Forrest and the Fallen
An astrological analysis of the recent controversy with Steven Forrest
Reviewing Steven Forrest’s birth chart and the transit chart for the moment the video went public—the podcast episode on the Lila Astrology YouTube channel where Steven used a racial slur, the N-word, and language many have called racist or leaning toward racist ideology—I’m not going to do a comprehensive review of everything. But there are a few things that stand out, particularly worth noting.
What follows is a technical delineation of Steven’s natal chart, and of the chart cast for the moment the video went public, with that second chart treated throughout as a transit against the first rather then as a reading of the moment on its own terms.
Natal (inner): January 6, 1949 at 3:30:00 am, Mt Vernon NY, USA
Event (outer): Thursday July 23, 2026 at 1:41:47 pm
I’ve set the event chart for New York rather than California. I’m in California, and it was morning here when the video went up. Steven’s birth location is New York, and because I’m reading the event chart as a transit to his natal chart, I adjusted the time to the location his own chart is anchored to. Some people have argued for keeping it in California, since that’s where Steven lives, but Steven may or may not have actually been in California at the moment the video published, and in the Hellenistic tradition I studied in, transits are read from the native’s birth location as a matter of course, not from wherever the native happens to be standing that day. There’s a second reason to: the video went up on YouTube, which is a global platform, and there’s no way to know which data center actually held it at the moment it went live, so nothing about YouTube’s own geography can anchor a chart in the first place.
For readers who don’t work in Hellenistic technique, what follows is divided into four parts. The first is a technical analysis of the natal chart alone. The second is a technical analysis of the transiting, or event, chart alone. The third looks at the receptions and aspects within and between those two charts. The fourth draws all of that together toward understanding the events themselves relative to the charts under analysis.
Doing this kind of reading means talking a lot about the dignity of planets, and that word tends to mislead people who haven’t worked with it before, since calling a planet undignified sounds like an insult, like their’s something wrong with the planet. Essential dignity comes from where a planet sits in the zodiac, by sign, accidental dignity comes from where it lands in the houses, and from the other conditions of the moment a chart is cast. Together, what those two forms of dignity describe is how the planets read each other, how they stand in relation to one another inside the same chart, which one the others see as holding the stronger position and which they see as holding the weaker one.
It comes down to a comparitive measure of capacity to act. Higher dignity gives a planet a higher capacity to act under certain circumstances relative to the other planets around it; lower dignity gives it a lower capacity, again relative to the others. Where dignities vary across a chart, differentiating between planets is straightforward: you can point to the one with more capacity and the one with less. Where every planet sits at a similar level, high or low or somewhere in the undignified middle, there is very little to differentiate on this axis, and reading that chart takes subtler methods, ways of judging one planet’s capacity against another that don’t rely on dignity alone. A chart where all the planets carry a similar level of dignity is a chart where none of them holds an advantage over the rest, and that’s a different chart to read then one where a single planet can act far beyond what the others can manage.
That’s the frame for the chart that follows, especially Steven’s own, where dignity turns out to be scarce almost everywhere. Calling a planet undignified there is close to moot, because there’s no differential of strength against weakness to measure it by. Dignity matters most where a strong planet stands against a weak one.
Part One: The Natal Chart
What comes to mind immediately in Steven’s birth chart is the condition of Jupiter and the Sun, four degrees apart in the sign of Capricorn, in the third whole sign house: the Sun at the sixteenth degree, Jupiter at the twelfth degree of Capricorn. What’s interesting is that in this configuration the Sun is seperating from Jupiter, in the third house, because Steven was born in the dark hours of the morning. The Sun, peregrine like the rest, holds Venus’s bound and Mars’s face there. Jupiter is combust and in a state of debility. In Steven’s birth chart, Jupiter is in its fall.
