The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 257, titled:

June 2020 Astrology Forecast

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on May 31, 2020

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2020/05/31/june-2020-astrology-forecast/

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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 Andrea Johnson

Transcription released July 13th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with astrologers Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees about the astrological forecast for June of 2020. Today is May 27, 2020, starting at 11:25 AM in Denver, Colorado. I believe this is gonna be the 257th episode of the show. And, yeah, let’s go ahead and get started. So, hey, guys, welcome back.

KELLY SURTEES: Hey.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.

CB: Hey. All right. So for those watching this on YouTube, we’re going to spend probably the first hour like recapping the past month, talking about some recent news and events. And then about an hour into the show, we’ll probably jump into the forecast for June. So if you wanna jump straight to the forecast, then just look at the description below this video, or on the description page for the audio, on The Astrology Podcast website, and you’ll find a timestamp to jump straight to the forecast. But otherwise stick around and we will talk about some other astrology-related news and events for the next hour. So, first things first, we are just coming off of a wildly-successful online astrological conference, one of the big conferences of the year, which was the Northwest Astrological Conference. It was scheduled to happen in Seattle over Labor Day weekend as an in-person conference. It was gonna be the 36th annual conference. But due to what happened with the pandemic, obviously, the in-person conference was canceled and it was moved online. So you guys both headlined this conference and did amazingly well. And the conference itself was, I think, an overwhelming and almost surprising success, I would say. Right?

AC: Well, Kelly headlined.

CB: Kelly headlined? Well, Kelly did the keynote.

KS: I don’t—yeah, I think there’s a lot of shared billing. But, yes, I did give the opening keynote, but I know Lynn Bell gave a keynote that was also well-received. I think Steven Forrest and Sam Reynolds also gave keynotes. So, yeah, there were a few. But it was definitely successful. There was more than twice the amount of attendees there, I think, online than would normally be there in person.

CB: Sure. So usually there’s like 3-or-400 attendees tops if it’s maxed out in person. But at least 600 people were watching your keynote live, I remember, Kelly, at the beginning. And, overall, when you factor in speakers and everything else, it was upwards of 8-or-900 people.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah. And, you know, that was really evident in the number of people at each talk.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Having spoken at NORWAC, I don’t know, once before, twice—I guess two or three times before—and attended many other times, you know, we’re all used to, you know, how many people are in a room. And seeing the numbers in the digital—you know, in the online lectures, it’s like, “Oh, there are 147 people here,” which is unheard of, right? You know, that would be—I mean, what do you think the biggest, normal lecture for the in-person NORWAC is? Like maybe if you get 80 people, that’s, I believe, the term is ‘fuckton’, right? If you’re doing it live, at the hotel.

CB: Yeah, like a normal lecture. And even, like, best-case scenario, if you’re giving a keynote in like the full ballroom, where they’ve opened up like all of the rooms, that’s only—that’s a maximum of, what? Like 300 people? Probably not even 400 tops, in person. So this was just way astronomically high. I couldn’t get over what a great manifestation—in a 10-minute talk I gave—what a great manifestation of this was of Saturn in Aquarius. Because we’ve all seen that with, you know, the virus and then the need for social distancing and then the quarantines and the lockdowns and everybody being separated and like social contact being cut off, but then, all of a sudden, as a result of that, people pushing to find other ways to connect and socialize, and platforms like Zoom, like we’re using right now, in order to like talk with each other becoming much more popular on every level of society, both for social reasons, but also, for things like schools or for classes or for like yoga groups or just about everything. And NORWAC—when Saturn stationed at 1° of Aquarius this month, in May, and NORWAC being the first time that a major in-person astrological conference—it’s been around for 30 years. Suddenly, it was moved online successfully. And seeing the dynamics of that was really striking to me in terms of this transit. I was attributing a lot of that to like an early manifestation of Saturn in Aquarius. Were you guys noticing that as well?

AC: Yeah.

CB: Is this fitting in with your ‘Saturn in Aquarius’ anticipations?

AC: Well, I think there are a couple of things. One, yes, Saturn in Aquarius, but especially Saturn in Aquarius in a square with Uranus. You know, this wasn’t a gentle move online.

CB: Right.

AC: This was the result of a significant disruption.

CB: Yeah.

AC: But we also can’t ignore the multitude of planets that were in Gemini at the time. As Kelly mentioned in her keynote—you know, which I thought was quite brilliant, Kelly. Thinking about Venus retrograde in Gemini—which is one of our themes for June, but started in the middle of May—is figuring out different ways of relating and figuring out how to relate, you know, in different conditions and different sorts of languages of relating. I think those, how shall we say? Both the successful adaptations, as well as the inherent challenges, were a big part of the NORWAC experience.

KS: Hugely so. Hugely so. I was—one thing, in addition to what you’re both saying, which I completely agree with—I realized I had never actually seen the birth chart for the NORWAC conference. Which I think, Chris, you displayed in your talk.

CB: Right.

KS: And that was really striking because it has, I think, an early Leo, like 1° or 2° of Leo rising. So not only was Saturn stationing in early Aquarius, but it was directly triggering the descendant in this particular chart. And to your point, Austin, yeah, it wasn’t like Laura decided a year ago, “Let’s try online and see what happens.” She made this decision at the end of March, which was only two month’s notice. Like it’s a very Uranus-Saturn thing of like pivoting very quickly, changing, you know, tact or goal midstream, and doing a lot of renegotiation, but also, a huge amount of setup. You know, there was no technological infrastructure for this in the middle of March, but somehow they managed to get the right people in to do everything that was necessary. You know, not only was it a great feeling, but my experience as a presenter—it was very smooth technologically. I don’t know if that was the same for everybody, but it was very consistent, very easy.

CB: Yeah. They pulled it off pretty well. There were no major mishaps. Of course figuring out how to have the social component that you’re missing from an in-person conference online was one of the challenges, And there are, certainly, some things still to be worked on, but it was interesting seeing how some of that could still be possible, and you could still have connections between people, even at a distance, and create a sense of community and individual connections between people through the live chats. Like the live chats during the conference were one of the most interesting things for me. Cuz even though we’re used to that—for example, here, where we have an audience of about 116 people, who are patrons, that are watching us record this episode live and sort of interacting. Seeing that in a conference format, and seeing people like talking about what the presenter was presenting live was new and not typical. Cuz, typically, you’re all sitting in a lecture room together just sort of like taking in the lecture, and occasionally there’ll be like a question or a Q&A or something like that, but it’s somewhat limited. This was like an ongoing discussion. Sam Reynolds likened it to like almost being able to hear each other telepathically as you’re sitting in the lecture room together.

KS: Yeah. And that’s a unique feature to being online because you would never get the chance to express those thoughts midstream if you’re participating in a lecture—listening to a lecture live, for instance.

CB: Right.

AC: Do you both think that that was primarily a good thing? Cuz a number of people complained about not being able to focus on the lectures because, literally, a hundred other people were just narrating their thoughts.

CB: Yeah.

KS: I do think there were some challenges with it, I would agree. Even as a speaker, I noticed this at one point in my keynote where I actually had to hold my notes above the chat box because I just wanted to stay in my zone. I guess cuz I’m used to teaching online, where there’s a level of interaction. I just had to remind myself, “Just deliver your thoughts and ideas here, Kelly. You don’t have to, you know, be interacting in the way that you normally would.” So I think there was just a little bit of I had to just slightly adjust my approach. Cuz I did hear something about that some people found it quite distracting.

CB: And I just found it useful afterwards—like I only did like a 10-minute talk, so I didn’t get the full experience that you guys did. But I closed it during that and then went back and looked afterwards, in order to see how people were reacting to the talk, sort of after the fact, and I found it useful for that. Or in some talks, it was a little bit more obnoxious than other talks, where the audience was a little bit more low-key, or there were interesting insights that were coming through the chat. But it could be a mixed bag.

KS: Yeah. And it’s tricky, cuz people do wanna connect, and they do wanna interact. Everybody has a different level of desire for that connection while they’re learning. Some people prefer to have the constant connection, and other people prefer just to soak in, you know, one thing at a time. And I guess everyone had to make different choices about how to manage that for themselves.

CB: Right. That’s definitely one area, certainly, to work on in the future, in whatever online conference, or if we ever did something. We’ve always talked about doing like an in-person thing. But figuring out how to have that social component for an online meeting is super-crucial.

AC: Well, and there were lots of shared, sort of breakout rooms. And they did sort of a, I don’t know, collective, almost a ‘wandering the halls of the hotel’ type, shared room as well. Which I thought it was good to make space for discussion and what not, outside of, you know, a formal presentation.

CB: Yeah. And a shoutout to West Ardere who actually went to the hotel and did a livestream from the hotel for us, for those that were missing it and got nostalgic about this hotel that NORWAC has been at for like 20 or 30 years.

KS: Oh, my goodness.

AC: Which, yeah, likely the most remarkable thing about that hotel is that NORWAC has happened there. But, you know, so just back to the sort of chat component—which is not present when you’re giving a talk online—a few people might whisper. Or, excuse, which is not present when you’re giving a talk in person. That would have been very different if the class sizes were not huge.

KS: That’s true. That’s true.

AC: Like you were saying, Kelly, you know, if you’ve got like 30 people or whatever and some of them are chatting, you can like track the chat as a speaker and integrate some of what’s coming up, and it can be really helpful. But when you’ve got like a tight, 1-hour-15-minutes, you know, and you’re trying to cram it all in there, and there are alike a 140 people, and there’s lots of stuff that you couldn’t possibly cover, and there’s lots of off-topic stuff, it’s different. It becomes a liability rather than an asset to have all of that—not dialogue, cuz it’s not two people—but ‘multilogue’ scrolling by you.

CB: Sure. Yeah, yeah. So let’s not get stuck on this for too long. Were there any other things, before we move on, about NORWAC that you guys want to mention, that were notable or important? I saw some amazing—I didn’t see a ton of talks, cuz, honestly, I was preparing for mine like I usually am, which, unfortunately, was on the very last day. So, of course, I’m like preparing all the way until halfway through the third and final day. But one of the cool things about this being an online conference is that when you bought a ticket, it also gave you two weeks of access, after the conference was over, to go back and watch any lecture that you want. So I’ve been going back and catching up. I did get to see Bear Ryver’s talk live on intersectionality in astrology, which I thought was amazing. I’ve gone back and watched Diana Rose Harper’s talk on natal astrology as radical self-care, which I thought was really good and interesting. I’m interested in talking with them both on the podcast at some point. I started watching Kaitlin Coppock’s talk on astrology and magic yesterday, and that was amazing. And I was just telling you, Austin, before we started recording, that I wish she had come with you. She decided not to come with you on the trip last December, or last November, cuz, otherwise, she would have been a great addition to that talk we did on astrology and magic. So, hopefully, at some point, we can do that again in the future. She has crazy design skills. You were mentioning her PowerPoint as being off-the-wall.

AC: Yeah. Making me feel terrible about everything I’ve ever done in that format.

CB: Yeah, exactly.

KS: Making all of us, I mean.

CB: Showing us up.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I saw so many great talks. Did you guys see any good talks, or anything that stood out for you, in terms of lectures?

AC: I literally didn’t see anything except Kait’s. Like you, I was working sort of up to the last minute on everything. As a brief aside, one of the things I thought was really interesting is that it felt like conference energy. Like super-stimulating, potentially, fragmenting, but like very ‘up’ conference energy. Like there’s a certain positive mania that you get from conferences. And I was surprised by, you know, just tuning in via my computer, I could like connect to that, and that was good.

CB: Right.

AC: I actually needed to shield myself from that so I could focus on my little things that I was supposed to do and just think about that. But it was interesting how much the conference energy was there, you know, to connect to or to retreat from.

CB: Totally. That was one of the biggest things I was surprised about, that they were able to recreate in an online conference. I guess that’s the hardest thing to attempt to convey now, after the fact, that somehow they pulled that off and recreated it, however that happens. What about you, Kelly? Did you see any lectures? You were working.

KS: It was similar to Austin, yeah, where it’s a working weekend. That said, and then I had the timezone factor. So, for instance, I didn’t get to catch Austin or Leisa live, just because it was three in the morning here. And I love you guys, but I needed my sleep, with working. So I’m very excited to hear theirs. I did catch part of Demetra’s talk on Friday about, I think, advanced dignity to do with the triplicities of the terms. I always like hearing Demetra. On Sunday night, I think I was stimulated by that point, and I was able to catch part of Kait’s lecture live, which I was really happy to. I caught the second part, and that made me even more curious to hear the first part. So I really only saw Demetra and Kait live, and I’ve got a long list. Like I heard so many good things about so many talks. The one piece of feedback I kept seeing over and over again on social media was, across the board, whether they were new speakers to NORWAC or veteran speakers, everybody seemed to just deliver over and above. It actually made me so excited that even though I do have access for two weeks, I’ve decided to spend the extra hundred dollars and buy the recordings, just so that I have a little bit more time to get through, cuz there’s so many wonderful speakers. And it was such a good mix in the speaker lineup this year between so many more fresh speakers, new speakers coming in, people we haven’t seen on the ‘astro-speaker’ circuit. Bear Ryver, Diana Rose Harper, just to name a couple. But I know there were a lot more as well. I know we did a good shoutout to all the speakers last month. But everybody’s just got amazing feedback.

CB: Yeah, it was really good. And that’s what’s important about NORWAC, is they always give new speakers—like, oftentimes, new speakers in the astrological community get their start at NORWAC. I did. I started out volunteering in like the bookstore in 2005, and I think in 2006, I gave my first talk for NORWAC. Austin, was your first major conference talk at NORWAC? I believe it was, wasn’t it, in terms of the astrological community?

