In our Q & A session on August 23rd, our new student, “L,” asked the following question. “Most of us have had many past lives. Which past life is shown in the birth chart? All past lives perhaps? Or the most relevant past life/lives? Or the most recent past life/lives?”

I responded during the call, and if you want to watch the “live” version, remember that if you are an FCEA student or Community Member, all those sessions are recorded, indexed, and always available to you. By the way, we know that for many of you, even here in North America, the timing of these Zoom calls is somewhere between awkward and impossible. Our apologies for that. There really aren’t any good solutions to that problem, other than us seeing to it that recordings are provided.

L’s questions are so fundamental to the practice of evolutionary astrology that I wanted to explore them a little more deeply here in this newsletter. Let me start by saying that it is of course quite possible to adapt our work to accommodate clients who aren’t comfortable with the idea of past lives. We can always talk about ancestral themes, DNA, and so on — or we can just bow deeply before the unknowable mysteries of the universe, and add the observed fact that, whatever the reason, everyone arrives on Earth with an inborn nature and certain astrologically-predictable challenges. In practice, I always ask my clients if the idea of past lives works for them. Only twice, in all the years I’ve been doing this work, has anyone ever said no. One was a professor at Catholic University in Washington D.C. – and he came back three or four years later and told me it was OK to talk about past lives this time. The other was a psychotherapist in Marin County, California — go figure!

First, here’s the simple part. L writes, “Most of us have had many past lives.” I think it’s more accurate to say that we all have had many past lives. Even people for whom this is their first human incarnation have lived in animal bodies. Have you ever met someone who behaved like a baboon, for example? Or like a dog fighting over a bone? For what it’s worth, my personal feeling is that some four-footed beings are ahead of some of us two-footed ones – that the reality is not as simple as “you graduate from animal high school and go to human college.” That’s just my opinion, and many metaphysicians would disagree with me. In fact, let me be clear: pretty much everything you’ll be reading in this essay is nothing but my opinion. Much of it is informed by Buddhism, Ram Dass, Edgar Cayce, and other wise teachers, but all these things are hard to prove or even to investigate in a foolproof way. Take what you like and leave the rest. These are the best truths I know.

L had a few more questions: Which past life is shown in the birth chart? All past lives perhaps? Or the most relevant past life/lives? Or the most recent past life/lives?”

“All past lives” would probably paint your chart black – it would require such a density of symbols that you couldn’t read anything from it at all. The deep truth is that a very great number of prior incarnations in various forms has brought you to where you are today. Fortunately, our techniques of nodal analysis filter all of that past-life information in an extremely radical way. Very little of that information actually gets through. These filters work in a very practical way, only telling you what you need to know. Everything else gets left out. You may have been one of the twelve apostles. Maybe you were Geronimo. You may have been Cleopatra – but if what your soul is working on in this lifetime isn’t connected to those particular past lives, there will be no symbolism in your chart for them.

• Maybe you were indeed “Cleopatra,” but you worked that karma out long ago. It no longer holds you back in any way. Poof – no nodal evidence for that lifetime appears in your birthchart.

• Maybe you were “Cleopatra,” but you’re not yet ready to wrestle with that karma. You’re saving it for a future lifetime when you are wiser and more evolved than you are today. Once again, poof – no nodal evidence for that lifetime appears in the chart.

That’s how the “nodal filters” work. So much of this line of thought is contained in one phrase that most of you have heard me say many, many times: what we see via nodal analysis is unresolved karma that has ripened. “Unresolved” means it’s still holding you back somehow in terms of your evolutionary intentions for this lifetime. “Ripened” means that the time has come for you to deal with it – you’re ready, in other words.

Back to L’s questions:

Which past life is shown in the birth chart? 

Answer: the one (or ones) that are actually pressing at you in this present life.

All past lives perhaps? 

Answer: definitely not all of them!

Or the most relevant past life/lives? 

Answer: L totally nails it here.

Or the most recent past life/lives? 

Answer: not necessarily — karma often takes a while to ripen.

I always like to underscore the fact that we don’t read astrological charts the same way that we read newspapers. Symbolism is not literalism. As we do nodal analysis, our aim is to invent a story that resonates emotionally with the person’s actual karma. Liberate yourself from the feeling that you need to find the literal reality of anyone’s prior lifetimes. We can’t do that and we don’t make that indefensible claim, nor do we burden ourselves with that impossible task.

If in a prior life, you were literally a rock star, but I tell you a nodal tale about how you were a movie star, I’ve done my job – that story is close enough to ring the right emotional bells. Same thing if I tell you a story about how you were once a victim of religious persecution and the reality is that you were a victim of racial or gender prejudice. In other words, the story doesn’t need to be literally true in order to be emotionally relevant – and thus capable of triggering a cathartic reaction in the client. Remember: everything starts with the south node of the Moon – we’re talking about the history of the emotional body, not a checklist of biographical “Mercury” facts. We don’t typically remember our past lives in a concrete way. What we remember is what they felt like. That “Moon energy” is what reincarnates with us. That’s where we store the hurt. That’s what we see in the chart. And that’s where we look for the cure.

Built into this line of thinking is another practical point. Most of the time in practicing evolutionary astrology, we tell a single “once upon a time” past-life story. That simplicity may or may not reflect literal reality. Karma, by its very nature, tends to be habitual and repetitive. Might a soul cycle through several lifetimes in which it kept making the same mistake over and over again – marrying the wrong person, for example? Sure! But our single past-life tale covers all of those emotional bases and that’s the point.

