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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

Here it is:

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

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

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

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

Location, Location, Location

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

Problem solved, right?

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

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

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

How Do They Work?

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

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

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

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

Here’s another example:

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

Here’s her current (possible) solar return:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Learn More about Solar Returns?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise all planets have dispositors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Sun is in Leo, the sign it rules.

• No other planet is in that “dignified” condition.

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

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

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

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

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

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