Blog

The bloody horror of the Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival and the ongoing bloodbath that followed it in Gaza – everyone with a heart or a soul is watching this nightmare unfold with disbelief. And of course there’s Ukraine and the seemingly endless, mindless brutality happening there. Then there’s the July 23rd headline from US News, “Six Months. 28 Mass Killings in the U.S.” Every idiot who wants one seems to have an AR-15, and nobody is safe to go bowling anymore and the kids are afraid to go to school – all because our great great great grandparents had single shot muskets, or something like that.

What’s going on? Why is everything so crazy? Astrologically, it’s a tough, multi-dimensional question. Certainly Pluto’s last gasps in Capricorn have a lot to do with it.

But then there are sunspots . . .

Read more

On November 7 at 9:36 AM-PDT, the Sun hits exactly 15 degrees of Scorpio. That might not sound exactly earth-shaking, but if you were a Druid, it would be a really big deal. Actually, you might still be in bed recovering from the previous evening’s festivities – more about that point in a little while.

Most traditional cultures were very aware of the Summer and Winter Solstices. The noon-day Sun would have reached its highest or lowest point in the sky. The days would start getting longer or shorter. All that is fairly obvious even to a casual observer, so our ancestors figured it out long ago in prehistory. I suspect that knowledge of the Equinoxes came a little bit later – again, no one knows the date because it all happened such a long time ago, but noticing that night and day were of equal length and that the Sun now rose or set due east or due west seems slightly less self-evident than the “return of the light.” 

Anyway, those four points – the two Solstices and the two Equinoxes – became the skeleton of the yearly calendar in every culture, not to mention the basis of the western Zodiac. They divided the year into four quarters – what we came to call the four seasons. Pretty much universally around the world, those four transition points were marked by festivals. Whether that was to please the gods and goddesses, or just because people like parties, is hard to say. 

Read more

We’re in the midst of the epochal, but painfully languorous, entrance of Pluto into Aquarius. We know it will change the world – Pluto’s sign changes always do – but please don’t hold your breath. The process won’t be complete until Pluto finally kisses Capricorn goodbye on November 19, 2024, a little over one year from now. And that will only be the beginning – Pluto won’t be done with Aquarius until January 2044.

Those of you who have been following Pluto’s patchwork transition know that it has already been in Aquarius once. That was for just 39 days, starting on March 23rd, 2023, whereupon it retrograded back into Capricorn, where it remains today. But on October 10th, Pluto turns direct and heads for the Aquarian frontier again. It crosses the line on January 20th – only to return once more into Capricorn on September 1, 2024 before definitively entering Aquarius 78 days later.

The push-pull you can feel in that long recitation of dates is not just happening up in the sky – it’s happening here on Earth too. “As above, so below” strikes again. The back-and-forth in the heavens is echoed here on planet Earth.

Read more

Following are some keywords and concepts about the fourth house to help unlock your creative exploration of your own - or others' - fourth house placements.

The Fourth House: Key Concepts

Key Words and Concepts: Roots ♥ Bonded Relationships ♥ Radical Commitment ♥ Hero & Shadow ♥ Family ♥ The Homeland ♥ Living Under One Roof ♥ The Innermost Self ♥ The Presence of the Ancestors ♥ A Sense of Place ♥ Absolute Loyalty ♥ The Urge to Nurture and Protect ♥ Ancestors

Critical Questions . . .

• The meaning of "family" is changing—what does it signify to you today?
• Where is your natural family, and what do you mean by the term?
• What are the characteristics of your natural home?
• To what inner archetypes must you remain true if you are to maintain contact with your own soul—or truly share it with someone else?
• What ancestors watch over you, in any sense? How do you honor them?
• Where, physically and geographically, do you return for renewal?
• Where and how must you surrender to the trans-rational voice of your soul—or lose contact with it?

• We are the only species in history that has ever forgotten how to mate.
• A house is not a home.
• One of us will go to the other one’s funeral
• All the truly important decisions of life must be made irrationally.

Reflection Questions

If you're studying astrology, consider the following "essay questions" for further reflection:

We are living in the only historical period in which bonded kinship ties of marriage and DNA do not define us and protect us—good news or bad?

We are living in a historical period in which people routinely move away from home, kinship, and friendship for their careers—good news or bad?

- Steven Forrest

On Friday evening, May 26, in Seattle, I presented a keynote talk. The title of my talk was one of my favorite subjects – “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality.” We’ve put the talk up on Youtube. You can watch it here:

https://youtu.be/tbyFL8-RhGU

Thinking back, maybe I should have titled this keynote address “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality (or trying to.) It’s not always easy!

In my twenties, I wrote my first astrology book – one that never saw print. It was basically a statistical study attempting to prove astrology in a scientific way. If you’re interested, I spoke of it in a bit more detail during the keynote. I bring it up here because one of my (many) rejection letters from publishers contained a line that I’ve been wrestling with ever since: “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric and I suspect it will remain that way.”

