I was happy to learn that many students and community members in our school have discovered LILA (which is pronounced LEE-la, by the way.) In case you don’t know, it’s a cell phone based astrology app that I’ve been working on for almost eight years now. I’ve written most of the text and the astrological approach is mostly mine while I’ve depended on other people’s skills for the marketing and technical side of the project. The whole idea for LILA originated with two people who have become dear friends: Linnea Miron and Ricky Williams. (For those of you who follow NFL football, yes, it’s THAT Ricky Williams.)

Central to the app is the idea that everyone has “a strongest planet.” I’ve heard that questions are emerging in our FCEA community about how to integrate that concept into the astrological approach that we teach. That’s what I want to try to clarify in this edition of Master’s Musings. 

(In case you have no idea what I am talking about, go to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and enter “Lila Astrology.” Alternatively, check out our website at lilaverse.app. In the app stores, you can download a simple, stripped down version of LILA for free or pay $9.49 a month for the full version.)

THE BACK STORY

For most of my professional life, I’ve been my own boss. With the advent of the LILA project and our school, both happening in 2018, all that changed. Suddenly I was faced with something I’d never had to deal with before: teamwork! (Unsurprisingly, the Moon was progressing through my 11th house.) Mostly, that’s been a great experience for me. All of you know how lucky I am with our wise and wonderful FCEA team. The LILA tribe is extensive and it has been good to me too even though what we are doing is very different. 

Anyone who knows my work will recognize my voice and my approach to astrology throughout much of the writing in LILA – with one exception: the strongest planet. That was 100% Ricky’s idea. I didn’t disapprove of it, but it never would have crossed my mind to include it. As all of you know, I put a lot of emphasis on what I call the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant. Now, in LILA, there’s reference to the primal quad, where we add the strongest planet to the mixture, pretty much as the fourth leg of the table. I know that’s confusing some of our FCEA students.

I have a lot of positive things to say about the strongest planet concept, and it’s definitely deep in LILA’s DNA. Still, at this point, we have no plans to integrate it into the FCEA curriculum. The system we teach works fine as it is, plus adding the strongest planet would involve completely re-doing all of our teaching materials from the ground up. As you know, we’ve never presented the FCEA approach as “everything in astrology.” Instead, the FCEA method is a lean machine that gets you as quickly and efficiently as possible to the heart of the matter with a client. Other approaches to astrology work too, but when we try to integrate them into our FCEA methodology, they only tend to muddy the water, create redundancies, or simply take up time that would be better spent going more deeply into the core material. 

Cutting to the chase, as I mentioned I’ve been learning a lot about teamwork. Some of that is about learning new things from different people. But naturally, a big part of that process lies in learning how to compromise. LILA’s strongest planet function covers both of those bases – it’s a powerful technique that I am still learning about, and it’s also a bit of a compromise on my part.

Let me tell you a little more about how the strongest planet works in LILA.

ASTRODYNES

The Church of Light was incorporated in Los Angeles on November 2, 1932. It was an extension of the Brotherhood of Light, which dates back to 1915. Its purpose was to preserve and promote the spiritually-oriented astrological work of C.C. Zain (a.k.a, Elbert Benjamine, a.k.a, Benjamin Parker Williams.) Zain created a weighted system for determining the relative strengths of the planets in a chart. He called the system astrodynes. Ricky got interested in Zain’s work and began his efforts to incorporate it into LILA – with mixed results, at least initially.

From my perspective, Zain’s astrodynes simply did not work reliably. For example, they gave Jupiter as my own strongest planet. That felt plausible to me – it’s conjunct my Sun, so it’s in a strong position and I do identify myself as a “Jupiter type.” But then there was my partner, Michelle, for whom the Moon emerged as her most powerful astrodyne. That didn’t feel right to either one of us – but for me the real corker was how the astrodyne system gave Venus as Michelle’s weakest planet. That was simply crazy. She’s been a successful professional painter all her professional life, plus she has a Libra Ascendent, which makes Venus the ruler of her chart! 

Like the rest of us, Michelle is a complicated human being, but anyone who knows her, along with knowing anything about astrology, is going to quickly think of Venus when they think of her. 

Ricky agrees. We both knew that there was something to astrodynes, but we also knew that we could do better. He and I have begun tweaking Zain’s original astrodyne algorithms, putting more emphasis on rulerships, which his system mysteriously ignores. Eventually we expect to have a system that works better than the original. I want to be clear that we are not there yet. I’m writing these words in late October 2025. I’ll be meeting with Ricky and Linnea again in a month in order to implement some major changes to C.C. Zain’s astrodynes for LILA purposes. I want to be clear that what’s currently “under the hood” in LILA is Zain’s system, not mine or Ricky’s. It works – but not for everybody all the time. 

At the outset of this little essay, I mentioned that I was learning a new skill: teamwork. In all honesty, I would not have implemented the strongest planet algorithm into the public version of LILA yet. I don’t feel that it’s ready for Prime Time. I think it will be soon. If your current alleged “strongest planet” doesn’t feel right to you, I can almost guarantee that you’re right. Check again in a few weeks, and it will probably have changed – and ring a lot more true for you.

