The basic idea is very simple. Maybe when you were born, Mars was rising. That means Mars was more or less in the East. Let’s state that idea precisely – Mars bore 97 degrees East, True. That was its azimuth at the instant of your birth – which really just means its “direction.” The word “True” means we’re relating Mars to the actual north pole – true north – not to the magnetic compass “north” which is a little different.

Of course a planet may not actually be on the horizon at your birth. If it’s high in the sky, then we drop it straight down to the horizon, as if it were actually there – and that’s its azimuth. Same thing if the planet is below the horizon – we just bring it straight up. So everything is projected onto the local horizon – hence the term, “Local Space.”

In essence you are standing there at your birth place at your birth moment looking out toward a big, clear, wrap-around 360 degree true horizon. All the planets are brought down or up to that horizon and you see in what direction they lie. Maybe Mars was to the east, Saturn to the northwest, whatever. Then the idea is that whenever you move eastward in your life, you are inviting Mars energy. Whenever you move northwest, you are inviting Saturn energy.

It’s a bit like the Celtic and Native American notions of the “Four Directions” except it’s much more personal and individual – my Mars direction might be your Neptune direction.

If you take a map and plot those directional lines connecting you outward to the planets on the far horizon, what would you see? Lines radiating out in every direction from your birthplace.

That, by the way, is how you know you are looking at Local Space lines rather than Astrocartography lines – the LS lines radiate out from your birthplace, while the Astrocartography lines don’t. They’re all over the map.

One more point: if you shoot a magic arrow to the west and it keeps traveling westward around the earth, eventually it will hit the back of your head – an unpleasant metaphor, but a useful idea for our purposes. All Local Space lines do exactly that – that’s why you’ll see that Mars line heading East, but you’ll also see another Mars line heading west – it’s really the same line, coming back around.

Here’s how it all works in practice:

When for example a client is retiring and wide-open about where he or she will move, I’ll set up both Astrocartographic and Local Space lines, all on a single map. In other words, I don’t really make much distinction between them – they’re all just lines of energy.

We’re evolutionary astrologers, and so in becoming skilled with these techniques, it is essential to avoid simplistic notions such as “moving to a Jupiter line is good and moving to a Pluto line is bad.” I lived happily on my Local Space (LS) Pluto line for forty years in North Carolina. My life there was definitely “plutonian,” but much of that extremity revolved around me helping other people through their own “descents into the underworld.” I definitely became far more “plutonian,” but it wasn’t a bad thing – although naturally I did earn a “PG” rating on a few occasions.

You’ll learn more in 404, but here’s another piece of the puzzle. In my own chart, Pluto is in the 9th house. Education, travel, and publishing are common associations with that house – and of course all of them were underscored in my life while I lived on my Pluto line. (If my Pluto had been in a different house, different areas of life would have been in the spotlight.)

In 2008, I  moved west, down a Jupiter line. I’ve prospered here, but I’ve also been chronically  overextended – plus I’d love to lose about 25 pounds. Lord Jupiter giveth and Lord Jupiter taketh away!

We can enter deep waters with these astrolocality techniques just as we can with the rest of astrology. But there’s a very simple, straightforward quality to them as well. Along a Saturn line, you’ll underscore Saturnian possibilities in your life. Will you be lonely? Or will you write a book or earn your doctorate? As ever, there are many possibilities, and much of what happens depends on choices you make.

I’m no fortune-teller and that’s not what the FCEA is all about . . . but just to make this real for you, take a peek at Volodymyr Zelkenskyy’s LS map:

Running north-northeast from Zelkenskyy’s birthplace are three LS lines. They pass through the Moscow area. One of them is Venus, but it’s a bit to the west and thus the least relevant when it comes to understanding Zelenskyy’s energetic relationship with the Russian capital. Mars and the Sun are the ones that really tell the story – notice how Moscow is squeezed in right between them.

What does Zelenskyy “see” when he looks toward Moscow? What energies and experiences can he expect to emanate from that direction? Rage, danger, and attack are of course distinctly “Martial” possibilities. The Sun can represent potentially overwhelming force.

The rest is history, as they say.

How’s about Vladimir Putin’s Local Space lines? Do they cast any light on Ukraine? Have a look:

What does Vladimir Putin see as he looks toward Kyiv? His LS Pluto line runs just west of the Ukrainian capital. As he turned his attention south, he was faced with his worst nightmares – history has borne that notion out in obvious ways, of course. More deeply, what unresolved psychological and karmic issues did he trigger into manifestation as he “moved in that direction?” What fear inside himself was he actually attacking – and what fear attacked him back again?

