Where’s Steve?

Where's Steve?

Proof that I remain alive and well is reasonably abundant in the FCEA –  at least I show up a couple of times a month for the big Zoom calls. But of course most of the time, you are only seeing my pre-recorded face in our instructional videos. When it comes to actual human interaction, you are mostly looking at Jeff and Catie, along with our three able tutors, Joey, Marie, and Teal. 
So where’s Steve? What am I up to? Maybe lying on some tropical beach, basking in those big FCEA bucks?.
Alas, no . . .
Actually I shouldn’t say “alas.” Lazing on a tropical beach even for a week would blow all my Saturnian fuses. I’m not there, and wouldn’t really want to be, at least not for a whole week. I am actually at home in Borrego Springs, working hard, and much of the time it is for the school. My FCEA efforts are just all a bit more “behind the scenes.”
When Catie, Jeff and I sat down and began planning how to create the school, one of my own major personal agendas was that I wanted to shift my “live, in person” teaching in a more advanced direction – essentially, I wanted to stop teaching the same fundamentals over and over again, and instead mostly offer “master classes” in holistic chart interpretation. It wasn’t that I was tired of teaching the basics – I actually enjoy that process a lot, even though naturally it tends to be rather repetitive. My motivation was really more an awareness that I was growing older and that I wanted to use the time I had left as wisely and as efficiently as I possibly could. That meant recording myself teaching all of those core astrological techniques once and for all, and thereby freeing up the time for me to focus on presenting more advanced work in a live setting.

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved on stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.“
– Pericles

That is still the big-picture plan and we are still on track to fulfilling it.
One obvious issue in terms of me eventually teaching those advanced classes is that because the FCEA is still relatively young, none of our students have as yet moved up to that Master’s Level. Out of respect, I’d like to immediately insert that I know some of you are indeed very advanced, even professionals – which brings me right back to the “little red schoolhouse” dilemma I faced in my old Apprenticeship Programs. When I taught master classes in the AP, I was kind of shocked – some of the students were 100% brilliant and ready for prime time, and some . . . were not. That won’t happen in the FCEA! No one moves to the next level until they’ve really absorbed the previous one.
Currently, our most advanced students have graduated from our “100-level” Apprentice program and are currently enrolled in our Craftsperson courses. They are busy learning transits and progressions. That means that there are still some miles to go before anyone is an FCEA Master-level student. That will certainly happen down the road and I look forward to it – but we’ve not yet crossed that bridge.
We’re not sure precisely what form those masters’ classes will take. I dearly love sitting in a small group, face to face, working at that intimate level, helping individual students find their own voices. But of course the FCEA is international, and we want to be fair to people living outside the United States too. Likely, such programs will involve some hybrid of live work and participation via Zoom. Another wild card – with Pluto ruling my chart from the 9th house, I’ve done astrological work on all the continents except Antarctica, and I’m open to the possibility of traveling to teach classes in other countries too. We’ll see what the world looks like and what kind of shape I am in when we get to that crossroads.
Not yet having any officially-graduated “masters” in the school yet leaves me waiting for those classes – but not exactly sitting idle on that tropical beach. I’ve been busy shooting videos as well as writing fresh material for the school. I’ve not done the Virgo-math, but I think that for every instructional video you’ve already seen, there are probably at least two that are already made but unseen yet by anyone except Jeff or Catie. (Jeff: I did the math…65 hours and still recording!)
That’s a lot of videos! I’m really excited about them too. I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about them in a bit more detail – and, more broadly, about what lies ahead for you in the FCEA program.
Our 200-level Craftsperson courses will soon carry you into the fascinating world of synastry – the astrology of relationships. Everybody loves that branch of our craft, and I am proud of the material we’ve created for you there. It’s fun and fascinating, plus it can really make a positive difference in people’s relationships. I’d also like to add a subjective note. To me, the most difficult branch of astrology to master is the very subject that some of you are slaving over now –  transits, progressions, and solar arcs. With synastry, you are also juggling more balls than with a single birthchart, but it feels easier to me. I bet you’ll feel that way too.
When the Craftsperson courses move upward and onward into the 300 range, we’ll delve a lot more deeply into the individual planets. I find it difficult to convey the excitement I feel about the material we’ve created there. At one level, it might sound like, “Oh . . . just more stuff about Mercury . . .” That is true – but wait until you see it. Standing on the firm foundation you have created for yourselves in the 100- and 200-level courses, you’re ready for a far more sophisticated view of all those planets, both natally and in their moving forms.
I am particularly excited about the Moon segment, which is FCEA 301. Lunar phase, the Out of Bounds Moon, the Moon’s speed – it’s quite amazing how multi-dimensional the Moon actually is. Plus, in those 300 courses, you’ll finally meet Chiron in a fully fleshed-out form, and also the new planet, Eris. I put a huge amount of work and passion into those 300-level videos and handouts. I’m hoping the passion proves contagious.
Jeff, Catie, and I struggled a bit in creating the overall form of the school’s curriculum. As you finish the 300-level courses, you will have reached the end of the FCEA “Craftsperson” program. That’s a long slog – but is it too long? 
Maybe . . . 
On the other hand, to truly be a full-fledged astrological “craftsperson,” you need all of those 100, 200, and 300-level skills – but once you have them, you do not really need anything more. You’re “there.” We hope that you’ll want more! Still, students who graduate from the FCEA Craftsperson program are ready to go out and serve their communities as professional astrologers. 
That’s the reason that we made this section of the curriculum so long. That’s why we called it “Craftsperson.” Finish it and you can call yourself a pro. It’s kind of like you have been to college.
What lies beyond? What is in our Master’s level program? 

The instructional material for FCEA 400 is nearly complete, although once again no one other than Jeff, Catie, and myself has seen it yet. It is full of more advanced, “speciality” topics. There, you’ll learn the art of chart rectification – how to figure out the birth time of a person who has no record of it. Electional astrology is part of 400 too – choosing the best date for a wedding or the launching of a business (or robbing a bank or koshing your enemies over the head . . . we’ve got some ethics themes in that course as well!) You’ll learn about astro-mapping – how to judge the impact of a new geographical place upon a person. There is a long section about working with the “big four” asteroids, and an interesting section about the Age of Aquarius and its enormous implications for astrological practice.
All that material is “in the can.” Remember the title of this newsletter, “Where’s Steve?” Maybe you’re starting to sense the answer. I’ve been busy – and I’m still not done. 
Beyond the 400-level “Master’s” courses I’ve just described, we’ve got more plans. At the top of the list are those masters’ classes I mentioned earlier. But we also plan courses around counseling techniques, possibly something about astrological writing, more advanced computation skills, and building an astrological  practice. We also plan some work in astrological ethics, which is a very tricky area. How soon after a session is it appropriate to date a client? What about selling your clients some books or crystals? Say a client runs a company and is thinking of hiring someone – can you look at that second person’s chart without his or her permission and report on his or her character and compatibility? Business-oriented astrologers often do that – but is it right? 
Being 72 years old has changed my perspective. The end of life naturally looms more vividly than it did when I was 25. Back then, like most young people, I felt immortal or something like it. Not anymore. Today I feel blessed – I’m engaged and healthy and grateful to be alive. If my mom’s genes have anything to do with it, I’ve still got a couple of good decades ahead of me. I hope so! There’s so much left to do. 
Above all, I want to keep this sacred flame burning, whether I am here or not. Having these videos made and my books written is a great comfort to me – but nothing is so comforting as your presence in this school. My profound gratitude to every single one of you. You are what will keep this work flourishing, helping people, lighting the path, teaching the next generation. It is difficult to express how much that means to me. Thank you!

