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Mountain Astrologer Interview
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Interview by Geraldine Hatch Hannon. Copyright 1997 The Mountain Astrologer. This interview first appeared in the June 1997 issue of The Mountain Astrologer. TMA is a state-of-the-art astrological journal with fine articles on an impressive range of astrological topics geared to both students and professionals. We recommend their site: http://www.MountainAstrologer.com
Steven and Jodie Forrest maintain a busy international astrological practice from their home in central North Carolina. Their best-selling volume on synastry, Skymates, was originally published by Bantam Books in 1989 and reprinted by ACS Publications. The Forrests' own Seven Paws Press brought out a new, radically revised and expanded edition in 2002. (Webmaster's note: please visit our Skymates page for a photo of the new version's cover, and some pictures of Steven and Jodie hard at work writing it!) Steven is also the author of The Inner Sky, The Changing Sky, The Night Speaks, The Book of Pluto. and, with Jeffrey Wolf Green,Measuring the Night: Evolutionary Astrology and the Keys to the Soul, Volume One. Steven travels widely teaching the Forrests' brand of choice-centered astrology. Jodie keeps up with her own busy schedule of private and business clients, runs their mail-order business and Seven Paws Press, manages their website and still makes time for her primary passion: writing fiction. Her first Viking Age novel, The Rhymer and the Ravens, was published in 1995 to rave reviews. The sequel, The Elves' Prophecy, appeared in 1996, and the conclusion, The Bridge: The Book Of Necessity, in 1998. Her explorations of pre-Christian Northern European mythology have spilled over unexpectedly into her astrological practice (see "Odin as Mercury,"TMA Aug./Sep. 1996, and Solar Deities in Norse Mythology). Steven and Jodie were married on January 7, 1984 and often meditate on the paradox of each one being luckier than the other in that regard. Write to them at P.O. Box 2345, Chapel Hill, NC 27515 or send them e-mail.
TMA: Jodie and Steven, were you both familiar with astrology before you met?
SF: Oh yes.
TMA: Is that how you met?
SF: Jodie came to me for a reading. She was already quite an advanced astrologer. Sufficiently advanced to know it is almost impossible to read one's own chart.
JF: I had been reading astrology books since I was eight years old. I started as a child and I simply never stopped. Astrology had been sort of a sideline passion. When I met Steve, I was finishing up a graduate degree in languages, but I had never stopped astrology.
TMA: So when you met and saw each other's charts, did you look at them in terms of compatibility?
SF: I was trying to be very professional about it.
TMA: When you saw Jodie's chart, did you say "Wow!"?
SF: There is a wonderful kind of Valentine's Day story. May I tell this, Jodie?
JF: Yes.
SF: Jodie came to me for a reading in December 1981. I did the session with her, and I did it professionally. I felt attracted to her, but, of course, one must learn to deal with that in the business. Then our paths didn't cross again for a while, and we had our first date on February 20, 1982. As things developed between us, we started wondering about the timing of our first contact with each other. We were curious about the astrology of our first meeting. And there was no problem in finding out, since it was a professional appointment. I looked back in my ledger, and there it was - December 16, 1981 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The interesting thing was something I had done then but had completely forgotten. I wrote in my margin notes, after filling in that she had paid me with a check and so on, the simple comment, "I love her." It had totally escaped me, but there it was.
JF: The ledger has gone into our archives. (Laughter)
TMA: Have you found that being astrologers and having the astrological language available has given you greater insights into your relationship. Have you used it along the way?
JF: It has deepened our understanding of and tolerance for each other tremendously.
TMA: Now, from your relationship to questions about your astrological knowledge of relationships. In your book, Skymates, you write about how to read the composite chart, which is a chart of the midpoints between the two individual's natal planets and angles. Do you ever use the Davison relationship chart, which is based on the midpoints between the birth times and geographic locations?
SF: I am familiar with the technique, but Jodie and I have found the midpoint-based conventional composite chart to be a more powerful tool. That has certainly been my experience. How about you, Jodie?
JF: I would agree. There was a period early in my study of astrology where I would run both charts for the synastry I was looking at, and consistently, the composite chart worked better. It is not that the Davison is without value. I simply think the composite is a far more valuable tool.
