Chiron, Pluto & The South Node: The Same Only Different

Chiron, Pluto & The South Node

Master’s Musings, July 2024

Chiron, Pluto & The South Node: The Same Only Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET THE SOUTH NODE INFORM PLUTO AND CHIRON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLUTONIAN WOUNDS VERSUS CHIRONIC WOUNDS

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

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

And remember – Barbie was a serious movie too.

THE PLUTONIAN WOUND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pluto is both the problem and the solution.

WHAT ABOUT CHIRON?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miracles do happen and Chiron is often connected with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOME PLUTONIAN AND CHIRONIC SPECIFICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Forrest
July 2024

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Reading Children’s Charts

Master’s Musings, June 2024

Reading Children’s Charts

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One of our more advanced students emailed me in a bit of a panic. She was about to do something she had never done before and that was to read the chart of a child. It was a paid professional session and the mother was due to sit with her later that day. What should she tell her? As an FCEA astrologer, the student was very well-grounded in theory. She felt she understood the chart. But how should she go about presenting the interpretation? Breaking it down, she faced two dilemmas.

First, children aren’t adults and so the language she was accustomed to using was going to need to change. What career advice do we give infants? What about any complications they’ll likely encounter in their sex lives?

The second dilemma was that understandably most parents tend to be protective and easily rattled by anything they perceive as a threat to their child’s wellbeing. What should the astrologer say if the child is an Aries with an 8th house Pluto squaring her Moon?

Our student suddenly realized that she was stepping into a potential minefield, or at least into uncharted territory. I’m glad she reached out to me. For one thing, it gave me a fine topic for my column and a chance to write a piece that will serve double-duty. We’ll integrate this essay into our school curriculum too.

What follows is a longer version of what I told her.

ABOVE ALL . . .

The first point I want to put in the spotlight is very simple – we read a child’s chart in very much the same way that we read the chart of an adult. There are some differences and we’ll soon get to them, but essentially it’s the same process either way. Underlying this guideline is a salient metaphysical point: the age of the soul and the age of the physical body are unrelated. Every saint took birth as an infant. Young or old, when we look at a natal chart we are looking at the same two things: first, a symbolic representation of the soul’s karmic predicament and, second, a sense of how to get on with one’s evolution.

The aim of evolutionary astrology is to support that soul-growth. To do that, we have to look at everyone through wiser, more conscious eyes than the world does – young or old, they’re souls on a journey. We make that philosophical approach clear to the parents right from the start. As we read the child’s chart, we’re not talking to a baby, we’re talking to a soul. Just like the mom or dad, this ancient being has now launched its boat on the stormy seas of life. As astrologers, we cannot protect anyone from that reality, but we can help them to navigate it in the most painless way possible. Meanwhile, we won’t let “baby talk” blind us to any of these deeper truths.

To make that perspective clearer, there’s a simple riff I almost always use at the beginning of a chart presentation to the parents of a youngster. (And as with all of my riffs, feel free to use it yourself without attribution or, even better, to create one of your own.)

As usual, I am recording the reading – a fact which takes on another level of practical importance, as you’ll soon see.

Let’s say the chart belongs to an infant rather than to an older kid. As I start the recording, I address the child directly by name, then I add, “as I say these words, you’re still in diapers and therefore little young to understand me. I still want to honor the fact that this is your chart and no one else’s. That’s why I am addressing you directly. My hope is that someday, decades down the road, you’ll find this recording and listen to it. I hope that you’ll derive some help and some spiritual encouragement from it. Until then, out of respect for you I will aim my words directly at you – but I may make a few side comments to your parents from time to time about how they can help you get off on the right foot in this life.

“That’s just a hundred words or so and it only takes a few seconds to say them, but of course even though we purport to be speaking directly to the child,” the parents are actually the ones who are listening. This little speech helps to create the right mindset in them and that’s the whole point. We’ve helped them see that this isn’t a baby we’re talking about, it’s a soul.

And of course, whether or not it ever actually happens, we are sincere in our hopes that the child will hear the reading one day. That wasn’t a lie. Let’s just call it a convenient truth.

BUT IT’S REALLY JUST A KID . . .

There are certain basic needs that all children have. Presumably any parent engaged enough with their son or daughter to be having a reading in the first place will be aware of them. These are obvious things, with love always topping the list. Add a reasonable sense of security, some training about safety and the social customs that govern society. Discipline of some sort is mission-critical in child rearing. We need to convey the idea that actions have consequences or that kid will be in serious trouble later on in life.

All of that is pretty obvious and so there’s no pressing need for the astrologer to spend much time banging those drums. Where it gets more interesting is when we wrestle with some of the tougher questions that all parents face, especially ones that do not have clear answers. That’s where astrology – and the child’s chart – enter the equations. For example, let’s say a nine-year-old boy wants to camp overnight in a tent in the suburban backyard of his best friend. Should the parent give permission or not? On the downside, in that kind of unsupervised night time situation, a pair of nine year olds could potentially face some dangers that they were not equipped to handle. On the other hand, adventures can build character, self-confidence, and maturity.

What’s the right parental call? Are we being too protective – or not protective enough?

Here I’ll simplify astrology like crazy just to make my core point as clearly as I can. If the boy is an Aries, go ahead and bless the backyard camping trip – that child is here on Earth to learn about courage and nobody learns much about it without facing a spot of danger.

On the other hand, if the boy’s Sun is in Cancer, it’s quite possible that deep down he is hoping that you’ll say no – that way, he can save face with his bestie by blaming you for blocking the trip, and still be safe at home in his bed that night.

In that situation, in the eyes of the Aries child, granting permission for that backyard adventure might seem like an expression of faith in him and respect for his autonomy, while to the Cancer, it might feel like abandonment – or you just “not caring.”

The essential point is that each soul needs different kinds of experience in order to grow. That’s true whether you’re an infant, you’re at the height of your powers, or you’re living in a rest home. All kids need love – but not all of them need to spend a night in a tent in the backyard.

When it comes to reading the charts of children, it’s in these kinds of parenting gray areas – places where judgment calls need to be made – that astrology really shines.

Here’s another example, one that brings us right into the raw heart of life. Say the parental marriage encounters a threadbare patch. Mom is feeling neglected while dad is feeling exploited and misunderstood. Maybe they’ll work it out, maybe not. Either way, because of that intimate tension there’s a bad vibe in the house.

Just try keeping that truth from a Plutonian child! You will surely fail.

Guaranteed, kids who are wired in that Plutonian way will sense those tense undercurrents – and there’s a good chance that they will overreact emotionally and misinterpret what’s going on, perhaps making it even worse in their minds than it actually is. Worse than that, those kids may very well bottle up their feelings. All you’ll see is a cryptic mood and a bad attitude.

In such a case, it would be far better for mom to speak honestly to the kid, “Sometimes your father drives me crazy. We’re having a hard time. Life sucks sometimes. We’re trying to work it out.” Put the truth on the table, in other words. That’s healthier for everyone, kids included – at least for those children who are born into that Scorpio/Pluto/8th house tribe.

Just as with those two boys contemplating a night in a tent in the backyard, in this situation the parents are faced with a tricky judgment call. If our marriage is on shaky ground, is it best to hide that from the children in order to avoid scaring them or to be honest about it? With questions such as any of these, beware above all of any paperback writer trying to sell you one-size-fits-all answers. A specific understanding of the children’s charts helps us know what’s ultimately best for them as evolving individuals.

Perhaps even better, such astrological understanding can help the parents avoid the trap of “their best intentions” actually damaging a child. For example, parents could blunder by lying about the actual state of their marriage “so little Tracy doesn’t feel insecure or get frightened.” That might possibly be best if “little Tracy” is a Libra or a Taurus, but not if there’s much Scorpionic energy in the kid’s chart.

AT WHAT AGE DO WE ACTUALLY SIT WITH THE CHILD?

When kids get into their teenage years, the ethics around whether we should be doing readings for them directly or doing them for their parents begin to get murky. Confidentiality is naturally a cornerstone in all counseling work, but there’s a general consensus that, while the principle is sacrosanct with adults, it’s more flexible with children. That’s for the obvious reason that children benefit from adult protection and guidance, at least until they are ready to launch themselves into independent life.

But when are they “ready” to have a private reading with you? There is no clear answer to that question. Maybe the only thing that is actually clear is that the answer is not a specific age. It’s not a number. Everything depends on the particular child.

In my own practice, here’s how I’ve handled it – and I wouldn’t “legislate” any of this in terms of how you or any other astrologers might practice. Basically, I’ve had “an official policy” – and I’ve also been willing to break my own rules whenever that intuitively felt like the right course.

“Officially,” I’ve had a kind of blackout age-range in which I would not do any kind of reading for the young person. That range starts around puberty and lasts until age twenty-one. Before that, I’d gladly do the child’s reading for the parents. After that period, I’d gladly sit with the young adult. In between, I’d simply say “let’s wait.” This policy is entirely based on my utmost respect for the principle of confidentiality.

When I was a teenager, there were all sorts of things about me I would not have wanted my parents to know. If I respect that boundary in myself, I feel I have to respect it in others too.

What about breaking my own rules?

I’ve known some people in their mid-teens who I sensed were advanced souls. They were already a lot more mature in every way than some folks in midlife. If they – not their parents – ask me for a reading, I am honored to do one. The key here is obviously that I have to have a personal acquaintance with the child.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Note that underlying all of these suggestions is a piece of practical strategy for the presentation of a child’s reading to the parents. You toggle back and forth between two linguistic orientations:

You address the child directly “for listening down the road,” presenting essentially a normal adult chart interpretation. The parents are actually the ones listening, but by speaking directly to the child, you are compelling them to step out of the “this is our baby” paradigm. You are also actually creating a kind of “time capsule” for when the kid has crossed the line into adulthood.

