At a technical astronomical level, the basic bones of the system we use in our school emerged gradually in recent centuries, mostly in Europe and the Americas. One very obvious practical point is that before our kind of astrology could develop, we needed clocks. There were crude ones as early as the 14th century, but the widespread knowledge of what time it was came much later. It would be hard to put a date on it; the widespread use of clocks and watches sort of drifted into the zeitgeist – and made our style of astrology, with its carefully-timed Ascendant, Midheaven, and house cusps, possible.

Still, even under the banner of “modern western astrology,” there are many techniques that we don’t use in the FCEA. We do use day-for-year progressions – technically called secondary progressions. There are “primary” ones too, but it’s an awkward technique and I’ve never used it in my practice. Slight errors in birth times make a mess of it. Then there are tertiary progressions and converse progressions . . . vertexes and antiscia . . . and on and on. You get the picture – “modern western astrology” is a grab-bag of techniques, most of which we ignore. 

Sometimes there is talk of “licensing” astrologers. Maybe it will happen someday. You need a license to practice medicine or law or to fly an airplane. Perhaps it’s not such a bad idea. But I cringe when I think of it. Who’s going to decide who’s qualified to be an astrologer? Imagine me going to India and telling all the astrologers there that they flunked the test because they were using the wrong zodiac! I’ve had successful students in my old Apprenticeship Programs fail the test for the American Federation of Astrologers even though I am sure they could dance astrological circles around most of the people testing them. I’d fail most of the tests devised by astrologers in other schools myself. 

The last time I had a professional astrological reading myself was with a Vedic astrologer named Swami Ambikananda. I choose her rather a western evolutionary astrologer just so my own ego wouldn’t get in the way. With techniques closer to my own turf, I would be busy “correcting” anyone who tried to explain my chart to me. But nobody would give me “an astrology license” in Mumbai or Benares, so I was safe. I could put my ego aside and just listen. What I heard was real and helpful.

I’ve often quoted this line from Robert Hand because it’s just so laser-like about getting to the heart of the matter. When asked about which kind of astrology was the right one, he responded,  “Which is truer, French or German?” That’s really how I feel about all of this. These astrologies are all just different languages. You can tell the truth in any of them, or lie in any of them. I respect all of them, at least when they are offered to their communities by wise, loving, non-destructive humans.

So why then would a student in the FCEA who even mentioned whole sign houses immediately be subjected to electro-convulsive shock? 

Well, that’s because we teach a very specific system here – the Steven Forrest Method. I admit I felt a little funny hearing it called that for the first time, but it’s right – that is what we are doing. We’re a Trade School, not a University. We teach my system, not anybody else’s. Emphatically, I would never say that there is only one way to do astrology. All I would say is that the way I have chosen to practice has been very successful. It has helped a lot of people, at least ones who are on a psychological and spiritual wavelength. It’s given me a good living and a meaningful and interesting life. That’s the gift we are trying to pass on in the FCEA. To receive it, we encourage you to start out by following in my footsteps – and we want to make sure that there are no other footsteps in the way to confuse you. And that is really the essence of what I am saying here – if you set out to master all of the various astrological traditions, you could maybe do it, but you would have to live to be about 178 years old. The good news is that maybe fifty years before that, the fog of confusion would begin to clear, and you’d be the wisest, most effective astrologer who had ever lived. Go for it, if you think you’ve got that kind of longevity in you! 

When I was young, I read astrology widely – and of course I became totally bedazzled by the differing perspectives. But the mass of contradictory techniques I had accumulated soon passed through the fire – and by that I mean the realities of the counseling room. Groundless theory expressed authoritatively before an academic audience often has an appallingly long lifespan. But such empty theory quickly collapses in the intimate presence of one glassy-eyed client yawning or saying “no, that’s not me at all.” 

Gradually, over the years, I carved out a system that worked for me and the people I served.  Some of that process involved creativity and innovation on my part, mostly in my efforts to integrate archetypal psychology and metaphysics into the system. The “Steven Forrest Method” would not be what it is without Carl Jung, Ram Dass, and my own root teacher, Marian Starnes. None of them, with the possible exception of Jung, were active astrologers, although they all knew of it and respected it. They, along with some Buddhism, gave me the philosophical foundation I needed. At the technical end, much of what I did was just “editing” – getting rid of techniques that seemed less meaningful, and concentrating on the ones that really delivered. In that process, I had just one guiding question: out of the wealth of techniques we’ve inherited from our astrological ancestors, which ones spoke to me?

So here it is in a nutshell.

