The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 513, titled:

Recurrence Transits in Astrology

With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best

Episode originally released on November 29, 2025

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/11/29/recurrence-transits-in-astrology/

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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 “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released December 9th, 2025

Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about a technique known as recurrence transits and doing an introductory workshop on this topic and on this otherwise not very well-known technique in the English-speaking world. So hey, Nick; welcome – thanks for joining me. 

NICK DAGAN BEST: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me back. It’s great to be here. 

CB: Yeah. So this is a big technique. This is a technique that you have actually been talking about for a while for many years now that I’ve just been finally starting to come around to over the past few years, and I finally feel confident about the technique and ready to talk about and give a workshop on it, and I’m excited to do this with you. So let’s start by defining the technique really quickly at the beginning just to give people an idea of what we’re gonna be talking about. 

So a recurrence transit – the premise of a recurrence transit is that when there’s an aspect between two planets in a person’s birth chart that at some point in the future when that aspect repeats in the sky between those same two planets, that an important event or moment will happen in that person’s life. So for example, let’s say if a person was born with a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in their birth chart, then at some point in the future when Venus and Jupiter align in a conjunction in the sky, that will coincide with an important moment or an important turning point in that person’s life. And this can apply to other aspects as well so that there’s this repeat or replication or recurrence of a natal planetary alignment in a mundane aspect in the sky. Is that a good definition of it? 

NDB: Yeah, that’s pretty good. Yeah, if you have a given aspect in your chart, and on any given day that same aspect is repeated by the same two planets, even if those two bodies aren’t making any kind of zodiacal or aspectual type of contact to the natal chart, just that repetition of having the same two bodies in the same configuration in your birth chart and on a given day, that is still a transit of sorts. It’s true; it’s not something you read about much in astrology texts or what have you, not in the English world. But they are transits just as much as the ones that we do learn and study and use, the ones that do – you know, if Saturn makes a trine to your Sun and that kind of thing. We understand transits at that level. These are no less or more important, but it’s really a matter of the geometry between these two bodies being repeated, being echoed or mirrored on a given day. 

CB: Right. So it’s like, there’s a transiting aspect that mirrors an aspect that was found in a given nativity. Or the way I was formulating it last night was if a person is born under a specific celestial alignment, then important moments in their life will happen when the same celestial alignment reoccurs in the sky. And that kind of covers like, a very broad category of this technique and some of the like, subsets of it, I think, that we’ve been working on over the past few years. And one of the things you said that’s important about this is this is really different than how we’re used to thinking about transits and how transits are usually defined. Because strictly speaking, usually a transit is when a planet in the sky makes an aspect to a planet or a point in the birth chart. But in this instance, we’re talking about an alignment in the birth chart being repeated in the sky, so that’s quite different than how contemporary transit theory is usually conceptualized, at least in the English-speaking world. 

NDB: Yeah. Certainly it’s something that I’ve never come across in any text whatsoever, until earlier today when you shared a German one with me that I didn’t know existed until you shared it. But yeah. It’s not something anyone reads about. The only reason I learned about them was my teacher, Michael Lutin, when I was taking a class with him in 1999, 2000. 

CB: So one of the things that you said, because you lectured on this back at UAC in 2012, and you said that these transits can be extremely powerful even if they don’t make a zodiacal contact to any point in a given chart. And I think that’s so crucial, and that’s one of the disconnects and it’s one of the issues I had for years, because I’d been aware of this technique through you since the mid- to late 2000s. But my understanding and grounding in transit theory, it’s always been very strong that it’s like, for a transit to be relevant – for something in the sky in the present to be relevant to an individual, it has to be aspecting something in their birth chart. And if it’s not, then it’s not gonna be personally relevant. But in this technique, it actually shows a way in which the alignment of the planets in the sky currently, if it’s repeating an aspect in the birth chart, can actually still be relevant in the life of the individual even if there’s no natal contact. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s different, and one of the points then is that it creates a model where there’s like, a resonance between the alignment in the birth chart and the alignment of the planets at some point in the future when that same alignment repeats in the sky. And I’ve been thinking about this, and one of the analogies I came up with recently was that it’s kind of like music that’s playing at the moment of a person’s birth, and then it’s what happens when that same music starts playing again at some critical point in their life in the future when the same two planets align. And I kind of thought about how like, you know in the HBO series Game of Thrones, they actually had a professional composer design a song that was specific to each character, and each character had a rousing emotional song that over the course of the series, when it would start playing when that character was doing like, really important moments – when like, Daenerys would do something or when Jon Snow would do something. And this technique and applying to charts, it reminds me of that, because it’s almost like a person is born with a certain alignment, then that alignment happens at some point later in the life in the future, and then like, that theme song starts playing again. And all of a sudden, you start doing important stuff around that time. That’s one of the ways that I’ve conceptualized it. How do you conceptualize it? 

NDB: Yeah, no, that’s a good one. I never watched Game of Thrones, but I remember Darth Vader had his own theme. Whenever he comes on screen in any of the Star Wars movies, there’s a very specific theme music that comes on and it lets you know you’re about to have a Darth Vader scene, even if you don’t see him yet. 

Yeah, no, that’s a good way of putting it. I think they’re almost like harmonies to the melody. Like, the natal chart is the original melody, and then these recurrence transits are like harmonies – the same rhythm pattern, but maybe in a different key – i.e., maybe in a different sign. And so that analogy accounts for what is the same but also what is different about a recurrence transit relative to the natal aspect. 

CB: Right. Because you bring up an important point that, for example, when we’re talking about conjunctions, a recurrence of conjunctions, it doesn’t have to be in like, the same sign. It may be more powerful if it happens to be in the same sign, but a recurrence transit is just a realignment or a recurrence of the aspect between the two planets, wherever they are in the zodiac or wherever they are in the sky. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, again, going to a musical analogy, there is a theme in the life. Not necessarily a musical theme, but a combination of two planets, an aspect in a person’s chart – it means something, you know? It represents certain experiences or certain innate traits or what have you. And whenever a recurrence transit happens, it’s a recurrence of that theme. So that’s another way that musical analogy works, because it is sort of like, oh here’s that melody again. The context might be different; it might be in a different key or what have you. But it’s that melody, unmistakable. It’s that person’s moment. 

CB: Yeah. Because like, right now, for example, there’s a Mercury-Mars conjunction in the sky, and Mercury has just stationed retrograde. We’re recording this on Sunday, November 9th, 2025, and we started 10 minutes ago, so at like, 11:43 AM with Capricorn rising. And I’ve noticed in the news in the past few weeks that people that were born with Mercury-Mars conjunctions in their birth chart are suddenly becoming prominent and like, popping up in the news. Like, for example, one of them who was born with a Mercury-Mars conjunction was Charlie Kirk, and that aspect recurred after his assassination when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom like, the following month basically very close to the Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio which repeated his natal Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio. 

Or alternatively, just a few days ago, Zohran Mamdani became the mayor of New York; he won the New York mayor race. And he was born with a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio as well in a completely different year from Charlie Kirk. And yet, both of them become prominent around this time when Mercury and Mars are forming this close conjunction in the sky that’s getting elongated because Mercury is slowing down and stationing retrograde at the same time. So that’s kind of an example of what we mean when we say that, you know, important moments can start happening when people have that in their birth chart. 

NDB: Right. Yeah. Perfect examples. Perfect recent examples. 

CB: Yeah. Okay. So that’s the initial introduction. So I do wanna talk about the history, and we have a little piece on that, so sorry for delaying that until later, but I just wanted to make sure —

NDB: Oh, it makes sense.

CB: — we did it — 

NDB: My apologies. 

CB: That’s okay. My apology for cutting you off. So in the English-speaking world, at the present time, this is not a very common or well-known technique. And that’s kind of why our purpose here today is to introduce the technique and give a workshop on it. 

So I learned the technique first from you as I said around when we became friends around, you know, 2004, 2005 in the mid-2000s. And you learned it from an astrologer named Michael Lutin in the late 1990s. And you’ve given lectures on the topic, and our friend Patrick Watson learned the technique from you and he’s also talked about it a lot over the years, although you’re really the primary proponent of it that I know, at least, that I’m familiar with in the English-speaking world. And for some reason, it’s not well-known as a technique. And so we were trying to research this week and trying to figure out where did Michael Lutin learn it from and sort of research those threads, but maybe first let’s hear what’s the story of how you learned the technique from Michael.

NDB: Yeah. I took a course with Michael Lutin – an astrology class – from January of ‘99 until the spring or early summer of 2000 when I left New York for good. And you know, it was a wonderful class; I learned so much. Not just astrology, but about how to be an astrologer in so many different ways. But I would often sort of pester him for astrological nuggets. I was a very hungry student. You know, I wanted to know more. And Michael started talking about recurrence transits, and then I would go off and research things and then come back to the next class and rattle off whatever research I had done over the course of the week. And that conversation would keep going. And indeed, I mean, he really was the only person – the only astrologer – I studied with many different astrologers during that period. He was the only one I met who knew anything about this technique, and I had never read about it in any books. In discussing it with astrologers, the only time I ever discussed it with astrologers who seemed to know what I was talking about before I had to explain it them were some French-speaking astrologers I knew in Montreal, which is interesting because Michael Lutin spoke French and lived in Paris for a stretch of his life. So you and I surmised because Michael spoke French and had lived in Paris and because the only astrologers I ever met who knew about this technique were also French-speaking, we’re like, oh, well maybe this is something that’s more common in the French-speaking astrological world or in the European astrological world or what have you. And it’s just something that literally hasn’t been translated, I suppose.