Six of the seven traditional planets in the natal chart (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn) hold no dignity at all where they sit: no domicile, no exaltation, no triplicity, no bound, no face. Peregrine is the word for that condition. Think of it the way you’d think of working a shift on someone else’s crew: you still do the job, and you do it at full strength, but the authority in the room belongs to whoever runs the sign. Jupiter is the one planet holding any dignity at all, and what it holds is it’s own bound in Capricorn. That’s also Jupiter’s fall by sign. Fall describes how the neighboring signs witness a planet: Capricorn runs on restraint, and Jupiter’s native expansiveness reads there as excessive, poorly witnessed by the sign around it, standing on its own ground by bound at the same time.
Jupiter is considered the greater benefic. But Steven has a night chart, so Jupiter is actually the benefic contrary to sect. In Steven’s chart, that Jupiter contrary to sect is in a state of combustion, of debility, and in its fall. Jupiter might, under certain circumstances, operate as what’s called a functional malefic, because of its particular style of debility.
Scorpio rises at 24°23’, which makes Mars the ruler of the chart: the planet whose condition sets the tone for the houses it touches. Mars sits at 1°15’ Aquarius in the fourth, peregrine, in Saturn’s domicile and in Mercury’s bound. The chart’s own ruler is operating on two other planets’ ground at once. The rising degree itself carries a second layer: ruled by Mars at the level of sign, 24°23’ Scorpio is held at the finer measures by two other planets entirely, Saturn’s bound and Venus’s face. Even the ascendant’s own degree, governed by the chart’s peregrine ruler, splits its detailed structure across two additional planets beyond the domicile ruler: the face and bound rulership add another layer to the diversity of dignity here.
The South Node falls at 1°39’ Scorpio, in the first house. That degree belongs to Mars three seperate ways: it’s Mars’s sign, Mars’s bound, and Mars’s face. Three independent dignity categories, all held by the same planet, stacked on the node that marks what’s already familiar, what doesn’t require new effort.
Mercury’s position at 29°58’ Capricorn matters on its own, apart from its dignities. Twenty-nine and a half degrees is the last full degree of a sign, traditionally read as a planet’s most urgent, least settled position, the point where a single further minute changes everything about it. Mercury holds Mars’s bound and the Sun’s face there. A planet whose whole business is connection and communication sits at the very threshold of its sign, its fine structure running through Mars and the Sun rather than through anything of its own. That belonging runs both directions: Mars sits in Mercury’s own bound, just as Mercury sits in Mars’s. Two planets, each holding no dignity of its own by sign, each holding a claim on the other’s fine territory instead. The Midheaven, at 7°33’ Virgo, is ruled by that same Mercury, who also holds the bound of the Lot of Fortune six degrees away, with the Sun holding Fortune’s face.
Mercury and Saturn are in mutual reception by domicile as well: Mercury sits in Capricorn, Saturn’s own sign, while Saturn sits in Virgo, Mercury’s own sign. Each holds the other’s house. Given how little dignity this chart holds anywhere, a mutual reception like this one stands out: each planet actually has claim on the other’s ground, rather then borrowing it the way the peregrine chain elsewhere does. It ties the Midheaven’s ruler to the out-of-sect malefic sitting on the Midheaven and the Lot of Fortune both. Saturn, in fact, hosts four of the seven traditional planets by domicile: the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, all sitting in Capricorn or Aquarius. The out-of-sect malefic, itself peregrine, is landlord to most of the chart.
Saturn is the out-of-sect malefic in this nocturnal chart, the harder of the two by condition. It sits at 5°49’ Virgo in the eleventh, peregrine: Mercury’s sign, Mercury’s bound, the Sun’s face. The Lot of Fortune sits at 6°44’ Virgo, fifty-five arcminutes away, the Midheaven sits at 7°33’ Virgo, also measured from Saturn. Both the lot of the body and material circumstance and the angle of reputation and public standing fall within two degrees of an undignified Saturn.
Venus sits at 21°14’ Sagittarius in the second house, peregrine, holding Saturn’s bound and Saturn’s face both. She’s hosted by Jupiter at the level of sign and by Saturn twice at the finer measures, the same Saturn that already governs so much of this chart. The Moon, at 3°21’ Aries in the sixth, is the natal sect light and peregrine as well, ruled by Mars, holding Jupiter’s bound and Mars’s face. The chart’s own preferred luminary answers to Mars twice, in the house of routine and the body’s maintenance, the same house that carries the skipped step read below. Natal Neptune sits at 15°08’ Libra in the twelfth.
