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

Have a look at this chart for the afternoon of July 21st. Uranus is just over the line into Gemini, while the Sun is in the last degree of Cancer. Only a little over one degree separates them from being in a perfect 60-degree sextile aspect. But they are in the “wrong” signs – Gemini and Cancer are adjacent in the Zodiac, not separated by one sign like a “true” sextile. Strictly in terms of sign-energy, that’s not a “harmonious” sextile – it’s a clashy semi-sextile. 

Try thinking musically: are we looking at the harmonious sound of middle C with an E played above it or the cacophonous sound of a C and a D played together?

I believe that the answer is a little of both and confronting that confusing insight brings us face to face with a fundamental paradox built into aspect theory – one that we can state as a simple question: are aspects between planets as we usually think or are they actually between signs?

As an astrologer steeped in modern tradition, when I was younger that question never crossed my mind. I knew that aspects were “obviously” between planets. We might quibble about orbs, but the basic idea was clear – a sextile was simply a 60-degree angle between any two astrological points. I have to thank my friends in the world of Hellenistic astrology for offering an alternative perspective: that aspects are actually about the relationships among the signs themselves. Planets are only along for the ride. 

That second sign-based perspective makes practical astrological sense too. In fact most of us think that way all the time when we’re reflecting on the astrology of relationships. In the modern pop astrological framework, “everybody knows that a Cancer shouldn’t marry an Aries.” (That’s not actually an idea I would endorse, but we certainly hear it a lot.) Note how no one who makes that kind of pronouncement is fussing about degrees. They would all agree that someone born on June 23rd was a Cancer and that someone born on April 18th was an Aries and that any relationship between them would be a catastrophe. 

But think about it: an early Cancer and a late Aries like that might actually have a close sextile aspect between their natal Suns. So is that good news or bad? 

In my own practice of synastry, I actually do tend to use these whole sign aspects – any Cancer planets in Hollister’s chart are effectively square to any Aries planets in Palmer’s chart. Regardless of which planets we are talking about, one is charged with Aries energy and the other is charged with Cancer energy and that basic tension between aggression and sensitivity will make itself felt in their relationship regardless of the planets’ degree positions. 

In synastry, I pay particular attention to that “whole sign” approach with interaspects between the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant, along with Venus and Mars. Meanwhile, with the rest of the planets, I tend toward a more modern, purely geometrical, reading of aspects – which naturally sometimes embraces planets being in the “wrong sign” for the aspect, as we just saw in our opening example of that Sun/Uranus sextile. 

The angle is right, but the signs are wrong.

Still speaking of my own practice, with transits and progressions I use the modern geometrical definitions of aspects – degrees of separation, not sign positions. Ditto for my work with birthcharts – although even in birthchart work, I often make an exception. If a Scorpio with a Leo Moon comes to me for a reading, I’ll almost always talk about the integrative challenges presented by that “Sun/Moon square” regardless of their degree positions. Forget about degrees – Scorpio is Scorpio and Leo is Leo and there will always be some core archetypal tensions between those two signs.

Note how I keep saying “in my practice.” All of this is just what has worked for me effectively in the counseling room. It’s what I have learned in my daily life as an astrologer as I tried to sort out this basic sign-vs-planet ambiguity that’s inherent in aspect theory. At a theoretical level, I am all over the map with this question, in other words. I claim no consistency at all – only the lessons of experience. 

• Are aspects geometrical angles between planets as the modern astrologers say or are they archetypal relationships among signs as our Mediterranean astrological ancestors thought?

The more I wrestle with that question, the more I believe that the best answer is “yes.” Both perspectives are true. And that means that the living reality of aspects is actually a very slippery subject.

Still, some dimensions of the mystery are pretty clear from our actual experience. Let me give you an example. You solar Aquarians out there – are you feeling Pluto’s energies in your lives now? Easy question, right? I’m guessing that the answer in most cases will be yes, even if your Sun falls near the end of Aquarius. Pluto in Aquarius is currently impacting all Aquarians – that’s a demonstration of whole sign aspects in action. Meanwhile, I suspect that if your Sun lies in the first few degrees of Aquarius, right now you’re really in “Pluto City.”  It’s a lot more vivid and intense for you than it is for those late-Aquarians.

That’s just one example, but it contains a key practical principle.

