The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 166, titled:
August 2018 Astrology Forecast: Final Solar Eclipse in Leo
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on July 31, 2018
Original episode URL:
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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 is recorded on Sunday, July 29, 2018, starting just after 4:00 PM. Actually, at 4:12 PM, in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 166th 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 Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock about the astrological forecast for August of 2018. Hey, guys, how’s it going?
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Oh, it’s going all right, Chris. Good to be here.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey, guys. Good to be back.
CB: Hey, Kelly. Austin, you have some ‘fire and brimstone’ going on in your neck of the woods, I heard, earlier.
AC: Yeah. For about the last two weeks straight, the forest fires just south of here have been so intense that you can see the smoke hanging in the air during the daytime. You know, it smells like a ‘meatless’ barbecue outside, and it’s giving my poor cat coughing fits.
CB: Wow.
AC: Probably not very good for me either, but, you know, I worry about the cat.
KS: It’s sweet that you worry about the cat.
AC: Well, he makes a big show of it.
CB: Wow. That is pretty serious. But otherwise you’ve been taking some time off or relaxing a little bit, or at least not doing things full-blast.
AC: I dropped my schedule down a little bit. I put my decan column on pause. I’m still teaching a class, I’m still doing readings, and I’m still writing dailies. But I’ve lowered the demands on my time and energy, which is great because I got really behind on a lot of things, including taking care of myself. And so, I’m really glad I made the decision to ‘retrograde’ with Mars.
KS: I like that. It’s like ‘dancing’ with Mars, but not quite as fun, maybe.
AC: Yeah, something like that. It’s more, yes, the dance of the ‘sweet science’ boxing. It’s more rolling with the punches rather than leaning into them and getting them right in the face.
KS: Smart move, I think. Very smart move.
AC: Thanks.
CB: Brilliant. And what have you been up to, Kelly?
KS: I’ve been teaching, actually, and my online class, on predicting with progressions, has been running through July. So I wanted to schedule that in June, but with someone that I’m doing a little bit of work with, we couldn’t quite make it happen, so we’ve been running it through July. And it’s been going really well, cuz I’ve been using some new technology with it. That’s been going really fun. But I haven’t quite got to the ‘retrograding with Mars’ part yet, but I had that scheduled for parts of August. So I’m really looking forward to that.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, I can’t believe we’re already in August at this point. 2018 is flying by. Let’s see, we’ve gotta get some news and announcements out of the way. We have a giveaway that we’re doing this month and then a few discussion topics, and then we’ll get into the forecast for August here later, probably in like 45 minutes or something like that, if people want to jump ahead in the recording to that part of the episode. So, first, news and announcement. One of the things I wanted to mention is that The Astrology Podcast now has an Instagram account. So you can find it on Instagram @theastrologypodcast, all one word. Thanks to Kelsey Rose Tortorice for snagging the username at the United Astrology Conference and then giving it to me. I’ve been meaning to start an Instagram account for a while, and I’m glad I did, cuz there were already a ton of people following us there. So, yeah, you can follow that if you’re interested. Are either of you into Instagram? Austin, are you a big ‘Instagram’ guy?
AC: So my ever increasing hatred for Facebook is making me consider doing Instagram. I realized recently that Twitter is slightly less awful than Facebook.
KS: Way less.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know, less.
KS: Less.
AC: And then Instagram seems to be pictures and less words, and I like pictures. But I don’t know. I don’t have an Instagram account, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
CB: Yeah. I mean, ‘astro Twitter’, as they call it, has really exploded over the past few years. It used to be like not very active, but now, suddenly, tons of people are using it. And I didn’t realize until recently that the same thing is also happening on Instagram. I remember when it first came out like years ago, like 2012, and I was using it for a little bit. But then my account was hacked, and I sorta forgot about that account and never went back to it, but it’s become a whole sort of ecosystem unto itself.
KS: Yeah. And Facebook does own Instagram. I don’t know whether they bought it recently or something. But there is definitely like a lot of cross-pollination between Facebook and Instagram; people are making some notes in the comments about this. And Instagram has exploded lately. There’s a lot of growth there, I guess. It’s not as hectic or crazy as Facebook is. But, yeah, ‘astro Twitter’, it used to kinda be Sam Reynolds who would have some really good discussions on ‘astro Twitter’.
AC: Yeah.
KS: And now, there’s more than a dozen people that are having these, and they’re high-quality conversations. They’re not just like, “Oh, you’re a Leo. You’ll meet someone sexy this week.” It’s like debates about house systems or a specific technique. There was a lot about the eclipse, but from a more substantial perspective rather than a superficial perspective.
CB: Right. People are using it to actually generate content. It’s not just like promoting something that’s somewhere else. But this is like the platform that people are using to like write a blog post, basically, but doing it in a much shorter format. I guess that’s what shifted over the past few years that I didn’t realize, that people started using that as the actual platform.
KS: Yeah. And like Twitter’s got these threads that you can have. And now, they have these things called Moments where you can kind of get a direct link to a thread conversation. So it’s easier to go back and find, you know, a series of tweets on a particular topic. So, yeah, if you guys decide to spend more time there, I look forward to chit-chatting with you.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s funny, cuz there’s little things that have probably developed out of there that have been unique in terms of astrology terminology and stuff. Like I’ve noticed over the past few months—or maybe longer than that—that everybody started using the phrase, “Leo season has begun,” or “Cancer season has begun.” And I thought this was a relatively recent phenomenon. As soon as I posted that on Twitter, everybody pointed out it’s been going on for a lot longer than I thought, like most of the past decade. But it’s something that certainly got more popular, so that it’s entered the common public discourse, where like a lot of people are actually using that terminology, which like a decade ago, I don’t remember being as common. Do you, guys?
AC: No, that makes sense. Cuz when you say that, I think like, “Oh, I can’t remember ever not saying that, especially with other astrologers.” I think it’s like a piece of ‘astrology’ slang that’s making it into, you know, a wider population.
CB: Yeah, like Mercury retrograde or Saturn return. It’s sort of gone mainstream as something that you might have heard some astrologers use, or people using it in columns, but I feel like I see it everywhere now. And somebody on Twitter actually pointed at a screenshot of a Google Trends search for ‘Leo season’ and ‘Cancer season’. I think it was Alan Laguda who showed on Twitter how it was actually increasing over the past eight years or so in frequency, in terms of the number of people searching for that. So it’s something that has been building or developing or getting more popular. But that in and of itself might be a sort of side effect of astrology becoming more popular with Millennials or astrology becoming more popular on social networking sites like Twitter or Instagram or what have you.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
KS: Agreed.
AC: That’s kind of exciting to hear. Because if I ever go back to writing monthlies—which I probably will at some point—I’ve always wanted to write them based on solar months, right? Based on Cancer season, Leo season.
KS: Yes.
AC: And I think every astrologer does. But you’re like, “Oh, it’s gonna confuse people.”
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: “And I’m not gonna get any search traffic. I’ll just write July.” But, you know, the Sun’s movement through a sign is a much more real measure of time than the vulgar calendar months.
KS: Did you call them ‘vulgar’?
AC: Yeah, that’s the appropriate term. Vulgar happens to sound insulting, which is great, but it is, technically, the right term.
KS: Okay.
CB: Right. So that’s always the tension, though, that astrologers sometimes have when writing and creating content and marketing themselves, or that tension between, you know, saying something that’s fully genuine to the astrology versus trying to translate that into language that the public already understands and knows and relates to.
AC: And you put yourself in the position to feel those tugs recently.
CB: Yeah, so I guess it’s been a month. And the last time we did an episode together, I was thinking about and had decided I was gonna do some horoscopes, and then immediately after that I actually went ahead. I stayed up all night and recorded a series of 12 video horoscopes for each zodiacal sign or each rising sign. And that was like a huge undertaking that took me all night to do, but I eventually actually got it out for July and it was a huge success. But it was interesting some of the tensions that I ran into in terms of terminology, in terms of interpretation. I talked about some of that already in the episode on “Why Horoscopes are Still Important,” with Adam Elenbaas and Jo Gleason, a few weeks ago. But, yeah, I should check in and talk to you guys a little bit about that, cuz there’s some things I meant to get your opinion and advice on. Actually it was such a success that I did my second set of horoscope videos yesterday, so I’m a little bit out of it today. Because doing 12, 15-minute-ish videos is actually kind of grueling.
KS: It’s a massive undertaking.
CB: Yeah. So I think that’s one downside of how I’m approaching it. Doing it with video adds a lot of additional complications and sort of things that you guys might not have had to deal with, where I would almost wish I was just doing a written version first. Because there’s some things that I could kinda like copy and paste or sorta do at my own pace, whereas with a video, you just have to go, and you just have to talk for 15 minutes. I mean, have you guys done anything like that, video-wise, in the past?
KS: I’m actually doing something. It’s not horoscope videos. In my Stellar Insights subscription offering, I do like a ‘week ahead’ video for every week of the month. So I have to record six or seven videos per month. You know, one’s a month ahead overview, one for each of the four weeks of the month, and then there’s like a ‘check your chart’ video, which is more of an application thing. So I do know. I can’t record all six in one day. So the fact that you did all 12 on one day, I totally take my hat off to you. Cuz 15 minutes—a 15-minute video can be an hour or an hour-and-a-half by the time you prep what you’re gonna say, prep the tech, get yourself organized. I don’t know. I always faff and waste a lot of time getting drinks and cups of tea and making sure my hair isn’t too frizzy. But obviously you don’t have to worry about that part, Chris. But it’s a lot to do, the videos. Although the flip side is writing things out is equally time-consuming, but for different reasons.
CB: Right. Yeah, like one of the issues is preparing and to what extent I would prepare versus just doing it on the fly and looking at the charts. And I almost wished I was doing a video version, because then I would be more readily prepared in terms of recording each video and looking at the specific transits to each rising sign, but then I would sort of be doubling my work. But I have a much better appreciation for how prepped you guys are going into these forecast episodes now. Because if each of you have done forecasts or horoscope columns before we actually record these, you guys are much more familiar with the transits than anybody is. I mean, you’re as familiar as you possibly can be each month before we record one of these episodes. One of the issues that I ran into—and I don’t know if you guys get this—is this tension between being overly-specific versus overly-vague as one of the biggest issues that I ran into doing a horoscope column.
AC: Yeah, definitely, because, you know, vague isn’t good. But you can’t be more specific than you can given the information you have. You’re like, “Okay, so this person has a Leo rising, and I’m delineating a ‘Jupiter’ thing. Jupiter’s in Scorpio. So Jupiter’s in the fourth from Leo. And Jupiter’s gonna be ruling the fifth from Leo, as well as the eighth, and I know what aspects it has.” But, like, you know, you don’t have their chart, right? You’re just delineating from the perspective of one sign, which is great practice. And so, there’s stuff you can do with that, where you’re like, “Oh, okay, so if that Jupiter gets activated, not only is there gonna be ‘4th house’ stuff, but because Jupiter has a trine, you know, it can see the 8th, which it rules in that chart. There’ll be some ‘8th house’ stuff there, too, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, exactly.” It’s like what can I say given the information? And what is like only gonna be true for like 20% of them? And then sometimes, I don’t know. Kelly, you’ve probably experienced this, where you’re like, “Ooh, like for that 30% or whatever who have this other setup in addition, I know it’s gonna look exactly like this.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, I’ll try to include, “You know, if you’ve got this going on, blah, blah, blah, then it’s gonna look more specifically like this,” but you have to kinda do an ‘if, if, if then’.
KS: Yeah. I mean, I remember in my early 20’s, when I first started my horoscope column-writing career, if you wanna call it that, you know, editors would sometimes come back and say, “Okay, that’s great.” But what if you’re writing about a ‘7th house’ thing, and you’re like, “This is a really good thing for commitment?” But then the editor’s like, “But what if they’re single?” or “What if that’s just not where they’re at?” So you kinda have to then think, “Okay, this is the theme, but how could it apply in five different circumstances, given that not everyone is in the same condition, at the same time?”
AC: Right.
CB: Right. Or if it’s like a 5th house transit and you relate that to like children or your children. Or 3rd house and like siblings. Cuz one of the issues I ran into is like sometimes that is gonna be very relevant, and I almost still wanna mention it, cuz obviously that’s not gonna be relevant for everybody. So that’s the general issue you run into when you’re doing a horoscope column, that it is something that’s very general. And sometimes you can make specific statements, but obviously it’s not gonna be applicable to everybody. But when should you allow that to stop you from going out and making the more specific statement occasionally?
AC: Yeah. Well, and again, it’s sort of a, ‘if this is your situation, it’s probably gonna look like this’. So if you have kids, look for this here, you know. Or with the 3rd, like the 3rd, I always see people who are like siblings to a person. Those relationships get activated by 3rd house transits even if the person is an only child. I remember when I went into my 3rd house profection, I literally had two friends show up within the week of going into that profection who were both guys that I had known for 20 years and had always done right by me, who were like brothers to me. They like both showed up, and I hadn’t seen them for a long time. They both showed up like immediately within the week. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, 3rd house.” And I saw my brother for the first time in a while that same week. Actually within the month. But, you know, it’s both siblings and sibling-like. You just gotta understand what ‘sibling-like’ means to the 3rd house, right? If that makes sense.
KS: I mean, I had read somewhere—it might even be in Deb Houlding’s book on the houses—that she had found maybe an obscure reference to ‘friendship’ also being a little bit connected to the 3rd, because the 3rd house also sextiles the ascendant, like the 11th does, which fits sort of what you’re saying, Austin. ‘Sibling-like’ people can be friends, I guess.
AC: Yeah. 3rd house includes like ‘homies’.
KS: Yeah, like a ‘brothers-in-arms’ kind of thing.
AC: Yeah, yeah. You know, just like your gang, you know.
KS: Your crew.
AC: Yeah, exactly. ‘Squad’, I believe, the kids are saying now.
KS: That’s true.
CB: That’s actually one of the issues in ancient astrology, like in the Hellenistic tradition. In modern times, we’ve tended—as the tradition went forward—to like narrow down the houses, so that there’s like one house that relates to each thing or each person. But in a lot of the Hellenistic texts, they have like multiple houses that relate to different things, like multiple houses for friends or multiple houses that relate to children. Like the 10th house is one of the houses that relates to children, in addition to the 5th and things like that. So that’s something I think about sometimes when issues like this come up.
