicy period in world history is no hardship. Thick, erudite academic volumes with tons of footnotes can admittedly be slow-going, but there’s no need to turn the process into such heavy lifting unless you feel like it. Such  “PhD-in-History” writing often gives you a lot more detail than what you actually need for our purposes. Popular treatments are fine.

And don’t forget about novels! If they’re any good, they contain characters with whom you can identify. That identification means that historical novels actually often make a long-ago period come alive for you more vividly than any pure “history book.” And they’re definitely more fun to read – many of them are real page-turners.

The same is true for films. Off the top of my head, I find myself thinking of that big Mel Gibson film from 1995, Braveheart. I bet many of you have seen it – and unwittingly gotten an education in late-13th century Scottish history. Admittedly, it’s a seriously flawed history – but it does give you a feeling for what it must have felt like for those poor Scottish farmers to be thrown off their land by English aristocrats.

What about Gladiator? Watch that movie and two hours later, you have enough rough  scholarship about the Roman empire in the 2nd century C.E. to tell a dozen colorful, historically-plausible nodal stories.

Titanic? Those Gilded Age days are long gone too and that well-heeled aristocracy went down with the ship – but what a wonderful set of images that film gives us for a Sagittarian south node in the 12th house squared by a 9th house Pluto!

The list of course goes on. I think of Mad Men, a television series that was popular during its 2007-2015 run. I suspect that many of you saw it. The setting is the 1960s – and (may God help me) half the people now enrolled in the FCEA might have actually had a past life during that tumultuous period! I was alive and reasonably sentient during that decade myself, but I admit that in watching Mad Men, the customs and especially the gender assumptions underlying the story made it felt like I too was remembering a past life.

Have kids? There’s a woman who was a dear friend of mine in college (just that – we were housemates) back toward the end of those Mad Men days. Her name is Mary Pope Osborne. We lost touch with each other long ago, but she’s become quite famous in the world of children’s literature, having sold 134 million books, most of them in her “Magic Treehouse” series. The “magic treehouse” she invented transports kids on time-travel adventures, some to historical periods, some to mythological ones.

If you’ve got kids in your life, reading Mary’s stories to them – or reading them yourself – will give you exactly the kind of knowledge I am talking about here. It’s fun and totally painless.

And Mary, if you ever happen to read these words, get in touch! I’m easy to find. I’ve often wondered if you and I were the only ones ever to actually make any money from our degrees in Religion – UNC-Chapel Hill, class of ‘71! 

In the name of having some creative fun, we both verged dangerously close to “scholarship” about that faraway time. I can set a nodal story there in my sleep.

Read The Rhymer and the Ravens and you can too.

A READING LIST?

Let me start by saying that trying to compile a reading list or a “must-watch” list here would be misguided. For starters, probably three-quarters of the films ever produced were made long ago enough that every single one of them is like a time-capsule. And I’m not even talking about “period pieces,” such as Gladiator or Braveheart. Every decade for the past dozen or so has yielded a crop of films that were “contemporary” – at the time.

Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca? Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire? Each one is like a living window on a decade that presently doesn’t boast many surviving representatives – but how many people living today might have lived back then too?

Books can be veins of gold in similar ways. How many historical novels have been published? How many straight history books have been written? I doubt that anyone would have enough time even to count them all, let alone read them.

Here I just want to list a few volumes that I’ve found particularly helpful. They could help you too – but maybe you prefer to help yourself.

In the list that follows, you’ll note one pattern that’s worth underscoring, and that’s an attempt at honoring cultural diversity. I suspect that most of us have occupied bodies with a variety of different “paint jobs” in our previous incarnations. For that reason, it’s good practice to make sure that your nodal stories don’t all sound like the scripts of costume dramas you might watch on the BBC.

SOME OF MY PERSONAL FAVORITES

Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, 1976. A tale of the Black experience in the New World. 

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, 1978. The Black Plague anyone? This brilliant, scholarly volume brings you right back to the late Middle Ages in Europe. And Tuchman can write – it’s not tedious at all. 

Gary Jennings’ Aztec, 1980. This is a very sexy “pulp fiction” tour of pre-Columbian Mexican cultures. It gave me a far more nuanced understanding of the diversity and complexity of those societies than I ever got from my western-biased education.

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997. In the U.K., this brilliant, even life-changing, Pulitzer Prize winning book was subtitled “A Short History of Everybody For the Last 13,000 Years.” That about says it all. Diamond ranges over various world cultures. For nodal stories set in the distant past, this volume delivers the goods on every page.

Edward Rutherford’s Sarum, 1987. This is the story of humans in Britain right from the beginning. It’s an episodic novel in which very similar characters keep appearing in subsequent historical periods. Was he thinking of reincarnation? I don’t know – but it reads that way.

Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, 1964. (This was also a fine 1970 film.) Either the book or the movie will give you a feeling for the Native American experience in the 19th century. My partner Michelle Kondos does historical Western painting. She has a friend named Michael Badhand who consults in Hollywood on Native authenticity issues. He’s generously helped her make sure that the Native people who appear in her historical paintings are depicted accurately. Badhand says that Little Big Man, even though it’s a comedy in many ways, gets more details right than most of them do.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, 2011. A Black friend gave me this book or otherwise I would have missed it. Wilkerson tells the story of the trials, tribulations, and hopes of Black people escaping the American South and heading north for jobs and freedom after the Civil War and onward through World War Two. It’s a gold mine. 

Susan Barker, The Incarnations, 2014. Chinese history is long, complex, and dauntingly alien to many of us in the Western world. Susan Barker’s book is the best introduction to that long story that I’ve ever found. Reading it, you get a very human perspective on various periods in Chinese history. Again, like Sarum, is it about reincarnation? I think so. 

I’d recommend Anne Perry’s fiction in general. She writes murder mysteries, all set in Britain, but in two different periods – the early and the late 19th century. It’s all England, but they are two very different times. Reading her work is like stepping out of a time machine and into the shoes of various characters from different levels of society during those periods.  

James A. Michener was hugely popular a couple of generations ago. Even though his star seems to be fading now, he can still transport you into another time and culture with his panoramic vision of societies developing over centuries. His opus is huge. I’d aim your attention particularly at Chesapeake and Centennial for some American history, Iberia for Spanish history, and The Source for the story of the Jewish people from their earliest roots. 

So that’s my list. It’s far from definitive. Once again, these are just books that have been personally helpful and meaningful to me. They’ve all certainly enriched my storytelling, and probably made me a better human being – and a better astrologer – in the process. 

To me, the glorious thing about books is that there are so many of them. The sad thing is that there is so little time.

Our most fundamental spiritual commitment as evolving souls is to honor human diversity. If we can’t aim to treat everyone with respect and compassion no matter how fundamental our differences are, we’ll be held back in our journeys by that attachment to separateness. 

Note that I wrote “aim to.” Getting it right every time is impossible. And the love I am talking about needs to start with ourselves. Faced with offenses against human kindness, hard, miserable feelings naturally arise. We have to forgive ourselves – and to try to forgive others. We have to get back to “aiming.”