CB: Right. Yeah. I assumed Michael got it – for some reason, I was under the assumption he got it from like, Uranian astrologers or cosmobiology or something like that because it sounds almost vaguely like something a Uranian or cosmobiology astrologer would use. But a few nights ago, I asked my Uranian astrology friend, Scott Silverman, about it, and he happened to be talking to Gary Christian over Zoom at the time that I emailed him, who’s one of the main Uranian astrologers in the US, and Gary said no, it’s not a Uranian or a cosmobiology technique as far as I’m aware. So one of the things I did remember, though, is that on Astro.com, for many years they’ve had something in their personal daily horoscope where it lets you know when the natal Moon aspect that the Moon has to the Sun in your birth chart recurs in your personal daily transits each month, which happens once a month – the natal Moon phase is recurred. So I emailed Alois Treindl, the founder of Astrodienst, to ask him about this, and he said that he had incorporated that from an earlier Czech medical astrologer who did it in the context of some discussions about fertility and astrological fertility. But he also said that he had heard of this technique since like, the last 1970s or early ‘80s in the German-speaking world, and Alois specifically pointed out a passage in the 1929 book Kursus der Astrologie from an astrologer named Herbert Freiherr von Klockler, volume three of his work, page 123. And he sent me the passage, and it does seem to be talking about this technique of what we’re calling recurrence transits, he called it a constellation recurrence or something like that. I wrote it down elsewhere. But it does seem like — 

NDB: Yeah, he said constellation. 

CB: Recurrence constellation, that’s what it was? 

NDB: That’s what you told me you read, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. Okay. So that means the technique did exist, at least in the German-speaking astrological community, from 1929 forward, and that his book was somewhat influential. So it would have been known for others. So it may just be one of those things that exists in German or in European astrological circles that didn’t really make it into English, at least as far as the texts that you and I have studied for the most part when I was coming up, at least, in terms of transits. We did know, you know, you and I interacted with another astrologer named Robert Blaschke years ago on the MySpace astrology forums, and he said that he had like, a somewhat similar technique similar to his work on the holographic transits. But I just called Jenn Zahrt who recently republished his works today, and the way that she explained it to me, it didn’t really sound exactly like recurrence transits because there was a lot of other stuff going on involving the Sun and the synodic cycle with the Sun and other things like that. Like, Sabian symbols. So I’m not sure that it was really recurrence transits as we’re focusing on here that he was necessarily a proponent of. 

So the technique is kind of similar, it does remind me of a technique in Ptolemy that’s somewhat reminiscent of it that he called “proper face” from the 2nd century. And the premise of this is he talks about it in the context of a discussion about dignity of the planets, and he says that a planet is stronger or sort of dignified when it repeats the aspect with one of the luminaries that that planet had in the Thema Mundi. So for example, like, a sextile with the Sun for Venus, or with Venus and the Moon, or a square between Mars and the Sun or a square between Mars and the Moon from the same side. It has to be the same phase relationship as well. So that’s not an exact parallel, because we’re applying this more to like, transits rather than a natal aspect to the mythical birth chart for the creation of the world. But there is like, an almost similarity there going back to that 2nd century text in some ways. 

NDB: Yeah, I would say that’s adjacent anyway as a concept to what we’re talking about. My feeling about them, and from what I understand of Robert Blaschke’s work, yeah, it’s sort of like a recurrence transit with a lot of other sort of ideas mixed in. My sort of view of recurrence transits is more in line with the kind of Neo-Babylonian thing I did. You know, very simple. Just like, two planets coming together, same two bodies in the same configuration and they can be anywhere. It’s a visual – you know, like a lot of astrology used to be anyway. It’s a visual key to a pattern that’s found in the natal chart. And I really do think of them in the same way that, you know, with the synodic cycles that you and I have talked about in other episodes. These are very sort of basic astronomical manifestations of astrology. Like, much simpler than anything in horoscopic astrology. And even though I learned about recurrence transits from Michael just like I learned about synodic cycles really first from Robert Schmidt, I’d say, studying Hellenistic astrology, I think even if they hadn’t told me about them, because of the kind of work that I’ve done over 20, 30 years where I’ve just been making these chart files and looking at a lot of transits of different people’s lives and really studying them closely, I can easily imagine anyone sort of rediscovering them for themselves. Like, if you just go out and study astrology for a good long time, especially like, transits and lifetimes and the kind of thing I’ve been doing, yeah. Someone wouldn’t necessarily have to tell you. I think if you worked at it long enough, you would just discover it yourself, you know. And my suspicion is that these are actually quite old and well-worn astrological techniques that just don’t happen to have made it into the 20th century English astrological lexicon, which we can think of as being this really big thing, but it’s yet another branch on this very big tree. 

CB: Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I mean, to the extent that the technique works, it’s possible that it’s been rediscovered independently at different times in the long history of astrology, but it’s hard to say. And ultimately, more historical research is needed to trace the origins and who’s been using it at different times, because we’re just barely scratching the surface here. But I hope that gives people some leads, and if people know more information about who’s used it in the past – contemporary or further back – let us know in the YouTube comments, and that’ll help contribute to that research. 

Hey, so quick addendum as I’m editing this episode in post, but I was rereading through the 2nd century astrologer Vettius Valens the other day and his work, The Anthology, because I had this suspicion like I’d seen this technique before somewhere and it was driving me crazy trying to find it. And I stumbled across this passage in Valens in Book Five, chapter seven where I’m pretty sure he actually refers to the concept of recurrence transits in this passage using different language. 

So here’s the passage. So Valens says, 

“Forecasts will be quite definite with respect to actions and critical points when the same stars come into the same configuration that they had at the nativity as the divine Critodemus reminds us. We append his system to the following chart and the accompanying directions.” And then he puts this table – it’s like, this simple table that you’re supposed to use for the technique. And then he says, “The preceding table is the table of the stars’ mutual return to the same intervals and configurations.” Then he gives this chart example to demonstrate the technique, and it’s actually using the birth chart of the Emperor Nero and a specific event in his life. 

So after the chart example, he summarizes this entire section by saying, “The chronocrators, or the time lords, found by using these intervals will be incontrovertibly active and operative when their rulers at the nativity have the same intervals in their transits at the time in question as they had at the nativity.” 

So when the rulers of the nativity have the same intervals in their transits at the time in question as they had at the nativity. And this is from Mark Riley’s translation of Vettius Valens, Book Five, chapter seven, sentences 17 through 36. So this passage is – there’s a few things. It’s within the context of a discussion about Valens’s advanced method of profections, and a particularly complicated approach to profections that he got from the work of Critodemus. And I think it’s especially interesting that he cites Critodemus at this point, because it means that he’s drawing on an earlier astrologer for this concept and technique. So it’s not something that Valens invented himself. 

So Critodemus probably lived around the first century BCE, and Valens may have been drawing on a commentary that was written on Critodemus’s work sometime around the late first century CE, or at least that’s the speculation of some of the editors of Valens’s text like David Pingree who believed that Critodemus wrote earlier and then that Valens was drawing on some commentary on Critodemus that was written around the late first century. And that’s why it was able to use Nero’s chart and to use a specific date in Nero’s chart. 

Anyway, to make a long story short, what I get from this is it means that the concept of recurrence transits did exist in the earlier Hellenistic tradition, and at least we have this passing reference to it. And there may be other references to the concept at other points in the tradition as well. So it’s worth researching a lot further. Nick and I had said that we only skimmed the surface and we were just giving people some ideas of like, where we got the technique from or what we were aware of up to that point, but I suspect that the technique may have shown up at different points in history, like we said, either through tradition or simply through being rediscovered at different points independently. So I hope this passage, though, at least gives you some idea that there’s a little bit more traditional grounding in this technique in ancient astrology than it might seem like at first.

So briefly – because we mentioned Michael – I just wanna mention briefly a little bit about him, because Michael Lutin was a fixture of the New York City astrological community for many years, and he was perhaps most famous because he was the in-house astrologer for Vanity Fair magazine for about 25 years, which made him very prominent with some of the articles he wrote, including his famous article about Pluto in Capricorn that he wrote ahead of the ingress of that transit and then ended up being very accurate in terms of some of its predictions. And he would also through Vanity Fair end up at like, the Oscar parties and stuff like and sort of hobnobbing with famous celebrities and stuff for many years. And he was also known to put on these elaborate plays at astrological conferences and did a number of those over the years. But I wanted to mention him, because as I was preparing this or was rushing to finish this last night and trying to trace the origins of the technique, I realized he actually passed away a year ago tomorrow – so pretty much to the day on November 10th, 2024. And he was born at the time of a Mercury-Mars conjunction, and there’s a Mercury-Mars conjunction that’s happening in the sky right now. So there’s actually a recurrence transit that relates to him as we’re talking about recurrence transits and we just happened to accidentally be doing this on the anniversary of his passing away. So I wanted to give him a shout out and give him thanks for that, and respect for that. Especially because like, I’d always wanted to interview him over the years but then we tried to set up towards the end of his life, but it didn’t end up happening, and then he got ill and he passed away. So I’m glad that we could like, accidentally do something to like, remember him a year after his passing. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s a pity too, because he was such a fascinating guy, always with a million stories to tell. And very funny, as anyone who ever encountered him in person. And live on stage, he was as talented as any stand-up comedian, but I can tell you just being in his weekly astrology class in his little office library, he was top-shelf funny all the time and interesting. And despite being this pop astrologer who wrote the Sun sign column for Vanity Fair, a really knowledgeable, sophisticated astrologer. And I used to read his Vanity Fair column in the magazine store a block away from his office before going to class, and I’d always wonder, like, is he spying on me? Is he talking to my friends about me? How does he know what’s going on? It was really spooky. And then I’d go sit in that classroom, and wonder these things. And of course he didn’t know anything; he was just, you know, being an astrologer. But he was that good at it, and yeah. You know, all these stories, the Oscar parties, because Vanity Fair hosted the biggest Oscar party. And so as a staff member, he got a free ticket; he was there every year for years. 

So yeah, the astrologer’s life we all would love to have, and it is a pity you didn’t have him on the show because he would have been a real fantastic guest. But yeah, remembering him a year after his passing – this is very fitting. I wanna thank him too. You know, everything he gave me as a teacher has really stayed with me. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And there’s a great interview I did find this morning I was watching over breakfast where the Kepler College YouTube channel did an interview with him a few years ago, I think in 2022, he was interviewed by Callum Wilkinson, and it’s a great interview so I’d recommend people search for that and check it out if they’d like more about his life story and his sense of humor and some of his techniques and views on astrology. It’s the interview I would have wanted to do if we had worked it out, but it didn’t end up happening. 