TMA: Do you apply transits and progressions to the composite chart?
SF: Transits, certainly. As for progressions, Jodie and I customarily use secondary progressions, and they are not applicable to the composite chart, because the composite occurs in an artificial time that never existed. But transits to the composite chart are quite powerful.
JF: Extremely powerful.
TMA: What have you seen happen?
SF: Pretty much the same class of responses one finds to an individual chart. Probably the best single insight I could offer a student working with the composite chart is to start off by thinking of the composite as a person. Just apply your basic human knowledge and birth chart astrological knowledge to it. Instead, here is a person walking around with two bodies instead of one. And all the techniques are pretty translatable that way.
JF: In readings, I refer to the composite chart as the "entity," with a few jokes about calling it the entity. But we do need to personify it, and as you personify it, it really comes alive. Anytime a student gets stuck understanding it, that is the best way to think about it.
SF: I often invoke an image of a couple who are committed to each other, and one comes home from work and talks to the other: "Do you feel like going out to dinner?" "I don't know, if you do...." "Well, what do you feel like having?" "I don't care." This is a kind of low-energy space couples will sometimes get to. So I invoke that image. And then I invoke the image of an individual person who is not living in accord with his or her birth chart, and we find the exact same symptoms there. There's no law that says you have to live out your birth chart; it is just a good idea. If people just watch TV instead of acting like a 9th-house Sagittarian or whatever, they get tired, they get flat, they get dull. And exactly the same symptom arises in a couple. It is a basic insight into the beauty of a composite chart and what kinds of problems it can address. It shows the couple how to live, just as a birth chart suggests the will of the gods, so to speak, for an individual.
JF: Particularly the house placement of the composite Sun. That is profoundly powerful.
TMA: You find the Sun's placement the most powerful?
SF: Oh yes.
JF: If I had to pick a single factor, absolutely.
SF: Of course, the key to astrology is always balancing many factors. The Sun is a great place to start.
TMA: What have you seen in terms of the Sun placement in a composite house?
SF: It is where the couple will best stay alive. By alive, I don't mean just the hearts beating. I mean in the sense of being engaged in life, energized. Jodie and I are a 5th-house Aquarian Sun. Jodie is a novelist, as well as an astrologer, and she wrote a novel, The Rhymer and the Ravens, which is about 9th-century Vikings, and Elves. It is a wonderful kind of quest story. And I wrote a rock opera based on it. The whole project took off in an explosive way, and over the last two or three years we wound up performing it quite a lot locally with a troupe of dancers, all matter of complexity. It was a very 5th-house kind of thing. And it was a renewing experience for our marriage. We had so much to talk about all the time. We would go to dinner, and there would be no flagging of the conversation that might happen after 15 years together. We were just so alive to it. This is a very concrete illustration of how the composite Sun might work.
JF: The activities of the house that the composite Sun is in are activities that nourish the relationship. That's the diet of experiences the relationship needs in order to grow and flourish and expand. In other words, one doesn't have to just look for Sun in the 5th, 7th, or 8th houses as an indicator of a long-term romantic relationship. The Sun in the composite shows where the relationship is going to be vivified.
SF: An excellent word for it.
TMA: What about the Moon in the composite?
JF: It feeds the heart, it feeds the emotional life of the relationship.
SF: It helps the relationship feel comfortable. Much of this is fairly elemental astrology. I'd rather say "elemental" than "elementary." Elementally, the Moon is connected with our domestic environment, what it takes for us to feel comfortable there, the normal routines of life for good or for ill. Jodie and I have an Aquarian Moon as well as an Aquarian Sun in the composite chart. It's in the 6th house, and we have Virgo rising. I don't know if this nurtures us, but there is a pervasive mood in our life of just fussing - that Virgo 6th-house thing of keeping two complicated, international businesses cooking.
JF: At least two. Our offices are in our home. Our great feeling of sharing the work, as I imagine the members of a medieval guild must have felt about sharing their work, is 6th house to me.
SF: And one very obvious illustration is that we work at home - the Moon being associated with the domestic environment. And there it is in the 6th house.
