The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 518, titled:
Triple Conjunction Recurrences: Venus, Mars, and the Sun
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on January 13, 2026
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/01/13/triple-conjunction-recurrences-venus-mars-and-the-sun/
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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 February 11th, 2026
Copyright © 2026 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 Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna talk about the very rare triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun that just took place in January of 2026 and some of the major news stories that this triple conjunction coincided with all in the first week or so of January and how each of these stories ties back into previous events in history based on the recurrence transits when other triple conjunctions happened in the past.
So hey, Nick. Thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me back!
CB: Yeah. So it is one of those weeks where it was just crazy and it seemed like a decade’s worth of history all happened in like, 10 days, basically. And in the year ahead forecast, I had talked about the early part of January and my keyword was “peace-shattering” because of the Venus-Mars conjunction and the Jupiter-Mars opposition, and that ended up being even more fitting than I could have even anticipated in terms of everything that happened this week. But it was truly a crazy week, right? I mean, it wasn’t just me?
NDB: Wasn’t just you. There’s a whole lot going on.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. No, there’s a whole lot going on, and we’re gonna get to as much of it with the astrology as we possibly can in one of our classic concise episodes.
CB: Very concise.
NDB: Very concise.
CB: So – yeah. So many things happened. So after the first event started happening, especially the attack on Venezuela, I started doing a special study this week – over the past couple of weeks – on Venus-Mars conjunctions, because I could see some of the astrology that was coinciding with this and I wanted to go back and look at history to try to understand the context of what had happened the last time some of these alignments took place. And so I spent a week intensely researching this, and sometimes my way as an astrologer of processing deeply disturbing events is to contextualize them by looking and seeing what’s happening in the sky now and how sometimes what’s happening in the sky now is a repetition of things that have happened in the past. And sometimes that gives me some – a better like, perspective and context for understanding the present, and sometimes anticipating where things might head in the future. And I think that’s kind of true; most astrologers do that, I think both in their personal lives when something happens, but also in terms of public events, I think, right?
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But you know, you have to be looking outside and inside to get all the astrology.
CB: Right. For sure. So I wanted to do this also instead of trying to like, pack all of these news events – because we’re only like, a little over a week into the month. Instead of trying to pack a summary of all these news events into like, the forecast episode that I do at the end of the month, I wanted to dedicate an episode to talking about some of these, partially because what happened is I started doing a historical study of Venus-Mars conjunctions and their coinciding with wars in the past, because I saw that World War I had started under a Venus-Mars conjunction and like, Vietnam was officially authorized by the US under a Venus-Mars conjunction. But as I was doing that study, I actually stumbled across something even more striking, which is that there were a number of triple conjunctions of Venus, Mars, and the Sun – which was the exact alignment that happened this month that coincided with very important news events related to things that happened this month – in the past over the course of the past century. So this builds on some of the work you and I have been doing, Nick, on recurrence transits over the past few months by looking at not just a two-planet combination, but looking in some instances, actually, at a three-planet combination which is more rare than just a simple two-planet combination.
NDB: Yeah. No, absolutely. The triple conjunctions don’t happen that often, and it’ll vary from century to century just how many there are. So in this case, we’re mostly gonna be talking about the ones that exist that happened in our era on a cyclical basis, but we will get into some of the past ones as well.
CB: Yeah. So let me show first the astrology of what happened, or let me describe the astrology of what happened. So let me just – I’ll animate the chart and I’ll set it to January 7th. All right, so here is the chart of the moment, of our starting to record this. We’re recording this on January 11th, 2026. It’s 12:43 PM right now in Denver, Colorado, with Taurus rising. And —
NDB: You scared me for a second. My wife’s birthday’s January 17th; I thought I was – “Oh no, I have to send a birthday present!” Anyway!
CB: Right. You’re like, “Oh no, I’m recording a podcast with Chris!” That’s not a good excuse, either.
NDB: No.
CB: No.
NDB: It wouldn’t fly.
CB: Yeah. All right, so January 1st, this is literally the first day of the month. We open the year, and we can already see how close Venus, the Sun, and Mars are where Venus is at 10 degrees of Capricorn, the Sun is at 11 degrees of Capricorn, and Mars is at 13 degrees of Capricorn.
So what happens is the first major news story happens already on January 3rd, and this is the day that the US invades Venezuela and does a military strike, and then captures and abducts the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and then takes him back to New York and then functionally takes over the country or the government – it’s a little bit unclear at this point, but at least based on their current statements.
So we can see on this day on January 3rd, Venus is at 12, the Sun is at 13, and Mars is at 14. And maybe instead of saying the other news stories, I’ll just quickly show the rest of the alignment. But over the next few days, we get first the Sun-Venus conjunction taking place around the 5th and the 6th. Then we get the Venus-Mars conjunction going exact at 17 degrees of Capricorn on the 7th. And then finally, we get the Sun-Mars conjunction going exact on January 9th at 19 degrees of Capricorn, and then right after that all of them just start opposing Jupiter at 20 degrees of Cancer, most notably probably Jupiter completing that opposition between Mars and Jupiter on January 10th. So that’s a really close conjunction basically to have Venus and Mars conjoining at the same time as they’re conjoining the Sun. Because that just doesn’t happen that often closely by degree. So the frequency is that by sign, there’s a Venus-Mars conjunction in the same sign as the Sun about every 26 months or so. So it’s not that super infrequent, but then when it comes to having those triple conjunctions happening all close by degree, that becomes much, much less frequent, especially the tighter and tighter it gets. So that to give you some idea of how infrequent it is to have it that tight, we’ve only had six of those that are super close within a degree over the past century since like, 1901, I believe is what I found basically, right?
NDB: Okay. I found five. I’m not sure what the – yeah, but five regular ones, or are there six? Whatever the number. But it’s every 32 years, the pattern will repeat for a stretch of time, but yeah.
CB: Well, the 32 is a little different, because if we’re talking about like, within a degree, that’s a little bit – so let me pull up my list of —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — frequency. So to give you an idea, there were six conjunctions within less than a degree since 1901. And so the close triple conjunction list of six is like, 1902, 1968, 1981, 1987, 2006, 2026. So —
NDB: Okay. Yeah.
CB: — that’s a somewhat uneven distribution, and those are the ones that are less than a degree, and the – yeah. So this one is unique, then, because it’s so close. Now there have been others. If you open it up to let’s say like, a three- to five-degree list, then it’s a little bit more frequent and it will happen about once a decade, basically in the three- to five-degree range. And then there’s a wider range of 10-degree and so on and so forth. But that basically gives you some idea that this conjunction is actually pretty rare, yeah?
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, just as an aside, the other thing is since the opposition to Jupiter is happening with the triple conjunction, Jupiter is always at its very brightest when it’s exactly opposite the Sun. So another component, even though the focus of this episode is the double conjunction of Venus and Mars or the triple conjunction of the two with the Sun, this particular one with this very bright Jupiter in perfect opposition obviously adds to the rarity of the moment.
CB: Yeah. That’s a great point, because I remember going outside, actually, on the night of maybe January 2nd, January 3rd. I was like, going to the gym and I saw the Full Moon, and right next to it was this freakishly bright Jupiter next to a surprisingly bright Moon, because the Moon was also – I think it was like, a super Moon, and it was closer to us than usual, so it was actually appearing even brighter while Jupiter at the same time was at its brightest due to being at opposition.
NDB: Correct, yeah. So it’s quite a sight and quite an astrological, you know, vibe, for want of a better word for this. And certainly points to just how eventful this month has been so far, and we’re not even halfway through it.
CB: Right, exactly. So in terms of the events, I wanna do a quick summary of the events just to give the context of what we’re gonna be talking about in this episode and what I’m going to be tying back this triple conjunction to previous events in history that are related to each of these news stories.
So the news story breakdown was like, January 3rd, the US does a military strike on Venezuela, abducts President Maduro, and takes over the country; this is the day of the Full Moon in Cancer. January 5th through the 9th, like, basically immediately after the US-Venezuela strike, the White House and the Trump administration and Trump himself threatens to take Greenland by force, which would end NATO. And there was a response from the Danish Prime Minister who’s in charge of Greenland or whose territory Greenland is a part of saying this would end NATO if Trump basically uses military force against Greenland. So Greenland was like, majorly in the news, especially in the history of connections with the US attempting to buy or take it over.
January 7th, the US announced its withdrawal from 66 treaties and international organizations. And on January 7th, this was the very day that the Venus-Mars conjunction went exact.
Also on January 7th, Trump announced a massive military spending increase of more than 50 percent, bringing the total spending per year to 1.5 trillion dollars – so massive military spending increase.
Also January 7th, the day of the Venus-Mars conjunction, there was a woman named Renee Good who was shot in Minnesota and killed by a masked immigration ICE agent, and this was a huge news story in the US.
Then all during like, the first week of January, there was a news story happening where on Twitter or X, Elon had approved this artificial intelligence named Grok that’s tied in with Twitter, and it started making unconsensual sexualized images of people. And basically, anybody could tell the program to like, undress somebody, and it would do that publicly. And this sort of went viral all in the first week of January, so much so that in Britain, I think it was the prime minister threatened to block Twitter entirely in the UK. And then this led, I believe, on the 9th, Elon to put it behind a paywall eventually after a week of just like, people running amok making these images.
Then on January 9th, Russia launched a nuclear-capable missile in an attack on Ukraine. And it didn’t contain a nuclear weapon, but it was a missile launch that could contain a nuclear weapon, so it was interpreted as like, a warning or a threat about the possible use of nuclear weapons in the future. This was the exact day of the Sun-Mars conjunction on January 9th.
And then finally, January 7th through the 11th, protests in Iran became widespread and seemed to explode across a bunch of major cities and provinces, and this is the primary news story of the day currently, like, all the way until the present on January 11th.
NDB: Yeah. Quite a week.
CB: Yeah. So that’s just a crazy amount of really pivotal, world-changing news stories in like, many different ways.
NDB: Oh, absolutely. You know, 2025 already felt like enough of a shift, but we are firmly in another age now.
CB: Right. Like, this is – and what’s crazy is all the astrologers know it’s like, all the big stuff is still coming up in 2026. Like, there’s still so much stuff to come, and we’re on the verge of so many big alignments, including the Saturn-Neptune conjunction going exact next month right in the middle of eclipse season. Uranus going into Gemini. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in July that you and I researched. There’s just so much other stuff coming up, and that if this is the context of stuff going into the year, then we’re already off to a pretty crazy start.
NDB: Absolutely. Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, you know, historically are always big history years, you know what I mean? Like, they’re always these big shifts. And yeah. I mean, we’re barely in the year and you can already see it happening around us and the conjunction hasn’t exacted just yet. I think it happens February 20th. So yeah, this will probably in some way seem like small potatoes by the time we get to the end of this year, but it’s huge. Things are already moving in big ways.
CB: Yeah. But this triple conjunction, while it was identified as being important ahead of time, turned out to be even more important. And part of it has to do with the rarity, like we were talking about, with there only being maybe six of these in the past century. One of the things that’s interesting, though, is I looked ahead – and we’ll talk about this maybe more at the end of the episode – there’s only gonna be one like this in the next century that’s this close of less than a degree, and it takes place, like, a century from now in the year 2124. There’ll be other ones within, you know, one to five degrees, but that gives you another idea of like, the rarity of this and the additional importance.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. This one’s super special.
CB: All right. So I wanna go through – during this episode, what we’re gonna do is go through this episode. Originally like I said, this was gonna be a Venus-Mars conjunctions episode talking about this tension with that archetype between war and peace and between like, countries making treaties with each other versus making war with each other, which I realized was a large part of the main dynamic, as well as some subset dynamics from that – like consent versus nonconsent and different things like that. But it kind of morphed into a triple conjunction episode, because it turned out that the triple conjunctions were really the centerpiece and the most impressive repetition. So I wanna go through each of the news stories I just mentioned and then go through the history of how there have been other triple conjunctions over the past century that have tied in with the news stories of today.
So why don’t we start first with Venezuela, since that was the biggest one and that was the first one that happened right at the top of the month?
Okay. So triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun – so in the last few forecast episodes – actually, one year ago, you and I did in, what was it? Like, January or February, the big Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history episode, right?
NDB: Right around that time. It might have been late January; I don’t remember exactly.
CB: So it was like, in that episode, we noted that one of the recurrences we noted that happened under Saturn-Neptune conjunctions we mentioned in passing was that in 1989, under the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction, the US actually invaded Panama and arrested the leader of that country, right?
NDB: Yeah. The Marines went in; they stormed – you know, he was embedded in some compound somewhat that the Marines surrounded the building he was in. This was Noriega – Manuel Noriega. And I believe they blasted Van Halen, the song “Panama,” on loud speakers until he was, you know, in repetition and then he had to come out. So that was the event —
CB: Okay.
NDB: They took down the head of the Panamanian government at that time. So there’s a total parallel with this in the sense that the US military going in and taking someone and pulling them out of the country. The one in Panama took a little longer than this; this was apparently very quick. But same basic event. And yeah, they were both Saturn-Neptune events, and they were both events where the Sun in Capricorn was basically sandwiched between two other planets, not dissimilar to how the Sun was surrounded by Venus and Mars.
CB: Right. So I mentioned this as a possible recurrence with Venezuela, I think it was in our November forecast just a couple of months ago. So when I was researching this, though, I found a stunning correlation when I was researching Venus-Mars conjunctions in the history of Venezuela. And it turns out in 2013, when Maduro became president, he became president under a triple conjunction – a pretty close one – of the Sun, Venus, and Mars in 2013. So basically, the beginning of his presidency started under a triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun, and then it ended under a very close conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun just, what, like, 13 years later.
NDB: Yeah, that’s an amazing find. I remember that triple conjunction in 2013, and vaguely remember him coming to power at that time. But it’s a remarkable bookend for him to begin and end his presidency under these quite rare triple conjunctions.
CB: Yeah. So let me actually show that just to demonstrate it and show how impressive it is. So he becomes president on this date – April 14th, 2013 – and we see the Sun is at about 24, 25 degrees of Aries. Mars is at 25 Aries, and Venus is at 29 degrees of Aries. So very tight triple conjunction as he’s becoming president. And this also, by extension, interestingly, what had happened is that the previous president, Hugo Chavez, had just died. So this triple conjunction in the history of Venezuela represents both like, the end of one president who died and the beginning of another. And then bizarrely, nearly 13 years later, you get the triple conjunction – again, I’ll put the chart back to January 3rd – and you get almost nearly the exact same thing, which is Venus at like, 12 Capricorn, the Sun at 13 Capricorn, and Mars at 14. So even though it’s taking place in a different sign, the principle going back to our recurrence transits episode is that because it’s the same planetary alignment, it’s linking the beginning and in this instance the end of something when the same planetary alignment happens in the sky.
NDB: Yeah. It’s quite impressive. I mean, the interesting thing about Maduro – we don’t need to get into like, the ins and outs of his natal chart, but he was born in November of 1962 when Venus was retrograde getting ready to station direct and Mars was about to station retrograde. So it’s like, his own natal chart, Venus and Mars are in almost the opposite condition as to where they are in these two triple conjunction charts where they’re at a very different part of the phase. So it’s very curious that like, his chart is distinctly so different in terms of Venus and Mars, relative to these two events.
CB: Yeah, that’s actually really striking. And even like, I was researching the history of Venezuela because Austin meant to mention – in the prep meeting for the year ahead forecast, Austin meant to mention it because he had noticed that Venezuela first declared its independence from the Spanish empire under a Mars-Uranus conjunction. So we were talking about the Mars-Uranus conjunction that’s coming up this year and how that would be a recurrence, but somehow we didn’t end up mentioning it in the forecast episode just because there was so much else going on that we had to cover. But the chart, I was looking at the chart for when Venezuela declared its independence first centuries ago, and the chart’s actually surprisingly similar to the US birth chart in like, three key ways.
Do you happen to have the data for that on you?
NDB: Yeah, I do. I’m looking at it. July 5th, 1811.
CB: And we don’t not have – I don’t remember if we have a time.
NDB: I’ve got a – oh, Gary Lawrenson rectified it to 2:39 PM if you wanna use that; it has the Mars rising.
CB: I mean —
NDB: He did a lot —
CB: — I don’t care about a rectified time, but I’m —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — interested if there’s —
NDB: Use midday.
CB: Actually, no, there is a historical time, because it was rising. Like, I think Nick Campion in his Book of World Horoscopes may actually have a time. I could be mistaken, though, so actually I don’t wanna commit to that.
NDB: Yeah. I don’t have the – my copy of his book is in Vancouver, so. I wish he would put it out on Kindle.
CB: It’s incredibly important; I’ve been using it so much more lately and like, finding more and more just how much research he did and the accuracy of it is really, really useful.
NDB: Very.
CB: So let me – we’re gonna do a noon chart just because I don’t wanna get into any things about, you know, committing to a birth time.
NDB: I do have it here; I just looked at my bookshelf. I thought it was in Vancouver! Shall I get it?
CB: Sure. In the meantime, I just wanna read some of the chart placements that were standing out for me as striking. So the first one, of course, actually the one that’s notable where Venezuela first came up was actually a year ago, because remember when we were researching the Saturn-Neptune episode, Orla – one of our research assistants who helped us research that – noted that during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction around 1810 and 1811, there was this wave of Spanish colonies in South America that suddenly kind of revolted and declared their independence. And Venezuela was one of them, so that it actually was born under its first independence chart, basically, has a Saturn-Neptune conjunction with Saturn at 21 degrees of Sagittarius and Neptune at eight degrees of Sagittarius. So part of what we’re seeing today, then, is a recurrence transit for Venezuela of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and it reaching an important turning point in terms of its history.
NDB: Yeah. That’s right. Venezuela was one of the last countries to declare independence; I think Argentina was last of the round of them. But it was because Napoleon had invaded Spain, and England was fighting Napoleon in Spain and Portugal. The Portuguese king went to Brazel, so he escaped, but the King of Spain was deposed and then his son was also deposed, and Napoleon made his brother king. So that just sort of destabilized everything, and Latin America realized that people could make a run for it, so to speak. So that was the background to that and why it happened.
CB: You know, what’s crazy about that, though, is the other ones that declared independence before we just declaring sort of like, a temporary independence until they wanted the original king to be restored. So they weren’t actually declaring full independence. Venezuela in 1811 was the first South American country to declare complete independence, and that’s what makes one, Venezuela unique, and two, what’s important about that is the Mars-Uranus conjunction. And that’s the other parallel with the US birth chart that really caught my eye is that Mars is at 24 degrees of Scorpio here conjunct Uranus at 14 degrees of Scorpio. So a 10-degree conjunction. So it shares that Mars-Uranus conjunction in its birth chart, and part of the reason for that is that some of the central people, especially one of the central people, was drawing inspiration from the United States’s Declaration of Independence where the US was the first country in North America to declare its independence as a colony from the UK and from a European colonial power. And so Venezuela, interestingly, becomes the first South American country to declare complete independence from a European colonial power, from Spain, and it also has a Mars-Uranus conjunction which is just incredible.
NDB: Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. It was Simon Bolivar, of course, who’s basically the South American George Washington, so that does make sense. I didn’t realize that distinction. But it makes sense that it would be Venezuela, since he was at the head.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. And he traveled around Europe, and he also traveled in the United States a little bit, and then came back and was part of that revolution. So the other interesting thing about this is that if you look at Mars, Mars has just stationed direct. This is coming off —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — of a Mars retrograde. It stationed 3.8 days earlier in Scorpio. And so as a parallel, this is – we had just talked about this one – this is the Mars retrograde that happened in 1811 that also coincided with the largest slave rebellion in the United States in US history, and then also with the birth of one of the people that would go on to influence the abolitionist movement in the United States the most who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, right?
NDB: Yeah. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, Harriet Beecher – so this is a really important Mars retrograde conjunct Uranus in Scorpio, and it’s like, largest slave rebellion in the US is happening during this like, let’s say first six or seven months of 1811. Largest slave rebellion in the US, Harriet Beecher Stowe is born, and then Venezuela is the first South American country declaring its independence. And then, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe would go on to publish Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a Mars-Uranus conjunction many years later.
NDB: Yeah. It’s amazing astrology.
CB: Yeah. So okay, and then the other thing that caught my eye about this chart – there’s actually two other things. One of them is that obviously, the Sun and the date – July 5th – is just one day off from the US birth chart, which is July 4th, in terms of their declaration of independence when the Sun was in Cancer and there was a Mars-Uranus conjunction. And that’s kind of interesting. But then also, look at Gemini; there’s a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, which is actually also what the US birth chart has. The US has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer. So I was just noting there’s some like, weird parallels between the US birth chart and the Venezuela birth chart for whatever, you know, some very specific reasons in terms of how possibly the declaring its independence was influenced by the US to some extent. But then now we see the history of Venezuela and the US crossing in this way at the present time as well.
NDB: Yeah. It’s all kind of spooky. And I’ve often been saying, you know, since we got into this whole Uranus in Gemini thing, that I imagine a few hundred years from now, people are gonna talk about this period as just being the age of revolutions. Like, literally from the Revolutionary War to now. To us, it’s 250 years. You know, down the road, it’ll just be like, a couple of paragraphs in a book summarizing the whole thing perhaps. But that’s what’s so striking about it. Like, all these revolutions influence each other. But it’s true. Like, yeah, the parallel between these two charts is really striking. Like a mirror image. You know, North and South America, and then all these similarities.
CB: Yeah. And the last similarity – the US birth chart, by the time you get to like, July of 1776, it doesn’t have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction because Saturn has just moved out of the sign. But in the buildup, like, immediately preceding the Declaration of Independence, Saturn and Neptune were in the same sign. And that was the period in which some of the rebellions started to build up, basically, at first, and where in the Saturn-Neptune episode you and I talked about – I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – there were also some like, secretive groups that were like, stirring up trouble and trying to foment rebellion, basically, with people like John Adams or Samuel Adams and different people like that. Yeah, actually, it was John Adams. So there’s some sort of like, parallel there a little bit as well.
NDB: Yeah. A lot of the grievance and hostility, you know, the Boston Tea Party and all that, that was the Saturn-Neptune part, before the Revolutionary War proper, but yeah. When everyone’s realizing that things are unsustainable as they are.
CB: Right. Yeah. So those are some like, kind of side anecdotal things, but I just wanted to share that, because it was some of the research I’ve been doing this past couple of weeks since this happened to try to understand the astrology.
There’s a few other pieces that are important, though. One of them, while the Panama recurrence is very striking from 1989 that connects the Saturn-Neptune then with the Saturn-Neptune now, there was another similar strike that happened on a Venus-Mars conjunction October 25th, 1983, and that’s when the US invaded Granada and did a similar like, lightning strike in another country, right?
NDB: Yeah. That was quite similar to this. I mean, they didn’t abduct anyone, but I think Granada’s president died and some kind of Communist government was taking over, and there were a handful of American medical students in Granada, and so Reagan sent the Marines in ostensibly to protect them from this totally peaceful government that was Communist, but you know, not with guns or anything.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that was, apparently it was called Operation Urgent Fury, and they, yeah. They had all these cute names for things that sometimes are actually evocative of the astrological signature. But yeah, so it was a very quick, basically military operation just like that. So I wanted to point that out, that that’s another sort of recurrence or parallel there in terms of history sometimes, and that some of the archetype of this is like, quick, sudden military strikes are sometimes what we see. So for those listen – for the audio listeners, in that chart, Venus is at 15 degrees of Virgo, and it’s conjoining Mars at later in 15 degrees of Virgo. And I think the conjunction would go exact like, what, a day later? Within a day?
NDB: Within a day, yeah. And —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — two days previously, October 23rd, 1983, there was an attack on a US barracks in Lebanon, I think in Beirut. I think Gaddafi was responsible. It was like, during that whole thing in the ’80s when there would be bombing attacks on US bases on foreign soil and things like that, so. That also occurred.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So okay. So that was another parallel I found in just checking Venus-Mars ones. Other Venus-Mars ones are I was looking at wars that started under Venus-Mars, and one of them that came up is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident and then the full authorization of the Vietnam War in the US, it was authorized under a Venus-Mars conjunction. And that’s a really interesting and sort of crucial one, because the US had been involved in that war for years. They’d been involved in military stuff in Vietnam for years up to this point. But the Gulf of Tonkin incident was – it’s widely regarded in retrospect now almost like a false flag or like something in that —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — area at this point. But it became the justification for initiating a full-scale war.
NDB: Yeah. There was something perceived, I think on the radar or something like that, that they were fired upon or something of that nature; I forget all the details. But it was later determined that it had been, you know, a mistake that they detected this thing. And President Johnson knew it, but decided to use it as leverage anyway, even though it was clearly a nothing burger, as they call it. And the commander of that boat was Jim Morrison’s father – little aside there.
