In November 2025, I published a newsletter about Mars Returns on my personal website,  forrestastrology.com. There, I invited readers to submit suggestions for future newsletter topics. There was enough response to keep me busy for a long time. Astrologer Jenny Yates offered a particularly interesting suggestion. Here are her slightly-edited words:

Self-awareness and sense of identity, as connected to the Ascendant and the Midheaven – which are more about the way people see you, and which are more about how you see yourself?

Let’s dive in and try to unpack this extremely slippery question. I say “slippery” because it’s  premised on assuming the duality of what’s inside us versus what’s outside, which is to say accepting that we are truly separate from everything else. Are we? That’s one of those eternal questions. As all astrologers know from their daily experience of synchronicity, there are mysterious links between what we are encountering deep inside ourselves and what we bump into “by chance” in our lives around the same time. To me, one of the most helpful concepts in Buddhism is that there are ultimate truths and relative truths – and I think believing in this inside/outside duality is a relative one. The great thing about relative truths is that they let us talk to each other, while the ultimate ones are always beyond the scope of language. 

So let’s talk! 

WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE

Let’s start with the shaky assumption that your skin marks a definitive boundary between your inner world and the world “out there.” Using that idea as our launching pad leads me to a basic insight about both the Ascendant and the Midheaven: 

• Each one of these “Angles” in the chart reveals what you look like from a distance. The only difference between the Ascendant and the Midheaven is how far away from you the person making the judgment is standing. 

Let me focus that idea a bit more clearly. The Ascendant reflects your personal style. It’s your affect, how you present yourself socially. Call it your vibes. Do you make eye contact? How do you dress? Are you easy to get to know or more elusive? The point is that in order to see those dimensions of anyone’s character, you need to be standing near them. You have to be in their physical presence – or, nowadays, at least Zooming.

The Midheaven, on the other hand, is about the hat you wear in the world. It’s what you look like to people who don’t really know you. The word “reputation” is tied to it. So is “status.” With the 10th house in general in modern practical astrology, we tend to focus on a person’s career. That’s valid – but if someone gets married, or gets single, we often also see Midheaven involvement via transits or progressions. Ditto with the birth of a first child. None of those developments are about anyone’s career per se, but they will certainly impact how people who don’t really know you file you away in their minds. 

Note that none of those life events or status questions imply anything specifically about a person’s vibes – Midheaven-fashion, they’re only about what we appear to be from a social distance.

• “Jane works seven days a week.” Is she an introvert or an extrovert? Feel how your mind freezes? We can’t answer. The problem is that we made a Midheaven statement, then asked an Ascendant question. 

• “Jason is a meticulous, cautious guy. Do you think he might have a future in politics?” That’s the same thing, only backwards – we gave Ascendant information, then asked a Midheaven question.

Maybe you meet a public figure – say, a star in the realm of film or sports. You arrive in their presence with an already-established sense of who they are and you are surprised to find that they are very different from what you expected. That’s not a rare experience. 

• Again, you know them through their Midheavens and you’re surprised when you meet their Ascendants. 

Those observations basically echo everything that we’ve been exploring all along, but let’s follow this trail of breadcrumbs a bit further into the deep dark forest of the human psyche . . . 

THE FIRST DATE

Say that you have a date with someone. You click right away. Your styles work well together. You feel easy and natural in each other’s presence. Your values are in harmony and you have similar senses of humor. Welcome to Ascendant heaven. Naturally you’re eager to see each other again. 

So far in this little dating episode, much is still primarily about people’s surfaces meeting. In any relationship, that’s how everything has to start. It’s pure Ascendant material. Still, as any relationship deepens we might begin to glimpse the Ascendant in a more sophisticated fashion. That’s because the Ascendant doesn’t really operate in a vacuum unless we’re talking about extremely formal, shallow social situations – those are typically all about surfaces. 

When it comes to the early stages of truly getting to know another human being, my favorite metaphor for the Ascendant is that it is like stained glass. That’s because the rest of the chart shines through it and is given a certain tint by it. Ultimately you can’t separate your planets from the Ascendant – like stained glass, it simply colors their expression as their energies are translated into actual social behavior. 

• Put a Cancer Ascendant on a Gemini and it’ll look very different than that same Cancer Ascendant on a Scorpio. 

With two people “getting to know each other,” that ancient process always starts with their Ascendants, but it soon pulls them toward deeper waters. In fact, right from the beginning, something in our vibes is already hinting at those deeper waters. They glimmer through the Ascendant, attracting and intriguing us.

Despite their auspicious first date, maybe things don’t work out for Jane and Jason. Maybe you’re pals with Jason. Maybe you hear him saying, “I feel like Jane just doesn’t really understand me.” This is far from the world’s most original relationship complaint, but it may be completely valid. There are parts of each one of us that are so deep that even we don’t understand them. And yet those core soul places inside us all are longing to be seen, acknowledged, and loved.

Put poor Jason’s romantic plight on the back burner for a few moments. We’ll soon get back to it.

Think of the point opposite the Midheaven: the astrological nadir, also known as the cusp of the 4th house. If the Midheaven is how we relate to the outer world, the astrological nadir is how we relate to the inner one. It’s where we keep our hearts. In introducing the 4th house to a client, here’s a line I’ll often use: “Sleep with someone in a spirit of loving affection for ten years or so and thus begin to get to know them.” This is where we keep our deepest personal essence. Naturally, it feels vulnerable and therefore, quite opposite the Ascendant or Midheaven, it’s cautious about revealing itself. 

The 4th house, along with the sign Cancer and the Moon that rules them both – these symbols represent the secret world that lives inside every one of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to find someone with whom we can share that inner realm. That’s the essence of true intimacy. In some ways, the 4th house is the true “house of marriage.”

To that list of lunar “inner realm” symbols, we can add the Pluto family (Scorpio; the 8th house) and the Neptune family (Pisces; the 12th house.) They also point our attention inward. If the Ascendant and the Midheaven are the north pole, welcome to Antarctica. These “Water family” symbols underlie everything we show to the world. To use Jenny Yates wording, they’re how we see ourselves, as opposed to how the world sees us. 

THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

One major key to happiness in life lies in figuring out good ways to express our deeper selves through our Ascendants. Remember Jason? He may be right that Jane doesn’t understand him, but quite possibly that might be more his fault than hers. His inner life, by definition, is invisible to her unless he expresses it. Sometimes that isn’t easy. 

Say Jason has Libra rising. Say his Mars squares it from Capricorn and the 4th house. Add that Jane, being human, has a habit or two that annoy him. Maybe his frustration about her behavior lurks undetected underneath the more conciliatory style implied by his Libran Ascendant. Behind his smiling face, he’s perhaps starting to go off the deep end: “Jane does that stuff just to annoy me. It’s micro-aggression. She’s got unresolved issues with her father and she’s projecting them onto me. She’s really not capable of intimacy . . .”

And yet if Jason had only said, “Dammit Jane, please quit doing that,” they might have lived happily ever after . . . or something like that. The point is that it is possible to integrate Mars energy with a Libran Ascendant. In plain English, you can let someone know that they’ve hurt you and that you are feeling angry with them about it without violating your basic sense of connection with them. In fact, such honesty actually enhances the connection.

In intimate situations – coupling love, healthy families, friendships – we want our souls to be seen and known. Conveying that information about our secret world clearly to our loved ones is the job of the Ascendant. It’s what stands between your inner world and the outer one. It’s the bridge. It’s the gatekeeper. It’s where consciousness and cosmos meet. To call it the “surface of the character” is only true up to a point, and if we leave it there, we’re in trouble. Once again, think of it as the bridge or the gatekeeper – or the translator.

A full understanding of how the Ascendant functions in a given person involves more than knowing what sign was rising when they were born. Are there planets in the 1st house? Where is the planet that rules the Ascendant? But everything else being equal, if you’ve got a Sagittarian Ascendant, you may have to work hard on learning how to express tenderness or personal insecurities in a way that really conveys those feelings to your loved ones. A Cancer Ascendant might present precisely the opposite challenges – Cancer doesn’t easily channel Sagittarian-style humor, bravado, and spunk, even though you might be feeling them strongly inside yourself.

No matter what your Ascendant, sometimes you’re going to feel like you’re hammering a nail with a fish or trying to set fire to a bucket of water. Still, you’ve got to try. The prize is your ability to feel truly, deeply, connected with anyone. It’s all about authentically translating the realities of your inner world into the language of actual human behavior.

WHAT ABOUT AT WORK?

With the Midheaven, it’s a somewhat different story. Do you really want your co-workers to know what you’re thinking? How about your boss? The Midheaven relates us to the larger community. Boundaries and some degree of distance are often appropriate there. That’s why most of us call our physician “doctor” rather than Doug or Camille. How wise is it to share your feelings about the speeding ticket with the cop who stopped you? There’s a certain comfort for everyone in playing their appropriate Midheaven roles. Not all relationships are meant to be intimate.

Still, ideally you want your job to have some connection with your soul’s purpose in the world. You want your lifestyle – which is another good Midheaven word – to have something to do with your actual nature and values. So once again, the great art here lies in aligning the Midheaven with the deeper, more interior, dimensions of your chart. How you look from a great social distance – Midheaven territory – should offer some clues about who you actually are in your core. There’s got to be some connection, otherwise life feels robotic and pointless.

As always, what we are aiming for in both astrological practice and in life is synthesis and integration. I began this essay with a brief bow in the general direction of a larger metaphysical framework. I referred to the understanding that ultimately, behind all the apparent fragmentation of life, there is a basic unity. Oneness is the highest truth. That’s the ultimate synthesis. 

Given a few lifetimes meditating in a Himalayan cave, we might actually begin to understand that. Meanwhile, we can make a good start by pressing toward a unity of our inner world and our outer one. We can accomplish that by helping mold our Ascendants and our Midheavens into clear windowpanes through which our souls can shine into the world with as little distortion as possible. 

Like any window, you’re inside looking out through them. Hopefully, people on the outside are looking in too, and seeing at least the silhouette of your soul.

“There’s nothing in my 7th house. Does that mean I will never get married?” I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question. As your own practice unfolds, I guarantee that you’ll hear it a lot too. If you sit with clients, empty houses are one of those issues that come up over and over again. That’s inevitable – for starters, unless we start flooding our charts with countless asteroids, everybody in the world has at least two of them. There are ten planets and twelve houses. You can do the math. 

So what do they mean? Are empty houses truly “dead zones” in a person’s life? That’s sort of true sometimes, but often not. The question is actually fairly complicated. Let’s explore it, starting with one stand-out fact:

AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS AN EMPTY HOUSE 

Planets definitely activate a house in a big way, but they are not the only astrological factor that can accomplish that feat. Signs represent energy too. Every house has a sign on its cusp. That sign sets the tone for our experience in that department of life even if there are no planets there. Lacking a planet, the house fades somewhat in importance, but it is still part of life. Everyone has all twelve houses and we can’t be fully human without some experience connected with each one of them. 

