The Conundrum Of Mother And Father Symbolism

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.

Artificial intelligence – does it spell evil hyper-intelligent machines deciding that humanity’s messy days on Earth need to come to an end? Or will it give us the cure for cancer, effective environmental solutions, and warp drive to carry us to the stars? I don’t know, you don’t know – and neither do the legions of boosters and doomsayers who claim that they know.  Here’s a far smaller question: what will AI mean for astrology in particular? I don’t know the answer there either, but I’m asked about it quite a lot, so for what they are worth, here are my thoughts.  I see both positive and negative potentials as AI transforms the way we practice our craft. And transform it, it will – the one certainty is that, barring a total collapse of civilization, artificial intelligence is here to stay. We have to learn to live with it. I also believe that if we, as a society, are successful in coexisting with this new technology, that success will not rest on technological breakthroughs. It will rest on cultural, social, and legal decisions. More about that in a while. What I plan to do as I explore this explosive topic with you is to bounce back and forth between pro-AI perspectives for astrology and negative ones. If you love AI, I’ll say some things you’ll hate. And if you hate it, I will say some things you’ll love. In the end, my aim is not to act as if I know the answer and arrive at some phony thumbs up or thumbs down bottom line – that would be nothing but an empty gesture, as if I were approving or disapproving of gravity. Again, I don't know where all of this will lead. All I know for sure is that AI is not going to disappear. We just have to learn how to live with it. And please – no mean emails. 

So there I was, just twenty-three months old and the King of the World. I had a pair of doting giants trained to meet my every need. One whimper and I instantly became the center of the universe. But trouble was brewing in paradise and I knew it. My mother had entered her second trimester, pregnant with The Interloper: my sister Jan was on the way and my kingdom would soon be ripped in half.    Right on schedule, Mars was returning to where it was on the day I was born. I was embattled and ready to kill somebody if only my body were coordinated enough to pull it off. Welcome to the infamous “Terrible Twos.”   In broad terms, Mars takes twenty-six months to return to a given zodiacal degree – just over two years in other words. Due to several factors, the cycle is somewhat variable. One of those factors is that, in common with the rest of the planets, Mars’ orbit is elliptical – it speeds up when it’s closer to the Sun and slows down as it gets further away. Ditto for Earth, of course – and we’re watching Mars from our own careening planet, so our perspective is always shifting. Because of retrograde motion, sometimes Mars makes not one but three conjunctions to its natal position. All of those wild cards complicate the timing. It’s a mess, but say twenty-six months, give or take two or three months, and your timing of Mars returns will be more or less on target. My own first Mars return, for one example, occurred after only twenty-three months and ten days. The bottom line is that you have to look it up. 

“As above, so below” – those four familiar words are really the heart of astrology. What happens above us in the sky is mirrored here on earth below. That’s true both in terms of events and also in terms of the seasons of our own minds and hearts. We astrologers normally apply that principle in practical terms by watching the planets dance with each other as they flow through through the twelve zodiacal signs. That system works very well and has helped people navigate their lives for at least two or three millennia. But are we missing anything? Is there anything else that’s happening “above” and thus impacting us all here below? Maybe something that we’ve been ignoring? Questions such as those are what keeps astrology from growing stale, but knowing how to ask them involves more than just keeping an open mind. Sometimes it’s about discovering something “up there” that we simply were not in a position to notice any earlier. Would it be fair to criticize 16th century master astrologer John Lilly for failing to include Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in his interpretations? Obviously not – no one back then even knew that those three planets existed. Still, they were certainly “above” – and if our basic astrological theory holds true, then down here below, we were affected by them.  Little did he know it, but William Lilly in fact died with Uranus making a station on his natal Pluto.   

When your world is lit up with squares and oppositions, sleeping through sextiles happens almost automatically. With hard aspects, your foot is in the fire. You’re highly motivated to act, in other words. Softer aspects aren’t nearly as pressing. You can think of them more as opportunities than as demands.  Still, missed opportunities are actually huge events. It’s just that they are often disguised as nothing at all. Imagine walking right past a hundred dollar bill lying on the sidewalk while looking the other way. Imagine feeling too tired to go to the party where your future soulmate is waiting for you.  Nothing happened? Ask your guardian angels . . .

“I always do what the voices in my head tell me what to do.” That’s become a familiar gag line. I don’t want to recommend psychosis as a lifestyle, but recently while rereading Carl Jung’s biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was struck by how much emphasis he puts on trusting cues from the unconscious mind even when they don’t seem to make any rational sense. There’s one such cue that has tugged at me persistently for much of my adult life. It’s the feeling that as I’ve been developing the methodology of evolutionary astrology as I practice it and teach it, that what I was experiencing was more like a process of remembering than one of me actually inventing anything.  There’s a problem though – ostensibly, what we call evolutionary astrology only dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. I was born in 1949. How could I have been “remembering” something that hadn’t been invented yet? Last May, I taught a class in Athens, Greece, primarily for students in my school. There were many signs and omens that I had some unresolved karma with that country so I approached the trip with some nervousness. I don’t want to be too personal in this essay, but if you want the deep background, go to forrestastrology.center and search for one of my “Master’s Musings” blogs from June 2025 called “What Greece Meant To Me.” The upshot is that there is much indirect evidence from various sources that, in a prior lifetime, I was a Gnostic Christian in that region of the world in the first or second centuries, C.E.  True or not, the problem still remains: how could I have experienced anything like evolutionary astrology almost two thousand years ago? At first there seems to be no rational support for such a notion. But as strange as it may seem, I have come to believe that a Gnostic in the Roman Empire culture of the second century C.E. would actually find much that was familiar in the work that we contemporary evolutionary astrologers are doing today, at least at the philosophical level.

Astrologers sometimes get carried away and say that every chart is totally unique. That’s not really true. Obviously it’s possible for two people to be born at the same place and time – or at least close enough that there’s no real practical difference between their charts. Even people born a few days apart, but with the same degrees on their Ascendants, will have extremely similar charts. Their Moons will be in different signs, and that’s important. But much else will be the same. Naturally as they go through life, such “time twins” will simultaneously experience almost the same transits and progressions. Because of that astrological similarity, we would expect many parallels in their lives – and in fact, we often do see exactly that phenomenon. Here’s perhaps the most famous of these “time twin” tales: An ironmonger named Samuel Hemming was born on the same day as the English King, George III – June 4, 1738. They apparently looked very similar and there were many parallels in their lives. Hemming opened his business on the same day that George was crowned king. They married on the same day. They both had the same number and genders of children. They were sick at the same time and they both died on the same day – January 29, 1820 – of similar maladies.  Stories of this sort are fairly abundant. As I was preparing to write this newsletter, I was poking around the internet and followed a link (astrologerpeg.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/time-twins) to a woman who bills herself as “Astrologer Peg.” I don’t know her or what her sources are, but her site mentions that she studied with Noel Tyl, which is a good credential.  In any case, I got two particularly dramatic versions of these “time twin” stories from her. I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but I have no reason to doubt it – again, tales such as these are actually very common.

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.