Starting back in 1986, every few years the various astrological organizations come together to produce the massive tribal gathering called UAC (say: YOU-Ack) – the United Astrology Conference. This year, it will be happening in Chicago from September 3-9 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. I’ll be there, showing the flag for our branch on astrology’s tree. So will our Dean, Catie Cadge – she’ll be commanding an FCEA table at the huge Trade Show, sharing it with our very own Lisa Jones, who’ll be there promoting her wonderful astrological odysseys to Greece. 

If you want more details or think that you might want to attend the conference, the website is uacastrology.com.

I’ve spoken at every UAC except for the first one in 1986, which was held in San Diego, California. My second book had actually just come out around then, but I still wasn’t a known quantity in the world of astrology, so I wasn’t invited to present any talks. In fact, I don’t think I even knew the event was happening. Back then, I was deep into astrology, but I knew zip about the organizations and actually cared less – I believe at that point in my life, I hadn’t even met another professional astrologer.

By the time the second UAC rolled around in New Orleans in 1989, I’d made a bit of a splash in the community and so I was invited to speak. That’s when I actually began to meet some other figures in the profession. Amazingly, while there I also met my future partner, Michelle Kondos. Much to my embarrassment (and her amusement) I don’t remember anything about it. She apparently approached me and asked me for a reading, but as the fates would have it I was already booked up. Another Jupiter-cycle passed before we actually met in a way that I remember – and yet another cycle before we became a couple.

Since then, UACs have rolled by like milestones on a long highway – Washington D.C. in 1992, Monterey, California in 1995, 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia, then 2002 in Orlando, Florida. Six years passed as various political alliances formed and collapsed, then there was UAC #7 which happened in Denver, Colorado in 2008. In 2012, UAC returned to New Orleans. 2018 brought it to Chicago, and now, after an eight-year pause, we are heading back to Chicago for a second time. 

I’ll admit it – I have mixed feelings about these events, mostly because they are exhausting for me. I sort of both look forward to them and dread them too. Being in the spotlight for five or six days is overwhelming. Because of my work, I’ve gotten to be at least casual friends with several famous people. I’ve learned not to envy them, at least not in any simple way. It’s often stressful for them to stick their noses outside their own homes for fear of being mobbed. Thankfully, I am nowhere near that well-known. Only rarely have I been “recognized” in public – except at astrology conferences. At those events, I can’t take two steps without signing a book, someone asking for a selfie, or me having to listen to somebody’s windy theories about quincunxes versus sesquiquadrates. 

Still, there is something glorious about being in a vibrant crowd of three or four thousand mostly highly intelligent people, all of whom understand the power of astrology – and at least some of whom seem sincere in wanting to thank me for my life’s work. I sincerely appreciate that blessing! It’s good to be appreciated and I am grateful for it.

Bottom line, if you’re there in Chicago in September, if you can’t find me in the lobby or at one of my talks, I am probably hiding under my bed in my hotel room trying to catch my breath. But don’t worry – I’ll emerge soon.

MY TALKS

In case you’re interested, at this upcoming UAC I will be presenting two short talks, plus one longer “post-con” workshop. I’ll also be presenting the Regulus Award for Education at the big banquet – I won it last time, and tradition dictates that the previous winner presents it to the next one.

On Friday, September 4th, I’ll offer a talk called The Ascendant and the Journey Of A Thousand Miles.  Here’s a description of it:

When a planet hits the Ascendant, you’re at a crossroads.The trouble is that you don’t really know what you are doing. Maybe you move to a new city. Maybe you get married. How can you really know what lies ahead? Making your first step the right one requires boldness, faith, and intuition. Your wisest move? Make an ally of the planet that’s triggering this new beginning – Neptune has different plans for you than Mars or Jupiter! 

On Sunday, the 6th, I’ll do one about the cycle of the planet Uranus as it relates to the human lifetime. 

With its 84 year orbit, Uranus mirrors the human lifespan. At age 21, roughly a quarter of the way around: leaving home. At 42, halfway: welcome to midlife, At around age 63 we enter elderhood. Each turning point presents minefields and opportunities. The stakes are high too – every really cool old person you’ve ever met got each step right. Ditto, only backwards, for the tedious old folks you want to avoid. 

Finally, on Wednesday, September 9th, I’ll present a longer program entitled, The Skillful Synthesis of Planets, Signs, and Houses. Here’s what to expect there:

We can talk theoretically all day long about Mercury or Venus, but they only take on living human meaning in the context of their signs and houses. The heart of the craft of astrology lies in blending these three levels of astrological symbolism. A 3rd house Venus in Libra is a different beast entirely than a 12th house Venus in Aries. Join Steven Forrest for a step-by-step analysis of this critical integrative process.

WHY ATTEND?

All of the UACs are like a living, breathing Who’s Who in the world of astrology. They provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn directly from various teachers who’ve made their mark in all of astrology’s multifarious traditions. For someone just getting started, I can’t think of a better way to get a taste of the whole spectrum of astrological practice in order to help you decide which one feels right for you personally.

If you’re already more settled in your approach, you’ll have a chance to take your learning to the next level by studying with the best teachers in your particular branch of the field. Of course you can also do that by reading books or watching teachers on YouTube. Still, there is something magical about the “direct transmission” you get in a live setting. I don’t fully understand why that is true, but it has always been vividly real for me.

Last but far from least, you can count on having a lot of mind-blowing random conversations with other attendees. You’ll meet people who are as passionate as you are about this craft we practice. Many would be fully capable of presenting lectures of their own, but their lives have just gone down different roads so they don’t check the “famous” box quite as clearly as some of the more popular speakers. That certainly doesn’t mean that they have nothing to say or teach . . . in fact, come to think of it, we could probably say the same thing about you as a student in the FCEA! There might be someone at UAC whose life you are going to touch with a word or two based on your own learning and experience.

If you feel moved to attend, UAC could open some doors inside of you that you didn’t even know you had.

