Normally I write two different newsletters each month, one for this website and one for my school. (If you want to keep up with my work at the FCEA, here’s the link: forrestastrology.center.) What follows is a modified version of a school newsletter that appeared a week or so ago. In terms of our understanding of the genesis of evolutionary astrology, this essay feels significant enough that I want to maximize its exposure – that’s why I am breaking with my usual pattern and publishing it on both platforms.

“I always do what the voices in my head tell me what to do.” That’s become a familiar gag line. I don’t want to recommend psychosis as a lifestyle, but recently while rereading Carl Jung’s biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was struck by how much emphasis he puts on trusting cues from the unconscious mind even when they don’t seem to make any rational sense. There’s one such cue that has tugged at me persistently for much of my adult life. It’s the feeling that as I’ve been developing the methodology of evolutionary astrology as I practice it and teach it, that what I was experiencing was more like a process of remembering than one of me actually inventing anything. 

There’s a problem though – ostensibly, what we call evolutionary astrology only dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. I was born in 1949. How could I have been “remembering” something that hadn’t been invented yet?

Last May, I taught a class in Athens, Greece, primarily for students in my school. There were many signs and omens that I had some unresolved karma with that country so I approached the trip with some nervousness. I don’t want to be too personal in this essay, but if you want the deep background, go to forrestastrology.center and search for one of my “Master’s Musings” blogs from June 2025 called “What Greece Meant To Me.” The upshot is that there is much indirect evidence from various sources that, in a prior lifetime, I was a Gnostic Christian in that region of the world in the first or second centuries, C.E. 

True or not, the problem still remains: how could I have experienced anything like evolutionary astrology almost two thousand years ago? At first there seems to be no rational support for such a notion. But as strange as it may seem, I have come to believe that a Gnostic in the Roman Empire culture of the second century C.E. would actually find much that was familiar in the work that we contemporary evolutionary astrologers are doing today, at least at the philosophical level.

WHAT EXACTLY IS GNOSTICISM?

Say NOSS-ta-siz-im, by the way – the “G” is just there to confuse everyone.

Cards on the table: I should start by saying that what I intend to write about here puts me on shaky ground in many ways. My one leg to stand on is that I did earn a degree in Religion from the University of North Carolina in 1971, and I studied Gnosticism there under Dr. John Schutz. But I am not an academic scholar and so in writing about this vexingly complex, ambiguous subject I am already skating on thin ice. 

An even more basic problem is that the word “Gnosticism” itself is very slippery. It’s a relatively modern label for a diverse set of beliefs that existed around the Mediterranean basin at about the same time that Christianity was arising. Importantly, many Gnostics were astrological in their thinking – but then again many were not. Gnostics were generally Christian, but not all of them were. Many, but not all of them, accepted reincarnation. Eventually, as Christianity became more institutionalized, Gnosticism was even declared a heresy – still, there are some clear traces of it in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John.

As exotic as that ancient history might sound, there are actually striking parallels between those faraway times and the world of modern pop spirituality. Think of one of those shops where you can buy crystals, incense, and Tibetan singing bowls. Think of the books on the bookshelf. They are diverse – as diverse in fact as what was being passed around the Mediterranean world almost two thousand years ago. Today in such a shop, you might for example find a volume that advocates thinking only positive thoughts sitting next to Steven Forrest’s The Book of Pluto. A couple of millennia ago, the Roman Empire – and early Christianity – were in very similar states. Then, as now, there was no Holy See to declare what was true and what was heretical. (OK, we do have a Holy See nowadays, but it lacks the punishing authority it once had.) There wasn’t even an official Bible – the Bible as we know it today was only assembled about two hundred years later, near the end of the 4th century. And of course the traditional Roman gods and goddesses still had their temples and their devotees. What about Sol Invictus – a religion that very nearly filled the space that Christianity came to fill once the dust settled? Zoroastrianism, anyone? They were all there, all active. 