TMA: With this Aquarian energy and working together, do you have separate offices? I think of Aquarius as needing one's space.
JF: We each have our own office, and there's a studio we've added onto the house, where the computers live. A lot of technical equipment. Books. We tape readings, and market our tapes. So books and tapes live there, too.
SF: That seems to meet our needs. And the need we are working on is preventing those three offices from expanding to four or five.
JF: They have imperialistic designs.
SF: We're at a standoff. (laughter)
TMA: In terms of synastry, what about progressions? For example, I will often see one's progressed Moon contact the other's natal Sun when they meet. Do you see that happen a lot?
SF: Yes. I find that one of the most basic ways we experience both our progressions and transits is meeting people who embody the energies that are passing through our charts. Certainly it's not the whole story, but synchronicity would have it that if you're going through a Saturn time, you're going to meet Saturnine people.
JF: This is not necessarily psychological projection in an unhealthy sense of the word either. It is probably very difficult to form a relationship without some amount of projection going on. So you project the energy, and that other person acts as a role model of that energy for you so you can learn to embody it yourself.
TMA: A friend and I have been having this ongoing discussion about what happens to a relationship after you pull back your projections. Then what do you have?
SF: See if anything is left. (Laughter) Sometimes there is.
JF: That's when it really starts to get rich.
TMA: When it becomes authentic.
SF: In America, we make such a god out of self-sufficiency. It's basically John Wayne marching into town, solving everything all by himself. That kind of mythology has entered pop psychology to such a point that we Americans tend to be a bit phobic about interdependency and about the idea of people completing each other. That almost sounds like a taboo statement, but I would say Jodie has completed me in ways I probably could never complete myself. She has a vision of things that are useful to me but would never arise naturally in me. So I'm stronger having an "inner Jodie," so to speak, which I wouldn't have to the same degree unless I had married her.
JF: I would say the same thing with a reversal of pronouns and nouns. In a healthy relationship, each person does grow and become a more wholly-integrated self-aware human being than he or she would have been alone. A healthy relationship makes you work on yourself, and not necessarily in painful ways. Sometimes in difficult ways, but not necessarily.
SF: Sometimes it is easy and fun, and you're still growing.
TMA: That's what I love about your book, Skymates. You show both sides of what isn't working, why it isn't working, and where it can work and really be enhanced.
SF: It is so essential to keep that element of freedom and possibility in astrology.
JF: Every planet has a high and low. For example, the same astrologers who make ominous noises about Saturn in the 8th house might do a lot of oohing and aahing when they see Venus in the 8th, but a malfunctioning Venus in the 8th is just as painful as a malfunctioning Saturn there.
TMA: Looking at people living together, and how well they will live together, is there anything in particular you look for in terms of their chart compatibilities?
SF: The Moon is critical.
JF: The 4th house/10th house axis.
SF: The 4th house is profoundly related to hearth and home and, as such, is the most underestimated relationship house in modern astrology. It is profoundly reflective of relationships wherein we have entered a state of commitment with each other. It doesn't have much relevance until we have moved into the same house and begun to share our stuff. In many ways, the 4th house is the true house of marriage, because it is home. We cross a line with people, and that line is beyond loving and trusting and making love for the first time. We are actually saying, "Here I make my clan, my home." That is the holy grail in terms of committed relationship, and the 4th house captures that. In modern astrology we look at the 4th house much more psychologically, and those are valid interpretations. The comment I would personally make is that when the clan broke up - because of the Industrial Revolution, and when people began to lose their sense of being in absolutely bonded relationships and taking the family name - when that great collapse of the clan archetype occurred, psychology arose. They coincided synchronistically in time quite closely. When our basic need to have absolutely trusted, bonded, committed links with other human beings ceased to be met, we all went a little crazy. When people go into therapy, much of what they are going to talk about are 4th-house issues, even in a very concrete sense - what happened to me in my family, what is happening to me in my current family, where is my family. They are all 4th-house questions. So the clan, bonding, hearth, home, the sense of having a place that is safe - that is all 4th-house stuff.