• Margot Robbie of Barbie fame has an empty 10th house, but her Midheaven is in Taurus, which is ruled by Venus in Gemini and the 11th house. Venus of course is the “goddess of the arts,” and so when it comes to career, a Venus path naturally opened up before her. She’s talented and beautiful, skilled with language (Gemini) and good at working in teams and joint projects – there’s the 11th house.

• Stormy Daniels was not famous for her chastity. One might expect her to have a highly activated 5th house, and yet it’s empty. Taurus to the rescue again – that’s the sign on her 5th house cusp, so once again we see the Venus rulership. Her Venus meanwhile is in Aquarius and squared by Uranus in Scorpio: lots of edgy, rule-breaking symbolism there, all related in clear ways to her 5th house experience. 

• Another person not famous for chastity but also born with an empty 5th house is Donald Trump. He’s got Sagittarius on the cusp and it’s ruled by his 2nd house Jupiter and squared by his 11th house Venus and Saturn, both in Cancer. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous line: “I can resist anything except temptation.”

Obviously in each of these three cases, I’m not diving into a deep astrological analysis. The point is simply that I could – and you could too. The symbolism is all there to be read and from what we actually know of these people’s lives, it fits. These “empty houses” are activated in ways we can understand astrologically. In each case, we could even go deeper and offer them counsel about how to optimize their responses to each of these houses based solely on sign information.

Let me add two more points. Even if a house is empty in the natal chart, sooner or later its underlying pattern of sign energy will be triggered into activation by transits, progressions, or solar arcs. Then there’s love or any of its variations: if a partner’s planets fall in one of your “empty” houses, as long as you are together the experiences of that house will figure in your life. A classic example is what happens when a childless person falls in love with someone who has kids. Suddenly that childless person has kids too – and probably a partner who drops a planet into his or her 5th house. 

Once again, the takeaway is that there is really no such thing as a truly empty house. All twelve are energized at least to some extent in every one of us.

THREE WAYS TO SAY EVERYTHING

Astrology is really three interlocking symbol systems: planets, signs, and houses. For every plain-English concept that we use in our work, there is a planet, a sign, and a house to represent it. They are not exactly interchangeable, but they’re close. For example, how do we understand partnerships from an astrological perspective – do we use Venus, or Libra, or the 7th house? In practice, in any particular partnership situation, any one of those three symbols could be in the spotlight. 

This leads us to perhaps our most fundamental insight into “empty” houses – they might very well mislead us. What if you have nothing in your 7th house, but Venus is conjunct your Ascendant in Libra? Are relationships likely to be a low-energy issue in your life? All astrologers know better.

• When faced with an empty house, before diminishing the importance of that area of life,  remember to check for the condition of the corresponding sign and the ruling planet. For every issue in life, there are three astrological ways in which it can be activated. Houses are only one of them.

Let’s look at the chart of the late, great spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. December 22 marks the sixth anniversary of his passing, but he lives on in the hearts of many of us. My band Silkworm was scheduled to open for him in North Carolina back in the late 1970s. We were there in the auditorium doing our afternoon sound check when he walked in. I’ll always remember how utterly human and unpretentious he was – like any true spiritual teacher, he wasn’t busy impressing us with his wisdom, yet his presence itself was a blessing.

Other than the famous words “Be Here Now” from the title of Ram Dass’s best-known book, perhaps his second-most quoted line is “love, serve, remember.” And he walked his talk – Ram Dass seemed to live to serve people. Yet his 6th house – the house of service – is empty. This absence is particularly striking because another dimension of the 6th house is mentoring and initiation. He was utterly devoted to Neem Karoli Baba, his guru – and of course he himself initiated and mentored many people in the course of his life, including me. 

So why no planets in his 6th house? What it symbolizes was clearly a huge area of his life. He was, after all, part of a lineage. 

Jupiter rules Ram Dass’s 6th house from the mystical 12th house. It’s in the nurturing sign, Cancer. All of that tells us something that’s relevant. But what is the sixth sign of the zodiac? Virgo is of course the answer, and there we find his Neptune in his 3rd house. He served (Virgo) by teaching (3rd house) spiritual matters (Neptune.) 

In practical astrology the word “work” can relate to either the 6th house or, more commonly, to the 10th. The two houses aren’t exactly interchangeable, but they do overlap a lot in practice. In simple terms, the 10th house is “the hat we wear in the world,” while the 6th house feels more like “Monday morning.” It’s where we actually develop and practice our craft. Ram Dass has a packed 10th house, so there’s no way we could do a meaningful interpretation of his chart without being pedal-to-the-metal about his mission in the world. And what sign lies on the cusp of his 10th house? Pisces – which, via rulership, brings us right back to that 3rd house Neptune in “6th sign” Virgo.

The point is that even though Ram Dass’s 6th house contains no planets, by the time we translate the related symbolism into English, we’ve pretty well covered the “6th house” base. That’s all because of the underlying principle that there is more than one way to say the same thing astrologically. Always, when you’re faced with an empty house, remember to look at the condition of the related sign and planet – and pay some attention to the sign on that house cusp and to the planet that rules it.

Again, empty houses are not as empty as they look.

WHAT IF ALL THREE SYMBOLS ARE QUIET?

Sometimes it happens that a house is devoid of planets, the corresponding sign is empty, and the related planets are hiding out in a corner. What do we do then? Start by remembering that there is always a sign on the cusp of that empty house. Based on it, you can always find something meaningful to say. 

• Keep perspective though – the message of the chart, at least from the evolutionary point of view, is that in this lifetime this particular area of life is of diminished importance for the person in question. That’s really the bottom line.

Imagine a person with an empty 7th house, nothing in Libra, and Venus not playing a very central role in the chart. It would still very likely be a major blunder to announce to that person that “relationships don’t mean anything to you.” Start with a little common sense – relationships are significant to basically everybody. Add the technical realities of astrology – as we have seen, people everywhere have Venus in their charts – and even if it’s a quiet one, it is still Venus. Everyone has some Libran energy even if there are no planets there. Everyone has a 7th house and it’s flavored with sign energy. 

No one’s chart contains zero relationship symbolism. That is simply not possible.

We also need to recognize that astrological symbolism speaks of relationships in a variety of ways. 4th house symbolism can indicate family. The 5th house can point to children or romances. The 6th can indicate mentoring relationships that are of enormous importance. The 8th house can point to the mysteries of coupling and sexual bonding. If those houses are activated, that’s the language we would use in talking about relationships – and, guaranteed, it would be meaningful to the client.

If all of those “arc of intimacy” houses are empty and the rest of the symbolism is quiet, in practice a working astrologer would focus on other areas of life. If the client were to ask about relationships, we could respond based on the techniques I’ve been describing – but we would also assure the client that from the deepest evolutionary perspective, in this incarnation they were not truly “majoring” in those intimate areas. Other developments were simply more pressing.

Whenever a part of life is relatively inactive in that sense, in my experience with clients, they often register a certain relief as they hear it. At some deep level, it rings true for them.

So these are my thoughts about empty houses: 

• First, there really aren’t any! 

• Second, the basic human ideas connected with houses that lack planets are often activated in other ways via related signs and rulerships. 

• Third, sometimes an entire area of life is de-emphasized in a person’s chart. If so, as astrologers, we should de-emphasize it too.

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.

Ride the waves of your imagination back to Balboa Park in San Diego, California, one hundred years ago. The year is 1925. A woman sits in a parked car. She is engaged in an intense private conversation with a man. They are both in their thirties. He draws a 3” x 5” index card at random from a large stack and places it face down. On the card, and unseen by either one of them, is the notation “Aries 4.” An image forms in her mind. She says, two lovers are strolling through a secluded walk. He jots it down, shuffles the cards, and draws another, this one is for “Libra 13.” The woman says, Children blowing soap bubbles.

So it goes. Over several sessions, astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and psychic Elsie May Wheeler covered the entire zodiac. To each degree an evocative image was assigned. Thus began the long, complicated birth of what came eventually to be known as the Sabian Symbols. 

Elsie Wheeler passed away in 1938 at age fifty-one. She had spent her entire life in a wheelchair, suffering from crippling arthritis. As psychics and mediums go, astrologically she looks like the real deal. Here’s her A-rated chart. Note her Moon in the last degree of mystical Pisces along with Neptune conjunct her Ascendant. If anyone was in touch with the Spirit world, it was her.

I found a photo of her by searching online. It’s rights-protected so I can’t share it here without risking getting us into legal trouble. If you’re interested, you can Google it yourself. I don’t know how you will feel, but for me it was love at first sight. Her eyes go back forever. 

For all the usual sad reasons, when people speak of the Sabian Symbols, the name that is generally associated with them is that of astrologer Marc Edmund Jones. Meanwhile, poor Elsie May Wheeler is often forgotten. I want to celebrate her here, especially now that we have reached the one hundredth anniversary of the time she brought these images from the next world into this one. The Sabian Symbols would not exist without her.

None of this is meant to discredit Marc Edmund Jones. The symbols would not exist without him either. He was also one of the most productive and creative of the mid-20th century astrologers, probably best known for his work with aspect patterns – buckets, bowls, see-saws, and so on. 

Jones continued to work with the Sabian Symbols for years after Elsie Wheeler’s passing, changing a few of them, writing little paragraphs of explanation for each of them. He initially published them for his students in mimeographed form. Eventually, astrologer Dane Rudhyar became interested in them too. He published a modified version in his monumental 1936 work, The Astrology of Personality, thus ensuring their place in astrological history. Jones himself published The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953. Twenty years later, Rudhyar devoted an entire book to them. It was called An Astrological Mandala. 

In 2004, Martin Goldsmith published a massive research project about the symbols and actually rejected some of Wheeler’s imagery, replacing it with fresh images that seemed to resonate better with the actual lives of people born with planets in those degrees. His book is titled, The Zodiac By Degrees. I suspect that purists frown on it because of his deletion of some of Wheeler’s images, but I found Goldsmith’s work impressive. For example, the original symbol for my own natal Sun’s position in 16 Capricorn is school grounds filled with boys and girls in gymnasium suits. I’m not an athlete. When I was growing up, gym was mostly about boredom and humiliation. It’s a stretch to make Wheeler’s original image for my Sun’s degree speak to me in a way that I can relate to. Meanwhile, here is Goldsmith’s new wording for that same mid-Capricorn degree: Turbaned guru explains a path to higher awareness, while his assistant walks among the meditating disciples and prods them into the correct posture. 

When I first read those words, I had to laugh out loud. I’m no guru, but obviously Goldsmith’s imagery relates much more obviously to the actual realities of my life than anything about a gymnasium. Reading it put a smile of recognition on my face – and as students and community members in the FCEA, I bet it put smiles on your faces too. I can’t help but think of our team of devoted tutors “prodding you into the correct posture.”   

Again, Martin Goldsmith derived these new images from meticulous biographical studies of the actual lives of people born with planets in these degrees. He only replaced Elsie Wheeler’s originals where it seemed appropriate and necessary.