CB: Okay. All right. So the Gulf of Tonkin incident supposedly happened August 4th, 1964, and Venus is at like, 29 degrees of Gemini. Mars is at three degrees of Cancer. But then as a result of that, 10 days later on the 10th of August – not 10 days later, but you know, six days later on 10th of August, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is passed on the 7th and then enacted on August 10th. And this gave LBJ – the US president – authorization for conventional military force. And this is basically the legal and political beginning of the American Vietnam War, effectively serving as the constitutional substitute for a declaration of war. So is was a huge turning point when the US becomes like, fully, fully committed and it’s a very close Venus-Mars conjunction with Venus at three or four Cancer conjoining Mars at seven degrees of Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. And then when Johnson would send troops in would be in March of 1965 during the Mars retrograde. So there’s like, almost a flipside to this. Venus and Mars were virtually opposite by this one once he sent troops in eight months later.
CB: Right. So that’s one, you know, because that’s – the other thing in terms of what people are talking about, but that’s one possibility here is, you know, this is an example of the US getting tied in with what became a long-running, unpopular war that they eventually lost and had to remove themselves from is one scenario.
Another scenario that’s not great either is that it turns out that Venus-Mars conjunctions were extremely tied up in World War I, and that what I found is World War I started in Europe on a Venus-Mars conjunction very closely. Then a few years later, the US joined World War I on a Venus-Mars conjunction. And then a lot of the important turning points during World War I pivoted on Venus-Mars conjunctions, even eventually the ending of it and the creation of the League of Nations in 1919 was also a Venus-Mars conjunction. So that – the First World War was like, very closely tied in with Venus-Mars conjunctions in a very remarkable way.
NDB: Yeah. I believe we talked about this when we did the recurrences episode, because Woodrow Wilson had the natal Venus-Mars conjunction, and his first wife died the same week that the war broke out. So he was having a personal tragedy, but also because he was the president who would eventually take the country into war, as you said, a couple of Venus-Mars conjunctions later, and then he was sort of the mastermind behind the Treaty of Versailles and creating the League of Nations. So he is pretty central, even though the US only came in at the last year of the war. It was an interesting example during the recurrence retrograde, you know, context, but also yeah, just looking at these Venus-Mars conjunctions related to the First World War on their own is very striking.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So let’s take a look at the timeline of the outbreak of World War I just so people can understand and see how stunning this is.
So here is the chart for July 28th, 1914, and we see Venus is at about 15 degrees of Virgo, and Mars is at about 19 degrees of Virgo, and they’re headed towards a conjunction that will complete on August 5th. So listen to this timeline.
July 28th, the day that we’re looking at here, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, marking the official start of the war. Then August 1st, here – I’ll advance the chart one day. We see the conjunction grow stronger; now Venus is at 16 Virgo and Mars is at 20.
NDB: You should be at August 1st.
CB: What did I move – oh, I need to move it more than one – yeah. Okay. So I move it a few days. So now Venus is at 19 Virgo and Mars is at 22. So now we come within like, a three-degree range. August 1st, Germany declares war on Russia. Then I’ll just say the rest. August 3rd, Germany declares war on France and invades neutral Belgium. Then August 4th, Great Britain declares war on Germany to protect Belgium neutrality. And August 4th also, the US declares neutrality. So let me move the chart forward, because now we’re at August 5th when the conjunction is exact with Venus and Mars both at 24 degrees of Virgo. And the first major battle begins on August 5th, the day of the exact conjunction. Like, it’s just absolutely extraordinary how closely that Venus-Mars conjunction marked the beginning of the first war that completely engulfed almost the entire world.
NDB: Yeah. And it reminds me that when the war began, everyone was so gungho because they thought it was gonna be a cakewalk. That it was kind of like, you know, going on a camping trip with your buddy kind of thing. And they thought it would be short. And they weren’t prepared for 20th century warfare. You know? The early days of the war, you would still have like, the French cavalry, I think, wanted to wear their traditional 19th century uniform which had like, these bright red pants. But now they’re up against machine guns, and just like, total targets because they’re wearing bright red pants on a battlefield with machine guns while they’re riding horses. It was real sort of 19th century meets 20th century kind of carnage. And no one was prepared for it. And of course, I think within a year or so, the poison gas is introduced, you know, and things get really crazy. So yeah, it was brutal, and it was just a standstill war and a total meat grinder.
CB: Yeah. One of the things – because, you know, I took this as an opportunity to like, learn more, and my specialty as we’ve talked about is like, ancient history and Hellenistic astrology. So I’ve been catching up with you over the past several years of modern history. And one of the things I sort of understood better this time around studying World War I again was how part of the reason it became a world war is that in the early 20th century, you have all these different countries that were these colonial powers that had just spent centuries like, you know, gobbling up countries and basically creating these vast tracts of land of different colonies that they owned through colonialism, just coming out of the era of colonialism, so that the moment all of these different European countries primarily went to war, suddenly all of their colonies were at war as well and fighting also breaks out all over the different colonies all over the world in different places as well. And that was something I guess I didn’t understand the scope of, of why it became the first world war as opposed to something else.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, England had, of course, Canada and South Africa and India, and you know, people from those countries absolutely fought in large numbers in Europe and other places – Turkey. And yeah, France of course had their colonies, and they would take people from their colonies and have them fight in the war for them. So yeah, it really, it’s an important war in the history of so many countries. A real turning point in Canadian history, certainly, and where I am now in South Africa. So yeah, that’s what made it a world war was because the British and French empires covered every continent.
CB: Right. Yeah. And so part of what we’re seeing here with Venus and Mars, and it’s such a fundamental and obvious principle, but I’ve been really struck by it this month and then going back and looking at history you can see it as well, is traditionally Mars is the planet of war and Venus is the planet of peace. And between the two of them, you have this dialogue and this tension that goes back and forth where sometimes Venus-Mars conjunctions are the shattering of peace and the start of these wars and the breaking of treaties very frequently. But then other times, the Venus principle overcomes Mars and you have the end of a war or you have the setting up of a treaty or the start of a friendship or something like that. So it’s this tension, basically, between the war principle and the peace principle that sometimes manifests very extremely literally.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly that. And of course, Europe had a history of being at war, but when the First World War broke out, the really – apart from the – there was the Crimean War where Britain and France fought against Russia in the 1850s. But apart from that, there really hadn’t been any major European wars in Europe since the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1814, a full hundred years prior. So it really was falling on people who had not personally experienced war where it was sort of something their grandparents had gone through, and it wasn’t something they really related to. So it really caught them off guard. And if you imagine how the world changed in such a short period of time, like, when the First World War broke out, cars existed but people were largely riding horse-drawn carriages and dressed in Victorian clothing and still kind of quite Victorian. But four years later when the war ends, people are gonna be driving around in cars, listening to the radio. Of course in the US, you get prohibition, so people are gonna be drinking – women are gonna be voting and drinking and smoking – things that would have seemed like, utterly unthinkable prior to this war breaking out. And the war does contribute in its own way to all those things happening the way they did.
CB: Right. Yeah. Help me expand on that principle that I was just talking about of understanding the archetypal like, what’s happening here and what the summary is. It’s this tension between war and peace, but also I was seeing this other underlying thing that becomes another umbrella concept, which is like, consent versus non-consent. Because one of the things I was realizing about treaties – and we’ll do a whole section talking about treaties later and the setting up of different treaties and agreements between countries – is a treaty is like, a consent or it’s a consensual agreement or relationship that two countries set up with each other, whereas oftentimes when a war breaks out, it’s this sudden, often nonconsensual severing or separation or destruction of a treaty where one country sometimes is doing something that’s almost like, you know, nonconsensual – that’s outside of the bounds of what the agreed upon relationship was supposed to be. And that’s part of actually what happened with World War I and why it spiraled into World War I is because a bunch of these different countries had treaties with each other, and when one of those countries was invaded and there was like, a violation of their personal sovereignty, it immediately drew in other countries who had contractual treaty relationships with them that then suddenly became involved in the war as a result of that agreement, right?
NDB: Yeah. It’s a wild tangle of things, but you’re exactly right. I mean, when it comes to the nonconsensual thing, probably the most obvious thing when the First World War is breaking out is that Britain declares war on Germany because Germany, in order to invade France, goes through Belgium. And Britain has sworn to protect Belgium. So that is the impetus, and that is the outrage. You know, if Germany had, for whatever reason, been able to just go into France without going into neutral Belgium, England might have said, “Okay. Have fun.” Not necessarily —
CB: Right.
NDB: — but there was an alliance between Britain and France at that time, but not one that guaranteed that England would have to come in the war on their side.
CB: Yeah, they were planning to – like, some of the British at the time were like, writing letters to each other, the British high command saying, “We’re just gonna speculate and watch this thing happen,” but then the French had built up this huge defensive line against the Germans, and then the Germans just decided to go around it by going through neutral Belgium, and that’s what draws Britain in. And Britain sends an ultimatum saying, “Leave Belgium within 24 hours, or we’re forced to go to war with you,” and the Germans ignored them, so they were forced to go to war.
NDB: Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, the way it came about, you know, you could point to all these factors that caused that war, some of them going back decades. There are things like when Kaiser Wilhelm came to power, you know, he was sort of young and very arrogant. His grandfather had been the Kaiser, but his grandfather died, and then his father took over, but his father was already dying of lung cancer. So in 1888, within a few months, Germany went through three kaisers. And so he was a young kaiser, became kaiser in 1888. In 1890, he fired Otto von Bismarck, who was sort of the architect of German unity. And when he did that, he was acting sort of belligerent. France and Russia, who were always having their eye on Germany, decided to form an alliance between them. And France was a Republican country and Russia was still very like, ultra orthodox monarchy. So for the two of them to come together was seen as a really odd pairing. But they had one thing in common; they didn’t trust Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany. England was still in something of a rough relationship with France, but when Queen Victoria died, her son became king, and he spoke French very well because he had waited his whole life to become king, not unlike Charles, and he learned to speak French hanging out in French brothels. And so when he went to France his first time as king, he made a huge positive impression on France because of how well he spoke France, and that helped this existing treaty get drawn up. And then Russia and England wound up having an agreement between them as well. And yeah, before you knew it —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — those lines were in alignment. But I mean, it’s a long story. I barely scratched —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — the surface, and I’ve said too much!
CB: Yeah, but so a bunch of countries suddenly go to war, and it becomes the First World War. There’s obviously other mundane stuff happening. Like, there was a Saturn-Pluto conjunction that was taking place. Saturn would go copresent with Neptune, and that would culminate in 1917 towards the end of the war. So it’s not like there’s not other major things indicating why this became a world war, but one of the important points is just it really does start – like, this Venus-Mars conjunction becomes the trigger of the starting point. And what’s interesting is it draws in a bunch of other people – like, individual figures and individual countries. So one of them that’s stunning that it immediately as I started doing this research it made me think about was Adolf Hitler, because Hitler famously was born with a super close Venus-Mars conjunction with Libra rising and Venus ruling the Ascendant. And his Venus is retrograde, so that Mars is actually overcoming it. So let me show his chart here, and then in a second I’ll explain why that’s relevant. That is not his chart; that’s Woodrow Wilson. So here is Hitler’s chart.
So Libra rising, Mars at 16 degrees of Taurus and Venus at 16 degrees of Taurus but retrograde so that Venus is moving backwards so that Mars actually runs into Venus and overcomes it in this chart in this instance, which as a side note, I was realizing my reconstruction of the concept of overcoming – I’m understanding what the original concept of overcoming was better now in the Hellenistic tradition. And I think I was slightly off in my book, because there was this tricky thing about how to deal with… Like, overcoming is primarily a sign-based thing that has to do with a planet being earlier in the order of signs overcoming a planet that’s later through a square or a trine especially as a condition of bonification or maltreatment. But so there’s a question of how to deal with it in a degree-based sense, and whether it’s like, the planet that’s earlier is the planet that’s overcoming or if the planet that’s later that’s overcoming. And I’ve always interpreted it as it’s the planet that’s later that’s in a dominant position, because that’s the one that’s being applied to. But I’m starting to understand doing some of this research with Venus and Mars and some of the retrograde and planetary retrograde research that these rare instances where Venus is retrograde or slow-moving, and then Mars is the one that applies to Venus, are really unique scenarios that are not great and we’ll see show up in a number of different instances. And Hitler is one of them in a natal context, but so he has this Venus-Mars conjunction that’s very close, and then of course, the outbreak of World War I then is a recurrence transit of that for him, because then Venus and Mars conjoin in the sky, and Hitler gets super stoked about the outbreak of World War I, basically. And on August 2nd, he’s actually present in the crowd in Munich when the war is proclaimed. And there’s this like, picture of a young Hitler looking ecstatic caught up in the nationalist furor. But being an Austrian living in Germany, he was not legally able to join the Bavarian army. So what he does is he writes a letter basically directly to the king requesting for special permission to enlist, and the very next day on August 4th, the king’s office grants his request almost immediately. And so that means as the Venus-Mars conjunction is going exact at the same time that World War I is starting, Hitler begins his military career basically the same day within like, 24 hours of that conjunction, which is just another incredibly stunning recurrence transit example, I think.
NDB: It absolutely is. Because I mean, it really does – the war changes him completely. No one would have figured him for being some kind of military guy at all until the war broke out. And in fact, he had left Austria in part to not have to fight in the Austrian army; he had contempt for it. So for him —
CB: Right.
NDB: — to then be so eager about Germany is also curious. It sort of shows, like, you know, where his heart was, obviously. But yeah, he’s very keen. He’s very keen. And he fights it very enthusiastically. You know, he’s heavily decorated; he does – he’s a messenger, so he’s running from trench to trench. He definitely puts himself in the line of fire constantly, and he’s really invigorated by it.
CB: Yeah. So and that becomes very important, and then there’s actually some stuff about like, the Treaty of Versailles and like, the war reparations and stuff like that that lands on some subsequent conjunctions that sets up the setup for World War II. I’m gonna skip over that here, because I wanna move onto the other section is that Hitler was not the only one having recurrence transits, but as you noted, the president at the time – Woodrow Wilson – also was born on an exact Venus-Mars conjunction, his at 17 degrees of Aquarius, where we actually have a time for him. He was born with Libra rising, and Venus at 17 Aquarius conjunct Mars at 17 Aquarius, although Venus is not retrograde in that instance, so Venus is actually just barely – by like, a minute – separating from the conjunction with Mars.
So what’s interesting about this is that the US – when World War I is declared, the US doesn’t get involved. Like, they issue a statement of neutrality basically. But then there are a few key events that change that, and maybe I’ll skip to actually the point. The point is that the US doesn’t join the war right at the beginning in 1914, but they wait a few years and then on a subsequent Venus-Mars conjunction when it goes exact, the US joins the war, which is stunning, right?
NDB: Yeah. I think the reason they join later – I mean, it’s that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s really more present in the second half of the war when everyone’s starting to realize the reality of the thing. Not to pivot to the Saturn-Neptune too much, but that’s the thing. Before a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, people are sort of convinced of their own narrative. They’ve convinced themselves of certain things. And then you get the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and it’s impossible to sustain these illusions that just are not sustainable. And that’s what’s happening here. By this point with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1917, the American people learn that Germany has been conspiring to get Mexico to attack the US as an ally in order to distract them from what’s going on in Europe. And so when the American people learn this and when Woodrow Wilson learns it, the mood for joining the Allies in the war, for joining Britain and France and Russia in the war, becomes very strong. And so that’s why Congress votes to join the war in April.
CB: Right. Well, it’s not just that; it’s also the shipping and the destruction of merchant —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — ships, which is —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — gonna be my other point. But I wanna focus on the Venus-Mars component, and I wanna show why this is so impressive because that’s what I’m trying to focus on here is… This is when the US enters the war on March 31st, 1917, and we see Venus at three degrees of Aries exactly conjoining Mars at three degrees of Aries. So that’s just absolutely stunning, because it means that World War I started a few years earlier in 1914 – three years earlier – on an exact Mars-Venus conjunction, and then three years later, the US joins World War I on an exact Venus-Mars conjunction. That is not a coincidence; that’s a crazy correlation.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I mean, there’s no statistically, like, there’s no way. There’s no way that that’s like, a —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — random, you know, thing that we just happened to see.
NDB: Astrology’s real.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: And it’s wild.
CB: So if anyone ever asks you, “Is astrology real?” You can point them to this correlation.
So there was a very important intermediate conjunction, though. So two things – one, as you said, Woodrow Wilson we’ve seen was born on that Venus-Mars conjunction in Aquarius. So then that means like, the outbreak of World War I in Europe and then the US entering the war are both recurrence transits for the president of the United States and for the leader of the country at that time. So that’s setting up part of the context. But then the other thing that’s important that was happening was the sinking of the Lusitania was – it took place on May 7th, 1915, on a Venus-Mars conjunction. And let me put the chart for that up.
And here we see in this chart, we see Venus at 12 degrees of Aries and Mars at 16 degrees of Aries. And this was incredibly important, because what was happening is that World War I was one of the first wars where submarine war was taking place. And even though the American public was overwhelmingly isolationist at this point and like, viewing the war as a European problem – and that’s why it took them three years to get involved – the Lusitania was this luxury civilian oceanliner, and a German U-boat torpedoed it off the coast of Ireland and killed more than a thousand people, including 128 Americans. And this was one of the first big outrages that catalyzes the American public into basically wanting to enter World War I, which they eventually do two years later shortly after – because you mentioned in the spring of 1917 the telegram about Germany trying to encourage Mexico to enter the war. But also what was happening then as a Venus-Mars conjunction was building up is that there were three other major American boats that were sank in like, March, and that was the other thing that catalyzed the US into joining the war.
NDB: Yeah. “Remember the Lusitania” was a battle cry for all that. But indeed. I mean, they waited two years. It certainly contributed to the overall mood, but the Zimmerman telegram and then, yeah, those other bombings really pushed them over the edge. And incidentally, it’s right in this time in March-April of 1917 that the Russian Revolution is really starting to happen when the tsar is overthrown. The tsar will abdicate in March of 1917. So even though the Soviets aren’t gonna be in the picture until October, the Russian Revolution is truly on, and the tsar is deposed.
CB: Yeah. And one of the crazy things about this is – I wanna put the chart back up for – I’m gonna put up for March of 1917, because what happened is there were these three boats that were sank. So these are sometimes referred to by historians as like, the “overt acts.” And it was like, March 16th, a ship named the Vigilancia is torpedoed and sunk, and 15 Americans die. March 17th, the City of Memphis boat is sunk. Then March 18th, the Illinois boat is sunk. And then after that, it’s on. And like, March 20th, Wilson’s cabinet votes unanimously for war. Then March 21st, Wilson issues the call for a special session of Congress. And then March 31st, right on the conjunction, the US declares war. Well, yeah. You have Wilson, and then you have – Wilson’s message to Congress on the 2nd, and then Congress declares war on the 6th.
So what’s interesting about this, though, is look – this isn’t just like, a Venus-Mars conjunction here. This is a triple conjunction —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that’s happening in March of 1917 when all of these boats are getting sunk, and then all of a sudden the US government and public is like, galvanized into entering World War I. And that’s still the case, basically, when the war is officially declared here March 31st. It’s actually a triple conjunction with Venus at three Aries, Mars at three Aries, and the Sun at 10 degrees of Aries. So while not as close as the 2026 conjunction in January of 2026 that led to, that had the US attacking Venezuela, you have a parallel here of a pretty close triple conjunction taking place when the US officially enters World War I.
NDB: Yeah. That’s very striking. And it’s amazing how it perfectly coincides with what’s happening with Russia at the same time. As one ally is leaving, another one is coming in. March 15th is when the tsar abdicates, and then on April 6th, the same day Congress votes to declare war, is when King George V of England tells his Russian cousin that he can’t come for sanctuary in England, which ultimately is gonna lead to the death of the Russian monarchy. So yeah, and that’s a whole like, breaking a contract kind of deal as well on a more personal level. But it’s amazing how much happens relating to this war all at once and with the US literally coming in as Russia is pulling out.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s amazing.
So there’s other stuff, but I wanna jump ahead to the end of the war and to all of the countries getting together and trying to figure out at this point how to stop another world war like this from happening. And this is the date I wanna look at. It’s the exact day of a Venus-Mars conjunction in Pisces on February 14th, 1919, where Venus is conjoined Mars at 14 Pisces. Venus at 14 Pisces and Mars at 14 Pisces. And what happens is on this exact day, President Woodrow Wilson presented the final draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference, and this was the first worldwide, intergovernmental organization whose principle mission was to maintain world peace.
So this is incredibly important, because it means that sometimes it’s not just the start of wars and the start of conflicts, but other times it can be the attempts to end wars and end conflicts. And just like we were seeing with the Mars-Uranus conjunctions in the episode we did I think in December, how sometimes a Mars-Uranus conjunction was the start – especially in Gemini – of a major war that the US would be involved in. Sometimes towards the end of Uranus in Gemini, the Mars-Uranus conjunctions would be the end or the resolution or the beginning of the end of a major war that the US would be involved in. And I think it has to do with that duality of conjunctions where sometimes a conjunction represents the beginning of a new cycle in the relationship between those two planets, but other times it also represents the ending of the previous cycle and the bringing of completion to something. And that’s what this conjunction with the League of Nations kind of speaks to for me, because it’s on the one hand the end of trying to wrap up World War I and put a lid on it, and on the other hand, it’s also setting a new foundation for attempting to create peace in the future.
NDB: Yeah. I also find it interesting, it’s the Sun conjunct Uranus opposite the Moon and Saturn. And what has just happened? Germany has lost their monarchy. Austria has lost their monarchy. Russia has lost their monarchy. There’s that whole dynamic between Aquarius and Leo and these questions revolving, you know, power of the people versus power of an individual. It’s really striking to me. I mean, all that had happened in the last couple of months, but this is really, like, you know, sort of… Yeah. Everyone really understands this is a new moment at this time.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah. And Saturn-Uranus conjunctions, I mean, the fact that this is something that ultimately is gonna be a failure. That there will be a Second World War 20 years’ time. The fact that Uranus is opposite Saturn, I think, is something of an acknowledgement of that, because those two planets are facing off at each other, it really feels like it’s not over. You know, they’re looking at each other; they’re ready for the next standdown.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, well, the big failure here – and the big irony is even though President Woodrow Wilson who has a Venus-Mars conjunction exact in his birth chart and who was the primary architect who’s presenting this blueprint for the League of Nations ultimately, even though he presents it on the date of this Venus-Mars conjunction, the US doesn’t end up signing up for the League of Nations is one of the great ironies so that one of the biggest countries doesn’t end up participating in it. And it gets stuck in Congress, basically. And as a result of that, the League of Nations ultimately fails, or that’s part of the reason why the League of Nations fails, which eventually leads to World War II. And then they have to try the same thing all over again after World War II by setting up the… Blanking! Help!
NDB: Oh, the United Nations?
CB: The United Nations. Okay, yeah. So they have to try all over again with the United Nations after World War II. But that’s one of the ironies of this is the US doesn’t join the League of Nations, which is just like, absolutely absurd.
NDB: Yeah, it is. The famous sort of penalties levied against Germany, you know, to pay for the war was a sticking point. They were very severe terms. At the same time like, the British prime minister had only just been elected in December of 1918, like, a month earlier or so. And he had been elected on the promise to really stick it to Germany in the negotiations. And the French prime minister as well, you know, was being criticized for being too lenient, even as things happened as they did. So there was tremendous popular pressure in England and France to be very punitive towards Germany. That’s the other thing that, you know, the Monday morning quarterbacks will talk about is putting Germany in this impossible position where they couldn’t recover, which is something that would be done very differently after the Second World War ended was not to sort of like, ruin the country but sort of help them get back on their feet after the fighting is over.
CB: Yeah. And I had a date, actually, for one of the important turning points with the war reparations falls on a Venus-Mars conjunction. But I’m gonna skip that, because we’re already going way long in this section.
But so when it comes to wars, those are some of the precedents up to this point, and then of course the most recent obvious precedent that we mentioned in the year ahead forecast that was obvious is that Russia invaded Ukraine on a Venus-Mars conjunction in 2022. So the start of that actual like, ground war, which has become the biggest ground war in Europe, I think, in a long time, was also a Venus-Mars conjunction just a few years ago.
NDB: Yeah. And because of the Venus retrograde, I think we had three Venus-Mars conjunctions during that time, as I recall, because of the back and forth path of the Venus retrograde made triple conjunction. So really drawing it out.
