The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 510, titled:

November Astrology Forecast 2025

With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock

Episode originally released on November 1, 2025

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/11/01/november-astrology-forecast-2025/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released November 16th, 2025

Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for November of 2025. Hey, Austin – welcome back. 

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. How’s it going? 

CB: It’s going good; it’s going very well. I’m excited about this episode and to talk to you and to catch up. We’re gonna spend the first hour talking about news and events that happened since the last forecast we did a month ago and the astrological correlations we found with those news stories. Then we’re gonna spend the second hour doing a deep dive into the astrology of November. 

So let’s go ahead and jump right into it. So here is the Planetary Movements Calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and where they’ll end up by the end of the month. And this month, one of the main alignments that’s happening is this pretty heavy Mercury retrograde that’s taking place in Sagittarius and Scorpio where Mercury’s gonna slow down and station retrograde on November 9th and Mars is gonna conjoin it around that time, which is pretty tricky. And this new graphic was designed as a new experiment for a graphic that was designed by graphic designer Paige Herbert for us who I’ve been working with to do the horary course graphics over the past couple of years. But we wanted to experiment with this new format to try to show you a little bit better what the astronomy of this retrograde actually looks like. 

So next is the Planetary Alignments Calendar, just to give you a quick breakdown of the astrology of November before we get into the news. So right away at the beginning of the month, Mars moves from Scorpio into Sagittarius on November 4th, and the same day, Mars exactly opposes Uranus is one of the tensest and most explosive aspects of the month. The very next day, we get our first lunation, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Taurus. Then Venus moves into Scorpio the day after that. Uranus retrogrades back into Taurus for its final trek through that sign on November 7th, and the same day, Venus squares Pluto. Then two days later, Mercury stations retrograde in Sagittarius on the 9th. Jupiter stations retrograde at 25 degrees of Cancer a couple days after that while trining Saturn very closely. And then the following day, Mars catches up to and conjoins Mercury on November 12th in one of our tensest aspects of the month besides the Mars-Uranus opposition on the 4th. 

The following week, Mercury retrogrades from Sagittarius back into Scorpio on the 18th. Then it immediately opposes Uranus on the 19th. The Mercury cazimi, which is the halfway point through the cycle, occurs on the very next day, which is the same day as our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in Scorpio. We also have the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune, forming an exact sextile on that day. Then the following day on the 21st, the Sun moves into Sagittarius and Sagittarius season begins officially. And the same day, the Sun opposes Uranus right before it switches signs. 

The following week right at the beginning of the week on Monday the 24th, a retrograde Mercury conjoins Venus. Then a few days later, Saturn stations direct in Pisces for its final station in that sign before it starts heading out of Pisces for good over the course of the next few months on November 27th. Then Mercury stations direct on the 29th, and the same day, Venus opposes Uranus. And finally, Venus departs from Scorpio and moves into Sagittarius on the final day of the month on November 30th. 

So that is the quick overview of the few little alignments we have to talk about this month. Not a lot of alignments, but we’re gonna talk about news and then we’ll get into going into the interpretation of those alignments in more detail in about an hour. 

All right. Austin, welcome back. Thanks for joining me. We made it through October. October was kind of crazy. Like, Mars was just bowldozing over all of my stuff in Scorpio all month. But I do have some good news – that The Astrology Podcast website is currently back online, and I’ve been able to recover it, rebuild the website new, and it’s currently online and functional. So I am very conscious that I had to relaunch it to get it up so I could release the audio version of this episodes as Mercury’s in its shadow and getting ready to station retrograde, so I’m not making any promises about, you know, stability of everything over the next few weeks. But I’m at least in the process of bringing things back and getting a handle on it. So I’m really excited about that, because it’s been a long month since the website crashed and was taken offline in October. And I know a lot of people were missing the audio feeds and wondering why it wasn’t on Spotify or iTunes or other places like that. That’s the reason. But now hopefully it’s back, and we can get caught up and get back to where we were before that. So good news, yeah? 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m sorry that happened to you. Instead of doing a review of what happened in the world for the Mercury-Mars in Scorpio, we could just review your life. I know — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — you kind of… I had some unpleasantness as a result, but it kind of ran roughshod over your works, so. I mean, we’ve got more Mercury-Mars to come, but it won’t be in Scorpio. Fingers crossed. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: Mostly for you. I spent — 

CB: There’s gonna be other — 

AC: Oh, go ahead. 

CB: — things. There’ll be some other things coming up with that Mercury slowing down to station retrograde conjunct Mars. Not super stoked about a second one of those aspects. But you know, we will stay on our feet and see how it goes. What’s been going on with you? How have you been? 

AC: Oh, I think I spent a lot of October just sort of slowly recovering from my eclipse hangover. That eclipse — 

CB: Totally. 

AC: — that eclipse at the end of September really set a lot of things in motion. One of them just being some health challenges, and so I was just – the short version of it was that it was twice as much work with half as much help and half as much energy. And so just kind of rundown. Feeling what might be some oats again; we’ll see. Might be — 

CB: Nice. 

AC: — a less fortuitous grain. But we’ll find out. 

CB: Nice. Yeah, I was surprised to see a lot of people slowly coming out of the eclipse season as we moved further and further into October, especially once the first lunation hit that wasn’t an eclipse seemed to be a definite stage. And then there was like, a whole ‘nother stage once the second lunation hit that wasn’t an eclipse, and just a lot of people piecing things together that had like, fallen apart or gotten seriously shaken up in September during that eclipse season with like, Uranus stationing in Gemini and with Mars going into Scorpio and everything else. 

AC: Yeah, that was exactly it. I was expecting the Full Moon, which was the first non-eclipse lunation, to fully pull me out of it. And the baleful rays of the eclipse did indeed cease from that point onward. But you know, when something’s broken, just because it’s not being actively smashed with a hammer, it doesn’t instantly reknit itself. Like, things take time to repair once they’ve been busted, whether it’s the stairs on your deck or your body or your mind. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And things take time to rebuild. Like, wounds take time to heal and various other both metaphors but also in some instances like, literally in some people’s cases. Like, those were things, and it takes a while for those things to go on and for healing to take place. So — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. I’m glad the further away from some of that we move; I’m happy about that. So we’re gonna do a little bit shorter of a news section today. I’m not even gonna attempt to like, cover all of the news stories that happened over the last month; there was just way too much. And my birthday is tomorrow, so I wanna – we’re recording this like, the day before on Halloween. But I don’t wanna spend all night or my birthday like, editing this episode, so I’m gonna try to keep this episode to two hours if we can and keep the news section shorter. As a result of that, we’ll talk about a handful of news sections, but we’re also going to gloss or miss a lot. We did not dress up, unfortunately, for Halloween. We did that – you know, I don’t know if you wanted to do that; I guess we didn’t really talk about it, yeah? 

AC: You know, I thought about wearing my – I’ve got a button-up that just has bones on it – like, skeleton style. But I feel like it might be sort of cursed to wear that on the podcast, because the only other time I wore that on the podcast was the December 2019 episode. So… 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s what I was thinking is we did all dress up like, a few years back when Patrick cohosted an episode – a forecast – with us. But then it’s just like, sometimes we’ll do a forecast episode, and then some tragedy will happen, or there’ll be some like, major news event, and I’m just imagining like, us ending up in the news on like, CNN. Like, a clip from the podcast, and it flashes to what the astrologers said, and it’s like, I’m dressed up in like, a beard and a wizard hat or something like that. 

AC: Well, the good news is that no one watches CNN anymore. 

CB: Okay. Well, yeah. Fill in your favorite news station or propaganda outlet or what have you. 

All right. Let’s — 

AC: Okay, I do vote 2026 Halloween you wear a beard and wizard hat. I think that’s a really stunning idea. 

CB: All right, we’ll take a poll. I mean, if people in the comments want that to happen, then let me know in the comments section, and I’ll count them up and we’ll see how it comes out. And next year I’ll let everyone know the results. 

All right, let’s get into the news section. So last month, the main alignment that we focused on in the forecast episode because it looked like the toughest alignment was the Mercury-Mars conjunction that took place in Scorpio on October 20th. And indeed, around that time, around when the conjunction was going exact on that day and the day before when it was still forming, there was all sorts of news stories that really fit the quality of that conjunction in a significant way. So I’ll just read them off real quick and then we can discuss them. But it was like, the Louvre jewelry heist happened on October 19th exactly around 9:30 in the morning when the Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio was like, rising up over the eastern horizon at the Ascendant at that moment. AWS, Amazon’s web server, crashed and took out a huge swath of the internet – like, tons and tons of sites; millions of users were affected. Windows released an update which introduced a critical bug, and this got widely reported on October 20th how it bricked a bunch of Windows computers and forced a massive like, emergency update. And then finally on October 20th, that was the first day that the pictures started coming out of the east wing of the White House being torn down in order to make way for Trump building a ballroom there. And yeah, so that was then also became like, a major topic of discussion as well. So I’m sure there was other stuff, but those are like, the four major news stories that I was just marveling at the different ways that the archetype and symbolism of Mercury-Mars manifested in different ways in each of those stories. 

AC: Yeah. Each one of those is very archetypally perfect, right? We have communications and tech with Mercury, and then Mars being a malefic meaning that it often brings a destructive or interruptive sort of force. And so, right, like we had the Mercury things were disrupted or fucked up. Like, the Windows 11 update, right? Here’s a new operating system, which is a way of organizing and navigating and therefore traveling from piece of data to piece of data, to program to program – very mercurial. And Windows 11 has been the least successful Windows update since Windows began. The only other more contentious update of an operating system was when Microsoft went from MS Dos to Windows, which was a very long time ago. And so there was the specific instance that you described; there was also the fact that Windows 11 won’t run on a lot of computers. And so even people who want to update to the heinous new spyware regime – or new and improved spyware regime – can’t, and so face – and this is another Mercury-Mars key concept – face ever-decreasing security of their machine and their data is another thing that Mercury-Mars does is it brings intruders, it brings thieves, it brings parasites, it brings people who might hack your website or steal your paintings or valuable sculptures. And so one of the immediate consequence for tens of millions of users for Windows is being ever more vulnerable. Right? And then the update has also been greeted with widespread rage, and so Mars brings anger, rage, resentment, irritation, et cetera, et cetera. I have currently not yet updated, and I really want there to be a way that I don’t have to. But I don’t wanna get a parttime job making my machine run on Linux. I am — 

CB: Right. Yeah. Because that, and what you’re saying is really important – that was the broader thing that was also happening that week is that Windows discontinued support at the same time for Windows 10, which means it’s no longer gonna get security updates. Which means everyone that does stick to it is going to have their computer be much more vulnerable to hacking and malware and all sorts of things like that than it would have been up to that point. So that was another thing that coincided with the Mercury-Mars conjunction and right in the middle of October. And I actually last month, Levente Laszlo is part of the HOROI project where he translates ancient Greek astrological texts. He actually translated this passage from Rhetorius about Mercury-Mars squares, and it just reminded me of how theft was like, one of the major things that the ancient astrologers associated with hard aspects between Mars and Mercury. So I was gonna read that passage really quickly. It says, 

“See that Hermes overcomes Mars by tetragon, for one of the sages says, ‘But if being foresighted, Hermes holds the upper place while the most base Ares, Mars, a low one, he affects cunning, deceitful ones, or plotting plunderers and deprives of others’ possessions and shows wandering from one man to another man while other times we might find that they cause harm as traitors with their evil device, and they will strip them of their property.” 

So I thought that was amazing, because he just happened to translate that as part of something else last month. But right at that time where I’m seeing like, these news headlines of Mercury-Mars conjunction and this high-stakes jewelry heist takes place in the middle of broad daylight with thieves breaking into the Louvre and then stealing a bunch of really valuable diamonds and running off with them. 

AC: Yeah, perfect. I got some quotes for you too. So from the Riley translation of Valens, in discussing people who have Mercury and Mars together in their nativity, he writes that “they resort to forgery in order to embezzle, steal, and loot. And having fallen into debt and expenses, they bring on themselves infamy and hot pursuit.” Right? 

CB: Right. 

AC: And then Firmicus says that those who have them in the same place – it says they’re smart, right, but “liars, and adept at every evil deed. They use their intelligence for all kinds of trickery and meet every contest with malice and fraud.” 

CB: Nice. Yeah. 

AC: So yeah. Sneaky, sneaky. 

CB: Yeah, I like that. Well, it’s a great example that – you know, obviously not everybody that has those alignments, there’s gonna be positive and constructive ways you can manifest those alignments, like being good in argumentation, being quick-witted, being like, a lawyer or something like that, which is arguably is like, positive negative. But there’s less constructive ways or there’s ways that you can use certain placements for not good deeds, basically, especially certain combinations. But it’s a good example of, you know, sometimes you’ll pick up some of the ancient texts – like, especially Firmicus, and he’s often very over-the-top about talking about how bad certain combinations are. And you know, sometimes you have to read between the lines. But sometimes like, those combinations do manifest very literally, and it’s important to understand the extreme literal sometimes negative possible manifestations of certain combinations. And I think this is a good example for a lot of us. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when we’re looking at the news, we’re going to see – we’re mostly going to see the negative version, because when things work out pretty good or there are some difficulties but they are swiftly averted, that doesn’t make the news. Right? Like, bad things – things that are either extraordinarily positive or extra negative are the things that make it through the news filter. But just as an example — 

CB: Right. Like we didn’t see like, the public defender who successfully argued and defended their client in court that day, for example. 