Meanwhile, Ricky and I decided to add a pair of new dimensions to the system, something that apparently C.C. Zain never considered.

ADDING SIGNS AND HOUSES

Let’s go back for a moment to Michelle hearing that the Moon was her strongest planet. By most conventional lunar standards, that statement is a real dud – she’s never had kids, she’s not a moody person, plus I do most of the cooking! But when I add that her Moon is in Aquarius, everything lines up better with who she actually is. I’d still not call her “a Moon person,” but Aquarius at least rings many of the right bells. An Aquarian Moon is of course an entirely different beast than one in Cancer or Taurus. That led us to a critical insight. In LILA – once your strongest planet is determined, it’s helpful to remember what sign and house it’s in. It may still feel off to you, but it will make more sense that way.

Ricky and I have taken that idea one step further for LILA. Just as we can weigh the planets to see which ones are dominant for you, we can do the same with your signs and houses. In adding those two additional pieces to the puzzle, we’ve left the realm of traditional astrodynes behind. You might, for example, find that Saturn is your strongest planet, but what if we then put Saturn in your strongest sign? (That might not be the sign that it actually occupies in your chart.) What if we do the same with your strongest house – we put Saturn there too? What you’ll get is a planet-sign-house combo that works pretty well as a super-quick summary of your chart as a whole.

Adding the strongest sign and house to the mixture is fresh territory. With no preexisting C.C. Zain formulas to muddy the water, Ricky and I set out to determine the relative weights of each sign and house in your chart. That’s all implemented in the current version of LILA and we think it’s working really well.

EXAMPLE

LILA founder Linnea Miron currently has Mercury as her strongest planet, as you can see in this graphic LILA screen:

Notice how Linnea’s Moon is a close second. That’s worth noting too. It gives you a more nuanced sense of things. Her mental focus (Mercury) has a lot of feeling, caring energy (Moon) animating it. And of course, there’s the question of whether Mercury will remain as her strongest planet once we tweak the planetary algorithm.

What about signs? Here are the relative strengths of all twelve signs in Linnea’s chart:

Pisces comes out on top, beating second place Capricorn by a wide margin. Now, putting two and two together, we’re thinking “Mercury in Pisces.” Let’s add the houses. Here‘s Linnea’s LILA screen:

With Linnea’s houses, we see it’s an almost three-way tie among the first, the second, and the tenth, with the first house “winning by a nose.” It’s helpful to take those second and third place symbols into account, but the bottom line is that LILA would summarize Linnea as “a Piscean Mercury in the first house.” 

And who is Linnea in real life? A leader in a spiritually-oriented information industry. 

WHAT ABOUT THE WEAKEST PLANET?

I’ve made no secret about my reservations regarding Lila’s strongest planet algorithm. In my opinion, it’s still a work in progress. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, what really triggered my biggest doubts was my Libra-rising artist-partner Michelle coming out with Venus as her weakest planet. To me, it was painfully obvious that by the simplest of astrological standards Lila was way off target there.

Here’s another example that makes the same point: me! Lila gives Mars as my weakest planet. Yet Mars co-rules my Scorpio Ascendant and is the dispositor of my Aries Moon! From the evolutionary point of view, it’s also the co-ruler of my Scorpio south node. My weakest planet? Give me a break, Lila!

There is a pattern underlying both of these examples: it’s the way Lila’s algorithm ignores the tremendous importance of planetary rulerships. There was a lot that was right in C.C. Zain’s thinking about astrodynes, but rulership was his blind spot.

As Ricky Williams and I meet to rework Lila’s strongest planet system, we’re hoping to correct that glaring problem. Once again, stay tuned – and if any of Lila’s pronouncements about your strongest or weakest planets feel wrong, trust your feelings!

THE BIG PICTURE

In doing astrology, we are constantly battling to stay on top of a massive flood of information. If we set out to describe “everything” in someone’s chart, we would have to stay wide-eyed and yacking for weeks. That obviously won’t work. Strategic simplification is an essential part of our craft. Faced with mountains of astrological complexity, the mind longs for core statements that spotlight a person’s essence. Those kinds of root insights keep us on track. They help us maintain perspective. The most familiar way for astrologers to do that is with Sun signs – “she’s a Gemini.” That’s lightyears away from full power astrology, but that reduction is actually its main advantage, not a liability. Sun signs focus our attention on something pretty close to the heart of the matter and they telegraph it to us in just a few syllables.

LILA’s strongest planet system does almost exactly the same thing – or it will, once we get the planet scales up to the same standards as the ones for signs and houses. Sun signs divide humanity into twelve types. The strongest planet system divides us into ten. They both make a stab at answering the same question: if you could only know one thing about this person, what would it be? 

In the “primal triad” system I first introduced in The Inner Sky, a Virgo with the Moon in Aries and Pisces rising could be called “the helper with the soul of a warrior wearing the mask of the mystic.” Once again, in that single sentence a whole lot of astrological information is conveyed simply and clearly. This time it’s much more granular than any Sun sign – there are 1728 possible combinations of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant.

If we place the strongest planet in the context of a person’s strongest sign and strongest house, we do something very similar – in this case, there are 1440 possible combinations.  By using all three astrological dimensions, we are making a vastly more individualized statement about a person than if we just say “her strongest planet is Uranus.”

