A Free Subscription To Lila!

Jupiter entered Cancer on June 9 and it will remain there until it enters Leo on June 29, 2026. In keeping with the planet’s benign reputation, its twelve-year orbit conveniently gives it about one year in each sign.  Traditionally, Jupiter brings luck, and there’s some truth in that notion – with a few provisos. First, what exactly do we mean by luck? During a big Jupiter transit, maybe someone wins a large pile of money. They feel lucky. Everybody calls them lucky. But how happy are they a year later? Did that money actually bring them joy?  Well . . . possibly. Not to rain on Jupiter’s parade, but one secret with “luck” lies in actually knowing what is good for you. The first obstacle we must overcome in achieving that goal is that everybody thinks they are already there! We all know luck when we see it, right? I mean, how would you feel if you won that lottery? Are you going to give that money back?  Put on your wisdom hat – and you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter if you didn’t have one. Something deep inside you knows that money can bring troubles as well as joy. It’s just hard for us humans to remember that. We get dazzled by glitter sometimes and mistake it for gold. And of course it’s not always about money. There are many other Jupiter “glamours” in this world, ready to beguile us: fame, sex, power – even being widely touted as “a deeply spiritual person.” Every one of those traps can breed attachment and blindness.

Want to have Steven Forrest in your pocket? That’s how many early adopters have described LILA (say: LEE-la), our astrological mobile app for iPhones and Androids. To spread the word about it, we’re giving away a free four-month subscription to anyone who wants one, no strings attached. Just hit this link and it’s all yours. https://link.lilaverse.app/Steven120 Please give it a try. There are some more step-by-step details below, but the offer is simple and straightforward. If you like it, feel free to share the link with your friends too – the link will work for anyone who has it and we are eager to spread it as widely as possible.   Listen in...

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....

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...

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....

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...

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....

How many books on your astrology shelf contain a phrase like this one: If your Mercury is in Gemini or the 3rd House . . .? With two cents’ worth of logic, the conclusion is inescapable: the author is telling you that the two configurations mean the same thing. If A equals both B and C, then B equals C and there’s not a single scrap of wiggle room about that anywhere. The trouble is that in this case, B does not equal C. Houses and signs are not the same. They do overlap in meaning, as we will see. They are far from unrelated. But if you treat them as if they were interchangeable, your astrological work loses focus. Still, this is a painfully common error among astrologers. Even though many of those books I mention contain useful perspectives in other areas, when it comes to this issue they are the culprit.  Learning to avoid this pitfall is not hard and it will take your work to the next level. Listen in....

The 2:14 PM time of birth I use here for mystery writer Agatha Christie is new information. When I wrote about her in Yesterday’s Sky in early 2008, I used her then-current birth time of 4:00 AM, which I found on seemingly good authority. Later, it emerged that "a midwife named Mrs. Shelton-Price who, according to her bill, had charged one crown and two shillings to deliver Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller at 2:14 pm on Monday afternoon, September 15." This new time of birth now gives Agatha Christie’s chart a Rodden Rating of AA—and a very different look. What follows is a rewrite of my previous analysis. Consider it a replacement for chapter fifteen for all editions and printings of Yesterday’s Sky starting from 2008 and running into the third quarter of 2024. In all new printings, this chapter will replace the previous incorrect one. As ever, astrology’s Achilles’ Heel is bad birth information. With someone you know, you can often sense that something is off in the chart. With strangers, you’re much more vulnerable. 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 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. 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. That’s some indication of the popularity of her work. Her delightful Miss Marple, who was at least as brilliant as Hercule Poirot and a lot more charming, made it safe for older, middle-class ladies on both sides of the Atlantic to have a formidable gleam of mischief in their eyes, along with garnering some respect for their well-tempered intelligence and insight. Anyone can say “don’t underestimate me.” Miss Marple’s irrefutable wisdom made that honorable sentiment irrefutable. Listen In...

On October 11, Pluto makes a station, turns around, and heads for the Aquarian frontier for the last time. As you probably know, it’s been toggling between retrograde and direct motion while straddling the Aquarian cusp for quite a while. It was in Aquarius for ten weeks back in the middle of 2023 and returned to Aquarius a second time between January and September 1st of this year. That’s the day it re-entered Capricorn for a final time. After making its station this month, Pluto turns direct and arrives solidly in Aquarius five weeks later, entering it on November 19th where it will remain for the next nineteen years. As ever, when a planet makes a station – in other words, stands still, about to turn retrograde or direct – its energies become very focussed and intensified. For that reason alone, October promises to be a very Plutonian month. On top of that, when a planet is the final degree of a sign – often called the anaretic degree – there’s an underlying sense of urgency to it. When you were in school, remember the way you felt the night before final exams? When it comes to studying, that meant it was now or never. That’s the feeling of an anaretic degree. With Pluto making its station in 29 degrees 38 minutes of Capricorn, we’re all in exactly that position – here comes our final exam. This event isn’t just about “history” happening – it will have personal meaning for you too. Everything in the sky does. But everyone on Earth will be experiencing this radical intensification of Plutonian energy simultaneously. In other words, it’s not like a transit that hits one person very directly and misses someone else. This one is for everybody. As always, some of us will do well with it and some of us will do poorly. If “poorly” wins, it bodes ill for the whole planet.  Don’t despair – surrendering to despair is simply one of the soul-cages dark Pluto offers everyone.  Listen in ...