JF: And that dovetails completely with the image of the 4th house as a relationship house, because in order to form your own clan, you need to understand what happened to you in your clan of origin. Just as the 4th house is supposed to rule birth and death, in some ways it rules your psychological resolution of your past clan in order to give birth to your current clan.
TMA: Then that extends the "arc of intimacy" you described in your book, in which the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th houses are the houses pertinent to relationship.
SF: I regret not including more of the 4th-house stuff in Skymates. It has been a major development for me in terms of my understanding of the symbolism post-Skymates. (Webmaster's note: the 2001 edition of Skymates will include this and other material.) I've spoken about this quite a lot in terms of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, as we begin to recognize the shadow side of the old mythologies that have been so dominant and mistaken for reality during the last 171 years. If you go back to the 1820s, the last time the Uranus-Neptune conjunction formed, you have in many ways the earliest roots of our modern culture - the first trains and steamships prefiguring fossil-fuel driven mass transportation, the first photograph and first sound recording prefiguring media culture. It would be a long footnote to go into full historical detail about it, but the society we have created, which has unwittingly fragmented hearth and home, is rooted there. And as we now come into the cleanup of the end period of the current Uranus-Neptune conjunction, we are dealing with the fact that we lost something. It was precious and most of us don't even remember what it was. But we know that we hurt. Where a bonded, trusted, and committed relationship should be, there is now a hole in most of us.
TMA: There is that extraordinary sense of isolation, aloneness, unconnectedness.
SF: Exactly. Marriage is still honored, but nowadays it seems that when people go to weddings, in the back of their minds they are wondering, "Will it last?" Recently I heard a story about a guy in New York who introduced his fiancé at a party as his future ex-wife. It is so sad, but it is a common assumption that most marriages will break up at some point.
JF: I heard a standup comedy routine by a woman, and she said that when she meets a guy, she thinks, "Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?"
SF: A healthy 4th house is the opposite of all that. Here's a bonded relationship I can count on, and no one is going anywhere.
TMA: When you look at the compatibility between the individuals' 4th houses, what do you feel signifies a healthy compatibility?
JF: First, it is impossible to tell just by looking at a chart. The individuals need to be fully aware of their own 4th-house energies - the energies around their own roots - without unconsciously looking for the partner to provide that for them. They need to be aware of their own 4th-house needs.
TMA: So if you find a man's planets transposed in his partner's 4th house, does it feel to you like that relationship for him is getting in touch with his own roots, his own feelings?
JF: When someone puts a lot of planets in your 4th house by transposition, that individual's affect on you is to raise your 4th-house issues and to increase the amount of time you are going to spend dealing with the 4th house. If your own 4th-house issues include a 4th-house Mars, and you are totally unaware of your own rage, this individual may have a catalytic affect on you. If you are well aware of your 4th-house issues and have worked out a reasonable modus vivendi with them, someone who strongly influences your 4th house may remind you of them, but still be someone with whom you feel comfortable and at home.
SF: Absolutely familiar.
JF: Yes. You live together easily. You are deeply familiar. You feel like you have known the person for a long time. There is a clan feeling, a tribal feeling.
SF: You smell right.
JF: A very good way of putting it. The primate part of you, the monkey part of you, feels okay being in this person's tree, and you feel okay if he or she is in your tree.
TMA: That really explains the 4th-house comfort in a way I haven't thought about before.
SF: It certainly is at the heart of relationships. When we look to the question of do we get along, can we communicate, can we a find a modus vivendi, as Jodie put it, I would look primarily to 7th-house kinds of themes, 7th-house placements, Venus placements. If we change the focus to the general categories of chemistry and electricity - those magical elements of passion and the heat of the blood that have their charm in a committed relationship - that I would relate more to the 8th house, to the
Mars, Pluto, Scorpionic types of things. They seem to be the astrological symbols that carry the chemistry and electricity for us, and ideally things would have to be cooking there, too. But for this deep sense of the rightness of staying together, we swing back into that 4th-house domain. In any relationship between adults, there is going to be a need to withdraw sometimes and just be alone and stare out the window, and that I would relate more to the 12th house. By similar logic, we could go around the whole circle of astrological symbolism and find that there isn't a single piece of it that is not relationship-oriented, because a relationship is between two human wholenesses. So a blunder for a beginning astrologer would be to believe there really is specific relationship symbolism in a chart. Holistic synastry has to include the relationship between two entire charts.