When Ricky first proposed adding the strongest planet function to LILA, his argument was that currently most of the astrological “typing” of people was sign-based – you’re such a Scorpio! That language works fine, but why not try a planet-based system? You’re so Plutonian! That works too. 

• And that’s really the heart of the matter. A planet-centered astrological system can complement a sign-based system. Each just highlights a different dimension of a person’s character and destiny. Often they overlap considerably too.

HOW TO WORK WITH THE STRONGEST PLANET

I have a fantasy. I hop in my time machine and set the controls for 1963 when I was just fourteen years old. There was no Internet back then, so I print everything that LILA would say to me about my strongest planet, I leave it somewhere where young Steve will stumble across it, and I quickly head back to hide out in the 21st century. (That’s Jupiter in Capricorn and the 2nd house, by the way.)

When my fourteen-year-old self learns that I have a potential for embodying Jupiter’s “star quality,” I would have snorted in disbelief. I was a shy, misanthropic kid. I knew I was smart, but otherwise I had very little confidence in myself. But then I poke a little deeper into that LILA material and I learn that none of that alleged star quality pops up automatically without effort on my part. With Jupiter in the 2nd house, I was going to have to prove myself to myself in order to earn that kind of confidence and maybe generate a little charisma. With Capricorn in the formula, that process would take hard work. It would depend on self-discipline, on me keeping my eye on the prize. 

Via my strongest planet, LILA would have given me the formula that I needed in order to rise to that “star quality” that seemed so unreachable to me back then. That information would have helped me, and helping people is always the point.

I’ve often said that no one really needs astrology. That’s easily proven – plenty of people live good lives without it, end of story. Astrology assists us though! No one needs weather reports, but they’re helpful too. When I was fourteen, I got my teeth into astrology and I never let go. A couple of decades later, LILA’s prophecy came true: I became something like a “star” in the field. 

Even without LILA to guide me, I did what LILA would have suggested and it turned out as LILA would have predicted.

The deeper point is that at several forks in the road I nearly derailed my life in various ways, almost taking paths that were not really mine. I got lucky or angels saved me or something like that. Again, we can all live just fine without astrology – but we live better with it! I would have been more sure-footed in finding the path to my destiny if I had known about my strongest planet and let it guide me.

That’s true for us all. That’s why I am happy to see the strongest planet system built into LILA even though here in late 2025 it is still a work in progress. Like everything else in our field, it can help you become your best self. It can fill you in about the gift that you can offer your community and your loved ones. It reminds you of who you truly are. 

And that’s why we do what we do.

Ride the waves of your imagination back to Balboa Park in San Diego, California, one hundred years ago. The year is 1925. A woman sits in a parked car. She is engaged in an intense private conversation with a man. They are both in their thirties. He draws a 3” x 5” index card at random from a large stack and places it face down. On the card, and unseen by either one of them, is the notation “Aries 4.” An image forms in her mind. She says, two lovers are strolling through a secluded walk. He jots it down, shuffles the cards, and draws another, this one is for “Libra 13.” The woman says, Children blowing soap bubbles.

So it goes. Over several sessions, astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and psychic Elsie May Wheeler covered the entire zodiac. To each degree an evocative image was assigned. Thus began the long, complicated birth of what came eventually to be known as the Sabian Symbols. 

Elsie Wheeler passed away in 1938 at age fifty-one. She had spent her entire life in a wheelchair, suffering from crippling arthritis. As psychics and mediums go, astrologically she looks like the real deal. Here’s her A-rated chart. Note her Moon in the last degree of mystical Pisces along with Neptune conjunct her Ascendant. If anyone was in touch with the Spirit world, it was her.

I found a photo of her by searching online. It’s rights-protected so I can’t share it here without risking getting us into legal trouble. If you’re interested, you can Google it yourself. I don’t know how you will feel, but for me it was love at first sight. Her eyes go back forever. 

For all the usual sad reasons, when people speak of the Sabian Symbols, the name that is generally associated with them is that of astrologer Marc Edmund Jones. Meanwhile, poor Elsie May Wheeler is often forgotten. I want to celebrate her here, especially now that we have reached the one hundredth anniversary of the time she brought these images from the next world into this one. The Sabian Symbols would not exist without her.

None of this is meant to discredit Marc Edmund Jones. The symbols would not exist without him either. He was also one of the most productive and creative of the mid-20th century astrologers, probably best known for his work with aspect patterns – buckets, bowls, see-saws, and so on. 

Jones continued to work with the Sabian Symbols for years after Elsie Wheeler’s passing, changing a few of them, writing little paragraphs of explanation for each of them. He initially published them for his students in mimeographed form. Eventually, astrologer Dane Rudhyar became interested in them too. He published a modified version in his monumental 1936 work, The Astrology of Personality, thus ensuring their place in astrological history. Jones himself published The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953. Twenty years later, Rudhyar devoted an entire book to them. It was called An Astrological Mandala. 