• By the way, if you are drawn to work with the Sabian Symbols, here is a point that needs to be 100% clear. In working with them, the first degree of Aries starts at 0 Aries and ends at 1 degree of Aries. If, in other words, your natal Mars is in 0 Aries 38’, you read Aries 1, if it’s in 1 Aries 08’, you read Aries 2, and so on. 

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE SABIAN SYMBOLS

So here we are, having arrived at the Centennial of the birth of the Sabian Symbols. It seems appropriate to mark it. Unfortunately no exact date was recorded for when Jones and Wheeler sat together in that park in San Diego. All we know is that it happened over several days in 1925. 

In any case, a hundred years have passed, and all 360 of the symbols are still alive and kicking in one form or another in the world of contemporary astrology. At this point, they’ve been around far too long for anyone to dismiss them as a fad. Still, they’re not actually used very widely – saying that they have a “cult following” is closer to the truth. The sorts of highly intuitive astrologers who might also be drawn to Tarot cards or dream interpretation do well with them. Meanwhile, more linear thinkers tend to shrug their shoulders. But only a fool would reject them entirely. Like astrology itself, give them a chance and they will prove themselves to you.

Australian astrologer Lynda Hill is probably their most prominent current advocate. Her website is fun and impressive: https://sabiansymbols.com. Hit that link, ask a question, click the nebula, and – boom – a Sabian Symbol appears “at random,” often casting light on the question you asked. Obviously, that kind of divinatory process is more like Tarot cards or the I Ching than astrology – but those systems work too.

I’ve played with the Sabian Symbols myself for years. I find them intriguing and delightful. I mean, who can read rabbits in faultless human attire parade with dignity without smiling? That’s Cancer 8, by the way. In the early years of my astrological practice, I occasionally used them with clients, with mixed results. Once again, my more intuitive, Neptunian clients could relate to them more easily than my more “Earth-toned” ones. I no longer use the Sabian symbols in my practice. But I still find them fascinating.

Maybe you will too.

Stories and metaphors build the bridge that connects you to your client’s heart. Without them, an astrological session can feel abstract and “heady.” Even the most shopworn figures of speech can enliven a session. “You’ll be up the creek without a paddle” might mean exactly the same thing as “you will encounter difficulty.” It just says it in a way that sinks in a little deeper. 

As I am sure you figured out immediately, “up the creek without a paddle” is a familiar cliché. You won’t win the Pulitzer Prize for using it. The point is that it works and it adds a hint of color to what you are saying. But maybe you can be a little more creative. Try this: “you’ll feel like you’ve arrived at the airport without your passport.” Or this: “You’ll step into the spotlight only to realize that you’ve totally blanked out on your lines.”

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry? Still no, but at least those words are a bit more original.

Do you have to be verbally creative – an artist with words – in order to be a successful astrologer? Putting it in such extreme terms probably goes a bridge too far. But creativity really helps!  Presenting a lively astrological picture to a client requires technical skill, truth, and sincerity – but it also benefits from a large dollop of performance art. Boring astrologers tend not to see many repeat clients – and that’s true even if their work is accurate and sound. A professional reading typically takes an hour or two. If you actually want to hold someone’s attention for that long, you can’t just drone on as if you were reading from a computer manual. Your language has to be interesting, engaging, and colorful. That’s simply part of the skill-set that animates our craft.

TEACHING CREATIVITY

Can creativity be taught? Talk about a fraught subject! Obviously, it would be unrealistic to imagine that we could all become as dramatic and eloquent as William Butler Yeats or Maya Angelou. Still, Ms. Angelou has some good advice for us. She once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” 

Practice, practice, practice, in other words. 

And don’t be shy! Remember, from an astrological perspective, creativity is in the domain of the 5th house, the “house of children.” To be successful at it, you’ve got to loosen up. You’ve got to feel like a kid faced with building blocks. As poet Sylvia Plath said, “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” To that, I might add “self-consciousness.” So while you’re experimenting with turning your words into images, metaphors, and stories, remember to have some fun with the process. Be like a child. With creativity, fun is actually part of the method. The more fun you are having, the more you are cooperating with your own unconscious mind. And that’s the mysterious source of all inspiration anyway. The more you dance with it, the better you’ll get at surrendering to it. 

An added bonus is that when an impactful image pops unexpectedly out of your mouth, you’ll remember it. Soon you’ll have a treasure house of imagery in your head ready to be rolled out even if you’re not feeling particularly creative that day.

What I want to attempt now is something I am not even sure is possible. Creativity is so personal that it’s not something I can teach, at least not in the same way as I might teach astrological theory. But given the very precise strictures which underlie all astrological thinking, I believe that I can offer you a structural template for creating your own arsenal of original images. You can think of what follows the same way that you thought of a coloring book when you were kid. I’ll help you create the outlines, then I encourage you to grab your crayons and take it from there.

THE TEMPLATE

In every astrological situation, we naturally have at least a planet, a sign, and a house. Each one serves its own purpose and also flavors the whole. Making the three of them dance together is the heart of our craft. We know that one possibility is that they wind up cooperating with each other and thus fulfill some higher purpose – but they can also stomp on each others’ toes and create an embarrassing, pointless mess. Any honest, effective story we tell our clients has to cover both of those bases.

Here’s the structural template:

Step One: What part of your life – what basic needs and drives – are we talking about?

(Look to the planet)

Step Two: What exactly does that planet want? What does it need?

(Look to the sign)

Step Three: Where is it happening? How should the planet act in order to get its needs met?

(Look to the house)

Step Four: How might you make a mess of it?  

(Look to the dark side of planet and sign)

Step Five: What would that mistake look like? Where would we see it? 

(Look to the dark side of house)

In applying this basic template, everything initially depends on your academic knowledge of the astrological symbols. It’s with those abstract ideas that we create your “coloring book,” making sure that all the outlines are in the right places. After that, you get out your crayons and let the fun begin.

ROLL THE DICE

Out come my trusty, if somewhat battle-scarred, astro dice. I roll them and I see Venus in Pisces in the 4th house. Let’s plug that configuration into our template. 

As you know, all the symbols in astrology are multidimensional. To keep us safe from being overwhelmed intellectually (and thus slaughtering our creativity), we can focus on one set of basics, then later move on to another set of basics if we feel like it. With Venus, let’s start with relationships – those are something that pretty much everyone is interested in. (With an artist, you might follow the same template, but with a focus on artistic inspiration. That’s Venus too. At a deeper level, we might explore the optimal pathways to peace and relief from stress. There are many Venusian possibilities, in other words. Pick one, and off we go. In this case, let’s choose love.) 

Step One: So what basic needs and drives does Venus represent? It’s about who to love and how to love. How to recognize a natural partner. How to make relationships work.

Step Two: With Venus in Pisces, for any of that to truly blossom, there is a driving need for a strong sense of a spiritual connection. With such a person, we may talk, but we don’t always need words in order to communicate. When we look into each other’s eyes, there is a feeling of unguarded openness. I sense that my soul is seeing your soul and vice versa. I also know that we both know that.

Step Three: In the 4th house, we are looking for a kind of “family feeling.” Houses are always about behaviors, and in this case it’s the behavior of relationships that last – ones that are characterized by mutual commitment to “the long, shared story.” The 4th house also implies sharing our “psychological selves” – our dreams and our feelings. Think of people trusting each other with their vulnerabilities, then ask yourself: what does that look like behaviorally?

Step Four: Here we enter the darker side of the equation. Venus often makes messes by focusing so much on maintaining a relationship with the other person that it forgets about its relationship with itself. Pisces makes messes by losing track of reality and slipping into fantasy-land or into patterns of escapism.

Step Five: Assuming we slip into the errors in Step Four, the dark 4th house result would be self-protective emotional withdrawal, a soul “going underground,” at least for a while. Maybe we go back into therapy after a heartbreaking relationship failure – and while that’s far from a dysfunctional response, it’s hardly the happiest one. Remember: what we were shooting for was something more like living happily ever after.

TURNING IT INTO A STORY

Here’s the bull’s eye. Having absorbed those five technical steps, let your human wisdom and experience kick in. Feel the meaning of all those words we just said. Make them human. What might all of this look like in real life? The trick to nailing this alchemy is actually pretty easy, but students often get so caught up in the technical side of astrology that they miss it. You’ve got to feel what the symbols are telling you. Plug them into your experience. It’s like turning them into a person, almost as if you are writing a novel. Turn them into an imaginary friend if you want – that’s a trick I do all the time.  

Over and over again in our 306 Master Class, I’ve seen students tackle a configuration by correctly stating all the theoretical material that they’ve memorized about it. That’s terrific and necessary. They’re off to a good start. But it’s when I press them with a specific question or situation that brings the configuration down to earth that they often light up. I see them cross the line from rote memorization into true creative helpfulness. 

If you know no astrology at all, but a friend pours her heart out to you about some complicated situation in her life, you very probably do a fine job of supporting her. That wisdom is already there inside you. The heart of this whole process lies in building a bridge between that innate wisdom and the astrological symbols. The symbols become a person to you, and you speak to that person – with a bit of supernatural guidance from your hard-won knowledge of astrological theory.

When it comes to creating the story that illuminates all of this, there’s no one single right answer, so don’t worry about finding it. Throughout human history, one out of every 144 people has had Venus in Pisces in the 4th house (twelve signs times twelve houses). Each one of them has lived it in his or her own way. Color within those established lines, but feel free to color creatively – just make sure that you don’t add any major lines that aren’t actually there!

Here’s another hint: you’re really going to need two stories here, not just one. The first is about getting it right and the second one is the cautionary tale about getting it wrong.

• Keep it as simple and direct as possible. 

A classic rookie mistake is feeling as if you have to be Leo Tolstoy writing War and Peace. You don’t! Don’t overdo it. Don’t write a novel. Cut to the chase. You just need to make the point in vivid terms that cut right through to the human heart of your client. Because there are so many configurations in any chart, in a full reading you’ll need a lot of imagery. Being too windy about each individual one would make the session too draining, both for you and for your client.

VOILÀ!

So, putting it all together,  with Venus in Pisces in the 4th house, here’s an example of what you might say:

Their eyes met in the candlelight. There were no words. No words were possible. They’d not known each for very long – or had they already known each other for a thousand years? Months later they were married, but to the two of them, that was the moment in which their souls were married. They had found each other again across the stormy seas of birth and death.

Boom. In those sixty-seven romantic words, we see the high side of Venus in Pisces in the 4th house expressed quickly in telegraphic, evocative language. I timed myself. It only took me twenty-seven seconds to say them out loud. And to the client with that configuration, those words will sink into their heart like a stone and stay there forever. You’ve given that person more of a feeling for Venus in Pisces in the 4th house than he or she would ever get by attending a tedious lecture about attachment theory at an academic astrology conference.