Yikes! Do we actually “resemble that remark?” Sad to say, the answer is often yes. There’s no shortage of silly ego-flattery in pop astrology – telling people what they want to hear and neutralizing any desire in them to improve themselves. Often such astrology encourages people to blame their problems on everyone else or on their “bad aspects.” In every case, it’s “me, me, me” – and that’s the definition of egocentricity.

Read more

As August opens, the Sun is in mid-Leo faithfully advancing about one degree per day. Meanwhile, Venus is retrograde, having made a station near the end of Leo back on July 22nd. That means that the Sun is going forward and Venus is going backwards and that they’re locked on a collision course. The two finally come together in a conjunction on August 13th. That happens in 20 degrees 28 minutes of Leo. After that, Venus will continue to move backwards until September 3rd, forty-three days after turning retrograde. By that time, the Sun will be well into Virgo. 

Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.

Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.

Read more

On July 12, the Moon’s Mean north node, always retrograde, leaves Taurus and backs into Aries. That means that the south node will cross into Libra at the same time. They’ll occupy those two signs until January 28, 2025 when the nodal axis shifts into Pisces and Virgo. As ever, they’ll leave an indelible stamp on the headlines – and on your own life too.

Here’s a quick review for anyone who’s not been studying evolutionary astrology for very long. The Moon’s nodes are really the heart of the system. The south node represents unresolved karma that has ripened – that means that it’s time to deal with it. The good news is that you are ready. Meanwhile, the north node suggests a powerful, effective antidote to those old, outdated south node patterns. Here’s where it gets sticky – that south node behavior comes up pretty much automatically, while reaching the north node always takes serious effort.

Read more

Rumors of a new world order emerging due to Pluto’s passage into Aquarius have been exaggerated – at least for now. For one thing, the Lord of the Underworld is now abandoning Aquarius (which it only entered on March 23) and returning to Capricorn, where it’s been stirring up chaos since 2008. That reentry happens this month, on June 10. Once back in Capricorn, Pluto will actually remain there for the rest of the year. We’re not out of the Capricorn woods yet, in other words.

On October 10, after four months, Pluto reverses course and turns direct, but it’s still in Capricorn when that happens. It only reenters Aquarius on January 20 of the coming year. 

Even then, we’re still not in the clear. On September 1, 2024, Pluto crosses briefly back into Capricorn a second time. That will only be a quick goodbye kiss – just forty days later, it enters Aquarius solidly. After that, it won’t be finished with Aquarius until early 2044 – and it won’t touch Capricorn again until February 28, 2254. 

Read more

The Covid pandemic changed everyone and everything. Who can doubt the idea that as years go by, memory will turn the pandemic into one of those “January 1, 1 A.D.” kinds of dates – pivot-points in history, like the birth of social media or Beatlemania. I never caught Covid myself, but I’m no exception when it comes to my life being “pivoted” by it – for one thing, pre-Covid, I was on the road non-stop for forty years. It’s a crazy way to live. After Covid, my passport has cobwebs forming on it and the Transportation Security Agency has barely crossed my natural boundaries in three years.

The roots of these changes in my lifestyle actually go back a little further than Covid. Late in the previous decade I saw Pluto and Saturn bearing down on conjunctions with my Sun, plus the progressed Moon about to enter my 12th house. Many astrologers would have suggested that Fear might have been my best strategy, but that’s not how I live with the planets – I feel that  they’re up there to guide me, not to scare me. I saw that to head off danger, I needed to make some changes. I was turning seventy. Maybe it was time to travel less. The planets asked me that question – I answered it in my own way with a big Yes.

At that time I had half a dozen apprenticeship programs going around the world, each one meeting once or twice per year. I took those responsibilities seriously, so I gave a couple years’ notice on ending them. Around the same time, with Catie Cadge and Jeff Parrett, I began to lay the groundwork for my online school – the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology. In January 2020, I did my last public program before the Plague struck – it was a synastry class in Palm Springs, California. We had over a hundred people signed up – and something like thirty of them dropped out, many citing “the flu.” That was my first inkling of what was to come.

Read more

It was November 1966. I was sweet seventeen and lying in bed recovering from a tonsillectomy. Transiting Neptune was one degree from my Ascendant. One effect of that transit was that I’d just had my first and only experience of knock-out anesthesia. Another far more important one was that I was about to discover serious astrology.

As I lay there in my bed nursing my sore throat, my Scorpio mom came in and asked me if she could get me a book to read. I asked her for an astrology book. I think she was a little surprised, but she didn’t have a problem with that – I was blessed with an open-minded family. A couple hours later, she returned with a paperback. It was silly Sun Sign astrology aimed at the sorts of teenagers who weren’t destined for careers in rocket science. I won’t name the book because I try to avoid blaspheming against other astrological authors, but it was truly terrible. I devoured it anyway. I could tell that there was something real going on behind the obvious pandering and stupidity. If I were a fish, I’d have been toying with the worm, not quite sure if I was actually going to chomp down on it.

Read more