Okay. I think that’s good. So I wanna move on now to really briefly before we jump into the examples my relationship with the technique, which is – like I said, I’ve known about the technique for years through you and Patrick, but I never did that much with it, and I was honestly like, kind of skeptical because it’s so foreign from the way we usually work with transits and the way that it’s like, an axiom that a transit to be important it has to aspect a natal planet in the chart was so ingrained in me from my early transit studies of like, you know, Rob Hand’s work, Planets in Transit, and following my personal daily horoscope on Astro.com every day for many many years. And so it sounds weird, I think, and for many listeners today it may sound weird compared to how contemporary transit doctrine works. But over the past year or two, I’ve really started to come around, and especially as you and I have been doing some of our historical research about different mundane planetary recurrences – like, first with our series on eclipses in history that coincided with major turning points that we did a couple of years ago at the end of 2023, that was like, a major game changer at first. I think that was at the end of 2023, right? 

NDB: I believe so. 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Ironically, this is a timeline I haven’t absorbed as well as others, but — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: — that sounds about right. 

CB: That’s like a Greek mythological figure – like, the astrologer who can memorize everyone’s timeline but his own. 

NDB: Yeah. I am a walking Greek tragedy, absolutely. 

CB: Absolutely. Me too. All right, so we started doing that work with eclipses, and that kind of came up because one of the principles that we really – that I got out of that research that became very clear was that if a person was born on an eclipse, then future eclipses in their timeline are gonna coincide with some of the most important events in their life, and that it really stands out that eclipses stand out as even more important for people that were born on eclipses. And that’s basically the same principle of a recurrence transit, because if a person was born on a solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse, then any future time that there’s a solar or lunar eclipse that’s gonna be a recurrence transit for that person. And the principle is that it’s more important for them personally because they were born on one. So it’s like —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — we did that work two years ago, and then you and I also did the Saturn-Neptune episode earlier this year on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, and that also like, necessarily led to some similar things of seeing especially in the long timeline of countries that there were certain countries that were probably like, born under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction or had an important foundation date and then recurrence of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions would mark really important turning points. Like for example in the history of Russia – that was a really major one, but also other countries. And then finally also some of our work on the Venus retrograde cycle over the course of the past three years, but especially this most recent one earlier this year, the Venus retrograde in Aries, where we could see that especially people that were born under Venus retrograde in Aries, when that would repeat again in the future, like, some very defining turning points in their life would tend to occur. And that’s also sort of similar thinking to the recurrence transit idea, I think, right? 

NDB: Yeah. They’re all adjacent to each other in the sense that it really is about the visual astrology on its own. Like, as if you’re looking at it in the sky, you’re not necessarily at the point where you’re projecting it onto the zodiac or anything like that; it’s just the sort of the raw combination of two planets. I mean, when you think about it, synodic cycles and recurrence transits are astrological phenomena that could be used in any style of astrology. Like I’ve discussed, I’ve given talks on synodic cycles to Vedic astrologers in India because hey, you know, it moves; it travels. It transcends the system, and there’s something about it in its own right that has an astrological message, even before you get to the horoscopic level. And these might have been — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: — the kind of things that astrologers were doing as horoscopic astrology was being developed, however that was done. These are the kinds of things that they would have had to have known, you know? They probably knew recurrence transits and synodic cycles before they were really drawing up the whole horoscopic system. It stands to reason. This is all inference, but it seems very, very likely to me that it would come about in that kind of way. 

CB: Yeah. Because that was the other research that led me this way slowly over the past couple years as well was on the Babylonian long-term planetary periods called goal year periods, and that’s an episode I’m still working on with Patrick on putting together an episode on those. But you’re right that this technique can be zodiac independent. Like, a piece of it is really independent of what zodiac you use, whether it’s like, tropical or sidereal, which is one of the interesting things about it. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So the other clincher, though, that made me stand up and start paying more attention finally was last year in the run up to the 2024 US presidential election when we were having some like, private discussions as astrologers about the outcome of the presidential election and the different arguments in favor for the two candidates – for Trump and Harris – and who would win based on their birth chart, you had long predicted that you thought Trump would win for different reasons, especially the prominence of Uranus in Gemini in his chart conjunct his Sun, the ruler of his Ascendant, and other things like that, and then Uranus moving back into Gemini as it did in July of this year for the next seven or eight years. But one of your other arguments that you made strongly last year that I remember standing out because I was kind of like, nervous about whether that was really a strong enough argument was you said that Trump has a natal Venus-Saturn conjunction in Cancer in the 12th house, and you noticed that on inauguration day on January 20th, 2025, that Venus and Saturn would again be conjoined in the sky in Pisces. And to you with your long background with recurrence transits, that was actually a strong argument that something very important would be happening for him on that day, that he’d be having an important turning point moment which by extension meant if he was having that then it may mean that he won the presidential election. And I remember being like, thinking you were almost putting too much emphasis on that aspect, but then sure enough, like, that happened. And you know, that’s where we’re at now. 

NDB: I think how I put it was I said it looks like his day. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: Like, I put it like that. And I mean, you know, no matter where you stand on the person, it certainly was his day, you know what I mean? Like, there is a sort of bare accuracy to that statement. It wasn’t merely that he had won, but you know, it was his day. And that was the thing. The Venus-Saturn conjunction in Pisces – the thing about presidential inaugurations, they happen every four years, so Venus is only ever in one of two places on presidential inaugurations. And that one in Pisces that was conjunct Saturn, if you go back to 2008 when Obama’s first inauguration, Venus was at that same position in Pisces conjunct Uranus. And there was also just that symbolic contrast between Obama in ‘08 being inaugurated under Venus-Uranus and Trump in ‘25 being inaugurated under Venus-Saturn. But yeah, it was very much – you know, the inauguration is the final word. You know, winning an election obviously is the deciding thing. But the inauguration is the final word – the, you know, “it’s done. He is now president as of this moment.” And so seeing that recurrence there – there were other supporting things like Uranus in Gemini, but that really was the thing that just sort of pointed – not only did I think he’s gonna be president, but look at that inauguration. It’s his day. You know, it’s not just that he’s being inaugurated; he’s won something a little more than an election. And you know, I think any armchair psychologist would agree with that, you know? 

CB: Sure. Yeah. And it’s like, there were other techniques as well. Like, one of the things was going back years. You know, one of the things that tripped me up way back in 2016 is we could always see that in zodiacal releasing, which is like, one of my primarily predictive techniques, that he would be going into a level one peak period shortly after inauguration day in 2025. And so that was one of the things back in 2016 that didn’t make sense to us, because we were like, how is he gonna win 2016 if his peak period is still in the future? So we thought his greatest days were still yet to come. And then he wins – there was no scenario back in 2016 where we could have imagined that he like, wins 2016, he loses 2020, and then he makes this comeback in 2024. So it’s like, there were other – but ultimately the zodiacal releasing was correct. It’s like, you know, that was correct — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: But so it’s not like there weren’t – there were many other arguments in favor of him winning at that time. But it was one of those things that caught my eye that you were right about in terms of that recurrence, and then as we got further into seeing other recurrences and I started like, being more open to paying attention to that, I started seeing it everywhere this year. And as a result of that, I’ve been working on other charts, especially in the houses series – there were a bunch of charts that came up. Like, for example, with Chaz Bono, that was a really good example I mentioned in the 5th house episodes. And you know, where it’s led me is I think a good way to adopt a technique, which I’ve been sort of like, reluctantly dragged into accepting that this is really a technique that’s working and it’s working in very interesting ways and doing something different, approaching things from a different perspective than I’m used to, but I can no longer – I’ve gotten to the point over the past year where I can no longer sort of like, ignore what it’s doing. And it was time to take it seriously and start researching extensively, so that is what I have done, and we’re gonna go through a bunch of example charts today in the remainder of this workshop, in the bulk of this workshop basically once we finish this introduction. 

NDB: Yes! This lengthy introduction! But it needed to be. Fantastic! I’m so glad you’ve come around. This is a long time coming, this episode, and we’ve got some really dynamite examples, so yeah. Let’s jump in. 

CB: Yeah. And once again, you are lightyears ahead of the game, having lectured on this, like I said, in like, UAC 2012, going way back. We’ll mention some of your examples from your UAC lecture back then. I do wanna mention the plan for today. So because this is I think gonna be many people’s first introduction to the technique, this is my first time really outlining it in detail on the podcast even though we’ve had references to it for years and I’ve explained it at different points in passing, I wanna make a compelling case for it today. And one of the ways I wanna do that is by simplifying things so that today we’re only gonna focus on conjunctions and recurrence transits involving conjunctions for the most part where a person’s born on a conjunction between two planets and then we’ll show how an important event in their life happened when the same two planets were conjunct or forming a conjunction in the sky. Because I think that simplifies the technique and will make it more straightforward and easy to understand as an introduction to it, as well as hopefully more compelling to actually, you know, show people that this might actually be a thing and to like, make the case for it. 

So in that way, we are gonna be limiting the technique somewhat, because as you’ve shown in your lecture, the technique applies to any aspect, especially if it’s like, a close aspect between two planets in a person’s chart in their birth chart, when that aspect repeats in the sky even if it’s like, a trine or an opposition or what have you, that’s when an important event will happen in that person’s life. But for our purposes, we’re gonna restrict it to conjunctions just for the sake of clarity and compellingness, and then maybe we can do like, follow ups in the future to go into more detail. 

NDB: Sounds good! 

CB: Okay. Cool. But yeah, you do work normally with like, all of the aspects? 

NDB: Oh yeah, absolutely. Like any – yeah, you know, if you have Venus sextile Saturn and there’s a Venus sextile Saturn transit in the sky, even if it’s not making any other aspect to your natal chart, that’s a recurrence transit. It can be any aspect. Absolutely. 