When Astrology Fails

When Astrology Fails

The following essay is a chapter in my upcoming book, The Endless Sky. I want to give the FCEA Community a sneak preview of it because I can guarantee that it is a topic that will keep you tossing and turning in your bed as you come online as working astrologers – sometimes the system just doesn’t seem to be working at all. Before you decide to go back to your “day job,” here’s a checklist of possibilities to consider . . . 

I got a worried email from a student of mine this morning. He had a client who had experienced transiting Uranus conjunct her Moon, but “nothing had happened.” He was concerned and embarrassed that his predictions had failed. I offered him a few possible explanations. I am sure that this student of mine was not the first astrologer to have had this disconcerting experience.

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

– Abraham Lincoln

The first point I want to make will sound pretty dogmatic, but I do believe it to be true:  astrology never fails. I would quickly add that astrologers themselves often fail, but that is a different issue. Astrology is fundamental to how the universe operates. Astrology failing would be like gravity failing. I’ll temper that remark slightly a little later in this essay, but I really want to put it up there “in lights” before I write another word.

Still, astrologers’ predictions sometimes do fail and it behooves us not to be afraid of acknowledging that fact and perhaps learning something from it. There are a lot of potential issues here. Let’s have a look at them.   

SYMBOLISM IS NOT LITERALISM

I have beaten this drum since long before The Inner Sky was a gleam in its daddy’s eye, so I don’t want to belabor it here. Still, this core point is the heart of the matter when it comes to “astrology’s failures.” Symbolism is not the same as literalism. We don’t read an astrological chart in the same way that we read a news feed or a computer manual. Let me give you an example. An astrologer sees Uranus entering someone’s seventh house. The astrologer predicts divorce. No divorce happens. 

Has astrology failed? No, it is the astrologer who’s now got egg on his or her face. That prediction was too narrow. Its very rigidity would doom it to being wrong more often than it was right. Think about it logically: the majority of long-term partnerships have survived one or the other of the people experiencing that transit. That’s one painfully obvious point. The real point, though, is that while divorce is indeed one possible expression of “The Lord of Earthquakes and Lightning Bolts” entering the House of Marriage, it is not the only one. What is really happening is that a pulse of individuation is in play in the client’s personal relationships. That pulse can play out in a lot of different ways.

A wife tells her husband that instead of going on their usual vacation with his family this summer, she wants to attend a week-long astrology seminar. She is afraid he will object, but instead he says, “Great! That’s actually a relief. I was hoping to skip my family this year, rent a motorcycle, and ride across New Mexico. I was afraid that you would be upset about skipping our vacation.” 

What’s just happened? They’ve given each other some Uranian breathing room. They are happier and closer because of it. They’ve probably also set a healthy precedent for “future negotiations” – one that works better for each of them.

That’s a far more self-aware response to this transit than divorce.

Our big question: did “nothing happen?” 

Of course not – the astrologer who foresaw a divorce simply had too narrow a preconception about what a Uranus transit meant. Again, symbolism is not literalism. In this case, the client (not the astrologer!) got the meaning of the transit right. Sadly, this 100% possible higher response to Uranus entering the seventh house lay outside the scope of the astrologer’s imagination. 

That kind of interpretive error alone accounts for the lion’s share of situations where “astrology fails.” Never under-estimate your clients – and never forget that there is a higher evolutionary meaning in every transit no matter “how bad it looks.”

Let’s look at another explanation for astrology’s apparent failures.

HUMANS LIVE IN TWO WORLDS

We humans naturally walk around in physical bodies, our senses engaged with the outer world. We bounce off each other, dealing with our needs and our appetites, and wrestling with our circumstances. 

But we also live in our inner worlds. 

Even our understanding of the physical world is conditioned by our inner attitudes and moods. If you doubt that, try reasoning with a depressed person that “life is not really so bad.” 

On top of that, every night we close our eyes, surrender our engagement with the outer world, descending utterly into the abyss of our inner lives.

That deep psychic underworld we all inhabit is at least as central to our experience as is the outer world of our jobs, the news, and the daily grind.

My point here is simple and it has fundamental relevance to our notion of “astrology failing.” Sometimes an astrological event unfolds 100% on the inner plane. It is still “an event,” except that its nature is purely psychic. It has no direct external behavioral correlates at all.

Again, let’s consider our example of Uranus transiting into a woman’s seventh house. This time, let’s say she is single and has been content to remain that way. Let’s say that her attitude toward relationships has boiled down to, “Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?”

That’s a funny line, but it also probably reflects a certain brittleness in this woman. 

Let’s say that some of her defensive attitude about relationships derives from a fear of being vulnerable. Let’s say that external social conditioning – always the enemy of the planet Uranus – has forged a resistance in her to trusting anyone. Let’s postulate, for example, that her father abandoned the family when she was little. 

Let’s add that she has surrounded herself with friends who also protect themselves from their own loneliness in that same “sour grapes” fashion – by devaluing relationships. 

Uranus entering this woman’s seventh house might be about her claiming her own true individuality back from those external influences. Sitting on a park bench having a long talk with herself, she realizes that in her true nature, she is potentially a loving partner – or at least she would like to be. She longs for that outward reality to manifest – and it takes courage for her even to admit it.

As she sits on that park bench, no knight in shining armor rides up on the proverbial white horse and sweeps her away to a castle on a hill. She is still single. Outwardly, nothing has changed. But if we say, “nothing happened when Uranus entered her seventh house,” angels laugh and shake their heads. Something enormous has happened. It just happened between her ears – in the psychic realm –  rather than in the outer world. 

Add a little imagination and a little human empathy, and we quickly realize that this Uranian change of heart in her can be understood as the prelude to some happy intimate possibilities in her future – and that without this change of heart, Prince Charming could fall on his knees before her and she’d turn away thinking, “Nice guy, but he’s too short for me.”

The message here is that we all live in an inner world as well as an outward one. It is possible for astrology to work on the inner plane without leaving a visible ripple on the surface of life. A good astrologer must be alert to that reality, while a bad one thinks only in concrete, outward terms of “predicting what will happen,” limiting the scope of that question to the positions of the atoms and molecules in the outer world.

While I stand by the basic point I am making here, I’d like to affirm that it represents a rather rare situation. Generally, because of the way the principle of synchronicity weaves through astrology, there are outward expressions of most transits as well as inward expressions. They may be subtle, but they are usually present. Our protagonist in the previous scenario might, for example, experience a 30-second flirtation with a stranger. 

See the connection with her inner changes? She might click on Match.com, take a nervous peek, and then quickly X-out of it. These are obviously microscopic events, easily ignored. But they are the subtle outward manifestations of the far more dramatic pattern of inner realizations.

An astrologer could be forgiven for not noticing them, but angels notice everything.

Let’s move onward to a third reason for astrology’s apparent failures.

HOW BADLY DOES THIS TRANSIT NEED TO HAPPEN?

A nearly fail-safe astrological principle is that no transit or progression happens unless it needs to happen – they all represent evolutionary necessities. They are all essentially soul-contracts we signed with the universe, right along with our first breaths. One way to express it is to say that we are all sick – and transits and progressions are the medicine. Calling us “all sick” sounds too negative, but ultimately why are we here, on this earth, in these physical bodies? Earth is not the most prestigious address in the galaxy. It is good to be alive and there is no shame in being here locked into these vehicles of flesh and bone, but it’s just one stage in a larger evolutionary journey – an evolutionary journey is reflected in your birthchart, while transits and progressions simply trigger its unfolding stages. The point is, they always happen when they need to, always at the right time. They arise to expand something in our awareness, to correct something, to heal something.

