Learning About Lunar Phases

Learning About Lunar Phases in FCEA-301

Dean’s Update, May 2022

Catie Cadge
 
Each month, when I write the Dean’s Update, I take a moment to think ahead and look to see what is on the horizon for the FCEA. Once again, I have this summer’s 300-level Moon course on my mind. I am really looking forward to this particular course. It teaches some core techniques about lunar phases every astrologer needs to know. These are fundamental cards in our astrological hand that we include in every reading with our clients. Why have we waited so long to teach these critical tools we use in evolutionary astrology? Steven and I believe patience is required in order to absorb, reflect, and develop our skill sets. Our advanced students are now ready to take in the rich layer of meaning evident when we consider the lunar phase in chart analysis. And what a rich layer it is!
 

“All aspects are about integration.” —Steven Forrest

 
But there is more to the lunar picture. In addition to learning about and applying interpretation of the phases of the Moon in the natal chart, students also practice working with the progressed lunation cycle, in FCEA 301, The Moon. How can we best speak to the client’s heart in a reading? Where in the progressed lunation cycle, almost three decades in length, is the soul in life’s long journey? The Moon phase by progression captures so well “the mood” of the life at the moment for a client. The sign and house location of the progressed Moon provides the emotional feeling, the core needs and values, while the lunar phase by progression helps us understand possible strategies, ones that are instinctual and attitudinal, for fulfilling these needs. Advanced students already studied the progressed lunar return in FCEA 203, The Biopsychic Script. Now we take on the progressed Moon in all her stages of lunar beauty! Building upon our 200-level curriculum, we hone our practical skills in analysis of the “current sky” to create a full, integrative chart reading.

 
Summer promises to be fun and engaging as we open our minds and hearts in FCEA 301: The Moon. We are excited to run this course on its maiden voyage. We also look forward to eventually sharing lunar wisdom and insight with all FCEA students at the appropriate level of advanced Craftsperson. What progressed lunar phase will you be in at that time? Let’s hope we all bask and shine in the moonlight!
 
Catie Cadge, PhD
May 2022
 

Forty Years Ago…

Steve - in maybe 1979

Forty Years Ago...

Master’s Musings, May 2022

Steven Forrest
Not long from now, some of you will be advancing to FCEA-302. There, in Module 7, we explore the mysterious Venus Pentangle – how every 584 days, a retrograde Venus lines up with the Sun, and how if you plot the sign positions of five of those consecutive “inferior conjunctions,” you’ll see an almost perfect pentangle. It’s one of those tears-in-your-eyes miracles of astrology. I also write about it in Chapter 21 of The Book of Air too, in case you want a preview.

That cycle of five inferior Sun-Venus conjunctions takes almost eight years to complete – actually just two days plus eight hours short of eight years. Repeat it five times, and you’ve got forty years – plus the cycle returns to its starting point.
Bottom line: transiting Venus, even though it’s one of our fast-moving “trigger” planets, also presents us with an eight-year cycle and a forty-year cycle. Five pentangles repeated five times – five times eight years – and we hit reboot and the cycle starts all over again. Anyone can see it’s amazing, but what might it signify?
Of all the courses we’ve created, in many ways that Venus module in FCEA-302 lies closest to my heart. Here’s why. I really don’t know what it means. I have some ideas. They work meaningfully for me personally. In that Venus Pentangle module you’ll be getting to, I present my thoughts and my own hypotheses – but I invite you to explore this strangely beautiful, totally mysterious cycle yourselves. I’m sure that as we put our heads together, I will learn from you. By the time any one of you reaches the 300 courses, you’re getting pretty experienced as an astrologer. I think of you more as a colleague than as a student.
 

I do find it intriguing that even though these Venus cycles have been known for a long time, I’ve never read anything about them that really spoke to my heart. There are no doubt major discoveries and insights that remain hidden.