AC: Yeah. Or I had a discussion with a student in one of my classes that got a little heated, but then we both drew back and came to a really good resolution and a greater understanding of the topic. Right? 

CB: Right. 

AC: It was like, nobody – I guess I talked about that. And it’s worth noting, Firmicus continues after every contest being met with fraud and malice – he’s like, but if Jupiter’s in favorable aspect, it indicates fame in athletic contests. Right? Mercury-Mars both like contests, and with a little bit of refereeing from Jupiter, that same like, hyper-competitive, “I’m gonna get mine” just becomes a fierce and effective competitor, not a malicious fraud who will resort to forgery to embezzle, steal, and loot. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Absolutely. And then Mercury’s also technical; it’s technology. And the AWS crash was entertaining, because AWS – Amazon is the server that, I don’t know, like, half of the internet is hosted on or some crazy percentage of the internet. At least like, a third of it or something of major websites are hosted on that. And that’s what crashed, so it took down all these major sites. But that day, it was funny – I was laughing, because even like, I went to order food from the place down the street. And their ordering app wasn’t working because AWS was down. So it was like, sometimes there were very tangible ways that the interruption of technology that was indicated that day sort of arose. 

AC: Yeah. I have a lot of my recorded classes backed up on AWS. And so my students, when they were like, “Okay, I wanna listen to lesson four of module seven,” and clicked on that on that day just got an error. Which was probably Mars – a frustrating experience. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. And lots of people had that with like, tons of social media sites were down and other things like that. So and then the final thing that day that was interesting astrologically was just the tearing down the east wing started that day, which then began at least like, a week or more that that’s been being discussed by everybody. And Leisa Schaim pointed out to me that this was actually happening in Trump’s 4th house, and he’s the one living there like, at the White House right now. And so the Mercury-Mars conjunction was actually happening in his 4th house, and he was the one that was like, tearing down part of that house that he was living in basically. But it also – one of the points that Leisa made to me that I thought was brilliant was like, we often talk about how when a person becomes the leader of the country, their chart becomes symbolically significant for the country as a whole to some extent, and how the White House is sometimes referred to as like, “the people’s house,” for example. So it was really fascinating that it was like, a 4th house transit happening in Trump’s house, but it had larger implications for the country and our national history and other things like that. 

AC: Yeah. That’s a really great example of that doctrine, or just that observation that what’s going on with the leader of a country affects more than just their personal life. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. All right, so moving on. In other news, the other major thing that happened this month right in the middle of October – I think it was around October 13th – was Pluto stationed direct in Aquarius. And when that happened, I thought it was really important because I was reflecting on it a lot, and something I didn’t reflect on enough in the previous forecast until I actually experienced the Pluto station is I realized this was actually the first time that Pluto was stationing direct in Aquarius, because a year ago when Pluto stationed direct the last time, it actually stationed direct in Capricorn. So this was the first time that Pluto moved through Aquarius in 2025, when retrograde earlier in the year and then came back all the way to the beginning of Aquarius, but then instead of falling back into Capricorn, it slowed down and stopped right at the beginning of Aquarius and started moving forward again. And one of my experiences of that and the way I was like, feeling it at the time and seeing the news stories was just this feeling of, you know, the world has changed and there’s no going back. Like, we are now firmly in this new era of whatever this is for the next 20 years that we’ve been seeing the beginnings of since 2022, I think. Since Pluto first started going into Aquarius. But now we’re like, we’re there, and there’s no going back to that earlier era at this point. And one of the ways I saw that manifest in the news stories is that day, when Pluto was stationing, there was this story that was making headlines of this research article that said that AI-generated content now was starting to either match or exceed human-generated content on the internet. And it showed this graph where this started around 2022 when ChatGPT came out, which is around the same time Pluto went into Aquarius. But then you see the graph of like, human- and AI-generated content start to converge, and then eventually now it’s like, fully converged so that AI-generated content is starting to exceed the content that humans are creating on the internet. So I thought that was a wild story to be hitting the headlines on that day that Pluto was stationing direct for the first time in Aquarius. 

AC: Yeah, I saw that graph as well and experienced the shadow of its dire consequence. And another way to frame that is that humans are now using AI to produce half of the content. Right? Because — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — the AI is not spontaneously doing all of these things. But just in terms of what people are doing and what people are being incentivized to do by the environment, right, people don’t want to make their own things. I know that I have second-guessed the idea of creating things because of the environment that there is now no going back from. Right? It’s like, oh, why bother writing something if it’ll just get scraped? 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, that was the other thing that launched this month that was a big Pluto in Aquarius technology and possible Mercury-Mars thing was Elon launched Grokipedia; he launched a rival to Wikipedia that’s entirely AI-generated and draws on all of these internet articles and other things like that and then creates this new generated articles that are – his intent is to make it match his political views, basically. So that was the other major possibly important historic turning point in terms of now somebody trying to create either a rival or something to get rid of Wikipedia or whatever that becomes. 

AC: Yeah. That feels very in line with the potential horror of the Pluto in Aquarius placement. Like, the replacement of the flawed human attempt to collect knowledge, right? Because Wikipedia’s not perfect; it’s flawed. Things get changed; things get edited, and they’re still not perfect. But then to replace that with a much more fundamentally flawed simulacrum feels very par for the course. You know, this point of no return for the AI-infected present and future really makes you appreciate human frailty and mistakes, because the mistakes that we’re now getting used to and the distortions that we’re now beginning to get used to with AI are like, in a whole ‘nother layer of monstrous, right? Because they not only repeat but they also compound the human mistakes. It’s amazing. And I think that, to your point that there’s no going back, right, or the point that there is going back to, which is the planet’s retrograde is still in Aquarius. We’re not going back to Pluto in Capricorn. And I think that you could see a lot of the news articles and commentary pieces from October through this lens where it’s a lot of people in different fields, financial and otherwise, grappling with, “Okay, so we can’t steer around or get away from this AI future. So what does that mean?” Like, what does it mean that there just is this massive likely over-investment that all this money is stuck in AI now. What does it mean? Is this a bubble that’s going to burst? If so, when? Like, what do we do from here, rather than like, oh, it’ll pass. Right? Like, there’s no dismissing it. There’s only how do we – what is the smart way to get through it, and where is it going? 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s a great point that brings up the Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well. Real quickly, one of the reasons I mentioned the new rival to Wikipedia, though, is because I was reading some of the articles about astrology, and I could see instances where things that I had written were influencing things it was saying about like, Hellenistic astrology. But I didn’t see citations of like, my book or what have you. So that’s one of the annoying things now in this new era as well is everything’s just being fed into the AI-generated things, and everyone’s content is being repurposed in that way and not necessarily with attribution. So it’s gonna be weird seeing, you know, what happens to humans in that context and what happens to human creative output when it’s just getting fed in and repurposed in different ways by these different AI machines that don’t necessarily give credit or links back or what have you. 

AC: Yeah. I mean, it increasingly throws the idea of intellectual property into question and begs desperately for a reformulation of it. Because when people cannot benefit from putting together ideas or writing books or doing research when there’s no incentive to do that, or the incentive is almost nothing because it just gets scraped and thrown into the vat, you’re going to have people doing less research and less thinking and putting out less material. And that’s, of course, what’s implied by the ominous graph that you mentioned earlier with a convergence. And so like, you know, as far as longer term things, intellectual property laws are going to need to be reformulated. Whether they will be and on what timeline, who knows? 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: But like, you can’t disincentivize all human thought and publication. Or you can, and we’ll see what happens. 

CB: Yeah. We’ll see what happens. 

Let me show that graph really quickly. Let me see if there’s a way I can show that, just because so I don’t have to do it in post and can enjoy my birthday without doing a bunch of editing. But here’s that graph, because it’s very visually striking. And you know, there’s different things about like, the sample size. Like, is this representative? Was it a large enough sample size? you know, I don’t – even aside from that, I don’t really care; the emphasis of this makes sense, and the general trend is something that we’re all seeing and that we’ve been seeing for the past few years. But here’s the graph where you can see like, human-generated content on top, and then AI-generated content down below, and then around 2022, just this shift where you start seeing more and more AI-generated content and less and less human-generated content. And then all of a sudden, now in 2024 and 2025, they are converging and AI-generated content is threatening to switch to the other side. 

So that’s one thing, just to visualize that. The other thing that really visualized Pluto stationing in Aquarius and the no-going-back theme for me this month was later in the month, a company launched this home robot called Neo. And there were these kind of creepy videos about it, but it was like, a supposed home robot that’s supposed to do like, chores and tasks for you and stuff. And they released these videos of it going around and doing things. And it’s kind of like, basic and janky, and there’s questions about whether this is actually a fully realized product yet or if it’s just like, the Saturn-Neptune dream or vision of a product. But the thing that it left to me is just knowing that Pluto’s only at like, one degree of Aquarius right now stationing direct, and we have 20 years of that transit. So we can see the seeds of that transit laying here with where they’re going with this and what they’re trying to do, and just imagine 20 years of iterations of this and where we’re gonna be by the end of Pluto in Aquarius. I felt like this month with Pluto stationing that I could see it very clearly for the first time. 

What do you think? You feeling good about it? You gonna get a Neo home robot? 

AC: Yeah. Why pay for a babysitter when a completely trustworthy faceless robot, maybe equipped with some sort of AI to entertain my child, would do such a good and loving and caring job of taking care of my spawn? No, it’s horrifying. And — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — it is telling in that sense that like, you can know that this is where things are pointed. Whether the goal is accomplished or not is another thing, but you know that untold billions of dollars will be spent in moving in this direction. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: Right? 

CB: Absolutely. 

AC: And how many, I don’t know, all I can think of are horrible things with that. We talked about that. Like, it immediately conjures these images of the robot just walking around the home just conjure for me images of like, petting a cat to death completely impassively. Like, thinking that your child is laundry and trying to fold it. Like, all of the many, many, many horrific mishaps. Like, it’s all going to happen. Right? It’s all going to happen. And whether we get — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — super cool robots as a result or not, I don’t know. But we’re certainly all the mistakes along the way will be made whether there is any great success at the end. And one of the things I’m haunted by with a lot of this new generation of technologies is the Metaverse and virtual reality, and how for my entire childhood and growing up, because I played video games, everyone was like, dude, we’re gonna get virtual reality, and it’s gonna be fuckin’ awesome. And it was always next year, and it got closer and closer, and then VR headsets came out, and they kind of did it and it kind of sucked and just made you sick. And you know, we had the Metaverse, right? We had Zuck’s Metaverse, which was a giant sickening failure. And just because something has lived in our sci-fi dreams for decades and decades doesn’t mean that when it arrives it’s going to be as awesome as we thought it was when we were children. Right? And so I just wonder of all these things, which of them are going to be quickly disappointing upon delivery. I don’t believe in the inevitable success of all these things. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and that was one of the things I was watching some tech guys talk about this robot yesterday, and they were saying like, that the AI technology and everything isn’t even fully there yet, so that one of the things it does have built in is that you can have a person like, remote control go into the robot and control it remotely from the company. So instead now you have a robot that’s being – with somebody driving it who’s inside your house like, doing stuff, and the potential for that, which is even more fun in terms of the implications and everything else. I think you would agree? 

AC: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s amazing. 

CB: Maybe I shouldn’t – actually, maybe we should drop the sarcasm, because I’ve realized recently it doesn’t read in transcripts. It transcripts, it sounds like we’re — 

AC: Oh! 

CB: — totally agreeing. 

AC: Austin just says, “That is amazing, Chris.” 

CB: Yeah. Austin’s like, “I’m fully on board with that; I’m ordering a prototype now!” 

AC: Yeah, I wish one was hovering six inches away from me, staring at the side of my head. 

CB: Right. So speaking of – was there something else I meant to say? Speaking of that, but that’s actually the point of what you were just saying to close that loop, which is the Saturn-Neptune is happening right now at the same time, and there are some products what I saw this guy saying yesterday like this that is like, they’re selling the dream of something that might be fully true in the future. But it’s not quite there yet. And that brings up this broader thing that got really intense this month about everybody realizing we’re in an AI bubble, and that the economy is entirely being held up right now by a handful of a few companies doing AI stuff, but that if that bubble pops, then we’re all in big trouble because that’s like, you know, everything else has become so tenuous at this point economically. 