The FCEA is designed to take you from zero to mastery as quickly and as efficiently as is humanly possible, without cutting any corners. By “mastery” we mean the ability to sit down with a stranger, even a skeptical one, and have an undeniable, helpful impact on that person. That’s all. We’re not about making any other forms of astrology wrong, but we’re not about teaching you those forms either. What we are about is transmitting one highly effective system of astrological counsel to you without distraction or confusion.

Once you’ve learned the Steven Forrest Method, blessings on your journey wherever it takes you – even if it’s into Jyotish, Cosmobiology, Hellenistic astrology or whatever. Astrology is always evolving, just like you and me. You’ll be part of that journey. I’d love to see what a marriage of Hellenistic astrology and our system might look like. Maybe one of you will someday pull them together.

Whatever you do, just please keep freedom and personal responsibility in the center of it – and, in every word you say, please keep one eye on the higher ground that lies beyond this crazy, tempting, terrifying, and eminently distracting world.

I read a lot of straight psychology during that period, trying to educate myself. Synchronistically, an opportunity arose for me to apprentice myself to a licensed psychotherapist. I’m sure we skirted many laws as I sat with her and a few of her clients, but I certainly learned a lot just by listening. Perhaps most importantly, I knew my limits – if someone’s problems seemed beyond my scope, verging into psychotic or borderline territory, I still had those referrals. I knew who to call and who to recommend. For example, I knew nothing about psychiatric medications – except an abiding belief that it is wrong to give them out like candy to anyone who reports the blues.

I no longer do much of that kind of one-on-one counseling work. The reason is simple: in 2008, I moved to the desert, miles away from any population centers, and so the logistics of any ongoing counseling became impossible. Astrology began to call me more loudly too and in a different way. My “legacy work” began. I realized that I needed to write several more books and, of course, to help establish the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, which, I pray, will keep this holy flame burning after my own physical flame has burned out.

For those of you actively enrolled in our classes, down the road we will come to FCEA 601 – Sacred Counsel. That’s where we will learn to thread the labyrinth that connects evolutionary astrology to the array of human counseling skills that allow us to make a difference in the lives of people who entrust their souls to us,whether it’s for two hours or for a longer time.

We’ll learn about how psychology and astrology can complement each other – and how they also present some seemingly irreconcilable differences. It’s one of my favorite topics, and I think it has a whole lot to do with the future of all the helping professions. That material will essentially be the culmination of our Master Level program, as it should be.

Years ago, in my office in North Carolina, a woman came to sit with me for a birthchart analysis. She was from a very “blue blood” Southern family, held her nose high, and was probably the most argumentative person I’ve ever met in my life. I couldn’t say anything right. All her sentences – most of which were interruptions – started with the word “No.” I endured the misery  for maybe half an hour. Finally I told her that the process was obviously not working between us – that we were “on different wavelengths.” I invited her to leave and of course I mentioned that there would be no charge. It wasn’t like I was angrily “throwing her out of my office.” I was polite – just call me “Mister I’m OK, you’re OK.”

The result was a transformation. She became courteous and receptive. She urged me to continue. By the time our session was over, everything was fine between us. We hugged.

Two take-aways from that story.

Do you talk too much? That’s a Mercury problem. What’s the cure? Learn to listen better. That’s a higher response to Mercury. Everything in the chart is like that. Everything has a double meaning. Everything astrological is a problem and everything astrological is the solution to the problem. What evolutionary astrology does is to chart the path between the low, self-defeating response and the higher ground. Thus we use the ego – and clarify, purify, and strengthen it – in order that it stops hindering us and starts serving the evolutionary needs of the soul.

In the East, the great enemy of the soul’s growth is generally referred to as attachment. In the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the First Commandment is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Strip it of the Bronze Age language, and that commandment is about attachment too. It means don’t let anything become more important to you than surrendering to your own divinity. Keep your spirituality front and center – and don’t let any attachments get in the way.
But what are we attached to? Hint: it’s not always just money, power, and looking hot. What we are attached to are the less conscious responses to each configuration in our charts. We’re not that way out of some innate perversity either – once again, the chart simply holds a mirror before your karmic predicament. It reveals your attachments. There’s nothing to be ashamed of except complacency.

Say you have Mercury in Leo in the 3rd house. Again, let’s say you talk too much, just like that silly Internet astrologer might tell you that you do. What’s actually driving that behavior? A need for attention. What drives the need for attention? An underlying insecurity. There’s the attachment. You were born with it. Maybe through nodal analysis, we can even figure out why you were born with it. But either way, there it is. All your friends can see it. Maybe you can see it too – and if you can’t, maybe an evolutionary astrologer can help you become aware of it.