AC: Yeah, yeah. I think I spoke at the Esoteric Book Conference before NORWAC, but I think NORWAC was the first astrology conference talk I gave.

CB: Yeah. And then, Kelly, you, of course, had already given talks at major conferences in Australia, for the Federation of Australian Astrologers before.

KS: I had. And I think I had applied under the new speaker program for UAC 2012. So my first big talk in the US—I had spoken at the SOTA Conference in like Toronto/Buffalo prior to 2012. But I actually spoke at the UAC 2012 in New Orleans as a new speaker. That was where I first crossed paths with Laura, and you and I were just figuring out that’s how I got to NORWAC the year after.

CB: Right. You actually just shared an old photo with me on Facebook today, from 2013.

KS: This is vintage.

CB: Us hanging out, talking and becoming friends at NORWAC 2013. And then we talked so much at this conference that we went home and like immediately recorded like three different podcasts in a row together, which were some of the earliest, like the first 10 Astrology Podcast episodes way back in 2013. So that was a while ago.

KS: Long time ago. There’s all those memories. I was like, “Oh, my God, Chris still has hair.”

CB: Right.

KS: Somebody shared a photo of the two of you, I think, like almost from that same timeline recently.

CB: Yeah. That was a less-good photo, when I was like further into my Saturn return, and it was also like at the end of a conference. So I’m not gonna share that one.

KS: You’re not gonna share that one, okay.

CB: Well, I don’t know. Do you have it, Austin? I don’t have the link.

AC: I don’t know.

CB: Okay.

KS: And I think that photo that you just shared, Chris, I don’t know if I should reveal this. I think it was about three in the morning.

CB: Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was.

KS: It was very late, on the last night. The classic, late night, foyer chat.

CB: Yeah. Cuz I think we were the last two standing at that conference, at like the very end of the final day.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So good times.

KS: Good memories. I mean, this is what happens at conferences, though, isn’t it? You meet people, you connect, you form your little crews and usually stay up late on the last night drinking. I mean, other people do it every night, but I can only do it on the last night.

CB: Yeah. So we’ll see what happens next year. The jury is still out on ISAR 2020. They did, earlier this month, have a public panel. They invited me and a few other speakers to like discuss what was going on publicly, in front of an audience of like a hundred ISAR members, and there were a lot of different pros and cons being kicked around. And they were talking about not being sure if even the state of Colorado will be allowing gatherings of that size by September. So a lot of stuff is still up in the air, and they’re saying that they will not make a final decision until June or July. So we’ll see what happens with that in terms of whether there’s gonna be another big astrology conference later this year in September. And, of course, we’ll see what happens with NORWAC next year, in 2021, since it happens every year in May, and whether that will be an in-person conference, or whether that will be online again or some mixture of the two.

KS: Yeah, I really would like ISAR to make a decision, but I appreciate they’ve got a lot of negotiation to do behind the scenes, so we have to wait. I think they said they’re not gonna make anything firm until late July. Is that what came out of that discussion?

CB: Yeah, I mean, that’s what they’re saying. And there’s gonna be different points where the contract with the hotel, the money, will probably increase and everything will get worse. But, yeah, it’s a big gamble just because if they cancel, and they don’t have a good reason for canceling the contract with the hotel, then ISAR just loses a ton of money and is in the hole and can’t host future conferences. So that would set the community back a lot. There’s a lot of big considerations going on there and we’ll see what happens.

KS: Yeah.

CB: But I’ll put out more information or news as soon as that’s available. Other than that, other things that have happened this month that I wanted to reflect on—did you read that New York Times hit piece, that was the first episode on astrology? That was the first episode we did this month. I don’t know if you happened to come across that.

KS: I saw the chatter about it, but I have to confess, I did not have a lot of spare time to dive in. I feel like there’s a lot of things I need to catch up on, so I don’t have a lot to say there. I just heard about it and thought, “Oh, God, getting beat up in the mainstream media again.”

CB: This again. Yeah, did you see that New York Times piece, Austin?

AC: Yeah. I mean, I looked at it, and I was like, “It’s gonna be another one of these.” And I scanned it, and it’s, you know, “Let us furiously attack the straw-man version of astrology.”

CB: Right.

AC: You know, it was like, okay, you know, same shit, different day. It says, I think, more about what the New York Times editorial board would like to believe about astrology than it tells us anything actually about astrology and what it’s good at and what it’s not good at.

CB: Yeah. So the title was, “Will Coronavirus Kill Astrology? The Pandemic Has Affected All of Us Who Saw It Coming.” And there’s just this like hilarious, like over-the-top—they must hire somebody.

KS: Oh, they’re burning it.

CB: They printed out a chart.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, they printed out a chart—for those just listening to the audio version—from Astro.com, and they like set it on fire. So, yeah, I think that it was a really bad piece. We don’t have to talk about it too much because Leisa and I did a whole episode about it, and that was the first episode of May. I did wanna mention it because one of the reflections that we had was, you know, often, a lot of the discussion or so much of the discussion in modern astrology—especially over the past 20-to-30 years has been coming from the psychological astrology crowd of ‘do no harm’ and like not wanting to do harm especially by issuing what could be perceived as like negative predictions about the future, either about an individual’s life or about mundane astrology. And, obviously, this year, we’ve seen the flip side of that, which is that if you see difficult stuff coming up, but you end up painting an overly-rosy picture, then you’re gonna get flack for that as well, and that is the other side of the coin. So one of the things that Leisa and I talked about—and that I was reflecting on in that episode—was certainly I remember we had some discussions when we were putting together our forecast for the year of 2020, back in November, when you guys flew out to Denver. And we were talking about like how to approach it, and how we wanted to present everything and what we wanted to say, as well as the transits as well, and just dealing with the fact that it obviously was a very heavy year. There were a lot of difficult transits, and it was also like a very momentous year because there were some major outer planet cycles that are taking place, like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction or the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that only occur every 20-to-40 years. So one of the discussions, though, I remember having was about language and framing and like what phrases we were gonna use. And I remember—at least in that episode—saying a little bit that I didn’t necessarily wanna end up with like another phrase, like ‘meat-grinder’ or something like that. Or at least I wanted to be more deliberate about whatever we ended up choosing to be the main phrase. And I think the way that I accidentally framed that made it come off to some people as if I had somehow censored you guys or censored Austin. And I just wanted to clarify or at least ask if you felt that that was the case, if you felt like I was censoring you or anything like that. Cuz I don’t think that was the context, but I think it may have accidentally given that impression.

AC: Well, so, you know, censorship is something that you need a powerful institution to inflict on an individual. And though I am a guest on your podcast, I wouldn’t characterize the power dynamic as quite like that. You know, as I think any long-time listener will pick up on, or even a short-time listener, we have very different senses of what is appropriate and useful, right? Again, as any medium-to-long-term listener knows, I often give myself the liberty of saying things that you would not. And so, if you are running a censorious regime, it’s not been very effective. But, you know, joking aside, we sat down the night before. And I don’t remember everything that was said, but I remember at least where I was coming from, which is this is such a shit-show, I don’t even know how to have fun with it. You know, part of why—

CB: The year ahead. The astrology for the year ahead.

AC: Yeah, part of the reason why, you know, the ‘meat-grinder’ worked. And that wasn’t all of last year. That was like a window of rough configurations. One of the reasons why I thought that was fun and appropriate is because there was a lot of good to offset the brutal last year. Whereas one of our biggest problems with 2020 is that there’s very little good to offset the difficult, you know, and that’s represented, technically, by the benefics being afflicted and in rough places almost the entire year, right? And so, you know, it was sort of like, “Uh, I don’t know if it’s appropriate to have fun with this.” We were basically like, “How do we break this—

CB: Be too jokey.

AC: —as politely, or how shall we say, as diplomatically, but honestly as possible? Because this is a bunch of bad news.” And remember, you know, we were doing this in the last days of Jupiter in Sagittarius. Even though there had been a lot of difficulties in 2019, there were a lot of things that were going well.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You know, people weren’t ready for just like a complete hammer blow. You know, in retrospect, like looking back at what I wrote and what I said on The Astrology Podcast and in my half-year ahead with Gordon White on Rune Soup, I don’t feel like we sugarcoated anything.

CB: Right.

AC: We didn’t necessarily twist the knife, right? Which maybe, I don’t know, would be appropriate. I don’t think so. It’s bad enough that we have to do it, right?

CB: Yeah. I just feel like it can sometimes get like almost distasteful if an astrologer goes too far or over-the-top in terms of the doom-and-gloom.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Well, and so, one positive thing about the terrible skies and earth of 2020 is that I think this has semi-permanently shifted the framework, almost like a weird astrology Overton frame, or Overton window, for what is appropriate and useful to talk about.

CB: Right.

AC: More people are now interested in like, “Well, is there something really rough coming up? Because it would actually be much more helpful to have an idea of when things will be difficult rather than sort of, you know, sugarcoating things.” You know, it was interesting, Chris, the way you framed it as ‘do no harm’, right? Setting a falsely-positive expectation can be a form of harm, right? So, for example, if I know that there are a like caltrops—which are little spiky things—on the ground, if I know that the ground is covered with spikes a hundred feet ahead, and I just reassure someone and tell them that they’re great, and that they can do anything, and then they get a big metal spike through the foot, you know, I did harm. How shall we say? It’s a sin of omission, right, to not mention the potential, the likely difficulty of the road just up ahead.

KS: And this is something that, I think, you know, at a meta-level we’re discussing, you know, year ahead themes and people who are writing astrology columns and things like that. But there’s also a level of this that goes on even in client consults—striking that sweet spot between informing in a way that is grounded and realistic and, as you say, Austin, sort of accurately describes the lay of the land ahead without being overly-Pollyanna about it and without being overly-doom-and-gloom about it. And that’s really where the skill is. And I think that’s something that every time we sit down to do a show, or every one of us sits down with a client consult. It’s trying to really hit that sweet spot. Sometimes astrologers get it. You know, you’re on it, and it’s great. Other times, you might go a little bit, “Maybe I was a bit too harsh,” or “Maybe I didn’t describe the challenges enough,” constantly just having to check back in and reflect and aim to be more accurate going forward.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

AC: It’s not easy.

CB: And then there’s a separate issue about what your client or what your audience hears and like how they perceive what you’re seeing that’s sort of out of your hands. But certainly that balance is something that every astrologer thinks about and tries to get right to the best that they can.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

KS: Were you gonna say something, Austin?

CB: Yeah, what were you gonna say?

AC: I don’t think so. I mean, I think I said my things.

KS: Okay.

CB: All right.

AC: Yeah, just to—yeah, go ahead. I don’t need to continue.

CB: I was basically just gonna move on, unless we have anything else to say about that topic. It has certainly been eye-opening for me, seeing the other side of it, since I’d been concerned about not going too far in a negative direction. And certainly we do see the opposite side of that. So I think it’s just been eye-opening for a lot of astrologers.

KS: Totally.

CB: All right. So other stuff that happened this month. The only other thing in terms of the podcast was the exaltations discovery. There was a little, minor episode where we may have, you know, discovered the origins of the exaltations after 2,000 years, which is pretty nice. I don’t know if you guys got a chance to see that one yet. Kelly, you said you saw part of it.

KS: No, I just saw that it flashed up. I think you guys dropped it like the week before NORWAC, so I just haven’t had a chance.

CB: You were like writing a keynote to present in front of 600 people.

KS: Probably on version 375 of my speech. I’m like really excited. I’ve got it flagged to watch. I’m guessing you’re in a similar boat, Austin.

AC: Yep.

KS: Yeah.

AC: I was busy. Yeah, I was busy spending time with an unfinished PowerPoint.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay. We will check in on that again next month. But definitely I wanna draw your attention to it, just cuz that was a big one. All right. I think that’s it in terms of like general topics. I did wanna do a little bit of a review in terms of the past month, or anything you guys noticed about the astrology of the past month. We have mentioned the Saturn in Aquarius and some of the Saturn in Aquarius themes. I mean, I guess if we start talking about the astrology of last month, we’re basically transitioning into the forecast at this point, right? Does this count?

AC: Yeah.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay, okay. Official timestamp here, whatever we’re in, 30 minutes into this episode, we’re gonna start talking about the forecast for June, starting with a little bit of a review for May, partially because some of those transits that started in May are still carrying through at this point in June. But, let’s see, where do we start with that? The Saturn retrograde? Or the Saturn station in Aquarius? That was it. It’s the Mars-Saturn co-presence. So this is something I think, first, that we addressed on the forecast, the 2020 year ahead forecast episode. We really identified that extended co-presence of Mars and Saturn together and had a lot of really interesting language for it. One of the ones that people keep quoting back to me in the YouTube comments the most was the statement about like ‘there will be no hugging’ that we said somewhat jokingly, but like an actual metaphor for the astrology in the like third week of March. And that ended up working out pretty well in terms of the lockdown fully going into effect and everybody being under quarantine by that point, by late March and early April. But a lot of that was just us talking about the symbolism of the Mars-Saturn conjunction that was piling up with all of those other planets in Capricorn at the time. And, Kelly, I know you got an article out pretty early in the lockdown, where you were speculating that this’ll probably, you know, be in full effect for the duration of the Mars-Saturn co-presence and then will start to lighten up by the time Mars leaves Aquarius and departs from that sign-based conjunction with Saturn by mid-May. And I know that we talked about that, basically, in the two forecast episodes. I think that ended up working out almost surprisingly well, now that we’re here at the end of May, and for various reasons large parts of the lockdown have started to ease, not just in the US, but also, in some other parts of the world as well.