Perhaps the most slippery question of them all is one that L didn’t ask. What exactly reincarnates? That’s a conundrum that keeps philosophers and metaphysicians talking until the wee hours.

Here’s how I understand it. I’ve been a Capricorn with an Aries Moon for almost seventy-five years now. After all that time, I’ve gotten pretty used to it. But at the moment my physical body dies, will I still be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon? That’s hard to answer – something of that imprint might survive in my post mortem consciousness for a while. But if we accept reincarnation, we know for sure that when I am reborn, I probably won’t be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon anymore. In other words, what reincarnates will not be my present personality.  Among people who are drawn to the idea of reincarnation, there is often a naíve attitude that “you” just come back again in a new body as if nothing had really changed. It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. The reality is that “you” as a personality are truly dead and gone.

So what else are you besides your personality?

That brings us right back to our slippery question: what reincarnates? Your soul? Here in the western world, we often use that word. Buddhists generally don’t like it. That’s because they aren’t comfortable endorsing the idea of any kind of eternally separate individuality. Instead, they often refer to the mindstream.

In some ways, mindstream is a more rigorous concept. In other ways, I might say what’s the difference? For what it’s worth, I do use the word “soul” myself – but let me explain why “mindstream” works better when we’re wrestling with the profoundest kinds of metaphysical questions, as we are here.

At some undetermined point down the line, I won’t be a Capricorn with an Aries Moon any longer – but, for good or for ill, my mindstream will have been conditioned by all my experiences in this lifetime. In other words, something far bigger and more ancient than my personality will digest everything I’ve learned as Steven Forrest with his Capricorn Sun and his Aries Moon. It will all enter my mindstream. But underlying that immediate addition to my mindstream is another, deeper sedimentary layer – that’s all the accumulated impressions of my own prior lifetimes, digested and turned into feelings, attitudes, understandings . . . and errors, hurts, angers, and so on. My experiences as Steven Forrest will simply join that larger flow.

• The mindstream is what reincarnates, not the personality – but underlying and shaping my future personality is that mindstream. Hopefully, as a result of being myself for all these years, it will be a little wiser and a little clearer.

Purifying that mindstream – teaching it love, not fear, generosity rather than grasping, acceptance, not aggression – is the purpose of life. Your present chart is just your particular current tack on those ancient, eternal challenges. It shows you where you’re stuck and exactly what you need to do to get free.

Think of it like a shirt you’re wearing. You may like it, but tomorrow you’ll take it off and put it in the wash. Personalities are like that. Mindstreams – or souls – are a lot more lasting.

It’s time for another peek at the school’s chart. A long hard look at your own transits and progressions can help keep you honest, and it’s the same for the entity we call the FCEA. That’s how we walk our talk – we listen when the planets shine a light on our path.

Most of us have seen the school’s chart before – here it is again in case you’re newly part of the family. This time I’m showing it with the current progressions in the middle ring and the current transits in the outer one. As usual, for clarity’s sake, I’m not progressing the outer planets – they’re too slow to be of much practical use. I’m also only using the transits of Jupiter through Pluto – they’re the ones that have time enough to pack the symbolic punch of deep developmental meaning. Everything is set for July 14th. There’s nothing special about that date – it’s just when I happened to be writing this essay. All of these bodies move slowly enough that nothing significant will have changed by the time you’re reading this.  

One glance at the basic natal chart of the school and you can easily see astrology at work. We’ve obviously got a massive 11th house. That’s because we’re a tribe – a group of people who have come together for a common purpose. There’s lots of Pisces energy too – after all, we’re a spiritual tribe. Our path is one of education – there’s the Gemini Ascendant and the big 9th house. None of that tells us anything we didn’t know already, but it demonstrates a good reality check if you’re using an “event” chart like this one – if it’s not true in “obvious” ways, that’s a sign that the chart itself might be flawed. Births are pretty objective things. Not so the “births” of ideas, relationships, or businesses. If the chart doesn’t echo reality in a crystal-clear “duh” sort of way, you’ve probably got a problem. No worry, we’re definitely good to go in this case – the school’s chart represents our reality very well.

Look at all those transits and progressions! As usual, one glance is enough to make you feel like you’re juggling a few too many balls. Birthcharts are complicated enough, but adding transits and progressions can be overwhelming. Much of the art of our work lies in knowing how to edit the clutter – that’s always our first step. Diving in willy-nilly without a plan is invariably a recipe for catastrophe. Those of you who are currently in (or beyond) FCEA201 know that our basic tool here is what we call The Four Nets. If you’re just beginning our program, you can read all about them in The Changing Sky. Basically they are simply a rough method of sorting through a slew of transits, progressions, and solar arcs with an eye on thinking in terms of first things first.

In no particular order (yet), here are what seem to me to be the biggest things currently going on in the school’s chart.