CB: Yeah. So here is that. Because that just brings up one of the other things that you and I noted as just a regular thing when it comes to natal charts is in the recurrence transits episode is that the recurrence transit that also involves especially the faster moving planet going retrograde always stand out as being way more important than just a simple conjunction. So this was an example of that, because – so this is the chart for Russia invading Ukraine on February 16th, 2022. And we see that because Venus is coming out of a retrograde, Mars is actually conjoined it that day. But it was Mars was the faster moving planet that comes up and overcomes and overtakes Venus, basically. So this is again, you know, like, going back to what I was talking about with Hitler’s chart, something I’ve really been thinking about and the concept of overcoming here is the faster moving planet going towards and overtaking the slower-moving planet in this instance. And at least here, or let’s say in Hitler’s chart, it’s like, the war principle is overpowering the peace principle of Venus.
NDB: Yeah, that’s very, very well put. Learn your planetary speeds, folks, because Venus isn’t always faster than Mars. This is a perfect example. You know, we learn those basic rules – Mercury is usually the fastest, Saturn is usually the slowest. But every year, there are all kinds of examples where really, you know, the five visible planets – well, all the planets, but especially the five visible ones – really rotate their speed in terms of who’s moving faster than the other. The average speeds are very clear, but from day to day, from chart to chart, sometimes Mercury can be the slowest planet in the chart or Venus. So it’s worth really understanding the planets on that level.
CB: Right. And I should have – actually, I need to clarify, because I mixed something up. February 16th was the date of the conjunction, and this is actually widely publicized to be the date that US intelligence predicted that the invasion would start because the US, for like, a month or two up to this point, was like, screaming that the US was about to invade Ukraine. But the actual fullscale invasion didn’t commence until February 24th. So it was actually a few days later, but it was this overcoming next to it that was incredibly important. So here’s the chart for the actual invasion is like, Venus at 22 degrees of Capricorn conjunct Mars at 22 degrees of Capricorn. And they’re also conjunct Pluto at the same time at 27 degrees of Capricorn, so it creates this not pleasant triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and Pluto.
NDB: Yeah, that’s the curious thing, because eight years earlier when they had invaded – when Russia invaded Crimea, there was the same Venus retrograde in Capricorn, and I think the direct station was conjunct Pluto. This time, Venus went retrograde conjunct Pluto, and then this is the follow-up conjunction after the direct station. And yeah, I mean, again, there were three Venus-Mars conjunctions, and Russian troops and what have you were on the Ukrainian border, I remember, in November of 2021. I was giving a talk to the Arizona Astrology Group, and mentioned that and said, “Well, we’re coming up to that Venus retrograde. The intelligence is probably correct; they’re probably gonna invade.” So yeah, I remember it going back several months that the US State Department was saying this attack was imminent, so.
CB: Right. Yeah. And just repetition sometimes being the key to prediction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so let me see if there’s anything else. I don’t think there is. Those are the main things I wanted to focus on there in the Venezuela section, just to give some context of that. And now we’ve added another major instance of a Venus-Mars conjunction and the start of some sort of military conflict that we’ll see where it goes after this point. But now at least from history, we know some of the potentials in terms of how important those have been or can be in history, and we’ll see what happens in the future.
All right. I wanna take a little break because we’ve been talking for a while.
NDB: Sounds good.
CB: All right, we’re back from break, and I wanna talk now about Greenland and what has been happening in the news over the past week where immediately after the US strike on Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro, which shocked the world, because it made very real some of the threats last year that seemed to indicate a renewed sense of American imperialism on the part of the Trump administration, immediately there started being this escalation of threats coming out of the Trump administration to take over Greenland and even threats of force at a certain point of Trump saying they would do it either the easy way or the hard way. And this over the course of the past week led to the Danish prime minister, I believe, warning that if they launch a military operation to take Greenland, that that would immediately be the end of NATO, of course, because Greenland and Denmark are part of the North American military organization and treaty that’s been in existence for quite a while. So this became a very real thing that already was in the news last year a little bit, but I was reading one commentator – like, one reporter – I saw one reporter this week say that basically after Venezuela happened and Greenland started coming up again, everybody that we all realized that Trump is actually dead serious about taking Greenland. And all of a sudden, the threats became much more real.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So yeah.
NDB: It’s striking that the triple conjunction that Maduro was elected under in April of 2013 was the 64-year return of the triple conjunction in Aries when NATO was founded – that there’s already sort of an astrological link between those two triple conjunctions of 1949 and 2013.
CB: Yeah. Well, I have a more specific set of dates I wanna zero in on. So one of them is more recent, which is that the first time Trump actually started expressing this interest in buying Greenland happened during his first term in August of 2019. And this was actually happening around the time of a conjunction. So it started with a news article on August 15th, 2019, and let me put the chart for that up right now.
So this was a triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun. We see each of them here – let me put them – I’ll do like, a noon-ish chart. We see the Sun at 22 Leo, Venus at 23 Leo, and Mars at 28 degrees of Leo. So we have a pretty close triple conjunction of those three planets here, and what happened is that on this date on August 15th, there was like, a news report that was published. And here’s the timeline. Okay, so it was the Wall Street Journal on August 15th broke – made a story, basically, breaking the news that President Trump has repeatedly asked his aides about the possibility of buying Greenland. Then there was like, a sequence of events as it’s building up to the conjunction where the next day on August 16th, the Greenland government issued a statement saying, “We’re open for business, but we are not open for sale.” So basically rejecting it pretty clearly. And then two days later on August 18th, let me advance the chart, because now the conjunction’s getting closer. August 18th, there we go. What happens is that on August 18th, President Trump himself confirmed the reports to the press calling the idea “strategically interesting” and framing it as “essentially a large real estate deal.” So that’s August 18th. But then that day then, the Danish prime minister who’s visiting Greenland responds firmly, “Greenland is not for sale. Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland. I strongly hope this is not meant seriously.” And she went so far as to call the discussion “absurd.”
So then Trump reacts strongly over the next two days, basically, where on August 19th he tweets a Photoshopped image of a gold Trump tower towering over a small Greenland village with the caption, “I promise not to do this to Greenland.” And then on August 20th, just four days before the Venus-Mars conjunction, in a sudden escalation, Trump abruptly cancels his upcoming state visit to Denmark which was scheduled for early September just weeks later, and he tweets that because the prime minister called his proposal absurd, he’s postponing the meeting. So then the next day on August 21st, the prime minister holds a press conference stating that she’s “surprised and disappointed” by the cancellation but affirms the US-Denmark alliance. And then eventually on August 24th, 2019, the triple conjunction goes exact when Venus and the Mars form the exact conjunction with Virgo, which I will show here – went exact here with Venus conjoining Mars at three, four degrees of Virgo while the Sun was at one degree of Virgo. So an extremely close triple conjunction sort of is the culmination and the ending of that huge, weird first escalation where it’s like, people couldn’t tell if this was real or if this was a joke. And then he escalated it by like, canceling a state visit. But now on a subsequent conjunction, everyone realizes that he’s dead serious, and that the statements coming out of the White House are increasingly sort of ominous about the possibility of them even potentially using military force or other means to take Greenland, evidently.
NDB: Yeah. It’s unprecedented stuff and a little terrifying. And considering that the NATO chart was also – you know, NATO was also founded under a triple conjunction, the fact that it’s in such a precarious position right now is a bit concerning. It’s kind of ironic, because you know, Vladimir Putin would probably love NATO to come apart, but then this thing that’s happened in Venezuela sort of works against him, so it’s kind of funny to see something work out really well and really poorly for him at the same time, I suppose. But yeah. That’s the thing. NATO really is in jeopardy now.
CB: Yeah. Well, that was the other immediate conversation that arose out of this, and that was one of the other great discoveries that I made in doing this research that shifted this away from just Venus-Mars conjunctions to actual triple conjunctions is not just seeing that Trump started this discussion in 2019 under one, but then discovering that two things – that both NATO was born on a very close triple conjunction in Aries on April 4th, 1949, and two, that when the US relinquished its claims to part of Greenland to the Danish in 1917, there was also a close triple conjunction taking place the day that that transfer of power took place. So there’s actually two other really critical triple conjunctions in the history of this weird history between the US and Greenland that actually goes back more than a century now.
So let’s take a look at the —
NDB: Yeah, that’s crazy.
CB: It’s absolutely insane, yeah. So let’s take a look at the NATO chart first. Actually, no. What should we take a look at first? I’m trying to think of what – I mean —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — you’ve talked —
NDB: Put up NATO.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Whatever you like.
CB: Let’s do NATO first, because that’s what you were talking about, so. This will just be the transits for that day. And I’m always just looking at rough transits. Obviously, I have the date – it’s set to like, Denver. We’re just looking at an approximation to get a general idea of the clustering, but you can see it very clearly here where Mars is at 10 degrees of Aries, Venus is at 11 degrees of Aries, and the Sun is at 14 degrees of Aries. And we can actually see that the Sun is coming up on the North Node, so we know an eclipse is incoming probably just a couple weeks after this when that Moon gets closer to Full.
But what we have then is it means that NATO itself was founded on a triple conjunction of Mars, Venus, and the Sun, and this is probably what happened this week is probably one of the most existential threats to NATO that’s probably ever taken place when one of the major member countries is now threatening to use military force on another member country, which would immediately end this treaty, basically, between all of these different countries.
NDB: Presumably! I mean, it certainly ends it for the US. And it’s true – the prime minister of Denmark said it would be the end of NATO. I have to wonder, you know, all the other countries in NATO, if they would really just agree to dissolve it, or if they would merely follow through with their commitment to the treaty, which would mean going to war with the US.
CB: Right. Well, that’s the problem and that’s the threat of the end is that the NATO means that when one member country is attacked, then all other member countries have to come in to defend them. And the only time NATO’s actually been sent, I think, as an actual military force – or the first time it was – in a war was in the Afghanistan war after —
NDB: That’s right.
CB: — 9/11 when the US was attacked in September 11th. NATO for the first time sent a force to Afghanistan with a collection of a bunch of different armies and soldiers from different countries, including a bunch of Danish soldiers that were sent to fight in Afghanistan in that subsequent war in 2001 and 2002 onward.
NDB: Yeah. I mentioned that in Uranus USA, my book. But yeah. That was the first time.
CB: Nice. So when it comes to NATO and the things surrounding this, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that needs to be mentioned as a part of this. Like, there’s a bunch of different member organizations that are involved in NATO, and I think it’s like, one of the largest military organizations or alliances in the history of the world, I think, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. Nothing like it.
CB: Okay. So that is scary. I’m trying to think. There’s other things surrounding NATO. NATO treaty signed in Washington by 12 founding nations, establishing a mutual defense pact against Soviet aggression, solidifying a key Cold War alliance for collective security. Okay. Maybe that’s good.
So that’s one of the dangers in terms of that and the threat to NATO. But then the other background, as I said, is it turns out that the US has like, a weird long history with Greenland, and over the past century like, attempts to buy Greenland, some of which were public and some of which were private, as well as different negotiations involving Greenland because Greenland is like, it was a Danish colony. But the US, some explorer had done some exploration of northern Greenland, so there was some like, latent or vague US claim to Greenland in the late 1900s and the early 20th century, so much so that it became a point of negotiation when the US wanted another island, basically – the US Virgin Islands – that were owned by the Danish or controlled by the Danish. But then the US wanted control over them, and there was this initial deal in 1902 that was connected to some conjunctions, but I might skip over here for speed. And the US didn’t offer Greenland at the time, and then what happened is that that deal fell through with the US Congress in 1902. But then the deal was revived over a decade later, and this time, the US sweetened the deal by saying that if the Danish gave them basically control of the Virgin Islands that the US would give up any claim to Greenland. And what happened is that this was enough to get the deal to go through on both sides, and then eventually the day that the changeover officially happened in 1917, that was the day of a triple conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. That’s a wild one.
CB: Yeah. It’s absolutely insane. So let me find the date. So the date of transfer day is what I’m setting this for is March 31st, 1917, because this is the day that it was official that the US Virgin Islands officially became under the control of the US, and then by extension that the other part of the deal – which is that the US gave up any claim to Greenland – also went into effect. And we can see in this chart Venus at three degrees of Aries, Mars at three degrees of Aries, the Sun at 10 degrees of Aries and even like, Mercury at 12 degrees of Aries. I mean, one side thing that I’m kind of skipping over here that we also saw in the last chart is that sometimes these are not just triple conjunctions. Sometimes these are quadruple conjunctions that are involving either a degree-based or sometimes a sign-based copresence with Mercury, which I believe we also saw in the NATO chart and then, of course, is also one of the things happening this month. So that’s actually an interesting point, even though we’re focusing on triple conjunctions here —
NDB: It’s true, yeah.
CB: Sometimes what we’re looking at is actually probably quadruple conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah. And there are other things. Like we were talking about how Jupiter is opposite right now. When NATO was founded, Neptune was opposite the triple conjunction from Libra to Aries. So sometimes there are even these opposition planets that come into the picture and add to the specific event.
CB: Right. Or in this instance, the other major thing – because we’re talking about 1917 – that’s obvious is like, that’s Saturn-Neptune conjunction land in 1917. And here we see Saturn’s within 10 degrees of Neptune. It’s in a different sign, but Saturn’s at 23 degrees of Cancer here, and Neptune is at two degrees of Leo, so they’ve come within 10 degrees and would be moving into a conjunction very shortly after that. So that’s another recurrence; that’s another Saturn-Neptune background major outer planet recurrence between then basically and what’s happening now.
NDB: Yeah. And that Saturn had been in Leo earlier in 1916 and had retrograded back into Cancer, so it had been closer already by this point as well, which I would take into account.
CB: Nice. Yeah. And that’s also kind of important, because one of the themes that we came up with that we saw emerge in the Saturn-Neptune episode was like, Saturn and Neptune and the meaning about ambiguity surrounding borders and how borders are like, these weird, imaginary lines. And that we saw other weird imaginary lines with like, timezones, for example, being introduced at one point during one Saturn-Neptune conjunction and here we’re talking about like, borders and control over things and claims to different lands or different borders and things like that.
NDB: Yeah. It’s very interesting.
CB: Yeah. So anyway, this is one of the other most stunning triple conjunctions I found is that the precedent for why Greenland and the US having – wanting – control over Greenland came up all of a sudden is because going back to when the US gave up control over Greenland had, you know, two of the same patterns that we’re seeing this month with the triple conjunction as well as the Saturn-Neptune.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So there are also others… There’s actually a bunch of others in terms of Greenland, because there are some other Venus-Mars ones that were important at different points. Like evidently, in 1946, after World War II, the US did make a secret offer to buy Greenland. This was in 1946. Oh yeah, December – see, this one, I didn’t fully include this because it was a little bit after the conjunction. But it has a piece in it that I think is relevant to now. So here’s the chart.
This only came out like, much later when somebody’s papers were published. And the primary thing about this is actually it’s more of a Sun-Mars conjunction in this chart that’s building up. December 14th, 1946, an American made an offer – American government official made an offer to buy Greenland, basically, to the visiting Danish representative. And there had been a conjunction with Venus, because Venus went retrograde in Sagittarius and Scorpio in the October-November timeframe. And at that time, there was an overcoming – it was one of the instances where Mars overcame Venus, as we can see here in the video version, in late Scorpio and early Sagittarius during the course of that retrograde. And what happened is the Danish were like, really surprised by this. They weren’t expecting it, and they viewed the offer as being really aggressive and ended up rejecting it.
So they were expecting like, something like the opposite of that, basically. Like, they weren’t expecting the US to attempt that at all. So it created a really awkward situation. And so it’s not a close triple conjunction, but the piece of that that’s important to me is that it happened, and that the US internal deliberations and choice to make that offer probably happened close to the conjunctions in the preceding month. But also that Venus was retrograde in Scorpio – I saw that come up a couple of times in the history of some of this stuff with Greenland. And we know that Venus is again gonna go retrograde in Scorpio later this year is the point I wanted to make with this example.
NDB: Yeah. It sure is, 80 years later.
CB: Yeah. So yeah, that was the important point about that. In terms of other stuff with Greenland… The other one I think was the move – there was a referendum in 1979, again, after a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. Just coming off of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, there was a referendum that took place in January of 1979 at the time of a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn, which is the exact repetition of the one that we just had where the people of Greenland voted to become more independent from the Danish, basically, at that time, right?
NDB: Yeah. The closest they came, 47 years ago.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Or – yeah.
CB: So and 47 is important, because this is something we’re gonna see come up in a couple of stories, but this is one of two most important ones, and I’ll mention the other one later. I don’t wanna jump ahead. But why is 47 important?
NDB: 47 years is a year where you get a cyclical return of Mars, Jupiter, along with a nodal half return. But specifically the Mars cyclical return relative to the Sun, so if you have a conjunction of Sun-Mars in January of 1979, you know that 47 years later in January of 2026, you will again have a Sun-Mars conjunction pretty close to where the one was in 1979.
CB: Right. So this is something we’ve talked about a lot in the Mars retrograde in Cancer episode a year ago and that I’d been exploring a lot more. You’ve done years of work on this, but I’ve been catching up over the past few years as I’ve gotten into Babylonian goal year periods where we saw that there’s a 79-year repetition of Mars where Mars will go retrograde in almost the same degree of the zodiac every 79 years. And we talked about that a lot in the past year; that’s come up a bunch of times, especially with Trump who turned 79 in June. But there’s also a 47-year repetition where Mars will also go retrograde in the same spot in the zodiac, and it’s not as tight as the 79-year repetition but it’s still pretty close. And so to give you an example of that, Mars is gonna slow down and start to go retrograde later this year and in early 2027 in the signs of Virgo back into Leo. And 47 years ago, Mars also went retrograde in Virgo and then moved back into Leo. So —
NDB: 48 years ago, but yeah. 47 years apart, those two Mars retrogrades, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So it’s a 47-year repetition. But the thing about the 47-year repetition is because it’s connected with the synodic cycle between the Sun and Mars, it’s not just the retrogrades, but it’s also the conjunctions between the Sun and Mars or the cazimis. So as a result of that, it sets up a direct connection sometimes between, in this instance, the conjunction between the Sun and Mars that just took place over the past week in January in Capricorn when all of this talk about the US wanting to take over Greenland exploded. And then 47 years earlier, when the people of Greenland voted to become more independent of the Danish under an exact same Mars-Sun conjunction that also happened in the middle of January of 1979.
NDB: Exactly. Can’t make this stuff up.
CB: Yeah. So let me pull up the actual chart for that. So the vote happened on January 17th, 1979. And again, I’ll just throw up the transits to get a rough approximation, because I want everyone to understand this, because it’s truly stunning. And what you see here is the Sun is almost exactly conjunct Mars at about 27 degrees of Capricorn. It’s moving into that conjunction basically the day of this referendum. And this was the 1979 Greenlandic Home Rule referendum where it altered the relationship with Denmark where it transitioned it from a country – basically a county of Denmark – to an autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. So it’s not completely independent; it’s still connected with Denmark and with the Danish. But it gained a much greater sense of self-autonomy at this time, which is interesting in terms of the Sun-Mars part of that and this idea of like, wanting more freedom or more self-autonomy over their own destiny. And then what happens is, you know, I’ll animate the chart. You can just jump it forward 47 years. And it brings you to, you know, the middle of January of 2026 when we again have a Sun-Mars conjunction taking place around the same degrees. And so that’s part of why there was this sudden connection there and sudden repetition.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So the other thing about this that I noticed that’s really important, though, is that we see Venus at the time of this referendum was in Sagittarius, and it’s coming out of a Venus retrograde in Scorpio that had taken place in the preceding months. Like, I’ll animate the chart back, and you’ll see this, so there’s Venus stationing direct. Let’s move it all the way, because this retrograde in Scorpio, it always takes place around October and November. So we see Venus slowing down and stationing retrograde here, actually, at the same time of a conjunction with Mars in late ‘78 in October of ‘78. And then it goes retrograde for 40 days before eventually stationing direct in early Scorpio.
So why this is important is that we are, as I said, again in one of those Venus retrograde in Scorpio years that repeats every eight years. But this retrograde is gonna take place later this year in October and November of 2026. So what’s bizarre about it, though, is just then that’s the same Venus retrograde in Scorpio that happened under the previous chart that we were just talking about when the US attempted to buy Greenland secretly in 1946. So it’s connecting together these themes of like, Greenland’s independence with attempts on the part of the US to buy it, basically. And somehow later this year, this Venus retrograde in Scorpio could become important with respect to that.
NDB: Yeah. The interesting one about the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 2026 is that the direct station’s gonna happen conjunct the star Spica in Libra, because it’s just in the last few turns that it started wandering into Libra.
So yeah, but apart from that, it is very much that same Venus retrograde in Scorpio that we had in 1946 and in 1978.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, this is really important because I kept seeing this come up over and over again where the Venus retrograde in Scorpio – because we’re already in the same year as one, we’re starting to see repetitions from other years linking in those eight-year increments, basically, and it’s already starting to happen earlier in the year. Because that’s something we kind of noticed last time was like, that entire year we were seeing repetitions back to the echoes of the previous eight-year increments over the past century.
NDB: Yeah. It’s wild how often, how frequently, how widespread it works.
CB: Yeah. So you and I will do a whole Venus retrograde in Scorpio episode at some point in history before too long here, but I’m already starting to get like, echoes of it. I’m already starting to get a preview of it here with this being a really important one potentially in the history of Greenland.
NDB: Yeah. It also obviously it’s strongly connected to American midterm elections, so you know, that’ll be another thread we cover when the time comes.
CB: Right. Okay. So there were other things with Greenland, but I think those are the main things that I meant to mention in terms of that. And then we will return back to this, because there is a parallel in January of 1979, but I wanna save it for our last section, where I started noticing other major news stories were happening this month that were also connected with January of 1979, primarily basically with Iran, which is that the Iranian Revolution happened then and the Shah left, basically.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So why don’t we transition at this point to talking about the treaties where on January 6th, the US announced that it was withdrawing from 66 treaties and international organizations on like, a whole host of different things, ranging from the environment to like, women and women’s rights and different things like that. Basically a ton of different international treaties the US is suddenly pulling out of. And astrologically, it was striking partially because this announcement came out on January 7th, which was the day of the Venus-Mars conjunction. So it was literally an example of like, the severing of treaties that had previously been entered into.
NDB: Yeah. No, I haven’t seen the whole list of these treaties, but you know, you were telling me about them; I did see a brief article about them. I mean, it’s in some ways, this story kind of gets buried as a lede because there’s so much else going on between Greenland, Iran, Venezuela. But this is huge. This is like, really going to like, stripping everything back decades if not, you know, a century.
CB: Yeah. So we had done, and we’ll circle back around to talking more about the specifics of the treaties later, but it turns out when we started doing research that there were a bunch of different instances of both treaties being made and formed between different countries in the past as well as treaties being broken under different either Venus-Mars conjunctions or under different triple conjunctions of Venus, Mars, and the Sun, right?
NDB: Yeah. We have a lot – good ones.
CB: So we’ve already talked about some. Like, one of them, for example, was NATO was like, a major treaty that was born on a triple conjunction. We’ve also talked about the League of Nations and the final draft of the League of Nations Covenant being a conjunction, the exact day of a Venus-Mars conjunction, in 1919. You had found one with the European Union, right?
NDB: Yeah, February 7th, 1992, when the Treaty of Maastricht was signed in the Netherlands, forming the European Union and setting up everything. The euro would come in 10 years later, but it’s agreed at this point that that’s gonna happen. The whole Schengen visa deal, all of it is signed on February 7th, 1992, with the triple conjunction of – no, sorry! Not a triple conjunction. My bad. Just a conjunction of Venus-Mars in Capricorn —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — alongside some other outer planets.
CB: So I see it’s like, Venus is at about 16 degrees of Capricorn, Mars is at 21 Capricorn, and they’re also conjunct Uranus at 15 Capricorn, Neptune at 17 Capricorn, and yeah. So it’s like a Venus-Mars conjunction, but it’s also tied in with these outer planets, so it’s obviously it’s part of a much bigger ideal of uniting all of Europe, basically.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s kind of curious. I mean, you know, this is Venus and Mars in Capricorn, not unlike what’s happening right now as well. So there’s something interesting about that. Not the triple conjunction, but nonetheless, they’re both there.
So yeah. This is huge. This is the EU, you know? And major, major treaty.
