The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 289, titled:
February 2021 Astrology Forecast: Saturn Square Uranus
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on January 30, 2021
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2021/01/30/february-2021-astrology-forecast-saturn-square-uranus/
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa Lardo
Transcription released December 31st, 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. In this episode, we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for February of 2021. Joining me today are master astrologers Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock. Hey guys, how’s it going?
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris —
KELLY SURTEES: Hi!
AC: — what’s going on?
CB: And we are gonna check in a little bit about what’s been happening and some of the news over the past month and contextualize the current events within the context of some ongoing astrological transits that are happening right now. And we’re also gonna look ahead at what where that’s gonna take us through the month of February.
So we’re gonna start by doing an overview of some major stuff at the beginning, and then later we’re gonna break down the specific astrological transits in more fine detail over the course of the rest of the episode. So we have a live audience of patrons who are joining us today, and today is January 28th, 2021, starting at 11:23, 11:24 AM in Denver, Colorado. And this is the 289th episode of the show. So let’s go ahead and jump into it. Kelly, how are you feeling today?
KS: Not too bad! Well rested. Looking forward to chatting with you guys and debriefing as well as exploring the astro for February.
CB: Excellent. And Austin, you’ve been enjoying everything moving out of the cardinal signs and into the fixed signs lately?
AC: I have. I don’t feel like the sky is trying to kill me every day anymore. It’s really a delight.
CB: Yeah. I think we’ve all seen things lighten up for the cardinal signs over the past month or two, and the shift towards the fixed signs getting the brunt of most of the transits has become more clear.
all right, so it’s been a month —
AC: So actually, one thing on that Chris —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — real quick. I didn’t tell either of you this. On the very last time that Mars squared my Ascendant, which I got a lot of them, I fell down the stairs and my back went out for like, a week and a half.
KS: Oh no!
AC: It was the first time I have ever had my back go out.
CB: Wow.
AC: I was just happy and running down the stairs, and I did like, a banana peel slip and like, went feet up, and then —
KS: Oh no!
AC: — I tobogganed like an awkward —
KS: Ouch.
AC: — sled, like, down the rest of the stairs and got rugburn —
CB: Wow.
AC: And I woke up —
CB: That’s very classic.
AC: — the next day and my back was – I’ve never, I’ve heard people all my life talk about like, oh, my back’s going out, it’s fucking terrible. I’ve never experienced that before, and so now I understand what sciatic pain is for the first time and how it’s a special pain. It’s different from other pains. It’s sort of a high-end luxury flavor of pain.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But anyway, yeah. That was Mars’s parting gift to me.
CB: For those late degree cardinal Cancer Ascendant, you got a nice square as Mars dipped out of and left the last few degrees of Aries.
AC: Yeah. It was a parting gift. It was a nice going away present.
CB: Very good. Good times. We’ll have to put that in the delineation book next time we’re working on like, delineations of Mars square Ascendant.
All right. So let’s jump into things. First I wanted to share an image that just shows the planetary movements for the next four weeks for the month of February. So this shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of February, as well as the two lunations that we have this month – a New Moon in Aquarius and a Full Moon in Virgo. As you can see, one of the main thing that’s happening this month is that everything is basically moving into the sign of Aquarius, and one of our main signatures this month is having a huge stellium or clusters of planets all in the same zodiacal sign of Aquarius.
Here’s the planetary alignments calendar which shows some of the ingresses, aspects, and lunations this month. The chief ones of which are Venus moving into Aquarius on the 1st, Mercury retrograde in Aquarius all month and hitting the halfway point with the Sun on the 8th of February. A New Moon in Aquarius on the 11th. The first of three exact Saturn-Uranus squares happens this month on February 17th. Then the Sun into Pisces on the 18th, as it does around this time every year. Mercury stationing direct in Aquarius on the 20th. Venus moving into Pisces on the 25th. And finally, a Full Moon in Virgo on the 27th.
So those are some of the things we’re gonna be breaking down over the course of the next hour or two here. Why don’t we start by talking about and giving an overview of some of the major stuff right at the beginning that is ongoing and carries us from last month into this month, and that may help us to contextualize and review some of the events that have been happening over the course of the past few weeks since we released our last forecast in mid-December.
So the first one and the primary one of which it seems like at this point is the Saturn-Uranus square, which even though we’re about to get the very first exact hit of that on February 17th, I think we can all agree at this point that we’ve pretty much seen that square starting to come into effect and be active in some world events since at least early January. Would you guys say that’s correct?
AC: Yeah. I mean, in many ways, it was Mars’s ingress into Taurus which activated that square. Like, that square is in the background of really this whole year and a lot of next year. But it’s when other planets sort of line up with it that we’re going to see – especially Mars – that we are going to, and already have seen it, you know, tell its story or tell its many stories, right? And it was the very day of Mars’s ingress that the Capitol chaos ensued, and there have been demonstrations and gatherings all over the world for lots of different reasons ever since then. It’s been – you know, I thought and I believe that we said, you know, that Mars’s time with Uranus kicking off that Saturn-Uranus square would show us exactly what that whole theme was about or set of themes was about immediately. And I don’t think it disappointed even remotely.
CB: No. I mean, literally that day, the day it went in was the Capitol – the riot or the attempted coup or whatever you wanna call it. And it was something that was like, very visible and tangible right away from the very start. Did that meet your expectations, Kelly, in terms of Mars going in and activating the Saturn-Uranus so just some of the – it seems almost weird. We have a continuation of the theme we ran into last year, which is could astrology stop being so literal and just give us like, some sort of abstract, psychological metaphor or something that you have to reach for? But instead, we keep getting these very literal manifestations. Was that your sense as well, Kelly, over the past few weeks?
KS: Yeah. I mean, it came in – I think we talked about this in our pre-show chat – Mars came in really strong. Where sometimes when a planet like Mars changing signs, we sometimes will see events within the first sort of 24 hours of that. Other times, we need Mars to actually get up to interact directly with Saturn and Uranus, and in this instance, it was a case of as soon as Mars was copresent with Uranus and forming another square to Saturn which we had so much of last year. Yeah. A lot of the combustibility, if you like. The volatile situations being inflamed or activated or taken to a new level of intensity has definitely been coming through.
CB: Yeah. So why don’t we really quickly – I wanted to reiterate some keywords for Saturn square Uranus and some themes for that. So some of the ones I was writing down are things like just tension, and sometimes it’s tension of like, the past versus the future, or the old versus the new. Tradition versus innovation, or breaking away from the tradition. Restrictions versus freedom. Rebellion is a common Saturn-Uranus sort of theme in and of itself. What are some other keywords that you guys have for Saturn squaring Uranus?
KS: Yeah. I mean, the idea of the clash of different forces, different power structures. Even we’ve seen it at a macro level, but even at the micro personal level as well, shifting foundations, breaking away from the past or wanting to do things differently from the way things have been done. It’s that combination of Saturn kind of being deconstructed so that it can be rebuilt in a new or a different or perhaps an innovative way. So another point to keep in mind is these are big forces. You know, in older forms of astrology, Saturn’s stuff described major shifts or larger shifts at a societal level or in terms of our own lives, it’s big things. It’s not just the small day-to-day stuff. It’s totally reorienting or resetting the focus or the foundations of your life. So it’s quite substantial. And we’re seeing some of that come through now, but we’re gonna see it get deeper and more into structures and systems throughout the year.
CB: Definitely. I love those keywords, and just thinking about the structural role that Saturn plays, both in society and the world in general as well as in our individual lives and the way that there might be some challenge or disruption to that in some way.
Here’s a graphic that I wanna share that I shared on the year ahead forecast that just shows how we’re gonna have these three exact squares between Saturn and Uranus during the course of the year, and our very first one occurs on February 17th where Saturn is at seven degrees of Aquarius and it’s making an exact 90-degree aspect or square to Uranus at seven degrees of Taurus. But as you can see, that aspect, as soon as Saturn went back into Aquarius in December, really started to build up so that we’re sort of coasting or we’re coming into something pretty hot that has started, you know, prior to now even though this is the first exact hit. It’s something that’s gonna get a little bit more intense, especially during the course of the year. It’s something that we were already heading into this year sort of building up to.
AC: Yeah. So I like your keywords. I have a hard time adding to them, but I think I have one, and I would say like, the dynamics between the center and the periphery. You know, those who are sort of in the citadel versus those who are protesting outside of the citadel. Or you know, citadel – whatever sort of walled structure you want to imagine for Saturn. Right? Because although I think, because of its drama and also because you and I, Chris, at least are Americans, the events at the Capitol captured a lot of attention. But I’ve been trying to be more disciplined about international news. And you know, we had huge demonstrations in Russia, in India, Tunisia, in Italy. Like, this sort of people lining up outside the walls or ignoring the rules or protesting the rules – it was not a simply American phenomenon, right? And it looks different in different places, and the dynamics are different. But that basic structure of, you know, gathering in protest in one form or another to whatever Saturn is doing is deeply international.
CB: Yeah. It’s something that’s coming up in different ways in different countries, and I’m sure there’s, you know, there’s different birth charts that are operative in different countries, so it’s coming up in different areas and different forms. But it’s interesting seeing the same collective energy of Saturn square Uranus manifesting in ways that are at least recognizable archetypally.
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s the same – one way I was thinking about it is if you just turn the sound off and saw video footage of all the stuff happening in different countries, it would look like the same thing. You wouldn’t be hearing people’s reasons or have the political background. But if you just like, cut the audio, you’d be like, oh, this is the same thing.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. So one of them that might help us, you know, put an even more specific take on some of the Saturn-Uranus that’s actually happening now and has just been happening in the past few days was the GameStop stock market thing and the sudden volatility in the stock market that’s ricocheting out from that. That seems very much tied in with the Saturn-Uranus and seems like it might help us to narrow down some of our keywords more that are gonna be operative for the entire year. So Austin, I know you’ve been paying much closer attention to this, so do you want to try to explain it concisely for those that have no background in what’s going on?
AC: Okay, I’ll try.
CB: Okay.
AC: You may have overstated the quality of attention that I paid. I just thought it was important to note.
