What do you think?
Rate this book
The Art of Forecasting Using Solar Returns
An in-depth and very thorough study of the technique of forecasting using Solar Returns from the popular author of 'Horary Astrology Plain and Simple'. The clear examples and many case histories make this a strong contender for even the most crowded bookshelf.
- GenresAstrology
330 pages, Paperback
First published March 6, 2008
7 people are currently reading
51 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 3, 2020
At the beginning of the book, the author expressed his worry about “spinning tales in the world of fantasy and illusion” without the actual charts. Well, this is exactly what happened.
The author got into this whole dubious world of "astrological patterns" early in his teens because he was traumatised by the death of his mother when he was a child, and I presume he wanted to find “explanations” of events in the stars. So he looked, and rectified (which is basically consciously adjusting the chart to match your life events – I wonder what is the point of it since you know you made the match yourself?), and had several hits, which convinced him to pursue this life-time hobby.
The whole book’s value is close to zero, because of one major methodological flaw – all charts are done in hindsight. What does it mean? It means “believing is seeing”. The author has a pre-conceived system of the astrological symbolism, combined with numerous “rules” and “universal laws” transmitted from the “ancient astrologers”, and he readily applies it to charts with known outcomes. In other words, he is seeking and expecting for certain indicators to come up, while freely ignoring other indicators that contradict his theories. He’s apparently unconscious of this process as he mentions “striking revelations” in almost all the charts he chooses to demonstrate.
The book has a clear negative bias towards death and other misfortunes – the epic battle between the archvillains/gods of the Greco-Romain pantheon such as Saturn, Pluto, Mars (and occasionally Neptune with Uranus) takes place in the author’s mind. Whatever he puts his attention to, the ugly heads of “malefics” seem to presage the worst.
The cherry on the cake is the final example of a death from cancer of a close friend. By unfortunate coincidence, the author couldn’t cast the chart in advance and warn his friend of the potential deadly illness, so… you guessed it, he’s doing it in hindsight as a sort of redemption. And as you may guess it again, everything in the charts/techniques points to death. When a person has an inoperable metastasized cancer, the ”prediction” of the astrologer is that…he will unfortunately die. It reminds me of “predictions” that when a woman gets pregnant, in 9 months something important will happen to her, or that an entrepreneur may have potential financial difficulties when starting a business (all these complicated astrological rules to “predict” that? It’s like a mountain in labour that gives birth to a mouse).
Just for information, most of predictive techniques in astrology rely on the premise that either the 6 hours after your birth tell you everything about your life, or that every day after your life equals a year (you can choose either solar or sidereal day/year), or that every birthday is indicative of the year head. The rate of advancement is usually the actual or mean motion of the Sun in either longitudinal or equatorial coordinate system. Other techniques are purely symbolical, meaning there is no actual chart that marks their beginning, just a passing of a year/or an allocated number of years: for example the planetary periods (profections, firdaria, zodiacal releasing). As you may imagine, there is no one unique way of calculating each and every ”predictive” technique (or you can call it a divinatory system), but with all this variety and diversity of methods, the American astrological community happily predicted Hillary Clinton as the next president of the US in 2016.
When the charts don’t seem to match exactly as the author expects, the symbolism becomes flexible and additional “unconventional” techniques are called for. One of the funny examples of the “flexible” and essentially selective interpretation is the aspect called “combust” (any planet conjoining the sun within 8 degrees of longitudinal arc): in some examples it’s a nasty debility and affliction, while in others it is a “protective” influence - depending on the outcome of the case. In example concerning John Lennon, to justify his mother’s fatal accident, the author recurs to the “paran-squares” (an aspect that you see only if you choose another system of coordinates, the prime vertical here) that occurred before and after the solar return, but not in the solar return itself. This apparently explains everything that followed as the moon was put to much “astrological pressure”. In the last example of an ill friend, the author talks about a hidden square (115 degrees on the ecliptic) between Saturn and Neptune, by “contrascion”, which surely indicates the cancer.