Eyes meeting wordlessly in candlelight – what could be more resonant with a Piscean Venus? We could almost leave it at that. The rest of the mystical, romantic language just amplifies that point. The references to marriage highlight the 4th house dimension of the configuration, so they are important too. The point is that, while in those sixty-seven words there’s not a single astrological term, you can easily see the fingerprints of Venus, Pisces, and the 4th house. You know they are there – but to your astrologically-naive client, these are the words that actually hit the target. Astrological jargon alone can never do that unless we’ve studied it ourselves – then it’s the richest language in the world. But most of our clients haven’t studied it, at least not in depth.

What about the cautionary story? What about translating Steps Four and Five into a warning? That is naturally an important part of our work, but it has to be handled mindfully. Here’s one way to spell c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e: leaving the client with the impression that with this darker story you’ve just made a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a warning! Make sure that point is as clear as a bell before you launch into the tale. After you’ve carefully set the tone that way, here one path such a story might take:

Everything was always so perfect with her lover Rowan that Avery never wanted to ruin things by polluting their pure spiritual connection with any negativity. Why bother with petty, ego-driven expressions of need or discomfort? They’d made a silent soul-contract to keep that kind of poison out of their relationship. They’d vowed to live on the higher ground for the rest of eternity. Three months later, Rowan was in love with someone else. Meanwhile Avery was looking for a very positive, supportive psychotherapist with a truly spiritual orientation – ideally someone with a Pisces Moon who would accentuate the positive side of things. 

Tell that second tale and there’s a good chance that your client will chortle a bit when you get to those last words. Avery apparently hadn’t learned the lesson that the relationship with Rowan offered: even with Venus in Pisces, you’ve got to do the Pluto-work that sustains genuine intimacy.

With these words, what you have done as an astrological counselor however is quite deft – “Avery” is, of course, the doppelganger of your client’s own shadow-side. You’ve said what needs to be said in terms of cautionary counsel, but you’ve skillfully side-stepped any direct assault on your client’s pride, dignity, and related defense mechanisms. He or she is far more likely to get the message when it’s aimed at a safer, less triggering target. That’s why you created “Avery” in the first place.

THE LAST WORD

Our five steps are basic astrological theory. All the creativity in the world won’t make you a competent astrologer if you lack that academic knowledge. In our quest for the right story, we always start there. By breaking our understanding down into this simple template and using it as your foundation, you can get your story launched on the correct foot. 

As you find your own way in our craft, a good practice is to use this template in order to formally lay out any configuration that you are analyzing. Do it step by step. Jot down notes if that helps, just as I did above under the “Roll the Dice” heading. Do all that and you’ll have a solid foundation under you as you move toward actually creating a story.

• Digest Steps One, Two, and Three and turn them into a simple, human situation that shines a light on the evolutionary intention of that planet, sign, and house combination.

• Digest Steps Four and Five to help you create the balancing, “tale of the dark side.”

Above all, remember Maya Angelou’s wise words: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Practice, practice, practice! And take heart from Sylvia Plath: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath’s words bring us right back to the 5th house: in the end, we’ve all got to trust our inner children. Give them the coloring book, but let them choose the crayons. Then stand back. 

Astrology is profoundly serious work and astrology is fun too. There’s no opposition or paradox there. The two ideas are interdependent, and every successful counseling astrologer embodies both of them.  

The June 2025 edition of this newsletter was titled, What Greece Meant To Me. That was probably the most personal essay I’ve ever published in this context. It had to do with a rather traumatic former life of mine a couple thousand years ago. I was apparently a Gnostic Christian then – and just possibly the kind of astrology that I experienced in that long-ago prior lifetime had a lot to do with me becoming an evolutionary astrologer today. 

There’s a problem though – ostensibly, what we call evolutionary astrology only dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. How could I have experienced anything like it almost two thousand years ago? Strange as it may seem, I have come to believe that a Gnostic living in the Roman Empire of the second century C.E. would actually find much that was quite familiar in the work that we contemporary evolutionary astrologers are doing today, at least at the philosophical level.

WHAT EXACTLY IS GNOSTICISM?

Say NOSS-ta-siz-im, by the way – the “G” is just there to confuse everyone.

Cards on the table: I should start by saying that what I intend to write about here puts me on shaky ground in many ways. My one leg to stand on is that I did earn a degree in Religion from the University of North Carolina in 1971, and I studied Gnosticism there under Dr. John Schutz. But I am not an academic scholar and so in writing about this complex, ambiguous subject I am already skating on thin ice. 

An even more basic problem is that the word “Gnosticism” itself is very slippery. It’s a modern label for a diverse set of beliefs that existed around the Mediterranean basin at about the same time that Christianity was arising. Importantly, many Gnostics were astrological in their thinking – but then again many were not. Gnostics were generally “Christian,” but not all of them were. Many, but not all of them, accepted reincarnation. Eventually, as Christianity became more institutionalized, Gnosticism was even declared a heresy – still, there are some clear traces of it in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John.

As exotic as that ancient history might sound, there are actually striking parallels between those faraway times and the world of modern pop spirituality. Think of one of those shops where you can buy crystals, incense, and Tibetan singing bowls. Think of the books on the bookshelf. They are diverse – as diverse in fact as what was being passed around the Mediterranean world almost two thousand years ago. Today in such a shop, you might for example find a volume that advocates thinking only positive thoughts sitting next to Steven Forrest’s The Book of Pluto. A couple of millennia ago, the Roman Empire – and early Christianity – were in very similar states. Then, as now, there was no Holy See to declare what was true and what was heretical. There wasn’t even an official Bible – the Bible as we know it today was only assembled about two hundred years later, near the end of the 4th century, C.E. And of course the traditional Roman gods and goddesses still had their temples and their devotees. What about Sol Invictus – a religion that very nearly filled the space that Christianity came to fill once the dust settled? Zoroastrianism, anyone? They were all there, all active. 

Gnosticism arose in that cultural matrix and itself reflected much of that complexity. For everything we might say about it, there are counter-currents and exceptions. In preparing this essay, I’ve been reading and rereading the historical literature. I’ve learned that, when it comes to Gnosticism, serious academics are all over the map on the subject. There are even frequent arguments about whether a given text is in fact Gnostic or not. 

The point is that it would be wise to take everything that I am about to write as an impressionistic approximation. For clarity’s sake, I’m also going to leave out a lot of really interesting material – for one example, the way Gnostics were generally much more egalitarian on gender issues compared to many of the early “church fathers.”

Before I dive in, let’s also remember that astrology was everywhere two thousand years ago. What we now know as Hellenistic astrology had exploded. Personal horoscopes were being drawn. And nobody had Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto in their chart – Saturn marked the limits of the known solar system. That’s a fact that will soon become pivotal in our understanding. 

THE GNOSTIC WORLD VIEW

Long ago, human souls fell from a realm of Light – called the Pleroma – into the realm of darkness and matter. Here in this fallen world there is only suffering, pain, and disappointment. The divine spark of our souls is imprisoned in materiality and blinded by it. We mistake ourselves for flesh and bone. Our only hope lies in remembering our true natures and finding our way back to the long-lost realm of Light. At the heart of that remembering was something called gnosis. Often translated as “knowledge,” it represents far more than book learning. Gnosis was something closer to a direct experience of our transcendent natures. You could call it enlightenment. 

So far, we are in familiar mystical territory. 

In Gnostic cosmology, there is an ultimate divinity called the Monad. The term translates neatly as “The One” or even as “Oneness.” For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave out the mythology – suffice to say that through a terrible error, another “god” was created. This was the evil Demiurge – often named Yaldabaoth. He created the material world into which human souls fell and were imprisoned. Worse, he tricked us into thinking that he, not the Monad, represented the ultimate reality.

In the astrological versions of Gnosticism, this Demiurge is identified with the planet Saturn. The lost realm of light lies out beyond Saturn, while the material realm of darkness lies within its orbit. 

Here’s the heart of the matter. This Demiurge created an evil masterpiece: he convinced humanity that he – not the Monad – was the ultimate god. But he is emphatically not the Monad – he is an imposter and a fake. Like Saturn’s lower expressions, he is a heavy-handed law giver. He judges. He demands worship. He punishes disobedience. He says “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” And by convincing us that materiality is our true nature, he stands between us and the Light, blinding us to its very existence. 

• One of the many reasons that Gnosticism was declared a heresy is that it often equated the Biblical Yahweh or Jehovah with Yaldabaoth, thus framing the entirety of what we came to know as the Old Testament in a distinctly non-canonical light. In Gnosticism, the “God of our Fathers” essentially became equated with Satan.

As souls tumbled down into the material realm under the whip of the Saturnian Demiurge, they first fatally fell prey to Saturn’s illusion that material reality is the only reality – that there is nothing beyond Saturn, in other words. Think of the first Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In the Gnostic context, those words might give us all chills. That’s Yaldabaoth speaking, not the Monad.

Then as humanity’s fall continued, we absorbed all the bad, soul-blinding qualities of each planet. Jupiter gave us pride and gluttony. Mars gave us rage and violence. Venus gave us lust. Mercury tricked us into thinking we lived in our heads. The Moon made us lazy, timid, and moody. The Sun made each of us believe that we were the center of the universe – it gave us egotism, in other words.

The final result? Here we sit in this degraded condition, hopeless cases – unless gnosis ignites within us and we begin to awaken to our true natures and head back up to the Pleroma, the realm of the true God, the Monad. 

How do we accomplish that ascent? Instead of taking on the negative qualities of each planet, we evolve upwardly through them, struggling to take on their positive qualities. The Sun gives us faith in ourselves, the Moon gives us the ability to care for others. Mercury gives us alertness and the desire to learn. Venus teaches us love. Mars gives us courage – and perhaps a selfless willingness to give our lives for others. Jupiter fills us with healthy pride. And even Saturn – evil Yaldabaoth – finally gives us the spiritual discipline we need to find the Pleroma where it’s been 

hiding all along, deep in our own eternal essence.

PERSPECTIVE

Let me reiterate that Gnosticism was extremely diverse. There can be no coherent summary of Gnosticism that does not grievously over-simplify everything, as I have doubtlessly done here. You could find Gnostics who believed everything that I just wrote and Gnostics who would argue with most of it. In fact, if you had a time machine and went back to the Holy Lands in the second century A.D. and started looking around for a “Gnostic” to interview, you would not have found anyone who answered to that label. As we have seen, the word itself didn’t even exist back then – it’s purely the invention of 19th and 20th century historians of religion. 

In writing this essay, I’ve drawn on several sources, including the Nag Hammadi scrolls which were discovered in Egypt in 1945 and which vastly multiplied the number of Gnostic texts to which scholars had access. In case you want to pursue any of this more deeply, I’ll list the three best books I found at the end. I also owe a great debt to Robert Hand who delivered a terrific talk at a NORWAC banquet some years ago in which he covered similar territory. He ended that talk with a memorable meditation, taking us all upward through the planetary spheres. 

THE ROOTS OF EVOLUTIONARY ASTROLOGY?

The essential philosophical parallels between Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology are very clear. 