Like many of you, I am heartbroken, angry and fearful about the recent American election. At a practical level, I don’t plan to give up. I don’t plan to cope with the hurt by taking refuge in some dissociated state of trying not to care or to feel. I’ll spend the rest of my days on earth fighting in my own way for fairness, kindness, inclusiveness, and a viable human future. 

That’s my outward commitment. Here’s my inward one.

There’s a simple saying I once heard from a Buddhist teacher. It’s helped me to keep my balance when I am faced with stormy, difficult emotions: Take what arises as the path. Whatever happens, it’s always a chance to work on yourself. It’s always the path. 

This is never about rationalization or a “flight into light.” It’s about a commitment to being vulnerable. Emphatically, it doesn’t take the hurt way. But it affirms our fundamental belief as spiritual seekers that nothing happens randomly, that the universe is an incubator of higher consciousness, and that whatever happens can be turned into an opportunity to work on ourselves.

With the recent election, I find myself pulled into a vortex of awful feelings. I’m torn between murderous fantasies and the urge to not feel anything at all. But if I try, I can still find a place of equilibrium, perspective, and even peace in myself too. That takes effort and I can’t sustain it – I can only experience it in glimpses before I am pulled back down into the hell-worlds. But I know what I am looking at: it’s the Higher Ground. 

Even misery can be used as a path to getting there. It can even accelerate the process, just because of grim necessity.

If you’re hurting, I hope these thoughts might grant you a few moments of peace before we return to our sacred work.

As we all know, it’s a world full of hard choices out there. For the school, one of them has revolved around the whole question of how we can most effectively keep students’ birth data and other personal information safe from any kind of Internet jeopardy. After much discussion and a lot of feedback from both students and tutors, we have decided to relax our anonymity policies – carefully.

• Loudly and clearly, students, members and anyone participating in FCEA programs and activities are never required to share their personal information. The sharing of personal information is completely voluntary. Those who prefer to keep their birth data private, as well as any other personal information, are still free to do so, no questions asked. Students are free to use a pseudonym, if they choose.

While making the point in “bold caps” that privacy remains an OPTION for anyone who chooses it, we are no longer going to formally require it.

Personally, I am delighted by this change in policy. I should add that I’m very confident that many of you share the same delight – and perhaps a little bit of befuddlement too. That’s because we know that such sharing has been happening anyway. There’s obviously been some “space” between our official policy and reality, which gives you some idea of how little comfort we’ve had with this policy – despite the legal advice we had received when we were structuring the school.

Evolutionary astrology aims to delve deeply into the very private, often totally invisible, soul-processes that drive everyone’s life-journey. When it comes to learning how those profoundly subjective changes and breakthroughs are reflected in astrological symbolism, here’s the hierarchy of what is helpful to us as students of astrology, in descending order.

1. An honest – and possibly totally private – talk with yourself in the light of what’s going on in your chart. Nothing can top that.
2. Intimate conversations with people you know and about whom you care while looking at them through the lens of astrology. (That works even better if they speak the language of astrology too, but that’s not necessary.)
3. Looking at events in the lives of people whom you don’t know – in other words, the charts of famous people.

Obviously in the FCEA curriculum, we have relied heavily on #3 – the widely-known stories of public figures, past and present. Emphatically, that approach works! We can learn a lot of astrology that way. 

There’s another compelling reason to go down that third road. For better or worse, these folks are “public property,” at least to some extent. Unlike total strangers – or a fellow student in the school who is basically a stranger to you – most of us know something about them. Looking at that shared set of biographical facts and personal impressions through the lens of astrology can be profoundly instructive. That’s why we use that approach so extensively in our school.

The trouble with that method is that it subtly enforces a kind of superficial focus on outward facts. Knowing, for example, that Saturn was transiting through Kamala Harris’s 10th house when she was nominated for president is obviously helpful and relevant. We can even make some good guesses about what it felt like to her. We could counsel her. But as evolutionary astrologers, we know that every astrological event represents a spectrum of possibilities. Where on that spectrum has she landed?

Wouldn’t it be illuminating to actually talk with her about it?

That kind of deeply personal exchange is what we have been sacrificing in the FCEA. We’re not going to sacrifice it any longer. 

In my old apprenticeship programs, the “Sorting Hat” was always a basic teaching tool, one upon which we came to depend. Invariably, I’d spend a day or two exploring some dimension of astrological theory, then we would reach into the hat and draw the name of a volunteer from the class and see how the theory fit his or her chart and actual experience.

Afterwards, the student – again only voluntarily – would get up before the group and share his or her responses, plus something about how it had worked out for them personally. 

To me, the Sorting Hat was the soul of the apprenticeship groups.

Because of that personal sharing . . .

• We learned the astrology of the inner life rather than being subtly seduced into focussing on the mere outward facts of biography – although of course we learned about them too.
• Little so forges a bond between human beings as the intimate sharing of matters of the heart. Over the years, the Sorting Hat helped to create a precious mood of trust and true friendship in the groups. And what a profound path of learning that was for everyone, myself included!
• The very format of this kind of personal revelation compelled us to think like astrological counselors rather than like “talking head” theoreticians holding forth at some conference.
• By carefully cherry-picking the charts of famous people, you can prove anything you want with astrology. Not so with the Sorting Hat! Our unwavering string of successful, meaningful chart interpretations enhanced everyone’s faith in astrology itself. That confidence is precious.

HOW IT WILL WORK

Once again, the essence of all that I am saying here is simply that everyone in the school is now welcome to share their charts, their names, and their own personal experiences wherever it feels appropriate to them. But with the implicit understanding that it is completely voluntary, and that they agree to our privacy policy and understand the risks associated with sharing that information. That principle now holds throughout the entire FCEA structure – class discussions, Circle community forum, and in our Zoom Q & A events. 

Let’s underscore once again that such sharing is 100% voluntary. I can’t say it enough. We want to be vigilant about not creating a culture of coercion about it. We support anyone’s decision to remain private, no questions asked. Those that choose to share can even use a pseudonym, if they choose.

One example of that principle in practice is that we forbid any student or tutor from requiring anyone to provide their birth data or to share any other personal matters. We want everyone to be comfortable with whatever level of self-revelation they choose.

Let me add one more point: I encourage you to be judicious about what personal information you reveal. Remember, everything is being recorded. Other students – even future students and staff – may have access to the recordings. I feel confident saying that we’ve got a fine bunch of people in our school and generally I trust them all . . . note the word “generally.” 

I am optimistic that we will never have a breach of anyone’s confidentiality, but it would be dishonest and unrealistic of me to promise that. 