AC: Yeah. Well, and there’s also, you know, derived or secondary houses, right? So, for example, you know, like the ‘siblings of your siblings’, the third from the 3rd, or, you know, the ‘siblings of your mom’, the third from the 4th, etc., etc.
CB: Right.
KS: Oh, you can have a lot of fun with you. Your children’s children, your grandkids.
AC: So what’s funny is—right. Yeah, sorry, go on. I don’t want to get too—
KS: We could go on about this for hours, couldn’t we? Did you want to say more, Chris, about your video horoscopes?
CB: The only other thing I wanted to say, I’m about to put up my next set—which I just recorded yesterday—on my YouTube channel probably today or tomorrow. The only other thing I wanted to say is we did a whole episode sorta defending, you know, the writing of horoscopes and why it’s valid and why it’s still important. And I almost wanted to see if you guys wanted to like play devil’s advocate for what is the other side of the argument. Where do horoscopes come up short? Or where is it that the more advanced forms of astrology are still, I don’t know, important? Not important, cuz that’s almost like an obvious answer. But what’s the other side of the argument, if we were gonna argue against horoscopes? Cuz I almost felt like I didn’t present that side of the argument enough in that episode. And so, I was curious what the arguments would be if we wanted to try to generate some genuine ones, I don’t know, against horoscopes.
AC: Well, I would say that if horoscopes are not contextualized as being a simplification—and a sometimes fun, sometimes useful simplification—you know, then they can give people the impression that that is astrology, that is the extent of astrology. But I think as long as they’re probably contextualized there’s no like deep moral argument against it.
CB: I mean, is it always possible to contextualize it? You know, it’s like I don’t think I’ve said anything necessarily, or there’s sort of an implication there that there’s more to this, or sometimes there’s like comment in passing. But how do you contextualize it?
AC: I don’t know. I’ve had a disclaimer on my website above every horoscope section for as long as I can remember that’s like, “Hey, guess what? This is not the full extent of astrology. You know, you should look at your chart, etc., etc. This is fun and useful.” It’s not ‘not’ astrology, but this is not the thing. Like this is not the entirety of the thing. This is not even remotely its full glory. That said, let’s do some scopes.” And I’ve like gone back and forth about doing horoscopes a lot. Half of me will be like, “Uh, this is stupid, I hate this,” and then I’ll be like, “Oh, no, this is really like a good way to extend beyond the inherently esoteric nature of full astrology.” But, yeah, I don’t know. Like you said, I’m really glad that you are feeling the tension, Chris, cuz Kelly and I have like been, how shall we say, cooked like soup in this tension for like a decade-plus.
CB: Right, right.
AC: And so, it’s nice, cuz I can see you’re really feeling it. I don’t know. It’s good.
KS: Yeah. I mean, the arguments against it are the simplification, how can one horoscope apply to everyone born under Aries, and some of those arguments actually say more about the other person and their lack of understanding about the depth of astrology. So I think part of the contextualization is—for us on the inside of astrology—knowing that horoscopes have a place, but they’re just an entry point. I mean, you couldn’t even call them an appetizer. Like they’re not even that substantial. But they are pointing you to where, you know, this can go, and I think they can be a really good tool for education. So informing people that, you know, there might be this sign, but this planet might affect this topic or whatever. Or that, you know, there is a Jupiter and it’s gonna do something to them. Or not do something to them, but, you know, stir something in their chart and get some sort of resonance in their life. There’s a lot of arguments against them, but a lot of the time it’s like they’re missing the point, if that makes sense.
CB: Right. Sure. Well, I just like having that discussion in order to like further articulate that, cuz it may be something a lot of astrologers are almost taking for granted. Yeah, it’s sort of a good disclaimer to have on some of these that most people may not realize. So it’s nice to see astrologers that have been doing this professionally for a long time actually talking about it and exploring some of those issues.
AC: Yeah. I guess one danger which doesn’t contradict the practice as a whole, but can certainly create negative results, is when the astrologer who’s writing the horoscopes doesn’t give context and does things like, “Hey, Aries! You’re an Aries. How’s it being an Aries?” and they encourage an over-identification with the qualities of a single sign.
KS: Right. When the horoscope is focused on personality description, like, “You’re an Aries, and therefore, you have these traits,” I mean, women’s magazines love this kind of stuff. Well, it’s less aligned to the actual solar chart, for instance, rather than saying, “This topic is highlighted this month.” There’s a difference. Cuz horoscopes can be, “This is your personality according to your sign,” or they can be, “This is what to expect in the month ahead according to your rising sign,” and not everybody understands the difference.
CB: Well, and it’s tough because there’s gonna be some people that have like a stellium of planets, or have like their Sun and Moon and rising sign in the same sign, and they really do like identify with that zodiacal sign very closely, and those are the people perhaps that might respond to their horoscope the most strongly. Whereas there’s other people where, you know, if they’re reading it for their Sun sign—and that’s like not a major placement in their chart, you know, their ascendant is something different and they were born with a night chart or something like that—they may not identify with it at all. And I wonder if there’s almost a filter mechanism that’s built into horoscopes as a result of that in terms of who gets really into it versus those who it never really resonates with until they find the more advanced forms of astrology.
AC: It’s 100% a solar filter.
KS: It is. Yeah, so ‘day chart’ people are generally gonna resonate perhaps more, or people who know their rising sign. I mean, one thing I say about horoscopes, that I say to clients and students—and they’re newer clients or newer students—is “If you read horoscopes, that’s totally cool. But can you please read for your rising sign rather than your Sun sign, because of the way they’re written, blah, blah, blah?”
AC: You know, when I write horoscopes, Cancer—which is my rising—almost always ends up being more on point than Pisces, which is my Sun. With Pisces, I’m always like, “Yeah, I can see how that applies. That’s not wrong.” But with Cancer, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s what’s going on.”
KS: Well, they’re so houses-based when you write horoscopes. Cuz the starting assumption for anyone writing horoscopes is we assume the Sun sign and rising sign are the same, cuz we can only write 12, we can’t write 144. I mean, imagine if you had to record 144 videos, Chris.
AC: Every week.
KS: It’s insane. I mean, there isn’t enough, like from a print media perspective. There’s no way they’d give you that much space. Yeah. But you’re right. I mean, I had a client recently who was a Libran, but she was a Sun-Uranus in Libra. And just getting their personal chart interpretation of ‘why you’re not like other Librans’, she was like, “Oh, now I understand. Cuz my colleague was trying to tell me about Libra, but I didn’t relate to it at all.” And I was like, “Well, for these various reasons, you’re not like other Librans.” I mean, it’s understanding, I guess, that horoscopes are the gateway drug, they’re not the main. They’re not the main thing.
CB: Yeah. Well, one of the positive things at least is I’ve noticed that with the popularization of astrology lately that more people know what their ascendant or rising sign is than 10 years ago. And that’s becoming much more common knowledge, cuz it’s so much easier now. That’s one of the side effects of the rise of the internet and websites like astro.com and Cafe Astrology. It’s so easy now to calculate your ascendant or your rising sign, as long as you know your birth time, that I feel like so many more people know it and know their ‘big 3’—their Sun, Moon, and rising sign—than I’ve ever seen before. And that has sort of interesting implications then as well in terms of the ability of people to read horoscopes from their rising sign rather than only knowing their Sun sign.
AC: Yeah, yeah, it’s good stuff. You know, it would be fun, I think it would be really interesting to do horoscopes from the perspective, from the house position of the planet that ruled the ascendant, right? Like write horoscopes from the lord of the ascendant. But that requires a lot on behalf of the audience.
CB: Sure. Yeah. One other drawback I’ve noticed is that sometimes when I’m delineating house placements—like Uranus ingressing into Taurus and how that shifted into a new whole sign house for everybody over the past few months—that one’s actually very important this month, because Uranus is making its very first station within that sign that it’s made since it ingressed for the first time in May. You know, there’s some people that are gonna react very strongly to that transit earlier on, and there’s some people that are gonna react very strongly like much later on, depending on where their personal placements are. And that’s the only area where I felt like there’s been some issues in terms of ‘general-ness’ versus specificity because you can’t say who’s gonna, you know, feel it earlier versus later. Like somebody that has their ascendant at 2° of Taurus versus somebody that has it at like 20° of Taurus.
AC: So one horoscope trick that you’ll see is, you’re like, “Okay, so Uranus enters Taurus. It means this for Taurus. For the Tauruses out there who were born in April.” just specifying that. “The ‘April’ Tauruses, you’re gonna feel this a lot more,” right? Because people know their birthday, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: And so, you don’t even have to say ‘early’ or ‘late’ sign. You can be like, “You know, for those mid-November Scorpios, you know, this is gonna hit you double,” you know, or whatever.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I like that. That’s a good trick. It’s an indirect way of getting and knowing the degrees, or at least one degree of the Sun.
AC: Kelly, you’ve probably done that a hundred times, right?
KS: Oh, yeah. Austin, we’ve got all the same tricks. I love it.
CB: Yeah, I need to mine you guys for like additional shortcuts and like little ‘horoscope writer’ tricks. You guys are like battle-hardened horoscope writers at this point.
AC: Indeed, grizzled.
KS: Yeah, I’m on a break. I’ve benched myself. Other than my annuals for WellBeing, I’m not doing weeklies or monthlies at the moment in any capacity. I haven’t been doing them for about 12 months, and I’m almost recovered, from however long I did them before, to start something again. So I don’t think I wanna go back into weeklies, but I’m contemplating monthlies.
AC: You know, I’m taking a break from it, but I’d like doing the ‘decan-lies’, you know, which I did over the last year.
KS: That’s really cool.
AC: I did one round of 36. And I like that. I didn’t put that on pause because I disliked it. It was just taking a ton of energy and time.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
KS: And that’s what I remember about weeklies. You know, there’s no letup. You know, you’ve just gotta churn them out. I mean, dailies is next level.
AC: Yeah. I mean, the furthest extent, where angels fear to tread and I will not go, is horoscopes for dailies. I do write-ups of the days.
KS: Oh, that’s right. You don’t do daily horoscopes.
AC: No. I delineate the quality of the day. It’s almost more of a like casual ‘electional’ thing. It’s just sort of like, “Yeah, yeah. Evening’s really nice. We get like a nice Moon-Jupiter during the evening.” “You know, morning’s rough. You know, Moon aspects Mars and Saturn before departing for.” It’s more of like a scheduling convenience.
KS: You know where I read yours, Austin? I read these on Twitter, and I loved them.
AC: Thank you.
KS: But, yeah, they’re not real dailies, from a horoscope perspective.
AC: No. They’re not horoscopes.
KS: No.
AC: They’re a description of the conditions, with some suggestions about, you know, “Strike while the iron is hot, like this is a good time to do some shit.” Or like, “This is not a good Friday night for partying, don’t do,” right? Or, you know, “I advise not to.” I also give people advice on when to have fruitless arguments on social media. You know, when there’s a really good Mars configuration, I’m like, “You know, if you really wanna waste some time becoming furious with strangers, this is a prime election.”
KS: “Jump on Twitter now.”
CB: I love that. That’s truly astrology for the 21st century.
AC: Right? But, one, I don’t wanna do daily horoscopes. Two, I like taking a more ‘electional/descriptive’ angle. But what I really like about doing the more ‘electional/descriptive’ is I do a month ahead of time and then we pre-program them so that they release. And then my Patreon’s all get the whole month as a PDF. But it’s good for micro-analyzing the days, cuz you’re looking at the Moon applying/departing between everything all month. And so, sometimes I see things from that point of view. I see things in more detail from that point of view that I might have noticed from a monthly or ‘decan-ly’ or weekly overview, but I’m like, “Oh, but what actually happens, the Moon’s over here, and then there’s this.” Like it’s a little bit different.
KS: This is why I actually have encouraged students and practitioners over the years to do a period of time where you actually write daily horoscopes. Like just set yourself like some sort of challenge for maybe a week. I would say a month, but I appreciate like 12 a day for a month is a lot. But it brings you into this really nuanced understanding of some of those personal planet cycles and things that you wouldn’t have given a lot of thought to, that you realize are actually much more rare than you might have realized. Okay, Austin, here’s one for you. I don’t know if I’ve shared this on the show. The first daily column I had was years ago. I was in Australia. I was writing for a mobile or a cell phone company back in the early days of mobile phones and horoscopes going out on them, and they wanted love-themed, daily horoscopes. So everyday, “What is their love horoscope?” And I did that for three or four years, which was really intense, but it did teach me a lot. But, you know, the idea of where angels fear to tread, daily horoscopes will bring you into a whole other place.
AC: And daily love horoscopes, too.
KS: When you were like, “I don’t even wanna do dailies,” I’m like, “Imagine doing dailies on a specific theme.”
CB: Right. Cuz it’s even more restricted in terms of what you can talk about or how you can contextualize things.
KS: Exactly. But it’s a good teaching tool
AC: I would love to do that sarcastically.
KS: Austin, we would love to read about your sarcasm.
AC: But not sarcastically, just brutally honest.
KS: Oh, like if you were to give everyone their love horoscope each day?
AC: Yeah. It’s like, “Oh, well, the Moon is conjunct Saturn and square Mars in your 7th. You know, this stirs up deeply-felt feelings of hatred.”
KS: Try not to project too much.
AC: Yeah. I mean, that’s how it would actually be. Or it’s like, “Well, nothing’s happening in your 7th house for a couple of years. If you’re single now, get used to it.” I mean, cuz that’s reality, right?
KS: It is reality. It is, yes. It’s not maybe your ‘horoscope-writing-land’ reality in terms of what people want necessarily, but it would be very honest. And sometimes, you know, it’s like, “Okay, don’t worry about this part of your life too much for a couple of years. Focus on another thing.”
CB: That’s actually a genuine issue I ran into—when to be more optimistic versus when to be more realistic, or when to talk about like difficult or negative things. That was a real issue I ran into talking about the difficult houses, like the 8th house or the 12th house that are often delineated as more problematic in traditional astrology. And I found myself wanting to fall back on more modern delineations that are a little bit more humanistic or growth-oriented or encouraging versus, you know, talking about some of the more difficult stuff that might arise with some of the other houses.