An interesting passage talks about the comparison of non precessed vs precessed solar return (essentially, it means whether you take into account the backward movement of the vernal equinox and the subsequent slight change of the return position of the sun). Unsurprisingly, the author finds that both charts "work", but differently. The first is psychological, the second is more event-oriented. Weird conclusion, if we take into account that 99% of the charts in the book are not precessed and interpreted as events. Alternative conclusion is more plausible to my view. As I mentioned, "believing is seeing". If you have a known chart and a system of meanings to apply to it, any chart will “work”. I would even say, you are bound to find spurious patterns in ANY chart, to confirm what you have in mind. Another example is the apparent link across time between speculative charts of the US history, and at least 6 charts of the 4th July 1776 – all surprisingly “working”.
The author has an admiration for Jean-Baptiste Morin, a French mathematician and astrologer of the 17th century. He was kind of an outsider in the scientific community and was pretty reactionary as well (he was against Galileo and insisted that the Earth was fixed in space). His mind-f•cking opus of +800p length was published after his death and didn’t interest anybody until recently. I wonder what is the value of “brilliant astrological insights” of a man who was a staunch geocentrist in a pre-Newtonian historical period? By the way, the prediction by Morin of his own death (”as a grand authentic astrologer”) is an astrological urban myth transmitted and recounted in articles by…astrologers themselves.
Apart from rehashes and blind repetitions (from numerous astrological books) of planetary, house and lunar phase meanings, the author also contributes his own understanding of a compilation of the repetitive and laborious 12 steps and 31 aphorisms of Morin. The bottom line is: analyse every possible variable, and in case of blatant contradictions – “synthesize” everything, whatever that means.
Lastly, the “recommended reading” section is firmly rooted within the bubble of the astrological literature. No perspective on astrology through history of science, no reports on empirical, real blind tests, no additional perspective from outside world. To promote critical thinking, I highly recommend all studies carried out by an ex-astrologer and scientist Geoffrey Dean, Wikipedia articles on astrology and science, the famous statistical test (and invalidation) of astrology by Michel Gauquelin, as well as the online resource astrology-and-science.com.
I give this book one star for the sincerity of the author, clear explanations of the technicalities such as the primary directions, progressions by a mean quotidian rate as well as his own technique of progressing lunar returns. While reading this book, I have mostly learned about human psychology and cognitive biases, rather than anything that would validate any claims of astrology.
The author got into this whole dubious world of "astrological patterns" early in his teens because he was traumatised by the death of his mother when he was a child, and I presume he wanted to find “explanations” of events in the stars. So he looked, and rectified (which is basically consciously adjusting the chart to match your life events – I wonder what is the point of it since you know you made the match yourself?), and had several hits, which convinced him to pursue this life-time hobby.
The whole book’s value is close to zero, because of one major methodological flaw – all charts are done in hindsight. What does it mean? It means “believing is seeing”. The author has a pre-conceived system of the astrological symbolism, combined with numerous “rules” and “universal laws” transmitted from the “ancient astrologers”, and he readily applies it to charts with known outcomes. In other words, he is seeking and expecting for certain indicators to come up, while freely ignoring other indicators that contradict his theories. He’s apparently unconscious of this process as he mentions “striking revelations” in almost all the charts he chooses to demonstrate.
The book has a clear negative bias towards death and other misfortunes – the epic battle between the archvillains/gods of the Greco-Romain pantheon such as Saturn, Pluto, Mars (and occasionally Neptune with Uranus) takes place in the author’s mind. Whatever he puts his attention to, the ugly heads of “malefics” seem to presage the worst.
The cherry on the cake is the final example of a death from cancer of a close friend. By unfortunate coincidence, the author couldn’t cast the chart in advance and warn his friend of the potential deadly illness, so… you guessed it, he’s doing it in hindsight as a sort of redemption. And as you may guess it again, everything in the charts/techniques points to death. When a person has an inoperable metastasized cancer, the ”prediction” of the astrologer is that…he will unfortunately die. It reminds me of “predictions” that when a woman gets pregnant, in 9 months something important will happen to her, or that an entrepreneur may have potential financial difficulties when starting a business (all these complicated astrological rules to “predict” that? It’s like a mountain in labour that gives birth to a mouse).