CB: Okay. Awesome. All right, so and then I’ll continue like, inserting some more things about the theory of the technique and other things along the way, but let’s finish up this introduction; let’s get into example charts and begin looking at how the technique works in practice. 

NDB: All right. 

CB: All right, so my very first example is one I’ve really been thinking about the past year ever since doing the year ahead forecast episode for 2025, which we released last December. Because one of the things we had to focus on was Uranus moving into Gemini, and that being the Uranus return finally of the United States, which is another technique you’ve been talking about for years where you’ve been way ahead of the curve. But one of the things that made me nervous about Uranus going into Gemini this time is I realized at one point in preparing that forecast that it would also be a return back to where Uranus was during World War Two when the US first developed the atomic bomb and the only time that the atomic bomb has been actually deployed and used in warfare when they used it to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and realizing that the return of Uranus back to that could potentially – I predicted last December – could bring back issues not just with nuclear power, since that marked the beginning of the nuclear age and important turning point with nuclear power, but also potentially a return to and a recurrence in some ways of some of those things with nuclear weapons as well. And that’s already started to play out over the past few months where Trump just announced in the past few weeks on a Mercury-Uranus opposition that the US is gonna begin testing nuclear weapons again. 

So one of the things that that made me realize though as I was thinking about that is that in the birth chart of the United States, for let’s say the Sibley chart or just the chart for July 4th, 1776, for the Declaration of Independence, that summer as the Declaration of Independence was being put together and was signed, no matter what chart you use that summer, whether it’s the Sibley chart or some other chart for around that time, there was a Mars-Uranus conjunction that moved into alignment at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the birth chart for the United States that most astrologers use, so that there was this natal signature for Mars conjunct Uranus sort of baked into the birth chart of the United States. And Mars has always traditionally represented like, war and weapons and explosions and even death, and Uranus has represented technology, technological advancements, sudden things, and when you put Mars and Uranus together it can be a sudden accident or like, a sudden violent event or something like that. And what happened – so that was a natal signature built into the birth chart of the US, which is Mars conjunct Uranus, and then in August of 1945 when the US developed and used the atomic bomb in war for the first time to bomb Hiroshima, Mars was again closely conjunct Uranus in the sky. And I think actually at the moment of that bombing, Uranus was like, right on the Midheaven or close to it. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So to me, I’ve been thinking about this as a recurrence transit example because it’s one of the most stunning – if you just think of the entirety of human history and you realize that the country that developed the atomic bomb first had a Mars-Uranus conjunction, and then the first and only time that they’ve used it in war and the first time it was used in the entirety of human history in war happened on a Mars-Uranus conjunction. That’s like, a stunning example of a recurrence transit in a country chart to me. 

NDB: Yeah. It absolutely is. And yeah, you know, when you really look into US history you see that pop up quite a bit – that Mars-Uranus. And obviously, Uranus in Gemini has an exiting relationship on its own in US history, but whenever Mars does join it in Gemini, yeah, things are volatile, and the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities just being the most extreme of really a chain of events over the centuries that have occurred in US history involving — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: — war and that combination.

CB: Right. So here’s the chart. So let’s say this is the Sibley chart for the US which has Sagittarius rising. Honestly, you know, even though I use the Sibley chart oftentimes the house placements don’t even matter, but just look at where Mars and Uranus are where Mars is at 21 degrees of Gemini and Uranus is at eight degrees of Gemini. So they’re forming certainly like, a sign-based conjunction; it’s a little wide as a degree-based conjunction, but it’s still actually a conjunction between those two planets. And so now look at the chart for the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, which is August 6th, 1945; we see this is actually a timed chart. It was 8:15 AM with Virgo rising. And at that time in the sky, the degree of the Midheaven was at 16 degrees of Gemini conjunct Uranus at 16 Gemini and Mars was at nine degrees of Gemini. So it’s just this perfect recurrence of that natal aspect between Mars and Uranus at the time of this bombing. And if you just think of the long scope of human history, I can’t think of anything more compelling in terms of just like, a singular moment or time and a turning point in human history where suddenly the development of this weapon was the point at which humanity could destroy itself. And like, there was a country that developed it first, and deployed it, and it happened to coincide with this alignment. 

NDB: Yeah. Just a little FYI that occurs to me is when Mars and Uranus were in Gemini in August of 1945 and the bombs were dropped on those cities, the interesting thing about that Mars in Gemini is that in the last months of 1943, less than two years earlier, the last Mars retrograde had been Mars in Gemini. And so this is Mars coming back into the sign where it had most recently been retrograde, and it’s joining Uranus in that sign. I think that’s another sort of factor in this really unique phenomenon in human history, at least so far and hopefully forever. But yeah. It absolutely resonates with the country’s creation when it was also under war. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So and that’s August 6th, 1945, and then a few days later, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki was on August 9th, 1945, and here the Mars-Uranus conjunction has grown even closer where Mars is at 11 Gemini and Uranus is at 16 Gemini. 

So just imagine, yeah, that turning point in world history under that conjunction and that it was something that was built into the birth chart of the US since the very beginning, since like, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And as you said, I think that’s the most stunning time in which that’s come up, although Mars-Uranus conjunctions in Gemini have also historically been relevant to the US at other important turning points. Like, even the start of the Civil War – like, Mars and Uranus were — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — conjoining in Gemini, right? 

NDB: Yeah. The attack on Fort Sumter occurred when Mars was conjoining Uranus in Gemini. And when Mars would be in Gemini over the course of that Civil War, like in World War Two, they would be some of the crazier times. Whenever Mars was in Gemini with Uranus during the Civil War or during the Second World War, these could be some of the bloodier, more destructive periods of those wars. In 1864 when Mars went retrograde in Gemini with Uranus, that was when Sherman was burning down Atlanta and doing his march through the South. A lot of destruction. As close as you could make an analogy between the Civil War and the Second World War, obviously nothing is like the bombing of the Japanese cities with the atomic bomb. But Sherman’s march on Atlanta and the South is about as close as you come to the idea of like, this total destruction of a place in order to bring the enemy totally to their knees. So yeah, it’s very – you know, when Mars joins Uranus, that tends to be what you get. 

CB: Right. So here’s the birth chart – or not birth chart. This is the event chart for Confederate forces attacking Fort Sumter, and the beginning of the Civil War on April 12th, 1861. And we see Mars at six degrees of Gemini moving into a conjunction very soon with Uranus at three degrees of Gemini. So that’s just a stunning correlation again with just the Civil War beginning very closely on a Mars-Uranus conjunction. 

NDB: Exactly. Yeah. And then it’ll come close to ending with one as well, you know, because like I said, Mars is retrograde in the last months of the Civil War in Gemini. I guess by the time they get to April and Lincoln, it has finally moved in, I think, to Cancer, but only just moved into Cancer. You know, shortly before Appomattox and the murder of Lincoln. So like, most of the last six, eight months of the Civil War, Appomattox notwithstanding, had Mars in Gemini because you had the retrograde and Mars always spends about six months in a sign during a retrograde. So that also just sort of like, when you think about in that terms, that’s an extending of the recurrence transit in its own way – certainly extending the copresence. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. And I talked about this on the last forecast episode for November of 2025, but I made this diagram because thinking about all of this made me, you know, wanna pay attention to then what are the ones coming up. And there’s gonna be four Mars-Uranus conjunctions coming up in Gemini over the next several years while Uranus is transiting through that sign. And the first one, the next one, comes up on July 4th, 2026, at three degrees of Gemini right on the birthday of the United States, which is pretty startling, that conjunction and that coincidence. The next one will happen June 23rd, 2028, at 11 Gemini. Then June 15, 2030, at 19 Gemini, and June 6th, 2032, at 26 Gemini. So we’ll be paying attention to the time period around those dates and in probably the month or two leading up to and after them, especially while Mars and Uranus are copresent in the same sign, will be a really potent period for that energy and some of the troubling potential of it. 

NDB: All right. 

CB: All right. So that was my first example, and that’s a big country one, obviously. We’re gonna focus on natal recurrence transits, but I wanted to start there to give, you know, one that’s gonna be a test case, not just for the past but the future, and we’ll see how that goes over the next several years. 

one of the ones, though, that was really impressive to me that I found… Let me see where to start here to go in terms of examples. One of the ones that I found in the 5th house series when I was just researching 5th house placements for that big series for the houses series that I just released over the past couple of months, one of the ones that I found is the birth chart of Chaz Bono who was born with Sagittarius rising and a exact or very close Venus-Saturn conjunction in the 5th house of sex and sexuality. And Venus is at 23 Aries and Saturn is at 23 Aries in a night chart. And what I found fascinating about this when I was doing my research and I was researching Chaz’s history with this is that what happened is in the early 1990s, Chaz was gay and was forcibly outed by a tabloid magazine who published basically and outed them as being gay – I think it was in 1990 – and it was right on a Venus-Saturn conjunction that was like, occurring in the sky at that time. And let me find my notes so that I can give you the actual date. So it was – outed in 1990, it was on February 13th, 1990, The Star published an article outing Chaz on a Venus-Saturn conjunction by transit where one of them was at 20 and the other was at 21 Cap. So it was like, a very close conjunction replicating the natal conjunction in the birth chart. And then get this – five years later, on April 18th, 1995, Chaz decided to come out deliberately in a cover story in The Advocate magazine, which was like, a queer magazine that was really important especially in the 1990s. And when Chaz deliberately made the decision to come out at that time, Venus was at 25 degrees of Pisces conjunct Saturn at 20 degrees of Pisces, so it was an exact another recurrence of the natal aspect of Venus-Saturn happening at the same time. 

And I thought this was one of the examples that I came across this month that again just sort of like, forcibly forced me to like, you know, my ears to perk up and to take that seriously, because it was obviously a very important turning point in the life – two important turning lifes – and it tied into also the natal position of Venus and Saturn being in the 5th whole sign house, which is the place of sex and sexuality, and can also sometimes relate to a person’s like, sexual orientation. Or sometimes when things involving sexual orientation become important to a person, sometimes we can see the 5th house becoming relevant. And yeah, that was the case here. 