KS: Yeah, and it’s tricky. I wanna be cognizant of the fact that every country has loosened in different ways, and there are certain things that some countries are saying, “Okay,” that other countries are like, “That’s still not okay.” But I guess the point we were trying to kind of indicate was Mars was in this extended Saturn co-presence, which, symbolically, in all the keywords would talk about restriction or limitation or restraint. And then mid-month, in May, Mars moves into a Jupiter-ruled sign. And it almost seemed like a really classic shift of now there’s movement, and there’s possibility, where before there wasn’t. And, I mean, we haven’t had a huge amount, and it depends on your circumstances. We’re in Belgium, where a number of restrictions have lifted. But because we’re here, connected to military organizations, they’ve kept restrictions quite strong. But I think the general tone is there’s just generally maybe a lifting of some of that intense fear that was so strong while the Mars-Saturn co-presence was going on. It’s not gone completely, and everyone’s got different levels there. But it does feel a little bit more like we can think a little bit about the future now, where before it was almost like day-to-day survival.

CB: Yeah. How did you feel?

AC: There’s been a significant trend towards loosening since the Mars-Saturn got out of that co-presence.

CB: How did you feel about that? Do you still—sorry, we’re having internet connection issues. It seems like I’m talking over you. But how did you feel? Cuz I still have this experience, and I don’t know if it’s just me. But like sometimes when astrology works, like you see the symbolism and you see it coming up ahead of time, and you know what that means in general. But then seeing how well it sometimes plays out and fits the symbolism to a ‘T’ when you actually then, two months later, experience the actual event—I still always really get a kick out of it and am somewhat almost surprised, if ‘surprised’ is the correct term. Did you have that experience this month, Austin? Or how would you describe it? Maybe ‘surprise’ isn’t the right word.

AC: I would say it’s always a delight when it works out perfectly.

CB: Sure.

AC: I’m less surprised every year, but my delight is no less.

CB: Okay.

AC: You know, often it can be a case of ‘astrologer-good’. It’s a bad thing, but it was exactly what the astrology predicted. So there’s at least a weird satisfaction, even if it’s an unpleasant event.

CB: I feel like there’s probably some word for that in like another language, like German or something, where you can string together like three different words to form like a long compound word. If anybody can come up with a good one for that at some point—the satisfaction that one gets from seeing a prediction come relatively true, relatively well—I think if we could come up with a term for that it would be nice. So we’ve seen a loosening of some of the restrictions in May. One of the things I thought was actually really interesting about that is that some of the restrictions were loosened—at least in the US—partially due to like political debates and things like that. And it’s not necessarily the case that restrictions—I mean, we don’t know yet. This is what we’re gonna find out, basically, over the course of the next month or two. It’s not necessarily—the astrology wasn’t saying necessarily whether restrictions should be loosened, but it seemed to be saying that the restrictions would be loosened around May. And I think that’s kind of an interesting and important distinction that I was kind of ruminating on a lot this month, as I saw some of the debates that were happening in the news and things like that.

AC: Yeah, astrology is much better at saying what will happen, like what a person or a collective will encounter than what will be the best possible choice. You know, in order to get the best possible choice, you need to look at the landscape and the dynamics that the astrology describes and plot a course through that. Very rarely does the astrology give you the right answer. It gives you the map, right? A map is different than the one carefully-threaded path through it.

CB: Right.

KS: That’s a beautiful distinction.

CB: Yeah. So we had the loosening with the Mars-Saturn co-presence clearing up. We also had the Venus retrograde station start. We had Saturn, of course, station retrograde, and we also had Jupiter station retrograde. And we are now about to be—once we open up June—about halfway through the Venus retrograde period. Did you guys see any notable Venus retrograde instances in the news? Or did you see any notable like client examples of an eight-year repetition? Like, for me, the exaltation thing ended up being an eight-year repetition because it was eight years ago that Ben Dykes and I got together around this time of the year, and we made the discovery about the planetary joys scheme, which showed how the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water came to be assigned to the signs of the zodiac, as well as a bunch of different concepts that were like built into the foundations of Western astrology. And that was a really big discovery at the time, which I published a paper on, titled, “The Planetary Joys and the Origins of the Significations of the Houses and Triplicities,” which you can Google and find online. But then this Venus retrograde in Gemini, eight years later—this repetition in the same spot of the zodiac—turned out to be us getting back together and finding this other piece of the system, kind of embedded in things, and realizing that the exaltations scheme is almost like a separate Thema Mundi or a separate planetary joys scheme that has certain things embedded in it, in this very weird and interesting way. So that—so far at least, only halfway into it—is part of my Venus retrograde story.

AC: Well, and it’s your—it’s in your 5th house, which is a volitional house. It’s a creative house, right? You’re creating. You know, you’re finding, you’re creating work, etc., etc.

CB: Yeah. Well, and to that point, 12 years ago was also when I created The Astrology Podcast during the same Venus retrograde phase. So we’re not through, and I’m not sure then what that means for whatever the next stage of The Astrology Podcast is right now, but I’m sure something will be happening. I mean, just today, we did have to finally buy expanded space for many more live people to be able to attend this livestream, because so many signed up that people were gonna be turned away. So I finally expanded it from like a hundred attendees to up to 500. So that is gonna push me to do more livestreaming to make the extra expense worth it. So perhaps that’s a change that’ll end up looking more notable in the future, in the long-run, in retrospect, than it does now.

AC: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KS: It could well be, yeah, that progress.

CB: Yeah. So did you guys notice any other interesting Venus retrograde stories so far, or things like that?

AC: I think NORWAC was probably the biggest one. You know, an astrology conference that has occurred 35 times in a building, occurring for the first time in an online space, right, and all of the relational advantages/disadvantages and necessary adaptations that were necessary. Like that seemed overwhelmingly Venus retrograde in a Mercury-ruled sign, while Mercury was there.

KS: Yeah, that juxtaposition of like Venus being retrograde in Gemini, while Mercury was retrograde—or, sorry, was in Gemini. Not retrograde, but Mercury was there as well. Really interesting play between like the success of the technology of NORWAC being online, for instance, versus the change in the dynamics of interaction with Venus being retrograde. Yeah, it’s very thought-provoking, the nuances. But in terms of like major things, I don’t recall anything else.

CB: Okay.

AC: Yeah, on a personal level, it feels like most Venus retrogrades, it’s less fun than normal. You know, certain go-to pleasures that you might have often become less appealing. You know, if Venus provides the sweetness, things are—there’s a certain lack of, you know, sugary delight just available ambiently. You know, this time I decided that I would very formally adapt to that. So I was saying to my patrons a couple of weeks ago, you know, when retrograde, Venus doesn’t offer the same sort of consistent pleasures that are possible during, you know, either the morning or evening rising. Venus is in the middle of an often complicated reconfiguration and isn’t simple and accessible as a source of harmony or joy. And so, you know, this time, with my momentum off of the Mars-Saturn co-presence, I was like, “You know what? I’m just not gonna try to have a great Venusian time.” And so, like I’ve had no sugar and no carbs for over a month. I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna do the dietary version of this, cuz I’m in a 6th house year.” My Moon is in Gemini. So this goes right over it. I was like, “I’m gonna do without the sugary delight, right? There are other pleasures to be found. And, you know, the Venus store is stocked with some weird stuff.” When I was talking with my patrons a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about these ideas and just this approach, and I was talking about how sometimes, you know, when you go to Venus, you go to do something that is harmonizing or sweet or nice. Sometimes you get an unexpectedly complicated result. And one of my patrons—I can’t remember who, I apologize—shared a story about staying with some friends, and how there was kind of a relationship kerfuffle that was catalyzed by one of the people baking a nice food for everybody. And usually baking a nice food is a socially-harmonizing thing. “Hey, everybody. I made us a pie. I made us muffins. I made us a cupcake.” But instead, this ended up catalyzing a conflict or a relational shift in process, and I was like it’s such a good example, right? And it may be that that relational shift needed to be addressed during this time period and will be ultimately for the good. But in terms of, you know, that day’s experience, you know, “Oh, I made everybody cupcakes,” it made things worse, right?

CB: Sure. Yeah. And, like I said, we’re not even halfway through. We’re about to be halfway through it. So some of the Venus retrograde themes still, I’m sure, will become or continue to become apparent as the month moves forward and as we get towards the end of June, where Venus will eventually station direct. Okay.

AC: I think one of the—go ahead. I think one of the things—

CB: I was just gonna transition us.

AC: Okay. Okay, do you wanna talk about the Venus retrograde in June, in another section?

CB: No. I mean, that’s the very first thing, so let’s just open it up. I was just gonna throw the calendar for June up on the screen, for those watching the video version. So this is the outlook from our Yeah Ahead Calendar of just the major astrological alignments in June. And on June 3, we actually open up with the Sun-Venus conjunction, with Venus retrograde literally halfway—exactly halfway through its retrograde cycle. So that’s really the first combination that we have to talk about this month, as we hit the halfway point at the top of June. So this is actually a great time to check in about the Venus retrograde. So what were you saying, Austin?

AC: Oh, I was just gonna say one of the things that I expect in June is for the Venus retrograde to correlate with—which is already beginning—an initial and unsustainable wash of spending that will make the various economies look stronger, as if they will recover more quickly than they actually will. There are a number of financial—

CB: Cuz that’s already happening. The fact that the stock market’s just like behaving bizarrely, rising and rising and rising in the US, even though the economy recently like grounded to a halt, there’s obviously like major cracks all over the place.

AC: Yeah. And there were cracks before this year began. You know, this isn’t striking a stone with a hammer. This is striking a rotten fruit with a hammer. But, yeah, a number of financial analysts have predicted a ‘dead cat’ bounce in June, which is when the market, the actual economy, doesn’t have any strength in it. Even though that term is delightfully-ghoulish, I didn’t come up with that.

KS: No. That’s a stock market industry standard.

CB: That’s not an Austin Coppock-ism?

AC: Yeah. Even something that is totally lifeless will bounce if it hits the ground hard. And it’s basically, you know, an indicator of false health or false vitality. And when I heard some analysts describing this, I was like that fits the timeframe for June perfectly because we have the Venus retrograde. You know, the Venus retrograde, when it does give sugar, right, when it does give some sweet returns or what seem like profits, when there’s spending, you know, it is not an indicator of a stable pattern to come. It tends to be an aberration. And then, the end of the month, we get a lot of really challenging things, and we begin one of the three negative tent poles, the three shit-shows that 2020 has planned. And the second quarter numbers will come out everywhere economically, and those will probably be devastating. And so, you know, this Venus retrograde, first couple of weeks of June, correlating with that ‘dead cat’ bounce makes a lot of sense. You know, the financial and the astrological seem to be saying very much the same thing there.

CB: Yeah. How are you feeling about all this, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, look, I definitely agree. I think that we have not seen the worst economically yet, unfortunately. And the first half of June—one thing I was really struck by when I sat with June, I mean, Venus retro for basically the whole month. Venus doesn’t go direct till the 25th. So there’s a sense of just being suspect. There are some things that aren’t ready or aren’t as stable as they might initially appear. And I think feeding into that—especially in the first few weeks of June—is that, you know, Venus and the Sun are kind of running together in mid-Gemini, and Mars is getting closer and closer to Neptune in Pisces. And there’s sort of this undertone of Neptune in the first couple of weeks of June where given that Venus is invisible, so close to the Sun, and planets are dealing with Neptune, I just wouldn’t trust the way things seem to be. It may seem great—as you were saying, Austin—like everything looks rosy, but it doesn’t make sense that it’s still this shiny and bright given everything that’s gone on. And as the fog clears and the Venus retrograde unravels, we’re gonna see some truths that will indicate this almost idyllic wishfulness is absolutely unsubstantiated.

CB: Yeah. I mean, and just to give the overview—cuz I like that we started doing that. I know you started doing that, Austin. It seemed like the overarching themes for this month are that we have the second half of the Venus retrograde in Gemini, first and foremost. But then, also, eclipse season begins this month, and we also start to see the effect of the recent nodal shift, which starts to be felt, which is gonna start shifting us towards eclipses in the Sagittarius/Gemini axis. And then, finally, by the end of the month, we see the return of some of the tensions in cardinal signs, especially in late June and early July, when we have Mars moving into Aries, and then in early July, Saturn retrograding back into Capricorn. So we have a return to some of those like cardinal tensions that we were feeling between especially March and April and early May, which may be a sort of prelude to September and some of the culminations around September, around the time of Mars stationing retrograde in Aries, square Saturn, Pluto, and Jupiter.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Would you guys say that’s an accurate thumbnail overview of June?

AC: Yeah, absolutely. By the time—you know, yes, I would say that that is accurate. We’ll deal with the individual factors eventually.

KS: I mean, the other thing—when you were talking before, Austin, too, and to your point further as well, Chris—the first eclipse is June 5, just a couple of days after the Sun-Venus conjunction, and it’s in Sagittarius. And this is kind of the first substantial thing. I mean, it’s a lunation, but it’s just a bit of Sag activation, which I think kind of feeds into that optimistic, maybe without reason to be. But the idea of trying to see, definitely wanting to look forward. And I can understand that. I mean, I’m definitely like, “When can we start thinking about the future again?” But, you know, it’s a South Node eclipse, so it may not have the solidness underneath it that we would like it to have.

CB: Yeah. And that’s a good one—

AC: So what’s interesting—

CB: It’s a Full Moon. So we’ve got a Full Moon in Sagittarius, which has that vibe and that energy in and of itself. But this is also another one of those ones where we always debate when it’s like just on the outside of being an eclipse. I mean, I usually tend to be more liberal in saying that that’s probably close enough to be an eclipse, especially since the nodes changed signs. You guys at all—do you fall on one side or the other on that?

AC: Well, so it’s an eclipse. It’s a very weak eclipse.

CB: Right.

