The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 158, titled:

Astrology Forecast for June 2018: Mars Retrograde

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on June 1, 2018

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2018/06/01/astrology-forecast-for-june-2018-mars-retrograde/

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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 November 14th, 2025

Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode was recorded on Friday, May 28—or Friday, May 18, 2018, starting at 2:00 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 158th episode of the show. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees about the astrological forecast for June of 2018. Hey, guys, welcome back to the show.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.

KELLY SURTEES: Hello.

CB: Hey. So we had little technical snafus today getting started and getting our mics together, but I think we’ve all got it together at this point and we are ready to do the forecast. What do you think?

AC: Oh, I’m ready.

CB: More than ready, okay.

KS: Good to go.

CB: We’re actually recording this on the 18th, which is super early for us. Usually we record more towards the end of the month. But we’re all getting ready to go out of town here in the next few days for the United Astrology Conference, which is taking place. I guess the opening is technically next Thursday, May 24, 2018. And then the closing is, what? Like Tuesday, the 29th or something like that? Is that about right?

KS: Something like that.

CB: Something like that, okay. So we’re actually recording this. I’m probably not gonna release it until the end of the month, so most of the events associated with UAC will already have taken place by then. But we’ll go ahead and just pretend that, for the purposes of this, it was a great conference, and we are now recording the forecast in the aftermath, in the warm afterglow of having had a great conference experience.

KS: That’s great. We can just channel ‘post-conference’ vibes.

CB: Okay.

AC: Let’s not channel the exhaustion.

KS: No, we don’t want that yet.

CB: Right. As well as the good feelings of the amazing podcast event that the three of us are about to have on Saturday—or did have on Saturday, May 26, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM, in the Halsted Foyer, on the fourth floor of the hotel—where we had a gathering of 300-400 people, and we led a rousing discussion about the future of astrology.

AC: It was a fine time.

CB: It was a fine time.

AC: I will forever remember the Halsted Foyer fondly.

CB: On the fourth floor.

AC: On the fourth floor.

CB: All right, let’s get into it. Let’s just jump right into it this week, since we’ve all got stuff to do as we’re getting ready to go out of town. So, first, news and announcements. You guys have any news and announcements?

AC: Yeah. So in June, I will be teaching a four-week class that I’ve titled The Proper Care and Feeding of a Birth Chart, and the focus is on remediation and management of your natal chart. You know, you’ve got your chart, and then there’s what do you do with that, right? And so, it’s maximizing strengths and remediating difficulties and then just general chart management and care. So that’s a four-week class. And then I’m also going to be giving a webinar on the upcoming Mars retrograde.

CB: Awesome. And both of you actually, last month, gave your webinars on Uranus in Taurus, right?

AC: Yeah, I did it two days ago.

CB: Wow.

KS: Cool. I’m actually doing mine in June.

CB: Oh, yours is still coming up, okay.

KS: It’s actually basically would have been a good time slot to do a Mars retrograde webinar, cuz it’s on Saturday, June 23, but I will be looking at Uranus transits for the new Uranus in Taurus cycle.

AC: That’s really interesting. Once you do that, I’d love to compare notes. I scheduled mine for the day after the ingress, cuz I wanted to get that ‘ingress’ energy. As those who attended my classes know, I often run over in time, but I think I set a new record for myself. It was supposed to be a two-hour talk—

KS: How long?

AC: I went for three-and-a-half.

KS: Oh, my goodness.

CB: Did you go through all 12 signs?

AC: Yeah, well, I wanted to do history and then ‘personal transit’ stuff. So I did a bunch of history. I actually didn’t get done with the history until about an hour-fifty in. And then I did in every house and aspecting every planet. And so, it took a while.

CB: Wow. Good times. All right, and people can find the recording for that on your website, which is austincoppock.com, right?

AC: Yep, yep, yep.

CB: Okay. And, Kelly, yours is kellysastrology.com. You’ve got that Uranus in Taurus webinar coming up. Do you have anything else coming up?

KS: That’s the big event for June. I think I’ll just be in recovery mode. It’s one of the first months this year where I will be at home just seeing clients, getting ready. I’ve got a big, four-week class coming up in July that’ll be teaching online. I’ve been saying forever it’s been such a hectic start to the year. And it’s slowly dawning on me that that may be true, but the year is now almost half over. So it’s not just the start to the year, it’s just been a hectic year so far.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Not that I wanna necessarily welcome negative things with Mars going retrograde, but just the chance to pause for a moment in June. But, yeah, so I just have the Uranus in Taurus webinar for that month, for people who are interested, and I’ll cover some of the topics Austin did. The challenge with Uranus in Taurus is you could almost separate it, because the history of Uranus in Taurus is basically a lecture unto itself. Cuz it is so fascinating, the things that happened historically when we’ve had Uranus in Taurus.

AC: Yeah, I had the idea that I was gonna do a really abbreviated run through of the history, and I did. I cut down the number of events I had on my slides by, I don’t know, a factor of three, just enough to make the point and establish the themes rather than go over everything and it still took forever. Also, it’s Uranus in Taurus, right? It took an unusually long time, right? You know, Taurus as a pattern is that which is long and slow and continuous.

KS: Yes.

AC: And so, that was the nature of the talk as well.

CB: Brilliant. Well, that sounds great. And I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about Uranus in Taurus as we get further into this episode, since that’s obviously still one of the major things going on, in addition to the Mars retrograde and everything else. As for me for June, I am basically just recovering from UAC, and a lot of students signed up for my Hellenistic course over the past month. And so, I’m starting a new group of people over the next month with the Hellenistic course, and I’m gonna restart some lecture series that I’ve been doing, where we read through some ancient texts together as a class and then discuss them and kind of analyze what the author is saying and then start applying some of those techniques in practice. So we’re gonna focus especially on some of the timing techniques, like annual profections and the advanced method of profections, which I’m doing a workshop on at UAC. And I’m hoping to add that recording to my course and do some more talks this summer about how to use annual profections to time the activation of specific parts of the chart and specific topics in individual years. You know, everybody has those years where sometimes you have one part of your life that goes really well and another part of your life that is just a disaster. And profections is a really good technique for isolating that and figuring out what part of the life is gonna go well in a given year versus where you’re gonna have some challenges. So for more information about that, you can check out my Hellenistic course, which is at theastrologyschool.com. All right, so let’s jump right into the forecast for this month. Right at the top of the month, obviously we’re recording this on May 18. So just a few days ago, Uranus ingressed into Taurus, where it’s gonna stay for the greater part of the next decade. And the other thing that happened immediately after that is that Mars ingressed into Aries—or, I’m sorry, into Aquarius, where it squared Uranus almost immediately. So we’re in that part of the year. I think this is like one of the top, major transits that we focused on in our overview for the entire year that we recorded back in December, if not the biggest transit. I mean, is this the biggest one that we really focused on this year, the Uranus ingress into Taurus followed immediately by the Mars square?

AC: This was top three.

CB: Top three, okay. And then it’s not just that ingress, of course, that takes place, of Uranus into Taurus and Mars into Aquarius. But then just a few weeks later, sometime in June, we get Mars actually slowing down and stationing retrograde in Aquarius, right?

AC: Absolutely. That’s one of this month’s—that’s one of June’s hot topics as it were.

CB: Sure. That seems to be the central one that I’m sure we’ll probably spend the most time focusing on. But in terms of the top of the month, I mean, where should we start? Do you wanna start with the big ‘elephant in the room’? Or should we just do it chronologically, from the top of the month?

AC: Well, before we do that, I think it would be nice to take five minutes to talk about what Uranus’ ingress into Taurus did, obviously, in the news, as well as what our experiences, if any, were of it. Are you guys down with that?

CB: Yeah. What have you guys seen so far? I mean, I have not been paying attention to the news, so I’m not even sure what’s been going on. But I know some astrologers have been identifying certain things that they feel like are correlating with it.

AC: Well, on a very simple level, I think the most literal possible manifestation of the disruptive planet, Uranus, in an earth sign—there were the Hawaiian eruptions leading up to the ingress and then shortly after the ingress, Kilauea blew much bigger. The instability of the Earth ramped up noticeably right after the ingress. You know, I thought that the ongoing eruption was a good enough sync, but it had to go and get more intense right after the ingress. That’s sort of a gimme.

CB: Sure. Major Earth changes with a disruptive planet moving into an earth sign.

AC: Yeah. And, boy, it’s not pretty when you look at the history. Natural disasters galore—again, that’s sort of the first thing that comes to mind with Uranus in Taurus. And sometimes the first thing that comes to mind doesn’t end up sitting so well in the historical record, but this is one of those where you’re like, “Well, I don’t know, ‘disrupted earth’?” and it’s all over the place.

KS: Yeah. This is not relevant right now, but there’s an image that Lynn Bell talked about in an article she wrote on Uranus in Taurus for the previous cycle, about how in the bombings in London people were hiding underground to protect themselves from the warfare coming from the sky. Like the bombs they dropped on the city of London. And I thought that imagery of Uranus, the sky god, literally like lightning bolts, or a modern-day version of that, which would be bombs, and people going into these tunnels underneath, the bomb shelters—which are underground—to try and protect themselves from that. So it’s such striking imagery, that even though it’s not necessarily what we’re seeing now, that’s something that I keep thinking about as we’re crossing this threshold.

AC: Yeah, that’s perfect. I don’t know if you saw my column where I discussed the ingress, but the metaphor, the visual that was—

KS: Oh, yeah, you had ‘fallen earth’ or something, didn’t you.

AC: Falling to earth. The visionary imagery that asserted itself in my mind when I was thinking about it repeatedly was like a meteorite or a stone falling to earth, but then buried in the earth and changing it. Like a virus-laden thing.

KS: I did read that, yeah.

AC: Like awakening and changing and disrupting the land. Like a stone fallen to Earth was the implication of ‘falling to Earth’. And there’s an interesting quality of heavenly or celestial, Uranian power coming from below, even though its origin is above. Demetra George—did you read Demetra’s piece?

KS: Yes.

AC: So I really liked her reference to the pairing of Ouranos and Gaia in Greek myth, and how Uranus impregnates Gaia, and then the Earth has these children that rise up from the depths, but they’re born from a celestial seed. I thought her location of the Uranus in Taurus in that particular ‘mythscape’ was very compelling.

KS: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And then, I guess, just a very, almost cliché personal example, I just felt so frustrated that week that Mars was squaring Uranus. Very frustrating. Nothing could happen fast enough. Just sort of that internal anger boiling. And I saw a lot of people saying the same kind of thing on social media around that.

AC: Yeah, I had that.

CB: Due to the Mars-Uranus square?

AC: Yeah, I’ve been feeling rebellious. You know, to a certain degree it’s Uranus in Taurus, but it’s also just a Uranus ingress, which just turns up the volume on all of the ‘Uranian’ themes.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, definitely. So I’m sharing the chart for right now, just showing today on May 18. We’ve got Uranus at 0° of Taurus and 10 minutes, and Mars is at 1° of Aquarius and 0 minutes. It’s just moved into 1° of Aquarius.

AC: And so, really obvious stuff that happened this week—the North and South Korea talks got disrupted, I think, on the day of ingress. Wall Street took a hit. Not a huge hit, but it had a little dip around the day after the ingress. Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting to talk about it for three-and-a-half hours immediately after it happened. You know, you obviously have to know some things ahead of time to give a talk, but in talking to people about it you often discover new things. You’re kind of in-twining yourself with that current and discovering it as you go.

CB: Yeah. One of the things that’s tricky about stuff like this is when a planet ingresses into a new sign, you often start seeing the rumblings of some of the changes to come or some of the themes that are gonna come up during the course of that transit. But it’s funny, because they’re not always fully-formulated. It’s not always just like the planet moves in and then, bam, you get a specific event that just clearly is a clear manifestation of that archetype. But instead sometimes you just get little previews of it that sometimes you don’t realize until much later how those little, almost inconsequential changes at the beginning would become indicative of larger changes later on. And with this one it’s almost reemphasized or emphasized twice because of that Mars retrograde, because the Mars-Uranus square is the first in a sequence of three. So with some of these things—like with the North Korea talks being sort of disrupted or something—I feel like we’re—in the short term, like with the Mars retrograde—looking at a sequence of events that’s gonna play out over the next several months, as we get Mars going back and forth over that square with Uranus. But then also in the long term—like over the next decade—some of the things that are happening right now, as Uranus has just moved into Taurus, are gonna be indicative of that longer-term transit as it moves through that sign over the next seven years.

AC: Yeah, absolutely.

KS: That’s a really good point, actually. There was a lot of commentary on social media where people were like, “Nothing happened.” And I think that point that you’re speaking to there, Chris, sometimes it’s the seed of what will unfold over the length of the cycle. Particularly, either the Mars-Uranus square, or just over the next 9-10 months as Uranus bounces around the early degrees of Taurus. And it may be something that you got frustrated by this week, or something that irritated you, or that bolt of insight that you had happen this week that becomes your motivation or the thing that you work towards over either the May to September period, which is the Mars square Uranus, or May to about April of 2019, which will be the Mars through that 0° of Uranus. Sorry, Uranus through the 0° of Taurus. I’ve said these words so many times this week.

CB: Yeah, yeah. I think by the end of the next month everybody’s gonna have ‘Uranus in Taurus’ fatigue.

KS: Yes. And then ‘Mars in Aquarius’, there all words that you have to be really clear with your speech. I feel like, Austin, you know these problems.

AC: I do. I experience them daily.

KS: Yeah. I call it ‘I lose my words’.

CB: All right, so this is what things are looking like now in terms of the Uranus ingress just having taken place, the Mars ingress having recently taken place. If we sort of fast-forward though to the beginning of the actual month that we’re talking about, to June 1, things are a little bit further along. So Mars starts out the month at 5° of Aquarius. I think it eventually stations later in June at 9°, right?

AC: I believe that is the case.

CB: That is correct? Okay. And that station is not gonna actually take place until June 26, at 9° of Aquarius, but already, basically, it’s getting very close by the opening of the month. Especially for people that have planets in fixed signs around those degrees—around 9° of Aquarius or Scorpio or Leo or Taurus—you’re basically most of this month, gonna have Mars grinding across those degrees and grinding to a halt right at 9° of Aquarius by the end of June.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah. All right, so aside from that, I mean, to me that’s the main thing I almost want to focus on here. But are there other things at the top of the month that we should talk about before the focus on just that station of Mars in Aquarius?

AC: Oh, yeah. Let’s see, one of the nicer things about June—especially the first part of June—is that we have Mercury in Gemini. And so, Mercury, of course, rules Gemini, and so it’s good. It’s good for ‘mercurial’ endeavors. It is invisible for most of June, though, and that’s because June holds the superior conjunction of the Sun and Mercury. So this is the one with Mercury on the far side of the Sun, as opposed to the retrograde conjunction of the Sun and Mercury, which is Mercury between us and the Sun. And so, that exact conjunction is on the 5th of June. And there are a couple of things to say about that, so I’d like to throw this out there as both a practical and theoretical concern. Generally speaking, when planets are close to the Sun, they’re combust, you can’t see ‘em, and they don’t work as well, right? If you’re looking at it as an influence on a period of time, the current of that planet is weak. There’s not much to drink from However, there is a Hellenistic rule—and, Chris, you can probably cite the source—that a planet which is in its own sign, or, I believe, its sign of exaltation gets to shake off or shielded from the effects of combustion. I believe that’s the planet ‘being in its chariot’ or ‘having a parasol’.

CB: Yeah, that idea of ‘a planet in its chariot’ as a mitigating condition is in Antiochus and Porphyry and Rhetorius. So it appears to be a pretty common rule in the Hellenistic tradition from very early on.

AC: Yeah. And so, I’m curious how y’all see that working out. Because when I see it and watch it, what I find is that the quality of the planet’s action is not reduced at all—high-quality Mercury in this case, with Mercury in Gemini—however the intensity or strength of the planet is weak and combust. It’s just that what gets through isn’t burnt up, it’s good stuff. But it’s as if the signal is not degraded in quality, but the volume is lower.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always found that mitigating condition of a planet being in its own sign or exaltation—and therefore, not as debilitated by being ‘under the beams’—to be a really solid mitigating condition to pay attention to. And this particular one’s funny, though, because Leisa and I were looking at this for elections this month. And it would otherwise be a nice, potential electional date—with Mercury in its own sign, in the heart of the Sun, at 15° of Gemini—but you have this really tight square from Neptune at the same time, at 16° of Pisces. So there’s this interesting doubling up of, on the one hand, Mercury being ‘under the beams’—which sometimes was interpreted in ancient astrology as an indicating something hidden or behind the scenes or secretive about the planetary placement or something internalized—and then you have also Mercury and the Sun squaring Neptune at the same time, which can sometimes be associated with deception or lying or misconstruing the truth in some sense. So you almost get like a double indication for that, and we were having a hard time with that. Cuz we wanted to, on the one hand, use Mercury in Gemini or recommend it as an election, but we had a hard time describing what you could use that for, for non-nefarious things. Cuz we didn’t want to recommend, “Use this election for deceptive matters,” or what have you. It’s not like we’re writing The Picatrix or something.

AC: It’s favorable for works of deception and treachery.

CB: Right.

KS: I mean, sometimes I think about when planets are very close to the Sun—I think about the Sun as the ancient symbol of wisdom, and the planet having access to some sort of specific insight or knowledge that is normally unavailable to that planet, or is normally unavailable to most of us. So something that was maybe more productive than treachery/deception, this particular aspect could be something about meditation rituals to do with one’s religious or philosophical practice where you get a particular teaching. You might not understand the whole thing, but you might get that kernel or that key that helps unlock something for you.

CB: That’s perfect, yeah. So going inside. Going deep inside on an internal-type journey, especially one of the mind or of the spirit. That would be a great manifestation of that Sun-Mercury conjunction in Gemini square Neptune.

KS: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of other mystical, mischievous things people can get up to. I often think about this with even planets that are combust, not just cazimi. The proximity to the Sun is difficult for certain things, but it does give you access to something that is not normally available.

AC: Absolutely.

CB: I always thought of how some of the Hellenistic astrologers would interpret planets that were not ‘under the beams’ as being externalized, and planets that were ‘under the beams’ as being something internal. They were often interpreting that literally, like internal ailments versus an external injury. And I always thought that that was a really positive or fertile area of research for modern applications of the technique and how you might integrate the concept of being ‘under the beams’ as a useful interpretive principle that could have some other modern value versus just afflicted versus not afflicted. There could be some psychological component or something like that to it.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, so that’s happening very early in the month, on June 5 already. It’s interesting that right at the same time as that Sun-Mercury conjunction, it looks like Venus is opposing Pluto almost exactly, simultaneously, at 20°59’ Cancer.

KS: It does happen on the same day, yes.

CB: Yeah, at 20° of Cancer opposing Pluto at 20° of Capricorn, down to the minute. So I think it’s just like an hour or two later that goes exact right around the same time. So it looks like we’ve got two, very specific alignments or very specific signatures that are sort of happening at that moment. And it would be interesting if both of those were tied into somebody’s chart at the same time. Those would be some pretty notable triggers.

AC: Yeah, it’s an interesting and kind of strange set of things. You know, I think part of what’s interesting about it is that they’re all saying different things. A Venus-Pluto opposition says something very different from a Mercury-Neptune square. I do want to just take a second to say I don’t think that any planet is as disruptive to Mercury as Neptune. I think Neptune is basically poison to Mercury.

CB: Right.

AC: Whenever I see strong contacts between Mercury and Neptune in the sky, I always see and sometimes experience events that are straight out of the ‘Mercury retrograde’ playbook. You know, somebody leaves their phone at the restaurant or drops their phone into something, or the emails don’t work or whatever. You know, there is, of course, a reconciliation possible as there are with any planetary pairing, but that’s a difficult one, and it doesn’t seem to consistently yield anything that people like.

CB: Yeah, just because they’re kind of antithetical, because Mercury fundamentally is trying to convey something. I guess convey or to transfer something. Usually that’s information, like by speaking or communication, whereas Neptune, typically, what it actually does, practically speaking, is making things less clear, or is introducing ambiguity into situations; which when you introduce it to Mercury then automatically disrupts the communication in some way, usually by making it ambiguous or misunderstood or not correct or inaccurate in some ways.

AC: Yeah, exactly. Mercury’s trying to sort things into piles based on similarity and difference, which is a differentiation. And Neptune ‘un-differentiates’, right? Neptune melts everything in the stewpot into one thing, whereas Mercury separates. And so, yeah, Mercury’s action of obtaining clarity by means of separation and contrast is contradicted by Neptune’s essential action.

KS: So there is an obscuring quality to this particular Sun-Mercury cazimi in Gemini, which would not otherwise normally be there because of the aspect. And I think that haze, if you like, that ‘Neptunian’ haze—we’ll see that over the next couple of days. Cuz the Sun-Mercury cazimi happens on the 5th, and then on the 6th and 7th, the Sun and Mercury each move into the exact square. So it feels very foggy for this first week of June.

AC: Yeah.

KS: You know, there may not be clarity. There may not be order. Your piles will not be neat. There may be connection, or there may be insight. You know, you might be hugging everyone cuz you had too many drinks. I always find when Mercury struggles, it really struggles with the specific ‘Mercury’ things that it likes to do, which is to be clear or to be concise. And so, we’ll see a lack of those things, I think, the middle of this first week of June.

AC: Yeah. And I think with that big power of the Mercury-Sun conjunction, you see the intense clarity of Mercury conjunct the Sun in Gemini attempting to pierce the fog bank, right? And so, that’s where the action happens, right? The attempt to clarify what is confusing.

KS: Yes. Yeah, the attempt, I guess. Potentially the unsuccessful attempt.

AC: Yeah. Or perhaps the necessity. Like, “Oh, I gotta get this figured out.”

KS: Yeah, great.

CB: Right. You know, not to get too political, but that’s been, over the past year, a great reminder and lesson in the ‘Mercury-Neptune’ stuff. That’s one of the closer aspects in Trump’s chart, and it’s one of the ones that he manifests the most regularly and sort of readily, which at the very lowest level or the most polite level is just sometimes questioning or creating sort of a ‘fogging up’ situation by raising alternate scenarios or questioning what seems to be the case and then saying maybe it’s something else or something like that.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

KS: Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned the politics, Chris, cuz I was thinking that as we were talking. And I was wondering whether the Sun-Mercury might represent a journalist or a publication or broadcast of some kind who has got some really sharp insight, but is having trouble getting their message through the fake news or the crazy ‘Neptune’ buzz, I guess. So it almost feels a little bit like maybe read between the lines or look for that thing that’s trying to get out, that doesn’t come through as clearly as it might otherwise.

CB: Sure. And not to be overwhelmed by maybe the nebulousness, because that seems to be one of the things that’s happening with some of the recent ‘fake news and social media’ stuff. Sometimes it seems like a deliberate strategy to raise so many different possible scenarios that everybody throws up their hands because they don’t know what the truth is. Or to muddy the waters by raising so many different possibilities or scenarios that nobody really knows what’s going on. So seeing that contrast in something like this here, Kelly, that is probably good advice in terms of attempting to not be overwhelmed by that.

KS: Yeah. I mean, trying not to be overwhelmed when Neptune’s active. I mean, one of the listeners in the chatbox is commenting on the fact that this all gonna happen with the Moon in Pisces with Neptune as well, so we might not see things right away. And I guess the other significant thing with Mercury this month is when it becomes visible later in the month. And, Austin, you might have spotted this—I’m sure you did—with your everyday thing, which just moves me to a higher standard every month. But when Mercury becomes visible—which is not till around the 19th or 20th if we’re using that 15° marker—it actually does so as it forms a trine to Jupiter. So Mercury has moved into Cancer by then. It’s literally sort of two weeks on from this Sun conjunction. And I did wonder about the idea of, a) Mercury emerging from the darkness at that point, but doing so with that touch of Jupiter, and whether there is something that is unclear in the first week of June, but becomes more clear or makes more sense by that third week of June. But I was interested to hear what you guys thought about that, given it’s a little bit interesting, I think, to have Mercury emerging with that particular aspect.

AC: Yeah. Well, so, let’s talk a little bit about how Mercury gets there.

KS: Yeah. I mean, there’s stuff between then, for sure.

AC: So I think it’d be useful to talk about the New Moon on the 12th, because Mercury moves into Cancer right before the New Moon. The Moon almost catches up to Mercury in Gemini. But by the time the Moon gets to the end of Gemini, Mercury’s moved into Cancer, right? And that’s during the period where Mercury is on his way back to visibility but has not become visible yet. And that shift into Cancer, I mean, that’s one of the most dramatic in terms of ‘from one sign to another’ shift. Like Gemini to Cancer is very, very active, manic, yang into very ‘yin’ Cancer. And that’s, I would say, additionally emphasized by Mercury who’s so strong and overactive in Gemini and then becomes very heartfelt and sensitive and shy in Cancer. And of course Mercury has to oppose Saturn before it can arise again visibly. So it’s funny we go from Mercury-Neptune—oh, go ahead.

KS: I was just gonna say that’s beautiful, Austin. I mean, I’m just taken by your poetry.

AC: Oh, okay, thanks. So it’s basically Mercury in Gemini but then contending with Neptune, and then it’s Mercury in Cancer. Again, thinking about the personal and emotional implications of things, that level of communication with people, tone, right? And while Mercury’s doing that, it’s opposing Saturn, right? Feelings and facts. Which are which, and what is the priority of both? And then once Mercury gets done with that square—or excuse me, opposition with Saturn in Capricorn—then gets to arise basically in a grand trine with Jupiter and Neptune.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, I like that sequence. So Neptune and the lies or the illusions associated with that square with Neptune-Mercury. Then Mercury gets out of that eventually, around the time of the New Moon, and hits the stark reality of the opposition with Saturn, followed by eventually it makes that heliacal rising and trines Jupiter later in the month. And by that time, of course, we’re already getting close to Mars stationing retrograde.

AC: Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure how I feel about a very sensitive, emotional Mercury in Cancer coinciding with that Mars retrograde. Some things are best not felt.

KS: Not felt and not said. Yeah, there is a lot of water still in that June 18-19-20 period.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Cuz Neptune stations then as well. So there’s just these periods of real wetness and, as you said, Austin, the emotion and the feeling and then what we do with that. You know, what do we do with those feelings? And it’s a month when Mars is going retrograde, and it is going retrograde near the South Node.

AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting. You know, every New Moon is significant, and it’s the beginning and end of one lunar cycle. But this New Moon is particularly interesting because we have two planetary ingresses within a day. Mercury stations—or excuse me, Mercury enters Cancer right before the New Moon. The New Moon’s on the 13th, right? So Mercury stations right—

KS: I’ve jinxed us.

AC: I don’t know. I’ll blame Uranus in Taurus. So the New Moon is on June 13. It is in the third decan of Gemini. And right before that, Mercury enters Cancer, and right after that, Venus enters Leo. And Venus entering Leo of course is a shift, right? We go from ‘comfort and intimacy-seeking’ Venus in Cancer to much more ‘bombastic, extroverted’ Venus in Leo. And Venus in Leo will also give us a preview of what Mars is up to, cuz Mars is 8-9 Aquarius. It’ll be there for the second half of the month. It’s so slow. And so, Venus moving through early Leo will be in opposition to Mars for a solid week. And so, that’s interesting. You know, that’ll kick off some of the relational dynamics which the Mars cycle has in store for us.

CB: That’s a really good point, cuz I had forgotten about this. Now that we have Uranus in early Taurus, every time we get an ingress into a fixed sign, it gets that hard aspect from Uranus like right away. It’s not just Venus moving into Leo and then eventually opposing Mars and eventually squaring Jupiter, but its very first aspect—as soon as it goes into that sign—is that square with Uranus.

AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, it’s Uranus and then Mars by square and opposition. So that’s a ‘less happy’ Venus in Leo than we might see under other circumstances.

CB: Sure.

KS: I mean, it feels like a bit of relationship drama, potentially, or the cliché, unexpected twist in the relationship story or in the dating story, depending on your circumstances. And that is going to happen over the next few months as planets start to ingress into Leo. We’ve got Venus going first, but by the end of June, we will have Mercury, and of course, late July, the Sun. And because Mars is spending so much time in the early part of Aquarius, and Uranus moves so slowly, there is this sort of ‘one-two punch’ kind of feeling. You know, Venus goes into Leo June 13, it’ll square Uranus on June 14, and then a week later, on the 21st, that Venus-Mars opposition becomes exact. So it looks a bit hot. It looks a bit feisty. You know, it could be passionate, but there’s probably gonna be a few hot words and a few disagreements there as well.

AC: Yeah. I mean, if you want to get in a fight, it’s a good election.

CB: Right. It makes me think—just going back a little bit—to the Sun-Mercury conjunction around the 5th or 6th and the simultaneous Venus-Pluto opposition. I just wanted to mention that cuz there was this great story in the news recently that reminded me of what Venus-Pluto aspects are like in general, especially the hard aspects. And I saw it on CNN, but it was around a few places. But the title on the Washington Post was like, “Woman Explains Why She Sent Her Date 65,000 Text Messages After They Went On One Date Together.” It’s been a while since I’ve seen a really good ‘Venus-Pluto’ story, but that’s like the type of thing that you see with Venus-Pluto, where it’s like Venus sometimes represents love and attraction and the desire to form a relationship. One of my favorite analogies is the astrologer Alan White. He always said that Pluto takes something that’s very small and blows it up into something that’s very large. Sort of like an atom bomb, where you take an atom, and just by splitting something like an atom suddenly you get a mushroom cloud. Other times he said it can do the reverse, and it can take something very big and shrink it down into something very small. But typically it’s the first one, going from the very small to the very large, and I think that’s a really good analogy for that. But that might be a good analogy to think about around the time of that Sun-Mercury conjunction square Neptune, the other part of it, which is just the weirdly close Venus-Pluto opposition at the same time. But it just made me think of that since the next signature we’re talking about—really not that long after that, just like a week or two later—is that Venus-Uranus square as soon as it ingresses into Leo. And that becomes one of the major signatures later this year, I just remembered, as well. Because, remember, when Venus goes retrograde later this year—I think in Scorpio—it’s opposing Uranus three times.

AC: Yep.

CB: That ‘Venus-Uranus’ thing is one of the major signatures for later this year. And here, we’re getting like a preview of that, with the first time that Venus is hitting a hard aspect with Uranus, now that it’s moved into a fixed sign.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Oh, go ahead.

KS: You go, Austin.

AC: Oh, and important to note, any of the planets aspecting Uranus in Taurus now is going to be introducing that ‘Uranus in Taurus’ storyline, but Venus is more crucial than the rest, because Venus rules Taurus. And so, whenever there’s a Venus-Uranus contact, it’s Uranus aspecting the ‘lord’ or ‘lady’, the ruler of it, right? And so, in terms of looking at your own transits—if, for example, Uranus in Taurus is in your 7th house, then it’s during those contacts between Uranus and Venus that events will be triggered, right? When a planet aspects the ruler of the sign that it’s in, events come about and things get moving much more quickly.

KS: That’s a really beautiful point, Austin. And I think that highlights why that June 14 period—when Venus makes that square to Uranus—is so critical. This is not the first Venus-Uranus aspect we have. We do have one in May, where Venus sextiles Uranus from Cancer, but I think this will be the first more hard or dramatic angle between Venus and Uranus. And, to me, I agree. I’m watching that date to see how some of the events that were maybe promised or initially stirred up or came into your awareness in mid-May—how they progressed, or that there’s an activation or a development in that story as Venus triggers Uranus then.

AC: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Venus being there—‘there’ be the early part of Leo, the first decan of Leo—it ties into the ‘Mars’ story that’s coming up, it ties into the ‘Uranus in Taurus’ story. And it’s on the North Node, so it also ties into the ‘eclipse’ story, as well as foreshadowing to some degree the retrograde later in the year. So, yeah, a more important ingress than it initially looks like.

KS: Than it appears to be. And speaking of the Venus retrograde later in the year, she’ll station at 10 Scorpio. So it’s just another emphasis around that 8°-9°-10° of the fixed signs. Mars stations at 9 Aquarius in June and Venus will station at 10 Scorpio. It is later in the year, but we’re getting a pattern developing here where that first decan of the fixed signs is really getting quite heavily activated by some of these cycles over the next little while.

AC: Yeah. I’m really interested, because I have Venus in the first decan of Aquarius, and it’s my profected planet this year. And so, it’s gotten some attention but it’s gonna get a lot more. You know, Mars will over it three times. Uranus stations an exact square with it. Venus is gonna square it. So for those of you who have planets in the first decan of fixed signs, there’s a lot of entertainment to come.

CB: Yeah. And we actually have a good question from one of the patrons who’s attending the live recording of this right now. So this is from Danny Larkin, and he said: “I’d be interested to hear how to work constructively with the change indicated by Uranus.” So that’s actually a really good question. How do you work constructively if you’re getting a major Uranus transit? For some people with this planet changing signs recently, that’s introducing a whole new theme into their life with some of these ‘Uranian’ archetypal changes. How can you deal with that constructively? That’s actually a good question, I think. Like I have an issue where it seems like a lot of the outer planets—one of the only answers that I can come up with—which unfortunately is applicable to a lot of them—is just that you have to sort of let go and become adaptable and let the change take you where it will, instead of trying sometimes to hold onto something that’s slipping away in your life, if that’s part of what that transit is about. But I don’t know if that’s actually a constructive, proactive attempt to take charge of things rather than just dealing with that which is outside of your control.

KS: I have so many thoughts on this. I’m sure Austin does. So I’ve had a bunch of clients this week who have the Sun at 0 Taurus, and I had one client earlier today with the Moon in early Taurus. So there’s sort of this similar thing. Each of them has this story that says, “I’ve stopped doing ‘x’ voluntarily.” Like, “I’ve stopped doing my salaried job,” or “I’m deciding to sell my home, and I’m gonna rent for a period of time.” You know, “I stopped doing a salaried job, and I’m going to work freelance or contract (if you like) for a period of time.” So I think there is definitely scope for considering the qualities of Uranus and then proactively looking to make changes that express those qualities. And because Uranus is about freedom and independence, one of the really classic things—if it shows up in a way connected to work—will be people looking to step away from safe, stable or regular types of employment, where you might be on a 9-to-5 schedule, you might be on a regular pay check—and wanting to consider work that is more flexible, which could be freelance or contract. Depending on exactly what it’s doing in the chart, it can be a real pivot in the career, where “I used to do banking, and now I’m finally gonna follow my passion for music,” for instance. So part of it, I think, is that if we know Uranus is active, know that you’re in a time where that more radical shift is maybe encouraged or more likely to happen, or you’re more restless and impatient and itchy for it. So you can think about what planet it’s triggering. So if it’s triggering Venus, it could be relationships. Or if it’s triggering the Moon—I mean, Uranus-Moon transits, I see people become gypsies or couch surfers. I’ve seen like older clients in their 50’s and 60’s and 70’s decide to give up their stable place of residence to go traveling or just to move around Airbnbs when they’re having Uranus-Moon transits. So any way that you can put yourself back in motion I think is really cool with Uranus. And the idea is if you choose it, you can more likely do it in a way that’s a little bit more on your terms or a little bit more meets your needs.

CB: And we were actually just talking about somebody that you know, Austin, who’s close to you, that’s kind of going through that right now. Do you feel like sharing that? Cuz that’s actually a really good example of what Kelly was talking about.

AC: Yeah, somebody I know who’s a Taurus rising is, coincidentally, leaving their place of residence at the end of the month and doesn’t have like, “I’m gonna move from here to there.”

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s sort of a ‘from being here to question mark to a period of exploration’. And so, obviously I spent like an hour-and-a-half two days ago talking about how to deal with Uranus in Taurus transits, so I have some thoughts. One of my rules of thumb for Uranus transits in general is to embrace an experimental attitude. You know, Uranus—it’s the planet of ‘mad science’, and progress in knowledge and science is through experimentation. You know, you come to know things by trying it out and seeing if it works the way you thought it would or it does something different. You have to get data, right? And to get data, you gotta experiment. There’s no point in doing an experiment if you already are certain as to the result, right? That’s what an experiment is. And so, being okay with accepting the ambivalence and incomplete knowledge that characterizes your situation and experimenting to get more data, right? You’re like, “Oh, God, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to (whatever) pursue music.” And what I see all the time is people don’t want to make a change until they are absolutely certain what’s on the other side of that change, but you can never be absolutely certain if you’ve never done that before, right? And so, what you get with this attachment to certainty is you get people either not changing, even though it’s becoming glaringly obvious that that has to go, or they change, but they assume this whole false narrative of exactly how it’s gonna go. It’s fake control.

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s not real control. It’s a controlled fantasy. And they’re like, “I’m gonna make this change and then it’s gonna be permanent.” It’s like, well, you know what, maybe you’re not sure and that’s okay. And you can just give it a go and see what that’s like, right? You know, I see people get in trouble with making giant, permanent leaps and sometimes that’s just what’s gotta happen. But in a lot of cases you’ve got room to wiggle your toes in that pond. You’ve got time to try this out for a little bit and figure it out. Again, maybe you’re a banker who’s fantasized about being a musician. You know, you do that for a couple of months, and you’re like, “You know what, this kinda sucks. I don’t want this for my life. I just like music.” Getting that data by experimenting will allow you to be more informed in the future.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Or sometimes just the necessity of getting that out of your system, so that you know what that experience or that side of life is like or could be like. And maybe you do find that it’s not for you, but still, at the time, you perhaps needed to have that experience.

AC: Yeah. Again, if you just ground yourself in uncertainty, then that’s great. Cuz now you’re just looking for information rather than like, “This has to work. This has to be the thing.”

KS: Yeah.

AC: And so, there’s actually an interesting question in the comments section, which is: “How is the ambivalence of Uranus different than Neptune?” And I think that the difference is the ‘directionality’. Uranus is chaos leading to insight, right? It’s the unknown of the science experiment, that by experimenting becomes known, right? Neptune is about going into the ambivalence, whereas Uranus starts ambivalent, but then gets to, “Oh, this is the result.”

KS: Yeah, that’s a really good question.

CB: To boldly go where no man has gone before versus what? Embracing ambivalence for the sake of development on some level?

AC: Yeah. Well, if we think about Neptune, Neptune facilitates states of consciousness which are deep trance, right? And part of the connection between Neptune and drug addiction is wanting to fall into a trance of undifferentiated, unbroken experience, right, getting drunk, doing heroin, whatever it is. Or doing prayer for eight hours at a time till you get that vision of God. Like that’s Neptune—that sinking, seeking that deeper, undifferentiated unity.

CB: What were you gonna say about that, Kelly?

KS: Oh, I feel like Austin. I have so many thoughts. A couple of very quick points on the Uranus transits, again. Short timeframes. So think in three- or six-month increments. I agree completely, Austin, with what you’re saying about it’s not really a time to make a change that you think is gonna be permanent, that you’ll stick with in the long term. I loved your analogy, too, about the scientist, because I always say with Uranus transits, it’s a period of trial and error. You’re gonna try a few things. And three out of four of what you tried are not gonna be right for you, but you will not know unless you get in there and give it a go. And the point is to try anything once. You know, just have a go. And then letting go of the attachment to the outcome—the point is to really act on those curiosities that you’ve got rather than to achieve something specific. And often that idea of return to stability, when does my life calm down again? It’s usually after the Uranus transit has completed its exact hits. So the period, the ‘experimentation’ period, where you’re gathering your data—what I’ve noticed with the clients—is the length of the transit itself.

AC: Totally.

KS: Just give up the dream of it being stable while you’re in a big Uranus transit. Cuz it’s flux, but it’s excitement and there’s progress. It just feels very chaotic as you go through it.

AC: Yeah, I like that characterization of ‘trial and error’. I would also point out that there’s no such thing as a failed experiment. The point of an experiment is to gather data.

KS: Yeah, that’s a good point.

AC: You always get data.

KS: That’s true. You always get data. People think they’ve failed when they don’t get the outcome they thought they should have, and that’s an internal issue rather than an external thing.

AC: Right. Sorry about your hypothesis, but it’s okay.

KS: But it’s all good.

CB: And one of things that might be worth mentioning also—one of the issues I have sometimes in answering a question like that (how to deal constructively) is that sometimes the change is like in one of those examples, where the guy is gonna live a nomadic lifestyle for a little bit, and that’s like a choice that he’s made, or it’s an opportunity that arose that he’s following up on for however long that ends up taking him, as that Uranus transit becomes more prominent in his life, and that’s kind of an internal thing. But Uranus transits aren’t necessarily always internal. Sometimes they are external, either in terms of events that occur in your life or people in your life that suddenly start playing that role in it. So that’s kind of a tricky thing then sometimes with Uranus transits, because sometimes the change can be external and it can represent a disruption or a revolution in some part of your life, but it’s not necessarily something that’s arising from within you. And in those instances sometimes there’s a question of how do you counsel those people. Or what do you tell them in terms of if it’s something that is truly outside of their control versus something that’s more within their control?

AC: Yeah. So very often it’s a dialogue between what happens and what you choose. In the case of my friend—with a Uranus entering the sign of the rising and kind of going off at the end of May—the lease agreement was up at the end of May anyway. So there wasn’t an option to stay there, so that wasn’t a chosen thing. But then it’s sort of like, okay, does that just happen to coincide with an internal change? Which is very often the case, right? Like you get handed more responsibility, but at the same time you kind of were just feeling ready about it or the reverse. And so, I think it’s almost always a dialogue whenever there’s like a real hit from Uranus. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Uranus conjoin someone’s Moon where it’s all internal or all external, or all chosen or all just what occurs. I think whenever you have a big transit it’s always gonna be on both sides, if that makes sense.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah, there is often the interaction between the external and the internal. And one example—which I had a series of clients earlier this year that had this—they were having Uranus affecting their career, and I can’t remember specifically whether it was like Uranus on the midheaven or Uranus aspecting the ruler of the midheaven. But their work environment—they didn’t want to leave their job, but their company went through massive restructuring, so the hierarchy within the company got completely reorganized. And some of the counseling strategies that I would have included in that session would have been things like, “What opportunities can you find for yourself in this change? So given that maybe you didn’t want to change, but the change is happening anyway, how can you turn it to your advantage?” And then also understanding the nature of Uranus, that it is spontaneous, and it is unpredictable, and that you’ve got this period of time where things may feel like they’re happening to you—cuz that’s some people’s reality, even though sometimes I think there is a bit of an internal parallel. So it’s trying to open that perspective around, “Okay, there’s gonna be more change or chaos now than you might prefer or that you might choose if you had your way. But if this is the lay of the land, or this is the road map going forward, in what ways could you collaborate with that?” basically.

CB: Sure.

AC: Yeah.

CB: It was just an interesting question that came up, actually earlier this month, when you and I did our experiment where we were reading those charts live or answering those questions. That was a lot of fun actually. Thanks for joining me for that. Just sometimes in a counseling position—when you’re talking to a client—even though sometimes there are external events that just happen to people, you still want to be able to say something constructive, and that’s the role that the astrologer is often in. You know, you want to be able to give that advice in terms of what to do or how to respond to certain transits like Uranus and staying flexible or what have you. But I forgot about that piece of it and that dynamic of having that desire to want to be able to give the person some sense of control over the transit, even if it’s something that’s come into their life, that’s causing changes that are somewhat outside of their control.

AC: Yeah. Well, and I think that ‘control’ is a very important theme for Uranus transits, because Uranus transits virtually always diminish our control over things and our sense of control. You know, Uranus—it’s a lightning bolt. You can’t tell it what to do. And sometimes those lightning bolts are within, sometimes they’re outside. You know, if you’re looking at your transits and you’re like, “Okay, Uranus is coming up on my Sun in Taurus,” rolling into that with the attitude that, “I’m going to keep that under control,” is going to make it much less fun. You know, it doesn’t mean you have no power, but you’re dialoguing with chaos. Yeah, you don’t get to order chaos, right? You don’t get to command chaos, but you can dialogue. It makes me think of the Orphic creation story where the primordial waters are churned and the Golden Egg appears and the first-born being comes out of that egg. In some versions of the story the very first act by the primordial Eros or Phanes is to mate with Chaos. Like that’s the very beginning. Things get started and the first act—once the being exists—is to mate with Chaos, and then everything thereafter is born out of that ‘reproductive’ dialogue between the shining first being and chaos itself. You know, the DNA of both.

KS: So that’s interesting. Cuz that’s almost like the metaphor then that from chaos comes growth, if you like, or comes the progress or the next step, basically. We’ve gotta have those periods of chaos to move ourselves into the next space.

AC: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

KS: Yeah.

AC: I just like the idea of, I don’t know—

KS: Mating with chaos.

AC: Yeah, for lack of other four-letter words.

KS: We’re keeping it relatively G-rated.

CB: That was actually the subject of my last episode immediately before this one, which was what house to assign sex to based on the tradition of three different assignments to different houses. You guys have any thoughts on that? I’m sure that’s a very brief topic.

AC: Yeah. So 5th as ‘fun’ and ‘pleasure’, I see that. And also, the 5th is the ‘house of children’.

KS: Yes.

AC: And it is also the house of the activity which generates children.

CB: Right. Procreation.

AC: With 8th, because like everybody else who started with modern astrology books and then got into traditional stuff, I was like, “Oh, the 8th house, that’s so stupid, it doesn’t have anything to do with sex,” this and that. And I’ve sort of mellowed on that rejection.

CB: That’s the cliché thing that traditional astrologers go into when they get into traditional astrology from modern—the rejection of the 8th house as ‘sex’.

AC: Yeah, that’s how you show the other traditional astrologers that you know what’s up. But, again, I’ve mellowed on it a little bit, because the 8th has as its essential signification the co-mingling of resources and the sharing of resources, right? And so, it is the house where one combines one’s peanut butter with another’s jelly, right? And that could be financial or otherwise.

CB: That’s gonna get quoted somewhere. I can see that in a book and being quoted in like a hundred years.

KS: Oh, my goodness.

AC: So I do think the 8th can speak to a person’s sexual experiences and proclivities. And I suppose you need another person, so the 7th house. You need a human. Well, hopefully you need a human. I guess the ‘robot’ thing is happening soon. So the 7th house provides the other person. So to a certain degree I suppose it’s always there. But I would say 5th first and then I can totally see that ‘8th house’ opinion. You know, 7th is relating directly and intimately on a one-on-one level, so you can’t leave that out.

CB: Yeah. And then really quickly—cuz I want to hear your thoughts, Kelly. Austin, Vedic astrology has a different set of assignments, and one of them is the 12th, right?

AC: Oh, yeah.

CB: That was something I completely forgot. I completely forgot to mention this in the previous podcast, so I wanted to mention it really quickly here.

AC: The ‘house of bed pleasures’.

KS: Bed pleasures.

CB: That’s what they call it, the 12th.

AC: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the significations, traditionally, ‘bed pleasures’. Which I think with the 12th makes a lot of sense, both for just lounging in the bed, where you’re kind of just you and your mind. You know, 12th house locations—prisons, monasteries—you’re just there with you in your cell. But it’s also ‘dreaming’, which is a 12th house activity, we do that. Those are both ‘bed pleasures’, and so I suppose the addition of the physical bed pleasures is not out of line.

CB: See, I thought part of the reason for the 12th—it probably isn’t—but that’s the sign that rose an hour or two before you were born. So in Rhetorius, he calls that the ‘place in-between worlds’ and that it indicates circumstances just prior to birth. Because that’s literally the sign that was at the rising sign before your actual rising sign, when you’re born, while your mother is in labor, theoretically. So then, more broadly, I thought maybe symbolically you could extend to that which happened prior to your birth or that which led to your birth, one of those things being your parents getting together. But I don’t think that’s actually the rationale that Vedic astrologers are using. But that’s one of the ways I tried to rationalize that myself—how using that schema of the angular triads, you might be able to rationalize the Vedic 12th house assignment in a Western context.

AC: Yeah, that makes sense. Also, Kait in the comments adds: “12th house, things you do in private.”

CB: Right.

AC: The 12th house is private and secretive.

KS: Yeah. I often think of the 12th house—weirdly, I use this phrase in a consult this week—“Oh, yeah, the 12th house is the boudoir.” And there was some 12th house activation and it was increased romantic or bedroom pleasure activity for this particular client, so I can see where the Vedic comes from. I think echo a lot of what Austin said, coming in from modern to traditional astrology, always being puzzled about why my tax bill and my sex life were in the same house. Unless I was writing it off and I’d paid for something, who knows. You know, it was one of those things that when I tried to teach it with students—because my first teaching was in modern astrology—I didn’t have a good reason for it. And then when I learned, of course, about the ‘joys’ of the houses, and the lower houses being more to do with the body and Venus being in her ‘joy’ in the 5th house, it felt like that made much more sense; and also, because children are begotten from sex. And when I’m doing fertility work with clients, it’s a lot about the 5th house, so I would definitely go 5th house first. So the 8th house, similar to Austin, I don’t have to get on a soapbox about why it shouldn’t be there. I’m okay with it. Just when I tend to work with clients, I’ll go for the 5th.

AC: I would never ignore the 5th if the topic was sex, whereas I might sometimes ignore the 8th. If I had to pick one, 5th all day long.

KS: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it.

CB: So I think we agree that even if the 8th has something to do with sex, that it’s probably overemphasized or overplayed in the modern tradition, at the very least, right?

AC: Yeah, I think that’s the perfect way to put it.

KS: Yeah. Cuz I can see if there’s a lot of other intimacies that happen in the 8th house, where you deal with finances with a partner, which is a huge thing. The other thing that I’ve come to appreciate about the 8th house through my understanding of traditional astrology is how it is connected to some of those fears and paranoias, like the sources of stress. And some of the older material speaks to almost like mental health issues without being necessarily that explicit, like ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’. And I think to the extent that many of us maybe have hangups about our bodies or about sexual connection, I could see that crossover there, too.

CB: Okay. All right, that’s a bit of a digression.

KS: Totally, yeah.

CB: Like 75 minutes into this, and I just bring up this huge topic.

KS: Totally. And we’ve just given you our ‘Reader’s Digest’ version.

CB: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. So let’s return back to the forecast really quick. One of the things I need to mention before I completely space out is the election for this month. As usual, Leisa Schaim spent a fair bit of time working on looking through electional charts for June and trying to find the most auspicious charts that she could find using the basic principles of electional astrology. And she came up with four or five charts, and I’m going to share one of them right now—the most auspicious one that Leisa was able to find. So we had a little bit of an issue. There were no amazing, amazing charts that were just completely clear from major downsides this month. But the one that we did come up with—that looks pretty good—is on June 11, 2018, at about 7:30 in the morning, with about 16° of Cancer rising. So the main thing with this chart, it has some major positives and some major drawbacks. But the main thing that Leisa was focused on in this chart is making Cancer rising, so that the Moon is the ruler of the ascendant, and therefore, it’s the most important planet in the chart. It’s the chart that primarily represents whatever you’re initiating at that time with your election. And the Moon is exalted in Taurus, in the eleventh whole sign house, and it’s actually applying to, eventually, a sextile with Venus, which is the ruler of the 11th house. And Venus is in Cancer, in the 1st house, at 27° of Cancer. So there’s actually a mutual reception between the Moon and Venus, with the Moon ruling the 11th house—or the Moon ruling the 1st house and Venus ruling the 11th house. So it’s a very strong ‘11th house-type’ electional chart, which would be good for ‘11th house’ matters pertaining to ‘friends’, ‘groups’, ‘alliances’, or the other traditional category of the 11th, which is ‘hopes’, which is basically things that you want to or you wish to achieve in the future, but that will take some time or some buildup before they fully manifest. So this is a chart that’s very much focused on the 11th house, and therefore, it would be good for that reason. So the only major drawback, the only thing I don’t really like about it is it does have Saturn in the 7th.

KS: I mean, it’s beautiful.

CB: Oh, go ahead.

KS: Sorry, I think there was a weird delay with my internet. It’s beautiful to have that exalted Moon ruling the ascendant in aspect to it. I just think that’s a lovely thing.

CB: Yeah. We wanted to find some way to grab that. It’s like Venus is almost out of Cancer, but you can catch it right at the very end there at 27, being able to get, not just an exalted Moon, but one where there’s a mutual reception. Cuz the exaltation of the Moon happens once a month, whenever the Moon moves through Taurus. But this one is extra unique because Venus is going through Cancer, and therefore, they’re exchanging signs. So the exaltation is improved even more through the support from Venus’ domicile lord. The only downside that I don’t like is that Mars in Aquarius now is in a superior square where it’s overcoming the Moon in Taurus by sign. So it’s still acceptable, because it’s not by degree and it is separating from the exact degree-based square, but it’s still introducing a little bit of problems into the mixture in terms of the Moon’s placement. But it is mitigated somewhat, or some of the edge is taken off of Mars by having Jupiter in Scorpio, which is itself overcoming Mars through a superior square as well. So, yeah, this would be a good 11th house election. Like I said, I think one of the elections Leisa does—that we’re gonna present in the Auspicious Elections episode for patrons, which we’re gonna record later today—one of the elections does take advantage of that Mercury in Gemini in its own sign this month. But we had a hard time finding really good ones because of that square with Neptune that we talked about earlier. So we weren’t able to get any super amazing Mercury elections this month as a result of that and instead decided to focus our main recommendation on that mutual reception between the Moon and Venus. Yeah, so that’s the electional chart for the month. If anybody wants to see the rest of the electional charts we found this month, we’re gonna present them in this month’s episode of the Auspicious Elections Podcast with Leisa Schaim, which we’ll be releasing to patrons on the $5 and $10 tier, later today. So if you want to sign up for that, just sign up for our page on Patreon, and you’ll get access as soon as it’s released. All right, so that’s it for the election. I think we’re like 75 minutes into this. So as we start to wind down, what are some of the other major—

AC: It’s time for Mars.

CB: It’s time for Mars. So we’ve alluded, we’ve mentioned, have jumped ahead several times—now it’s time to talk about the ‘elephant in the room’, which is the Mars retrograde that happens towards the end of the month, where it stations at 9° of Aquarius.

AC: So one timing note is that basically within a day or two of that ingress, we also have a Full Moon in Capricorn conjunct Saturn. You know, between Mars stationing and a Full Moon conjunct Saturn in Capricorn the last week of the month is rough. And it’s an introduction to what will be a series of rough lunations over the third quarter, as well as Mars being retrograde for a lot of the third quarter. So it’s not a teaser, it’s the actual beginning of a sequence. The show is starting. It’s not like a teaser trailer. It’s not a preview. It’s like, here we go.

CB: Sure. So there it is. I’m displaying it for the people watching the video now. So it’s June 27. Here in Denver, it’s really late. It goes exact really late at night, at like 11:00 PM, where the Moon exactly opposes the Sun. The Moon is at 6°28’ of Capricorn, and it’s opposing the Sun at 6°28’ of Cancer. And the Moon is separating from a conjunction with Saturn at 5° of Capricorn. So, yeah, that’s a pretty heavy Full Moon exactly conjunct Saturn in Capricorn. So this is actually like the first Full Moon with Saturn in Capricorn that we’ve had since that ingress took place in December, right?

AC: Yeah, the first Full Moon in Capricorn since then.

CB: Right. Okay. So, yeah, that’s pretty heavy. And that does sort of kick off a whole—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—summer of pretty serious lunations, as you said.

AC: Yeah. And of course Saturn is the ruler of Aquarius, so Mars in Aquarius is gonna be vibing off of Saturn. And so, that Saturn is emphasized. It’s like a day-and-a-half after Mars’ station.

CB: Okay. Well, and it’s also interesting because if Saturn is at 5° of Capricorn, and it’s opposing the Sun, then that means it’s like precisely at the midpoint of its retrograde cycle. It’s halfway between those stations, since whenever Saturn is opposing the Sun, it’s always gonna be retrograde. And, yeah, that makes it like the halfway point through the stations.

AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. And whenever you have that, it means that that planet is also at its nearest point to the Earth. So that’s Saturn near and bright, right? That last week is as bright and as close as Saturn’s gonna get all year. And that’s interesting because the same thing is true with Mars. And so, moving into this summer/Q3 is Mars’ brightest, closest point in its two-year cycle. So bright, close, retrograde malefics.

CB: Right. Look at that. We’re actually gonna be able to see all of these.

KS: Great sky viewing. Great sky viewing.

CB: Yeah. Right here at the end of June, you’re gonna see some amazing observational astronomy. So this chart right now that I have set, it’s set for about 11:00 PM in Denver. So basically just after sunset. Once it gets dark enough that the stars start coming out, it’s still gonna be bright, because it’s gonna be a Full Moon. So that’s gonna be obscuring some stars, but you should still be able to see a bunch of planets at that time. Like at this time Mars is gonna be this little red star that’s rising over the eastern horizon. Venus is over in Leo, and it’s gonna be a bright white star that’s like setting over the western horizon. Then you’re gonna have Saturn like right next to the Moon, within a degree. That’ll probably be visible, right? I mean, Saturn will be kind of dim.

AC: Oh, yeah.

KS: That’s actually one of the best times to try and catch Saturn is when the Moon is near it.

CB: Okay. And then finally you’ll have Jupiter—which will also be visible up there in Scorpio—in the tenth whole sign house, right at the top of the ecliptic. So you can basically see every planet, except for—well, Mercury is actually far enough away from the Sun at that point that you’ll see Mercury shortly after sunset as well.

AC: Yeah, it’s 22°. That’s getting close to maximum elongation for Mercury. Yeah, this is the show.

CB: This is a unique situation then where you can literally see every visible planet just after sunset.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I don’t think that’s normal.

KS: It’s not. It’s beautiful. Definitely get out and look at the sky.

CB: Brilliant. Okay.

AC: So, Kelly, what do you think about that Mars retrograde conjunct the South Node in Aquarius?

KS: So, yeah, well, I’m not spinning this one in any positive way. It doesn’t feel great. It feels volatile. And I think what we’re getting set up for in June is really building into the lunar eclipse at the end of July. It’s sort of like everything comes to a head, and we’ll talk more about that next month. But Mars on the South Node retrograde—‘old toxic’ stuff, ‘old anger’ stuff. I mean, from the Vedic tradition, the South Node has this ‘spiritualizing’ perspective. So it may be that idea of being able to somehow transform or shift some of the gunk, but I do think we are gonna see some challenging expressions of Mars energy. We’re going to have some anger—like from a personal level, something just comes up from inside you—and it’s maybe triggered by some really old stuff. And I think we’re gonna see a bit of lashing. Like a spraying, if you like, of some of the negativity. And that whole last week of June—with the Mars stopping and the Full Moon conjunct Saturn—I mean, the feeling I have for these few days is just like running into a brick wall, having to stop or having to slow down. You know, there’s a big sign that says, “You cannot pass here right now,” and so, definitely this feeling of frustration.

AC: Yeah, definitely. So I would add the South Node—or Ketu in the Vedic material that I’ve studied—not only has a ‘spiritualizing’ effect, but it has its own ‘fire’ or agni. And so, Mars and the South Node actually double-up each other’s heat in many ways. Yeah, Ketu is like the fire of a purification or a trash fire. You know, it’s the burning up or like the heat in a sweat lodge which purifies you, but it has its own intemperate heat. And so, Mars of course has intemperate heat. And so, there’s a doubling-up of the heat with South Node and Mars. Actually, I remember many years ago there was a Mars-South Node conjunction in the news. A bunch of people died in a sweat lodge because they turned it up too high.

KS: I remember this.

AC: And so, in a natal chart, the South Node-Mars is thought to form a combination where there’s the danger of excessive rage or heat, because, again, it’s a doubling-up. And the South Node is not happy with things, generally.

KS: No, it’s angry and hungry.

AC: Yeah. I would say more disgusted than hungry.

KS: Okay.

AC: And so, one of the things, as I was thinking about this, that Mars’ retrograde phase, the sign of Aquarius, and the South Node all have in common is rejecting and going away. You know, Aquarius is the sign of Saturn, which is about being on the outside, right? Being forced into exile. The South Node is about withdrawing from attachments, rejecting things. And then Mars, when it’s retrograde, often has this sort of, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.” It’s very non-participatory. It doesn’t want to be part of whatever everybody’s dumb story is. I think there are gonna be—especially with its configuration with Uranus—I think a lot of people are gonna be like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done. I’m leaving.” Whether that’s a relationship or a job or, I don’t know, participation in social media, just this, “No, I’m outta here. Just not doing this anymore.” There’s that kind of purification or burning away that only happens when you’ve got isolation. You know, you have to remove contact with the situation to process it and excrete it.

KS: Great words there, Austin. But it does have this signature, doesn’t it, of endings of letting go. I liked how you tied the Aquarius and the Saturn themes with the Mars and the South Node around the isolation or standing outside the crowd, like being the odd duck out or the black sheep and either removing yourself or being removed. And there’s some sort of, I don’t know, purification. You get to be relieved from a burden as a result of that.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, and just looking at the ‘outsideriness’—also the South Node as a cast or role in society—is people who are outside the class system. Like not merchants and not kings or whatever, but the nodes are like outsiders, right?

KS: Totally.

AC: You know, one of the simple ‘word salad’ things we can get out of this is the anger of the exile, the anger of the rejected, the anger perhaps of the refugee, but the outsider’s anger rising up, right?

KS: Well, and this is interesting. Because then when we think about those themes in the context or compared to the Full Moon in Capricorn conjunct Saturn, to my mind it is very much about people who are within. They’re the conformers or people who have measured up. You know, it’s almost like the opposite side of Saturn, if that makes sense.

AC: Yeah, that’s the way I think of it. If Saturn is a wall, Capricorn is what’s inside the wall, and Aquarius is what’s outside the wall.

KS: Yeah. Because both of these Saturnian themes are activated within just a couple of days, at the end of the month, it’s interesting how will each relate to that idea of ‘the wall’ or defining things about what is allowed and accepted or what is permissible and then what is not and how that creates some ‘outsider-type’ energy. And it’s just really interesting to be so distinctly different with these themes in such a short space of time.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, and the fact that Mars will eventually come back to Capricorn at the end of the retrograde.

KS: Yes.

AC: So it’s really straddling that wall.

KS: Well, and I liked, too, the idea of the ‘South Node’ influence there with the purification and the intense, extreme heat. Cuz this June—where we have the first Mars-South Node—this is only the first of three that we’re going to get, whether the purification happens this month, or whether it begins a process which continues over the next few months until we get that last Mars-South Node, which I think is the end of September.

CB: That might be worth reflecting on in terms of a constructive approach to this. Cuz I remember at the beginning, Austin, you were talking about feeling a greater sense of frustration or anger or other things already as a result of that transit. And it reminded me sometimes of what Mars transits are like when they’re a personal spot in your chart, and sometimes just that literal or that gut-level feeling of having more fire or more heat and the subsequent feelings that come along with that in terms of the tendency to express things like frustration or anger in a way that’s more readily available or where your fuse is a little bit shorter than it might be otherwise. It’s something to pay attention to, so that if this is something that comes from within—in terms of that Mars transit hitting your chart in a personal way—you don’t create problems in your own life by saying something or doing something impulsive that you might not under different circumstances, if you were in a different frame of mind.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. Reflecting on the metaphor and phenomenon of heat, if people talk about ‘reaching their boiling point’, Mars speaks to the power of fire to transform matter, right? It is fire that allows the blacksmith to shape the iron, right? And of course it’s fire which allows us to reshape our lives. Now what’s interesting is when you actually look at objects exposed to heat is that there’s generally not a gradual change. Like water doesn’t evaporate at a steadily higher rate as you add fire, there’s a boiling point. There’s literally one temperature point where if you just go that one degree more suddenly the water is becoming steam very rapidly, whereas two degrees under that, it’s not doing that, right? And so, even though the buildup is gradual, there’s that flash point. And it’s the same thing with ignition. People talk about a fuse. You ever try to light a candle, the wick either catches or it doesn’t, right? You can’t have half-fire, right? Things can’t be half on fire. Either ignition has happened or it hasn’t. And so, Chris, what you were saying is like don’t blow up, don’t ignite on people that you would like to continue having relationships to. With some level of self-awareness, you can see what the fire is, what the issue is, what is bringing you closer to that boiling point and perhaps address that ahead of time. I feel like for this one, making space—instead of quitting your job immediately, taking your vacation time, letting yourself occupy a space where you can kind of work through some of this stuff—is gonna be really helpful. Making space ahead of time rather than blowing up to clear space.

CB: Yeah. That’s so funny, cuz that’s the last thing you will want to do when you’re in that mindset, in the moment.

AC: Maybe, maybe. There’s also the like, “Oh, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate.” And so, instead of just doing that thing over and over again until you blow up, be like, “You know what? This is really a situation that I need some distance from.” Even if it’s inconvenient—it doesn’t make sense with your plans or how you budgeted your vacation time or whatever—be like, “I’m gonna take a few days off.”