• Transiting Pluto is squaring the school’s Uranus.
• Transiting Uranus will hit the Ascendant in two years
• Solar Arc Saturn is conjunct the school’s Pluto
• Transiting Saturn is sweeping through Pisces, hitting all of those Piscean planets
• Transiting Neptune is conjuncting Mercury 
• The Progressed Moon is in the 12th house heading for the Ascendant
• Transiting Jupiter will soon be squaring our Sun and Moon
• Transiting Jupiter will trine the Sun and Moon in two years

Got all that? The heart boggles in the face of it all. We need a way of getting a handle on the complexity. The Four Nets to the rescue! Be warned though – they’re flawed. I wrote them so I should know! By all means, use them, but only as a starting point. The trouble with the Four Nets is that they suffer from the same limitations we find with the orbs of aspects. What orb should we use for Mercury? The right answer varies with Mercury’s strength and centrality in the chart. If Gemini is rising and the person’s Sun is in the 3rd house, you’ll want to use wider orbs with Mercury – that’s because of that person’s enhanced sensitivity to those areas of life. It’s exactly the same with the Four Nets – a progressed Mercury, say, trining natal Neptune would rise higher in the Nets for people who have that same kind of enhanced Mercurial natal sensitivity – and it would sink in importance if they didn’t!

Remember: use the Four Nets as your launching pad, but not as your crutch!

Let’s apply the Four Nets to the current astrological situation of the school. As we sort through our list of configurations while letting the Nets set our priorities, here’s what we see. (By the way, the numbered lines I quote in italics here are taken directly from the Four Nets handout in FCEA201. They’re also pretty close to what you’ll find in The Changing Sky where I first published them back in 1986.)

First Net

Our transiting Saturn is sweeping through Pisces, hitting all of those Piscean planets

4. Transiting Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto making a conjunction or hard aspect to the natal Sun, Moon, Angles, or nodal axis.

Our Progressed Moon is in the 12th house heading for the Ascendant 

2. The progressed Moon passing over the Ascendant or Descendant.

Our transiting Uranus will hit the Ascendant in two years

4. Transiting Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto making a conjunction or hard aspect to the natal Sun, Moon, Angles, or nodal axis.

Second Net

Our transiting Pluto square Uranus

4. Transiting Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto conjunct, square or opposed to any sensitive point other than Sun, Moon, Angles, or nodal axis.

Our transiting Neptune conjunct Mercury

4. Transiting Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto conjunct, square or opposed to any sensitive point other than Sun, Moon, Angles, or nodal axis.

Our Solar Arc Saturn conjunct Pluto

8. Any solar arc planet making a hard aspect or conjunction to any natal planet or point, or changing sign or house.

Our transiting Jupiter square the Sun and Moon

5. Transiting Jupiter conjunct, square, or opposed to the natal Sun, Moon, Angles, or nodal axis.

Third Net

Our transiting Jupiter trine the Sun and Moon

3. Any aspects made by transiting Jupiter not already covered.

What follows is probably the most important thing I’m going to say in this little essay: if you only looked at those First Net configurations and you did an in-depth job of understanding them and integrating them with each other, you would have been of enormous help to anyone who had been lucky enough to turn to you for counsel.

Never forget – we’re working for our clients, not to win some kind of award offered by a team of censorious techno-astrologers.

The bottom line is always to go as far with the Nets as you possibly can, but stopping just before your intuitive sense of the wholeness starts to get swallowed up in a lather of intellectual anxiety.

So what does it all mean? What can we learn about the school’s current evolutionary possibilities?

I’m going to be brief here since a thorough job of interpretation would require quite a lot of time and would be a lot easier to deliver orally rather than in writing. As you’re probably figuring out by now, I actually have two aims in writing this short essay. Obviously, one is to think about the school and our collective journey. The second one is to offer some guidance and encouragement about how to navigate the potentially-overwhelming labyrinths that the astrological symbols always create. Interpretively, this will be a simple strategic overview rather than a detailed analysis, in other words.

Let’s start with those three First Net configurations. They are our foundation. Beginning anywhere else could easily put the cart before the horse. The first thing I see is that while one of these First Net events is currently active, the other two crest in the near future and are thus less active right now. Let’s start with those two:

• Number one, the progressed Moon hits the school’s Ascendant on March 3, 2025.

• Number two, transiting Uranus soon follows, hitting the Ascendant in August 2025, retrograding over it that October, and making a final direct hit in January 2026.

• Finally, Saturn’s current sweep through Pisces – number three – can thus be understood as preparation for the new beginnings the other two First Net events are prophesying.

See how that simple insight based on the relative timing of these three events gives us an initial interpretive structure? We’ll start with Saturn, and try to see how it can prepare us for those Moon and Uranus developments. Saturn entered Pisces in March 2023, but it will be crisscrossing our Sun and Moon between April 2024 and January 2025 – and note that Saturn’s finish in January 2025 comes just a few weeks before the progressed Moon hits the Ascendant and a few months before Uranus joins the Moon there.

We’ve hit upon a developmental sequence – and recognizing a pattern like that is pure gold in our craft.

Again, these configurations are vast subjects, but in essence with the Saturn transit through Pisces, we see the school in its current situation, which is that we are maturing. Reflecting that idea in material terms, we’ll probably be graduating our first class of master-level FCEA astrologers early in 2024 – there’s a very concrete (Saturn!) maturational milestone! Given Saturn’s nature, we’ll probably also be facing various (surmountable) obstacles – that’s usually part of Saturn’s signature too. The process of navigating those obstacles is often what actually matures anyone, the school included. Saturn usually also demands some hard negotiations, some compromises, and some sacrifices.

As one quick illustration of how this Saturn transit has already been at work, think of the big school Zoom Q & A calls that we do. From my point of view, the last two or three of them have been the smoothest ones ever. That’s because – live and learn, Saturn-fashion – we’ve created a format that really works: an hour on the submitted questions, half an hour or so on a chart reading, and the rest of the time for spontaneous discussion. We learned from our experience and improved things. We matured – and that’s pure Saturn.

With those two other big First Net events heading for our Ascendant, we’re focusing on building a vision for the future, but succeeding there requires some reflection  and patience. Building that “vision” is the message of the progressed Moon’s current position in the 12th house. Once that vision is “cooked,” the Moon hitting the school’s Ascendant in 2025 will be something of a “Grand Opening” – and with Uranus hitting the Ascendant at about the same time, we can safely “expect the unexpected.” We will also very probably take off in some novel or surprising directions.

That’s the message of the First Net.

Those novel and surprising directions are echoed further as we move into the realm of the Second Net. There we see Uranus in the spotlight once again, but this time because transiting Pluto is squaring it. That’s happening throughout all of 2024. Meanwhile, transiting Neptune is back and forth over our Mercury between May 2024 and January 2026. That transit echoes the “vision quest” elements we saw in that First Net progression of the Moon through the 12th house. Together these two Second Net transits caution us against the kind of unrealism (Neptune) that could lead to a real mess – something that Pluto squaring a 12th house Uranus warns us about as well. Right now, Saturn is teaching us to keep our feet on the ground. Our job is to remember that!

Solar Arc Saturn made a conjunction with Pluto in July, and that energy is still very active and represents more of the same. There are bumps in the road – delays and maybe a few minefields as well. We acknowledge all that, but we keep perspective – these are Second Net events, not First Net ones. We counsel alertness and caution, but not fear.

Moving on in the Second Net, transiting Jupiter squares the Sun and Moon between August 2024 and April 2025. That warns us specifically against over-extension – and it further focuses the cautionary notes we just struck. Concretely, the chart might be counseling us, for example, against taking on too many new students or new tutors, or simply spending too much money.

A little further down the road, transiting Jupiter moves beyond those squares to the Sun and Moon and slides into trine aspects with them. That happens between August 2025 and April 2026. By then, the progressed Moon is in the 1st house and Uranus is snicker-snacking back and forth across our Ascendant. If we’re careful, if we do the hard Saturn work, and if we let ourselves gradually feel our way into a new vision, we will have built the foundation for that new beginning, and I suspect we’ll be smiling gratefully at what we’ve created – there’s the message of Jupiter trining our Sun and Moon, probably bringing luck and opportunity.

Remember how you felt back at the beginning of this essay when I first listed the eight biggest events that were impacting the FCEA chart? Eight were enough to be overwhelming – and that was just the top eight! What if I’d added a bunch of Net Three events as well? Or Net Four? It’s simply too much for the mind to digest. But think about what happened to your attitude when we passed those eight configurations through the Nets.

• The First Net reduced them to the three most important ones – and with just three events, we could begin to get a handle on the message. Our “overwhelm” was greatly reduced.

• Even better, because they were First Net events we could reassure ourselves that we were keeping perspective and tuning into the big picture.

• Then we noticed a pattern in those three events. We reflected on their timing and we saw how one of them was currently setting the stage for the other two.

A strategic approach like that is how we go from confusion to a story we feel in our bones and which we can tell with confidence. Once we have the First Net figured out, we just plug some Net Two and maybe some Net Three insights into the basic “big picture.” Always, our sense of the integrated wholeness of things that Net One generates for us is our foundation.

Beyond that, we embellish it with lesser configurations until our brows start to wrinkle – or our clients start to look glassy-eyed.

With experience, we improve even further – we sense when that dreaded glassy-eyed moment is about to arrive and we say Amen just before we get there. 

The next thing you know, you’re a professional astrologer and an FCEA graduate.

We’re proud of what we’ve created here at the FCEA in the four years since we first conceived it back in March 2019. We’re also delighted by the expressions of support, enthusiasm, and appreciation we often hear from our students and Community Members. New businesses are famously shaky and many of them quickly fail. Not us! All in all, we’re doing OK and that’s thanks to all of you.

Naturally we hear grumbles from time to time. Keep them coming! We’re good, but we know we can get better and that’s our aim. Your feedback is helpful, even if we can’t always make everything fit everyone’s individual needs.

Sometimes “grumbles” isn’t the right word either – we also get lots of minor corrections and they’re always welcome. For one example, just this week a perspicacious student noticed that I’d made a typo in my handout about the discovery date of Eris. I had it down as January 25, 2005 when it was actually January 5 – obviously that mistake was not the end of the world, but it’s good to make things right! We fixed it right away. Someone else once pointed out an error in a birth time for one of our teaching charts – I can’t even remember which one, but we fixed that too. There have been a few more instances of little goofs on that kind of scale – not earth-shaking, but still important – and we wouldn’t have known about them without your help and sharp eyes, so thanks!

With the FCEA curriculum materials we can quickly fix things, but in my life as an author, I’ve had a futile ambition all along – it’s that someday I would publish a book without any typos at all. Still, even with a  dozen eyes, including my own, combing through the pages, that’s never happened. And once a book is in print, it’s graven in stone unless and until there’s a new edition. We can at least include a note about those kinds of errata in Moodle. We’ve done that – the bad charts for Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Skymates II come to mind.

In pursuit of ways that we can possibly improve, a few of our tutors have let me know about some frustrations they’re hearing from students. Four of these issues have come up with some consistency and I want to touch on them here. Two of them are biggies and two are fair to call “small potatoes.” I should say right away that none of them are completely fixable, at least in the present circumstances of the school. Mostly here I simply want to say “we hear you” and to take the opportunity to explain our position. One aim we’ll always have here in the FCEA is to be as transparent with everyone as we possibly can be.

FACE TIME

By far, the issue that comes up most often is the desire for more “live” interaction with the tutors and with myself. I have a lot to say about that, starting with a simple agreement: almost everyone agrees that more live interaction would be great! 

Let me first speak about the tutors, then I’ll speak about myself.

Our tutors are paid by the hour – not enough, not what they’re worth, but they are paid!.And there’s a lot of them and that gets expensive. Those hours mount up. The FCEA has no outside source of funding – even the loan Jeff Parrett gave us to start the school is being paid back with interest. You probably see where this is going. Financially, the school is usually “in the black,” but not by much. To afford more tutor hours, we’d have to raise our tuition rates. No one – including us – wants to do that.

Speaking for myself, I really do enjoy the many Zoom Q&A sessions we do. I like teaching. Beyond those, this (northern) autumn, we’ll finally reach FCEA 306 – that’s a course where I’ll be teaching “live” via Zoom in a small-class context. I look forward to that! Let me also add that  at the 300-level, students are advanced enough to begin working together with a tutor and their peers in live Zoom classes every week. Even better for many of you, we just started our 101Z and 102Z labs. They’re led by tutors on Zoom and students get live interaction every week there too.

One of my personal goals in framing the FCEA was for me to be able to do more teaching at a “master class” level. I felt that doing that would be a better use of my time than teaching the basics over and over again – hence the reason behind all the videos and handouts I’ve made for our curriculum, not to mention all my books. Those are where I teach the basics – although our Q&A sessions are actually often that too. And even there, we’re building our indexed reference library, which is also gradually becoming another resource in our basic curriculum. But a real motivator for me is to be able to teach at a higher level. As the first wave of FCEA students reaches the 306 level in a few months, we’ll finally arrive at that point.

There’s one more thing that’s sort of tangentially related – we’ll soon be implementing a platform called Circle (www.Circle.so). I honestly don’t know much about it yet, but we’re hoping it will facilitate an easier and more lively kind of social interaction among us.

Speaking of face-to-face interaction, let me add that it was a joy to finally meet some of you in person at the big ISAR conference in Denver last August and also at the NORWAC conference in Seattle just a few weeks ago. My upcoming event this August at Omega Institute in New York is promising to be a big one – last I heard, 107 people have signed up! I know many FCEA students are among them. (If you’re interested in possibly attending, here’s the link: https://www.eomega.org/search?query=Steven+Forrest). 

Then there’s Astro-Bash (https://www.astro-bash.com) starting on September 28th. Ralph MacIntrye, a former student in my old Apprenticeship Programs who happens to live in the same desert town as me, has put together a broad group of evolutionary astrologers as speakers. Our Dean, Catie, will be among them. I’ll do a keynote. Getting to Borrego Springs is not the easiest thing in the world, but for me it’s home sweet home. Maybe some of you can come too.

I’m writing about these in-person events because they’re part of how I want to address the whole question of more live teaching and “face time.” By the way, as I write these words, I’m aware of how unfair much of this must sound to our students who live in other countries. I’m sorry about that, but at least these events do provide another option for face-to-face work, at least for some of you. We still hope to create an actual FCEA conference at some point, but frankly we’re all just too busy running things day-to-day to even think much about it at this point.

Let me briefly belabor another obvious issue for a moment – like the rest of you, I have to make a living and there are only so many hours in the day. Most of how I support myself comes from work outside our school. That does put some constraints on my time. That’s of course true as well for our tutors, teachers, and staff.

THE CLONE WARS

There’s a second issue that’s come up from time to time. Let’s call it “the Clone Wars.” So, is the purpose of the FCEA to crank out dozens and dozens of robotic Steven Forrest clones? In response, I’d start by softening that language a bit, but basically let me admit that, yes, in a sense, that’s exactly what we’re doing. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. 

There’s something terribly unsettling about that kind of language! Cloning? What about respect for your own individualities? What about that core principle of any healthy kind of astrology, which is respect for human diversity?

Here’s our reasoning. Astrology is a wide world. I’ve often felt sorry for enthusiastic beginners attending their first astrology conference. If they listen to ten lectures, they’ll probably hear ten different takes on astrology. Many involve perspectives that would be very difficult to reconcile with each other, both practically and philosophically. There are helpful, impressive astrologers practicing in the Vedic traditions, along with many fine Hellenists, Uranians, and Cosmobiologists. There are good psychological astrologers – and in the FCEA we’re pretty close to them, but we’re not the same. Even in the mainstream forms of modern astrological practice, you have a dozen systems of house division to choose among. Should we use the Vertex? What about the Part of Fortune? What about planetary midpoints? What about harmonics? Black Moon Lilith anyone?

Again, I pity beginners as they try to pick their way through this whole smorgasbord of astrological possibilities. They often feel that to become good astrologers they need to understand it all. But no one can understand it all! There’s just too much. And on top of it, no client anywhere would have the patience, time, or attention span to listen to a session that applied all of those techniques at once.