The Lot of Spirit falls at 12°01’ Aquarius in the fourth house, the same sign and house Mars itself occupies. Its own ruler is Saturn, not Mars, Venus holds its bound there, Mercury its face. Both lots read in this chart are computed from the ascendant, the Sun, and the Moon, with the formula reversed between day charts and night charts: in a night chart, Fortune is measured as the ascendant plus the Moon’s distance from the Sun, and Spirit as the ascendant plus the Sun’s distance from the Moon.
Natal Uranus sits at 27°50’ Gemini in the eighth house, retrograde. Pluto sits at 16°01’ Leo, retrograde, in the tenth house: angular, the house of visible action and public standing. The North Node, opposite the South Node, falls at 1°39’ Taurus in the seventh, the house of partnership and the open other, ruled by Venus, who also holds its bound. That’s the growth point the chart is oriented toward rather than what it already holds by default. Venus, like Mars, is peregrine, so the point the chart grows toward is itself unanchored, no more established than the point it’s moving away from.
Laid out as a chain, the peregrine planets carry a circular relationship through the decans, nearly circuitous rather than linear: Mercury’s face-lord is the Sun, the Sun’s face-lord is Mars, Mars’s face-lord is Venus, Venus’s face-lord is Saturn, and Saturn’s face-lord is the Sun again, looping back rather than ending. The Moon’s face-lord is Mars as well, and so is Jupiter’s, both feeding into that same loop from outside the peregrine chain itself.
The natal Mars is also squaring the natal nodes. In evolutionary astrology, when a planet squares the natal nodes, it’s considered a skipped-step: a lesson that hasn’t been integrated, and needs to be learned in this life. Mars, in Steven’s chart, rules the first house of identity and person, and the sixth house as well, by whole sign. As an evolutionary astrologer, Steven typically works in quadrant houses: Placidus, or Porphyry. There’s nothing inherently wrong about reading whole sign alongside evolutionary technique. It’s on the heterodox side of usage patterns, but certainly not anything that should be considered forbidden. By whole sign, Mars squaring the nodes indicates a skipped step relative to the topics of the first and sixth houses.
In ancient Hellenistic astrology, the sixth house held the topic of slavery.
Mercury is also close to the square with the nodes, and part of that skipped-step experience too, off by a couple of degrees, out of sign, but close enough to the nodes to count. Mercury natally sits in the third house of communication.
Part Two: The Transiting Chart
Contrast that with the transiting chart. The Sun and Jupiter are again in a proximal relationship, the Sun in the first degree of Leo and Jupiter in the sixth degree of Leo. They’re very similar in distance from each other at the time of Steven’s birth and at the time of this event, but in different signs: the tenth whole sign house of Leo versus the third whole sign house of Capricorn. In this configuration, the transiting Sun is applying to Jupiter, not seperating from it. In the transiting chart, Jupiter is combust as well. Its essential dignity is again limited to bound rulership. By accidental dignity the combustion is the more influential condition.
At the time of publication, transiting Jupiter and transiting Pluto were in opposition: Pluto in the fifth degree of Aquarius, transiting Jupiter in the sixth degree of Leo. Transiting Pluto is also opposite the transiting Sun, a Pluto opposition with Sun and Jupiter touches all three planets together.
The transiting Mercury was in the seventeenth degree of Cancer, in the ninth house, Mercury is retrograde.
The eleventh whole sign house is the house of community, of audience, of published work disseminated to large audiences. Social media is in the eleventh house. Venus is in her fall there, undergoing a state of debility, connecting with Mercury in the ninth whole-sign house of astrology by sextile.
The South Node is in the first degree of Virgo, getting ready to make it’s ingress into Leo ahead of the solar eclipse on the twelfth of August, a total solar eclipse.
The transiting Moon, at the exact moment of publication (we have the timestamp down to the second), was at twenty-six degrees eighteen minutes of Scorpio. The Moon is also in a fallen condition.