See you there? See how you feel.

Fate versus Free Will – it’s the oldest argument in astrology. The fact that it’s still being debated after all these centuries proves that there must be some truth on both sides. It’s not like fussing about whether two plus two equals four or equals five. That question was settled long ago simply because it’s “settleable.” We can do the math. In my opinion, fate versus free will is a different beast entirely – it’s not settleable at all. To me, the most obvious parallel lies in physics, where you can prove two things. First, that light is a wave and that it could not possibly be a particle. And second, that light is a particle and it could not possibly be a wave. (By the way, if you want that idea spelled out in lucidly clear language, the best book I could recommend would be The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav.) 

The more deeply we come to understand the universe, the more it appears to be ruled by paradox. Maybe the universe is itself a Libra, reflexively saying “on one hand, but then on the other hand.” 

Paradox, paradox, paradox . . . it’s built into the very fabric of reality. For one obvious parallel, I think that there’s a deep interdependency between kindness and truthfulness. Neither has any real meaning without the other. And I believe the same thing is true for fate and free will.

So much for philosophy.

ENTER THE COUNSELING ROOM

The bell has rung and it’s time for us to exit our Philosophy 101 classroom and move on to Psychology 101. There, my client says, “Of course I can’t shut up – I’m a Gemini. I know I drive everyone crazy by being such a motormouth, but you’ve seen my chart. I can’t help it.”

Steve: Gemini is about communication and that’s as much about listening as it is about talking.

Client: But . . .

Steve: You can choose to listen more. You have that power. You can become a better Gemini.

Maybe the client accepts that guidance, maybe not. We can’t control anyone. But clearly in that short exchange, we see a necessary underlying counseling room emphasis on the exercise of  free will – the idea that we are capable of taking responsibility for our own choices. By contrast, imagine how uselessly destructive it would be for an astrologer to agree with a Gemini client that they have no power over their own mouths. That kind of hopeless, resigned passivity has never once made anyone’s life any better. Astrological fatalism actually damages people. In that area, I believe that we are not debating technique, we’re debating ethics.

In my case for free will, let’s call that Exhibit A. 

Here’s Exhibit B: There are in fact yackety-yack Gemini people who improve. They learn to listen. They become more effective communicators. Why? Because they chose to. They exercised their free will. They recognized that they have some degree of agency in their own lives. This is an observed reality and it must be factored into our efforts as we attempt to zero in on the truth.

Here in our Psychology 101 classroom, we recognize that in the context of any kind of counseling, astrological or otherwise, the assumption of free will – and its close cousin, personal responsibility – is absolutely necessary. Failing that, we find ourselves adding an astrological seal of inescapable doom to whatever vices or stuck places a client presents. Our job is to aim people at the higher ground, not to tell them that it’s impossible to reach it. We need to leave them with a map for getting there, along with an empowered feeling that they can in fact succeed. Any kind of fatalism is antithetical to all of that. 

Fate versus free will – as counselors, we embrace freedom as a practical truth that lies at the foundation of everything good that we do. But what is the ultimate truth – the one that embraces both sides of the paradox? 

We graduated from Philosophy 101. Let’s head for Philosophy 102.

IT’S YOUR FATE TO FACE CERTAIN QUESTIONS . . .

Many of my readings for clients open with those exact words. Specifically, I say, “It’s your fate to face certain questions and certain possibilities in this life. How you answer those questions or respond to those possibilities is up to you.” 

To me, those words nicely straddle both sides of the paradox. 

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo complains to the wizard Gandalf about the burden he is fated to carry. He’s wishing the One Ring had never come to him. Gandalf replies, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.“

There, straight from the wizard’s mouth, is exactly the same principle that I’m espousing here. It’s a middle path between fate and free will – a path that leaves room for both, while ignoring neither of them. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.“

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Why do you have the chart that you have? Evolutionary astrology is perhaps the only form of our craft in which we attempt to answer that question. The answer is always karmic – the chart you have today is the direct result of actions you’ve taken in prior lifetimes, for good or for ill. As the Tibetan saint, Padma Sambhava put it, “If you want to know your past lives, consider your present circumstances.”

Those past-life actions are done. They’re water under the bridge. Their results, which are evident in your present life, are therefore foreordained and inevitable. All that is clearly “in the hands of fate.” But exactly how do you go about navigating those labyrinths today? What do you do with the time that is given to you? That’s in your own hands. You can respond habitually, repeating old patterns. That’s pure karma: the repetition compulsion. Or you can respond creatively and more wisely – and that’s your evolutionary path. That’s the road to the higher ground.

ENTER THE ASTROLOGICAL HOUSES 

Astrology is really three symbol systems woven into one. We have planets, signs, and houses.

Of the three, “the hand of fate” is most obviously evident in the houses. The reason is simple: houses are linked directly to the kinds of specific circumstances that life presents to us, often whether we like them or not. Meanwhile, signs are more motivational and psychological. They correlate more with a person’s energy than with his or her behavior. Try this: “Jane works ten or twelve hours a day six days a week. Is she an introvert or an extrovert? Notice how you can’t answer? That’s because we gave you “house information” – that is to say, comments about Jane’s behavior – then we asked a sign question.

As we saw, houses represent the circumstances that life thrusts upon us – and circumstances, by their very nature, are obvious. In evolutionary terms, we might make a case that the twelve astrological houses are like classrooms where we are offered the opportunity to learn the lessons for which we’ve signed up in this incarnation. They’re “required courses” too, so we don’t have much choice about skipping them. 

• What that all boils down to is that “fate” will constantly present us with situations that are reflected in the emphasized houses in our natal charts. Our “freedom” lies in how we respond to those situations.