AC: But I think that that actually is the perfect descriptor. Cuz as Kelly just said, you know, it’s a Full Moon in Sag, right? It’s not that the Moon is going to go blood-red anywhere, but there’s going to be a stain on that optimism, right? There’ll be a little creeping doubt or shadow. Like that literal quality of the eclipse is exactly, I think, what we’re going to get. You know, the lights are not swallowed by shadow until we get to the solar eclipse two weeks later, which is annular, which is basically as strong as they get. You know, that’s when Sauron’s forces, you know, sally forth.

CB: Definitely. The analogies for all of The Lord of the Rings nerds in the audience, I love that. So that’s a really good thing, though. So we have to like combine those two things. And I guess that’s appropriate, since the first one is a Sun-Venus conjunction, and then the second one is a Sun-Moon opposition. So we’re seeing kind of the culmination then of some of the optimism in maybe the first and second week of June before things start to set in and get real again with the third week of June. Mercury stationing retrograde, the solar eclipse happening.

KS: It’s very different after that middle of the month. Like it’s just very different.

CB: Right. Like first half of the month versus second half of the month.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

AC: We should talk about that Mercury retrograde. Cuz that’s one of our very important pieces.

CB: Yeah, okay. I mean, after the eclipse in Sagittarius, that’s really the next major thing that I have on the calendar. I mean, there’s also the Mars-Neptune conjunction, which I think occurs around the same time, or maybe a little bit before that. But what’s going on with the Mercury retrograde? Or why is that retrograde important, aside from just being one of our three retrogrades this year?

AC: Right. So, one, with Venus in Gemini, Mercury is the ruler of Venus. So we have, for about 10 days after that, we have retrograde Venus ruled by retrograde Mercury, which gives us not a tremendous amount. We could say that the lay of the land will not be clear for a lot of people at that point. There is a tremendous opportunity for confusion. Now even though Mercury may be confused there, it’s not afflicted. There aren’t malefics staring right at it. However, when we get to the end of the month, and the beginning of next month, we’ll see Mars move into Aries and then put itself into a harsh square with Mercury.

CB: Oh, yeah.

AC: So where Mercury is going is much harsher than the point at which it turns around. So that Mercury retrograde will bring nasty things, but not at first.

CB: Yeah. It’s like the beginning of the retrograde initiates a review process, and the end result of that review process is some unpleasant endpoint.

AC: Yeah. And then Mercury and Mars will spend a lot of time in a square in July. An unusual amount of time. And we will have Saturn on the very 1st of July retrograding back into Capricorn, which puts Mercury in a sign-based opposition with Saturn, while being in a degree-based square with Mars in Aries. So both malefics are very strong, and this Mercury retrograde, this Mercury cycle is going to end up configured to both, which is very harsh. But we don’t see that harshness until the very end of the month. But, you know, how shall we say, we board the train in the middle of the month.

CB: Yeah, right on that Mercury station, around the 17th and 18th of June. 17th,18th, and 19th. So, of course, that’s when Mercury actually stations. It looks like it stations at 14° of Cancer. 14°45’, approximately. And it’s gonna retrograde back to—what’s the degree? To 5° of Cancer.

KS: 4 or 5.

CB: Which means it’s gonna enter its shadow at 5° of Cancer, around June 1. Wow. So we literally enter the shadow phase of Mercury, the degree that it’s gonna retrograde back to at the very beginning of June.

AC: Yeah, there’s a lot, how shall we say? There’s a lot growing in the shadows during the first half of June. Maybe the good version of that is nutritive fungi. But there’s a lot of fungi that is not nutritive.

CB: There’s a lot of things that that fungi has to grow into, you know, what it is. So it seems like, though, if the shadow’s already starting at the beginning of June, then a lot of what’s happening in that seemingly optimistic part of June, in the first week—with the Venus retrograde conjunction and the eclipse, the lunar eclipse—then is what gets revisited. Cuz anytime you have Mercury passing over its shadow degree, and then it eventually comes back to that, there’s something that has to be revisited, that took place at that time. So everything that takes place in the first week or two of June perhaps could potentially come back to and need to be revisited at some point at a later date.

AC: Yeah, yeah. One thing—and I don’t want this to be too long a tangent, but it’s worth describing briefly. These upcoming transits—this Mercury retrograde, as well as the nodal shift into Sagittarius and Gemini, and that getting activated—are very tightly-configured to the US Sibley chart. The US has its benefics, both Jupiter and Venus, in the first decan of Cancer. And its Sun is right in the middle of Cancer. And so, we have that Mercury retrograde station basically on the US’s Sun, and then the direct station is right on the benefics. And our big solar eclipse is in the first decan of Cancer as well. And the activating Sag and Gemini—as the eclipses are—that’s big stuff in the US Sibley chart, which has a Sag rising and a Gemini 7th. And thank you for the graphic, Chris. And we see we have Mars and Uranus in the 7th, in the US Sibley chart, in Gemini. And so, you know, we’re looking at North Node eclipses on top of Mars-Uranus in the US for a while, and we’re looking at South Node/dragon tail eclipses on the ascendant for the US for a while. And, you know, if we look at the nodal cycle—which is around 19 years—we don’t get particularly stirring and positive moments in United States history if we pop back by that number. 19 years ago, 2001, right?

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sure.

AC: And there are other factors. I’m not saying that that will occur, but it doesn’t help my point. It stimulates difficult portions of the US chart.

CB: Right. Yeah, I was looking at that Aquarius Moon, and I was thinking about that recently. It was Saturn stationing in that sign this month, in May, stationing in the early part of that sign. You know, like the New York Times ran a front page headline the other day about how the US is reaching about a hundred thousand deaths from the COVID epidemic—or pandemic—and thinking about just the enormity of that in the context of something like a national chart.

AC: Mm-hmm.

KS: It’s interesting when you think about the Moon in the US chart, about the Moon having to do with the people and being in an air sign. You could sort of see some of the symbolisms about the health and the body and the types of issues. The mind as well. There’s a lot of layers to it.

CB: Sure.

AC: Yeah.

KS: I do worry with what you were just saying, Austin, about the Mercury squeeze, really, getting back into that Mars-Saturn jam. The previous time that we had a little bit of Mercury in that besiegement or maltreatment was when there were a lot of headlines about the US Postal Service, for instance, really struggling and what should happen with it. So it’ll be interesting to see whether it’s that particular topic, or whether there are other things along those lines to do with Mercury’s topics and Mercury’s themes coming under pressure when Mercury itself is dealing with Mars-Saturn.

AC: I think one of the ones that we can say pretty easily will be besieged is commerce.

KS: That’s true. Yeah, fair point.

AC: You know, I don’t wanna be ‘doomy’, but, you know, we have not even remotely seen the consequences, the economic consequences of our situation. So here is—and I’m gonna frame this as an unnecessarily-negative Austin metaphor. This is the way my brain tells me things, right? I was saying the other day to Kait, I was like, “It’s a little bit like a nuke that went off 50 miles away. You can see the brilliant flash of light on the horizon, but the blast wave hasn’t hit yet. And the blast wave is economic.” And I think we have two big waves, one of which is end of June, first 10 days of July, and then the other one is in September. And we’re gonna need to get both of those impacts to see where we actually are.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah. And one of the ones I just released this month—I re-released an old episode that Nick Dagan Best and I had done on Venus retrogrades, which was like the main Venus retrograde episode that I’ve done on the podcast, and it was done pretty early in the history. One of the things that Nick talked about in that episode were things like—sometimes during Venus retrogrades—riots and racial tensions. And one of our listeners, Medupe, is asking or pointing out in the chat that there’s already, recently—just happened in the past few days—protests in Minneapolis because of the murder, basically, of a guy named George Floyd by some police officers. Did you guys see that video? I think it just went out like yesterday.

AC: I just saw it this morning, actually. It’s horrific.

CB: Yeah, I watched it. When I woke up yesterday, I saw it in my Twitter feed or on Reddit or something, and it’s just really shocking. It literally is like murder on camera. There’s a group of people around that are like trying to stop it, and wanting to interfere and trying their best to, but they just weren’t successful. And, yeah, it was pretty tough to watch.

AC: And behind that, like that’s the one, thoroughly-documented version of that, right? How many times does that go undocumented, right? The overwhelming majority.

CB: Sure. Yeah, so that’s probably an important element of what’s going on right now as well in terms of the Venus retrograde. It can be tied in with that. And we’ll probably see a continuation of some of that story continue to unfold and play out as people demand justice for that. And one of the keywords that Nick Dagan Best used for Venus retrograde was ‘challenging consensus’ and what happens sometimes when like the consensus reality or whatever the consensus establishment reality is needs to be challenged in order to change or revise something, especially as a result of something like injustice. So that can be one of the more positive manifestations of Venus retrograde, even though sometimes it is the result of—or there’s an event that causes it, that’s not necessarily positive, but is negative or is a tragedy.

AC: I think that, yeah. I would give Mars in Aries for six months—I think that planet will take up the duty of making sure that every cauldron of rage boils over. And we’ll get an initial dose of that with Mercury retrograde’s configuration to that Mars in July. But then we’ll get a double-triple-dose in September and October.

CB: Sure. All right. So we didn’t really go through this chronologically, but one of the things I did wanna mention, or that we might wanna focus on at this stage, happens mid-month. Let me double-check to see if that’s true. Mid-month, yeah, about mid-June, before we get to some of the other heavy stuff. Or it almost, in some ways, kicks off some of the other heavy stuff. But we get the culmination through the conjunction of Mars and Neptune, it looks like, around June 12, at 20° of Pisces. So that’s something. That’s a transit that would have begun already and started to build up in the middle of May. But then, eventually, we see the sort of peak of it when we get the exact conjunction here, right in the middle of the month. So Mars conjunct Neptune you can see there on the screen. So, Kelly, how do you usually delineate? What’s one of your like archetypal delineations for Mars conjunct Neptune?

KS: I was just reflecting on what we were just talking about with the Venus retro and the—yeah, so much there. Mars-Neptune. Oh, okay. I often describe this. Often, when you’re working with clients—sorry?

CB: If you had something to say, if you didn’t wanna move on, we could still linger on that.

KS: I think the only thing that I wanna maybe just clarify—cuz I’ve been trying to think a lot about this. You know, as a white person, it’s so easy to say, “This is so shocking.” But I think if you’re a black person, particularly in America today, this is not something that’s surprising, and it’s not something that’s once. I mean, what I was trying to remember was there was a black policewoman who—I think she was a policewoman. She was shot and killed in her home, and I was trying to remember when that happened. I think that was actually very close to the start of Venus retrograde. She was at home. The police came to her house, looking for somebody else, and she was killed in the safety of her own home. So to your point, Chris, when you were talking about Nick’s research on the Venus retro cycle, I wonder if it just brings it to a wider audience. But I know that there are parts of the population, this is their fear everyday. An EMS worker. And so, yeah, I’ve just been trying to respectfully respond and think about this, knowing that I’m a white person. And it seems shocking to me, but for someone who’s not a white person, who’s a black person or a person of color, unfortunately, this is more of their regular reality.

CB: Yeah. And that was something that, actually, I really appreciated about this NORWAC, that several of the new speakers brought a voice to and brought more of a focus towards discussions. For example, like Bear Ryver’s and Diana Rose Harper’s talk about issues of like privilege and how astrologers discuss things that they take for granted, when they have different backgrounds, where they just don’t have the same struggles as other people. Or where there’s certain things that they take for granted, that they assume everybody has access to the same things, or has the same opportunities or what have you, and it creates a sort of blind spot. But I really appreciated the way that they introduced that and brought, from the social sciences, sort of more of that discussion into the astrological community in a gentle, but also, very important way. Because it’s something that probably has been missing and was discussed, for example, after Sam’s keynote. Cuz Sam Reynolds, a friend, who’s been on the show a few times, has tried to play a really active role in trying to, you know, bring in and create more of a diverse audience in the astrological community, or at least hold a place for that. Because he always knew that it was there, it just wasn’t being represented properly or as much as it could be.

KS: Yeah. And Sam’s been really influential to activating that conversation, I think, which is really important.

AC: Persistent even when it wasn’t comfortable.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sure. But it’s something obviously to be aware of about when we’re like discussing something like this, in terms of the point that you were making, Kelly, in terms of when things become documented and become like a media sensation, and hopefully, is the linchpin that leads to some change or some sort of development versus the reality of just this being a constant, you know, in some communities, that’s just ever present, and that you are just aware of occasionally, when something comes up in the news.

KS: I think that’s the reality that sometimes someone like myself misses and has to be more cognizant of. Then there does come a point where, you know, all of our best wishes are just bullshit, and that has to translate into some kind of action to try and change the situation, even in small ways that just help to take steps in a better direction. Yeah. I think the situation most recently—I actually did get really emotional, but I couldn’t actually watch it. I read about it and, you know, I posted a little bit about it, particularly, on Instagram. It’s just so sad that somebody in this day and age—like, I don’t know. It’s incredibly devastating. Then when I remembered that woman, the EMS lady—I wish someone could maybe remind me of her name. But she was just in her home—that’s, anyway. So, yeah, sorry. Oh, my God. It’s obviously emotional.

CB: Sure. Yeah.

KS: Yeah. It’s just very unfair. It’s very unfair.

CB: I would encourage people to just watch the video and not read about it or anything else. Because it’s one thing to read about, and I’m sure there will be different spins or different attempts to defend different things. But like if you just watch the video, it’s like a very emotional, moving thing that you learn from, and I think people should watch it in order to understand.

KS: I wanna just say that lady’s name, Breonna Taylor. Thank you, yeah. And so, Chris, you were saying, really, we all have to just watch that video because we can’t turn a blind eye to it, basically.

CB: Yeah.

