The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 170, titled:

September 2018 Astrology Forecast: Moving Forward

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on August 31, 2018

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2018/08/31/september-2018-astrology-forecast-moving-forward/

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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. Today is Thursday, August 23, 2018, starting just after 7:00 PM. It’s actually 7:12 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 170th 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 September of 2018. Hey, guys, how’s it going?

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Good. How are you doing?

CB: I am doing fantastic. I’ve had a very productive August, I feel like. I don’t know what it was. I ran into a few obstacles with the Mercury retrograde, but it wasn’t anything that kept me down. And, yeah, it’s been a good month. Kelly, you’re in Australia, or you’re traveling again?

KELLY SURTEES: Yeah, just for a change. As our regular listeners know, my dad had a big birthday a couple of weeks ago. So we had a family celebration here, which was lovely. And I’m very envious of your productivity this month, Chris. I’ve had most of the month of August off. So I feel like I’m just now getting back into it and playing catch-up.

CB: Awesome. Well, nothing wrong with taking some time off.

AC: Yeah. I would not characterize my August as being particularly productive. I got some things done. But I’m not giving myself any awards, commendations, honors, ‘attaboys’.

CB: Yeah. Well, you’re doing some like restructuring and reorienting, right, Austin?

AC: Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of catching up and then thinking about, you know, what do I wanna do going forward—you know, and in what order—and then thinking about how I need to structure my time over the next six months in order to do that. You know, I stopped writing my ‘decan’ columns basically on Mars’ retrograde, and I said I would take that time to figure out what forward or direct motion was like, and so, I’ve been doing that. And so, I’ve got a couple of things I know I’m gonna do. I need to give it the Full Moon in the station to, you know, actually officially stamp it and announce certain things. But, yeah, dealing with the past in order to get to the future.

CB: Brilliant. Yeah, writing horoscopes. There was the contest—or it wasn’t a contest. It was like a competition we were doing.

KS: The ‘daily writing’ challenge or something.

CB: Yeah. And they’re all dropping like flies after writing it for like a few weeks. And, yeah, it was really interesting seeing that, because people were having a hard time after a while writing like 12 daily columns. Yeah, I could never do that. You guys have done that at different points, right?

AC: I’ve never done daily horoscopes. I write about a paragraph or two, sometimes three, about the configuration everyday, but I don’t ‘horoscope’ it for people. I’ve done weekly, monthly, yearly, decan-ly horoscopes. Or if I write a piece about Saturn in Capricorn, which I did, you know, I’ll do 12 for that. But I’ve never done the true daily challenge, nor do I particularly want to. But hats off, hats off to those who did it.

CB: Yeah. I mean, do we know people? Like Rick Levine does dailies.

KS: Oh, I’ve done it.

CB: You have done it, okay. How long did you do it for?

KS: It was a relationship-themed daily column. So it was 12, everyday, but on relationships only.

CB: So even more restricted.

KS: Even more restricted, three or three-and-a-half years, very early in my career. I was probably in my early-to-mid 20’s. Like it was really good training ground. I learned a lot from it. I was happy to move on from it, but it was my choice. Like it was me saying to the publishers, “I think I’m ready for something different.” And, yeah, it is rigorous, for sure, but, you know, you do get a lot out of it.

CB: Yeah, totally. And it would be a little bit easier if you were younger in your career and you had less going on. You would be both more hungry, but also, have more time for something like that.

KS: Totally. And that was it, the time factor. You know, at the time, I was just getting started in my own business, and it was a steady paycheck. I just considered it rent money. It was like two days a week, cuz I’m a fairly quick writer, and I just would, you know, do them, like just dive in and do them. And then I’d have a few days each week where I could be building my clients and building my student practice, so it fit really well. And I found with all of the columns I’ve done—you know, whether it’s a weekly column—I’ve done some other daily columns over the years, but, you know, you do them for a few years. Usually, two to three years, they say for regular columns, like daily or weekly, and then you want something fresh. You want a different focus or a different format, basically.

CB: Sure. Yeah, I think like if a similar challenge like that happened in the future, it might be better for people to start out more slowly with like monthlies or something like that—which seems to be more of an entry point—and then if you wanna ramp up from there, you can. But otherwise it seems like if you jump straight into doing dailies, that’s just like the hardest thing you could possibly do right from the start.

KS: It is intense. Yeah, the month is good. Weeklies are nice because it’s a smaller timeframe to cover. There’s usually enough going on that you can pick like one really significant aspect or two really significant aspects for that sign for the week. Monthlies—I’ve always found monthlies one of the hardest to do. I don’t know how you feel, Austin.

AC: No, I’m similar with you, because it’s much harder to know how deep to go and like what to emphasize. Like with a week, you know, there could be no important things, but that’s important in and of itself, right?

KS: Yes.

AC: There could be one important thing that’s easy, or maybe there’s two and, you know, you’re like, “There are these two things that are both happening this week that aren’t the same, or they work together in this way.” With monthly, there are lots of important things that happen. At least they’re going to feel important for, you know, that span of days. And so, yeah, I’ve written monthlies that ended up being like 6,000 words, and I just thought I was doing the bare minimum. But then other times I’ve been like, “No, this is the gist of it,” and I’ve got the theme, so I don’t have to talk about details. But, yeah, there’s something about the monthly that makes it harder to decide on scope and depth than the other levels.

KS: Totally, yeah. And if you’re writing for yourself online, you know, you’ve got kind of free reign with your word count. But when you’re writing for a publisher, and they might say, “We want 2-or-300 words per sign for the month,” you don’t have a lot of room to move there. You really are forced to pick, and then there’s a lot of pressure on picking the right thing. Whereas in a week, yeah, I’ve always enjoyed weeklies and then annuals or the year-aheads. They’re my favorites.

CB: Definitely. And Arthur says in the chat—so we’ve got a live audience here of patrons who are attending this episode. And he says that there’s a hashtag right now, which is ‘daily astro weather’ on Twitter and Instagram, which is talking about the daily astrological weather, but it’s not for every horoscope sign. It’s just a sort of general thing, it sounds like.

AC: Right.

KS: That’s what you do, Austin.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay. And, Austin, you’re actually using that hashtag?

KS: I don’t know if you’re using the hashtag, but that’s what you’re doing. That’s your output.

AC: Kait set it up so that my dailies have been tagged that way for, I don’t know, a year or two, something like that.

CB: Okay, got it. Cool. All right. In terms of like other things going on this month in retrospect, we just finished up the Mercury retrograde that just stationed not too long ago. I actually had a funny thing happen with that. Because I thought it went by and sort of came and went and nothing significant—that I got out relatively unscathed. But then I found out towards the end of it—as Mercury was getting ready to station direct—I get this like frantic email, and kind of like an annoyed email from some conference organizers, who were asking me why I didn’t respond to a conference invitation where the deadline had just passed. And it turned out they had invited me to a major conference, but they sent the invitation to like a plumber named ‘Chris Brennan’ who lives in Ireland. And they actually sent it right around the time Mercury was stationing retrograde, and I found out a few weeks later, as it was getting ready to station direct.

AC: Oh, it didn’t go out to the ‘Strangler’?

CB: No. It didn’t go out to the ‘Westside Strangler’ Chris Brennan. Evidently, there’s another Chris Brennan who’s a plumber. So I found that funny.

KS: That’s totally funny.

CB: Yeah, so that’s my ‘Mercury retrograde’ story. I don’t know if you guys have one.

KS: I have a little one. I don’t know. It’s just happened this past week on Twitter, and it has to do with Australian politics and a 30-year-old Black man in the States called Peter Dutton, who happens to share the name of a gentleman in Australian politics who was doing some massive challenge for the leadership here in Australia at the moment. So the name ‘Peter Dutton’ on Australian Twitter has just been trending this week. And this poor guy—cuz that’s his name in the States—he keeps getting people tweeting to him. And this Peter Dutton in Australian politics is not very popular, so he’s cocked a bit, but now he’s updating his Twitter bio to say that he is, you know, the ‘people’s choice for Australian prime minister’. So just that name thing, I guess, where, you know, people are tweeting without checking, which is a bit of a ‘Mercury retrograde’ thing.

AC: Well, and especially Mercury retrograde in Leo being ‘confusion about identity’. Like mis-identifying someone.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right. I kinda wish that the plumber had showed up—had accepted the invitation for my talk, though, cuz I think that would have made a much better anecdote in the long term.

KS: You’ll have to tell this anecdote when you actually give the conference lecture.

CB: Yeah, I thought about that. It would make like a great keynote joke, like opening joke.

KS: Totally.

CB: Yeah. All right.

KS: Can you tell us which conference it is? Or is it still a bit of a secret?

CB: I actually need to come up with my talk descriptions for it. But it’s for the AA conference—which I’ve never spoken at—in the UK next year.

KS: Congratulations! That’s super exciting.

CB: Yeah, I’m really excited about that. I spoke at the lodge—at their history conference—about 10 years ago, in 2008, but I’ve never spoken at the AA conference, so it was a big deal. And when I first got the email, I was like, “Oh, my God, I just missed a deadline through this like weird snafu.” And luckily, once it was sort of ironed out and they figured out what happened, they were very cool about it.

KS: That’s fantastic. Is it the Astrological Association of Great Britain or something?

CB: Yeah, that’s it.

KS: Just for our listeners.

AC: It’s not ‘Astroholics Anonymous’ or something?

CB: Right. Yeah, I’ll be speaking for the Alcoholics Anonymous next month. No. It’s June of next year. So it’ll be right after NORWAC. Next year’s gonna be a packed year for conferences. There’s like NORWAC in May in Seattle. There is the Astrological Association conference in June. And then speaker applications for the NCGR conference just closed a few weeks ago. And that, I think, is happening in like August in Baltimore.

KS: Yeah, the summer is really full. I think the AA does do a conference every year. It’s around the summer solstice, if I recall correctly.

CB: Yeah. It used to be in like September-something a few years ago, I don’t know. But they moved it forward this year, and then it seems like they’re maintaining that next year.

KS: Got it. Got it.

CB: Did you guys apply for the NCGR conference? I was trying to like remind everyone to do that, but I wasn’t clear if people were actually doing it.

AC: No, I didn’t remember. Mercury and Mars are the two planets that I need functioning more than any other planets to do my life, and both being retrograde at the same time was not very helpful for me.

KS: You say that so deadpan, Austin.

AC: It really wasn’t. It was sort of like, “Okay.” You ever have the moments where, you know, there’s like ‘doing you’? You’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna get up and ‘do me’ today.” And then you like try, and you’re like, “What am I working with here? I don’t know how to navigate from this space. I can’t assemble myself in a way that functions as my normal self does.” And you’re like, “All right, well, I’ll try to work from here. Got two more weeks of this.” I had a lot of days like that. I was like, “Okay, I guess I’ll look through all the email or unpack boxes and see what I need and see what I need to throw out.”

KS: Totally. I didn’t apply. Did you, Chris, for NCGR?

CB: Yeah, I applied like at the very last minute, but I did get my application in.

KS: Oh, good. Yeah, I just have a lot of teaching gigs already for next year. And then early 2020, I’ve got a couple of things. So I was like, “I just need to maybe do a little less on that front.” Because, as Austin cracked the whip last month, I’m speaking to a publisher. Which nothing’s confirmed yet, but it looks like it’s moving. And so, I have to free up a bit of time for the writing.

CB: Nice.

AC: Nice.

CB: That’s exciting.

AC: That’s awesome. That’s great to hear.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Well, actually, I am traveling. I’m actually going to Australia this fall.

KS: I heard a rumor.

AC: Yeah. It’s at a point where I can actually announce it. This will be the first public mention of it. I’m doing an event, a live event, in Melbourne on November 24—Saturday, November 24—called So Below, with my good friend and colleague, Gordon White.

KS: Ahh!

AC: Yeah, it’s an entire evening. All of the drinks are free. We’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna talk about archaeology, astrology, astrological magic, navigating this time period—all the things that Gordon and I usually talk about. I guess the people who are hearing this live, you’re literally the first people this has ever come out to. There’s gonna be an Eventbrite to sign up and go, if you want. It’s capped at a hundred. The event is called So Below. We’re gonna officially put it out to Gordon’s premium members and my ‘Patreon’ people first before it goes public. And then it’ll go out to the public maybe first of the month, something like that. But I’m really looking forward to it. Gordon and I have been talking about doing something ‘down under’, as it were, for a while. And so, this has actually come together the last month or two, mostly through Gordon’s competence. As I said, I’ve been pretty useless lately.

KS: Well, you have skills in who you pair up with then, which is great.

AC: Yeah. You’ve met my wife.

KS: Yes.

CB: And this’ll be your first trip to Australia, right?

AC: Yeah, I’ve been to Europe a little bit, but I’ve never been to the Southern Hemisphere, and I certainly haven’t been to Australia proper.

CB: Awesome.

KS: Well, they are gonna be very lucky to have you.

AC: Well, hopefully they’ll feel that way once I’m actually there. But, yeah, I don’t know. It seems like it’s gonna be a lot of fun. We’ve got a whole bar venue for, I don’t know, I think like 8-10 hours.

KS: Fantastic.

AC: And so, we’ll talk for a few hours, and then, you know, it’ll just be hanging out and drinking for the rest of the time.

KS: And you’re in Melbourne itself?

AC: Yep. This’ll be in Melbourne itself. Melbourne proper.

KS: That’s so exciting.

CB: Cool. And what do you have going on, Kelly? Or what do you have coming up?