A FEW EXAMPLES

Oprah Winfrey was born in 1954 in Mississippi to an unwed teenage mother. Poverty was obviously a big part of that situation. Nowadays she’s said to be worth three billion dollars. Mercury, Venus, and the Sun are all in her 2nd house. That means that the gods and the goddesses put her in a classroom called “Let’s Think Some Deep Thoughts About Money.” That house focus doesn’t always spell vast wealth – poverty can be a teacher too, as it actually was at first for Oprah. One “fatalistic” statement we can make with good reliability whenever we see a strong 2nd house is that the person’s relationship with money will usually involve many changes, many ups and downs. That’s because the universe wants us to keep thinking about money, what to do with it, and how much to concern ourselves with it. Dealing with those kinds of questions was part of Oprah’s “fate.” She’s faced it pretty much in a “both sides now” fashion.

Actor Timothee Chalamet has Sun, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, and Uranus all in his 5th house, all in Capricorn. The “fates” beckoned him to a 5th house life of disciplined performance and creativity. How? His mother “happened” to have been a Broadway dancer, so he grew up around that kind of energy. Living in New York City, he was able to attend a nearby performing arts high school and make useful connections there. During high school, he actually dated Madonna’s daughter for a year.

Was he “forced” to become an actor? No – but “the fates” certainly beckoned him in that direction through his circumstances.

One traditional meaning of the 5th house is children – and often people with strong 5th houses find themselves interacting with kids whether or not they are parents. We’ll see how that works out for Mr. Chalamet as the years go by, but we certainly already see the way “the fates” led him to become the artist that he is today.

Running parallel to Timothee Chalamet is the life of seminal singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, whom Chalamet portrayed so brilliantly in the 2024 film, A Complete Unknown. Dylan himself has four planets in his 5th house – Saturn, Moon, Uranus, and Jupiter, all in Taurus. His “fate” involved creativity too. And Dylan has fathered six children.

Princess Diana had a Sun-Mercury conjunction in Cancer in her 7th house. Anyone who knows anything about her tragic life can feel the “hand of fate” operating upon her in terms of the life-shaping power of marriage and relationships.

A 1st house stellium is almost the antithesis of fate in that it puts enormous focus on self-generated, independent decisions – often ones made in isolation or even loneliness. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, is a fine illustration of that principle. She was born with Venus, the Sun, Mercury, the south node, and Saturn all in her 1st house. At birth, her mother was unable to care for her and quickly put her up for foster care and eventually adoption – her 1st house lessons started early. Perhaps Simone Biles’ clearest demonstration of independent self-mastery happened in 2021 when she shocked everyone by withdrawing from Olympic competition. She said, “I say put mental health first.” Biles could have let herself be railroaded by social pressure and other people’s expectations. In 1st house fashion, she simply made her own decision and said no. Was that choice  “fated?” I don’t think so – but the fact that she found herself in that position was. 

Ram Dass had a Sun/Uranus conjunction in Aries in his 10th house. His Midheaven is in Pisces. Who would have thought that the fates would eventually summon the son of an upwardly mobile Jewish lawyer from Boston to become a semi-Hindu rebel spiritual teacher and role model for hundreds of thousands of young people during a cultural revolution? The gods and goddesses had a different – and very Uranian – plan for his public life.

As a final example, let’s consider Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez – a waitress from the Bronx in New York City who won a shock election and became a U.S. congressional representative. The call of the fates, anyone? “AOC” has a Sun-Mars conjunction in her 10th house and, just like Ram Dass, the Divine Hand had a very public plan for her too.

A FINAL WORD

None of these examples feel even slightly forced. The truth just leaps out from the shape of bare biographical facts, and in it we can sense higher forces working in these people’s lives. It would be fair to call these forces “the hand of fate.” 

Still, the trouble with that kind of language is that a temptation arises to imagine that all of these outcomes were foreordained and inevitable. Don’t succumb to it. Each of these seven human beings co-created their “fates.” They were not mechanically “fated” at all, at least not in any inescapable sense. Each one of them could have slept through the opportunities that life presented them. They could have let fear make their decisions – or the love of money, or status, or sex, or addiction. Or simple laziness. That they did not do that is an expression of their innate freedom. I, for one, would never want to rob them of that dignity. I say that not simply out of respect for them, but for a deeper reason. I say it out of respect for the free will in each one of us and how it dances with whatever doorways the Divine Hand opens before us all – and how it closes them just as quickly if we don’t seize the moment.

Fate versus free will? It’s time to delete “versus” and replace it with an endless interplay of cooperation, mutual potentiation, and interdependency operating between ourselves and forces that are embedded deeply in the mysteries of the universe – forces that call us and guide us, but which do not ultimately control us. As astrologers we should strive to never forget how in our negotiations with those synchronistic energies, we are far from powerless.

Let’s say you get up at dawn on May 21. The Sun is rising. It’s in the first degree of Gemini, so that means that Gemini is rising too. Around noon, the Sun is as high in the sky as it can be – and therefore so is Gemini, right on the Midheaven along with the Sun. Sunset? Gemini is on the Descendant. 

No surprises in any of that. It’s just Earth turning on its axis. In the course of twenty-four hours, each sign rises once.

Switching gears, how do we define progressions? Again, this is very elementary astrology. Days become years. If you want to know where your progressed Venus is located on your fortieth birthday, count forty days after you were born. Where was Venus then? That’s its progressed position.

• In a single day, each sign rises once. Following the strict logic of progressions, one day turns into one year – and therefore in the course of one single year, each sign should rise once by progression. In other words, you should have a brand new progressed Ascendant every month or so.

Technically, this very pure method of progressing the Angles is called Daily Houses. In my experience, nobody uses it very much. In terms of actual impact, this form of progressing the Angles works very much like the equally fast transits of the Sun, Mercury, and Venus. Like them, it triggers events, but it doesn’t reveal big developmental patterns. Daily Houses are miles away from true “First Net” material.

• The key point for our purposes here is that the Daily Houses method is actually the only logically consistent application of progressions theory to the four Angles of the chart – days become years, period. It’s totally straightforward. Meanwhile, all of the other methods of progressing the Angles have to dance around a variety of rationalizations.