AC: Yeah, I try to do problem-solving. Cuz if there’s a configuration that suggests that there are problems in that area of life, and those problems will be intensified, I try to give people, if I can, some insight into that area of life, what kinds of problems tend to arise. You know, like with the 8th house, one of the things I see a lot—because it’s other people’s resources, like when Saturn’s in the 8th or something—people will get tangled up in who deserves what, and how much is mine and how much is yours, and that person owes me, or this person feels like I owe them. And, you know, I’ll just point them at that and be like, “This is a ‘tangley’ area of life. That is why it is a ‘dark’ house,” right? I won’t say ‘the dark house’ part. “But this is a ‘tangley’ area of life. You know, some stuff might come here. You wanna be prepared to deal with that.” You know, just leaning into it’s a problem, so do problem-solving rather than like, “Uh, it might be totally awesome.”
CB: Sure.
KS: I do think people appreciate the honesty if something’s difficult, cuz there are configurations, astrologically, that create stress or tension or discord, if you like. So at least being able to say, you know, this tense aspect is gonna show up in your career, so don’t overreact if your boss, I don’t know, yells at you or something.
AC: Yeah.
KS: It at least gives people a little bit of preparation and like, “Oh, just cue in about these things there.”
CB: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s really important and relevant. Cuz that actually came up this month for like Aries rising, where Mars is going retrograde and stationing direct towards the end of August in their 10th house, and one of my delineations was like strife or conflict at work, within the context of your career or with superiors. And that seems like a pretty straightforward delineation to me. But at the same time, I wonder if somebody might read that—that doesn’t have any background in astrology—and if it will unnecessarily freak somebody out, you know. Sometimes that’s some of the things that have come up, that I’ve started to think about in doing this.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Well, and so one way to do that is, for example, Mars regressing back into the 10th from Aries, while ruling Aries, right? It’s like, yeah, it’s coming back, so it’ll bring up stuff that happened or was brewing during the time Mars was in Capricorn before, but it’s like it’s on its way to direct. So with Aries, right, the ruler of Aries being exalted in the 10th, that’s actually like powerful. You know, that’s actually a positive configuration, right? Like if you saw somebody with a chart like that, you’d expect them to be a serious ass-kicker. And so, you know, it’s moving from strife into what is probably a very positive moment of like, “I know exactly what I’m doing with both myself and my career. And it’s a bloody road, but totally ready to walk it, you know.” Anyway, that’s the way I think about this.
KS: Well, yeah. Cuz, Austin, what you’ve done is something that I would do similarly, which is the Mars station in Capricorn this month—it reflects back to events from May. And in some ways it’s that idea of when Mars was last in late Cap. Sort of that idea of resolution or culmination from that time for the ‘Aries rising’ people at work, potentially.
AC: Yeah. And so, I guess, you know, what we’re both talking about is context. Like if you just say, “You know, this week, there will be strife at work, and your body will feel like shit,” sorry. “Your body will feel terrible as well,” that can be totally true and accurate. But if you sandwich it between the week after that, which is different, then like you’re not fudging, right? You’re not like blurring the lines. But you’re just giving context so people aren’t hyper-focusing on like the one bad day. You know, we all have bad days, bad weeks, bad months, but, you know, astrology tells you that nothing is forever.
KS: Yes. This is the weather, and the weather passes and changes.
AC: Yeah, thank God. I’m about ready to be done with this season.
KS: Yeah, let’s have Mars and South Node to have a little bit of distance. Each of them back to different corners, please.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. We will get into that in a second.
KS: Oh, yeah, yeah.
CB: Why don’t we wrap up this intro section. We’ve got some—not news and announcements. We’ve got some other news and announcements we need to get out of the way and then we can move onto the forecast for this month. So one of the news and announcements is that for this month’s giveaway, we have a special giveaway from Austin’s wife’s company, Sphere + Sundry—which I mentioned during the episode that we did earlier this month—that she recently started. So Sphere + Sundry produces materials for self-care and magic on rare and potent astrological elections, which are chosen in consultation with Austin. So you actually help her do some of these magical elections each month for the production of some of these different things, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m not picking all of the elections. She picks different projects and gets inspired. Then we work together to fine tune the elections and, you know, get the planetary hours and all of that as clean and perfect as possible.
CB: Brilliant. All right. So the items are created by Austin’s wife, Kaitlin, following strict ritual protocols on sympathetic herbs, metals, gems, and oils. So today we’re gonna give away three full sets from the Asclepius series that she recently came out with, which Austin and I talked about a little bit, I think, during Episode 164, when we were talking about your book. That was the one that we actually discussed, right?
AC: Yeah. Well, we were talking about Demetra’s essay, which is the Thessalos translation, which is a translation of a book of Hellenistic era astrological herb magic, which claims transmission from Asclepius as part of its formula. And that was, I think, part of the inspiration for Kait to do an Asclepius series. So Asclepius is obviously not a planet, but, you know, for the Greeks, our constellation of Ophiuchus was Asclepius. You know, Asclepius is the god of medicine. And so, you know, the guy handling the snake, that’s the single snake that you see wound around the staff for the medical symbol. And so, we’ve been reading some Bernadette Brady on the ‘chief’ star—one of the ‘chief’ stars in Asclepius, or Ophiuchus, which is Rasalhague—and she found it to be strongly related to healing talent and interest in natal charts. And even though it’s not one of the fixed stars, which is in the short list for magic—like the Behenian stars—it was an experiment Kait wanted to do. And so, it has the Moon on Raselhague, etc., etc., and it ended up being really good. This stuff is so, for lack of a better term, ‘heal-y’. I’m really glad she did that experiment, because I definitely needed some ‘heal-y’ over the last month, and it’s been really good. I think it worked better—the material ended up being way more potent than either of us expected.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, we’re gonna give away three full sets from that Asclepius series, and the set includes incense, anointing oil, bath salts, ritual salt, and a spray, in addition to instructions for the use and a ritual for healing and purification called ‘The Triple Purification of Asclepius’. And the value of the set is $260 per full set. So we’re gonna give that way to three lucky patrons on the $5 and $10 tier who support The Astrology Podcast each month as a sort of thank you, as part of the giveaway that we do each month. For those looking to get their start with planetary magic, or just magic in general, Sphere + Sundry is a great place to start, because all of the items come with directions, prayers, and suggested timings for working. So the site also features a lot of useful information about remediation for natal placements and transits, so you should check out and learn more about it at sphereandsundry.com. Cool. All right.
AC: Kait’s been on fire. She’s put out so much well-written material in such a short period of time. It’s kind of nice, from a partnership perspective. Cuz I’ve like taken a step back and been less productive, and it just happens that she’s been on fire for the entire time that I’m like sleepy and tired and sad.
CB: Yeah, she’s been killing it. And I love some of the articles that she’s been putting up on the website, as well as some of the other social media stuff on Twitter and Instagram. So people should definitely check out the website, and you’ll see a lot of the different offerings and other things available there. All right, cool. Well, I’ll announce the winners for that through Patreon in the next day or two. So keep an eye out for that in the announcement for the release of this episode. All right, so other news and announcements before we move on. Kelly, do you have anything?
KS: Two things quickly. I will be in Sydney at the end of August, where I’m teaching a one-day workshop on traditional health and medical astrology. So for intermediate students that are in Sydney and want to learn about health and wellness, as well as self-care, and things like illness tendencies and trends in the birth chart, come along to that workshop at the end of August. And my next group mentoring starts early September. So for anyone who is either one of my students or wants to join the group mentoring program, we have a relatively small group. So we are capped at 20, and we meet once a month to ‘chart’ chat, basically. You get the charts in advance and then we go through how we would approach them. Our September focus is timing trends. So if you’d like to brush up or practice some of your timing techniques in a group mentoring context, you’re welcome to join us in September.
CB: Brilliant. Awesome. And, Austin, what do you have going on?
AC: I’m teaching one class in August. I’m teaching my class on fixed stars, which is an introduction to fixed stars and how to use them. And then I deal with not all of the stars in the sky, obviously, but I go through the—
KS: You’re not gonna speak for a week just on the fixed stars?
AC: Yeah, right? I do go through the entire Behenian list, as well as the four royal stars. I was like, “What do I do for a set?” And I was like, “I can’t ignore the ‘royals’, and I can’t ignore the Behenian list.” And so, yeah, it’s a discussion of how to use the fixed stars. And it is not an explicitly astro-magical class, but the discussions of the stars includes a description of what Agrippa says they’re good for, for example, for a talisman, and I use that to contribute to some of the delineation material, like different angles on that star, right? So if we’re looking at Regulus, for example, Ptolemy says this about Regulus in a magical context, Agrippa says this. It’s also worth noting that this star is what indicates this lunar mansion, and this lunar mansion’s about this. Just, you know, bringing in different material, getting different angles, trying to understand the star by looking at it in different contexts.
CB: Awesome. That sounds great. A lot of people are always asking me about fixed stars. That is actually something I have not done an episode of the podcast on yet, that I meant to at some point.
AC: You should get Bernadette Brady on.
KS: Oh, my gosh, that would be amazing.
AC: She’s the ‘star lady’.
KS: She is phenomenal.
CB: Yeah. We did an episode last month—or last year. One year ago from, I think, this month on the eclipses, which is the other big thing that she’s known for, her work on eclipses and the Saros cycles. But fixed stars is like the other major thing that she’s known for.
KS: Yes.
AC: I find her work on the fixed stars to be invaluable. I don’t know. A lot of the other sources seem like a giant mess to me when I compare them with Brady’s work.
KS: Her book on fixed stars, the Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars.
AC: Yeah. There’s a clarity. Yeah, exactly.
CB: You’ve got all of your books just within immediate reaching distance of the important ones.
KS: Yeah, I have a tiny office. Sorry, go.
CB: Yeah.
AC: In terms of what I have within reach.
CB: Speaking in terms of books that I’ve got in reach.
KS: Austin, your book is by my bedside.
CB: I like the idea that we all have like each other’s books and other paraphernalia within reaching distance at any time.
KS: Totally. I have a tiny office. And I have a bookshelf with maybe about 50 books on it, but they’re the books that I use all the time.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, I have a milk crate with like what I’m working with right now. And so, there are about 10 books in there.
KS: So many good books.
CB: I’ve got a whole shelf just behind the camera that has about 20 books. That’s one of the things that unites astrologers is astrologers and their books. Like Demetra always talks about, cuz it’s true, even historically in the tradition as well because that’s how astrology is transmitted. One of the ways that it’s transmitted is through books and translations and writings. And so, astrologers have always like had their books as like a major thing involved with their study, and it’s something that all astrologers can kind of relate to in different traditions.
KS: Well, we’re basically book nerds.
CB: Right. Astrologers are basically book nerds.
KS: Yeah. I don’t even know where we’re going.
AC: I know where I was going.
KS: Oh, we were giving away Kait’s wonderful product.
AC: No, no, no, no. I was gonna—oh, it’s so hard not swearing. I was gonna give you some stuff about—
KS: Some excellent stuff.
AC: About not having a book that Chris and I can hold up. Where’s the book, Kelly?
KS: Oh, yeah. That’s true. Why don’t I have my own book? Well, I confess to you the reason why, Austin. But you will be happy to know—and maybe my clients are less happy to know—that I have started just trimming down my consultation hours for the second half of the year, because, as you guys both know, writing a book takes a huge amount of time. And I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do many other things with my time, with astrology, but I have to make adjustments for book creation.
CB: Is it gonna be a secondary progressions book?
KS: Yeah, I’d like to start with that, just to get that out. And then they’ll probably be—as you guys probably have the idea—you know, four or five. When you teach astrology a lot, you get used to how you like to explain things or the kind of references you wanna provide for students. So a lot of it would be that sort of accessible, practical space, and with the blend of, yeah, we’re talking to people in the 21st century about how can we use some of the older techniques.
CB: Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s gonna be great. One of my most popular episodes was the ‘secondary progressions’ episode we did earlier this year. So I know that’s gonna become a classic whenever you do come out with it.
KS: Thank you, yeah. And there isn’t a lot of stuff on it. I mean, I was 18 when I read Steven’s book, The Changing Sky, and I haven’t seen anything better come out since. Like I’m still using that as, you know, a resource reading guide for students; Bernadette Brady’s book, The Eagle and the Lark, they’re the two books that I use as reference for that. But I would do things a little bit differently, of course. You know, we all put our own kind of angle on it.
CB: There’s some techniques like that where even though everyone uses it, like there’s not a lot of books on the topic. Like synastry—that was the last episode I did—is another one. But this book by John Green—this is his book, Do You Love Me?: Astrology of Relationships—is a really good book on synastry. Interesting shortcut he took to doing it that I forgot. Because he originally studied with and was a tutor at the Center for Psychological Astrology, a large part of the book is actually like transcripts from a workshop that he gave, that he then edited and then basically published at that point. And I forgot that a lot of the Center of Psychological Astrology books are like that, where you can read the interaction between him sort of like dialoguing with the audience and taking their questions. That’s kind of a really smart way to like get out a book relatively quickly on a topic—to do an edited transcript of like a presentation.
KS: Yes, that is a great idea.
AC: There’s some precedent for that, you know, in terms of literary style, right? There’s a lot of that in the Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra. It’s a dialogue between the teacher and a student. The Corpus Hermeticum is a dialogue. You know, they’re mythical dialogues, but I don’t know if one would be comfortable assuming a mythical role. Yeah, dialogue as text has been a thing for a long time. and you can do things with it that you can’t do with like straight prose or essay.
CB: I would love that, actually, if you adopted that as a literary conceit, Kelly, of having like a revealed wisdom about secondary progressions, and it’s like your dialogue with Hermes of how you learned this technique.
AC: And you can have Hermes asking you questions.
KS: Oh, right. I’m giving him information.
CB: Right.
KS: Okay, well, that’s probably not the style that I will go for. I mean, I could try it as a writing practice. But, no, don’t hold your breath waiting for that one. It’ll be a little more less-mythical, but hopefully really practical.
CB: Looking forward to it. All right, we’re only like an hour into this episode. So shall we transition into talking about the forecast for August?
AC: If you don’t think it’s premature.
CB: I mean, it is a little early.