 
Steve - in maybe 1979
Steve — in maybe 1979
Welcome to May 2022. Forty years ago – one complete “five times five” cycle of Venus – I was busy writing The Inner Sky. Bantam Books had given me the contract and half of my $10,000 advance in August 1981. That was on the strength of a single sample chapter and some fast talking. A few months later, I was earnestly engaged in tapping out the complete text on a manual typewriter. A ream of paper was slowly being transformed into a book manuscript. That was forty years ago – so whatever Venusian seeds were planted then are getting a reboot now. As you get to FCEA302, you’ll see what I mean – that you can “connect the dots” in your life in a very meaningful way by counting out eight-year and forty-year intervals. The eight-year ones are easier to wrap your head around, of course – but forty years completes some kind of mega-cycle.
Here’s the proof of the pudding. We can easily trace the roots of the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology to a 33 year old guy banging away on a manual typewriter in North Carolina in 1982. The publication of The Inner Sky set wheels turning in my life in big ways, both personally and publicly. It doesn’t strain the imagination very much to see a kind of seed-to-flower relationship between me writing my first book and the current emergence of the school. Astrology works in a mechanical way like that, but it also works in deeper ways. So let’s be careful here . . .
There is a natural tendency when we think of cycles to think of repeating patterns – of “history repeating itself.” That’s ultimately a pretty depressing way of viewing life. It’s as if history teaches us nothing – which actually often appears to be the case at a world-history level. Let’s just hope it’s not always the case at a personal level. Even for individuals, the metaphor of the endlessly circling merry-go-round can be sadly accurate sometimes, but only if people miss the point of having experience in the first place. Experience should teach us something. We should be wiser – and thus different – for it. If we get a second look at the same thing, maybe we can react in an unprecedented and creative way. Maybe we’ve learned something from our mistakes. Maybe we can do better.
Let’s replace the cyclical metaphor of the merry-go-round with a helix – like an ascending corkscrew. Hopefully, we are not just going ‘round and ‘round – hopefully, we are also going higher and higher.
 

Here are some examples of exactly that kind of evolution as my own helix completes a 40 year Venus cycle. Watch a pile of typing paper forty years ago morph into an international online school today.

 
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.
 
Steven Forrest
May 2022
 
 
 
 
 

Imagination & the Bigger FCEA Picture

Imagination & The Bigger Picture

Dean’s Update, March 2022

Catie CadgeToday’s third birthday of the FCEA is on my mind as I sit writing my monthly Dean’s Update on March 6th. Happy Solar Return, dear FCEA!
What a year it has been. Jupiter by transit is conjunct the school’s Sun and my ascendant at the moment. Lots of hope is in the air. But I must admit it feels as if there is a lot to meditate upon as well. Our Piscean school still seems fuzzy around the edges at moments. Time to get my Capricorn sleeves rolled up once again and reinforce the FCEA’s solid structure, the firm foundation in what it will take our students to reach completion. Does one ever become a “master”?

 

Strive for something real, a level of achievement, and let perfection be a lifetime journey.  
 
Capricorns are known to be the type to want a strategy, a goal, a clear mountain path to climb. I always tell my sea-goat clients that it might feel good to have a plan or an orderly approach. Get one’s “ducks in a row” so to speak. I think many of you know that Steven Forrest and I are both Capricorn Suns and we both have natal Mercury in Capricorn as well. From the very start of the FCEA, Steven and I worked to make a school curriculum with clear objectives and a structure that made sense. We were always so careful to not push students into material too advanced or confusing. We both have been trying to gradually open classes at one level at a time and to calculate growth in logical and realistic ways.

 

So what is the next step for the Dean in growing our school and supporting our students?

 

 
This spring, Steven and I are organizing our advanced courses at the 300 to 600-level into possible time frames for completion. In other words, we hope to move toward defining the Craftsperson and Master certification, along with developing electives so our students can choose their own best track of study.
Both Jupiter and Neptune, conjunct this spring by transit, are moving through the school’s 11th house and squaring the FCEA natal Jupiter in Sagittarius. We want a mystical school that honors our sacred craft! Some of those “fuzzy edges” have been a necessary part of dreaming our school into being. Imagining a picture of our changing goals and aspirations. Such Piscean windows into our imagination make the dream happen. But now we also need some Saturnian discipline and structure. The months ahead provide a step toward practical planning and building.
Steven and I will meet this April during the “big” conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune in an exact square to our school’s Sagittarius Jupiter in the 7th house. Please wish us luck in creating the BEST degree program in evolutionary astrology—and keep an eye out for our 2022 Course Catalog and Calendar, to be posted by the end of this month!
Long live the FCEA! Happy International Astrology Day, March 20, and many blessings on the vernal equinox!
 