In 2004, Martin Goldsmith published a massive research project about the symbols and actually rejected some of Wheeler’s imagery, replacing it with fresh images that seemed to resonate better with the actual lives of people born with planets in those degrees. His book is titled, The Zodiac By Degrees. I suspect that purists frown on it because of his deletion of some of Wheeler’s images, but I found Goldsmith’s work impressive. For example, the original symbol for my own natal Sun’s position in 16 Capricorn is school grounds filled with boys and girls in gymnasium suits. I’m not an athlete. When I was growing up, gym was mostly about boredom and humiliation. It’s a stretch to make Wheeler’s original image for my Sun’s degree speak to me in a way that I can relate to. Meanwhile, here is Goldsmith’s new wording for that same mid-Capricorn degree: Turbaned guru explains a path to higher awareness, while his assistant walks among the meditating disciples and prods them into the correct posture. 

When I first read those words, I had to laugh out loud. I’m no guru, but obviously Goldsmith’s imagery relates much more obviously to the actual realities of my life than anything about a gymnasium. Reading it put a smile of recognition on my face – and as students and community members in the FCEA, I bet it put smiles on your faces too. I can’t help but think of our team of devoted tutors “prodding you into the correct posture.”   

Again, Martin Goldsmith derived these new images from meticulous biographical studies of the actual lives of people born with planets in these degrees. He only replaced Elsie Wheeler’s originals where it seemed appropriate and necessary.

• By the way, if you are drawn to work with the Sabian Symbols, here is a point that needs to be 100% clear. In working with them, the first degree of Aries starts at 0 Aries and ends at 1 degree of Aries. If, in other words, your natal Mars is in 0 Aries 38’, you read Aries 1, if it’s in 1 Aries 08’, you read Aries 2, and so on. 

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE SABIAN SYMBOLS

So here we are, having arrived at the Centennial of the birth of the Sabian Symbols. It seems appropriate to mark it. Unfortunately no exact date was recorded for when Jones and Wheeler sat together in that park in San Diego. All we know is that it happened over several days in 1925. 

In any case, a hundred years have passed, and all 360 of the symbols are still alive and kicking in one form or another in the world of contemporary astrology. At this point, they’ve been around far too long for anyone to dismiss them as a fad. Still, they’re not actually used very widely – saying that they have a “cult following” is closer to the truth. The sorts of highly intuitive astrologers who might also be drawn to Tarot cards or dream interpretation do well with them. Meanwhile, more linear thinkers tend to shrug their shoulders. But only a fool would reject them entirely. Like astrology itself, give them a chance and they will prove themselves to you.

Australian astrologer Lynda Hill is probably their most prominent current advocate. Her website is fun and impressive: https://sabiansymbols.com. Hit that link, ask a question, click the nebula, and – boom – a Sabian Symbol appears “at random,” often casting light on the question you asked. Obviously, that kind of divinatory process is more like Tarot cards or the I Ching than astrology – but those systems work too.

I’ve played with the Sabian Symbols myself for years. I find them intriguing and delightful. I mean, who can read rabbits in faultless human attire parade with dignity without smiling? That’s Cancer 8, by the way. In the early years of my astrological practice, I occasionally used them with clients, with mixed results. Once again, my more intuitive, Neptunian clients could relate to them more easily than my more “Earth-toned” ones. I no longer use the Sabian symbols in my practice. But I still find them fascinating.

Maybe you will too.

Stories and metaphors build the bridge that connects you to your client’s heart. Without them, an astrological session can feel abstract and “heady.” Even the most shopworn figures of speech can enliven a session. “You’ll be up the creek without a paddle” might mean exactly the same thing as “you will encounter difficulty.” It just says it in a way that sinks in a little deeper. 

As I am sure you figured out immediately, “up the creek without a paddle” is a familiar cliché. You won’t win the Pulitzer Prize for using it. The point is that it works and it adds a hint of color to what you are saying. But maybe you can be a little more creative. Try this: “you’ll feel like you’ve arrived at the airport without your passport.” Or this: “You’ll step into the spotlight only to realize that you’ve totally blanked out on your lines.”

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry? Still no, but at least those words are a bit more original.

Do you have to be verbally creative – an artist with words – in order to be a successful astrologer? Putting it in such extreme terms probably goes a bridge too far. But creativity really helps!  Presenting a lively astrological picture to a client requires technical skill, truth, and sincerity – but it also benefits from a large dollop of performance art. Boring astrologers tend not to see many repeat clients – and that’s true even if their work is accurate and sound. A professional reading typically takes an hour or two. If you actually want to hold someone’s attention for that long, you can’t just drone on as if you were reading from a computer manual. Your language has to be interesting, engaging, and colorful. That’s simply part of the skill-set that animates our craft.

TEACHING CREATIVITY

Can creativity be taught? Talk about a fraught subject! Obviously, it would be unrealistic to imagine that we could all become as dramatic and eloquent as William Butler Yeats or Maya Angelou. Still, Ms. Angelou has some good advice for us. She once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” 

Practice, practice, practice, in other words. 

And don’t be shy! Remember, from an astrological perspective, creativity is in the domain of the 5th house, the “house of children.” To be successful at it, you’ve got to loosen up. You’ve got to feel like a kid faced with building blocks. As poet Sylvia Plath said, “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” To that, I might add “self-consciousness.” So while you’re experimenting with turning your words into images, metaphors, and stories, remember to have some fun with the process. Be like a child. With creativity, fun is actually part of the method. The more fun you are having, the more you are cooperating with your own unconscious mind. And that’s the mysterious source of all inspiration anyway. The more you dance with it, the better you’ll get at surrendering to it. 