So we have this Saturn-Uranus like, protest demonstration energy, right? And what’s really interesting is that occurred – for those of you who haven’t seen it, you should look it up – on a financial market level where a number of hedge funds had giant short bets on GameStop, the company GameStop. And you know, a short bet is you put money on the fact that this is gonna go down, right? Or that, you know, this is gonna lose value. And if it loses value, then you win money. There were a number of people, I believe it began on Reddit, who decided to pump up that stock in order to make the hedge funds lose money. And so there’s been – I don’t know where it said. I think the stock is worth almost 10 times, maybe more, than what it was worth a month ago. And so it’s really interesting to me, because it is a congregating, a gathering together against a system. Which is, you know, something we see – that’s what a protest is, or a demonstration. But in a digital way, and you know, in the midst of the big capitalist financial market. What many would say the rigged game of the stock market. Sort of like a cyber peasants’ rebellion. And it’s both interesting in and of itself, and I also think that it’s a little bit – it gives us at least a silhouette of the future. Right? you know, if half of our lives now are in this digital world, and if money is primarily digital, then it makes sense that you would have protest movements that were primarily digital as well.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, so and it started with GameStop, and it’s also – there’s other stocks now that are getting tied in with it like the AMC movie theatre chain and other things like that which are companies that have not been doing very well. And you can sort of see why large investors would be betting on those companies continuing to decline – like GameStop, for example, because they sell primarily like, physical games and media, even though online gaming has been on the rise and just like, downloading video games has become much more common over the past decade leading to the decline of stores like that in the same way that record stores have gone under over the course of the past decade or two with the rise of MP3s and iTunes.
So anyway, but some of the keywords I was getting from this are things like volatility. So like, the volatility of these stocks like, going up suddenly or dropping suddenly and the price or the value getting suddenly very high or suddenly dropping very low. We saw a similar thing with that actually as well over the past month with Bitcoin and the price of that suddenly shooting up to like, crazy, record-high levels and having major movements again. So volatility is a major theme with Saturn square Uranus as a continuing thing this year.
Other keywords I was coming up with was tensions between established institutions versus erratic upstarts, as well as attempts to put rules in place to tame some of the unruliness or the volatility, because it seems like some of the trading sites are putting blocks on like, trading some of these things due to everything that’s going on. Additionally, other keywords were things like establishment being hit with a curveball that they didn’t see coming. There’s also some other implications of like, class warfare or a large wealth transfer from the financial ruling class to the middle class. There’s also linking up social media with the stock market and the erraticness and unpredictability of social media, in this case primarily Reddit. Other themes like disruptive technologies and yeah, those are some of the themes that seem like they’re coming out and becoming very strong in this which we might see echoes of in other areas. That’s one of the reasons why it’s important to pay attention to it now, as this may not be an isolated theme this year.
AC: No, I mean, this is —
CB: Kelly, you had some —
AC: This is an introduction of what we’re gonna be doing.
CB: Right. Kelly, you had some like, background in some financial stuff, right?
KS: Yeah. I mean, very very back in the early days of my working career I did work in a stock broking firm. So I understand a little bit about the short selling side of things. But I haven’t deeply read up on the current situation other than, you know, when you are short selling or you’ve got put options out there, you are really exposing yourself and you’re taking a big gamble that the market’s gonna go one way. And if it moves in the other direction, then you will have a big loss, which I think is what we’re seeing with the hedge funds now.
What’s really interesting is the integration – you kind of alluded to this, Chris – it’s sort of the intersection between social media and the stock market, which I think we maybe haven’t seen such a direct… You know, in the finance industry, they talk about market movers and they talk about big hedge funds or big mutual funds or big investment banks being able to move the market by the size of their investments or their bets and things like that. And that’s not new in the stock market sort of world, but to have that push come in from social media – I think that’s what’s new and what’s different about this situation. And to your point, Austin, that January, February 2021 is really an introduction of what the year is gonna be about with this Mars-Saturn-Uranus combination which we see repeated throughout the year. And this is really interesting to let us know some of the different topics that are going to experience this volatility and this kind of breaking down of the old rules or the old ways so that, you know, the social media world can influence the stock market, and what else could be triggering things that it wouldn’t normally have an impact on.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
AC: Yeah. That’s a great point about that big movers in the stock market, which are basically you know, they’re funds. It’s a collection of money that moves as one. And so we’re seeing a new version of – it’s almost like a voting bloc, but a money voting bloc. And we’re seeing that outside of a hedge fund; we’re seeing that on Reddit, for example. And so what’s interesting – or one of the many interesting things – about that is we’re seeing a mimicking of a hedge fund strategy, but by people outside of financial institutions coming together to do that. And there’s one thing that occurred to me, just to call back to what should be an ongoing discussion about what is this age of air business about? I was thinking about air dynamics, and we talked about scattering, dispersion, et cetera, et cetera. But then I was thinking about beings which live in the air, right? And so birds will do flocking, right? Like, geese will get together. They’ll all get —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — together to do the big migration. And so you have that like, congregating or gathering, and then dispersing. On an insect level, right, it’s swarming. But it’s not like putting a thousand geese together is not like putting a thousand bricks together. Like, it creates a collective structure that has collective power, but then it can disperse very quickly just as it formed very quickly. I think we’re gonna be seeing more and more of that in different areas.
CB: Yeah. I like that analogy with the birds, because almost they sometimes will try to ride the same current as a group, and there’s like, natural air currents that you can sort of coast on to get you much further ahead than you would otherwise that you might catch as a group. And that’s a good maybe analogy as well to what’s going on sometimes when you see large groups of people trying to jump on the same current.
AC: Yeah, and the – go ahead.
KS: I was just gonna say the other thing, just to what you were saying, something you said Austin reminded me, of course, you know, we’re starting to see the air elemental expression come through. And one of the qualities that we’ve all noticed about the air elemental era is that it’s about decentralization of power or dispersing of power centers and you know, hedge funds and the stock market. If we have a group of the social media flock, if you like, it’s sort of challenging or dispersing that traditionally held control there to a certain degree.
AC: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But it’s different because it’s not a rival building made of brick, right? It’s a temporary congregation.
KS: Yeah, I like that. And then that makes me think, of course, of the super Aquarius couple of days that we do have in February. It’s like, that’s a big flock of birds coming together. But as you said, they disperse quite quickly.
CB: Yeah. So let’s back up a little bit, because we did see at the very beginning of the year. So for example, especially on January 6th, like, the nature of that protest was something that was while shocking to many people, especially in the US and to a lesser extent around the world, was something very literal and seeing major protests is not something that’s unexpected this year with Saturn squaring Uranus. I think ideas of like, protests or rebellion or even – I was actually surprised just looking up in a Combination of Stellar Influences one of their delineations for Saturn square Uranus was like, violence or sudden unexpected violence as like, a very literal manifestation sometimes. And that was the day that Mars went into Taurus, which gives you an additional, much harsher maybe spin on that Saturn-Uranus square than it might have otherwise.
I’m trying to think if we need to dwell on that anymore. I mean, one thing that was interesting, of course, was that was the day that in the US Capitol that they were basically going to certify the electoral college vote, which was the final thing that needed to happen to make Joe Biden’s sort of election valid and to finalize it basically with Congress. And what was interesting is that the riots delayed that, and they still ended up reconvening and going back into the Capitol and then doing the votes. But as a result of the delay, they ended up finalizing it later that night after Mars had ingressed into Taurus, whereas if they had done it according to the normal time, it would have occurred when Mars was still in Aries, basically. So I thought that was really interesting, because that was also the final thing which basically ended Trump’s presidency. It was like, the very last thing. And Trump, of course, with Leo rising, Taurus is his 10th whole sign house. So basically, Mars ingressed into his 10th whole sign house that very night, the night in which it was sort of finalized that he would basically be fired from the presidency.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. Do you remember what the risings were on the originally scheduled time versus the time it actually happened, Chris?
CB: No. I mean, I could attempt to —
AC: It’s okay if you don’t; I was just curious.
CB: I could attempt to look that up, but it was like, late at night by the time it finally happened. I think Leisa stayed up late in order to watch that like she usually does. But let me take it back and just show you the chart. Here it is. So it’s like, Mars was in Aries all day, most of the day at least, but then it switched in —
AC: I think it was about two o’clock in the afternoon here when it switched.
CB: Right.
AC: West coast time.
CB: Yeah. So it’s just so striking having it go in, not just in activating Mars then going in to start squaring Saturn and Jupiter and then eventually conjoining Uranus. But just it was a really good demonstration that sometimes, you know, when those ingresses take place and a planet moves into a new whole sign house, sometimes you can see the shift immediately. And that can be like, a really big deal or really striking deal. And it was striking especially for Trump just watching from a neutral political standpoint, because so many times things that people for any other politician that would have been like, the end of their career, he’s always weathered and survived at different points. And it was interesting seeing Mars go into Taurus and this being the thing where he finally got probably the most blowback out of anything he’s ever done, it sort of seemed like to me.
AC: Yeah. Well, poll numbers certainly support that.
CB: Right. So here – let me just share the screen really quickly to show what that looked like of literally a planet moving from being in his 9th house one day where it had been retrograde for the past six months and sort of before Mars went retrograde it sort of threatened in a sense to go into his 10th house, but then didn’t. But then all of a sudden on January 5th and 6th, it just switches into Taurus and into his 10th whole sign house. And that is the, you know, to use his own phrase, that is the “you’re fired” transit – Mars going into your 10th house – sometimes under worst scenario.
So pretty literal. Like, severing or separating. And then also one of the things that I learned from that is I think we really learned over the past two months how much when you’re trying to forecast things like elections in the US, it’s not just about election day. You actually do have to pay attention to some of those follow-up days, which in the past only seemed like they were just procedural, but they actually do have real importance. And some of the astrological alignments on those days, if you pay close attention to them ahead of time, would have been really illustrative. Like, knowing the solar eclipse was gonna take place in Biden’s rising sign when the electoral college voted on December 14th, or knowing that when the vote was counted and ratified on January 6th that Mars would ingress into Trump’s 10th house. All of those are like, interesting data points that future astrologers should probably pay closer attention to in trying to forecast future elections.
AC: Definitely. I think that even though technically the United States doesn’t have a monarch, we have like, you know, the presidency is sort of monarchical, right? We’ve got different elements in our government. I think that if we queried any astrologer from the past who lived and breathed in a monarchy, they would probably tell you that the coronation itself was a very important chart.
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, and that ended up – the chart for that this year, of course, as every year was on January 20th when we had the inauguration itself and the transfer of power. And it was interesting how much after the riot that occurred on January 6th when Mars ingressed into Taurus, there was just like, a huge amount of tension in the country for the next 13 or 14 days then leading up to inauguration. And we had commented in the year ahead forecast about noting the exact Mars-Uranus conjunction that would occur in the rising sign of the inauguration chart on inauguration day. And then one of the things that was very notable and out of the ordinary ultimately about that is there ended up being like, a huge amount of military present in Washington, DC, basically locking the day down – or locking the entire city down – on the day of the inauguration.
AC: Yeah. And I think that that’s a pretty easy translation from keywords for a Mars-Uranus conjunction. Like, an unprecedented military presence, right? Uranus is anything that is way out of normal, and it could be an absence; it could be an absence where you’re expecting presence, or it could be a presence that’s vastly more substantial than you expected. And in this case, it was an unprecedented military presence.