• Whole sign aspects work in practical, observable ways, but when an aspect moves within modern orbs, its action is vastly more dramatic and obvious.  

That’s all pretty intuitive. We can take it a practical step further by remembering two of our cardinal principles of interpretation: (a) first things first, and (b) you’ll never have enough time to “talk about everything.” Strategic editing of our presentations is fundamental to achieving clarity with our clients. And that means that in practice you’ll often leave out the effects of whole sign aspects even though they are real simply because they don’t pass the “first things first” test. At any given moment other configurations are probably more pressing. 

In my experience, all that is true both in a transits and progressions context and also with natal chart analysis. 

HYBRID VIGOR

We are still left with the knotty question I raised right at the beginning of this essay: what do we do with aspects that are in the wrong signs? I was taught to call them “Out of Quality” aspects, but I suspect that just saying “in the wrong sign” is more common nowadays. Certainly if you put it that way, any astrologer would understand what you meant.

The truth of it is that such aspects are truly hybrid. In our initial example, there is a strong sextile between the Sun and Uranus, suggesting mutual excitation and encouragement. At the same time, we cannot ignore the underlying archetypal tension between Cancer and Gemini. All of those levels of interaction must be taken into account as we unravel the full significance of this aspect. 

This is a good time to remember an overarching principle of evolutionary astrology: all aspects are about integration. With this Sun/Uranus situation, we just have a bit more integrating to do.

Let’s break it down. There’s a powerful push toward individuation implicit in the Uranian energies. Via the sextile, Uranus is stimulating the solar ego to act boldly and unilaterally on its own behalf. The risk of heedlessness and insensitivity is worth mentioning, but basically this aspect is a big green light for decisive, self-oriented action. 

All of that is based on the strict “it’s a sextile” interpretation, and that is definitely part of the truth – but let’s not forget that the clashing undercurrent of the semi-sextile between Gemini and Cancer is operating too. Remember though – in evolutionary astrology, we never say the words “bad aspect.” That dissonance can be helpful even if it’s unpleasant. Think of it like this: maybe you’ve got a friend who loves you enough to tell you things that you don’t always want to hear – there’s an example of a so-called “bad aspect” in action. They can be good for you in a “corrective” sort of way.

So, the case of our Sun/Uranus sextile on July 21, what does this “wrong sign” perspective add to our understanding?

The Sun is in Cancer, so it’s sensitive. It knows it could get hurt. It is therefore inclined toward caution. Meanwhile, Uranus in Gemini is all, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

There’s the tension. That’s how the semi-sextile dimensions of this aspect play out. They add notes of uncertainty and ambivalence to the energetic matrix. At their best, the Sun and Uranus both benefit from it. Cancer’s caution might help the person evade some nasty surprises. Uranus being in alert, open-minded Gemini might open up channels to some new “outside the box” information that could make a helpful, fresh contribution to whatever situation is arising. 

All in all, what’s trying to happen here is indeed centered on the bold pulse of individuation and self-claiming that the modern “by-the-orbs” sextile promises – but in this case it is tempered and made wiser by some uncomfortable yet timely doubts and questions. 

You can, in other words, feel both the effects of the geometrical aspect and the whole sign one.

And that’s how aspects “in the wrong signs” actually work.

Just a quick word before I begin. The essay that follows is a lot more personal than what I usually write. No lie – some of it is me doing therapy on myself! But I hope it’s more than that. What I’m hoping to demonstrate here is something like “living evolutionary astrology” – an approach not just to our craft, but to life . . . one where we let the symbols interact with the rest of the clues that experience gives us, letting them help us in our struggle to actively penetrate more deeply into the reality of the psyche – yours and mine!

My column for September 2024 was titled “Greece, The Moon and Me.” In essence, it was about how I was feeling spooked about our then-upcoming Greek adventure. No need to repeat all those astrological details here. Suffice to say that fifty years earlier, with Pluto opposing my Moon, the door to Greece slammed in my face. Now, with Pluto sextiling my Moon, it was opening again. Mix a trip to a foreign land with unresolved Pluto issues and you can see why I felt nervous. Let me add that I have a Pluto/Descendant astrocartographic line running through Greece and you get the picture: as Michelle and I boarded the flights to Athens, something karmic was definitely afoot for me. Skeletons in my psychic closet were beginning to stir.