KS: But, I mean, there is a mild segue here on the fixed stars to the Full Moon at the end of August, but we would have missed a bit in-between.
AC: Maybe we’ll save it.
KS: Yes.
CB: And actually one of the things that’s funny is I only create the artwork for the forecast episodes usually after we’ve recorded it, when I’m in the process of trying to like post the actual finished episode. But this month—because I did the horoscopes yesterday—I actually created the artwork first. So let me share the Planet Watcher Calendar for August. Is this showing up on your screens?
AC: Yep.
KS: Yes.
CB: Okay. So there it is. So this is sort of a snippet from the Planet Watcher Calendar for August. By the way, the Planet Watcher Calendar, you can find that on Amazon. And I’ve had to drop the prices radically, cuz basically we’re more than halfway through the end of the year. So if you want to get some cool astrology calendars, still, do a search for ‘Planet Watcher Calendar 2018’ or ‘astrology calendar posters’ or whatever it’s called, and you’ll find like heavily-discounted posters at this point. Anyway, this is the snapshot for August, and these are some of the major transits that we’re gonna be talking about today. I mean, this is pretty much all of them. Are there any that are not depicted here, that you guys noticed, that are missing?
AC: I mean, there are some details, but, you know, this is a good overview.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure. So just to maybe run through them really quickly.
KS: You’ve got the highlights.
CB: Venus ingressing into Libra on the 6th. The next day, on the 7th, Uranus stations retrograde in early Taurus, at 2° of Taurus. Then a few days later, we have a solar eclipse in Leo on the 11th. The following day, on the 12th, we have Mars, which retrogrades back into Capricorn from Aquarius. A week later, we have Mercury—which has been retrograde in Leo all month—station direct in Leo around the 19th. The same day, we have transiting Jupiter exactly trine transiting Neptune from the water sign Scorpio and Pisces. Then a few days later, we have the Sun ingressing into Virgo on the 23rd, as it always does roughly around the same time of the year. Then we have a Pisces Full Moon on the 26th. And finally, Mars stations direct at 28° of Capricorn on the 27th of August. And those are the major transits for the month.
AC: Yep, so that’s it, folks. Bye.
KS: Thanks for coming. That’s a really good visual, actually.
AC: Yeah, it is.
CB: Yeah, it’s helpful. And I incorporated that into most of my video horoscopes yesterday, which is why I have it. But I thought it would be a useful sort of foundation or starting point for us.
KS: Totally.
CB: So let me pull up—for those watching the video version of this episode—the actual chart for right now and for August. So here’s the chart from Solar Fire that I usually use, using my Hellenistic page layout from Solar Fire. Everyone always asks—for some reason people don’t know—but this is using the astrology program called Solar Fire. And you can get a 15% discount on the program if you use the promo code ‘AP15’ when you purchase it from the company that produces it, called Astrolabe. So here’s the chart for right, but let’s go forward and start with the beginning of the month, on August 1.
KS: Bam, fireworks. Mars square Uranus.
CB: Oh, you’re right. So the month opens, like right from the start, with an almost exact—it is exact, that very first day of August—Mars-Uranus square, from Mars being at 2° of Aquarius to Uranus at 2° of Taurus.
KS: Yeah. And this is the second square. The first one was back in May, when Mars first ingressed into Aquarius and Uranus first ingressed into Taurus. So there is sort of an energetic resonance, if you will. We talked earlier in the year about Mars making three squares to Uranus as part of this retrograde process. So we’ve got the second one coming up at the beginning of August. It’s not the same energy as the eclipse at the end of July, but it’s definitely a combustible, you know, electric, destabilizing, if you like, kind of energy, because Mars and Uranus together are definitely shaking things up. They don’t have that permanent quality. It’s like everything is in flux.
CB: Right. Definitely. You’ve got the sort of severing and separating energies of Mars—or sometimes strife and conflict-type energy of Mars—that’s coming into a hard aspect and creating tension with the sort of explosiveness or unexpected disruptions that are typically indicated by Uranus.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Your thoughts, Austin?
AC: Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was writing about this in a daily the other day, and I can actually remember what I wrote for once. So, you know, Uranus catalyzes, right? And so, Uranus is in a position to catalyze what Mars is doing. And so, you know, the ignition or an explosion when you light the firecracker, that’s catalyzing, right? And so, this will definitely catalyze some explosions, both person and probably literal in the world. But Uranus is also in a position here to catalyze some of the insights into whatever process this Mars retrograde has led people into. You know, catalyzing insights about personal power, the use and misuse of personal power. You know, what’s worth fighting for or what’s not worth fighting for. You know, Uranus—my pet phrase is ‘breakdowns and breakthroughs’,and with Mars I would add ‘blowups’. This is definitely not like a great configuration to have a sensitive conversation around difficult topics unless you absolutely have to. I can definitely see it catalyzing separations, Chris, like you said. Both Uranus and Mars like separations. You know, and some of those withdrawals or severances may be temporary. You know, some of them might just be getting some space, some of it might be more permanent. I would also add that, you know, if you look at where the Moon is, the aspect is exact on the 1st. But two days later, on the 3rd, the Moon conjoins Uranus and squares Mars while it’s still very tight. So, you know, it’s over those couple of days that it’ll be quite active.
KS: It’s a very ‘Uranus’ start to the month. I know there’s been a lot of talk about the eclipse. But, yeah, the Moon activation in this square—I like that word ‘catalyzes’, Austin. Yeah.
AC: Thanks. That’s one of my go-tos for Uranus.
KS: Yeah, I like it.
CB: Yeah, that’s good. And it’s not just that the squares happening. But it’s like Uranus is already slowing down and is only a week away from stationing retrograde.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So it’s like Uranus is actually getting amped up just in and of itself at the same time even if it wasn’t squaring Mars, but it happens to be doing both.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I like that term ‘amp up’. You know, when a planet approaches a station, it feels like it’s gathering a charge. You know, it’s brewing something. And so, when it gets pinged, when it’s in that charged state, you usually get more out of it. It’s sort of like, you know, one last thing to say before turning retrograde, this Mars-Uranus station. Oh, sorry, Mars-Uranus configuration.
CB: Right. Definitely. And it seems like one of the things I was saying in the horoscopes is that planetary stations—even though there is technically a specific day in which the planet is officially moving backwards instead of forwards, or forwards instead of backwards—it’s not always like that exact day that the result happens. But sometimes there’s kind of like an orb of a few days or even like a week on stations, because they’re really like slowing down and hovering around the same degree for quite a while. Would you guys agree? Or is that too wide, putting like a week orb on something like a planetary station, especially for an outer planet?
AC: I think that’s 100% what I do, and special attention to the day of that planet, which is previous to the station direct or retrograde. There’s no ‘Uranus’ day. We have a seven-day week, right? But, you know, for Mars, the Tuesday, right immediately before the station, you will feel it. And same with the planetary day following.
CB: I wish there was a ‘Uranus’ day. That would be great.
AC: It would make timing more convenient.
KS: It would, yeah. I agree completely with the station. And I think, you know, for something like Uranus, I might even use a little bit more than a week, or look at, you know, what are the other planets that are gonna trigger this outer planet as it’s in its station degree. Because, as you said, your image, Austin, of like they’re broadcasting and the other planets coming in that are aspecting them are picking up that message and carrying them forward.
AC: Yeah, totally.
CB: All right. Yeah, so we open up the month with that Mars-Uranus square. Uranus is also stationing retrograde, and it turns fully retrograde by the 7th of August. And this is the first time, as I said earlier, that Uranus has made any sort of station since it moved into Taurus back in May for the first time.
KS: Yeah, it’s stationed direct.
CB: Stationed direct?
KS: Yeah. It’s stationing direct at 2.
AC: Retrograde.
CB: Retrograde.
KS: I beg your pardon. Sorry, retrograde, sorry.
CB: Right.
KS: My brain is retrograde.
CB: No problem. And so, this is like a long-term transit in terms of Uranus going through Taurus over the course of the next six or seven years, but I think this is actually really important in terms of people getting a sense of what that Uranus transit is gonna be about over the course of most of the next decade. Because even though the ingress of Uranus was important back in May—and that’s when all the astrologers were talking about it—this being the first time it’s stationed in that sign, I think a lot of people are gonna start to get some sense for some of the themes that are gonna sort of grow and develop and eventually start to snowball as Uranus moves further and further into that sign as a result of this station, especially within like a week before or a week after this station. Just because, you know, those stations can be so important and so much of an intensification of the planet, I think it would be good for people to just pay attention to any themes, even if they’re very subtle or very low-key-type themes that are occurring in their life at that time, because of the potential for that to snowball as Uranus moves further and further into the sign.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. This is the first time Uranus has stationed in Taurus in many decades.
CB: Right. In something like, what is it? 84 years or something like that?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Brilliant. All right, so that’s happening already in the first week. And right around the same time, we have one of the first planetary ingresses that takes place this month, which is the ingress of Venus, which takes place on August 6, where it moves from Virgo into Libra. And Venus is gonna spend the rest of the month transiting through Libra for, you know, the next three weeks of August into early September.
AC: Yeah. And this is a really nice thing. It’s a benefic in the sign that it rules. The only thing is, I don’t know, that ‘Venus in Libra’ social lubrication, even just a slightly better feeling about everything. That’s gonna be a little bit delayed, because Venus has to square Saturn upon entering Libra. And Saturn’s only at 3°, and so, you know, Venus will get past Saturn in a couple of days. You know, the first thing Venus does is make that square to Saturn, which is, you know, bringing up some not necessarily soothing or pleasant issues or bringing a not-so-soothing quality to things emotionally, right? Saturn’s great for lots of things. Saturn’s not great for ease, luxury, leisure, lubrication, etc., etc.
CB: Right. It’s funny that it runs into that wall almost immediately after ingressing into Libra there in the first few days.
AC: Yeah, that totally ruined a good Venus election that Kait and I were looking at. Cuz the Moon conjoins Venus in Libra, but it’s still only cleared it by about 5°. It’ll probably feel fine as a transit, but it’s not acceptable for an election.
CB: Yeah, there it is, around like August 14.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. No Venus-Saturn squares in my Venus, thank you very much.
KS: Yeah. Well, Saturn is such an inhibiting quality that it is going to almost overshadow the potential of what Venus in Libra could offer, but not for the whole time. I think, you know, she does get far enough into Libra that we start to get some of the sweetness and that sense of the lubrication, or the idea of collaboration, being able to find common ground or agreement.
AC: Yeah. You know, one thing to remember is that it’s not just Venus in Libra. What we’re talking about here is the transition of Venus from the sign in which it’s fallen to a sign where it’s super strong. And so, you know, part of a lot of July—in addition to having some very difficult things spotlighted, like Mars retrograde and a gnarly eclipse and all that—Venus was also in Libra. Or excuse me, Venus was also in Virgo, which meant, you know, Venus was in the sign where she has the toughest time. And so, the way that I experienced that, and the way I see a lot of people experiencing that is that it’s just harder to find joy in things. It’s like harder to appreciate things. It’s harder to find common ground with people. Although, those ‘Venusian’ functions, there’s just not much fuel for that, or you can find that you’ve gotta kinda work through some stuff. And so, this is Venus going from a place where it’s tricky to, you know, get good ‘Venus’ stuff to a place where it’s, you know, abundant and naturally provided.
CB: Definitely. I like that. So all of this is happening—or at least that’s starting off in the first part of the month, when we get that ingress of Venus into Libra. Just a few days after that we already have another major—it’s one of our major events of the year, which is a solar eclipse that occurs in Leo on August 11. So this is the continuation of the series that we had—that was really prominent a year ago—that all of the astrologers were talking about and that, you know, we focused on a lot, which was the Great American Eclipse that was actually visible over the United States about a year ago now. And this is the continuation of the same eclipse series where we actually have a solar eclipse at 19° of Leo that takes place on August 11, right?
AC: Yeah. So the calendar date is the 11th, right? The 11th is a Saturday, but it’s actually gonna be occurring Friday night, if that makes sense. You know, it’s not going to happen on Saturday, right? It’s going to happen the night of the 10th after it becomes the 11th.
KS: To be very explicit and specific.
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, when you write dailies, you gotta decide which day to talk about things on.
KS: Totally. Yeah, because it’s like if you’re gonna say, “Look up tonight,” you need to say that on Friday, not on Saturday, cuz you will have missed it.
AC: Yeah. There’s a difference between, you know, the experience of days and their numeralization and their calendar dates. So this is another solar eclipse in Leo, like last year. What’s worth noting, this is the last solar eclipse in the Leo/Aquarius series, right? There’s only one more eclipse in the Leo/Aquarius series, which began at the beginning of 2017. And there’s one more, which is at the very beginning of 2019, and there’s a full eclipse.
KS: A Full Moon.
AC: There is a lunar eclipse in Leo, and that’s it, and then we’re done with the Aquarius/Leo series. And so, this is the last solar, is what I’ll say.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Cuz the nodes are getting so early in Leo and Aquarius at this point, that they’re getting ready to move back into Cancer and Capricorn. And you can only have eclipses in certain signs when the nodes are moving through those signs.
AC: Right. And so, the ones coming up in six months are that transitional set where the solar will be in Capricorn, but the lunar will be Leo. And then it’ll move into, you know, being more solidly just Cancer/Capricorn.
KS: For all of next year.
CB: Brilliant. And that actually raises the point that we actually scheduled this episode so that we could do it just after the lunar eclipse, the major lunar eclipse that just occurred a few days ago in Aquarius. Aside from it being like really striking and visible in the sky, I don’t really have any commentary on that so far. But do you guys have anything that you noticed worth mentioning?
AC: Well, everything is on fire. Like Europe is on fire. Large parts of the West Coast are on fire. I mean, the West Coast is always on fire. But Sweden is not usually on fire, nor is Greece. I was listening to the news, and I believe that the fire in Greece, or what was said in the news—this is The Economist—was that the fires in Greece are the worst fires since the end of World War 2.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Wow.
AC: It’s almost like the lunar eclipse was conjunct Mars, which is red and considered to be hot and destructive.