CB: Right. As well as Saturn just being squaring that and again the tensions between like, Saturn attempting to lock things down versus the rambunctiousness and sometimes violence of a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus and the tension between those energies.
So that does make me a little nervous that the Mars-Uranus conjunction then is baked into the inception chart of that presidency. But we’ll see how things play out and we’ll see if that ends up being a sensitive —
AC: You don’t think we’re coming into years of peace and calm and satisfaction amongst the people?
CB: Yeah, I mean, I appreciated the calls for unity, and it was kind of interesting. Yeah, we’ll see how things go.
All right. Anything else about that in reviewing – oh yeah, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction! We recorded our year ahead forecast before that, shortly before it. Did you guys actually go out and see it? I actually went outside and saw it that night or within a night of it. But you guys had watched it at some point, right?
KS: Yeah, I had seen it getting closer, and I’ve seen it sort of since. Although I know they’re not as tight now. But we had typical Belgian grey, cloudy weather, so I didn’t get to see it on the day.
AC: Yeah, I missed. We had heavy cloud cover on the day, but as I was saying earlier, like, I feel a little bit like a jaded hipster about it, because I saw Jupiter and Saturn sneaking up on each other probably a hundred nights this year. And we’ve got windows that face the southeast that we’re near often during the evenings, so you can just – we just saw them every night, every night, every night. So you know, I’ve known about that band forever!
CB: Okay. Here’s some – I tried to find some good stock photos on like, Adobe Stock that took it. And this is basically what it looked like if you went out and looked in the night sky; it just looked like these two little brighter-than-normal stars sort of right next to each other meeting up that got closer and closer over the course of like, a few week period until all of a sudden, they were right next to each other. So there was that one. Let me see what else I got. There’s a little closer close-up for those watching the video version, and there was this little video of them, but they don’t move very fast. And then eventually they – there it is! That was the conjunction when they got together.
KS: They got to hang out, do the tango together. I mean —
CB: Right.
KS: — it is, if you can see these things in the sky, I remember one of my early astrology teachers reminding us all to go out and look up. Because the magic in the work that we do comes from the experiential of seeing these things come together or move apart or form an alignment, and there is something awe-inspiring when you do actually get to see it. I mean, that’s why we’re all so fascinated with it, I think.
CB: Yeah. That’s one of the things I really appreciate about like, for example, Chani Nicholas every month will tell people on social media to go outside and look at the Full Moon, which consequently is actually occurring tonight or today as we’re recording this, because that really can ground you much more deeply in what we’re actually doing in astrology by going out and looking at these as visual phenomenon that are occurring out there and not just as abstract charts like, on a computer screen.
AC: One thing I’ll say about the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is that it felt impossibly heavy and dense and serious to me. It felt like, you know, like a teaspoon from a quasar which weighs a million tons or something. Like, it just felt heavy and portentous. It felt like a thing that we would use to – excuse me – it felt like history. Right? Which is why we’ve been talking about it is that these are really important historical conjunctions, and it did —
CB: Right.
AC: — it felt like there were decades of events like, compacted into that one configuration. I didn’t know that it would feel that way. I was a little bit surprised, but at the same time, it made a lot of sense. And in the days around it, I was just like, sleeping huge amounts of time and I felt like I was unpacking a very dense download. Unzipping a very dense file. And again, I was surprised by that, but then it made sense immediately.
CB: Yeah. Because we talked about that literally a year before that in December of 2019, and we all knew at the very end of 2020 we would get through this very long, already kind of tough, monumental year with the pileups in the cardinals signs like Capricorn and Aries and the Mars retrograde, and that at the very end of that we would have this monumental Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius and the shifting of the triplicities with the great conjunction, which by the way, I really appreciated that the phrase “great conjunction” was like, trending on social media and became commonplace all of a sudden. I think, you know, somebody like Abu Masshar from the 9th century would have really appreciated that. But by the time we actually got there, we did all feel like we were both at the end of an era and the beginning of a new era in a much more visceral way than I think any of us even anticipated a year prior to that.
KS: Totally.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right. So speaking of Aquarius, that’s one of the other major themes we have this month is the huge pileup of planets in the sign of Aquarius, which has gotta be one of the largest stelliums I’ve seen in a while in a sign, you know, aside from last year in March when all of those planets piled up in the sign of Capricorn right around the time that the global pandemic really set in and the lockdowns began. But at some point this month, we’ll end up with this stellium of planets of Saturn, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, and the Sun all in the sign of Aquarius. So that’s gonna be where the biggest concentration of energy is this month, which I think last month we were using a translation of an ancient Greek term for when you have a pileup of planets, which was an assembly of planets. Is that still our —
KS: Yes.
CB: — keyword going into this month for the Aquarius stellium, or do you guys have any other good pileup or conjunction-type terms?
AC: Well, I’m tempted to use “flock” now.
KS: Flock, yes!
CB: Flock of planets.
KS: I know like, the element of air obviously is connected to three zodiac signs, but I always think about birds of a feather when I think about Aquarius more than any other air sign, even though it’s where we’re getting the sweet water that nourishes the kind of rational self poured out, but I always think about the flocks of birds. And yeah, someone’s mentioned this in the chat, and I know this because I have a client born the last time we had so many planets in Aquarius, which was February of 1962 when we had Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius and the Sun there plus Venus and Mercury. We also had the node there in the early ‘60s as well.
So it doesn’t happen very often, which I think is part of the significance, but I do like the word “assembly.” Are you going back, Chris? Look at you!
CB: Yeah. Look at that.
KS: There you go! Yeah.
CB: Solar Fire. Solar Fire’s —
KS: Yeah, because Mars —
CB: — the program we use.
KS: — was, yeah. It depends. Oh yeah, oh my gosh.
CB: Look at that.
KS: Oh my god! Look at that!
CB: Yeah —
KS: That was more!
CB: — it’s actually even bigger than our current stellium, but —
KS: Yeah, because it’s got Mars there.
CB: Right. So for the audio listeners, if you cast a chart for like, February 4th, February 5th, 1962, you end up with a chart with Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Sun, South Node, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon all in Aquarius. So —
KS: Yeah. So if you went back 24 hours, Chris, that’ll be the New Moon in Aquarius in February ‘62. Which —
CB: There it is.
KS: — that’s the closest, it’s not exactly the same, but because they don’t have the —
AC: And it wasn’t —
KS: — Mars in Taurus.
AC: — just a New Moon. That was an eclipse.
CB: Oh yeah —
KS: Yes!
CB: — because it’s on the South Node. Okay.
KS: The nodes are there.
AC: Tight.
CB: That’s fun. Oh yeah. Somebody points out that Garth Brooks was born – he was born in that ‘62 lineup. That’s pretty funny.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So Aquarius lineup. And we talked a lot, we used some very beautiful metaphors in the year ahead forecast for the square that Mars is casting to the Aquarius stellium. What were our beautiful primary metaphor again, Austin?
AC: Well, Kelly had suggested an assembly, like a school assembly, and that Mars was the one kid who was making loud fart noises and not enjoying or cooperating with the proceedings. And —
KS: Yes, the disruptor.
AC: — the fart noise aspect. Part of that is Mars, and then part of that is especially because it’s Mars with Uranus. But like, you know, doing the…
KS: The disruption.
AC: I wasn’t that kid, but I knew that kid.
CB: Yeah, I think you would have been very good friends with that kid.
KS: It’s —
AC: I appreciated their contribution.
CB: So that’s one of the analogies that we came up with, and we were trying to brainstorm other analogies in our planning meeting. I don’t know that we got that far; did we come up with anything new?
KS: We talked more symbolically about Mars in Taurus and just who or what that might represent as kind of the outsider. You know, you’ve got this – do you remember that? The outsider – the keywords around, you know, like, to me because it’s Mars, it made me think of more youthful people, and because Mars is in detriment, maybe people that are angry as well. And then any time I see Mars in detriment, I also think about that representing a group of people within society that maybe don’t have a lot of power or feel disempowered or disenfranchised in some capacity. So there is the assembly of all the planets in Aquarius, and then there are the people who either don’t feel they fit or they don’t belong or there isn’t a place for them, and they’re making some noise about that.
CB: Yeah, I think Austin, you were saying that Mars in Taurus is like, the peasants are revolting.
AC: Something like that. But yeah, there’s a very much like, who’s got power, who’s outside of power sort of dynamic which will play out in a lot of different ways. You know, that congregation, that assembly, that flock of planets in Aquarius – you know, we could see the swifter moving planets sort of adding energy to and talking to the slower moving planets, which are Jupiter and Saturn. And in a sense we could say Saturn is “what are the rules gonna be,” and Jupiter is like, the “how are we going to solve these problems” or “how are we going to improve things,” right? And so it’s a very – on both a collective level, which will be pretty obvious, but also on an individual level, it’s very much like a policy meeting. Like, okay, so all of this has happened; so what’s the policy gonna be? How are we gonna deal with X, Y, or Z? And, you know, I think that will be intimately tied with this dialogue between Uranus and Saturn, which is sort of like, “What is the institutional position” or “what is the rule set or ideas” versus “what is the dissent from that,” right? And like, how does each respond to the other? I think we’ve got sort of, you know, we’re going to be having – well, we’re already in it. We’re in the midst of this back and forth between the shape of things and then the dissenting voices who are like, “That shape sucks” or “That shape doesn’t work for me,” or “That’s great, but we need this too.”
CB: Yeah. So one of the things we wrote down is that all those planets congregating in Aquarius is kind of like, they’re attempting to create some sort of unified vision or some sort of unity. But the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus squaring that is acting as a disruptive influence that is sort of needling and attempting to disrupt the unity to some extent. Perhaps not super successfully while Mars is transiting through Taurus in the inferior position, but it will be interesting to see what happens later in the year when Mars gets to Leo and opposes the Aquarius planets through an opposition, which is more on par with or has parity with the Aquarius placements, or even later in the year when Mars gets into Scorpio and then Mars finds itself in the superior position where it might suddenly have the upper hand over some of the Aquarius planets.
All right, so —
AC: Exactly.
CB: That’s some of the overview. There’s one other thing this month, of course, which is the Mercury retrograde in Aquarius which casts a sort of shadow and is one of our main signatures for the entire month. But maybe… Should we start with that, or should we start doing our day-by-day breakdown? Because the Mercury retrograde starts at the very end of January, so it’s kind of like our opening thing. So we almost might as well start with it.
AC: I think so.
KS: Sure.