Before we get into the weeds with all of this – you can call me Mister Capricorn, but let me just say that I’m not comfortable with rationalizations or lapses in logic. I do get my own joke – I believe that the universe is a lot more comfy with those kinds of things than I am! But still, here’s what works for me: when it comes to progressed Angles, I use straight solar arcs. However far your Sun has progressed since the day you were born, I add that same number of degrees to everything else, including the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, and the astrological nadir. That’s all straightforward solar arc theory, so, unlike with the other forms of progression for the Angles, no complications are swept under the carpet. 

Technically, by the way, that 4th house cusp is called the Imum Coeli, which is Latin for “bottom of the sky.” Its most common pronunciation is IMM-um CHAY-lee. Often in practice, astrologers simply refer to it as the “IC.”

WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS?

I do have to say that I’ve often gotten pretty good results with other methods for progressing the Angles, but in the interest of not overwhelming myself by trying to use too many versions of astrology all at once, in practice I limit myself to solar arcs. That’s a personal choice, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from working with other methods – just make sure that you don’t suffocate your intuition by trying to juggle too many balls at once.

Just quickly, here are three of my own personal experiences with solar arc Angles. They really do work! Often they are uncannily accurate in terms of the timing of events. 

• My Midheaven squared my natal Uranus just a few months before I graduated from college. I decided to focus on astrology rather than going to graduate school – a choice which everyone around me viewed as “Uranian,” to put it politely. 

• By solar arc, my Ascendant formed a conjunction with my natal Venus within one month of starting my full-time astrological counseling practice – I emphasize “counseling” for the obvious Venus connection. 

• By solar arc, the Midheaven squared my Jupiter the very month that my first book was published – nicely precise in timing, and also illustrating the idea that squares are not always bad news.

ONWARD INTO THE WEEDS

I’ve always felt that there’s something good to be said for astrologers understanding the astronomical basis of our craft. I do believe in that principle, but in all honesty if I were pressed to defend it, I’m not sure that I would be very convincing. Certainly there are many fine astrological counselors who can’t tell a Vertex from the Celestial Equator. One happy bottom line: there are no “points off” for any of you in the FCEA community who skip the rest of this edition of Master’s Musings! None of it is particularly relevant when you’re sitting with charts and people with tears in their eyes. 

Matrix’s Winstar software – which is the program I’ve used for most of my career – has a method of progressing the Angles which they call Secondary MC. Years ago, I asked co-founder Stephen Erlewine how these Matrix calculations were made. Here’s what he told me.

“The first attempt was to duplicate what most astrologers were doing by hand at that time, and we call it Secondary MC. The Sun’s position is calculated for the progressed date using one-day-equals 365.25 days, then the solar arc is calculated from that position and that arc is added to the natal MC and the houses derived. But instead of using the arc along the ecliptic as in the solar arc method, it is added along the celestial equator since that more closely approximates the Midheaven that our customers were used to using, and, of course, the Right Ascension of the Midheaven is the basis of any house system.” 

Confused? See below for some definitions. This diagram might help you visualize everything we’re about to explore.

Astrology, as we practice it in the FCEA, is based on the familiar twelve signs, which are defined by the Equinoxes and the Solstices. That’s the zodiac – although astronomers call it the ecliptic. It is simply the apparent yearly path of the Sun as it travels against the starry background. The ecliptic is one “line in the sky.” There’s another: we can also project Earth’s equator out onto space – and, no surprise, that line is called the celestial equator. 

The plane of the ecliptic is tilted about twenty-three and a half degrees relative to the plane of the equator, as you can see in the diagram.

Declination is a measurement based on the celestial equator. It corresponds to what we call latitude on Earth – that is to say it represents a planet’s elevation north or south of the equator. Mincing the words a bit, you might say that Norway has a “higher declination” than Spain.

Meanwhile, right ascension (to which Stephen Erlewine referred) corresponds to earthly  longitude, which is to say that it is based on the celestial equator. Arbitrarily, we start counting longitude on Earth from the Greenwich meridian near London. Similarly, the 0° longitude point of right ascension is the position of the Vernal Equinox on the celestial equator. 

Ready for more weeds? Right from the start of this essay, the issue we’re exploring is that all of the methods for progressing the Angles depend on some rationalization and improvisation. As we saw, the only method that is absolutely consistent logically is the “Daily Houses” approach, with each month bringing you a new progressed Ascendant and Midheaven. A little while ago, I confessed that in my own practice I simply apply the standard solar arc approach to the Angles. In the other methods, some astrological theorists – most of whom are far better astronomers than myself – have actually had a similar instinct about using solar arcs, but they’ve applied them in more technical ways. Still, it’s a helpful perspective to remember that they all use some variation on solar arcs. 

Before we go any further, let’s add one more necessary complication. We speak of the Sun’s progressed speed – and thus the speed of all solar arcs – as “one degree per year.”  That figure is actually an approximation. Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical, so we speed up and slow down in the course of a year. Earth is closest to the Sun – and thus moving at its fastest speed – every year around January 3rd. In practical terms, that means that if you were born during the colder months in the northern hemisphere, your progressed Sun – and thus your solar arcs – are moving a little faster than one degree per year. It’s vice versa if you were born during the warm months. 

The average annual speed of the progressed Sun is 59’ 08” – that’s actually just under one degree per year. But it varies about 1.6% from that figure over the course of twelve months.

Is your head spinning? I’d be the first to confess mine is spinning too. Like most of you in the FCEA, I’m a counselor, not an astronomer. 

With this next step, I’m definitely edging into “over my head” territory . . .

• The Midheaven – and thus the other three Angles – can be progressed by solar arc either along the ecliptic (that is, in celestial longitude) or along the celestial equator (that is, in right ascension). 

• Furthermore, it can be progressed by the actual measured solar arc – that is, taking into account the Sun’s annual variation in speed. Alternatively, it can be progressed in a constant fashion, using that average figure of 59’08” per year. That method is called Naibod, by the way. 

