Some Thoughts About Astrology And Artificial Intelligence

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.

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...