AC: I think that’s good.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s back it up to late January and let’s start doing our breakdown. So we can see Mercury stationing retrograde here around the 30th of January at 26 degrees of Aquarius. So that means that Mercury actually traversed most of the way through Aquarius over the course of the past month, but then it slows down and starts – it stops at that degree at 26 Aquarius and then begins moving backwards for pretty much the entirety of the month of February until eventually Mercury will station direct at 11 degrees of Aquarius around February 20th or February 21st. So it’s not just that we have an Aquarius stellium, which would already put a lot of emphasis on that sign and the energies surrounding that sign in and of itself as well as that part of everyone’s chart or everyone’s life. But Mercury going retrograde in that sign and leading to some sort of review or revision of some of the things that happened there recently is also an additional sort of overlaying signature on top of that for pretty much the entirety of February, especially the first three weeks.
So what are —
AC: Yeah, I mean, these —
CB: — some of your —
AC: — oh go ahead.
CB: No, go ahead. What were you saying?
AC: Well, in a sense, it is perfectly appropriate that this is what Mercury is doing, because all of these questions of like, oh, what are we gonna do about X, Y, or Z on all different levels, individual up to giant blocs of people? 2020 successfully posed a number of very significant questions, right, whereas 2020 was very short on answers. And now we’re coming into this position, it’s like, okay, so what are we gonna do about all this? And that’s true – you know, yes, it’s true politically, but it’s also true personally. A lot of people – myself included, I think almost all of us included – are looking at a very different swatch of terrain than what we expected. We may have expected certain features to change, but now that we’re here, you know, we’ve successfully crash landed on a new planet, and we kind of have to figure out how things are gonna work here. Right? How are we gonna do agriculture on this new planet? What kind of social mores, both legal and sort of cultural, are we gonna – how are we gonna do this? Right?
CB: Yeah. Well, and especially this feeling like, okay, we’re moving forward now, but one of the issues with Mercury retrograde is that sometimes in order to move forward you first have to go backwards. And I think that’s gonna come up in a variety of ways this month. One of the ones that’s actually really interesting that Leisa Schaim noted on Twitter was that Mercury on February 9th, which is actually the day that Trump’s impeachment trial will begin, it’s actually going to have returned or retrograded back to the degree that it was at on inauguration day when he left office on basically his last moments in power as president. So we can see on January 20th, 2021, Mercury was at 18 degrees of Aquarius, and then Mercury stations retrograde at the end of January and begins moving backwards from 26. And then when you get to February 9th, Mercury has made it back to 18 degrees of Aquarius. So interestingly, there will suddenly be this looking back on Trump’s presidency and his last moments in power, part of which was – I mean, the focus of the impeachment trial is gonna be inciting the riots that occurred on January 6th. So I’m not so much focused on that as the event or the main thing here, but I think that’s a really good example of how – or the reason why Mercury retrogrades sometimes require us to review things, because Mercury in the sky literally returns or goes back to some degree that it passed recently and therefore initiates some sort of review of some actions or some deeds that were done in the past.
KS: Yeah, and I think just building on the general Mercury retrograde theme, which is such a feature for February, because the first three weeks we have Mercury retro in Aquarius. There’s that sense of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius are trying to formulate maybe larger strategies or bigger plans or far-reaching, longer kind of changes. And Mercury retrograde there is well, what are the specifics about how we’re gonna do that? What are the actual details or the data? How can we do deals within this new paradigm, if you like? And I think the Mercury retrograde is just gonna take us deep – you know, when you go back over something, hopefully in an ideal situation you go deeper into it. And so as we come into February, there’s a sense of just going down further, personally and I’m sure we’ll see this collectively, in terms of what is possible or systemically or structurally how can we actually do this? What is going to be the strategy that makes it happen? Because we’re seeing so many things, you know, governments all around the world that are promising all kinds of things with vaccines and lockdowns or not lockdowns; there’s a bunch of different things going on that have this sort of jerky, not smooth, slightly unprepared quality, whether it’s schools open, schools closed, vaccine being rolled out, vaccine being delayed. And this is all the territory of Mercury in February is trying to deal with or sort of some of that mess or that entanglement that has not been as smooth as perhaps intended initially in January.
AC: Yeah, that’s really good. I would also say that so some of it is untangling that and figuring things out, bringing some order where there has been – would you say like, kind of jerky or inconsistent action. But I think there is also some – especially more on an individual level – is how do we do planning? How do we set expectations in an environment where a greater level of disorder is known, right? In a sense, what we saw in a lot of 2020 was it was unknown disorder; it was disruptions that we weren’t expecting. But if you know that an environment is relatively high chaos, how do you – if that’s known, to a certain degree that’s less chaotic, but you can say how do I exist in a relatively chaotic environment? Right? And you can – you know, there are better and worse plans for that. There are better and worse strategies of approach.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. So to borrow a famous phrase from a very important piece of literature recently that I know Austin is familiar with from the Song of Ice and Fire where Dani – she receives a prophecy that says in order to go forward you have to go backwards. And what was the plot point with that? She ended up having to go back to her former tribe in order to like, raise an army in order to conquer the other known world?
AC: Oh, it’s been a while. I kind of burned Game of Thrones from my mind after that last season —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — ruined everything.
CB: It was pretty rough. I’ve never seen anything like —
AC: Soldering —
CB: — change on a dime.
AC: Yeah.
CB: I’ve never seen anything drop out of like, cultural relevance as quickly as that did, what, a year or two ago now?
AC: Yes, it was —
KS: Yeah, I’m —
AC: — profoundly disappointing.
KS: The books are better.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay. All right. Well, let’s pretend that this is like, two or three years ago before we saw the last season, and that would have been a brilliant analogy to make. But just the notion of needing to – before you can go backwards, you have to go back and review something, and that’s often why Mercury retrogrades are associated with being annoying or being frustrating or there being this sense of being stuck. I mean, one of the last retrograde things we saw, you know, in November, of course, we had that Mercury retrograde square Saturn where it stationed direct square Saturn and there was this sense of like, slowness and things being drawn out and having to review and recount ballots with the votes in the United States presidential election and everything else. And this one’s a little bit different, but we get some taste of that with Mercury being in a Saturn-ruled sign. And I believe when it stations direct, it’s conjunct Saturn, which is not gonna be quite as bad as November because it’s not like, a square with Saturn like I think it was before. But there might be some taste of that idea of like, going back and reviewing things and there being a slowness or a deliberateness or a sort of exacting character to it or quality to it at the same time. But the positive side is there’s also an optimism, because I think Mercury – even though it has to go through a trial by fire by squaring Mars first at one point, it eventually stations direct and hits Jupiter when it begins moving forward again, and that’s kind of the optimistic side of this retrograde, I believe, right?
AC: Well, what’s interesting is that the direct station puts Mercury right between Jupiter and Saturn. Right? So between the problems and potential solutions. It’s not squarely on the problems, and it’s not squarely on the belief in a better future. You know, it’s dead between them. And what’s interesting is you’ll be able to see that. You’ll be able to see those three rise together just as you saw Jupiter and Saturn very tightly at the end of December. You’ll see them still close, but Mercury between them in the pre-dawn darkness. And that’s exactly – I mean, how nice a metaphor is that? Like, we’re exactly between like, “It’s not hopeless! Maybe if this happens or if we do this, we can – you know, this’ll work.” But then, you know, as an answer to very real problems, it’s pretty good.
KS: Yeah. I mean, the Mercury-Jupiter story is the one that gets activated three times, or that aspect does form at three points. We had an exact Mercury-Jupiter conjunction in January when Mercury was direct. Mercury will be retrograde conjunct Jupiter around February 14. And then the final direct Mercury-Jupiter conjunction is early March. And all of those three Mercury-Jupiter activations happen after Mercury has met Saturn, so it’s this sense of like, Mercury has been – it has got the message from Saturn about, “These are the problems” or “These are the issues,” and then Mercury goes into this three-part process with Jupiter to try and problem solve. And it just takes time. And so we’re getting another attempt at that around the middle of February when Mercury retrograde conjuncts Jupiter, but it’s still retrograde, and then we’ve gotta get it out of the retrograde and then to make that final piece. Because yeah, the conjunction with Saturn is the first conjunction that Mercury made once it moved in. But it only makes the Saturn conjunction once, and then we go into this three-part Jupiter piece, which is just an interesting symbolism where you think about if you’re Mercury and you’ve had a meeting with Saturn, and now you’ve got three meetings with Jupiter and you’re just going to keep working on things over that timeframe.
CB: Yeah. I love that. That’s a really good point.
AC: And just to that point, like, what comes out of this is more hopeful because of the three conjunctions of Mercury to Jupiter.
CB: Right.
AC: You know, I think that 2020 set the bar very low for a lot of people. And that there will be – I think that we’ll see a little rekindling of maybe some of these things which just felt like, you know, like a ton of bricks, maybe they can be shifted. Maybe some problems can be solved. Right? And it is, as we talked about, it’s in a Saturn-ruled sign, and so it’s not some like, Utopia gate. But it’s like, ah, maybe some of these things aren’t quite as insoluble as it felt like they were six months ago.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And I think that’s – I mean, that’s really something to look forward to. I like the tone of optimism that maybe we should emphasize more or that we’re kind of getting to here with that Mercury-Jupiter conjunction later in the month.
KS: Yeah. I think if I had to pick a couple of keywords about Mercury conjunct Jupiter, it does feel like positive news or welcome news or news that supports progress or something that has more of a hopeful quality to it compared to what we’ve been dealing with.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. I mean, I… Yeah. Go on.
CB: No, what were you gonna say?
KS: Are we doing Mercury-Jupiter as we talk about Mercury-Jupiter?
AC: Well, I was just going to reiterate that a lot of the configurations in 2020 made it seem, it seemed, felt, looked, sounded like there were problems that were just too big. They were impossible. And I feel like with Mercury’s extended time with Jupiter, we’re moving back not into even an actively positive place on an absolute scale, but just on the scale of where we’ve just emerged from back into a like, “Yeah, there are problems, and it’s not” – like, there’s possibility rather than just sort of like, one cramped doom-choked hallway. Like, history might have a few crossroads and the path might open up a little bit rather than just like, one dungeon tunnel, which is what a lot of 2020’s configurations felt like – Saturn-Pluto in an earth sign and all that.
We’re just moving into like, not that. Which is going to feel like utopia in a sense.
KS: Yeah, relatively speaking. But not in an absolute sense.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Got it. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And it was interesting seeing some of the reflection that was being done and the deliberate attempts around the time of like, inauguration day, for example, to do some reflecting on the fact that we – in the US at least – had reached like, 400,000 deaths in the US related to or connected to covid, which was like, a huge – I remember back when it was at like, a hundred thousand in May, and that just sounded like an impossibly high number. And to have that quadrupled. And while at the same time, now there being efforts and running into obstacles and stumbling blocks to get the covid vaccine out to everybody and figuring out the timetables for that I’m sure is gonna be related to this year. I mean, that was one of the major things about the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was just how fast that vaccine was developed being something that it was like, the first time in history something had been developed that quickly. And I don’t know if we dwelled on that enough as a really interesting side effect of the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that happened in December and the use of technology to do something which had been done before but fast-tracking the development of it much quicker than anything had in the past.
AC: Well, so two things. One, so the development of the vaccine was under Mars in Aries, which makes sense as far as fast goes, right? It was released before the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. And one of the things that we talked about wanting to look back at just very briefly was that eclipse, the solar eclipse in December, which was for the United States the release or first administration of the vaccine. And we were curious about that, because that eclipse also happened to be on Rasalhague, which is the star associated in Greek sources with Asclepius, who was the physician of the gods. We were like, that’s interesting. And so two things are very clear in retrospect. One, the vaccine wasn’t born under that, because it was – you know, it began to be administered in different countries at different times. But as the inception chart for the vaccination effort in the United States, it’s gone especially poorly. So we see the eclipse being a like, you know, a wah-wah sort of indicator for that, and then Kait pointed this out to me. This is really interesting. So the solar eclipse on the star of the divine physician, the royal physician – Trump’s wacky looking sort of ‘70s style doctor – died in the weeks following that, right? And so this was really interesting to me, because at an ancient level, the solar eclipse is death of the king, right? But this was someone who was in a sense of a royal rank. Like, the king’s physician. And having a solar eclipse on the physician star and having the king’s physician or the president’s physician die was too good. It was really interesting. It’s given me lots of new thoughts about how to think about eclipses. That maybe it’s just the royals —
KS: Super interesting.
AC: — that are affected by the eclipses, not just the one person.
CB: Right. Those around them or —
AC: So credit to Kait. Kait pointed that out to me.
CB: Those in the royal retinue?
AC: Yeah, the small council.
CB: Yeah. And then also one of the downsides that we saw towards the end of the year that’s now becoming more and more relevant or impacting more and more was I had said I think in the October or November forecast that I was nervous about the final Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in November, because in the 1918 pandemic, it was when that conjunction got really close that it wasn’t the first wave of the pandemic that was deadly but when the virus mutated in 1918 and there was a mutation, that’s when it became much more deadly around the time of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. And then, you know, in November, we had that third conjunction, and since then there has been a new variant of the virus that are more highly transmissible, which is causing complications and stuff as well over the past couple of months.
KS: Definitely.
CB: Yeah. So good times. All right, let’s go through a day by day breakdown to break down the minor points. Not minor points, but the day by day sort of breakdown of the month of February.
So here for those watching the video version, we start off the month with Mercury has just stationed retrograde, so that’s basically the first thing. And then right away, Venus on the 1st of February ingresses into Aquarius, which really begins our stellium of planets in that sign where we have five planets in that sign – Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Sun, Mercury – and then eventually later in the month the Moon will catch up to make six. So that is our opening aspect.
KS: And you could think about it, if we’ve thought about this Aquarius assembly or sort of conclave of planets, Venus is the last sort of planet to arrive other than the Moon. Sort of something is in session or something is now being considered or discussed or explored once Venus comes into Aquarius. Because we’re gonna have these five planets in Aquarius until later in the month when the Sun leaves. So it’s just an interesting, okay, now we’re all here. I know the Moon’s not there yet, but it just feels like kicking into a different gear. And of course, the one thing that I’ve got my eye on – I don’t know about you guys – is the first weekend in February, Venus will interact with Saturn and Uranus. So Venus comes up to conjunct Saturn and square Uranus, which I think is worth noting A, because we’ve got a quicker moving planet kind of setting off this longer and very important Saturn-Uranus square, but also with the rulership component of Venus being the ruler of Taurus where Uranus is. I’m curious, you know, for all of us at a personal level in our day-to-day lives how we might notice this relationally in terms of changing patterns or breaking habits, pattern breaking, in the way we interact with other people.
CB: Yeah. That’s an interesting combination, because Venus-Saturn is a colder, sort of more distant aspect, but Venus-Uranus square is usually for Venus at least a much quicker, hotter aspect. So it’s interesting seeing Venus have that rapid transition between the two.
What delineations do you have for like —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — that, like, either Venus conjunct Saturn or Venus square Uranus?
AC: To sort of follow in the wake of what Kelly was saying, you know, Venus-Saturn is about patterns of relationship and also I always think of commitments, agreements, you know, the contracts we sign with each other both formally and informally. The expectations we have of each other. And so there’s a natural sort of return to that. And because it’s Saturn, it’s like, in a sense what oaths and pledges have we upheld, which ones have been broken. You know, you have both loyalty and betrayal as themes for Venus-Saturn. But then we have the Uranus part, like, which is maybe on a constructive level what alterations could be usefully made to our understandings and agreements and patterns of commitment to one another.
CB: I like that. So what changes can be made. Go ahead, Kelly.
KS: Yeah. And it is interesting that Venus, technically, if we’re breaking down the movement or the process, it’s Venus-Saturn first, and then Venus-Uranus. So there’s something there about the clarifying responsibility, duty, obligation, commitment, agreement within relationship – maybe even assessing satisfaction levels. Am I keeping my part of the bargain; are you keeping your part of the bargain? Are we on track long-term? Is there a misfit here that we need to be honest about? All of those Venus-Saturn things. And then Venus-Uranus is, okay, well, if we still agree that our long-term goal is X or Y, are we gonna maybe try to approach it differently perhaps? Because I think Venus-Uranus has a stimulating, activating kind of approaching things differently quality.
CB: One of the things I talked about this month and did an entire episode on was the concept of reception and especially reception as a mitigating factor for difficult combinations or combinations that can be more difficult, especially with malefics. And this really reminds me of that, because we have Venus moving into Saturn’s sign, into Saturn’s domicile of Aquarius, one of its traditional signs, and then Saturn actually being there at home in Aquarius and kind of welcoming Venus and supporting it in some way. So this is one of the more like, positive case scenarios of a Venus-Saturn conjunction is Saturn welcoming and providing some resources to Venus as a guest that’s staying in their home or in their house or what have you. So I would tend to see this as a much more constructive Venus-Saturn combination of maybe positive reinforcement or you were both talking about like, looking back at or looking at and reassessing agreements and maybe trying to confirm some of those agreements or create ones that are more long-lasting or stable. And maybe revisiting the structure of relationships in a way that’s constructive and can help create ones that are more long-lasting in the future. It’s just weird that there’s this immediate square with Uranus that comes after that, because that’s something that would typically be much more surprising and destabilizing potentially when it comes to at least conventional relationships or ways of relating.
KS: Yeah, I think there’s also a pacing difference here as well that Venus-Saturn would be perhaps more methodical or slower to move through or approach things, whereas Venus-Uranus would be quite quick and perhaps a little bit impulsive or a little bit more spontaneous. So there’s also that pacing difference there as well.
CB: Right. Okay, so that’s one of our major themes already pretty much in the first week that culminates on that first weekend of February, as you said, Kelly, especially around Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then Venus keeps moving forward and departs from its conjunction with Saturn and square with Uranus and then starts heading towards a conjunction with Jupiter. Before we get there, there is a Sun-Mercury conjunction at 20 degrees of Aquarius, which occurs around February 7th, February 8th, so that marks the halfway point through Mercury’s retrograde cycle, which is usually the point in my observations when some of the problems or some of the delays that are set up at the beginning of the retrograde cycle you start to see some turn of events where things start to head in more of a constructive direction and you start to see some of the things being cleaned up, even if there’s still a lot of work to do after that point. And I think there is still work to do, because immediately after that on February 9th, February 10th, we see Mercury retrograde straight into a square with Mars, which occurs from Mercury at 17 degrees of Aquarius to Mars at 17 degrees of Taurus. And that goes exact around February 10th. So that’s like, going back and reviewing something, but there’s some sort of discord or some sort of verbal fight or tension that occurs in the process.
KS: Yeah, that feels like maybe a heated exchange or having to try to carefully navigate differences. But there is definitely a bit of a heat quality, whether it’s discord. I also think about it as agitation in the mind. So for some of us, this will manifest externally where you do have a bit of an altercation or a disagreement with someone. And for others of us, this could manifest internally where we’re just churning over something inside our brain trying to figure something out, or we’re really unsettled about a topic or a situation that we just can’t sort of find some mental peace around.
CB: Yeah. That is a really good point. All right, so after that, we enter into our first lunation of the month, which is when the Moon conjoins the Sun at 23 degrees of Aquarius on February 11th. And so this is setting a new foundation and beginning a new lunar phase that will last for approximately a month. Kelly, I know one of the things you talked about is in the days leading up to that when the Moon is moving through Aquarius, that it was interesting that you’re in the balsamic phase or you’re in the like, closing down or ending or wrapping some things up phrase of the lunar cycle as the Moon is initially moving through Aquarius around February 9th and February 10th. But then we get this sort of renewal of the luminaries that occurs on February 11th.
KS: Yeah. And that was partially in the context of the Mercury retrograde square Mars aspect, which can sometimes have, like, you know, Mars has that cutting quality or maybe endings or severing tone. And I did wonder about that Mercury-square-Mars being about dealing with information or decisions or data relating to a transition or an ending of some kind. And the Moon phase at the time seemed to reinforce that quality of something is coming to either its natural conclusion or a timely conclusion, and you know, transitions are always tender times where we can feel a little bit more vulnerable as we transition out of something and into something new. So that Mercury-Mars square with the balsamic or dark Moon phase did feel like, you know, if you have to end something or you need to talk about something that might be a little uncomfortable, that might be a day where those kinds of conversations are happening. And then —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — the New Moon day is totally different.
CB: Yeah.
KS: At least —
CB: I really like this New Moon just because what happens simultaneously is not only does Mercury start moving away from that more confrontational square with Mars, but we get the exact Venus-Jupiter conjunction around 12 degrees of Aquarius around the same time or within the same 24 hour period around February 11th. And that’s one of our most sort of optimistic and positive aspects this month in terms of unity and accord and other sort of good vibes in Aquarius.
KS: Yeah. That New Moon day that the movement or the application of the planets is definitely on the up and up. Yeah, the two benefics coming together. There is a sense of agreement or conciliation, support, even just finding common ground or finding something that you can agree on about how to move forward or the way to move forward or what you wanna focus on as you move forward. I think there’s something about that Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Aquarius which is there’s a togetherness quality and there’s a forward-looking or a forward-moving quality to that as well.
CB: Yeah. So Austin, we were just talking about the New Moon on the 11th at 23 Aquarius and the beginning of that new lunar cycle, and the sort of optimism of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction at 12 Aquarius that’s occurring simultaneously.
KS: What are your thoughts on Venus —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — Jupiter, Austin?
AC: I think – well, so Venus-Jupiter is, you know, in and of itself always a positive combination, right? It is the two benefics; it is the two goods, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: Two —
KS: Double good.
AC: — fundamental flavors of good. And you know, to a certain degree, we have a more personal, relational, felt personal good with Venus, and then we have like, a larger sometimes more collective, sometimes more philosophical but less tangible good with Jupiter. And so the conjunction of the two goods is, you know, we might say it’s double plus good. In Aquarius, I think what we’re looking at and what we’ll be feeling is sort of a preview of if we can get this right, what the rewards might be. Right? Like, if we can figure this out, like, you know, it’s opening a window on the rewards of successful adaptation to this new environment. Right? Like, if we can just get X, Y, and Z right, then this is a real possibility, and I hadn’t even thought that it could be that good. Right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: It’s like opening a window into a little slice of a heaven realm that maybe you thought that the gate was permanently closed to. I think it’s very forward-looking, but it’s also, you know, there are many destinations that are not – you would never arrive there unless you knew that it was possible to get there in —
KS: Yes.
AC: — order to direct yourself there. And I think it’s really also important that Mercury has just done that square to Mars —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — and is now moving into Venus —
KS: Yes!
AC: — and Jupiter.
KS: Yes.
AC: Right? So the thinking, like the planning function is like, okay, there’s this bump in the road; there’s this problem; there’s this issue with Mars, but it’s like, moving into that, but what if we could solve that? Or what if I —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — could solve that? Look at the possible rewards of this. And so it just really kind of keeps pinging back on the main theme. One thing I would just add to the Sun and Moon lining up, that’s right on Deneb Algedi, which is a fixed star that is very strongly associated with just and fair – like, a morally decent order. It’s orderly; it’s sort of like if Saturn was a good-hearted grandpa rather than like, a cranky old bastard. There’s a certain decency. It’s moral and it’s lawful, right, but it’s like, in a D&D sense, it’s like, somebody who’s actually lawful good, not just interested – it’s like Saturn, but it’s not punitive. And I think that that attempt, that desire to develop order in a way that is also moral is just a huge part of all this stuff in Aquarius. And it’s certainly something people are, you know, that’s not a surprising theme for where we’re at in history.
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s a good point. We don’t often talk about the moral standpoint of Aquarius, but the idea of like, morality is kind of actually a core sort of Aquarian vibe and Aquarian thing.
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot of should to Aquarius.
CB: Right. A lot of should and a lot of like, what is the greater good for society or humanity or what have you.
AC: Yeah. And that’s part of the, I think, the frustration that planets in Aquarius often have is looking at what is and then feeling the abyss between what is and what should.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. All right, so this is kind of the height of our stellium basically is this New Moon that takes place on February 11th. And one thing I wanna tie this into a little bit like, natal charts and people’s natal charts because I think that helps to ground some of the abstractness of our like, mundane discussion. But I went through – actually, after we did the year ahead forecast – I went through and actually did horoscopes for all 12 rising signs last month, and I made it more manageable by like, cutting it down to 10 or 15 minutes per rising sign. But I really love doing that as an exercise because it helps you to ground, you know, what house is this taking place in in each person’s chart, and how is something like a stellium or a cluster of planets gonna be relevant for each person. And that’s really one of the primary ways is just what house does it fall in in your birth chart. Are there any notable things that you’ve seen developing with some of the Aquarius planets starting to shift into or some of the planets starting to shift into Aquarius lately like, in client charts or anything like that?
AC: I can definitely see people in my personal life – I can see like, every house that is energized or every house that is Aquarius, I can see like, oh, big things are about to happen there. You know, whether you’re Cancer rising or Libra rising or whoever. I haven’t been doing clients this last month, so I don’t have any like, awesome examples. Kelly, have you been doing any clients lately, or are you – you’ve been on a hiatus, right?
KS: Just for the last 10 days or so, but I did do some at the start of the year. What was the question?
AC: Chris was asking —
CB: I was talking about —
AC: Go ahead.
CB: I was talking about doing – I did rising sign horoscopes for all 12 rising signs, and it’s nice to ground some of these discussions in what house is this gonna fall in, especially what whole sign house, in each person’s natal chart in order to, you know, oftentimes tie it more into their life in a more personal way. And with something like a stellium where you’d have all the planets like, clustering in a single sign, sometimes it’s a little easier to see how that’s manifesting in somebody’s life. And I was asking Austin if he started to see any major shifts for clients, for example, with Jupiter and Saturn moving into Aquarius and starting to activate that house in their chart.
KS: Yes. I’m just having a little think. I think, yeah, there is a real sense of it’s almost so literal you don’t have to work hard to get the topics, if you like.
CB: Right.
KS: You know, I’ve got one client who’s just come to mind who this is 10th house, and there’s just so much going on professionally for them in terms of their standing in the world. Like, their standing in their career, but also some stuff about relationally the terms that they’re defined by, not defined by regarding their relationship. So in some ways, it’s almost like, if you’ve got a good grasp of the house, if you have a deep understanding of the houses, you’ll get how this is gonna show up for you, I think.
AC: Yeah, I think that the point that you initially made is especially valid, Kelly. Like, it’s gonna be pretty obvious for most people. Right? It’s not —
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: — it’s going to be an astrology being literal thing. It’s like, oh, you know, if you’re Leo rising, what’s going on in relationships? It’s in the 7th. If you’re Aquarius rising, what’s going on with you and everything? You know, if you’re a Capricorn rising, what’s going on with your money, right?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: If you’re Taurus rising, what’s going on with your career, since it’ll be in your 10th house.
AC: Yeah.
KS: One hundred percent. Yes. Yeah, I’m thinking about someone I know with… One person with Libra rising where it’s in the 5th, and there’s a lot going on with children and what’s happening with their children routines, and their —
CB: Right.
KS: — commitments to their kid versus that’s changing. And then someone else with Scorpio rising who’s having this in the 4th house where it’s all about what’s happening with their home situation and their living arrangement. So it is very – I think, yeah, it’s almost so literal you don’t have to work hard to get to it.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, we’ve got some themes then that people should think about in a broad sense of going back and reviewing something since we have the Mercury retrograde. We have some of the Saturn issues, which first made themselves known almost a year ago with Saturn dipped into Aquarius for a few months in the second quarter of 2020. And it would have oftentimes for a lot of people I’m hearing reports of it having been a much more challenging and difficult time, because of course Mars went in and conjoined Saturn in Aquarius at the same time. So there was usually some obstacle that came up or some major difficulty that came up at that time. But here, this month especially even though Saturn is back and there may be some challenges or difficulties that come up that have to be worked through or pushed through over the course of the next three years, this month it seems like we’re talking more about largely positive and affirming developments because we have the conjunction of the two benefics taking place in that sign and helping maybe to balance things out and to repair some difficulties or discord that may have been there recently.
KS: Yes.
AC: Yeah. And I think it’s – I’ve kind of said this four different ways, but I think it bears repeating. Saturn is there, and so it’s in – and ruling the sign – and so it’s in all of these solutions and happy possibilities are in the presence of the problems. It’s much more solutions to problems and gains and goods as a result, rather than a gain or a good that is outside of the context of a problem. Right? Because we can just —
KS: I’ve got a great example —
AC: — add a new good thing, or we can solve a problem; both are a net gain. But they’re different feelings and dynamics.
KS: Yeah. As you were saying that, I’m like, I know I have one client story in here! And this client, I’m not gonna reveal a lot of details about her but she has given permission for her chart to be used for teaching purposes. She’s Cap rising, so this is all 2nd house for her – Aquarius 2nd house. She works in the airline industry, and she’s at a level of seniority where she still has a job for now, but her current job involves laying out staff at the moment. And when she’s through having to do that, she herself will go into a redundancy sort of situation. So there’s this sense of the Venus-Jupiter, the redundancy will be great; she’s been with the company for a really long time. But we’re still dealing with Saturn in the 2nd; what will you actually do for income, you know, after that kind of thing? So to your point, Austin, about it’s Venus-Jupiter in the context of the presence of Saturn. That’s a little bit of kind of both going on there, I guess.
AC: Yeah, it makes sense.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, let’s get back to our day-by-day breakdown then. We made it up to like, February 11th, which is when the Aquarius stellium sort of culminates and the culmination of the concentration of that energy. Of course, since it’s a New Moon, that’s gonna carry over, and a lot of the energy of this chart right here in front of us with the Aquarius stellium is gonna be imprinted on the next 28 days or so of the lunar month. But moving after that point, we see the next day on February 12th/February 13th that the Mercury retrograde conjoins Venus, it looks like, at about 14, 15 degrees of Aquarius. Venus is actually cruising; it’s moving really fast at this point because —
KS: She’s quick, yeah. She’s heading —
CB: So close to the Sun.
KS: — towards the Sun. Yeah.
CB: Okay. And then shortly after that on February 14th, this is one of my favorite aspects of the month on Valentines Day – Mercury meets up with and conjoins Jupiter at 13 degrees of Aquarius. So it’s just really nice, like, after we get through the sort of tension at the very least, and in the worst case scenario the discord of the retrograde Mercury square Mars aspect, it just like, you know, runs into the arms of both of the benefics shortly after that. And we have some easing or some cooling off of some of those tensions shortly thereafter towards the later part of the retrograde cycle.
Then a few days after that on February 17th, we get our key and probably most important mundane aspect of the month, which is the very first exact Saturn-Uranus square from seven degrees of Aquarius to seven degrees of Taurus on February 17th. So this is an aspect that we first started to feel forming and started to see hints of in the world at large last year after Saturn went into and got to about two degrees of Aquarius, it started that sign-based square between Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus. And there were two like, major waves of protests that we saw. First there were some of the like, lockdown protests that were happening around May-ish after Saturn went into Aquarius. And then in June, we saw more social protests and unrest with things like the George Floyd protests. So to me, that was sort of like a preview of some of the different types of potentially protests and other things to come, and it’ll be interesting to see with the very first exact aspect what version of that we might be looking at here in mid-February.
KS: Yeah, I mean just to make sure we don’t —
AC: I kind of feel like it’s all in motion already.
KS: I think there’s just a little delay. Sorry.
CB: Yeah, I think we saw in January, for example, we saw a very similar echo from more of the let’s say right wing type protests from the “stop the steal” crowd and everything going on with that, which is sort of to me an echo of the anti-lockdown protests, which tended to be more right-leaning in May. It will be interesting to see if we do see social protests from the left in a similar way in the same way that we sort of saw to a certain extent in June of last year.
AC: Yeah. I would also add that per the Navalny protests in Russia, if we’re gonna do left/right, would probably be left, right? They’re like, anti-authoritarian, you know, pro-democratic. And so we’ve already had a variety of things pop off. As I’ve said a couple times, like, Saturn-Uranus is not partisan. It’s not like, just this group protesting just that group. It’s wherever and however that dynamic can occur. And we’ve already had like, a good smattering. And we’re likely – like you were saying, Chris – within the United States, it’s unlikely to just stay on one side. Right? Like, the Saturn-Uranus is gonna get everybody’s attention, because there’s —
CB: Well, and —
AC: — the center, and then the periphery is not one thing.
CB: Yeah. And it’s interesting, also, because sometimes Saturn is the establishment or those in power, and it’s interesting over the past year then how there’s just recently been a flip of that where suddenly we went from one administration being in power to literally overnight like, another administration being in power, and therefore some of those dynamics changing. And it was interesting to me thinking about, like, that inauguration chart, for example, suddenly coming into play. Or also some of the ancient ideas about like, the king’s chart being relevant for the country as a whole at that time and thinking about what that meant for, you know, Trump’s chart to be relevant for the entire country in the US, at least, for the past four years versus suddenly Biden’s chart and whatever transits are happening to it being relevant over the course of the next four years or however long he’s, you know, the head of the state, basically. Just thinking back to some of your reflections from December about, you know, some of those ancient rules for something happening and it affecting the royal court.
Okay. So Saturn-Uranus peaks there right in the middle of February around February 17th. And then moving back to our day-by-day breakdown, the next thing happens on February 18th when the Sun moves into Pisces and suddenly the Aquarius stellium starts to break up, basically the band breaks up starting February 18th, and we start getting some movements into Pisces and into the mutable signs later in the month.
So Sun into Pisces, Mercury eventually stations direct a couple days later on February 20th. And this is the Mercury direct station ending three weeks of retrograde. It stations right in between Saturn and Jupiter, which is not too bad, not too shabby. Venus – there is a Venus that I didn’t mark down, but there is a Venus-Mars square that occurs around that time from —
KS: On the 19th, yeah.
CB: On the 19th, okay. From 22 Aquarius to 22 Taurus. How do you feel about that? It’s interesting, again, coming back to the idea of reception, because Mars is moving through Venus’s sign, and then Venus squares Mars exactly, which would be a case of reception – I don’t know to what extent that’s gonna – I mean, normally, if this was a birth chart, I would say that would take some of the edge off of that square. Is that how you guys usually interpret receptions?
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s a one way reception, right? The reception is not mutual. Venus —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — can help Mars, but Mars can’t help Venus. Venus says, “ah, you’re in Taurus! That’s my spring home. Let me give you a tour.” Whereas Mars doesn’t have any – Mars can’t help Venus navigate the end of Aquarius in the same way.
KS: No. And in fact, he might throw a little bit of a hot potato at her to have to juggle while she’s —
AC: That’s clearly what Mars in Taurus —
KS: — on her way out.
AC: — does when it attacks is the potato gun.
KS: Hot potatoes!
AC: Right?
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah. I think it’ll be like, a bump. A manageable bump. You know, there’s some friction. It’s Venus-Mars.
AC: I agree.
KS: Sometimes there’s friction that can lead to, you know, sparks. Sparks might fly. Can be good or bad. But it’s a little bump.
CB: Yeah. Let’s see. So —
AC: Yeah. I mean, Mars has already squared Saturn and Mercury a couple times, and Jupiter. Like, we’ve had these – in a sense, we could frame the Venus-Mars square is the last of the squares from planets in Aquarius to Mars —
KS: Yes.
AC: — or vice versa. Right? It’s like, the last part of a theme that is not going to be surprising at all at that point.
CB: Right. So this is at the Mercury direct station; that’s actually – that coincides with, and that’s what we picked up on to focus on for our auspicious electional chart for the month. So I should probably talk about that, which is scheduled for February 21st, 2021, starting at about 11 AM local time. So set the chart to about 11 AM in your location, whatever city you’re living in, and adjust the chart so that it has about seven degrees or so of Gemini rising or put the Ascendant in the sign of Gemini. So what you’ll end up with is a chart with Gemini rising and Mercury stationing direct ruling the Ascendant placed in Aquarius in the 9th whole sign house. So this will pick up some of the sort of vibes of Mercury moving direct again as well as having that conjunction with Jupiter, and Venus still being in the same sign of Aquarius copresent with Mercury. Mercury’s also conjunct Saturn, which can be a little bit slowing, but I don’t think that’s too bad because it’s a day chart, and there’s also some form of reception between them even though Mercury doesn’t complete the conjunction with Saturn.
The Moon is in Gemini around the later degrees of Gemini, and in our location at least, and I think even on the west coast and certainly any locations east of Denver – like the east coast of the US or other cities – the Moon should be applying to a trine with Venus in Aquarius, which is at 25 degrees of Aquarius and the Moon is at 24-ish Gemini, applying to a trine with that. So the Moon is relatively well-positioned; it also has superior trines from both Venus and Jupiter, which are overcoming the Moon and bonifying it, which makes it actually kind of useful as a 2nd house election to some extent because the Moon is the ruler of the 2nd house and it’s relatively well-placed.
So this chart is primarily focused on 9th house matters because the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 9th house with both of the benefics. So it would be a good chart for things like education, developing one’s learning, either academically but also potentially since the 9th house is the place of religion and philosophy it could be good or could be used for something like that as well. The 9th house is also a good house for publishing things. I know the 9th house came up for me when I published my book on Hellenistic astrology, so publishing things is a good thing for this. Obviously due to the circumstances, I don’t wanna recommend this necessarily for travel. This might normally be a decent election for traveling or long-distance travel, but that seems like not something that’s happening very much this year. And it’s been funny seeing astrologers have to like, navigate around when they see 9th house stuff come up and whether to talk about travel or not.
What are some other like, 9th house topics that you guys use or would associate with things like this?
KS: I always like to use —
AC: I think you covered it.
KS: — the, yeah. I mean, you definitely hit all the highlights. But I always like to think about it’s the house where the Sun has its joy. So I think about the wisdom pathways, whether that’s studying astrology or philosophy or other pathways to kind of contextualize or take meaning from.
CB: Yeah, definitely. Go ahead, Austin.
AC: So one thing about this that’s not particularly 9th house but the fact that it’s right on the Mercury stationing direct, which in terms of destination is a switch from Mercury getting closer to Saturn to changing, you know, doing a U-turn and then heading towards Jupiter. If there’s something that needs to be turned around, right, this is a turn around energy election.
CB: Yeah. Like, especially if you just went back and you’re finishing a period of revising or re-looking at and going back and retooling something, then this is a great thing for once you’ve reached the end of that process and you’re ready to sort of relaunch or begin moving forward again after a period of going on kind of like, a discursion or a review phase.
So this is one of my favorite electional charts of the year. Leisa and I are gonna record – we found three other charts for the month of February that we’re gonna talk about on The Auspicious Elections Podcast when we record that either later today or tomorrow to release for patrons through our page on Patreon. And then I don’t know if I mentioned, but we actually did launch in December our Year Ahead 2020 Electional Astrology Report where we went through and highlighted one electional chart for the next 12 months for the entire year of 2021. And that’s also available – you can find that on my website, which is ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com.
All right, so that’s our electional chart for the month. And then we basically get into the end game transits of February where not just the Sun, but also eventually Venus on February 25th shifts into the sign of Pisces, which is the sign of its exaltation, and departs from and further kind of breaks up the great assembly of 2021 in Aquarius.
So Venus —
KS: It’s really striking to see that, because from the start of the month where we had the assembly to now, there is that sense of like, spaciousness or shifting focus onto different topics just starting to extend out and not being so blinkered or single-minded in focus.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. Well, it’s sort of… Once policy has been decided, once you’ve got a plan, you’re like, okay, this is what I’m gonna do for the next while, then there’s the moving onto doing it. Right? And doing it as various things pop up, you know, we talked about how this is the movement of planets into mutable signs, which continues and expands in March. You know, because you set a plan, and then there’s like, all this stuff that happens, right, that wasn’t according to plan, and how do you stick to the plan? How do you maybe edit or adapt the plan how things actually went? And it’s the very beginning of okay, let’s see how this goes. But it’s not that – yeah, it’s what happens next inevitably after you try to fix things into a particular shape.
KS: Yeah, that’s a great point.
CB: That makes sense.
AC: You can just imagine – I just imagine people leaving the big meeting —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — and being like, okay, well, we’ll see how it goes. I gotta go, you know, pick up groceries; all right, I gotta go, you know, I got this class I’m going to. Like, you know, after the coming together, everybody kind of goes in their different directions.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
CB: And that shift away from the fixed signs and towards the mutable signs is completed at the very end of the month when on February 27th, we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Virgo at it looks like about eight or nine degrees of Virgo, right?
KS: Yeah —
CB: Or late —
KS: — I think, yeah. Nine.
CB: Actually, yeah, late – eight degrees. You’re right. So if a lunation at eight degrees of Virgo, and I noted that this lunation – because it’s at eight Virgo and the nodes at this point are at 16 Gemini and 16 Sagittarius, this Full Moon then is at the bendings sort of at the halfway point or almost at the bendings, the halfway point, between the eclipses once we start getting mutable lunations basically. So we’re halfway between our eclipses. Our Gemini eclipse, for example, in November and some of the other mutable eclipses in Gemini and Sagittarius that are coming up three months from now.
KS: Yes, that’s a good point.
CB: All right. So how are you guys feeling about this lunation?
KS: Well, I —
AC: Pretty good!
KS: Yeah. It’s —
AC: Go ahead, Kelly.
KS: Yeah, I mean, I kind of like it. I mean, I think it’s gonna be nice to have a little bit of a Virgo emphasis to maybe get organized, to think practically about things. I love the symbolism of two things for this Full Moon, the Full Moon being like a light in the darkness because it’s gonna be a bright Moon in the half of the zodiac that doesn’t have anything else in it at the moment, and —
CB: Right.
KS: — I think about two things of that. Like, are you the light in the darkness for someone else, or do you find something that represents the kind of hope of what finding a light in the dark is? you know, it’s that sort of revelatory quality. That’s a little bit more symbolic rather than like, pure astro, but something about the visual component of that speaks to me. And I also like that this Full Moon is ruled by the newly stationed direct Mercury in Aquarius, which is now definitively moving towards Jupiter. And I think this is sort of, you know, the point at which a workable plan that can achieve some sort of tangible outcome or impact starts to make itself known, whether it happens right around the Full Moon or in the days following as Mercury gets closer to Jupiter. But there is a sense of like, this is how we’re gonna try and do the things that we’ve been talking about. So that’s my thoughts. What about you, Austin?
AC: I think those are really good thoughts. I mean, that’s basically what I was thinking. You know, we have the bright Moon illuminating all of the details, right? Because you know, this grand convocation in Aquarius has a lot of ideas about how things are gonna go, right?
KS: Yes!
AC: But in order to actually do the travel, for things to move, all the earth stuff needs to be handled. And it’s nice, because it is an inflection point in an earth sign that is not a malefic. Right? Like, Mars is in Taurus, and that’s practical but it’s contentious. You know, Uranus is in Taurus, but in many ways contradicting the normally stabilizing events that occur in Taurus, whereas the Moon is stabilizing. A Full Moon is very pro manifestation. And so it’s like, a nice, stabilizing positive thing in an earth sign, which I think we could all use at that point. Especially if any of those grand ideas which we came up with are going to manifest.
CB: Right. It’s interesting that it’s like, the grand ideas that we came up with that are being initiated were initiated under the Aquarius – that like, forward-thinking Aquarius – New Moon that happened two weeks earlier in February. But then the full manifestation of that is the Full Moon that occurs two weeks later here on February 27th when you really have to get down to the details of like, what is the practical implementation of this – what is that gonna look like? And it’s interesting and kind of fitting for a Full Moon happening right after that here in Virgo.
KS: Helpful, we might even say.
AC: It’s a nice fit.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is our second lunation of the month; it occurs right towards the end. And that’s basically looking at my planetary alignments —
KS: That’s it!
CB: — calendar, that’s basically the final major thing for the month. There’s the calendar again showing our Full Moon on the 27th right there at the end, and that’s pretty much a wrap. That’s pretty much the astrology for the month of February. Is there anything we left out in terms of major alignments or major astrological details?
KS: February is a short month, isn’t it? It’s like, oh! We’re at the end already!
CB: Well, yeah. We’re used to like, last month doing the entire year ahead. So it’s funny bringing it back down to just breaking down the individual details of a single month. It almost seems like, you know, we’re supposed to be saying so much more, but we’re just talking about a very small slice of time.
KS: Yeah, I think we covered the highlights. The good parts and the parts to watch out for.
CB: Okay, cool. Something I forgot to do, which I should do at this point, is plug our sponsor for this episode, which is The Mountain Astrologer Magazine. Are you guys familiar with this publication?
KS: Yes.
AC: I am.
CB: You have some familiar? I believe both of you have been published at different points in this magazine, right?
KS: Yes, I have.
AC: Yes indeed.
KS: Yes.
CB: All right. Well, here’s our little —
KS: It’s a great publication. Highly recommend it.
CB: — promo image for The Mountain Astrologer Magazine or TMA as it’s lovingly called. Here’s the cover of the latest issue which I actually just got in the mail a few days ago. So The Mountain Astrologer Magazine is a print publication or it’s a bimonthly magazine on astrology that is made – it’s produced – by professional astrologers for students of astrology as well as professional astrologers. I wrote down some notes for it. So TMA, like I said, bimonthly. You get six issues per year. It’s affordable; it’s educational; it has articles written by professional astrologers, which includes forecasts, news and events, cartoons, horoscopes, book reviews, and a bunch of other different things. It’s available in both print and in a digital version, and you can actually download the digital version to your browser as a PDF, which I really appreciate because I like having a PDF version of digital stuff. And it’s also pretty affordable so you can buy a print subscription for 46 dollars for one year, and it actually comes with digital access for that entire year, so you can get both the PDF and the print version. They also have a bunch of back issues that are available digitally for sale for just like, seven or eight dollars each, which is amazing because they have a whole archive going back 30-something years at this point. And it’s just a pretty good publication, so I’m excited – I’m actually genuinely excited to talk about and promote them because I think it’s one of those things that most students of astrology should know about and I wish more people in the younger generation did know about it. I know you, Austin, you found it like, relatively early in your studies.
AC: Yeah. I bought a giant stack of used Mountain Astrologers when I – I don’t know – in like, year one or two of being interested in astrology. And it was hugely helpful. You know, I got turned onto so many ideas and things and astrologers; it was immensely helpful.
CB: Yeah. And Kelly, you have written like, a lot. How many articles have you written for TMA at this point? Like a dozen?
KS: Oh, no no no. Maybe half a dozen? I can’t —
CB: Okay.
KS: — remember. It does ship internationally, because I remember saving up to get a subscription when I lived in Australia, and that was before they had the digital edition. But I think you can still get – actually, I still get my copies shipped to Canada. Yeah, so it just gives you exposure to like, a quality cross-section of what’s happening in astrology, and there’s the articles which are great, but you also get info about upcoming events and things like that, which will be more relevant in a post-covid kind of world, but yeah. I remember getting my first article published there in I think it was back in 2008 and just feeling like, you know, it was like winning the lotto. It was great.
CB: Yeah, it’s like, something everybody does at some point. It’s like a milestone in one’s career as a professional astrologer, getting published in TMA. And it’s actually – I would encourage younger astrologers that are still trying to build a name for themselves, I think TMA is always looking for article submissions. So if you have a good topic, you know, try writing in to them.
So people can find out more information about that at MountainAstrologer.com, I believe is the URL. Yes, MountainAstrologer.com. So check it out.
All right, guys. I think we have reached the end of our forecast episode. What do the two of you have planned for the coming months? I think you’re both launching new classes and stuff again since we’re at the beginning of the year. Kelly, what do you have going on?
KS: Yeah, so I have a new course called “Your Guiding Lights,” which is a deep dive into the sect light and the ruler of the Ascendant in the chart. So it’s a four-part training which will start March 1st. It’ll help you get better at birth chart interpretation and it’ll also help you kind of figure out how to hone in some of the key things. Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful! Thanks, Chris – that’s great.
CB: It is a beautiful image, isn’t it?
KS: Yes. We have to thank Tony. The course is hosted through Astrology University, and he’s got a great eye for things. So yeah, it’s sort of a general interest course – probably not suitable for beginners, but if you do have some understanding of aspects and you just wanna go a little bit deeper into chart interpretation, there’s that. And of course, I always have my monthly astrology guide subscription, which operates just like a Patreon, but it’s available through my website – KellysAstrology.com – and that has lots of info about all the different aspects that are forming each week. So I create some exclusive content for that. Thank you so much, Chris, for these wonderful visuals!
CB: Yeah. I am – this is a professional operation here that I’m running at this point —
KS: Yes!
CB: — which is funny from the like, ragtag if you go back and look at like, our first forecast episodes and us just like, throwing things together on the fly.
So people can find out more information about all of your classes and other offerings on your website, which is KellysAstrology.com, right?
KS: Yes. Thank you so much.
CB: Okay. And Austin, what do you got going on this month?
AC: Well, I’ll be opening enrollment for my year-long astrology classes towards the end of the month. But on the very first day of the month, there’s a series that I elected coming out through Sphere and Sundry. It is an utterly voluptuous Venus in Taurus series. Got nice Venus-Moon in Taurus in the 10th, day and hour of Venus. It’s from that little part of the very beginning of the quarantine when everyone was enjoying their time off work with their family; they were baking cookies —
CB: Nice.
AC: It was one of the only really beautiful moments that Venus had in 2020. And so that is the Empress series, and that Sphere and Sundry will be releasing that on the 1st.
CB: Awesome. What is the URL for that?
AC: SphereAndSundry.com.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I believe that’s correct. It’s SphereAndSundry.com with the “and” typed out.
AC: It’ll be in the show notes.
CB: Okay. I’ll put a link to it. Here’s the beautiful website for Sphere and Sundry, designed by Kaitlin Coppock and her awesome web design skills. So people can check that out there; I’ll put a link to it in the description below. And do you have anything else coming out, Austin?
AC: Well, just the big announcement about classes, and I believe that I’ll also be opening readings back up. That’ll be towards the end of the month. And that’ll be at AustinCoppock.com. I might very well have a shiny new website at that point. This Aquarian hyper stellium is a lot of rebuilds for me and getting my spaceship repaired so it’s not torn —
CB: Definitely.
AC: — apart in the void of the future.
CB: That would be a great thing to use that Mercury retrograde election for is like, launching a new website once Mercury stations direct and spending a few weeks retooling it leading up to that.
AC: I agree.
CB: Yeah —
KS: Oh, yeah!
CB: Maybe somebody already thought of that. All right! As for myself, I’m gonna keep doing The Astrology Podcast. The podcast has become my main thing, much to my surprise, over the past five to six years. Thanks to all the patrons who support it through Patreon.com. We get people early access to new episodes as well as other bonus content for being patrons. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Subscribe.
Something I realized last month is I don’t mention frequently enough – because I assume everybody knows about it – but I actually wrote a book on ancient astrology, which is titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune. It’s available both in print in fine bookstores everywhere as well as as an ebook through Google Books. So you can find out more information about that at HellenisticAstrology.com, and the book is a nice complement to my online course on Hellenistic astrology which is something where you can basically learn how to interpret birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, guided readings of ancient texts, and it’s pretty much suitable for beginner, intermediate, and advanced students of astrology. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right. And speaking of books, I’m gonna keep – Austin, you showed me a preview of your amazing illustrations for 36 Faces, and I’m even more excited about that. I know that’s like, one of the big – everybody’s talking about how they can’t get a copy of this book and they’re waiting for the new version to come out because the last one went out of print like, years ago now. So are you possibly gonna grace us with that at some point in 2021?
AC: Soon.
CB: Soon.
AC: I’m not gonna promise dates, but soon! There’s very little left to do, but you know about the last five, 10 percent of a project, right?
CB: Yes. That is always the hardest – you gotta make that final push when you’re already running on empty at that point, and that’s always the toughest part.
And then Kelly, your long awaited book on secondary progressions – do you think we might – how are you doing on that?
KS: It will come this year, but I can’t say when! I think I’m like Austin and I’m like, there’s just… Last year, it was obviously not what was expected or planned. But it is still being worked on. In fact, I did a little bit of work on it today, which was fun. Yeah, there’s just so many examples; I have too many examples. But yes. It is still being actively worked on, I think is the best thing to say.
CB: Awesome. Well, everyone is looking forward to that. We’re all rooting for you both to get those books out, and I’m really looking forward to doing some episodes and some interviews with both of you on those topics at some point when the books are out. So I guess we will take a rain check until when it’s time later this year.
KS: Thank you.
CB: All right guys.
KS: It’s great to have the interest and support. It’s good. Thank you.
CB: Yes. Everyone keep encouraging Kelly to work on that secondary progressions book, because it’s gonna be really good when it’s out.
Thanks for doing the forecast with me today, guys, and thanks everybody who joined us in the live audience for the live recording of this. We appreciate you and your comments during the live chat always end up informing the discussion to some extent and taking it in different directions. So thanks for that today.
Yeah, and I guess we’ll be back again next month for the forecast for March, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: Okay. Excellent. Well, I’ll be looking forward to it. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck next month, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Bye!
KS: Thanks everyone!
[END CREDITS]
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