Back in the apprenticeship programs, a young woman shared how she had happened unexpectedly to come by carnal knowledge of the partner of a relative of hers. It was an upsetting story and it would have been totally appropriate for us to dive into it in the context of private astrological counsel. But this was a semi-public event. When she realized that her “confession” had been recorded, and might become available to the “public”, she understandably became nervous. We took good care of her – we wound up editing the recording to delete that section, which was quite a lot of trouble. So, be aware that all of our classes and calls are recorded, and as such, please be judicious and careful in what you choose to reveal.

It’s also worth mentioning here that our website is fully encrypted, and that we take safeguarding data seriously and have measures in place to prevent unauthorized access. However, we do rely completely on the security of 3rd parties to protect most of our files, which include all of our videos and discussion forums that are stored on sites including, but not limited to, Google Drive, Circle, Moodle and Vimeo. And, of course, we must defer to their privacy policies and security measures, over which we have no control.

THEREFORE…

In order to formalize our policy on voluntarily sharing personal information, we will be making the following updates:

• We will update our Privacy Policy so that it reads: You are not required to reveal your birth data or share any personal information as part of any FCEA course, program, forum or event. This includes, but is not limited to course sessions, course assignments, forums, discussions, Q & A sessions, the Circle community forums, or as part of any other FCEA discussion forum or platform. I understand that if I choose to share birth data or personal information, I will be offering it voluntarily and at my own risk. I recognize that others, including students, staff, anyone with access to the servers on which such data is stored, and potentially AI or other non-authorized entities, may gain access to information about my identity and any other personal information which I have chosen to share.”

• We will add a mandatory checkbox to our shopping cart so that when a student enrolls in a course, they agree that they “have read and agree to the FCEA Privacy Policy.”
• We will require teachers/tutors to state a “disclaimer reminder” to students at every course orientation. We will provide them with a short script they will be required to read at the orientation. 

All of this sounds terribly legalistic, and it is! We live in a litigious age as well as in a digitally-dangerous one, even with the tightest of security measures in place. As a school, we need to be realistic about all of that. Still, we’ve agreed that we’ve swung too far in the direction of letting fear and caution rob us of a precious chance to get to know each other more deeply – and through that (voluntary!) sharing, we know that we can help each other better understand this sacred language that we are learning. 

So: be kind. Be respectful of everyone’s boundaries. Be judicious – when it comes to any personal information, “when in doubt, leave it out.” 

And within that framework, please be as generous with self-revelation as you feel comfortable being.

Half a century ago, for reasons I’ve never understood, the Higher Powers of the Universe shut the door to Greece in my face and hung a Do Not Enter sign over it. Now, fifty years later, they’ve traded that sign for a welcome mat. Suddenly, Michelle and I have been offered an all-expense-paid deluxe trip there with a merry crew of friends, compliments of the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology. All I have to do is sing for my supper. 

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I find myself gazing quizzically up at the Heavens, wondering “what’s going on? Why the sudden change of heart?”

Let me begin at the beginning. Way back in September 1973, I was twenty-four years old and sitting in Kennedy airport in New York City awaiting my first ever flight to Europe. Like many of my generation, I had a Eurail Pass and a backpack. I planned to remain in Europe until my money ran out. And my real destination was Greece. I was so hungry to see that country that I had actually memorized a vocabulary of a couple hundred Greek words. For reasons I could not name, to me the rest of Europe was only a sideshow. 

Why was I so passionate about Greece in particular? Beyond a catch-all reference to “some kind of karma there,” I have no idea at all. I have no Greek ancestry – according to Ancestry.com, genetically I am 100% northern European – call me Mister Whitebread. My affinity for Greece was a mystery, but just like when you’re falling in love with someone, all questions and doubts were irrelevant. I was going to Greece, come hell or high water. In the back of my mind was the possibility that I wasn’t going to come home again, at least for a long time.That’s how strong my feelings were.

By November 1973, I had made my way through England, down through Spain, and onward to Rome. In those days, the “hippie route” to Greece was to catch the ferry to the Greek island of Corfu from the heel-of-the-boot Italian coastal city of Brindisi. My girlfriend and I were about to head there when word spread through the youth hostel that a violent revolution had just started in Greece. There were rumors of students being shot in the streets after a major uprising on November 17. The evil dictator, Georgios Papadopoulos, was under siege. The border was closed. No one could get in even if they were crazy enough to want to try. 

After a bloody mess, the dictatorship was overthrown a week later on November 25,1973 – but only by hardline elements in the Army. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, in other words. It looked grim. To make matters worse, I was a long-haired leftist hippie, so I might as well have had a bull’s eye painted on my forehead. Looking the way I looked, only a fool would step onto those blood-soaked streets. I badly wanted to see Greece, but I’m also a practical Capricorn. I could do the math. We turned around and went back to Spain and hung out on Mallorca in the Balearic Islands until the money ran out.

Sadly, after all of that planning and dreaming, there was no Greece for me – just a feeling of depletion. All the juice went out of that dream. 

Until now, fifty years later.

LOOKING THROUGH THE ASTROLOGICAL LENS

So what was happening for me astrologically in November 1973? Can the planets cast any light on my questions? Here’s my chart, plus my transits and progressions for November 17, 1973 – the day the student protests exploded and my dreams of seeing Greece died.

As always, it’s wise to start any analysis of transits and progressions with the birthchart itself. Pluto rules both my Scorpio Ascendant (and my south node) from the 9th house – the “house of long journeys over water.” Clearly there’s some “geographical karma” at play in my life. Any 9th house configuration suggests that a person will be called upon to travel or at least interact with a new cultural framework. Because Pluto also rules the south node, some of the places I’ll be “fated” to visit are certain to trigger past life memories and impressions – feelings of “returning to the scene of the crime.” That’s true whether I did “the crime” or it was done to me. 

At the time of my aborted visit to Greece, those astrological potentials were being seriously activated. My natal 4th house Moon was triggered by an opposition to transiting Pluto. (That lunar house placement adds a particular sensitivity in me to where I live and to location in general.) Pluto was stirring up some kind of repressed “homing instinct” in me – but why was it repressed? Something psychologically threatening was surfacing.

Of course, among other things, Aries – my Moon sign – is the sign of war. War in the home (4th house)? As a kid, I actually had a happy family life – but the streets outside our apartment in New York were mean. I had to fight a lot. But in evolutionary astrology, we understand that everything in your chart is karmic. What prior-life themes underlie that hot Moon of mine? Back to Greece – and here’s where we put two and two together. What had hurt me in Greece long ago in another body?  Remember – transiting Pluto was opposing my natal Moon during that whole period leading up to my failed visit to Greece. Pluto has a particular karmic resonance with me because of its rulership of my south node. 

My last exact Pluto-Moon opposition had occurred just a few weeks before the border closed, but Pluto hadn’t moved very far. What hard memories was I “barely ready” to face?

There’s more. As we have seen, much of this analysis goes back to my natal Moon. But to me, the most dramatic astrological piece of my whole Greek puzzle lies with the progressed Moon. When I was literally “on the cusp” of entering Greece in November 1973, that progressed Moon was only one degree away from entering my 4th house – it was “returning home” too.  Metaphorically, I was “one degree” away from entering a land that in some mysterious way felt like home to me. 