You make “side comments” to the parents about how to best support the child’s development based on the child’s unique psychological and evolutionary situation. That’s how you compensate for the otherwise-adult language of the reading.

COACHING: THE PARENT AS ROLE MODEL

Rhiannon is ten years old. She’s a Pisces with the Moon in the 12th house and Neptune on her Ascendant. You’re her mom. You sit down to meditate. Rhiannon pipes up and says she’s hungry and would like to have her lunch. You open your eyes and gently say to her, ”I promise I’ll fix your lunch soon. First I need to have a little talk with God.” You close your eyes again – not for long, just a minute or two. Then you get up and make lunch.

You’ve just normalized “having a little talk with God” and demonstrated to Rhiannon what such a process looks like. In this agitated, materialistic world, you just gave your daughter a supportive foundation for taking care of herself throughout the rest of her life.

That’s one example of how parents – especially parents informed by knowledge of their child’s chart – can demonstrate positive, helpful behaviors, and do it at the optimal time. That’s when the child is young and still learning how to be human, mostly by watching mom and dad. This is also a good example of the kinds of “side comments” I make to the parents in the course of a presentation.

Let me take this “role model” idea further with three quick personal examples. Here’s a photo of my father landing a biplane that he and a friend of his built with their own hands.

If you know your old movies, while I was growing up I thought of my dad like Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol. I never got my own pilot’s license, but having a father like him really helped me get off on the right foot with my 4th house Aries Moon. I needed a hero and I had one. Dad had an Aquarian Mars on his Midheaven, so he played this role naturally. The universe often works that way – you have the parents you have for a reason.

I’ve got a Sun-Neptune square. One of the wisest things my mother and father did when I was growing up was occasionally to serve me a small glass of wine at dinner. It didn’t happen often – only, as I recall, when mom had made spaghetti. But they modeled social drinking for me. I’m afraid that if I had been raised by tea-totallers, when I hit college my naïveté about alcohol might have gotten me into trouble. Again, they were helpful role-models.

My third personal example is of a way my parents failed me, even though they were trying to do what they thought was best. Only one time during the entirety of my childhood did I see them have a tiff – and as tiffs go, it was practically nothing. I just remember the four of us – I have a younger sister – sitting at the dinner table and my father getting up and stomping out of the kitchen. I have no idea what happened between my parents, but obviously there was some kind of emotional disagreement.

Why do I view the nearly-relentless domestic harmony I experienced as a child as a failure on my parents’ part? I believe two things – first, that some degree of honest conflict is part of any deep relationship and, second, that there is a necessary skill-set for handling such negotiations productively. (I’d be the first to admit that my own Aries Moon, Mars in the 3rd house, and Scorpio Ascendant perhaps further “underscore” that need in me.)

Because of the apparent equanimity of my parents’ marriage, I learned nothing about what healthy conflict looks like. I wish my parents had taught me a few things about it by the example of them working through their issues in front of me. I wish I had seen them angry and frustrated with each other – but still able to listen and work together toward balanced, loving answers that worked fairly for both of them.

But they never showed me how to do that.

Is that all just about me and my own nature? Probably. Maybe if I had seven planets in Libra and the rest of them in Taurus, it would be different. And that’s the point: each child has different needs and a different nature. An astrologer can help the parents sort out the slippery questions of child rearing in a way that’s actually supportive of that particular child’s ultimate evolutionary aspirations.

Meanwhile, always remember that many years after you sit with a newborn baby’s parents, that grown-up child will be faced with some kind of crossroads in life. Maybe they find the recording of that long-ago session. Maybe it will make a difference. Maybe they’ll smile at the subtle wisdom you displayed in actually doing an adult interpretation of their chart, all the while letting the parents think that you were talking about their little kid.

Steven Forrest
June 2024

Upcoming Live Events

Master’s Musings, May 2024

Upcoming Live Events

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As many of you know, for about twenty years all of my high-level teaching happened in the context of my Apprenticeship Programs. They were four or five day “live” events, happening once or twice a year in the USA, Australia, China, and Europe. All together, the various groups met well over a hundred times. I feel that I grew up with those “AP” meetings, both as a teacher and as a human being. It was in those marathon teaching sessions that I found my true voice as an astrologer. I look back on them fondly.

Even though they ended in 2019, the roots of the present FCEA lie in those programs. The basic material we teach is the same, although it’s more polished, orderly, and succinct nowadays. The main difference between the FCEA and the AP is simply structure (not to mention having a fine staff of tutors so it’s not all just me talking.) As you know, our school curriculum doesn’t let you skip any steps. The AP, in all honesty, was more of a hodge-podge – the content was all there, but there was no order to the way it was presented session-to-session. The administrators and I would come up with an interesting topic, announce it, and people would sign up – or not, if the topic didn’t interest them. After they had attended any three such programs, they earned a Level One certificate. Three more, and they’d qualify for Level Two.

It worked. Many graduates of the AP have gone on to practice astrology professionally. I’m proud of them. The trouble was, depending on which programs they chose to attend, they might have missed something important – nodal analysis, solar arcs, or the composite chart, for three painful examples.

We’ve plugged those leaks in the FCEA! Anyone who attains masters’ level in our program will be an expert “full service” evolutionary astrologer. That’s the good news.

The bad news, at least for me, is that I really miss the hugs! I miss just hanging out after a day of teaching and getting to know the students in a simple, human way. I miss the musical jam sessions, the wine, and the laughter.

Going a little deeper, the social dimension of the Apprenticeship Programs created a lot of “real life” for us to digest as a group. There were affairs and romances, of course. Naturally, not everybody always liked everybody else. Happily, there were marriages and lifelong friendships that came out of it. We experienced some deaths too – and little creates a sense of spiritual community as effectively as a member passing. As I think of that, my mind immediately turns to Joyce Van Horn who ran the Calistoga program for many years. She passed away a few weeks ago in Mexico. I feel a gap in my heart where we all “should have” gotten together as a community, mourned her passing and celebrated her life – but, alas, there was no more Calistoga group, so that didn’t happen.

In contemplating the creation of the FCEA back in 2018 and 2019, my main personal fear was that the online format would feel cold. I’ve honestly been surprised and delighted that I was totally wrong about that. Genuine warmth permeates our program. That I can feel closely connected emotionally to people I have never actually met “in the flesh” has been a happy surprise to me.

But, as I mentioned, I do miss the hugs!

Speaking of hugs, last summer I presented a five-day program at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. It was a huge group – I think there were about 110 people in attendance all together. I was delighted to see that over forty of them were students in our school. Even though time was limited, it was a joy to be able to meet them all in person. Catie and Penelope were there too, along with our tutors Patty and Allison.

That Omega program was a birthchart intensive. This coming July 28 through August 2, I’ll be returning to Omega, this time to teach an intensive about transits and progressions. I’m hoping that once again we can have a lot of FCEA people there. If you would like to learn more about that program and possibly attending it, here’s a link:

www.eomega.org/workshops/changing-sky

My plan for this Omega event will parallel last year’s approach. I’ll present some theory, then demonstrate it in practice based on a pivotal event in the chart (and life!) of a well-known person. Once we’ve done that, the rest of the program will follow the same tried-and-true formula we used for years in the old Apprenticeship Programs – I’ll reach into “the Sorting Hat” and pull the names of volunteers from the class. Their chart – and their transits, progressions, and solar arcs – will go up on the big screen, and we’re off to the races.

Toward the end of September, I will present a half-day workshop in the context of the Astro-Bash conference, right here in my hometown of Borrego Springs in the southern California desert just north of Mexico. Astro-Bash is a four-day conference with many speakers – in fact, I believe they are still signing people up to do short presentations, so maybe some of you might feel moved to apply. If so, contact Ralph McIntyre at macfuel [at] gmail.com.

This is the second year for Astro-Bash. It was a lot of fun last year. Our dark desert skies were an added treat at night. At that first one, I only presented one short talk, but this time I’ll offer a half-day workshop about how Pluto’s new Aquarian face will offer different possibilities and purposes by transit than it did while it was in Capricorn. Pluto-in-Aquarius is a beast we’ve not seen since Christmas Eve 1798 and so it’s time to renew our acquaintance with it. We astrologers need to learn to update our approach around those pivotal Plutonian events we’ll all be experiencing.

Interested in possibly attending Astro-Bash? Here’s a link:

The FCEA is an international community. I’m acutely aware of the unfairness of how these two events I’ve just described present practical difficulties for our students living outside of the USA. I do take some comfort in knowing that at least we’ve managed to stage one of them on the East coast and one on the West coast – but I know that’s not much comfort to our Asian and European students.

I do have some good news for our Asian students however. In October, I am planning to return to China. Once again, my sponsors are the wonderful NoDoor team. I’ll be speaking in Beijing for three days – Saturday through Monday – in mid-October. Plans are still formative at this point, but we’re considering a program about vocational and career perspectives. I’m up to my Adam’s Apple in trying to get a visa. Watch this space – we’ll keep you posted.

What about Europe? We have no specific plans for an event there at this point, but let me just leave you with this – there’s been some “loose talk.” If it comes to anything, you’ll be the first to know.

Again, I do hope to see some of you “live, in person” before the end of the year! And I’m hoping that, with your kind permission, we can share a hug.

Steven Forrest
May 2024

The Planet that Rules the House

Master’s Musings, April 2024

The Planet that Rules the House

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Virgo is on the cusp of my 10th house. Since Mercury is the ruler of Virgo, we can say that Mercury rules my 10th house. That’s an example of a common phrase in the technical language of our craft. It’s also a useful concept once we get clear about how it works.

Let’s begin by recognizing that the word “rules” can get us into a world of trouble right from the starting line. It’s not that Mercury “tells my 10th house what to do” like a mean boss or a tyrant. As ever with rulership, it’s more about friendship between a house and planet than about any issues of authority or control. There is a resonance between a planet and the house it rules, that’s all. With planets and the signs they rule, the words we use to describe one are similar to the words we would use to describe the other. When a sign falls on the cusp of a house, the planet that rules that sign influences the house – but again, it’s about affinity, connection, and similarity, not about domination.

Rulership links one part of a chart to another part. It’s like an astrological version of the circulatory system in your body.

Even beginning students of astrology quickly become aware of the power of the planet that rules the Ascendant – the so-called “ruler of the chart.” What we are considering here is basically the same idea, but extended to include the rest of the house cusps.

Book of the universe – opened magic book with planets and galaxies. Elements of this image furnished by NASA

With my Virgo Midheaven, my profession naturally takes on a Virgo tone. For starters, it’s a service. It also involves some other Virgo signatures. For example, in order to live out my proper mission in this world, I’ve had to master a complex technical system. I’ve also benefited enormously from contact with teachers as I was “initiated into a lineage.” That idea of being initiated by mentors, by the way, is a big piece of Virgo (or 6th house) lore that often sadly gets forgotten in modern astrological practice.

I’ve got Saturn on my Midheaven too, but that’s a bit outside the point I’m wanting to explore in this essay – which brings us back to Mercury being the planetary ruler of my 10th house. That means that wherever Mercury lies in my chart, its energetic fingerprint is going to be felt in my career and public image.

In my natal chart, Mercury is on the cusp of my 3rd house – the house of language. And what do I do for a living? I talk and I write! My Mercury is in Capricorn – and what I talk and write about is complicated and requires an orderly, logical (Capricornian!) approach if anybody is going to understand me. Note how knowing where the ruler of my 10th house lies has added specific details to my chart’s description of my mission in the world. That’s one dimension of how the ruler of a house cusp actually works.

Many people have Virgo Midheavens and naturally Mercury rules them all – but that’s generally from a different position than my own Mercury. Take astronaut John Glenn, for example – he was the first American to orbit the Earth. Mercury rules his Virgo Midheaven, but from the 8th house and Cancer in a conjunction with Mars and Pluto. To realize his mission, John Glenn had to face the possibility of a scary death – there’s the 8th house signature, augmented explosively by the presence of Mars and Pluto. And he had to face that grim possibility while trapped in a tight little tin can a hundred miles up in the sky, which is where we see the Cancer symbolism (a crab in a shell!) come into the mixture.

Like me, John Glenn had to master a complex technical system. Like me, he was part of a lineage – in his case, of explorers. And like me, he probably felt that he was doing a service for the world. All that is the mark of the Virgo Midheaven. He and I hold that in common – but beyond that, no one is going to confuse John Glenn with Steven Forrest. Our Midheaven-ruling Mercuries tell very different tales.

Here’s another example – one that demonstrates how widely the ruler of the Midheaven can range in meaning.

Back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, actor Bette Davis was often in the spotlight. Even now, nearly a century after her heyday, she’s still considered to be one of the most truly iconic film stars – and as someone who made it in the movie industry based on her actual theatrical talent rather than on having a pretty face. She made 82 films and garnered 10 Oscar nominations, including winning Best Actress for Dangerous in 1935 and for Jezebel in 1938.

Like John Glenn and me, Bette Davis had a Virgo Midheaven, but this time we find that her Mercury lies in Pisces and the 4th house.

What do truly fine actors like Bette Davis do? They become somebody else – there’s Pisces “transcending the ego.” To succeed at that, they have to hide their own natures – there’s the 4th house.

Acting also involves mastering a set of technical skills, of course – there’s the signature of the Virgo Midheaven. But in Bette Davis’s case, those technical skills are subjective and creative as befits Mercury in Pisces and the 4th house. I’m also fascinated to think of the psychological work a fine actor must do in order to find the whole spectrum of human types inside themselves. To me, there’s something truly spiritual about that process. Once more, in those words, we feel the vibrations of both the 4th house and Pisces.

DUAL RULERS

Earlier, I mentioned my own Virgo Midheaven. That of course gives me Pisces on my 4th house cusp. So what planet rules my 4th house? Is it Jupiter, the traditional ruler, or Neptune, the modern one? As usual, my suggestion is to use both of them.

I’m always self-conscious when I go on at length about myself, so I’ll keep this brief. Taking the 4th house to be the “house of the home” implies not only the building in which we live, but also loving, committed relationships in it – “our family,” at least in some sense of the word.

Let me start with Neptune – a planet which often entails letting go of good things for some higher calling. With often-ascetic Neptune ruling my “house of family,” I’ve never had children. My Libran Neptune in the 11th house has called me to “serve my tribe” in a way that never fit with the possibility of being a good, present father. So that never happened.

What about Jupiter, the traditional ruler of Pisces? I can relate to that too.

Jupiter is conjunct my Sun in Capricorn and the 2nd house. Again, I could yack about myself at length here, but very simply I now live in a beautiful home that makes me feel like a rich man – there’s Jupiter in the 2nd house impacting my 4th house experience and style of life. I hasten to add that I definitely didn’t start out that way. I grew up in a 3-room 4th floor walk-up apartment in an edgy ethnic neighborhood just outside the Bronx in the New York City area. I’ve come a long way from there. Today I live in a style I could barely imagine then.

I’m grateful for my life and I’d be the first to say that I have been lucky – but I’ve worked hard too. There’s the Capricorn signature – to get to my present 4th house home took a lot of hard (and very meaningful!) effort. Once again, the ruler of the 4th house cusp – in this case, the traditional ruler – tells the story, augmenting what we might see based solely on the sign we find there.

WHAT IF THE RULER IS IN THE HOUSE IT RULES?

Let me add one more practical perspective. About one time out of every twelve, you will find that the planetary ruler of a house is actually in the house that it rules. Obviously this affords us less enhancement of our perspective – although let’s add that it’s not unusual for the ruling planet to be in the next sign, and that can offer a bit of fresh information.

What I’ve found to be generally true in the situation where the planetary ruler is in the house it rules is that the person’s success in terms of that house depends very much on independent, “self-starting” activity.

I think happily for example of my own 2nd house – the “house of money.” Sagittarius is on the cusp and Jupiter is in the 2nd house too, but in Capricorn. As I write, I am one month away from celebrating the 47th anniversary of me not having a boss. For most of my life, I’ve been self-employed. No one else has been signing my paychecks.

Did I mention feeling lucky?

IN PRACTICE

Sometimes the connection between the house and the position of its ruler is very obvious. You can see that clearly in the three easy examples I’ve explored here – John Glenn, Bette Davis, and me. Other times the linkage is more subtle. In a moment, I want to present three technical views of planetary house rulers. Reliably, at least one of them will jump out as you compare a chart with the dynamics of a person’s life.

Before I get there, let me emphasize that so far I’ve mostly been using the example of the planet that rules the Midheaven. That’s no accident – in practical counseling astrology, questions around career are common and knowing the position of the ruler of the 10th house adds a lot of helpful perspective. Still, every house has a sign on its cusp and in every case, knowing the position of its ruling planet adds a helpful dimension to our understanding. Where’s the ruler of your 7th house? You’ll see something there about your partner, if you have one – or where to look for one if you don’t and would like to change that. The ruler of your 5th house? What’s the natural style of your creativity and where might you find the most bang for the buck in terms of simple joy in your life?

I’m hoping that these illustrations have given you a feeling for how to work with the planetary ruler of a house. Again, just think of resonance or connection between the house and its ruler. Through rulership we link the basic meaning of a house to some other “foreign” part of the chart – and typically at first it’s a part of the chart that seems to have nothing to do with the house in question – until you think about it for a while. Then the linkage becomes apparent.

So far these examples have been about lives that are already lived – or mostly lived. That’s how we often can see the full manifestation of anything astrological, so it’s a good way to learn. But what about when we are counseling a young person – or counseling someone who’s feeling lost or confused in life? Then these principles can help us aim such a person in the right direction. That’s when they really turn to gold.

Let me underscore once more that in thinking rigorously about the planetary rulership of houses, it’s mission-critical to get beyond the notion of the planet somehow “controlling” the house. Sometimes it actually works that way, but other times it’s the reverse. The bottom line is that the house and the planet are meant to be a team, working together to help people become what they are meant to become.

I want to offer three interlocking perspectives on these planetary house rulers. Even though you’ll see some contradictions among them, try thinking of these three templates as different angles of understanding rather than as an argument where there’s going to be a winner. In practice, what I suggest is that if you feel stuck as you try to sort out a pattern of house rulerships, try switching among these three frameworks. In my experience, one of them will usually leap out – and with more penetrating analysis, you’ll typically find some relevance in all three of them.

The energy of the house expresses itself (reveals itself; flowers) through the house, sign, and aspectual position of the planetary ruler of its cusp.

The planetary ruler of the house cusp governs, overshadows and focuses the expression of the house energy.

The planetary ruler of the house cusp serves the needs of the house, bringing it what it needs in order to shine.

Once again, planetary rulers of house cusps operate like the circulatory systems in the human body, carrying energy from one part of the chart to another, binding everything together. As ever, our goal in chart interpretation lies in wholistic integration. You have many planets in your chart, but you have only one head between your ears. Rulership is one of your most reliable allies when it comes to melding many symbols into one coherent message.

Steven Forrest
April 2024

Happy 5th Birthday to the School!

Master’s Musings, March 2024

Happy 5th Birthday to the School!

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The FCEA was born on March 6, 2019, in Pleasanton, California, at 10:00 AM-PST. That means it’s time to celebrate – we have our fifth birthday this month. When we arrive at that moment, Earth will have gone around the Sun five times and returned to its starting point – or so most people would think. The reality is a little bit more complicated than that. When the school was born, the Sun was in 15 degrees 52 minutes of Pisces. This year, it returns to that precise point a day ahead of our official birthday – at 4:13:11 PM-PST on the fifth day of March rather than on the sixth. That’s about eighteen hours early.

Why?

Let’s start by recognizing that the idea that the year is “365 days” long is a convenient fiction. Actually, it runs 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. That’s why 2024 has a “February 29th” in it – we’re in a Leap Year, where we add a day to reconcile the calendar with reality, at least approximately. As you doubtless know, we make that adjustment every fourth year so that extra “quarter of a day” in the true solar year winds up compensated, more or less. The underlying reality is that the convenient fiction of the 365-day year is only an approximate reflection of what’s actually happening in the solar system. And that “wiggle” between reality and your calendar is the reason why your true astrological birthday – when the Sun actually returns to its starting point – often falls a day before or a day after your calendar birthday.

All this might seem picky and irrelevant at a practical level. Mostly it is, except for its impact on one basic astrological technique: the solar return chart. That’s a chart set up for the moment the Sun returns to its natal position. For the school, that would be a chart set up for 4:13:11 PM-PST on March 5th in Pleasanton. A chart set for 10:00 AM the next day – our “birthday” – would be meaningless.

Here it is:

Solar Return charts are a staple of modern astrological practice. Our school’s birthday this month seems like a good time to introduce them. In simple terms, these “SR charts” are seen as a way of predicting the nature of your year ahead. Interested? They’re easily explored – all professional-level astrological software supports creating them.

The first thing I want to say about SR charts is that their absence from our 200-level curriculum might seem conspicuous. Why are they not part of what we teach at the school? After all, they’re the real deal. Many years ago, I used them all the time in my practice. I found them valid, but I also found that after I’d looked at a client’s transits, progressions, and solar arcs, the solar return chart didn’t actually add much that I hadn’t seen already. They were redundant, in other words, and actually less precise than our other techniques in terms of timing – everything was about “this year” rather than the way we can name actual dates with the other techniques.

As ever, all counseling astrologers face the tyranny of the one or two hour appointment versus the sheer volume of all the astrological information we have available to us. In winnowing down my own arsenal of techniques to the most impactful ones, solar return charts simply fell into disuse. As ever with the school, our guiding principle is to convey to you as efficiently as possible an approach to astrology that has been effective for me personally. That involves a lot of editing! Our overriding strategy has been to first set our students on a firm professional foundation, and only then encourage them to wander off in any directions that interest them.

For some of you, that might include learning about SR charts. If they attract you, go for it! I’d be the first to admit that casting one is an eternal birthday ritual for me. The technique is valid and sometimes illuminating. I set up mine on January 6th this year and saw my Sun in the 12th house. Nine days later I came down with the flu and was sidelined “on the mountaintop” for the next month. They work!

Location, Location, Location

I always advocate setting up a solar return chart for your birth place. There’s an astrological cottage industry that involves sending people to exotic locations for their birthdays “so they have a great solar return chart.” It’s fun, and not a totally groundless practice, but if you’re an evolutionary astrologer, there’s a serious problem with relying solely on that technique. Remember: you have your chart for a reason and that reason is always rooted in the past. If we lose sight of that, we’ve lost sight of the metaphysical heart of astrology in the process. Let’s say your solar return this year shows the Moon’s south node in the 8th house. Some painful, wounded karma is surfacing. Now let’s say you don’t like having that kind of karma, so you decide to celebrate your birthday in Hawaii – that way, your south node will be in the much nicer 5th house.

Problem solved, right?

Obviously not. All we’ve done is to use astrology as a form of denial. Again, I don’t want to totally reject the idea of setting up your SR chart for where you actually are located on your birthday – that technique tells us something, but do be careful not to lose perspective: the SR chart set for the place of birth is the deep one.

Here’s a way of keeping perspective on these two approaches. If you move to a new home many hundreds of miles from where you were born, go ahead and set up your birthchart as if you had been born there – same time, different latitude and longitude. Your Ascendant and house placements will all look different. That relocated chart won’t replace your real one, but you’ll certainly feel its effects. That new chart acts like permanent transits in your new home – as long as you live there, you’ll feel that new emphasis in your experience.

The point is that it’s exactly the same with relocated solar return charts. You’ll definitely feel their influence – just don’t let them eclipse the birthplace version of that SR chart. That’s the deep one. That’s where you’ll find the soul of the technique.

How Do They Work?

A solar return chart reflects the tone of the year ahead. Where will your energy be focused? What kinds of events, opportunities, and challenges are likely to come surfing into your life on the waves of synchronicity? As we bring our evolutionary philosophy to bear on solar return charts, we ask ourselves questions about what our soul is learning this year and how to adapt to it. We ferret out timely warnings about any karmic pitfalls that might be looming.

In other words, in pretty obvious ways everything you’ve been learning in our FCEA training applies to solar return charts.

Here’s an example. July 1981 changed my life. That was the month in which I got the contract to write The Inner Sky. My solar return for my birthday in January of that year shows a massive Mercury influence – that’s no surprise with an (unexpected) publishing contract in the future. Virgo is rising, so Mercury rules the chart. Gemini is on the Midheaven, linking Mercury to my career – or in FCEA terms, linking Mercury to my mission in the world. Mercury itself is on the cusp of the creative 5th house, and in a conjunction with my natal Sun. That SR chart was Mercury City, in other words – and I was soon under contract with Bantam Books to write the book that altered the direction of my life.

I should also add that I had a grand mal love affair with a woman who had both her Sun and Moon in Virgo that year – there’s the fingerprint of that “house of love affairs” Mercury again. In this case, that intimate drama was aided and abetted by a very karmic south node/Mars conjunction, also in the 5th house – all that, plus a tight Venus-Neptune conjunction in Sagittarius. Romantically, I was doomed, but professionally, things looked pretty good for me, in other words. And it was all there in the SR chart set for my birthplace. At the time, I was actually living 400 miles away in North Carolina, so the relocated chart wouldn’t have reflected reality nearly so deeply.

Here’s another example:

Taylor Swift’s time of birth has an X rating on Astrodatabank, but they favor a time of 8:36 AM on December 13, 1989, in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Trusting a chart with a shaky birth time is risky business, but Swift is having such a big year that if the 8:36 AM birth time is accurate, her solar return chart should be reflective of her current situation.

Here’s her current (possible) solar return:

That late-Capricorn Pluto is conjunct her Aquarian Midheaven, and she has of course become a lightning rod for right-wing projections, not to mention becoming a “plutocrat” in the sense of being the first musical star to experience a billion-dollar tour. Uranus tightly conjunct the SR Ascendant naturally reflects the extreme and unpredictable “wild cards” that have characterized this period of her life.

More striking to me (and perhaps in the long run to her as well) is the massive reference to intimacy built into this solar return chart. Currently she is very publicly and apparently very seriously in love with NFL star, Travis Kelce. Reflecting that relationship, with Taurus rising, Venus rules the SR chart, for starters. From our evolutionary viewpoint, that Venus is further strengthened by the Libra south node, suggesting some intimate karmic chickens coming home to roost for her this year. The 8th house refers to intimate bonding – the true mysterium tremendum of human sexuality. There we find both the Sun and the Moon. Clearly, she’s having a massive 8th house year.

Naturally betting on the longevity of sexual passion among rock stars and movie stars is shaky business, but in the case of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce I think we are looking at the real deal. With an 8th house like that one in her SR chart, her heart has probably never been opened in such a grown-up intimate way. At the very least, Taylor Swift is having a taste of what real marriage actually means – all those weird, wonderful psychic interminglings are undoubtedly happening for her and Travis. If I were sitting with her, here’s a thought I would run up the flagpole – despite the hype and fru-fru (and enormous success) of her Eras Tour, the soul-meaning of this year has more to do with Travis Kelce’s impact on her than the private jets, the public hoo-rah, and the billion dollars. I suspect that as I said that, she would nod her head and we would have a moment of sweet mutual understanding.

As a side note, given the good alignment of this solar return chart with Swift’s current existential realities, I’d be inclined to take this 8:36 AM birth time for her seriously.

What about the FCEA? How does our solar return look for the year starting on March 5?

Like Taylor Swift, we’ve got an 8th house Sun this year too, but I doubt we’re going to fall in love with Travis Kelce. In the chart of an institution such as ours, a strong 8th house does bode intense, transformative relationships. We’ll see that happening in the school in general. I suspect lots of “buttons will be pushed” emotionally as long-buried emotional material surfaces for many of us. As a school, we’ll need to have a long talk with ourselves. It’s a time of deepening.