JF: Each individual chart is so complex, it is like a country. You need to think about how these two countries, these two empires, each with their own natural premises and predilections for home and hearth and relating, do and don't get along. Each chart is like a culture.
TMA: So when you are doing astrological counseling and looking at both charts, is it your intent to help each individual understand the other's individual empire?
JF: Synastry for me has three parts. I have Mercury in Capricorn and I can't help making structures. I look at each chart individually from a relationship-oriented perspective, as if the other person weren't in the room. Then I talk about how those two relationship needs in each chart do and don't get along. And number three, I look at the composite.
SF: We both follow that same format.
TMA: What happens when you see a lot of planets in the synastry that are quincunx. To me that signifies that the two people are operating from very different levels.
SF: I have always thought of the quincunx as an aspect of..."missing" is the word that comes to mind. When you are talking to someone and you both are of good will and struggling to communicate, you have the same dictionaries with the same words in them, but the definitions are different. It is a very challenging aspect in terms of synastry, I would say.
TMA: Do you see that a lot between people?
SF: I tend not to see it very often. A premise, which I believe Jodie would share with me, is that it is not the astrologer's business to say yes or no to a given relationship. If a couple comes to me and they are trying to make a relationship work, my task is to help them do that. I define the problems as clearly and honestly as I can, suggest solutions where I see them, and address where the strengths are and how to exploit them. In this area, there is perhaps some tension between astrological theory and astrological counsel. A counselor's job is to support people, to fan the flames of higher possibility. But I do think it is objectively accurate to say that when you find a relative lack of aspects between two charts, the probability of the relationship working out is markedly lower - in fact, the probability of its even starting is markedly lower as well. "No aspects, no action" - that principle from Horary astrology has relevance to synastry. The lack of any major astrological connection is far more difficult than many squares and oppositions simply because there is so much less basis for communication on every level, including the erotic.
JF: I would agree.
TMA: I always look for those classically troublesome aspects to see what and where the dynamics are in the relationship.
SF: Exactly. They are really not so bad at all. It raises a big set of issues.
JF: It is very rare not to see a few of them.
SF: Oh yes. It is essential to see them. A very general rule of thumb with aspects, and all the other ways we can observe astrological tension and harmony between people, is that the harmonious kinds of aspects allow people to be good roommates, to just be able to get along with each other, which is a precious thing if we are trying to live together. With many of the so-called "bad" aspects - Jodie and I prefer to use words like "difficult" or "tense," because these words are not quite so evaluative - I have observed that they are much more associated with passion. If we are taking a fairly mpty-headed approach to synastry and imagining that trines are good, and we find a synastry where everything is in trine, such a relationship can be made to work, but its shadow is a terrible tendency to fall asleep. It is so easy to share blind spots, so easy to support each other's defenses. Therefore, quietly corrosive factors can creep into this relationship without bothering either person enough to do anything about them - a kind of dullness, too many "yes, dears," a diminution of erotic heat. The result is a gradual erosion of intimacy. But the sense of processing life together, the nakedness and passion and intensity - those are much more related to the challenging aspects, where the feeling is "Work on this or die."
JF: There is a funny parallel between what Steve is saying about tense aspects, and the inconjunct in business relationships. I rarely see inconjuncts in personal relationships, but I do see a fair amount in business synastry. I often find that an inconjunct between people working together is a great asset, because one of them tends to see things that the other overlooks. They are tuned into each other's blind spots. If this is brought up in a helpful way, each partner can rely on the other to see what he or she is missing. That's a powerful combination for working together in a business.
TMA: That's a wonderful insight. Now, going back to composites, do you see Sun-Venus conjunctions in long-term relationships, and do you see that a lot?
JF: Very often.