And I was prevented from crossing the line. Something blocked me. What’s the planet that represents blockages in astrology? Everyone knows that the answer is Saturn. I was born with Saturn on my Midheaven, so that same progressed Moon was also opposing my Saturn. That aspect would be exact just six weeks later, so it was very close to precise when the door slammed in my face. 

Meanwhile, where was Saturn itself by transit? I almost want to laugh – it squared my natal Moon on November 26, 1973, one day after the dictator Papadopoulos fell. Once again, everything leads back to the Moon. And with my Moon in the 4th house and both Pluto and Saturn in the picture, the “blockage of home” symbolism is dramatic, unambiguous, and literal. 

Let’s take one more brief step. This one is about Neptune, a planet which can often represent loss or “doing without.”  In a conventional astrological conversation, we would say that during this episode in my life, transiting Neptune was “squaring my Midheaven.” And that’s true – the aspect had been exact just one month before I had to turn around and head for Mallorca. But let’s not forget that “squaring the Midheaven” also means squaring the astrological nadir – squaring the 4th house cusp, in other words. Once again, we see astrological symbolism for loss (Neptune) linked to home (the 4th house.) 

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. 

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

That of course is the real question! In a sense, most of what I have demonstrated so far is simply that astrology works. But you already know that. Amazing or not, there’s limited glory in letting astrology tell us what we already know. The factual bottom line is simple: I really, really wanted to go to Greece, but the Cosmos said no. As we’ve just seen, that reality is reflected clearly in the most basic form of astrological analysis.

If I knew zero about astrology, I’d write the whole misadventure off as nothing but bad luck and bad timing. You win a few and you lose a few, end of story. But as astrologers, we stand on a different set of assumptions. We assume that the planets reveal a higher intelligence operating in our lives – that there was a reason that I was blocked from going to Greece. 

• If anyone challenges us on that belief, here’s something I’d challenge them to refute: while we might not mention Greece in particular, the essence and the timing of all of this could have been predicted from my chart ten seconds after I was born. It’s very hard to reconcile that inescapable fact with any notion of “randomness.”

So why did the door to the Hellenistic world get shut in my face? We’ve already encountered some deeper astrological hints. My natal south node is in Scorpio and on the 12th house cusp, plus it’s ruled by (and squared by) Mars – obviously there’s some painful karma there. Because of these particular events in my life back in 1973, I suspect some of that hurt has to do with prior-life experiences in Greece – a place I loved, but in which I experienced some Plutonian disaster involving loss of home and family. 

Edging a bit beyond the scope of this little essay, let me just add that in astrocartography, I’ve even got a Pluto/Descendant  line running through Greece, which helps put that specific country – and my unresolved karma with it – in the astrological spotlight. 

All of those configurations add some clarification, but the real answer to the question of why the Cosmos barred me from entering Greece is still fundamentally uncertain to me. I suspect that once I get there, some clues will appear. One clue that I can already see coming is that I’ll be traveling with my sweetheart, Michelle Kondos. She’s 100% Greek on her father’s side. Her ancestors were from the area around Kalamata – yes, the famous olives. And it turns out that Kalamata is on the itinerary that Lisa Jones put together for our bus tour after the class in Athens. 

A clue? Maybe me winding up with “a daughter of Greece” has improved the opinion the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus hold of me.

I also speculate that had I been able to enter Greece back in 1973, I would have been pulled into the vortex of Hellenistic astrology, which was reborn just twenty years later. I have nothing against Hellenistic astrology or any other form of our craft, but it just wasn’t the path I was meant to follow in this lifetime. Emotions can cloud judgment though, and “love of home” is high on the Richter Scale of feelings. Could Greece getting into my soul in my mid-twenties have knocked me off the path I was meant to follow? I don’t know, but it seems plausible.

Pluto runs deeper than all of that though. In trying to keep myself as honest as I can be, my best guess is that in 1973 I was almost ready to face the energetic heart of some awful karmic wound, but then something happened to abort the process. Did my guardian angels have second thoughts about my readiness? Did my unconscious mind “change its mind?” Did my soul chicken out – and did synchronicity reflect that? Take your pick.

Bottom line, I was nearly ready – but, with such Plutonian stakes, “nearly” wasn’t good enough.

WHAT ABOUT NOW?

Our class in Athens is set to open on April 25, 2025. The timing is perfect. Remember how back when the door to Greece closed in my face, Pluto was opposing my Moon? In April 2025, Pluto will be sextile to it. That’s a classic example of “old school” aspects in action – a door once closed (opposition) is now open (sextile), right on schedule.

Even more dramatically, my progressed Sun will be only 37’ away from a perfect conjunction with that 4th house Moon of mine which lies at the center of everything. The “homecoming” symbolism is inescapable. If Greece doesn’t seem “strangely familiar” to me, I will be very surprised.

Going deeper, assuming the lights stay green for this trip, I think the message is that now, in my middle seventies, I am ready to understand something that would have overwhelmed me in my middle twenties.

A FINAL NOTE

As we’ve been seeing over and over again, the Moon and the 4th house represent “home,” but home is a word that has many legitimate meanings. It’s all about our roots, however we define them. Above all, the 4th house is about roots that run deeper than geography. It’s the house of your inner self – your inner hero and your inner shadow. And it’s about “your people” too – your family, whether we define that notion conventionally through genetics and marriage, or in the more modern way, as in what we might call your soul family – the people with whom you’ve chosen to share your life.

To me, the FCEA – and my old apprenticeship programs that went before it – are a kind of soul tribe. I say “tribe” rather than “family” because “family” might exaggerate the point a bit –  although definitely some “family” relationships have sprung from those two groups. All the signs in my chart suggest that I’ll be meeting with my soul-tribe in Athens, a long-lost soul-home of mine, in April and May 2025. I suspect that for many of the attendees this will not be their first experience with me in Greece. I wonder how many of them shared whatever nightmare I experienced. I wonder how much healing is at stake, and not only for me.

Of course you’re welcome to join us. That’s because you’re family too. 

And we need to talk. 

Evolutionary astrology as we understand it today didn’t really exist when I was young. All of my instincts were oriented in that direction, but the only astrologers I could find who thought in that more purposeful, spiritual way were mostly British ones who had been steeped in Theosophy. Despite their more lofty philosophical orientation, they still tended to be quite rigid in their “delineations” of people’s personalities and fates. At least they provided a hint of something bigger going on. I don’t particularly recommend their books today – astrology has come a long way since then. But I still owe them a big debt for helping to get me started.