With my natal 12th house Scorpio south node dead-square my Mars, any evolutionary astrologer could see that some of that ripening karma would make a good horror movie. Toss in the fact that transiting Pluto is currently conjuncting that Mars while squaring the node, and my chart was locked and loaded for something pretty intense to happen. Should I get on that airplane at all?

I try never to let astrology scare me, but maintaining that good attitude took some work this time.

Right on schedule, a month before we left for Greece, I basically went blind in my right eye. I had a sudden retinal detachment. I’m fortunate to be living in the age of lasers when such a thing can be fixed, but it’s still a long, difficult process. As I write these words, I’m still unable to see properly and I’m facing a second and third eye surgery. Karma? Since my early thirties, I’ve been aware that I was intentionally blinded in a prior life. My first inkling of it happened when a very gentle eye doctor tried to fit me with contact lenses. That was the only time in my life when I’ve experienced a literal cold sweat. My reflexes simply would not allow it. 

(Mars squaring a south node often suggests unresolved past life issues around being hurt by some kind of violence. Further focusing that idea, our five senses are symbolized by both Mercury and the 3rd house. That’s me – in my chart, Mars is separated from Mercury by about one degree and they’re both in the 3rd house. Both planets also make a square to the south node nearly exactly. A very literal interpretation: violence involving the eyes and ears!) 

Why would anyone want to blind me? Well, Mercury and the 3rd house are not only about the five senses – they’re about speech too. That Mars is in rebellious Aquarius, and since Mars rules my south node, it represents me in the prior life. Putting all these pieces together, it’s pretty clear that my big mouth once got me into trouble with some nasty characters. 

So with transiting Pluto triggering all of that, I arrived in Athens as a one-eyed man. Mister Cyclops.The lack of normal binocular vision made everything blurry. Having no depth perception meant walking on uneven ground was difficult. Going up and down stairs was treacherous. Because of my hearing loss, I do a lot of lip-reading – but bad vision made that harder. And if you’re from the USA, just try lip-reading someone “speaking Australian!” Because their words sound different, their lips are moving differently as they form them. During our whole Greek adventure, I probably understood about half of what was said to me. As you can imagine, that’s a trigger for constant low-level stress. Because of the surgery and my eye problems, I also felt old and weak – and paradoxically both isolated by not being able to hear and yet dependent on others because of not being able to see. 

All of that makes simple psychological sense in the present tense – but with Pluto and the nodes in the mixture, something far deeper was happening. This was not the first time that I’d had those feelings. They were surfacing again. It was time to revisit them, and perhaps to make a more conscious response to them. 

• Remember: it’s the south node of the Moon that we are talking about. What reincarnates most directly is what the prior life felt like. 

TWO QUICK IMAGES

At Mycenae, I made my way up a hill fairly easily, but coming back down the other side was rough because it turned out to be a lot steeper. To avoid stumbling, I was taking baby steps. One of our class members – Gabriele Ranfagni, from Italy – kindly saw my plight and let me steady myself with a hand on his shoulder as we descended. Talk about deja vu! I experienced a distinct emotional memory of being a blind man being led by a friend. I don’t believe this was the first time that Gabriele ever helped me walk either. Later I learned that he has the south node in Taurus and conjunct his Moon, all opposite my own south node by sign. In the formal language of evolutionary astrology, the face he presented to me in a prior life was a solid, steadying, nurturing one. Once again the present echoed the past. I was asking the universe to set everything up again, including the same cast of characters. I needed another look at it.

• In times when the nodes are stimulated, we meet people we knew in prior lifetimes. Had Gabriele actually been there for me when I was newly blind many centuries ago?

My second image is more embarrassing. As I walked around in Athens with our students, it was hard for me to keep up their pace. I was struggling to not trip over the uneven sidewalks. A good friend tried to take my arm to steady me, but I actually didn’t want that help since it threw my balance off even more. I was afraid that despite her good intentions she would unwittingly make me fall and that I would bring her down with me. When I asked her not to do that, she playfully teased me about how “Capricorns can’t accept help” – which of course contains a kernel of truth. But I was preoccupied with trying not to trip. Uncharacteristically, I snapped at her, and she didn’t deserve that.