KS: Well, I’m really bummed that I’m not gonna be in Australia in November to go to Austin’s event. I have got coming up for September—my next group mentoring starts on the first Friday of the month. So we capped that at 20. We’ve still got a few spots left. And our theme for the end-of-year mentoring series is timing. So we’re gonna do some charts and case studies each month looking at how we would navigate timing and forecasting in the chart. So it’s less of like a teaching class and more of a practicum, where students get a chance to really apply the knowledge or see the theories in action. And so, that’s coming up in September. And the other thing I have in September is my next webinar for Astrology University, which is on purification and power, looking at conjunctions to the Sun. So just talking about, you know, the combustion/cazimi phenomenon and what really happens when a planet’s combust the Sun, but also, how we handle that in chart interpretation. So that’s coming up later in September. I think it’s Monday, the 24th. But registrations are open already at the early-bird rate. So there are my September events.

AC: Oh, I guess I’m teaching a class in September.

KS: Of course you are.

AC: Yeah. It’s, I believe—oh, what month is it? Is it month six? Yeah, it’s month six of my fundamentals class. And even though it’s part of a sequence, people can pop in if that’s the piece they need. And it’s the class on dignity, on traditional dignity. So we’ll look at rulership and exaltation and, you know, terms/bounds and triplicity, and of course my favorite, the decans. And so, that’s like, you know, doing the structures and then learning about what does this look like? What does it mean when something dignified? What can dignity tell you? What can dignity not tell you, right? So, you know, again, it’s fundamentals, right? It’s one of the gears you need to craft to make the clock tell the right time.

KS: Oh, my God, I forgot something I’m doing in September. I’m going to Minnesota to speak at the astrology group there, in the middle of the month.

CB: For Stars? Is that the local group?

KS: Yes, the local group, the middle of the month. The 14th and the 15th, I’m doing a lecture on the Friday night and workshop on the Saturday. There is information on my website. That’s what happens when I’m on the move too much.

CB: Awesome.

AC: Is that Ben Dykes’ group? Or is that the group that Ben Dykes is a part of? He doesn’t own it.

CB: Yeah. Yeah, you’ll have to say ‘hi’ to Ben Dykes and our other friend, Charles Obert who are both in Minneapolis.

KS: Yeah, I’m really excited. I was actually just re-listening to one of Charles’ podcasts with you, Chris. So I’m excited to meet him in person, which I haven’t done. And Ben—I’m looking forward to seeing Ben, cuz I haven’t seen him for a while. Yeah, so that’s the middle of the month, for anyone who’s local there.

CB: Brilliant.

KS: What have you got going on, Chris? I think you just launched a new online course, didn’t you?

CB: I did. That’s what I’ve been working on all month. I just launched a course, finally, I’ve been working on this for a few years, or wanting to launch it for a few years, and I did sort of like a test lecture at NORWAC a few years ago. But I’ve finally gotten it together and turned that into a full course, and I’m just launching it, yeah, doing my first full unveiling of the course today. Basically, this is the first time I’ve ever announced it publicly, when this episode comes out. But it’s called, The Professional Astrologer Course, and the basic purpose of the course is it’s like I teach people, normally, like Hellenistic astrology and how to practice astrology and how to read a chart effectively as an astrologer, but sometimes after people learn that, they get stuck in this like in-between space of, you know, wanting to do astrology professionally, but not really knowing how to get started. So the purpose of the course is sort of a two-part thing of, on the one hand, teaching people how to make that transition to start actually seeing clients and some of the things that they need to know when they’re sort of in the process of starting to see clients, and just the mechanics and practical things surrounding doing that. And then the other thing that I focus on in the course is how to build an audience. So once you’ve started seeing clients, how do you not just, you know, become a professional astrologer, but how do you actually become successful and make that your primary vocation or make a decent living doing it? And some different strategies for building an audience and other things like that. So people can check that out on my course website, which is theastrologyschool.com. And I’m gonna launch that, and I’ll also be doing some webinars with people where we do Q&A sessions to talk about different questions that people that are trying to make that transition have, and continually adding new videos to the course and things like that.

AC: That’s great, dude. I just think back on my wayward and winding journey into being a professional astrologer and how any guidance, really, would have been helpful. Not that I would have listened. I could have at least looked back and be like, “Well, that was really good advice.”

CB: Yeah. No, exactly. All of us—I think most astrologers just sort of figure it out as we go, and you make mistakes and you just sort of trial and error. Sometimes you like look and see what other people are doing, but most of the time everybody’s just sort of grasping in the dark. And everybody comes up with their own unique or like cobbles together whatever their astrological practice or business is as a result of that, but I wanted to actually pass on some stories. So one of the sections of the course is where I talk about the podcast and like my history doing a podcast and what worked for me and what didn’t, and what moves were effective and what weren’t, or other means of building an audience that people can use. Like blogging, giving lectures in the astrological community, different sorts of equipment, or other things that are useful; software programs and other stuff like that. So really getting into all of the practical details of actually practicing astrology.

AC: Yeah, that’s really good. That’s really good. Kelly, you don’t seem like you were as blind and confused as I was. You know, you were like, “Oh, yeah, I was 22, and I was writing for this magazine for a while and then building my practice on the side. And then I moved on to this.” You seemed like you were a little bit more aware and effective as to becoming an astrologer.

CB: You had a separate, previous existing business, right, Kelly? You had other business experience.

KS: Actually, I set them both up at the same time. So I became self-employed when I was like 22 or 23, and I was a trained remedial massage therapist, and I had done my astrology studies. So I was looking to build a business sort of on both fronts. And it was actually Kaitlin at UAC—she sort of got into my ear a little bit, and she said, “You know, that’s not how most people set up their businesses,” which really got me thinking. And I haven’t sort of come up with any clever answers, you know, about what I might have done differently, that allowed it to be a little bit more of a smooth process. One thing that I think I did that was maybe different from what people do when they’re doing astrology or setting up astrology businesses—I didn’t think it was weird or unusual to be setting up a business as an astrologer. I just thought I know a lot of naturopaths, I know a lot of homeopaths, I know a lot of massage therapists—I’m just doing a business like they are. So there was something about maybe normalizing it and just almost getting over the hump of “Could I?” or “Would it be weird?” and I just dived into the how to make it happen. So dive straight into the execution or the action-taking, and looking for clients—whether you’re a nat-path or a counselor or a massage therapist, or even a lawyer or a plumber; like my brother runs a plumbing business. Looking for clients is looking for clients. It’s just about communicating who you are and what you have to offer. But I have noticed over my years of teaching that many people get stuck at that point, where they’re very well-trained, they’re very well-educated as astrologers, but crossing that bridge into the practice or into using it is a little bit tricky. And so, I’m really happy to see this course come out, Chris. Cuz I think Arthur had said this in the comments—and I completely agree—that I don’t think as a community we do enough to help people cross that bridge. And anything that helps provide that bit of hand-holding, “Like this is how I did it,” or “This is what you could try,” in the beginning, you need concrete steps. You need to think, “I’m gonna do this promotion,” or “I’m gonna write this blog post,” or “I’m gonna send this newsletter,” or “I’m gonna do something on social media.” It’s just putting that energy into it and getting some tips on where to start, you know, is always very helpful.

CB: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes being able to just pass on like little anecdotal things that are helpful. That’s one of the episodes I did early this month with Dennis Harness, where the genesis of that was that when I was at Kepler 10 or 12 years ago, he gave this talk once on six different client types that can sometimes be problematic or that you need to watch out for when you’re a consulting astrologer. And one of them is the person that just really doesn’t want to be there, and that sometimes happens when the consultation is given as a gift. And so, the person is like begrudgingly like doing the consultation, but honestly doesn’t have any interest in astrology and will sometimes make things more difficult for you than they need to be. And that actually turned out to be a good piece of advice, that most of the more like not-great consultations I’ve had have been with people where it was given as a gift. And sometimes that doesn’t work out as well as you would think, even though the intention is usually positive when people give that as a gift.

AC: Yeah, I’ve had some of those. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes that, “Oh, I want you to go talk to Austin or whatever,” is like a passive-aggressive way of saying, “Get your shit together,” to that person.

CB: Right.

AC: And like they’re fine with things. They don’t want, you know, a stranger giving them a bunch of advice or telling them who they are; you know, any of that stuff. And so, that’s one of the things that I’ve seen.

KS: Absolutely. And I noticed that same thing, too. What you’re saying, Austin, is so cliché, because it often happens for me in couples, where one person will say, “I’d like to send my partner.” And I have learned that the first response in any gift situation, “My child’s in their early 20’s,” or what have you, “I wanna get them to come and speak to you,” the very first response I say, “You have to ask them if they actually wanna come.” Because there’s nothing worse than trying to do a consult with someone who doesn’t wanna be there. And when you are setting up your business in the early stages, it kind of seems counter-intuitive to decline a client. But there is an idea, if you like, in marketing where declining sales actually helps you to target your market and helps you focus on the kind of people you wanna work with. So saying ‘no’ to the wrong kind of person actually saves you a lot more time and energy in the long run than, you know, trying to take every client in the beginning.

AC: Well, yeah. And also, when you’re like just getting going, you know, kind of an off-reading does not help your confidence.

KS: No.

AC: Once you’ve done a thousand readings, you’re like, “Yep, sometimes they’re not amazing,” but you’ve this, you know, experience of doing 940 good ones, right? Whereas when you’ve done 40 readings, you know, even one bad one is like a significant percentage, right? That’s like, what, 2.5% of your readings are now bad if you just have one bad one, or, you know, just a not-so-great one. And so, I think that ‘figuring out clients’ thing is important. What I mean is like figuring out like what you can do and like to do for people and then to represent yourself in a way that people come to you for what you’re good at and the kind of reading you like doing. Cuz I tried for a while to just like completely subordinate myself to whatever that person wanted.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And, you know, after a while of doing that, it’s like, “Oh, well, I’m still better at the things I’m better at, and if we can like start with that.” Like, “You can go to somebody else for this other thing. I can probably do that.” But, you know, figuring out the range of things that you like to do is really important, so that you have people coming to you for that and, you know, having them—what’s the word? A compatible perspective on what astrology is and what a consultation is. I actually kind of go out of my way to do a little explaining at the beginning of every reading, like, “This is exactly how to work with me.” Like I work best when I’m asked questions, right? You know, I was like, “I will occasionally monologue, but like I need to know what’s important to you, so I can tell you what the astrology says about it.” Whereas that’s not how everybody works, so now I just explain it. I’m like, “Do you want the best reading from me? This is the best way to do it.” And things have gone better since I started doing that.

CB: Yeah, definitely. And I think all three of us are like examples to younger astrologers that you can make it in this profession full-time and that it is possible. And there’s so many people that maybe never make that jump or never make that leap, cuz they’re afraid that they won’t be able to be successful or won’t be able to get by just doing astrology as their primary vocation. So the more people that I can bring into the field and like help make that transition and make it, you know, gentler than it was for me, for example, then I think the better. So that’s the goal.

AC: Yeah. Well, that’s great, dude. Obviously, there’s a lot to talk about there.

KS: Yeah. We could keep going.

CB: Yeah. Well, and actually what I’m gonna try to do is I wanna try to get some short, 10-minute interviews with each of you on some of these topics at some point to splice in. Cuz I wanna do some interviews with different community members about their transition and things that were helpful. So that’ll be a part of it eventually as well, and I’ve started adding some of those interviews already to the course. So, anyway, that’s available on the course site. The other thing I did this month is people have been asking me—podcast listeners have been asking me for at least two years now to make some shirts and some merchandise, and I finally got around and have started to do it. So that’s the other thing I’m sort of announcing or launching today—I’ve already got some shirts up for The Astrology Podcast. So let me share it for the video version, so people can see. And there’ll probably be more available by the time I actually get this going—by the time this episode comes out next week. Cuz I’ve got a few more that are in production, but there’s a bunch that are live. Right now, you can order them through Amazon. Some of them are just the standard The Astrology Podcast logo, and it’s available for both men’s and women’s sizes in like a bunch of different colors. And then I’ve also been working on some like sort of funny, sort of cutesy ones like, “What’s Your Sun, Moon, Rising Sign?” shirts, which is, I think, more common, as well as what I think is my favorite one so far, which is the “Ophiuchus is Not a Zodiac Sign” shirt. Cuz I think we have to start pushing back a little bit on that. And what better way to do it than to put the message right on your shirt.

KS: I love it, Chris. Chris, I just also have to say like you have had an incredibly productive month. Austin and I are like, you know, deer in the headlights, and you’ve like whipped out six new businesses. So the whole ‘Mars retrograde’ thing—I think just as a case in point example for our listeners—it really does depend on what it’s doing in your chart, what it’s activating, etc., etc.

CB: Yeah. I mean, the Mars retrograde was going through my 1st and then it went back into Capricorn, where my natal Mars is placed. And I think that did give me a lot of energy, in addition to like Jupiter. That last station in Scorpio was in my tenth whole sign house, and I’m actually in a Scorpio 10th house profection year.

KS: Got it.

CB: So me launching this course and getting the ‘shirt’ thing together finally, I think that’s a large part of it.

AC: Yeah. Well, and also, even if Mars is retrograde, if it’s transiting your 1st and ruling your profected 10th, you’re not going to be inactive, right? You know, if we were making predictions, we might say something about like the efficiency of the action or the person’s temper, but we would not expect them to just be like, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m tired and I can’t do anything,” like that’s very active. You know, ruler of the 10th in the 1st, etc., etc.