KS: Yeah. And there’s a note in like the Australian press that bush fire season has come forward by two months. So even though it’s a little early in Australia for fire season, it’s already happening there, too. Personally, I definitely felt the Mars-South Node. A concept that I’ve really been wrestling with since Mars came into the sign of the South Node, Aquarius—in an air sign—is this idea of mental angst or kind of like angry thoughts or dark thoughts. Like a heavier mental energy. And I definitely experienced a little bit of that peaking last week with the eclipse obviously so close to the South Node. And there were a few discussions on Twitter around that as well, so that idea of just everything feeling a little bit electric and fried or frazzled. And within, I think, an hour of the eclipse peaking, that energy started to calm down, even though I had felt it very strongly for four or five days leading up to it.
AC: Yeah. There was a quality of growing tension. For me, there was a quality of growing tension and angst leading up to the eclipse, and then the eclipse was a little bit of a release. I have a little ‘remediation ritual protocol’ thing—that I did based on some insights that I had the day before the eclipse—that worked really well. I actually feel a lot more at peace with the things that are not at peace, if that makes sense.
KS: That’s beautiful.
AC: But, yeah, I mean, and that’s part of the South Node. The South Node releases.
KS: Yes.
AC: And, you know, sometimes what is released can be very destructive, but it’s still released. You know, I’m Sun-South Node, so I like the South Node. The ‘South Node’ stuff feels good for me. I know, because I have friends and clients and don’t only look at my own chart, that not everybody experiences it that way.
KS: Yeah. So you like letting go of things, Austin? You’re not a hoarder?
AC: No, I’m definitely not a hoarder. I like letting go of thinking that, I don’t know, reality is so terribly important and my feelings are important, and everything’s so important. You know, there’s definitely like a little bit of an ‘ego dissolution’ thing that comes with the South Node that lets things drop away, and I like that. It feels good to me. It feels like—how shall we put this—returning to the ‘silky’ void and like floating there a little bit. It’s like, “Oh, yes, this is the ground of being, and this is peaceful. And much arises from this, and much returns to this, but this is the ground of being, and this feels good.” But I don’t know. You know, not many people are comforted by the idea of ‘silky’ voids.
KS: No. That might be slightly unusual. But, I mean, the South Node—I think I have Mercury on the South Node, and I like the idea of letting go. I’m definitely an ‘overthrower-outerer’ of things. That’s not even a word, but hopefully it conveys my meaning. And I always think about the South Node from that Buddhist, non-attachment perspective of why are we holding on, in the end it all doesn’t matter anyway. So just offer it up or put it back out there and keep going, basically.
AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you were born when there was a solar eclipse on the South Node.
KS: Yes.
AC: But you and I both have stuff on both sides of the nodes.
KS: That’s true, we do.
AC: And it’s sorta like North Node-Saturn—perhaps the reason I like release is I hold on really tight to ‘Saturn’ stuff. You know, I’m like, “No, I gotta do this, and this has gotta happen,” and, you know, build myself a little cathedral/prison.
KS: Yeah. So, I don’t know, did you notice anything, Chris, with the nodes? Austin and I, obviously, have some commonalities.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I noticed some ‘letting go’ stuff that was kind of interesting just sorta going along with that. But one of the things that I always frustrates me is that I know it’s through like consultations and like seeing clients over like the next few weeks—and looking at some individual stories where you can hear the details of people that were hit really specifically or really closely by that transit—that you’ll see some of the most striking manifestations. And one of the things that’s annoying is that sometimes it’s not till a long time after that, that you’ll like have a consultation with somebody where it really lined up closely with their birth chart, and then you’ll see like the perfect manifestation of what that transit was about. But some of those stories you don’t learn until a long time later. Like YouTube always recommends random videos to me, and it recommended one about like a jogger that was like randomly killed a couple of years ago. And I looked up the chart, and she was Saturn in Sagittarius when she was Saturn returning. And it happened, basically, like two hours after Mars ingressed into Sagittarius, where it conjoined her natal Saturn at the same time while she was having a Saturn return. So that was that big Mars-Saturn conjunction in Sagittarius that we were talking about a lot on the forecast a couple of years ago. But it was something where it manifested in a very specific and very drastic way in somebody’s life, but we never could have known that until, you know, a long time later, when I happened to stumble across it. I feel like there’s just like hundreds and thousands of stories like that where if we were aware of them, we’d have a lot of really interesting things to talk about. But, you know, just a day or two later, you often, you know, have not seen all of those stories yet.
KS: That’s true. That’s true.
CB: Yeah, so that’s one of the things that’s interesting, though, when people write in to us. And so, I’d love to hear if there’s any listeners that have had any interesting manifestations of either observations they’ve seen or some stories in their personal lives about that lunar eclipse that occurred just a few days ago on the 27th and how that’s manifested in your life, or if you’ve seen anything interesting. Because sometimes through sort of crowdsourcing those stories amongst astrologers that’s the way that we can learn the best as a community about how those things work out.
AC: On that note, one of my Patreon supporters—I got a little forum and we talk about stuff—said that she owns a laundromat, and there were like huge problems with the plumbing and what not on the lunar eclipse. And she was like, “That has only happened once before, and it was on the previous lunar eclipse.”
CB: Wow.
KS: Super interesting.
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, sometimes it’s literal. But, yeah, like that flooding can definitely be water damage, can definitely be a ‘lunar eclipse’ thing if it’s strongly connected to the 4th and other things are set up, right? I had that happen one time on a lunar eclipse. It was a lunar eclipse in Gemini on the South Node, on my Moon, and Kait and I’s apartment flooded very badly and a lot of our possessions were destroyed.
CB: Wow.
KS: That’s horrible.
CB: In the chat—cuz we’ve got a live chat going for patrons of The Astrology Podcast who are sharing some stories—Veronica Gledhill’s actually got one really interesting literal one where she says: “One of my friends’ husbands had Mars and the South Node in the 1st house, and on the day of the conjunction he discovered he has a giant intestinal parasite.” So, yeah, that’s a very, very literal manifestation of that transit. That’s a good one. Thanks for sharing that.
AC: Wow. That’s such an unpleasant discovery, and yet, so much better than not knowing, right? Cuz now you can get rid of it.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean, it always makes me laugh. Like astrologers—sometimes their first reaction is like always like, “Wow, that’s actually a really interesting manifestation. A very literal manifestation of that transit.” And then the second reaction is, you know, “Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”
AC: Yeah. Or like, “Oh, yeah, I’m a human being. I forgot for a second.”
CB: Yeah. Well, no, it’s the almost like scientific or empirical side of just witnessing the astrology in action and seeing a specific manifestation that completely fits the archetype and just how interesting that is, that is like your initial impulse as an astrologer.
AC: Yeah, it’s funny. Oh, go ahead, Kelly.
KS: I was gonna say, totally. I mean, in the amount of time the client will be like, “Yeah, I’ve decided to break up,” or what have you, and I’ll be like, “Excellent! Yes!” And then I’ll be like, “Oh, no, that’s horrible that you had to break up, but it’s spot on with this astrological transit,” or progression or whatever it happens to be. And, look, I mean, if you’ve been in a difficult relationship sometimes getting out is the best thing. Cuz more often than not, the follow-up response from the client is, “No, no, it was a really good thing.” So, yeah, I totally get it. The instinctive response is like the astrology researcher versus the humanity of ‘that would be horrible to go through’ kind of thing.
AC: Well, and then there’s the reverse, right? Where your friend tells you something, and you’re like, “Oh, my God. That’s terrible.” And then you’re like, “I wonder what the chart looks like?”
CB: Right. Well, and also, it’s not just completely external either, and it’s not just astrologers like gawking at or immediately not having empathy or something. But even in our personal lives, oftentimes—even if you have like a really terrible or traumatic event—you’ll think about the astrology right away, and you’ll be like, “Well, that’s at least a very good manifestation of that transit.” Or you’ll kind of be impressed by how the astrology has worked out very literally, in addition to whatever you’re going through at the time in terms of processing and dealing with the actual hardship itself.
KS: It’s like a consolation prize of this is a horrible thing, but at least I understand what this astrological stuff means.
CB: Right. Definitely. All right. Yeah, so that’s a lot of the stuff going on with the eclipses. So we’re finally gonna be out of eclipse season.
AC: We didn’t really talk about the solar in August.
CB: Right. Yeah, we fell back on, again, like talking about the lunar eclipse.
KS: We have to talk about that.
CB: Yeah, solar eclipse in Leo. And this one’s interesting because it’s actually complemented by a Mercury retrograde that’s happening at the same time, in the same sign, in Leo, that’s also in effect for most of the month. And Mercury doesn’t station direct until later in the month—I believe around the 19th—when it stations direct at 11° of Leo. So during the solar eclipse. You know, at least in terms of if that’s hitting an important part of your chart, or if you have placements in Leo or the middle of the fixed signs, you’re kinda getting hit by the eclipse happening there, but also, Mercury retrograde happening sort of simultaneously.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and fortunately, we do have the cazimi point, or the inferior conjunction of Mercury and the Sun right before the eclipse. And that usually helps with getting a little bit of clarity on whatever confusions or rearrangements are necessitated by the Mercury retrograde. It’s something.
CB: Yeah. It looks like that happens on August 8 at 16° of Leo.
KS: Yes.
CB: In my horoscope videos yesterday, one of the things I was talking about is a realization that I’ve had about Mercury retrogrades over the past year or so and going through some new ones. And one of the things is that like you’ll do something at the beginning of the retrograde, but for some reason it’ll get messed up. Or it’ll turn out that there’s a mistake or an error with it, and you’ll have to redo it or do the same thing over again. But usually it ends up being constructive, or there’s some sort of like positive overall experience that you get out of it. Because, typically, when you’re forced to do the same thing over again a second time, you oftentimes will do a better job the second time than you did the first time around, just because you have more experience with it. So it ends up being, although frustrating and kind of annoying initially, it’s sort of productive overall in the long term, just because you get better at doing whatever it is that you have to do twice, and you sort of grow from it as a person as a result of that, typically.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s true.
CB: Is that a very cliché or like obvious ‘Mercury retrograde-type’ insight to provide? This is stuff you guys have written probably a million times, right?
AC: Yes. You’re right. I wouldn’t necessarily have added ‘personal growth’ as a result. I mean, sometimes.
CB: Yeah, sometimes. Well, I’m trying to put the positive spin on it, which you were doing earlier with your ‘how to put a positive, useful spin on this’ instead of just saying, “This is gonna be annoying. You’re gonna have to like make a mistake and then repeat it over again, and that’s the end of the story.” But at least in some instances, let’s say, perhaps you grow from it or learn from it as a person.
AC: Yeah. You learn from it, right, like you said. Like the second time you do something, you have more experience than the first time, right? So, you know, there’s value definitely in being forced to dig into something. To solve a problem you usually have to learn more about a situation than if you didn’t have to fix the problem. Like if your audio setup was malfunctioning, you have to go in and look at all of the settings and tweak this, and you learn stuff.
KS: Yeah. It’s like you’re learning what you didn’t know you didn’t know.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Also having an opportunity where like repetition is a way to build skill. And because we’re talking about Mercury retrograde, repetition is a helpful thing for building competency with whatever it is you happen to be doing.
CB: Right. And sometimes like failure or hardship or having to do it over again—because that is like an annoying or is a frustrating process that feels like a hardship at the time—you end up, sometimes at least, as a process of repetition, gaining greater experience as a result.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
KS: Yeah. It’s annoying cuz it takes more time. But often the end result of going over something brings you to a deeper understanding of it. It’s frustrating in the moment, because you think, “I wish I could’ve been more efficient with that.” But we have plenty of time to get efficient at the end of the month when we get into our Virgo season, if you like. #VirgoSeason.
CB: #VirgoSeason.
AC: All right, so this solar eclipse.
KS: Yes.
CB: Solar eclipse.
KS: Austin is not gonna let us leave without discussing it. Go, Austin.
CB: It’s part of a series. So that was the first point you brought up, Austin, that this was not just the end; or it’s one of the last ones in this series that’s been going on for over a year now. So maybe that’s the first thing we need to say to help contextualize it. This is part of a continuing process that keeps happening in six-month increments. You said the first set was in early January of 2017, right?
AC: I think it was February of 2017. But, yeah, you know, first quarter of 2017 was when we got our first eclipse on the Leo/Aquarius axis. And so, just a little bit about like North Node in Leo—cuz this eclipse is off the North Node—in thinking about this, I’m remembering what I wrote about it last year, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Why did I forget that?” Because a lot of what I’ve been seeing with North Node in Leo, and with the Sun on that, is ego issues. There’s a lot of like, “I wanna be seen as this. I wanna get credit for who I am.” And then there’s this sort of sandwich of, what is the image I am projecting? How are people seeing me? And then, what is the image I have of myself? And this seems to be bringing up those three layers, as well as how harmonious or ‘inharmonious’ their relationships are. You know, am I like thinking people are seeing me this way, but they’re really seeing me that way? There just seems to be a lot of like ‘ego need/being seen’ stuff, because right now the Sun has conjoined the North Node. And so, the eclipse, the solar eclipse on August 11, will be, you know, putting a pin in it. You know, it’ll be like that’s what you were chewing in your mind; that’s what was kind of rolling around and you were feeling. Although more heart with Leo than mind. But, you know, it’s definitely ‘feeling-sy’ and a little bit dramatic, as it is Leo. So that’s some of what I’m seeing. You know, the solar eclipse speaks to the solar level, the lunar eclipse speaks to the lunar level. So this is the last solar eclipse in this series. I think if people look back at how their identity changed, and how the way that they perceive themselves and present themselves changed over the last year-and-a-half, you’ll see a storyline there that’s maybe easy to miss if you just look at what’s going on at this moment or this month. I see it as like shedding and regrowing skin. You know, painting and crafting and then burning masks.
KS: These are really beautiful points that you’re making, Austin, around image and appearance and what is presented versus whether the external represents the internal. It’s a beautiful way of thinking about it and contextualizing that. It’s not just the eclipse right now. Take it back to first quarter. I checked. I think Feb 2017 was the first eclipse on this Leo/Aquarius axis. And the North Node actually moved into Leo, I think it was May 2017, maybe, off the top of my head.
AC: That sounds right.