One of my favorites was a Scotsman by the name of Charles E.O. Carter. In his 1925 book, The Principles of Astrology, he describes the 11th house as ruling over “our hopes and aspirations.” Sixteen years earlier, in his Manual of Astrology, “Sepharial” – born Walter Gorn Old in England back in 1864 – called the 11th the house of our “wishes and hopes.” Later, Isabel M. Hickey, in her 1970 book, Astrology: A Cosmic Science, associates the 11th house with “goals and objectives.” Hickey wasn’t a Theosophist, but at least she would speak of us as souls rather than simply as personalities. Finally, the late, great Noel Tyl in his 1974 book, The Houses: Their Signs and Planets, refers to the 11th house in terms of  “new, larger goals that are set to receive the energies of full development.”

To be fair, these references that associate the 11th house with development over time tended to be buried under much more extensive references to friends, organizations, and fellowships. However, those nods in the direction of “possible futures” were always there too. Mostly they were left unexplored and undeveloped. Still, somehow this notion of the 11th house having an orientation to the future got me thinking. Like a good Capricorn, I understood that any goal that one sincerely and consistently holds would be virtually guaranteed to bear some kind of fruit eventually. Opportunities would arise, the motivation would be there – and what’s to stop anyone from eating the candy when it’s placed right in front of them? 

• I reasoned that anything promised in the 11th house would naturally tend to grow in our lives as time passed. That told me that an 11th house planet would very likely blossom more brightly in the second half of life.

Fundamental to the philosophy of evolutionary astrology is the rejection of the notion of “good” planets and “bad” planets, so it wasn’t like if you had a “bad planet” in your 11th house, you were doomed. Ditto, only backwards, for the so-called “good” planets – nothing wonderful was guaranteed. Get it right and it would become one of the guiding beacons defining the purpose of your life. Make “the dog’s breakfast” of it, and you have a formula for becoming a tedious old person. As ever, freedom is inseparable from personal responsibility. Your chart is a tool. You’re the one who is using it.

• Mercury in the 11th house? Will you actually have something important to say as you get older – or are you just one of those boring older folks who can’t stop pontificating? 

• Venus? In your fifties and beyond, are you loving and creative – or just bloated, vain, and trying to look younger than you are? 

THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS

What about “friendship?” We always hear that word associated with the 11th house. In this case, “friendship” actually means something more like alliances – tribes, organizations, and fellowships. Emphatically, the 11th house is not about your “near and dear.” If we use the word “friends,” let’s remember that we mean friends like you have a thousand of them and you can’t remember half their names. Once again, words such as group dynamics, teams, and networking ring clearer bells. We all have a sea of familiar and semi-familiar faces around us. That’s your 11th house. How do we link “goals and aspirations” with all those faces?

• Here’s the “unified field theory” of the 11th house in a single sentence: if you want to be a writer, hang out with writers. In other words, defining your goals must come first – only then can you choose the kinds of “associates” who might support you in attaining them. 

Every front has a back, and so there’s a corresponding danger posed by any 11th house planet: if your goals aren’t clear, there will be an element of randomness in your choice of “friends.” You’ll wind up thrown off your natural track by distracting social associations. You’ll hang out with the wrong crowd. Maybe you want to be a writer, but you wind up wasting every Saturday night with a bunch of troglodytes who haven’t read a book since they were forced to fake it in high school. 

And they might be nice people! They just won’t do you any good at all.

Synchronicity always plays a role in astrology. By what we are taught to call  “chance,” we inevitably encounter people and situations that offer us the opportunity to learn what we need to learn. That’s vividly true with the 11th house. The universe wants to support you in reaching your evolutionary goal. You might think of how “fate” magnetizes you into a particular set of soul-tribes. Some of that is simply because you are there to help those same people who are helping you. You’re part of a karmic team. Other people’s futures are riding on your success, and vice versa. There’s a lot of that kind of symbiosis in any healthy response to an 11th house configuration. People who share common goals, interests, and values can often be of practical help to each other as well as providing emotional encouragement. Writers ask each other what they’re working on lately. Painters tell each other when paint brushes are on sale. Musicians listen to each other play.

LIFE’S OFTEN-HIDDEN PURPOSE

Even among people who believe that life is purposeful, it’s often hard to prove it based on an honest appraisal of our own actual experience. Life in fact often feels pretty random.

We fall in love. The relationship lasts six years. Now we don’t even know where our former partner lives.

We work in a restaurant for seventeen years. It closes. We find some other way to keep a roof over our head – and we wonder what those seventeen years were all about. 

In the light of all of that apparent randomness, here’s perhaps the most magical and inspiring dimension of the 11th house – one that we’re only able to see retrospectively as we advance into the second half of our lives.

• Looking back from an 11th house perspective over the seemingly random patterns of our life-story, we recognize 1) an orderly pattern of necessary development, 2) an underlying unconscious strategy, and 3) a core purpose in everything that happened.

A higher intelligence aimed us at fulfilling our 11th house destiny – a truth that was invisible to us at the time those events were actually happening.

THE TECHNIQUE

As we analyze anyone’s 11th house dynamics, naturally we pay a lot of attention to any planet that happens to fall in that house – and we never ignore the influence of the sign that planet occupies. Mercury in Pisces is a different beast – and represents different goals – than Mercury in Aries.

Second, are there significant aspects to that 11th house planet? They modify, complicate, and further focus its meaning.

Third, remember that the sign on the cusp of the 11th house flavors our goals and aspirations as well – even if you have no planet in that house, you definitely have energy there. 

Fourth – it is pivotal that you never forget to take into account the position of the planet that rules the sign on the 11th cusp. Its importance would be hard to overestimate. That planet, as we will soon see, offers another critical dimension to the unfolding story. 

At a technical level, those are the four pieces of your puzzle. You need to look at all of them and tie their messages together. If you focus exclusively on any planet that happens to be in the 11th house, you’ll be playing a guitar that has only one string.

IN PRACTICE

As befits my own Neptune in Libra in the 11th house, as you read these words, presumably I will have just finished teaching a course in evolutionary astrology at Omega Institute in New York state – hopefully having had a chance to hug a few of you there too! 

So there I am, up on the stage at Omega, doing what I do now that I am older and my Neptune has had time to blossom – I am teaching a large group of people (11th house) about spiritual matters (Neptune) as they apply to counseling techniques (Libra).

In my teens, there was no visible sign of that path opening up for me. In fact, I was an unlikely candidate for such a role. Basically, I was a boring, shy, science-track kid.

By my early twenties, there was just a hint of it – I’d begun to find my spiritual teachers and I was absorbing astrology as fast as I could.

That 11th house path only began to really take off in my late twenties as I got to my lunar and Saturn returns. That’s when I started my astrological practice – and began to overcome my shyness enough to teach.

Ever since then, my Neptune has been like a snowball rolling down a snowy mountainside, gathering mass and momentum. 

So far, all of that reflects the classic development-over-time function of any 11th house planet.  

But at Omega, why am I leading the program rather than simply attending the class? Alone, my 11th house Neptune could support the idea of me sitting in row 7, taking it all in – and indeed I have spent a lot of time sitting in such classes, at least as I was growing up. I majored in Religion in college, for example. Before that, I spent a lot of time in church and various church groups. Since then, I’ve been blessed to sit fairly often with some spiritual teachers who were truly heavy-hitters. 