Gnosticism arose in that cultural matrix and itself reflected much of that complexity. For everything we might say about it, there are counter-currents and exceptions. In preparing this essay, I’ve been reading and rereading the historical literature. I’ve learned that when it comes to Gnosticism, serious academics are all over the map on the subject. There are even frequent arguments about whether a given text is in fact Gnostic or not. 

The point is that it would be wise to take everything that I am about to write as a broad impressionistic approximation. For clarity’s sake, I’m also going to leave out a lot of really interesting material – for one example, the way Gnostics were generally much more egalitarian on gender issues compared to many of the early “church fathers.”

Before I dive in, let’s also remember that astrology was everywhere two thousand years ago. What we now know as Hellenistic astrology had exploded. Personal horoscopes were being drawn. And nobody had Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto in their chart – Saturn marked the limits of the known solar system. That’s a fact that will soon become pivotal in our understanding. 

THE GNOSTIC WORLD VIEW

Long ago, human souls fell from a realm of Light – called the Pleroma – into the realm of darkness and matter. Here in this fallen world there is only suffering, pain, and disappointment. The divine spark of our souls is imprisoned in materiality and blinded by it. We mistake ourselves for flesh and bone. Our only hope lies in remembering our true natures and finding our way back to the long-lost realm of Light. At the heart of that remembering was something called gnosis. Often translated as “knowledge,” it represents far more than book learning. Gnosis was something closer to a direct experience of our transcendent natures. You could call it enlightenment. 

So far, we are in familiar mystical territory. 

In Gnostic cosmology, there is an ultimate divinity called the Monad – the term translates neatly as “The One” or even as “Oneness.” For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave out the mythology – suffice to say that through a terrible error, another “god” was created. This was the evil Demiurge – often named Yaldabaoth. He created the material world into which human souls fell and were imprisoned. Worse, he tricked us all into thinking that he, not the Monad, represented the ultimate reality.

In the astrological versions of Gnosticism, the demiurge is identified with the planet Saturn. The lost realm of light lies out beyond Saturn, while the material realm of darkness lies within its orbit. 

Here’s the heart of the matter. This dark Demiurge created an evil masterpiece: he convinced humanity that he – not the Monad – was the ultimate god. But emphatically he is not the Monad – he is an imposter and a fake. Like Saturn’s lower expressions, he is a heavy-handed law giver. He judges. He demands worship. He punishes disobedience. He loves to say “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” And by convincing us that materiality is our true nature, he stands between us and the Light, blinding us to its very existence. 

• One of the many reasons that Gnosticism was declared a heresy is that it often equated the Biblical Yahweh or Jehovah with Yaldabaoth, thus framing the entirety of what we came to know as the Old Testament in a distinctly non-canonical light. In Gnosticism, the “God of our Fathers” essentially became equated with Satan.

As souls tumbled down into the material realm under the whip of the Saturnian Demiurge, they first fatally fell prey to Saturn’s illusion that material reality is the only reality – that there is nothing beyond Saturn, in other words. Think of the first Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In the Gnostic context, those words might give us all chills. That’s Yaldabaoth speaking, not the Monad.

Then as humanity’s fall continued, we absorbed all the bad, soul-blinding qualities of each planet. Jupiter gave us pride and gluttony. Mars gave us rage and violence. Venus gave us lust. Mercury tricked us into thinking we lived in our heads. The Moon made us lazy, timid, and moody. The Sun made each of us believe that we were the center of the universe – it gave us egotism, in other words.

The final result? Here we sit in this degraded condition, hopeless cases – unless gnosis ignites within us and we begin to awaken to our true natures and head back up to the Pleroma, the realm of the true God, the Monad. 

How do we accomplish that ascent? Instead of taking on the negative qualities of each planet, we evolve upwardly through them, struggling to take on their positive qualities. The Sun gives us energy and faith in ourselves, the Moon gives us the ability to care for others. Mercury gives us alertness and the desire to learn. Venus teaches us love. Mars gives us courage – and perhaps a selfless willingness to give our lives for others. Jupiter fills us with healthy pride. And even Saturn – evil Yaldabaoth – finally gives us the spiritual discipline we need to find the Pleroma where it’s been hiding all along, deep in our own eternal essence.