KS: Yeah, the reason it stands out to me is my own personal ‘Leo’ experience. Within a week or two of that North Node moving into Leo—if you’ve ever kind of known me in real life, I’m very relaxed about my hair in that I don’t really go to the hairdresser. I don’t wash my hair every three days. Like it’s just very wild and relaxed and casual. But for the first time ever, I actually went to the hairdresser and I had my hair dyed. I got some of my grays addressed, within a couple of weeks of the North Node going into Leo last year. I haven’t done it since. You know, it was totally like a one-off thing. But it was sort of this interesting experiment that I had around, what is it like if my hair doesn’t have its grays, for instance. I was also getting ready to go to my ‘Leo’ sister’s, very ‘Leo’ wedding and thought I should have some decent hair for the photos. It’s an interesting little piece around, you know, do you need to do this, or can you just be who you are, basically. And I’m relaxing into the grays now.
AC: Yeah, and that’s the thing. It’s like you become aware of the image you’re presenting, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to change it. But a new awareness of that, you’re like, “Well, now this is a question rather than just something that always happens that way.”
KS: Yeah. So it’d be interesting to hear if anyone else had any other suitable ‘Leo’ things that they’re working through. And then the wrap-up—cuz this is our last solar eclipse in Leo, which feels, obviously, really significant.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s gonna make some of the changes, which have been ongoing for a while, conscious. I think people will be like, “Oh, this is part of a process that I kinda forgot was happening.” Cuz that’s the nodes, right? The nodes take a year-and-a-half-ish to transit a pair of signs. So, you know, a transit from the nodes is longer than Jupiter.
KS: Yes.
AC: And so, whenever we have transits that are that long, it just becomes normal. You know, like that’s just life. We kinda forget, “Oh, this is happening because Jupiter’s transiting my 5th,” or whatever. And so, the nodes are even longer. And the eclipses, I think, take the latent significations of the nodes and they bring them into the foreground, you know, for a couple of weeks.
KS: Yeah. And the other interesting point about the significance of this eclipse is maybe a full stop at the end of the Leo/Aquarius eclipses. Between this eclipse and the next eclipse season in January of 2019, the nodes themselves will change signs. So the next time we deal with ‘eclipse’ energy, the nodes will be in Cancer and Capricorn. So it’s very much the end of that ‘Leo/Aquarius’ trend from the nodes.
AC: Right. There is one more eclipse in Leo.
KS: Yeah, but the nodes will be in Cancer/Cap at the time.
AC: Yeah. “It’s like before you go, one last thing, you know, boom,” and that’ll be like the final thing. But I think it’ll probably feel pretty complete after this one that’s happening in August. There’ll just be, you know, a little ‘PS’ in January.
KS: PS, Leo loves you.
CB: Maybe that which is initiated or like has to be initiated, that’s gonna have long-term implications will become fully initiated. Or those seeds will be fully laid at this eclipse, especially since it’s a New Moon solar eclipse at this time.
AC: Yeah. So with lunar, I look at lunar in terms of more material and emotional, and solar in terms of intelligence and ego. I think the conscious half of it will be the conscious half of ending this process. You know, the egoic, as well as the intelligent, discerning part will get dropped by the solar this month. And then there’ll be a final shift of emotions and perhaps resources, depending on the houses involved, during the lunar in six months.
CB: Definitely. One of the things I noticed about eclipses is that sometimes, for like a solar eclipse, it seems like it starts or initiates a new phase in your life or a new series of activities in the house that it falls in. But oftentimes it’s not like readily apparent to you at the time how important that new beginning is gonna end up being until later on in retrospect. But it’s something that sort of starts out slowly or sometimes has very humble beginnings, but then later snowballs into something more important. So these Leo eclipses—it always makes me think of like 10 years ago; there was another set of Leo eclipses. And I always relate eclipses to the houses, primarily, to see like what area of the life it’s developing in the person’s life. And over the summer I started like a new relationship, and it was supposed to be like this blow-off relationship and neither of us thought it would be a big deal, but I happened to notice there was an eclipse happening in my 7th house. I was like, “Well, that’s weird, cuz that almost implies maybe this relationship will be more important than I think it’s gonna be currently, where neither of us are that invested in it or think it’s gonna last for more than a few months,” and we both went into it knowing that. But then, 10 years later, I turn around and I’m still in the same relationship that started when I had that solar eclipse in Leo in my 7th house. And that’s always been one of those sort of lessons for me about what a solar eclipse can sometimes do—start or lay the foundations or the seeds for something in a certain area of your life that you don’t realize is gonna be as important or as long term until you turn around in retrospect, and it’s something that’s built or grown into something bigger a few years or a few months down the line.
AC: I remember looking at those eclipses with you 10 years ago.
CB: Yeah, cuz we were talking about it. We’re like, “Well, that’s weird. It’s happening in my 1st house and my 7th house. And there is this small thing happening. But surely that’s not gonna be a major deal.”
KS: Yeah. Well, eclipses, I think they’re tied into the longer trend. I think maybe, Austin, you sort of said this earlier—or maybe Chris—that it’s not just about the eclipse right now. It’s how it participates in an 18-month-to-two-year period that feeds into this longer thread and the house activation is so critical. Cuz they do get activated every 9-to-10 years by the time we get the nodes reversing.
AC: Yep, yep.
CB: Side note or digression, have you guys ever had anything like that? Not necessarily that you miscalled it, but that you sort of like saw something and didn’t realize how significant it will be, so that maybe you misjudged the significance or how major the transit was gonna be until later in retrospect.
AC: I’m sure I have. No good examples jump to mind.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, the more common thing of course for astrologers, I think, is the opposite, which is seeing a transit coming up, especially a negative one, and sometimes like overestimating how significant or how bad it’s gonna be. But then it comes and goes and it turns out like there’s something that happened, but you got through it and it wasn’t the end of the world.
AC: Yeah, I think that that’s probably true with astrologers.
KS: Yes. I do have to get clear on a few bloopers. Because one of the panels at SOTA—at the SOTA conference this year—they’re doing a panel where they’ve asked a few of us to speak on when we’ve got it wrong and to share, you know, what we thought would happen and what actually happened and just to kind of dissect the fact that, you know, we make mistakes. So I’ll have some better answers on that later this year.
AC: I think that’s a great idea for a panel.
KS: Right? I’m really looking forward to it, actually.
CB: Cool. All right. And when is that? That’s in October, right?
KS: Yeah, the SOTA conference, it’s mid-October. 18th-22nd of October in Buffalo, New York. So don’t come for the weather, but come for the fun and friendship.
CB: Right. If you’re going for the weather, then there’s another conference happening in May that I just got the invite to. So the Northwest Astrological Conference is happening in Seattle at the end of May in 2019. And I have to come up with lecture descriptions for it, I think, in the next like 48 hours. So I’m kind of scrambling here.
KS: Shit, thanks for reminding me. I hadn’t done that either.
CB: Yeah, you’ve got a deadline as well?
KS: Yeah, 1st of August. And you gotta be on time with NORWAC, because it’s run by ‘Ms. Saturn’ herself. No late submissions allowed. I forgot about that. I’m so glad you’re gonna be there, Chris. Are you coming, Austin?
AC: I’ll probably come. I totally forgot that there was that deadline.
CB: You got invited to speak?
AC: I’m not even sure.
CB: Why would the deadline be relevant? If you know about the deadline or it’s relevant—
AC: Oh, okay, so it’s not the application deadline.
KS: No.
AC: Okay.
KS: NORWAC, it’s usually an invitation. Like you could submit for consideration in June or July.
AC: You know, I still haven’t gotten through all of my emails over the last couple of months, cuz I got so much stuff after NORWAC.
KS: You could have an invitation there waiting to be attended to.
AC: Yeah, I found invitations to a couple of things from like two months ago that I never responded to. I was like, “Oh, dear sir or madam or other conscious being, I apologize for the delayed response. Thank you very much.” But this is why I stepped back from my work schedule, cuz I was getting, you know, super behind.
CB: Well, I’m thinking about doing another live podcast event at the conference, either as a workshop—like a post-conference workshop—or as an event one night. So I think if we can get all three of us there, we should think about that or plan on doing that. And people should mark their calendars if they’re interested in attending something like that. Cuz we’ll be doing it one way or another at the end of May in Seattle next year.
AC: Yeah, that’d be fun.
KS: Very cool.
CB: All right, so back to the forecast. Do we have anything else to say about this solar eclipse? Did we sufficiently cover the main points?
KS: I’m good. Austin?
CB: I think Austin’s taking a brief break, running to grab something. He’ll be right back.
KS: He’ll be right back. So if he’s gone, then we can move on.
CB: Okay. Austin’s gone and will let us move on from the eclipse.
KS: Because the very next day, that’s when Mars retrogrades back into Capricorn.
CB: Yeah, and that’s huge. So that’s one of the major signatures this month. Mars—which stationed retrograde last month in Aquarius—officially, on August 12, retrogrades back into Capricorn, where eventually it will station direct at the very end of the month at 28° of Capricorn on August 28. So this becomes one of the major signatures of the month. Cuz we have Mars basically retrograding back and then hovering around the same degrees, at the very end of Capricorn, for pretty much the entirety of the second half of the month.
KS: Yeah. And I think this is really going to change the ‘astro’ vibe. I mean, Mars moving out of Aquarius into Capricorn, we’re going from air into earth. So it’s potentially a little bit more stable, but certainly a more grounded version of this Mars retrograde. So there is gonna be a shift in the quality or the experience of the Mars retrograde, in addition to the fact that if you are using a whole sign house system in your chart, Mars is going to retrograde into a whole other house as well. So Mars is escaping the ‘South Node’ influence. So that intense purification and letting go kind of subsides a bit. Mars is moving back into the sign with Saturn and Pluto. But Mars in Capricorn, it is bringing Mars back into its exaltation sign. So it’s not that I wanna suggest we all have high hopes from that, but I think it’s a little bit more of a productive energy. And it’s actually one of my main events for how August kind of gets split into two, with the Mars in an air sign before the 12th and then Mars in the earth sign afterwards.
AC: I agree with the month being split in two. It felt like that to me, too, when I looked over it.
CB: Yeah. And that stationing Mars is a little bit more tense, cuz we’ve got that happening in the second half of the month and the actual station not happening until August 28, which is the most intense part of that transit. But also, the Full Moon in Pisces occurs right towards the end of the month as well, I believe, right?
AC: Yeah. And that’s a relatively lovely Full Moon. Actually I like the day after the Full Moon better than the Full Moon.
KS: In general, or specifically this month, Austin?
AC: Oh, specifically this month.
KS: Because of the Mars direct, or why? Tell us more.
AC: So the Full Moon occurs at—
KS: A trine to Jupiter.
AC: Yeah, the Sun at 3 Virgo and the Moon, full, at 3 Pisces. And so, we have a configuration to Saturn and Uranus. They’re both at 2 Capricorn and Taurus. But if you just look at the next day, after the Moon, you get like a fun Moon-Neptune conjunction trine Jupiter as far as like a nice-looking day. That’s less important than the Full Moon itself. Just saying it’s cool. It’s a nice day.
KS: No, you’re totally right, Austin. Actually Kaitlin has already been sharing insights and reminding us on Twitter. I’m totally giving a shoutout to the ‘astro’ Twitter crew here. But, yeah, a) it’s a nice Full Moon, and b) the relationship to Jupiter from the Full Moon is definitely helpful. But you wanted to talk about Mars station. Sorry, Chris. We jumped in on the ‘Moon’ stuff.
CB: Yeah. Only just the intensification of that transit as being the most important at that time. But also, as we’ve mentioned—I think maybe it was in the pre-show chat—that of course in talking about this in the context of the horoscopes this month, we all had to remind people that Mars—because this is a retrograde—it’s actually returning back to a spot in the zodiac that it’d already transited earlier this year. So whatever energies it does bring up at that time are probably gonna be a reminder or a return to something that was sort of left unfinished from earlier this year.
AC: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
CB: So when was that, that it passed 28° of Capricorn?
KS: First half of May.
CB: First half of May, okay. So it looks like, yeah, very early May.
KS: Or the 5th or something. It’s almost like a recollection. Like collecting something that you kind of put on the shelf back in May, or resurrecting something that you started and then got sidetracked from. It’s certainly that sense of like reconnecting or a resonance with the early May period. And then something from back then needs to be brought forward as you go forward from this end of August period.
AC: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I already know what that is for me. When the Mars-Saturn co-presence started in Capricorn, I was the perfectly organized ‘war machine of productivity’, and I had my schedule out and which hours on which days. I was doing ‘which’ activities. I was like working out like crazy, getting a bunch done. And then by the time I got into May, the wheels had kind of started to fall off. And then since then, you know, since Mars’ ingress into Aquarius, I’ve sort of not been able or not wanting to get back into ‘hyper-productive’ mode. But having just passed the midway point in Mars’ retrograde right now, I can totally feel that coming back and my orientation switching towards, you know, getting back to being a ‘war machine of productivity’. I can feel the desire increasing already. And that was exactly the timeline for that.
KS: That’s super interesting. So hopefully that helps listeners to have a think about, you know, that early May period. You could get as specific as looking at the Capricorn house in your chart. But definitely thinking about—as Austin was sharing—maybe where the wheels fell off a little bit for you in early May. And then the experience, whatever’s happened between now and then, might give you a little bit of that sense of ‘this is how I could do that better moving forward’.
AC: Yeah. Well, and like you said, Chris, when you have to do it over again, you know how to do it right the next time, and I can feel that. I’m like, “Okay, so I’m gonna make these changes to my schedule. And I won’t try to do that, but I will do this. I’ll wake up at this time, etc., etc.” You know, one of the images, ideas, metaphors that I’ve been thinking about the Mars retrograde through—cuz it kinda feels this way—is this like pulling back the bow, right? For me, especially during Mars direct stations, I’m always like, “Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing for the first time in four months,” and I’m unconflicted about what needs to be done. Whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, it’s like, boom. It’s that release of the tension. But you can’t fire an arrow without drawing back the bow. Or you can, but you just drop it on the ground. Or you do like a bad throw and it doesn’t go very far.
KS: It doesn’t. I mean, the arrow, the setting up for a shot in tennis or golf or something, it’s that idea that, you know, it’s not just the striking of the ball or the releasing of the arrow, it’s what you do beforehand to make sure that the ball or arrow goes to the target that you have in mind.
