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Steve here – just a word before I surrender my monthly podium to my old friend and long-time student of evolutionary astrology, Vernon Robinson. February brings us to Black History Month and that’s something we always celebrate here at Seven Paws Press. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to do that than to just get out of the way and let a wise son of the African Diaspora reflect astrologically on the life of a Black man, not to mention, spiritual giant who has been like yeast in the bread of American culture since before I was born. 

The inspiration for this article came from me viewing the documentary Quincy on Netflix and checking on the synastry between Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. These two geniuses were lifelong friends, having met in Seattle when Q was only fourteen and Ray was sixteen. As you’ll soon see, I found many interesting synastry connections with people who were important musically in Quincy’s life. 

Steven told me that Quincy was one of his musical heroes, so I decided to show him what I’d found. We both agreed that this would be the perfect way to celebrate Black History Month. Icing the cake, Quincy will be turning ninety in March of this year.

This article will include a look at a few important moments in Quincy’s life which are reflected in his birth chart, but my main focus will be the synastry between him and not only Ray Charles, but also Count Basie, Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, all of whom had major impacts on Quincy’s musical career and life, and vice versa.

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Asteroids are fascinating, but in truth I don’t use them much in my own astrological practice. It’s not because I don’t “believe in them” or anything like that – their effects are quite demonstrably real. The reason is simply that the “big” planets keep me busy enough. In all professional astrological work, there is always a balance that needs to be struck between the number of points an astrologer will have time to discuss in a counseling session versus having mercy on the client’s attention span and energy. It simply takes me so long to do justice to the message of the major planets that I’ve rarely had time to add asteroids to the menu.

Then there’s the minor problem of there being about a million of them! Last I heard, something like 14,000 of them even had names. To avoid being overwhelmed, many astrologers who use asteroids limit themselves to what are often (erroneously) called “the big four.” They’re not actually the biggest, they’re just the first four to be discovered – Vesta, Ceres, Juno, and Pallas. Hygiea is actually more massive than Juno by far and, if size matters, it should be in that quartet instead. Juno just happened to be the third one to be discovered, but it only squeaks into the Top Twenty as “heavyweights” go.  

The more massive an asteroid is, the more powerful it is astrologically? That tempting notion makes a degree of intuitive sense, but I doubt it’s true. That’s because astrological experience teaches us otherwise. Pluto’s mass, for example, is relatively tiny – only about one 400th the mass of Earth – and vastly less than Jupiter or Saturn. Yet woe betide the astrologer who ignores Pluto! 

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On December 21, my online school, the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, will reach its second birthday. We’re thriving and growing. We’ve got about 200 students, several tutors, and a couple of hardworking staff people. Our Dean, Dr. Catie Cadge, is putting in long hours surfing the inevitable waves of chaos stemming from the daily running of the school. Meanwhile, I’ve made 250 teaching videos, and written quite a lot of new material for the curriculum. I also do monthly Zoom “Q & A” events for the students and drop in on some of the classes from time to time, so I’m staying busy and engaged too. 

The school may be about teaching “the Forrest method,” but its operations are not really centered on me personally. Tutors carry most of the teaching load. And they’re great – all of them have studied intensively with me, and all of them are warm-hearted, caring, and wise. Right from the beginning, I wanted to make sure that the FCEA would become an institution which could live on beyond me. I also wanted to make sure that it felt warm and human despite being conducted online. That’s where our team of tutors comes in – they’re constantly interacting with the students.

We still feel like the school is very much in start-up mode. Being nominated for “Favorite Astrology School” in the awards ceremony at the big ISAR conference in Denver in late August was a happy surprise – not that it was so surprising that we were nominated, but that it happened so soon. We’ve not really done much publicity.

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Everything revolves around the Sun. I have always delighted in that phrase. Long ago, half-legendary Hermes Trismegistus crystallized the entirety of astrological theory in four simple words – “As above, so below.” Saying that everything revolves around the Sun embodies that Hermetic principle perfectly.  

• Above, in the sky, the Sun is the gravitational center of the solar system. 

• Here below, on earth, it is the gravitational center of your head. 

On both levels, the Sun’s job is to hold the planets in their courses – and by “the planets in your head,” we mean all your contradictory, paradoxical needs, drives, and values. Being human is complicated.  We’re pulled in so many directions, torn between appetites and integrity, pleasure and productivity, and so on. Still, you get out of bed in the morning and you have a sense of who you are. You have an identity. There is reasonable continuity in your life. That’s the Sun at work, with its “gravity” coalescing you into one reasonably coherent whole.

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Like most astrologers, I tend to be in awe of Pluto and Neptune as they make their stately, slow-motion passages through houses, signs and aspects. In doing that they illuminate the broad symphonic development of our lives over years and decades. With experience, we soon learn that they can knock us for a loop, sending us out of one relationship and into another, or into a new career, or off to live in a different part of the world. We can say the same for the other slow-moving planets – Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter – as well as all of the progressions and solar arcs.

Heading sunward toward the center of the solar system from the august realms of the outer planets, we cross the asteroid belt and enter a far more frenetic zone. Like a carousel that's drunk one more cup of coffee than it should, Mars, Venus, and Mercury zoom frantically around the Sun – and around our charts. They’re powerful triggers, but what they actually trigger are those bigger developmental themes that were signaled by the slow moving bodies. Right there, we see one of the bedrock practical principles of working with planetary transits: the distinction between the fast bodies and the slow ones, so beautifully punctuated by the asteroid belt.

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Development-over-time astrology – the kind of astrological work some people call “predictive” – has a lot of moving parts. Transits, progressions, and solar arcs are enough to keep most of us busy, both as astrologers as we try to keep track of them, and even more so simply as human beings as we live them. In every chart, there’s always a lot going on all the time, in other words – too much really for the human mind to collate. Part of the art of surfing these waves of astrological complexity lies in taking a “first things first”  approach – don’t sweat the small stuff until you’ve sweated over the big stuff. And when it comes to the big stuff, there’s nothing bigger than the progressed Sun.

The progressed Sun is the Evolving Self. As it moves through the chart, ever so slowly the lessons of life make it through our thick skulls and become part of what we are. We change at the most fundamental level.

Of all the things the progressed Sun can do, the most important ones are when it switches from one sign to another or from one house to another. A close second would be when it forms a conjunction with a natal planet, followed down the “poker hands” of the rest of the aspects. Any one of these events is virtually guaranteed to change the direction of your life. 

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Many of you reading or hearing these words 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 – if 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 probably without even intending it, pretty soon you are practicing astrology. 

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 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.

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As July opens, the Moon’s north node lies at just under 20 degrees of Taurus. By the end of the month, it has retrograded (the Mean nodes are always retrograde) to just over 18 degrees of Taurus. That’s a swing of about 1 degree 35 minutes.

Do you have any particular astrological sensitivity to those degree areas – say, the Sun in 19 degrees of Scorpio (an opposition) or the Moon in 19 degrees of Aquarius (the square)? If so, is the karmic wave about to break for you? Is something huge and fated about to happen?

Maybe. Maybe not. Read on.

Every 18.5997 years – that is just a little over every eighteen years, seven months –  the  transiting nodal axis completes one cycle through the Zodiac. The south node returns to zero degrees of Aries, in other words. Another way to express this is that the lunar nodes spend about a year and half passing through each sign. 

In my experience, don’t count on these nodal transits to correlate reliably with anything big. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’ve seen them pass pretty much unnoticed and I’ve seen them rock people’s’ worlds. For an example of the latter, Will Smith’s natal Moon lies in 21 degrees 8 minutes of Scorpio. When he lost his temper and hit Chris Rock at the Oscars last March, the transiting south node was in 22 degrees 2 minutes Scorpio – bull’s eye, in other words, smack on his Moon. The south node was conjunct it and north node opposed it – in that very emotional moment. What kind of unresolved Scorpionic karma was welling up from his psychic depths? Was he hitting Chris Rock or some ghostly figure from the past?

Whatever the answer, that edgy, Scorpionic moment will mark his public image for the rest of his life.

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On June 1, 2021, at 9:21 pm-pdt in Santa Monica, California, my dear friends Linnea Miron and Ricky Williams had a little boy. They named him Sol Forrest Miron – and I bet that middle name caught your eye almost as quickly as it caught mine. Actually he’s named after me only in the sense of synchronicity. Linnea’s mom picked out the name from a list of possibilities. I’ve never met her nor at any time did I slip her a twenty dollar bill. But Sol and I do have a connection. I’m grandpa. Sometimes, with babies, you just know there’s karma there, just like with the adults you meet.

While pregnant with Sol, Linnea asked me one of those simple-sounding questions that sends you spiraling into questioning your basic understanding of the universe. Little Sol is a Gemini. Linnea wondered if he was a Gemini because he was born on June 1st, or the other way around? Was he born on June 1st because “he was already a Gemini in his soul” even though he hadn’t gotten around to being born yet?

I love questions like this one. They are so subversive, and what they subvert is my favorite target of them all: the dominant paradigm. Like it or not, we live in perhaps the most materialistic age humanity has ever experienced. That doesn’t only mean that everybody is out looking for money – avarice is definitely part of it, but materialism runs far deeper than that. Ultimately it is the core belief that we are nothing more than these bodies of flesh and bone, living in a push-and-shove, cause-and-effect universe, awaiting our expiration dates. Delete magic. Delete meaning. Delete miracles. 

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Here are the first 39 astrological words that I ever published anywhere outside of my local community: “Back in the fifties when I was a little boy, I once put a quarter in a vending machine inscribed with paintings of various improbable creatures. Out came a packet describing the traits associated with my Sun Sign, Capricorn.” Those are the opening lines of the foreword to my first book, The Inner Sky, which came out back in summer 1984. The text went on from there: “the message was that I was shy and uptight, but that while no one would ever be very excited about me, I could console myself with the knowledge that I would probably get rich.”

Those were hard words to read at the tender age of ten or so! The worst part was that they sort of halfway fit me, at least back then. Famously, far worse than a lie is a half-truth – they can be far more seductive. I doubt I was the first person to be hurt by that kind of pigeon-holing pop astrology. Somehow I think it planted an aspiration in me that I would be among the last.

Bantam Books publishing The Inner Sky naturally opened a lot of doors for me. Miraculously, even though the book came out nearly forty years ago, I still believe pretty much every word I wrote in those pages. What I regret is not something I wrote, but rather what I did not write. And here it is in a nutshell: If it were not for that vending machine and its depressing message about Capricorn, I might never have become an astrologer. For all its many flaws, I cannot escape the fact that silly Sun Sign astrology gave me a start on the life I live today. I should be more grateful to it, whatever damage it might have wreaked upon my developing psyche. Even though that little packet about Capricorn was rigid in its delineation of my nascent personality and discouraging about my fate, it contained enough kernels of truth that I was intrigued. 

As I suspect is also the case with many of you, the seeds of my interest in astrology had to fight their way into my life through the tangle of religious, cultural, and scientific barbed wire. For me,  that was amplified by me being an academically promising little boy in the strait-jacket culture of the late 1950s. Worse, for astrology to take hold of my imagination, the smattering of wisdom in that 25-cent packet had to fight against its own pandemonium of obvious errors. Looking back, it is a miracle that astrology won. 

But it did. 

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