Can We Allow Evolutionary Astrology to Evolve?

Steven Forrest used a racial slur on a podcast (and more). He’s apologized, though it took some time and he still doesn’t quite seem to fully get it, conferences have pulled him from their programs, and the community is doing the work of sorting out what real accountability looks like. Others are still working with Steven directly on what that looks like, especially for an elder in the community with his following. That conversation matters, and it belongs first to the people most harmed by it. I’m not going to referee it here. Nor is it my intention to fan the flames more.

But riding along on that bigger story is a second one, quieter and with a wider reach, and that one I do want to sit with. Because alongside the accountability, there’s a growing move to put Evolutionary Astrology itself in the dock. Not the man — the method. The lineage. The whole way of working. And I want to slow us down there, because a lot of Astrologers learned inside that lineage, spent years with it, do careful and ethical work, and watching an entire body of practice get folded into one person’s disgrace doesn’t sit right.

So let me take one part of the critique I actually think is worth taking seriously, because I’ve been sitting with it privately for years.Though, yes, I am aware of other critiques. I believe they themselves are also evolving.

I’ve read a colleague’s account of an EA demonstration — an EA Astrologer reading a woman’s nodes to a room, narrating her past life and her soul’s purpose with complete confidence while she sat there quietly. Afterward she told people it had missed her entirely. She hadn’t recognized a word of it. And I’ve never forgotten it, because I was taught to do a version of that same thing. One of my teachers had apprenticed with Forrest, and the technique came down the line to me: read the South Node and its ruler as the story of a past life, read the North Node as where the soul is headed, and tell the client that story.

I could do it. But it never felt clean. Every time I got near it, something in me pulled back, because I was being handed a stranger’s inner life and asked to narrate it back to them as fact, from a chair of borrowed authority. That is a lot of authority to assume over someone you met twenty minutes ago.

And that, for me, is the real shadow of EA — not the past-life idea itself, but how comfortable the work can let you get in the guru’s chair. Stand at the front of enough rooms making up confident stories about strangers’ souls, with a following nodding along, and you can start to believe you really are the one holding the map. It is a short walk from teacher to guru, and a shorter one still from guru to the cult scaffolding that tends to grow up around anyone who stops being told no — the inner circle, the special access, the quiet sense that the ordinary rules bend for the gifted. We are watching, across a lot of fields right now, what happens when those pedestals finally wobble.

Studying EA does not hand anyone a divine dispensation. We are regular people trying to help other people understand their own lives a bit better — that is the whole job. I don’t exempt myself. I was handed the technique, I could do it, and the pull to sound certain is real, which is exactly why it needs saying out loud.

And here’s the part that keeps this from being a simple takedown, because I don’t think the underlying observation is actually wrong. The past life — whether you take it literally, or as a story the psyche tells itself to hold something true, and I hold that question open — does seem to show up in the chart. I know this from the inside. I had a past-life regression long before I ever learned the nodal technique, and when I finally went and looked, it was sitting right there in my nodes, plain as anything. A friend told me her own regression story recently and it was there in her chart too. So the correspondence is real, or real enough that I’ve stopped arguing with it.

What I don’t believe is that it’s mine to hand to you.

That’s the whole line for me. The chart shows the landscape. I can see the terrain — the old grief, the thing that keeps repeating, the direction the growth seems to want to go. But the meaning of it, the story that makes it yours, is yours to find. My work is to walk you into your own inner landscape and help you look around. Not to stand at the front of a room and tell you who you used to be while you nod politely and quietly decide I’ve got the wrong person.

Let me show you what I mean, because Astrology people like a worked example and fair enough.

Say someone comes in with the South Node in Scorpio, North Node in Taurus. Here’s one way to read it — the way I was taught to perform it:

“In a past life you held real power and it was taken from you. Betrayal, maybe a violent end, something you died protecting. Your soul still carries that wound, and your work this time is to stop grasping for control and finally learn to trust.”