AC: Right. With the exact angle of intersection you want. Like with tennis, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s not just hit it. You know, make sure its angle and your angle are just perfect.
KS: And if you’re not sure what I mean, just google on YouTube ‘Roger Federer top 10 best shots ever’ and you’ll get some great examples of the importance of precision with the direction.
AC: Yeah. I’m actually really excited about Mars stationing direct in its exaltation. You know, just to take a step back into years and this little period of history, this is a tough stretch of road, this end of this decade. And, you know, although, objectively, the virtues of softness and hardness are not superior or inferior to each other, this particular stretch of road, or this particular period of time—especially with Saturn in Capricorn—feels like it’s requiring some harder virtues out of people. There’s a lot of like needing to toughen up and get through it and get it done despite the fact that, you know, history appears to be drunk. And so, I don’t know. You know, I feel like, on one level, Mars direct in Capricorn is like exactly what we all need.
CB: Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people—when I was interpreting this within the context of like the whole sign house it was falling in—that was one of the things that became clear to me or that I ended up focusing on. Mars returning back to Capricorn is not just a return of Mars, in and of itself, transiting that house in your chart, but it’s returning back to a sign that already contains Saturn and Pluto. So it’s like people are already dealing with like some long-term, somewhat heavy transits through that sector of the chart, or through that area of their life, but then there’s a sudden like return back to or reintroducing this energy of Mars for a brief period of time, of a few weeks here in August and September, which kind of like intensifies or can create some additional potential for strife and conflict in that specific area of the life. And while there might be something that’s cathartic about that, where there’s like a release of energy, sometimes the return of that energy could be a little bit problematic to deal with in terms of having to return back to a conflict or a return back to something that you already went through, where you sort of had it out, but it’s sort of left unfinished. And for some people that might be a bit problematic in the short term.
AC: Yeah, definitely, definitely. You know, from a certain perspective, you don’t need to call Mars in if everything’s going great. Like you don’t need, you know, a planet with swords and fire if like things are cool, right? You know, you don’t need a sword unless somebody attacks you, right? And so, sometimes, you know, I’ve seen a lot of Mars direct stations—they bring an end to a conflict. They finish it. But sometimes, you know, the finishing is, “And now we’re definitely broken up,” or “Now we are no longer business partners.” Like, Kelly, we were talking a little bit about this with the ‘Mars eclipse’ thing. In retrospect, like it’s a good thing that that relationship was severed, but in the moment, it’s not super exciting. It doesn’t necessarily overflow with, you know, warm, luxurious feels.
KS: Not at all. And I had actually picked the period from August 21 to August 23, when the Moon moves through Capricorn joining the ‘Mars-Saturn-Pluto’ piece.
AC: Nice call.
KS: And I thought of you this morning, Austin, when I was doing my Moon power dates, which are included in my Stellar Insights monthly. I was like, “Yeah, this is an ‘unhappy’ Moon,” you know. There’s some frustration. She’s just stuck with all three of these ‘cronies’ for a few days. And I think that even though there’s no other thing happening there, other than the Moon moving through that same sign, it’s just really gonna bring those ‘Mars retrograde’ events and that Mars at the end of Capricorn—it’s really just gonna bring a lot of that home for people.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. I mean, one of the questions people might ask is, in terms of what house that’s transiting in your chart, was there anything positive or a constructive confrontation that you had months ago that wasn’t fully resolved, that you need to return to in order to finish once and for all, or where something was left undone and still needs to be addressed by returning back to it—while at the same time, doing so in a way that’s like measured and appropriate and not going too far, or not incurring a sort of separation in your life that’s worse than it needs to be by aggravating the situation rather than just like appropriately addressing an issue that’s, you know, tense, but that otherwise still needs to be addressed?
AC: Yeah. I think that when Mars—when any planet’s in its exaltation, it seems to do ‘clean’ work, where it accomplishes its planetary function very efficiently. You know, I think Mars in its exaltation is very much the ‘clean kill’ or the ‘clean break’.
KS: I wanna throw a ‘classically Kelly’ positive out there on this, because this’ll be happening for me—I have a Capricorn 11th house. And within a couple of days of Mars ingressing into Capricorn earlier this year—like mid-to-late March—I reconnected with two very old dear astrology friends who I’d kind of lost a bit of touch with. And we formed this WhatsApp group like just a couple of days after Mars went into Capricorn in my 11th house. And we basically have not stopped talking ever since. It’s like, you know, the friendship that we first started in our 20’s has just been able to reconnect, even though we’re all now in different cities, and some of us have got kids and all that jazz. And on this period in August 21-22-23, the three of us are actually all gonna be meeting up together in the same city in Australia for the first time in years. So that’s something that I’m super excited about. And, subjectively, I am happy about this. It’s a positive. So I just wanted to throw that in there. Depending on your own chart—I mean, it’s very specific to the house this is happening in for me, cuz it’s 11th house and it’s friendships and it’s reconnecting with old friendships, so it’s kind of tying in the Mars activation with the longer ‘Saturn in Cap’ trend. I just pulled all this together now. I was like, “Oh, that’s the time I’m going up to Queensland to see Felicia and Cas. So it could be a little happy for some people.
AC: Yeah. So I would be surprised if you don’t end up being like, “We should do something with this.”
KS: Already in the cards.
AC: Right. So that’s what I was talking about with, like, you know, the ‘war machine’, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: You know, like, ‘No, this is awesome, this can kick ass,” and then the moving forward from there. You know, inspecting, you know, your tank—like that’s what the Moon’s doing. It’s looking at, you know, all this stuff. It’s like, “No, this thing’s got legs, this has power,” right?
KS: This has some staying power. Cuz I do think—you know, not to speak so much about myself now, the idea that the Mars and Saturn combination—Mars in Capricorn, Saturn in Cap, the togetherness there, the co-presence—this is really setting us up for the next two years of the Saturn in Cap transit. There is a hardening, and the hardening can be about ordering and organization. The idea of the clarity that goes with if we form and strengthen here, then we can be more productive or effective in other areas.
AC: Definitely, definitely. 100% agree.
CB: That’s actually really important. Cuz I just noticed—and I didn’t realize this previously, cuz I was confining myself to only looking at August—but Saturn’s really close to stationing, and it stations direct in very early Capricorn at the very beginning of September.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So that kind of reemphasizes what you were saying there, Kelly, in terms of setting things up for the longer-term Saturn transit over the next couple of years.
KS: Yeah. And Mars will still be in late Cap. I know they’re not connected by degree, but they are kind of just vibing in the same place.
AC: Yeah, definitely. They’re co-present, right? They’re roommates in the same house. Just their rooms are on opposite sides of the structure. But just one thing I wanted to say about that Full Moon in Pisces.
KS: Oh, yeah.
AC: You know, pretty chill. Like that’ll be the first non-eclipsed lunation since June. And not only that, you know, if we just look at the lunations over this season—so we talked about the solar eclipse in Leo, which happens in August, and then before that was the lunar eclipse in Aquarius, and before that was a slight-but-still-real solar eclipse in Cancer, and before that was a Full Moon tightly conjunct Saturn. So we have had a rough series of lunations, and that string is broken by this Full Moon in Pisces. It’s interesting, cuz it’s got a really tight sextile to Uranus and a really tight sextile to Saturn. If you’re into midpoints, the Full Moon is on the Uranus-Saturn midpoint. And that’s interesting, and that actually suggests to me—especially with it being timed around Mars’ direct station, also in an earth sign—you know, like changing things physically. Like rearranging the way your money works, or, you know, rebuilding a section of your house. You know, moving around real things. We’ve got that Saturn (structure), that Uranus (change), both in earth signs, and then the Moon receiving that, but the Moon in a good place, in a fecund place in Pisces receiving that. And so, like, yeah, that’s not like the ‘perfect piece’ Full Moon, but it’s the best lunation we’ve had in a long time.
KS: It absolutely is. And, Austin, just to be really explicit on what you’re speaking to here, on the 25th of August, the Sun will go through to Virgo and activate this sort of temporary grand trine configuration. This is also kind of as close as the Saturn and Uranus trine gets, and the Sun kind of pulled that in, and then we have the lunation. So it’s kind of a full few days on that last weekend in August.
AC: Oh, yeah.
KS: I’ve said exactly the same thing to my tribe, Austin, the idea of that grand trine configuration. We are rearranging the moving pieces. The material, the money, the body, the environment, you know, it’s all of those physical components that need a bit of a refresh or a restructure or a reset of some kind.
AC: Yeah, and maybe an update.
KS: We need to run some new software, basically.
AC: Yeah. Like you said, it’s like the software of where things actually are. What I’ll probably end up doing is totally rearranging my office. I’ve had like things that I was gonna do for a while. It’s like buy a new bookshelf. These books go on the shelf, that shelf goes in the southeast corner of the room, right? It’s solid like that.
KS: Yeah, there’s tangible and there’s substance, and something is physically different afterwards than what it was before.
AC: Yeah, exactly.
KS: Yeah. I did want to make one point about the ‘Full Moon-fix star’ connection.
AC: Oh, yeah.
KS: I feel like we cannot not talk about the fact that this Full Moon is conjunct the royal star Fomalhaut.
CB: Which degree is that at?
KS: It’s 3 Pisces, basically.
CB: Oh, wow, okay.
KS: Yeah. So it is a little bit more of a ‘dull’ star. Like it’s not the brightest of the royal stars. It’s associated with that sort of ‘winter’ energy. But one of my favorite things about Fomalhaut is it’s about the idealism that clashes with mainstream thinking. And this can go a little bit either way where there’s that sense of we’re totally idealistic and unrealistic versus we’ve got some ideas that can inspire like a shift in perspective or even a change in behavior.
AC: That’s true. So I have Mars natally on that star, and I love that star. That was probably one of my favorite stars to talk about in my star class. I agree with everything you said, and what I would add is that has this like ‘poet/wizard’ energy.
KS: Totally.
AC: And it’s like getting access to fairyland or being kidnapped. And then, do you bring something real back from that or not?
KS: Yeah.
AC: But, you know, like just in terms of the royal stars and what they do, like how do they grant a person being of the first rank, right? Aldebaran, the ‘eye of the bull’, is like this sturdy, enduring—what’s the word—like vigorous builder and changer of the world. And Regulus is Regulus. You know, Regulus is like super famous. You know, it’s the ‘royal’ part of the royal stars. You know, it’s big and everybody can see it, and it gives courage to assert oneself, right? And then there’s Antares, right? And Antares, the ‘heart of the scorpion’, you know, it grants eminence by being victorious in battle, right? It makes you, you know, impossible to kill and unwilling to ever admit defeat. You know, it’s tough. And so, I was thinking about this. You know, those are all really kind of easy to see how they grant eminence. But with Fomalhaut, you’re like, “You’re imaginative?” It’s like the famous artist, or like the court poet or the wizard at the court. You know, it grants eminence through a more artistic, magical sort of excellence rather than tough stuff or, you know, just a super performative quality, like some of the other stars.
KS: Absolutely. I mean, I always think of the winter season. It’s the mystical royal star. It’s the one that gives talent or skill in the magical arts, if you like.
AC: One of the most famous mixed martial artists is a guy named Anderson Silver. Excuse me, Anderson Silva. He’s the ‘Muhammad Ali’. He’s just amazing. He’s like, you know, silky smooth, poetry in motion. I looked at his chart, and he’s got a Mars-Fomalhaut conjunction. And I was like, “There it is,” like giving art to his Mars, which made him famous.
KS: Absolutely. Like a really simple way for people who are newer to these fixed star concepts and ideas is to think about that 3° marker in Pisces as the best type of the most classic Pisces energy that you could imagine. It’s like uber productive, magical, mystical. The poetry, the creativity, the talent, the skill that has that otherworldly component to it, I think.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. But in this case it’s gonna be very much in service to that practical, pragmatic grand earth trine.
KS: Absolutely. And I think that’s the key, I mean, from a chart-shape thing. It’s like a kite that’s forming, but that creates more of a productive component. I really like this last couple of days, this last weekend in August, with what’s coming through with the Mars station. It feels like some unfolding, and the final piece or pieces that help you move forward in a substantial way from there.
AC: Yeah. I mean, just contrast it to the earlier part of the month, right? Like, one, it’s a not-crap lunation, right? And then Mercury’s direct, and Mars is going direct.
KS: Mars is going direct, yeah.
AC: And Venus—
KS: Is in Libra.
AC: Yeah. You know, this is good stuff.
KS: It’s very juicy. And then of course, yeah, just the sign-based support that Jupiter is giving to the lunation, which is in a Jupiter sign.
AC: Yeah. And Jupiter’s direct and in a water sign.
KS: Very fertile. Like I think you used the word ‘fecund’. It’s very fertile. There’s a lot of this sort of growth energy there. It’s very lush.
AC: Yeah. That water, that, you know, big watery Moon, really, it helps the grand earth trine from getting dried out.
KS: Yes. Keeps it very wet. Keeps the ground wet so that something can grow, and grow in a flourishing way and in a faster way, because that’s what moisture gives.
AC: Yeah, in an imaginative way. Cuz, you know, sometimes like if you’re rearranging your office—like the example I gave—you can do that because you have to. You’re like, “Really, this would be better if I did that,” and it’s boring. But then that same activity can also be inspired, and be like, “Oh, and then it’s gonna be like this,” you know.
KS: And then the energy will feel better, and it’ll be more aligned, or the feng shui or what have you.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the Pisces Moon gives that practical rearrangement that nice quality.
KS: So shoutout to Pisces Moons.
AC: Yeah, shoutout to Pisces Moons.
CB: It’s funny that you guys mention all of this, because this is actually the election for this month, that Leisa Schaim picked out for us. It’s actually August 26.
KS: Leisa, we co-sign.