AC: Yeah. Well, and a lot of things are not actually being held up by that. Like, the big numbers like GDP and the numbers in the stock market are absolutely being held up. But like, I read recently that somewhere near half of the states in the United States are in recession territory in terms of their actual economies. Right? It holds up some of the big numbers; it certainly holds up if you’re investing in these things. But some of that is an illusion, and there’s something to be said for the power of an illusion to hold things together. But even that illusory potency would be good if there was a pop. 

There is also a piece that I listened to recently that I thought was really interesting, and it was about how The Economist in 1997 said, “there’s a tech bubble, and this is exactly why, and this is exactly what the pop will look like.” And they nailed it. And they were three-and-a-half years early. 

CB: Right. 

AC: And so — 

CB: Yeah — 

AC: Like, simply knowing that something is a bubble is not necessarily an indicator that we’re in pop land. But it is extremely discomforting. 

CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things I was fascinated by this month is, you know, I’ve been waiting for October, because that was the repetition of where Venus was – to put it really simply – going back to 1929. And all of a sudden, in October this month, there was all this discussion about 1929 and like, a famous MSNBC host or CNBC host I think, he published a book about the 1929 stock market crash. And as a result of that, he was doing like, a bunch of media interviews everywhere talking about it. And so there was all this discussion about 1929, and there was a real repetition in terms of that really coming back in people’s minds, especially with everyone coming to this increasingly nervous-making realization that we’re kind of in bubble land right now, and everyone’s waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of when that could pop. 

AC: Yeah. And there’s this sense of living in a house that is deeply structurally unsound. Like, that has been condemned, and yet you can’t move out, and so every little like, creak and groan that a house might make carries the implication of potential collapse. Right? But you can’t repair the house, and you can’t move out. Maybe you can move to – you can locate yourself in a room that is less vulnerable to collapse. But it brings a sort of state of structural – or yes, a particular flavor of paranoia that’s based in reality, and yet also becomes irrational because every little thing seems like it might be an indication that the whole thing’s gonna come down. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. One last point to mention here to circle back to something you said about the robots and like, Pluto in Aquarius and everything else – it reminded me that there were headlines because Elon Musk made headlines this month because on an early earnings call later in October after Pluto was like, stationing direct and Mercury-Mars were going exact, he was arguing for getting this payout, and he started making these statements where he said he had concerns because he said, 

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not current control, but a strong influence.” And then he said, “I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I didn’t at least have a strong influence.” And then the third quote was, “My fundamental concern is if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” 

So he made headlines because he kept using the phrase “robot army,” which is like, not the phrase I wanna be hearing right now at the beginning of Pluto in Aquarius, especially seeing that other robot walking around inside people’s homes. But robot army, unfortunately, with Pluto stationing this month, might be a keyword that unfortunately is gonna haunt us for some time to come. 

AC: Yeah. It’s funny; it’s all of these sci-fi dreams and nightmares. Right? And we can’t tell – or it’s very difficult to tell which ones are merely phantoms and which sci-fi dreams and nightmares will appear prophetic in retrospect. Right? Because that’s the Terminators! Right? That’s Skynet. Skynet took over with a robot army. 

CB: Right. Or that Will Smith movie from like, 20 years ago. What was it called? 

AC: I, Robot, which is based-ish on a classic Isaac Asimov novel. It’s one of the tech dreams, and it’s really interesting to see what happens when these dreams hit the wave of technology that makes them potentially real. 

CB: Yeah. I meant to say, like, I laugh sometimes, but none of this is funny. I’m just like, so exasperated that there’s nothing you can do but laugh at like, how bad some stuff is getting and what a weird dystopian timeline that we’re on and that in some ways we’re like, we found ourselves somehow in the worst timeline. So in some instances like, there’s nothing you can do but just like, laugh at how bizarre it’s getting. 

AC: Yeah. It’s definitely clown town. You know, I was talking to you the other day about I was looking at this period in 2019, and it just seemed like it would be mind-bogglingly stupid and surreal, and yeah. You know, I couldn’t even imagine what was gonna be here, because I was looking at 2025 as this big hinge point and just how silly the Neptune-Saturn stuff was gonna be, but how it was going to be real. And when you make the absurd real, it usually ends up in the horror genre. And you know, just knowing that I wouldn’t – you couldn’t possibly time travel back and be like, okay, so this is the case. It would just seem silly. And yet, here we are! And when the absurd becomes literal, it becomes more disturbing than comedic. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Absolutely. 

So all right – so two more heavy, not good news stories to wrap up this section. One of them is Venezuela. A lot of news this month that Trump is building up forces near Venezuela and has sent a carrier there among other things and seems to – it’s being reported – people are saying – news sources are saying that he seems to be trying to depose or may have plans to depose the leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, there. And when a lot of news sources were comparing this to the 1989 time period when the US deposed Manuel Noriega in Panama, and that immediately caught my attention because in the Saturn-Neptune episode that we did earlier this year, we talked about that happening in 1989 and how that coincided with a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So that immediately made me think of this basically being a recurrence transit 40 years later when Saturn and Neptune are again forming in the sky, and the US is again posturing itself to potentially depose the leader of another country in South America. 

AC: Yeah, that’s a really good call. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s one piece of news I wanted to mention in passing. And then the last one – also very not great – is do you remember in year ahead forecast, when we were talking about Uranus in Gemini, I had a little segment talking about atomic weapons. And the reason I had that is because what I said in the forecast was that with Uranus coming back to Gemini, one of the things that it made me realize was that we’re also returning back to the last time Uranus was in Gemini when nuclear weapons were developed and the only time – so far – that they’ve ever been used in war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what happened. And so I was anticipating that that would come back and come up again. And actually, let me read the quote just so I’m clear what I actually said and what you said actually in the same forecast. 

So this is from the transcript from our year ahead astrology forecast that we put out in December of 2024 for 2025. I said, 

“The last thing I wanted to mention in this section” – when we were talking about Uranus in Gemini, parenthetically – “is that the atomic age began in 1945 when the US developed the nuclear bomb and detonated them. And that began both the nuclear arms race of the era of atomic weapons, but also the era of nuclear power as well, which went through different stages and different sort of like, waxed and waned in popularity over the years. But something’s happening right now where all of these big tech companies are putting a bunch of money into nuclear power suddenly because they are all realizing that they’re gonna need massive amounts of power to run these massive data centers that are necessary for artificial intelligence. So what’s happening is a bunch of these companies are returning to nuclear power, and we may see during the course of this Uranus transit, which is itself a return back to when the nuclear or the atomic era began, both a return to nuclear power and the popularity of that, but also, you know, potentially more problematically returning back to that period of a turning point for nuclear weapons as well. And since the last and the only one that was used during war was used during the last period of Uranus in Gemini.” 

And then you responded and agreed, and you said, “Yeah, I think the planets plan to make nukes scary again.” And then what happened this month is that on October 29th just a few days ago, the day that Mercury opposed Uranus in the sky, Trump announced that he’d instructed the US to immediately begin the process of starting to test nuclear weapons again. And so Trump has announced, basically, that the US is gonna start testing nukes again, and so nukes all of a sudden, which the US stopped testing them back in 1992 and 1993, that was the last time that the US detonated a nuclear bomb – it’s potentially on the table again that they’re gonna start detonating them again.

AC: Yeah. 

CB: So that was a pretty good call, I feel like — 

AC: Yeah. No, absolutely. Good call. True call. I think we citizens of planet earth will be pretty lucky to get through Uranus in Gemini this time with no nuclear weapons being deployed. 

CB: Yeah. Unfortunately, that confirmation of that prediction with Mercury opposing Uranus that day and having that announcement about nuclear weapons and this being just the very beginning of Uranus in Gemini, that really does heighten the possibility again. Which is a really grim, scary possibility for the next seven to eight years that Uranus is gonna be transiting through Gemini. And in particular, when I start thinking about that over the past few days, I was thinking about it again, and it’s like, you know, Hiroshima was a Mars-Uranus conjunction in the sign of Gemini, which itself was a recurrence transit of the United States which natally was born with a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini at the time of the Declaration of Independence. So it was like, the country that developed and detonated nuclear weapons had this Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini in their birth chart, and then they developed and deployed nuclear weapons for the first and only time when the same alignment happened in the sky again. 

So something you and I know and we’ve been talking about for a while that’s coming up in the future is now that Uranus is back in Gemini for the next seven to eight years, we’re gonna have four Mars-Uranus conjunctions take place during the course of that time. And two of them we’ve already looked at because they fall in really critical, weird periods for the US – like the one next summer on July 4th, 2026, is the first Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini right on the 4th of July and on the birthday of the US. Then two years later, there’s another one on June 23rd, 2028, and another on June 15th, 2030, and then another on June 6th, 2032. So I don’t like that the US is talking about bringing nuclear weapons tests back, and that’s not a good sign for the future to me that I would like to like, not see if we weren’t gonna go in that direction. But the fact that they are heightens the possibility that that could be really problematic in the future. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it’s back on the menu for a while. And hopefully will not be the item selected, but I don’t think that there will be an announcement from the administration like, “Nah, we’re just kidding; we’re not gonna do that.” Like, we’re moving into a period – or we’ve moved into a period – where great power conflict is much more likely, or is already happening but leading to hot conflict or more proxy wars is kind of already happening and going to keep happening. Like, the tensions, the frictions, and the seeming need for an escalation of force is the era we’re already in. And there’s nothing about the precedents for Uranus’s time in Gemini that suggests that we’ll see a significant deescalation as soon as we would like. 

CB: Yeah. Especially when we take into account the previous US history of always being involved in a major war, either externally – like World War Two – or the Revolutionary War, or internally like it was when Uranus was in Gemini during the Civil War. So I think the next step then is we need to see what alignment happens if the US does conduct another nuclear test; I wanna know what the alignment is when that happens, because that may give us some further clues about if that Uranus in Gemini is gonna continue to get activated and if that’s the thing we need to pay attention to. Yeah. 

Actually, last thing about that – the last nuclear tests happened in 1992, and that was when Mars was in Cancer getting ready to go retrograde in Cancer, and then in 1993, they basically started passing stuff in order to stop nuclear testing. And 1993 is – as I’ve talked about many times this year – that was a 32-year recurrence when Venus went retrograde in Aries and Mars went retrograde in Cancer just like it did earlier this year. So that’s the other thing that’s connecting this period of time of the last time nuclear weapons were used in the US, basically, versus this time period where the same configurations recurred earlier this year when the new administration came into office. 

AC: Interesting. 

CB: Make sense? 

AC: Yeah. And it sort of – yeah, it does make sense. And it also historically times the sort of end of the Cold War or era of tense international geopolitical relations with the sort of re-beginning of a time of very tense international geopolitical relations. I don’t know if it’s – I wouldn’t say that we’ve entered a new Cold War; that’s not going to be the name for this period of history. And it probably happened several years ago. But the obviousness with which we are now – the degree to which it is obvious that we are in a new era of much scarier relationships between nations and even within nations is very clear now. And so that’s interesting that those recurrences time the end of an era and the new firm location within a new era, which again will be named hopefully quite cleverly at some point in the future. 

CB: Yeah. Clever names – we’ll have to work on that. 

Diana in the live chat – patrons who’ve joined us for this live recording today, shout out to all the patrons – says, “Maybe there could be a new breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology,” and I think that’s a really great point because that is the other thing that was happening that was starting the atomic era at that time was nuclear power, and that was part of my original quote. And it does seem like they’re at a critical point already right now, I’ve seen, with some of the nuclear fusion and fission reactors. So that could actually be the thing over the next seven years as well is finally a turning point in terms of that and whether they start producing more energy than they take to get started, which has been the dream of that for years now that they are just barely starting to now achieve. So maybe we’ve also reached the critical turning point in terms of that, which potentially could be good for the world and for the environment and other things like that to move away from other fossil fuels and things like that. 

AC: Yeah, that would be great. It’s another one of these long held sci-fi dreams that may or may not be prophetic. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s at least one positive let’s say dream to keep in mind hopefully, especially as we’re moving into this era where the AI data centers and everything else is starting to use huge amounts of energy and the environmental impact of that and everything else. 

All right, so I think that’s it for the news section. Is there anything else to mention? Do you have anything like, positive that happened to you this month or anything else to wrap up this section? 

AC: No. 

CB: No? You got nothing? 

AC: I got nothing. 

CB: I’m thinking really hard; it’s been a rough month, so I don’t necessarily have anything either. But the astrology has been impressive. I’ll just say that, that I continue to be impressed by the astrology, and I continue to be impressed by – this is so simple of a concept, but applying and separating aspect, especially by transit, work so well. And sometimes an event does happen exactly as your transit is going exact. And I was like, watching that happening several times this month when disastrous things were happening in my life. But just sitting back and kind of being impressed that like, the planetary alignment that represented that that I’d sometimes been anticipating and waiting like, okay, what’s this gonna be this weekend? This isn’t gonna be good. And then the event would happen like, right on the alignment. I continue, you know, going back to our hashtag astrologer good thing that we came up with maybe 10 years ago. I continue to be impressed by that, especially when an aspect is applying and still forming and there’s this feeling of tension that’s increasing and peaks at the exact aspect. But then as soon as it starts separating, there is this flowing away and decreasing of the tension and a moving into past of what you experienced with that. And it’s such a fundamental thing that almost doesn’t bear repeating, and yet when you experience it, it can be such a visceral experience to experience applying versus separating transits and aspects. 