AC: And just a quick note about, you know, where is that coming from. That’s coming from the rapid militarization of the police in the United States over the last couple of decades, and the prisons-for-profit industry. And so, you know, if you’re going to vote for somebody, maybe vote for somebody who has prison reform and judicial reform and checks on police power as one of their priorities. You know, those are the mechanisms. You know, awareness is good, but like those are the systems that create that on a large scale.

CB: Right. Or recognize it and has it as part of their platform and discussion, and a deliberate attempt to discuss things like racial injustice or, you know, police injustices or other things like that that are important social discussions that need to be happening in the country.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah. I would like to see policy coupled with lip service.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sure. All right. So to take us sort of back to what we were talking about with the astrology, and just trying to get back to June, since we’re now in the middle of June. The Mars-Neptune conjunction, while hard to articulate—as with most things with Neptune, hard to pin down and sort of grasp as a single, specific thing—I think is important, potentially, to discuss, just because it falls right in the middle of the month, right around the point where we get that shift towards some of the more challenging configurations that we’ve been talking about in the second half of the month. Some of the exuberance or the optimism surrounding the eclipse in the first week, in Sagittarius, begins to subside, and there is a transition into something else. So, archetypally—in the 2020 forecast, the year ahead forecast, we ended up inadvertently doing a good job just by attempting to describe the archetypes, sometimes coming up with keywords for them, like—what was the phrase? Like I always keep forgetting it. But it was like ‘there will be no hugging in the third week of March’ was gonna be one of our iconic phrases for 2020. If we were to come up with a phrase for that, for Mars-Neptune, what would it be?

KS: Oh.

CB: I know, Austin, somebody sent you a meme recently that was something like that, with like a man holding a sword, who seemed to be like standing in the ocean and like fighting against the waves or something like that.

AC: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, so, yeah, with Mars-Neptune, you have two very different powers. You know, we can say Mars is the fire of individual assertion, right, whereas Neptune is inherently massive in its scale. You know, its orbit encloses every other planet and is very collective and very watery. And so, it tends to dissolve the individual concern into a vast sea, which can disperse it to the point that it seems not to exist. Just on a transiting level, Mars’ conjunction with Neptune will often feel like Mars disappeared for a few days. You know, that fire is just totally put out. Sometimes you will see—just sticking with elemental metaphors—you know, you’ll see some of that water boiled into steam. And if there are threats or attacks, they will be indirect, or, you know, of the nature of a toxic cloud rather than a single spear point.

CB: Right. So that which comes from many directions and is enveloping in the way that it sort of attacks rather than something that is a single, specific, distinct sort of like spear point that one can deflect against.

AC: Yeah. Generally speaking, though, Mars-Neptune, especially in Pisces, is just a less-aggressive vibe for a while. You know, there’s no time where nobody will attack anybody, you know, out of seven billion people, right? There will be some aggression. Generally, less aggressive as a baseline. And when attacks do occur, they will tend to be more subtle. On an interpersonal level, passive-aggressive, more indirect, more diffused, and occasionally, just nuts and delusional.

KS: It’s very low energy and lethargic. I think the elemental associations you were referencing, Austin, around like the water/fire kind of piece is very appropriate to get a handle on that.

CB: Yeah. And also, cuz Mars also can tend to be or is fundamentally—in people’s charts especially, natal charts—about decisiveness and how a person takes decisive action. Whereas Neptune is creating a sense of uncertainty and not really knowing which way to go. And when you combine those two energies, it often gets delineated as something that’s problematic because the decisiveness of Mars suddenly is just all over the place and doesn’t have clear direction. So that may be one of the issues and one of the clear themes around the middle of the month. Not a misapplication, but a lack of clear direction, and a lack of knowing which way to go as you’re sort of like wandering through the fog. Even though there’s a necessity of taking action, the uncertainty at the time makes it difficult.

AC: Yeah, absolutely.

KS: Very confusing.

AC: What do I work really hard to do?

KS: Why, again?

AC: What direction do I boldly charge ahead in?

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: I don’t really feel like charging. Anyway.

KS: There’s a lot of congestion and a lot of sleepiness, I guess. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna be a productive few days. Cuz the Moon is also there. I was just trying to check the degrees.

CB: Yeah. The Moon conjoins Mars and Neptune right at 20, right around the same time as the conjunction. And, of course, some of these themes are getting repeated or echoed or compounded by the Mercury retrograde, which is also slowing down and stations retrograde just a few days later, by June 17-June 18. So we get some similar themes of, you know, things like miscommunications or uncertainty or going back on one’s word or having to retread steps that you’ve already taken previously, that start coming in around the same time, with the Mercury retrograde.

KS: Yeah, it’s just very unclear, isn’t it?

AC: Well, and it may be good to pause during this mid-June. Because the second half of June has a bunch of stuff that if you kept your momentum from early June, you’d be heading in the wrong direction. And I do wanna say something nice about the temporary excitement of the first half of June. So, you know, we’ve perhaps belabored the point that, you know, a lot of the goods we see in early June aren’t gonna last. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good time to do things that are fun, but don’t need to last, right? You know, we still grow flowers even though they wilt, right? You know, it’s okay to enjoy. Even if it’s like not everybody’s not so stressed out for a week, that’s still something valuable. You just don’t want to draw conclusions about where things are going from that good week. But, by all means, enjoy that good week or two.

KS: Yeah, that’s something I was saying for my month-ahead subscribers for June. You know, it’s okay just to have more of a flexible or a fluid period of time. It may not stay that way, and it’s highly unlikely to, but it’s okay to take things down a notch, or just to, you know, not have to be so clear or timely for a little while.

CB: Yeah. For me, over the past like week or two, it’s been something with the Mars-Saturn co-presence finally ending. Just something as simple as like being able to get takeout again, takeout food, has been relaxing, or like almost like a return to normalcy, even if I know there’s still other stuff going on, and even if we know that things could still take a weird turn or very well may take a weird turn very soon in the future. At the same time, some of what you were just saying, Austin, reminded me of some of the pictures we’ve seen from some states where people are suddenly like flocking to pool parties and stuff again—even though they’re going out and enjoying things and trying to enjoy life again and return back to normal—some of the potential drawbacks that there might end up being for stuff like that in the middle of the pandemic.

AC: Yeah, that’s one case.

CB: Sure. I guess that’s kind of doing the opposite of what you were trying to do. You were trying to bring, ironically, some levity. Not levity, but like some optimism to our picture this month.

AC: Well, not even—just what is the time good for, right? Some utility, right? It’s okay to enjoy things. You know, just because there are more difficulties waiting in this year doesn’t mean that you should be focused on the worst parts of the year and just be miserable the whole time, right? You know, there are plenty of things that don’t need to—you know, you’re not electing, you know, the starting of a foundation that you hope is gonna endure for 200 years. Yeah, maybe this isn’t a good time to do that, or starting a business that you hope to support you for 20, right? But like, you know, throwing a thing, getting together or doing something, having a fun night, I don’t know, by yourself—whatever it is, you know, you can still make use of the flower even though it will wilt.

CB: Sure. Yeah, so bringing us back to mid-month. Why don’t we move into our second lunation, and move into that last week or two of the month, where things start getting more serious? So we have the Sun move into Cancer, as it does, around this time of the year, every year, on the 20th. Then we get the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and immediately after that we get a solar eclipse in Cancer. And I believe this is the last solar eclipse in Cancer that we have for quite a while now, for years. Because the nodes have moved out of Cancer and Capricorn, so now we’re gonna stop that. So this is the final one in this series, that has been bouncing back and forth between Cancer and Capricorn for months now, with the last set taking place in like December and January, I believe, right?

KS: Yes. Yeah, this’ll be the last Cancer/Capricorn axis eclipse. It’s a very strong one. That eclipse cycle is definitely going out with a bang, if you like. Yeah, so we have the solstice on June 20 and then the eclipse, I think, is the very next day. And that is going to be quite dramatic. I mean, for various reasons, one of the reasons I always look for, you know, if we do have an eclipse very close to a solstice point, it just seems to trigger more drama and more dramatic events and outcomes. Sometimes we see it in the weather, with nature events, but we also see it in our lives and collectively as well.

CB: Right. So here’s the eclipse. I’m just showing it for those watching the video version. So it’s right there at 0° of Cancer. So that really emphasizes and drives home your point that this is really right on the summer solstice, or right on the solstice, and therefore, on a very pivotal and very powerful point in terms of astrology and just in terms of the world in general. And it’s also just very close to the node. The True Node is still there at 29° of Gemini. So that means this lunation is right there on the nodes.

AC: Yeah, which is why it’s an annular eclipse

KS: That’s what makes it so intense.

AC: The closer to the nodes, the more darkness and shadow you get, right? So an annular is when you get the ring of the Sun with the shadow darkening the center, but the little ring of fire on the outside. That’s what this eclipse will be. And so, it’s interesting. Whenever you have one eclipse that’s super-intense like that, it means the surrounding eclipse or eclipses will be super-wimpy. It’s like there’s only so much shadow to go around, and it can be either evenly-distributed between the eclipses or one could take the lion’s share. Or the dragon’s share, I think would be more appropriate.

CB: I like that phrase, a ‘wimpy eclipse’.

KS: Yeah. It has to do with the amount of shadow, but also, yeah, the proximity to the nodes. So the closer the lunation is to the nodal axis, the more powerful. But that’s not as poetic as saying ‘wimpy’ and ‘dragon’s share’.

CB: Yeah, yeah. You’re applying that to other eclipses. So this is powerful.

KS: This is very powerful. Yeah, cuz it’s right there.

CB: Okay.

KS: Yeah, the Sun’s on the North Node around June 19, which is basically the middle-point of the eclipse season or the eclipse window of possibilities.

CB: So one of the reasons this is important, of course, is because the year opened with eclipses, and that was one of the contributing factors that we discussed in the 2020 year ahead forecast. It wasn’t just the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that happened in January, which coincided with the rise of the pandemic. But that set of eclipses that was happening in the Cancer and Capricorn axis was also a major contributing factor in December and January, right?

AC: Yes, indeed.

CB: So just to take a look, I’m gonna animate and take the chart back to look at those. This was the Cancer lunar eclipse, right, which was about January 10, at 20° of Cancer.

AC: Right next to the exact Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

CB: Yeah, which is beautiful. And in my presentation at NORWAC, I pulled up the New York Times like ran an article that day, on January 12, that was like “mysterious, flu-like illness reported by China,” or something like that, which just beautifully lined up with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, but also, with that lunar eclipse. So we had that lunar eclipse in Cancer, in January. And then, of course, back in December, we had the solar eclipse around December 25-26, which occurred in Capricorn. So this set of eclipses at the end of this month and in early July is going to bring to culmination and is gonna be a return to—or like a bookmark or a bookend—some of the stories that started for some people back then, around December and January, and a return to some of those themes.

AC: Even earlier. We are approaching the last eclipses on the Cancer/Capricorn axis. After this, it’s all Gemini/Sag for a while. So this is actually, you know, bringing to an end a year-and-a-half/two-ish-year-arc of eclipses in Cancer and Capricorn.

CB: Right. And it’s kind of poetic in terms of, also, it happens shortly after this month, but it’s tied in. But also, having Saturn retrograde back into Capricorn, right at the beginning of July, for its final last pass through the tail-end and last few degrees of that sign. So all of this like intense energy in the Cancer/Capricorn axis is just getting one last pass during this six-month timeframe, from June and July onwards. And then that takes us fully into the second half of the year, and is like an opening of a continuation of themes all the way to December.

AC: Yeah. You know, speaking of the poetry, one thing I was reflecting on as I was looking over this month—in preparation for today—is from sort of a strictly omen-reading perspective, like not bringing in any of the more sophisticated tools we use, the two solar eclipses, this one coming up and then the one that was in December, you know, for a lot of people that was a solar eclipse on Christmas, right, which is a couple of days after the solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun starts growing in light, where the day strikes back against night and begins growing. And here we have another sort of natural point of solar celebration in the Northern Hemisphere, the point of maximum day—you know, which is what the solstice is—which is darkened again. Again, just from a strictly observational perspective, those don’t seem like good omens for 2020.

CB: Yeah, that reminds me of the solar eclipse in December. And I was trying to put a slightly-positive spin on it, cuz it was with Jupiter. And I’m gonna go ahead and say you called that one.

KS: Yeah, what was the phrase, Austin, for that? Do we dare repeat it? No.

CB: I don’t know if you had a phrase, but we had a slight disagreement about like Jupiter being in such close proximity to the solar eclipse. The Moon getting in the way of the Sun and extinguishing its light and whether that puts a slightly-positive spin on that. And I’m gonna go ahead and give that one to Austin and say the answer was, no, not as much as one might hope.

AC: Well, thank you. That’s very gracious.

CB: Yeah, people in the chat were saying that was the ‘Anti-Christ’ one.

KS: Yeah. I’m like I’m sure it was the ‘Anti-Christ’ eclipse.

AC: You know, that was the ‘Anti-Christ’ election that everybody missed, you know. Kait and I were gonna try to have a baby for that one, but just couldn’t get our shit together.

CB: Cuz it was like right around Christmas.

KS: Oh, my goodness.

AC: Well, it was a solar eclipse, yeah, on the birth of the Christ, right? So that seemed like a pretty natural, you know, ‘dragon’ baby election.

CB: There’s the chart. So, yeah, Sun conjunct the Moon on December 26. Actually it was very late on the 25th, and then Jupiter was right there at 5° of Capricorn. And this brings up another point. Cuz there’s some traditional astrologers that were trying to debate like could you have seen the pandemic just through traditional astrology, and one of the main things they pointed to was the eclipse. Which it’s like, yeah, the eclipses in December and January, yeah, you can see some of that. But I really did feel like this made a pretty good case for the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and Pluto not being a completely worthless piece of space junk, in my opinion, but instead, having some interpretive value in terms of, especially, mundane astrology.