Catie Cadge, PhD
March 2022
 

Building a Professional Practice

Building a Professional Practice

Master’s Musings, March 2022

Steven Forrest
Many of you in the FCEA have no interest in making your living as professional astrologers. A lot of you are here for reasons of simple interest or personal growth. That’s fine – everyone is welcome. But one thing is nearly 100% sure – as word gets out among your friends that you are studying astrology, some of them are going to ask you to have a look at their charts. Before you know it and without even intending it, pretty soon you are at least practicing astrology at a professional level – regardless of whether any money is changing hands.
Where will that process eventually lead? Who knows?
It’s easy to say that the choice is yours, and that is mostly true. But it’s not really quite that simple. As you master evolutionary astrology, you begin to have a kind of spiritual superpower. And with that power comes certain ethical imperatives. If someone is drowning and you are the only person who can swim…well, you see where this is going.
The first time I ever accepted money for an astrological reading was in the summer of 1973. I was 24 years old. A friend was at a turning point in a relationship and asked me to have a look at her chart. I’d been studying astrology as a hobby for about seven years at that point, and had learned the rudiments from a potpourri of mostly-contradictory and generally pretty depressing books. Naturally I had already looked at the charts of many friends and even “sat with them.” But getting paid for it? The whole idea made me nervous. But I did that session with my troubled friend, and she was moved and helped by it, and so she insisted on giving me some money in exchange. I think it was ten dollars – and even though I argued that it was not necessary, I soon enough realized that getting paid in fact was necessary.
 

It wasn’t about paying the bills. The exchange of money completed a kind of energetic circle and allowed both she and me to release any entanglements of imbalance that might have otherwise arisen and instead just bask in the goodness of the experience.

 
Wheels turned. Four years later, I cut my ties to any semblance of a conventional career and embarked on being a full-time astrologer. I’ve told that story before, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that I now had to do a certain number of paid readings per week to keep the famous wolf from the door. I had crossed the line into becoming a professional astrologer and I needed to pay some attention to the practical matter of building my practice.
Only a few times in my life have my inner guides actually spoken plain English in my mind, planting a specific sentence there. This was one of those times. I found the words “say yes to everything” having somehow taken root in my thoughts. I knew what those words meant too – whenever any chance arose anywhere for me to be public about my work, I needed to take advantage of it. Once, for example, I drove 150 miles to speak for free in a bookstore for seven or eight people. That’s the kind of behavior my angels advised. At first I took it to be savvy marketing advice. And it was. But only later did I realize their advice had another dimension to it.
 

Every time I spoke about astrology, whether it was privately to a client or publicly to a “horde” of seven people, I was moving closer to finding my voice. And, really, in the end, that is what building a practice is all about.

 
During that whole period, I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the town where I went to college. All together, I lived there for a little over forty years. By 1984, The Inner Sky had come out and I really could have made my home pretty much anywhere I chose. But I loved Chapel Hill and my community of friends and clients there. I still wasn’t making a whole lot of money, but I was getting by. Here’s a photo of the house where I lived. I had the upstairs apartment.
 

This is where I wrote The Inner Sky and The Changing Sky, right behind that middle upstairs window.

 
Reflecting back on those days, I do think that staying in one place as I did actually helped me build my practice. That’s because there’s no advertising as effective as simple word-of-mouth buzz, and it simply takes time for that famous “Holy Grail” of marketing to reach critical mass. After forty years in Chapel Hill, I almost felt as if I could have run for mayor. It seemed as if I had done astrological sessions with half the population – a big exaggeration of course, but it makes the point. In building a practice, there are big advantages to staying in one place. Word gets around about your work.
Nowadays, the Internet and Zoom have changed the playing field for aspiring professional astrologers. The benefits of remaining in one place long enough to become part of the woodwork are not as stark as they once were. There are “wandering astrologers” whose practices basically exist in cyberspace. That works too! And maybe it suits your desires and your disposition better than putting down deep roots in a single community. If so, go for it. Still, when it comes to soul-counseling, there is something unique about eye to eye human contact.
 
 
A deep, almost familial, bond can develop between astrologer and client, and the precious word-of-mouth advertising that results from it still probably functions most effectively among networks of people concentrated in a single geographic location. If someone hears your name in a positive light, that’s a good thing – but if that same person hears your name independently from six different friends, that’s pure gold. On top of that at a less tangible level,  there’s much to be said spiritually for serving a single community over the years, and there are advantages if that community is local. I know it worked splendidly for me – and that happened long before my books had given me any kind of national profile.
People often ask me about advertising. The conventional wisdom is that ads make the world go ‘round, and I suspect that is true with cars, beer, and politicians. I’m not so sure it’s true with astrologers. In all honesty, I have done very little advertising over the years, so what I say here is speculative and personal. I do know that if I were seeking an astrologer, I would be much more likely to trust the recommendation of a friend who had had a good experience over a glossy ad in a magazine. Choosing an astrologer is closer to choosing a medical doctor or a psychotherapist than it is to choosing a soft drink.
 

 
In the end, there is no substitute for being good at what you do. Getting you there is what the FCEA is all about. Do skillful, helpful readings, and your reputation will grow. That is the bottom line and it is guaranteed. There is no shortage of starving astrologers, but I suspect it says more about the quality of their work than anything else. The actual potential market is vast and still mostly untapped. As most of you know, I’ve had to stop booking clients entirely – I’m in my 70s and my waiting list runs over a decade. I know I am in a unique situation because of my books and my public profile, but you really don’t need to be “famous” to have a vigorous practice.
There are a lot of spiritually hungry people out there who want the kind of guidance that astrology can give without the long-term commitment and often-calamitous expense of psychotherapy. You just need to be good – and along with skill and caring, you need to stay consistently “in one place,” whether it’s actually a city or some niche you have carved out for yourself in cyberspace. Wherever form it takes, you need to be there long enough for people to become aware of you and start telling their friends how much you helped them.
That’s all it takes.
Plans are still vague, but we do intend that as we come to the Masters Level of the school, we’ll have an elective course in building a professional practice. My first thought is that we’ll bring in some successful astrologers and let them tell their stories.
 
Steven Forrest
March 2022
 
 
 
 
 

Annual Summit

FCEA Annual Summit Master’s Musing Adventures in Promotion February 13, 2022 Adventures in Promotion Master’s Musings, February 2022 We were all happily surprised when the FCEA got off to such a successful start in its first year. Our classes were full, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…. January 14, 2022 Long Ago, In a Galaxy […]

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Tutor Training

Tutor Training Program

Overview

This page describes the criteria and process of becoming a tutor with the FCEA. Start by reading the article Becoming a Tutor on the right side of this page. Participation in the program is by invitation only. Completion of the program does not guarantee employment with the FCEA.

Criteria

This section includes the criteria for those who are eligible to participate in the training program. Review each of the criteria below. At this point we will not be making exceptions to this criteria.

Click on the plus (+) sign for details

You MUST have participated in Steven’s previous Apprenticeship Program. You must have achieved at least a level II certificate, Masters certificates given priority.

You must have an active evolutionary astrology practice for the past 2+ years. In that practice you have performed at least 50 readings.

You must be actively continuing your astrological training through participation in conferences, meetups, webinars or other online events.

You have an active online presence showing the nature of the astrological work you offer. Includes web site, blogs, newsletters, articles, presentations or other social media.

You are currently or in the past have experience teaching courses. Bonus if you have taught online or an astrology course.

Process

This section describes the process we will be using to select candidates for our tutor training. Completion of the training does not guarantee employment with the FCEA.

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Review the criteria in the section above to ensure you meet the minimum requirements to apply for the training.

Complete the online application, button below. Includes a 250 word essay on why you want to become a tutor.

You will be notified of receipt of your application and the next steps.

Participate in a 30 minute interview with the FCEA staff.

Committment

This section describes the expectations of participants in the program. You agree to participate in the following activities for the duration of the program.

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Attend the online weekly tutor training call. Calls will be recorded for later viewing.

Complete the FCEA Competency courses as a demonstration of evolutionary astrology knowledge. This includes completing the 103, Chart Reading Practicum, demonstrating your interpretation skills.

Shadow participation in the 101, 102 and 103 courses. Learning the course content and online training platform.

Working with an FCEA teacher you will act as a tutor for a group of students to develop and demonstrate your tutoring skills.

Apply

Announcement

Welcome to the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology

 Evolutionary Astrology for Personal Growth or Career

The following videos will tell you how Steven Forrest came to be an astrologer, what it’s like to have a career as an astrologer and our plans for the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology

Join us on this journey

 

Steven's Inspiration

My career as an astrologer began in my 20’s, yet the seeds were planted much earlier. Here’s my story, maybe you’ll be inspired as I was.

Becoming a Professional Astrologer

As I sit here, looking back at a career that’s spanned over 40 years it has been an honor and privilege to support thousands of people in their evolutionary growth.

If you feel the calling, the FCEA is for you.

Learn about the FCEA

In this video Jeff Parrett (president) interviews Catie Cadge (dean) and Steven Forrest about the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology.