Steven Forrest Evolutionary Astrology Podcast

My online school, The Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, is blessed to have Mister Sagittarius himself, Ryan Evans, as one of our tutors. True to his Sun Sign, Ryan is an ace at asking the really big questions. A few months ago, I got the following email from him. In it, he raised an issue that could not possibly lie any closer to the heart of evolutionary astrology:

I have a question regarding the astronomical understanding of the south node. Do we consider it to be “the past” primarily due to the notion that south equals “down” equals “past” or is there more of an astronomical correlation than just that? I’ve got a scientist here asking astronomy questions.

I should start by saying as clearly as possible that I have no definitive answer for Ryan. Why should the place where the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic heading south pull us toward old, outworn attitudes and behaviors? All I know for sure is that the observation is robust. It works reliably. 

But why?

Since early 2025, Steven Forrest has been at work composing and recording an astrological song-cycle. You can find it where you stream music, including Apple Music or Spotify by searching for “Ten Planets, Ten Songs”.

Astrology sometimes gets a little top-heavy intellectually, and yet it’s as much about the seasons of the human heart as it is about insights and theories. Steven's books speak to your head. Trying to keep that precious balance, here’s a song that captures the feeling of each planet – something that’s aimed straight for the heart. 

What follows is the story behind the project. Enjoy!

Which astrological house represents your aunts and uncles? The traditional answer is the 6th house. The reasoning behind that idea is a classic illustration of the theory behind  derived houses. It goes as follows.

 

Your home – and thus your parents – is represented by the 4th house. The 3rd house refers to siblings. Who are your aunt and uncles? They’re your parents’ brothers and sisters. Thus your aunts and uncles are the “3rd house counting from the 4th house,” which is the 6th.

 

As you can see, the basic idea behind derived houses is simple. Don’t let that blind you to the miracle it represents. The fact that it works at all – that it’s not just some kind of crossword puzzle we play in our heads – is actually kind of astonishing. There are layers of internal consistency behind astrology’s wheel of houses that hint at depths of meaning that resonate with some fundamental twelve-fold mystery of the universe.

If that weren’t true, derived houses wouldn’t work.

 

That‘s a truly fascinating subject, but it’s not the one I want to pursue in this essay. I just want to use derived houses as a springboard for exploring a troubling area of astrological inconsistency and confusion – and hopefully finding a way through it.

Our road toward that trouble starts off with a seemingly innocent question about aunts and uncles. Say your interest is more specific. Say you want to know what house represents your aunt on your mother’s side. She’s your mom’s sister, so you would just count three houses starting with the house of your mother, right? Many traditional texts would say that your mother is symbolized by the 10th house – which is the 7th house counting from the 4th house. The idea is that the 4th house represents your father, so his wife – your mom, at least back in the old days – had to be the 10th house.

A reader named Clarissa invited me to write about a subject I’ve not explored here before – the Part of Fortune. Let me start off by saying that it’s a technique that’s fallen out of my arsenal over the years. That’s not because I found it ineffective – with some modern tweaks, I think it’s a useful astrological tool. In essence, I stopped using it because I found I was getting to pretty much the same bottom line through other methods, so it became redundant.

First, a bow in the direction of the astrologers who have led the renaissance of traditional astrological techniques over the past three decades. They revealed something I didn’t know:  traditionally, there were two ways of calculating the Part of Fortune, one if you were born at night and another if you were born during the day. The day-version of the Part of Fortune is what I grew up with, even though I was born at night myself. Back then, that version was all we knew about.

One more point before we get rolling. While traditionally the Part of Fortune was viewed as a lucky point connected with pathways to material success and health, my approach to it is less predictive and more evolutionary. To anyone familiar with my attitude toward astrological matters, there’s no surprise there. My apologies in advance to those traditional astrologers because what I plan to explore in this newsletter will probably sound somewhere between weird and heretical to them, starting with me not being at all concerned with any distinctions between night births and day births.

By the way, sometimes the term “Lot” is used rather than “Part,” and occasionally the Part of Fortune is simply called “Fortuna.” As I understand it, its roots lie in Arabic astrology, where there was an extensive system of these “lots.” As I recall, there was even a “Lot of Melons.”

How did an early Christian martyr's feast day morph into a celebration of romantic love? The route was circuitous. Look it up if you’re interested, but that’s not what I want to write about in this newsletter. What I want to write about is affectionate life-partnerships, the kinds that endure through the years. 

Perspective: you might find yourself at a wedding. Even if you’re full of bright hopes for the couple, naturally in the back of your mind are the ominous words “fifty/fifty.” Those are their chances of them actually staying together. When it’s our turn to toast the happy couple, we may not mention that statistic, but everyone today knows that something like half of all marriages end in divorce. 

But, hey, that means that half of them don’t! And given human realities, isn’t that a miracle? Those are the kinds of relationships that I want to celebrate in this newsletter.