KS: Early intervention will be critical to stave off some of the more dramatic manifestations of this, I think. And the one thing, too—the way you described that, Austin, with the fire helped me clarify something. Cuz I always think with really hot energies—like configurations like this Mars-South Node, for instance—how you respond or how you get stirred, it often depends on how much heat you have internally anyway. So if you’re quite a ‘combustible’ person by nature—if that’s your personality and maybe you see it in your chart, cuz there’s a lot of fire or there’s a lot of Mars or there’s a lot of Sun—then this is just like pouring fuel on the already hot innards of you. But if you’re more of a ‘cool’ type—where you have more wetness or more earth or more Saturn—types like that, they sometimes need this excessive heat to actually stir a problem into action. I’m not necessarily saying it will be smoother for those people, but from a holistic or a balancing perspective of the qualities, it’s that idea of are you pouring fuel on an already ‘hot-going’ fire, or are we pouring fuel on something that needs a bit of extra boost to get going?

AC: Yeah, right. If we’re going to turn the thermostat up 15°, are we going from 60 to 75, or are we going from 100 to 115, right?

KS: Yeah, exactly. So that’s a few thoughts from both of us. But, Chris, do you have more on this that you want to share?

CB: No, not necessarily on this. I did have something recently I thought was interesting. Austin, some of your statements made me think about the quickness of Mars. Especially in traditional texts, you have a difference between Saturn sometimes being like a long-term difficulties-type thing, whereas Mars is often like short, one-time events, if it’s gonna be like, let’s say, a negative event. And I had one thing come up recently, looking at a chart of somebody that had a gambling problem, like a gambling addiction issue. And he had Mars in a day chart in the 2nd house—and that seemed to be like one of the main culprits—which is a really interesting placement in terms of thinking about that, because it was indicating negative or challenging financial matters pertaining to his 2nd house. But it was this impulsive nature where he would impulsively put down lots of money on sports betting, and it was always this impetuousness or this impulsiveness that got him into trouble. And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor, in some ways, for Mars, or the different ways that Mars’ impulsiveness or impetuousness or fieriness—as we’re describing it here—can sometimes play out depending on what part of the chart it’s located in.

AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

CB: Yeah. You know, obviously, for everybody, Mars is gonna be stationing retrograde in a different house and in a different part of the chart. For some people it’s gonna be more notable than others, depending on if it’s activated as a time-lord through something like profections, or if it’s actually aspecting a sensitive point in your chart closely, especially if you have something around 9° of the fixed signs. You know, it might be interesting for each person to think about what house Mars is stationing retrograde in and what the core significations are of that house, and what that sense of fieriness or impetuousness or suddenness could import into the life if you were to try to come up with a delineation of that archetype for Mars being imported into that specific sphere of your life as represented by that house. And that should give most people something to work with in terms of understanding what that transit’s gonna be about in your life when it comes up towards the end of June.

AC: Yeah, that’s nice. Just a few more things. When Mars is retrograde, there’s generally a lack of control and a lack of desire to control Mars, right? Mars is always a subject of control, like control your temper, don’t act out, etc., etc. Don’t say mean things to people. Don’t express your hostile feelings. And so, we’re always kind of clamping down on Mars. And the Mars retrograde periods—you can see in both people’s personal history, as well as in the history of history books—are periods where the martial sort of breaks the chain, like a dog breaking its chain and running wild in the woods for a while. And so, externally, we encounter people who are ‘off the leash’, right? And then we also generally yearn for, “I wanna do what I wanna do,” in the area where Mars retrograde is. You know, we’re tired of being so careful and controlled in that area. And I think that particular signification is strongly supported by the ongoing square to Uranus—Mars square Uranus in mid-May. Mars doesn’t get even 10° away from that square with Uranus almost all summer. Like the ‘Mars-Uranus’ thing is ongoing. That, like, “Uh, I’m so tired of trying to control this; I’m so tired of doing what I’m supposed to; I’m so tired of whatever,” is a real thing. Socially, Mars likes independence, right? Mars is not a ‘married’ planet. Mars is a ‘single’ planet. Well, there’s one thing from Jyotish class that’s come up over the last couple of weeks that I really like. In the Parashara, Parashara says that a planet is three times more desirous or hungry when it’s retrograde. Mars wants to ‘Mars’ three times as much when it’s retrograde. That’s different than being capable, but the desire is increased threefold. I thought that was a really interesting angle.

CB: Interesting.

KS: Yeah, that’s cool.

CB: And in terms of the threefold, that’s worth mentioning again just because Mars will of course make that square with Uranus three times. And one of the things worth mentioning is if somebody does have some major event or turning point in their life that coincides with the Mars retrograde at the end of June, it may set off a sequence of events that aren’t fully wrapped up until Mars returns back to that degree later this year. And it looks like it’s not until around October 9 or October 10 that Mars returns finally back to 9° of Aquarius, which is the degree that it stations retrograde at in June.

AC: Right. Just in time for the Venus retrograde.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. Just in time for Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And there’s like a nice little New Moon in Libra right about that time as well. So this is something I’m sure, once we do our October forecast, we’ll be returning to and noticing some interesting correlations in terms of events being brought to completion or sometimes just revisited and reviewed in some way later in the year, which took place or were centered around this initial station back in late June. But it’s maybe worth noting that, because sometimes paying attention to the long-term sequence of some of these transits can help you to get a better perspective on them, especially after the fact, in retrospect.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. You know, just while you were talking and this ‘Mars’ stuff is bouncing around in my head, I think one of the storylines that will be available and that some people will play out during this Mars retrograde is going to be Mel Gibson in Braveheart running around with a claymore screaming, “Freedom!” and leading an ultimately failed revolution.

CB: Okay.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So be on the watch out for people with big swords screaming “Freedom.”

CB: Yeah, don’t cross them.

KS: Don’t join their revolution.

AC: Yeah. Let them tire themselves out.

CB: Sure. All right, well, I think that might be a good note to wrap up on, as we’re wrapping up what became the ‘Mars retrograde’ episode of the year. Do you guys have any final words, as we wind down here at the end of month?

AC: Oh, we’re pretending it’s the end of the month.

CB: Yeah, we’re pretending that it’s not like mid-May right now and we’re all about to have the more important events that are happening this month take place. Because I’m releasing this after the fact, at the end of the month.

AC: Just one more thought on Mars. You know, if you just keep an eye on it, you should be able to see it coming. A lot of it, you should be able to see coming a couple of weeks out from the station. You know, the station is not the time to start paying attention.

KS: Yeah. And I think the only thing that occurs to me as a sort of a summary is we take a big step back now. I think, Chris, you and I had said at the start of the show that June is a bit of a ‘recovery’ month for us, because we’ve both got a lot of stuff happening in May, and it’s just gonna be a chance to catch our breath; which speaks to me of what, Austin, you were talking about with some of the ‘isolation’ themes to do with the Mars signatures in June. And it’s interesting to me that I’m actually looking forward to that as a chance to kind of just collect myself. And I wonder if that’s something others could open themselves to. If the month does seem a little bit quieter, take that as an opportunity just to slow down and check in, given there’s so much going on in the sky.

CB: Yeah. And speaking of going on in the sky, the final thing I want to leave people with is just pay attention to the observational astronomy this month. Cuz that lineup of being able to see all of the visible planets in the night sky—especially later in the month, around the time of the Full Moon—is pretty spectacular. And I think especially if any of you are undergoing heavy transits this month, or if any of these key things—like the Uranus ingress into Taurus or the Mars station in Aquarius or the Full Moon happening next to Saturn—if any of that stuff is hitting your natal chart in a notable way, and you start going through major events in your life, it might be worth just taking a moment to look at the sky at night and reflect on some of the positions of the planets. Because I think that also is helpful just in terms of putting things in perspective of how astrology works and what we’re actually looking at in connecting these abstract, two-dimensional diagrams that we’re always looking at with charts with what the actual astronomical placements are and developing a better understanding or a deeper understanding of astrology as a result of that. So pay attention to the night sky this month. I think that would be my main piece of advice.

AC: Yeah, that’s awesome. Don’t forget to look up.

CB: Don’t forget to look up. All right, well, that should be our tagline for the forecast episodes from now on. All right, well, I think that’s it for this episode for this month. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys next week. And we’re gonna see, I’m sure, like hundreds of listeners next week, so it should be a lot of fun. And hopefully, we can do some sort of recap after things are over just to talk about how UAC went.

AC: Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome, and I look forward to reflecting on it with you all.

KS: That’ll be fantastic. It’ll be like six weeks from now, but it’ll be good.

AC: Yeah, it will.

CB: Yeah. And, Austin, if your book is out next week, we’re totally doing an episode talking about your book here pretty soon.

AC: Oh, that would be awesome. Yeah, that’ll be a lot of fun. Last I heard from the publisher, it should be at UAC, fingers crossed. Fingers crossed until I have it in my hand.

CB: All right, awesome. Well, cool. I think that’s it then. So, yeah, thanks everyone. We had a great audience today of patrons who joined us live. So thanks to everyone who joined us for the live episode.

AC: Yeah, some really good comments.

CB: Yeah, some really good comments this month. Sorry we didn’t get to all of them. There was a lot, and I wasn’t able to keep track. Thanks to all of our patrons who support The Astrology Podcast each month. It makes a huge difference in being able to consistently do these episodes each month, which would otherwise probably not be possible. Yeah, thank you guys, Austin and Kelly, for joining me for these episodes every month. And I’m looking forward to doing our live episode for the first time next week. And, yeah, thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

AC: Bye.

KS: Bye.