PERSPECTIVE

Let me reiterate that Gnosticism was extremely diverse. There can be no coherent summary of Gnosticism that does not grievously over-simplify everything, as I have doubtlessly done here. You could find Gnostics who believed everything that I just wrote and Gnostics who would argue with most of it. In fact, if you had a time machine and went back to the Holy Lands in the second century C.E. and started looking around for a “Gnostic” to interview, you would not have found anyone who answered to that label. As we have seen, the word itself didn’t even exist back then – it was first invented by an English philosopher named Henry More in the 17th century, then taken up by 19th and 20th century historians of religion. 

In writing this essay, I’ve drawn on several sources, including the Nag Hammadi scrolls which were discovered in Egypt in 1945 and which vastly multiplied the number of Gnostic texts to which scholars had access. In case you want to pursue any of this more deeply, I’ll list the three best books I found at the end of this essay. I also owe a great debt to Robert Hand who delivered a terrific talk at a NORWAC banquet some years ago in which he covered similar territory. He ended that talk with a memorable meditation, taking us all upward through the planetary spheres.

THE ROOTS OF EVOLUTIONARY ASTROLOGY?

The essential philosophical parallels between Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology are striking:

• Both systems are unabashedly metaphysical and they are both based on an astrological model of the evolution of consciousness. 

• In both systems, the astrological symbols have dark sides and higher meanings. How we embody them is up to us. With “gnosis,” we can get them right. Without it, we are eaten up by the traps they set for us.

• As we trace the pattern of increasingly positive responses to each planet, we see the outline of a systematic evolutionary path leading step-by-step toward something in the category of Heaven, Enlightenment, or Salvation. 

• Again as in both Gnosticism and evolutionary astrology, one lifetime is not long enough for anyone to make the journey to full gnosis. The idea of reincarnation solves that. 

Who knows how Gnostic astrologers were working two thousand years ago? Was personal astrology part of their practice? If so, in helping people reach toward the Pleroma, did they have specific advice for someone whose Mercury was in Cancer and the third house? To my knowledge, there are no surviving records of any of that. Perhaps they were lost. Perhaps they never existed. I’ve not studied Hellenistic astrology myself, at least not in a deep way. Maybe someone immersed in that field such as Chris Brennan or Demetra George would be aware of connections of which I am unaware. 

Concerning all of that, one striking thought has been pressing at me ever since many of us in the school made our pilgrimage to Greece in May 2025. I mentioned it at the beginning of this essay. Fifteen years ago, in composing the concluding chapter of my book Yesterday’s Sky, I wrote these words:

I cannot prove what I am about to say, but my intuitive feeling in developing the principles that underlie this book was more one of remembering something than of creating it. I believe that the knowledge of most of these principles existed in the past. To be sure, there is no recorded precedent in astrological history for these particular techniques. From any academic astrological perspective, they are new. For whatever their worth, they were clearly created by a group of astrologers, mostly in America, over the past generation or two. But my guts tell me to question that.

Now, in reflecting on Gnosticism and putting two and two together, I am finally finding some concrete, academic support for what was only a gut feeling fifteen or twenty years ago. Is evolutionary astrology in fact that old? Or perhaps even older? Were the first evolutionary astrologers actually Gnostics? Maybe it ultimately depends on how we define both terms. In any case, humans have been using the map the planets provide to help souls find their way home for a long, long time. Gnostics did it. We do it. And who knows where the Gnostics got the idea? Egypt? China? Atlantis? 

All of us who practice evolutionary astrology can be proud to be part of that ancient lineage. We’re links in a long, sacred chain – a chain that is only growing stronger during our time in the world. 

Are we the new Gnostics? You decide

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. Second, enlarged edition, 1963.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels, 1989.

Rosicrucian Digest. Gnosticism, Volume 11, #2, 2011

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