My personal North Star has always been aimed at meeting the needs of those clients. Over the years, sitting with many, many thousands of them, I’ve honed my arsenal of techniques down to the few that have consistently seemed to work the best, at least for me and my clients. I’ve also only pursued techniques that answer the kinds of questions that I personally find most compelling – basically the ones around how our psychological processes relate to the growth of our souls. I find it more exciting to wrestle with those particular angels and devils than to try to pick the stock whose value is about to rise or the candidate who’s most likely to win the election.

The distillation of all that I have learned – and unlearned, and forgotten, and discarded – is the Steven Forrest Method. And that efficient, accurate, stripped-down package is what we teach in the FCEA. That’s what we’re “cloning.” The point is not that we reject all the other traditions and techniques – the point is that we want to chart the most efficient course from A to Z for our students, where A is a blank slate and Z is the ability to sit down confidently with an astrologically naive client and actually know what words to say. So we teach one method – again, call it “cloning me” if you want – and if you want to explore other methods, go for it! Just please do it outside the framework of our school. 

Learning this FCEA methodology is, as you know, a serious commitment. Even stripped down like this, it still takes three or four years of hard work to get on top of it enough to reach a professional level of competence. It’s sort of like going to medical school. The bottom line is that in the FCEA, our aim is to get everyone to “Z” as efficiently as possible, so we limit our attention to specific practices, while we discourage anyone from muddying the waters for the other students by wondering about what this chart would say in Porphyry houses or in Whole Sign House format. That’s not because those systems are wrong, but rather because they’re confusing to anyone who’s trying to keep their eyes on the prize as we’ve defined it. 

Once you’ve learned the Steven Forrest Method, you can take it anywhere you want. In fact, even now as active students in our school, if you want to check out other approaches or other teachers, go for it – just please support the other students by staying focused on our core curriculum.

There are a couple more areas where a few concerns have been expressed. They’re both comparatively minor, but I’d like to clear the air about them as best I can.

INCONSISTENCIES ABOUT ASPECT ORBS

I’ll own it! In the videos and handouts that comprise the FCEA curriculum, sometimes you see me suggesting an orb of 2.5 degrees for a certain aspect, then elsewhere I might suggest 5 degrees. I’m all over the map about orbs and I admit it’s probably confusing. 

Some of that is simply my own inconsistency – and that’s further exacerbated by the fact that, for example, The Inner Sky and The Changing Sky both date back to the 1980s, while much school material is practically current by comparison. So you’re looking at over three decades of my own learning curve. As an evolutionary astrologer, I am proud to say that I am not “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow!”

There’s a deeper issue. Universally, astrologers of all schools use wider aspectual orbs for the Sun than they do for Neptune. But what if that Neptune is in Pisces or on the Ascendant? Then maybe we stretch the orbs a bit further because the planet is a little stronger in that particular chart. What if a planet is in its own sign? What if it rules the Ascendant? What if two planets in a wide hard aspect to each other are also in mutual reception? That softens their tension. Do we still get any benefit from thinking of them as “in opposition?”

It goes further – what if we have a planet in the first degree of Aries and one in the last degree of Gemini? Geometrically, that’s a tight square – but the basic harmony of Aries and Gemini makes itself felt too. Clearly that square isn’t quite the same as one between Aries and Cancer. Now widen the angle between them a bit – at what point do you stop thinking of it as a square? It’s hard to be rigid about any of this, but clearly in practice that Aries/Gemini square would break down sooner than an Aries/Cancer one.

The point is that, beyond the exact geometrical angle between the planets, orbs are influenced by many factors. For that reason, only a (hilariously) inexperienced astrologer would formally pronounce that “the proper orb for sextiles is five degrees – not four, and not not six.” 

The inconsistencies you’ll encounter about aspect orbs through the FCEA curriculum materials fall somewhere between a happy mistake and a bit of a “time capsule” study of my own evolution as an astrologer over the years. Personally, I’m actually glad they are there – that’s because if I were consistent about them you might start to think that they were consistent themselves. They’re not!

REPEATING CHARTS

The further into your FCEA studies you go, the more charts you will see. Catie and I are really happy with the diverse spectrum of “case studies” the school presents. We’ve got mostly famous people, a few made-up charts, and the occasional client example – that, plus tons of “mystery charts,” which are mostly famous people supplied with false names. 

Basically, the more charts you look at, the smarter you get. That’s why, as an FCEA student, you’re subjected to such a flood of them. The only limit we’ve set is that we’ve mostly steered away from very contemporary examples, mostly because “the verdict isn’t in on them yet.” I’m profoundly grateful, for example, that when I was writing The Inner Sky in the early 1980s, I used John Lennon for my example. Imagine the mess I’d have been in today if I had used Bill Cosby – or that bon vivant and then-rising star of commercial New York real estate, Donald Trump. When it comes to analyzing a life, it’s often helpful to have the whole story.

One or two students have grumbled about seeing a particular chart used more than once. Why not switch to someone new? I believe the issue was around the chart of Muhammed Ali, although I believe Lily Tomlin comes up more than once in the curriculum as well, and there are others – Amy Tan and Jane Goodall, for example. They mostly occur at the 100-level where students are first building their confidence and we think a longer look at a single chart is probably most beneficial to them.