CB: I see Jupiter’s there at like, 12 degrees of Virgo sending in this supportive trine, which might be part of that as well.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So let’s talk about some other treaties, because there’s some major ones. One of the ones you found that I found fascinating was a treaty that happened centuries ago that divided during the colonial period when a treaty was made that divided the globe into hemispheres between Spain and the Portuguese. And I thought that was really striking that you found this one – it was a triple conjunction – partially because we’ve had these like, discussions happening in the past week after Trump invaded Venezuela and started talking about Greenland, people started talking about like, the Monroe Doctrine, which was this old 1800s sort of imperialism idea about the US and different countries having their like, hemispheres or their sectors of the globe or something like that. But you actually found an instance where the world was divided up that had very tangible and important results, and yeah. So tell me about that.
NDB: Yeah. This is the Treaty of Tordesillas. It’s in 1494. So think about it – it’s barely two years after Columbus’s first voyage – more like a year and a half, if I recall, after his first voyage in 1492. So it’s very early in the colonial project. But since Portugal has started sailing around the coast of Africa – you know, Bartolomeu Dias had sailed not far from where I’m sitting right now a few years earlier – I think 1488 – when the Portuguese rounded the Cape in finding the route to India. And so Columbus’s voyage for Spain and discovering for himself that there was a whole continent there, suddenly there was this thing to discuss. Like, Portugal and Spain didn’t want to step on each other’s toes. The queen of Spain was a close associate of the pope who was sitting at the time, and so the king and queen of Spain and the pope brought in Portugal and agreed to sort of partition the globe between them. And Portugal got everything sort of east of the, you know, halfway through the Atlantic Ocean, and Spain got everything west of there. Brazil being the one Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas was, you know, either Portugal found it before that treaty was signed, or they kind of acted like they found it in… You know. Part of it juts out and was probably – the way the continent juts out, that part of Brazil, that part of South America was crossing the line that Portugal had a claim to. So yeah, this is why —
CB: I mean, yeah, is that true? Because that’s one of the things, that’s one of the historical accidents. Because like, Brazil and South America wasn’t fully mapped yet; this is so early in the explorations —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — of the Europeans that it almost like, some of the official history is almost as if like, because that line was drawn there, Brazil almost accidentally falls into the side of the Portuguese. But are you saying it’s possible that it was already discovered – they had already known about it or something?
NDB: There are some historians who say they might have figured out it was there beforehand. But either way, I mean, it is – yeah. The way the line was drawn on the treaty to some extent gave Portugal a claim to some land that might be east of that line in the ocean. Because yeah, nothing was mapped yet; they’re literally just figuring all this out. It’s so early in that project. But yeah, this is why most of the Americas are Spanish-speaking. And Africa has, you know, it’s got a little – there’s Equatorial Guinea, a little tiny, tiny, little country on the Atlantic coast, and then I think it has a little chunk of Morocco and what have you, but largely Africa was Portuguese, and the Americas were Spanish, and that’s the way it was gonna be.
CB: Right. I’ve been getting really – I was really interested when you mentioned this, because I had gotten interested – I was just watching a video on that period of like, Spanish and Portuguese colonialism of South America, and there’s a crazy – the astrology of was it Cortes? When Cortes enters Mexico City, it’s the beginning of the end basically of the Aztec empire and some of the just like, terrible colonialism and stuff that was done there. The astrology of that is crazy, and I definitely wanna talk about that at some point in a separate episode. There’s a lot of interesting history —
NDB: Oh, absolutely.
CB: — surrounding some of that.
NDB: Yeah, no, absolutely. I also I’ve been quite studying a lot of that history as well, as well as like, Spanish history – Andalusia and what have you – because it all sort of fits in together in this really interesting narrative. But yeah, certainly the Aztec surrender to Cortes and a lot of these other, you know, conquerings that happened during this time, the astrology is really interesting. Definitely worth doing an episode.
So yeah, that was the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 besides all this —
CB: Give me the data.
NDB: The data is June 4th, 1494.
CB: All right. So here’s the chart. We got a Venus retrograde at 18 degrees of Gemini that’s just been conjoined and overcome by Mars at 18 Gemini, and then the Sun is at 22. So this is a very close triple conjunction between Venus, Mars, and the Sun, and it’s taking place literally when this treaty is signed to divide basically the world in half between these two colonial empires of Spain and Portugal and what would eventually then create the divide between that would lead to like, Brazil and that side of South America speaking Portuguese versus the western side of other lands on the other side mostly speaking Spanish. And this is the chart for the start of that basically.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Yeah so can we expand on this a little bit of what we’re seeing here? Like, sometimes what we’re seeing is like, colonial powers or people in power making treaties to divide up land and territory or to take and deciding what lands and territories they’re gonna take in some instances forcefully. Like, the entire history of South American colonialism is crazy, violent, and just like terrible. So sometimes that’s what we’re seeing here, though, is like, we’re seeing these different powers making agreements regarding that.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it was brutal. When Columbus sailed, the Spanish had only just that same year – 1492 – ended a hundreds of years long war fighting the Muslim occupation of Spain, Andalusia, which had started like, 700 years earlier. Like, the length of three Americas virtually. And so Spain had been occupied and had fought a series of these brutal anti-colonial wars against their occupiers, and the Inquisition – because the Protestant Reformation had happened, the Inquisition pops up, which is famously brutal and savage. And so in the midst of all this, this newly liberated country that is also sort of fighting to keep its religious identity and practices with Catholicism just doubles down in trying to preserve the things that they want. When they get to the Americas, they find gold and silver in huge amounts, and they just rape the land. And so the violence is also in part sparked by the tremendous greed, rapacious greed, that’s overtaken these Spanish conquistadors who come to the new land and can’t believe what they’re finding.
CB: Right.
NDB: It’s very, very ugly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So one of the examples of that, just because I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get – if we ever actually will do this or get a chance to, so I wanna mention it really quickly just because this chart is crazy for when Cortes enters the capital of the Aztec empire – November 8th, 1519 – because I’ve never seen a chart that draws together so many ominous-looking things. And specifically ominous-looking things that you and I have studied separately, but are like, all brought together here.
So look at this chart. This is November 8th, 1519. This is one of the Spanish basically conquistadors, one of the biggest ones, entering into the capital of the Aztec empire and later within two years time, like two years later they would just absolutely destroy and decimate and subjugate the entire Aztec empire, and this is like, the starting point of them sort of like, welcoming them into the city and hosting these initial explorers. And look at this – Venus is slowing down in Capricorn and getting ready to station retrograde conjunct Saturn and Pluto. And that’s one of the first things that jumped out to me, because what’s interesting about that is the astrologers of the Aztec empires focused on Venus and Venus retrograde cycles. So what’s interesting about that to think about is there would have been some astrologers that would have been watching that and probably would have been nervous or like, would have known – especially if they had been studying like, eight-year repetitions or something like that and if there was any previous history of that retrograde cycle being problematic – that that would be one of the most problematic ones probably in their entire history. But on top of that, you also have an eclipse. This is two days after a lunar eclipse in Taurus, so that means there would have just been an ominous-looking eclipse taking place in Taurus just two days before this happens. And there’s —
NDB: That eclipse, the Moon might have been conjunct Algol, because of course it would be a few degrees earlier than it is now.
CB: Right. Yeah, because the Sun’s right there at 25 Scorpio conjunct the South Node at 21 Scorpio, and so yeah. The Full Moon would have been about 23, 24 Taurus.
NDB: Yeah, maybe even 22, 23. Yeah.
CB: And then —
NDB: So yeah.
CB: And then the last thing —
NDB: Go ahead.
CB: — the third thing, that Full Moon was also conjunct Uranus, which is there at 14 degrees of Taurus. The third thing, though, that relates back to things is that Saturn-Pluto conjunction. And that was the way I originally stumbled across this, because that’s a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn that reminds me of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction we had in Capricorn in 2020 when the covid pandemic exploded. And of course, one of the things that’s happening during this time during the early Spanish conquistador period is like, they’re bringing all these plagues and epidemics and stuff that are then just wrecking the native populations because they’re not used to dealing with things like smallpox and other diseases that were confined to Europe and other continents up to this point.
NDB: Yeah. It’s estimated it could be upwards of 90 plus percent of the human beings living in the Americas from Argentina to Canada were impacted by these diseases brought over. You know, so people who didn’t have direct contact with the Europeans in a game of sort of telephone, so to speak – germ telephone – these diseases spread over the continent. And you know, it’s what made the whole colonial project really possible in the Americas the way it was was that most of the human beings died. Everyone else, all the First Nations people who had to live under the boot of Spanish or English or French colonialism, were the leftovers, were the people who survived a massive epidemic that wiped out most of the people on the continent.
CB: That’s insane. Wow.
NDB: Yeah. And I have something else with regard – oh, go ahead.
CB: Before you —
NDB: Yeah, go ahead.
CB: Before you go on, I just wanna mention I just – I decided to just animate the chart, because I realized that because the Sun was so close to conjoining Venus and to Mars in the chart we were looking at for the first entry, and because Venus is going retrograde, I just realized this was probably another triple conjunction. And it looks like it was; look at this.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: During the Venus retrograde, Mars would overcome Venus at 15 degrees of Capricorn by January 7th; it looks like a 15-20, and then the Sun was not too far at 26 Capricorn. And it’s of course, they’re all together with like, Saturn and Pluto. And I was reading about the story of this, and it was just absolutely insane, because it’s like, they’re welcomed into what would become Mexico City by the king, but then at some point they take the king hostage over a period of time. And then I think he ends up getting executed at one point, and then eventually the Spanish are trapped there for a while and then they escape somehow. But that means probably a lot of that’s taking place near this triple conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Well, what I wanted to tell you as soon as you put the chart up – speaking of that Venus-Saturn – the Aztec surrender – you wanna type this date in. August 13th, 1521, a year and a half after they first arrived. August 13th, 1521.
CB: August 13th?
NDB: Yeah. 1521. This is the day that the Aztecs surrender Tenochtitlan – the future Mexico City – to Cortes. So Venus is retrograde again, because it does go retrograde every 18 months, but this time it’s opposite Saturn. It was conjunct Saturn a year and a half ago, and now it’s opposite Saturn, and this is when Cortes fully takes control. He hasn’t just kidnapped the king; it now belongs to the Spanish.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s crazy. Yeah. So that was a little sidetrack, but it was just like, some of the random things that we find in these historical things in terms of like, crazy astrology of some of the most important events in world history. And I kept seeing a ton of eclipses. Like, a lot of the dates that come up in some of this research with Venus-Mars and the triple conjunctions, there’s also like, eclipses taking place near these dates, and I’m not always noting that here, but there is often other important stuff going on. It really impressed upon me how eclipses are often falling really close to the big turning points in world events, and that’s something we’re about to see next month when eclipse season starts and overlaps with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, the other thing is you noticed Uranus was in Taurus during that period with the Aztecs, and that’s something – you know, Uranus was in Taurus during the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century. Spanish history seems to revolve a lot around Uranus in Taurus and Scorpio, kind of a bit of both, not unlike the way the US does with Gemini. So it’s also interesting when they’re invading what will become Mexico that Uranus was in Taurus for a lot of that.
CB: Right. For sure. All right, are there other important treaties or other things we wanted to mention before we wrap up the treaty section?
NDB: I wanted to mention – well, there’s the League of Cognac, which is 32 years after the Treaty of Tordesillas. This is May 22nd, 1526. May 22nd, 1526.
CB: Okay. Let me share the chart for that.
NDB: Yeah. This is everything; this is a treaty, but it’s also a breaking of a treaty, and it’s also the starting of a war or the resumption of a war. People are changing sides. So what happened was France had invaded Italy and fought this war like, from 1521 to 1526. The king of France was taken prisoner; he was forced to sign a treaty with the Holy Roman Emperor. But then the Pope wanted the Holy Roman Emperor to get out of Italy, so he made a deal with the king of France, and the king of France was now his ally. And this is gonna be called the League of Cognac. This is like, the wars of Italy, the second half – this is beginning a four-year war that’s gonna result in the ending of the Florentine Republic. The Medicis will take over Florence; you’ll start to see some really interesting artwork being funded by them. And yeah, I mean, this is really sort of stirring up the European order in a big way. You know, this is the whole sort of, the early days of the Protestant Reformation. You know, Martin Luther’s theses were only nine years earlier. So that’s also creeping into things. People don’t necessarily think of themselves as Protestants and Catholics yet, but there’s no doubt the Pope is, you know, half of Europe is certainly wanting to get rid of him. And so yeah, this war is part of what – for instance, the fact that France is Catholic and Germany’s more Protestant, although it’s mixed, but yeah. Maybe France wouldn’t have been Catholic if the Pope hadn’t made a deal with the king of France at this point. Maybe they also would have been more Protestant. So a lot of things are really sort of taking shape as this part of the war begins. And this is the same Venus retrograde – this is 32 years after the Treaty of Tordesillas, the one that divided the globe between the Portuguese and the Spanish. So there were only two Venus like, triple conjunctions of Sun, Venus, and Mars in Gemini during this period – the one in 1494 and this one in 1526. But this one involves this massive Gemini stellium – Jupiter, Sun, Venus retrograde, Uranus, and Mars in Gemini! And you know how we love Mars and Uranus in Gemini on this podcast.
So yeah, it’s a very striking chart. I came across it pretty late in our research for this. But it was just so – it’s so spot on with everything that we’re talking about that it was interesting just to, you know, explore this as well.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Even if it’s not directly related to the news. Sorry, go ahead.
CB: Right. And so this is the 32-year repetition of the previous treaty, and part of that is are you saying that the previous treaty is partially broken on this chart 32 years later?
NDB: No. I was just giving that for a time – Spain is involved in both these treaties. Spain is one of the countries involved here. But I was only pointing out the 32-year thing because Venus-Mars conjunctions will repeat; they’ll make a joint synodic return every 32 years, so it’s common —
CB: Right, okay.
NDB: — if you have a conjunction between the two planets at one time, 32 years later you’ll see it again.
CB: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And sometimes in other ones, we may see that tie together specific events in 32-year periods. We saw that a lot last year, actually, with how that we’ll have the Venus retrogrades and the Mars retrogrades repeating in the same signs every 32 years. But this is another great extension of that is if there’s a triple conjunction in a sign, 32 years later there will be a triple conjunction in the same sign approximately around the same time.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. They do generally – they wander off after a few repetitions, but because Venus was retrograde in these two in 1494 and 1526, it wasn’t as, you know, sometimes those triple conjunctions can repeat four or five times every 32 years. But in this case, there were just these two, because Venus would have been in Cancer 32 years before 1494, and then in Taurus 32 years after 1526 during these returns. So these are the only two where you get the triple conjunction – very special, very unique.
The other thing I should say about this is this was also – in 1526, this was the astronomical transit of Venus to the Sun where Venus was literally crossing across the path of the Sun, not unlike what we had in 2012 and 2004. So there was also that. That was the last transit that happened when we didn’t have the proper equipment to view it closely.
CB: Nice. Okay. Yeah, that was the 2012, that was the one where the world ended or that was the reason why 2012 was supposed to be important.
NDB: One of them, yeah. I remember when the world ended. I thought it was the Mayan calendar and the winter solstice, the December solstice. But anyway. Good times! Terrible movie. Good times.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I liked the movie; it wasn’t that bad.
NDB: Okay.
CB: I like a good disaster movie.
NDB: Fair enough.
CB: All right. So there’s other treaties, but it actually ties in with other – especially like, a bunch of nuclear treaties that happened in the 20th century, but I’m gonna save those for a later news section that connects with another news event. But I think that’s good for treaties, yeah?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay, cool. Let’s take a little break.
All right, so we are back, and there was one major breaking of a treaty that I forgot to mention it as a sidenote, but I thought it was an important one because, like you said, sometimes treaties are made during Venus-Mars conjunctions and sometimes treaties are broken. But one of the ones that I forgot to mention was on October 13th, 1933, Hitler who had recently come to power withdrew from the League of Nations one day after a – it was actually on October 14th, 1933. And this was one day after a Venus-Mars conjunction at three degrees of Sagittarius that went exact on October 13th.
So let me share the chart, and here we can see on October 14th, Mars at three degrees of Sagittarius, and Venus is just separating from that conjunction with Mars, and Venus is now at about four degrees of Sagittarius.
So this is important and this is striking, of course, because as we said, the original proposal for the League of Nations was presented and finalized under a triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and the Sun back in 1919. And this is Hitler coming to power and then officially pulling Germany out of the League of Nations and therefore severing, you know, alliances and severing connection with a diplomatic organization that was meant to promote peace and to avoid future wars. And of course, that would end up becoming – would be ominous, and would be a sign of things to come since World War II would start later in that decade.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: It’s the beginning of it all unraveling.
CB: Yeah. So it turns out there’s actually, as we said with Hitler, so this becomes another recurrence transit for Hitler, who as we showed earlier has a Venus-Mars conjunction in his birth chart. He joined World War I at the start of the war under a Venus-Mars conjunction. But during the course of this, I actually found he had a bunch of other important turning points in his life under Venus-Mars conjunctions as well,. So I’m not gonna mention all of them, but I did wanna do a quick side trip to show some of them, because I think it was really stunning. I mean, frankly.
So one of them is the publication of Mein Kampf, his book, on July 18th, 1925, was one week after a conjunction. So here is the chart for July 18th, 1925. And what we see is Venus at 18 degrees of Leo coming off of a conjunction with Mars at 14 degrees of Leo. And Hitler is like, in jail after attempting to do a coup, basically, and he writes his manifesto basically where he lays out what is functionally the ideological blueprint for the war that he would start 14 years later.
NDB: Yeah. And he really does lay it all out. Anyone who actually read the book knew what he was up to, but you know, some people just didn’t take him seriously until it was too late.
CB: Yeah. That’s really fascinating, because I was reading about – there were some British who were like, in terms of like, appeasement or people that didn’t think he was serious and didn’t take him seriously, but one of the people that did, I think, was —
NDB: Churchill.
CB: — Churchill. Because Churchill read the book, and he was like, “No, this guy is absolutely —”
NDB: Exactly.
CB: “ — ideologically serious.”
NDB: Yeah. And that really is Churchill’s one thing is he’s the guy who knows Hitler’s a problem when everyone else is either trying to appease him or just, you know, giving him soft support or what have you. Churchill takes this very hard line, so that when things really go badly in 1940, he’s the only choice to be prime minister because he’s the only one who, you know, hasn’t been caught with his pants down —
CB: Right.
NDB: — so to speak.
CB: Yeah. That makes so much sense. So then another important date is we jump forward when on August 2nd, 1934… I’ll put up the chart. You can see it; there’s a Venus-Mars conjunction. Venus is at 11, 12 degrees of Cancer, and Mars is at 11 degrees of Cancer – very close conjunction basically the same day. And what this is is the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in Germany, which basically makes Hilter immediately the leader of the country. And this is when Hitler becomes Fuhrer and has absolute power, basically, after this point. So this is when Hitler becomes fully powerful as the head of the country and it’s literally on a Venus-Mars conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. This is also when Uranus has finally gone into Taurus and is conjunct Hitler’s Sun. So you take that – I mean, you know, Mr. Uranus in Taurus himself, and then the Venus-Mars recurrence, and this is the moment he’s waiting for is for Hindenburg to die so that he can take over and become Fuhrer. Because he’s only Chancellor up until this point.
CB: Right.
NDB: Not fully —
CB: So he’s chancellor, and they were almost like, placating him by making him chancellor up to that point, or didn’t —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — maybe fully appreciate like, how much they were screwing up by making him chancellor.
NDB: Exactly. And about five, six weeks prior to this, he had done the Night of the Long Knives event. Overnight, he executed all these different rivals he had within the Nazi party and started clearing the path for anyone who might have been a rival for seizing power. So he took care of that in, I think it’s June of ‘34 right when Uranus is going into Taurus and then yeah, Hindenburg dies and that clears the way. There’s nothing in his way from becoming the Fuhrer at this point.
CB: Right. Yeah. And literally like, the day before this, Hitler’s cabinet passed a law that was set to take effect upon Hindenburg’s death abolishing the office of president and merging it with the chancellor. And so on this day, Hitler declares himself Fuhrer, basically, leader and Reich chancellor. And then interestingly, crucially, the same day, August 2nd, the German army was ordered to swear an oath of allegiance not to the constitution, but to Hitler personally. And this is basically the moment that his dictatorship becomes absolute.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So really crazy and really powerful Venus-Mars recurrence. Again, it’s like, when I think about this stuff, I think about – you know, as modern astrologers, we’re not used to thinking about Venus and Mars as being that important. Like, we’re used to thinking of them and their relational dynamics and gender things and sex and sexuality components. And we’re used to thinking of other outer planets as being more important and sometimes more defining. But what some of this research is showing is like, no. Like, Venus and Mars can be incredibly important, both in terms of people’s personal lives as recurrence transits, especially if they have an important Venus-Mars aspect in their birth chart. But then also in terms of world events. Like, Venus-Mars conjunctions can be incredibly important, and that’s what we saw with World War I breaking out under one, and that’s what we’re seeing here with basically the pieces moving into place for World War II happening in Hitler’s life and in the German politics under these Venus-Mars conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah. I was wondering, did you mention the fact that the Sun was conjunct the South Node? Like, that there had been eclipses when Hindenburg died? I forget if you mentioned that part of it when you had the chart up.
CB: No, I didn’t, but that’s a great point, because this is literally in the middle of eclipse season. Because August 2nd, I see the Sun is there at Taurus – or the Moon is in Taurus, and the Sun is at nine Leo conjunct the South Node at 10 Leo. So one eclipse in Aquarius just took place a week earlier on July 26th, and then a solar eclipse in Leo was about to take place a week after this on August 10th. So it was right in the middle of that, the intensity of eclipse season.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s also a nodal half-return from when Mein Kampf was published nine years earlier. You know, the nodal cycle’s about nine, nine-and-a-half years. So it’s also interesting, like, this the Sun with the South Node in Leo, but when Mein Kampf was published, the North Node was at about four Leo and the Sun was in late Cancer about to move into Leo. So there’s almost, there’s also sort of a flip side between the publication of Mein Kampf and the death of Hindenburg and him becoming Fuhrer.
CB: Wow. Okay. Yeah. There’s a lot of eclipse stuff. When we get to Iran at some point, there was a lot of Leo-Aquarius eclipses taking place during some of the important coups or revolutions. And that’ll become important. But yeah, that’s a good point that eclipse season’s taking place here so that, like I said, when I was going through and searching for Venus-Mars stuff, I was also seeing eclipse and other major outer planet things that were just reemphasizing some of the research you and I had done on the importance of eclipses in world history as well as the importance of things like Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in world history as well.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, the nodes, the more I focus on them thanks to those episodes we did together, it really helped me go deeper on understanding the nodes, and I think I’m doing better work with them now that I ever could have had we not done it, so.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It’s good.
CB: So you had one more date that relates to World War II when it comes to Venus-Mars —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — right?
NDB: April 7th, 1940.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. And so this is, just to set the scene for you – so Germany invaded Poland September 1st, 1939, a week after signing the pact with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was invade Poland from the other side, and they would each take half of Poland and wave at each other from across the line. But then apart from that, nothing much happened for a few months, and in Europe, they were calling it the phony war, because apart from the invasion of Poland and Britain and France declaring war on Germany because they’d invaded Poland, nothing happened.
Over the winter, the Soviet Union got in a war with Finland, but that still wasn’t – it had nothing to do with Hitler or what he was doing. But then finally, April 7th, 1940, he attacked Denmark and Norway and invaded them. Funny – Denmark again. You know, I mean, on the Greenland question. And this is —
CB: Right.
NDB: — when he, so first he attacks Denmark and Norway, takes them. And then the following months, he’ll attack the Netherlands and then go through Belgium and take France. And by June, France is his. But this is the beginning of the real sort of European theatre of World War II insofar as it’s Hitler trying to conquer Europe.
CB: Wow. And we have, for the audio listeners, Venus is at three Gemini, and it’s conjoining Mars at four degrees of Gemini, and then apropos of our last chart, this is also the day of an exact solar eclipse with the Sun at 17 Aries getting conjoined by the Moon at 17, and they’re right on the South Node at 19 Aries.
NDB: Yeah. That’s pretty wild. And that —
CB: Wow.
NDB: — North Node looks like it’s very close to Hitler’s Ascendant, too. He’s got a Libra Ascendant; I forget the degree of his Ascendant. Let me look that up. But it’s close.
CB: So you feel, even though the start of World War II is usually tied back into Hilter invading Poland, you feel like this is when —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — things really heated up when he invaded Norway and Sweden?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, had he… You know, he occupied Poland. War was declared on him. But nothing happened for months, and people were joking in Europe – like, in England and France. Like, oh, it’s a phony war; we’re not really at war. We’ve declared war, but nothing’s happening. So I mean, no; the war begins September 3rd, 1939, when they do declare war on Germany. But nothing happens until he moves against Denmark and Norway and begins his taking over Europe or his attempt to take over Europe. So it’s the beginning of something. It’s not the beginning of the Second World War, but it’s really the beginning of the fighting, you know, apart from taking Poland, apart from that occupation.