SF: It's very common. In fact, it is one of many avenues where a statistical proof of astrology, which seems to be a holy grail for some people, would be fairly easily accomplished. Get a group of people who have been married or committed to each other for five years or more and do a statistical analysis of the presence of the Sun-Venus conjunction in the composite chart versus chance. I would stake my life on it that we would see a distinct Venus pattern because it emerges so often in the counseling room.
TMA: In synastry, do you often see the Sun-Moon conjunction? That is another one that is often talked about in synastry.
SF: Yes. In fact, Jodie and I have that. My Sun is in the middle of Capricorn, and her Moon is there too. That is a classic synastry connection. There is such a wholeness when you get the Sun and Moon together, such a completeness in knowing each other.
TMA: It doesn't matter which gender?
SF: I don't think so. There were certainly a lot of gender-based astrological laws in the old days, but I don't think they're true anymore. Perhaps even more pointedly, I don't think it's very helpful to think in those terms anymore.
TMA: Speaking of gender, do you work with gay relationships?
SF and JF: Oh yes, quite a bit.
TMA: Have you found anything that stands out that may have a specifically gay relationship signature?
SF: I have a tentative thought, but I don't have a lot of energy in this one. In the individual birth chart there may be a little more emphasis upon Uranian contact with relationship significators, but I don't feel strongly enough to make a great fuss about it. I've never really sensed much of a distinction between gay and hetero relationships. The issues are the same, apart from the societal insanity.
JF: If I were to cut off the names from the charts, I would have no idea if this were a heterosexual or a gay relationship.
TMA: In Skymates, you write about the effects of a person's Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto touching another's natal planet(s). How wide an orb do you use?
SF: I tend to pay the most attention to the most vigorous, powerfully operating symbols, aspects included. And given that, I'm inclined toward rather narrow orbs, simply because they tend to focus attention on the aspects that are most vigorous in the chart. So it is purely a practical consideration. You can use 7°-8° orbs with the outer planets and learn useful things. But if I see something with a 2-1/2° orb, I will pay closer attention.
JF: I would agree with that. The narrower the orb, the more the aspect is felt. I use slightly wider orbs if the Sun, Moon, Ascendant, or the ruler of the Ascendant are involved.
TMA: What are the effects of having a partner's Jupiter or Saturn touching your personal planets?
JF: I'll do Jupiter. The traditional line about Jupiter is that it expands what it touches. There are many images one can use with Jupiter, and one that works pretty well is to think of Jupiter as a guardian angel, although sometimes it is an angel that is full of itself and thinks it is God rather than merely an angel. When somebody's Jupiter touches your planet, you feel better about that planet, you feel inspired, you feel optimistic, you feel blessed, you feel cheered up, you feel helped. Sometimes you lose all sense of your mortality in relation to that planet and feel bullet-proof. How you feel depends a lot on your individual maturity level, or whether you are having a good hair day or not. (Laughter) I see a lot of Jupiter contacts in long-term relationships, and I look for them because they bring ease, grace, forgiveness, tolerance, and a sense of humor in the area they are touching. Humor is essential in relationships. It is impossible to maintain a long relationship unless both people have a sense of humor and can laugh at themselves. That's one of the gifts Jupiter brings.
TMA: Would Jupiter also have the partner saying, "I know what's good for you. Do it my way"?
JF: That's a more inflated sense of Jupiter. That's when the angel thinks it is God. That's the fundamentalist preacher side of Jupiter: "I have a pipeline to the Lord and the Lord told me all about you."
SF: The Hollywood mogul with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, "I'm going to make a star out of you." Just give up your individuality....
JF: Become a satellite.
SF: I think encouragement is a key word with Jupiter. It is so encouraging. Of course, sometimes it can be terrible. There are some things we shouldn't be encouraged to do.
TMA: How about Saturn?
SF: Saturn is such a great bugaboo with people who take a traditional approach to synastry - the greater malefic, the lord of solitude, the bringer of coldness and distance. This is very misleading. A critical observation about Saturn is that it is the planet of commitment. The ability to take a vow is utterly Saturnian, and if the relationship is going to become a marriage, or anything like that, it requires a commitment. I'm thinking of M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, in which he titled one of his chapters, "Love Is Not a Feeling." There is obviously some extremity in that - of course love is a feeling. But his point was that it is more than that. Love is a set of promises and commitments between two people, and those are very much in the domain of Saturn. I find that in long lasting relationships, it is fairly typical to find strong Saturn contacts. It gives that sobriety, and the ability to let the vow help you through the threadbare patches when you are not feeling love for each other. I find Saturn precious. Something I have observed in the practicalities of everyday astrological practice is that in the charts of younger people, say, before their Saturn return, if Saturn crosses Venus or reaches the 7th house by transit, it often correlates with a breakup. However, as people get older, often those same Saturn events correlate with a commitment or marriage.
I'm talking about a pattern here, and of course there are individual exceptions. I'm no fortuneteller. I wouldn't want anyone to presume that this is what it always means. But the patterns are there, and it does say something. When we get past the youthful "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" kind of love, and we know what we are getting into with another human being, Saturn comes in and steels our nerves and sobers us up and helps us make the promise.
TMA: I've also seen that same pattern in terms of Saturn's pre- and post-return effects. Now, let's turn to the R-rated material - sexuality in the chart. What are the factors that you look at?
SF: I want to say right off, and this fits in with what we said earlier, that I look at the entire chart. If anything becomes dysfunctional in any category of relationship, and is not dealt with, it's going to have an adverse impact on the erotic dimensions of the relationship. There are specific areas, but that has to be the first statement.
TMA: Exactly. But in the chart, where would you say our basic individual sexual needs and desires are described?
JF: You will see in an individual chart how important passion is to a person, and one variant of that will be sexual passion. Often you will get some sense of how comfortable someone is with his or her body, with the whole physical plane. You will get a definite impression of what somebody's likable/lovable button is, and what sort of people they find likable/lovable. The Moon often gives a sense of a baseline emotional need and what a person needs to be comfortable, especially the element of the Moon's sign. You have to look at the whole chart to get a globalized feeling. Steve was absolutely right there. Sexuality is a more holistic set of needs in that the whole chart must be taken into account. With that in mind, the sign, the element, the house of the Moon; Venus and Mars; 8th house, 5th house, 7th house, and Pluto.
SF: Yes. For myself, dealing explicitly with erotic/sexual kinds of questions, I look at two fundamental dyads. One of them is the 5th-house/8th-house dyad, and the other is the Mars-Venus dyad. The 8th house is the idea of chemistry and electricity, the stuff that can potentially sustain passion over years. On a spring day, we can whimsically get turned on two or three times while walking down a street, but when we're dealing with what it takes to sustain passion, that is 8th-house energy - that deep sense of feeling right, of fitting and being right together. Regarding the important, yet somewhat more superficial questions, like a person's style in bed, I think this is much more 5th-house-oriented. There is a performance element there, like dancing or playing music. It's an expression of life. So in working with a couple, if we are looking at some stylistic tension between them that is inhibiting the free flow of sexual energy, I'll look to the 5th house. If we're dealing with more fundamental issues that crystallize as "Do we want to be together? Is this the person for me?", I look to the 8th house. Then I flip over to the Mars-Venus dimension. Probably at this stage of cultural evolution, the most important initial observation is that everybody has Mars and Venus regardless of their gender. It seems like a fairly straightforward statement, but we need some reminders.
There is a tribal tendency to give Venus to the women and Mars to the men. Mars is the heat of the blood in us and Venus is our more sensitive and romantic sensibilities. Most people who are in a satisfactory adult relationship will recognize that sexually they tend to do one of two things. One is they make love, and the other is customarily described with the familiar word that begins with "f." Most couples who are comfortable talking about this kind of stuff would agree that both are precious. We need the wild, free-flowing release of erotic force without inhibition and we also need tenderness and eye contact. And they are rather different kinds of sexual expression. Venus will describe the more tender place in our needs, and Mars, this wilder place. You may find a couple getting along wonderfully in terms of their Venus needs, but there might be some issues in terms of their Mars connection, so they are carrying around some sexual frustration. Or they may have tremendous passion, but they don't ever seem to connect with the sweet place where they "make" love, creating love. These are just schematic ways of coming to terms with that most imponderable of questions.