• In times when the nodes are stimulated, we experience distorted or exaggerated emotional reactions. Feelings from the past loom up out of the psychic depths. If you’re mindful enough to notice, those exaggerations are a certain sign that you are re-experiencing an old hurt – and that you can possibly now respond to it more consciously.

TWO THINGS I REALLY DON’T WANT TO WRITE ABOUT

When Pluto knocks on your door, unconscious material is trying to become conscious – that’s our axiom. But why was it made unconscious in the first place? Naturally the answer is because the perception was unacceptable to the conscious mind – too threatening to our egos or our self-image for us to integrate it. There’s a sure sign that you are on the right track with surfacing karma: you notice that you’d rather do anything – go to the dentist or clean the house – than think about it. While I was in Greece, synchronicity dished up two examples of exactly this sort of resistance in me. In my original draft of this essay, I didn’t include them – the Dark Side of the Force almost won. As you read these two tales, you may wonder why it was hard for me to write about them – they’re actually pretty simple and not really so embarrassing. Again, the answer is not in the stories themselves – it’s in the way they resonate with something unresolved from long, long ago.

Here’s the first story. In Athens, Michelle and I were ripped off by a taxi driver. I’ll spare you the details, which are as tawdry as most crimes. The essence of it is that I trusted him and he used that trust to trick me. How many taxi cab rides have I taken in this lifetime? I’ve never had any trouble, so my mindset was one of trust and normalcy. As soon I realized what had happened, my mind immediately leapt ahead – I could see that if I challenged him, it would quickly escalate into a police situation and that the police would side with him. Somehow I just knew that – or felt that I did. He drove away and I was out a pile of Euros.

Why did this petty little crime happen? Remember: my astrocartographic Pluto/Descendant line runs through Greece. The Descendant – or cusp of the 7th house – is always about trust, so there’s the connection. In terms of the karma that was ripening for me in Greece, one piece of it is about me trusting the wrong people in a prior lifetime. It’s about betrayal. What about my certainty that the police would turn against me? Does that reflect a prior life situation in which “the authorities” were corrupt and arrayed in opposition to me? I think so. 

Clues, clues, clues . . . because of synchronicity, they are everywhere. And during Plutonian times, your own mind doesn’t want to register any of them.

The second story is a weird one. A woman whom I don’t know emailed me about an astrological theory she had developed. She wanted to send me some of her writing. Because of my public visibility, that kind of request happens quite a lot. I’m generally happy to help. Oddly, she insisted that she wanted me to be the one to write about her ideas. That’s something I had never heard before. In any case, the next thing I knew she sent me a second, rather “superior,” email denouncing me for being “mired in this world.” It felt like she was trying to position herself as my salvation. 

A self-appointed guru whom I had never met arrives unbidden with a plan for my future, claiming detailed knowledge of “my case?” What was she thinking? Me, “mired in this world?” My first instinct was to respond to her by pleading guilty as charged – and then asking, “and you’re not?” 

But I didn’t. I didn’t respond at all. And at this point I’ve not heard back from her or received the pages she was planning to send me. 

Weirdly, the word she used for the God she was quoting on my behalf was “the Monad” – a term rarely heard outside of the Gnostic traditions. Stay tuned. You’ll hear about Gnosticism again very soon. Clues, clues, clues . . .

So what was that situation all about? I’d mark the whole interaction as strange but forgettable, except that it had Pluto’s eternal fingerprints on it. What I mean is that I clung to it, worried about it, planned responses in my head . . . it carried that tell-tale extra psychic charge, in other words. That’s Pluto’s signature. That little episode is another piece of my karmic puzzle, another echo from two thousand years ago. I suspect there were “spiritual” people back then who were standing in judgment of me, “worried about my soul” – the difference was that back then their judgement had far sharper teeth. This strange woman may have actually been one of them. Again, during times of nodal stimulus, we meet the very souls with whom we have unresolved karma.

PLUTO AS NODAL RULER

So far, when I’ve spoken about the ruler of my south node, I’ve been referring to Mars. As always, I feel it’s important to honor the classical rulerships. But what about my natal Pluto, Scorpio’s modern ruler? It too would have to be part of my karmic story. Pluto not only rules my south node, but it is also in a mysterious quintile aspect to it, while forming a tight quincunx to my Sun.