CB: Right. Of like, a major escalation.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Got it. All right. And then —
NDB: Let me just – so I’ll just say the best way to explain this – one last thought – the best way to explain it is from here on, there’s no stopping until April of ‘45. That’s what I mean to say. Sorry. Go ahead.
CB: So we’re gonna skip the rest of World War II, and one observation I had is I felt like World War… I guess I didn’t dive into it as much as I could have, but I did feel like World War I was much more clearly tied in with Venus-Mars conjunctions. In World War II, there was obviously like, other stuff going on. So I think there might be some wars that are more closely tied in with Venus-Mars conjunctions than others possibly due to different scenarios. I mean, due to different things. I mean, one of them was just the fact that World War I starts right on a Venus-Mars conjunction, and then I think that set it up for all the subsequent recurrences that then happened in the rest of the war, whereas World War II might be a little different, aside from what you’ve picked here. But one interesting thing I did find is the end of World War II. In 1945, we jump forward five years; we’re gonna skip through all of World War II, and we’re gonna go to the spring of 1945 where Hitler has clearly messed up and everything has fallen apart. He’s in his bunker. His birthday happens in April of 1945. He gets married, and then he commits suicide basically as part of his honeymoon around this date. It was like, April 30th, right? 1945?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So what’s interesting about this to me is this is – Hitler commits suicide, Venus is retrograde in Aries at 17 degrees of Aries, and Mars is at 28 degrees of Pisces. Hitler commits suicide on this date. What happens is a couple, a few days later, Mars then ingresses into Aries. And Venus, which is retrograde then, is slowing down to station direct in Aries. And what happens is in this first and early second week of May, once Venus and Mars become copresent while Venus is stationing direct, once Hitler is dead, the control over Germany is like, handed down to some of his successors, and they basically negotiate the end to the war and negotiate surrender and end up surrendering basically in the first and second week of May.
So while this doesn’t end up becoming a close conjunction of Venus and Mars, what happens is that Mars moves into the copresence right before germany surrenders and ends the war in Europe. And then the rest of the month is like, Mars catching up to Venus, although interestingly what I find fascinating about this is Mars doesn’t connect with Venus. It’s not able to overtake it this time, because Venus starts moving forward and starts picking up steam, and then eventually basically like, escapes the clutches of Mars, by late May and early June moves into Taurus, and Mars never completes the conjunction. So there’s something about that that’s kind of interesting to me. But it does mean that World War II technically ends, at least in Europe, on a sign-based conjunction of Venus and Mars.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. There had been – I mean, the Battle of Stalingrad sort of really gets into its final phase during the Venus-Mars conjunction in Scorpio of 1942. There are elements of the Second World War that are Venus-Mars, but I think the main thing is the Venus – like, when Poland’s invaded, it’s the Sun conjunct Venus in Virgo and Mars had only just stationed direct. So it’s sort of like a twist on the triple conjunction; you have the Sun-Venus and then a Mars just coming out of a retrograde. So a slight variation on that theme, yeah. And the Mars retrogrades are important. The next one will be just before Pearl Harbor, and the one after that as Stalingrad is coming to a crescendo, so yeah. It’s just it’s more of a Mars retrograde with Sun-Venus conjunctions instead of a triple conjunction.
CB: Got it. Yeah. So this is like, the ending of the European war, basically, in May of 1945. But then the Pacific war, of course, famously ends in August of 1945 under the Mars-Uranus conjunction that we talked about previously after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So that’s why it’s like, there’s other stuff going on here that’s kind of important. But I think that’s what – so that was a digression in terms of the Hitler part, but it was just important because one of those early things was like, breaking and pulling out of basically the League of Nations at that point and starting to cut off diplomatic ties, which is one of the things that sometimes happens at the start of wars.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: All right. So let’s move back into the next section and into our next news story that was a major news story this month that, again, was a little bit under – in terms of all the things that happened – maybe under-reported. But on January 7th, which was the day of the Venus-Mars conjunction, Trump announced his intent to do a massive increase of military spending of more than 50 percent to raise the budget of the military spending to 1.5 trillion dollars, where at the present time it’s at or just below like, a trillion dollars per year in the United States – so that would be a massive increase in spending of about 50 percent or more if that goes through – announced on the Venus-Mars conjunction day. And one of the things that I found is that one of the last times that the US or a US president did such a massive spending increase was with Reagan in the 1980s. And it turned out that that was also on a Venus-Mars conjunction.
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: Do you recall?
NDB: That was – yeah. That’s true. In 1981, that triple conjunction, that is when he increased that spending, which in Reagan’s case – I mean, that is kind of what helped him win the Cold War, so to speak, in that the Cold War really ended because the Soviet Union couldn’t keep trying to catch up with the spending that Reagan was doing. And then when Star Wars was proposed as an idea, the SDI offense, then the Soviet Union knew they couldn’t match, they couldn’t spend the same amount.
CB: Right. So let me pull up the chart of this triple conjunction. All right, so here we go. So there’s like, a few important dates, but basically this is a repetition of a triple conjunction where on the day of this announcement, March 10th, 1981, Venus is at three degrees of Pisces, the Sun is at 20 degrees of Pisces, and Mars is at 25 degrees of Pisces. And what happened is that Reagan had just got into office starting his first term, and he had run on basically partially on expanding the military. And he requested a 30 percent increase in spending over three years, eventually doubling the defense budget during the course of his presidency. And this triple conjunction would eventually go exact within a degree on April 5th, 1981. So this is actually the build up basically to one of the super, super close triple conjunctions very similar to what we just had this month in January where we had a triple conjunction within a degree. This is an exact parallel basically coming up as he’s proposing this and as it starts to go through.
NDB: Yeah. And this was really early in Reagan’s term; he had only just been inaugurated January of ‘81, so we’re talking about not even two months into his term. But yeah. He hit the ground running.
CB: So and then so he increases his spending, and then I guess part of what happens is like, the Soviet Union tries to start increasing their spending to keep up, but then it sort of backfires because then it destabilizes the economy or something like that?
NDB: That’s pretty much it. And I mean, in 1983, Reagan comes up with this idea for what they would call at the time the Star Wars defense idea – SDI – like, the idea that you could have satellites in space that could shoot down missiles from space. So sort of like, you know, protection from missiles from above. At the time, it was a technologically unfeasible idea; you know, I don’t know about today, but at the time, it really was Reagan riffing in a science fiction kind of fashion. But just to have him talking about it, the Soviet Union didn’t know whether or not, you know, the US could pull it off or not. But they knew that they were already way out spent by the US, and if there was anything real to this SDI thing, there was no way the Soviet Union could match it. So that is —
CB: That’s an interesting —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: It’s like, square Neptune. It’s kind of interesting that it’s like, because at some level, it’s almost like, a bluff because they didn’t have the technological capability to do the Star Wars program fully at the time, but it was kind of like, almost saying that they could.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t a bluff in that Reagan thought it could be done! So —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — he wasn’t playing 3D chess. But just the fact that he was talking about it, you know. Some people would ridicule it at the time, because it did sound kind of fanciful and science fiction. But just the idea that if the US was actually gonna attempt that that the Soviet Union was totally outmatched.
CB: Right. Because it creates an issue with the mutually assured destruction, the MAD doctrine, because then if one country’s able to not be – to stop the missiles, then all of a sudden, it throws off the balance of the Cold War nuclear scenario and the deadlock that had been in place for a few decades at that point where neither country does anything because they both know for sure that they would both be destroyed if they did. And then all of a sudden introducing this missile defense element throws off the balance of power and of peace, ironically – the balance of peace because the mutually assured destruction doctrine was one of the things that kept them from using nukes on each other up to that point.
NDB: Yeah. So yeah, that was it. It was just, the money had run out.
CB: All right. So that’s really important as a precursor. So we have a direct triple conjunction precursor for a massive increase in defense spending. There was one other I wanted to mention, though, which is we talked about the triple conjunction of the NATO treaty, which is April 4th, 1949, when it’s like, Sun-Venus-Mars-Mercury and nearing an eclipse basically, coming up on an eclipse, actually. But when they signed NATO, when the US signed NATO, while the spending didn’t skyrocket the day of the treaty, they created a strategy document after this which explicitly called for tripling the US defense budget from 13 billion to 50 billion back in the 1940s and 1950s. So as a result of that, this triple conjunction in the US signing onto NATO marked the decision to permanently militarize the US economy against the Soviet Union, which creates a very similar parallel with the 1981 conjunction and then what’s looking like the 2026 conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. Not to mention that the NATO triple conjunction was 32 years before the ‘81 conjunction; it’s that same 32 thing. So —
CB: Oh.
NDB: — there is, you know, that connection as well.
CB: Nice. Yeah. So that’s a really concrete example of the triple conjunction. And because Venus and Mars are on a 32-year synodic cycle how that triple conjunction will repeat around the same time every 32 years. Good eye.
NDB: Yeah. And this is also 32 years after the triple conjunction of 1917 that we were talking about —
CB: Oh.
NDB: — when war is declared in the First World War and all that stuff. So yeah, that’s the way these go. These, you know —
CB: Well, and the Greenland deal.
NDB: And the Greenland deal! Yeah.
CB: Was 1917.
NDB: Right. Yeah. And the tsar’s abdication.
CB: It’s all interconnected.
NDB: It is.
CB: There was also another important thing; there was a major famine in Iran in 1917 that I connected with the conjunction, but might be relevant to – I connected to Saturn-Neptune, but it may also be relevant for the triple conjunction as well. It’s all interconnected.
NDB: Yeah. That’s a good observation. Certainly I’ve seen a lot of Saturn-Neptune in Iranian history in this century and previous ones. And certainly Mars, a lot of Mars in Aquarius stuff, and the Sun-Mars conjunctions in Capricorn and Aquarius and other things as well, so. Yeah.
CB: Oh, we’re getting there.
NDB: Worth getting into. We’re getting there.
CB: Yes. We’re getting there! All right. So let’s move into our next news section where all of this stuff was happening on January 7th – the last three things that we mentioned were all happening on the Venus-Mars conjunction on January 7th. But then – which is the day of the Venus-Mars conjunction – but then the biggest piece of news in the United States that happened that day was that in Minneapolis, Minnesota, there was a woman named Renee Nicole Good who was shot in the face and killed by a masked ICE immigration agent on this day. And it sparked outrage across the country that this like, murder basically took place at this time, and a huge amount of concern and discord and everything else, because this has already been an issue over the past year as Trump has been putting money into ICE, and that they’ve been going around covering their faces and then starting to do questionable things legally and in terms of rounding up immigrants and other people in the country. And then this, though, was a really important turning point where like, a woman – and she was a mother of three – was murdered and it was caught on video, and then the videos went viral, and it caused a wave of protests and tensions and other things in the coming days which we’re still experiencing at this point on January 11th.
So that was a major event, and it happened right on the day of the Venus-Mars conjunction. And as I started looking into the history of this, I found other instances of notable shootings that have taken place in the country. I have seen other instances of notable – instances where a woman specifically was killed or shot or murdered basically that caused a protest or an uprising, or other instances like that. But it was a really startling event that took place, basically, on January 7th.
NDB: Terrible. Terrible thing.
CB: Yeah. So one of the ones I wanted to focus on was a recurrence of the triple conjunction that ties in another event, which is in 2009, there was an election in Iran that was widely thought to be stolen, and there was a bunch of protests that started happening. And early in those protests, there was a woman named Neda Agha-Soltan who was murdered; she was shot in the heart by security forces during the Iranian protests, and her death was captured on video and then ended up going viral and becoming this global symbol of that movement that was happening at that time in 2009.
NDB: I remember well. The year of the election.
CB: Yeah. So do you remember the context of that with the election?
NDB: Well, I remember Ahmadinejad was running for reelection, and I believe the shooting happened around protests revolving around that, if I remember correctly.
CB: Right. Because that was part of the protests is that there were, it became a disputed election. So the election itself happened on June 12th, 2009. Then on June 15th, 2009, millions of people marched in Tehran in the Where’s My Vote protests. And then on June 20th, 2009, one day before the exact conjunction of Venus and Mars, Neda was shot and killed during a protest. So let me put the chart up for that date.
There we go. So what we see is Venus is at 14 degrees of Taurus, and Mars is at about 14 degrees of Taurus in an exact conjunction. So part of, you know, what this is is it’s like, there’s some sort of archetype sometimes of like, a woman dying basically a violent death during the course of a protest that then sparks outrage and creates further energy surrounding a political movement was basically what happened in this instance when it came to Iran.
NDB: Yeah. I remember it was massive; it was a huge, huge deal. I was in Montreal at the time; there were even, you know, people coming out there.
CB: Okay. All right, so that was one event I wanted to mention. Another one that it immediately also evoked was the Kent State killings that happened in 1970 where there were two young women who were killed by the National Guard during a protest just days before a Venus-Mars conjunction. And then the photo of one woman or one student screaming over a body became like, this defining image of that era.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. I’ve heard the story described by a number of people who were there that day. I’m Facebook friends with a woman who was a sister of one of the girls who was killed that day; I believe she’s involved in the astrology community. And also one of my favorite bands, Devo, members of that band, it was sort of a formative event for them and I’ve heard in interviews with them their account of being there that day and standing across this field from the National Guard. Basically, you know, young guys in uniform who were close to the same age as the protesting students. And yeah, you know, things just went very wrong and four people were killed. The National Guard opened fire, and four people were killed. And it was a massively radicalizing event. You know, it was May of 1970, so you were coming out of the ‘60s and post Martin Luther King, post Richard Nixon getting elected, all this stuff. I mean, this was now like, very, very grim and sour and yeah, there was no love and peace anymore. It was ugly.
CB: Yeah. And there was this famous photo that came out of that event, out of that killing, that was published in newspapers and all sorts of other places, and it was this image of one of the protesters just lying dead on the ground, and another woman looking up and like, she’s crying and exclaiming to the camera, and it just became this like, viral image in 1970 that was everywhere.
NDB: Yeah. Horrible.
CB: Yeah. So this helped to like, galvanize some things at the time, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it really, you know, some people who might have been more sympathetic to the government and less sympathetic to protestors, this was now young middle-class kids in Ohio being shot down by the National Guard. So it just felt like everything had become much, much more serious, you know, very quickly. And also, I mean, the thing is the Vietnam War, part of the reason people were protesting was Nixon was elected on the promise that he would end the Vietnam War. But by the end of 1969, people found out that he had actually been bombing Cambodia secretly and really ramping things up. So people were now like, pushing back all the more because they had already been through Johnson and the Vietnam War, and the war was still going on, and the guy who campaigned that he would end it was apparently extending it. So there’s something to that as well that might seem a little familiar.
CB: You mean politicians can say things when they’re running and not deliver on them?
NDB: Yeah, I know! It kind of boggles the mind that anyone would ever think to do that, but apparently it does happen from time to time.
CB: All right. Well, I am surprised.
So it turns out there’s a lot of other shootings in history, especially in US history, under Venus-Mars conjunctions. One of them that we’ve already talked about but skipped over is the triple conjunction in 1981. Very close to it was when Ronald Reagan was shot in an assasination attempt, I think just like, five days from that triple conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: We also have the assassination of JFK was a Venus-Mars conjunction just two days after the conjunction on November 22nd, 1963. What else? The largest mass, the deadliest mass shooting in US history was the Las Vegas shooting October 1st of 2017, and this is four days before a conjunction of Venus and Mars. Yeah. There’s just a lot, but this adds to, unfortunately, it’s not like – you know, there’s been many other shootings in the United States, so it’s become commonplace in schools, for example. But there’s other instances in this exact day of a Venus-Mars conjunction and this specific woman’s story became a focal point this time.
NDB: Yeah, indeed. The shooting of Reagan, there was I think his press secretary, Nicholas Brady, was hit and I think paralyzed during that attempted murder of Reagan. And as a result of that, 13 years later, November 30th, 1993, Bill Clinton signed the Brady Handgun Violence Act named after Nicholas Brady who’d been shot in that attack. And yeah, Venus and Mars were approaching a triple conjunction with the Sun – not like the one that would be full in January of ‘94. Venus was at 27 Scorpio, the Sun at eight Sag, and Mars at 15 Sag, so it’s a little preliminary, but considering this bill was signed specifically November 30th, 1993, you know, this bill was signed in response to what happened to Nicholas Brady. And you know, it’s this one sort of gun legislation that an American president managed to put through in the last —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — in our lifetime.
CB: So here’s the day of the assassination attempt on Reagan. It was March 30th, 1981, and we see Venus at eight degrees of Aries, the Sun at 10, and Mars at 10. So this was one of those shootings in history – we’ve seen a few other shootings under Sun-Mars conjunctions lately over the past several years, especially of famous figures or notable figures on Sun-Mars conjunctions. And this was Reagan and then, as you were saying, I mean, one of the things that’s striking about this as a triple conjunction is something I realized about the Maduro case as well is you get the Venus-Mars aspect of things, which is like, the breaking of peace and the initiation essentially of a war. But then when you add the Sun into it sometimes, sometimes what the Sun is doing is it’s creating a central figure – like, in some instances like the leader of a country who becomes the centerpoint of the violence. In the case of January 2026, it was Maduro literally being abducted basically by another country and the initiation of that attack. In this instance, it’s Reagan being attacked or an attempted assasination with a very close Sun-Mars-Venus conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So what was the 1990s date again?
NDB: November 30th, 1993. This is Bill Clinton signing the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and it’s called the Brady bill. So yeah, Venus is out of sign, but you can see it’s approaching there, and this bill was signed; it’s an anti-gun bill signed by a US president, and it’s close. I just thought in reference to that, because Brady was hit it was worth peeking at this.
CB: Yeah. And look at it – it’s right after an eclipse. An eclipse has just taken place literally two days earlier —
NDB: The previous day, yeah.
CB: — at seven degrees of Gemini. So that’s like, sort of activating the Sun, which is right in the middle of Venus at 27 Scorpio, then you have the Sun at eight Sag and then Mars at 15 degrees of Sag. So that’s pretty interesting.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So are there other shooting ones that we should look at? I mean, there’s other shootings. Like, one of them that came up actually that was weird was the shooting of Tupac Shakur on September 7th, 1996, was four days after a conjunction of Venus and Mars. And in that instance, it’s like, you have a famous celebrity and musician who’s just like, suddenly murdered in a random act of violence. Venus was around eight degrees of Leo, and Mars was around 28 degrees of Cancer. And they’re both opposing Uranus, which is at one degree of Aquarius.
NDB: Yeah. I just saw Toure, the music journalist, talking about this is an interview because of the new documentary that’s out about Puff Daddy or Sean Puffy Combs or whatever his name is now, you know, who may or may not have had a hand in Tupac’s murder. You know, the jury is out on that so to speak.
CB: Yeah, I saw a notification the other day from Cy Scofield, a data collector, saying that a new biography that just came out actually has a birth time for Tupac, but it’s —
NDB: Ooh!
CB: — it’s 12:15. So it actually gives what roughly had been used as the noon chart, basically, if you were using a noon chart with Virgo rising, but it actually finally completes our understanding of his birth time, basically.
NDB: Okay.
CB: You know, what’s crazy about it is it makes so much sense because then if it’s true – and I wanna say this, if it’s true, because it says it in this biography that was just published, and it says he was born at like, a quarter after noon at 12:15 PM is what the biography says. So you know, it’s not an official birth document, so that’s only like, a B rating in terms of the Rodden rating system, but it’s something; we previously had no time for Tupac. But if hypothetically it was true, it gives him Virgo rising, so that that Mercury which is in Gemini becomes the ruler of the Ascendant in the 10th house along with the Sun and Venus and the Midheaven just so prominent. And there’s something pretty striking about that just in terms of his way with words and with poetry and with rap and everything else was pretty legendary.
NDB: Absolutely. And it’s kind of funny – so he was shot very close to the conjunction. And you know, there have been two other Tupacs in history; he was not the first. The first was in the 16th century in South America, and the second was in 1780 – a First Nations person who rose up against the Spanish in a rebellion and was executed, Tupac Amaru. He was executed November 4th, 1780, and Venus and Mars were about eight degrees apart. They were in different signs, but they were getting pretty close too. And it was an eclipse.
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: So there’s even – so he’s not even the first Tupac to be killed by someone when Venus and Mars are very close.
CB: Okay. Wow. Yeah. So that was another one. And then obviously, like, the most famous one is the assasination of President Kennedy in 1963 was also a Venus-Mars conjunction.
NDB: Both him and his brother.
CB: Oh, and Robert? Okay. So the first one was November 22nd, 1963?
NDB: Correct.
CB: So this is not a timed chart, but it’s just an approximation. So this is the day and we have Mars at 20 degrees of Sag and Venus at 21 degrees of Sagittarius right there. What was the date of Robert Kennedy?
NDB: June 5th, 1968. It’s a triple conjunction.
CB: Oh wow, okay. Yeah, that was the triple – because I had seen this one before in researching Sun-Mars conjunctions that were assassinations, but I didn’t make the triple conjunction connection.
NDB: Yeah. And the following day, June 6th, is when Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, so there’s even a two-fer. Yeah. No, no – or was it the – I think maybe Warhol was shot the previous day. I think when Warhol’s in the hospital recovering from being shot, he’s watching TV seeing Kenendy get shot, so he must have been shot the day before. My bad. But yeah, Warhol —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — and then RFK during the triple conjunction.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s crazy then that both brothers are basically killed under Venus-Mars conjunctions. And again, that just raises… I mean, it’s also Sun-Mars in Robert’s case, and that’s crazy that this is a triple conjunction then, because this changed history because then Robert Kennedy would have been running against Nixon. But then as a result of Robert Kennedy dying, Nixon ends up winning the presidency and getting into office.
NDB: Yeah. It’s pretty wild. And the funny thing is, just to like, cap on it all, their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had a heart attack on December 19th – sorry, a stroke – December 19th, 1961, during the first year of the Kennedy presidency, and Venus and Mars were, again, eight degrees from conjunction in a triple conjunction from the Sun in late 1961.
CB: December 9th, 1961?
NDB: 19th. December 19th, 1961. Joseph Kennedy had a stroke. And so he was paralyzed for, you know, he died in ‘69 a few months after Chappaquiddick, so throughout his son’s presidency and the murder of two of his sons and the disgrace of his third son, he was paralyzed by this stroke. This is the way he spent the last eight years of his life. But this is him having the stroke, and this is the patriarch; this is the guy who was the mastermind behind the whole Kennedy dynasty and political ambition and all of that.
CB: Right. Yeah. So but to bring it back to this topic, so with the – sometimes gun violence comes up, and obviously there’s many other reasons for gun violence, but sometimes on Venus-Mars or Sun-Venus-Mars having a prominent instance of gun violence is part of that archetype, and sometimes especially when like, a woman is involved in some way. But in this instance, one of the things that’s troubling about it for me is because it was a Venus-Mars conjunction that was happening so close to the conjunction with the Sun, and that all three were conjunctions, conjunctions are often seed moments where it’s like, laying a seed for something else. And that’s one of my biggest concerns with this is if we end up looking back on it in retrospect as being a seed moment and also being one of the issues with having a secret police running around with their faces covered doing things like this; that’s not a good precedent obviously, and yeah. We’ll have to see where that goes in the future.
NDB: Yeah. It strikes me these Venus-Mars shootings, the ones we’ve been talking about, they’re all very public things. They’re all things that all happened in front of a lot of people. Have we cited one that wasn’t? None of these are sort of like, you know, in a dark alleyway with no one looking. These are all sort of out in full public. The attempt on Reagan, the two Kennedy shootings, what happened to this poor woman in Minnesota the other day. Yeah. You know, that might be another factor to it. Venus and Mars are of the lunar sect; they’re social planets. And so that might be, you know, it’s not just the violence but also the violence in full view of the public gaze.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good point. Yeah. There’s a tension there because of, on the one hand, you have the Sun involved, and the Sun may be part of what’s raising the profile of it or like, shining a spotlight on it to some extent. But then you also, it’s like, in ancient astrology you have adjacent ideas of sometimes planets too close to the Sun – being behind the beams – and there also being something that’s happening behind the scenes at the same time. And I do think there’s probably some things that happened that are either happening behind the scenes this month that aren’t clear related to Venus-Mars conjunction dynamics, or there are some things that are acting as seed moments that seem like an event at the time that might normally be a one-off event but instead may be laying the seed for a sequence of events that will play out in the future.
NDB: Yeah. Terrifying.