TMA: Jodie, do you have anything to add?
JF: I'd like to go back to where the chart will often give a good indication of just how central and important sexuality and relating to somebody is. There are people for whom these are just not central aspects of life. Or they simply vibrate at a much lower or much higher frequency. This is one of the first things I look at when I am considering sexuality in a synastry. Not so much what is in the 8th house and where Venus is and where Mars is, although these are all crucial, but just the relative number of watts somebody has running down the sexuality current. And those watts need to be somewhere within one another's ballpark if two people are going to be happy with one another.
The Moon has a lot to do with whether or not we are simply feeling loved and how we communicate love, particularly the element of the Moon. The 8th house represents energies that need to be present in a mate if the monkey part of us wants to go on sleeping with the person. The 7th house represents energies we need to feel are present in someone before we can really trust them. The 5th-house energies need to be there in the person if we don't want to feel that the relationship has just evolved into nothing but responsibilities.
TMA: Speaking of the 5th house, one of the things you indicate in Skymates is that the 5th house seems to be where we want to live in the moment, in the now. Which is what sexual energy is about...being so completely in the moment.
SF: Yes. The 5th house has so much to do with fun, and that's important. With a very strong 5th house in the composite, for example, I will emphasize creativity or just going out and merrily spending too much money in a French restaurant. There are lots and lots of 5th-house expressions that do bring us into the present and renew us in that fun way.
TMA: Going back to wattage, Jodie, is there anything that describes high and low wattage?
JF: Basically, look at where the major chart energies lie. For high wattage, if someone has everything but the kitchen sink in relationship houses - 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th - then that's a lot of planetary energy running along the relationship current. So are a lot of planets in Libra and Scorpio, and to a lesser extent in Cancer or Taurus, or perhaps a very prominent Venus, Mars, or Pluto. For low relationship wattage, look for a lack of the above factors, and see if the major chart energies have everything to do with something other than relating - e.g., if most of someone's planets are in the 6th and the 10th houses, then work is a far more central concern to this person than relating would be. For a triple 1st-house Aquarian with Uranus opposing the Sun and Moon, independence and freedom are primary.
SF: I do have one general point I would like to add. We see so much about how marriage is falling apart or certainly taking it on the chin lately. I'm inclined to look at this positively, even though for the last 20-30 years there has been so much agony, at least in the Western world, over the inability of men and women to get along. I'm seeing something very wonderful happening, which is an emergence of a new paradigm going beyond the old gender roles. And sexism is still a huge issue, but I'm not going to beat that drum. It's a little too obvious at this point; most of the readership has meditated on this one. But what I would emphasize is the notion that people throughout much of history used to be under tremendous pressure to marry. If you were a good person, you would either marry or become a nun or priest. That's baloney. You can look at birth charts and see some that are very relationship-oriented and some that are not very relationship-oriented. The holy spirit made us all.
And marriage is not a path for everyone. This emerging paradigm - I don't think it's here yet, but I think we're starting to see the shapes of it in the fog - is one in which marriage is simply recognized as one human option, one way of living with human sexuality. And although it's an honorable path, it's not the only path. If somebody is wired for it and they want to take that path, God bless them. And if somebody wants to be single, God bless them, too. That's a good path as well. This sense of diversity, dare I say a kind of sexual multi-culturalism, seems to be emerging. And I think marriage will be much healthier when we are under less pressure to assume that it is the only path, and instead begin to treat it like a yoga. It's not for everyone. Volunteer for it if you want it. That's a new bumper sticker.
TMA: Volunteer for marriage?
SF: Yes.
TMA: Also, there is the other aspect, that if a relationship does not "work out" and evolve into marriage, it is seen as a failed relationship, when, in fact, it may have been a very healing connection. Also, as you pointed out in Skymates, because people are not in a committed relationship does not mean they have a fear of intimacy.
SF: Right. That would spin off from what I was just saying. In terms of relationship, nothing reveals the human psyche more clearly than being in a committed relationship, and there is no subject more interesting than the human psyche.
TMA: Jodie and Steven, thank you.
SF and JF: Thank you.
©1997 The Mountain Astrologer - all rights reserved
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