An added bonus is that when an impactful image pops unexpectedly out of your mouth, you’ll remember it. Soon you’ll have a treasure house of imagery in your head ready to be rolled out even if you’re not feeling particularly creative that day.

What I want to attempt now is something I am not even sure is possible. Creativity is so personal that it’s not something I can teach, at least not in the same way as I might teach astrological theory. But given the very precise strictures which underlie all astrological thinking, I believe that I can offer you a structural template for creating your own arsenal of original images. You can think of what follows the same way that you thought of a coloring book when you were kid. I’ll help you create the outlines, then I encourage you to grab your crayons and take it from there.

THE TEMPLATE

In every astrological situation, we naturally have at least a planet, a sign, and a house. Each one serves its own purpose and also flavors the whole. Making the three of them dance together is the heart of our craft. We know that one possibility is that they wind up cooperating with each other and thus fulfill some higher purpose – but they can also stomp on each others’ toes and create an embarrassing, pointless mess. Any honest, effective story we tell our clients has to cover both of those bases.

Here’s the structural template:

Step One: What part of your life – what basic needs and drives – are we talking about?

(Look to the planet)

Step Two: What exactly does that planet want? What does it need?

(Look to the sign)

Step Three: Where is it happening? How should the planet act in order to get its needs met?

(Look to the house)

Step Four: How might you make a mess of it?  

(Look to the dark side of planet and sign)

Step Five: What would that mistake look like? Where would we see it? 

(Look to the dark side of house)

In applying this basic template, everything initially depends on your academic knowledge of the astrological symbols. It’s with those abstract ideas that we create your “coloring book,” making sure that all the outlines are in the right places. After that, you get out your crayons and let the fun begin.

ROLL THE DICE

Out come my trusty, if somewhat battle-scarred, astro dice. I roll them and I see Venus in Pisces in the 4th house. Let’s plug that configuration into our template. 

As you know, all the symbols in astrology are multidimensional. To keep us safe from being overwhelmed intellectually (and thus slaughtering our creativity), we can focus on one set of basics, then later move on to another set of basics if we feel like it. With Venus, let’s start with relationships – those are something that pretty much everyone is interested in. (With an artist, you might follow the same template, but with a focus on artistic inspiration. That’s Venus too. At a deeper level, we might explore the optimal pathways to peace and relief from stress. There are many Venusian possibilities, in other words. Pick one, and off we go. In this case, let’s choose love.) 

Step One: So what basic needs and drives does Venus represent? It’s about who to love and how to love. How to recognize a natural partner. How to make relationships work.

Step Two: With Venus in Pisces, for any of that to truly blossom, there is a driving need for a strong sense of a spiritual connection. With such a person, we may talk, but we don’t always need words in order to communicate. When we look into each other’s eyes, there is a feeling of unguarded openness. I sense that my soul is seeing your soul and vice versa. I also know that we both know that.

Step Three: In the 4th house, we are looking for a kind of “family feeling.” Houses are always about behaviors, and in this case it’s the behavior of relationships that last – ones that are characterized by mutual commitment to “the long, shared story.” The 4th house also implies sharing our “psychological selves” – our dreams and our feelings. Think of people trusting each other with their vulnerabilities, then ask yourself: what does that look like behaviorally?

Step Four: Here we enter the darker side of the equation. Venus often makes messes by focusing so much on maintaining a relationship with the other person that it forgets about its relationship with itself. Pisces makes messes by losing track of reality and slipping into fantasy-land or into patterns of escapism.

Step Five: Assuming we slip into the errors in Step Four, the dark 4th house result would be self-protective emotional withdrawal, a soul “going underground,” at least for a while. Maybe we go back into therapy after a heartbreaking relationship failure – and while that’s far from a dysfunctional response, it’s hardly the happiest one. Remember: what we were shooting for was something more like living happily ever after.

TURNING IT INTO A STORY

Here’s the bull’s eye. Having absorbed those five technical steps, let your human wisdom and experience kick in. Feel the meaning of all those words we just said. Make them human. What might all of this look like in real life? The trick to nailing this alchemy is actually pretty easy, but students often get so caught up in the technical side of astrology that they miss it. You’ve got to feel what the symbols are telling you. Plug them into your experience. It’s like turning them into a person, almost as if you are writing a novel. Turn them into an imaginary friend if you want – that’s a trick I do all the time.  

Over and over again in our 306 Master Class, I’ve seen students tackle a configuration by correctly stating all the theoretical material that they’ve memorized about it. That’s terrific and necessary. They’re off to a good start. But it’s when I press them with a specific question or situation that brings the configuration down to earth that they often light up. I see them cross the line from rote memorization into true creative helpfulness. 

If you know no astrology at all, but a friend pours her heart out to you about some complicated situation in her life, you very probably do a fine job of supporting her. That wisdom is already there inside you. The heart of this whole process lies in building a bridge between that innate wisdom and the astrological symbols. The symbols become a person to you, and you speak to that person – with a bit of supernatural guidance from your hard-won knowledge of astrological theory.