CB: Yeah, that’s really funny, actually. I’ll have to let her know that you guys approved of this election and you sung its high praises before I even showed you the chart. So this month it’s set for August 26, 2018, at about 7:30 PM, local time, which here in Denver, Colorado gives about 1° of Pisces rising. So we had a couple of charts. There was another possible chart as our top pick of the month, that was a Leo rising election, with the Sun in Leo, and the Sun right on the ascendant a little earlier in the month, but it had some drawbacks. We decided to go with this chart as the main one we’re recommending this month. It’s a Pisces rising chart. So you want about the first degree or two of Pisces rising. So this is happening right around sunset, cuz the Sun is at 3° of Virgo at this point. So it’s still a day chart, but it has Pisces rising, with Jupiter in Scorpio in the ninth whole sign house. And the Moon is in Pisces in this chart at about 10° of Pisces, and it’s applying to a trine with Jupiter with reception, with the Moon itself in Pisces. Part of the purpose of this chart is to take advantage of now that we’re in the part of the year where Jupiter has stationed direct in Scorpio, it’s gonna make its way out of Scorpio just a few months from now later this year. So if we find a good chart—where we can really take advantage of that Jupiter in Scorpio, where it’s otherwise not afflicted by any inner planets—it’s a good time to take advantage of it while we still can now that it’s direct again. So it’s a very 9th house-focused chart, but it has a lot of those qualities that you guys were talking about in terms of the wateriness with the Moon and Jupiter sort of as the focal points in Pisces and Scorpio.
KS: Totally. And of course, selfishly, cuz I’ll be in Australia, I’m like, “How does this translate down under?” And it looks like it’ll be the day after the 27th, around maybe 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening. Do you want an early Pisces rising, Chris, for this? Is that the goal? Or just any degree rising?
CB: No. I mean, there is a question here about whether to make it a day chart or a night chart. We leaned more towards a day chart. So that creates a very narrow time window, so that you have to make sure that you have only like 1° or 2° of Pisces rising. Which is kind of tricky, because Pisces actually rises very quick as a rising sign, so you have to make sure that you get that window pretty precisely. And we have it set for 7:30 here, because that’s when 1° of Pisces is rising in Denver. But you need to adjust the time so that the ascendant is at 1° of Pisces in whatever your location is. And that’s really part of the main point of this chart, to keep it a day chart. That way, Jupiter is of-the-sect-in-favor. It’s a benefic, a daytime planet in a day chart. You could make it a night chart. Cuz one of the downsides was that Mars—or Jupiter is then ruled by Mars, which is stationing direct in the 11th, in a day chart, but at least it’s exalted in Capricorn. It has a nice relationship with Jupiter and Venus. Yeah, so that’s one of the reasons we lean towards more of a day chart rather than a night chart.
KS: Lovely. So very early Pisces rising, 0°, 1°, or 2° to keep the Sun right on the descendant.
CB: Yeah.
KS: That’s great.
CB: It’s also good in terms of making sure that the Moon is applying to Jupiter in a day chart rather than Jupiter in a night chart. Just in order to further accentuate the positiveness of that reception between the Moon being in Pisces—which is ruled by Jupiter—and applying to it by making Jupiter a little bit more benefic.
KS: Absolutely. Great. Yeah, that’s totally replicable in Sydney.
CB: Right. Oh, it is okay in Sydney?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s one of the tricky things.
KS: I was looking at it’s basically August 27 at around 5:20 PM, and that’ll give you 2 Pisces rising. The Moon is maybe—she’s at 12° or 13° Pisces. So she’s still in the same application.
CB: Okay, so still applying to Jupiter.
KS: Yeah. Cuz sometimes when you change the location so differently, you can’t get the Moon application. But because it’s a longer application here, it totally works.
CB: Yeah, that’s an issue we run into. And that’s why we didn’t go with the other Leo rising election, I believe, because it was applicable in all timezones except for the West Coast of the United States. So we decided to not make that our primary election this month, cuz it wouldn’t be usable by the entire like western coast. So this chart’s actually funny, also, because this is basically very similar to a core part of the chart of the astrologer Robert Zoller, who was born with Pisces rising and Jupiter in Scorpio, and the Moon in Pisces, in a day chart, applying to a trine with Jupiter. So it’s kind of like this chart is like a little ‘Robert Zoller’ talisman, you might say. What would be your delineation, Austin? I mean, cuz I always think of Zoller as like a mystical guy into occult arts like astrology, but also, other things like alchemy and things like that. Which I always thought was very fitting of his ruler of the ascendant in the 9th house, and he becomes like ‘the’ astrologer known for doing Medieval astrology during the early revival of older forms of astrology in the 1980s and ‘90s, as well as one of the few astrologers that became associated with some of the predictions that he made about 9/11. What’s your general take? How would you delineate that, with the ruler of the ascendant in the 9th in Scorpio?
AC: For this election?
CB: Yeah, or just in general.
AC: So, I mean, yeah, the 9th house in Hellenistic astrology—and in other astrologies, but it’s very clear in the Hellenistic—is where you see magic, religion, prognostication, such as through astrology, right? You read through Firmicus—for me, I have the Sun in the 9th house—and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, so what you should do is you would be really happy working in the temple constructing divine images, right?” Cuz, you know, it’s Sun (visibility) and image (9th).
KS: Yeah.
AC: He’s like, “Oh, Saturn in the 9th, you’d be great at keeping the temple clean and making sure the ceremonies run on time; also, you’d be not bad at interpreting dreams,” right? You know, the 9th is also more mundane things like taking a trip. But the 9th, like it’s the house where you see spiritual work and spiritual power. And so, this is an idea that I think you can find in Western strands of astrology, but is more explicit in Vedic astrology, is the 9th is also a lucky place. It’s just lucky, right? To a certain degree that’s what magic aims at is to create a very specific kind of luck, so that this will go well or this will happen, right? And so, Jupiter is obviously a nice fit for the 9th, and it’s direct and unafflicted, ruling the 1st. That’s beautiful. If I’m not incorrect, with Zoller, I believe he had a Mercury-Mars-Sun conjunction in Aquarius. Has, has—he’s still with us on this plane.
CB: You’re right.
AC: And so, for that, there you have the ruler of the 9th in the 12th with the sect light. And so, you know, the ruler of the 9th and the 12th is gonna take you even deeper into mysteries, right? That linkage of the 9th and 12th. But, anyway.
KS: That’s nice. I’ve heard some very negative interpretations of the ruler of the 9th in the 12th. I like your one better.
AC: Oh, I think it’s gonna not be as good for material things and luck, but I think it would serve quite nicely on a, you know, spiritual/esoteric level.
KS: That’s really cool.
CB: Yeah. Like ‘ruler of the ascendant in the 9th-type’ stuff is always funny to me, because sometimes you do get like major religious themes coming up in the person, or the person being very interested in metaphysical or philosophical or religious things. But then, you know, in some of the Hellenistic texts, it’s funny, because it sometimes delineates like negative placements there as problems or struggles with religion, or skepticism about it. And when I did a lot of my research for this in putting together a lecture on the ruler of different houses—like the ruler of the ascendant in the 9th—one of the ones that was funny, there was like a major astrology skeptic who ended up having like Saturn there in the 9th in night chart.
AC: I was just gonna bring that up! I was literally going to bring that up with Firmicus. I was getting Firmicus open. Please go on. I’m very excited. We are literally on the same page.
CB: Yeah. Well, I just always was fascinated by that. So I think it was—if I’m remembering correctly—the chart of Geoffrey Dean, who was like a major astrology skeptic. Supposedly, his story is that he was an astrologer—or he was somewhat into astrology—but then later decided it was false, and so, sort of dedicated his career to critiquing or attacking it. That’s such an interesting manifestation, then, of having that placement in the 9th house, as being something where you’re sort of skeptical about the topic of that house, or where you struggle with it in some way, and manifesting in a very literal way like that.
AC: So can I just read you one paragraph, which is Firmicus delineating Saturn in the 9th by day and then by night?
CB: Yeah, yeah.
AC: Cuz it’s hilarious. Okay. “Saturn in the 9th house will make famous magicians, renown philosophers, or temple priests noted for their reputation for magic. According to the nature of the signs, he also makes seers, diviners, and astrologers. They are always outstanding in their responses. Some carry on the rites of temples or are in charge of rituals, sometimes to become long-haired philosophers or interpreters of dreams. However, Saturn in this house by night indicates the wrath of gods and hatred of emperors, especially if the waning Moon is moving toward him in any way. But greater evils still are predicted from gods and emperors if Mars from any direction is in aspect to Saturn and the Moon.” So the reason my mind went to that is I did an article for The Mountain Astrologer, I don’t know, six-seven years ago, about the chart of Marilyn Manson. And he has Saturn in the 9th with the waning Moon applying to Saturn. And if you wouldn’t like somebody who is hated by the wrath of gods and emperors, this is someone who literally billed himself as the ‘Antichrist Superstar’ and who authority figures everywhere hated. People protested his stuff, but I thought that was amazing. To call him sacrilegious is an understatement in the extreme, right? So you see the wrath of gods and anger at God or gods, a hatred of emperors, like people who are ruling, but that was what made him famous. Like that’s true, but that was actually the key to his eminence. You know, it’s a funny thing where it’s exactly as it is in the book, but different.
CB: Yeah. I always appreciate that and love that when you have like ancient, sometimes very literal, and sometimes very like stark or extreme delineations in the old textbooks from like 2,000 years ago, and then seeing somebody with that placement in modern times—having a manifestation of it that fits it very perfectly from an archetypal sense, but still puts a modern or a unique spin on it, that is sort of unique in some way.
AC: Yeah. You know, it would be fun to go back to his chart. Obviously, the planets involved there are keys to eminence, or they’re part of eminence combinations or raja yogas for him, and so, being hated was the key to his success.
CB: Right. Yeah. And he has like the ruler of the ascendant like applying to that with reception and all sorts of other weird things.
AC: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Anyway, so this is an election like that. It’s very much 9th house-focused. Like a ‘9th house’ pursuit would be like education. And with the ruler of the ascendant being in the 9th house in Scorpio, maybe like beginning an educational focus or pursuit—especially of a more Scorpionic nature, like occult things or something like that—would be a great symbolic use of this election.
AC: Yeah, getting into something. Starting a course of study. But, again, I think that the 9th house—especially Jupiter in the 9th direct and unafflicted—there’s also just like a general or a global ‘this is useful for a lot of things’, but I would agree totally that it would be especially useful for something of that nature.
CB: Well, and especially it’s for serious things and doing things very deliberate and doing a sort of deep dive, educational pursuit into something, where you’re not like just sort of scratching the surface. But you’re sort of going all the way as far as you can in terms of pursuing some course of study or looking into something, I guess, more broadly speaking.
AC: Right. And so, what I wanna say immediately—which I realize is so ‘Pisces Moon’—is immersing yourself, right?
KS: Yeah. Immersing. Locking yourself away with all your knowledge. We’re talking from an electional perspective where you consciously choose to do something at this time. So signing up for a course. Starting to work with a mentor. But it could also be that, you know, if you’re out and about at this time of day, you might stumble across something that becomes influential or motivating or inspiring or aspirational for you.
AC: Yeah, definitely. This would be a great time to start a research project.
KS: Totally. Or maybe start writing something.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CB: All right, so that’s our auspicious electional chart for August. We actually have three other charts that Leisa found this month that we’re gonna talk about in the Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is available to patrons who support this show on the $5 and $10 tiers. So we’ll be recording and releasing that tomorrow, I believe. So all you need to do is sign up to become a patron through our page on Patreon and then you can get access to that each month as soon as it’s released. So, yeah, I think that’s it for the elections. And that kind of brings us to the end of this month. I think we accidentally went way, way over time, and the clock is telling me it’s been two-and-a-half hours. And I don’t quite believe that. That seems a little long. But apparently we’ve been doing this for quite a while.
KS: We had a lot of fun and time flies when you’re doing that.
AC: There were some interesting side roads that we explored.
CB: Sure. We were even more digressive than usual this month, but that’s all right.
AC: Mercury’s retrograde, right?
CB: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, anything else to close up? In terms of listeners, let me know. Because I’m trying to come up with lecture topics—and maybe this applies to you also, Kelly—if you guys have any suggestions for lecture topics you’d like to see us do at NORWAC next year, like in person giving lectures, let us know. Cuz Kelly and I will both be scrambling to come up with those topics over the next few days before the deadline, so we would appreciate any suggestions about what people actually wanna see. Additionally, if you’d be interested in attending a post-conference workshop with the three of us, let me know, since I wanna seriously consider potentially trying to do something next year. And I’d like to see if people would actually be interested in staying over at the conference an extra day to do something like that.
KS: Yeah. Either coming in a day early or staying over a day later at the end. Like before or after.
CB: Right.
KS: I know that our dear friend and colleague Mark Jones has a thing that happens the day before the official NORWAC stuff.
CB: Right.
KS: Not that we would be competing with him. But the venue would be open, if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah. Well, and I was given—I think it’s a post-conference. So I’m just trying to decide whether to do a workshop on something, or it would kind of be more fun to do something with the three of us. But, yeah, I’d like to hear what people think. All right, guys, well, I think that’s it for this episode of the podcast. So thanks a lot for joining me today. I really appreciate it. It’s always fun to catch up with you guys, and I look forward to checking in again next month. I guess, Kelly, you’ll be in Australia by that time, right?
KS: I will be in Australia when I chat to you all next month. So I look forward to that, as always.
CB: Awesome. And, Austin, I hope that the world around you or nature outside of your house is not on fire by the time we talk again in a few weeks.
AC: Yeah, me, too, me, too. That would be great. The fires are closer than I would like, but, you know, we’ve got a car. We can outrun it if need be.
CB: Sure.
KS: As long as you have a carrier for your cat.
AC: We do. It’s his least favorite thing in the world. He used to just meow for hours if he was stuck in there. And now he just accepts it and gets super depressed. He’s just like, “Uhh.” You know, cats are only reasonably emotionally communicative a lot of the time, but it’s just like waves of depression coming off of this cat. He’s just silent and just sits there. He won’t even eat treats. But that’s better for going to the vet than, you know, “Meowrr,” for two hours straight. That’s how it used to be.
CB: And next month we’ll have to consider—when we do our forecast episode—maybe using this election with Pisces rising and Jupiter in the 9th for the next forecast episode.
AC: I don’t know, dude. I kinda need to start like three things during a very small window of time.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. That we would have to do this instead of initiate other projects. All right, well, we’ll think about that. We’ll figure it out over the next few weeks, and we will see everyone again next month. So thanks everyone for joining. We’ll see you again next time. And, yeah, have a good month.
AC: Bye.
KS: Bye.