In our formal analytic methodology, as one of the planetary rulers of my south node, Pluto represents me in a prior life. It’s in the 9th house. Religion? Travel? It’s in Leo – was I in some position of power, “performing” somehow? Putting two and two together, was I preaching far from home? (Note the present-day corroboration: I was doing exactly that in Greece!) Add my node-ruling Mars and how my mouth got me into trouble – was what I was preaching viewed as “Aquarian” blasphemy by people who were bloody-minded enough to punish me for it? Did my intense, not-so-diplomatic, Plutonian nature press their buttons? 

Figuring out who we were in past lives is fraught business for many obvious reasons. Our ace in the hole is that we have a variety of methods for accomplishing it. Evolutionary astrology is only one of them. Intuition and dream work naturally play a big role. So can hypnotic regressions. And then there are psychics – and the good ones can be uncanny in their accuracy. Two such gifted souls have had a real impact on me in ways that are relevant to the story I am telling here.

One was my root spiritual teacher, Marian Starnes. In my early twenties, she foresaw that I would face hearing loss. She said it was because I couldn’t bear to hear the screams of people who were being tortured. (There’s a long story there.) It was many years before I realized she had gently nudged me toward a memory of having once been tortured myself and not being able to stand my own screams. I am pretty sure that being blinded was part of that experience – and that this particular bit of unpleasant karma that was now surfacing in the form of my retinal detachment.

A second psychic carries us deeper into the story. She is a woman whom I’ve never actually met in person. Her name is Mary Roach and she works in informal association with the Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach. My partner Michelle is an old friend of hers. When Michelle and I were falling in love, she had a reading with Mary in which she asked about me. Mary was very specific. Among other things, she said that I had been a Gnostic Christian sometime during the first couple of centuries A.D. In other words, almost two thousand years ago, I had been a traveling spiritual teacher banging my head against the wall of Roman pagan culture, talking about the teachings of Jesus. 

If you know the Bible at all, you’ve probably bumped into Saint Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians. Perhaps these beautiful words are familiar to you: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a clanging cymbal.” While in Greece, we actually stopped for coffee in Corinth – it’s the same place Saint Paul visited. The point is that as Christianity spread outward from the environs of Jerusalem into the larger Roman Empire, it first seeped into the lands we now know as Greece, Turkey, and Italy – where it was not always welcomed. As Mary Roach divined, I was part of that perilous evangelical process.

Mary specifically mentioned Gnosticism, echoing that weird woman’s use of the term “Monad.” (Say: NOSS-ta-siz-im) That was a real goose-bumper for me. I studied Gnosticism fairly deeply as I was earning my degree in Religion at the University of North Carolina. It resonated with me because it is in part an astrological religion. Early Christianity was extremely diverse. Gnosticism eventually was declared heretical and basically disappeared – only to be reincarnated, more or less, in the form of evolutionary astrology. That’s a big oversimplification, but it contains a germ of real truth. Suffice to say that one thing I took home from our trip to Greece was the realization that I need to revisit Gnosticism and write about it. Look for an article  down the road. 

As we contemplate these various clues, you can feel the exact nature of my former-life “heresy” coming into focus. Many of these pieces of the puzzle were in my mind before we landed in Athens, but they hadn’t yet jelled into such a clear understanding.

Let me give you one more piece of the puzzle.

ME AND GREEK MYTHOLOGY

With the group on this trip, we visited a spectacular site called Epidaurus, famous for its huge amphitheater. While there, Lisa Jones beckoned several of us down an overgrown path at the very edge of the historical area, one that seemed to be leading nowhere. There we came to the Propylaia – a sacred structure built around 300 B.C., it was once the entrance to the precinct dedicated to Asklepios, the god of healing. Not much is left there today except a stone floor and an incredible vibe. A group of about fifteen of us sat down on the stones and meditated quietly. 

As I sat there letting the energy of the Propylaia wash through me, a lightning bolt of insight entered my mind. The majority of psychologically-oriented astrologers, at least of the deeper sort, love Greek mythology and use it all the time to cast light on the symbolism of signs and planets.

Not me! I’ve never paid much attention to it at all. 