NDB: Yeah, that’s a fantastic example. Chaz’s Venus, the natal Venus was about two weeks before it went retrograde, so Chaz’s Venus is moving probably slower than Saturn is in that conjunction, ironically. And that first example when they were outed in 1990, February — 

CB: He. 

NDB: — 13th, 1990, that was Venus stationing direct with Saturn. So there are Venus stations also worked into this recurrence along with the conjunction and Saturn. 

CB: Yeah. I think that’s really important in his case. Chaz is now a trans man. But that was something I saw coming up over and over again myself is that when one of the planets was also stationing, that tended to mark that let’s say conjunction in that instance or that recurrence as standing out, as being even more important, especially in terms of the overall chronology. So there’s additional like, modifying factors that can help to either filter out or to further specify like, which conjunctions will be more or less important during the course of the life as well. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. All right, so that’s a good example. Let’s see. So moving on to my next example. My next example – let’s do one of my favorites that I’ve used in a lot of other contexts, but it’s Vincent Van Gogh. 

So Vincent Van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter, there’s several different recurrences, but one of the ones that I thought was the most interesting is that he was born with a natal conjunction and copresence of Mars and Neptune in Pisces, where in his birth chart he had Cancer rising and Neptune at 12 degrees of Pisces and Mars at 26 degrees of Pisces, and they’re very close to the Midheaven, which was around 22 degrees of Pisces or so. 

So a Mars-Neptune copresence being in the same sign and conjunction functionally, basically, in his birth chart. And what I found recently in researching his biography is that I think it was in the year 1890, right? Do you have the… 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So in the year 1890, in the late spring, Van Gogh had been suffering with mental health issues and had famously — 

NDB: 1889. Sorry, 1889. 

CB: Okay, in the spring of 1889, he was suffering with mental issues that famously had led him to self-mutilate late the previous year or early the same year. And at the time of a Mars-Neptune conjunction, he checked himself into a mental health asylum and like, voluntarily committed himself basically. And it was a Mars-Neptune conjunction was closely forming at the time that he checked himself in. And then the following month while Mars and Neptune were still in the same sign, the sign of Gemini which is actually his 12th house which is interesting because the 12th is associated with mental health and also asylums and prisons and things like that. As Mars and Neptune were still in the same sign, Van Gogh actually painted his most famous painting called The Starry Night, and it was partially based on the view of him looking out his window at the asylum and the sky and the stars that he could see. So he painted his most famous work at a mental health asylum while a Mars-Neptune conjunction was in the sky, which was replicating his natal Mars-Neptune conjunction in the Midheaven in the 9th whole sign house. And I thought that was just an incredibly brilliant and compelling example of this idea of recurrence transits. 

NDB: Absolutely. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Yeah, his chart has a lot of them. But that’s a really good one, yeah. 

CB: Right. So I had found others; I’m trying to remember them really quickly. So he also has like, a Venus-Mars conjunction in his birth chart, and his brother, Theo Van Gogh, who’s younger, was born on a Mars-Venus conjunction in Taurus. And then you had noticed that he quit his art dealer job and decided to become a painter full time on a Venus-Mars conjunction on March 30th of 1876, right? 

NDB: Yeah. Correct. As he’s turning 24. Yeah. He quit – this is like, him suddenly deciding he wants to be a painter, and it was his brother Theo who had gotten him that job, so they’re both having that Venus-Mars recurrence when he takes off and does that. 

CB: And they’re very close. Like, him and his brother. 

NDB: Yeah, exactly. And then their father dies years later during another conjunction, which impacts them both, obviously. And it’s right when the father dies that Vincent paints the first painting that people consider a major work of his – The Potato Eaters – which he does around that spring of 1885 as he’s turning 32. And 32 is always a synodic Venus and Mars return, and their father died the same week he was turning 32 and he was painting The Potato Eaters and a lot of things were coming together under that one recurrence transit in 1885. 

CB: That’s incredible. And then one final one that I found is that his brother, Theo Van Gogh, married his wife Jo Van Gogh-Bonger on April 17th, 1889, and this was Venus retrograde conjunct Mars in Taurus. So it’s replicating the Venus-Mars conjunction of both Van Gogh himself as well as Theo, the brother. And then this would become important – this wasn’t just like, a random thing for Van Gogh, for the brother, but this is actually personally important for Van Gogh because what happened is that Van Gogh suffered with mental health issues towards the end of his life; he painted like, some of his greatest works towards the end when he was at the mental health asylum and towards the end of his life. But then he ends up taking his own life at the end without ever selling a single painting. And then all of his paintings then went to his brother, but his brother’s so distraught and depressed at the death of Vincent that Theo himself dies like, two years later. And then all of the paintings of Vincent — 

NDB: Sooner than that. I’m sorry, I’m sure he dies less than a year later, if I remember correctly. 

CB: Okay. Well… All of the paintings are left to Theo’s wife, Jo, and then Jo becomes the one who promotes Vincent’s work and paintings and eventually sets up art shows and the largest eventually exhibition in 1905 like, 15 years later of Vincent’s works ever. And eventually, she’s the one that’s successful in promoting his work and essentially making Vincent become a household name and wildly recognized as one of the most important painters in the past century. And so this conjunction when Theo, Vincent’s brother, marries her, of Venus conjunct Mars replicating Vincent’s natal Venus-Mars conjunction on his Midheaven was actually super, super important. 

NDB: Yeah. But you know, the funny thing is Theo was also born with that Venus retrograde, because Theo married Jo when he was turning 32. He was a few years younger than Vincent, and so he turned 32 a few years later just as Vincent was turning 32 when he had that Venus-Mars recurrence and their father died and he painted The Potato Eaters, Theo turned 32 as he married Jo and he had that Venus retrograde with Mars. And yeah, that totally signifies that she would wind up being this default archivist of the Van Gogh legacy. So yeah, that’s another great one. There is one other — 

CB: Yeah, because — 

NDB: Venus-Mars —

CB: — because we wouldn’t – hold on a second. Because we wouldn’t know — 

NDB: Oh yeah. 

CB: Basically, we wouldn’t know about Vincent if not for her, and — 

NDB: That’s right. 

CB: One of the ways that I was blown away by finding this as I was doing this research is because I’ve always used – like, going back 10 years in my Hellenistic astrology course, I used this as an example of derived houses because I could see that that Venus-Mars conjunction was so prominent in Vincent’s chart on the degree of the Midheaven, but it’s in the 9th whole sign house, and the 9th whole sign house is the 7th house from the 3rd house of siblings. So it’s like, you know, Vincent is Cancer rising – that’s him. Virgo is his 3rd whole sign house – that’s his brother Theo – and then the 7th sign from Virgo is Pisces, and that is Jo where Vincent has this important cluster of Venus, Mars, Midheaven, Neptune. And then it’s the recurrence of those – of Venus-Mars – when Jo and Theo marry, and then Mars-Neptune when Vincent paints Starry Night as well as a bunch of other paintings around that time like Lilies, for example. 

NDB: Yeah. Exactly. 

CB: So it’s also a good example of like, derived houses basically. 

NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. Did we wanna cover that one other Venus-Mars in his life? It’s the one that even people who know nothing about art, when they hear the name Vincent Van Gogh, they think of one thing. Not about what he did as a painter, but something he did to himself on a certain night after he had an argument with Paul Gauguin. 

CB: Okay, sure. What was the example? 

NDB: Oh, on December 23rd, 1888, just before he wound up being committed and in a few months painting the Sunflowers, there was a Venus-Mars conjunction in Aquarius, and he got into an argument with Paul Gauguin who stormed off, and then Van Gogh apparently cut off his own ear and would later offer it to a prostitute at a brothel that the two of them frequented. So yeah, a lot of people know about Van Gogh and the ear, and even that happened on a Venus-Mars recurrence transit.

CB: Got it, okay. So it was like, Venus-Mars several months earlier conjunction when he cuts off his ear, and then later that year it’s Mars-Neptune when he commits himself to the asylum and paints Starry Night. 

NDB: Right. 

CB: That’s brilliant. 

NDB: Exactly. Yeah. 

CB: Okay. So this is great, just because it’s a complex example showing that it’s not just like, one planet recurrences, but sometimes there’s different alignments in a person’s chart that are overlapping or happening at other times that are bringing in this other element. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Incredible. All right. Well, that is good. Let’s go ahead and move on to our next example. 

So do you know the Max Planck example? This is actually one that Patrick found, but I wasn’t sure how familiar you are with it. 

NDB: It rings a bell. That’s funny; I just was thumbing through a biography of Max Planck not long ago. But hum a few bars, and I’ll fake it! 

CB: So — 

NDB: As they say. 

CB: You know, this one I’m not as strong with, but basically Max Planck was one of the founders of quantum theory. And he was born on April 23rd, 1858, and he had this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in his chart with Jupiter at 22 Taurus and Uranus at 27 degrees of Taurus. There was like, a bunch of other stuff there as well because he had a whole Taurus stellium of like, Sun, Pluto, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus as well. But one of the important outer planet alignments that’s pretty close in his chart is Jupiter conjunct Uranus. And one of the examples that our friend Patrick Watson, who has also done a lot of work with recurrence transits over the past 15, 20 years now after learning it from you and the important influence you played on his work, but Patrick noted that in the year 1900, there was a recurrence of a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Sagittarius that year at different points. And in that year, he worked out and he developed the idea – he introduced his groundbreaking hypothesis that radiant energy is emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta, which basically initiated the entire quantum physics revolution. And he’s basically the originator of quantum theory. And he first delivered his landmark paper to the German Physical Society with the concept of energy quanta at the time – December 14th, 1900 – when Jupiter was at 21 and Uranus was 13 degrees of Sagittarius. 