With those broad philosophical points established, let’s recognize that at a given moment, some of us might need firmer correction than others. How far off-target are you in your life? How much of a bite has spiritual laziness taken out of your higher potentials? Like the rest of us, you’ve had your soul-victories and you’ve probably had your spiritual prat-falls too. 

All of this leads to the key point: the vigor of a transit is connected to how big a “correction” or “lesson” is appropriate for you. And that is not something that we can see in your chart. The answer has to do with how well you have been responding to your chart all along.

Back to Uranus transiting into that hypothetical woman’s seventh house. Even if she is in a  happy relationship, she still has her own path to follow in life. How successfully has she balanced the compromising realities of partnership with fidelity to her own journey and her own nature? Those are always knotty questions. Naturally we all make mistakes. She is presumably no exception. Out of love for a partner, we might compromise too much sometimes, perhaps without even knowing we are doing it. Or maybe we are so pig-headed, selfish, and stubborn that we find “meeting in the middle” offensive. 

Along comes Uranus with this woman’s report card.

Illustration: she has been “an obedient, pliant wife,” sacrificing herself to the needs of her husband and family to the point that she has become almost a phantom in her own world. Uranus hits her hard. Perhaps it truly feels like “the Lord of Earthquakes and Lightning bolts has entered her House of Marriage.”

What happens?

Maybe she finally blows up – abandons the marriage, has an affair, moves to South America under an assumed name. Spectacular stuff! And the fortune-telling astrologer is of course delighted by the accuracy of his or her over-the-top prediction. 

More likely, given this hypothetical woman’s passive nature, she experiences the transit internally, but in a dark way. She gives up. She withdraws further into emotional dissociation. She chooses to become a zombie in her own life. And maybe her husband doesn’t notice a thing.

Angels notice, and they weep.

The underlying concept here is that our protagonist badly needed this Uranus transit. The evolutionary requirement it represented was pressing, so the “fault line was locked and loaded” and the earthquake promised to be huge. 

And it was huge – in one scenario, she divorced. We just have to be sensitive to the notion of an “inner earthquake” as well as the more pyrotechnical outward one. 

In these scenarios, we obviously would not be looking at “astrology failing.” But what if the initial situation were far milder and the necessary “correction” not so dramatic? 

Earlier, looking at the same transit, we imagined one partner telling another that she was “skipping their usual family vacation and going to a week-long astrology seminar.” Her partner had no problem with that – he wanted to zoom off on a motorcycle anyway. In that case, the necessary Uranian corrections were far smaller and the evolutionary necessity simply less charged. Two wise humans simply make room for more individuality in their partnership. They are both happier and they love each other more for it. 

But remember: for the astrologer thinking Uranus in the seventh house “‘means divorce,” nothing happened.

There’s yet another reason that astrology can sometimes fail . . . and in this case, actually fail.

ASTROLOGY IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Most modern astrologers shudder at the thought of trying to practice our craft without any knowledge of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. And yet up until about a century ago, at least one of those planets was missing.

In parallel fashion, I often think of the plight of our astrological forebears in ancient Greece, Egypt or China, working before the invention of the clock. How could they do astrology properly with only a vague sense of anyone’s birth time? They found ways to work around the problem – but I’m grateful to have a nice, timed Ascendant and accurate house cusps in any chart I contemplate today.

Going further, I’ve come increasingly to realize that it is a big mistake to leave Eris – a trans-Neptunian planet the size of Pluto – out of our thinking. But I admit I still don’t use it as much as I should – not yet, at any rate. But, like astrology, I am a work-in-progress too.

Up until maybe a dozen years ago, I didn’t know much about declination. I shake my head as I think of all the readings I did for people born with the Moon Out of Bounds without my knowing it, understanding it, or mentioning it.  

The list goes on. The point is that I am sure there are many undiscovered astrological techniques and factors out there lurking in the future, waiting for unborn astrologers to come along and find them.

The system has always been – and probably always will be – a work in progress. 

For our purposes in this little essay, my next thoughts provide a twist on the main subject. What we have been exploring is what is going on when a known transit or progression seems to fail. Here, we look at the mirror-image – what about when something happens in life, but there doesn’t seem to be anything going on astrologically to explain it? That’s another kind of “astrology fails” scenario.

Any honest astrologer will acknowledge this reality. When it happens, is there some exotic force at play – an undiscovered planet, for example? That is undoubtedly true sometimes – how could it be otherwise? That there are undiscovered planets is a virtual certainty – and, ditto, that they have astrological meaning. 

There are “ghosts in the astrological machine,” for sure.

Now for a little bit of lead in our shoes – when something happens “without an astrological explanation,” the reason might possibly be a lot more prosaic. As an astrological teacher, when a student complains that he or she can’t see any astrology to go along with a big biographical event, my mind immediately goes to a less exotic notion than “undiscovered planets.” I cannot count how many times I’ve heard a student say, “Oh, I never use solar arcs” or “Oh, I didn’t notice that the Moon had entered its Balsamic phase . . .” 

When astrology fails, have we just not looked hard enough at what was before our eyes in the chart? Is it a gap in our own technical knowledge rather than some fundamental hole in astrological theory that has made a monkey out of us?

Our present arsenal of astrological techniques is certainly incomplete, but it is already quite vast and impressively powerful – and let’s just add the obvious corollary: it requires considerable effort to rise to a high level of skill in this craft.  I believe fervently in free will – but please never confuse it with bad technique! Most of the time when an astrologer can’t see the fingerprints of the planets on an accident or a new relationship or whatever, the explanation boils down to not looking hard enough.

When astrology fails, there is still one more serious possibility to consider . . . 

IS THE CHART ITSELF WRONG?

Astrology depends upon a long, complex chain of principles. By far its weakest link is our dependency on accurate birth information. Even novice astrologers know to mistrust a birth time given simply as “around noon” or to cringe when we hear that “mom says it was around 6:00.” 

Even a birth time given as “7:22 pm” can be misleading. What does “the moment of birth” actually, specifically, mean? How accurate were the clocks on the walls?

When I was a teenager and starting to get interested in astrology, I asked my mom for my birth time. She confidently told me, “6:15 am.” Later I found my baby book. It turns out that I was born about three hours earlier – but I weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces.

Never, ever, trust your own mother. 

It is always possible that the source of a wrong “prediction” – even if we are wise enough to be predicting questions rather than answers – is simply a wrong chart. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in the world of computing. It is of course an obvious cheap trick to blame “a wrong chart” for our own errors. When it seems that “astrology is not working,” do first consider  all the points we’ve already explored. Still, if there is a consistent pattern of errors and the chart simply seems “not to fit the person,” then beware: you might be working with bad data.

Generally such errors are matters of minutes. As such, they would not have much impact, for example, on the timing of a Uranus transit to the natal Moon – a few minutes isn’t going to move the natal Moon very far. But even a few minutes of error can move a house cusp significantly – the average figure there being about one degree of error for every four minutes of error in the time of birth.  

It can get a lot worse. 

In my experience with older birth certificates and handwritten records, it is not unusual for the numeral “1” to be transcribed in error as a “7.” Worse, an “AM” might have been clerically mangled into a “PM,” producing a chart that is 12 hours off.  Even the position of the Moon would then be wrong by something like six degrees. And of course everything would be in a totally wrong house. Those are “penmanship” mistakes and obviously they are more of a peril for people born before, say, 1985 or so. Nowadays, birth records tend to be more computerized and typically entered via keyboards. Time will tell if the “improved penmanship” balances out the tendency toward sloppy data-entry errors.