AC: Yeah, it’s so, so, so very important for looking at transits, for looking at how the astrology of a given time manifests in the news and the events. Is this a thing that’s still coming into being? Right? Are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg? Or are we seeing the sea serpent heading off into the distance and its spine sinking beneath the water? Are we seeing something on its way, or are we seeing something on the way out? And for those of you who haven’t spent the time with your natal charts figuring out whether the aspects in it are applying or departing, it’s very important. Was the difficult thing, the Venus square Saturn in someone’s natal chart, was that coming into being and getting stronger? Or had that already happened, right, and you’re just suffering the hangover from it? Or the world was suffering the hangover from it as you were born? Same for the positive things. Because it makes a big difference in interpretation and you know, what you can expect and what you should expect. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Great points. 

All right, cool. I think that’s good. Why don’t we take a little break? 

AC: All right, great. Yeah. 

CB: All right, I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening next year May 21st through the 25th, 2026, in Seattle, Washington. So you can join the Northwest Astrological Conference either in person in Seattle, or you can attend online from anywhere with their new affordable virtual streaming option. 

So NORWAC, if you’re not familiar with it, the Northwest Astrology Conference which we all lovingly refer to with its acronym NORWAC, is one of the longest running astrology conferences in the world. And the 2026 conference, they’re making it a little bit more of an intimate gathering to be a little bit smaller than last year’s on purpose. And part of the purpose of that is they’re designing it to be easy to connect with speakers and easy to connect with other attendees so that you can make new friends in a welcoming and inclusive and community-focused environment, because NORWAC is run by a family – like, generations of astrologers that have been doing it for over 30, 40 years now – and they really focus on that like, community element of everything. 

So at NORWAC, you can hear from over 30 leading astrologers who are gonna be giving different lectures, and you can choose from a range of different lectures and workshops covering both modern as well as ancient techniques. So it’s gonna be an amazing conference, and you can either learn more or you can sign up by visiting NORWAC.net, and I’ll put a link in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website that you can click to visit it and check out. And Austin, you’ll be making an appearance at NORWAC next year I hear. 

AC: Yeah, I’ll be making a pair of appearances. I will be leading a pre-conference workshop, and I will also be giving a during-the-conference talk. 

CB: Fantastic. All right. Well, it’s gonna be a great conference, so definitely check it out. And especially if you’re thinking about attending it in person, I remember tickets have sold out the past few years. So if you wanna attend in person, then get your ticket early. But online tickets, of course, will be available from here until when the conference actually begins. 

AC: Yeah, and insert sort of oft repeated, almost cliche but definitely true statement about there’s nothing like being there in person. It’s true. It’s cliche, but it’s true. It’s really nice. It’s unique. The event has such an energy, and dare I say magic, that you get a whiff of from the online attendance. You know, there’s definitely some of it, but there’s nothing like being there.

CB: Yeah. Being there’s nice, but online – one of the things that’s nice about online is the past few years, they keep upping the online experience in terms of include more community and discussion elements to bring the online people more into the mix. And I was actually impressed at how they did that this past year’s conference. So for those of us that can’t travel and be in person for health reasons or other reasons, it’s a great alternative. So — 

AC: Yeah, it is. And NORWAC has made efforts to prove that every year and capture a little bit more of the magic bit by bit. And you know, you do have to wear pants if you attend in person, or you do have to cover your bottom. Whereas that is not at all required if you attend online! 

CB: Austin, are you wearing pants right now? 

AC: I am! I’m actually wearing particularly well-fitting dress pants. 

CB: All right. I’m gonna take your word for it just for my own piece of mind, and I will not inquire further. But on that — 

AC: There’s no particular reason. I just woke up in them, and I was like, hey! These are nice! Why did I go to sleep in these? Who knows! 

CB: All right, well, thanks to NORWAC for sponsoring this message about Austin’s pants, and visit their website at NORWAC.net. 

All right. I think that’s good for the first half of this show. Let’s transition into talking about the forecast for November and the major astrological alignments that are going on. 

So I wanna give a synopsis of just the major stuff from my vantage point that’s happening this month, and then we can get into the details in chronological order. But the major alignments this month is like, right away at the top of the month right out of the gate, we have this explosive Mars-Uranus opposition that’s happening right away around November 4th and the days surrounding that. And that’s gonna be a really tense aspect to start November with. Then immediately like, the following week, Mercury slows down and stations retrograde, and Mars comes up and conjoins it for a second time, which is gonna bring back some of that energy that we had of the Mercury-Mars conjunction in October, but it’s gonna add a Mercury retrograde right on top of that, which is a lot of like, miscommunication, delays, misunderstandings, but add like, a fiery, argumentative, conflictual energy with Mars at the same time. And then Mercury’s retrograde for the next three weeks for the rest of November until the end of the month. 

Then we have Uranus retrograding and returning back to Taurus early in the month as well, which is returning for unfinished business going back to the 2018-2019 timeframe when Uranus first went into that sign and first went into especially that whole sign house in our chart. So I want people to think about Uranus in terms of the fact that it’s returning back to Taurus and returning to a certain whole sign house of your chart for unfinished business and to wrap some things up that you had already been doing since 2018 and 2019 in that sector of your life. 

And then along the same lines, the last major thing that happens this month is that Saturn has retrograded back into Pisces, and it’s gonna make its final station in Pisces late this month in November. And a station is always like, an exclamation mark and like, a planet speaking loudly. So this is the last big message about what was learned and what we were supposed to learn and about the experience that we had over the course of the past two-and-a-half years ever since Saturn moved into Pisces in March of 2023 and moved into that whole sign house in whatever sector of our chart that it’s been transiting since that time. We’re getting Saturn coming back, you know, throwing out a reminder, and throwing out some final changes in that area of our life before it hightails it out of there and heads into Aries for good early next year. 

So those are the main things I wanted to focus on and talk about this month that I think are the most important. What do you think? 

AC: I agree; I think those are the, I don’t know if “highlights” is the right word. But those are the most useful things to know about the month and to have in mind as we walk through it. 

CB: Absolutely. One last thing I forgot to mention – Jupiter’s stationing retrograde in Cancer while trining Saturn at the same time. And the part about trining Saturn I think is actually really good for the Saturn sector of our chart. But I thought that was an important thing to mention as well is just that Jupiter station in Cancer we’ll talk about a little bit as well. 

All right, so where do we start? Let me pull up the actual chart for the 1st of November, because one of the things I wanna do is like, go through chronologically the alignments this month showing them on a chart. This is today; we’re literally recording this – I’m gonna try to turn this episode around – we’re recording it today on October 31st; I’m gonna try to get it released tonight or tomorrow. And these are the alignments at the beginning of the month, and that actually makes me realize I wanna give the electional chart for this month, because the electional chart for this month is literally on the first day of November, unfortunately. Sorry for the lack of head’s up. If you’re a patron, you learned about this a week ago when I did the electional astrology podcast and released our best dates for November. But for those of you, our best chart that we found in that podcast that I did wanna share here is on November 1st. Earlier… No actually, it’s later in the day. Later in the afternoon with Pisces rising. 

So the best chart is November 1st, and then set the chart for about 3:45 PM local time wherever you’re at; just adjust it, set it for your city, and then at 3:45 in your location – like, don’t adjust the timezones or anything; it’s 3:45 local time – you should get about something similar to this chart with Pisces rising. 

So part of the reason this is the best chart for the month is it’s before a lot of the trickiest stuff really sets in. So it’s about a week before Mercury stations retrograde fully, for example. Or it’s before Mars has departed from Scorpio and moved fully into Sagittarius, and then exactly opposes Uranus. So unfortunately, Mars is already like, heading into that opposition with Uranus, so that is built into this chart. But I assure you, from what I’ve seen, I have a hard time recommending a lot of the charts later in the month that are really much better than this. 

So this is the electional chart. You got Pisces rising; the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is exalted in Cancer in the 5th whole sign house in a day chart. Very well-placed Jupiter doing very good. It’s in a mutual reception with the Moon, which is in Pisces in the first whole sign house, and the Moon itself is applying to a trine with Jupiter. So very good 5th house things going on in terms of 5th house things involving like, pleasure, fun, games, hobbies, enjoyment. Also things sometimes related to like, children can come up and other 5th house activities would be excellent for this chart. The thing it’s not so good for with Mars in the 9th house is things involving travel, interaction with foreign places, sometimes things involving education or beliefs. I did some elections this month using Pisces with Mars in the 9th house, and I like, inadvertently angered people who had strongly held beliefs, so it was an interesting example of what happens when Mars is in the 9th house in a day chart. So you do wanna be a little careful about that. But other than that, this chart also takes advantage of the very final days of that applying Venus-Jupiter square with Venus in Libra at 23 degrees applying to a square with Jupiter in Cancer in the 5th house. So that is my best election for the month. Did you look at the electional weather this month, Austin? 

AC: I did. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. There are a few nice moments right at the beginning of the month while Venus is still in Libra. But those disappear pretty quickly; they disappear by the end of the first week. 

CB: That actually reminds me; I forgot to say there’s a variant chart that day which I will give to people in case they can’t use the Pisces rising one. But the variant chart is Capricorn rising, which occurs in the middle of the day. Let’s say at least in my location in Denver, we would probably wanna stick with like, early Capricorn rising, so put the Ascendant early in Capricorn and try to get Venus on the Midheaven there at 23 degrees of Libra. If you do that, you’ll end up with a chart with Saturn ruling the Ascendant; it’s in the 3rd house in a day chart. It has a nice trine from Jupiter. The Moon and Jupiter are still in a mutual reception now between the 3rd and 7th house of relationships where we find the most positive planet in the chart in this instance. And then we put that Venus in Libra in the 10th whole sign house. So if people wanted an alternative or a variant time on the same day, you could also use this chart and also have some pretty good things about it. The only downside is that Mars then moves to the 11th house of friends and groups and alliances, so there could be some conflict or some strife or tension in that area where if what you’re initiating is more focused on friends and groups, then I probably wouldn’t recommend using this chart. 

But for other charts, if you’re looking for other electional dates during the course of November, Leisa and I just released this month’s episode of the electional astrology podcast about a week ago. And you can find I think at least like, 10 other charts that we found during the course of November for if not planning things, at least trying to plan around some of the most difficult combinations of the month and picking the best times to act, given the otherwise kind of challenging astrological weather. So you can find out more about that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Elections or sign up on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. 

All right. So that is the electional weather. But that segues into the alignments for the beginning of the month, and we basically have to jump into that Mars-Uranus opposition because it’s the first major thing. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t open with that, because the best thing that happens – you mentioned already, Austin – which is we get this lovely Venus-Jupiter square that happens at the very beginning of the month on November 1st and 2nd that does have a positive energy, especially if you have let’s say anything around 24 or 25 degrees of cardinal signs, right? 

AC: Yeah. And we could just say generally cardinal and especially late cardinal. Right? Even though Venus’s time in Libra did not prevent the Mars in Scorpio things from happening, it did bring a number of pleasant things into being. The two benefics both being in great signs where they’ve got a lot of strength offset a lot of the nastiness for the second half of October. And we have the last bits of that – not the dregs, but it’s like, the last couple bites of cake before it’s gone during this first like, five days-ish of November. And so — 

CB: I like that – the last bites of cake. That’s a good one. 

AC: Yeah. You know, then we have to confront the no-more-cake situation. And you know, the fact that you had cake didn’t keep your website from getting hacked. The goods and the bads are sometimes separate, right? But you know, do you want a hacked website and cake, or a hacked website and no cake, right? Cake, please. 

CB: Definitely. I am pro cake. I am definitely pro cake. 

AC: Pro cake! 

CB: Especially tomorrow! On my birthday, actually. 

AC: Oh, yeah! Yeah. Aww! And so yeah, we get a little bit more of that, and the Moon in Aries on the 2nd and 3rd is configured, is angular to both Venus and Jupiter. It’s not the most splendid, magnificent configuration imaginable, but it’s fun, it’s peppy, and there’s still cake, right? Cake is still being served until the 6th when Venus enters Scorpio. And so — 

CB: Yeah. Until the 4th, let’s say, because the 4th, things get rocky from — 

AC: No, I — 

CB: — the 4th on. 

AC: Well, the Mercury-Mars will introduce more problems, but they will be problems that run concurrently with the serving of cake. Like, it’s not like Mercury-Mars attack Venus and Jupiter; they just create problems while cake is still being served. Depending on which side of that you’re on, you might just be like, great, it’s still cake for a few more days. Or the issues that Mercury and Mars present may completely obfuscate the availability of treats. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s what I was thinking is sometimes it’s hard to eat cake when there’s like, explosions going on outside of your house or like, a fire has just broken out or something like that. 

