Astrology Articles

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Yesterday's Sky French Translation

A delightful French woman named Claire Heurté Rauwel has offered our Francophone readers a generous gift. She has translated the opening two chapters of YESTERDAY'S SKY into French. If you are French speaker, please enjoy them -- and if you are a French publisher, Claire would be delighted to work with you on the rest of the book.

Claire's background is fascinating. She has translated the Tibetan language into both English and French for some very powerful Lamas, including Ven Gangchen Rinpoche and Ven Tralek Rinpoche. Our shared interest in the interface of astrology and Buddhism is what brought us together on the Internet. I somewhat nervously sent her a copy of Yesterday's Sky,  hoping that it would pass muster with such a fine dharma-scholar - and of course fearing that it wouldn't! She wrote back to me with this generous endorsement. "I have reached the end of Yesterday's Sky and I was very moved by the compassionate, loving motivation underlying the whole book. This is a landmark, a master book, a bodhisattva work. I bow to Steven Forrest's realization of the paramita of knowlege of the stars, and feel so lucky that he has offered us this precious result of so many years of work and experience." I felt enormously encouraged to get such a glowing seal of approval for the underlying principles of the kind of astrology I teach from someone so immersed in the living world of Tibetan Buddhism.

Read Chapter 1 of Yesterday's Sky in French: Chapitre 1

Read Chapter 2 of Yesterday's Sky in French: Chapitre 2

 

by Steven Forrest
Birth Data Rodden Rating: A

Agatha Christie b. September 15, 1890, 4:00 AM-GMT Torquay, England

Four billion copies of her books are in print. She is often described as the best-selling author in history. Her play, The Mousetrap, is the longest continuously running one in the world, having opened in London on November 25, 1952, and still going strong as of this writing.

But it is for her murder mysteries that Agatha Christie is best known. Her work practically defined the genre that Arthur Conan Doyle launched. Her vain Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, with his waxed mustache and his brilliant deductions, humanized the infallible “Sherlock Holmes” archetype. Poirot is the only fictional character ever to be given an obituary in The New York Times, after Christie killed him off in her 1975 novel, Curtain—such was the popularity of her work at the time. Her delightful Miss Marple, at least as brilliant as Hercule and a lot more charming, made it safe for older, middle-class ladies on both sides of the Atlantic to have a devilish streak and a gleam in their eyes.

Reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries today, one might be excused for thinking that they are riddled with clichés—until we realize that she originated most of them! Arguably, there is not a mystery writer today who does not owe her an enormous debt.

So who was this mystery woman?

Agatha Christie was born in Devon on the southern coast of England. Her mother was British and her father was an American stockbroker who died when Agatha was eleven. Their circumstances were comfortable—at age sixteen, for example, young Agatha went to Mrs. Dryden’s Finishing School in Paris to study piano and voice. In 1914, she married a pilot, Colonel Archibald Christie. She gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind, in August 1919. In October 1920 her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published to glowing reviews. She had written it in 1916, with transiting Uranus and the progressed Sun applying to trine to her north node. It was published with Jupiter, ruler of her south node, rising into the seventh house by solar arc.

This list of brief questions will help illuminate the meanings behind these key symbols in the birth chart, as understood through the lens of Evolutionary Astrology.

Sun

What are the core principles and soul-intentions to which you must be true in order to maintain sanity, identity, and authenticity? What are the core drives to which you must be true in order to maintain vitality and life-force?

Moon

To what "trans"-rational needs and joys must you be true in order to maintain happiness and a feeling of well-being? What is the most effective way in which you can nurture, heal and restore yourself?

Ascendant

How do you compose your outward style in order to achieve a maximum sense of "centeredness?" How do you "get your act together?" What is the optimal stylistic interface between your deep psyche and the outer social and experiential worlds?

Originally appeared in The Mountain Astrologer magazine, June 2010. Reprinted with permission.

The familiar circle of twelve signs is a useful fiction. Like time, space, gender and money, it helps us organize our particular, parochial sense of reality. We watch our transits or progressions as they speed or plod along this imaginary line in the sky that we call the ecliptic, as if it were a narrow highway with hard curbs in the vastness of starry space. In our ephemerides, for example, we see Mercury zipping merrily along, 1E g, then 2Eg then 3Eg. We see Pluto passing the same mileposts—little knowing that Pluto might actually lie thirty degrees from Mercury, way above or below it in the sky, even though we say they are “in conjunction.” In actuality, the only moving astrological point that sticks exactly to the ecliptic is the Sun. Its path, in fact, is what defines the term. Everything else follows it only approximately.

Ever wonder why we don’t have a total solar eclipse every month? Sure enough, there on your computer screen you plainly see the transiting Sun and the transiting Moon aligned in 15Ed 24'—but no total eclipse of the Sun. The reason is that the Moon is usually a little above the Sun or a little below it. They are “conjunct,” but only in the context of our imaginary celestial railroad track, the zodiac. They are lined up in the two-dimensional framework of the ecliptic, but not in the three dimensional framework of the heavens as they actually meet our eyes. (1)

With so many different kinds of astrological software in use, the simplest suggestion is to just go to the “Help” files in the program you use and look up “Declination.” There you will see how to display it for any chart you calculate. Declination will be given as either North or South, sometimes shown as a + or - . If the value exceeds 23°28', it is Out of Bounds. This will work for both a natal chart or a progressed one.

Using Solar Fire

Out of Bounds Moon

Calculate or open a chart. Click on “Reports” in the top line. Click on “Current Chart.” A window opens titled “Chart Reports & Tabulations.” Under “Chart Points,” you will see a column labeled “Decl.” That is declination. Check to see if the Moon’s value is 23°28' or greater. If so, it is Out of Bounds. Again, this will work for both a natal or progressed charts.

Progressed Moon Declination Cycle

To watch for the Moon progressing Out of Bounds over longer time-scales, open the natal chart, then click on “Dynamic” on the top line. Click on “Graphic Ephemeris.” Open “Saved Selections,” scroll down and click on “Declination of Moon (one year).” Under “Period of Report,” click the “Years” button (unless you want to zoom in on a specific period of your life).

New Moon

Sun-Moon Angle: 0-45 degrees
Seasonal Event: WINTER SOLSTICE
Pagan Holiday: YULE

The Teacher; The Avatar
Sweetness. Nurturing. Leadership. Guidance. Becoming symbolic to others; making others into symbols. Bringers of gifts. Luminosity.
We are fresh from the Dark of the Moon—the realm of mystery—still caught up in, and shrouded by, the archetypal perspective. We radiate powerfully, but we are relatively blind to the subtleties and complexities of the material world, especially other people. Everyone senses that “we know something,” and they are therefore drawn to us.

The biopsychic script refers to astrological events that are marked by key moments in our evolutionary development which we all share and have culturally identified, such as midlife, or retirement. Below is a list of the key cycles we can track, including the cycle length and planet involved. Spend some time looking at these dates in your own birth chart, and notice what you discover!

VENUS CYCLE

Cycle Length: 7.997 years. Notes: In only two days, eight hours short of exactly eight years, Venus completes its pentangle and returns to Inferior Conjunction with the Sun at a point two or three degrees earlier in the zodiac than it was when the cycle began. Count eight year intervals forward two ways: from the date of birth and from the date of the previous Inferior Conjunction. They often coincide closely with intimate relational turning points.

by Steven Forrest
reprinted with permission from The Moutain Astrologer, August 2007 issue

Pluto’s recent demotion to the status of “dwarf planet” upset a lot of us  It shouldn’t. We astrologers have been calling the Sun and Moon “planets” for a long time. We have, in other words, a long tradition of using the term “planet” differently than astronomers do. Experience has taught us that Pluto simply works like one—we know it’s a “planet” and we really don’t need anyone’s approval before we use the term.

Even better, most of us have had some fun thinking about upcoming Pluto transits for those astronomers in the International Astronomical Union who demoted Pluto! How would you like to explain that one to the Lord of the Underworld?

But there are deeper, more disturbing issues here. We need, collectively, to address them. Astrology’s bones are being rattled, and it’s not just by a bunch of academics quibbling over slippery definitions.