I have had experiences where I was left confident that someone’s parents had misled a child as to his or her actual birth date – for example, to conceal a pregnant bride. This is less of an issue nowadays, but it would be foolish to ignore it, especially with clients born before the social revolutions of the 1970s.

One more source of potential catastrophe: beware that 11/8/68 means November 8, 1968 to an American and August 11, 1968 to a French person. That one has fouled me up more than once too.

The bottom line is always take birth data with a grain of salt. If your predictions aren’t working, an error at that most fundamental level could possibly be the cause of your problems. 

A helpful hint – such errors would have to be consistent over many transits and progressions before you take them seriously. If it happens only once in a chart that has otherwise proven reliable, go back and think about the other possibilities we’ve been exploring.

I’ll close by echoing once again that, in my opinion, astrology never fails. The statement might sound arrogant, but I believe it to be true. As I contemplate its meaning, its power actually has the opposite effect on me – rather than feeling puffed up, I feel humbled by it. I’m the poor astrologer who has to try to live up to that challenge. In my bones, I know that a good answer to a trusting client’s most pivotal soul-questions lies there before me on that single sheet of paper. He or she has come to me, counting on my wise counsel. And while astrology never fails, astrologers sometimes do. 

Me too.

AlI I can do is to practice as wisely as I can within my own limits – and to constantly struggle to press those limits further in the direction of wisdom and skill. 

Add love, and maybe some humility, and it is a privilege and a joy to practice this sacred craft, even with all my warts.

Building Our Staff

Building Our Staff

Since we launched the FCEA, I’ve gotten emails from people aspiring to become tutors in the school at the rate of about one per week. I’ve even gotten a few painful ones – follow-ups from people who were hurt or angry because they hadn’t been selected. 

I am a great fan of total transparency at least until it bumps up against people’s right to privacy, so what I want to write about in this edition of our newsletter is my experience of the tutor selection process. I underscore the words “my experience” for a lot of reasons, the main one being that actually training the tutors is really in the able hands of our Dean, Dr. Catie Cadge. Once someone is a tutor, they are in her territory. In this newsletter, I want to be careful not to trespass there. If you have questions about tutoring, Catie is the person to ask.

Loudly and clearly, let me say that we make no claim that our tutor selection process has been completely fair. We like fairness! But there really wasn’t time for it – in truth, there still isn’t. Launching the FCEA has been an absolutely monumental undertaking, as I’m sure you can all appreciate. Creating the educational contents, learning to work with Moodle, enrolling students, designing the website, jumping through all the legal and technical hoops – that’s a whole lot of work for just three people, even if two of them are Capricorns and the other one has a Sun-Saturn conjunction. We’re all  worker bees, for sure, but Jeff, Catie and I have been pushed to our edges with this project for the past two years. It’s been worth the effort and it’s been a big success – but the process has often involved difficult choices, especially about how best to use our most precious resource, which naturally is time itself.

Early on, we realized that we were already in desperate need of a few tutors. Jeff, Catie, and I  were juggling more balls than we could keep track of – but on top of all those pressing distractions, we knew that we had to get cracking on the tutor issue anyway. Some of that urgency was because we knew that tutor training would be a lengthy process, so we had to plan ahead.

“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world…but it requires people to make the dream a reality.“

– Walt Disney

At least no one on our initial list of possible candidates would need to “learn astrology” – but they would need to learn how the FCEA program itself worked. That meant they had to figure out Moodle, understand the courses, learn the material in my books inside out, and so on. They also had to “shadow” classes that Jeff and Catie were teaching and listen in on my big Zoom calls. Getting them up to speed that way was going to take a long time, so we really needed to get tutor training started – even though many other hungry crocodiles were crawling up our legs at the same time.

On top of all of those practical issues, while a crystal-clear understanding of evolutionary astrology was an obvious requirement for a tutor, it was far from the only one. An FCEA tutor needed to be a person of good character, someone we respected spiritually as well as intellectually. They had to be reliable and responsible. Astrology, when misused, can really hurt people. We could not let that happen in our school. 

Making matters worse, none of us had time for lengthy interviews with a long line of candidates. Given all of these constraints and challenges, there was only one way forward that Catie, Jeff, and I could see: to make these kinds of character judgements, we needed some history of personal relationship with the possible applicants. We had to actually know them.

So here’s how it worked. Jeff, Catie, and I each independently came up with a short,  count-them-on-one-hand, list of possibilities. All of them had to have had a long involvement with my old Apprenticeship Programs – that ensured that all the candidates were likely to have the requisite technical astrological knowledge. 

The trouble was that over the years, a couple thousand people had attended various APs around the world – too many for any single one of us to really have gotten to know all of them personally. Still, in the normal social course of things, the three of us had all built genuine friendships in the program. These were people for whom we could vouch personally in terms of character, values, and general affability, as well as in terms of their technical expertise. 

And that’s how we made our initial list of candidates. 

When we contacted them, several turned out to be busy with other things and demurred. We whittled the list down to six people. They soon learned that the training was rigorous, time-consuming, as well as unpaid. 

No surprise – three of our initial six tutors-in-training dropped out.

That left us with Marie O’Neill, Joey Paynter, and Teal Rowe: the survivors! And our three treasures. There are so many ways that our selection process could have crashed and burned. God is good – it didn’t. We are so fortunate to have these three fine human beings on the FCEA team.

We’re on our second round of tutors-in-training now. They are all promising. We’ll see how many of them stick with it. I’m not going to name names yet out of respect for their privacy. This time around, we did a better job of approximating fairness. For this second cycle of potential trainees, we opened up an application process. We didn’t advertise it in a big way, but it was announced in Catie’s “Dean’s Corner” newsletter for the month of May 2021. I immediately want to point out that we are not currently soliciting new tutors since we’re not sure we will need them. For the sake of archiving FCEA history, here’s the link: – Expanding the Herd

How many tutors will we eventually want? That of course boils down to the question of how large the FCEA will grow. Naturally, we have no idea.

Again, my aim in writing this newsletter is simply to be as honest, open, and transparent as I can possibly be about how we’ve selected our candidate tutors. Even though the results have been blessedly perfect so far, the process itself has admittedly been imperfect. Obviously “who you know” (namely, Catie, Jeff, or me) has been a big factor in it, and that’s ultimately not fair to anyone. My only excuse is that the system was cobbled together under extreme pressure and we did the best we could. And we are getting better at it. The pressure still remains though – Catie, Jeff, and I continue to be grievously over-extended, teaching, creating material, administering, and all the while putting out the inevitable brush fires as best we can. Because of all that, in order to move ahead as efficiently as possible, I ask any of you who are interested in possibly tutoring to please refrain from contacting any of us informally – for example via social media – and instead just check the FCEA newsletter for any future tutor searches down the road. We’ll announce them, just as we did last time.

The long-term solution? 

The FCEA is becoming more solvent, and we anticipate hiring some much-needed technical and administrative help very soon. That will make a big difference – but that’s Jeff’s department, so I’ll let him make those announcements when the time comes.  

Until then, it is onward through the fog. As my friends in the tech world often say, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” We’re doing our best, I’m proud of what we have accomplished – and I promise that the best is yet to come.

The Endless Sky

The Endless Sky

Some of you future super-sleuths with strong Plutonian signatures may have already noticed that I’m not in my usual habitat just from the different scene you see behind me in our Zoom calls. I’m in rainy, musical New Orleans, where I’ll be located until early August. I’m here mostly so my partner Michelle can “shoot some judges” – and I suspect you can imagine the fun we’ve been having with that line! 

As I most of you probably know, Michelle is a portrait artist. Not to spoil the joke, but these worthy Louisiana judges are all being shot photographically rather than with live ammunition. Jupiter has been busy with Michelle lately – she painted one of the judges over in Jefferson Parish a few months ago. The portrait proved so popular that four more judges got jealous and signed up too. That’s the main reason I’m writing today, in the rain, on pretty Prytania Street.
I am not able to record astrological readings here – it’s just too noisy. The leaf blowers are the worst part, but motorcycles screaming by don’t help much either. I don’t feel right offering a client an expensive recording with those kinds of audio horrors included as part of it. I also don’t much like what the intermittent racket does to my own equilibrium, and I need to hang onto at least some speck of that inner balance in order to do a good job with the reading. As I am sure you’re all beginning to sense from your work in the FCEA, doing a good chart interpretation has some overlap with meditation. The process doesn’t blend well with the sudden roar of engines, or with homicidal ideation. 
We’ll be here at Michelle’s place for about six weeks. As I reflected on it, I realized that this was actually going to be the first time since 1977 that I would go six weeks without any client work at all – although of course we still have our Zoom calls, complete with charts, and my astro-mouth hard at work. But not doing a full private consultation for six weeks for the first time in forty-four years . . . I guess I really am a Capricorn.

“Once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up.”
– Leonardo Da Vinci

I knew that this break would give me some unbroken time to write. Even after all these years, I still love doing the readings – but a chance to write is also something I relish too. After the marathon of creating the four Elements books, I wanted a project that was a little easier though. It dawned on me that this would be the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and that is to create a collection of my articles and newsletters. So that’s exactly what I am up to. It will be called The Endless Sky: Collected Astrological Essays, 2002-2021, and I expect it will be available before the end of the year.
My dear friend Jaan Uhelzski has agreed to write the Foreword. I’m really happy about that. She’s an astrologer herself, but her main claim to fame is that she was one of the original rock’n’roll journalists for the old Creem magazine. She was even on stage in makeup with the band KISS once, and I have a photograph to prove it. Some of you may be too young to remember the magazine. Suffice to say, I expect Jaan’s writing will be edgy, as well as professional.
Meanwhile, creating the new book remains a big job, even though much of the writing is obviously already done. With Saturn in Virgo on my Midheaven pestering my poor innocent Mercury via a quincunx, of course none of the articles were good enough as they sat there. I’ve had to line-edit each one of them, re-writing them here and there, adding some later thoughts, and so on. I’ve also written a brief introduction to each one of them individually, placing them in context. In the “new writing” department, I’ve added a substantial introduction and a serious concluding chapter. It’s been a lot of work. Still, in all honesty, some of the material is old, and much of it has been available for free on my website in the past. It just felt like time to bind everything under one cover for the sake of convenience and easy reference.

The articles range widely. Interested in the meaning of Mercury retrograde? Curious about Eris, the new planet? Planets in Exaltation or Fall? Wondering if transits still work after someone is dead? (Yes – and we prove it with Vincent Van Gogh and Jim Morrison) It’s all in there. I think The Endless Sky will be a fun read for astrology fans – the kind of book you leave on your bedside table or in your bathroom, picking it up at random.
Meanwhile, Lila, the astrological cell phone app I’ve been helping to create has just launched in “beta” form – which means it’s a shortened, stripped down version, complete with some bugs. We passed a big hurdle just getting it out – and also getting it placed in the Apple store, which is not easy. Try heylila.com if you are interested. Eventually Lila will include lots of transits and progressions material, and I am madly writing all of that while I’m here in New Orleans too. 
I’ve always been all about creating easy stepping stones between simple Sun Sign astrology and the “real deal” as we practice it in the FCEA. Lila is part of that larger framework of intentions – it’s geared toward the general public, but the same choice-centered, evolutionary philosophy permeates it. The app will also grow more sophisticated over the next year – I’ve already written a lot of deeper material that’s not yet been unveiled.   
So that’s what I’ve been up to. 
When I get back home to California, I’ll be making more videos for our school. As the wheels turn in the Craftsperson program, we will soon need a demonstration video of a “real life” transits and progressions reading, sort of like the birthchart one I made for Ines . . . promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Journey of the Craftsperson

Journey of the Craftsperson

Exciting news: we are right on the cusp of launching our Craftsperson’s level FCEA courses. Jeff, Catie, and I are really thrilled to finally be doing this. We’ve been working hard to create  the material for a long time, and we’re actually just now putting the finishing touches on the last parts of it. Enrollment opens July 1st and the first course starts July 21st.

By the way, we call it the “Craftsperson” level for one simple reason: by the time you have absorbed all that we will be offering, you will really and truly be an “astrological craftsperson.” With astrology, there is always more to learn of course – that’s actually one of the great things about our field. But the bottom line is that you will have the knowledge and skills that allow you to serve your community as a full-service, one-stop astrologer. 

“There are two people inside the artist, the poet and the craftsperson. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsperson.“

– Emile Zola

We cannot tell a lie – with these upcoming courses, there’s a lot of hard work ahead. For one thing, this series of teachings takes a long time. When we take into account the 200 and 300 level coursework, we are talking about a commitment of 70 weeks. The FCEA is a serious, professional program. We think of it as more or less equivalent to training as a mental health professional or an attorney. There is a lot to absorb and the process cannot really be rushed without too much depth getting lost in the shuffle. We know there are people out there who take a six week astrology course and get their business cards printed up and their website launched. That’s not the FCEA.

What you have learned so far is how to read a natal chart. As you surely know by now, that’s a complicated task! Mastering it is a real accomplishment. In the first half of the Craftsperson program, the new FCEA 200 courses, you’ll add to what you already know by bringing in the ever-changing astrological environment as reflected in transits, progressions, and solar arcs. You will also learn about synastry – the astrology of human relationships. If you thought one chart was complicated, try reading two at the same time! You need to understand them both, plus their interactions, plus a powerful third type of chart called the Composite. 

With “predictive” astrology – transits and so on . . . well, you already know what to do with a person’s natal Mercury. Now let’s try adding three more Mercuries to the mix: transiting Mercury, progressed Mercury, and solar arc Mercury. Each one has something important to say, and each one is in conversation with not only the natal planets, but the other moving ones as well. 

Balancing all of this at once is tricky – but don’t worry! We think you will do just fine. That’s because you are already standing on the solid foundation we laid down in the FCEA 100 courses. You already know astrology’s basic language – and just like when you are learning to speak a foreign language, once you have mastered an initial vocabulary of 100 words, the rest of the process is a whole lot easier – you are on the glide path to eloquence. That linguistic skill is what you have already attained with your hard work in FCEA 100. Getting started is always the hardest part, so congratulations! You’re halfway there.

You’ve probably detected the fingerprints of my Sun sign, Capricorn, in our very structured, step-by-step approach to astrological mastery. Those same orderly values have guided us in creating the architecture of the 200 and 300 level course work. As I’ve said, with our Craftsperson courses, we are about to complicate the astrological picture enormously – but we will do it slowly and strategically. And, no surprise: we will continue to emphasize preserving your intuitive function above everything else – you will need it as the density of the data increases. 

Birthchart analysis, transits and progressions readings, and synastries – in astrological practice, those techniques are the big three. Most professional counseling astrologers spend at least 90% of their time employing that triad of tools. Long ago, I could have given up teaching and writing, and just focused on offering those three skills in my private astrological practice. It would have been a good life, a meaningful one, and a prosperous one. That is what we mean when we say that as you complete our Craftsperson program, you can truly call yourself a professional-level astrologer. Naturally, your skills will deepen with experience – that’s true in any profession. But even a brain surgeon has to start somewhere. That surgeon might not want to tell his or her patient, “hey, this is the first time I’ve ever tried this” – but logic guarantees that, just like you, every brain surgeon sooner or later had to solo. You will too. And we will help you succeed.

Our Craftsperson program embraces not just our 200-level courses, but also the FCEA 300 courses. In those classes, we will add some more advanced techniques to what you know already – we’ll be working with the phases of the Moon, for example, along with lunar declination. We’ll also delve more deeply into all the planets, both in the natal chart and in motion. You will see many, many more real-life examples of planets in action. Your confidence will grow, as will your vocabulary and your arsenal of metaphors. We’ll get to know Chiron a lot more deeply. We’ll meet the newest major addition to the astrological syntax – Eris, orbiting way out in deep space far beyond Pluto. There is so much to know! But when you have internalized the Craftsperson material, you will have reached a significant plateau. The mountain continues upward, but once you arrive on that plateau, you can practice astrology effectively, helping other people with skill, confidence, and a significant degree of mastery.

Thanks for being part of our maiden voyage. Your feedback has been enormously helpful. Even more importantly, your faith and enthusiasm has sustained us as Jeff, Catie, and I have climbed our own mountain, often hanging onto cliffs and ledges by our fingernails, trying to stay one step ahead of you.

Once again, a deep and sincere congratulations to all of you on completing your Apprentice level work and entering our Craftsperson program.

Charting the Path

Charting the Path

I’ve really enjoyed all of our Zoom sessions with students and members! The questions have been uniformly excellent. All of them have been worthy of deeper responses than the time we have had, but the clock keeps ticking. The hardest questions for me have been the ones about specific chart configurations. I love answering them, but I’ve almost always had to edit them down. That’s because, with a question about the south node for example, we naturally need to look at the sign and house involved – but where is the south node’s ruler? What if it has two rulers? What aspects do other planets form to that ruler or to the node itself? And what about the north node? 

By this point in your learning curve, you know how it all works – there are no “simple questions” about anyone’s nodes! Most of the time, in order to understand the nodal axis, you really need to understand half the chart. In real life, my readings usually take a couple of hours. You can do the math – if I put half that time into answering  a question about half of someone’s chart . . . well, there goes our hour. And that leaves us no time for any other questions.

This has presented a real dilemma for Jeff, Catie, and me. On one hand, real astrology depends upon our looking at the whole chart integratively. On the other, we’ve felt that answering the diversity of good questions we’ve been getting has probably served the greater good more effectively than devoting an hour to looking at one single chart. It’s a dicey judgment call, for sure.

“You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.“

-Wayne Dyer

For the student Zoom call on May 20th, we are going to try a different approach. The first 30 minutes will be the usual Q & A. During the second 30 minutes, we will put an actual chart up on the screen – and that second “30 minutes” might turn out to be 45 minutes, we’ll see how it goes.

We’ve usually been getting 12- 15 questions submitted for each program. I’ve generally managed to answer most of them. Next time, we will need to be pickier. I’ll choose between four and six of the most interesting ones and respond to them in that first half hour. Then we’ll put the chart up on the screen.

Which chart? And how to deal with the time limitations? Here’s how we plan to do it . . .

Everyone is free to submit a chart – and it’s fine if it is your own. Jeff is going to come up with some random method for choosing which chart we will use. All charts are interesting, so we have no agenda there at all. I’m sure that he will be fair and transparent about his selection methods. For purposes of confidentiality, we will obscure the identifying characteristics of the chart – but please do remember that these Zoom calls are archived for future student use. The analysis will be available to FCEA students “‘til the sun refuses to shine and the mountains tumble to the sea . . .” If potentially having your chart made public makes you uncomfortable, think twice about submitting it. Again, we’ll not show your name. Realistically, however, it’s not too hard to deduce birth information from planetary positions, and from there, someone might connect the dots.

Since we will have only 30 or 40 minutes to spend with the chart, we will need to keep the process very focused. If you choose to submit a chart, please also submit a question about some specific configuration within it – a planet or node or aspect, whatever . . . even a human question, such as “talk about career” or “why did I marry that creature from Outer Space.” I will use that question as our launching pad, and see where it leads us. Again, the clock will be our guide there. We’ll cast our interpretive net as widely as time allows.

We know that once you have learned the basic vocabulary, much help comes from seeing real-life interpretation in action. That’s what this little half-hour demo will be about. On a closely related note, I recently did a birthchart reading for a woman in Switzerland. She has agreed to let me use it as a teaching tool in our school. Usually with the private work I do, I just make audio recordings. This one is a video. It runs about two hours in length and it’s divided into four more “bite-sized” parts.  My aim was to create an example of how I actually bring all of our 100-level course material to a practical, integrated focus with a client who is not an astrologer. We’ll find a place for it very near the end of the Apprentice Level part of the FCEA program.

Meanwhile, let me chime in and wish a warm welcome to our newly-fledged FCEA tutors, Marie O’Neill, Joey Paynter, and Teal Rowe. They were all already fine astrologers, and they faced a steep learning curve mastering Moodle and the specific content of our program. Six began; three survived – and thanks for hanging in there!

Steven’s Big Strategy

Steven's Big Strategy

Even though I often feel as if I have a tiger by the tail, I am grateful that I’ve always had a strong sense of mission in my life. If anyone asked me to summarize what it was, I would say that my aim has simply been to bring the light of evolutionary astrology to a wider audience. In pursuit of that goal, I’ve naturally had some hits and some misses. Writing a monthly Sun Sign column for ELLE magazine is an example of the latter. That was probably “the height of my fame” as far as sheer audience numbers go, but much of the soul of astrology was lost in translation. That episode only lasted for a couple of years. That’s when I decided I would rather try to be Carl Jung than Justin Bieber.

Publishing my first three books with Bantam Books was a big win. Those volumes represent serious astrology and, with Bantam’s marketing muscle, they quickly reached a lot of people. Meanwhile, my apprenticeship programs lasted for twenty years and touched a couple of thousand people on four continents. That felt like another win – but I had to admit that the constant travel was wearing me down. It was also tough on my homelife. I remember being on a flight somewhere, maybe in 2016 or so, and thinking big thoughts about my future and what new directions I might take. I knew I wanted to travel less. I also realized that I was getting older and that I needed to start thinking about how this sacred work might live on after I was gone. 

“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.“
– author Richard Bach

When in doubt, always look for that north star: what is the true core of your mission? What would you be a fool to compromise? For me, once again the bottom line was bringing evolutionary astrology to a wider audience. I didn’t care about impressing other astrologers. I cared about reaching people who didn’t already know about it. On that flight, five miles high over God only knows what land or ocean, I began jotting down some ideas. First and foremost, I knew that before I died, I needed to “write down everything I had learned about astrology” – impossible, of course, but that dream is what led to my four Elements books, which I started writing in early 2018. I also began musing on how I might continue my teaching, or even expand it, in a way that didn’t involve me being on the road so much. An online school was the obvious answer, but I knew very little about how any of that worked. 

Angels came to the rescue, as they often do when you follow your heart. With my progressed Moon in the 12th house, I knew that I should run on faith and be open to a new vision. Covid-19 helped me let go of my beloved-but-exhausting apprenticeship programs, along with half of my private counseling practice. I used the time to dive into completing the Elements series – 1728 pages in three years, which is a lot of writing! Just two months into that lunar progression, I had my first meeting with Jeff and Catie, which led to the founding of the FCEA. Our program launched a few months after my Moon progressed into the 1st house – right on schedule, in other words.