Let’s add that focussing on the Midheaven here is just shorthand. Naturally the IC would always be directly opposite it. Meanwhile, each Midheaven degree is linked to a specific Ascendant degree, which varies by latitude – and that of course determines the degree of the Descendant. 

So, deep in the weeds, here is the bottom line: we have the progressed Midheaven potentially advanced along the ecliptic by two forms of solar arc – that is, by its true speed or its average annual speed. We also have the progressed Midheaven advanced along the celestial equator by those same two forms of solar arc. 

Thus, we have four distinct methods of calculation, each with its adherents. 

Complicating the process of sorting out the best methods is the fact the results are often close together. 

In all honesty, the progressed Angles are among the most unsettled, and widely misunderstood, dimensions of our craft. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from experimenting with any or all of these techniques. As with all things in astrology, the proof of the pudding is the correspondence of any of these techniques with your own experience. 

Given the “trade school” values that underlie the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, in practice let’s focus on simply adding the actual arc of the progressed Sun to the positions of the four Angles. That straight solar arc method works well – and leaves some energy left over for thinking about everything else that’s going on in a chart.

Are your eyes getting glassy? Mine too. But if you’ve absorbed the basic ideas I’ve written about here, I can confidently guarantee that you now actually know more about the progressed Angles than most astrologers working today.

At The FCEA, we have been rolling out new 400 courses addressing advanced topics. One of our new classes is “402: Chart Rectification” Here’s what that speciality course is all about. As we all know, a person’s exact time of birth is mission-critical in astrology, but sometimes it’s impossible to find it. That’s especially true if someone was born at home and no record was kept. Generally it’s more of a problem with older people – years ago, it was more common not to bother with “an inconsequential detail” like that. People are pretty good about it nowadays.

The problem runs deeper. A birth listed “at noon” also naturally triggers suspicion. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ditto for a birth registered exactly on the half or quarter hour. Naturally, it’s possible for someone to be born at 10:15, but the number smacks of being rounded off. Sometimes even a few minutes of error can make a big difference in a chart – it could change the Ascendant sign, for example. We need to be careful with “recorded” birth times like those.

More insidiously, even a seemingly accurate birth time can be off by a little. Maybe your client reports, “My birth certificate says that I was born at 11:07 PM.” That has the ring of real authority – but what do we actually mean by the moment of birth? Some of you female readers have had babies, and you know it’s not quite like, “Pop! Oooh, a baby! Quick – what time is it?” Are we talking about the first breath, the emergence of the child’s head, the final separation from the mother’s body, or the severing of the umbilical cord? There’s no clear agreement about any of that.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern: it runs out that people are often born a little earlier than what’s recorded. It’s not a reliable principle, but it’s one worth considering. The reason is probably pretty simple: the medical staff is busy with the actual birthing process. When it’s over and the baby is safely delivered, someone looks at the clock and calls out the time. The actual birth occurred a bit earlier. I’m a good example of that. On my birth certificate, my time of birth is listed as 3:30 AM. I’ve come to believe that it is closer to 3:22 AM. That’s an eight minute difference – enough to make some significant changes in my chart.

Then there’s the final vexation: how accurate was the clock on the wall? As we all know, unless a clock is tied to the Internet, it can easily drift a minute or two away from reality. Typically no one notices it. 

• The bottom line is that there is always at least the suspicion of some uncertainty in anyone’s time of birth. Being mindful of that possibility is good astrological practice. Always consider it if a chart feels a bit “off.” Quite possibly, it is.

Applying that caution in practice brings us to the fascinating world of chart rectification.

WHAT IS CHART RECTIFICATION?

We all know that a person’s astrological chart correlates with the timing of life events. That’s an astrological staple; it’s the standard practice of transits, progressions, and solar arcs. What if we turn that process on its head? What if instead of predicting events from a chart, we use the timing of events to predict the chart? 

That, in a nut shell, is rectification.

Take for example the start of a significant relationship. Such a life-changing event is always heralded by relevant transits, progressions, or solar arcs. At such a time, progressed Venus might, for one illustration, form a conjunction with your natal Sun. That’s everyday astrology at work – but it won’t help us much in this case. Why? Because even if all we know is the day that someone was born, we already know the position of their Sun within about one degree of accuracy. That Venus progression doesn’t narrow down the time of birth at all. 

• What we are looking for is any transit, progression, or solar arc impacting any of the four Angles – the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, and Astrological Nadir. Those are the time-sensitive points. They are what hold the secret of the actual moment of birth. They are the astrological clock on the wall.

Let’s say that when that significant relationship started, progressed Venus was entering your 7th house. Like Venus hitting the Sun, that would also be a textbook astrological correlate for someone important popping into your life. But to know the position of that house cusp, we would have to know the time of your birth within a few minutes. 

The next step is the critical one.

Say we don’t know a woman’s birth time, but we do know that she met her husband when her progressed Venus had reached 11 degrees of Capricorn. Let’s also say that she told us that years earlier when she met “Mister Wrong,” transiting Pluto was in the same position. And when solar arc Jupiter was there, she met her literary agent who opened publishing doors for her.

We don’t know the woman’s birth time, but we’re starting to see a pattern of relationship sensitivity around that Capricorn degree. Let’s add one more critical point: no planetary aspects are triggered there. So what’s happening? Why are her relationships sensitive to that degree? 

• Might the timing of those events reveal the position of her 7th house cusp? 

That’s how rectification works. When a birth time is unknown, the Angles reveal themselves through clusterings of astrological events that cannot otherwise be explained. In other words, we’re not interested in transits, progressions, or solar arcs making aspects to planets. We are only interested in their aspects to the four Angles of the chart. 

Essentially we work backwards through the timing of actual events in order to find the chart that would have predicted them. 

That’s rectification.

A FEW PRACTICAL GUIDELINES

In undertaking a rectification, I ask the client for a list of the dates of about ten “big events.” To prime the pump, I suggest physical moves, the beginnings or endings of relationships, illnesses or accidents, career developments, significant deaths, the births of children, and so forth.

I also add an important stricture: make sure these events are all separated by at least a couple of years. Otherwise we’ll get “false positives.” How far do the outer planets or the progressions go in a year? Not far! So if the dates are close together, meaningless clusterings are inevitable. One exception: with dates separated by two or three months, it’s okay to use the transits of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. They move fast enough that they spread out over time periods like that. Never use anything slower with dates that are close together!

If the client can give me exact dates – for example, “I got married on June 13, 2019” – that’s great news. That means I can use those quick transits of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. That’s why events where people can recall exact dates are particularly useful: marriages, the births of children, and parental deaths come to mind. 

Often in practice the date won’t be so precise. Instead, you’ll hear something like, “I moved to Chicago in summer 2007.” That can be helpful too – but we have to sacrifice those fast planets. Over three months, they’ll cover wide arcs. The good news is that even with vague dates, you can still use all the slow-moving ones – the transits of Jupiter on out, plus all the solar arcs and progressions. With the possible exception of transiting Jupiter, they don’t move far in a single summer.

Sometimes people know that they were born “early in the morning” or that “dad had to rush mom to the hospital in the wee hours.” That’s not accurate enough for us to set up a chart, but it’s still a huge help because it considerably narrows down the possibilities. Before you start a rectification, always see if any hints like that are available.

We know that when a planet has moved within a couple degrees of an Angle, things tend to happen. The planet doesn’t have to be exactly on the Angle, in other words. In my earlier example where we saw events clustering in a woman’s life when planets got to “11 degrees of Capricorn,” I was oversimplifying. A more likely reality would be seeing a clustering of planets falling between, say, 9 and 13 degrees of Capricorn. You basically average it out – because of orbs, the truth will likely lie somewhere in the middle of the cluster.

The more events you have, the better. As I mentioned, I’ll initially ask for ten. That’s generally been enough in my experience. Sometimes you get unlucky though – maybe all those events make perfect astrological sense, but they’re all tied to planetary aspects, not aspects to the Angles. If you’re not getting anywhere with a rectification, ask for another batch of events.

There’s one more stricture: since this whole process depends on having the dates of many big events spread out over a long period of time, it follows that you really can’t do reliable rectification work for children.

FCEA 402

That’s our rectification class. It dives deeply into the nuts and bolts of this method in a lot more detail than I can cover in a brief newsletter. In framing 402, I used the chart of soul-singer James Brown as an example. No birth time was available for him. He was born in poverty. But in a live video of one of his performances, he made reference to having “Leo rising.” That narrowed his time of birth down to a couple of hours, and I took it from there. 

James Brown was of course a famous person, so it was easy to research the dates of various biographical events, both glorious and inglorious. 

In 402, we teach a strictly hands-on method of chart rectification. All you need is time and astrological knowledge. Nowadays, there are many computer-assisted rectification methods available as well. Sirius software and Astrolabe’s “Jigsaw” can help. In the past, I’ve often used the rectification module in Alphee Lavoie’s A.I.R. software program. I’m not sure if that’s still available at this point.

Tools such as those can be helpful and there’s no shame in using them. Still, they embody the same kinds of temptations and pitfalls that are built into Artificial Intelligence in general – rely on them too much, and pretty soon you’re letting the machine do your thinking for you, while you learn nothing at all. 

Rectification taught me an enormous amount about how transits, progressions, and solar arcs actually work. For one example, when I was a young astrologer, I was bamboozled into believing the standard line about “benefic” and “malefic” planets. Perhaps more than anything else, rectification disabused me of all that. I saw enough deaths heralded by Jupiter and enough loving relationships heralded by Saturn that I was compelled to think more deeply about everything.

Intuition definitely plays a role in astrological work. We do need to be careful of it though. Be wary if you find yourself saying something like, “I just know you must have Gemini rising.” It might turn out that the person has Cancer rising, but with Mercury conjunct the Ascendant. You sensed the energy correctly, but you mislabeled it – and naturally such an “intuitive” error would cascade into a wildly incorrect reading.

There’s no substitute in other words for doing the rigorous work of rectification. Perhaps the biggest danger that arises if you simply let the software do it for you is that such laziness cancels out all the parts of your intuition that are actually helpful. By the time you’ve rectified a chart, your understanding of how the planets actually work in that person’s life is profound. Even better, maybe you get the feeling that a planet seems to be in the wrong house – rectification puts it in the 9th, but the 8th house feels like a more natural fit with the actual story of the person’s life. Then you realize that if he or she were born just one minute later, that planet would indeed land in the 8th house. 

Behind such a realization, here’s what’s going on technically. Remember how when we saw a cluster of planets hovering over a three or four degree area which we suspect is the position of an Angle, we just averaged it out and picked the middle? Because Angles have orbs, that’s just the way it all works in practice. The results are always slightly fuzzy – say, within a degree or so of error. And maybe because of that inherent imprecision, moving that suspect planet into the 8th house not only makes astrological sense, it’s also operating within the bounds of the small “quantum” uncertainties that underlie all rectification work. 

The point is that it was your precious intuition that sensed the error. If you had relied solely on computerized rectification, that intuitive insight would never have arisen. As with the best of modern astrological practice, we’re working in partnership with these mighty microchips, but we shouldn’t enslave ourselves to them.

Let me offer your intuition one final image: there’s an astrologer who sometimes simply gazes in awe at the starry night sky and there’s another one who never steps away from the computer screen. Which one do you want to trust with your soul? 

So roll up your sleeves, dive into the rectification process, and let your intelligence and your intuition learn to dance together. They’re stronger together than they are apart.

Some dimensions of this core principle of professional astrological conduct are too obvious to belabor. If a client shares with you that they have an improper relationship with a rubber duck, don’t post that information on Instagram. If you are a decent counselor of any sort – psychologist, astrologer, or tea-leaf reader – you will go to your grave with more juicy secrets than you can remember. That’s the deal. That’s what you signed up for. Most of your greatest victories, most of your brilliant moments – all are known only to you and one other person, bound for eternity under a seal of confidentiality. If you want applause from an audience larger than one person, try another career. 

That’s just a hundred words or so and I could probably have thrown away fifty of them – just keep your mouth shut about any private information that your clients share with you. It’s as simple as that. Everything here is clear as a bell . . . so far.

Some people – and some astrologers – prefer to keep their charts secret. Personally I prefer to be an open book, but that’s just me. God knows, you can learn a lot about a person from his or her birthchart! If someone doesn’t want that to be public information, that’s their business. So, along with personal secrets of the “rubber duck” nature, I also make a policy of never revealing anyone’s time of birth without their explicit permission. (The date and place are often public knowledge, so they’re a moot point.) Even the simple fact that someone has been a client of mine should never become public knowledge unless that person chooses to reveal our  relationship. The situation is improving, but in some circles there is still a stigma associated with anyone consulting an astrologer, so once again, that information needs to remain confidential.

There are no surprises or controversies in any of this: just keep mum about the details of a person’s life and birthchart. That’s an obvious ethical imperative. All of that’s easy to understand. What I actually want to explore in this essay are the gray areas. Once we get past what’s clearly right and wrong, the question of confidentiality collides with the real world in some tricky ways. Everything becomes more nuanced. 

As with much that happens in life, with questions of confidentiality good astrologers may come to different ethical conclusions. Let me say loudly and clearly that from now on all you read here are nothing but my own opinion – my suggestions, really. My aim is to reflect with you about the nature of right and wrong regarding confidentiality in more ambivalent circumstances. I’m mainly hoping to encourage some thought and some mindfulness, and maybe some dialog in the broader astrological community – and what I mean by that last comment will be clearer when we get to the final point that I want to explore in this essay.

SYNASTRY

A couple asks for astrological support as they work out their relationship. We set up their charts and off we go. This can be one of the most satisfying, straightforward dimensions of our craft – provided that both of the people have given their blessing to the process. What if one of them has not? What if, say, a wife asks you to explain her husband’s chart to her without telling him? Maybe he hates astrology. Maybe he has some religious reservations about it. Can we ethically share our interpretation of one person’s chart with another person without the absent person’s blessing? Is that right or wrong?

My first instinct here is to say no, we shouldn’t do that. I feel that I should have the other person’s approval before I explain their chart to anyone else. Note that this does not require that they “believe in astrology.” They can be dismissive of the whole thing. They can even say,”Go ahead, waste your money.” I have no problem with that. All that I needed to hear was that “go ahead.” 

In concrete terms, my only specific requirement is that my client assures me that their partner has given the green light to the process. To ask for a note seems silly – one could easily be faked. 

A gray area? Yes indeed – once again, this is simply how I personally have chosen to navigate this particular ethical quagmire.

Let’s have a look at some nuances and some exceptions.

ABUSE

A client is abused or even battered by a partner. Naturally they’re desperate and frightened. They ask me for help. Obviously under those circumstances the main astrological focus should be on their own chart, but in an extreme situation like that I might set up a bi-wheel with my client’s chart in the center and their partner’s planets in the outer wheel without the partner’s permission. What I am looking for is how the abusive partner impacts my client – how his (or her!) Pluto opposes my client’s Moon, for example. 

The focus is on understanding that interaspectual impact rather than understanding the nature and motives of the abusing partner. 

In setting up that bi-wheel, I’ve edged into ethically-questionable territory in terms of confidentiality, but in this situation that breach seems like the lesser of two evils.  If my client needed to ask her abusive partner’s permission for the session, she might face physical harm. It would clearly be wrong for me to put her in that position. And because her position is so dire, I want to pull out all the stops to help and empower her as much as I can. So I skate along the edge of an ethical abyss and I pray that I don’t fall into it.

Again, once we’re beyond the most obvious situations, confidentiality is a nuanced subject fraught with plenty of individual judgment calls.

CHILDREN

Kids, especially younger ones, are always a special case. A baby is born. The parents ask me for a reading of the child’s chart. I’m delighted to do it – and as soon as I open my mouth, I am flagrantly waiving the child’s right to confidentiality. Is that wrong? I don’t think so, but I’d be willing to take someone seriously who argued in the opposite direction. Children are human too. One could make a case that they have the same rights as any adult.

As the man said two thousand years ago, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I wish my own parents had had the benefit of an understanding of my chart when they were raising me. That would have helped us all. Personally, I think the good that comes from parents understanding the specific needs and karmic situation of their child outweighs any issues of the kid’s right to confidentiality. Every culture and every legal system that has ever existed grasps the need to treat children differently than adults. To me, the “bad” of violating a child’s natural right to confidentiality is outweighed by the good of supporting the parents – and the child – by providing astrological perspective.

Maybe you feel differently? Other perspectives are of course possible.

What about teenagers? We’ve all been “them,” languishing in that twilight zone between childhood and adult life. Should we respect their confidentiality or share our understanding of their charts with their parents – with or without their permission?

Again I go back to “do unto others.” When I was, say, fourteen years old, how would I have felt about my parents “knowing my secrets?” Some stranger whom I did not know is talking about me to them behind my back? Forget about it! As a teen, I probably would not have wanted that, so for that reason I personally feel that I have no right to impose that violation on a teenager. 

Still, with a very troubled teen – for example, one with suicidal ideation – I’d probably make an exception. Nuances, nuances, nuances . . .

Generally starting around the age of puberty I avoid reading kids’ charts until they are old enough to absorb the work directly themselves. That “black out period” is not very long. I’ve had many fine astrological experiences sitting with bright, motivated sixteen year olds. In those sessions, there’s something sweet and intimate about us both understanding that everything we say is our secret – usually including a few private giggles about their parents.

All my work is recorded, so later on teens can share it – or not – with their parents. That’s up to them.