So this was basically like, the birth of quantum theory, and even though his work was originally met with skepticism, it marked the beginning of that. And then his theories got influenced and got incorporated or allowed – and were incorporated in important ways by like, Einstein and a number of other scientists over the course of the next decade or so. So that it’s a really good example of a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, especially in the way that it contradicts classical physics where energy is believed to be continuous. So it was like, a major scientific advancement and discovery. 

NDB: Yeah. And this is – you know, the great thing is, again, Max Planck, we don’t know what time he’s born. We don’t know where it fits into the house scheme. But this is another example of how looking at recurrence transits this way can help you look at a chart that might be otherwise, you know, vague to you because you don’t have a time of birth. There is still astrological information that you can glean from a given person’s date of birth using a simple idea like recurrence transits. So it’s, yeah. I mean, it also sort of emphasizes that angle as well. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Let’s do some – should we do one that goes along with that, which is Jobs? Or should we do two depressing ones, and then Jobs in order to like, break it up? 

NDB: No, let’s do Jobs, although Jobs is kind of depressing as well in the – you know, spoiler alert, he dies in the end. But yeah, let’s do Jobs. It works as a companion piece, I think. 

CB: Right. I was gonna make a joke that you’re like, a Windows guy, not a Mac guy, but you actually are a Mac guy. 

NDB: I am a Mac guy. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: But I do run Windows on my Mac, so you know, there you go. 

CB: Oh, you traitor. 

NDB: I’m platform curious. 

CB: Okay! I appreciate that. I appreciate your openness. All right, Steve Jobs. Is his chart up? This is the birth chart of Steve Jobs. Can you see it? 

NDB: Yep, I sure can. 

CB: All right, just making sure I have the right window up. So Steve Jobs was born February 24th, 1955, and like Max Planck, Steve Jobs was born under a very close Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is associated with like, advancements in technology. Like Jupiter traditionally represents like, growth and affirmation and expansion, and Uranus represents technology and technological advancements. And so Steve Jobs was born under this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, and this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction shows up at like, at least three major turning points in his life, right? 

NDB: Yeah. There’s three or four, but it really outlines the chapters of his life in this really discernible way. You could take the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions that Steve Jobs had every 14 years in his lifetime and they could make up the five chapters of a book about him. And those conjunctions would be these perfect sort of new chapter headings in that book; they have that kind of feel. They just sort of feel very organic when you’re looking at a person’s lifetime this way. Yeah. I think people will – and if they don’t understand what I’m saying now, they’ll understand as we go through the example. It really illustrates itself nicely. 

CB: Okay. Well, let’s do it quickly with the highlights, and then we’ll get into more detail. So the first one is —

NDB: Sounds good. 

CB: — in the late 1960s, there was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and he had a recurrence, and this is when he gets his first tech job famously working for Bill Hewlett who he like, cold-called and got a job from. Then – because these conjunctions only happen every 14 years, and that’s one of the things that makes them additionally impressive is like, then the next time there was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, it was in Sagittarius in 1993. This is when Jobs introduced the Lisa — 

NDB: ‘83. 

CB: Sorry, yeah, ‘83. 1983, Jupiter-Uranus in Sagittarius, and Jobs introduced with Apple – he was the founder of Apple Computers – the Lisa computer, which was revolutionary because it introduced the graphical user interface as well as the use of a mouse to interact with the computer to the public. And these would become core concepts that would define the Macintosh and really all personal computing. At the same time, he successfully recruited John Sculley to become the head of Apple and to become the CEO, but then unfortunately Sculley later would end up being the one who would fire Jobs not that long after that like, a few years later ousting Jobs from Apple. 

And then there was one other but I’ll skip to the next one, because it ties in so well. Then you jump forward to 1997, and there’s another Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aquarius and this is when Jobs, who was ousted from Apple in the 1980s, he ended up going and founding another computer company called NeXT, and that company ended up being bought by Apple in 1997. And this brought Steve Jobs back to Apple, initially as an advisor, but then he would eventually basically take over the company eventually again. So it marks his return to Apple under the 1997 Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. And then finally, you jump forward to the next conjunction, which is happening around 2011; there was a series of conjunctions in 2010, 2011, and at this time he ends up announcing his medical leave of absence from Apple, and it effectively marks the end of his career leading Apple Computer which he founded, because he would then die later that year later in 2011. So it marks the end of his career as well as the beginning and these important turning points in the middle. 

Sorry, I think it froze again. So pretty good, yeah? 

NDB: It did. Yeah. I just wanted to summarize, you know, when you think about it, he’s born under the conjunction. The next conjunction is he discovers computers, you know, really starts working with them. The next conjunction is like, sort of Apple at its first peak before he leaves and is fired. And then the next one is when he comes back to Apple. And then the next one is when he dies. Like, you see what I mean; it really is just like the chapters of a book. If his life could be five chapters in a book, you would sort of divide them that way; it’s very… It goes with the seams of his timeline. I don’t know if I’m putting it right, but it’s just a very natural way to break down his life into those parts. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the other things – there’s other interesting things. Like, in the 1983 conjunction, he gave this famous speech in Aspen, Colorado, where he uncannily predicted the future of technology, including concepts that would become the iPad, the app store, and wireless networking. And what’s crazy about that is that speech was on the conjunction in 1983. On the conjunction in 2011 around that time, that’s when the iPad itself is being released. It was released in 2010 under the earlier conjunction. So it’s like, he even is talking about this concept on a conjunction in ‘83 that’s so forward-looking that eventually he would release the very product that he was giving intimations about later like, two conjunctions later. 

NDB: Yeah. I even remember – you know, I covered Steve Jobs when I did that talk on recurrence transits in New Orleans in 2012. And he had only been dead about nine, 10 months by that point. But my friend who I drove to New Orleans with had a brand new iPhone, and I remember we’re driving through Kentucky; she was a vegetarian; she wanted to find a vegetarian restaurant. And for the first time, we could use this phone as we’re driving across America to tell us where the find a vegetarian restaurant off the highway in Kentucky. And gosh darn it, it did it. And in 2012, that seemed like some like, huge, you know, jump ahead technologically. Today it sounds quite mundane. But at the time, it seemed really amazing that we could do that. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: And that was brand new, just as he left. Like, these things were still coming out. 

CB: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So that’s another great example of like, scientists and innovators which we’ve always associated with Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, for example, and you get people like Max Planck or Steve Jobs. But it’s like, then for Jobs and for Planck, that cycle continues to be important every time those two planets come together in terms of their innovations with technology and science as well as their personal story that’s tied in with that and how it impacts the world in general. 

NDB: Yeah. In a big, big way. Again, it’s that theme, that idea of their being a theme. Like, whenever Jupiter-Uranus was making a conjunction, it’s like Steve’s theme music was playing again. It was time for him to show us what Jupiter-Uranus conjunction meant to him. 

CB: Exactly. Yeah. That’s what I think. It’s like that idea of theme music. You know, I came up with the idea of like, zodiacal releasing being the chapters of a person’s life – like, the chapters and the paragraphs and the sentences, which was how the technique always struck me, but yeah, there’s something about this and this idea of resonances or music or sound, and it sort of invokes that ancient concept of the music of the spheres. But there’s something to it. And I don’t know if this is an access point, but you know, the fact that these are mundane aspects may be – because obviously, it’s a very personal and personally relevant for the person. But for a lot of these, also we’re seeing the ways in which they impacted the world in different ways. So maybe that’s part of the crossover as well in terms of these being mundane aspects that are happening in the sky at the same time. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, obviously, when it comes to Max Planck and Steve Jobs, these are two individuals who unambiguously did things that have changed our lives. I mean, Jobs in particular with regard to you and I. But yeah. You know, it’s not always world-changing, but it’s always gonna be Jupiter-Uranus or whatever the combination is. It’s always gonna be true to the planetary combination.

CB: Yeah. And that’s been something that’s been really interesting is that these examples have really clued me in sometimes on – or it’s given me a different perspective for understanding some of those planetary combinations and what they mean in very concrete ways by looking at these recurrences in the life of people that have them. And then sometimes you get a much more stark example of what that combination is all about like in these two instances. 

NDB: Yeah. And the whole sort of chapters in a book feeling, I mean, particularly when you get these recurrence transits between slower moving planets that only – you know, like, Jupiter-Uranus I think is every 14 years. So things like that, that’s where you get the real chapter breakdown feeling from these. We’ll see it again when we get to Michael Jackson later. 

CB: Yeah. It is like, reminiscent of some of the time lord techniques and the way like, the slower moving ones can break up these really large parts of the life. But that’s what’s interesting – it’s so variable based on the planetary cycles, because some of them are very quick inner planet cycles, like let’s say Mercury and Mars or Sun and Saturn, which is like, every year, versus medium-sized ones like Venus and Mars or Mars and Jupiter, or you get like, longer ones like Saturn-Uranus, Saturn-Pluto, Jupiter-Saturn, which is every 20 years, and so on and so forth. 

NDB: Exactly. Like, with my chart, ironically, being sometimes of a pioneer or whatever in recurrence transits, my chart is mostly a stellium. I have the biggest aspect in my chart really is a Sun-Neptune square, and once a year, there’s a Sun-Neptune square. But I have looked at my life, and every week when that Sun-Neptune square occurs, there is something in my life that does resonate with that transit, even though it’s this very fast-moving annual one. There is something there. I’ve learned to identify it. You know, kind of like getting the flu once a year or something. Like, oh, here we go again, you know? Like that kind of reliable rhythm.

CB: Yeah. Is that – do you have any other examples of recurrence transits? I wonder if this is a good time to like, mention ours or if we save those for later. I don’t remember if you had other ones.

NDB: Oh, I mean, you know, not – I mean, that’s the thing about my chart. I don’t have many. You know, Venus-Mars conjunction or a Moon-Mars – sorry, Venus-Jupiter conjunction or a Moon-Mars square. But that’s just it. With my chart, there aren’t that many. I really learned them looking at other people’s charts. I don’t know if I would have learned them if I was only looking at my life, because of the layout of my chart. 