Naturally, we could dive far more deeply into the charts of these two men, making the personal meaning of Putin’s Pluto and Zelenskyy’s Mars much clearer. As ever, in the spirit of the FCEA, our questions would revolve around how we might counsel them rather than how we might predict their futures. In FCEA 404, we will learn how to do all of that. Here in this brief newsletter, I just want to give you a taste of how this branch of astrology promises to empower you with a new set of skills. Even at the simplest level, it’s pretty astonishing – Zelenskyy looks to Moscow and sees Mars and the Sun, while Putin looks to Kyiv and sees Pluto.

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

I’ll admit to gloating a bit – I was standing just outside my front door when I snapped this shot, but I was probably just wearing a tee-shirt. The top of the mountain you see is about 8000’ higher than our house. It’s a lot colder up there! We never see snow on the ground here at home. 

Personally, I’m fine not dealing with ice and snow – but even with my more tropical disposition, every year we do love driving up to the high ground and soaking up the winter wonderland.

The reason I am saying all of this is that snow actually has a powerful lesson for us as astrologers. It’s often said that every snowflake is different and unique. Yet they’re all built out of exactly the same stuff – water. On top of it, all of them have roughly the same beautiful form: a six-armed mandala. From an astrological perspective, snowflakes are just like us, in other words. Like them, we are all different and yet we are all alike. 

Every human being is built out of the same handful of signs, planets, houses, and aspects – and yet our variations are effectively infinite. Depending on how you count them, astrology is based on a vocabulary of maybe forty “words” – Taurus, the 3rd house, sextiles, and so on –  and yet their possible combinations keep ramifying in a fractal way, producing the Vladimir Putins of this world, along with the Christine McVies, the Greta Thunbergs, the Oprahs and the Ram Dasses. 

Snowflakes and us – the parallels continue, and here’s where everything gets truly miraculous. Every snowflake that has ever fallen has a certain geometrical feature in common. As I mentioned a few lines ago, all of them have six arms, like an asterisk. It’s the very symbol we astrologers use for the sextile aspect – and if you pie-slice a chart into a series of sextiles, you’ve got the map of a snowflake.

Think carefully about this basic hexagonal snowflake plan. You can say it has six arms – but here’s another way of saying it: you wouldn’t know an arm was there unless there were empty spaces on either side of it. Otherwise it would just be solid. So we could say that actually the basic design of a snowflake involves twelve iterations rather than six – a positive space, followed by a negative space, followed by another positive space, and so on around the circle, just like Yin and Yang in the Taoist model. 

Meanwhile in astrology, without forcing anything, we can easily relate the Earth and Water signs to Yin and the Fire and Air signs to Yang – and of course in the zodiac, they alternate too. That means that, just like a snowflake, every chart that has ever existed or could ever exist is based on that same twelve-fold pattern of alternating Yin and Yang energies.

Next time it’s snowing, have a look out your window. It’s snowing zillions and zillions of little birthcharts. If you could study each of them through an ice-cold microscope, you would always see that same fundamental structure. But of course you would also see something else – that each one was beautiful in its own unique way. That’s the part that puts tears of joy and wonder in our eyes – and the part that, in remembering it, we become better astrologers.

OMEGA INSTITUTE, JULY 31 – AUGUST 4, 2023   

Here at the FCEA, we’ve always had an ambition to eventually do some live conferences where we can actually meet each other. Most of us miss the warmth of those direct human connections. The combo platter of Zoom and Covid have of course changed the world – many of you are starting to feel like familiar friends to me, despite our never having been in physical proximity to each other. Compounding those realities, we also have the complicating factor that our FCEA tribe is international. If we were to meet in person, where could we do it? California? Shanghai? Berlin? Obviously there is no possible answer that works fairly for everybody.

The bottom line is that I will be doing a five-day astrological intensive in the US state of New York this (northern!) summer, and you’re all invited. I understand that for some of you, attending would simply not be feasible. I’m truly sorry about that. I do hope that at least a few of you can come. It’s something I am doing anyway, and smiled when I realized how nicely it might fit into one of my favorite dreams for the school – that at least some of us could meet in person.