Delivered with enough certainty, that sounds like knowing. It’s a story I invented about a person I’ve known for twenty minutes, handed to them as their own history. Bits of it might even land, because Scorpio is evocative and we’re all a little suggestible in a reading. But I’ve done all the meaning-making. They leave holding a script that may or may not be theirs, and I leave having been terribly impressive.

Here’s the other way, which is how I actually work:

“Your South Node’s in Scorpio, so there’s old, deep terrain here — power, survival, intensity, and often a well-worn soul habit of holding things close and keeping a hand on the controls. That’s the reflex the chart keeps pointing back to. I don’t know your story, though, so I’m curious — when I say that, does anything move for you? … And the North Node in Taurus reads to me like the growth edge: coming home to your own core values, building real self-worth from the inside instead of through power and its dynamics, learning to feel solid without having to grip. The interesting part is that as that steadier Taurus ground comes in, the old Scorpio triggers tend to lose some of their charge — you get less reactive to the very things that used to run you. But you’d know far better than I would what that’s actually asking of you right now.”

Same placement. One version makes me the authority on your soul. The other makes me a person with a map, sitting next to you, checking whether the terrain I’m describing matches the ground you’re actually standing on.

I keep thinking about how therapy has been moving, because it’s the same shift. Family Systems therapy looks at the web of relationships around you — your parents, your partner, the roles you got handed. Internal Family Systems turned the lens inward and started working with the parts inside you instead: the critic, the protector, the exile, the ones at war with each other. Both are useful and they work beautifully together, and IFS is what happened when the field kept evolving — a move from being told how your system works to being helped to meet it yourself.

That is exactly what I see happening in Astrology, EA included. The version of Evolutionary Astrology a lot of us were handed works more like the older model: the astrologer as the one who knows, narrating your soul’s history to you. Where it’s going, where plenty of practitioners have already quietly taken it, is closer to IFS — the chart as a map of your inner parts and their long history, and the astrologer as a companion who helps you meet them. Same raw material. Different relationship to authority.

And this is where it stops being only about EA.

I’ve said for years that Western Astrology (all Astrology in fact) was first encoded under a dominator culture — patriarchal, hierarchical, built on the story that we’re separate from all that is, and that some people get to pronounce on others. The astrologer-as-authority-who-tells-you-your-fate is baked right into that inheritance. EA didn’t invent it. And the older traditions being revived right now, the ones sometimes held up as the more rigorous grown-up alternative, carry their own version of the same inheritance — fixed dignities and debilities, a planet in “fall” read as simply bad news. That’s its own verdict from on high. It will evolve too, in the hands of the people practicing it now, because that is what living traditions do.

So when the whole of Evolutionary Astrology gets thrown out with the bathwater — the method, the practitioners, the thousands of people who studied with Forrest or with Jeffrey Wolf Green and went on to do good, grounded, ethical work — I don’t think that serves the evolution anyone claims to want. It just rebuilds the same hierarchy pointing the other way. My system is clean, yours is contaminated, sit down. We’ve been here before. It’s the dominator move in a new outfit.

Because in the end it’s all Astrology. All of it — traditional, evolutionary, psychological, the Kuiper Belt and asteroid work I do that half of everyone thinks is bonkers — is our human attempt to read the sky and put language to it. Every school is a draft. Every one of them is mid-evolution, whether its practitioners have noticed yet or not.

So here’s my actual ask, and it’s a gentle one. Let it evolve. Hold the accountability and the evolution in the same hand — both can be true. If you trained in EA and you’re watching all this feeling like you have to burn your whole education down, you don’t. You get to keep what’s real in it and compost the rest, which is what the careful ones have been doing all along.

And because I’m a word nerd and cannot let it go: evolutionary has evolve sitting right there inside it. A tradition that named itself for change was always going to be asked, sooner or later, to actually do the thing. So let’s.

The chart shows the landscape. You choose how you walk it. And so, it turns out, do whole traditions.

Now go do something kind for the part of you that’s been holding all of this.

Much love, Louise