AC: Sure. But sometimes it’s just irritating, you know? Like, the Mercury-Mars is gonna create problems. For some people, it’ll be a little bit of annoying over here while a little bit of good happens over there. For some people, the Mercury-Mars will certainly outweigh what cake remains. 

CB: For sure. All right, so moving into the non-cake portion, I will say that even once the cake of the Venus-Jupiter square ends by November 6th and Venus moves into Scorpio, something I’m looking forward to about that is that Venus will come in and clean up and counteract some of the mess I think that Mars made as it was going through Scorpio over the course of the past month, month and a half. So that’s a nice era that will be beginning with that ingress of Venus into Scorpio on November 6th. And of course, you know, simultaneously on November 4th, Mars’s ingress into Sagittarius where it opposes Uranus will simultaneously be the departure of Mars from Scorpio and therefore the removal of an irritant that’s been in that sector of our charts for the past month and a half since whenever Mars went into Scorpio in late – actually, I remember that very vividly – when it went into Scorpio in September. You have the date? 

AC: Yeah, it was basically a day after the – or, it was the day of the equinox. 

CB: Yeah, I was thinking how it was like, a day or two after the eclipse. The second eclipse was on what, September 20th, I think, right? 

AC: Yeah, it was on the eve of the equinox. 

CB: Got it. Okay. 

AC: Yeah, so — 

CB: So hold on. So —

AC: Okay. 

CB: Just emphasizing that point to everybody – think about personally. Because we saw this happen earlier this year when Mars went retrograde in Cancer, caused a lot of problems in the Cancer whole sign house in our chart. Then Jupiter came in and Venus as well at some point, and there in some instances was some positive cleaning up that occurred when the benefics moved through the sign that the malefics had recently went through and caused problems. So some of the experience this month with Venus going through Scorpio will be a positive counteraction of things as well as Mars no longer being there. So it’s a good thing to think about in terms of personal astrology. 

AC: Yeah. Mars leaves Scorpio. And Mars causes problems in Scorpio, but for those that like a little Mars and that Scorpio is well-placed. For Mars in Scorpio can also be and was a powerful motivator, stimulant, et cetera, et cetera. Although I didn’t love all the Mercury-Mars. Like, I always get a lot done and I’m happy in retrospect with Mars’s pass through Scorpio. And so to whatever — 

CB: Yeah, there’s a Iamblichus says that the energy of Mars like, in the celestial spheres is that it excites, it drives and excites life into action and creates movement and extreme forms of forward movement and that in the sublunary sphere sometimes this can be experienced as going to extremes, which can mean like, going too fast or being jostled or jolted or even feelings of like, burning or irritation. But that fundamentally in its most constructive form, it can just be working really hard and having a lot of forward movement. And yeah, that is a lot of what we saw in Scorpio. And then it will be bringing that energy now to the Sagittarius sectors of our chart. 

AC: And I like the term “driven.” Right? Because when you’re driven, there’s a sense that it’s not something you’ve chosen on a whim, that there’s some reason why you’re moving in a direction and potentially some consequence for not moving in that direction. Because even when Mars indicates a period of, you know, heroic accomplishment or badassery of some sort, the forces of necessity and consequence are very often present. It’s not just something you kind of felt like doing and wasn’t that fun, right? You’re driven. Right? 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. 

AC: By forces within or without. 

CB: Yeah. I will say that like, with Mars going through my 10th house, it was like, the website was immediately destroyed as soon as Mars ingressed like, literally that day. And then so there was like, a burning down and a destruction of something, but then it forced me over the next month to work really hard on the website to create a new one and to rebuild it and to make it sort of like, rise from the ashes as something new. So when people go there, you’ll see it’s a much different and much more simple layout at this point, but it’s also – I like it. It’s got new, better typography; it reads better; it looks better; it’s faster. And the amount of energy that I put into constructing it was like, a huge exertion for me, but I was also digging deep to find that energy, and I found it. And it was also a good feeling in terms of that, so I think that speaks to what you’re talking about. 

AC: Yeah. And because you had to. Because the consequence — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — was well, how about no website? 

CB: Right. How about everything ends – The Astrology Podcast and everything ends like, right today? No, that was not – I was not done. I was not done with doing this podcast. We’re gonna get more than 500 episodes, hopefully. 

AC: Nice. Yeah, yeah. The struggle is real and will continue. 

So yeah. So Mars leaves Scorpio, right, and it enters Sagittarius. For me, one of the things about this – like, as part of larger patterning – is that this brings Mercury and Mars back into the same sign, because as we begin the month and as October ended, we had a brief respite where Mars and Mercury being in the same sign. Mercury jumped into Sag before Mars could get there. There’s about a week from like, the 29th up until the 4th here when Mars enters Sagittarius where there’s no Mars-Mercury copresence for just a little bit. And I experienced that and loved it yesterday when I had a lot of mercurial errands to run, and nothing went crazy wrong. Because every time I’ve tried to do mercurial errands over much of the last month, there’s always been a lot of additional difficulty being introduced because Mars-Mercury. So that — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — that respite is over, and it’s from —

CB: Yes. 

AC: — the 4th to the 18th. We’ve got Mars and Mercury back in the same sign. 

CB: Yeah. So it’s only a very brief period, so we’ve gotta get into that now, which is that most of the experience of this month is gonna be this intense Mars-Mercury energy because from the 4th onward, the two of them are building up to another conjunction basically when Mercury slows down and stations retrograde on the 9th at six degrees of Sagittarius, Mars is at three degrees of Sagittarius. So Mars a few days later catches up to Mercury and conjoins it on the 12th and 13th. So we’re gonna get a whole other Mars-Mercury conjunction like we experienced around October 19th and 20th, but this time with Mercury stationing retrograde and like I said earlier adding those additional Mercury retrograde themes of like, miscommunication, delays, technical snafus, and other things like that on top of that conjunction, which is going to not be super pleasant. And it’s also probably gonna call back and mean that there’s gonna be a continuation of some of the Mars-Mercury issues that started or happened in October that maybe you thought were finished are actually gonna continue or return back into your life at this point around the time of the second conjunction when it turns out that some of those things were not one time events but rather it was opening up a sequence of events that are gonna play out during the course of especially this retrograde period. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Which might be frustrating and/or unpleasant to hear if you got the worst or even half of the worst of the Mars-Mercury during October. Worth noting, Chris, that in this chart that you have up now for November 12th for the second conjunction of Mercury and Mars, the Sun just happens to be in the degree that Mercury and Mars conjoined the first time. I’m just noticing — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — that now. Just for shits, giggles, and bonus tidbits. 

CB: Well, that’s a great point, because that’s the degree that Mercury’s gonna retrograde back to, because that was its shadow degree, and that’s the degree it’ll station direct at eventually at 20 degrees of Scorpio around here at the end of the month around November 28th and 29th. So for some reason, that 20 degree Scorpio period is super important and super active, and if it coincided with an event when Mercury and Mars first moved over that degree, then you can expect a return back to the events as part of a sequence by late November when Mercury goes back there and then stations direct at 20 Scorpio. 

AC: Yeah. And so I wonder if we should remember to keep an eye out for follow-ups on the Louvre heist and also to see if there are further developments with the Windows 11 rollout as well as AWS outage. If like, those events in retrospect were the beginning of something, of at least a short sequence that needed some time to play out. 

CB: Right. 

AC: One thing — 

CB: And the White House construction as well. 

AC: Oh yeah. 

CB: That was the other big thing. And then there was also protests that happened around that time – the No Kings protests happened around that conjunction so that could be something as well, because that obviously a protest archetypally fit the symbolism of Mercury and Mars. So maybe it’s some other protests or other things like that that come up. 

AC: Right, yeah. Giving speech – Mercury – to anger, dissent – Mars. 

CB: Right. Let me show that Mercury retrograde graphic again, because we spent – two things. Actually, I wanted to show – I made a infographic just for Mercury in general to make sure we state the standard Mercury retrograde things, which is, you know, Mercury retrogrades happen three to four times a year when Mercury appears to move backwards in the sky for about three weeks, and that’s what’s happening most of November. There’s communication challenges like delays, misunderstandings, and technical issues. It’s a good time internally or personally for like, review and reflection, to reevaluate your plans and decisions, and especially to look back into your past and to revisit something, especially in the house or houses that Mercury retrogrades in, which in this case is gonna be your whole sign Sagittarius house as well as your whole sign Scorpio house. And then finally during Mercury retrogrades, we always tell people to have patience and to be flexible and adaptable, because you’re gonna get some curveballs during a Mercury retrograde that you don’t expect that are gonna throw your plans off, and you need to be able to adapt to that in order to deal with the curveballs the most gracefully. 

So here is the Mercury retrograde graphic again that Paige designed to help better illustrate this as like, an astronomical phenomenon of kind of like, the shape roughly approximately let’s say that you see in the sky where way back here on October 6th, Mercury went into Scorpio, which is the sign it will later retrograde back in. So that sets up the initial activation of that whole sign house of our chart. Then October 21st, it entered its shadow at 20 degrees of Scorpio, so that was – you know, pay attention to any events that happened around that time, because they’re gonna be returned to when Mercury returns. Mercury goes into Sag on October 29th, then it stations retrograde on November 9th in Sagittarius. We get the conjunction with Mars several days later just after the station. Then Mercury goes back into Scorpio on the 18th and reenters whatever whole sign house that is in your chart before eventually stationing direct at 20 degrees of Scorpio on the 29th. Then it goes back into Sag in December 11th, exits its shadow, and completes most of the retrograde stuff on December 16th, and then finally departs from Sagittarius entirely and completes the entire sign-based sequence by January 1st. So pretty good way of visualizing things, yeah? 

AC: Yeah. Well, I think it’s very descriptive of the experience of Mercury retrograde to see that it’s not just going back and forth; it’s actually doing a rollercoaster loop-de-loop.

CB: Right. 

AC: Where things — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: You know, where if you were to ride that, you would feel upside down at certain points, and you can more easily imagine the G forces that you were subject to during the acceleration and declaration periods, right? Because it’s not merely that things are moving; it’s that you are moving along with them or you are on – I was gonna say a moving train, but a train on a loop-de-loop track, on a track that has the dimension of height, right? 

CB: Right. 

AC: Because Mercury’s retrogrades often feature disorientation as a key part of their experience. And so — 

CB: Totally. 

AC: — knowing that that’s literally what’s happening makes a lot of sense. 

CB: That’s a great point. And this is when – it’s right here when Mercury stations, and then it begins that entire retrograde movement here. That entire period is like, the most intense experience where you do have that – like you’re saying – like, imagining if you were on a rollercoaster; that’s the point at which it starts like, suddenly going upwards and then you’re inverted when Mercury is actually retrograde between November 9th and November 29th before it stations direct. And then eventually things start resuming that forward movement again. 

AC: Yeah. No, so it’s a great visualization. 

CB: Yeah. So shout out to Paige for making that for us. And… What was I gonna say? There was a final thing about Mercury retrograde, which is just… Maybe that’s good. If I think of it, I’ll come back to it. So let’s go back to the chart, though, because we’re skipping that really important aspect that starts fundamentally the month off with. Even though we have a nice few days at the beginning, this Mars-Uranus opposition that goes exact around November 3rd, 4th, and 5th is particularly tense and explosive. And we need to make sure we give adequate treatment to that, because the last several Mars-Uranus hard aspects have been pretty rough and pretty crazy. The most recent one was the one that happened in June. Remember when Mars was moving through Leo, and it squared Uranus in Taurus. And that was like, that crazy weekend when the first No Kings protests happened and like, there was the war with Iran started around that time, and there was like, two or three other things that were like, popping off all around that Mars-Uranus square, remember? 

AC: Oh. Oh yes. Yeah, I mean, Mars and – like, to bring it back to an hour ago, what were we deeply concerned about in terms of the nuclear fate of the world? Oh, it was a — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — series of Mars-Uranus conjunctions. Like, Mars-Uranus blows shit up, and it can do that in a positive way. Sometimes there’s like, fantastical achievement that breaks boundaries and that you didn’t know was possible, but the level of energy that you often have with Mars-Uranus, this boundary-bursting, precedent-ignoring, straightforward assertion to just stitch together some keywords – there’s not a lot that can hold that without getting damaged. And so it can be extraordinarily positive, but very often it’s destructive, whether that’s the intention or not. Like, because it both – you know, Mars is inherently aggressive and would rather cut through than go around. And Uranus intensifies that sort of contentiousness to an extreme degree. And so yeah, it’s hard to find a container that isn’t damaged by Mars-Uranus configurations. 