When it comes to creating the story that illuminates all of this, there’s no one single right answer, so don’t worry about finding it. Throughout human history, one out of every 144 people has had Venus in Pisces in the 4th house (twelve signs times twelve houses). Each one of them has lived it in his or her own way. Color within those established lines, but feel free to color creatively – just make sure that you don’t add any major lines that aren’t actually there!

Here’s another hint: you’re really going to need two stories here, not just one. The first is about getting it right and the second one is the cautionary tale about getting it wrong.

• Keep it as simple and direct as possible. 

A classic rookie mistake is feeling as if you have to be Leo Tolstoy writing War and Peace. You don’t! Don’t overdo it. Don’t write a novel. Cut to the chase. You just need to make the point in vivid terms that cut right through to the human heart of your client. Because there are so many configurations in any chart, in a full reading you’ll need a lot of imagery. Being too windy about each individual one would make the session too draining, both for you and for your client.

VOILÀ!

So, putting it all together,  with Venus in Pisces in the 4th house, here’s an example of what you might say:

Their eyes met in the candlelight. There were no words. No words were possible. They’d not known each for very long – or had they already known each other for a thousand years? Months later they were married, but to the two of them, that was the moment in which their souls were married. They had found each other again across the stormy seas of birth and death.

Boom. In those sixty-seven romantic words, we see the high side of Venus in Pisces in the 4th house expressed quickly in telegraphic, evocative language. I timed myself. It only took me twenty-seven seconds to say them out loud. And to the client with that configuration, those words will sink into their heart like a stone and stay there forever. You’ve given that person more of a feeling for Venus in Pisces in the 4th house than he or she would ever get by attending a tedious lecture about attachment theory at an academic astrology conference.

Eyes meeting wordlessly in candlelight – what could be more resonant with a Piscean Venus? We could almost leave it at that. The rest of the mystical, romantic language just amplifies that point. The references to marriage highlight the 4th house dimension of the configuration, so they are important too. The point is that, while in those sixty-seven words there’s not a single astrological term, you can easily see the fingerprints of Venus, Pisces, and the 4th house. You know they are there – but to your astrologically-naive client, these are the words that actually hit the target. Astrological jargon alone can never do that unless we’ve studied it ourselves – then it’s the richest language in the world. But most of our clients haven’t studied it, at least not in depth.

What about the cautionary story? What about translating Steps Four and Five into a warning? That is naturally an important part of our work, but it has to be handled mindfully. Here’s one way to spell c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e: leaving the client with the impression that with this darker story you’ve just made a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a warning! Make sure that point is as clear as a bell before you launch into the tale. After you’ve carefully set the tone that way, here one path such a story might take:

Everything was always so perfect with her lover Rowan that Avery never wanted to ruin things by polluting their pure spiritual connection with any negativity. Why bother with petty, ego-driven expressions of need or discomfort? They’d made a silent soul-contract to keep that kind of poison out of their relationship. They’d vowed to live on the higher ground for the rest of eternity. Three months later, Rowan was in love with someone else. Meanwhile Avery was looking for a very positive, supportive psychotherapist with a truly spiritual orientation – ideally someone with a Pisces Moon who would accentuate the positive side of things. 

Tell that second tale and there’s a good chance that your client will chortle a bit when you get to those last words. Avery apparently hadn’t learned the lesson that the relationship with Rowan offered: even with Venus in Pisces, you’ve got to do the Pluto-work that sustains genuine intimacy.

With these words, what you have done as an astrological counselor however is quite deft – “Avery” is, of course, the doppelganger of your client’s own shadow-side. You’ve said what needs to be said in terms of cautionary counsel, but you’ve skillfully side-stepped any direct assault on your client’s pride, dignity, and related defense mechanisms. He or she is far more likely to get the message when it’s aimed at a safer, less triggering target. That’s why you created “Avery” in the first place.

THE LAST WORD

Our five steps are basic astrological theory. All the creativity in the world won’t make you a competent astrologer if you lack that academic knowledge. In our quest for the right story, we always start there. By breaking our understanding down into this simple template and using it as your foundation, you can get your story launched on the correct foot. 

As you find your own way in our craft, a good practice is to use this template in order to formally lay out any configuration that you are analyzing. Do it step by step. Jot down notes if that helps, just as I did above under the “Roll the Dice” heading. Do all that and you’ll have a solid foundation under you as you move toward actually creating a story.

• Digest Steps One, Two, and Three and turn them into a simple, human situation that shines a light on the evolutionary intention of that planet, sign, and house combination.

• Digest Steps Four and Five to help you create the balancing, “tale of the dark side.”

Above all, remember Maya Angelou’s wise words: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Practice, practice, practice! And take heart from Sylvia Plath: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath’s words bring us right back to the 5th house: in the end, we’ve all got to trust our inner children. Give them the coloring book, but let them choose the crayons. Then stand back. 

Astrology is profoundly serious work and astrology is fun too. There’s no opposition or paradox there. The two ideas are interdependent, and every successful counseling astrologer embodies both of them.  

The June 2025 edition of this newsletter was titled, What Greece Meant To Me. That was probably the most personal essay I’ve ever published in this context. It had to do with a rather traumatic former life of mine a couple thousand years ago. I was apparently a Gnostic Christian then – and just possibly the kind of astrology that I experienced in that long-ago prior lifetime had a lot to do with me becoming an evolutionary astrologer today. 

There’s a problem though – ostensibly, what we call evolutionary astrology only dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. How could I have experienced anything like it almost two thousand years ago? Strange as it may seem, I have come to believe that a Gnostic living in the Roman Empire of the second century C.E. would actually find much that was quite familiar in the work that we contemporary evolutionary astrologers are doing today, at least at the philosophical level.

WHAT EXACTLY IS GNOSTICISM?

Say NOSS-ta-siz-im, by the way – the “G” is just there to confuse everyone.

Cards on the table: I should start by saying that what I intend to write about here puts me on shaky ground in many ways. My one leg to stand on is that I did earn a degree in Religion from the University of North Carolina in 1971, and I studied Gnosticism there under Dr. John Schutz. But I am not an academic scholar and so in writing about this complex, ambiguous subject I am already skating on thin ice. 

An even more basic problem is that the word “Gnosticism” itself is very slippery. It’s a modern label for a diverse set of beliefs that existed around the Mediterranean basin at about the same time that Christianity was arising. Importantly, many Gnostics were astrological in their thinking – but then again many were not. Gnostics were generally “Christian,” but not all of them were. Many, but not all of them, accepted reincarnation. Eventually, as Christianity became more institutionalized, Gnosticism was even declared a heresy – still, there are some clear traces of it in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John.

As exotic as that ancient history might sound, there are actually striking parallels between those faraway times and the world of modern pop spirituality. Think of one of those shops where you can buy crystals, incense, and Tibetan singing bowls. Think of the books on the bookshelf. They are diverse – as diverse in fact as what was being passed around the Mediterranean world almost two thousand years ago. Today in such a shop, you might for example find a volume that advocates thinking only positive thoughts sitting next to Steven Forrest’s The Book of Pluto. A couple of millennia ago, the Roman Empire – and early Christianity – were in very similar states. Then, as now, there was no Holy See to declare what was true and what was heretical. There wasn’t even an official Bible – the Bible as we know it today was only assembled about two hundred years later, near the end of the 4th century, C.E. And of course the traditional Roman gods and goddesses still had their temples and their devotees. What about Sol Invictus – a religion that very nearly filled the space that Christianity came to fill once the dust settled? Zoroastrianism, anyone? They were all there, all active. 

Gnosticism arose in that cultural matrix and itself reflected much of that complexity. For everything we might say about it, there are counter-currents and exceptions. In preparing this essay, I’ve been reading and rereading the historical literature. I’ve learned that, when it comes to Gnosticism, serious academics are all over the map on the subject. There are even frequent arguments about whether a given text is in fact Gnostic or not. 

The point is that it would be wise to take everything that I am about to write as an impressionistic approximation. For clarity’s sake, I’m also going to leave out a lot of really interesting material – for one example, the way Gnostics were generally much more egalitarian on gender issues compared to many of the early “church fathers.”

Before I dive in, let’s also remember that astrology was everywhere two thousand years ago. What we now know as Hellenistic astrology had exploded. Personal horoscopes were being drawn. And nobody had Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto in their chart – Saturn marked the limits of the known solar system. That’s a fact that will soon become pivotal in our understanding. 

THE GNOSTIC WORLD VIEW

Long ago, human souls fell from a realm of Light – called the Pleroma – into the realm of darkness and matter. Here in this fallen world there is only suffering, pain, and disappointment. The divine spark of our souls is imprisoned in materiality and blinded by it. We mistake ourselves for flesh and bone. Our only hope lies in remembering our true natures and finding our way back to the long-lost realm of Light. At the heart of that remembering was something called gnosis. Often translated as “knowledge,” it represents far more than book learning. Gnosis was something closer to a direct experience of our transcendent natures. You could call it enlightenment. 

So far, we are in familiar mystical territory. 

In Gnostic cosmology, there is an ultimate divinity called the Monad. The term translates neatly as “The One” or even as “Oneness.” For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave out the mythology – suffice to say that through a terrible error, another “god” was created. This was the evil Demiurge – often named Yaldabaoth. He created the material world into which human souls fell and were imprisoned. Worse, he tricked us into thinking that he, not the Monad, represented the ultimate reality.

In the astrological versions of Gnosticism, this Demiurge is identified with the planet Saturn. The lost realm of light lies out beyond Saturn, while the material realm of darkness lies within its orbit. 

Here’s the heart of the matter. This Demiurge created an evil masterpiece: he convinced humanity that he – not the Monad – was the ultimate god. But he is emphatically not the Monad – he is an imposter and a fake. Like Saturn’s lower expressions, he is a heavy-handed law giver. He judges. He demands worship. He punishes disobedience. He says “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” And by convincing us that materiality is our true nature, he stands between us and the Light, blinding us to its very existence. 

• One of the many reasons that Gnosticism was declared a heresy is that it often equated the Biblical Yahweh or Jehovah with Yaldabaoth, thus framing the entirety of what we came to know as the Old Testament in a distinctly non-canonical light. In Gnosticism, the “God of our Fathers” essentially became equated with Satan.