• Both systems are unabashedly metaphysical and they are both based on an astrological model of the evolution of consciousness. 

• In both systems, the astrological symbols have both dark sides and higher meanings. How we embody them is up to us. With “gnosis,” we can get them right. Without it, we are eaten up by the traps they set for us.

• As we trace the pattern of increasingly positive responses to each planet, we see the outline of a systematic evolutionary path leading step-by-step toward something in the category of Heaven, Enlightenment, or Salvation. 

• Again as in both Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology, one lifetime is not long enough for anyone to make the journey to full gnosis. The idea of reincarnation solves that. 

Who knows how Gnostic astrologers were working two thousand years ago? Was personal astrology part of their practice? If so, in helping people reach toward the Pleroma, did they have specific advice for someone whose Mercury was in Cancer and the third house? To my knowledge, there are no surviving records of any of that. Perhaps they were lost. Perhaps they never existed. I’ve not studied Hellenistic astrology myself, at least not in a deep way. Maybe someone immersed in that field such as Chris Brennan or Demetra George would be aware of connections of which I am unaware. 

Concerning all of that, one striking thought has been pressing at me ever since many of us in the school made our pilgrimage to Greece in May 2025. Fifteen years ago, in preparing the concluding chapter of my book Yesterday’s Sky, I wrote these words:

I cannot prove what I am about to say, but my intuitive feeling in developing the principles that underlie this book was more one of remembering something than of creating it. I believe that the knowledge of most of these principles existed in the past. To be sure, there is no recorded precedent in astrological history for these particular techniques. From any academic astrological perspective, they are new. For whatever their worth, they were clearly created by a group of astrologers, mostly in America, over the past generation or two. But my guts tell me to question that.

Now, in reflecting on Gnosticism, I am finally feeling some concrete, academic support for what was only an instinctive feeling fifteen or twenty years ago. Is evolutionary astrology in fact that old? Or perhaps even older? Were the first evolutionary astrologers actually Gnostics? Maybe it depends ultimately on how we define both terms. In any case, humans have been using the map the planets provide us to help souls find their way home for a long, long time. Gnostics did it. We do it. And who knows where the Gnostics got the idea? Egypt? China? Atlantis? 

All of us who practice evolutionary astrology can be proud to be part of that ancient lineage. We’re links in a long, sacred chain – a chain that is only growing stronger during our time in the world. 

Are we the new Gnostics? You decide.

________________________________

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. Second, enlarged edition, 1963.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels, 1989.

Rosicrucian Digest. Gnosticism, Volume 11, #2, 2011

Have a look at this chart for the afternoon of July 21st. Uranus is just over the line into Gemini, while the Sun is in the last degree of Cancer. Only a little over one degree separates them from being in a perfect 60-degree sextile aspect. But they are in the “wrong” signs – Gemini and Cancer are adjacent in the Zodiac, not separated by one sign like a “true” sextile. Strictly in terms of sign-energy, that’s not a “harmonious” sextile – it’s a clashy semi-sextile. 

Try thinking musically: are we looking at the harmonious sound of middle C with an E played above it or the cacophonous sound of a C and a D played together?

I believe that the answer is a little of both and confronting that confusing insight brings us face to face with a fundamental paradox built into aspect theory – one that we can state as a simple question: are aspects between planets as we usually think or are they actually between signs?

As an astrologer steeped in modern tradition, when I was younger that question never crossed my mind. I knew that aspects were “obviously” between planets. We might quibble about orbs, but the basic idea was clear – a sextile was simply a 60-degree angle between any two astrological points. I have to thank my friends in the world of Hellenistic astrology for offering an alternative perspective: that aspects are actually about the relationships among the signs themselves. Planets are only along for the ride. 

That second sign-based perspective makes practical astrological sense too. In fact most of us think that way all the time when we’re reflecting on the astrology of relationships. In the modern pop astrological framework, “everybody knows that a Cancer shouldn’t marry an Aries.” (That’s not actually an idea I would endorse, but we certainly hear it a lot.) Note how no one who makes that kind of pronouncement is fussing about degrees. They would all agree that someone born on June 23rd was a Cancer and that someone born on April 18th was an Aries and that any relationship between them would be a catastrophe. 

But think about it: an early Cancer and a late Aries like that might actually have a close sextile aspect between their natal Suns. So is that good news or bad? 

In my own practice of synastry, I actually do tend to use these whole sign aspects – any Cancer planets in Hollister’s chart are effectively square to any Aries planets in Palmer’s chart. Regardless of which planets we are talking about, one is charged with Aries energy and the other is charged with Cancer energy and that basic tension between aggression and sensitivity will make itself felt in their relationship regardless of the planets’ degree positions. 

In synastry, I pay particular attention to that “whole sign” approach with interaspects between the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant, along with Venus and Mars. Meanwhile, with the rest of the planets, I tend toward a more modern, purely geometrical, reading of aspects – which naturally sometimes embraces planets being in the “wrong sign” for the aspect, as we just saw in our opening example of that Sun/Uranus sextile. 

The angle is right, but the signs are wrong.

Still speaking of my own practice, with transits and progressions I use the modern geometrical definitions of aspects – degrees of separation, not sign positions. Ditto for my work with birthcharts – although even in birthchart work, I often make an exception. If a Scorpio with a Leo Moon comes to me for a reading, I’ll almost always talk about the integrative challenges presented by that “Sun/Moon square” regardless of their degree positions. Forget about degrees – Scorpio is Scorpio and Leo is Leo and there will always be some core archetypal tensions between those two signs.

Note how I keep saying “in my practice.” All of this is just what has worked for me effectively in the counseling room. It’s what I have learned in my daily life as an astrologer as I tried to sort out this basic sign-vs-planet ambiguity that’s inherent in aspect theory. At a theoretical level, I am all over the map with this question, in other words. I claim no consistency at all – only the lessons of experience. 

• Are aspects geometrical angles between planets as the modern astrologers say or are they archetypal relationships among signs as our Mediterranean astrological ancestors thought?

The more I wrestle with that question, the more I believe that the best answer is “yes.” Both perspectives are true. And that means that the living reality of aspects is actually a very slippery subject.

Still, some dimensions of the mystery are pretty clear from our actual experience. Let me give you an example. You solar Aquarians out there – are you feeling Pluto’s energies in your lives now? Easy question, right? I’m guessing that the answer in most cases will be yes, even if your Sun falls near the end of Aquarius. Pluto in Aquarius is currently impacting all Aquarians – that’s a demonstration of whole sign aspects in action. Meanwhile, I suspect that if your Sun lies in the first few degrees of Aquarius, right now you’re really in “Pluto City.”  It’s a lot more vivid and intense for you than it is for those late-Aquarians.

That’s just one example, but it contains a key practical principle.

• Whole sign aspects work in practical, observable ways, but when an aspect moves within modern orbs, its action is vastly more dramatic and obvious.  

That’s all pretty intuitive. We can take it a practical step further by remembering two of our cardinal principles of interpretation: (a) first things first, and (b) you’ll never have enough time to “talk about everything.” Strategic editing of our presentations is fundamental to achieving clarity with our clients. And that means that in practice you’ll often leave out the effects of whole sign aspects even though they are real simply because they don’t pass the “first things first” test. At any given moment other configurations are probably more pressing. 

In my experience, all that is true both in a transits and progressions context and also with natal chart analysis. 

HYBRID VIGOR

We are still left with the knotty question I raised right at the beginning of this essay: what do we do with aspects that are in the wrong signs? I was taught to call them “Out of Quality” aspects, but I suspect that just saying “in the wrong sign” is more common nowadays. Certainly if you put it that way, any astrologer would understand what you meant.

The truth of it is that such aspects are truly hybrid. In our initial example, there is a strong sextile between the Sun and Uranus, suggesting mutual excitation and encouragement. At the same time, we cannot ignore the underlying archetypal tension between Cancer and Gemini. All of those levels of interaction must be taken into account as we unravel the full significance of this aspect. 

This is a good time to remember an overarching principle of evolutionary astrology: all aspects are about integration. With this Sun/Uranus situation, we just have a bit more integrating to do.

Let’s break it down. There’s a powerful push toward individuation implicit in the Uranian energies. Via the sextile, Uranus is stimulating the solar ego to act boldly and unilaterally on its own behalf. The risk of heedlessness and insensitivity is worth mentioning, but basically this aspect is a big green light for decisive, self-oriented action. 

All of that is based on the strict “it’s a sextile” interpretation, and that is definitely part of the truth – but let’s not forget that the clashing undercurrent of the semi-sextile between Gemini and Cancer is operating too. Remember though – in evolutionary astrology, we never say the words “bad aspect.” That dissonance can be helpful even if it’s unpleasant. Think of it like this: maybe you’ve got a friend who loves you enough to tell you things that you don’t always want to hear – there’s an example of a so-called “bad aspect” in action. They can be good for you in a “corrective” sort of way.

So, the case of our Sun/Uranus sextile on July 21, what does this “wrong sign” perspective add to our understanding?

The Sun is in Cancer, so it’s sensitive. It knows it could get hurt. It is therefore inclined toward caution. Meanwhile, Uranus in Gemini is all, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

There’s the tension. That’s how the semi-sextile dimensions of this aspect play out. They add notes of uncertainty and ambivalence to the energetic matrix. At their best, the Sun and Uranus both benefit from it. Cancer’s caution might help the person evade some nasty surprises. Uranus being in alert, open-minded Gemini might open up channels to some new “outside the box” information that could make a helpful, fresh contribution to whatever situation is arising. 

All in all, what’s trying to happen here is indeed centered on the bold pulse of individuation and self-claiming that the modern “by-the-orbs” sextile promises – but in this case it is tempered and made wiser by some uncomfortable yet timely doubts and questions. 

You can, in other words, feel both the effects of the geometrical aspect and the whole sign one.

And that’s how aspects “in the wrong signs” actually work.

Just a quick word before I begin. The essay that follows is a lot more personal than what I usually write. No lie – some of it is me doing therapy on myself! But I hope it’s more than that. What I’m hoping to demonstrate here is something like “living evolutionary astrology” – an approach not just to our craft, but to life . . . one where we let the symbols interact with the rest of the clues that experience gives us, letting them help us in our struggle to actively penetrate more deeply into the reality of the psyche – yours and mine!

My column for September 2024 was titled “Greece, The Moon and Me.” In essence, it was about how I was feeling spooked about our then-upcoming Greek adventure. No need to repeat all those astrological details here. Suffice to say that fifty years earlier, with Pluto opposing my Moon, the door to Greece slammed in my face. Now, with Pluto sextiling my Moon, it was opening again. Mix a trip to a foreign land with unresolved Pluto issues and you can see why I felt nervous. Let me add that I have a Pluto/Descendant astrocartographic line running through Greece and you get the picture: as Michelle and I boarded the flights to Athens, something karmic was definitely afoot for me. Skeletons in my psychic closet were beginning to stir.

