Steven Forrest Evolutionary Astrology Podcast

Available Episodes

5 of 86

Conscious Use Of Electional Astrology
My #1 Nightmare: We’re getting married on Saturday! Is that a good time? What can I possibly say? Here, we are entering the realm of electional astrology – the art of choosing the right time to take an action. Astrologically, time weaves an ever-shifting labyrinth of red lights and green lights, but the lights are more often red than green. Bottom line, the odds are long against the happy couple who chose Saturday for their wedding having randomly picked an astrologically encouraging moment. I don’t want to lie to them, but I don’t want to scare them with the truth either. Ever the artful dodger in situations such as that one, I’ll often simply say that I haven’t looked into it, which is generally the reality – I’m not a walking ephemeris. Then I quickly dance away into a fog-bank of congratulations and well-wishing. There are deeper waters here. Let’s say that this couple had actually chosen a totally rotten time to get married – Venus is retrograde in Aries in the 12th house squaring Saturn while the Moon is heading for a final opposition to Uranus in the 7th house. Does this mean that their marriage is doomed? Astrologers who say that kind of thing are simply revealing their inexperience. A lot of factors go into a happy marriage. Some are indeed astrological, and some are in the more obvious categories of love, maturity, and basic sanity. My main point is simple: those virtues can defeat a dreadful wedding-day chart. Going further – and limiting ourselves strictly to purely astrological factors – a good wedding chart is only one piece of the whole picture. In my experience, the actual synastry between the two charts dwarfs it in importance. I’d rather marry someone under the Wedding Chart from Hell than, for example, to marry someone with whom my chart made no significant aspects. Listen in....
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16:34
Zoom!
Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. I used to get up on my high horse about the spiritual emptiness of Zoom events. My favorite line was that human relationships could not be reduced to an audio track and a video track – that if all we have are those two channels, something precious and intangible was missing. I still believe that there is truth in that attitude, but I’ll admit I’ve had to eat my words. Through my work with my online school, various podcasts, and some other collaborations, I now feel close in a genuinely soulful way with some people I have never actually met, at least not in the flesh. The surprise for me is that despite my initial attitude, those sweet psychic tendrils of human connection seem capable of heart-to-heart piggybacking over computer screens. I was wrong and I admit it. Still, there is much to be said for a hug. There’s much to be said for eye-contact. There’s much to be said for idle chit chat and just getting to know each other in a human way. Vibes come through with a lot more multidimensional punch when two people are in the same room. I do miss all of that primeval bonding. My old apprenticeship groups were very tribal. Lasting friendships formed. There were affairs. A marriage or two happened. There were conflicts, along with some inappropriate behavior that had to be handled. There were tragedies and there were deaths – and even those kinds of sorrows bond people together. That’s all part of how we create community. I believe that every one of us learned a lot from those human experiences, especially when we all peered at them together through the lens of astrology – and maybe sat around later over a glass of wine yacking and gossiping about them. Listen in...
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13:45
The Lunar Nodes Have Crossed The Pisces/Virgo Axis
The lunar nodes shifting into a new pair of signs is always a big deal. It happens every year and a half or so, and it impacts everybody, both personally and in the world’s headlines. A few weeks back, on January 28, the Moon’s (Mean) north node crossed the line and entered Pisces, where it will remain until it transitions into Aquarius on August 18, 2026. (The south node entered the opposite sign, Virgo, at the same time.) In this short essay, my intention is to put the personal meaning of the nodes shifting signs in the spotlight. Since we’ll all be experiencing some of this energy collectively, it will impact the positives and negatives of the wider world too. As always, we start by underscoring a point that is really the bedrock of evolutionary astrological theory: the south node of the Moon represents the gravity of old habits which are holding us back, while the north node symbolizes the remedy that can liberate us. In my own work, I view the soul cages represented by the south node as problems and challenges that originated in prior lifetimes, although other philosophies can be made to fit too. In any case, as the late, lamented astrologer and my dear friend, Michael Lutin, once put it, “the north node is the meeting and the south node is the bottle.” If you know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous, Michael really covered the essence of the point in those thirteen words. Listen in....
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25:30
Carl Jung, The Red Book, And The Birth of Psychology
Pluto, the “Lord of the Underworld,” was discovered on February 18, 1930 and announced publicly on March 13 of that year. While the exact dates are of limited importance in our work, Pluto’s discovery itself was momentous. From the astrological perspective, it marks nothing less than the collective human discovery of the unconscious mind. In essence, with the discovery of Pluto, we are talking about the birth of psychology as part of the human conversation. As ever, with massive astrological changes such as this one, it’s helpful to take a long-term perspective. Uranus was discovered in 1789 – and marked the (very Uranian) overthrow of the rule of kings along with the birth of scientific inquiry, even when it violated religious dogma. That didn’t happen on a single day! Similarly, Neptune was discovered in 1848 and it marked a massive change in the scope of human imagination and human spirituality – again, that’s something we can see clearly in retrospect, but not something that happened the very minute Neptune was found. In exactly the same fashion, the human discovery of the true extent of our inner world – our Plutonian unconscious mind – unfolded over a generation or two. Still, the astrological signature of the event itself dates to the physical discovery of Pluto back almost a hundred years ago. Listen In...
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20:51
“Malefic” Mars Vs. My Poor Ears
I cringe whenever I hear an astrologer call Mars a “malefic” planet. Mars can bring us so many gifts, starting with the courage to stand up for ourselves. It's got a dark side though – so do all the planets. Where Mars lies in your chart, you’ll definitely need some of that courage. That’s because Mars usually marks a place in your life where you’ll face some serious stress. Nobody enjoys that, even though we might learn some useful lessons in facing it down. I suppose that astrologers who miss the evolutionary point of that extra dose of tension are the real reason poor Mars got saddled with the “malefic” label. In my own chart, Mars is in the spotlight in many ways, starting with the fact that I’ve got Scorpio rising which makes Mars the traditional ruler of my chart. It’s also sextile to my Mars-ruled Aries Moon, which deepens my reactivity to it. Mars itself lies in Aquarius, in my 3rd house (Placidus) and in a conjunction with my late-Capricorn Mercury. Mercury and the 3rd house are both about communication, so those two features reinforce each other, and that’s the dimension of Mars that I want to explore in this newsletter. Listen in....
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23:37