We’re proud of the FCEA, but my age-old dilemma still remains: how to reach more people? How can we bring this kind of illuminated astrology to a wider audience?  It can be so helpful, and yet so few people are aware of what we can offer them. There’s also a lot of dumb astrology out there, further muddying the water.

Angels helped there too. In 2017, former National Football League great, Ricky Williams, became a student of mine, as well as a dear friend. His wonderful wife, Linnea Miron, soon followed. Together, they had an idea for a serious astrological cell phone app based on my work – and we’re talking about genuine  “date, time, and place” astrology, not just Sun signs. We met over the last weekend of January 2018 and Lila was born. Ricky and Linnea had connections and resources beyond what I could imagine, and skills far outside my domain. They soon assembled a fabulous technical team. Meanwhile, I started writing the actual content. Here’s a link to a 3-minute video about the Lila vision, in case you are interested:

Lila Vision (click here)

Ricky Williams is hugely famous in the sports world, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and a stadium in Texas named after him. We’ve also got the AstroTwins – Ophi and Tali Edut – working with us. Their astrostyle.com website gets 12 million visitors each month. Ophi and Tali are “popular astrologers” for sure, but they also know what they are doing astrologically. Blessedly, they think of themselves as evolutionary astrologers and they know my work well. I really liked them both right away. Interestingly, their Jupiters and my own are almost exactly conjunct. They now write that same column for ELLE that was once mine. Karma!

Between Ricky’s marketing power and that of the AstroTwins, we think Lila has the potential to get very big. Lila is definitely a glossy commercial project, but 99% of its actual content is my own. In preparing the material for the app, I’ve basically written yet another book in the past year or so. It’s a simpler kind of astrology than what we do in the FCEA, but it is still honest evolutionary astrology. 

The point of my saying all of this is that Lila offers the missing third ingredient in my grand strategy after the first two, which are the FCEA and my Elements books. That third ingredient is outreach. Between Lila itself and the support of the AstroTwins, we anticipate a lot more attention being drawn to my existing work. A likely side-effect is that the school will grow rather dramatically over the next two or three years. 

I want to thank all of you for being part of this process, for helping us smooth out the technical wrinkles in Moodle, and in getting our teachers, tutors, and material up to speed before we start growing. You are the first wave. Among you, I am sure, are some future teachers in the FCEA. I feel as if we are making history, and I appreciate your faith in us and the support you have offered.

One more quick point. Beyond writing the Lila material, I’ve been busily creating videos and written content for the more advanced FCEA courses. We’re excited about what’s in store next for you in the program. Once all the school material is created and Lila is launched, my own life will change a lot. For one thing, I will have a lot more free time than I do now – and if my personal history can be trusted, that time will quickly fill up with other projects, one of which will be more active, higher-level teaching in our school. I look forward to seeing more of all of you when the pages of that chapter start turning.

Happy Birthday FCEA!

Happy Birthday FCEA

March 6 marked the second anniversary of the birth of the FCEA. On that day in 2019, at around 10:00 in the morning, Catie Cadge and I sat down with Jeff Parrett at his kitchen table in Pleasanton, California and began the conversation that started the wheels turning. 
As is so often the case, practical considerations rather than astrology dictated the moment for the birth of the school. The previous afternoon, I had finished teaching my “Sex, Death, and the Occult” class in Petaluma with the old northern California Apprenticeship Program. The three of us drove back to Jeff’s place that evening, but we were all too tired to do anything. By 10:00 the next morning, our teeth were brushed, our coffee and tea were made, and we were ready to start talking about the possibility of creating our school. 
Amazingly, we managed to time that conversation almost exactly with the moment of a Piscean New Moon, which had occurred just a couple of hours earlier. (More about that in a minute.) Without knowing it, we also hit an early Gemini Ascendant – no surprise since we were there to talk about teaching.

“Do we choose the birthcart or does it choose us?“

Astrologers are often hired to “pick a date” for a wedding or the opening of a business. That branch of our craft – called “electional” astrology – is a powerful, helpful technique. You’ll learn about it later in the FCEA program. The reality is that this birthchart for the school “elected us” rather than the other way around. And that is actually the way the universe usually works – every moment has an astrological personality, and everything “born” in that moment reflects it. No one has to believe in astrology for that to be true. Every breath you take has an astrological signature – although I’d be quick to add you can go crazy thinking about that too much.
 
The FCEA could hardly be more Piscean. Obviously having both the Sun and the Moon there guarantees that. But with Gemini rising, Mercury becomes the ruler of the chart – and it too lies in Pisces. Then there’s Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces. It’s conjunct both Sun and Moon by a fraction of a degree, further pressing the school in that “fishy” symbolic direction.
 
All of those Pisces energies are operating in the 11th house. On the surface, there is a very simple, obvious truth in that symbolism – we are, after all, an organization. Many of us have come together united by a common purpose in classic 11th house fashion. We are all “friends” in that 11th house sense too – although words such as teammates or allies are often more accurate. 
 
Once again, we see how in this “random” choice of a moment for Jeff, Catie, and me to sit down and start talking, the astrological signatures of what was actually being born were all there. 
 
To be true to ourselves and genuinely glad to be alive, we all need to be true to our Suns, Moons, and Ascendants, as well as to the rest of our charts. With all that Piscean energy, for the FCEA, doing that means that we need to remain true to our mystical heart. Add that collective 11th house energy, and the full picture emerges: we are a mystery school. 
 
A full analysis of this “birthday” chart is a bit beyond the scope of my musings here. Let me just add a few more points as simply as I can. Pisces is the 12th sign, always resonant with the 12th house – where we find two more planets: Uranus and Mars. That adds another log or two to the mystical fires. That rebel Uranus also rules the Midheaven, so our public destiny reflects the “troublemaker” role of a mystery school in the context of our fundamentally materialistic society.
The 9th house is interesting too. Venus is there in Aquarius, but we also see that Capricorn south node, ruled by Saturn and conjunct it, with Pluto only a degree and a half from the node. The karma of the FCEA could be seen as that of “a university,” given the “higher education” significance of the 9th house. But of course, with Pluto in the mix, this nodal structure looks pretty heavy! It also feels extremely solitary – there’s the fingerprint of Saturn and Capricorn. 
My first thought is that historically many mystery schools needed to keep their existence secret in order to avoid persecution. I suspect that is what we are looking at here.
The Cancer north node is in the 3rd house – teaching leaps out again, but this time it has a warmer, gentler quality. Ruled by that Piscean Moon in the 11th house, there is a feeling of sweetness, outreach, and public transparency about the dharma of the FCEA, as opposed to its battle-weary “secret handshake” karma. 
I could say more, but I’m out of space. Let me plant one more seed though. Each one of you is part of our tribe and your presence is potentially a very specific gift to the rest of us. If, for example, you have a lot of sensitivity to around 6 degrees of Aquarius, you may help us “do our Venus.” Maybe you’re tuned into the middle of Pisces. If so, please remind us of our mystical heart, especially if we ever start letting “the world be too much with us.”
Meanwhile, my own Sun is in the middle of Capricorn, very close to that Saturn. I guess my job is to be Gandalf or Dumbledore – or maybe just grandpa. Finally for those who like that whole mystery school vibe, the logo for the FCEA is derived from the aspects in its birthchart!

Monthly Calls

Monthly Q&A Call

We had our first monthly Zoom call on January 26th. If you missed it, no worries – it’s recorded and you can easily access it. For existing students it is available on the Student Resources page and for Members it’s available on the Members Only page. If you want to join in, sign up for a course or become a member.

Our next Zoom call is set for February 22 at 8:00 AM PST – and, by the way, I’ll be getting my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on the previous afternoon. I had no reaction to my first one, but I hear the second one can be harder. If I’m a little bleary in that call, that’s why. 