CB: Got it. Okay. And I’ve been focused on learning the others, and I only started recently applying it and seeing it to my own and then being impressed by some of the alignments. Let me – why don’t I do that real quick just for the sake of —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — making sure I include it and include some of my best examples like, early on. 

NDB: Oh yeah. You and I both have Venus-Jupiter, don’t we? 

CB: I don’t, but it’s been an important one, and that’s — 

NDB: Oh. 

CB: — one of the interesting questions I have for other reasons is like, it almost becomes important for me by secondary progression, which is weird. But I don’t know if that’s really it. I have some open questions. 

All right, so here is my chart. And I have a few different combinations that I was looking at. But one of them… Maybe I should do it with an animate – I haven’t been using the biwheel because I know it’s gonna slow us down if we do, and I try to look at the transits. But maybe I should for this example for the sake of showing what I’m actually talking about, which I haven’t been doing. We’ve been doing it with just the natal chart in order to make this quicker. But… March… All right. So one of the things – actually, no, I’ll start with the natal chart. In the natal chart itself, I have a Mars-Jupiter conjunction; it’s in the 12th house. 12th house is not a great house; it’s often associated with like, illness or like, chronic illness, especially long-term illness opposite to the 6th house which is more acute illnesses typically or injuries. 

So that Mars-Jupiter conjunction, I had a recurrence of that actually in Capricorn in March of 2020. And that was when I got sick famously with covid right at the very beginning of the pandemic. So March 15, 2020… And because that was famously like, when the lockdowns happened in the US was March of 2020, and I just kind of barely missed that and got covid like, right before the lockdowns set in place, which really sucked. It was unfortunate timing for me, but one of the things that you can see that was happening that week – the week that I got really seriously ill – is that Mars and Jupiter were forming a conjunction in the sky which went exact March 19th. So it was really under that exact conjunction that I’m like, deathly ill for like, a week – or for like, a month. And then after that, I developed – it hit my system in some sort of weird way that the doctors don’t understand where it created some sort of permanent damage that people call long covid nowadays, but it’s a persistent chronic illness with chronic fatigue and memory loss and I can’t exert myself very much, because when I do, I fall into a deep energy hole for like, a week after that. And it’s created all sorts of health issues for the past five years which I’ve slowly come to understand are permanent and potentially irreversible my life and has limited me so that I don’t – I can’t travel because I get sick so easily, and I have gotten sick with covid subsequent times, which has made it worse over the past several years so that I’ve had to stop going to conferences and giving lectures, for example, where I traveled all over the world in the decade leading up to that like, giving lectures and speaking at conferences, and I would be like, headlining most conferences right now if I was able to. But I can’t, and it leads back to this Mars-Jupiter conjunction which was a recurrence for me in my 12th house in March of 2020 that timed getting sick. On top of that, I also had a Saturn-Pluto copresence in Scorpio, which is like, a Saturn-Pluto conjunction basically where Pluto is at two degrees of Scorpio and Saturn’s at 17 degrees of Scorpio. And that was also a recurrence that year, because famously in January right when the World Health Organization was recognizing covid as an upcoming pandemic, basically, Saturn and Pluto exactly conjoined at that time and were still in a very, very close conjunction which happened to be also in my 12th house at that time. So I was having multiple recurrences happening in my 12th house at that time; I got really sick. You can go back and watch the forecast videos for that time where I look and sound absolutely terrible. Yeah. But it was a huge turning point in my life that happened to coincide with those two recurrences. So — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Pretty good. 

NDB: Grim! 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Well, yeah. Pretty grim, but you’re still with us, thank god. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing about this. We’ve had some positive ones, but these do not always coincide with good things. You know, obviously, there can be bad alignments as well, and the insight that this gives us can give us some helpful things for understanding and contextualizing some of the most important albeit difficult times in our life. 

So — 

NDB: Yeah. I guess you were also 35 at this point, weren’t you? And that’s a 12th house profection year as well, just to like, throw it all on even more. 

CB: Yeah, it was like a 12th house profection year; everything was hitting that Mars, which is always my — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — most problematic planet in the 12th house because it’s a day chart, so Mars is contrary to the sect. Yeah. So it was a lot of stuff. 

So more positively, another one that I found in my own chronology that I was really impressed by just in the past few days as I was working on this is I also have a Mercury-Pluto copresence in the same sign, which is a sign-based conjunction with Mercury at 23 Scorpio and Pluto at two degrees of Scorpio. And this is one of my aspects I associate with that I really like to investigate and like, dig down deep into things and research things really extensively. Like when I get focused on something I wanna research, it’s like my, you know, what was it? Who was it that had that – the writer of Sherlock Holmes, I think, had that conjunction as well. 

NDB: Oh, Arthur Conan Doyle. 

CB: Yeah. So interestingly, I looked back and I found when I first started studying Hellenistic astrology was in 2004, and I looked up in the – I started studying Hellenistic astrology with Demetra George in a class that she was teaching at Kepler College. And I was able to find with the help of my friend who I took that class with at the time, Laura Michetti, she was able to find the start of that term and it was December 8th, 2004. And at that time, Mercury had recently stationed retrograde conjunct Pluto, and on that day, Mercury was at 20 degrees of Sagittarius conjunct Pluto at 21 degrees of Sagittarius in my 11th whole sign house but also copresent with the degree of my Midheaven that’s importing 10th house significations into that sign. So this was a replication of my natal Mercury-Pluto sign-based conjunction in a very close degree-based conjunction essentially the day or the week that I started studying ancient astrology, which would eventually become my thing that I would write a book about over a decade later. 

So — 

NDB: Yeah, I — 

CB: — one of the things — 

NDB: — met you about three months after this. I met you in March of 2025 online, so one thing led to another, yeah. 

CB: Nice. Yeah. So one of the things that was funny about that, though, with it being like, a Mercury retrograde conjunct Pluto that I remembered and laughed about that I’d forgotten was at the beginning of that term, I got a book that was like, a collection of excerpts of translations of the different Hellenistic astrologers that came with the course that was put together by Robert Schmidt. And then Demetra also had an extensive write-up and commentary and like, her actual teachings on the material that was also supposed to be emailed out or sent out at the same time, but there was a snafu and I didn’t receive like, her notes and her lessons, basically. So for the first like, three weeks of the class starting at this point, I only focused on just the translations and like, really – I had to try very hard and read them very carefully and like, deeply to truly understand what they were saying when I didn’t have any other help or commentary or anything else to do so, so that I had this early experience for the first three weeks while Mercury was retrograde, basically, until the end of the month of trying to just read the texts on their own terms and coming to my own conclusions about them without anybody else’s commentary. Not Demetra’s and not Schmidt’s or anyone else’s. And then at the end of the month when Mercury stationed direct, like, I was giving answers that were not quite what Demetra was expecting on the homework and we realized that I hadn’t gotten her notes, and so then she sent it to me and it was like, rectified and then I caught up and everything. But it was an interesting early experience in terms of that and just in terms of then like, foundational experience of how then I’ve always approached Hellenistic astrology and trying to read the texts on their own and coming to my own conclusions about what they said or what they meant. 

NDB: That’s a brilliant story. And yeah, like, it’s funny how sometimes a seeming deficit actually helps you exercise some muscle that becomes unique to you. You know, your own unique set of skills. 

CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. And then that was the purpose of my book later on is that – it’s actually really hard to do that, to just pick up the Hellenistic texts on their own and read them and understand them, especially without – they commonly use technical terms that they don’t define. And so it’s actually kind of tough to do that, and that was the purpose of me publishing my book over a decade later in 2017 is giving people like, a primer so that they could have an overview of the Hellenistic tradition, and then that would make it easier for them to read and understand the texts themselves. And I always encourage people to do that and read them on their own terms and not just take what I say about them for granted. 

So get this, though – this leads to one other weird recurrence and weird facet of the technique that I keep seeing coming up, which is look at this chart. One of the other things that’s happening in this chart when literally the week I first start studying Hellenistic astrology is there’s a Venus-Mars conjunction that’s happening in Scorpio in my 10th whole sign house where Venus on this day is at 20 degrees of Scorpio, and Mars is at 18 degrees of Scorpio. Look at what happens over a decade later where I spend over 10 years – I started in 2007 writing a book on Hellenistic astrology and basically researching a book on Hellenistic astrology. And after 10 years, I finally published the book on February 10th, 2017. So that Venus-Mars conjunction in Scorpio in my 10th house the day I start studying Hellenistic astrology, and then look at this. The day I publish my book on Hellenistic astrology, February 10th, 2017, there’s a very close Venus-Mars conjunction in Aries in my 3rd whole sign house, the place of writing and communication, with Venus at five degrees of Aries and Mars at 10 degrees of Aries. So what I took from this and what’s a little bizarre about it is it set it up so that me starting to study Hellenistic astrology created almost like, a foundation chart of its own with its own signature of like, Venus conjunct Mars in Scorpio, and then that signature was repeated when the culmination of that starting to studying Hellenistic astrology happened with me publishing the book on it, and then Venus-Mars again repeats.

NDB: Yeah. Pretty amazing. It also explains that South Node, but that’s for another conversation. 

CB: In terms of like, the eclipses? Because there was an eclipse repetition as well. I don’t know if that’s what you mean. 

NDB: Oh, sorry. 

CB: In terms of the — 

NDB: Did you want me to repeat that? 

CB: In terms of the eclipse repetition, or what do you mean? Because there was an eclipse interesting like —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — recurrence as well. 

