“Why would a person have this chart? Why would they have this moon placement? What lessons are they learning? Where are we meeting you in this life, based on what’s been done before? Your soul chose this chart. “Evolutionary astrology always brings us back to the question of why,” she tells NYLON. “I like to think of it as extending the chart beyond the bounds of one lifetime.” That’s Taryn Leigh Bond, the beloved evolutionary astrologer whose erudite TikTok posts break the field down to new-user-friendly terms. It’s not just who we arrived as, but what we came here with, which informs the work laid out for us. In viewing the chart as a karmic map, evolutionary astrologers work beyond the confines of linear identity, opening up the study to include past lives and biological karma. No planet, then, is wholly negative or positive, but is instead a gate through which we move forward. Students of this field view all the elements of a chart as tools or teachers meant to progress one to their ultimate destiny. The use of astrology to map a soul’s progression is known as evolutionary astrology.
But what about the past, namely: the really, really distant past? If your chart maps a compass of your arrival on this planet, can it reveal any truths about who you were in previous lives, and what karmic assignments you’ve yet to wrap up? It’s no secret that astrologers can map the future.