CB: Yeah. And I tried to take my own advice for my Aquarius rising horoscopes this month. Cuz I did the second round last month, which also continued to go well on my YouTube channel. And, you know, I actually watched some of other people to see what other people were saying about that recently, and the consistent advice it seems like astrologers are giving are, you know, channel that energy, if that Mars retrograde is hitting your chart in a way that’s kind of tense or challenging and bringing a lot of energy to your chart. Either find a way to channel it productively or, you know, that might go internally and then it could lead to, you know, explosions or outbursts or, you know, anger, or other things like that that could be less productive.

AC: Yeah. One thing that I’ve really seen this time is that natal Mars phase—not just was it retrograde or direct—seems to matter a lot. You know, the gasoline just gets taken out of my car during every single Mars retrograde, and it’s different, but I have a very consistent, low-power experience. And I was reflecting this time on the fact that I was born during the opposite phase. I have Mars with the Sun, you know, about 10° away, right? Whereas the Mars retro is literally the opposite side—it’s the opposite phase, where Mars is either opposite the Sun or in one of the two signs adjacent to the one opposite the Sun. And so, in terms of like understanding why a particular phase feels like kryptonite, you know, understanding that there’s nothing more foreign to my Sun-Mars relationship than the Sun-Mars relationship of the retrograde itself has been helpful.

CB: Yeah, definitely. All right. So, yeah, I’ll put a link in the description page for this episode where people can find out more information about the shirts or order one. If anybody has any ideas for shirts, I’m trying to like come up with some related to the podcast or astrology in general. So if you have an interesting idea, shoot me an email. And, yeah, I think that’s it for that. So in terms of other discussion topics before we get to the forecast, one of the ones that a lot of astrologers were talking about this month is that Netflix special on astrology came out, as part of the Explain series. So it was titled, “Astrology Explained,” which was produced by Vox in partnership of some sort with Netflix. Did you guys get a chance to see it?

AC: I can’t watch things like that.

CB: Okay.

AC: I didn’t watch the ‘Bill Nye’ thing either. My eyes would just—they would roll so hard that the muscles which attach them to my skull would tear and then I would have to get surgery.

CB: Right. Did you see it, Kelly?

KS: I didn’t watch it, but not for such strong reasons as Austin. I just haven’t had time.

CB: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think if you had been around the astrological community enough, you get jaded pretty quickly and you know that most mainstream documentary-type things that come out on astrology are gonna be bad in differing levels of intensity.

AC: Is it an F5, like the ‘Bill Nye’ one, or just an F4?

CB: No, it’s lower on the scale. It’s actually much better. And this is why I watched it, because the producer, she was actually in contact with some astrologers, and she was very cool. And she went to UAC, and they filmed some footage and some interviews there. There were some like actual astrologers that we know. They didn’t just like get anonymous, blow-off, like wacky astrologer-types, which is often sometimes what they do. It’s like it’ll end up being some astrologer nobody’s ever heard of, who’s doing something totally weird or is actually just like a yoga teacher or a psychic or something like that and not an astrologer full-time. In this one, though, it wasn’t like that. They had interviews with Sam Reynolds. They had Chani Nicholas. They had Jessica Lanyadoo. And a bunch of other people actually appeared in the documentary, actual astrologers, so it was actually positive in that sense. Also, they talked to Adam Elenbaas, and Adam put the producer in touch with me, and I talked with the producer a bunch to correct and just give them some historical information. And they also talked to Leisa Schaim, and they actually gave me and Leisa a credit—like a thank you at the very end in the credits—for the consulting we had done on that, and I had given her a copy of my book. So I had moderately high hopes for it, although I’d been burned enough in the past that I actually knew there was gonna be something that was not gonna be great about it; it was just a matter of how bad it was. And, yeah, most of it was actually pretty good. And it’s actually a very good, concise, like 15-minute segment on astrology that talks a lot about the history and is probably a good introduction to the subject. But then it takes this weird, unexpected U-turn or veer at one point about halfway through where they start talking about the ‘13th sign’ and how astrologers don’t know about it or aren’t using it.

KS: Ah.

CB: The way it portrays a few of the astrologers from UAC—like Jessica and Sam and like a few other people—I felt was a little bit misrepresented, because it treated them as if they didn’t care about or didn’t know about or were just brushing off the ‘13th sign’ thing, instead of actually having a response to it. So it was just a little bit weird, and that was the main thing that I think stood out to most people. And, weirdly, they actually used that segment in the promotions for the entire episode. So if you go to like their Twitter account, that segment, you can watch it; it’s from the very middle. And that was the most negative part of the entire segment, whereas the rest was more of like an objective, just trying to describe this phenomenon of astrologers still existing in society.

AC: You think maybe there was like a producer or somebody—not one of the people actually working on it and building it—who at the end was like, “Oh, well, you gotta do a thing on that, everybody knows about that,” and that’s maybe—? I don’t know.

CB: Well, I mean, they were consulting with some of the people. Some of the people that they consulted with were like a science historian and other people like that. So I’m sure they were consulting with other scientists or astronomers who were like doing the sort of typical ‘and astrologers don’t even pay attention to Ophiuchus’ thing. But what’s so annoying about this—like seeing this treatment allowed me to, I think, formulate what is so offensive about this for the first time. It’s always a thing of people outside of the field—who don’t believe astrology is a legitimate phenomenon—telling people inside the field, if they did believe in it, or if it was a legitimate phenomenon, then this is how they would do it, hypothetically. But the problem with that critique is that they don’t actually believe it’s legitimate and don’t have any basis for telling astrologers like how the zodiac should be structured. It’s always a weird critique for that reason, I think. Or I think that’s at the core of it.

AC: Yeah, that’s very ‘armchair quarterback’.

KS: Yeah, it’s like backseat driving, basically.

AC: Yeah. Or like, you know, some guy on his couch yelling at the boxer what to do on the TV.

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s disingenuous because it’s an attempt to say ‘this is the way it should be done’ by people that don’t actually believe it’s a legitimate phenomenon in the first place. They’re just throwing it out there in order to attempt to raise doubt about the subject in general.

AC: Yeah. It’s much more on the order of propaganda than anything else.

CB: Right. Yeah, so that’s unfortunate.

AC: So you’re saying I really missed out and I should totally go watch it right now.

CB: And you should watch it just to understand like the historical context of like how astrology is being presented in the early 21st century. Not that you don’t already know that and it’s not gonna surprise you in any way, but it is interesting. You know, Chani did an amazing job. Sam did a great job. So, you know, seeing some actual astrologers from our generation—like people that we came up with—starting to be the people that are being interviewed, I think it’s really interesting from that perspective.

AC: Yeah. Well, it’s a little trippy. It reminds me of when you were on Fox & Friends like 10 years ago.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, in 2012.

AC: I remember seeing that. Yeah, was it then? Was that the first? Weren’t you on twice?

CB: I don’t think so. I think it was just 2012.

AC: Was it that late? Okay.

KS: But that’s still six years ago now.

AC: But I just remember I was like, “What’s happening to reality?” It’s not that Chris doesn’t deserve to be on television—but Fox & Friends of all places? And they were super respectful to you. And I was like, “What is happening?” I was like, “There’s gotta be a Mercury-Neptune aspect?” and yes there was. Cuz I was like, “Reality is like ‘Dali’ style—all the clocks are melting and the elephants have 20-foot stick legs,” in a good way.

CB: It was bizarre. It was totally bizarre for me. But they weren’t being that respectful. And the whole point of it was just that they were trying to run early interference on like the Hillary Clinton campaign. I think they were trying to run a story on like whether she would run in 2016. And, remember, she put off announcing that she would run as late as possible; basically, as far as possible. But when another reporter from ABC approached us and asked if we thought she was gonna run, we said, “Yeah, we think so, if this birth time is correct. We don’t know if she’s gonna win, because it depends on who her challenger is. But we do feel pretty confident that she would run, because she was hitting the high point in her zodiacal releasing period at that time, by the time of the 2016 election.” So then Fox News, hearing that, immediately wanted me to come on. But that was one of the reasons why I got out of politics after that, because I realized astrologers getting involved in politics is actually very dangerous, because it would start being used for propaganda purposes. And after going on Fox & Friends, I realized that was exactly what was starting to take place.

AC: You know, on that topic—

CB: I closed down The Political Astrology Blog after that election was finished in 2013.

AC: Right. That makes sense. So just on that topic, Al Cummins published a book maybe five or six years ago which deals with how astrology was utilized politically during the English Civil War era, and like literally, you know, one astrologer who was on the side of ‘blank’ would write this thing about, “Well, when you look at the chart, it clearly says that we’re correct,” and the other side would find astrologers to, you know, reinterpret the chart the opposite way. It’s really interesting.

CB: Yeah. And, I mean, that’s the thing that makes me nervous. It’s at the point when like politicians or authority figures start taking astrology seriously that you do have a problem, or that astrologers start having a problem. Because then people want to control either what’s being said, or they want to stop astrologers from making those statements. And that’s like an issue I’d like to not have to deal with in modern times. Cuz astrologers right now are in a relatively good space in terms of being able to practice under free speech laws and not having a lot of other, you know, anti-astrology laws in effect at the moment.

AC: Yeah, yeah.

KS: Yeah. Just to go back to the Netflix documentary for a moment, I was excited that it was there just because I thought it is a testament to how popular astrology is currently. Whether it’s favorably portrayed or not, Netflix put a documentary together on astrology, and they did enough research to figure out we had this big conference—where there’s gonna be, you know, thousands of us—and they sent some people down there to record. So it may or may not have come out, you know, totally favorably in the end, I was kind of heartened by the fact that it was at least created and put out there.

CB: Yeah, I was surprised, and I had wished almost that there had been more people trying to do a documentary there at UAC. And actually only very little of the actual footage or interviews that they did there got in, which, on the one hand, is kind of disappointing. But then, on the other hand, we also probably lucked out a little bit, because they were just interviewing random people at certain points. And I heard one of the things that they attended was like a press conference they did at the very beginning of the conference, which was just a disaster. So there’s like certain pieces that we’re almost lucky that it wasn’t worse, and for that reason I wasn’t super disappointed in the whole thing. Anyway, so that’s the ‘Netflix’ thing. It’s actually worth checking out. I really do not like the segment in the middle, and I was never told that that was gonna be there. Otherwise, I would have corrected them and told them, you know, “No, this is not accurate. You know, tropical astrologers have been using this approach for nearly 2,000 years. We’re well aware of it. And the existence of that constellation doesn’t change the basic structure of the 12 signs. So this would be inaccurate to put in your documentary.” But I wasn’t given that option.

AC: So I wanna take a sentence that you just said, Chris, which is, “I wasn’t totally disappointed in it,” and I want that to be like, you know, when they show critics’ quotes in order to try to excite you about a movie or a film. You know, “Blah, blah, blah, Netflix documentary. I wasn’t totally disappointed. Chris Brennan.”

CB: Yeah. The thing is I don’t wanna be a total jerk about it, though, either, because there was a genuine attempt on the part of the producers to ask us and to get corrections on certain things. And I’m sure as an outsider—if you’re coming to it and approaching it, and you have no background whatsoever in astrology, and you’re just supposed to spend like a month or two treating this topic you’ve never heard of before—and you come into the middle of it, and you have two sides that are saying extremely different things, where you have the astrologers on one side doing one thing, and then you have the scientists and the skeptics saying a completely other things, it’s gonna be really hard to balance those two, especially in a way that makes both sides happy. And one of the things I noticed is that immediately when they started promoting the Netflix special—once it came out—through Twitter, I told you they released that one short segment, which was like the worst segment that attacks astrology, criticizes it, and sort of mischaracterizes it the most as their promotional video for it. But even releasing that promotional video, it was largely negative in its treatment of astrology. On Twitter, they were just getting hammered for talking about astrology at all. And people were like, “Why are you talking about this? You’re doing a disservice to the public by even mentioning astrology? It’s totally bogus. You should do an episode on it.” So even that largely negative treatment of it was treated negatively. So I can understand then, yeah, why they sort of framed it in the way that they did. Anyway, you guys should check it out at some point. Let me know what you think. If anybody else has feedback about it, let us know in the comments section for this episode.

All right, moving on, other news and announcements. So I had one other discussion topic, and then we have to talk about the giveaway. And then we should get into the forecast for the month, since we’re about an hour into this. So the last discussion topic I wanted to have is I wanted to give a shoutout to a few new astrology podcasts. Cuz lately there have been a bunch of new astrology podcasts that are starting, and I’m actually very excited about it. So I wanted to mention a few of them so that people can check them out, cuz I think it would be good to support some of these new efforts that are starting to like diversify the general discussion of astrology in the podcast sphere. So one of them is Jessica Lanyadoo who actually launched a new astrology podcast called Ghost of a Podcast, and it’s rising up the iTunes charts really fast. And it’s actually ranking really high in some of the categories that she’s categorized the podcast for, so that’s one I would definitely recommend checking out. And she was on the show earlier this year, and we had a great talk, and I’m hoping to have her back again before too long. Another great podcast—oh, did you wanna say something?

KS: Yeah, sorry, Chris. Jessica is one of those people that when you do your interviews around how to have a business with astrology, like she is next level with the business acumen that she brings to this business. So pop her on your short-list there as well.

