Yesterday's Sky: Astrology and Reincarnation

Author & Context

By steven-forrest (2008, expanded 2012; Seven Paws Press, Forrest's own imprint). Yesterday's Sky is Forrest's late-career return to the metaphysical material he had largely suppressed in The Inner Sky (1984) at his publisher's request. In his words, Bantam Books had told him in the early 1980s that "spirituality was still seen as a marginal topic" — he was advised to "go lightly on the word 'soul,' if I had to use it at all." So he snuck a few references to prior lifetimes about two hundred pages deep into The Inner Sky and waited. Yesterday's Sky is the book he meant to write a quarter-century earlier.

The book also marks Forrest's clearest alignment with the broader evolutionary astrology movement, alongside Jeffrey Wolf Green (who developed an independent but convergent system) and others. The shared metaphysical commitment: the soul is real, the soul reincarnates, and the chart encodes the karmic curriculum brought from prior lifetimes.

Core Argument

Forrest's central technical claim is that the chart's South Node–North Node axis and the placement of Pluto jointly disclose the soul's karmic history. The framework reads each of these as a specific kind of signal:

1. The South Node = where you have been. The South Node names the deep prior pattern — the patterns of past-life experience that are deeply ingrained, familiar, and constraining. The South Node sign and house describe the kind of past-life pattern; aspects to the South Node from the planets describe who and what surrounded the soul in that prior life. South Node configurations name the karmic comfort zone — what the soul knows and would default to.

2. The North Node = where you are going. The North Node is the growth direction this lifetime — uncomfortable but evolutionary. The polarity between South Node and North Node is the lifetime's core developmental axis.

3. Pluto = the soul's deep wound and developmental edge. Pluto names the unhealed material the soul has been working on across lifetimes — the unconscious pattern of suffering-and-power that has been the soul's growth curriculum. Pluto's house and sign disclose the theme of the deep work; aspects to Pluto disclose the complexity of the pattern.

4. Saturn = the karmic teacher. Saturn names the structural lesson this lifetime is set up to deliver.

5. The Moon = the emotional residue. The Moon's placement carries the felt emotional tone of the soul's history.

These five chart factors — South Node, North Node, Pluto, Saturn, Moon — jointly disclose the soul's "story." The book's bulk is a method for reading these factors together as a coherent past-life narrative, with detailed case studies (including the famous person whose chart was used in the original Mountain Astrologer essays the book grew from).

Forrest is careful methodologically. He is not claiming to know specific past-life details — he is naming patterns the soul has been working on. The framework is more reliable for pattern than for narrative content. The astrologer can confidently say "your soul has worked on the pattern of suppressed-anger-and-loss-of-power"; the astrologer should be more cautious about "you were a French aristocrat beheaded in the Revolution."

The book also makes a practical-clinical argument: when clients recognize the chart's past-life pattern, they often experience powerful relief and integration — the recognition liberates current-life material that had felt unaccountable. Whatever the metaphysical status of past lives (and Forrest is genuinely open: the framework works as a symbolic device even if literal reincarnation is doubted), the clinical effect is real.

Key Concepts (lifted to wiki)

• north-node — the soul's growth direction.
• south-node — the soul's prior pattern.
• birth-chart — extended to multi-lifetime reading.
• soul — the agent that incarnates and brings karmic material.
• fate-and-free-will — Forrest's position: the chart names the karmic terms; free will is the response.

Frameworks / Models

• evolutionary-astrology — the framework the book most fully articulates.
• western-astrology — the broader tradition.

Notable Quotes

"Lucky me — in my fiftieth year I caught a second wind." — Introduction (on the late-career return to metaphysical material)

"Spirituality was still seen as a marginal topic. I was told to go lightly on the word 'soul,' if I had to use it at all. I snuck a few references to prior lifetimes into that volume [The Inner Sky], buried about two hundred pages deep." — Introduction

"Each astrological symbol represents a spectrum of possibilities" — recurring formulation from his earlier work, applied here to past-life patterns.

Practical Applications

• Career decisions. A career feels right when it serves the North Node (growth direction) without abandoning the South Node's hard-won skills. A career feels wrong when it retreats into the South Node's familiar comfort or when it overshoots into a North Node aspiration without the South Node's foundation. The framework gives a developmental compass.
• Identity transitions. A persistent identity pattern that feels deeper than this life may be a South Node configuration. Recognizing it as karmic, not personal-historical, can be liberating — the pattern is real, but it is not who you have to be.
• Relationships. Synastric Pluto and node contacts disclose karmic relationships — bonds the souls have brought into this lifetime to continue working on. These are not necessarily romantic; family-of-origin and lifelong friendships often carry the strongest karmic signatures.
• Daily practice. Notice patterns of suffering that feel older than this life. The framework predicts that these are real karmic signatures and that working with them consciously is the soul's curriculum.

How This Book Connects

• Builds on: Edgar Cayce (Forrest's teenage introduction to reincarnation); Jeffrey Wolf Green (the parallel evolutionary-astrology tradition); dane-rudhyar (humanistic astrology's soul-orientation); Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics of karma and rebirth; theosophical traditions broadly; liz-greene's Jungian frame on a karmic substrate.
• Contradicts / tensions with: Hellenistic-revival astrology, which does not engage past-life material as part of its technical apparatus; mainstream scientific materialism, which rejects reincarnation; some Christian theological traditions; some astrologers within the evolutionary movement, who emphasize the patterns without committing to literal past lives.
• Extends to: Forrest's earlier the-inner-sky (the suppressed metaphysics now articulated); his apprenticeship program's broader curriculum; astrology-for-the-soul (jan-spiller — fellow North-Node specialist with adjacent metaphysics); within Notebook 5, the karmic-soul frame complements cosmos-and-psyche (Tarnas) and saturn-a-new-look-at-an-old-devil (Greene) without identifying with them.

SWOT for the Author's Worldview

• Strengths. Forty years of practitioner experience refined into a coherent method. The clinical-effect argument (clients experience real relief at recognizing past-life patterns) is independent of the metaphysical commitment. Forrest's prose is unusually accessible for esoteric material. The framework is teachable — his apprenticeship program reproduces it.
• Weaknesses. Requires acceptance (or at least suspension of disbelief) of the reincarnation metaphysics. The cautionary line between pattern (defensible) and narrative content ("you were a French aristocrat") is sometimes crossed by less-careful practitioners. Hellenistic revivalists view the framework as technically thin.
• Opportunities. The pattern-recognition methodology can be partially adopted even by practitioners who do not commit to literal reincarnation — as a symbolic framework for working with deep-seated material. Integration with contemporary trauma therapy and Internal Family Systems is barely begun.
• Threats. Mainstream cultural skepticism about past lives. Within astrology, the technical-revival movement's growing prestige. The framework's reliance on the South Node–Pluto axis can occlude other chart factors.

Open Questions

• What is the epistemological status of past-life patterns disclosed by the chart? Are they (a) literally past lives, (b) symbolic but real psychological patterns, (c) ancestral-genealogical material misread as past lives, (d) confabulation?
• Why does the framework "work" clinically? The clinical effect is documented; the mechanism is contested.
• How do Forrest's framework and Jeffrey Wolf Green's parallel evolutionary-astrology framework actually differ? Both center Pluto and the nodes; the technical specifics diverge.
• Could the framework be tested empirically — for example, by checking whether North-Node prescriptions correlate with reported life-satisfaction over time?

Citation

Forrest, Steven. 2008 (expanded 2012). Yesterday's Sky: Astrology and Reincarnation. Borrego Springs, CA: Seven Paws Press. ISBN 978-0-9790677-3-0.