As souls tumbled down into the material realm under the whip of the Saturnian Demiurge, they first fatally fell prey to Saturn’s illusion that material reality is the only reality – that there is nothing beyond Saturn, in other words. Think of the first Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In the Gnostic context, those words might give us all chills. That’s Yaldabaoth speaking, not the Monad.

Then as humanity’s fall continued, we absorbed all the bad, soul-blinding qualities of each planet. Jupiter gave us pride and gluttony. Mars gave us rage and violence. Venus gave us lust. Mercury tricked us into thinking we lived in our heads. The Moon made us lazy, timid, and moody. The Sun made each of us believe that we were the center of the universe – it gave us egotism, in other words.

The final result? Here we sit in this degraded condition, hopeless cases – unless gnosis ignites within us and we begin to awaken to our true natures and head back up to the Pleroma, the realm of the true God, the Monad. 

How do we accomplish that ascent? Instead of taking on the negative qualities of each planet, we evolve upwardly through them, struggling to take on their positive qualities. The Sun gives us faith in ourselves, the Moon gives us the ability to care for others. Mercury gives us alertness and the desire to learn. Venus teaches us love. Mars gives us courage – and perhaps a selfless willingness to give our lives for others. Jupiter fills us with healthy pride. And even Saturn – evil Yaldabaoth – finally gives us the spiritual discipline we need to find the Pleroma where it’s been 

hiding all along, deep in our own eternal essence.

PERSPECTIVE

Let me reiterate that Gnosticism was extremely diverse. There can be no coherent summary of Gnosticism that does not grievously over-simplify everything, as I have doubtlessly done here. You could find Gnostics who believed everything that I just wrote and Gnostics who would argue with most of it. In fact, if you had a time machine and went back to the Holy Lands in the second century A.D. and started looking around for a “Gnostic” to interview, you would not have found anyone who answered to that label. As we have seen, the word itself didn’t even exist back then – it’s purely the invention of 19th and 20th century historians of religion. 

In writing this essay, I’ve drawn on several sources, including the Nag Hammadi scrolls which were discovered in Egypt in 1945 and which vastly multiplied the number of Gnostic texts to which scholars had access. In case you want to pursue any of this more deeply, I’ll list the three best books I found at the end. I also owe a great debt to Robert Hand who delivered a terrific talk at a NORWAC banquet some years ago in which he covered similar territory. He ended that talk with a memorable meditation, taking us all upward through the planetary spheres. 

THE ROOTS OF EVOLUTIONARY ASTROLOGY?

The essential philosophical parallels between Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology are very clear. 

• Both systems are unabashedly metaphysical and they are both based on an astrological model of the evolution of consciousness. 

• In both systems, the astrological symbols have both dark sides and higher meanings. How we embody them is up to us. With “gnosis,” we can get them right. Without it, we are eaten up by the traps they set for us.

• As we trace the pattern of increasingly positive responses to each planet, we see the outline of a systematic evolutionary path leading step-by-step toward something in the category of Heaven, Enlightenment, or Salvation. 

• Again as in both Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology, one lifetime is not long enough for anyone to make the journey to full gnosis. The idea of reincarnation solves that. 

Who knows how Gnostic astrologers were working two thousand years ago? Was personal astrology part of their practice? If so, in helping people reach toward the Pleroma, did they have specific advice for someone whose Mercury was in Cancer and the third house? To my knowledge, there are no surviving records of any of that. Perhaps they were lost. Perhaps they never existed. I’ve not studied Hellenistic astrology myself, at least not in a deep way. Maybe someone immersed in that field such as Chris Brennan or Demetra George would be aware of connections of which I am unaware. 

Concerning all of that, one striking thought has been pressing at me ever since many of us in the school made our pilgrimage to Greece in May 2025. Fifteen years ago, in preparing the concluding chapter of my book Yesterday’s Sky, I wrote these words:

I cannot prove what I am about to say, but my intuitive feeling in developing the principles that underlie this book was more one of remembering something than of creating it. I believe that the knowledge of most of these principles existed in the past. To be sure, there is no recorded precedent in astrological history for these particular techniques. From any academic astrological perspective, they are new. For whatever their worth, they were clearly created by a group of astrologers, mostly in America, over the past generation or two. But my guts tell me to question that.

Now, in reflecting on Gnosticism, I am finally feeling some concrete, academic support for what was only an instinctive feeling fifteen or twenty years ago. Is evolutionary astrology in fact that old? Or perhaps even older? Were the first evolutionary astrologers actually Gnostics? Maybe it depends ultimately on how we define both terms. In any case, humans have been using the map the planets provide us to help souls find their way home for a long, long time. Gnostics did it. We do it. And who knows where the Gnostics got the idea? Egypt? China? Atlantis? 

All of us who practice evolutionary astrology can be proud to be part of that ancient lineage. We’re links in a long, sacred chain – a chain that is only growing stronger during our time in the world. 

Are we the new Gnostics? You decide.

________________________________

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. Second, enlarged edition, 1963.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels, 1989.

Rosicrucian Digest. Gnosticism, Volume 11, #2, 2011