CB: Right. Because Mars has this inherent severing and separating quality which can be used constructively. Like, you need to cut into something during surgery, for example. But severing and separation is oftentimes experienced by us as something that’s traumatic where you’re like, ripping something apart for some reason, or something is getting torn apart – like, let’s say a relationship separating or two countries going to war or what have you. So Mars is also traditionally the planet of war and conflict, and then it’s opposing Uranus, which is this energy of unexpected disruptions and sudden, rapid changes is the primary indication of Uranus. And so when you put those two energies together, especially by putting them in an opposition, which is a naturally discordant energy – when you put two planets on as like, far ends of the spectrum as you possibly can from each other so that they have opposing priorities and orientations to what they’re trying to do and accomplish, it creates a tension between those two energies that’s hard to reconcile and oftentimes can be experienced as sudden upsets and difficulties and conflicts and strife and other things like that. 

AC: Yeah. And with the Uranus gives it a very out-of-the-blue quality. Like, oh, I didn’t even know we were having a fight about that. I didn’t know that that was so important to you. Uranus crosses or ignores previously established boundaries. Right? So like, an act of aggression or assertion that ignores previous agreements or ignores boundaries that had become the norm. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So this’ll actually also be – I realize now – our first Mars-Uranus opposition in Gemini. So this is gonna be an important aspect to pay attention to historically, because whatever events or dynamics or arise at this time in the news, especially in a few days around November 4th, we’ll probably see recurrences of those same dynamics or energies or even news stories over the course of the next like, seven years as we have probably three or four more of these oppositions take place between Sagittarius and Gemini. And you know, that’s also activating a much different axis in our chart than Mars-Uranus oppositions have been for the past seven or eight years where they’ve been taking place between Taurus and Scorpio. So we’re not gonna be quite accustomed to dealing with those unexpected disruptions and that type of energy taking places in those whole sign houses in our chart and that axis. 

AC: Yeah. And so to speak to that, with Uranus having spent most of the last seven years in Taurus, you know, Taurus is slower. It’s more substantial. There’s more – things are solid and accumulated and have mass. In Gemini, and then in Sagittarius which is opposite it, we have things move much faster. They tend to move in multiples rather than singular heavy things. And there’s a general capacity for speed and the chaos born of many things moving quickly in these mutable signs that we don’t see as much with the fixed signs where Uranus has been and where Mars has opposed Uranus since 2018. 

CB: Yeah. Definitely. 

All right, so we open with that sort of explosive, tense energy right away on November 4th, and that’s like, our introduction to Mars in Sagittarius. So it starts moving away from that opposition over the next few days, and we get our first lunation of the month – which is that Full Moon in Taurus – the very next day on November 5th in Taurus. And so it still has that Mars-Uranus opposition very, very close and very, very pronounced at a time when the sort of heightened energy of the Full Moon is taking place at the same time. 

AC: Yeah. And it’s interesting, because we have some counterpoints to that like, jagged, nonconciliatory Mars-Uranus energy; it’s the Full Moon in Taurus, which is the place of exaltation for the Moon. And the Moon exalts in Taurus because it stabilizes the sometimes too quick waxing and waning and this and that of the Moon. It like, stabilizes; it helps create some security, and we have at that point in time and for not much longer, we still have Venus in Libra. So again, the forces of reconciliation, stabilization, and peace are strong, and the applying aspect from the Moon after it leaves perfect opposition and fullness with the Sun is a sextile with an exalted Jupiter in Cancer. Right? And so we have this one last sort of gasp of double benefic, stabilizing, maybe it’s not so bad energy while this next round of destabilizing, line-crossing, quick, fast, confusing and aggressive starts up. And this is really the last gasp of the double benefic stabilizing energy. So it’s interesting that these sort of cross paths. We get one last nice while the new mean introduces itself! 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. And it bakes that into that Full Moon, which then that lunation is sort of effective for the next couple of weeks. And something about that energy then carries forward. 

So after that time, Venus goes into Scorpio as we said on November 6th and 7th and begins cleaning up some of the mess that Mars left behind there, which is kind of positive and eventually later on Venus will move into and form a trine with Jupiter and Saturn, which will be an awesome aspect that will take place around the time that Mercury is like, stationing direct there. So there’s a lot of actually positive resolution type energy later in November around the time of let’s say we have this Mercury-Venus conjunction on November 24th. We have Venus trining Jupiter exactly on November 26th; Venus trining Saturn around the same time, and then Mercury stationing direct on the 28th and 29th. So at least in terms of that stuff, I like how Venus’s entry into Scorpio earlier in the month builds up to and eventually culminates with coming in to really help out Mercury as it’s returning and retracing its steps in Scorpio, but then finally starting to move forward again and pick up the pieces and build things back up again stronger. 

AC: Yeah. Venus does some nice things during the last portion of the month. I don’t think it’ll be much help during the beginning of the month, though. 

CB: Sure. Right. All right, so going back. 

AC: So and the day after Venus enters Scorpio, we get a very important regress. Uranus ends this preview period in Gemini, and returns to Taurus for almost six months. It’s gonna be April 25th before Uranus is back in Gemini. And then — 

CB: Wow. 

AC: — on April 25th, 2026, Uranus returns to Gemini and will be there until 2032. And then a little bit more – then into Cancer, then a little bit more in 2033, and then done for good. But this is the – what we begin on the 7th is the last portion, the wrap-up, the epilogue of the Uranus in Taurus story. And not only is that significant in and of itself, but it also begins this strange period in which we finish the year in which Saturn is back in Pisces, just like it was at the beginning of year, Neptune’s back in Pisces just like it was in the beginning of the year, and Uranus is in Taurus – just like it was in the beginning of the year. Whereas for a chunk of 2025, we saw all three of these outer planets in new signs. And what we saw – especially during the third quarter of the year – was the positions that those planets will hold for several years to come. For Uranus, seven years; for Neptune, 14; and for Saturn, two and a half. But we’re sort of weirdly back to where the year began once Uranus moves back into Taurus. And so there’s a strange quality of so much has happened, and yet the vibes are going to be eerily similar to how we began and yet they can’t be. Right? Like, we’re back to being on the precipice of this brave new world rather than being in this brave new world which we got a taste of this year. It’s a very strange thing. It’s something we remarked on in the yearly and have remarked on throughout the year. 

CB: Right. Yeah, we got a heavy taste of what Uranus in Gemini is gonna be about over the past several months since it went in in July, and especially when it stationed retrograde in Gemini for the first time at the beginning of September. But now we’ve got it going back into Taurus and going back to that transit that some many of us have been experiencing in different sectors of our chart, different whole sign houses especially, since 2018 and 2019. And you and I – what’s funny, you and I both know like, I know a Taurus rising in my personal life who Uranus went into Taurus, into their rising sign, and they immediately wanted to change things in their life and start making major moves. And they packed up all their bags and moved to like, a different part of the country to like, live out their ideal living situation scenario. But I’ve been noticing as that transit’s like, winding down, that they almost went through that and had that liberatory experience and achieved new levels in terms of that, but almost feel like they’ve come to – they’re bringing that to completion and maybe might return back to where they started in some way. And that’s like, a very literal example, but there’s something broadly about that that I think we’re all experiencing with Uranus in whatever house it went through it our chart and the major changes and radical changes and sometimes upsets in that part of our life, and how we finally saw that winding down over the summer with the removal of that energy. But there’s something left that needs to be finished there over the next several months between now and April as Uranus goes back into that sign. And that’ll become really pronounced when Uranus stations in Taurus, and we’ll get the final message about what that was all about. Do you know when that station is, by chance? 

AC: Oh, I don’t. 

CB: Okay. Actually — 

AC: Between November 7th and April 25th? 

CB: Well, it’s right here. It’s 87 days from November 7th. So that’s approximate – it’ll station direct at 27 degrees of Taurus. I could just stop being lazy and like, animate the chart. Here it is. So it’s like, if only there was a way to know! I’m like, sitting in front of an astrology program. There it is! So February 3rd, Uranus stations direct at 27 degrees of Taurus, so that will be the final exclamation mark, the final speech that Uranus really has to give about what that transit is about and what major radical changes and liberatory experiences in some instances that we all had to have in that area of our life – that house that Uranus was transiting – before it makes its way out in you said April? 

AC: April 25th. 

CB: Got it. Okay. 

All right. So a return back to that Uranus in Taurus energy is very important. We’ve talked about that as like, the financial stuff over the years. Obviously, like, crypto, Bitcoin, all of those things have had radical changes since 2018, 2019 in terms of the bizarrely quick mass adoption that’s taken place, especially in the past year where suddenly that’s being advocated by the government and being normalized in different ways. So I’m sure there’s gonna be some final things going on there. The financial and monetary systems and the conversions to digital currencies that we’ve seen. But also, I mean, we’ll see about the potential disruptive potential of some of that since that’s also been a, you know, potential bubble or something that’s been there over the course of the past year in terms of how much money’s being put into crypto and then a year ago, we were also talking about like, BRICS and whether the US dollar remains the primary world reserve currency and the efforts to move away from that by different countries. There’s a lot of things that I think this final transit of Uranus in Taurus is gonna bring about, not just personally but also in terms of world events and world astrology. 

AC: Yeah. Currency in general, whether it’s crypto or otherwise, is a big part of Uranus’s historical journeys through Taurus. It changes currencies and what holds value, et cetera, et cetera. To speak to the point you were making about personal journeys, what Uranus has wrought over the last seven years, you make a really good point about it being timed to do the last part of it – which might be the integrating of it – what did I learn on my journey into the wild – in whatever sense. Like, I sought independence and empowerment, you know, and who I am and what I am apart from my previous context, because Uranus is about the principle of individuality, but in a more extreme sense where it is individuality with as little interfering context as possible. Right? When nothing constrains me, what choices would I make? Rather than —

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — what practical choices do I make given the many constraints and commitments? And so it is that this does begin — 

CB: It’s like, a rebellious teenager energy.

AC: Yeah, it can be! It can be – like, there are mature and silly versions of it. But it’s certainly, it’s the seeking, “who am I really when I’m not arguing with my parents,” right? So I’m gonna move away from my parents, and then you know, who am I when I don’t have to argue with anybody? And that can be very positive. And so we have the wrapping up of that. But then for people who have positions in mutable signs or in Gemini who got a taste of that Uranus, this is a step back from and a chance to reflect on what impetus, like what fires have been lit to seek independence, autonomy, empowerment, apartness, innovation. Like, what fires got lit to do that over the summer, right? Or from July until literally now? Like, you know, what new fools’ journeys are starting to be tempting? Because this is sort of a step back into where we’ve been, but this is also where the seeds of the next round of those begin sprouting invisibly. 

CB: Definitely. Yeah. And we’re gonna see some crucial check-ins in that when Mercury, for example, is gonna retrograde back into late Scorpio and oppose Uranus. So for example, on November 18th, and that just happens to be very close to – within a day of – our second lunation of the month, which is this New Moon in Scorpio that takes place on the 19th while Mercury’s opposing Uranus in Taurus. And then later, Venus will oppose Uranus on the very final days of the month, especially on November 29th. We’ll have Venus at 29 degrees of Scorpio opposing Uranus at 29 Taurus while Mercury’s stationing direct. So those will be two especially key moments of checking in on that final Uranus transit that’ll happen this month. 

AC: Yeah. And I think that’s worth further emphasizing. So this movement of Uranus back into Taurus does not go unnoticed. It gets hammered this month. So as soon as Mercury retrogrades back out of Sagittarius and into Scorpio, immediately Mercury makes an opposition with Uranus and that opposition with Uranus is supported by the fact that there is a New Moon. The Sun and Moon are conjoined Mercury as it makes that opposition, meaning that the Sun, Moon, and Mercury all oppose and spotlight Uranus back in Taurus. And because — 

CB: Right. 

AC: Right? And because three times is the rule for Mercury retrograde, as you said, there’s another Mercury-Uranus opposition further along when Mercury is direct. And so this is not like, this wrapping up, reflecting on, experiencing the last chapter of the Uranus in Taurus story will not be subtle, and you will not wait months to experience that. It’s part of the DNA of this month. 

CB: I’m glad you mentioned that, because that basically is the signature aspect for that second lunation of the month, which is the New Moon on November 19th at 28 degrees of Scorpio conjunct Mercury exactly opposite Uranus – only a degree off at 29 degrees of Taurus. And that’s interesting, because since this is also the Mercury retrograde cazimi when Mercury makes its retrograde conjunction with the Sun, that’s exactly halfway through the Mercury retrograde cycle. And typically what we see is that’s the point when you start to see some glimmer of hope or glimmer of resolution to the problems that the Mercury retrograde set up at the beginning when it first stationed. You usually start to see a shift towards resolution at this point, but there’s something surprising or something unexpected that happens around that time that comes through that opposition. 

AC: Yeah. That Mercury-Sun conjunction is sort of the, it’s the path-finding moment of okay, this is how I get through this; this is how I navigate these obstacles; this is how I negate them. And so there’s something… Either something occurs, right, with Uranus that changes the landscape and changes what course we’re gonna take out of this web of confusions. Or the answer – like, the path-finding answer – is a revelatory or unexpected or deeply unorthodox one. Right? Like, the way to — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — win the game is to stop playing, right? Like, some sort of – Uranus gives like, galaxy brain moments, both — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — fake and real. And it’s hard to tell —

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — the difference sometimes. 