Scorpio rises again in the event chart, at 3°56’. That degree belongs to Mars in a triple way: Mars’s sign, Mars’s bound, and Mars’s face, all three, on the rising degree itself. Mars rules the event ascendant too, the planet whose condition again sets the tone for the chart being read.
Transiting Saturn sits in the sixth house of bad fortune, the mala fortuna, at fourteen degrees forty-four minutes.
The event chart’s own Mercury holds its own bound and its own face at 16°19’ Cancer even while retrograde and out of its own sign, dignified twice by the finer measures, moving backward, in the house of things sent outward to be heard far from where they were made. The event chart’s Lot of Fortune falls at 29°21’ Aquarius, the last degree of the sign, in the fourth house, held by Saturn twice over as ruler and bound-lord.
Transiting Uranus sits at 4°43’ Gemini in the eighth house.
Set against the Sun and Jupiter’s strength in Leo, three planets in the event chart are in fall: the Moon in Scorpio, Venus in Virgo, Saturn in Aries. The Sun, in its own domicile, conjunct Jupiter and the Midheaven, is the only planet in either chart fully at home by sign, in a structure otherwise built almost entirely from peregrine and falling placements. That makes the Sun the one clear differential in an otherwise level field: the planet the others read as holding the strongest position, precisely because so little else around it holds any position at all.
Part Three: Reception and Aspect
The opposition of the natal Sun with the transiting Mercury creates that tension in the themes and topics of communication, teaching, education, being across the third and ninth house axis of education and teaching and astrology, that tension that is held with Mercury in the ninth house of Cancer opposite to the natal Sun and Jupiter, is impacting Mercury’s ability to successfully host Venus, who is in the sixteenth degree of Virgo in the eleventh whole sign house.
Reception gives that a firmer footing. Mercury is the domicile lord of Virgo, so the transiting Venus, at fifteen degrees twenty minutes of Virgo, is hosted by Mercury. The same Mercury, natally, is bonded to both malefics at once: in mutual reception with Saturn by domicile, and in mutual reception with Mars by bound, sitting at 29°58’ Capricorn, the final minute of it’s natal placed sign.
The transiting Mars in the eighth whole sign house participates in the second-house resource story below, and in Gemini is hosted by domicile by Mercury as well, the same mutual bond already read in the natal chart, Mercury and Mars trading fine-grained authority, now carrying into the transiting picture too. Both the Venus in the audience house and the Mars opposite the resource house are landlorded by a Mercury that is natally peregrine, at a threshold degree, and bonded on both sides to the chart’s malefics. In the same Capricorn cluster, the natal Sun stands under a thirty-seven-minute opposition from transiting Mercury at the moment of publication. Transiting Pluto, in its turn, is hosted by Saturn, transiting Moon and transiting Saturn are both hosted by Mars, the chart’s own ruler and its skipped-step planet.
Also, the natal Mars is in the second degree of Aquarius, which is opposite the transiting Sun in the first degree of Leo: a natal Mars in opposition with the transiting Sun, a Sun–Mars opposition arriving at the same moment as the Pluto opposition read above.
Another significant opposition at this time is transiting Saturn opposite Neptune in the twelfth whole sign house of Libra, in the sixteenth degree, or fifteen degrees eight minutes of arc, meaning that the distance is twenty-four arcminutes, less then half a degree. Close to a partile opposition, though not partile itself.
The transiting moon had just transited across the natal ascendant point, which rests at 24 degrees and 23 minutes of arc in Scorpio. The transiting ascendant had just moved across the natal South Node. So we have the transiting ascendant and transiting Moon, both in the first whole sign house of Scorpio, connecting to the natal South Node and natal ascendant. The event ascendant’s own triple-Mars signature, read above, is the identical pattern the natal South Node carries: the natal chart holds it on a point behind the horizon, the event chart holds it on the horizon itself. The event chart’s own South Node, wide but structural, spans the same handful of degrees of Virgo that natally hold Saturn, the Lot of Fortune, and the Midheaven together, the harder malefic’s undignified ground already read above.
The natal nodes of the moon are in the second degrees of Scorpio and Taurus, and the transiting Sun is in the first degree of Leo, so we essentially have the transiting Sun at the bendings of the natal nodes, and depending upon how wide an orb you give Jupiter, it could also be considered part of that bending situation, with those planets square: the transiting Sun and Jupiter squaring the natal nodes.
Transiting Mars is applying to an opposition with the natal Venus. Transiting Mars is in the eighteenth degree of Gemini. The natal Venus is the twenty-second degree of Sagittarius. And that second house is dealing with resources.
Transiting Neptune sits fifty-nine arcminutes from the natal Moon, the tightest contact between the two charts. Transiting Pluto sits a little over three degrees from natal Mars, the chart’s own ruler. The event Sun and Jupiter, both in the tenth, apply by degree toward natal Pluto at 16°01’ Leo. Transiting Uranus, already read, sits in the same sign and the same whole sign house natal Uranus occupies, roughly twenty-three degrees apart. The event chart’s own threshold degree, it’s Lot of Fortune, echoes the natal Mercury sitting at the last minute of Capricorn.
Part Four: What the Interactions Say
First, the full details are reported separately. From publication of the video through the social consequences, through what the professional bodies and the joint conference board eventually did once they had the record in front of them, all of it lives in one document, found at the following URL: Shadow Work: A Record.
When Jupiter, by transit, is also experiencing debility, combust and under the beams of the Sun, we can see that the natal promise of Jupiter activates the capacity to operate as a functional malefic. The condition of Jupiter in the transiting chart is debilitated, operating as a functional malefic, square to the natal nodes. The South Node sits in the first whole sign house too, so that same square also activates the topics of identity, karmic patterns, the way we express ourselves and are perceived by others in the world. The subject under discussion that day was named as shadow-work by everyone in the video. Near the end of the recording the participants said, in their own words, that they felt like they were walking a fine line, between what people need to hear and what just becomes too much for them, which is first-house territory, the line between what a person shows and what they keep back. The transiting Moon crossed the natal ascendant at the moment of publication, and the transiting ascendant crossed the natal South Node at the same time, so the first house is activated twice over, at the same hour the video went up.
The tension traced in the sections above falls on the house of communication and the axis of teaching, so we’re looking at the very topics a podcast release indicates. One of the passages that drew the most attention afterward belongs on that same axis. In the recording, he offered a memory of recognizing, as an adult in his thirties, that Black people held the same intelligence as white people. He offered it as evidence of shadow work already done.
Natal Mercury, ruling that third house of communication and sitting at the last degree of its own sign, is the planet carrying both the story and its timing. One response written in the days after didn’t dispute that a realization had occured. It disputed when. By his thirties, the man doing the remembering had already published, already taught, and already been credentialed in the field, so calling that recognition leftover childhood conditioning didn’t square with the timeline. That rebuttal was itself about timing, which puts it on the same axis we already assigned to Mercury and the third house.
Peregrine means wandering, without a house of one’s own to answer to. A chart with almost nothing dignified is a chart where almost nothing differentiates one planet’s capacity to act from another’s, and that’s the condition we watch the transiting chart arrive to activate rather then create.
Held to the evolutionary layer, natal Pluto sits angular in the tenth. The event Sun, Jupiter, and Midheaven are all applying to that exact degree read above, bringing a public reckoning to a chart already built for exposure in that house. The recording itself didn’t stay where it went up. At some point before this piece went to press it had disappeared from its original address, and who took it down, or when, isn’t something this record can say. Transiting Mercury was retrograde in the ninth house, the house of things carried outward to be heard far from where they were made, so Mercury is the planet doing that carrying here. It was moving backward the whole time what it carried kept moving forward into the world, which is roughly the same shape as a recording that went up and then pulled back from where it was posted.
The fallen Venus in the eleventh house falls short of a functional malefic. By essential dignity, its state counts as debilitated, but it lacks the corresponding natal debility to be a fully functioning malefic in its transiting location. The eleventh house is a positive house, so its a good house. But we can see some of these other conditions all converging just at the exact moment, on the exact day of this release, connecting to the natal planets in exactly this configuration, activating all these transiting planets.