But now I lead. Why? Where is that indicated in my chart? The answer does not lie in an 11th house Libran Neptune, at least not by itself.

Libra is on the cusp of my 11th house. That makes Venus its planetary ruler. As I mentioned a few lines ago, never forget about the planet that rules the sign on the 11th cusp! It always adds a critical element to the basic message. 

For me, Venus falls late in my 1st house – there’s the signature of leadership. It’s also in Sagittarius, and that’s where we see “religion and philosophy,” along with some of the necessary “Jupiter” skills that go with trying to hold the attention of large groups of people for long periods of time.

Just so you can visualize everything I just said, here’s a stripped-down version of my chart, only  showing the features I just mentioned. You can do the same thing with yours – and remember, even if you have no planets in the 11th house, you always have a sign on the 11th house cusp. Beyond that important clue, you also have a planet (or two!) that rules the 11th house cusp.

GOD’S MYSTERIOUS HAND REVEALED

Here’s a line you read a few moments ago: Looking back from an 11th house perspective over the seemingly random patterns of our biography, we recognize an orderly pattern of necessary development, an underlying unconscious strategy, and a core purpose in everything that happened – something aimed at fulfilling our 11th house destiny, and something that was invisible to us at the time those events were actually happening.

To me, this is the piece of the 11th house puzzle that puts tears of wonder in my eyes. In this crazy world, we are under such relentless pressure to believe that life is essentially random and without purpose. The major contribution of the 20th and 21st centuries to the world’s treasure house of philosophical thought seems to boil down to “shit happens.” And honestly life really does look like that a lot of the time! Yet, peering through the lens of the 11th house, we can see irrefutable evidence of a guiding higher intelligence at work, creating an objective order in our lives – and again, it’s an influence of which we are generally quite unaware at the time that it is happening.

Quickly, here are some of the ways that this higher intelligence has worked for me. Some of what I’m about to express would require “full biographical treatment” to do justice to the details. I’ll spare you that blather about me, me, me and just offer a few simple hints to illustrate the heart of my point.

• One of my first memories was wanting a telescope so I could look at the stars. Thank you, Holy Universe, Incubator of Consciousness, for making a man named Marty Bresnick a close friend of my family. He was an amateur astronomer and he helped me build my first telescope – something that linked me to the heavens in a direct way at a tender age. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for introducing me to a German woman who taught me the rudiments of palmistry when I was just thirteen years old. Palmistry uses much of the same language as astrology. And it works. That experience immediately inoculated me against the “scientific” dismissal of the ancient wisdom traditions. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for moving my parents to buy a paperback copy of Thomas Sugrue’s There Is A River: The Edgar Cayce Story and to unwittingly leave it on a bookshelf for me to discover at age twelve. Reincarnation entered my consciousness. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for blessing me with a good church experience growing up. Until I was about seventeen, the Community Church at the Circle in Mount Vernon, New York, fed my Neptunian soul a diet of love and a genuine search for God. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for blessing me with a hellishly bad church experience as I was shipped off to a Fundamentalist school for a couple of my teenage years. It gave me a much-needed perspective on the dark side of religion. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for connecting me with my first true spiritual teacher, Marian Starnes, when I was in my early twenties. As I began my astrological work, she believed in me more than I believed in myself. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for making me the pluperfect late-60’s hippie dude. The hippies – that very 11th house Libran social movement – aided by Neptunian psychedelics, blew me loose from the shackles of any kind of conventional life. My astrological identity was hatched in that heady environment. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Thank you, Universe, for letting me spend an hour with Ram Dass. Thank you for letting me sit at the feet of various Buddhist Rinpoches. Thank you, Universe, for letting Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche feel moved to touch my forehead with his forehead. I was guided and I didn’t know it. 

• Finally, thank you, Universe, for letting me play in rock bands for half my life. That might sound like a side track, but for me it was actually a huge piece of the puzzle. As I’ve mentioned, I was a shy kid. I think I never once spoke voluntarily in a class until I was in my second or third year of college. But you can’t look shy and play rock’n’roll! Praise God that there’s no photo of this, but the first time I played in public was at a church talent show in about 1964. I was wearing a Beatle wig. (Tell no one). The point is that, without my experience with my rock bands, I would not have developed the ability to get up in front of large crowds and “perform” like I do. Even in that seeming dead end in my life, the mysterious Hand of God was guiding me toward being able to fulfill my 11th house “goals and aspirations.” Once again, I was guided and I didn’t know it.

If we play our part, that’s how life works for you, me, and everyone. Once again, you don’t even need a planet in your 11th house for this to be true. You’ve got a sign on its cusp and that sign has a ruler. That’s enough to get you going.

THE MYTH OF RANDOMNESS

Randomness is an illusion. Our lives have purpose, even when we have no idea what’s happening. You don’t have to take that on faith – all you have to do is to wait fifty or sixty years and look back at where you’ve been and why you’ve been there. 

Your 11th house will spell it out for you. 

One more point – there is a symbiosis between you and your 11th house tribe. Get it right, and you are benefiting them just as much as they are benefiting you. Everyone wins. As I stand there teaching at Omega or anywhere, all of you attending are my fellowship – my sangha – helping me to keep on track in my life, helping me a safe distance from the darker side of my own Neptune.

All I can do is say thank you. 

As students become more advanced in their FCEA training, they often raise questions about the differences among Pluto, Chiron, and the Moon’s south node. Let me start by saying that this is  one of those places in astrology where feeling a bit confused is a sign of wisdom rather than of missing something. The simple fact is that these three symbols do indeed overlap considerably in practical meaning. They share the common ground – and the common keyword – woundedness. All three represent, among other things, a place where you hurt. Faced with a chart, if you entered the interpretive process by thinking of Chiron, Pluto and the south node as three separate wounds – and three separate pathways to wholeness – you would be off to a good start. Your words would resonate with your clients, and, more importantly, you could help them along on their own healing trajectories.

Still, Pluto, Chiron, and the south node are not interchangeable. As you become more aware of the distinctions among them, your work becomes more precise. There’s a balancing act here – you want to recognize their differences without losing sight of the blurry places where their meanings actually do run together. In this short essay, my aim is to help you feel the unique ways that these three energies interact with the human psyche and – more importantly – with each other. We’ll aim to keep perspective on them, explore their distinct energetic signatures, and, above all, see how they work in concert with each other as we reclaim our wholeness, our spiritual sanity, and our power.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE MOON’S SOUTH NODE

Everything comes back to the Moon’s south node. It is the root of all our understandings regarding what might hold a soul back in its journey. Whenever you see anything going on that involves Pluto or Chiron, a good guideline is always to try to tie the messages of those two bodies back into the south node story. No aspect involvement is necessary for that to be an effective technique. Pluto and Chiron may bring old unresolved issues to the surface, but what are those issues? Pluto and Chiron themselves will give you important clues, but always the heart of the answer lies with the south node itself.