With my natal 12th house Scorpio south node dead-square my Mars, any evolutionary astrologer could see that some of that ripening karma would make a good horror movie. Toss in the fact that transiting Pluto is currently conjuncting that Mars while squaring the node, and my chart was locked and loaded for something pretty intense to happen. Should I get on that airplane at all?

I try never to let astrology scare me, but maintaining that good attitude took some work this time.

Right on schedule, a month before we left for Greece, I basically went blind in my right eye. I had a sudden retinal detachment. I’m fortunate to be living in the age of lasers when such a thing can be fixed, but it’s still a long, difficult process. As I write these words, I’m still unable to see properly and I’m facing a second and third eye surgery. Karma? Since my early thirties, I’ve been aware that I was intentionally blinded in a prior life. My first inkling of it happened when a very gentle eye doctor tried to fit me with contact lenses. That was the only time in my life when I’ve experienced a literal cold sweat. My reflexes simply would not allow it. 

(Mars squaring a south node often suggests unresolved past life issues around being hurt by some kind of violence. Further focusing that idea, our five senses are symbolized by both Mercury and the 3rd house. That’s me – in my chart, Mars is separated from Mercury by about one degree and they’re both in the 3rd house. Both planets also make a square to the south node nearly exactly. A very literal interpretation: violence involving the eyes and ears!) 

Why would anyone want to blind me? Well, Mercury and the 3rd house are not only about the five senses – they’re about speech too. That Mars is in rebellious Aquarius, and since Mars rules my south node, it represents me in the prior life. Putting all these pieces together, it’s pretty clear that my big mouth once got me into trouble with some nasty characters. 

So with transiting Pluto triggering all of that, I arrived in Athens as a one-eyed man. Mister Cyclops.The lack of normal binocular vision made everything blurry. Having no depth perception meant walking on uneven ground was difficult. Going up and down stairs was treacherous. Because of my hearing loss, I do a lot of lip-reading – but bad vision made that harder. And if you’re from the USA, just try lip-reading someone “speaking Australian!” Because their words sound different, their lips are moving differently as they form them. During our whole Greek adventure, I probably understood about half of what was said to me. As you can imagine, that’s a trigger for constant low-level stress. Because of the surgery and my eye problems, I also felt old and weak – and paradoxically both isolated by not being able to hear and yet dependent on others because of not being able to see. 

All of that makes simple psychological sense in the present tense – but with Pluto and the nodes in the mixture, something far deeper was happening. This was not the first time that I’d had those feelings. They were surfacing again. It was time to revisit them, and perhaps to make a more conscious response to them. 

• Remember: it’s the south node of the Moon that we are talking about. What reincarnates most directly is what the prior life felt like. 

TWO QUICK IMAGES

At Mycenae, I made my way up a hill fairly easily, but coming back down the other side was rough because it turned out to be a lot steeper. To avoid stumbling, I was taking baby steps. One of our class members – Gabriele Ranfagni, from Italy – kindly saw my plight and let me steady myself with a hand on his shoulder as we descended. Talk about deja vu! I experienced a distinct emotional memory of being a blind man being led by a friend. I don’t believe this was the first time that Gabriele ever helped me walk either. Later I learned that he has the south node in Taurus and conjunct his Moon, all opposite my own south node by sign. In the formal language of evolutionary astrology, the face he presented to me in a prior life was a solid, steadying, nurturing one. Once again the present echoed the past. I was asking the universe to set everything up again, including the same cast of characters. I needed another look at it.

• In times when the nodes are stimulated, we meet people we knew in prior lifetimes. Had Gabriele actually been there for me when I was newly blind many centuries ago?

My second image is more embarrassing. As I walked around in Athens with our students, it was hard for me to keep up their pace. I was struggling to not trip over the uneven sidewalks. A good friend tried to take my arm to steady me, but I actually didn’t want that help since it threw my balance off even more. I was afraid that despite her good intentions she would unwittingly make me fall and that I would bring her down with me. When I asked her not to do that, she playfully teased me about how “Capricorns can’t accept help” – which of course contains a kernel of truth. But I was preoccupied with trying not to trip. Uncharacteristically, I snapped at her, and she didn’t deserve that.

• In times when the nodes are stimulated, we experience distorted or exaggerated emotional reactions. Feelings from the past loom up out of the psychic depths. If you’re mindful enough to notice, those exaggerations are a certain sign that you are re-experiencing an old hurt – and that you can possibly now respond to it more consciously.

TWO THINGS I REALLY DON’T WANT TO WRITE ABOUT

When Pluto knocks on your door, unconscious material is trying to become conscious – that’s our axiom. But why was it made unconscious in the first place? Naturally the answer is because the perception was unacceptable to the conscious mind – too threatening to our egos or our self-image for us to integrate it. There’s a sure sign that you are on the right track with surfacing karma: you notice that you’d rather do anything – go to the dentist or clean the house – than think about it. While I was in Greece, synchronicity dished up two examples of exactly this sort of resistance in me. In my original draft of this essay, I didn’t include them – the Dark Side of the Force almost won. As you read these two tales, you may wonder why it was hard for me to write about them – they’re actually pretty simple and not really so embarrassing. Again, the answer is not in the stories themselves – it’s in the way they resonate with something unresolved from long, long ago.

Here’s the first story. In Athens, Michelle and I were ripped off by a taxi driver. I’ll spare you the details, which are as tawdry as most crimes. The essence of it is that I trusted him and he used that trust to trick me. How many taxi cab rides have I taken in this lifetime? I’ve never had any trouble, so my mindset was one of trust and normalcy. As soon I realized what had happened, my mind immediately leapt ahead – I could see that if I challenged him, it would quickly escalate into a police situation and that the police would side with him. Somehow I just knew that – or felt that I did. He drove away and I was out a pile of Euros.

Why did this petty little crime happen? Remember: my astrocartographic Pluto/Descendant line runs through Greece. The Descendant – or cusp of the 7th house – is always about trust, so there’s the connection. In terms of the karma that was ripening for me in Greece, one piece of it is about me trusting the wrong people in a prior lifetime. It’s about betrayal. What about my certainty that the police would turn against me? Does that reflect a prior life situation in which “the authorities” were corrupt and arrayed in opposition to me? I think so. 

Clues, clues, clues . . . because of synchronicity, they are everywhere. And during Plutonian times, your own mind doesn’t want to register any of them.

The second story is a weird one. A woman whom I don’t know emailed me about an astrological theory she had developed. She wanted to send me some of her writing. Because of my public visibility, that kind of request happens quite a lot. I’m generally happy to help. Oddly, she insisted that she wanted me to be the one to write about her ideas. That’s something I had never heard before. In any case, the next thing I knew she sent me a second, rather “superior,” email denouncing me for being “mired in this world.” It felt like she was trying to position herself as my salvation. 

A self-appointed guru whom I had never met arrives unbidden with a plan for my future, claiming detailed knowledge of “my case?” What was she thinking? Me, “mired in this world?” My first instinct was to respond to her by pleading guilty as charged – and then asking, “and you’re not?” 

But I didn’t. I didn’t respond at all. And at this point I’ve not heard back from her or received the pages she was planning to send me. 

Weirdly, the word she used for the God she was quoting on my behalf was “the Monad” – a term rarely heard outside of the Gnostic traditions. Stay tuned. You’ll hear about Gnosticism again very soon. Clues, clues, clues . . .

So what was that situation all about? I’d mark the whole interaction as strange but forgettable, except that it had Pluto’s eternal fingerprints on it. What I mean is that I clung to it, worried about it, planned responses in my head . . . it carried that tell-tale extra psychic charge, in other words. That’s Pluto’s signature. That little episode is another piece of my karmic puzzle, another echo from two thousand years ago. I suspect there were “spiritual” people back then who were standing in judgment of me, “worried about my soul” – the difference was that back then their judgement had far sharper teeth. This strange woman may have actually been one of them. Again, during times of nodal stimulus, we meet the very souls with whom we have unresolved karma.

PLUTO AS NODAL RULER

So far, when I’ve spoken about the ruler of my south node, I’ve been referring to Mars. As always, I feel it’s important to honor the classical rulerships. But what about my natal Pluto, Scorpio’s modern ruler? It too would have to be part of my karmic story. Pluto not only rules my south node, but it is also in a mysterious quintile aspect to it, while forming a tight quincunx to my Sun.

In our formal analytic methodology, as one of the planetary rulers of my south node, Pluto represents me in a prior life. It’s in the 9th house. Religion? Travel? It’s in Leo – was I in some position of power, “performing” somehow? Putting two and two together, was I preaching far from home? (Note the present-day corroboration: I was doing exactly that in Greece!) Add my node-ruling Mars and how my mouth got me into trouble – was what I was preaching viewed as “Aquarian” blasphemy by people who were bloody-minded enough to punish me for it? Did my intense, not-so-diplomatic, Plutonian nature press their buttons? 

Figuring out who we were in past lives is fraught business for many obvious reasons. Our ace in the hole is that we have a variety of methods for accomplishing it. Evolutionary astrology is only one of them. Intuition and dream work naturally play a big role. So can hypnotic regressions. And then there are psychics – and the good ones can be uncanny in their accuracy. Two such gifted souls have had a real impact on me in ways that are relevant to the story I am telling here.

One was my root spiritual teacher, Marian Starnes. In my early twenties, she foresaw that I would face hearing loss. She said it was because I couldn’t bear to hear the screams of people who were being tortured. (There’s a long story there.) It was many years before I realized she had gently nudged me toward a memory of having once been tortured myself and not being able to stand my own screams. I am pretty sure that being blinded was part of that experience – and that this particular bit of unpleasant karma that was now surfacing in the form of my retinal detachment.

A second psychic carries us deeper into the story. She is a woman whom I’ve never actually met in person. Her name is Mary Roach and she works in informal association with the Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach. My partner Michelle is an old friend of hers. When Michelle and I were falling in love, she had a reading with Mary in which she asked about me. Mary was very specific. Among other things, she said that I had been a Gnostic Christian sometime during the first couple of centuries A.D. In other words, almost two thousand years ago, I had been a traveling spiritual teacher banging my head against the wall of Roman pagan culture, talking about the teachings of Jesus. 

If you know the Bible at all, you’ve probably bumped into Saint Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians. Perhaps these beautiful words are familiar to you: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a clanging cymbal.” While in Greece, we actually stopped for coffee in Corinth – it’s the same place Saint Paul visited. The point is that as Christianity spread outward from the environs of Jerusalem into the larger Roman Empire, it first seeped into the lands we now know as Greece, Turkey, and Italy – where it was not always welcomed. As Mary Roach divined, I was part of that perilous evangelical process.

Mary specifically mentioned Gnosticism, echoing that weird woman’s use of the term “Monad.” (Say: NOSS-ta-siz-im) That was a real goose-bumper for me. I studied Gnosticism fairly deeply as I was earning my degree in Religion at the University of North Carolina. It resonated with me because it is in part an astrological religion. Early Christianity was extremely diverse. Gnosticism eventually was declared heretical and basically disappeared – only to be reincarnated, more or less, in the form of evolutionary astrology. That’s a big oversimplification, but it contains a germ of real truth. Suffice to say that one thing I took home from our trip to Greece was the realization that I need to revisit Gnosticism and write about it. Look for an article  down the road. 