A Mars skipped step sits around absorbing the topics of slavery, through its rulership of the sixth house. The ruler of that house sits, in its natal position, in opposition to the transiting Sun—the planet of spirit, of purpose, of drive. Jupiter acts as a functional malefic, disrupting the topics of the tenth house of career and reputation. Venus, debilitated, causes a withdrawal in the house of audience and social media. Together, the themes and topics specifically relevant to the situation are clearly represented in the planetary placements of the transiting chart, relative to the natal placements of the key indicating planets. The sixth house, which ancient Hellenistic astrology assigned to the topic of slavery, is one of the houses Mars carries its skipped step into. The other is the first house, the lesson the squared nodes mark as not yet worked through. What surfaced there was concrete: a family account of an ancestor’s part at the founding of the Klan, told as history. Later one of his students called that ancestry into doubt, but for what we’re reading here, it’s the topic that matters more than whether it’s factually accurate.
The house that holds slavery and the planet that carries what hasn’t been worked through yet land on the same inherited story. The word spoken to Ricky Williams, the one Black person in the video, sits on that same natal opposition, Sun to Mars. That’s the public life vs ancestry axis: transiting Sun in the 10th house, across from natal Mars in the 4th. Mercury sits nearby too, just across the sign boundary by a coupl arc minutes. Earlier in the same conversation Steven had named that the norm around the word had changed, that what once passed as a way of mocking racism no longer did. That naming happened in the same conversation, on that same natal Sun-Mars opposition, as the word that came right after it.
The stress on Venus doesn’t stop with transiting Venus in a fallen state. We can see transiting Mars applying to an opposition with the natal Venus, and that second house deals in resources: money and values. Steven was, in fact, uninvited from UAC, the largest astrological conference, a decision affecting his resources and reflecting how the eleventh house’s audience judged what the second house holds. The recording itself had a commercial purpose as stated by Ricky Williams. It was made, in part, to promote a paid workshop the two of them were bringing to market together, that’s second-house material about as literally as it comes.
What followed the recording’s release was a sequence of three responses, spread across fourteen days: a written statement, a set of comments underneath it, and later a video made together with both Williams and Forrest. Each one added something new, but none of them closed out what the one before it had left open. The UAC board that eventually ruled on his place at the conference said that the public responses following the episode hadn’t demonstrated the accountability its members were looking for.
What we’re looking at is a description of sequence, three attempts in a row that never quite settled into one position, and it sits with the same functionally malefic Jupiter already read above: it wasn’t one attempt handled badly, it was three separate tries, each one still being judged against somebody else’s standard. Transiting Mercury retrograde stationing direct carries that same sequence from the other side.
By the time the UAC board reached its own decision, we can see that two of the field’s other professional bodies had already acted on the same record. One removed him outright from the advisory role he held with them, the clean exercise of its own authority. The other recommended his removal from the same conference platform and said in its own statement that it didn’t have the authority to decide the matter alone.
On the day Venus shifted into Libra the UAC 2026 Board withdrew Steven from the speaker platform. Its own statement footnotes that he had already emailed to withdraw before the announcement was formalized, and the Board credited that acknowledgment. The Board states plainly that the decision is not intended as a permanent judgment on his career or his contributions to astrology, the statement is signed by Kay Taylor, UAC 2026 Board President, who is also President of the OPA Foundation and on the faculty at Kepler College, where I will be the TA for her evolutionary astrology course this September of 2026. Both halves of that outcome, the Board’s own decision and the withdrawal that arrived from the other direction just ahead of it, land on the same eleventh house just vacated by a debilitated transiting Venus, the community and the audience acting through its own platforms.
So we see this connection of Venus at play there, under stress from the transiting Mars by opposition, which is the ruler of his natal skipped-step phenomenon. Mercury, off by a couple of degrees and out of sign but still close enough to the nodes, we can count as part of that skipped-step experience too, activated by the opposition of Mercury by transit on the day of publication of the video.