Here’s the key: most of us forget the mundane details of our prior lives – our names, where we lived, and so on. But we remember what those lives felt like. All the planets have south nodes and they all have to do with the past, but that emotional connection is why the south node of the Moon in particular is so important. The Moon represents the emotional body, and in a sense, that is the part of us that actually reincarnates. The essential idea here is to remember that our emotional bodies are robust enough to survive the trauma of death and rebirth mostly intact, unlike our specific “Mercury memories” – the labels we place on people, places, and things. Those factual memories tend to dissipate as we move into the space between lives – we typically even see that process starting here on Earth as people age. Think of how you wake up remembering a bit of a dream, but it soon fades away – it’s basically the same with the “facts” of your life once it’s over and done.

• Attitudes and moods are what survives death and rebirth. If we were loving in a prior life, we’ll likely be loving in this one. If we lived a life of fear or of some kind of terrible lack, those feelings survive too.

There are treasures in the south node, but its active ingredient is always a set of blinding emotional assumptions and limiting, distorting attitudes. If you had an easy, indolent prior lifetime – one whose karma has now ripened – laziness might interfere with your journey in this lifetime. If you were badly scared, or shamed, or otherwise traumatized, those emotional wounds will undercut your faith in yourself this time around.

• Whatever its specific nature, this south node distortion in our underlying attitudes and assumptions about life is our Rosetta Stone when it comes to fully understanding anyone’s woundedness in this present lifetime – and the full interpretive process includes understanding their relationships with Pluto and Chiron.

I would just add two more notes – as most of you know, the first one is that by “the south node,” we mean a complex analysis that includes the message of its planetary ruler or rulers, along with a network of aspects. The second note has to do with how the north node of the Moon works as a remedy for the south node’s blindness and stubborn stuckness. In contrast to the south node which contains no medicine, Pluto and Chiron carry the potential for their own resolution – that is simply the higher meaning of both of those points. Meanwhile, the remedy for the south node does not lie in the south node itself. For that remedy, we look to the north node.

The south node carries strengths of its own, but they are not particularly relevant to the healing process, at least other than the obvious notion that we achieve release from the south node karmic pattern by not doing it anymore, or at least by letting go of being so identified with it and attached to it. But once again, unlike Pluto and Chiron, it’s a separate point – the north node – that supplies the jolt of magic that lights the fuse of insight and transformation on our limiting attitudes, assumptions, and habits.

LET THE SOUTH NODE INFORM PLUTO AND CHIRON 

In a little while, we will sharpen our sense of the differences between Chironic wounds and Plutonian ones. They aren’t the same, but for now let’s just see them both simply as wounded places in the reincarnating psyche. The specific nature of the wounds they represent can be  focused by looking at their sign and house placements and the aspects they make – by the conventional procedures of normal astrological analysis, in other words. Do that, and you are off to a good start in understanding them.

To take your interpretation to the next level, integrate what you have learned about the south node into your understanding of Pluto and Chiron. Say, for example, we have either one of them in the 5th house. One possibility with Pluto or Chiron in that house is that there is a wound in connection with the human need for pleasure, play and release. Such a wound can naturally take many forms ranging from dissipation and excess to a fear of letting go at all. 

Now imagine two nodal scenarios, each one flavoring our interpretation of that 5th house Pluto or Chiron in a different way:

• The south node is in Virgo and the 9th house, conjunct Saturn. That could easily correlate with unresolved karma relative to the impact of harsh, repressive religion – a self-denying attitude that was brought forward from a prior life “in holy orders” and now negatively impacts our ability to celebrate and have some 5th house fun.

• The south node is in Sagittarius conjunct Neptune in the 11th house. In a prior life, you were swept along into enthusiastic, hedonistic escapism by a wild crowd. As a result, you might say yes today when you really ought to say no. There’s your 5th house wound. 

As you can see, the south node mood creates a totally different set of issues in each case. This integrative style of interpretation illustrates how we can let the message of the south node inform our understanding of a Plutonian or Chironic wound. 

The flow of insight goes in the other direction too – in these two hypothetical scenarios, the presence of Pluto or Chiron in the 5th house sharpens our understanding of the south node by underscoring prior-life impacts on our capacity for joy in our present life. If Pluto or Chiron had been in the 10th, the south node impact would be reflected in wounds to our career or status. If in the 7th house, it would point to intimacy problems, and so on. 

This is just one illustration. The 5th house has other meanings too. Any of them might also be relevant. The south node distortions might negatively impact our Plutonian or Chironic attitudes toward children or towards our own creativity, for two quick examples. 

My aim here is not so much an exhaustive analysis of all the possibilities as it is an attempt to illustrate how these three related symbols “talk to each other” in a chart.

PLUTONIAN WOUNDS VERSUS CHIRONIC WOUNDS

Start by remembering that these two kinds of hurt overlap a lot!  As we saw earlier, a bit of blur between them in your understanding is a positive sign, not a negative one. As an analogy, just think of all the different ways you might define a “good movie.” In summer 2023, like half of America, I enjoyed both Barbie and Oppenheimer. I’d happily call them both “good movies.” But, like Pluto and Chiron, I would never confuse them. Wounds, just like good movies, come in a lot of flavors. I wouldn’t push this analogy too far, but compared to the Oppenheimer vibes of a Plutonian wound, the Chironic wound is Barbie. 

And before anybody writes me a mean email about that last statement, let me clarify that my point there is not to minimize Chiron’s hurts – it is more to stand in total awe of Plutonian ones and to bow before those souls who are fierce enough to heal them. 

And remember – Barbie was a serious movie too.  

THE PLUTONIAN WOUND

Thinking about Pluto, imagine a sensitive young man is drafted into the military in the midst of a horrible war. He sees things no human being should ever have to see. Perhaps under the relentless pressures and exhaustion of battle, he does things of which he is ashamed. When he comes home, he is in a state of psychological, spiritual, and emotional wreckage. 

My next line hurts me even to write, but please bear with me. Imagine someone tells that poor, wounded young man “to just get over it.” 

You want to whack them for saying that, right? For starters, it’s grossly insensitive. Worse, it’s simply clueless. People don’t just “get over” things as horrific as that – things like war, or rape, or terrible abuse in their childhoods. Things like spousal abuse. Things like the truly vicious dimensions of racism, sexism, and all the variations on homophobia and the other  shadow-wars around gender identity. There is true darkness in this world. When it touches us, it leaves a deep mark.

Plutonian healing from trauma like that takes time. We may need help too. Let’s also recognize that such healing might require more than one lifetime. That’s how deep these Plutonian wounds can go – maybe one lifetime isn’t long enough to “get over it.”

Let’s add that Pluto also represents the skill-set that we need in order to succeed at that kind of monumental healing. It is the sovereign planet of psychotherapy – and when I say “psychotherapy,” I’m actually thinking of it in the original Greek, where “psyche” means soul and “therapy” means healing. In other words, maybe you have “professional help” or maybe you don’t, but it’s always about the emotionally raw process of dealing with the results of life’s darkness. That’s what our souls are healing from. 