CB: Of like, you can win the game by just throwing the entire board game off the table. 

AC: Yeah. Or just unplugging the Nintendo. 

CB: Right. That’s a good move. Classic move when you’re losing like, GoldenEye – just unplug the Nintendo. 

AC: You throw the controller hard enough that it yanks the whole system out of the wall. 

CB: Okay. No, that’s how you get punched, my friend, if you’re playing games over at our house as a teenager. 

AC: The astrology of rage quitting. 

CB: Rage quitting. That would be a good title for this month, actually, for several reasons. 

So one of the things I like about this New Moon, though, aside from the unexpectedness and the disruption of the Uranus opposition is this New Moon at 28 Scorpio has this nice trine with Jupiter, which is slowing down – which has stationed, actually, just a week earlier. It stationed eight days earlier, and it has this nice trine with Saturn. So there’s like, some supportive aspects with the lunation that are bringing in a constructive element, both in a Jupiterian sort of expansive sense, but also in a more conservative but like, making slow, steady progress type Saturnian theme as well. 

AC: Yeah. And it brings a lot of – it gives Mercury’s path-finding questions a lot of weight, because so many important planets are configured to it. Like, we’re looking at navigating not just like, a little circumstance that just formed up really quickly, but the circumstance which is created collectively between Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, a little bit of North Node, and the Sun and the Moon and Mercury and Uranus. Right? It’s taking in a lot. It’s how do I navigate these seas? There are very few planets left out of this, honestly. 

CB: Right. Yeah. 

AC: Some larger, deeper questions about how to make our way through this in a way that achieves our aims, it minimizes suffering, et cetera, et cetera. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So I wanna jump into the two stations this month. One of the stations is Jupiter stationing retrograde at 25 degrees of Cancer around November 10th, 11th, and 12th. So this is gonna be – again, a station is like an exclamation mark next to this transit that Jupiter has been making ever since it moved into Cancer earlier this year. Suddenly we reach a crucial turning point with respect to that. And for some people, like if you have a degree that’s active in your chart around 25 degrees of certain signs, like especially Cancer, that could be a really positive transit that you’re happening, because you have Jupiter just slowing down and camping out at that degree for several weeks, which could be experienced as an extended positive energy that’s bringing in like, balance and abundance and other things into your life. So that’s one of the aspects that’s decent this month. 

And then the other one is Saturn’s station in Pisces. And this one’s – to me, actually – one of the most important aspects this month just because I think this is leading us to the final resolution of a lot of the challenges and a lot of the – in some instances – setbacks, but in other instances, lessons that we’ve been learning since Saturn started moving through the Pisces sector of our chart in March of 2023. So I want everybody to think about what major changes started happening in your life in March of 2023, especially that match whatever whole sign house Pisces coincides with in your chart. And in some instances, it may just be things of like, having greater responsibility or taking on bigger duties in that area of your life. In other instances, there may have been challenges that started to arise or setbacks that started to arise in that area of your life that caused you to have to negate something or to get rid of something, or where you were proceeding on a certain path, but life and fate said no – that you can’t proceed further on that path, and you have to go a different direction or you have to do something else. We had a temporary departure and alleviation of that energy for most of the past several months that Saturn was initially in Aries for a little bit there this year. But at the beginning of September, Saturn came back to Pisces, and I saw a bunch of people suddenly having to return back to something that they’d been putting a lot of work into and sort of wrestling with over the past two-and-a-half years since March of 2023. And I think this station here is important for a lot of people. It’s going to be important for a lot of people in late November, because it’s gonna be one of the final turning points in order to bring resolution to that sequence of events that’s been happening for two-and-a-half years. And Saturn’s gonna get some help from the other planets this month, because it has that nice trine from Jupiter while it’s stationing. It has that nice trine from Venus in Scorpio, and it has that nice trine from Mercury stationing direct at 20 degrees of Scorpio at the same time. So there’s just some positive resolution of those Saturnian transit issues is in store for us around that time, and that’s something I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out for many people. 

AC: Yeah. I think that’s a really good description, and you make a good point that at the time of Saturn’s direct station, it’s configured to both benefics, which pulls in help from both Jupiter and Venus for making that final march through those last degrees of Pisces. And —

CB: Right. Friends, help, allies are good trine keywords. 

AC: Yeah. As well as inspiration, right? Like, simply being inspired to do the thing is a very different state than being depressed and avoidant about doing the thing. And like, seeing that by doing – like, this is the way forward. You know, this has meaning and has great benefit, rather than just resentfully putting one foot in front of the other, and that with Venus there are like, some quiet joys to be found in this. 

CB: Yeah. Or like, you know, for a lot of people, a lot of the responsibilities and the things they’ve been working on in the Pisces sector of their life over the past two-and-a-half years in many instances, it’s been burdens that they’ve had to carry on their shoulders alone. But this might be a good time to ask for help or to get or receive help in that area that you’ve been working on over the past two-and-a-half years, and that maybe the key to finally moving forward and putting that era of your life behind you is reaching out for help around that time. 

AC: That’s a nice thought. Yeah. You know, the timeframe for me is really obvious. It was shortly after this that Kait became pregnant with Lucian, and then Lucian was born, I don’t know, like a week or two before Saturn conjoined my Sun exactly in Pisces. And so just the increase of responsibility and learning how to, you know, meet my responsibilities that pre-existed being a father as well as meeting the responsibilities of being a father and the changed responsibilities of not just being a husband but also being a coparent has timed really tightly with Saturn in the same sign as my sect light. And —

CB: Yeah. That’s perfect also, because now it’s like, you’re a year-and-a-half into that journey, and some of the themes that you’re experiencing earlier in it – like the sleeplessness and other things like that – are reaching some alleviation. 

AC: Yeah. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely easier than it was, you know, six months ago or 12 months ago. 

CB: Right. 

AC: And so upon reflection, I get some really cliched but useful Saturnian themes. It’s like, oh, learning to bear greater responsibility with some measure of grace. Right? And then another thing that I can see both in myself as well as other people with the Saturn in Pisces period is how to find or create some structure or order even though life does not provide it. Like, how to create and dare I say cling to some skeleton of order even when life and the world is chaotic, right? Pisces especially with Neptune there is not a particularly orderly place, and so figuring out how to keep some schedule, you know, whether it’s work, diet, social life, et cetera, et cetera. Like, how to maintain some good and supportive order despite a chaotic or unpredictable environment is a real skill that comes out of meeting that challenge. And I know a number of people have had that challenge with Saturn’s time in Pisces. 

CB: Definitely. All right. And then of course we’ve got Neptune there very closely as well, although Saturn and Neptune are a little bit further away from the super close conjunction that they had over the summer. But that energy is still very potent, and now it’s not just Saturn but also Neptune that’s back in Pisces at this time for another trip. 

AC: Yeah, until the end of January. 

CB: Okay. Yeah, that conjunction’s gonna be wild when we get – because we didn’t get it in July. They got super close within less than a degree, but they didn’t exactly conjoin. So we are still waiting to see what that exact conjunction’s gonna look like in Aries in early next year. 

AC: Yeah, February 19th, I believe. Neptune’s back in Aries at the end of January; Saturn goes back into Aries on February 13th. And they finally kiss on February 19th. 

CB: That reminds me – a year ago, last year we saw like, the first Saturn station in Pisces was like, the Titan submarine disaster. But last year, the two stations, there were things about old age and like, people hitting their limits. Like, the first one was when Saturn stationed retrograde in Pisces was Biden’s debate performance where it became really clear that he was too old to be running for office, and that was the beginning of the end of his candidacy. And then the second station later that year, if you remember, was that Mike Tyson fight where it was like, that fight where it was kind of hard to watch because he was much older, and he was fighting a much younger guy, and he was just kind of getting pummeled. So some themes surrounding that of like, issues in terms of mundane astrology of like, age and reaching limits and recognizing boundaries and limitations that maybe previously you hadn’t or you’d refused to recognize or been unwilling to come to terms with. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, honestly, when I look around at the world, I see a lot of structures that are weakened and decayed and cannot possibly endure, yet they’re still here. And the consequences of their collapse are unpleasant to think about. And so there’s a lot of like, well, this can’t possibly continue. Like, this has to change; this should have been addressed five or 10 years ago, but now we’re here with the even more rotted out version of what it is. And so it contributes to that feeling of living in a structurally unsound house and being paranoid as to which sections will collapse and how dramatically and when. 

CB: Totally. That’s an amazing way of phrasing that, and the structural weakness – because I think that’s a great keyword for Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But also that then ties back in with the bubbles and this question of like, Saturn-Neptune is also bubbles. And when do bubbles pop is sometimes when there’s like, a needle that comes along and pierces through it. And that is kind of the thing we see on the horizon there by the time we get to late November as well as we see Mars passing through mid-Sagittarius and getting ready to move into the 3rd decan, at which point it’s coming up pretty fast on a square with Saturn in December as well as a square with Neptune. And with all the talk about like, the bubble and when will the bubble pop and everything, when I was looking at the astrology and you and I were talking about this and looking at the astrology, this was one of the times that stood out to me, and I think to both of us, of like, a potential bubble-popping energy is around this time. It looks like, what, December 8th, December 9th, and the days surrounding that is the Mars-Saturn square, and then Mars squares Neptune a few days later around December 14th. So that’s an energy that, you know, really begins building at the beginning of the month on November 4th as soon as Mars goes into Sagittarius, because it begins its sign-based square with Saturn and Neptune at that point. But the energy is gonna increase and increase and gather steam and intensity until it eventually culminates in December, especially in early to mid-December. 

AC: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you know that there are fragile structures that can’t bear a stress test, then like, where are the stress points? And that’s definitely one of the stress points. And as we talked about, it just so happens that Mars squaring Saturn also coincides with Mercury’s third and final opposition to Uranus, which also – you know, Uranus gives destabilizing. And yeah, in addition to — 

CB: It’s weird that we have like, so much positive, affirming transits for Saturn’s station around November 24th, 26th, 27th, 28 when Saturn is stationing and it’s like, trine Jupiter and Mercury and Venus are trine Saturn. So there’s like, a positive affirmation of that Saturn there as being a turning point but in a good way. But then we get the other side of that, which is – as you said – the stress test a few weeks later that comes in in the first and second week of December. So those are gonna be very distinct energies that we’re gonna see play out over the course of the next six weeks here when we get the good side of Saturn stationing in Pisces and how we’re experiencing that collectively in mundane astrology as well as personally. And then we’re gonna get the shaking up of that and seeing what parts of that structure still stand after the shaking is done in the first and second weeks of December. 

AC: Yeah. And one useful way to think about that might be what on a personal level can be fortified with Saturn’s direct station, with both benefics attending. Like, what parts of my life — 

CB: That’s good. 

AC: — don’t need to be a bubble, but if I ignore them and just wait for something to go wrong, there might be some collapse? But like —

CB: Right. 

AC: — what can I fortify? What can I shore up? And —

CB: That’s good. Having a moment of clarity of like, this is the thing I need to work on, and this is the time to put the sandbags in around it or to firm up the foundations in preparation, knowing that some unevenness and shakiness of the ground is coming up and is just weeks away. 

AC: Right. Yeah. And it being Halloween, I can’t not think of rotten pumpkins for structural weakness. Right? Like, because a pumpkin – I don’t know, you know, the way I grew up, people would carve pumpkins and they’d leave them out on Halloween. And a lot of them would just get left around. And so a pumpkin, even super rotten, will hold its shape for a really long time if nobody touches it. But once it’s rotten enough, it takes very little for it to just smoosh, right? And so, you know, bubble popping is one way to think about structural weakness that can’t take a stress test. I would also – it being the season – advise people to use rotten pumpkin analogy. 

CB: That’s good. I like the word “smoosh” is a good Saturn-Neptune-Mars square keyword. Yeah. 

All right. That’s really the astrology that’s set up by the end of the month. That really brings us to the end of our forecast, because that’s really – it’s like, we have that Mercury stationing direct. We have Saturn stationing direct at the end of the month. But then we have the stress test on the horizon that doesn’t really fully come into effect until early December, and that’s kind of where we leave November at the end of the month. 

AC: Yeah. And it’s worth noting that November ends on a more clear, “this is the way forward at least for now” note, because we have not only that direct station of Saturn, but Mercury’s direct station comes a day after that. And they’re in a trine configuration. Like, you may or may not love the lay of the land, but like, we’ve done a lot of backward. We’ve seen some things. And it’s sort of time to plot a way forward, at least for the next bit. And it’s much less confusing, I would say, than the second and third weeks of the month where Mercury’s going backwards and there’s Uranus and there’s Mars, and we are in the upside down portion of the rollercoaster. Right? We’re still on the rollercoaster, but we’re in the right side up phase by the end of the month, and Saturn has also begun a grim but certain march forward. 