I’m not totally ignorant of those myths nor am I opposed to using them, but I have never had the slightest desire to employ the Greek myths in my astrological practice or my teaching. In the FCEA curriculum, you’ll see only a few hints of it, mostly in connection with the asteroids and Eris. Suddenly as I sat there meditating on those ancient stones, I understood why. As an early Christian missionary, what was I preaching against? Obviously the answer is the old pagan cosmology – Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang. Apparently, I still harbor a certain resistance to them now, two thousand years down the road.

At that time two millennia ago, those gods and goddesses were dead. Roman citizens were required by law to make sacrifices at their various temples. It wasn’t voluntary or joyful. People just didn’t feel it anymore. That old religion, which had once been vibrant, had become as empty an experience as what happens in many churches today. Back then, if you wanted to experience real ju-ju, if you wanted to catch fire with the holy spirit, what you needed was the new magic: Jesus Christ. As ever in history, these collective visitations of holy energy come and go – and nothing makes them dry up faster than rigid theology, a deadening, bored priesthood, and bureaucratic institutions. That’s true whether we are talking about the ancient Greek pantheon or what’s happened over the past fifteen centuries to the reality of Jesus and the original fire of the Christian path.

SO WHAT DID I LEARN IN GREECE?

I’m still processing all this – and thanks, by the way, for indulging me. I’m obviously talking a lot about myself in this edition of Master’s Musings. Writing about it is a healing process for me. As always, I hope that in telling my own story, the basic principles of evolutionary astrology shine through in a humanized way. I’m also always happy to try to illustrate how evolutionary astrology can play an active role in helping us examine our own lives. It can take us so much further than, “uh oh, here comes Pluto.” I am also sure that I still have more to uncover – Pluto will be hanging around with me for quite a while yet – but right now, I’m focusing on four practical lessons.

• None of us can make it on our own. Humans need each other. Long ago, such interdependency was forced on me in a cruel way. I resist it today because I associate it with bitterness, cruelty, and betrayal. I need to work on that! 

• Despite my age I generally do not feel old, but old is what I felt in Greece. I need to better prepare myself for that reality.

• I’ve got a ton of issues around my eyes. I don’t like anyone or anything near them. Thanks to astrological understanding, I am consciously focussing on the good will, competence, and caring of my eye surgeon, trying to let her help me replace fear with the trust she deserves. Thank you, Dr. Camille Harrison – who incidentally, it turns out, was a Classics major (!). Like most doctors today, she always needs to keep one eye on the clock, but we had a five minute discussion about Saint Augustine. Karma! 

• I really need to revisit Gnosticism. I’ve always said that I felt that I was “remembering” evolutionary astrology – that I felt that the basic system was ancient even though I had no proof of that. I think the proof has been sitting there right in front of me for fifty years, but I was unable to see it because it was locked up behind this unresolved – and unconscious – prior life wound.

So thank you, Greece and thank you, Pluto! Thank you Lisa Jones and Catie Cadge for making this journey a reality. Thank you to the 85 people from 21 countries who came to Athens and poured their good energy into the classroom. I surfed the waves of your life-force for four days of teaching and, given my weakened condition, I don’t think that I could have kept it up without your love and your soulful, intelligent attention. 

God bless our tribe and the sacred flames we feed!

On March 19, as we were preparing for one of our frequent Question-and-Answer Zoom sessions, Penelope contacted me with a minor concern about our monthly “chart winner.”  As usual, many people had submitted their charts, hoping to be the one whom we would put in the spotlight for a half hour or so at the end of the Q&A time. Penelope had done the usual drill, using a random method to pick the winner. When she had chosen, she quickly emailed me with her problem. “I am confirming the Ascendant degree with the chart winner. She was born in Brooklyn at a very specific time (3:26am), but she was not specific about exactly which Brooklyn location.”

Penelope was right. Brooklyn is big! It stretches about fifteen miles from Greenpoint in the north to Brighton Beach in the south. Was she right to worry about coming up with the wrong chart unless we knew precisely where in Brooklyn this woman was born? We all know that the place of someone’s birth is a critical element in our “holy trinity” of birth date, birth time, and  birth  location. How big an error in her Ascendant and house cusps might we introduce if we had her being born in Greenpoint when she was actually born in Brighton Beach?