CB: Yeah. So okay. I think that was the main thing I wanted to show in terms of just setting some historical precedents for that. So why don’t we move on and look at the next major news story, which is during the entire first week on January, especially January 1st through the 9th, all of a sudden on Twitter or X something had changed where all of a sudden its AI system called Grok was changed to be more permissible about making images of people. And all of a sudden, there was this huge situation where people were suddenly able to make unconsensual sexualized images of people where you could tell it to take a photo and undress somebody and make them practically naked or in sexually suggestive situations, and it could be done to like, anybody all over Twitter, and it created this huge string of this happening all over the place, which eventually was so bad that I think it was like, the prime minister of the UK or somebody threatened to ban Twitter or X from the UK, from Europe, or from England over this. And then as a result of it, I think by about January 9th, Elon Musk made it not possible for the public to use it for free but put it behind a paywall so that now people could still pay to do this, basically, but lessened the ability of people to do it slightly. And while that doesn’t seem like a major news event in terms of like, the range of news events that were happening this month, let’s say historically, there was still something about it because I was watching it happen under a Venus-Mars conjunction, because I had seen other instances where bad dynamics involving sex and gender had come up over the past year or two during hard Venus-Mars aspects like conjunctions. And so for example, like, one of the ones we saw was that Epstein was born on a Venus-Mars conjunction, and it’s one of the closest aspects in his birth chart. And also his collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was also born on a Mars-Venus conjunction, so it was something the two of them shared in common. So —
NDB: She just turned 64, so she had the recurrence —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — in December, yeah.
CB: So one of the things I did then is I wanted to go back and research, because I realized one of the things about this dynamic I was trying to understand archetypally is there was a unconsensual dynamic to it. And this brings up some of the discussion that’s been happening in the astrological community lately about Venus and Mars and their associations with sex and sexuality and some debates about, you know, whether Venus and Mars both signify sex or whether Venus signifies sex but that Mars signifies unconsensual sexual things or different things like that. And I don’t really wanna get fully into that discussion here, but I have seen some recurrences where different negative sexual things have definitely come up when it comes to some of the Venus-Mars recurrences. So I wanted to mention a few of those here.
One of them is that I already mentioned Jeffrey Epstein and him being born on a Venus-Mars conjunction, and it turns out that when he was arrested in 2019 and then mysteriously died in prison supposedly of suicide, this was a triple conjunction of the Sun, Venus, and Mars in 2019, which is a really striking example of a lineup and recurrence transit for him.
NDB: Yeah. Some people think it was a nonconsensual suicide, so you know, that fits in with the theme as well!
CB: Right. Yeah. A nonconsensual suicide. So let me pull up the chart. Do you happen to have the date for that?
NDB: I do.
CB: I’m trying to find my…
NDB: Yeah, I have it somewhere. While I’m looking, I’ll mention that it’s funny that Epstein’s birthday was January 20th; he had the Sun at zero Aquarius, so he’s been having a Pluto transit. You know, Lazarus bringing him back from the dead, so to speak, because he’s been dead for six years but he’s been in the news everyday.
CB: Well —
NDB: Here we —
CB: — but that has more to do, though, with – he was born on a very close Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1953 —
NDB: That too! Yeah.
CB: — and that’s been the biggest thing. So why don’t I just show his chart. So it’s like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Here’s his chart. January 20th, 1953. We actually have a timed chart for him, but I don’t have the time. Do you have the time offhand? I don’t have it saved.
NDB: I’ll have it here. August —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — 10th. August 10th was when he was found dead. August 10th, 2019.
CB: Right.
NDB: And his birth time, he was born at 6:15 AM in Brooklyn.
CB: Okay. Because this… This is a prediction I got right last year was he… I was looking at his Venus-Mars conjunction and I saw how it was tied in with some of the negative sex scandal things that he was involved in, and I saw there was an eclipse coming up in Pisces that would be on that. So I said at one point one of the monthly forecasts that there would be an important turning point with respect to him and his case when that eclipse happened. And what happened in September when that eclipse hit on that conjunction is a huge dump of the files came out, and one of the ones that came out at that time was his birth time and I think it was his birth certificate or something like that.
NDB: Right.
CB: So here’s his Mars-Venus conjunction in the 3rd house; it’s ruling the 5th house and the 10th house. And we see he has Capricorn rising, Saturn ruling the Ascendant, and it’s up there at 27 Libra and it’s closely conjunct Neptune at 23 degrees of Libra. So one of the things that happened is last summer in the summer of 2025 when Saturn and Neptune first came within a degree, the closest pass that they had gotten to that conjunction last summer in July, is when the story and the case surrounding him just exploded all over the news right in the first six months of the Trump administration basically. So that’s part of what’s happening is he’s having a major recurrence of Saturn and Neptune.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. That was when the speaker closed Congress for the summer early without them voting on it and all that stuff happened. Yeah, absolutely. The Venus-Mars recurrence, the Saturn-Neptune recurrence, and then that hilarious fact that he’s got the Sun at zero Aquarius just cracks me up.
CB: Right. Yeah. So let’s go back to when he died because this is absolutely stunning. So it’s —
NDB: August 10th.
CB: — August 10th, 2019, and it turns out that this was a triple conjunction where Venus is at 16 degrees of Leo, the Sun is at 17 Leo, and Mars is at 25 Leo. And this is that same triple conjunction where oddly enough, you know, like a week later, Trump has that spat over Greenland and has that exchange with the Danish prime minister where they say that Greenland’s not for sale. And here at the same time we see Epstein dies under this triple conjunction in his jail cell.
NDB: Yeah —
CB: So that’s weird. Weirdly, I was expecting some news under this Venus-Mars conjunction this month about Epstein, and there were a couple of things. One of them – his brother did some sort of interview claiming that Epstein, that some autopsy report was gonna come out that he had done and that Epstein wasn’t killed or that he was convinced that Epstein was murdered and didn’t commit suicide and somehow that was gonna come out. And there was one other piece of news related to that recently, but I can’t remember what it was.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s not a stretch to imagine that the whole Maduro affair helps divert public attention from this story, although I don’t think it’ll succeed for too long. But yeah. You know, I think the administration wants it to go away.
CB: Right. I’m trying to find the other thing. I can’t find the other story, but that’s fine.
So that was one thing. But other instances that I found is in 2017, when – like, the very day on October 5th, 2017, let me put the actual chart up.
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: Can you see the – you’re looking at the animate chart, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So October 5th, 2017. The exact day of a Venus-Mars conjunction, the New York Times published an investigation detailing decades of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the famous Hollywood producer. And this – the day of a Venus-Mars conjunction set off very shortly after this, basically, the entire Me Too movement, and it exposed this systematic predation basically of women in the entertainment industry, which is like, Mars and Venus. And not too long after that, Alyssa Milano came out and she made the tweet with the phrase “Me Too” just days after this. And then this prompted millions of women to share their experiences and highlight sexual harassment and assault that they had experienced in different industries and different places in their personal life. So and this came out the day of a Venus-Mars conjunction.
So I wanted to bring that up, because I think that’s really important, especially because on Twitter it’s like, with the people being undressed obviously was mainly women that this was happening to and that it was often happening like, unconsensually, too.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, that’s, you know, it speaks for itself. You know, Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, to find these conjunctions everywhere in this story is, yeah, speaks to what you were touching on. All the different facets of consensual and nonconsensual interaction, you know, be it sexual or as we’ve seen military as well. Venus and Mars are of the lunar sect; they are about how we relate to each other at the best of times and the worst. But it is curious, these conjunctions and these like, the revelations of these really gross transgressions against people.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It’s very – yeah. It speaks volumes.
CB: Yeah. So there were other ones, like just to run through quickly, like February 10th, 1992, the Mike Tyson rape trial concluded and he was convicted at that time, and there was a whole discussion. It sort of changed the discussion in America about date rape and consent. And I was reading how it was saying like, before this time period, the concept was often dismissed, but then after this and some other things that happened during that time period, it was more legally solidified as an actual thing. So this is —
NDB: Well, you should also look at the date of the infraction. Desiree —
CB: I don’t wanna go there.
NDB: Oh, okay.
CB: But yeah, for sure.
NDB: It is a conjunction. Yeah.
CB: Okay. Was it —
NDB: It is a conjunction.
CB: — conjunction? Wow. Okay.
NDB: Yeah, July 18th, ‘91. Just so you have it.
CB: Got it. Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So I think that was important. There was also other ones I wanna just mention very briefly in passing, like… Because it connected the technology piece in a way that was important. But there was a conjunction August 24th of 1987, and this was actually a triple conjunction of the Sun, Venus, and Mars; it was very close in Virgo. And remember, the very close ones don’t happen super often. And around this time just after this, actually, in September, for most of this year there was this huge attempt to catch – well, basically, this was a historic date in September of 1987 because it was the first time that DNA was used to catch a rapist and a killer, basically. And there’s a whole story behind it about how he was like, evading it over the course of that year as they were testing different people and he was getting a coworker to take their blood and use that to try to hide what he was doing. But then one of the coworkers like, was talking about it and bragging about getting money to help this guy avoid this investigation, and a woman overheard it. And then she eventually went to the police on September 18th, 1987. So it starts getting, it’s a little distant, because this is like, more like the Sun being in the middle of Mars and Venus. But it’s just notable that around this time you had the first instance in which DNA was used in order to catch somebody like that, and then that would set the whole precedent technologically for everything after that point.
So I only mention this because this is one of the ones I found where there was a parallel where there was this weird technological element going on when it came to some of this stuff, and that seems relevant in different ways.
NDB: You just reminded – I don’t wanna divert you, you know, for more than second. But we were just talking about Tupac Shakur, and when you put up this chart, you reminded me of the very first high profile hiphop murder which occurred August 27th, 1987, a shooting of DJ Scott La Rock from Boogie Down Productions, and it was with the triple conjunction – the Sun, Venus, Mars very close. And since we were talking about shootings and Tupac Shakur, I just wanted to mention Scott La Rock’s shooting was also in that very close triple conjunction, August 27th, ‘87. Sorry. Let’s go back to science.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I wanna focus on this one.
So one last one I wanna mention that was also really striking is on January 10th, 1994, the Lorena Bobbitt trial began. This was January 10th, 1994, and this was a close triple conjunction with Venus at 18 Capricorn, Mars at 16, and the Sun at 20 Capricorn. And this was a really notable trial at the time, because it became this circus, but it became focused on and it brought up all these issues of like, sexual violence, marital rape, and physical violations of the body. Because she famously like, while he was sleeping, cut off his penis and threw it out the window of a moving car, but then during the trial said that he had sexually abused her, and it became this entire drama centered around all of those themes. But this was, again, a precedent of a Sun-Venus-Mars conjunction at a really important cultural moment when some of those discussions about consent and other things surrounding it and sexual violence and other things like that were being discussed. So I wanted to mention that here, just because I feel like there’s some sort of recurring theme here that we saw echoes of this month that are kind of important.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s funny, Bobbitt had Venus in Taurus opposite Mars in Scorpio, both of them with the nodes. Again, like, sort of the total opposite of this particular chart.
CB: Right, yeah. He did in the 6th and 12th house. And it was like, Mars was retrograde or something like that in a day chart.
NDB: Yeah. Correct. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s all I got for that. There’s others; that’s kind of a heavy one, but I’m trying to understand, and I wanna like… One of the things that happened this month is a bunch of really important news stories all arose at once. And they were all very distinctive in describing different aspects of the Venus-Mars archetype and sometimes the Sun-Venus-Mars archetype, so I wanted to explore as many of them and truly understand them as possible. And sometimes by going back and looking at past historical recurrences, we can develop a better idea of what we’re seeing and what the underlying similarity is that connects some of these different events.
So even though that, as well as the previous one, are very heavy, of course, I hope that makes sense in terms of as astrologers sometimes needing to look at some of these things with clear eyes in order to learn from them and understand sometimes what the potentials are in different scenarios.
NDB: Yeah. It really helps. The more of these you look at, the more you can look at charts blindly and pick things up right away. It’s very important to do this exercise, I think.
CB: Yeah. Okay. I think that’s good. Why don’t we take a little break, and then we’ll come back for the last couple of sections?
NDB: Sounds good.
CB: All right, let’s start our next major section where on January 9th, Russia launched a nuclear-capable missile in an attack on Ukraine. And while normally it wasn’t actually loaded with a nuclear weapon, it had the potential to be, and this was viewed as a potential warning about the use of nuclear weapons in the future by some observers. And one of the things I noticed astrologically is that this was the day of a Sun-Mars conjunction on January 9th. So that led me to look back at other triple conjunctions and other conjunctions in the past, and what was interesting is one of them I found was in 1968 when there was a nuclear nonproliferation treaty was signed. It was open for signatures under a very close triple conjunction of the Sun, Mars, and Venus. But in that instance, it was the attempt to control nuclear weapons and stop the proliferation rather than to use them.
NDB: Yeah. An anti-ballistic missile treaty, yeah. And then it led to the SALT One few years later.
CB: So here’s the chart for that. So the date is July 1st, 1968, and we see Mars at seven degrees of Cancer, the Sun at nine degrees of Cancer, and Venus at 13 degrees of Cancer. So it’s like, on the one hand, you have a treaty and an attempt to control – like you said – ICBM weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, but then on the other hand, you have Russia using an intercontinental – I believe – an ICBM this month in January of 2026, and it did not have nuclear weapons in it, but it was just the potential that it could is what was kind of scary.
NDB: Very. Very, very scary.
CB: So and you had pointed out that there was an announcement on this same day. On July 1st, 1968, President Johnson of the US announced an agreement to begin discussions, which is what would eventually lead to the SALT One treaty on limiting both offensive nuclear weapons as well as anti-ballistic missile defenses. And that actually also, the SALT treaty, would be signed on a Venus-Mars conjunction on May 26th, 1972.
NDB: Yeah. Just three weeks before the Watergate break-in would happen. This would have been one of Nixon’s crowning achievements if things had not gone awry a few weeks later! He had just been to China the previous month, and now he was doing this. He was like, you know, on top of the world just before everything fell. But there you go – Venus was just going retrograde copresent with Mars; it’s another one of those situations that’s not gonna reach Mars, but it’s certainly it’s very close within five degrees and —
CB: Right.
NDB: — opposite Jupiter, not unlike today. Venus-Mars —
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: — opposite Jupiter, yeah.
CB: You’re right, a Mars-Jupiter opposition. Wow.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So and for the degrees for those listening to the audio version, it’s like, Venus is at four degrees of Cancer stationary; Mars is at nine degrees of Cancer, and they’re both opposite Jupiter at six degrees of Capricorn.
So what was significant about this treaty again?
NDB: This was like, the major agreement – the other one, the one in 1968 was signed by the foreign ministers of the US and Soviet Union, whereas SALT One was signed by Richard Nixon and Brezhnev, the Secretary General of the Soviet Union – the top brass for the countries. And this was a more, you know, all-encompassing anti-ballistic missile and nuclear treaty, like you said, offensive and defensive things. So it was a much bigger version of what they had started in July of 1968 is the best way to put it. And there would be a SALT Two treaty later on under Carter, but it wasn’t anywhere near as important as this one.
CB: You know, this is something I didn’t realize and something that creates a connection with the triple conjunction we saw with Reagan and we connected with his huge increase in military spending under that triple conjunction in 1981 is that in these treaties in the 1968 one and the SALT treaty in 1972, they’re also anti-ballistic missile defense treaties making agreements not to develop systems that would shoot missiles out of the sky, and it would mess up the mutually assured destruction doctrine. And so that means that while the SALT treaty here is signed in 1972 and it restricts those anti-ballistic missile systems, one of the things Reagan then does a decade later in ‘81 by authorizing that on that triple conjunction, the huge hike in military spending, he also starts talking about the Star Wars system which would be one of those systems that would shoot ICBMs out of the sky and upset the balance of the mutually assured destruction doctrine.
NDB: Yeah, and speaking of Reagan, exactly almost to the day 16 years after the SALT One treaty was signed, in May of 1988, Reagan went to Moscow and signed a new anti-nuclear treaty with Gorbachev in Moscow, which would have seemed – I’ll get you the date right now – would have seemed utterly highly unlikely even two years earlier before Gorbachev and Reagan started talking. Let’s see, where is it? He spoke at the university on May 31st, is that the – no, the summit began May 29th, 1988. He spoke at Moscow State University, which may be the same day he was signing that treaty. The US Senate ratified an INF treaty with the Soviet Union May 27th, 1988, and Reagan signed it like, within a couple of days. So it’s late May, May 29th to May 31st – somewhere in those three days.
CB: Okay. But that doesn’t have anything to do with Venus and Mars in this instance?
NDB: It doesn’t; it’s just the Venus retrograde return. My apologies.
CB: Okay. Eight years later?
NDB: Yeah, the 16 years later, the Venus retrograde return. I just wanted to point that out.
CB: Got it.
NDB: Still astrology. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So specifically, though, related to Venus-Mars and triple conjunctions, I started looking elsewhere for triple conjunctions of Venus and Mars and the Sun, and a major one that I found was North Korea’s first nuclear test occurred close to a triple conjunction on October 9th, 2006. So here is what that looks like. October 9th, 2006, we see Venus at 11 Libra, the Sun at 16, and Mars at 20 Libra in a triple conjunction. And this was really important, because it changed the global security architecture, basically, forever when North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon, because North Korea is still be treated as like, a rogue state where extreme sanctions are being put on it, and then all of a sudden it detonates a nuclear weapon.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that was really important. And then… I thought there was one more North Korea one, but I can’t find it. I did find that there was one positive treaty; it’s a little bit wide, but it’s on this date. May 24th, 2002. Mars is at 27 Gemini and Venus is at five Gemini, and this is when President Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, in Moscow, and it committed both sides to slashing their deployed strategic nuclear warheads by nearly two-thirds. So it’s like, a treaty where they’re reducing the amount of nuclear weapons basically at that point, you know, 20 years ago near a Venus-Mars-Jupiter, because Jupiter’s also there in Cancer, conjunction. But now on the other end of that 20 years later, we have this escalating threat of nuclear weapons that’s, you know, starting to happen over the course of the past year. And that’s all the more startling as you and I have talked about in the last episode in December on Mars-Uranus conjunctions, just because the last and only time that nuclear weapons were deployed in war was during a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini. And so now that Uranus is back in Gemini, we’re coming up on four Mars-Uranus conjunctions over the course of the next several years starting on July 4th of 2026.
NDB: Yeah. It’s daunting. It is daunting.
CB: So and this, like I said, the use of this missile happened the day of a Sun-Mars conjunction here in January, so the concern is that this may be one of several other like, seed moments that we’ll have to pay attention to in the future.
NDB: I fear.
CB: All right, so let’s move onto our final story, which is starting around January 7th and up until the present point where today is January 11th, protests in Iran which started already in December started becoming widespread across major cities and provinces over the course of the past week. And you know, it’s really hard to tell from an outside perspective like, how much is, I don’t know, genuine organic things versus other possibilities, but there is a lot like, pictures and video and eventually one of the things that happened over the past week is the Iranian government severed the internet and cut off the ability for Iranians to access the internet. And each night, at least in the west, we keep seeing on social media these pictures and these videos of what seem like increasingly large protests and also reports of violence, of protestors starting to be shot and like, lots of people dying and other things like that so that at the present time like, seems like it’s something that’s building up more. And so this led me to start looking into and researching recurrences in the history of Iran. And you know, part of the backdrop with that even before we get into the triple conjunction ones is one year ago when you and I did the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions episode, we realized that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions were really important in the history of Iran, and they had come up at least in two or three other really defining moments in Iranian history. And the short version of that is basically one of the things that happened is in 1917, there was a major famine in Iran, and it set up the circumstances that allowed for a British-backed coup to take place in 1921 just a few years later, a few years after the conjunction. Then you jump forward and there’s another Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1953, and this time there’s a US-backed coup that installs the Shah as the leader of Iran and gets rid of the more democratically-oriented government at the time. Then you have the Iranian Revolution in 1979 which is not a conjunction, but interestingly it’s a Saturn-Neptune square, and you have a religious government coming into place and replacing the previous secular government. And then the last thing that we noted in that episode a year ago, you noted that the leader of Iran who had led the Revolution in 1979 actually died in 1989 on the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which was the last one that happened prior to the one that we’re experiencing right now.
So that was something you and I were noting last year at the beginning of last year as being an important recurrence transit then, because we knew that that had been so important in the history of Iran and that it kind of implied then that there was a really important turning point that was about to take place. And what’s a little ironic about that is like, we were convinced – I was convinced – that there was going to be, that the US was gonna invade Iran last year and that it was gonna take place, I was thinking it was gonna happen earlier, closer to the Aries eclipse that was in the March-April timeframe. And the US ended up moving all of its forces into place for that, or began moving them into place for that, but then the actual invasion didn’t happen until – or military strike – didn’t happen until June shortly after Saturn moved into Aries, which is important because the sign of Aries was very crucial, we could tell, in several eclipses up to that point where Iran, its leader was born with an Aries stellium that includes Saturn and the Sun, and an eclipse that took place the day he was born in Aries. Whereas for Israel, the leader had a Libra stellium and was born the day of a solar eclipse in Libra. So Aries kept coming up over and over again for Iran for the past several years that there were eclipses taking place there, but it was really the Aries eclipse last year was a omen of that, of what was to come. But the timing ended up being the Saturn ingress into Aries in June, and then the Saturn-Neptune conjunction came the closest at that point but it didn’t go exact. It came close to that, and then it retrograded away in July, and then Saturn and Neptune both retrograded out of Aries over the course of the past several months starting in September. But now Saturn and Neptune are getting ready to go back in and actually complete their conjunction in February, which creates the larger mundane backdrop, I believe, of everything that’s happening now. But then it turns out that there’s some other triple conjunction things behind everything as well.
NDB: Yes. Yes. And some other things that we alluded to earlier as well. So there’s all kinds of things pertaining to Iran for this conversation. Where should we start?
CB: It’s hard; there’s so much. Because I was like, I’ve been having to learn more about it, because we learned a lot last year when we did the Saturn-Neptune episode, and we were talking about the 1953 conjunction. One of the things I was learning about last night that was fascinating, you know, because let’s just talk about Saturn-Neptune conjunctions first and set that backdrop and that stage. One of the things that’s interesting about the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that we focused on is that one of the things I didn’t know or that I learned recently or one of the speculations from a historian was that they said part of the reason the US participated in the coup in 1953 was because of paranoia that was taking off at the time about the Russians, about Russian paranoia, basically, and about the Communists taking over everything. And so that was part of the justification supposedly of the coup in 1953 internally. And what’s interesting is that the coup really got going immediately after Eisenhower is elected at the beginning of 1953 and then gives it the green light. But I was really interested that there was a crossover there I didn’t know about about the increasingly Saturn-Neptune – one of the things that happens sometimes in Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is like, paranoia about things, and that that was a bit of a crossover there.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it drove everyone into a panic, and this was the Dulles brothers, and they used Iran as a kind of testing ground for what they would continue to do elsewhere, like Guatemala the following year. But yeah. It was a terrifying time for them, and everything was totally turned upside down. I’m not sure if we mentioned this during the conjunction; I feel like I might have, but the opposition of Saturn-Neptune that happened in 1971 fell in the middle of this huge international event in Iran when the Shah celebrated the 2500th anniversary of the Persian dynasty. And he had all these world leaders there – Queen Elizabeth, Henry Kissinger, you know, all these notable names. And to host this event, the Shah had a lot of political dissidents, you know, arrested so they wouldn’t be causing trouble during this big international event. And that stirred a lot of the resentment that would bubble up later when the Revolution happened seven years later.
So it’s interesting just looking at the conjunction that this period in ‘71 with the opposition was also very pivotal and is sort of like, a halfway point between the overthrow of Mossadegh in ‘53 and then the revolution in ‘78 and the death of Khomeini in ‘89.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah. Conjunction and opposition, square, conjunction. Yeah.
CB: Right, yeah. The full cycle being relevant. One of the things to go back to the conjunction in 1953 that was also important that you and I focused on, again, one year ago in the Saturn-Neptune episode that tied together the 1989 conjunction symbolically was in 1953, the attempted coup was actually failing. Like, they were actually, they were bumbling it and it almost failed. But then the people doing the coup took over a radio station and they started broadcasting a message saying the coup was successful and that a new government had taken over. And then that kind of like, bluff basically ends up working, and then people start rallying around them, and then it leads to the downfall of the existing government. So there was this element of like, confusion or deception that was going on that was very fitting for a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And then in 1989, we saw something similar with the fall of the Berlin Wall where there was like, a false report – there was some confusion that happened, and there was a false report that came out that said to open the gates or something like that, but it was a mistake. But then as a result of that mistake, the entire thing just falls apart at that point, even though it was a misunderstanding.