As we contemplate these various clues, you can feel the exact nature of my former-life “heresy” coming into focus. Many of these pieces of the puzzle were in my mind before we landed in Athens, but they hadn’t yet jelled into such a clear understanding.

Let me give you one more piece of the puzzle.

ME AND GREEK MYTHOLOGY

With the group on this trip, we visited a spectacular site called Epidaurus, famous for its huge amphitheater. While there, Lisa Jones beckoned several of us down an overgrown path at the very edge of the historical area, one that seemed to be leading nowhere. There we came to the Propylaia – a sacred structure built around 300 B.C., it was once the entrance to the precinct dedicated to Asklepios, the god of healing. Not much is left there today except a stone floor and an incredible vibe. A group of about fifteen of us sat down on the stones and meditated quietly. 

As I sat there letting the energy of the Propylaia wash through me, a lightning bolt of insight entered my mind. The majority of psychologically-oriented astrologers, at least of the deeper sort, love Greek mythology and use it all the time to cast light on the symbolism of signs and planets.

Not me! I’ve never paid much attention to it at all. 

I’m not totally ignorant of those myths nor am I opposed to using them, but I have never had the slightest desire to employ the Greek myths in my astrological practice or my teaching. In the FCEA curriculum, you’ll see only a few hints of it, mostly in connection with the asteroids and Eris. Suddenly as I sat there meditating on those ancient stones, I understood why. As an early Christian missionary, what was I preaching against? Obviously the answer is the old pagan cosmology – Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang. Apparently, I still harbor a certain resistance to them now, two thousand years down the road.

At that time two millennia ago, those gods and goddesses were dead. Roman citizens were required by law to make sacrifices at their various temples. It wasn’t voluntary or joyful. People just didn’t feel it anymore. That old religion, which had once been vibrant, had become as empty an experience as what happens in many churches today. Back then, if you wanted to experience real ju-ju, if you wanted to catch fire with the holy spirit, what you needed was the new magic: Jesus Christ. As ever in history, these collective visitations of holy energy come and go – and nothing makes them dry up faster than rigid theology, a deadening, bored priesthood, and bureaucratic institutions. That’s true whether we are talking about the ancient Greek pantheon or what’s happened over the past fifteen centuries to the reality of Jesus and the original fire of the Christian path.

SO WHAT DID I LEARN IN GREECE?

I’m still processing all this – and thanks, by the way, for indulging me. I’m obviously talking a lot about myself in this edition of Master’s Musings. Writing about it is a healing process for me. As always, I hope that in telling my own story, the basic principles of evolutionary astrology shine through in a humanized way. I’m also always happy to try to illustrate how evolutionary astrology can play an active role in helping us examine our own lives. It can take us so much further than, “uh oh, here comes Pluto.” I am also sure that I still have more to uncover – Pluto will be hanging around with me for quite a while yet – but right now, I’m focusing on four practical lessons.

• None of us can make it on our own. Humans need each other. Long ago, such interdependency was forced on me in a cruel way. I resist it today because I associate it with bitterness, cruelty, and betrayal. I need to work on that! 

• Despite my age I generally do not feel old, but old is what I felt in Greece. I need to better prepare myself for that reality.

• I’ve got a ton of issues around my eyes. I don’t like anyone or anything near them. Thanks to astrological understanding, I am consciously focussing on the good will, competence, and caring of my eye surgeon, trying to let her help me replace fear with the trust she deserves. Thank you, Dr. Camille Harrison – who incidentally, it turns out, was a Classics major (!). Like most doctors today, she always needs to keep one eye on the clock, but we had a five minute discussion about Saint Augustine. Karma! 

• I really need to revisit Gnosticism. I’ve always said that I felt that I was “remembering” evolutionary astrology – that I felt that the basic system was ancient even though I had no proof of that. I think the proof has been sitting there right in front of me for fifty years, but I was unable to see it because it was locked up behind this unresolved – and unconscious – prior life wound.

So thank you, Greece and thank you, Pluto! Thank you Lisa Jones and Catie Cadge for making this journey a reality. Thank you to the 85 people from 21 countries who came to Athens and poured their good energy into the classroom. I surfed the waves of your life-force for four days of teaching and, given my weakened condition, I don’t think that I could have kept it up without your love and your soulful, intelligent attention. 

God bless our tribe and the sacred flames we feed!

On March 19, as we were preparing for one of our frequent Question-and-Answer Zoom sessions, Penelope contacted me with a minor concern about our monthly “chart winner.”  As usual, many people had submitted their charts, hoping to be the one whom we would put in the spotlight for a half hour or so at the end of the Q&A time. Penelope had done the usual drill, using a random method to pick the winner. When she had chosen, she quickly emailed me with her problem. “I am confirming the Ascendant degree with the chart winner. She was born in Brooklyn at a very specific time (3:26am), but she was not specific about exactly which Brooklyn location.”

Penelope was right. Brooklyn is big! It stretches about fifteen miles from Greenpoint in the north to Brighton Beach in the south. Was she right to worry about coming up with the wrong chart unless we knew precisely where in Brooklyn this woman was born? We all know that the place of someone’s birth is a critical element in our “holy trinity” of birth date, birth time, and  birth  location. How big an error in her Ascendant and house cusps might we introduce if we had her being born in Greenpoint when she was actually born in Brighton Beach?

The answer was easy to discover with a few minutes’ work. I can’t remember the details of the chart, so I just did some fresh calculations here at my desk as I wrote this little essay. I happen to be writing on April 25. Arbitrarily, I set up a chart for noon today in Brooklyn – but I altered the latitude that my Winstar program gave for “Brooklyn” to reflect a birth way up in the north end of the borough, in Greenpoint. There, I got an Ascendent at 23 degrees Cancer 58 minutes. I then did the same thing for the south end of Brooklyn, at Brighton Beach. There the Ascendant is 23 degrees Cancer 51 minutes. 

The two Ascendants are indeed different, but only by seven minutes of arc. That’s too small a change to make any practical difference at all. No worry, in other words. It didn’t matter where in Brooklyn our chart winner was born. Saying “Brooklyn” was good enough.

That was a north/south change. What about east/west? That would naturally have more impact on the Ascendant. Here let’s look at the worst case scenario: a true megalopolis. Shanghai, China, stretches about seventy-five miles in an east/west direction. I applied the same method I used with Brooklyn, altering the atlas listing of Shanghai’s latitude and longitude to reflect two widely-spaced places of birth that were both technically within the city limits. In the east along the coast, that calculation shows an Ascendant of 1 degree Leo 49 minutes. In the west, seventy-five miles away, the Ascendant backs off to 0 degrees Leo 47’. It’s shifted over one degree, in other words. And there, even though the change is not huge, we might potentially run into some trouble.

The takeaway is that if you are dealing with a client who was born in one of the world’s truly gigantic cities – Mexico City, Mumbai, and so forth – it might be worth asking them for some clarification about exactly where in the city they were born.

By the way, when I simply accept the atlas’s figures for the position of Shanghai, they point to the central district of the city. I am not sure exactly what the protocol is for choosing the latitudes and longitudes in the various astrology atlases, but I suspect that approach is typical. And sensible. The point is that if we had simply accepted that given “downtown” latitude and longitude and used it in setting up a chart for someone “born in Shanghai,” that one degree shift from east to west would be considerably mitigated, and probably drop down to no more than about a half-degree of error. And that’s well within the margins of acceptability for our work.

The bottom line is that when Penelope wondered about where in Brooklyn our chart winner was born, she really did not need to worry at all. “I was born in Brooklyn” is enough for us to set up a chart in which we can have confidence.

THE REAL ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM . . .

 . . . is not the place of birth, but rather the time of birth. Even small errors in the time, unlike discrepancies in latitude and longitude, can quickly make a big difference.

Our chart winner had what appears to be a carefully timed birth of 3:26 AM. But what exactly do we mean by “birth?” Some of you women who are reading my words are mothers – and Happy Mothers’ Day, by the way! But you know very well that it wasn’t as if one day you were walking along minding your own business when suddenly, pop, there’s your baby. 

Some births are fast, some are slow, but none are “instant,” where there would be an easily and universally identified minute of birth. Is the moment of birth the emergence of the child’s head, the full emergence, the first breath, the cutting of the umbilical cord? I’ve heard all of them and I really don’t know which theory is correct.

Our chart winner was born at 3:26 AM? Hmmm . . .

And of course there’s human error, clocks running fast or slow, especially in the pre-digital days.The time of birth is ever the Achilles’ Heel of astrological practice. My birth certificate states that I was born (whatever that means) at 3:30 AM. Through my own experience of the timing of events in my life, I’ve rectified that back to 3:22. And that change has thrown my Ascendant off by nearly three degrees, enough to make a significant difference in my chart.

I suspect errors of that order are common and widespread.

• The underlying point for our purposes here is that any slight error in one’s house cusps that is introduced by ambivalence about where in a given town or city a person was born is eclipsed by the almost-inevitable uncertainties that are built into a birth time, even a seemingly accurate one.

So how can we live with these wild cards? Carefully, is the answer. We get the best birth information we can get and we set up a chart, trusting it to be more or less accurate. If we have an ongoing relationship with a client, we might start to notice small but systematic errors in the timing of events in that person’s life – things happen a little sooner or a little later than we would have predicted. Perhaps that time of birth needs some adjustment, just like my own.

Soon we will have an honors elective available about the technical process of rectifying a birth time. That will be FCEA 402 – and if you have much Virgo energy, welcome to paradise! It’s a picky process, but it will get you up to Warp speed with your understanding how transits, progressions, and solar arcs actually work faster than any other method I know.

Until then, don’t sweat the place of birth – but keep a suspicious eye on everyone’s time of birth.

Keeping aware of what’s happening in your own chart is an essential practice. There’s nothing that brings you to the heart of astrology faster than watching your own experience mirrored there. Individually we can all do that. In that same spirit, let’s have a quick peek at what is currently unfolding in our school’s chart.

Let’s start with a biggie: on January 13th, our solar arc north node entered Leo where it will remain for the next three decades. Just six days later, the nodal axis also made a square to the position of Uranus on the school’s inception chart. Meanwhile, our progressed Moon finally hit our Ascendant on March 3rd. That means that we will be in this mission-critical “new beginning” stage until the Moon progresses into the 2nd house. That doesn’t happen until January 7, 2027, so we now have the rest of this year and all of next year to get ourselves properly launched into the fresh twenty-seven year lunar cycle.

• That means that two different important configurations both are pointing to the start of a three-decades-long cycle. The stakes are high!