AC: Yeah. And it does bring up really good questions, Chris, about mundane astrology. I think that one thing that’s very doable with mundane astrology is to say, will this be a shit show, or will this be great, or will this be a mixed bag? Like you can judge quality of time relative to human expectations pretty easily. But figuring out like if there’s a ‘bad’, right, is it a ‘hurricane bad’? Is it ‘plague bad’? You know, what kind of ‘bad’? And I think that this is part of the frontier for what’s gotten called the traditional revival, right? I feel like the traditional revival, well, it started with horary, and then there was a wave of natal. And we’re just starting to have people who have, how shall we say, the experience points to start applying these to the mundane, right? And so, I’m actually oddly excited about the ability to make large-scale predictions that happens when we integrate a lot of the mundane techniques, which were collected so nicely by Ben Dykes in his Astrology of the World: Volume 1 & 2. But when you combine that with some of the—Tarnas didn’t invent it, but he explicated it very well, the bigger Saturn-Pluto cycles, which are not, you know, discussed by Abu Ma’shar, but use a logic, you know, the psychologic that’s present in that earlier strata. I think we’re going to have a better and better mundane astrology, you know, perhaps a year too late. But, you know, sometimes it takes something terrible to get people to realize that, hey, maybe it’s worth forecasting a plague, even if that sounded like the mere obsession of the endlessly negative, you know, a few years ago.

CB: Yeah, totally. And Leisa and I talked about this a little bit—on the podcast at the beginning of this month—about the media’s coverage, attempting to paint astrology in a negative light and say that they didn’t predict the pandemic. The broader point the article was trying to say is that astrologers were saying that 2020 was gonna be a great year, and there weren’t gonna be any problems.

AC: Who said that?

KS: They quoted Susan Miller, didn’t they?

CB: Yeah. They made the focal point of the piece Susan Miller. She got on some television show and tried to put a positive spin on stuff. But that’s partially kind of her style. She tries to put a positive spin on things, and that’s like a deliberate thing on her part. Cuz she’s primarily doing Sun-sign horoscopes for people, which are like individual readings for non-astrologers. But that’s kind of like different than doing mundane astrology or doing analysis of like long-term planetary cycles. And one of the ones we pointed out in that episode—and we read the quote—is that there’s a famous French astrologer, André Barbault, who actually did an article in 2011, that he published in 2011. He actually passed away late last year in October. He was born in like the 1930s, so he was very old. But the timing is just amazing. He published his article in 2011. And let me read you—because Mark Cullen on Skyscript actually had an excerpt from this article, which was titled, “A Survey of Pandemics,” with Barbault’s conclusions of the article, where he’s looking at long-term outer planet cycles that coincided with pandemics in the past. And one of the things that he said in this French journal was: “Going back to the pandemics and going back to the past century, the fore crises of 1918, 1954, 1968, and 1982 are obvious; the two considerable being the first, the famous Spanish flu, which is said to have claimed 25 million lives, and the last one, in which is AIDS, which is even more devastating and continues to be deadly. Since then, there has also been a small influenza surge in 2009, against the last, lowest critical index cycle 2010.” And that’s like his phrase for some of these planetary alignments, cyclical index. But he says: “We may well be in serious danger of a new pandemic at the 2020-2021 mark, at the lowest peak of the cyclical index of the 21th century, with the quintet of outer planets gathered over a hundred degrees. A conjunction—Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto—can even specifically lend itself to the ‘tissue’ of this imbalance. Nevertheless, this configuration can also transfer its core of dissonances to the train of geophysical disasters without ultimately sparing the international affairs scene, nature and society being indiscriminately affected.” So it’s like he’s trying to like sort of put a positive spin in the end, but like he makes a pretty clear statement based on the repetition of previous pandemics, which was the focus of the article. Cuz that’s the thing. It’s like most astrologers aren’t specialists in like studying pandemics and haven’t gone out of their way to study those different cycles. But one of the astrologers who actually did point out this year as a potentially problematic one in that context. And this prediction was made years ago, and then he died just as the prediction was about to start coming true.

AC: Yeah, yeah. And that’s a great counterpoint. And also, yeah, Barbault called a lot of other amazing, big things in the world, like the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which he also called like 10 years ahead of time, based on the Saturn-Neptune cycle in that case.

CB: Yeah, there was another famous prediction in the book, Mundane Astrology, with Nicholas Campion and two other co-writers—let me look up the name—where one of his co-writers in that book actually predicted the fall of the Soviet Union based on that conjunction of planets in Capricorn in the late 1980s.

KS: Uranus and Neptune and Saturn, I think.

AC: Mm-hmm.

CB: Yeah. So it was Charles Harvey, Michael Baigent, and Nicholas Campion. And I forget if it was Harvey or Baigent that made the prediction. But Nick Campion always, as a historian, still looks back and acknowledges that as actually a pretty impressive prediction at the time, since that book was published in 1984.

AC: I think Barbault also called it in ‘79 or ‘80. I’d have to double-check. But if I remember correctly, Barbault had a prediction that was published like five years before that of the same thing.

CB: Sure. But it just goes to the point of the challenge of mundane astrology and the astrologers that specialize in it, and also, how one approaches it or what your context is for what you’re trying to predict, or what cycles you’ve looked into in the past, and then what you’re trying to project out into the future. And in some instances, for example, in our forecasts, we’re just trying to look at the archetypal meaning of the planets and talk about that in the broadest sense of what sort of things that would coincide with, or what kind of energies would be in play during those times. And then the specifics of that work itself out in the future in more concrete ways, but the goal is always to attempt to articulate the archetype.

KS: Yes, that’s always the goal.

CB: Is that your goal? Is that your goal, Kelly?

KS: Yeah. And I find when I’m working with students, you know, I think there’s a tendency that we may have as astrologers to try and jump to defining very specifically exactly what a symbolic thing might look like.

CB: Right. Cuz that’s what everyone wants.

KS: That’s what people think they want, I think. And when you can clearly and articulately describe the symbolism—to use the ‘anti-cuddle’ reference that I think it might have been Austin, anyway. It was in the year ahead podcast about late March. That was purely derived from the symbolism of Mars conjunct Saturn. Nobody said pandemic or this or that. We just spoke to the symbolism. And when you can speak to the symbolism—to use Austin’s metaphor from earlier today—you read the lay of the land. You may not get the specific manifestation of the symbolism, but you capture the core of the experience of that timeframe, and that’s incredibly meaningful for people, I think.

CB: Yeah. I mean, it just reminds me of, again, like our ‘no hugging’ in the third week of March phrase, which was like one of the phrases that we came up with, but ended up being archetypally correct in a funny and not-so-funny kind of way.

KS: Yeah. And it’s that piece of trying to stay with the archetype.

AC: I would like that to be a tagline for astrology as a whole. ‘Correct in a funny and not-so-funny way’.

CB: Right. That could be the new tagline for the podcast.

KS: Yeah, yeah.

CB: Yeah. All right.

KS: So that’s the eclipse. That was all on the eclipse discussion.

CB: That was on the second eclipse of the month.

AC: I have one more thing on the eclipse.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

AC: Just in terms of one of the things that that will probably mean. So, as I mentioned before, in the Sibley US chart, we have both benefics in that first decan of Cancer. And I’ll wait till it pops up.

CB: Oh, you want the Sibley chart? Okay, hold on a second.

AC: Yeah, if you could. And so, it’s the 8th house. Eighth whole sign house of the chart. And so, you know, what is the 8th house? It’s going into debt, or borrowing a bunch of money. I think that that massive, how shall we say? It’s almost like an eclipse that intense will drop a bowling bowl onto the fabric of whatever part of the chart it hits, right? Like the Einsteinian bowling bowl which distorts the space around it. I think that knowing what we know now that, you know, massively stimulating the debt portion of the chart will look like another massive bailout in the United States. Not on that day, right? Eclipses take a little while to unpack. But I think that that virtually guarantees that another multi-trillion-dollar, you know, whatever you wanna call that—heist/slight relief for normal Americans—will almost certainly take place.

CB: Sure. So that’s taking place in the 8th house of the Sibley chart for the US. And then also happening that week, Neptune stations retrograde on the 23rd. So we get a little intensification of some Neptune significations that are going on. Which is kind of an intensification of some of what we were already talking about with the Mars-Neptune conjunction. So it’s just a reiteration of that in some ways. So there’s the animated chart for that. Neptune stations there on the 23rd-24th at 20° of Pisces. Then a couple of days later, on the 25th of the month, we get Venus stationing direct at 5° of Gemini. So we start to finally get some forward movement again over the next few days, with Venus coming out of that retrograde phase. And then Mars completes its co-presence with Neptune and moves into Aries. This is a huge shift. Because this transit of Mars through Aries is gonna last for like the next six months, or something crazy like that, because Mars goes retrograde in September. So normally, Mars will do what it just did, which is like make its way through a sign in like a month or a month-and-a-half or something. But here, it’s gonna slow down, and it’s gonna stay in Aries. And it’s gonna stay in that part—whatever part of your chart this is, where Aries coincides with some house or whatever houses in your chart—for the next six months. So that’s gonna be a really extended transit for everybody, no matter how you look at it, whether it’s from a mundane standpoint, or whether it’s from a natal standpoint.

AC: Yeah, that’s a big one.

CB: Let me just animate the chart.

KS: Yeah, the Mars in Aries.

CB: Let’s see when Mars actually, finally, departs.

KS: It’s like early January

AC: January.

CB: Yeah, January 6-January 7.

KS: It is more than six full months.

AC: Yeah.

KS: And then, Austin, yeah, where does it go?

AC: Oh, it conjoins Uranus and squares Saturn when it enters Taurus. Next year is better than this year, but it has a rough start.

KS: It does have a bumpy beginning, that’s for sure.

AC: Takeoff may not be the most comforting experience. So, I don’t know. Go ahead, Kelly.

KS: Oh, I was just gonna say, I mean, I was like, “Oh, we’re getting so far ahead.” But, yeah, it’s hard to avoid. When I looked at 2021, I was like, “So when’s Mars gonna be in a fixed sign? How often is that gonna happen? You know, it happens a few times.” But, yeah, there’s Mars in Aries for six months. A chapter of our lives, basically.

AC: So one thing that I’ll say about this is, okay, it’s six months. So plan to start getting good at dealing with Mars in Aries on day one, right? You’ve got a little bit of time to figure out how to kind of work with and adapt and protect yourself, you know, from what it’s like when it rains gasoline every couple of days, right? And so, you know, Mars brings high volatility to anything in general when it’s in Aries, including people’s moods and dispositions, right? And so, you know, just think about like, “Okay, I’m gonna have to store gasoline. You know, I’m gonna have to manage the gasoline all around me for six months,” right? And the answer to that, you know, is not to be terrified. But like how do you, how shall we say? How do you store it carefully? And then that’s also a super abundance of fuel. What engines do I put this into? And we are careful when we work with gasoline, not because it is evil, but because it’s highly combustible, right? Like, on a personal level, that’s the challenge, right? And maybe the gasoline’s coming from your 7th, from your 4th, from your 10th, from your 12th. Wherever it is, it rains gasoline in that 12th pretty regularly, for a long time. And so, don’t curse the gas. Like, just think about, “What am I gonna do with this? How do I contain it? How do I use it?”

CB: Yeah, that was a great keyword you said, an overabundance of fuel, or like an overabundance of gasoline. Because with this transit, it’s kind of a return, since we have Mars going back into a cardinal sign. And with Saturn retrograding back into Capricorn, Saturn is overcoming—through a superior sign-based square—Mars. So there’s a return of some of those tensions that we were having between March through the first part of May about like wanting to move forward, but being held back. And a lot of that manifested in a sort of collective feeling of constraint through like the lockdowns and stuff, the quarantines. It’s almost like we get a return of some of those feelings. But this time, Mars is not in Capricorn, where it’s like more restrained and is almost behaving itself a little bit more. But instead, Mars is in Aries, where that sense of there being like a lot of fuel there that’s wanting to be burned is much more present and is a little bit harder to control than, I feel like, when it was going through Capricorn.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

KS: Harder to control, yeah. And I also think, too, about the difference between Mars in Aries versus Mars in Aquarius, where Mars didn’t have any major sign-based dignity. And, you know, certain parts of the world are in fair amounts of lockdown. And different countries have different cultures, where they respond to lockdown restrictions in different ways.

CB: Right. There was a story about like Japan is actually doing really well right now as a result of just the culture being somewhat different surrounding the lockdown and everything else. And the deaths were surprisingly low.

KS: Yeah, yeah. One thing I’m holding some curiosity—and maybe a little bit of wariness around—is that Mars, if you like, being in a sign that he rules, he does have a lot of agency there to kind of push back maybe, or to try and tango with Saturn in a way that he just wasn’t able to. You know, there’s a difference between being in the same sign—Mars and Saturn—that’s something. But being at odds with each other, but physically distant/apart is a different kind of thing.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah. It’s Mars and Saturn, but there’s some really critical differences about the way they form up in the second half of the year.

CB: Yeah. And Mars being left to its own devices and having access to its own resources. And fuel or gasoline is a really good imagery, or, you know, asset of Mars in Aries, and Mars wanting to, then, sort of go out on its own and start fires during that time, and being less amenable to the restrictions that Saturn represents.

AC: Indeed.

KS: Or more angry about them.