Our reasoning here is actually very simple, at least with Muhammed Ali. To understand anyone in the context of transits, progressions, and solar arcs – or for that matter, in a synastry framework, it is essential to understand the core birthchart. As you know, analyzing a birthchart is a big undertaking. It requires time. For that reason, Catie and I just decided that it made sense to introduce Muhammed Ali’s natal chart in the FCEA 100 courses, and then to build efficiently on that foundation when we got to the FCEA 202 Practicum and it was time to look at his transits. Why redo 101 material with a new person when we were ready to work with transits and progressions and everyone already had a strong foundation with Muhammed Ali?

In general, don’t worry – in our school, you won’t often see the same chart used more than once!

Those are the four areas I wanted to address in this newsletter. Once again, we always welcome constructive criticism and helpful suggestions, so please keep them coming. We won’t be able to make you happy every time, but we’ll do our best. 

Even better, do let us know when you’re simply feeling good about the school. Running it is a lot of hard work and positive feedback is what keeps us going, so thanks for that too!

In our Member Call on May 11, Cliff Passen asked a good question, but time ran out and we never got to it. Here it is: Considerations of Dignity, Debility, Exaltation and Fall seem not to have made the cut in FCEA. Could you please speak about the decision not to include these perspectives?

Thanks, Cliff – this issue is important enough that I want to dedicate this newsletter to responding to it. Before I dive in, I do want to express gratitude to everyone who submitted questions for that call. We had quite a lot of them this time, and they were all interesting. I knew that one hour was not going to be long enough to get through them all. We’ll save many – but not all – of them for next time. Always our aim is to use our Zoom time in a way that seems to be of most benefit to the greatest number of students and members. The least general benefit comes from questions that basically involve “putting a chart up on the screen” – except doing it by listing most of its configurations verbally. That kind of litany is hard for audience members to follow – it’s hard for me too! (But I’m lucky – I get to see all the questions in advance. I actually make a little sketch of the chart so I can follow.)  Deep chart analysis is what our “Chart Winner” segment is for – and we’ll always do an actual chart analysis as the second part of these online sessions.

Bottom line: I won’t say that we’ll never accept questions like those personal, chart-specific ones again, but they’ll generally have a lower priority. Much will depend on how many questions get submitted. Asking about a specific configuration is fine – for example, “please talk about my Venus in the 3rd house opposite Saturn.” That’s short enough that everyone can digest it in “spoken word” format.

Onward to Cliff’s question.

He wonders about our decision not to include dignity, debility, exaltation and fall in the FCEA curriculum. Let me begin with a minor quibble – the reality is that we do include them, at least  functionally. What we exclude is that specific language. The reality is that each planet is naturally more comfortable with certain signs, while feeling less comfortable with others. We acknowledge that fact, and that’s basically what those four words that Cliff mentioned are all about.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The focus of our school is the development of “clinical” skills – we’re all about astrological counseling, in other words. Succeeding there of course depends on mastering astrological theory – but theoretical knowledge alone does not make a person an astrological counselor. We also have to think about how we present astrology to our clients, most of whom are not versed in the technicalities. That means that we always have to think carefully about the impact of our words. Maintaining rapport with the client is mission-critical.

Imagine I’m a first-time client and I know nothing about astrology. I hear that my Venus is “in detriment” or that my Jupiter is “in the sign of its fall.” How do those words land on my ears? Not well! The word “debility” is perhaps the most dangerous one of all – even if we don’t exactly say “your chart suffers from many debilities,” that is the baleful news that the client is likely to hear.

You can probably already see where this is going. Clearly, detriment, fall, and debility are not words that leave people feeling encouraged. They imply that there is something wrong with their chart, and by extension, that there is something fundamentally wrong – or simply doomed – with them. Those are not feelings that we want to trigger in our clients! The language itself is damaging. Perhaps worse, it is also simply incorrect. Everyone’s chart is perfect – they all fit the needs and conditions of the soul like the proverbial glove. 

Technical astrologers having a technical discussion out of earshot of any clients can use words like dignity, debility, exaltation and fall as an effective shorthand in their conversations with each other – no problem there, so long as those astrologers know what they’re talking about. The trouble is that often they don’t. Astrologers themselves have often fallen prey to the misleading implications of those words, imagining for one example that it’s “bad” to have Mars in Libra – the sign of its detriment.

Let’s think specifically about Mars in Libra as a way of approaching the general heart of the matter. That Mars “rules” Aries makes perfect sense – their natures are very similar. That’s why traditional astrologers say that Mars is “dignified” in that sign. But Mars in Libra? No “dignity” there at all! Mars is the god of war and Libra is about peace, reconciliation, tolerance, and seeing the other person’s point of view. Clearly poor Mars is confused and “debilitated” when we invite it to learn those kinds of lessons – it’s like asking a lion to be a vegetarian. But ask yourself: is learning those kinds of lessons actually bad for Mars? Or might the god of war benefit from a little dose of peace, love, and understanding?

Truly understanding fall and detriment really hinges on those kinds of questions. Paradox, ambiguity, and complexity are not “debilitated” conditions – they’re just tricky to think about.

Can we ever fight for peace? Think about John Lennon, with his Mars in Libra. In the back of my head, I’m hearing him militantly leading the chorus in the anti-war song Give Peace A Chance.

