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New Introduction to The Night Speaks
This is an excerpt of the new introduction for the 2016 reprint edition of The Night Speaks
Which one of your kids do you love the most? Anyone who actually answers that question obviously has no future in politics. In a similar way, authors, down the road in their careers, are often asked which of their books is their favorite. The stakes are lower, but the dilemma is the same. Books are like your kids.
by Steven Forrest
At the big International Society for Astrological Research (ISAR) conference in California this past October, a panel of astrologers predicted who would win the U.S. presidential election. None picked Donald Trump. Their calculations suggested a Clinton victory, just as the majority of pollsters had predicted.
As they say, “the rest is history.” The astrologers on the panel, along with the majority of pollsters, got it wrong.
This was not a glorious day for our craft. One vitriolic internet article trumpeted, “Astrologers Were Wrong About the 2016 Election, Casting Serious Doubt on Their Predictive Abilities.” The piece opened with the lines, “Astrology is bullshit. But for some reason, many Americans still believe that astrologists have the ability to predict the future.”
For my teaching programs, 2017 brings a “new year” of a different sort too. This month, on January 10, the Apprenticeship Program completes exactly one cycle of the lunar nodes. On that day, the Moon’s north node returns to 5° 35' Virgo – exactly where it was when the whole thing got started.
Reasonable people would give me blank looks and cross the street if I stood on a corner shouting, “A nodal return, a nodal return!” But for anyone who has studied the basic methodology of evolutionary astrology, we understand that the lunar nodes are about as central to the system as your third lumbar vertebra is to your back. We could not do evolutionary astrology without them.
by Steven Forrest I keep seeing damaging, stupid, evilly-intended misinformation all over the internet about how astrology is wrong, with the idea that "you were not born under the sign you think you were" because there is a "13th sign."...
Santa Claus is being good to me this year. I am getting a gift that I have wanted for a very long time – my fourth book, The Night Speaks, which has been unavailable for many years, is coming out again in a revised, updated edition. I am delighted to see it in print again.
Much of my writing over the years has been aimed at people who wanted to learn astrology. The Night Speaks serves that community, but even more, it is a book about why to do astrology – and, perhaps at an even deeper level, why to believe in it. It is, in other words, a book for anyone with an open mind and a mild interest in astrological possibilities. I think it also would make a fine, if somewhat subversive, gift for anyone who loves an astrologer, but who has not the foggiest idea what he or she thinks or does.