AC: You know, that Mars in Aries begins at the end of June, and then we see it activated, especially by Mercury, the Mercury retrograde in July. And then the planets, and probably us, will be in a slightly more, I don’t know, harmonious relationship with it, when the Sun is in Leo and trining Mars before it’s gone retrograde. But by the end of August, and then September, it’s Mars stationing retrograde square that Saturn and Pluto. And that’s where we see, you know, the large-scale frictions that will be brewing for a long time, you know, take place on the biggest stage. Chris, what is the name for a planet that is on the inferior side of a square? Was it hurling rays back at the oppressor planet? The planet that’s in a superior position? It’s hurling rays, right?

CB: Especially once it gets within like a degree range of being able to closely aspect that planet. It’s said to be hurling rays or to be striking with a ray, as if you’re aiming with like a bow and arrow, and you shoot an arrow backwards towards your target.

AC: Oh, interesting, yeah. And so, that’s gonna be September. We don’t have that intensification until September. But, you know, difficult moments are a lot easier if you watch them develop and know how to position yourself, right? Doesn’t make them not happen. But this one is worth watching develop on both a personal and a collective level.

CB: Right.

AC: You know, with that hurling of rays, I always think of how much vitality and ferocity an animal has when it’s cornered. I was re-reading part of The Art of War the other day, and one of the pieces of advice—

CB: As one does.

KS: Just light Sunday reading.

CB: You’re sitting in like the forest, reading The Art of War and like meditating is like perfect ‘Austin’ imagery.

AC: Well, I was having my Mars return. One of my lectures was about superior—or involved superior/inferior squares, and I wanted a quote from Sun Tzu. It’s basically the army should prefer the high ground, or prefer the high to the low. But, anyway, in looking through The Art of War, I came across a quote that reminded me of that hurling rays back at the planet, that’s on the superior side of the square. And Sun Tzu advises, you know, when you know that you can defeat the opposing army, always leave a way out for them to run away, because no army will fight as fiercely as when it is cornered and the back is to the wall. And you don’t wanna subject your troops to the ferocity of, you know, an army that has its back to the wall, right? So you leave a way out, so you don’t have to face that pressure. And that just reminded me so much of the hurling of rays dynamic, right? Cuz Saturn may ‘win’, but take a huge amount of damage by putting Mars’ back to the wall there.

CB: Right. Well, that may bring us to one of the final other major alignments this month, which is the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, which is happening pretty much simultaneously, at the same time. So here’s that. It’s happening at 24° of Capricorn. Both Jupiter and Pluto are retrograde. So this is the retrograde conjunction, and it’s the second conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto. The second out of three. So this is the sort of middle phase and their sort of dance between each other.

KS: Yes.

AC: Yes. So among other things, this is another factor I think that attests strongly to big bailout energy.

KS: We saw the first of the large bailouts in early April. They were either just coming or being clarified, depending on which country you’re in. And that was the first Jupiter-Pluto conjunction.

AC: Yeah. I wanna ask a question. What have either of you gotten from this Jupiter-Pluto on a personal level, in addition to the big things that we’ve seen? Cuz I think of a few things, but I’m curious about your experiences.

CB: I mean, I’ve definitely got one. Unless you wanna go first, Kelly?

KS: No, you go. You go. I’m gonna put my thoughts together.

CB: So mine—and I wanted to express this carefully and as careful as I could. But the big thing that I started realizing—that’s I’d been overlooking, but became really evident at the beginning of May—and I think was very much tied into the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction was just issues of like truth and this deep desire by large groups of people, by everybody, to get to the truth of like what is going on, and to try to uncover the true reality of that which is taking place. And one of the interesting manifestations of that towards the beginning of May—it was already happening in April, and we talked a bit about this. But there was like this huge spike at the beginning of May that I noticed on social media of the sharing of different videos that were supposed to be, you know, uncovering the truth about like the coronavirus, or like what’s truly going on, and different like theories surrounding that. And I didn’t mean to come off as dismissively as it came off, so I apologize for that, but I referred to it as ‘conspiracy theories’. I think that’s like a reasonable term that could be used in a very broad sense to describe like a theory that involves a conspiracy—especially among groups of people, or like government entities, or what have you—in order to accomplish different ends. But for lack of a better term—let’s just say for the sake of discussion—there were a lot of like conspiracy theory videos that were going around on social media in early May. Like the ‘plandemic’ video that got very big. And I think that is something that really gets to the root of what was going on with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, and I had a lot of big insights about that at the time.

AC: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And that syncs beautifully with an article that Patrick Watson put out before, you know, all of this circus started. He just looked at the history of Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions and found that microscopes and telescopes alike—that allowed us to see things we’ve never seen before—arrived in the human world during Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions. Which is being able to look at things—either big things or small things—but being able to look further in search of truth, right? And our circumstances, for very different reasons, have absolutely kind of created the same need, right? And whether people do a good job of that or not, that is the root action and motive.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, that’s really good, Chris.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I mean, well, there’s the desire to use critical thinking sometimes to try to discover the truth about something, or sometimes having the feeling of discovering a hidden truth, which can be a very empowering feeling. And that was actually initially what drew me to astrology. I actually got into astrology through, broadly speaking, what used to be a much-less pejorative term, but it seems like people often take it more pejoratively now than I realized. The world of conspiracy theories is how I got into astrology, and I learned astrology partially in that context. You know, there’s some conspiracy theories I’m open to, and sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. But just because you believe in conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that you believe that every conspiracy theory is true. And even somebody who believes in lots of conspiracy theories acknowledges that there are some that are not true, or even that sometimes conspiracy theories are put out by people who want to spread a certain narrative, so that conspiracy theories can sometimes be used as like another mechanism of control, even though they appear to be the opposite. And that’s one of the things that I was having a deeper realization of during this transit, that I thought was important, and I’m trying to put in the most delicate and like general way possible. I think that’s one of the themes of the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that we’ll continue to see a development and expansion of—different attempts to sort of manipulate and control narratives and to question truths. Cuz, remember, this came up way back. I think it was when Jupiter was going through Scorpio and when Saturn was going through Scorpio, we were having these questions about truth and like justice coming out, and truth being told by different people. Yeah, I think it was the Jupiter in Scorpio and like the MeToo movement and past discussions coming up about truth and justice for past instances of wrongdoing, and people like speaking their truth. And so, now with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, ideas of truth are also starting to come up.

AC: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, Jupiter’s the big picture, what’s really going on. And I believe that it was during Saturn in Scorpio and Jupiter in Gemini that we had the Snowden stuff come out about the degree to which America was surveilling its own people, as well as other people.

CB: Yeah. And somebody mentioned—I actually looked this up because 30 people wrote to me saying that the CIA created the term ‘conspiracy theory’. And I actually looked it up, and it turns out that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ goes back to like the late 18th century or something like that. Late 19th century. So that wasn’t necessarily true. And then it’s ironic that a lot of people into conspiracy theories think that that’s true. There’s a portion of that that’s true, in the way that it became something to deflect and to reject theories about that, even that’s worth looking into. To question truths and not take things for granted is maybe an interesting lesson about that, which could be taken in a number of ways. Did you get anything out of the Jupiter-Pluto transit? Or has it led to any new insights for you, Kelly?

KS: Not so much on a collective level beyond what you guys are already saying. I have been thinking about how it’s impacting my own chart. And the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction is very close to the ruler of the 3rd house for me. Like I have a planet at 24 Capricorn, and so, this is right on it. And one of my siblings has been going through a very difficult time. The timeline began almost as soon as Jupiter entered Capricorn back in December. And that situation has sort of been playing out in a kind of almost classically Pluto way, with that intensity and life getting consumed by just a couple of different things because, you know, there’s a level of urgency. And so, I’ve definitely seen it, you know, at that personal level as well, in addition to what you are speaking to with the topics of truth, and then the more collective financial bailout pieces. So there’s been different levels, I guess, of reflecting on that one.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah.

CB: I just wanted to clarify. Cuz I don’t want it to be unclear, even though I’m trying to do this very delicately. But I don’t endorse, for example, the ‘plandemic’ video or the views expressed in it. So I don’t want it to come off—because I’m trying to treat it delicately for those that are into some of those things. But it’s not meant to be an endorsement, but more reflecting on some of the themes that are coming up with those transits and some of the conclusions that I’ve been making from that.

AC: Yeah. Well, we can be critical of, you know, the official story or the particular handling of an incident without necessarily, you know, believing that it was, you know, a reptilian plot or an intentional viral weapon, right? You can be very critical and very suspicious of how this situation is abused, is being abused, and will probably continue to be abused without necessarily agreeing with every—and it’s impossible to agree with every scenario. My friend and colleague, Gordon White—

CB: To interject, that was the reason why I wanted to say that because there almost seemed to be this reaction that if you criticize one conspiracy theory, that you’re criticizing all conspiracy theories, or are somehow against the idea in general. And that wasn’t the case. But more just the necessity of pointing out that sometimes even conspiracy theories themselves can be mechanisms of manipulation or control or propaganda. And that was actually the deepest insight I had. I thought back to Pluto’s discovery in 1930 and the way in which, very quickly, like the Nazis were using things like propaganda, or using things like conspiracy theories surrounding the Jewish people being the behind-the-scenes manipulators in controlling the financial systems or other things like that, and other conspiracy theory documents like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and just stuff like that in order to control and manipulate history, in order to accumulate political power to themselves. Cuz, you know, the other outer planets—it’s always so clear what their discovery coincided with and how that connected very closely with their fundamental astrological meaning. Like Uranus and the American Revolution. Or like Neptune and the advent and development of—like Alan White always says—starting to print photos from the Civil War in newspapers, and people thinking that they’re looking at the real thing. But, in fact, what they’re looking at is inkblots on paper that’s just recreating and giving you the false idea that you’re looking at the real scene. With Pluto this month, I felt like I got a deeper understanding of what was truly going on around the time of the discovery of that planet, that was really relevant to its core significations and meanings, that’s evident in our time, even though it’s subtle and sometimes hard to see.

AC: Yeah, I love that. And, of course, with Pluto, what happened at the time that Pluto was discovered was inherently concealed, right?

CB: Right.

AC: You know, manipulated, etc., etc. I was just gonna say, you know, my friend Gordon White said one of my favorite things about speculating, the variety of angles of speculation about the coronavirus and, you know, everything that’s sort of stapled together in the 2020 timeline. He basically said, you know, in 20 years, people will still be arguing over this. This is a little bit of a Kennedy assassination, where there’s like so much that’s going on, that’s like intriguing and shady, but there’s very likely not going to be the truth that’s discovered. You know, like in 20 years, people will still be arguing about everything that happened in 2020. I thought that was pretty good.

KS: It’s very spot on. That’s true.

CB: I think that’s probably true and there’s definitely truth to that. But at the same time, I think people should be careful not to be distracted from the shady stuff that’s actually just really evident and right in front of us and is being documented everyday in the news, and be distracted by more complex, like elaborate conspiracy ideas that are going on, when sometimes the most shady stuff is right in front of you. And sometimes those other things are just being used to distract from that.

AC: Yeah. And that’s actually what Gordon was setting up. He was like, “So, this is that.” He’s like, “But there’s all this stuff right ahead of us. And trying to get to the bottom of this story is not what we need to be doing now.” Like there’s a lot that needs to be done. A lot of people need to make big adaptations to be safe, and, hopefully, prosper in a much more difficult era that we’re entering, right? So that’s great if that’s your hobby. He’s like, “It’s a hobby of mine.” He’s like, “It’s a hobby, but there are more pressing concerns, though.” Like we can just look at how that first bailout was distributed, right, and how much went to giant corporations, the tiny amount that went to individuals. And, apparently, the most misallocated portion of those funds was to small businesses who are in tremendous danger, right? Like that we can just get stats on, and we can be concerned about things that are very real, to speak to your point, Chris.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right. Yeah. So that kind of brings us to the very last thing, which weirdly happens simultaneously and may be tied in. So we’ve seen some other transits that are happening simultaneously that seem to be connected, like the Sun-Venus conjunction at the beginning of the month, that coincides with the Full Moon lunar eclipse. At the very end of the month, we have the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction—the second of three Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions—which actually coincides with the Sun-Mercury conjunction right in the middle of the Mercury retrograde. So that’s on the very last day of the month. So we hit the very middle of the Mercury retrograde cycle at the same point, which usually starts to resolve or starts to move towards some conclusion at that point. Whatever the problem that was set up a week-and-a-half-or-two earlier by the Mercury retrograde station, there starts to be some clarity at that point. So there may be some connection between those two events.

KS: Yeah. One thing that sort of came up for me, Austin—I think you mentioned shadow or light when you were talking about the eclipse. And it reminded me that one of the threads that runs through June is this interplay between shadow/darkness and then light and sight. Because we start the month with Venus conjunct the Sun, and Venus is actually invisible for almost the first half of the month. And just as she, you know, pops out in the morning sky, Mercury starts to go into his retrograde phase, which also takes him close to the Sun. So between it being a month with two eclipses, and a month—well, with Mercury and Venus retrograde, which includes this invisibility, you know, going in and out of sight, being seen, not being seen, being in darkness—there are these weird interplays between seeing things and then things going on in the shadowy corners or out of direct sight, or things happening in the backrooms that don’t become immediately obvious. And I think everything that we’ve said—especially what you guys were just talking about—speaks to that at a collective level. But I think it’s important to keep that in mind at a personal level that there are things that are obscured for now, that will become clear. There are glimpses of light, but there is this general sense of a shadow, just to do with planets being in darkness and lights being blocked.

AC: Yeah, that’s really good.

CB: Definitely. Very good.

AC: Like, on a very simple level, you know, Mercury disappears in the west, while Venus reappears in the east during June.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And the point of the triumph of day in the Northern Hemisphere—the summer solstice—is changed by there being an annular solar eclipse on that day. Yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot of like non-metaphorical light-and-darkness stuff happening. Like you can just go outside and see the play of light and darkness.