Mars also rules Scorpio and thus is said to be in “detriment” in Taurus, the opposite sign. Both Libra and Taurus are ruled by Venus, so peace is quite fundamental to our understanding of the evolutionary aims of both signs. So once again, can we fight for peace? Ask that famous “peacenik,” Thich Nhat Han – he had Mars in Taurus, and more than a thing or two in common with John Lennon.

Planets in detriment or fall are learning to deal with paradoxes. There is something intellectually sophisticated about them, something full of nuances and subtleties. Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that the straight ahead quality of Mars in Aries is not automatically a good thing – it can potentially be violent, intolerant, and crude. Why? Because, unlike planets in detriment or fall, it lacks any reflective perspective on itself. 

I don’t want to make it sound as if a planet being in the sign it rules is a bad thing! Or that fall and detriment are automatically good. Nothing in astrology works that way. Everything comes down to understanding the evolutionary lessons implicit in the configuration and getting those ideas across to the client in a cogent, convincing, and encouraging way.

In our FCEA course work, the specific idea of rulership actually does come up frequently. We tend not to label it a “dignity,” but otherwise it’s pretty much everywhere in our work. We put great emphasis on the planet that rules the Ascendant, for one example. As any of you who’ve been through FCEA 102 know, we simply could not do evolutionary astrology without recognizing the power of the planet or planets that rule the sign of the lunar south node.

Rulership basically means resonance – and astrology hums because of the way Mars and Aries are always energetically linked in a chart no matter what their specific configurations may be. Ditto of course for Mercury and Gemini, Jupiter and Sagittarius, and so on. From the counseling perspective, I would also add that a client hearing that “Neptune rules your chart” is not likely to be frightened or damaged by those words. That sentence simply does not carry the same linguistic baggage that comes with telling a client that his or her Saturn is in detriment or fall.

By not using the words “fall” and “detriment” in our FCEA courses, we bypass the pitfall of having them creep into the language we use with our clients – or sneaking into our own heads with that judgmental tone.

Much of what I’ve written about here so far is really about rulership and detriment. What about exaltation and fall? Let me begin by directing you to chapter four of The Endless Sky: Planetary Exaltations; Planetary Falls. I delve deeply into the topic there. (Chapter three of that book, by the way, is about rulerships and detriment – it covers ground similar to what I’ve explored so far  with you here.)

Here are a few lines from chapter four of The Endless Sky:

“With exaltation, the situation is a bit more subtle. In essence, the sign has the effect of underscoring some specific potential strength in the planet – or similarly, of correcting one of its blind spots. The planet is therefore uplifted – “exalted,” if you will.”

Meanwhile, Venus is exalted in Pisces – and so the spiritual and romantic qualities of human affection are underscored when Venus is in that sign.

Turn it around – a planet in the sign opposite its exaltation is said to be in fall. That means that the Moon is “in fall” in Scorpio – and that’s because we can tie ourselves in knots with too much “second-guessing, overthinking, and Scorpionic psychology,” and thus lose track of the “simple Taurean truth.” Meanwhile, Venus is “in fall” when it is in Virgo – and that’s because picky fault-finding doesn’t go well with romantic love.  

Let’s keep all of this honest though – a little psychological perspective on our gut feelings can be healthy, which means that the Moon doesn’t automatically become “bad” when it’s in Scorpio. A romantic bubble in which acknowledging a partner’s flaws becomes taboo doesn’t always contribute to long-term intimate happiness – so there’s real wisdom in Venus in Virgo. 

“Fall,” in other words, is no more an inherently bad thing than is “detriment.” Like detriment, it is ultimately about dealing with paradox and subtlety.

In my own practice, I don’t actually pay much attention to exaltation and fall. The effects are real enough, but for me they sort of disappear into the broader questions of figuring out the specifics of the dance that each planet does with each sign. Again, have a look at chapter four of The Endless Sky if you’d like to learn more about my take on that topic – it’s real, but it’s just not something that I have personally found useful.

Exaltation and fall are very much a part of traditional astrology and so the available interpretations tend to be steeped in the values of the past. Here’s a list of the traditional exaltations:

• The Sun is exalted in Aries – and has its fall in Libra

• The Moon is exalted in Taurus – and has its fall in Scorpio

• Mercury is exalted in Virgo – and has its fall in Pisces

           (Note: this is the same as its rulership/detriment)

• Venus is exalted in Pisces – and has its fall in Virgo

• Mars is exalted in Capricorn – and has its fall in Cancer

• Jupiter is exalted in Cancer – and has its fall in Capricorn

• Saturn is exalted in Libra – and has its fall in Aries

Note the absence of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – that’s because, once again, these are ancient traditions, dating to a time before those planets were known. Modern traditionalists argue about whether those “new” planets should or should not be assigned exaltations and falls. Some say yes, some say no. Personally, I’ll just say that I don’t have a horse in that race.

Mercury being exalted in Virgo – the sign it also rules – does seem weird to me. Convincing arguments have been made for Mercury’s exaltation in Aquarius since Aquarius supports Mercury “thinking for itself.” I find that idea compelling – but lest I invoke the fury of the traditionalists, I’ll keep my mouth shut on that one too.

Back to Cliff’s question – for our purposes, in the FCEA we actually do use all of the basic concepts implicit in dignity, debility, exaltation and fall – we’ve just updated them, put them in evolutionary terms, and recognize that when it comes to dealing with clients, each of those words is a potential minefield of misunderstanding.

As ever, “first do no harm” is our guiding principle.