In this newsletter, I want to talk about how these calls will evolve as time goes by and also about some of the thinking that has gone into planning how we do them.

“No one left behind “

Many of these online meetings will take the same form as the first one – they’ll be driven by questions submitted by all of you, both FCEA students and community members. I will take about an hour and try to answer as many of them as I can. Realistically I probably will not be able to get to everything. That means that we will “curate” the questions, selecting the ones that promise to be most helpful to the most people. Going through the submissions in advance takes some time – that means that we need to receive them 36 hours before the call. 

Priority will always go to questions that have the most general relevance. That usually means that the ones which begin with “in my chart” won’t make the cut. Given that the FCEA has just been launched, for a while we will also leave out any questions that are ahead of the current learning curve – at this point, that means that we will not be looking at anything involving transits and progressions or any of our other more advanced topics. As the program matures and students advance, we will welcome more sophisticated material. Right now, we want to be careful that no one is left behind.      

With 75 or 100 people in the Zoom-room, these monthly programs need to be rather structured. Catie and Jeff will moderate, and we will run a fairly tight ship, limiting interruptions and comments. If that many people begin a free-form “chat,” chaos quickly ensues. Again, our aim is to provide the most benefit to the greatest number of people in that hour or so. We need to use the time efficiently, avoiding going down any rabbit holes.

Where the rubber meets the road in astrology is actually looking at charts. The trouble is that there are very few truly simple questions about any chart. Astrologically, everything is connected to everything else and so looking at a single chart on the shared screen could easily take up the entire hour. We’ll probably do exactly that! But not right away. At this point, we think briefer, more generalizable questions do more good for the majority of us. Don’t worry – if you are hungry for more integrated, in-depth chart analysis, there are also plenty of videos of me presenting complete interpretations a little further on in the FCEA curriculum. 

Down the road, we plan to create an index to the archives of these Zoom calls. Students and community members will be able, for example, to look up “house cusps” and go directly to the video recording of me discussing them on January 26. We anticipate this index becoming an increasingly valuable resource over the years as the calls accumulate.

With FCEA students spread over the globe, finding a convenient time for these Zoom events is pretty much an impossibility. What we have settled on is the idea of alternating them monthly between  8:00 AM and 5:00 PM-Pacific Time. That is not a perfect solution, but 8:00 o’clock in the morning at my house is around 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon in London and midnight in Beijing. When the clocks read 5:00 PM here, it is 1:00 in the morning in London and 9:00 AM in Beijing. “Convenient” might not be the first word that comes to mind, but perhaps “workable” does.

Compounding the time zone challenges, we are doing these calls on weekdays rather than weekends. That’s just me taking care of myself. I already have to work on some weekends. Sacrificing another weekend per month would not be a popular choice on the home front. 

Again, I repeat that all of these Zoom calls will be recorded and archived. That means that no one ever has to actually miss one. Since all the questions are submitted in advance, no one even misses the chance to ask questions. Sometimes, when time allows, there will be follow-up questions and comments. People watching later will only miss having a chance to participate in that part. Everything else is equally accessible to them.

One monthly Zoom call does not seem like much “Steve time.” One or two students have expressed frustration that I am not more directly present and available in the program, even though you will see plenty of me on the instructional videos we have recorded. I’d like to address that issue directly here. My response comes in two parts.

First, at a personal level, one of my aims for the FCEA is to create a vehicle for this kind of astrology to continue to grow and to be taught after I am gone, or after my physical and mental capacities are reduced. I am eager to pass the torch onward to Jeff and Catie and to our wonderfully able crew of tutors-in-training. I have no plans to retire, but at age 72, I would like to have more free time to do some exploring of my inner and outer worlds. All of that dictates a smaller role for me in the day-to-day running of the school.

Secondly, as the FCEA moves forward, we plan to host various Craftsperson and Master level activities. I anticipate my interacting with our more advanced students in a much more direct way. Those plans have not jelled specifically yet, but we are committed to them. I really love “live” teaching with a small group, coaching people as they present their own interpretations. Post-Covid, we do anticipate holding some physical gatherings – classes, even conferences. Because of the international reach of the FCEA, I want to be fair to people who live far away, so there will be some online dimensions to these higher-level programs too.

Bottom line, I do anticipate being more actively involved in teaching for those of you who master our more foundational course work. Much of the actual shape of that teaching really depends on something imponderable – the angels’ plans for my physical body as I move deeper into my seventies. (My dad made it to 83 and mom almost to 96, so I’m optimistic.) 

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing you every month.

Finally, I’d like to add one more point about our monthly Zoom calls. After the formal Q&A discussions, we always have some social time. One of the things I miss most about the old Apprenticeship Programs is the fun of just hanging out with interesting people, laughing and comparing notes. “Zoomland” is a new world of course. I have been happy to discover that it’s warmer and more human than I had feared. As we build the FCEA community, these social times play an important role. Because it is hard for fifty people to have a conversion, Jeff has been exploring Zoom “break out rooms,” where smaller groups can gather, or two people could even have a private conversation if they wanted. It’s something we’re making up as we go along, getting used to, making it human. Please join us for that part of the program as well.

Steven Forrest Method

Steven Forrest Method:
The Path to Mastery

When does one “attain competency” as an evolutionary astrologer? That is a very slippery question. Here are some parallel questions – when did you grow up? When does a puppy become a dog? When did the modern period begin? We are, after all, talking about an evolutionary process. It flows rather than bursts full-flower into a brand new day.

In the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology program, we arbitrarily define three developmental stages for the advancing student: the Apprentice, the Craftsperson, and finally the Master. 

An Apprentice has done the hard work of establishing the foundation of astrological understanding. The work done in the FCEA 100 series is actually the most important work of the whole program. Calling it “elementary astrology” really rings the wrong bell. Better to call it the core of everything. The Apprentice learns to speak the underlying vocabulary of the universe as it is reflected in human consciousness: signs, planets, houses, aspects, and the lunar nodes. Students who have completed the Apprentice level may not yet be ready to advertise themselves as a professional astrologers – but we can guarantee that, if such graduates were to sit with a friend in need, they could be of genuine help just by looking at that person’s birthchart and speaking out loud the material they’ve learned. And that effective helpfulness, bottom line, is what we would call astrological competency!

“There are many things we can say about the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, but probably the most fundamental one would be that it provides the missing catalyst to Steven’s existing work: structure. “

The Craftsperson has gone even further, mastering two more core astrological skills: astrological “prediction” and synastry, which is the astrology of human relationships. These are the topics covered in the FCEA 200 and 300 series. They build on the foundation of the 100-series – the language of the birthchart, in other words – and they constantly refer back to it. One who has graduated as an FCEA Craftsperson is ready to be a member of the ancient guild. He or she has all of the essential competencies of a working counseling astrologer. Add some practice and some experience, and nothing more would really be absolutely necessary in order for that person to be of real service to the community. But of course there is always more to learn . . .

A Master has internalized the astrological fundamentals and has now, with the support of the FCEA community, begun to polish them, mature them, and deepen them. Some more advanced or specialized topics are presented, so our technical training does not come to an end. Steven will teach advanced interpretive programs which are only available to students who have reached this Masters level of competency. Perhaps more importantly, masters will teach each other. Some words you may have seen elsewhere in our website bear repetition here:

Astrological mastery, as defined by the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, means getting to a level of competence, confidence, and experience in which you can sit down with a stranger and the stranger’s chart and speak meaningfully and helpfully to that person for an hour or two, even if that stranger has chosen to share nothing personal with you until you have actually earned that kind of trust from him or her.