KS: That’s the thing. There’s something really poetic in that, I think, even though it’s like actually happening.

CB: Right.

AC: So, Chris, what’s our auspicious election for the month?

CB: Thank you. I meant to mention that earlier, but this is a good time to mention it. And thank you, again, for not letting me forget it, as I almost did last month. One of the problems this year that Leisa and I ran into when we did our 2020 Year Ahead Electional Report—where we picked out one electional chart for each month—is that, especially the past few months that we’re just getting out of, was really tough for elections. Later this month, we did find one election that we wanted to focus on, which is actually more of a Mars election, actually. So you may or may not like this, Austin. I know you’re into the planetary elections for different like planetary talismans. But what we wanted to focus on this month was a very brief window where there might be a decent Mars election available, and that takes place on June 29, 2020, at 12:30 AM. So this is actually a late night chart. Let me put the actual election up. So June 29, basically, just after midnight. Let me put that on the screen there. Okay, that is not quite it yet, but we’re almost there. So June 29, about 12:30 at night, whatever your location is, cuz we’re using local time. So you basically just have to set it for about 12:30 at night, and you wanna adjust the chart until you have about 1°-or-so of Aries rising. So what you’ll end up with is a night chart, of course, cuz it’s just after midnight, with Aries rising. And Mars has just ingressed into Aries, into its own sign. And Mars will be in the first whole sign house conjunct, roughly, the degree of the ascendant, in a night chart, and relatively well-placed. Jupiter is up in the 10th house, in Capricorn. Venus is over in the 3rd house, in Gemini, having recently stationed direct, where it’s casting a sextile ray backwards to Mars, in one of those positive hurling ray examples, like Austin was talking about earlier. Jupiter is up in the 10th overcoming Mars through a superior sign-based square. The Moon is in Libra, in the seventh whole sign house, and it’s applying to a square with Jupiter by degree, within orb. And Venus, at 5° of Gemini, is overcoming the Moon with loose sign-based reception through a superior sign-based trine. So, basically, you get the two most important planets in the electional chart—which are the ruler of the ascendant and the Moon—relatively well-placed and not afflicted in this chart. This chart, we would recommend, as a good Mars election. So anything Martian, where you have to take decisive action. Sometimes you have to do things on your own or independently. Actions that require bold or sometimes aggressive, but probably appropriately aggressive-type actions in order to succeed. What are other really positive, Mars-type archetypes or actions that you guys would associate with like a well-placed Mars?

AC: You know, if I were gonna start a new workout regimen, where I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna do,” whatever, an ‘X’ number of push-ups, sit-ups, etc., you know. Or, “I’m gonna do this power lifting program.” I’m gonna do this type of physical discipline, which is gonna require a lot of work and effort for, let’s say, 40 days, and I want a specific time to begin, that would probably be something I would want a strong Mars for.

CB: Totally. Like a workout regimen, or this is like when you’re really gonna start something like that. Cuz Mars can be great for vitality and for those bursts of energy that you need in like short periods of concentrated work. Especially over a long period of time, but in short bursts.

AC: Right. I mean Mars, on a positive level, is very much ‘get up off your ass’ energy, which can be really annoying if you’re trying to relax. But if you’re trying to, you know, tie yourself to, “I wanna make sure to get up off my ass, you know, an ‘X’ number of times per week and do this thing,” then that can be harnessed. That’s a strong Mars, right? First decan, right, which is a double-Mars decan. It’s in Aries. That’s literally Conor McGregor’s Mars, his 0 Aries.

CB: Right. Go ahead, Kelly.

KS: I was gonna say it feels like this would be a great chart if you had to make a decision, or you’ve been thinking about something and you wanna, you know, take action on that idea. The feeling I got was like if you wanted to elect a time where you needed to have an interaction with someone, where you wanted to really advocate for yourself or stand up for yourself—not so much that I want you to get into a fight, but this could help someone who isn’t very good at being decisive or putting their own needs first, I guess.

CB: Definitely. I love that. That’s a really good point, that would be a good manifestation of a chart like this. Yeah. So, obviously, it’s in the middle of a Mercury retrograde, so it’s like you can’t avoid that. Because the Mercury retrograde, as we said, the shadow begins on like the 1st of June, and Mercury’s already stationary retrograde by the middle of the month. So if that’s like a major consideration, or if that’s hitting your chart in a weird way, that could be problematic and not something you wanna do. But if you do wanna focus on Mars, one of the things that’s nice about this is this is before the Mars retrograde, and it’s also not in its shadow yet. So Mars is actually moving fast. And if you look at the little readout in the bottom-right corner that I have for my layout in Solar Fire, Mars is actually the only planet that’s moving fast and is not retrograde, or not slow because it’s coming off of a retrograde station, so that’s why we wanted to focus on Mars at this point. Also, if you do it in this short time span, at the very end of June, it’s before Saturn has retrograded back into Capricorn, at which point it’s gonna be overcoming Mars through a superior sign-based square and becomes very prominent in the 10th house. So the one thing this chart’s probably not great for is Saturn in the 11th house, in a night chart. Even though it’s somewhat mitigated due to being in Aquarius, in its own sign, and it’s also got some nice close configurations with Venus and Jupiter, the part where you would probably struggle with a little bit might be groups and friends or alliances with Saturn in the 11th, in a night chart. But that’s almost appropriate since we’re talking about like a bold, Mars in Aries-type chart to begin with, which is much better for individual action than necessarily like collective or group action to begin with.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I mean, with the Mars-Saturn sextile and the Libra Moon and all that—there is some potential to coordinate ferocious individual action with a larger program. Like the focus of it is definitely individual action.

CB: Definitely. Yeah, good point. Especially with the Libra Moon, yeah, like you were saying. So this is our auspicious election, the one we wanted to highlight for this month. Leisa and I are about to get together later today, I think, and record our Monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is a 45-minute podcast where we’re gonna outline four or five auspicious electional charts for the month of June, which are then released to subscribers and patrons who are on the $5 tier, the $10 tier and up, through our page on Patreon. So you can find out more information about that at Patreon.com/TheAstrologyPodcast. And, yeah, I think that’s it for the auspicious election. So thanks to Leisa for finding that, especially this month. As well as a shoutout—I don’t know know if I gave her a proper shoutout for giving a great couple of lectures at NORWAC and having a successful conference, giving a lecture on zodiacal releasing sub-periods, and a lecture on weird chart placements and the astrology of the weird, which is like a really fun topic that I would recommend checking out if you’re looking for NORWAC recordings to watch.

KS: Yeah, I’m super-excited to see the presentation and the chart examples, especially, on the astrology of the weird. That’s very intriguing.

CB: Yeah. One of the lectures—

AC: Sorry.

CB: Oh, go ahead. I’ll let you go.

AC: Okay. I was just gonna say, boy, like I have the listening equivalent of a long reading list from NORWAC. There were a number of talks that were, you know, clearly met with thunderous applause, and I need to catch up.

CB: Yeah, totally. You know, you can only see a number of lectures, even if you’re attending a live conference. And I always say like, “I’ll get the recordings afterwards,” or whatever, and then I rarely do. This time, though, I’m trying to have some discipline, since I know I have that two-week window to watch them, and I’m trying to watch at least one lecture a day. And I know that AFAN or NORWAC itself is organizing some watch parties where you can join a group of people, if you’re an attendee, and watch some of them live, with other people, engage in the chat and stuff like that. Laura did say on the episode we recorded yesterday—the organizer of NORWAC—that she’s thinking about opening it up to buy like a pass in order to have that same two-week window that attendees had, to be able to watch all of the lectures during a two-week period. So I’m hoping that she puts out an announcement about that soon. Otherwise, you can buy the audio, which comes with the PowerPoint slides, through the NORWAC website, which is NORWAC.net. All right, guys, well I think that brings us to the end of our forecast for June, which is a little bit of a bummer, cuz there’s a bit of a cliffhanger in it. It always is, but this month especially it seems like. It’s like taking out a clip, like an old movie reel, where, you know, a film is like just frames or individual pictures that are strung together to create an animation. And it’s like each of these months, we’re just looking at a single frame. And we kept almost going forward to the next month because we know where some of these frames are headed, but we always have to stop ourselves at that point, so we don’t give too much away for next month. But we’ll have to return again, four weeks from now, to look at the astrology of July.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Yes.

AC: Well, and this one, especially, I think that’s right, Chris. The end of June and the beginning of July are like the same arc. It’s very ‘cliffhangy’. It’s not just a few threads left unresolved.

CB: Right. Obviously, by the end of June, we’re transitioning, not just in the calendar. Cuz oftentimes the calendar, you know, is arbitrary. The civil calendar is arbitrary and not tied into the astrological calendar, but for some reason it lines up really well. The end of June, we do start fully transitioning into the second half of the year, and like the second half or part two of the major transits for 2012.

KS: So stay tuned. More to come on the ‘end of June’ stuff in early July.

CB: Yes, stay tuned. All right. And remember to watch the horoscopes that we did for 2020. Remember to go back and watch our 2020 year ahead forecast, if you want an early preview. I’ll put links to that at the very end of this YouTube video, in the ‘watch next’ thing. Otherwise, check out Austin’s website, which is AustinCoppock.com. Check out Kelly’s website, which is KellysAstrology.com. Do either of you have classes? Or are you just gonna collapse at this point? Cuz you’ve been lecturing and teaching like nonstop for weeks now. Are you gonna take a break or something?

KS: No.

CB: No? Okay.

AC: My classes run until the end of November, but not all the time, right? So I have a little bit of a break between sessions after this. And, yeah, I absolutely intend to collapse.

CB: Good. Well, I hope you take a little bit of a break. You both did an amazing job at NORWAC and had great workshop attendance and everything else. You’ve been hearing rave reviews, and also, great memes. Did I mention the ‘Cosmos and Psycho’ meme account on Twitter? Both of them must have attended all of your lectures or workshops or something, cuz they both came out of them with some great astrology memes I would recommend checking out. I actually didn’t get memed until after my workshop. And I was very sad, cuz I thought maybe I wasn’t gonna get memed, cuz they were so good. Yeah, I literally laughed out loud at several of them.

KS: Yeah. My meme had a cat in it. So I was very happy about that.

CB: Very nice. Very nice.

KS: Yeah. I do have classes going on in June, but not till the middle of the month. So that’s kind of nice. I do have a little bit of time, I realize.

CB: You do have classes. Austin, did you call William Lilly ‘Willy’? Is that what I’m to understand from this meme?

AC: Yeah. I didn’t mean to, but it works for me. Yeah, Big Willy.

KS: Totally. Yeah.

CB: Yeah, that does totally work. And then, Kelly, you had a great one that came out of one of your lectures, which was—

KS: The cat face gets me every time.

CB: That is literally the face of this cat, if you’re watching the video version. A very pleasantly, satiated cat getting ready to eat a plate of waffles is exactly how I described people walking out of Kelly’s lectures, especially the lunar phase one. But especially, also, the plenary, where you opened the conference.

KS: Thank you. Yeah, it was a nice addition. I really wanna acknowledge the effort they put in, cuz it added this funny, little, beautiful touch.

CB: Totally. All right. And, Kelly, you said you were doing classes?

KS: Yeah. So I’ve got a four-part training on aspects, which starts June 13. June 15, sorry. Monday, June 15. It is part of my ongoing Become an Astrologer training program. And there’s details about that on the website. I’m also co-teaching a webinar with Frank Clifford on the floating midheaven. And that’s gonna be Saturday, June 20, before things get too intense. You’re teaching that. Cuz I know you use whole sign houses, and so, you use the floating midheaven.

KS: Yeah. I think Frank might use equal houses. So he has a floating midheaven situation, too.

CB: Okay.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Got it. Cool.

KS: So we’re gonna discuss how we deal with the MC when it’s not in the 10th house, basically. And then the IC, not being in the 4th.

CB: Brilliant. That’s such an important discussion, that’s important for people that are considering whole sign houses. So I’m glad you’re doing that, and that should be great.

KS: Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. And, Austin, when do your classes start up again?

AC: Oh, they’re ongoing. They started in April, and they will run until the end of November. I’m just doing my two-year-long classes.

KS: That’s right. That’s right. Nice.

CB: All right, guys.

KS: Okay.

CB: Thanks a lot for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. I always enjoy our monthly check-ins, and I look forward to seeing you again next month. Are we still thinking about doing, very quickly, fixed stars in June? A fixed stars episode, maybe? Kelly, you said you’re up for it. Austin?

KS: Yeah, I think we have to discuss scheduling.

AC: Let’s talk about it.

CB: Okay, we’ll talk about it. You guys need a break. All right. Thanks, you guys, for joining me today. Thanks to all the people in the chat. You’ve been awesome. Our hundred attendees. Thanks to all the patrons of The Astrology Podcast who support the show each month. I really appreciate you. And you’re helping me to keep doing this work and keep expanding the show. And thanks to all the listeners. So thanks for listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.

KS: Bye, everyone. Take care.

[credits]

Thanks to the patrons who help to support the production of this episode of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to patrons Christine Stone, Nate Craddock, Maren Altman, Irina Tudor, Christina Caudill, and Bear Ryver, as well as the Astro Gold Astrology App, available at Astrogold.io, the Portland School of Astrology, at PortlandAstrology.org, and the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, available at Honeycomb.co. The production of this episode of the podcast is also supported by the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting a major astrology conference in Denver, Colorado, September 10-14, 2020. More information about that at ISAR2020.org. And, finally, also, Solar Fire Astrology Software, which is available at Alabe.com. And you can use the promo code ‘AP15’ for a 15% discount on that software. For more information about how to become a patron of The Astrology Podcast and help support the production of future episodes, while getting access to subscriber benefits, like early access to new episodes or other bonus content, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.