Omega Institute (www.eomega.org) is a fabulous place, and I’m honored to be invited to speak there. The first time I did was way back in 1984, and I’ve taught there several times since. The Institute is both prestigious and unpretentious, which is a hard balancing act to sustain. “Everybody who’s anybody” in the world of cutting edge, body-mind-spirit thinking has spoken there – Gloria Steinem, Eckhart Tolle, Pema Chödrön, Deepak Chopra, Jane Fonda, Van Morrison, Bobby McFerrin, Paul Hawken, Maya Angelou, and Ram Dass to name a few. But I still feel right in characterizing Omega as “a hippie summer camp.” That’s what it feels like. The campus is spacious and way out among the forests and farmlands in the deep upstate New York countryside. There’s a lake. People can swim. Everyone dresses casually. We stay in simple cabins. Mostly-vegetarian food is served in a gigantic mess hall, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Best of all, the attendees are generally terrific – I’ve often felt, looking at the faces around me there, that if the entire world were full of exactly these kinds of humans, we’d be living in paradise.

My Omega class will officially go on sale in early January. It’s not yet listed on their website since it’s still many months away. I do want to emphasize that this is not an “official” FCEA event – I’m under contract to Omega, and the class is open to the public. The last time I taught there, I had around fifty students. Their faces reminded me of your faces, and vice versa. I’d anticipate a seamless social integration, in other words. In teaching, I’ll downplay any FCEA angle to make sure that everyone feels welcome. But I would love to see as many of you there as can make it happen!

The title of the class is Cutting Through to the Heart of the Birthchart. Here’s the course description:

Why do you have the astrological chart that you have? As soon as we ask that question, we leave the dreary world of merely cataloging “personality traits” and enter the dynamic world of evolutionary astrology. In this system, it is your fate to face certain questions and certain possibilities in this lifetime. Beyond that, we have no use for the word “fate” at all. Instead, the power of your magic, your choices, and your intentions takes over, and they are pitted against old karmic reflexes that might otherwise imprison you in looping, dead-end patterns of behavior rooted in unresolved hurts from prior lifetimes. Anyone who has internalized the basic language of astrology –  for example, by reading Steven’s book, The Inner Sky – will be able to benefit from this five-day workshop. Our aim will be to cut through the confusion that naturally arises as we contemplate the myriad of signs and planets and make a bee-line for the holy grail of any astrological counselor – the healing wizard-words that go straight to the client’s heart and ring of pure, liberating truth.

As you can see, it’s a fairly generic description of evolutionary astrology. There is always some spontaneous improvisation in classes such as this as I assess the skill-level of the students. I anticipate it will run deep, and that we will spend most of the time diving deeply into the analysis of specific charts – probably some famous people, and certainly some class members. Five days gives us a lot of breathing room. I’d also say that Omega’s schedule is gentle – long lunches and there’s one half-day in the middle.

My apologies to those of you who are too far away for attendance to be feasible. I certainly understand. There will be no “FCEA credits” given to attendees or anything like that – anything else would be unfair to students who cannot be there. But it will be deep and magical – and I hope I finally have a chance to hug a few of you!

ON ANOTHER NOTE ENTIRELY…

There’s a bit of controversy brewing in the world of traditional astrology. All of this is many miles from how we practice in FCEA, but it may be of some interest to a few of you. Over the past few decades, a lot of interest has arisen in “traditional astrology,” which is a catch-all term for everything practiced from about 200 B.C.E. up through the European Renaissance. Its earliest Greek expressions have been alleged to employ Whole Sign Houses — which means that if Gemini is your Ascendant, then anything in Gemini is in your 1st house, anything in Cancer is your 2nd house, and so on. The system has been popularized and has attracted many younger astrologers.

Along comes Deborah Houlding, a respected traditional astrologer in England. She was the editor of The Traditional Astrologer magazine and is the principal of the School of Traditional Horary Astrology. She’s delivered a talk that’s stirred up a hornet’s nest in the “trad astrology” camp. She alleges that no astrologers actually ever used Whole Sign Houses until these past few decades and that the whole thing is based on a mistranslation of an ancient text.

You can imagine the hoor-rah of a tempest that’s brewing in those teapots! None of this has any relevance to the timed-Ascendant system we employ in evolutionary astrology, but for those of you who are interested in the historical bigger picture, you are invited to read her article, “The Problems of House Division”:

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/houprob_print.html

And here’s a link to her actual talk, which runs about an hour (cost is £5.00):

https://www.astrologicalassociation.com/product/the-sign-the-whole-sign-and-nothing-but-the-sign/

As you’ll see, she is quite a scholar. I wrote to her to congratulate her for her courage. She wrote back that “I never felt so good as I did the moment after that talk was delivered.”