NDB: Yeah. They asked an East German official when people would be able allowed to cross the wall, and he didn’t know the answer so he just off the top of his head he said, “Right away, today.” So people just ran, you know – they headed there and that’s how it happened. It was very sudden. He was just caught off guard, you know? He wasn’t expecting the question, didn’t really know the answer. I don’t think there was really a plan, but that’s how it happened.
CB: I mean, it happens to the best of us, you know?
NDB: Yeah. You know, like —
CB: Who among us?
NDB: Well, you know, it kind of happened the other day when someone blurted out that actually, you know, the US is gonna occupy and run Venezuela. And I think some of the State Department thought they were just going in for Maduro. And that was something that was also said off the top of a head during an interview, so those things do happen.
CB: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I have no idea what their actual plans are in terms of that, but so, okay. So there’s a Saturn-Neptune element, so that’s something we have to pay attention to in terms of the Neptunian, the deceptive element to it. And so let’s get into some of the – oh yeah. But the last point is I was surprised, because I didn’t know until recently that the previous Saturn-Neptune conjunction before the 1953 one was also really important for Iran where in 1917, there was this massive famine that took place in Iran, and it was one of the worst social and natural disasters in the history of the country where just millions and millions of people died. And it weakened the country and it’s one of the things that set it up so that in 1921 the British encouraged and kind of backed a coup that then took place at that point as well, which is the thing that set up and installed the Pahlavi dynasty, which would then go on to be the centerpiece of the 1953 coup and then would have their downfall at the 1979 revolution, and then more recently as we’re having another Saturn-Neptune conjunction, of course, are coming back up again in the news.
NDB: Yeah. The – Reza Shah Pahlavi, the first Shah Pahlavi, came in I think around 1925 as the full Shah. And he was in power until —
CB: Well, he came in in 1921, but then he was elevated in 1925.
NDB: That’s what I mean, yeah. To the Shah position. Yeah. And he was in power until 1941; he was deposed just as Mars was going retrograde in Aries in September of ‘41, because the Soviets and the English were worried that he would sell oil to the Germans. Germany wanted Iranian oil. So they overthrew him and put his son in place, and it’s his son, the second Shah Pahlavi, who would be the guy who would be restored to power in ‘53 and overthrown in ‘79, and then he died of cancer in 1980.
CB: Right. Yeah. So to give some context, though, because it’s like, one of the things that they’re saying is that there’s major economic issues that have gotten really bad in Iran recently due to inflation and other issues like that with the value of the currency, and that this is part of what may be fueling some of the protests and the riots and things like that. And I was just thinking about how in this Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1917, the most conservative estimates are that like, two million people died, which was roughly 20 percent of the population, whereas higher estimates say the toll was something like eight to 10 million people, which would be —
NDB: Whoa.
CB: — closer to like, 50 percent of the population, which is just an insane number.
NDB: Yeah, that’s a lot.
CB: Yeah. So I wanted to put that point there to make that clear in context that that’s really important, because that was the year of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So it’s not, you know, it’s not just the later conjunctions like ‘53 and ‘89, but also this earlier one.
So I wanna jump forward to… I was looking at some of the triple conjunctions and the Venus-Mars conjunctions, and there are some really important ones that were taking place that were like, building up to the 1953 coup I think, right?
NDB: Yeah. Where do we start here? Yeah, there was an attempt on the Shah’s life in 1949. Is that where we’re starting?
CB: I think let’s start with the nationalization of the proposal basically to nationalize the oil in 1951. That was February 19th, 1951, and what’s interesting about it is it’s a Mars-Venus conjunction; Mars is at 22 Pisces, and Venus is at three Pisces. And this whole period is really interesting, because there’s this figure, this democratically elected figure, Mossadegh, who rises to power at this point in time. And he’s trying to institute like, some positive changes for the country, basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. He’s not a Communist, but he’s accused of being one. But he wants to nationalize the oil industry; Iran has a lot of oil. It’s been pilfered by the English and the Russians and now the Americans, so he’s just trying to keep the local product local, so to speak, and not have it run by outsiders.
Mossadegh had a natal Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is interesting as well, so it was a recurrence for him when he was overthrown in ‘53. But yeah – in ‘51, he nationalizes the Persian oil holdings.
CB: Got it. Okay. So we have this, and what happens is like, he makes this proposal, but then the prime minister doesn’t think it’s a good idea basically for various reasons. But then he gets assassinated on March 7th, 1951, and —
NDB: On a solar eclipse.
CB: Yeah, that’s what I was about to say. So Venus and Mars are still close. Like, Venus is at 13 Aries and Mars is at four degrees of Aries. But this is literally the day of a solar eclipse at 16 degrees of Pisces. The prime minister who’s pushing back against nationalizing the oil industry, he gets assassinated, and then that clears the way basically where the Iranian parliament then on March 15th votes to nationalize the oil industry at this point. And look at —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — what happens when you jump there. This is all happening during this crazy eclipse season as well as this Venus-Mars conjunction in Aries or copresence. But it’s in between when they nationalize it the Pisces eclipse that took place on the assasination, and then here when the parliament votes it’s in that interim between two eclipses because it’s building up to a lunar eclipse on March 23rd in Libra.
NDB: Yeah, it’s wild. It all happens very, very fast.
CB: Yeah. So they nationalized the oil industry, and then this is what sets in motion this chain of events. Oh, you had mentioned the earlier – because there’s this tension between the Shah or the king of Iran is still in place, but there’s these democratic, there’s like, a prime minister and there’s these democratic processes that have been integrated at the same time. But it’s creating this tension. And you had mentioned that a few years earlier on February 4th, 1949, somebody attempted to assassinate the Shah under a Sun-Mars conjunction, right?
NDB: Yeah. Sun-Mars in Aquarius. And those conjunctions don’t happen often; you know, it’s the rarest one, so but that’s what was happening in ‘49. There was an attempt – someone tried to shoot him.
CB: So this is February 4th, 1949, and we see the Sun at 15 and Mars at 24 Aquarius.
NDB: Yeah. The actual conjunction would happen in Pisces, but you can see they’re approaching there in Aquarius. And even for them to just be copresent in Aquarius does not happen very often.
CB: Got it. Okay. So we eventually get to like, there’s crazy eclipses happening in Leo and Aquarius during the 1953 coup, but one of them… I’m trying to find the breakdown. Like, this is… Is there an event before this? This is the radio broadcast – August 19th – but is there a prior one we should look at? I think the solar eclipse in Leo was important. I’m losing my notes on it, though.
NDB: Oh, okay. Earlier in August, I don’t know anything, but I’m gonna look it up now. I have other things from earlier in the year and other events leading up to that. Well, according to here, the coup d’etat actually starts on August 15th, so it’s like a four-day thing. 19th is the culmination. What day was the eclipse that summer?
CB: So the eclipse is on August 9th right in the middle of Leo, and there was a preceding lunar eclipse on July 26th. So there’s just like, this crazy eclipse season that’s happening, and one of the things that perked up my ears seeing this is that it’s happening in Leo and Aquarius, and this is the same eclipse series that we’re about to start next month when we get our first eclipse in Aquarius, which will be followed six months later by our first eclipse in Leo.
NDB: Okay.
CB: So what happens is that the Mossadegh nationalizes the oil industry and then this creates tensions with the Shah or the king, and then the king gets kicked out of the country basically at this point in August, right?
NDB: Yeah, or he leaves. Yeah. He’s either kicked out or he’s intimidated to leave, but yeah, he goes.
CB: Okay. And then what happens is that he’s brought back, basically, when this – like, when he’s kicked out, the Americans and the CIA ends up backing this coup and putting like five million dollars into it or something like that to fund the overthrow of the democratically elected government, and then to bring the Shah back from being exiled basically.
NDB: Yeah. They bring him in and they install him as more of a full-on dictator, not so much a figurehead with other governmental powers, democratic governmental powers. So yeah, they install him as their puppet, basically.
CB: Got it, okay. So and you have a date – you said when does he return?
NDB: I believe it’s on the 19th.
CB: Of August?
NDB: That’s what I thought.
CB: Yeah —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that makes sense. Okay. Because it’s on the 18th, I believe. Right? The 18th is the radio broadcast?
NDB: Something – it all does happen very fast, so I don’t have it broken down to the hour.
CB: Actually it’s the 19th. So it’s —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — I just found it. So it’s August 19th, the false radio broadcast goes out saying even though the coup’s failing I guess that the coup’s being successful, and then all of a sudden it starts working and influencing people, and they start backing the coup. And then in like, very quick succession, the Shah is brought back to Iran and the leader up to that point, Mossadegh, is overthrown.
NDB: Yeah. The Shah was hiding out in a hotel in Italy, but yeah, he flew back from Rome to Tehran virtually right away.
CB: So what’s interesting is what we see here by this point is like, a Sun-Mars-Pluto-Mercury conjunction, and I thought that was kind of interesting because the stellium is heading towards Aquarius right now where Pluto is, so there’s gonna be a stellium like that just next month of —
NDB: Right.
CB: — Sun, Mars, Pluto, Mercury and Venus as well, actually, for that matter.
So okay, so that’s the 1953 coup. They’re successful. The US overthrows the existing leader who tried to nationalize the oil industry. They bring the Shah or the king back, and he works with the US and the oil companies to continue doing business as usual. He has a really severe government style that’s oppressive even though he’s like, liberalizing the social things in society and he sets up a university and different things like that for a couple of decades from the 1950s through the 1960s, there’s some not good things as well at the same time, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, his father had really liberalized the country already in the ‘30s. Women didn’t have to wear scarves or burkas or anything like that; people were wearing western clothing. It was quite, quite modern cosmopolitan by all extent. But yes, with a repressive regime that would crush dissent and what have you, so it was kind of a, you know, a facade of a liberal regime, I suppose.
CB: Got it. Okay. So what we come to next that’s really important is we get to like, 1978 – so we fast forward a couple of decades to the Iranian Revolution. And what’s the story? Give me the background of the story of the Iranian Revolution.
NDB: Right. Well, in the early ‘60s, there was this one dissenter, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was exiled from Iran, and he was exiled to France; he lived in France for a good 16, 18 years, whatever it was. And he sort of built up a following of Iranian ex-pat religious followers who wanted to overthrow the Shah and take back the country. And he had this movement going. And New Year’s Eve 1977, President Carter and Rosalynn Carter were in Iran, were in Tehran for New Year’s Eve. And on live television in front of the whole country – Carter and the Shah toasted with glasses of champagne, which is very taboo in Islam.
So that really set people off – the image of the Shah toasting, you know, drinking champagne and toasting with the president was very provocative. And so there started to be dissent and uprising, what have you. Then in the autumn of 1978, the revolution went into full force. It kind of took on a life of its own, probably not unlike today. This was the period when Venus was retrograde in Scorpio with Uranus. You were referring earlier to the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of 1978. The one in 1978 was particularly kooky; it was Venus retrograde in Scorpio copresent with Mars and Uranus in Scorpio. And during the 40 days that that Venus retrograde happened, there were all kinds of nutty things happening in the world. If you know who the Sex Pistols were, that was when Sid killed Nancy; this is when Jonestown happened; this is when Harvey Milk was murdered; this is when John Wayne Gacy was found and arrested. Just really, everything was really sort of overtop and kooky. And the Iranian Revolution was happening under this backdrop. And it went on and on until January of ‘79 —
CB: Whoa, wait. Don’t skip. Hold on, let’s stay —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — with this.
NDB: Okay.
CB: So —
NDB: Yeah?
CB: So this is really important. So it’s like, the Iranian Revolution earlier in 1978 is already starting to pick up steam. And one of the things that’s funny is you and I talked about that last year in our Mars retrograde in Cancer episode, I belive, because Mars was retrograde in Cancer at that time in the 47-year repetition. So you and I actually discussed how the Iranian Revolution was getting going under that Mars retrograde that was happening at that time. But it’s interesting —
NDB: Venus.
CB: — that that then under the Venus – oh, okay. Right. The Venus retrograde in Aries. So it was in the Venus retrograde in Aries —
NDB: Scorpio.
CB: — episode. I’m talking about last year. So I’m talking about the retrograde that happened a year ago. So I was right —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — right?
NDB: Yes, yes. A year ago, it was Aries. I thought you were talking about the one in front of us; my apologies.
CB: Well, no, but that’s what’s interesting is you and I did this whole piece on how the Iranian Revolution got going in early ‘78 under some of the conditions that were present in our timeframe one year ago in early 2025. But now we’re moving into the following year, which is the conditions that were actually present once the revolution became successful in late 1978 and early 1979. So —
NDB: Right.
CB: But to sort of sharpen that is like, the Iranian Revolution, its origins are earlier in 1978, and you have this religious cleric who is exiled, but he’s very popular and he’s growing increasingly popular, and he’s issuing political statements tied up with religious statements from abroad. And then the Iranian Revolution’s getting more and more serious, and then on September 8th, 1978, is the Black Friday Massacre where troops —
NDB: Right.
CB: — opened fire on a group of protestors, killing nearly a hundred people. And this is the thing that really pours gasoline on the Iranian Revolution and makes it sort of spiral out of control during the course of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio that you were talking about, which is taking place over the next couple of months, especially in October and November of 1978. Because we get a Venus-Mars conjunction where Mars overcomes Venus like in some of those past instances. So right here we have October 21st, Venus at 22 Scorpio and Mars comes up and conjoins it at 22 Scorpio while Uranus and Mercury are present in the same sign.
NDB: Indeed. The shooting at Jaleh Square I believe happened just as Venus was making the ingress into Scorpio, even, but yeah —
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: — it mounted and mounted and mounted.
CB: So September – I mean, I’ll back it up to September 8th. Oh you’re right – literally like, that —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — day —
NDB: Yeah, I have that —
CB: — Venus —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Nice.
NDB: In my chart time for Tehran – because of course Tehran’s further ahead – yeah, Venus is full on at zero Scorpio. So yeah. Yeah.
CB: So and this is important, because this Venus retrograde in Scorpio is gonna repeat this year. The thing that’s weird is that – where there’s a weird reversal because this retrograde’s gonna repeat later this year in October and November in Scorpio, and there’s an event we’re about to talk about in January that’s a repetition, the Sun-Mars conjunction of the event that just took place or is taking place this month. But this Venus retrograde in Scorpio’s very important, because it seems like that’s when the revolution truly took off and became something —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that the Shah couldn’t control anymore.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah, the thing is, of course, the Venus cycle is an eight-year cycle, so you get a Venus return at 48, whereas the Mars cycle is alternate sums of 15 and 17. First Mars return is 15; the next one is 17 years later at 32. And then the next one is 15 years later at 47. So it’s just like, I mean, the reason it goes off is that Mars is a 47 thing and Venus is a 48. So whereas in 1978, you have Venus go retrograde in Scorpio followed by a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn, this time we get a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn followed later that year by the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, if you can follow, because of that difference between Venus being 48 and Mars being 47.
CB: Yeah. I think it’ll become clear in a second when we get to that conjunction in Capricorn.
NDB: Fair.
CB: But so the point being is that at the last quarter of 1978, this Venus retrograde and this Mars-Venus conjunction puts gasoline on the fuel of the revolution so that by the end of the year, it’s gotten out of control from the perspective of the Shah. And by January, Venus stations direct in early December but it’s still like, coming off of this retrograde by the time we get to January. And then the date is January 16th, right? Or 17th?
NDB: I believe so.
CB: Or is it the 17th?
NDB: I have 16th.
CB: Okay. So it finally comes to this date – January 16th, 1979 – when the revolution has gained so much steam, the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Revolution in Iran has gained so much steam that the king or the Shah of Iran decides to leave the country for different reasons, and it happens right on this Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn, right?
NDB: Yes. And a reminder that 32 years – no, sorry, not 32 years earlier, 30 years earlier there was an attempt on his life when the Sun and Mars were copresent in Aquarius.
CB: Oh wow, yeah. Near that conjunction.
NDB: Right. And 32 years after this at the next conjunction of the Sun-Mars in Capricorn would be the Arab Spring – the beginning of the Arab Spring. I realize Iranians aren’t Arabs, but these big, Islamic uprisings that overthrow governments – there is something to it.
And yeah —
CB: So if it was 32 years earlier that the assassination attempt took place, that means that that was also a —
NDB: That was —
CB: — Venus retrograde in Scorpio year?
NDB: No, no. That was a 30-year one. I misspoke when I said —
CB: Oh, okay.
NDB: — the 1941. But the Arab Spring is 32 years later, so that’s —
CB: Okay. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: Mars —
CB: So what’s important here is so the Shah decides to like, leave, and he goes to Europe. People don’t know, but he actually has like, cancer. He has leukemia and he’s dying and he’s partially going for a treatment, but there’s some idea that he might come back. But he leaves at this point on this Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn in the middle of January of 1979, and then shortly after this, the Ayatollah comes back to Iran from exile and the entire government that existed up to that point for decades collapses very rapidly.
NDB: Yeah. And what’s interesting, when the Shah leaves, the Sun-Mars is in Capricorn. And when the Ayatollah arrives, it’s February 1st, by which point they’re both in Aquarius. So there’s sort of like a shift over, if you will, between the Capricorn-Aquarius and the two distinctly different regimes.
CB: Right. Yeah. And Jupiter’s in Leo. And so this is important, because what’s crazy about this, about the Shah leaving on January 16th, 1979, is we’re having an exact 47-year Mars repetition of that, a planetary period repetition of a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn this month. And I’m gonna change the increments to 47 years and then jump forward from January 16th, 1979; it takes us to January 16th, 2026, where in January we’re having the same repetition of, like we said, every 47 years Mars will go retrograde in the same places but also the Sun-Mars conjunctions will happen in the same places around the same month, basically, or within a few days. And that’s what’s happening right now, and I keep seeing commentators commenting on how striking it is that this has been happening over the past week exactly 47 years since the Shah first left, which opened —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — it up for the current government. And I think that’s so striking, because I don’t know why sometimes the commenters are mentioning that, except that it’s taking place at the same point in mid-January. But from our perspective as astrologers, there’s this incredibly striking 47-year repetition that’s taking place basically.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I think they are commenting on it because the ‘78, ‘79 revolution did kind of feel like that. Like, it was really out of control. But nonetheless, you’re right. I mean, to astrologers, it means so much more.
The other things that happen at 47 – there’s a nodal half-return. And I think that’s very important with regard to the difference between the two events that are 47 years apart; like, there’s a flip involved. And Jupiter is usually —
CB: Which is to say that the —
NDB: Go ahead.
CB: Which is to say that the South Node is in Virgo and the North Node is in Pisces now, and 47 years ago the North Node was in Virgo and the South Node was in Pisces so that functionally like, eclipses are taking place in the same signs.
NDB: In the same signs, but with a very, you know, with a sort of reverse dynamic. The North Node and South Node are very different from each other, so to have the half-return, to have the North where the South was and vice-versa, there is something sort of awkward about it. It’s not a perfect return; it’s almost like a mirror image or flipside rather than, you know, something that’s completely copacetic. So yeah, it’s interesting the way that coincides that way.
CB: So and in the revolution, like you were saying, in 1979, the Shah leaves under the Sun-Mars conjunction and then the Ayatollah comes back on February 1st. And then I was trying to read and understand it more, but it seems like at first there’s some dialogue and back-and-forth about whether some elements of the preexisting government are gonna continue to exist, but then pretty quickly over the next several months they’re like, dismantled, and a new government is created.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s a whole new, you know, ultra, ultra orthodox Shiite regime, you know? Very strictly Islamic. During that Venus retrograde, you know, women in Iran had to go from wearing western clothing to going back to scarves and burkas and what have you virtually overnight – very Venus retrograde.
CB: During the Scorpio one?
NDB: Yeah. Leading —
CB: Oh wow, okay. Got it.
NDB: And yeah, you know, it was a very oppressive regime. And then we’re building up to the hostage crisis a year later, but I’m sure you don’t wanna get derailed by that, other than it’s another Mars retrograde in Virgo thing like we’re gonna have next year.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the weird things is just… So to go back to the, you know, the weird discrepancy between the Mars and Venus thing that’s a little bit off this year that has me curious how that’s gonna play out is that in 1979, the Venus retrograde in Scorpio came first, and then the Sun-Mars conjunction came after in January, and that ended up being the final turning point. And the Venus retrograde had accelerated the revolution, but the Sun-Mars conjunction was like, the decapitation of the existing king, basically, the Shah. But this year in 2026, the Sun-Mars conjunction is coming first. Like, this month it’s already happened, actually; the exact conjunction happened January 9th, which is right when a lot of this was really kicking off and becoming intense. But then the Venus retrograde in Scorpio isn’t happening until later this year, but we already know that something else really important is gonna happen first, which is next month the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is gonna go exact and both Saturn and Neptune are gonna move into the sign of Aries. And that seems really crucial, because we also know – and eclipse season is gonna kick in starting February 17th, with the first eclipse in Aquarius and then a second eclipse in Virgo on March 3rd. So there’s like, some major stuff coming up —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And we know that Saturn-Neptune conjunction is important, because the 1989 one was crucial, right?
NDB: That was the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini; he died in 1989 during the conjunction, June of 1989. The other thing about the coming month along with the Saturn —
CB: So it’s like, hold on – don’t move on from that. So the guy that led the revolution in 1979 dies on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1989?
NDB: Exactly. And he’s such an important figurehead. I mean, they have other leaders after him, but they can never really, you know, he was the, yeah. He was kind of a messianic figure, so he’s not easily replaced. So there was something – I think the country felt lost after he died.
CB: One of the things that’s really interesting about that in 1979 I was looking at and didn’t fully appreciate until last night is how there’s this Saturn-Neptune square that’s taking place in like, ‘78, ‘79, and so where Saturn’s going through Virgo and it’s squaring Neptune at different points. And that’s part of the signature for the Iranian Revolution is this Saturn-Neptune square. And it starts going like, really exact later in ‘79 when Saturn starts getting to the later part of – the middle parts – of Virgo. Like here, for example, like, August-September of ‘79, Saturn is squaring Neptune from Virgo to Sagittarius.
NDB: Yeah. It would continue into 1980, too. First half of 1980 still in square. But yeah.
CB: And during that period, it’s like, this formerly somewhat secular republic is being transformed into a religious state or religious republic, basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. Very, very religious. Yeah, the Shia Muslims are the more sort of devout, orthodox, you know, if you can make those analogies, compared to the Sunni. So yeah. It’s very, very strict, very dour. You know, very religious.
CB: It just – I think that’s really remarkable, because one of the things you and I saw in the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions episode was we saw a bunch of instances in history of like, religious communities or communities being created based on a religious or philosophical vision was a really common Saturn-Neptune conjunction event that we saw come up at different points in history. So I thought that was really interesting that that’s part of what came up here with the Saturn-Neptune square.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed.
CB: It’s like, you have a religious leader or religious cleric who arises who leads a revolution and then reconfigures a country based on a religious or philosophical or ideological idea or agenda. And there’s been other periods in history where that’s happened as well based on different ideologies. Like, even you know, we showed how like, Communism is developed under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction back in the 1800s, for example.
NDB: Right. Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. All over the place.
CB: All right, well…
NDB: Yeah. I wanted – oh, sorry. What were you gonna say?
CB: So 1989, let me just – do you have the date for when that happened?
NDB: June… Sorry, there’s an insect bothering me. It is summer here. June 3rd, 1989.
CB: June 3rd. Okay. So we see Saturn at 12 degrees of Capricorn conjunct Neptune at 11 degrees of Capricorn, so it’s extremely close. And then this was the death of the Ayatollah. And then does the current Ayatollah come in at this point?
NDB: No, no. They’ve been through a few.
CB: Okay.
NDB: No, no. They’ve been through a few. You know, two, three, four? I forget. I haven’t been keeping track, but no, it’s been a few.
CB: Got it, okay. But this was a definite like, major ending point of a major chapter there on that conjunction?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, he’s wildly popular. He’s not replaceable by anyone in that sense.
CB: One of the things I was struck by is how in the 1979 revolution in some of the video footage, it seems like there’s so many like, young people that seem excited and swept up in the ideas of the revolution and that there’s an ideological or religious fervor surrounding some of the supporters who are really stoked about it. And it’s interesting how – that there may be like, differences now from back then, and some of the idealism that people might have in starting something like that where it is at the end of that Saturn-Neptune cycle almost 40 years later now.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Iran’s a big country with a lot of people, so not unlike the US, you have a chunk of the population who are religious and devout and look down on secular liberality. But then you have a lot of very westernized, you know, people living in the present who are secular who enjoy western culture; they wanna go skiing and wear bikinis and listen to hip-hop and play video games and do things that people around the world do. So there is, you know, that clash has always been there. It’s just for the past 47 years, it’s been under this shroud that really discouraged these sort of western interests. But yeah. There are a lot of people in Iran, especially particularly young people, and they have a high percentage of young people who wanna live in the same kind of western democracy that you and I have enjoyed living in up until recently. So yeah, you know, it’s a complicated country in that way, not unlike the US where you just, you got different kinds of people who happen to be living within the same border.