CB: Yeah. I appreciate the clarity that we’re gonna start feeling of coming out of the Mercury retrograde and being out of the loop and being not inverted again, and therefore some of the like, miscommunications and delays and technical snafus starting to be fully resolved as Mercury moves forward again, and yeah. Having that clarity with the trine with Saturn at the same time, as well as the trines with Jupiter. So yeah. There’s some good stuff by the end of the month, but we got some stuff we gotta get through that’s gonna be a little tricky – not gonna lie – with the Mercury retrograde and conjunct Mars and other stuff like that, the Mars-Uranus opposition, et cetera, as we’ve talked about. But I think we’ve pretty much covered it as extensively as we can in terms of trying to describe some of the symbolism of what’s coming up in the astrology of November. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: Always fun. Always fun to map it out, make our guesses as to what it’s gonna look and feel like, and then get to see what happens. 

CB: Yeah. I think it’s important, you know, I mentioned the prediction I had made about Uranus and like, nuclear weapons on the year ahead forecast and then how that kind of started coming true the day that Mercury opposed Uranus in Gemini. And one of the reasons I mentioned that is not just like, to take credit or something, but to show how astrological predictions are done. And I saw some astrologer recently that didn’t seem to understand – or somebody that didn’t understand that astrologers look at celestial phenomena and the movement of the celestial bodies, and then they interpret those movements symbolically. And on some level, that’s the divinatory element of astrology in terms of what we’re doing and in terms of how we make astrological predictions. And one of the things you and I try to do really as well as we can is to ground our astrological predictions in the actual movements of the planets and in grounding it in either like, recurrences of past transits that we’ve seen, or other empirical observations like that. But that’s really how we make predictions as astrologers is by interpreting symbolism and interpreting the planetary movements symbolically. Like, you know, Mercury being the planet of communication that’s associated with communication and it going retrograde and symbolically it’s just moving backwards in the sky from our perspective as an observer, which sometimes skeptics will point out and say, “Well, that’s just an optical illusion.” But that’s actually the key thing for astrologers interpreting things symbolically is that it actually matters from the perspective of the observer what’s happening in the sky, and that that does have symbolic import. And it’s just such a key thing that people need to understand about astrology in general, but also in making mundane predictions like we do is we’re doing our best to interpret the symbolism as accurately and as close as we can get it. But that’s like, it’s a process and it’s a skill that you have to develop. And it’s interesting, you know, seeing our progression over the years and where we’ve come to today in our ability to do that. 

AC: Yeah. And as you said, it’s a dialogue with facts. Right? Like, there is the… The planets’ motions and configurations with each other give a range of possibilities and topics that you then narrow down through study. And then you look at what things that are possible might match that, and that is massively informed and strengthened and made more accurate by recourse to past instances, because that’s a core part of astrology is the cyclical understanding of events —

CB: Right. 

AC: Just like after day follows night, and then again and again and again. When Mars goes through this part of the sky, these things keep happening. When Mars and Saturn are together, we get these kinds of things. And so — 

CB: Right. Or like with Uranus, it’s like, noticing that when Uranus was in Gemini the first time – or the first time it was in the Revolutionary War, and then 84 years later, it was in the Civil War, and then 84 years it was in World War Two. And so now 84 years later, we are in whatever we’re about to be in. Or how in my prediction, I was like, well, what was one of the major events that happened last time Uranus was in Gemini? And it was like, well, the atomic era started, and nuclear weapons and energy came up. So therefore that may become prominent again this time. And like, an actual paying attention and predicting things based on a repetition of celestial movements. 

AC: Yeah. Exactly. And so if we’re doing that again, what does it look like this time? Right? And what else — 

CB: Right. 

AC: What’s the same and what’s different? 

CB: It’s funny what a breadth of like, history you have to study both in world events but also in personal events in order to be able to pull that off by being able to know like, well, what happened last time those repetitions occurred. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so valuable to understand what happened last time this happened for me as a person. 

CB: Right. 

AC: Which doesn’t work with Uranus, right? Doesn’t work with Neptune; doesn’t work with Pluto. But for some of the more swiftly moving planets, with Mars, you’ve seen Mars in every sign of the zodiac every two years for your whole life. You’re like, I don’t know – Mars is gonna conjoin my Moon; it freaks me out – you’ve done, I don’t know, 15, 20 of those. 

CB: Right. 

AC: Just see what happens. 

CB: I was thinking about that with Mars conjoining my Mercury, because that transit always historically sucks for me in my 10th house like, ruling my Lot of Fortune. And I knew that weekend was gonna suck, and indeed it did suck. But I was like, meditating on that before the transit happened of like, knowing and what is the point of knowing, and what can you do when you know that, and what can you also do given the range of possible manifestations and the fact that it is a range rather than a super narrow one. There’s a lot of interesting things to reflect on there in terms of that and the value of astrological prediction. 

AC: Right. Yeah, which is yeah, kind of like, can tumble into the whole, gigantic question of foresight and what is sometimes in stories the curse of foresight, and then sometimes what is just simple and useful. And so I knew there was gonna be trouble, so I made this decision and it wasn’t as much trouble. But that’s not always the case, right? There’s the being trapped in prophecy storyline, which is also true. 

CB: Right. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that is more and more relevant the longer I am an astrologer. But then, of course, there’s also sometimes the value to knowing when not to act or when to withhold action or when to know. I was thinking like, last night of looking at a chart – like, if I make an action at this point, it’s gonna lead to conflict. And that sometimes the best move is not to play. And I think that can be valuable sometimes in knowing the astrology and knowing sometimes when not to act. 

AC: Absolutely. Especially with Mars transits, which by their nature provoke a reaction that wants to turn into action. Whereas sometimes Mars gets you by provoking you into action. 

CB: Exactly. Yeah. 

All right, I wanna keep talking about this all day, but we’ve already gone my two hour limit, of course. You and I get gabbing together and all — 

AC: I know. 

CB: — of a sudden we’ve been talking for two-and-a-half hours. So unfortunately, I will have to bring this conversation to an end so that I am in one piece and can still celebrate my birthday tomorrow. 

What do you have going on? What are you working on this month? What’s coming up? 

AC: So I’m teaching classes. I’m mostly teaching classes, working on writing projects when I can, doing electional work for Sphere and Sundry. One of the projects that I elected is gonna come out, I don’t know, first 10 days of the month, and this is a decanic series. It is anchored to the third decan of Leo, which… Let’s see. What I wrote about it 10 years ago was something like, “Within it, one can find courage in the face of daunting odds, summon ferocity within and without, and rouse and rally others to a cause. The banner that flies over the third decan of Leo conjures hunger, power, and purpose. What good or evil that flag will accomplish when waved is, however, entirely dependent upon the hand the rests upon it.” So —

CB: That’s beautiful. 

AC: Thank you! 

CB: You should – have you written that? You should publish that somewhere; have you considered — 

AC: Aw, thanks. 

CB: — perhaps publishing a book on decans? 

AC: Yeah. I’m considering it. 

CB: Okay. 

AC: But yeah. Leo three’s great; it’s super – it’s fiery; it’s exciting; it’s about arousing the animal spirits within and without. It’s for conjuring inspiration, purpose, and hunger. It’s really good for getting yourself and other people excited about things. I dare say it’s actually really useful for marketing, as loathe as I am to acknowledge the dire science of promotion. It’s good for that. It’s good for a lot of things. So that’ll be that series launches again like, within the first 10 days of November. Maybe the 6th, maybe the 7th; we’ll see. But yeah. I’m just working on my stuff. I did realize, much to my chagrin, that something good, something nice did happen in my sphere during the end of October during the nice Venusian part. Kait at long last launched her perfume project, which is called L’Toile, or “The Star,” as it were. And so there’s – you can check out L’Toile perfume. Kait’s been working with scent for a really long time with Sphere and Sundry and got inspired earlier this year to just work with scent itself without having to wake up at 2:45 in the morning to catch Venus at a particular time in order to work with scent. And so I would suggest people check that out. It’s at LetoileParfum.com. 

CB: Nice. 

AC: Next time you see me, Chris, I’m gonna smell good. 

CB: Flowery? Scent and perfumes are an underrated signification of Venus that’s sometimes not recognized well enough. 

AC: Well, yeah, scent is so subtle, right? Because it’s generally in the background, but it changes your interpretation. Like, if you walk into a room and it just smells a little bit rotten or funky, like, it makes you think of decay and look for every – like, it makes you look for mold in the corners or spiderwebs. Whereas if something smells good, you know, it just changes – it like, half-consciously changes – the way that we frame our experience. 

CB: Right. Yeah. 

AC: So — 

CB: Absolutely. Or when something — 

AC: Again, next time you smell me — 

CB: — smells good — 

AC: — the experience of Austin is gonna be framed very differently. 

CB: I mean, when I smell you, it’s always a good experience, Austin. So I don’t know. When you smell something good, it brings back a positive memory from the past. That’s one of the things oftentimes we experience during like, the holiday season, for example, is like, smells that sometimes invoke a range of emotions and feelings from the last time we smelled that. 

AC: Yeah. It’s like, just as a scent fills a space, like, a scent can take you back to being in that space, right? Whether – yeah, it’s holidays or the last time we embraced. Right? So — 

CB: Sorry! 

AC: No, it’s good. We don’t need —

CB: All right. 

AC: — to dwell upon my scent and its upgrade! So my astrology stuff is AustinCoppock.com. Sphere and Sundry is SphereAndSundry.com. And L’etoile Parfume is LetoileParfum.com – L E T O I L E P A R F U M dot com. 

CB: Brilliant. All right. Cool. As for myself, the holidays are coming up, and one of the things that’s always funny during the holidays is I often see like, a spike in sales of my book – Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune – and I often realize in retrospect that it’s because a bunch of people are like, buying the book for their astrology enthusiast family member or friend or what have you for the holidays. So I wanted to put that out there that the book is actually a great gift if you are listening to this. I know there’s a lot of, you know, astrology enthusiasts that sometimes listen to the podcast, and their partner’s like, hearing it in the background. So I’m speaking secretly to you, the partner in the background of the podcast, right now. If you’re looking for a good gift for the person in your life who listens to this podcast a lot, they might really enjoy getting a copy of my book, Hellenistic Astrology, which you can get from Amazon. And then you can also – if you wanted to go even further – my Hellenistic astrology course, which is this comprehensive course in ancient astrology; there’s also an option to buy that as a gift when you purchase the course during checkout, there’s actually a gift option, and that would be a great gift for the holiday season. So I just wanted to put that out there, because one of the things I’m gonna continue doing and that I’ve been doing and enjoying lately is each month I do a webinar with students of my Hellenistic astrology course. And we’ve been doing a lot of chart work over the past few months. And the last webinar we did was we did a check-in where we talked with people and I interviewed different students about how the eclipses went in September and what major changes occurred in their life. And it was a really interesting series that we did over the course of two months of going through that whole experience together and hearing those stories firsthand from different students as they applied the techniques and the sort of perspective that you learn from my Hellenistic astrology course and that complete system that takes you from beginning concepts up through intermediate and advanced ones for reading birth charts.

So if you’d like more information about that and signing up for the course, you can go to TheAstrologySchool.com, and I’m gonna be doing my next webinar some time probably around the second weekend in December for that unless you and I have to do the forecast that weekend. We need to check in about scheduling that here pretty soon, because we’re coming up on the end of the year, which means it’s year ahead forecast time, Austin. 

AC: Oh no. Dude, I began my grim dive into the minutiae of 2026 last week. I know. 

CB: Good. Okay. 

AC: Right now I’m in March, and I’m feeling — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — the tension. 

CB: Yeah. You’ve been like, texting me – sometimes excitedly, sometimes alarmed – about like, different combinations that you’re finding for next year. And I’m also starting to begin that research, because Leisa and I are gonna sit down and we’re gonna work on and we’re gonna finish our year ahead electional astrology report for 2026 this month. And I hope to launch that at some point during the course of this month, probably later in the month, I’m guessing, towards when Mercury stations direct. But I know people are waiting for that. But I’ll have that out by the end of November as well. 

AC: Nice. 

CB: Yeah. All right, my friend. I think that’s it for this forecast. Thanks a lot for joining me; this was awesome. I’m glad we did this today. This went really good. And yeah, it was fun talking to you. 

AC: Yeah. Ditto. Let’s do it again next month. 

CB: Why don’t we? All right, we’ll do it! 

All right, so we’ll be back again – same time, same place – one month from now, late November, and we will assess everything that happened and check in again at that point and then also do the forecast for December. 

So if you wanna join that live, there’s been a group of patrons joining us live and putting their comments here through my page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast if you wanna join us for that at the end of November. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks everyone for watching. Good luck this month in November. And we’ll see you again next time! 

[END CREDITS]

If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to find a way to help support my research, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to subscriber benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, the monthly electional astrology podcast, an exclusive podcast series called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. For more information, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.

Special thanks to patrons on my Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlynn West, and Nicki Crawford.

People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.

The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com. 

For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.

If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com. 

Finally, shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the United Astrology Conference, which is happening September 3rd through the 9th, 2026, in Chicago. Find out more information at UACAstrology.com.