Interview with Michael De Baker
EA Interview series, part 4
How did you get into Evolutionary Astrology and how long have you been practicing it now?
I got into EA when, as a practicing past-life regression therapist, I was wondering whether there existed an astrology that could shed light on people’s soul issues and past lives. I have now been practicing it officially for a little over ten years, unofficially twice as long.
You call your brand of EA “Therapeutic Evolutionary Astrology”. This begs the question: Are there other ways to work with EA that you feel are not therapeutically helpful? How do you ensure that your own EA practice is therapeutic in its effect on the client?
There are as many ways of working with EA as there are people who practice it. It is a tool. As is the case with most tools, its efficacy entirely depends on the hand that holds the tool. In the hands of a mediocre practitioner, its effect will be limited. In the hands of an incapable practitioner, its effect can be anywhere between negligible and deeply damaging. In the hands of an able practitioner, its effect can be healing. This goes for therapeutic and non-therapeutic EA approaches alike. Therapeutic evolutionary astrology is predicated on the notion that the insights gained from EA can be a therapeutic tool, meaning that they can be applied to help people on their life’s path, both in the many difficulties and challenges they face in their everyday lives and in the deeper, existential and even metaphysical issues that might cause anxiety in them. As to the second part of your question: an entire module (i.e. #4) is dedicated to exploring how EA can be used to therapeutic effect, so I don’t think I can do it justice in one or two lines. A group of graduates and near-graduates has just embarked on this Module, so it will be interesting to see how skilled they get in the therapeutic application of EA.
Tell us a little about your school, the EA School Online. If you were to make an honest appraisal of the school, why would you recommend people who are new to EA to come study with you?
Perhaps I’m not the person best suited to answer that question. You would have to ask students. The EA School Online has been training students desiring to become able evolutionary astrologers for some years now. Based on the feedback I get from students, what they seem to value most is the depth of insights gained and the methodical approach followed in the teaching materials used. They feel they are being taught in a manner where each step rests on a previous one taken, which is tested and consolidated before new ones are added, which, so I hear, gives students a very secure footing in what otherwise would have been an interpretative labyrinth.
Having taken your courses and read your books on EA, I know how careful you are with interpreting a planet in both house and sign – beginning with the house, and then letting the sign contextualize the house placement. And indeed, you can read in the EA Glossary that this is how EA chart analysis is meant to work.1 Despite this, I have not been able to find any text or other resource where Jeffrey Green specifically taught this approach. Do you know a source where he talks about it?
There is a section in Jeffrey Green’s book Uranus: Freedom from the Known, where he shows the reader, in considerable detail, how to do this. From page 99 onward, he breaks down how to interpret Uranus in the 5th house Cancer square Mercury in the 8th house Libra. I do not necessarily agree with the methodology used, but, in any case, it is clearly laid out there and so you can follow this “synthesizing of layers” that you speak of.
You have developed several new techniques and perspectives relative to EA, all presented in your books. What do you feel is your primary contribution to the field of EA, something that you really hope will be picked up by other astrologers and become an integrated part of Evolutionary Astrology?
That’s a hard one to answer because I feel the “new techniques and perspectives” you refer to are all equally important. The Trauma Helix, to me, seems as important as the teaching on Chiron, which, in its turn, is no more important than, say, the understanding of how it is the Moon’s new response and not its north node which facilitates soul evolution, or indeed the notion of all planetsheld together by the Sun and working in unison toward that same Moon response. But, since you are asking me to choose, I would say that the one thing I hope will someday become an integral part of EA is Orbital Moon Dynamics. The notion that you can understand the Moon without looking at the nodes, or indeed the nodes without the Moon, is a deeply erroneous one. The lunar nodes are the Moon as it intersects with the ecliptic. So, to treat any of the three without looking at the other two cannot but lead to wrong astrological conclusions. Since the lunar nodes can be said to form the linchpin of EA, working with a flawed lunar model renders one’s entire methodology flawed.
Where do you see EA 10 years from now? What kind of developments would you like to see? What would be some pitfalls that the EA community needs to avoid?
EA would need to avoid two pitfalls. Firstly, if it does not evolve and acknowledges that it cannot be outside its own law, it will disappear. So, if it wishes to survive, it will have to make room for the new and abandon the idea that what this or that evolutionary astrologer said in his or her day is sacrosanct and therefore untouchable.
Please, allow me to apply this to myself. Earlier you mentioned the fact that I have developed several new techniques and perspectives. What if some of those, or all of them, are wrong? That is a possibility, right? It is my ardent wish that one or more of my students find flaws in one or several of the innovations I have brought to the EA paradigm, lay it bare, correct it, and then develop the now corrected version of whatever notion was found lacking, thus taking it to the next level. That would ensure the continuation of the paradigm. A teacher’s wish is to make themselves superfluous and to see their students carry the torch. This can only happen if they do not become parrots. The moment they are expected to abandon their own critical thinking, the paradigm is dead, in the sense that it has no future. Well, not the very same moment, of course, but sometime after. It takes a while for things that have no future to actually die. First, they flounder, then they stagger round the stage in their death throes, and then they draw their final breath.
The second pitfall EA would need to avoid is getting stuck in its current speculative stage. By that I mean that if it fails to come up with hard, irrefutable, and clinching evidence for its main tenet, namely that the south node of the Moon and its ruler hold information about one or more prior lifetimes, it will not be taken seriously. Any self-respecting paradigm in the past has needed to back up its claims with solid proof. There’s simply no way round that. If you don’t, science’s gatekeepers will tear you to shreds. In the past fifty years or so, EA has failed to produce this proof, except for the dozen or so cases in the Same Soul series (Anne Frank – Barbro Karlén / Branwell Brontë – John Lennon / Louis Braille – Helen Keller / Edgar A. Poe – Wes Craven / Paul Gauguin – Peter Teekamp / James M. Huston Jr. – James Leininger / Lou Gehrig – Christian Haupt / Jack Phillips – Paul Amirault / J. Carroll Beckwith – Robert L. Snow / Gen. John B. Gordon – Jeffrey J. Keene / Alexander Herrmann – Stéphane Allix), written by yours truly.
So, in practical terms this means that EA would need to find ironclad cases of reincarnation, like the James M. Huston Jr. – James Leininger / Lou Gehrig – Christian Haupt ones and establish the strictest of correlations between the south node of the Moon and south node ruler found in the chart belonging to the later life and the well-documented and publicly available biographical facts belonging to the earlier life. That’s the second pitfall, and it’s as big as the first one. If it is not avoided, it cannot but lead to the paradigm’s demise.
EA Glossary, p. 152, “Synthesizing the Layers”.