CB: Yeah. One of the things I was reading about the 1979 revolution is there was a difference between like, the cities versus the countryside where the Shah had done a lot more development of the cities and city life and especially for the upper classes had a lot of benefits from the oil wealth and things like that, but that the countryside didn’t and was like, languishing in poverty – and in some instances, like extreme poverty – and that that’s part of what created some of the conditions for the revolution in 1979. And yeah.
NDB: Yeah, it’s a rugged, mountainous place. I did fly over Iran once coming from South Africa, flying to Canada. I flew over it. It’s very mountainous, so it’s not the – it’s a kind of place where people are living very remotely from each other, so it’s not even that they’d be rural in the sense, like, if you’re living in the rural US and there’s just this one little state highway or whatever. It’s really rugged and rocky, so people are kind of partitioned off from each other. But you’re absolutely right. The rural-urban divide is – along with the rich-poor divide, it’s a universal thing whether you’re in Iran, China, the US, Canada, South Africa. We all have that. We all have, you know, city people and country people. And that’s an ongoing struggle. But you’re absolutely right; the Shah played into the cosmopolitan, city, western, secular kind of part of the culture at the expense of people living out in the fringe.
CB: Right. Yeah. So I guess it’s just, it’ll be interesting to see if that’s one of the tensions, because you know, what we’re reading – and it’s like, it’s hard sometimes for me to distinguish between what’s propaganda and what’s not, especially knowing that there’s a Saturn-Neptune conjunction happening right now, but that there may be some issues with the currency crashing and how bad the economy has become, and therefore people partially uprising as a result of economic issues and whether that’s not the case again here, or whether that ends up playing some sort of role, I guess we’ll see.
One of the things I just noticed – what was the date we were looking at again? It was this – it was June 3rd, 1989, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s when he died, yeah.
CB: Something I just noticed again, because I see the nodes are again in Leo and Aquarius is that the eclipses are in the process of switching over from the Pisces-Virgo axis to the Leo-Aquarius axis in 1979 when this major changeover takes place. And that’s of course, you know, one of the things that’s happening this year is that the eclipses are starting to shift from the Pisces-Virgo axis to the Aquarius-Leo axis. And I keep seeing —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — eclipses in the Aquarius-Leo axis especially as being important in Iranian history, so that’s another kind of suggestive thing with the first Aquarius eclipse coming up here in February and then the first Leo eclipse coming up in August.
NDB: Yeah. You know, this is 37 years ago; 37 years is a nodal return, so indeed this summer the nodes will be moving right to where they were when the Ayatollah died. I think it’s July or August that the nodes change sign.
And speaking of Aquarius, this is the thing I wanted to say about all this – like, the upcoming month, you know, this February, Saturn and Neptune are gonna be conjunct in Aries. But we’re also gonna have this massive stellium in Aquarius, and —
CB: Right.
NDB: — I mean, you know, you made the point about the eclipses in Aquarius and Leo; I fully agree with that. But there’s something about Iran with Mars in Aquarius that’s kind of wild. Now, you remember I showed you the attempt on the Shah’s life in February of ‘49; Mars was in Aquarius with the Sun. When the —
CB: Yeah. Be careful.
NDB: When the Ayatollah – this is all good – when the Ayatollah came in in February of ‘79, the Sun and Mars were in Aquarius. If you go – you remember I was telling you in 1971 when Saturn was opposite Neptune, go to October 12th, 1971. October 12th, 1971?
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. So this was when the Shah had that big event with the 2,500 year anniversary of the Persian dynasty; Queen Elizabeth, Henry Kissinger, all these dignitaries – massive, massive event. You know, Olympic-size kind of event. And Mars is with the North Node in Aquarius; it had just been retrograde that summer as he was having all these people arrested so that they wouldn’t cause trouble for the big event, cleaning up everything, but cleaning up in a way that wasn’t pleasant for the people who he wanted to remain invisible for the event. So you know, again, it just like, it’s always this Mars in Aquarius thing pops up in a lot of places in Iranian history. And Mars spends less time in Aquarius than any of the 12 signs of the zodiac proportionately. It just, it’s there less frequently than any of the other signs. But whether it’s coming out of a retrograde here, or whether it’s in the conjunctions with the Sun or what have you, it just it always – it often seems to be in Aquarius during very curious times. So yeah, some of what unfolds could even be awaiting us just in the coming weeks as we move into that Aquarius stellium.
The other thing I wanted to —
CB: Yeah. The – before you move on from that point, you know, the next really… Because I wanna talk a bit about future transits here, and we can give a whole list. But one of the really rough ones, the really nasty ones that we know is coming up – because in the year ahead forecast we had identified the Mars-Jupiter opposition especially as being rough at the beginning of the month, but then the later part of the month, the worst aspect is the Mars-Pluto conjunction that’s taking place here around January 26, 27th, and 28th. And that’s in January probably the next worst aspect, but then in February, all of the Aquarius planets start hitting late Aquarius where they all start squaring Uranus, which itself is making its final station in the sign of Taurus in early February.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, it’s an electric month, and it wouldn’t surprise me – I mean, obviously Iran is already turning upside-down, but knowing what I know about Mars in Aquarius in Iranian history, I’m just, my hunch is that that late January-February period is gonna be really, really critical before we even get to the Venus retrograde in Scorpio next year.
CB: Right. And there’s this Mars-Uranus square as well at the end of February is also a really tricky aspect.
NDB: Yeah. Agreed. Like, earlier you were speculating about how, you know, back in ‘78, ‘79, you had the Venus retrograde in Scorpio followed by the Sun-Mars, whereas this year it’s happening the other way around, and —
CB: Right.
NDB: — what’s happening this year reminds me, it’s kind of like the year 1917 where in the spring during a triple conjunction, the tsar is overthrown in a revolution, but it’s not the Bolsheviks at that point. They’re Russians who just wanna run a more organized society. But then the following October, as Venus is gonna be going retrograde soon, the Bolsheviks sort of do a second revolution and take the revolution away from the revolutionaries. So that’s one way that this could play out is that things blow up in late January, February in Iran, and some new power source moves in to fill in the vacuum, but then that again is undermined once we get to October, November and Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio. That’s one way. I’m just, you know, riffing that that could play out in that way.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s gonna be interesting to watch, though, and to see everything unfold very quickly, not just in terms of Iran but in terms of some of the other events, obviously, that started to unfold in January and that we saw the seed moments of will start to grow and develop in different positive and negative ways very quickly here as we move into February.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. I wanna take just a brief break and then come back and do some conclusions.
NDB: Sounds good.
CB: All right. So I’d like to make some concluding remarks and start to wrap this up. And one of the things that we started to do just now that I just wanna complete is just give a quick rundown of the immediately upcoming astrology that’s about to happen in the next month, because I know some of these dates and some of these timeframes are gonna become important with some of the news stories that we discussed from this month and some of the other completely new news stories that are gonna arise over the course of the next month as well of things that haven’t happened yet.
So on January 18th, there’s gonna be a Mercury-Mars conjunction, which is a verbally combative aspect and has other not great meanings. January 23rd, there’s a Sun-Pluto conjunction, plus Mars enters Aquarius that day. January 26th, Neptune enters Aries, where it’s gonna stay for more than a decade. January 27th, there’s a Mars-Pluto conjunction which is a very – usually it’s a very violent aspect that sometimes takes violence and just magnifies it on a massive scale.
February 3rd, Uranus is gonna make its final direct station in Taurus. Then February 4th through the 27th, that Aquarius stellium begins squaring Uranus, I think first starting with Venus and then culminating with Mars squaring it towards the end of that range.
February 9th, eclipse season begins once the Moon gets to that square with the Sun, and at that point the pace of events is gonna quicken and we’re gonna start seeing some major pivotal events taking place with some figures who are in a high position suddenly falling downwards and other figures who are in an obscure position suddenly being thrust into the limelight. Also lots of major beginnings and major endings taking place. There will probably be some notable figures who pass away during that time as there often are during eclipse seasons. It’s gonna be a crazy period, and it starts around that point around February 9th or so.
Then on February 13th, Saturn moves into Aries where it’s gonna stay for the next two years. February 17th, there’s a solar eclipse in Aquarius; that’s the first eclipse in Aquarius of a new series that’s gonna take place over the next couple of years. Then February 20th, there’s gonna be the Saturn-Neptune conjunction going exact to the degree in early Aries. Then February 26th, Mercury stations retrograde where it’s gonna go retrograde for three weeks. February 27th, Mars squares Uranus.
And finally, March 3rd, there’s a lunar eclipse in Virgo, and then that’ll be the next peak in eclipse season, and then eclipse season will last for another week after that until about March 10th or 11th before things start to calm down a little bit and it starts to trail off a little bit in terms of the pace of events.
So in terms of like, the immediate sequence, that’s what we’re looking at to pay attention to since, you know, weirdly almost every date in January up to this point that’s had an exact alignment or aspect has had some really notable event. These are some of the dates we’re gonna be paying close attention to over the course of the next month or two.
NDB: Yeah. Should be fun.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know if I would describe it as “fun,” but it’s gonna be, you know, “may you live in interesting times” type scenarios.
All right. So that’s happening. In terms of conjunctions, one of the points I wanted to make, and it’s something I would like to get in the habit of doing is that we’ve just talked a lot about triple conjunctions, and I think we’ve seen how impressive those recurrences have been this month in connecting major events that happened this month with major events that have happened in the past. But one of the things that we can do also is project that now into the future, and that’s something I’d like to get in the habit of doing now with you of at least mentioning some of the future dates briefly and that the presumption then, based on the past and the present, is that some similar events that happened this month are going to come up again in the future or are going to repeat themselves in archetypally similar ways and similar dynamics in the future. And one of the things that I did is I got a list of triple conjunctions over the next century, and I narrowed it down to the nine closest ones. And I wanna give that list really quickly.
So the first one, of course, is the one that just took place, which is January of 2026, the triple conjunction in Capricorn. And that one was less than a degree, so that was the closest one possible.
The next one after this is 2032, specifically around June 22nd, 2032; the spread is about five degrees, but there’s gonna be a Venus-Mars conjunction with the Sun about five degrees away, which is pretty close.
Then October 25th, 2038, in Scorpio, a spread of about two degrees, which is a very tight triple conjunction. Then April 9th, 2045, in Aries with a spread of about five degrees. Then August 25th, 2051, a triple conjunction in Virgo – spread of about five degrees. Then January 10th, 2058, in Capricorn – a tight cluster within about three degrees. Then October 26th, 2070 – a triple conjunction in Scorpio within about four degrees. Then July 20th, 2111 – a triple conjunction in Cancer with a spread of about one degree, so very, very close; that’s the next closest one after our current one in 2026. And then finally the closest one of all of them will take place in about a century from now in the year 2124 on May 5th; there’s a triple conjunction in Taurus within a degree. And that’s actually the next closest one that’s within a degree that most closely replicates at least the distance by degrees as our current super close one has happened in January of 2026.
So those are —
NDB: That last one in Taurus, is that not the first one we’ve heard of happening in Taurus in quite a while? I guess like, they’ve all been Aries, Scorpio, Cancer – like, they’ve all been in the same signs. But I can’t remember hearing of a Taurus one yet. So maybe that’s a new place.
CB: I honestly don’t know; I don’t know if that’s true, so I don’t wanna —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — commit to that.
NDB: Fair.
CB: But if we take a look at it, one of the things that’s interesting about that one is it’s during a Venus retrograde. So you get Venus retrograde conjoins the Sun at 15 degrees of Taurus and at the same time, Mars is conjunct those at 15 degrees of Taurus at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. Pretty awesome. The previous one, the one in 2111 also had a Venus retrograde. So —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — it looks like, I mean, that’s interesting. In the 20th century, we never had a triple conjunction with a Venus retrograde. We’ve seen them in older charts, like in the 14, 1500s, but it looks like we’re headed back to another era later in the 21st century and in the 22nd century where we’re seeing more triple conjunctions happen with retrogrades.
CB: I wonder if any of those are Venus transits like that one from the 1500s was that you found.
NDB: Probably not, because it takes like, 120, 140 years or something like that, and not enough time has passed since 2012.
CB: Okay. But we know – so we – like I said that only just because we know that when Venus goes retrograde and conjoins the Sun, those are the only times when it’s possible for Venus – a Venus transit is when Venus actually passes over the face of the Sun, not just in longitude but also in latitude.
NDB: Yeah. It usually happens around Gemini to Cancer. They’ve always happened – or Sagittarius, actually. Gemini or Sagittarius, close to the nodes of Venus; that’s where they happen. That’s true. Winston Churchill was born with a Venus retrograde in Sagittarius at that transit, and then the ones in 2004, 2012 were in Gemini. The ones back in the one that I was looking at in 1525 was in Gemini; it happens close to the nodes, so only a Venus or Gemini – Sagittarius or Gemini.
CB: Got it. Okay. So you know, this year we’re gonna continue to see as we get closer and closer to the Venus retrograde, we’re gonna see the repetition of events connected with previous Venus retrograde years when Venus went retrograde in Scorpio. And could you tell me – I wanted to just like, read off really quickly some of those dates, because as I’ve already seen, it’s already starting to happen. Things that happened in those previous Venus retrograde in Scorpio years are starting to repeat, and we’re starting to see connections. So those years are in eight-year increments 2026, 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, 1986, 1978, 1970, 1962, 1954, 1946, 1938, 1930, 1922, 1914, and 1906.
So you know, some of the things to be – really interestingly now, we can actually make this crossover. What was the day that the Shah left in January of 1979?
NDB: January 16th.
CB: So one of the crossovers that happened in that year is within 24 hours of that, that’s when Greenland held their referendum in order to gain greater autonomy from Denmark, and that was in January of 1979 under the Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn that we’re having a recurrence of now in January of 2026. But also Venus would have been doing a similar thing in terms of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio that year, basically, that preceded that, right?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: So that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing a closer repetition, because we’re repeating like, Venus and Mars cycles from that time period, basically. But increasingly, we’re gonna see as we get closer to Venus throughout this year repetitions of all of the years that I just mentioned and like, connections.
NDB: Very likely.
CB: Yeah. So you and I will have to do next sometime before too long a Venus retrograde in Scorpio one in order to go back through the past century and actually collect and try to note more what some of the important things were that happened in those years. But already, you know, just looking through my list, I can see some of the things that happened in previous years. You know, 1978 was the Iranian Revolution got going and took off. 1946, that was the year that the US secretly attempted to buy Greenland. 1914, that was the beginning of World War I, and there’s probably other years here that are relevant, but that’s gonna be important. And then to go back to the future again, because I’m sort of like, going back and forth here, and those dates that I just mentioned of future triple conjunctions, what are some of the things that we learned about this triple conjunction of the Sun, Venus, and Mars that came out archetypally then that we might expect in the future? I mean, one of them is sometimes like, military conflicts obviously coming up like it did this year where you had a very fast, like, lightning strike with the US invading Venezuela and abducting the president of Venezuela and then like, taking over a country. So sometimes very notable events like that.
NDB: Yeah. Mass shooting – well, not mass shootings, but shootings done in public of figures.
CB: Right. There was a —
NDB: Treaties —
CB: Well, so it’s this month it was like, a woman was shot, and it caused an outrage, and that was part of the dynamic this month. And then we’ve seen other shootings during other triple conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah. But ones that are sort of happen out in the open that everyone sees.
CB: Right. There was a major theme that keeps coming up of like, consent versus nonconsent or consent versus violation, and it’s like, that comes up sometimes in like, for example, the Twitter thing and the AI that’s undressing people. But even like, you know, Trump’s statement about Greenland at one point in this past week, he said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” basically, sort of threatening presumably physical force basically in a military context. But that kind of language is kind of reminiscent of some of the other things that come up under other triple conjunctions like the Me Too movement, for example, starting under the triple conjunction in 2017 or even the Epstein case first really blowing up in 2019 when he was arrested and then died in jail under a triple conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. A lot of that stuff, all of it.
CB: Yeah. So some of those notions are very important. Broken treaties was a major theme that came up this month and that we’ve seen come up under other triple conjunctions. There’s also sometimes the creation of treaties and important treaties basically either being created or broken seems to be part of the archetype of this triple conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Created, broken, or sometimes both at once.
CB: Yeah. Attempts to buy or purchase like, sovereignty over lands or over peoples or countries seems tied up in this to some extent in different ways, the triple conjunction. So like, sovereignty sales and exchanges of land for financial or other strategic purposes.
You’ve seen that come up?
NDB: Oh yeah. Yeah yeah. All over.
CB: Okay. Let’s see. Other things. So rapid militarization and escalation of military and defense budgets as a major theme has clearly come up like, two or three times under these conjunctions. So under some of those future conjunctions over the next century, I think we can predict that there will be like, similar instances of some military budgets that suddenly become expanded and escalated.
NDB: Yeah. Although it’s gonna be hard to top this new like, doubling to the billions or trillions of whatever it was that’s happening now.
CB: Right. Well, that’s what’s so funny —
NDB: 50 percent increase.
CB: Right. 50 percent increase. Well, that’s what’s so funny looking back at some of the past ones is if you look at some of the past ones, like when they create NATO and then they have to increase it by a certain amount, like, the budget then compared to now looks paltry in comparison. But looking at it from the percentage standpoint of like, a 30 percent increase or a 50 percent increase, and you project it out in the future, you know, in the future it’s gonna be, what, to us seem like, just unimaginable amounts of money spent on defense in the future.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I mean, because in the future, some of these things – we’re talking about a century for now. We’re talking about like, space defense budgets and other things like that where the world is like, becoming an interplanetary species and so, you know, concepts of war and peace are being extended to outer space and are being extended to contact between different colonies that are living on different moons and different planets and things like that when you start thinking about the long-term. But some of those core archetypal principles of war and peace and like, sovereignty and its opposite and like, consent versus nonconsent are still gonna be relevant in the future in whatever the technological and futuristic dynamics are in whatever it looks like in the future.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, there is a basic element to human society that remains unchanged from, you know, day one. Yeah, we’ve been looking at these transits over the course of mostly the 20th century. We’ve dug a bit into the past, but you can see how these themes are the same, even if technology is developing or changing or cultures are developing or changing. Like, there is some sort of core thread that runs through these.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Other themes are like, resource nationalism, peace accords but also the opposite which is like, alliance dissolution or the threat of alliance dissolutions. We’ve seen a couple instances under triple conjunctions of like, women martyrs or female martyrs. Nuclear escalation and attempts to either the threat of expanding it or the attempts to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other types of like, weapons of mass destruction of which nuclear is probably relevant – will continue to be relevant, unfortunately – in the future and increasingly relevant. But then there may be other types of weapons in the future that we can’t imagine now that you still have similar dynamics of of just like, weapons of mass destruction as a category.
Yeah. Are there any other themes that really came out during these triple conjunctions that are really important that are worth just like, summarizing now that obviously came up in the present that we can learn and apply to this combination in the future, or could become relevant during future repetitions?
NDB: Yeah, I think it’s, you know, like, some of the things when I’m thinking about the Sun with Venus and Mars, you know, the Sun is sort of contained by two planets that are not of its sect. There does seem to be some kind of, you know, like, a coming together of parties that maybe aren’t usually on each others’ side or have to sort of cooperate in some fashion. You know, there’s some element of that. The Sun doesn’t necessarily wanna be conjunct Venus or Mars, does it? You know, they’re not friends. They’re not, you know, and so there is something to that, and maybe that’s another part of the discomfort that we see. You know, the individual versus the collective type of thing. The Iranian people versus the Shah or you know, those types of dynamics.
CB: Right. Yeah. And having the – I think that’s where – like I said earlier – adding the Sun into the Mars-Venus thing, there was a real element there of like, the Sun has always represented like, the king or the leader of a country. And to have the leader of the country suddenly captured in a rapid military strike was pretty crazy and unprecedented. Well, it turns out that there were precedents, but I think that was part of it when you add the Sun into the Sun-Mars thing is sometimes it puts a singular figure as the focal point of the Sun-Mars conflict of war versus peace and consent versus nonconsent, because it adds this singular focus through the Sun as the center of our solar system and often representing leadership or oneness in some ways.
NDB: Yeah. I think it’s a vulnerable time for the Sun for that reason, in a way, insofar as the Sun can be vulnerable.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And seeing – sometimes we saw some instances of the isolation of the Sun and Mars being like, for example, the Shah leaving the country and leaving the government basically and this idea of severing or separation of the central, solar figure.
NDB: Yeah. The father —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — of the people.
CB: Right. All right, my friend. Well, I think that brings us to the end of this. So this turned into another epic thing, but I’m glad we got to do this, because like I said, this is my process sometimes for understanding current events in the news is to go back and study them historically to try to get some perspective on things. And I think we got a ton of perspective from doing this, a ton of historical perspective, a ton of insight into what’s happening now and what’s coming up in the immediate and near future, but also we learned new things about this core technique that you and I have been exploring more together about recurrence transits and we’ve developed it further by really focusing in on one particular recurrence transit of these three planets of the Sun and Venus and Mars, and that’s a great additional step forward in terms of this planetary period and recurrence transit research. So thanks so much for doing this with me and taking the time to explore all of this and document the research with me.
NDB: Thank you so much. And one thing I wish I had said that I didn’t is that the Shah of Iran – the second one, the one who was deposed – was born with Venus and Mars conjunct in Virgo in October of 1919. But anyway, I should have said it earlier. The revolution was a recurrence transit for him.
Yeah, Chris, this has been possibly my favorite of all these ones we’ve done together so far. Really illuminating. I’ve been looking at this work forever, and yet, when I do this stuff with you it really does bring up this other layer that I hadn’t arrived at without you, so I really appreciate that. Fantastic work, and yeah, can’t wait for the next marathon.
CB: Awesome —
NDB: Venus in —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — Scorpio! Venus retrograde in Scorpio. I was gonna say that I read my first astrology book not long after Venus had been retrograde in Scorpio in early ‘95, and then eight years later in 2002, during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, is when I had my awakening as to how Venus retrograde transits work in the fashion that you and I are discussing now. So, you know, there’s something about that Venus retrograde in Scorpio that also walks in with my life as an astrologer, it seems.
CB: I love that. That one was also important for me, because that Venus retrograde in Scorpio very shortly after the cazimi in 2010 is when I took over my first podcast and I started podcasting for the first time. So that Venus retrograde’s in my 10th house and is also important for me.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, well, people can let us know in the YouTube comments; let us know if you would like to see us do a Venus retrograde in Scorpio in history episode, then let us know in the YouTube comments. That’ll help us encourage us to like, you know, do the research, to buckle in and do the research it’s gonna take to do that. Let us know also – we love to hear from people in terms of if you see something else that happened under a triple conjunction in history, let us know in the YouTube comments, because then we can pool that research, and sometimes people notice things – either triple conjunctions that we missed, or there can be things about triple conjunctions we talked about that we overlooked. So definitely let us know in the YouTube comments; that’s the best place if you notice something interesting.
And also check out Nick’s website, because Nick, you have a great collection of especially chart files where people can load them into Solar Fire to search for saved charts that you have for so many of these world events. It’s a really useful resource for looking at things. And you sell them on your website as well as do consultations at NickDaganBestAstrologer.com, right?
NDB: That’s right. And I will be adding more files to that, to the ones I sell. I sell a certain amount of them, a certain number, but I have many more. You know, I have an Iranian file and a Latin America file and stuff, so – and I haven’t made those available yet, so I’ll be making more available soon. But the ones that are – that have been available for two years people are really enjoying. I get a lot of really great feedback, so. And yes, I’m available for consultations, so come see me if you want one.
CB: Yeah. Especially if you’re curious about that upcoming Venus retrograde in Scorpio for you. I know you do a good job of like, personalizing it for people based on talking with them about their past chronology and things like that.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a technique that really works, and people are always, yeah. They wind up doing a lot of the, you know, you can point out these timelines to them, and if you point out these different periods when Venus has repeatedly gone retrograde in the same place, it already conjures the events of those times in their lives, and they start to get it in a way that is very personal. You know, it’s… Yeah. In a way that only the person themselves can really recognize the significance.
CB: Okay. Cool. All right, buddy. Well, thanks for joining me today.
NDB: Thank you!
CB: All right. Thank you everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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