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.

Random Stranger: Steve, you are a total lunatic.

Steve: Why, thank you! What a nice thing to say!

That critical stranger perhaps had my belief in astrology in mind, although I can think of some other possibilities. For example: 

I believe that consciousness survives death. I believe that nothing in life is actually random. I believe in ghosts and spirits. I believe the dream-world is as real as this one – (and I believe there’s a great joke in that line too . . . how real actually is this world?) I believe that miracles happen. I believe in reincarnation. I believe that soulmates – or two feet or four – can find each other again across the seas of death and rebirth. I believe there are true psychics and mediums and that they are a blessing to any community lucky enough to shelter them. I believe that there are still saints among us. I believe in magic. I believe that certain shamans can journey into the astral worlds and impact the lives of people about whom they care or whom they hate. I believe in what we’ve traditionally called God. 

I have little to offer in the way of proof about any of those beliefs, at least not anything that would convince that random stranger. They are just things I know in my bones – and I am totally aware of how weak my argument of “just knowing” would sound to many “rational” people. They’d probably treat me like a mental patient who “just knows” that he is Jesus or Napoleon. But it works for me. And it comforts me. 

Astrologically much of my “lunacy” arises because I have a strongly-placed Moon. By the way, when we say “lunatic” today, we obviously mean a crazy person, but originally it was an adjective, not a noun – accent on the second syllable. And it didn’t mean “crazy.” It meant “lunar.”

Ask any group of astrologers what the Moon signifies and most of them will say “feelings.” That’s true – the Moon definitely resonates with your emotional body. When you’re sad or happy or proud or feeling tender, that’s Moon territory for sure. But when you meet someone and you “have a feeling” that you could become friends, that’s the Moon talking too. When a friend of yours starts seeing someone and you sense they are going to be together for a long time, that’s something you might say that you have a “feeling” about, even though it’s not exactly an emotion. 

In all of these situations, we use the word “feelings,” but it really has two meanings. Sometimes by “feelings” we mean emotions and sometimes we mean intuition or even psychic impressions. In any case, it’s all lunar territory – it’s just that the territory is a lot bigger and more mysterious than experiencing happiness when you get what you want and sadness when you don’t.

• To say it rigorously, the Moon represents a wavelength of perception on which you become aware of everything that slips through the nets of rational analysis.

Think of love. Most of us understand that love is a reality. But it is notoriously hard to measure or predict. It “slips through the nets of rational analysis.” Think of the idea that life is inherently meaningful. No one can prove it, yet many of us sense it. Again, meaningfulness itself “slips through the nets of rational analysis.” And what gives meaning to life? There’s more than one answer, but one that’s on everyone’s short list is love, so we’ve soon circled back to that “unmeasurable” reality.

I don’t want to attack academics or to sound anti-intellectual. I’m not really that way. But I think that it’s fair to say that among “highly educated, rational” people, often the dominant belief-system today is a kind of existentialist materialism. Ask them what happens when we die, and you’ll typically hear something with a hint of humor such as, “I guess I’ll find out” – that, or perhaps some variation on “everything fades to black.”

 . . . as if we actually were these fragile bodies. As if the brain and the mind meant the same thing.

That’s where materialism enters the equations. It’s not always about the pursuit of money. At an even deeper level, materialism is ultimately the belief that humans are only flesh, bone, and firing neurons, and death means “over and out.” Ask the Moon: we are more than that – but then ask the Moon to prove it, and the Moon just says, I know. 

Picture an old woman in a hospice. She’ s facing death. She’s led a good, loving life, but she’s not very lunar by nature. Perhaps she believed that life basically boiled down to what she saw on television. Naturally, death is a scary prospect for her. A “lunatic” friend comes to sit with her – someone who intuitively believes many of the things on that list I opened this essay with: life after death, and so on. This lunar person doesn’t preach to her dying friend. Perhaps they don’t even talk about the “elephant in the living room” – that this old woman is on death’s door. Perhaps they just sit quietly together. Maybe they talk about the weather or politics or some happy memories they share. It doesn’t matter what they say. Something precious is flowing from the friend’s soul into the heart of the dying woman. Let’s call that magical Moon-energy faith, but by that I don’t mean anything like religious dogma. 

Bruce Springsteen’s moving 2002 album, The Rising, had a song called Into The Fire. It was a tribute to the first responders on 9/11 when the Twin Towers were brought down and three thousand people lost their lives, including many of those brave firefighters. One simple line about those heroes still brings tears to my eyes: May their faith give us faith.

That’s a lyric about the Moon. That’s what is flowing from the visiting friend into the soul of that dying woman in the hospice. It’s not an idea. It’s not about words. It’s not about proving anything to anyone. It’s pure life-force, pure energy – something coming straight from the ancient Mother Goddess, through the lunar person, and into the hearts of anyone fortunate enough to be nearby.

If the Moon is a prominent part of your chart, your higher calling is to be a pipeline of this contagious faith – a faith in everything that slips through the nets of rational analysis – into the world. In any situation, your presence alone is half the magic.

Even with a prominent Moon, not everyone gets this right. Like everything else in astrology, we can respond to it weakly or well. A strong Moon can just be moody and whiny, obsessed with its own needs and fears. But it can be strengthened! It can evolve to a higher level! And even if the Moon does not play a big role in your astrological makeup, it too can be strengthened and begin to resonate on this higher wavelength. 

Everyone has a Moon, so how do we tune it up? How do we bring out the best in it? Your Moon occupies a certain sign and house. It makes certain aspects. It’s in a particular phase. At any given moment, it’s undergoing certain stimuli via transits, progressions, and solar arcs. It has a mysteriously symbiotic relationship with the south node – that’s of course the south node of the Moon, so the connection with the mysteries of karma and prior lives are intimately tied up with it. The point is simply that your chart contains a specific formula for how you personally can bring out the best in your Moon. Doing that is the secret of personal happiness, but it also strengthens your intuitive side. Do enough of that lunar empowerment and you soon find yourself seeing through the illusion of death as the end of everything. What a gift to give yourself! But there’s more: your very presence is a gift to everyone with whom you share time and space.

Want to know more? Please think about joining the rest of us lunatics at our Moon Retreat in San Diego in April. We will be exploring all of this lunar wisdom, and more. Click here for details: www.forrestastrology.center/moon

See you there, I hope – and if that’s not possible, we’ll all be feeling each other through the astral realms. That will be true whether or not our bodies are all there in San Diego. Tune into the Moon and you’ll know it too – you just won’t be able to prove it!

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

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

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

So let’s talk! 

WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST DATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT ABOUT AT WORK?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS AN EMPTY HOUSE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE WAYS TO SAY EVERYTHING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT IF ALL THREE SYMBOLS ARE QUIET?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So these are my thoughts about empty houses: 

• First, there really aren’t any! 

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

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