CB: Yeah, definitely. And her website’s awesome. And the way that she’s like structured her podcast is awesome on the website. If you actually go and look at the way that it’s set up—I really love the way that it’s structured and everything, from even just an aesthetic standpoint.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So definitely check that out. Another podcast that launched recently—Annabel Gat launched a podcast titled Annabel Gat’s Astrology Show. Annabel, of course, is the popular author of the horoscope column for Broadly/Vice, and she’s had a growing—over the past few years—and very dedicated following of people that read her horoscope column. So she’s launched a new podcast, which I’m really excited about, and she’s got a few episodes out now I believe you can find on iTunes. Another podcast I’ve been listening to—that launched a few months ago—is called Energetic Principles, with Melissa LaFara. And this one is really interesting. She has a lot of different people that she’s been bringing on the show, which I really appreciate. And she also has like a really great voice—that’s like the first thing that stood out to me—just for doing a podcast, and you’ll hear as soon as you start listening to it. She’s also a musician, so it has really good production quality, and I would recommend checking that one out. And then, finally, there’s another one that came out earlier this year, but it’s become like wildly popular. It’s titled, What’s Your Sign? Podcast, with Julia Loken, Stevie Anderson, and Lisa Chanoux. So it’s kind of new—it just came out earlier this year—but already it’s got a huge following and like a ton of ratings on iTunes. And it has probably the best intro song of any astrology podcast I’ve ever heard. And I don’t know if it’s like a unique song, that’s unique to show that they came up with, or if it’s like a song that I just don’t know about, but it’s really great and I would recommend checking that out. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on, and I think astrology podcasting is in a really great place all of a sudden. And I’m glad, also, to see more women doing it. Cuz like there’s my podcast that’s out there and then there’s Adam Sommer’s podcast, Exploring Astrology, which is also good. But it almost feels like a little bit too like ‘brocast-specific’ when so much of the field is women, so I’m glad to see more women like getting into actually doing podcasts.

AC: Sausage-casting, as it were.

CB: Right.

AC: I’m actually thinking of doing a little ‘sausage-casting’ myself.

CB: Okay.

KS: Oh, my God, Austin.

AC: I’m not gonna be doing like a ‘regular, weekly podcast’ thing. And this relates back to some of what we were talking about earlier with like hearing stories—let me rephrase. Okay, so what I’ve been thinking about doing—which I’m about 95% on—is I wanna have some of the conversations that I have with people anyway, who practice the same arts that I do, whether it’s astrology or magic or whatever. Because I’ve looked back and I’ve learned so much from trading stories with my peers, and then like talking about, “Well, this worked this way, and that implies this about the theory.” You know, narrative and technique kind of blend into each other, and I just wanna like kind of just tape some of the talks I have with people anyway. And so, I don’t know, my working title, at least in my head, is Eavesdropping.

KS: Ooh, I like it. I like it.

AC: You know, I don’t wanna make it approachable. What I mean is I wanna have like ‘practitioner’ talk, so that people can listen in on that, you know. One of the things that especially made me think of this again recently is seeing people like getting into astrological magic. And, you know, when I think about why I mostly know what I’m doing, there’s, you know, reading and experimenting and looking at results and theorizing. But there’s also been a lot of comparing notes with people over the years and just being like, “Yeah, I did this, and this happened.” And I think there’s a lot of informal education that you get from hearing those stories and then analyzing those stories and then going back and doing more experiments. That sort of dialogue between story and technique and experiment—I guess that’s a trilogue—has been really helpful. So, yeah, I’m not sure exactly when I’m gonna do that. I might do, I don’t know, one or two a month, we’ll see. We’ll see how hard it is.

KS: Well, that sounds exciting, Austin. I’m not doing anything of any kind like that. I’ll just be showing up with you guys each month.

CB: Oh, no. You’re doing your monthly forecasts, though, that’s private for subscribers.

KS: Oh, yeah, for the subscribers, the Stellar Insights. Yeah, that’s true, actually. I guess you gotta subscribe, that’s what makes it private. And, yeah, there’s actually a video per week. So I guess it’s like a private podcast, you’ve just gotta sign up for it. Yeah, that’s actually very true. I forget all about these things.

CB: You’re doing a highly-exclusive, highly-detailed, advance forecast for private individuals.

KS: For private individuals, highly-exclusive, yeah. There’s video and audio. And there’s a lot of detail, actually. Basically, I look at every aspect in the month, and we just go week-by-week, so you get it in weekly chunks. Thank you for mentioning that, Chris. And I was just gonna say, Mel’s podcast, I’m actually going on as a guest for her at the end of September. So I think that episode will be out early October.

CB: Oh, you are. That’s awesome, okay.

KS: Yeah, Mel LaFara. She’s down in San Diego, which is just a part of the world that I love.

CB: Good, yeah.

KS: She has quite a musician background. So, yeah, her voice is beautiful.

CB: Yeah, totally. And that’s one of the things I like. Even though I like what you were saying, Austin, and that’s certainly also what I do on this show in terms of having more practitioners and more high-level discussions. And I don’t necessarily hold myself back from doing that, and we don’t hold back necessarily from doing that. But I like some of these other podcasts—that they’re also making astrology more approachable, and that’s something I don’t always necessarily focus on as much as I could. And I appreciate some of the diversity now of the different podcasts that are out there, that are making it more approachable in different ways that I couldn’t do or haven’t done myself, and that’s one of the other things that’s exciting about it.

AC: Yeah. Well, it’s a group effort, right?

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right. Yeah, especially as astrology actually is becoming more popular in mainstream culture over the past few years. And I think seeing the launch of some of these new podcasts is both evidence of that, but also, is gonna help that in terms of raising the level of discussion amongst the mainstream about astrology. So, anyway, check those out. I’ll put links to all those podcasts on the description page for this episode. The last thing that I have to mention—before we move onto the forecast—is the giveaway this month. We did a partnership this month with Astrology Hub to do this month’s giveaway, and we’re gonna give away three passes to patrons on the $5 and $10 tiers who support us through our page on Patreon. They actually have an online event that’s coming up in September, later on in September, and this is the description that they sent in. It says: “This September, join Astrology Hub’s free, online event, Astrology Summit 3.0, which is titled, Raising Consciousness and Deepening Your Spiritual Path. So over the course of the next seven days, learn how physics and spirituality are merging through astrology and how to use it all to shift your reality. So you’ll hear some of the world’s top astrologers and spiritual leaders, such as Rick Levine, Teal Swan, David Cochrane, Sahara Rose, David Palmer, the ‘Leo King’, Jennifer Sodini, Nadia Shaw, and many more.” So you can find out more information about that at summit.astrologyhub.com/astrologypodcast.com, and I’ll put a link in the description for this episode, where you can find out more information about it. So definitely check that out. All right, I think that’s it. So we’re only like an hour into this episode. So maybe it’s time to get to the forecast. What do you guys think?

AC: No.

KS: Let’s do it.

AC: No need to rush things.

CB: We could keep talking, but I think we’ve got some astrology to get to. It looks like September is actually more packed than I initially thought. Like I thought September was gonna be relatively quiet. But when I actually got into it, there was actually a lot more going on than it first seemed.

AC: I had the same experience.

CB: Same experience?

AC: Yeah. Well, cuz you’re like, “Well, it’s before the Venus retrograde, and then it’s after the Mars retrograde. And there are no eclipses and there are no Mercury retrogrades.”

CB: Right.

AC: There’s so much drama before it, and there’s, you know, some real drama after it that I think that simply because it wasn’t, you know, a ‘flaming shitshow’ that you’re like, “That’ll be restful,” you know.

CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, we’re finally out of eclipse season. The Mars retrograde is now officially over, cuz it’s actually stationing here at the end of August. So by the time I release this episode, Mars will actually be direct again.

AC: Woo!

CB: Yeah, I think one of the most crucial things that we highlighted on this year’s yearly forecast episode has already passed, and I thought there was gonna be like a little period of like quietness before we hit other stuff, like the Venus retrograde. But it doesn’t really look like that’s necessarily the case. What do you think, Kelly?

KS: Well, yeah, I agree with you guys. Definitely the feeling I had for September was like the ‘passing of the baton’. You know, Mars is not retrograde anymore, but still in shadow. And there’s still some cleanup to be done with Mars. We’ve still got a square to Uranus and conjunction to the South Node coming up. We’re kind of not done with those features yet. But Venus goes into her shadow very early in the month, so she’s starting to slow down. So there’s that sense of, yeah, one retrograde’s winding down, but the other one is starting and there’s a few other things going on. I also realized, too, that Mercury is moving really quickly at the moment. In September, he’s back up to kind of top speed. He’ll move through Virgo in just over two weeks, which means all of those little trigger transits that faster planets like Mercury can make—that’s part of what makes the middle of the month so busy, if you like, with just a number of a lot of different things happening.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

AC: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly about a ‘baton pass’. And there’s one particular moment where that ‘baton pass’ is, I think, most clear, but that’s a little further on. So let’s maybe get to that in sequence.

KS: We’ll go chronologically.

CB: Yeah—go ahead.

AC: I don’t know about you guys, but the first thing that I saw, that I thought was really interesting—which really starts on the 5th—is that we’ve got Mercury moving into Virgo. And Mercury, one, it’s a sign change for a planet, so that matters, and it’s Mercury, you know, in a sign that it both rules and is exalted in—we like this, right? But it puts Mercury into a grand earth trine with Saturn and Uranus for approximately three or four days. And a couple of days into this, we actually have the Moon conjoin Mercury in Virgo. So we have this grand earth trine between Saturn in Capricorn, Uranus in Taurus, Mercury in Virgo, and then we have the Moon on top of Mercury.

CB: And this is also when Saturn’s stationing direct at the beginning of the month in Capricorn.

AC: Exactly, exactly. Saturn stations—what is it? The early, early morning on the 6th, at least in North America. So that’s right in the middle of that.

KS: Yeah. Same day in Australia, just later.

AC: And also, just taking a step back and looking at basics, that’s a whole lot of earth, right? That’s Mercury, Sun, Saturn, Pluto, Mars, and Uranus all in earth and then joined by the Moon briefly. That’s a lot of earth. You know, this summer has not been earthy, right? It’s been a lot of things. But, Kelly, it makes me think of what you were saying about kind of wrapping up the ‘Mars retrograde’ stuff. So, yeah, the actual retrograde motion is over. Like, for me, I’m like, “Okay, and then I’m gonna be ready to move forward on these things,” but the actual process of picking up speed and moving forward is not instantaneous.

CB: For Mercury? Is that what you’re saying?

AC: No, just in general. I was speaking about Mars.

CB: Okay.

AC: But also about life, right? There’s like, “Oh, okay,” then two months of rethinking things and rewriting battle plans and then there’s moving forward. But just the moment that you’re ready to move forward, that doesn’t mean that you’re at top speed and, you know, taking names immediately. It takes a while to put things into practice and get the wheels rolling. And there’s all this sort of, you know, ‘practical adjustment’ stuff, which I think is implied by the Saturn-Uranus-Mercury in earth signs, right? It’s like, okay, so this is how the shape of things needs to change in order to move forward.

CB: Right. Definitely.

KS: Yeah. And in some ways, this is really highlighting almost the ‘Saturn-Uranus trine’ piece, which to the Virgos amongst us doesn’t technically become exact as a trine, because it doesn’t perfect by minute. But Saturn is trine Uranus by degree, if you like, from mid-August to mid-September. And this is really a period where whatever that aspect might mean for you is kind of in the spotlight or really deeply highlighted and emphasized.

AC: Right. And so, my Saturn in Virgo is glad you mentioned that, and then I’m gonna ‘Saturn in Virgo’ further. Even though they do not complete a trine, Mercury carries the light from Uranus to Saturn, and so does the Moon. So it gets completed by them.

KS: It totally does. And then I love our Saturn in Virgos will just keep on winning. This will also hark back to the last weekend in August when the Sun actually moved through that early part of Virgo and just activated the Saturn-Uranus trine as well. So that idea of the translation of light, if you like, pulling this grand trine together or this collection. It’s one of those aspects, the Saturn-Uranus, that is kind of in the background and maybe overlooked, but is still having an impact in this early part of September.

AC: Oh, yeah. And I can see that literally in my office. I’ve been like rearranging where things are and unpacking boxes and deciding what I wanna keep and what I’m gonna, you know, throw away. We’ve been working on the yard like crazy, being like, “Okay, these plants can stay. These aren’t native here. They’re just gonna die unless we give them 10 gallons of water every year.” Like it’s literally just been earth-reshaping and the location-of-object reallocating. It’s been very physical.

KS: Yeah. Sorry, Chris.

CB: No, go ahead. I was gonna say something else, but it’s a side note. So you should go with what you were gonna say.

KS: Oh, I was just gonna say, yeah, there’s all this earth energy. I loved what you said, Austin, about working in the yard, in the garden. Cuz it’s really got a sense of like picking things up and putting them in different places, or figuring out what needs to go completely and what completely new thing needs to come in. So it’s very much on that material/physical/tangible level.

AC: Yeah. Like what things do I need, and what things don’t I need? And of the things that I need, where do they go?

KS: Yeah. Where’s the best place for them?

CB: I’ve seen some people struggling with that. One of the things that’s interesting about Saturn stationing here in early Capricorn is this is the last time it’s gonna be this early in Capricorn, in terms of the first couple of degrees of Capricorn. It’s never gonna return, you know, back to this early for another 30 years. So some of the people that, you know, have Saturn in early Capricorn, and are going through their Saturn returns right now—that have it super early in that sign—this is gonna be like the peak Saturn return period. And even though you’re gonna have some aftereffects that last for another few years as it continues to go through that sign, this is gonna be the high point for some people. But I’ve even noticed some people with Saturn in very late Sagittarius—like 29°—who are still having major ‘Saturn return’ stuff going on and still struggling with how to organize and how to restructure their lives, or sometimes hitting a wall and having to make really hard decisions about what parts of their life to keep and what parts to let go. And for some of those people, I think this is gonna be the final wisp of whatever their Saturn return was about, as Saturn is stationing at 2° of Capricorn, within the closest vicinity that it’s gonna make to any late Sagittarius placements for quite a while as well.

AC: Yeah. Three things on that real quick. One, progressed Saturn could very well have moved into Capricorn for them. Two, there’s an antiscia between 2 Capricorn and 28 Sag, etc., etc. And then, three, the Saturn return doesn’t solve everything. You don’t come out of it like this perfect adult, you’re just kind of through that. And so, it’s also Saturn in Capricorn. And so, whatever Capricorn is in your life is being asked to be taken to a whole new level of organization with Saturn there. And some people may be mistaking that for their ‘Saturn return’ issue.

CB: Right. Definitely. I mean, one of them that was interesting—I saw a horoscope writer who just got into the field doing like video horoscopes a year ago and just rose to like huge levels of success, and after a year of hitting it really hard, had like 20,000 subscribers on YouTube, but then sort of hit this wall of becoming way too overwhelmed with what she was doing and having to stop for a while; and suddenly, after 12 months of doing it almost everyday, hasn’t posted in like a month or two or something like that and posted videos saying she has to sort things out. And I think she ended up having Saturn at 29 Capricorn. So that was a really interesting sort of last gasp of the ‘Saturn return-type’ thing that she was going through.

AC: Yeah. There’s also just the grind, you know. It’s one thing to be like, “Oh, I wrote some monthly horoscopes,” or “I did a weekly for two months.” You know, when you get into year five—you know, Kelly knows what I’m talking about. The grind is real and excitement always wears off. It always comes back, but it always wears off.

KS: You know, we talked earlier today about like business and things like that, consistency is really important. And consistency isn’t just repetition over a few weeks or a few months, it’s about the years. You know, can you come back year after year? And part of, you know, setting yourself up for success with that is being thoughtful about what it is you commit to being consistent with in the beginning.

AC: Yeah. Well, and that’s just ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ talk, right? You know, can you keep this up forever?

KS: Yeah, yeah.

AC: And, Chris, that’s not a diss on you doing some horoscopes.

CB: Oh, no. I mean, yeah, I’m trying to keep it up actually, but the monthly is the best I could do. I couldn’t do like a weekly or something like that, or a daily.

KS: I think for video, weekly would be a big ask. I don’t know why I think the writing then would be easier.

CB: I mean, writing would be a lot easier and I’ve actually thought about that. But video, there’s a whole lot of like production and editing and post-production and uploading to YouTube, and then writing an actual description at that point, then adding keywords and like a thumbnail. And it’s a whole thing that I’ve just been doing really intensely over the course of a few days, at the end of the past couple of months, but I actually messed up. I didn’t get it together, cuz we scheduled this forecast episode earlier than we usually do, so I didn’t get a chance to do my horoscopes yet. So I don’t have as much background as I had going into it last time, although I still have a little bit more than I usually do. All right, so Saturn’s stationing direct. We’ve got a grand earth trine. One of the things I want to mention before we move off of this—this was an issue we ran into with the elections this month, which was kind of like a larger, decade-long, meta issue. Normally, you know, Mercury in Virgo—the Sun there, the Moon there, and everything else—you would want to try to use for like a detail-oriented, Mercury in Virgo-type election that’s very grounded. Every time we move into, you know, ‘Virgo’ season each year now, we end up running into very quickly now—for like the first half of the month—that opposition with Neptune in Pisces.

KS: Yeah.

CB: And that’s like a huge roadblock that’s throwing in like a separate—maybe ‘roadblock’ isn’t the right analogy for Neptune.

AC: No. It’s more that the road has been washed out.

KS: Yeah. It’s a flood.

CB: The road becomes like an abstract painting that you have to navigate unsuccessfully.

KS: Yeah. Very Monet’s lilies in the water pond.

CB: Yeah, yeah. So that’s one of the issues like leading all the way up through the middle of the month is Mercury doesn’t clear Neptune until like September 13. That’s when it hits the exact opposition, it looks like. There’s like a difference there between, you know, Mercury going through Virgo, applying to an opposition with Neptune versus Mercury separating from an opposition with Neptune, and then maybe being able to regain some of the clarity that it would have not had as much of as it was applying to it.

AC: Yeah, and we looked at the same thing. And then you get this issue or potential issue with Mercury being extremely combust at this point. You know, there is the idea that a planet in its exaltation or rulership can resist combustion, and I’ve found that to be kind of true. I mean, maybe. I was looking at different things. Maybe it’s Mercury at 20 in a sextile with Jupiter, so it’s like getting a different aspect, a full palate cleanser from the Neptune aspect. But, yeah, it is to be worked with and around.

CB: Sure. Yeah, so I just wanted to mention that. And before we move on—also in terms of the beginning of the month—it doesn’t happen in September. I know we’ve talked about it a little bit, but the thing that happens right before we move into this month, of course, is that Mars station at 28° of Capricorn, thus technically ending the Mars retrograde cycle, so that Mars will be no longer retrograde by the time September opens. But then so much of this month is Mars starting to move forward again, and then starting to retread ground that it’s already moved over, over the past few months, as it retraces its steps or retraces its shadow on the other side of the retrograde and then eventually starts moving into Aquarius, squares Uranus, and starts doing all of that other stuff as it moves through Aquarius.

AC: Yeah. We’re gonna do it all over again, but this time direct. Mars is gonna square Uranus. Mars is going to conjoin the South Node. And the ‘baton pass’ moment that I think Kelly was probably thinking of is when Venus enters Scorpio and Mars reenters Aquarius at more or less the same time.

KS: The 9th and 10th.

AC: Yeah. And they’re both in a T-square with Uranus, and the Moon conjoins one of them. It’s just setting off. That’s already pretty tense. It’s Venus in its shadow. Mars on the other side of its shadow. And then we have Uranus in hard angles to both of them, with the Moon hitting it. What is it? The 13th, maybe? 11th?

KS: The 9th and 10th.

AC: 9th and 10th.

KS: Yeah, when Mars and Venus change signs.

AC: Right. And then the Moon hits Venus a few days after that, reactivating it. Yeah, there it is.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And so, like that’s a hand-off. Cuz we’ve got literally the same dynamics that we dealt with with Mars, and the dynamics that we’re gonna be dealing with with Venus a couple of more times.

CB: Right. Cuz this is the first of three oppositions with Uranus, as well as what will be three—will it end up being three squares with Mars, or does Mars escape the third one?

AC: Just one square with Mars.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Well, technically, there are two, cuz Venus makes a square. Venus in Libra makes a square with Mars in Capricorn. But then Venus is slowing down, and so, Mars catches up and we have another square in Scorpio and Aquarius.

CB: Okay. So, yeah. And Venus, of course, is in its shadow at this point. I actually wrote down the date on that, cuz it happens relatively early in the month.

KS: Like the 3rd, I think.

CB: Yeah, I wrote down September 2. So September 2-September 3, Venus enters its shadow when it moves over 25° of Libra, because that’s the degree that it’ll eventually retrograde and station back at. It’ll return back to that degree later. So that means that we’re already really ramping up for the Venus retrograde as soon as the month opens on September 2, and that’s gonna be one of the major things that will eventually start to characterize this period, even though the full Venus retrograde doesn’t start—the period doesn’t start until the beginning of October.

AC: Yeah, the shadows will begin gathering, though. The desires will become more complicated and obscure.

CB: Right. And we have to guess that a large part of that is gonna have to do with that cluster that occurs around September 10th, 11th, and 12th, when we have that Venus-Mars square, the Venus-Uranus opposition, and everything else.

KS: It’s part of the cluster.

AC: Yeah, that’s like ‘hide your relationship in the bomb shelter for a few days’.

KS: It is very intense. Very intense.

CB: I mean, let’s talk about why is that. Why would a Venus opposite Uranus square Mars be something that could be explosive or could be problematic for, let’s say, relationships?

KS: There’s just a lot of friction there. It’s got this volatile feeling. I mean, Mars is gonna be moving to square Uranus, which doesn’t peak until the 18th, but Venus is involved, too. So it’s like extra complications, disagreements, difference of opinions. Even if we think ‘Venus and Mars’, you know, it’s difference in, you know, pleasure or desire or satisfaction, and the tension between two people that may sometimes normally be on the same page. It’s like it’s this friction. And there’s something else I wanna say about the ‘Venus’ component, but it keeps falling out of my head.

CB: I mean, part of the context of this Venus retrograde is interesting to me, cuz it’s a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and that’s like a very distinctive Venus placement.

KS: Yes.

CB: How would you describe Venus in Scorpio, Kelly?

KS: Venus in Scorpio. Well, I mean, the first word that comes to mind is very ‘seductive’. But, you know, there is a secretive component, but there is also a sharp component, because she’s in Mars’ sign. So part of what I think also makes this almost like a teaspoon—it is a T-square—is that there is the ‘rulership’ piece as well. So Venus is in Mars’ sign, Uranus is in Venus’ sign, and Venus and Mars are in the square pattern. So it just looks like a lot of that tension. I mean, Venus in Scorpio is looking for loyalty. I always think of Jodie Foster, the actress. She gave this speech years ago when she won some award, and she basically just talked about ‘love people and keep them beside you’. And I thought that was a very ‘Venus in Scorpio’ sort of statement. You know, when you love someone, you hold onto them, you keep them there. And, you know, what does the ‘keeping them there’ look and feel like when Mars and Uranus are involved? Like I’m not sure if people want to be kept there. And that’s sort of the difference between ‘I wanna keep you/well I don’t wanna be kept’ kind of thing.

CB: Right. Cuz Uranus opposing that is almost like an external sort of factor that’s coming in from the outside, that’s causing instability in whatever Venus wants to be holding onto.

KS: A lot of instability. The destabilization with Mars there, for sure.

CB: Yeah, and even Mars on top of that, since Mars’ general significations usually are the opposite, are also kind of like removing or severing things.

AC: Yeah.

KS: ‘Severing’ is a good word. Yeah, Austin.

AC: Yeah, so I was thinking about this the other day. There are certain pairs of planets in astrology that have an inherently complementary relationship, where one kind of defines the other—the Sun and Moon being the most archetypal of those. But Mars and Venus are also paired in a lot of ways, right? They’re complementary colors. They’re green and red. One is the next planet closer to the Sun, one is the next planet further out from the Sun, you know. And they’re love and strife, and we’re always balancing those in, you know, our relationships. And so, just in terms of like, you know, asking whether this is a period where we can find balance between those principles of love and strife, this is a very difficult moment, especially. Cuz we have Mars, who’s just come out of a really big change and looking and acting different, and then we have Venus, who’s just about to go into a really big change, right? And so, neither one of them are like exactly on solid ground, and they’re both in signs where they don’t have a lot of dignity, right? Meaning that they don’t fit really easily with what’s going on around them. And so, that’s tricky in and of itself, but then you have the South Node with Mars, and then you have Uranus squaring and opposing the two. And so, it’s like that’s a lot of like ‘sudden change’ energy that’s being thrown at what’s already kind of a ‘difficult-if-archetypal’ balancing act between the Venusian and the martial. And even though this is an interesting moment, and we’ll see it in the news, it’s a moment—especially in people’s lives—that’s gonna lead into the next quarter.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah. Because one thing—I know we will talk more about this in the October episode—but to make the point, Venus retrogrades are on these eight-year cycles back in the same sign. So we’ve got this very specific ‘Uranus’ complication to the Venus retrograde in Scorpio this year that’s unique for 2018. But for our listeners, if they wanna get a general sense of what Venus in Scorpio might mean for them in terms of the context of their chart, think back to the October-November period of 2010, which was the last time we had this specific Venus in Scorpio retrograde cycle. You know, this is September, so it’s the buildup, the same way that September 2010 was like the buildup to that period eight years ago.

CB: Right. And then eight years before that, the ‘2002’ one.

KS: Yes.

CB: I remember that one. That was like gut-wrenching relationship issues I saw happening in like my life and friends’ lives around me. That one was really distinctive. And I don’t remember why that was or if there were other things going on, like there was with this one, where it’s like opposing Uranus and squaring Mars, that makes it more distinctive than others. But having a Venus retrograde in Scorpio—there’s something unique about that, cuz Venus in Scorpio is one of those signs that’s much more distinctive for me than, you know, some of the other placements. Austin, did we get your thoughts on like Venus in Scorpio in general? Arthur’s asking in the comments.

AC: Oh, I’m reminded of something I wrote the other day. I described Venus in Scorpio as alternately ‘darkly delicious’ and ‘negative and needy’.

CB: Nice.

KS: Yeah. I think that’s something that’s not often said about planets in Scorpio, some of the emotional neediness or ‘holding-on-ness’ of planets there, so it is good to keep that in the back of our minds. And, Chris, I just had a quick look. The complicating factor to the Venus retrograde in 2002 was a square to Neptune in Aquarius.

CB: Okay. Right. Neptune was still going through Aquarius. That was fun. That was a fun time.

KS: Fun times?

CB: Well, that was when it was going over my rising sign and Moon and everything and squaring all my ‘Scorpio’ stuff. Whereas, you guys—or you at least got it going through your rising sign now.

KS: Yes. Yes, I do have Neptune everywhere. Well, I think I’m a little done with Neptune for now, but it has been there. So I guess, yeah, Venus in Scorpio—we’re all gonna get to know here a little bit more in the next couple of months.