• Where conventional astrology can actually become an obstacle to spiritual growth is when it implies that you “will always talk too much” because that’s the meaning of that chart configuration. You were born with it, so you are stuck with it. But ask the evolutionary astrologer about the cure. Here’s what you will hear . . .

• Start with Leo – we suggest that you aim to cultivate the generosity of the good king or the good queen. That aspiration motivates you to listen to other people because it would be cheap of you not to grant them that attention – hey, you are the king, after all! You can afford it.

• Then you take the risk of expressing yourself creatively, which means being vulnerable and painstakingly real in what you say.

• That sense of risk generates compassion in you toward others who might be stepping out on the stage in the same risky way. That compassion makes you a better listener.

In all that I just wrote, note the basic fingerprint that distinguishes evolutionary astrology from all the other forms. We just described that 3rd house Leo Mercury as a path rather than as a “trait.” In one simple statement, we define what makes evolutionary astrology different from all the other forms.

• We underscored the fluidity of what we call the personality rather than reinforcing the illusion that it is fixed and stable.

• We turned an attachment into something entirely different – a yoga, or a spiritual discipline, what Buddhists would call a “skillful means.”

If anyone ever accuses you of reinforcing people’s egos with your work, this is where we make our stand. Your chart represents a path, not a personality profile. It’s a path that confronts you with your attachments and offers you a cure for them. And curing them is the essence of everyone’s spiritual journey.

In a nutshell, evolutionary astrology helps you know where to put your foot next on the spiritual path. And if you always have a good answer for that one, you’ll always be doing just fine, on track eventually for Enlightenment. It may be miles away, but at least you are heading in the right direction.

And the alternative to the spiritual path? Actually, there isn’t one.

Example #1

In The Inner Sky, you read that the Ascendant is the “mask we wear.” That’s not a bad way of expressing it, but the trouble is that a mask hides a face and that’s not exactly what the Ascendant does. So you’ll read “mask” in those pages, but in later books, in the videos I’ve made for the school, and in our Q&A sessions, you’ll more often hear me speak of the Ascendant as the “stained glass through which the light of the soul is shining.” That’s a more accurate metaphor –  and I fervently wish that I had thought of it forty years ago when I was writing that book!

Live and learn – and isn’t that the point? Please know that as a student in the FCEA, as you read my books, you’re exposed to a shifting landscape. You have my thinking today, plus my thinking forty years ago, plus all the steps in between. Naturally, you will find some inconsistencies. Hallelujah! If there were none, it would mean that I had learned nothing in four decades.

Example #2

In the Pluto section of The Inner Sky, you’ll read a lot about destiny and finding meaning in your life. I still believe all of that, but I think I’ve probably learned more about Pluto over the past forty years than I have about any other planet. Back then, I still had not fully grasped the nature of the intense inner work Pluto requires – facing our innate woundedness and all of that. I don’t need to repeat it here because you’re hearing plenty about it in courses you are taking. The point is that I didn’t know it when I was writing The Inner Sky, so it’s not there in those pages. I regret that omission. I know it now, but it’s too late to put it in a book that’s already written. Like you, I am a work in progress.

Example #3

In The Inner Sky, I called Pisces “the Face Dancer.” That’s an image taken from the then-popular book, Dune, by Frank Herbert. “Face Dancers” were a race of people who could take on anyone else’s appearance – and that nicely encapsulated one dimension of the sign Pisces. The metaphor worked like crazy for a few years. But then Dune sort of faded from public attention and soon I was spending a lot of time answering emails about what I meant by “Face Dancer.”

Using that culturally-transitory term was a rookie mistake on my part. I’ve learned not to do that in my writing anymore. That’s why in my subsequent books and articles, you won’t see words like  “chicks and dudes” or the more current “do you feel me” –  or “dope” or LOL, OMG, or TTYL. That kind of language may be the cat’s pajamas today and old hat tomorrow – and that sentence sure was fun to write.

Of course, Dune is now back in the form of the Denis Villeneuve film, so maybe my use of Face Dancer will get a lucky reprieve for a few years. Whatever its fate, the term is hard-wired into those unforgiving pages and I have to live with the consequences.

Example #4

In The Inner Sky, I called Sagittarius “the Gypsy.” I’ve occasionally gotten some grief for that, as if I’d somehow insulted Roma people by using the term. Given the folkloric implications of the word “gypsy,” especially here in the USA, it works like crazy for conveying at least one dimension of the spirit of Sagittarius. To me, using the word “gypsy” in this context doesn’t seem any more insulting than  . . . well, calling someone a Sagittarian. But people are sensitized now, and I frequently find myself trying to use more neutral terms, such as “voyager” or “traveler.”