THE DEAD

At the other end of life’s trajectory we of course encounter relationships with people who are deceased. A client might come to me troubled by an unresolved relationship with her mother who’s just passed away. Without any hesitation, I would say “show me her chart.”  Once more, I’d be the first to admit that this is a judgement call. Someone might fairly criticize me for violating the privacy of the dead. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel that once someone is beyond any harm that this world can do to them that I have an open invitation to help those who are still here as they try to deal with whatever situations such a soul left in his or her wake.

In practice, I’ve not done much of that kind of post mortem astrology, but when I have, it’s been profound. I remember one instance particularly vividly. A woman came to me with pain about her father’s life-long emotional distance from her. She knew he loved her, but he always seemed to be withholding any expression of it. The man had a Cancer south node in the 12th house conjunct Saturn. As we speculated about his karma, we saw him as a celibate monk fasting in a cave somewhere and still scarred today by the wounds inflicted by that extreme austerity and isolation. Immediately the Holy Grail of informed compassion toward her father arose in my client’s heart. Through that astrological insight, she was able to feel more forgiveness towards him. I call that a good day.

Did I violate her father’s confidentiality even though he was currently in the Great Beyond? Yes, clearly so. Am I glad I did? Yes I am. It gave my client real comfort – and I suspect it gave her father some comfort too as he listened in from the Other Side.

CRIME

Client: Steve, I’m planning on murdering my wife. When’s the best time for me to do it? Naturally I’m hoping to get away with it.

Me: Ah, well, I see that next Tuesday after about 3:00 PM, the stars are aligned . . .

Perhaps you sense an ethical lapse here? As with my opening lines about generally not blabbing about our clients’ charts or their secrets, the ethics here are pretty obvious: don’t collude in a crime. 

What about reporting one? How does client confidentiality fit into the picture then? I’m using a terribly broad example here – a man planning to murder his wife. If you were an astrologer in that position and felt that the man was serious, should you inform the police? It would be a painful moment fraught with uncertainties, but I think the right answer is yes. You’ve broken confidentiality in a huge way, but in this case higher principles seem to supersede our normal ethical reflexes.

What about a client who mentions cheating on taxes? What about having run a stop sign or been guilty of littering? As we move down the criminal food chain from Murder One to relatively minor peccadillos, you’ll encounter gray areas where all you have is your own judgment and your own conscience. 

In a half-century of astrological practice, I am grateful to say that I’ve never had to report anything about a client to the authorities. People have confessed crimes to me, but none so horrendous that I felt obligated to violate the sanctity of the counseling room. Believe it or not, I actually once heard the following lament: “Do you have any idea how much money it costs to bribe the (bleeping) senator from Louisiana?” That really happened – and I’ll go to my grave with the specifics, even though the client who said those words is now deceased.

Am I what a prosecuting attorney might call “an accessory after the fact?” I guess so. Let’s hope I make it over the Mexico line before this essay hits the Internet. I’m optimistic. As I sit here writing these words, it’s only forty-five miles south of me . . .

THE ONE EXCEPTION TO ALL OF THIS . . .

. . . . Or is it? Or should it be? I am talking about the confidentiality of famous people. You can’t go to an astrological conference without some astrologer doing a lecture that uses the chart of a celebrity as an illustration, often going into intimate detail. I do it myself. We all do. And we never ask for permission. Is it right to do that? Is it ethical? Or are we violating the most primal ethical imperatives of any legitimate counselor? The FCEA curriculum, for one obvious example, is full of such charts.

This is one of those questions that the astrological community has collectively agreed to sweep under the carpet. 

The temptation to pepper our lectures or even our consultations with sexy references to famous people is ever-present. Go to Astrodatabank on Astro.com and you can get birth information for literally thousands of public figures – none of whom have explicitly given their permission for that information to be used in public. Go to Wikipedia or any other media source, and you can often get lots of salacious detail about their personal lives too – embarrassments and scandals included.

For an astrological teacher, welcome to paradise. From the perspective of astrological education, the benefits of this practice are enormous. Almost anywhere in the Western world, you can invoke “Elvis Presley” and virtually everyone knows who you’re talking about. Add a few moments of research and you’ll know that he basically died on a toilet seat of a drug overdose on August 16,1977 while transiting Neptune was conjunct his Ascendant. A teaching moment? For sure! 

Celebrities have become like modern versions of the Greek gods and goddesses. They now function as public property, holding mirrors before us all, like archetypes. Is that the price they have to pay for all the fairy dust in their lives? Maybe. If you need an illustration for sainthood, try Jane Goodall. A tragic beauty? Marilyn Monroe. Geniuses, devils, fools – they’re all there. Today the names of Taylor Swift or Timothee Chalamet create a far deeper human reaction in almost everyone than, say, Arachne or Poseidon. How many people anymore even know that the latter two are characters in Greek mythology?

Can we forgive astrologers for de-humanizing modern celebrities and thus robbing them of the ethical protections we feel that everyone else naturally deserves? Should we feel bad about using them as if they were cartoon illustrations in our lectures, books, and articles for The Mountain Astrologer? 

Should I forgive myself for doing it?

Discuss. 

One final point. I’ve done astrological work for a lot of famous people, mostly in show business. Once there’s a personal relationship like that, in my mind everything shifts into maximum, inviolable confidentiality. I know that a number of other astrologers are in the same position.

I live in horror of the day when someone asks me a question about the chart of a celebrity for whom I’ve done astrological work and who has not gone public about our relationship. What can I say? If I answer the question, I’ve broken the golden rule of keeping silence about clients. On the other hand, If I explain why I can’t answer, I’ve revealed that the person is a client – another no-no. 

What can I do? It’s a moral checkmate. So far, I’ve been lucky enough that the situation has never come up. I can only pray it never does! Like so much of this tricky territory, I have no clear answers – only an instinct to try to do a good job of balancing right and wrong. 

And in the end, that’s the essence of my suggestion to you.