• Wherever your Pluto lies, if you strive toward its positive expression in terms of its sign, house, and aspects, you are strengthening your greatest ally when it comes to healing all of your soul’s wounds – and that includes your Chironic wounds as well as the emotional wounds reflected in your south node. 

One more point about Pluto work – and this is one that underscores its powerful interdependency with the south node. There may be “Mercury memories” – names, dates, places, people – associated with Plutionian wounds, but the substance of those wounds is purely emotional. As a soul releases itself from the grips of a Plutonian wound, there is typically a powerful explosion of emotional energy. In fact, if we are afraid of strong emotions – especially dark ones – we will never succeed with a Pluto process. 

Hate is a spiritual poison, for example. No reflective person thinks hatred is good for anyone. But perhaps you came to your hatred honestly. Perhaps you were brutalized as a child. Perhaps in a prior life someone you love was murdered before your eyes. You didn’t ask for it, but that hatred is now inside of you. The world put it there. You can pretend it’s not there, but that’s just spiritual posturing. If you are going to truly liberate yourself from it, it must erupt out of the unconscious mind. When it comes out, it won’t look like little pink angels playing harps. 

This is why Plutonian healing processes are so raw – and so difficult, and ultimately so profoundly freeing.

Note how in exploring the Plutonian wound, we encounter two sides of a coin. Pluto is a place where you’ve stored up lifetimes’ worth of dark energy – but it also represents the very set of courageous, instinctive skills that you need in order to get beyond them. 

Pluto is both the problem and the solution.

WHAT ABOUT CHIRON?

Chiron is tiny by planetary standards. Astronomers today call Pluto a “dwarf planet,” but even little Pluto makes Chiron look like a pipsqueak. Pluto, with only one quarter of one percent of the mass of Earth, still has ten times the diameter of Chiron. Chiron would easily fit between New York and Boston – or Paris and Brussels. In China, it would just cover the Shanghai-Hangzhou metroplex. 

Size isn’t everything in astrology – again, look at Pluto, which is small but fierce. Still, it is important to remember that no astronomer and no experienced astrologer calls Chiron a planet. We take it seriously and its effects are not always subtle, but we do need to keep perspective on it. 

In a classic example of “as above, so below,” our most telling clue about the astrological nature of Chiron derives from one of its orbital characteristics. It revolves around the Sun between Saturn and Uranus, but it actually crosses the paths of both of those major planets. Its perihelion – when it’s closest to the Sun – lies just inside the orbit of Saturn and its aphelion is just outside the perihelion of Uranus. That last sentence is a mouthful. What it means is that Chiron never reaches the average distance of Uranus, but it does cross Uranus’s closest approach to the Sun. 

• The key here is that Chiron weaves together the materialistic, logical realities of Saturn and the electrical-magical realities of Uranus.  Half horse and half man in mythology, it builds a bridge between the instinctual, physical realm and the realm of mind-power and intellect.

With Pluto’s wounds, we emphasized the folly and insensitivity of telling someone to  “just get over it.” With Chiron, evolution and healing can potentially move much more quickly – again, more like a flash of electricity than Saturn’s heavy tectonic plates. Forces from the invisible Uranian realm interact suddenly and powerfully with the more plodding realm of Saturn. 

Sometimes all it takes to trigger Chironic healing is a single liberating insight – or a crisis. In medicine, there are many examples of spontaneous healing, even among people who have received medical death sentences. That’s Chiron in action too. People speak of episodes of hysterical strength, where for example a person can lift a car off a trapped child. I suspect that’s a Chironic feature as well – but instead of lifting cars, let’s think of a psychological expression of that same superpower. 

My favorite illustration is how you might forget about your painful toothache if a friend comes to you in tears over some tragedy. You were preoccupied with your pain, but then suddenly you were distracted from it by your friend’s crisis. The mind has more power over pain management than we like to admit when we are busy hurting. The point is that human consciousness has an extraordinary potential for engineering incomprehensible breakthroughs. These are Chironic manifestations. How much of our pain is in our heads? How quickly can we change? 

Bottom line, are there any limits to the power of consciousness to address suffering? My guess is that probably yes there are such limits – but where are they? How firm are they? And might we underestimate our own healing powers?

Miracles do happen and Chiron is often connected with them.

There’s more. Certainly the most common description of Chiron in the world of modern astrology is the Wounded Healer. The basic idea is very simple:

• Once you have found a way to liberate yourself from a wound sufficiently that it no longer controls your life, you’ve got a map that you can potentially share with other people who are suffering from the same wound. 

In 12-Step programs, there is a tradition of a member having a personal sponsor. That might be someone who, for example, has suffered from the psychic wound of alcoholism – but who hasn’t had a drink for fifteen years. That is a person who can understand your thirst if you’re an alcoholic yourself. Maybe they can help you deal with it “one day at a time.” This idea of mentoring – of guiding and being guided – is fundamental to Chiron. Often, during times of Chironic stimulation, all we need is meaningful contact with someone who has already been where we are hurting today – and not only survived it, but thrived. Such a meeting alone can be enough to trigger a breakthrough.

Pluto processes are slow, Chiron’s are fast – that simple idea is even reflected in their orbits. Pluto takes 248 years to get around the Sun. Chiron’s orbit varies. In the past, it has occasionally been as short as 46 years or as long as 52 years. At the present time, the orbit is close to 51 years. 

By the way, Chiron’s orbital variability reflects the fact that it’s such a cosmic lightweight – the gravity of the “real” planets, especially Jupiter and Saturn, kick it around a lot. 

The point there is that once again with Pluto we need patience, while with Chiron perhaps all we need is faith.

SOME PLUTONIAN AND CHIRONIC SPECIFICS 

When it comes to understanding the details of a wound represented by Pluto or Chiron, always reflect on the signs and houses they occupy and the aspects they make. Those bedrock astrological techniques are always the heart of the interpretive procedure. Beyond that, each of these bodies has a natural resonance with certain particular areas of life. In other words, it’s exactly like how, when we think of Mercury, we naturally think of communication or when we think of Venus, we think of relationships. 

With Pluto, think of healing the long-term effects of:

Lies. Shame. Violence. Sexual transgressions. Dramatic or tragic deaths. Contact with evil. The abuse of power, given or received. Poverty – or too much money. Toxic psychotherapy. Betrayal.  Corrosive guilt. Tragedy. Collective nightmares such as plague, famine, and war.

With Chiron, think of healing the long-term effects of:

Bad mentoring and misguided guidance. Physical problems, disorders, and diseases. Rejection. Abandonment. A “family curse” – that is to say a dysfunctional pattern passed down from one generation to the next. Chronic, exhausting caregiving. 

So there you have it – the three faces of our woundedness: Pluto, Chiron, and the Moon’s south node. Each has its own story to tell, but the clearest telling is when we listen to all three of them together.