Just for information, most of predictive techniques in astrology rely on the premise that either the 6 hours after your birth tell you everything about your life, or that every day after your life equals a year (you can choose either solar or sidereal day/year), or that every birthday is indicative of the year head. The rate of advancement is usually the actual or mean motion of the Sun in either longitudinal or equatorial coordinate system. Other techniques are purely symbolical, meaning there is no actual chart that marks their beginning, just a passing of a year/or an allocated number of years: for example the planetary periods (profections, firdaria, zodiacal releasing). As you may imagine, there is no one unique way of calculating each and every ”predictive” technique (or you can call it a divinatory system), but with all this variety and diversity of methods, the American astrological community happily predicted Hillary Clinton as the next president of the US in 2016.
When the charts don’t seem to match exactly as the author expects, the symbolism becomes flexible and additional “unconventional” techniques are called for. One of the funny examples of the “flexible” and essentially selective interpretation is the aspect called “combust” (any planet conjoining the sun within 8 degrees of longitudinal arc): in some examples it’s a nasty debility and affliction, while in others it is a “protective” influence - depending on the outcome of the case. In example concerning John Lennon, to justify his mother’s fatal accident, the author recurs to the “paran-squares” (an aspect that you see only if you choose another system of coordinates, the prime vertical here) that occurred before and after the solar return, but not in the solar return itself. This apparently explains everything that followed as the moon was put to much “astrological pressure”. In the last example of an ill friend, the author talks about a hidden square (115 degrees on the ecliptic) between Saturn and Neptune, by “contrascion”, which surely indicates the cancer.
An interesting passage talks about the comparison of non precessed vs precessed solar return (essentially, it means whether you take into account the backward movement of the vernal equinox and the subsequent slight change of the return position of the sun). Unsurprisingly, the author finds that both charts "work", but differently. The first is psychological, the second is more event-oriented. Weird conclusion, if we take into account that 99% of the charts in the book are not precessed and interpreted as events. Alternative conclusion is more plausible to my view. As I mentioned, "believing is seeing". If you have a known chart and a system of meanings to apply to it, any chart will “work”. I would even say, you are bound to find spurious patterns in ANY chart, to confirm what you have in mind. Another example is the apparent link across time between speculative charts of the US history, and at least 6 charts of the 4th July 1776 – all surprisingly “working”.
The author has an admiration for Jean-Baptiste Morin, a French mathematician and astrologer of the 17th century. He was kind of an outsider in the scientific community and was pretty reactionary as well (he was against Galileo and insisted that the Earth was fixed in space). His mind-f•cking opus of +800p length was published after his death and didn’t interest anybody until recently. I wonder what is the value of “brilliant astrological insights” of a man who was a staunch geocentrist in a pre-Newtonian historical period? By the way, the prediction by Morin of his own death (”as a grand authentic astrologer”) is an astrological urban myth transmitted and recounted in articles by…astrologers themselves.
Apart from rehashes and blind repetitions (from numerous astrological books) of planetary, house and lunar phase meanings, the author also contributes his own understanding of a compilation of the repetitive and laborious 12 steps and 31 aphorisms of Morin. The bottom line is: analyse every possible variable, and in case of blatant contradictions – “synthesize” everything, whatever that means.
Lastly, the “recommended reading” section is firmly rooted within the bubble of the astrological literature. No perspective on astrology through history of science, no reports on empirical, real blind tests, no additional perspective from outside world. To promote critical thinking, I highly recommend all studies carried out by an ex-astrologer and scientist Geoffrey Dean, Wikipedia articles on astrology and science, the famous statistical test (and invalidation) of astrology by Michel Gauquelin, as well as the online resource astrology-and-science.com.
I give this book one star for the sincerity of the author, clear explanations of the technicalities such as the primary directions, progressions by a mean quotidian rate as well as his own technique of progressing lunar returns. While reading this book, I have mostly learned about human psychology and cognitive biases, rather than anything that would validate any claims of astrology.
March 16, 2023
Anthony Louis has written a masterpiece on Solar Returns. From the history of this predictive technique to how it was used, he then gives us the method in a way that is easy to follow. If that’s not enough, the book is full of illustrative example charts. This is one I have recommended to my students, again and again.
You can watch Anthony discussing this book on Lightways @lifeastrologer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsqHJ...
You can watch Anthony discussing this book on Lightways @lifeastrologer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsqHJ...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews