Blog
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