One classic meaning of the 8th house is “other people’s money” – Taylor Swift certainly has found a lot of that green stuff this year. The FCEA is not looking for investors, but if we were, this chart would support it. Will there be some unexpected financial developments for the school? Let’s keep our eyes open for them.

I’m struck by the double-whammy combination of Saturn conjunct our Sun and the Capricorn Moon in the 6th house. Both configurations have a hardworking vibration, for sure. There’s a nose-to-the-grindstone feeling of building, building, building, not to mention the school simply maturing – that’s Saturn again. I’m immediately drawn to think of our struggle to get our social platform, Circle, cooking. It’ll happen, honest!

It doesn’t show in this chart format, but that Capricorn Moon is wildly Out of Bounds too – 27 degrees 47 minutes south declination. Given the 6th house focus, does that portend staff change? Unexpected developments in our support team? Circle figures in there too – it’s a tool that supports us.

Finally, you’ve got to love that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in the 10th house – all told, this SR chart looks like a bouncy, nose-to-the-grindstone ride in the general direction of success.

Want to Learn More about Solar Returns?

One can delve more deeply into solar return charts than I have in this quick overview of the technique. Again, all of our basic evolutionary principles apply – we just have to make sure we are aiming them in the right direction, which is to focus our sense of our soul-aims for a given year.

As I mentioned, I don’t actually use SR charts very much in my own practice and so we’ve not employed them as part of the FCEA curriculum. If you’d like to learn more, the best book I know about the technique is Cycles of Light by my dear friend, Lynn Bell. It was written in 2005 and is now happily back in print and available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Steven Forrest
March 2024

An Integrated View of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto

An Integrated View of the Outer Planets

Master’s Musings, January 2024

An Integrated View of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto

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On December 7, 8 and 9, 2023, I did a long online program for my Chinese students. It was called “Working With The Invisible Planets.” The teaching went well, but it was tough going for me – three back to back six-hour classes, running from 4:00 pm to 10:00 pm each day, starting on a Thursday. That timing corresponded to the class opening at 8:00 on Friday morning in China, so it worked well at their end, but not so well for this “morning person.”

Even though those hours were hard for me, I am glad I did it. There are many reasons for that – I love my Chinese students, for starters – but the main one is that much to my surprise I actually learned something new, fundamental, and, at least to me, rather eye-popping about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. That kind of surprising serendipity happens sometimes – I’m going over what I think of as familiar territory, and suddenly a new understanding comes into focus. Lightning strikes and in a flash I feel the way I felt studying astrology when I was 19 years old. Back then, those lucid moments happened frequently – astrology felt like a rich, new continent where I was always tripping over unexpected nuggets of gold. Those lightning bolt experiences are less common for me now, but I’m grateful that they still happen from time to time. Fresh astrological mysteries and patterns still reveal themselves.

About my new insight into Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – let me give you a little background first so everyone is up to speed. In the FCEA 300 courses, we go deeply into each of the planets, singly or in groups. One of those groups, which we study in FCEA 304, is about this trio. They’re very different beasts, but we link them together under the banner of “The Invisible Planets” – and what that means is simply that we can’t see them unless we use a telescope.

The “invisibility” of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto is of course a literal reality, but it also provides a fine metaphor – we can only really get to the higher potentials of these three bodies if we use “unnatural means.” Here’s what I mean. Mars might do its job well simply by instinctive reflex – we see a bear and we run away, for example. Not so with our invisible worlds. To get each of them right, we have to go beyond the natural reflexes and instincts of our “monkey bodies,” and that never happens automatically. It takes something more than our inborn instincts – something that doesn’t arise naturally or spontaneously in us.

Uranus requires individuation – we must overcome our herd instinct and truly think for ourselves. Nobody does that on automatic pilot.

Neptune requires an expansion of consciousness. We must overcome our instinctive sense of our separateness from everything else – that means our reflexive identification with our physical bodies and our egos, not to mention their preservation.

Pluto requires brave inner work. We must overcome our natural defensiveness in relation to our own shadow, our wounds, and our unconscious mind. We must acknowledge the unknown and the uncontrollable. We must face psychic fear. We must recognize our own mortality. We must let our guard down.

All of this is familiar territory to any of our students who have gotten past our 300-level courses – and really, to anyone who has been studying evolutionary astrology for very long in any fashion. We’ve not yet arrived at my “light-bulb moment.” To get there, we need to add another layer to our thinking.

In my Chinese program, I told the story of how at some long-ago astrology conference, I was invited to be on a panel tasked with “finding God in the chart.” Lots of the panelists pointed to the Neptune, Pisces, 12th House family of symbols. In practice, that’s a helpful answer. But I disagreed. I told everyone to look outside the circle of the chart – the space outside it is what represents God to me.

Everything in the chart represents your personality – your “ego,” in the technical psychological sense of the word. The mystery we call God lies beyond all of that. (Neptune doesn’t).

Astrologically – or astronomically – that realization directs our attention to the space beyond Neptune and Pluto, or more properly, to the space beyond our solar system.

At the deepest level, the purpose of life lies in reaching a kind of mingling transparency with that vast spaciousness. Call it “God” – or enlightenment, salvation, heaven, satori, nirvana, cosmic consciousness. The words don’t matter – in fact, at that level of being, words only get in the way.

Everything I’ve said so far is material I’ve taught for years. Most of you are quite familiar with it. My lightbulb moment as I prepared my notes for that Chinese class, came when I realized there was a natural, step-by-step sequencing of Uranus to Neptune, to Pluto – and from there, into the Great Beyond. What I found was something we might call “the unified field theory” of the invisible planets.

I can make this clear most easily if I start in the middle, with Neptune. In The Book of Neptune, I introduced the planet as “the window” between the ego-mind and the deep space of consciousness itself. Neptune isn’t the soul – it works more like an interface between individual consciousness and the vastness of what lies beyond it. Meanwhile the light of the mysteries shines back into our lives through that same Neptunian “window.”

The paradox of windows is that they are both inside and outside the house – and that’s Neptune. It’s the part of the ego that can potentially look beyond itself.

Looking through Neptune’s window gives us an entirely different perspective on what it means to be human. We realize that we are composed of consciousness. Flesh and bones are only substances we inhibit briefly (and repeatedly) on our deeper journey. From that Neptunian perspective, life looks totally different to us than it does to the rest of the human race. Probably the clearest illustration of that principle is that, from Neptune’s viewpoint, death isn’t really such a big deal – try popularizing that idea at your local shopping mall and you’ll see what I mean by thinking differently from the rest of the human race!

To even begin to think in Neptunian fashion, we must separate ourselves from that collective, “shopping mall” mentality. We must, in other words, individuate – and that’s why everything in this invisible planet sequence starts with Uranus. I began to realize that, while Uranus has many meanings and applications, its most fundamental purpose is to be the first step on our journey to the “outer space” beyond Pluto.

As we begin to think of ourselves as souls rather than as hungry, horny, angry monkeys, we have definitely left the “shopping mall.”

Uranus allows us the freedom to get to Neptune. With it, we escape the materialistic “common sense” illusions of consensual reality.

Gazing through that Neptunian window into the mysteries beyond it is tricky. That’s because the window is dirty. It’s cluttered with what Buddhists call “obscurations” – or what a modern psychotherapist would call “our personal issues.” This is where Pluto enters the story.

Say there’s a woman who actively identifies herself as being “on the spiritual path.” She’s the real deal. She’s sincere about it – but let’s also say that she hates her father, maybe with good reason. Still, fairly or unfairly, her unresolved hatred of her father “dirties her window.” If she could get past that hatred, she would see through the window more clearly. None of this is about morality. None of it is about right or wrong. It’s simply a fact – dirt on a window makes it harder to see through it, period. Philosophy has nothing to do with it.

Our Neptunian windows are always dirty, one way or another. We all have unresolved karma, in other words. That’s why we’re here in these monkey-bodies in the first place. If something scared us in our childhoods (or in a prior life), when we look through the window we see fearful things. If we were conditioned by easiness and a coddled existence, we expect evolution to not require effort. If we were embattled, we project “war” onto every process and experience.

Obviously, there’s a place for the south node of the Moon in our thinking here, but let’s just file all of those karmic issues under “our obscurations.” The point is that dealing with them is Pluto work. That’s how we clean our windows.

Here’s the sequence. With Uranus, we begin to look beyond the normal human reality of life lived unreflectively and instinctively. We began to sense that the tribe may have missed something truly fundamental about the purpose of life. “Normal” people – the ones dominated by ego, hunger, fear, and aggression, in other words – may, in fact, have missed the whole point of human existence.

With Neptune, some light starts to shine through that muck, flowing in from the higher realms – and, fascinated, we begin to turn our attention in that beguiling direction. The more we see that great light, the hungrier we become for it – and that soon brings us face to face with resistance: our psychological and karmic issues. We realize that our journey to the Light must route through the Darkness.

Pluto work is difficult, but as we loosen the shackles of our own madness, we stop wasting energy on life’s dramas. With that energy redirected, we become powerful enough to make the great leap into the vastness – a vastness that has been our true nature all along, only we didn’t know it.

In that “empowerment,” we feel the shamanic dimensions of Pluto.

With the discovery of Eris in 2005, the realm of the “Trans-Neptunian Objects” – the TNO’s – opened up. Pluto is really one of them – that’s mainly why the astronomers downgraded it from a full planet in their nomenclature. Rather uniquely, Pluto weaves in and out over Neptune’s orbit. That orbital quirk is a big subject, but it provides us with what I think is the reason we experience Pluto with such power and intensity – again, it’s like a shaman journeying to the Underworld, then coming back to the “village” of our everyday minds with some heavy, but ultimately empowering, messages.

I believe that the TNOs are emerging as a map of the unconscious mind and the archetypes which animate it. That’s a big subject too. Suffice to say that beyond the realm of the TNOs – which is the karmic and psychological minefield we must navigate as we liberate ourselves – we meet the realm of deep space. We meet the thing that since the beginning of human time many of us have called God.

So here in skeleton form is the model that dawned on me as I was preparing my Chinese class. I think of it as the “unified field theory of the invisible planets:”

Uranian individuation allows us to realize that “the obvious, common sense truths of life” are mostly an illusion.

That liberating Uranian realization gives us the freedom to “get weird enough” to believe the insights, experiences, and information we sense streaming in through Neptune’s window. We stop dismissing them as “craziness.”

In our desire to see through that window more clearly, we feel compelled to clean it. We begin to deal with our own issues – mostly the fears, angers, resentments, and desires that separate us from the rest of life. That Plutonian process simultaneously clears us and energizes us enough to make a leap in consciousness – one that takes us eventually beyond these bodies and entirely beyond this time-bound, three-dimensional world.

Steven Forrest
January 2024

A New Project for the School

Master’s Musings, December 2023

A New Project for the School

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Some people are simply perpetual students of astrology. They love our ancient art and they can’t get enough of it – and when it comes to something you can’t get enough of, astrology is as good as it gets since the field is practically infinite in scope. Those eternal students are welcome in our school – we know that not all of us are set on becoming practicing, counseling astrologers, and that’s fine. But of course for many of us, our aim is to use our astrological education to start making a difference in other people’s lives, perhaps even doing astrology professionally. While we welcome everyone, our school is specifically geared with that counseling intention in mind – and that leads us directly to a basic challenge: learning astrology theoretically is one thing, but learning to present consultations to the general public is another.

When it comes to sitting confidently with clients, there’s no substitute for practice. Your voice will become more fluent – and more your own – over time. To help you get there, we also have our more advanced courses. For example, we just finished our first master class, which was a big success. Our counseling course will open up soon too. Together, those courses will help prepare you for “the real world” of working with clients.

What this newsletter is about is that we are planning another way to support you in getting there.

The purpose of the FCEA is not to “clone” me – well, at least not exactly. Obviously there is some of that “cloning” in the mixture. My long-term hope has always been to help everyone in the school “stand on my shoulders” – then once they’ve taken in the view, to see things I’ve never seen or figured out myself. Astrology is vast, but over the years I’ve whittled its corpus down to some core techniques that are powerful, robust, and meaningful enough to enough people that you can build a popular practice with them. In the school, we put blinders on you and aim you toward mastery of that single approach – a process that takes three or four years, thus shaving centuries off the impossible process of “learning everything about astrology.”

Once you’ve neared the end of your FCEA training, you’ve won half the battle: you’ve got the theory down. The next stop is finding your own voice. Again, some of our advanced courses will help you with that process, but we are in the middle of planning another way to support you. We intend to create a library of actual readings that I have done. Here’s how it will work – or at least how we hope it will work. Getting there will require your help.

INTRODUCING CIRCLE – A NEW FCEA COMMUNITY FORUM

We have exciting news for 2024! We will soon have Circle implemented – a sort of private social media “watering hole” for the school. It’s being created as a space for the FCEA community to connect and communicate with one another in a fun and informal environment, and will also include a library of videos and other materials.

We are also hoping that this new community forum will create a wonderful replacement for our discontinued study group calls. Although the study group calls have had a low participation rate (only 10%), we understand that the 10% of students who did attend them valued them very much. Yet the low participation rate did not make them sustainable for the school. We trust that our new offerings through Circle will offer everyone a new means of inspiration and an even more sustainable (and hopefully broader) community connection. It will also better serve our international student body who reside in a wide variety of different time zones, as Circle will be available 24/7. Once we open this online gathering space in early 2024, everyone will be able to engage with the platform to some extent.

We realize that the past distinctions between Student and Member were confusing, especially because we have always considered every student an integral member of the FCEA Community, whether or not they had paid for the additional benefits of FCEA Membership. So, from now on, everyone will be considered a Community Member—as we introduce two levels of membership: the FCEA Membership (free) and the FCEA Premium Membership (for an annual fee) which will feature enhanced memberships benefits.

Here’s how all of this will work: Everyone who registers for an FCEA account on our website is able to watch Free Community Calls available on forrestastrology.center – and now they’ll also be able to create a free FCEA account on the Circle platform. FCEA Members who purchase the Premium Membership will be invited to attend all of the FCEA’s live Monthly Q&A calls with me (which are included in our courses for current students) and have the opportunity to continually chat and comment as a community within the Circle platform. Premium Members will also be able to access all previous Q&A Calls (from December 2020 through the present day) on Circle, and chat and comment there as a community, continually.

Premium FCEA Members who are also students at the 200 Level and above, and including FCEA graduates, will gain special access to a rotating library of donated recorded Steven Forrest readings.

CALLING FOR VOLUNTEERS

Over the years, many of you have had me do private readings. We would like to ask if you might consider sharing them with the school. Immediately I want to underscore that this would be completely voluntary, with no pressure implied. For totally understandable reasons, many of you will want to keep those recordings confidential. Again, no pressure!

If you do decide to help, we will keep everything confidential, at least with the boundaries of the school. But I often use people’s names – at least their first names – in the readings. And naturally we would need your chart as well. We can delete last names from them. We could even delete birth data, but it’s often not hard to reconstruct it from a chart. The reality is that other students would often “know it was you.” We want to be transparent about that. Sometimes when I do a reading for someone, they’ve shared sensitive information with me in advance. I may reference it directly in the recording. If anyone in that situation prefers not to share the reading, we support you 100%. In fact if anyone prefers not to share their readings for any reason at all, that’s fine too – yet again: no pressure!

For legal and ethical reasons, we will have anyone who volunteers their recording sign a waiver granting the school the right to use the material.

Naturally, we’d be interested in all kinds of readings – a birthchart analysis, transits/progressions, even synastries. We welcome any and all of your submissions through this online reading donation form.

We hope you will consider it, but please don’t do it if you feel ambivalent about it. If we don’t have enough volunteers from within the school, I would plan to put out a more general request on social media. Over the years, I’ve done many thousands of readings for the general public – some of you may actually be reading these words. Depending on the response of our FCEA community, we may or may not reach out more broadly.

Access to these readings will be posted in a limited access area of the new FCEA Circle platform, accessible only by 200 Level students and above, and graduates of the FCEA, who have active FCEA Premium Memberships. Therefore, these readings will not be available to the general public – it’s strictly for our student body.

Soon after receiving your reading donation application, we will have a page on the website where you can easily complete the online waiver and securely upload your reading. Thank you so much for your consideration!

SO WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

That question brings us right back to whether or not the FCEA is an attempt to “clone Steven Forrest.” I think the most honest answer is “at first yes, and then ultimately no.” And with that said, we swing back to a point I made right at the beginning of this newsletter – first you learn astrological theory, then you find your own voice. Inevitably your voice will at first probably resemble my own at least to some extent.

Over the years, I’ve developed a huge reservoir of stories, metaphors, and images. They all work well for quickly telegraphing complex astrological ideas across to my clients. I am hoping that if you let some of my readings drone in the background as you drive your car or clean your house, you’ll pick up some of that language. I encourage you to use any of it that you want. I have no proprietary feelings about it – in fact, I probably “stole” half of it myself, except I can’t remember when or from who.

THE TIME TABLE

When will we make this happen? Soon! There are too many wild cards in the mix for us to be more precise than that. Getting Circle up and running – and getting us all signed up for it – is a process that will take a while. Then there’s the unanswered question of how many of you will feel comfortable sharing your readings. We know they’re very personal! So we’ll see how long that takes.

We’ll do this though – and I’m confident that it will be a major piece of the “endgame” of your FCEA education.

Steven Forrest
December 2023

Planetray Dispositors

Master’s Musings, November 2023

Planetary Dispositors

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NOTE FROM STEVE . . . A few weeks back, Catie shared with me that Cliff Passen had wondered why we never covered the question of planetary dispositors in our FCEA program. As I thought about it, I decided it merited a short handout in our 101 course. As I got into writing it, I realized that dispositors were a richer topic than I had anticipated. Since so many of you are beyond FCEA101 at this point, I’ve decided to let the handout be my column this month so everyone can have a look at it.

From time to time in your astrological reading, you will run into the word “dispositor.” It’s a fancy term for a simple idea – one that’s based directly on the principle of planetary rulership. Say Mercury is in Aries. Since Mars is the ruler of Aries, we would then say that Mars disposits Mercury or that Mars was Mercury’s dispositor. In a nutshell, a planet’s dispositor is the planet that rules the sign the planet happens to be in.

If you think about that for a moment, one further point immediately becomes clear: when a planet is in the sign it rules, nothing can disposit it.

Otherwise all planets have dispositors.

In our evolutionary system we recognize dual rulerships. That means that any planet that’s in Pisces has two dispositors: Jupiter and Neptune. Ditto naturally for planets in Aquarius and Scorpio.

Technically, that’s the basic idea of dispositors right there. Pretty simple really. Let’s talk about what it means.

Basically a planet’s dispositor has a certain degree of influence over it. Understanding the exact nature of that influence can add some helpful nuances to our grasp of the disposited planet’s function – but do keep perspective: understanding the impact of a planetary dispositor is secondary in importance to its basic sign, house, and aspects. Saying that the dispositor “rules over” the planet that it disposits pushes the idea too far. As ever, the dominator tone of the word “rulership” is a medieval hangover that always tends to take astrologers down the wrong road. Rulership is really about resonance, common ground, and mutual influence.

In practice, the dispositor represents a trio of interlocking influence over the expression of the planet which it disposits.

Relative to the disposited planet, the dispositor wields three pressures:

It represents a Guiding or Governing Principle
It represents an Overriding Concern
It represents a Constraining Limitation

Consider the chart of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. We start with something that should be no surprise for a performer of his renown and durability – he has both Venus and Neptune in his 5th house. Both planets are in Virgo, so their dispositor is Mercury, which we find in Leo and in Jagger’s 4th house. Without going deeply into his chart, let’s see how our basic principles apply to him.

Like the 5th house, Leo relates to performance – once again, that’s no surprise. It’s where the 4th house placement of his Mercury enters the picture that everything gets interesting and we really begin to see the signature of a planetary dispositor. The 4th house is deep, internal, and hidden. Those are not the first words to enter our minds when we think of Mick Jagger strutting on the stage!

But reflect for a moment: is the “sex machine” we see fronting the band the real Mick? Of course not – it’s a performance, quite literally. It is a persona that he has adopted in pursuit of his craft.

I once heard a cute quote from one of Mick Jagger’s daughters when she was young – “Everybody thinks my father is the devil and he lets them think that.” She obviously “had his number” – but probably that was because he had given it to her in the intimate domestic context of 4th house privacy, trust, and confidentiality.

Applying our principles regarding the dispositor, we can see that throughout Mick Jagger’s long career, A Guiding or Governing Principle has been to stick unwaveringly to the public image he created.
Meanwhile, An Overriding Concern and A Constraining Limitation in his life has been to keep his real self buried in the 4th house, at least in terms of his public identity as a performer.

As a footnote, presumably doing all that has kept him living in something pretty close to a literal palace – that’s a Leo/4th house signature too, and it brings us closer to conventional astrology.

By the way, it is mission-critical for us as astrological counselors to remember that none of this is intended to be critical of Mr. Jagger. It’s just how a dispositor works. His chart is his path, just like yours. He’s followed it – and in this case it appears that he’s done it very well. How many men over the age of eighty can convince the world that they’re still dangerous sex machines?

Sometimes one planet disposits all the rest of the planets in a chart. For that to even be a possibility, two conditions have to be met. First, there has to be a planet in the sign it rules. Second, there can be no other planets in the signs they rule. If those two conditions are met, there is a chance that the single planet occupying its own sign might be the final dispositor of the chart. To find out, you have to follow the chains of rulership and see if they all lead back to that first planet.

Here’s an example of what that looks like – and note the “dispositor tree” on the right side. That shows these lines of power and how they all trace back, in this case, to the Sun.

The Sun is in Leo, the sign it rules.

No other planet is in that “dignified” condition.

The Sun disposits Mercury, which through Virgo, disposits Venus, Pluto, and Uranus. Through Gemini, that same Mercury disposits Jupiter.

Venus disposits Mars and Uranus disposits the Moon, while Pluto disposits Neptune – which finally disposits Saturn. That’s everything.

Without knowing about dispositors, we would have no trouble respecting the strength of a Leo Sun in the 10th house! But now we see that reality spelled out even more clearly – how the pressures and possibilities of a Leo “mission” in the world completely “govern, override, and constrain” this person’s life.

Most charts don’t have final dispositors like this, but you’ll often find a long chain that leads back to one single planet. Look at the realities of the person’s life, and you’ll see an elevated level of influence wielded by that planet. Once again, it “governs, guides, and constrains” almost everything – at least almost everything in the realm of the planets it disposits.

As I mentioned, we’ve placed a similar version of this essay as a handout in FCEA101 – very early in our school curriculum, in other words. All in all, it feels right to do that. Dispositors are an elemental piece of astrological theory, one that’s inseparable ultimately from the whole idea of rulership. It feels right that we introduce the word pretty much from the beginning of a person’s astrological studies. My only hesitation is about overloading our 101 students with too many technicalities, especially ones that might not deserve to be up there on equal footing with the foundational basics of signs, planets, houses, and aspects.

The bottom line is that knowing about dispositors is something we should probably hear about in the 3rd grade – but then revisit when we get to college.

Steven Forrest
November 2023

Photo Credit: Jerzy Bednarski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Launching The Master Practicum

Master’s Musings, October 2023

Launching The Master Practicum

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On Monday, September 25, we had our first meeting of our long-awaited master class – FCEA-306. Fifteen students were enrolled, and fourteen were present. The course will run for a total of seven weeks, with each session 90 minutes in length. The first one went smoothly, as did the next two. We seem to have found the right template for making the process work – more about that in a moment.

Personally, seeing FCEA-306 finally happening was a happy moment for me. I’d actually been waiting for it since March 6, 2019, which is a long time! That was the day that Catie, Jeff Parrett, and I committed to creating the school. Altruistically, my motivation in launching the FCEA was to make sure that this form of evolutionary astrology would outlive me, but I had a more personal motivation too. I felt that the best use of my remaining time on Earth lay in teaching more advanced forms of astrology to serious students. That meant master classes! I knew in order to make space in my life for that, I would need to cut back on teaching the basics over and over again.

The dilemma was that in order to be in a position to have master classes, we needed some masters! People like that are not the products of weekend workshops. Astrological mastery comes with time and commitment. We had to wait about three years for the FCEA’s first wave of students to make their way through the foundational courses and get to the point where they were ready for me to work with them individually.

Exactly how to do that was the problem. Ideally, each student would do a complete analysis of a birthchart, a transits-progressions situation, and a synastry. I would listen to all three and offer personal feedback and support. Multiply that by fifteen students and it was clear that time was going to be an insurmountable problem. Catie and I had to get creative. Seven classes of 90 minutes meant that we had a total of just over ten hours to work with. That meant about 40 minutes per student. How could we best use that time?

The plan we came up with seems to be working very well. Each week we assign a single chart to the class in advance. We encourage the students to study it as if they were preparing to do a consultation for the person – to be ready for anything, in other words. When the class meets, Catie and I take turns asking specific questions about the chart. For example, we might ask something technical – say, a prominent Venus-Uranus opposition. Or we might ask a more general, integrative question, such as how would you counsel this person about career? Then we roll the drums. I reach into a hat and pull out a random number. Each number corresponds to one of the students in the class. That student is then invited to take about ten minutes or so to respond to our question. I let them run with it for a while, then I coach them a little further, helping them polish their comments and insights.

Once a person’s number has been pulled from the hat, we set it aside – that way, we’ll make sure that everyone has had a turn before anyone is called upon a second time.

In that first class, we worked with five students. I found that number very encouraging since it means that all the students are likely to get at least two or three opportunities to share their knowledge over the total of seven weeks in the class.

The first four of the weekly sessions will involve looking at a natal chart. Then two will be transits-progressions situations and one will be a synastry. We’ll use the same four natal charts for all seven sessions. The reason is simple: to do a good transits-progressions analysis or a synastry, you need to understand the natal charts thoroughly. That takes time, which is in short supply with only ten hours of class time. It seemed more efficient to build on the knowledge we had all gained from looking at those four natal charts earlier in the program. The first chart, in fact, was “Matthias Brown,” who had already made an appearance earlier in the curriculum.

Our four natal charts are fictional – there are no famous people or anyone we know personally. It’s pure astrology, in other words. Still, all astrologers are helped if they know a little bit about someone’s practical situation. That’s because there’s much that’s relevant to life but which cannot be seen in a chart – for instance, a person’s current relationship status, or some specific circumstance that overshadows everything, like maybe they’re fabulously wealthy or in a wheelchair or serving time in prison. We can always do helpful astrology while only knowing the date, time, and place of a person’s birth – but knowing a bit more helps us to speak more clearly. To help out, I constructed short biographies for each of our four fictional characters. Those are available to all of our FCEA306 students in advance too.

I mentioned that we had fifteen students signed up for the class and only fourteen present. Absent was our friend, Cezary Piscorz. He was a victim of our frustrating Time Zone problem. It is an absolute joy to me that our FCEA student body is so international, but it does create insoluble scheduling problems. Our class started at 5:00 pm-Pacific Time – which would have been the wee hours of a Tuesday morning for poor Cezary! (That time worked out all right for everyone else, although naturally it was easier for some than for others.)

For Cezary, we’ve made a special arrangement. One of our seven classes will occur at 8:00 am-Pacific Time, which is late afternoon for him (and awkward for some other class members). On that day, we will suspend our usual process of pulling a number from a hat and just start with Cezary. He can catch the rest of the classes via recordings, but we’ll miss his lively presence at our meetings.

I want to thank Cezary for his patience and understanding. Meanwhile I want to applaud this first wave of FCEA master astrologers-in-the-making individually by name. Thank you, Cezary, Raine, Sophie Salanat, Lauren Neubauer, Karla Smith, Lelia Thell, Lidia Ranieri, Linda Walker, Barb McNemar, Paula Crall. Teema Loeffeholz, Alan Egge, Sharon Kruger, Kimberly Blanchette, and Jackie Johanasen.

I’m proud of all of you!

Steven Forrest
October 2023

Some Thoughts About Reincarnation

Master’s Musings, September 2023

Some Thoughts About Reincarnation

In our Q & A session on August 23rd, our new student, “L,” asked the following question. “Most of us have had many past lives. Which past life is shown in the birth chart? All past lives perhaps? Or the most relevant past life/lives? Or the most recent past life/lives?”

I responded during the call, and if you want to watch the “live” version, remember that if you are an FCEA student or Community Member, all those sessions are recorded, indexed, and always available to you. By the way, we know that for many of you, even here in North America, the timing of these Zoom calls is somewhere between awkward and impossible. Our apologies for that. There really aren’t any good solutions to that problem, other than us seeing to it that recordings are provided.

L’s questions are so fundamental to the practice of evolutionary astrology that I wanted to explore them a little more deeply here in this newsletter. Let me start by saying that it is of course quite possible to adapt our work to accommodate clients who aren’t comfortable with the idea of past lives. We can always talk about ancestral themes, DNA, and so on — or we can just bow deeply before the unknowable mysteries of the universe, and add the observed fact that, whatever the reason, everyone arrives on Earth with an inborn nature and certain astrologically-predictable challenges. In practice, I always ask my clients if the idea of past lives works for them. Only twice, in all the years I’ve been doing this work, has anyone ever said no. One was a professor at Catholic University in Washington D.C. – and he came back three or four years later and told me it was OK to talk about past lives this time. The other was a psychotherapist in Marin County, California — go figure!

First, here’s the simple part. L writes, “Most of us have had many past lives.” I think it’s more accurate to say that we all have had many past lives. Even people for whom this is their first human incarnation have lived in animal bodies. Have you ever met someone who behaved like a baboon, for example? Or like a dog fighting over a bone? For what it’s worth, my personal feeling is that some four-footed beings are ahead of some of us two-footed ones – that the reality is not as simple as “you graduate from animal high school and go to human college.” That’s just my opinion, and many metaphysicians would disagree with me. In fact, let me be clear: pretty much everything you’ll be reading in this essay is nothing but my opinion. Much of it is informed by Buddhism, Ram Dass, Edgar Cayce, and other wise teachers, but all these things are hard to prove or even to investigate in a foolproof way. Take what you like and leave the rest. These are the best truths I know.

L had a few more questions: Which past life is shown in the birth chart? All past lives perhaps? Or the most relevant past life/lives? Or the most recent past life/lives?”

“All past lives” would probably paint your chart black – it would require such a density of symbols that you couldn’t read anything from it at all. The deep truth is that a very great number of prior incarnations in various forms has brought you to where you are today. Fortunately, our techniques of nodal analysis filter all of that past-life information in an extremely radical way. Very little of that information actually gets through. These filters work in a very practical way, only telling you what you need to know. Everything else gets left out. You may have been one of the twelve apostles. Maybe you were Geronimo. You may have been Cleopatra – but if what your soul is working on in this lifetime isn’t connected to those particular past lives, there will be no symbolism in your chart for them.

Maybe you were indeed “Cleopatra,” but you worked that karma out long ago. It no longer holds you back in any way. Poof – no nodal evidence for that lifetime appears in your birthchart.

Maybe you were “Cleopatra,” but you’re not yet ready to wrestle with that karma. You’re saving it for a future lifetime when you are wiser and more evolved than you are today. Once again, poof – no nodal evidence for that lifetime appears in the chart.

That’s how the “nodal filters” work. So much of this line of thought is contained in one phrase that most of you have heard me say many, many times: what we see via nodal analysis is unresolved karma that has ripened. “Unresolved” means it’s still holding you back somehow in terms of your evolutionary intentions for this lifetime. “Ripened” means that the time has come for you to deal with it – you’re ready, in other words.

Back to L’s questions:

Which past life is shown in the birth chart?

Answer: the one (or ones) that are actually pressing at you in this present life.

All past lives perhaps?

Answer: definitely not all of them!

Or the most relevant past life/lives?

Answer: L totally nails it here.

Or the most recent past life/lives?

Answer: not necessarily — karma often takes a while to ripen.

I always like to underscore the fact that we don’t read astrological charts the same way that we read newspapers. Symbolism is not literalism. As we do nodal analysis, our aim is to invent a story that resonates emotionally with the person’s actual karma. Liberate yourself from the feeling that you need to find the literal reality of anyone’s prior lifetimes. We can’t do that and we don’t make that indefensible claim, nor do we burden ourselves with that impossible task.

If in a prior life, you were literally a rock star, but I tell you a nodal tale about how you were a movie star, I’ve done my job – that story is close enough to ring the right emotional bells. Same thing if I tell you a story about how you were once a victim of religious persecution and the reality is that you were a victim of racial or gender prejudice. In other words, the story doesn’t need to be literally true in order to be emotionally relevant – and thus capable of triggering a cathartic reaction in the client. Remember: everything starts with the south node of the Moon – we’re talking about the history of the emotional body, not a checklist of biographical “Mercury” facts. We don’t typically remember our past lives in a concrete way. What we remember is what they felt like. That “Moon energy” is what reincarnates with us. That’s where we store the hurt. That’s what we see in the chart. And that’s where we look for the cure.

Built into this line of thinking is another practical point. Most of the time in practicing evolutionary astrology, we tell a single “once upon a time” past-life story. That simplicity may or may not reflect literal reality. Karma, by its very nature, tends to be habitual and repetitive. Might a soul cycle through several lifetimes in which it kept making the same mistake over and over again – marrying the wrong person, for example? Sure! But our single past-life tale covers all of those emotional bases and that’s the point.

Perhaps the most slippery question of them all is one that L didn’t ask. What exactly reincarnates? That’s a conundrum that keeps philosophers and metaphysicians talking until the wee hours.

Here’s how I understand it. I’ve been a Capricorn with an Aries Moon for almost seventy-five years now. After all that time, I’ve gotten pretty used to it. But at the moment my physical body dies, will I still be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon? That’s hard to answer – something of that imprint might survive in my post mortem consciousness for a while. But if we accept reincarnation, we know for sure that when I am reborn, I probably won’t be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon anymore. In other words, what reincarnates will not be my present personality. Among people who are drawn to the idea of reincarnation, there is often a naíve attitude that “you” just come back again in a new body as if nothing had really changed. It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. The reality is that “you” as a personality are truly dead and gone.

So what else are you besides your personality?

That brings us right back to our slippery question: what reincarnates? Your soul? Here in the western world, we often use that word. Buddhists generally don’t like it. That’s because they aren’t comfortable endorsing the idea of any kind of eternally separate individuality. Instead, they often refer to the mindstream.

In some ways, mindstream is a more rigorous concept. In other ways, I might say what’s the difference? For what it’s worth, I do use the word “soul” myself – but let me explain why “mindstream” works better when we’re wrestling with the profoundest kinds of metaphysical questions, as we are here.

At some undetermined point down the line, I won’t be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon any longer – but, for good or for ill, my mindstream will have been conditioned by all my experiences in this lifetime. In other words, something far bigger and more ancient than my personality will digest everything I’ve learned as Steven Forrest with his Capricorn Sun and his Aries Moon. It will all enter my mindstream. But underlying that immediate addition to my mindstream is another, deeper sedimentary layer – that’s all the accumulated impressions of my own prior lifetimes, digested and turned into feelings, attitudes, understandings . . . and errors, hurts, angers, and so on. My experiences as Steven Forrest will simply join that larger flow.

The mindstream is what reincarnates, not the personality – but underlying and shaping my future personality is that mindstream. Hopefully, as a result of being myself for all these years, it will be a little wiser and a little clearer.

Purifying that mindstream – teaching it love, not fear, generosity rather than grasping, acceptance, not aggression – is the purpose of life. Your present chart is just your particular current tack on those ancient, eternal challenges. It shows you where you’re stuck and exactly what you need to do to get free.

Think of it like a shirt you’re wearing. You may like it, but tomorrow you’ll take it off and put it in the wash. Personalities are like that. Mindstreams – or souls – are a lot more lasting.

Chiron, Pluto & The South Node

Master’s Musings, July 2024

Chiron, Pluto & The South Node: The Same Only Different

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

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

LET THE SOUTH NODE INFORM PLUTO AND CHIRON

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

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

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

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

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

PLUTONIAN WOUNDS VERSUS CHIRONIC WOUNDS

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

And remember – Barbie was a serious movie too.

THE PLUTONIAN WOUND

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

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

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

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

Pluto is both the problem and the solution.

WHAT ABOUT CHIRON?

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

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

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

Miracles do happen and Chiron is often connected with them.

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

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

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

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

SOME PLUTONIAN AND CHIRONIC SPECIFICS

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

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

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

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

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

Steven ForrestJuly 2024

From Steven

Reading Children’s Charts

Master’s Musings, June 2024

Reading Children’s Charts

First, children aren’t adults and so the language she was accustomed to using was going to need to change. What career advice do we give infants? What about any complications they’ll likely encounter in their sex lives?

The second dilemma was that understandably most parents tend to be protective and easily rattled by anything they perceive as a threat to their child’s wellbeing. What should the astrologer say if the child is an Aries with an 8th house Pluto squaring her Moon?

What follows is a longer version of what I told her.

ABOVE ALL . . .

To make that perspective clearer, there’s a simple riff I almost always use at the beginning of a chart presentation to the parents of a youngster. (And as with all of my riffs, feel free to use it yourself without attribution or, even better, to create one of your own.)

As usual, I am recording the reading – a fact which takes on another level of practical importance, as you’ll soon see.

Steven Forrest
July 2024