The answer was easy to discover with a few minutes’ work. I can’t remember the details of the chart, so I just did some fresh calculations here at my desk as I wrote this little essay. I happen to be writing on April 25. Arbitrarily, I set up a chart for noon today in Brooklyn – but I altered the latitude that my Winstar program gave for “Brooklyn” to reflect a birth way up in the north end of the borough, in Greenpoint. There, I got an Ascendent at 23 degrees Cancer 58 minutes. I then did the same thing for the south end of Brooklyn, at Brighton Beach. There the Ascendant is 23 degrees Cancer 51 minutes. 

The two Ascendants are indeed different, but only by seven minutes of arc. That’s too small a change to make any practical difference at all. No worry, in other words. It didn’t matter where in Brooklyn our chart winner was born. Saying “Brooklyn” was good enough.

That was a north/south change. What about east/west? That would naturally have more impact on the Ascendant. Here let’s look at the worst case scenario: a true megalopolis. Shanghai, China, stretches about seventy-five miles in an east/west direction. I applied the same method I used with Brooklyn, altering the atlas listing of Shanghai’s latitude and longitude to reflect two widely-spaced places of birth that were both technically within the city limits. In the east along the coast, that calculation shows an Ascendant of 1 degree Leo 49 minutes. In the west, seventy-five miles away, the Ascendant backs off to 0 degrees Leo 47’. It’s shifted over one degree, in other words. And there, even though the change is not huge, we might potentially run into some trouble.

The takeaway is that if you are dealing with a client who was born in one of the world’s truly gigantic cities – Mexico City, Mumbai, and so forth – it might be worth asking them for some clarification about exactly where in the city they were born.

By the way, when I simply accept the atlas’s figures for the position of Shanghai, they point to the central district of the city. I am not sure exactly what the protocol is for choosing the latitudes and longitudes in the various astrology atlases, but I suspect that approach is typical. And sensible. The point is that if we had simply accepted that given “downtown” latitude and longitude and used it in setting up a chart for someone “born in Shanghai,” that one degree shift from east to west would be considerably mitigated, and probably drop down to no more than about a half-degree of error. And that’s well within the margins of acceptability for our work.

The bottom line is that when Penelope wondered about where in Brooklyn our chart winner was born, she really did not need to worry at all. “I was born in Brooklyn” is enough for us to set up a chart in which we can have confidence.

THE REAL ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM . . .

 . . . is not the place of birth, but rather the time of birth. Even small errors in the time, unlike discrepancies in latitude and longitude, can quickly make a big difference.

Our chart winner had what appears to be a carefully timed birth of 3:26 AM. But what exactly do we mean by “birth?” Some of you women who are reading my words are mothers – and Happy Mothers’ Day, by the way! But you know very well that it wasn’t as if one day you were walking along minding your own business when suddenly, pop, there’s your baby. 

Some births are fast, some are slow, but none are “instant,” where there would be an easily and universally identified minute of birth. Is the moment of birth the emergence of the child’s head, the full emergence, the first breath, the cutting of the umbilical cord? I’ve heard all of them and I really don’t know which theory is correct.

Our chart winner was born at 3:26 AM? Hmmm . . .

And of course there’s human error, clocks running fast or slow, especially in the pre-digital days.The time of birth is ever the Achilles’ Heel of astrological practice. My birth certificate states that I was born (whatever that means) at 3:30 AM. Through my own experience of the timing of events in my life, I’ve rectified that back to 3:22. And that change has thrown my Ascendant off by nearly three degrees, enough to make a significant difference in my chart.

I suspect errors of that order are common and widespread.

• The underlying point for our purposes here is that any slight error in one’s house cusps that is introduced by ambivalence about where in a given town or city a person was born is eclipsed by the almost-inevitable uncertainties that are built into a birth time, even a seemingly accurate one.

So how can we live with these wild cards? Carefully, is the answer. We get the best birth information we can get and we set up a chart, trusting it to be more or less accurate. If we have an ongoing relationship with a client, we might start to notice small but systematic errors in the timing of events in that person’s life – things happen a little sooner or a little later than we would have predicted. Perhaps that time of birth needs some adjustment, just like my own.

Soon we will have an honors elective available about the technical process of rectifying a birth time. That will be FCEA 402 – and if you have much Virgo energy, welcome to paradise! It’s a picky process, but it will get you up to Warp speed with your understanding how transits, progressions, and solar arcs actually work faster than any other method I know.

Until then, don’t sweat the place of birth – but keep a suspicious eye on everyone’s time of birth.