Probably the single most important factor in developmental astrology – the astrology of transits, progressions, and solar arcs – is the progressed Sun itself.The only trouble with it is that it’s very slow, moving at just about one degree per year, so you generally don’t want to hold your breath waiting for it to get anywhere. Not this year, not for our school! The progressed Sun is super-busy, making not one but two major aspects before the year’s end. On October 23rd it forms a square to our powerful 7th house Sagittarian Jupiter. Less than a month later, on November 18th, it sextiles our Pluto, which lies in Capricorn in the 9th house lined up with Saturn and the south node of the Moon. Given the slow speed of the progressed Sun, those aspects are definitely already activated.

What about transits? Contrary to what many astrological doomsayers might have predicted, we’ve actually been thriving under a relentless onslaught of Saturn energy. Between April 2024 and this past January, Saturn has been crisscrossing through a series of conjunctions with both our Sun and our Moon. The last hit on the Moon happened as recently as January 25th. Just as we would counsel our clients to do, rather than curling up and dying, we have worked hard and matured under Saturn’s rays. During this period, our registration has actually grown. That makes me happy for two reasons. The first is obvious. The second is that it feels good to make monkeys out of those astrological doomsayers!

In all charts, there’s always a lot going on by transit, but we’ve got one more standout to put on the table: on July 7th, Uranus enters Gemini and exactly one month later it makes its first precise contact with the school’s Ascendant. It will retrograde back through that exact conjunction on October 5th and hit it a final time going direct on May 15, 2026 – then settle in for a seven year passage through our 1st house. The fabled Lord of Earthquakes and Lightning Bolts is coming for a visit.

Here’s a quadwheel that shows the school’s natal chart at the center, then progressions, solar arcs, and finally transits in the outermost wheel. (Personally I find these quadwheels a bit overwhelming visually, but at least all the relevant positions I’ve discussed are visible there.)

THE BIG PICTURE

There’s more of course, but those are the major pieces of the puzzle. What can we make of them? What is the universe telling us about our path? How do we stay in harmony with the larger cosmic flow?

If the school were a client of mine, I would build my presentation around those seven events I just mentioned. In fact, even though there are dozens of other interesting astrological forces at play, I might very well limit myself to them. This is always a drum I like to beat: you don’t have to talk about everything. In fact, you cannot – there is never enough time. Say I have two hours with a client and these seven configurations to discuss. Crudely, that’s seventeen minutes per configuration, which doesn’t sound too bad. But the reality is that you need to not only describe these seven individual transits, progressions, and solar arcs, you also need to tie them together into a coherent, meaningful whole. And naturally if your client is sitting with you or you’re engaged on a Zoom screen, that person will very likely have a few things to say too. That “seventeen minutes” per configuration quickly collapses into much less time.

• The goal of a professional astrological reading is to leave the client with some clarity, some practical, actionable tips, and a feeling of encouragement about their journey – not a spinning head jammed with confusing jargon and an endless string of dates.

With a client, I’d actually take a couple of hours to explain this astrological weather report. Here in this newsletter, my goal is more modest. I want to talk about how I would strategize everything in my own mind before I said one word. I know that before I open my mouth, I need to have a basic narrative in my head. What are the broad outlines of the story – the CliffsNotes version, so to speak? If you’re clear about that, you will have a handle on the whole presentation. You will know what the client’s takeaway will be. You’ve avoided the single greatest peril that faces any working astrologer: confusion. Getting lost in the astrological labyrinth is the easiest thing in the world – and remember: if you’re even slightly confused, your client will be totally confused!

So: the FCEA is clearly moving into a new beginning. Anything significant hitting the Ascendant is ample evidence of that, and we’ve got two of them: the progressed Moon and transiting Uranus. The former emphasizes a need to follow our heart’s guidance: our intuitive function, which has been honed and prepared during the Moon’s long passage through the 12th house. The upcoming bolt of Uranian energy tells us to be open to innovation and to the unexpected. We’ll need to individuate and to be wary of judging ourselves by the standards of “our culture,” which is basically to say the rest of the astrological community – other astrological schools, in particular.

Our road is the road less traveled.

In practical terms, Uranus often correlates with the impact of new technologies. Openness in that area can be a great advantage, so we should keep our eyes open for those kinds of “wave of the future” possibilities.

Just as the progressed Moon’s passage through our 12th house can be understood as part of our preparation for this momentous new beginning, similarly we can frame the Saturnian maturation we have just experienced as also having laid the foundation for what is coming.

• Our narrative is founded on the simple idea that we have been preparing for a fresh start and that now the time has come for us to light the fuse on it.

That simple overarching idea adds a unifying structure to the big picture. Instead of drinking from the firehose of fragmented astrological details, we now have a single, comprehensible narrative framework that pulls everything together.

Now that we have that basic idea understood, the ground under us is solid enough to bear some more complexity, so let’s keep going. Our solar arc north node has entered Leo, and to get it right, the new beginning we have just been describing must be informed by Leo values. We need to bet on ourselves. We need to risk putting ourselves out there. If we cultivate a feeling of being welcome in the world and act on it, we overcome any Aquarian south node attachment to the idea “that nobody will understand us” or that “nobody will ever like us.” It’s time to walk like kings and queens even though in order to succeed, for a while we may have to “fake it until we make it.”

What about the immediate square of that solar arc node to Uranus? Let’s ask that question in the light of our core integrative principle: remember what you have already said! Recall that transiting Uranus will be hitting our Ascendant around the same time. Put them together and again we are reminded to be careful not to let attachment to past patterns trip us up.

New technology? New procedures? New attitudes? Those are qualities that put a smile on the face of the great, thundering god, Uranus. And let’s expect some wild cards too. But, realistically, how can anyone do that? Obviously “expecting the unexpected” is a logical conundrum. Still, to some extent, it is actionable advice. We can cultivate alertness. We can avoid letting habitual patterns blind us to early warning signals. We can have Plan B.

The progressed Sun is coming to a square of Jupiter. Jupiter is still Jupiter and so we  continue with integrating the theme of expansion and positive, confident thinking. There’s always a cautionary note implicit in squares though. Over-extension could be a danger. If, say, someone put forth a plan to grow our student body to a thousand people by summer 2026, I’d say let’s question whether that is something we actually want. And let’s reflect on that question before we even wrestle with the question of whether or not it is possible. Wanting what is truly good for us is always the key with Jupiter and it’s not as easy as it sounds.

That Jupiter is in the 7th house. Such dubious growth plans could very well come from someone or some other institution suggesting a partnership or alliance. Sagittarius might possibly indicate something foreign.

Once again, caution and discernment are indicated.

Around the same time that the Sun/Jupiter action peaks, we also see the progressed Sun forming a sextile with Pluto. With just a month separating these two peaks, it’s really best to see them as one single event. Pluto always calls for making an effort in the direction of honest self-knowledge – the famous “long, hard talk with ourselves.” With the sextile, such a talk doesn’t have to be gut-wrenching, but it does need to be truthful. Add the 9th house: what are our core values? Add Capricorn: let’s put maintaining our integrity at the top of our list. Mixed with Jupiter, we might face “a temptation.”

I am reminded of a line from an old Lowell George song: “The easier it looks, the harder it hooks. Ain’t no such thing as easy money.” It’s a good lyric – and good advice for anyone experiencing a Jupiter square with a big dollop of Pluto in it.

Once again, everything that I have written here is definitely the short version of any professional reading I would do. My central aim has really been to help us see the unifying pattern behind these configurations. Sometimes it takes sitting with the symbols for a while before that pattern jumps out. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is to be patient enough to wait for that lightbulb to light over your head. There’s little worse than opening your mouth with a client and realizing that you have no idea what you’re talking about. This approach remedies that.

SO WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING FOR THE SCHOOL?

We already see evidence of these energies coming into practical manifestation. My recent bout with retinal detachment leading us to suddenly cancel a Q&A for the first time certainly bears the fingerprints of Uranian energy. Still, it’s helpful to remember that a lot of what we’ve explored here simply hasn’t happened yet. There will certainly be some more surprises – how could it be otherwise with Uranus in the picture? But whatever happens, there’s one point we can take to the bank: we will see the signatures of these seven configurations underlying everything. Astrology always works.

As I mentioned earlier, enrollment at the school has grown a bit over the past year – not to a spectacular degree, but solidly. We now have eighteen tutors – or nineteen, if we count our Dean, Catie Cadge. She wears a lot of hats, but tutoring is one of them. Penelope Love, our Communications Director, is also a  tutor now as well. The mixture of Saturnian hard work and Jupiterian opportunity has made itself felt, in other words – and remember: even though the progressed Sun isn’t exactly square to Jupiter until later this year, it’s been within orbs for quite a while.

(By the way, we’ve also been experiencing transiting Jupiter in our 1st house since the middle of last year. I could easily and justifiably have included that configuration in our list of seven biggies. Why didn’t I? Simple: I knew that with a client, I’d be covering that Jupiter base since the progressed Sun was squaring it. I keep the nuances of difference between these two Jupiter events alive in my head, but I don’t want to fog my client’s head with unnecessary jargon and complexity.)

Our beloved Communications Director, Penelope Love, tells me of a somewhat unexpected development – and there’s another early Uranian fingerprint. She says that there are many already-experienced astrologers arriving and signing up as students. Because they are advanced in their studies, they are mostly enrolled in the self-paced 101 course so they can get right to the guided nodal work and learn what’s unique about our approach. Their arrival has quickened the pace of the school’s growth. Penelope adds that now more people self-pace at all different rates. We don’t actually see their faces until they get to 102 or 103.

What about new technology? Well, as we all know, Artificial Intelligence is popping up everywhere lately, which brings us back to Penelope: “Our Call Archive from all of the Q&A sessions Steve has done since the school began is currently in a reconstruction format. We’re working on a project using AI to timestamp past calls and will be releasing a major improvement of the Call Archives in the future. I can’t say exactly when, but it’s going to be a major upgrade.”

Here’s another piece of evidence of our recent Saturnian maturation. I’ll start by saying that I personally think of us all as mental health professionals – really, that’s exactly what we are doing, even if we do it in a somewhat more Uranian way than the term conventionally implies. (Feel some Jupiter in that assertion? Let’s boldly and confidently assume our position next to society’s various “licensed” psychotherapists.)

Counseling other human beings is serious business and it  requires a specific skill-set. That’s why our 300-level Sacred Counsel course is so integral to our larger program. I’ve written and recorded a lot of material for it myself, but I bow gratefully to Dr. Joey Paynter for doing the lion’s share of the teaching. She’s a mental health professional by anyone’s standards and with her education she brings something to the table that I could never bring myself. Thank you, Joey!

Catie reminds me that in our last term, our Sacred Counsel course was a big success – but we all realized it needed to be expanded. Now it’s FCEA 300SC and it’s expanded to full two-hour sessions, still under Joey’s able guidance.

Once again, the wheels I describe here in this edition of Master’s Musing are only beginning to turn. We’ve all got front row seats well-positioned for seeing what actually happens next.

Enjoy the show and thanks for being part of it!