CB: Yeah. And that’s not fully kicking in. We don’t have the station, obviously, until October. October 5, I think, is when Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio. But already with Venus moving into its shadow—and especially when it moves into Scorpio on September 8th and 9th—that’s when, you know, all of this is gonna start to constellate and fully start to come together. So we have that to look forward to. What else is going on at the beginning of the month that we should talk about? We talked about Mars. We talked about Venus. Mercury—you guys already touched upon this, but I just wanted to mention it. I mean, it’s moving really fast again, and it leaves its shadow already at 23° of Leo by the 1st of September. So I just wanted to mention that, cuz I thought it was interesting that the month actually opens with Mercury fully clearing its shadow on the first of the month, if I’m calculating that correctly.

KS: Yeah, it is. I do think it’s interesting that even though Venus and Mars are still, you know, figuring out how to get their groove on, Mercury is just flying through the sky this month. And that period with Mercury in Virgo—it sort of feels like maybe, you know, wrapping up loose ends or dealing with some, you know, schedules or planning matters that had been a little stuck with that extended Mercury in Leo. I know that Mercury in Virgo is not without its complications because of the combustion to the Sun and the opposition to Neptune, but we’re still gonna have a slightly more productive Mercury, because it’s Virgo, than what we’ve had with Mercury in Leo these past few months.

AC: Oh, definitely. So we did miss the New Moon in Virgo.

KS: Oh, yeah.

AC: The first lunation of the month. It’s okay. It’s easy to miss. It’s opposite Neptune. It’s concealed.

KS: Yeah. That’s on the 9th, I think, Chris. It’s kind of in that Venus-Mars-Uranus.

AC: It’s right before that.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So it’s right after. So Venus has just ingressed into Scorpio it looks like, but Mars has not quite made it into Aquarius yet. And we have a New Moon that takes place at, what is it? Late 16° of Virgo. Yeah, 16° of Virgo is the New Moon, September 9. So this is like opposite, within 2° to Neptune, so it’s bringing up some of those dynamics, or it looks like that’s one of the main signatures going on there. We have the very start of the Venus-Uranus opposition, since Venus has just moved into Scorpio, and it’s 2° away from perfecting the opposition with Uranus. What else is there about this?

AC: Well, in terms of the tone it sets, right, it’s actually a pretty self-sufficient little lunation. You have the Sun and the Moon in the same sign as the ruler of that sign. And I think that it actually coheres well with the lots of things in earth signs. It’s very much a, you know, ‘get it together’. You know, this summer probably left a few things out of place. Make sure to get all of that done, despite the fact that Neptune is over there trying to distract you. Because, you know, yes, there’s a few touchy moments this month, and Venus is in the shadow, but, you know, next month, most of it is going to have the Sun in Venus-ruled Libra, with a Venus that is retrograde, and there’s some other stuff next month that is going to be much more emotionally-distracting. As much as September is not a completely clear, open space, there’s a lot more to get done; a lot of little adjustments that you can make to tighten up your ship for, you know, our last challenge of the year, which will be Venus retrograde. I think this New Moon speaks to that pretty clearly. It’s also tightly sextile Jupiter, which is nice.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: You know, as long as you don’t, you know, get wasted everyday—like, you know, Neptune—there’s a lot here that can help you get it done. Just get all the stuff, you know, that should have been done, get that squared away. Get prepared, get a little bit ahead coming into next month, so that if things go a little wacky and your emotional bandwidth is down cuz you’re ‘retro-ing’ with Venus, you know, you’ve taken care of some things ahead of time.

CB: Yeah. Those applications—those sextiles of all the Virgo planets to Jupiter is a nice feature of the early part of the month that I just wish we could take more advantage of, without them all opposing Neptune first before they get there.

KS: Yeah. The sextile to Jupiter from the lunation is really nice. And it does remind me—Arthur is reading my mind. I did wanna briefly mention that Jupiter sextile Pluto aspect, which is coming up on the 12th of September. It’s the third activation. I mean, I know it’s not a major outer planet square, but it is some ‘outer planet’ action, if you like, for this month. And it speaks a little to the longer ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ trend, as well as the longer ‘Pluto in Cap’ trend, but we’re getting a bit of that vibe coming through this week. This sort of middle week of September, if you like—the week starting the 10th—it is really interesting, because we’ve got those complicating Venus-Mars-Uranus squares and oppositions. But we also have this weird sort of, kind of productive or like ‘obsessive about getting it done’ energies with the New Moon in Virgo and then the Jupiter-Pluto sextile coming through as well.

AC: Yeah, I like the moment on the 16th, where we have Mercury trining Pluto and sextiling Jupiter, while Jupiter and Pluto are sextile; Jupiter at the midpoint of Mercury-Pluto. I kind of like all of that at once.

KS: So that’s the middle weekend, the 15th, 16th. Yeah, that looks like it could be the most functional, I guess.

AC: Yeah. I could see that being good for a couple of things. In one sense, it’s very ‘therapy’, right? We’ve got Mercury and Pluto, right, and then the midpoint is that Jupiter in Scorpio, which also has sort of an ‘underworldly’ stench about it. Like getting way into things and then like getting something good out of it, whether that’s like psychotherapeutic. I could also see that being a really good time to go on a ‘research’ bender, just go super deep on something.

KS: Yeah, the ‘research’ vibe, for sure. Just that digging and discovering. I’m trying to say two words at once. The investigating, if you like, and then finding something in all the data or the information that’s really valuable.

AC: Yeah.

CB: That’s probably one of the best aspects of Scorpio in general, the investigative aspect, which is probably just connected with Mars ultimately, and the idea of piercing something. But what you’re piercing is deep into something in terms of research or finding the truth or what have you, in terms of a positive manifestation of Scorpio. Especially with something like Jupiter there, which one of its primary significations is ‘truth’ or ‘justice’.

AC: Yeah, definitely. That reminds me of an aspect of Mars—or a facet of Mars—which is emphasized in the Vedic tradition that I’ve been studying. And they associate Mars with ‘intelligence’, but intelligence that is directed in a very specific way towards ends. And so, they say, oh, yeah, Mars can grant like knowledge and skill and intelligence in an area, but it’s not a balanced or well-rounded intelligence. It’s in one direction. Like the engineer is not a philosopher, right? It’s like, “I know how to do this.” That struck me as being true when I think of like ‘Mars-y’ people and their intelligence. It’s like they’re good at that. It’s like you reminded me that this research—the going deep, the piercing—is by nature projecting in one direction. Whereas Jupiter has this sort of naturally holistic ‘growing in all directions and more spherical expansion’, Mars has that arrow that pokes out.

CB: Right. The ability to singlemindedly focus on something. And that’s sometimes, then, why people—I don’t wanna say confuse—but also modern astrologers quickly often associate parts of Pluto with Scorpio. Probably because Pluto has that obsessive quality sometimes, which has similar overlapping functions in terms of obsessiveness.

AC: Yeah, definitely. And so, you know, side topic. I think we need a better term than ‘modern astrologers’, because, literally, we are modern astrologers.

CB: Right.

AC: I don’t know what the better term is. I know, you know, we use that term to like designate people with a particular approach. But are we not modern? Are we not of the present day?

CB: I mean, for a while, in the earlier part of this decade, I was playing around with calling myself or other people like ‘post-modern astrology’; like what comes after modern astrology and calling it ‘post-modern astrology’. But that ended up not really taking off and sounded kind of lame. So, yeah, we probably need something better than that.

AC: Yeah. Or just something a little bit more descriptive, right? Not like when it happened, but what is the approach.

CB: In order to do that, though, we’d have to somehow characterize like 20th century—especially late 20th century. Cuz usually what we mean by ‘modern astrology’ didn’t fully form until the last few decades of the 20th century.

AC: Yeah, I use ‘late 20th century astrology’ from time to time. You know, late 20th century approaches to astrology, which include X, Y, and Z.

KS: We are really getting our ‘Virgo’ on today.

AC: Well, we’re vibing with the planetary placements that we are observing.

KS: Correct.

AC: I think this happened during our last September episode, too. I think we got like super bogged down/obsessed with details.

KS: With very little specifics. Yeah, like minute specifics.

AC: “Like is that exactly the right word for that?”

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right.

KS: That is such a ‘Virgo’ thing to do, though. “No, that’s not quite right. This word has, you know, basically the same meaning, it’s just a little bit better.”

AC: “Let’s move it an inch to the left.”

CB: Right. If you’ve ever watched YouTube videos, and like you scroll through the comments, you see that one person that has noticed the most minute thing that’s weird in the video. Like somebody’s off in the background, and they noticed somebody in the crowd who’s like a celebrity or something like that, that nobody paying attention to the main thing in the video ever would have noticed—I’m convinced that those people have like a lot of Virgo placements or like a Virgo stellium or something like that.

KS: Cuz who else would notice?

CB: Right. Well, it’s just a great manifestation of Virgo—the ability to focus on or sometimes obsess about that which is very small.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah.

CB: So the Sun actually just went into Virgo. Right now, it’s at 0°54’ Virgo.

AC: Conjunct the fixed star Regulus.

CB: Right.

KS: Well, it’s Regulus day.

CB: Yeah, so what is this? Tell me about this. I’ve only heard about this in passing.

KS: Austin, you’ll have to speak on behalf of Kait.

AC: Okay, yeah. So Kait and Michael Lutin put together—cuz Kait did a Regulus series for Sphere + Sundry earlier this year, and Michael Lutin’s been banging the ‘Regulus’ drum for a while now. And they decided to do a little collaboration and declare it ‘World Regulus Day’, when the Sun conjoins Regulus. And they put together a little ritual protocol, you know, for honoring that and, you know, getting a little bit more Regulus in your life, which most of us could use.

CB: Right. And I remember he was making a big deal about that at UAC, back in 2012. And I think his play was like themed with Regulus in Virgo. Cuz Regulus—for people that don’t know—is like the ‘heart’ in the constellation of Leo, or the constellation of the Lion, and has always traditionally been associated with, you know, Leo, the zodiacal sign Leo. But now, that fixed star has actually precessed—due to precession—and it’s now moved into Virgo, like at least a few years ago.

AC: Yeah, Kait and Michael collaborated on a piece of writing and put that out, that’s really interesting, that looks at what does it look like for Regulus to shine through Virgo rather than Leo. Actually, it’s really interesting. And I did my little ‘Regulus Day’ ritual today, about three hours ago. It was nice.

KS: Excellent. Yeah, it’s a very powerful star to work with.

AC: Yeah, it really is. It’s very solar in a way that almost no stars feel solar. But it has so many things in common with the Sun in that it has to do with being visible and courageous and wiping away or clearing up melancholy, is, I believe, what Agrippa said. And it totally does that. I remember I tested that ‘clearing up melancholy’ thing, I don’t know, like eight years ago. I was feeling rather negative, as I do sometimes. And I was like, “Moon’s about to conjoin Regulus,” and so, I did a little thing with Agrippa’s seal and then felt like instantly better. Which I was like, “Okay, so that’s what he was talking about. Got it.”

KS: Yeah.

CB: I like that idea of astrologers trying to reconcile like the sidereal zodiac—with the tropical astrologers basically trying to integrate elements of the sidereal zodiac by looking at when the fixed stars precess into different tropical signs—and then the tropical signs taking on sometimes different qualities based on which fixed stars have moved into them. And you almost kind of see Ptolemy trying to do something like that 2,000 years ago when he’s establishing the tropical zodiac as the primary reference point. But it’s interesting seeing astrologers try to do that now, when you have major fixed-star shifts like Regulus going into Virgo, and the question of does that import some Leo-like qualities into that sign.

AC: Yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you interpret somebody who had a 0° Virgo Sun differently if there was one of the most potent fixed stars there? Absolutely you would. You know, like the end of Taurus has Caput Algol, right? Like I don’t treat those nativities like they’re totally normal ‘Taurus’ people, cuz they’re not. They’ve got some other ‘sauce’ on their meal that’s not Taurean at all.

KS: Yeah. I mean, Regulus moved into tropical Virgo, I think, it was back in 2011 and there was a fair bit of stuff that was out around then. And it is really interesting to think about the difference—cuz Regulus had been in tropical Leo for more than 2,000 years—you know, the qualities of leadership that might be associated with, you know, Regulus vibing through Leo versus Regulus vibing through Virgo. And it’s a super powerful star to check in around. And for those people who are listening—who might have a Sun that’s a little bit challenged in their chart—you can kind of tap into some of the positive solar qualities by working with Regulus rather than doing ‘Sun’ stuff, which can be a way to balance that out.

AC: Yeah. When Kait did that Regulus series of stuff earlier this year, and it came out really good—you know, she’s got a midheaven in very early Virgo—she found it activated her midheaven in a way that it never had been before. You know, she started seeing it as almost like a ‘solar’ hack, right? And, yeah, it certainly seems to work that way.

CB: And I don’t know if we wanna get into this, but a lot of astrologers over the past few days have been mentioning this being the one-year anniversary from the solar eclipse a year ago. And a lot of people were talking about the solar eclipse being on Trump’s ascendant and Sun—or ascendant primarily at 29° of Leo—and then exactly one year later, the Sun comes back to that position at 29° Leo, and then the two trials just concluded, I think, the same day, the Cohen trial and the other one with his campaign chairman. You guys have any thoughts on that?

AC: I would say that’s certainly very interesting.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s not concluded yet. Cuz one of the big questions—a lot of people were talking about—that’s still up in the air is what was the effect of the eclipse on Trump’s ascendant, and was that just about Trump becoming the president, basically, at that point, and the first year of presidency and leading the country and everything involved with that. That was also the point when some of this stuff, some of the investigations with Mueller started. The special counsel was appointed like a month or two prior to that. And then some of these investigations started, which are now evidently turning into stuff, with some of these trials actually taking place.