No writer wants to write “plain Vanilla” language, but we all have to pick our battles.

Despite growing up in the times I did, I think I’ve been relatively clean when it comes to racism, sexism, and homophobia. I don’t think there are instances of any of those toxins in the pages of The Inner Sky or any of my other books. I thank divine guidance for that. How would you like to have everything you said forty years ago a matter of public record? The printed page, once printed, does not change or update itself. It is unforgiving.

I used the term “evolutionary astrology” several times in The Inner Sky. My editor at Bantam wanted me to “soft-pedal the spiritual stuff,” but I was already working with the lunar nodes and reincarnation in those days. I snuck a bit of that into the material about John Lennon. He was “the warrior who lost the war,” with his Aries south node in the 12th house. I’m glad it’s there, but I wish there were more of it.

Naturally, back in my salad days, I was working with transits, progressions, and solar arcs. The Inner Sky just wasn’t about them. My thinking about these moving points was already pretty well-established, but I didn’t go to print with it until The Changing Sky in 1986. As you read that book, you’ll also see that I was finally beginning to get clearer about the function of Pluto. I still feel good about what’s in those pages, but there is one big feature of The Changing Sky that has come back to haunt me right here today in the FCEA. That’s The Four Nets. I probably get more questions and requests for clarification about that system than about any other single topic in the entire curriculum of the school.

As you know, the Four Nets were an attempt to establish a kind of formal hierarchy of importance among all the possible transits, progressions, and solar arcs. Without some kind of system, they quickly become overwhelmingly chaotic. In the FCEA, we always emphasize a “first things first” approach – but for people learning the system, knowing how to weigh transiting Saturn conjunct the Sun versus progressed Mars squaring the Ascendant isn’t intuitively obvious. Hence: the Four Nets – they are a rote and mechanical way of at least defining four basic “bins” based on the relative importance of various configurations Those bins come packaged with a big “thou shalt not:” do not worry about the second bin until you’ve gotten the stuff in the first bin figured out.

All in all, I think the Four Nets work pretty well. I think they have proven helpful. But when I was first formulating them back in 1984 and 1985, I still had a lot to learn. Back then, I didn’t fully grasp the importance of the progressed lunar cycle, for example – but a progressed New Moon can stand your life on its head. It’s Net One material, for sure! I didn’t grasp the significance of declination either.

Over the years, The Changing Sky came out in several editions and the Nets were always getting tweaked. Once the book was in its final form by about 1998, I continued to learn. Various handouts of The Four Nets were created over the twenty years or so of my Apprenticeship Program, all of them slightly different.

On top of all of that, there is the practical problem of trying to get the Four Nets to fit on one page. If you set out to make a simple, clear guideline, then you  start over-complicating it, you’ve defeated your own purpose. That’s tough because there are so many nuances to deal with. For example, we read Net One, #3 – “Any progressed planet or Angle (except the Moon) conjunct, square, or opposed to the natal Ascendant, Midheaven, Sun, or  Moon.”

That’s already a mouthful! But by “any progressed planet,” I actually meant any planet that we in fact use in progressions – so no progressed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. That point is clear enough in the text of The Changing Sky, so I didn’t clutter the Four Nets with it. Maybe I should have – we’ve had a lot of questions about it.

The real problem is that The Four Nets are only a guideline, nothing more. They’re kind of like training wheels on your bicycle. They’ll keep you in balance until you learn to ride. And “learning to ride” with transits, progressions, and arcs really depends on gauging the individual power of each planet – with Gemini rising, those Mercury progressions pack more punch than if you have Taurus rising, for example. Lunar people react more strongly to the Moon than do Mercurial people.

We could program a computer with the latest version of the Four Nets and it would mechanically set up a reasonably effective interpretive strategy for you. The point is that with two or three years of experience in our school, you’ll do a better job than that computer ever could. The Four Nets are your launching pad, that’s all – and if they feel a little shaky under your feet sometimes, I think that uncertainty is good mindfulness medicine for you.

I do apologize for any confusion that’s been created by the discrepancies among various versions of the Four Nets! Really, it was inevitable though – and inevitable for a good reason. Forty years has taught me a lot of astrology! It’ll teach you a lot of astrology too. And if you are wise today, think how wise you will be after Venus has spun its mysterious pentangle in your life five more times. Astrology is as infinite as life.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me.