AC: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve kind of stopped following it at some point, just because it seemed like a part-time job to keep up with everything and try to figure out what any of the developments meant and if they were really developments or not. But it will be very interesting to look back in say two years. Because I think we’ll be able to see the story structure, and we’ll be able to see that relative to the astrology, and it’ll probably be really clear in retrospect. But it’s difficult to see as an American, in the present. You know, we’re so close to it.

CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole thing for me is people keep asking about it. But the ‘loosing of the bond’ isn’t over yet. There’s still another year-and-a-half or something. So I think it concludes in early 2020. And then whatever that was about in Trump’s chart will be fully clear and sort of finished by then. So we’ll see what happens. All right, so back to the forecast. There’s kind of a gap in the middle of the month, I think. So we have Mars moving into Aquarius September 10-ish. Jupiter sextile Pluto exact September 12. But then the next thing I had written down, the next major shift isn’t until like the 21st and 22nd.

AC: No, Mars-Uranus.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Oh, am I skipping over? Okay.

AC: Yeah. And that’s gonna be like building that whole middle of the month.

KS: As soon as Mars goes into Aquarius.

AC: Yeah. Mars doesn’t make an exact square to Uranus until like, what is it? 18th-19th?

KS: 18th, yeah.

AC: But it’s within 2° for a week-and-a-half leading up to that. So that’s gonna get pinged, you know, on every Mars hour, on every Mars day, and every time the Moon, you know, hits either of them. So there’s a lot there.

CB: There it is. So September 18, it looks like, is when that Mars-Uranus square goes exact at 1° of Aquarius and 1° of Taurus.

KS: Yes. I mean, when I think about the second half of September, we’ve got the Mars square Uranus on the 18th. We also have Mars, then, conjunct the South Node on the 26th.

AC: Yeah.

KS: And we have a lunation in between that is a Mars-ruled sign. We have the Full Moon in Aries on the 24th. So there are these kinds of weird ‘Mars’ frustrations or moments, shall we say, activations. And, Austin, just what you said there, like every time we have a Mars hour or a Mars day, we’re getting kind of the final repetition of this ‘Mars-Uranus-South Node’ craziness that’s been going on the last few months. And the feeling that I had was it’s like the final purge, the final break, the resolution to whatever that frustration and that need for freedom that has been building, really since early May, when Mars first went into Aquarius and squared Uranus.

AC: Yeah. I think for a lot of people, even though, you know, this is volatile stuff—Mars-Uranus, right—cuz this is the third time, I think there’s gonna be a lot of like, “And I am breaking free.”

KS: Yes.

AC: Mars-Uranus can also be super empowering.

KS: “I’m done,” or “I’m doing it.”

AC: You know, like breaking through internal limits that you’ve been circling around and like, “Oh, I don’t know.” You know, I think some people are gonna have a very positive ‘Mars-Uranus’ experience. It probably won’t look that way in the news. Like if we look at events on a collective scale, it’ll probably just look like, you know, surprising and unpleasant things. But like on a personal level, I think there’s gonna be sort of a positive unleashing for a lot of people.

KS: Yeah, I agree. Because it is the third of three, like I’m totally with you on this, Austin. It’s not the first time. It’s not the new shock. It’s not the, “Oh, my God, I have to change this.” It’s like, “I’ve finally figured out how to make the change,” or to push through or to step away, whatever it happens to be. Insert personally-relevant metaphor or action state here.

AC: Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes.

CB: Is the highest manifestation of Mars and Uranus, in their best states, the ability to like separate yourself or to cut something out that’s not productive in order to achieve liberation in some sense?

AC: Yeah. Well, and to push past all limits in the pursuit of achievement. You know, to stop doubting yourself or worrying what people are gonna say, and just be like, “Nope, I’m doing this. This is gonna be awesome. It’s time to rock and roll.”

KS: Well, yeah.

AC: Not everybody’s gonna have that. But like that’s gonna be one of the, you know, three main species of experience with this one, I think.

KS: Totally. I mean, there’s a very sort of, okay, common concept in modern astrology—however we wanna define it based on our earlier conversation—that idea of authenticity. You know, Mars-Uranus is very much about like what is right for you—how do you need to buck tradition or break away from convention, so that you do something that is in the spirit of your own uniqueness or your own ‘I-ness’, that is not kow-towing or bowing down to the expectations or pressures of society or culture or others in some way.

CB: It’s funny. Because while I can see that being the most empowering, like positive interpretation in the highest sense, I could also see people thinking that that’s what they’re doing or mistaking that that’s what they’re doing and just like cutting things out or creating chaos in their life or in a partner’s life or something like that under that premise. But in actuality they’re just, you know, doing something totally destructive and like erratic or unhinged, that isn’t necessarily constructive.

AC: Oh, yeah. There’ll be some of that, too.

KS: There’ll be the wild and crazy.

CB: Right. Yeah, that’s always funny. And it’s a funny thing—as I’ve been doing the horoscopes—like figuring out how to frame that and trying to get both of those in. But sometimes it’s hard to always articulate both sides of that each way without sometimes it being negative. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen this, but for some reason, I got the most negative feedback on my Leo horoscopes. Anytime I would say something even like moderately negative, a lot of the ‘Leo’ readers evidently would get really depressed and like really upset, or like taking it really personally. Have you guys seen reactions like that—of individual Sun signs or rising signs—before?

AC: Yeah. I can see how your angle isn’t inherently ‘solar’ or ‘sunny’. Not to say that it’s, you know, bad or negative. I mean, I’m the same. Like if you think about archetypal Sun in Leo, what does the world look like from that point of view?

CB: Right.

AC: It looks very different. And so, yeah, I have like runs where people will consistently complain about how I’m dealing with ‘X’ sign, and then next year, you know, it’ll be the Sags that are unhappy or whoever. But, yeah, I’ve gotten sign-specific critique, on and off, for years.

CB: Have you altered or like adjusted how you speak to different signs as a result of that, by knowing what their, I don’t know, approach is gonna be, or how they’re gonna respond to certain things?

AC: Sometimes. And sometimes I do it anyway. I don’t know, it kind of depends. I kind of feel like I’m doing different stuff when I write horoscopes at different times. Sometimes I’m like, “I’m gonna try to support everybody.” Then I’m like, “I’m gonna give these people exactly the shit that I think that they need,” you know. And so, I don’t know. You know, I certainly listen to feedback, I don’t always incorporate it. But I do think about it and whether I agree or disagree and why.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah, totally. Cuz sometimes you get the feedback and you think, “That’s a fair point.” But sometimes then you’re like, “That’s actually what I was trying to say,” or “That was the point I was trying to make.” So while they may not have liked it, that was actually where I was coming from.

AC: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was trying to do.

KS: Yeah, yeah. It’s like, “Well, that’s what I was trying to do. I’m sorry if you didn’t like it, but I meant my intention.” And other times it’s like, “Oh, wow, okay, if that came across that way, then maybe I didn’t, you know, express myself clearly,” or what have you. The feedback is always good to have, I find, cuz at least it’s thought-provoking.

CB: Right. Definitely. And it shows that people are like connecting with it in some way and having a reaction to it of some sort. So, anyway, I just raised an issue with this because this is obviously polarizing in terms of the way that it could manifest and the different extremes of Mars-Uranus aspects, especially hard aspects, and the ability for, on the one hand, sudden liberation, and on the other hand, sudden, I don’t know, disruption or destruction. I wonder sometimes if people accidentally couldn’t use the ‘empowering’ delineation as an excuse to do something stupid, basically.

AC: They definitely can.

KS: Yeah, yeah. And this is one of the tricky balances. Because, yeah, something that’s maybe a little too positive can give someone false confidence. And then something that’s incredibly negative—or not negative. But something that’s more like, you know, one of the more difficult possibilities of Mars-Uranus is like you get the rug pulled out from under your feet in a way that you just absolutely weren’t expecting. And that is gonna be the case for some people, but not for everyone.

CB: Right. All right, well, I guess that’s one of our challenges, then, as astrologers as a broader issue. That’s probably like one of the key issues, actually, for all astrologers—writing or even doing delineations or consultations—walking that line between those two extremes or two approaches.

AC: Yep, absolutely.

CB: All right, cool. So the Mars-Uranus—this is the third and final Mars-Uranus square and then we’re finally done with that, which was so much a part of the retrograde cycle. It looks like a few days later, Mars moves over the South Node again one more time. So that’s the last one of your favorite aspects of this year, I think, Austin.

AC: Yeah. Well, and in the meantime, as Kelly mentioned, we have our second lunation of the month.

CB: Right. So it looks like this occurs on September 24. We’ve got a Full Moon in Aries.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Okay. So this is right after the Sun moved into Aries only a day or two earlier. And this Full Moon takes place at 1° of Aries, late, on September 24 in the US.

KS: Yeah. So it’s just after the Sun’s moved into Libra for the equinox. Another thing that I wanted to just mention briefly is I do always find it a little telling when we have a lunation—or a Full Moon, I should be specific—right near a solstice point or an equinox point, you know, within a couple of days of that. It just seems to trigger a little bit more. You know, weather events seem to be a little bit more dramatic. And I think there’s also a correlation around, you know, emotional and psychological states when we get a Full Moon right near an equinox or a solstice. I wasn’t sure if you guys had noticed that.

AC: I’ve heard people saying that for a long time.

CB: That it’s more dynamic when it’s closer to the equinoxes and the solstices?

AC: Yeah. Those quarter points, the 0° cardinal, have more juice.

CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely. That makes sense. I mean, that’s that important turning point, especially in terms of the Sun and its light reaching into a new quarter of the entire seasonal cycle at that point.

AC: Yeah, it’s reasonable. It’s not something I’ve focused on, but I think it sounds right to me.

CB: I mean, and the symbolism of that—maybe we could delve into that. Cuz there’s such an interesting symbolism with that, in this instance, because we have the Sun going into Libra. And that’s the halfway point, like in the Northern Hemisphere, the southern solstice, where the days are the longest, and in the Northern Hemisphere, the other one, in Capricorn, when the days are the shortest and the night is the longest. And here we have the halfway point when the Sun moves into Libra, when the days start getting shorter. And in some of the ancient texts—like in Rhetorius—he tries to say that that’s the reason why the Sun has its fall in Libra, because that’s when the light starts to diminish and starts to be lessened or starts to sort of fall apart or fall away. So we have the Sun just starting that quarter of the year, but on the other end of that, we have the Moon actually being at the height of its brightness, hitting a Full Moon and opposing the Sun in the opposite sign of Aries. So there’s this like weird light/dark polarity going on here, even with just those two. And then you throw into the mix that Saturn is also squaring both of them from 2° of Capricorn, near the winter solstice, which is at 0° of Capricorn. And Saturn, of course, is a planet that’s typically associated with things like darkness. So there’s some weird ‘light/dark polarity’ thing going on here symbolically in late September.

AC: Yeah, definitely. And to bring it back to Mars, as Kelly pointed out, that’s a Mars-ruled lunation. And this is Mars right after squaring Uranus, and right before conjoining the South Node again for the third time. And so, as far as like really finishing up, you know, scrapping the bottom of the barrel, getting all of the consequences of this Mars cycle out in the open and in place, this lunation serves to do that, right? Cuz it’s Mars-ruled just as Mars is replicating the connections it had two previous times.

KS: Yeah. The word—when I was prepping this, that kept coming up for me, Austin—was your word from one of our earlier shows over the past few months around ‘purification’ with this ‘Mars-South Node’ combo. The fires—the idea of the fires of purification. So, to me, this really felt like, okay, what is the last thing that you need to throw in the fire? Or what is something that needs to be maybe purged or cleansed in some way? Because, again, it is that, you know, third of three. But it just felt like that final purge.

AC: Yeah, definitely. And adding to that, that it’s a Full Moon in a fire sign. Arguably the ‘fieriest’ of the fire signs.

KS: Yes. So a little drama to be expected, basically.

AC: Yeah. But then there’s that Saturn squaring both of the Sun and the Moon really tightly. What do you all think about that?

CB: Right. I mean, that seems like a dampening effect or something that’s holding back, otherwise, like a fiery Full Moon at the peak of its brightness. At the same time, as soon as it comes off of that Full Moon, it immediately applies to the square with Saturn. So it’s like it runs into a wall like immediately after that, as soon as it moves into the waning cycle. So it’s like starting off the waning cycle, where the Moon’s brightness starts to decrease by immediately hitting a planet that’s often associated with slowness and darkness.

AC: And then hitting Mars exactly, immediately after that. Like there’s all that ‘Mars-y’ stuff, but the Saturn sitting on that lunation—it’s sort of demanding that it be controlled or, you know, kept in a particular area, bounded. And, you know, now that I’m looking at this, I don’t love the fact that this is a Full Moon that is tightly aspecting both malefics and zero benefics.

KS: Yeah. Yeah, cuz the benefics are completely, you know, averse to this lunation. The Saturn feels frustrating, and it feels like there’s almost this undercurrent of melancholy, which is a ‘Saturn’ thing, and it’s a quality associated with the Moon going into that particular quarter, just after the Full Moon. It’s this weird kind of appearing to be fiery, but with this sort of earthy, melancholy undertone.

CB: Right. It’s that thing of like once you hit the peak of something, once you’ve reached the high point, there’s usually a sense of jubilation. But also, once you’ve hit the highest point, there’s gonna be like a coming down after that. Or you will have gone as high as you possibly can, everything else has to be sort of coming down from that, or is gonna be lesser in some sense.

KS: Yeah, the cooling, calming, slowing. Like a friend of mine’s brother rode in the Olympics many years ago for Australia. He was a wonderful athlete. But, you know, Olympic athletes talk about like the ‘post-Olympic’ comedown, and that’s kind of the analogy that feels relevant here. You build up to something, and you strive for something, or you work towards something, and then afterwards, there’s a bit of nothingness and where do you go from there.

CB: Right. There’s like a sobering quality to it.

KS: Yeah, very sobering.

AC: This feels really like the necessity of—

KS: Such a good ‘Saturn’ word, necessity.

AC: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. The necessity of using controlled force and assertion. You know, when you have Mars and Saturn together, you have this like need for a very focused, controlled power, right? There’s a little bit of a like, “Okay, this is the way it’s gotta be. I’ve gotta do that.” It’s not just like, “Do me,” right? That Mars-Uranus—the positive side of that is like, “Yes, me!” But then with this lunation, it’s like, “Yes, you, within these particular parameters.” Like you can do that, but it needs to be within this shape and, you know, inside the lines and on this timeline.

CB: Sure. And, finally, while we’re talking about Saturn, of course, squaring from Capricorn, there’s one more station. This is actually the third station that occurs in Capricorn, and this is one of the things that stood out the most to me when I was looking at it. Cuz the first two take place at the beginning of the month, where we have Mars stationed direct in late Capricorn. Then a little bit later, we have Saturn stationing direct in Capricorn. But then we get the third planet stationing there towards the end of the month, and that’s Pluto stationing direct at 18° of Capricorn, right at the very end of the month, around September 30. Yeah, so that stood out to you as well, Kelly?

KS: Yeah. I’ve been prepping my ‘September’ stuff for Stellar Insights. I mean, it’s weird just from a calendar perspective, cuz it’s right at the end of the month. But I hadn’t thought about it in the context you were talking about, with the Saturn station and the Pluto station coming after the Mars station. I mean, I feel like we just all need to get to know our Capricorn houses or parts of our chart. You know, that part of your life is really being the to-and-fro. Where do we wanna go? Where do we wanna consolidate? What are we committing to? And what are we stepping away from? Which are very ‘Capricornian-type’ things, generally.

CB: Yeah. And it’s weird they’re all direct stations. It’s like three direct stations. But it’s like whatever part of your chart Capricorn is that’s like some major activations that are going on in that area of—I wanna say everyone’s life, but obviously that’s too broad. But, you know, if Capricorn is an important part of your chart, and it’s activated at this time, in this year somehow—like through time-lords or profections or something like that—having all three of those planets stationing direct at this time is gonna cause some major changes.

KS: Yeah. Because really it’s three direct stations in like what will be essentially a five-week period, from late August to late September.

CB: Right.

AC: Yeah. I mean, four, if we wanna stretch it for Mercury. Cuz it was Mercury direct, then Mars direct like a week-and-a-half later. And then Saturn direct and then Pluto direct over about five-and-a-half weeks. So, you know, the best thing about this is I get to go online and not see people going, “Oh, my God, you guys, so many planets retrograde.”

CB: Right.

KS: That’s been interesting to see, yes.

CB: Yeah. I mean, horoscope writers have to talk about something. And I think that was one of the flavors of the year—the ‘five-planets retrograde’ thing, right?

KS: Yeah. I mean, it was one of the flavors of the northern summer, for sure, for sure.

CB: Sure. Yeah, but, you know, with the ‘Capricorn’ thing, just looking at it from a whole sign perspective—in terms of it applying to an entire house or even more recently looking at it from a horoscope/rising sign perspective—just having all three of those, otherwise kind of heavy or sometimes difficult. I mean, you have both the ‘malefic’ planets—you know, if modern astrologers, if 20th century astrologers, had anything approaching a malefic planet, then Pluto would probably be it—all stationing direct in that sign and the potential for raising some challenging issues in whatever part of your life that relates to, because you’re getting all ends of the spectrum. You know, if you have a day chart, then Mars is the one that’s more challenging, or if you have a night chart, Saturn is the one that’s more challenging. Having both of those station in the same sign over the course of the month, plus Pluto, seems to promise some challenges coming up in that area no matter what.

AC: Yeah, or just reversals. Changes of direction. Like, “I thought things were moving in one direction, and now they’re moving very much in a different one, which I maybe did not anticipate.”

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah.

AC: To reframe it in terms of what you were saying, “I thought the challenge was this, but it turns out it’s actually this, which is not what I planned for” and having to pivot to meet challenges from a different angle.

CB: Right. But at least it’s the direct station in both instances. So at least there’s some sense of like finality or conclusion to it, so that you’re moving forward after that point, whatever the challenge or the change is, rather than it’s something where it’s like setting up a sequence of events that’s not gonna come to fruition until later. That already happened earlier this year. This is more bringing it to completion.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I experience and see—let’s just take one of these. Let’s just take Saturn, right? So you’ve got Saturn direct in Capricorn, you’re getting to know him through the first part of the year, and then there’s a retrograde. You know, Saturn stations retrograde, and now it’s something different. And then because all three of the planets that we mentioned have long retrogrades—you know, Saturn’s retrograde for like three-and-a-half months—that just becomes normal. You know, what was a reversal is just like the new normal for a while. And then the direct station happens and sometimes you’re just like, “Oh. Oh, oh, this is normal. We’re getting back on track now. But I’d gotten so adapted to doing the ‘retrograde’ thing that I kind of forgot what things were like before the retrograde.” Does that make sense?

KS: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Austin. It almost makes me sort of think that, you know, the Saturn cycle through Capricorn, obviously, it’s the longer trend. We’re gonna be dealing with that for three years. And we’ve just had this Mars retrograde cycle, which has involved part of Capricorn. It almost feels a little bit like maybe that ‘Mars retro’ part has been a little bit of a distraction or an interruption to whatever the larger plan or process or pathway, you know, is going to be or needs to be with the Saturn in Cap, and now, you can maybe get back onto that. You know, like this is the real thing.

AC: That’s a better way to put it than I did, but that’s exactly right.

KS: Yeah. We’re just putting that sidebar away, and we’re back to the main event kind of thing.

CB: Right. And then we’ll have Saturn moving forward for quite a while for a number of months, before we have another Saturn station again.

AC: Yeah. Was it 8.5-ish months of direct motion?

KS: Until next year, yeah. I think it goes up to 20° or 21°.

AC: Getting scary. Getting scary close to Pluto.

CB: Looks like 20. Its next station is gonna be at 20° of Capricorn in about 200 days. 210 days from September 30.

AC: That Capricorn is a hot piece of property this year and next. Tell you what, we’re gonna have the South Node there for all of next year.

KS: Yes.

AC: There’s definitely change occurring in that neighborhood.

KS: Yeah. So if you aren’t that familiar with your Capricorn planets or house in your chart, you’re going to have many opportunities to get to know this part of your life in the months and years to come as well.

CB: Right. So figure out what house that is in your chart as one of the major areas of activity in terms of some of those transits that we’re talking about. Which I think, for us, we would mainly talk about like your whole sign house, but whatever house system you use, pay attention to that area of your life.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right. And, Kelly, I was like doing a search for something the other day. Did you write an article about why you use whole sign houses? I’ve never seen you publicize this. Did you just quietly like slip that out at one point without telling anyone?

KS: Yeah, I did. That was one thing I did get done over the summer.

CB: Okay.

KS: Tony asked me like probably a year ago. Okay, Tony is like this idea’s guru, and he’s always saying, “Write on this,” or “Do this, you know, students need this,” or whatever. And one of the things he had asked me was, “Can you just write a little bit about why you switched to whole sign houses?” And I was like, “That would be good to do,” because I’ve been teaching astrology. You know, I’ve got students who were with me before the switch and then after, and, you know, just having to deal with, “Oh, my God, Kelly, my chart’s different. What have you done?” You know, I’m like, “Okay, well, I don’t have that much power, but we’re just shifting our perspective or whatever.” So I didn’t want to inflame any controversy, which is why I did publish it very quietly over the summer, and I’ve just been sharing it with my students. And it’s lovely now, of course, that we’re talking about it right as Mars is going to station direct, and at least while Mars is out of Aquarius. But, yeah, I just wanted to explain a little bit about how I came to make that change and some of the things I read, some of the people I’ve spoken to. Austin, you know, before you were saying you’d like to do this ‘Eavesdropping’ kind of conversation.

AC: Mm-hmm.

KS: Part of how I got to that switch was conversations with people like both of you guys and some other people that I spoke to as well, and just reading a few things. So, basically, I wasn’t saying, “You should all do it because I did,” but I just wanted to share. It was like a letter to my students. “This is how I came to make the switch. This is where I’m coming from. These are some of the points of difference.” Just as an FYI, for people who are willing to work with me. So I can almost hear Kaitlin there saying, “You’ve done it in your ‘Kelly’ way,” where I just wanted to put it out there. So, yeah, I did publish that—I can’t remember—a few weeks ago, before I went traveling.

CB: Okay. Well, yeah, I just wanted to point it out. It was a really good article. So people should definitely check it out, cuz it’s your personal story and journey with that.

KS: Thank you, yeah. I felt like, you know, it’s such a big topic, and I wanted to write something on it without contributing to the controversy—if that is possible. But that’s what I’ve tried to do.

AC: “Why I Switched to the Best House System,” by Kelly Surtees.

KS: I didn’t actually know. Austin, do not drag me into this.

AC: Well, no. Chris gave a talk with ‘Best’, I believe, in the title many years ago, which started a particularly dramatic set of dialogues. That’s what you get. That’s what you get.

KS: What a surprise!

AC: What you get for trying to be lighthearted and fun, Chris.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Punishment.

CB: And now I keep it, you know, no comedy, “Not Literally the Best Form of House Division.” All right, well, I’m gonna make a shirt just for you, Kelly, that says ‘Whole Sign House is Literally the Best Form of House Division’.

KS: But only the best. I will wear it in one of our episodes, if you do.

CB: Okay.

KS: I know. I know. I’ll do it.

CB: Okay. That’s actually funny. Somebody’s saying they would wear that shirt. That is actually a shirt that I’m working on. However, I’m gonna be a bit of a war profiteer, cuz I’m also gonna make a competing Placidus and quadrant houses shirt that says ‘Quadrant Houses also are Literally the Best Form of House Division’. And then we can just see which one becomes popular.

AC: Or maybe, ‘Give me Regimontanus, or Give Me Death’.

CB: Right. Yeah. These are the types of ideas that I need. So if anybody has any funny astrology shirt ideas, let me know, cuz I will seriously turn it into a shirt for The Astrology Podcast website.

KS: I love it.

CB: All right.

AC: If you sold those at a conference, that would be amazing.

CB: This is happening. Like this whole ‘shirt’ thing is happening. I’ve already got a bunch of them. I’ve got the ‘Ophiuchus is Not a Sign’. I’ve got some like ‘Sun/Moon/rising sign’ ones, which I think would be great for conferences. If you’ve ever wanted to have astrologers just throw their birth data at you without having to ask, what better way than to wear a shirt asking the question?

AC: I suggested earlier, off camera, but, you know, for the ‘Ophiuchus’ ones, ‘Make the Zodiac 12 Again’.

CB: Right.

KS: That’s great.

AC: Maybe some fetching hats.

KS: Fetching, that’s such a good word. It is very ‘Team Jennifer/Team Angelina’. I like it.

CB: Right. Well, prepare for NORWAC next year, because there will be shirts and who knows what else.

KS: Chris, are you wearing a shirt right now? Do you need to model it? We’re getting a lot of comments here.

CB: I didn’t get one of my like great ones. I just got one that I was testing out for sizing. So it just says that.

KS: Oh, that’s a really smart one.

AC: Yeah, I like that one.

CB: That’s a little high-brow. But I’m working on some other astrology logo ones that are on the way, and I’ll definitely show those off once I get them. And all that stuff’s up for order now. So if anybody gets a shirt, and you wanna send in a picture, then please do and I’ll probably throw up a gallery at some point here before too long on the website.

KS: Go, you. Like a ‘mogul’ astrologer in the making.

CB: Yeah. Well, people have been asking for, you know, podcast merch for a while, so I finally got it together and got on it. And I guess, according to you guys, that is the Mars retrograde or the Jupiter stationing in the 10th house. So there’s a good example.

KS: Totally, with your profection. It’s like the combination of everything there for you.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right, guys. Well, I think this brings us to the end of this episode. So it’s been fun talking about the astrology of September. And we’re gonna have to reconvene again here pretty soon to talk about whatever the next month is after that. But, yeah, thanks for joining me.

KS: October.

CB: October, all right. Yeah, thank you guys both for joining me today. Thanks everybody who attended the live taping of this episode. We had like 20 or 30 people attending. All patrons who support the podcast, which I really appreciate, each month, and it helps to support and continue to fund this whole project. And, yeah, thanks everyone for listening. As always, we appreciate ratings on iTunes. That always helps people to find out about the podcast. Check out some of those other astrology podcasts because they’re really great, and it would be great to support other astrologers that are creating content like this. And, yeah, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks, Austin and Kelly, for joining me today.

KS: Thank you, guys. Pleasure as always.

AC: It was my pleasure. Yes, definitely. Let’s do it again sometime.

KS: Yeah. Whatever month comes next.

CB: Whatever comes after September. All right, guys. Thanks everyone for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

AC: Bye.

KS: Bye.