NDB: Yeah, no, I mean, you have the South Node with all those Scorpio planets including the Mercury-Pluto. And in December of 2004, when you were first taking the class because you were 20 years old, that South Node was again in Scorpio although at the other end of the sign. And the South Node is very much about learning things the way you learned without that book. Sort of learning by process as opposed to like, learning by method, which is more North Node. But yeah, I didn’t wanna drag you too far into this, but it was just a little – that really, to my mind, explains that South Node in the overall stellium in your chart and the fact that it was occurring at that time as well. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s really interesting, because there were – I was looking at, you know, because a few months before I started studying Hellenistic astrology I moved to Seattle to study at Kepler. And that was basically happening under this Mars-Jupiter conjunction and copresence that was happening in my 9th house, so there was another recurrence there, but I wasn’t gonna go into that. But it was also there were eclipses happening at that time, and it was this eclipse in late October, and I ended up moving around that time. And I had known about the concept of whole sign houses for a year up to that point, but I rejected it. Ironically just with this technique, I often like, start out kind of skeptical and not easily picking something up. So I knew about whole sign houses from like, a Rob Hand article or something from a year before this and had rejected it, but then I noticed that I ended up moving like, right – like, events constellated so I ended up moving very close to this eclipse that happened in Taurus in my 4th whole sign house, and that was one of my early instances that made me like, perk up and start paying attention that whole sign houses could be a legitimate thing, because otherwise it was weird for that lunation to take place there around the time of my move. 

NDB: Absolutely. And the other thing that’s interesting about it when you have a birthday like that when the Sun is with the South Node, something else that happened to you in that year is very South Node is this was the year you would be invited to come live in Cumberland. This is a very sort of South Node, you know, Sun kind of experience where the South Node is chosen or invited or offered things, as opposed to the North Node which has to seek out or be proactive in achieving what it needs to achieve or getting what it wants. The South Node is very much like, you know, that all sort of happened; I met you online, then we met in person with Bill. We went to dinner. Bill invited you to come live in Cumberland. Next thing you knew, you were living in Cumberland studying Hellenistic astrology. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: By the end of August. So yeah. That all sort of – that’s all very South Node like, where it’s not so much about what you’re putting into place but how things are conspiring around you and how you go with the flow and accept opportunities. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s incredible. And then just to briefly mention a few others from my chronology, you know, one that I mentioned this summer over the summer when there was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction is I have this weird Venus-Jupiter one, and it’s not a signature in my birth chart, so I’ve often been a little curious about why that shows up in my stuff. But my partner, Leisa, first emailed me in 2006 about something – like, some question – and it was our first contact and it was like, the day of a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Scorpio. And then in my chart by secondary progression, her and I ended up getting together in a relationship a few years later when Venus and Jupiter exactly conjoined by secondary progression in my secondary progressed chart. And then later we spent some time apart and we got back together on a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in 2015, and then over the summer this summer under the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer in my 6th house, she had just had surgery for breast cancer, and I was taking care of her under that conjunction. So there’s this weird history behind that that’s almost tied in with the first contact chart between us, which was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction which I find fascinating because it’s not necessarily a recurrence in my chart. But it’s something there that sometimes just like how I started studying Hellenistic astrology on Venus-Mars conjunction and then the book was published on a Venus-Mars conjunction, sometimes events in our life can almost set up a new foundation chart for subsequent recurrences. 

NDB: Absolutely. But I do also think there’s something to be said for the fact that the progressed Venus was coming to Jupiter, and sometimes that can also – you know, a secondary progressed aspect is an aspect that you sort of arrived at over the course of life. And then the recurrence transits can be a recurrence of a progressed aspect as opposed to a natal one, you know? 

CB: Is that what it is? Because I’ve been puzzling about that. 

NDB: Yeah. I’d think so. For me, secondary progressions are transits on an internal clock. But they are transits essentially, and so yeah, it’s that element of you have this kind of transit on the inside and then it manifests on the outside with — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: — you know, when a recurrence transit happens. 

CB: I’ve used this example before, but just to show people what we’re talking about because it’s just stunning. Because you imagine it’s like, this is my birth chart where I have Venus at 15 degrees of Sagittarius, and Jupiter is at eight degrees of Capricorn. So it’s like, they’re not in the same sign, and this wouldn’t be considered a copresence. But they are if you were to look out that day, like, in roughly the same region of the sky let’s say so that Venus is moving towards Jupiter, and it’s a little less than 30 degrees away. But then if you start animating my chart by secondary progressions, like, one day per year, you see Venus moving through the rest of Sagittarius starting at 15 and moving through the end, going into Capricorn in the mid-’90s to early 2000s, and then it comes up right on Jupiter and conjoins it. And then the Moon actually swoops through and conjoins Venus and Jupiter at the same time when like, the longest and most significant relationship of my life begins. So I’ve always thought that was a stunning example, but then it’s also been weird that these Venus-Jupiter conjunctions also recur at other important times in the relationship. 

NDB: Yeah. But I mean, to my mind, that explains it beautifully, you know? Yeah. Secondary progressions do that. They interact with the other transits, with the real-time transits. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: I think of — 

CB: All right. 

NDB: — I treat them as being the same technique in a way, you know? Like, I don’t use secondary progressions without transits.

CB: Got it. Okay. Well, let’s bookmark that. Sorry for the long digression, but — 

NDB: Yeah. Very interesting. 

CB: — we’ll come back to that another episode. 

Okay, so you know, I’ve mentioned now in my example, for example, the Mars-Jupiter was a tough one or Saturn-Pluto conjunction was a tough one. There’s other examples that can be really tough. So I wanna mention a few of those that I came across which are like, other chart examples that I’ve used at different points. And one of the chart examples I’ve used in the past was Rock Hudson, who was a famous actor in the middle of the 20th century. He was born November 17th, 1925, and he was born with a Mars-Saturn copresence with Mars at two degrees of Scorpio in a sign-based conjunction with Saturn at 17 degrees of Scorpio in a night chart. And Rock Hudson was a famous actor, but one of the things about him is that he was gay and he was closeted at a time when being a gay man could have cost him his job as an actor basically. So he had to stay in the closet for the majority of his life. But then what happened is on June 5th, 1984, he was diagnosed with AIDS very early on in the AIDS epidemic and pandemic. And this happened – his diagnosis happened – under a very close Mars-Saturn conjunction in Scorpio within three degrees with Mars retrograde applying to Saturn. And he was diagnosed with AIDS and then later they announced it, and his publicist and him announced it, and it was one of the early things that really shocked people in the United States and made people start taking the AIDS pandemic more seriously basically, that this very famous actor got sick with it and then subsequently died not that long after. 

NDB: Yeah. And I remember it at the time, he went to the White House because of course he was friends with Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan; they came from the same Hollywood milieu. But it was, you know, suddenly Ronald and Nancy Reagan were sort of looking awkward and embarrassed standing next to their old friend because he was kind of emaciated and sick, and essentially it was only – yeah. He was the first celebrity to be diagnosed with AIDS and to die of it. And you know, it sort of collided with the image that the Reagans had been cultivating during the presidency, and yeah, Reagan didn’t do much for AIDS research during his term and even with his friend dying. So it was all very powerful, all happening – it really was that moment when everyone was really starting to understand what this new disease was all about and what it was doing. 

CB: Yeah. So one of the important things from this example I really wanna emphasize – because I know some people might initially it might be different than how some astrologers are used to practicing. But one of the things I’ve really revived from Hellenistic astrology and ancient astrology is the use of both sign-based aspects as well as degree-based aspects and both being important and relevant. And this is a good example of this and partially how this technique works, which is that Mars and Saturn in his birth chart are in a copresence or a sign-based conjunction by sign. But by degree, they’re pretty far apart where Mars is at two degrees of Scorpio and Saturn is at 17 degrees of Scorpio. But what I would say and what I think this example shows is that nonetheless when two planets are either in the same sign or when they’re close in degrees, it does create that signature in the birth chart. And then when that conjunction happens in the future, either by sign – both by sign as well as by degree, because here at the actual time of the event, the conjunction was extremely close – you know, a significant event happens and actually takes place. So that’s something I wanted to emphasize here is both the sign-based aspects as well as degree-based aspects are important and relevant when it comes to this technique. 

NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, what’s funny is Rock Hudson’s wife – I mean, he was gay, but he had a wife as a beard that he married when he was 30 in 1955 – her name was Phyllis Hudson; she was three weeks younger than him, and she had the Mars-Saturn conjunction in her chart. 

CB: Oh wow. 

NDB: And he married her as his progressed Mars was just going past his progressed Saturn because he was, you know, just turning 30 and he was a few weeks older than her. So yeah, like, he married her, she had the natal conjunction, and he was having that progressed conjunction. Not unlike you meeting Leisa. So there’s something to that as well. 

CB: Got it. Okay. Nice. 

NDB: And it was a Mars-Saturn marriage. You know, it was a phony marriage. 

CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s a heavy example but an important one. 

Another heavy one that I found in my research is Malcolm X who was born May 19th, 1925, and he had this Mars-Pluto conjunction in Cancer that was pretty close with Mars in the 7th whole sign house at six degrees of Cancer conjunct Pluto at 11 degrees of Cancer. And what I found is that when he was murdered, when he was assassinated, there was a Mars-Pluto conjunction in the sky at that time. So there was an exact recurrence of the same pretty difficult – like, Mars-Pluto is a pretty violent signature natally in the birth chart, and then it recurs at the time when he was assassinated. 

NDB: Yeah. That’s a very good example. The Mars when he was murdered was just coming out of a retrograde, so it was a very slow Mars with that Pluto as well. 

CB: Okay. Let me pull up – so here’s the actual date when he was murdered – February 21st, 1965. And we see Mars is actually retrograde at – this is correct, right? Mars at 24 degrees of Virgo and Pluto at 15 degrees of Virgo in his… No, sorry, this is Hudson’s chart on the wrong. This is the right transits, but it’s looking at the wrong inner chart. Let me redo that. 

NDB: But yeah. But it is true that he was shot, yeah. The Mars was retrograde with the Pluto. I thought it was a little before the station, but no, it was after the station.

CB: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. Okay, here it is. So it’s like, this is Malcolm X’s chart in the middle, and then the Mars-Pluto conjunction was happening in his 9th whole sign house with Mars at 24 Virgo – yeah, like you said, having stationed retrograde recently. So this is another one of those examples that we were talking about when one of the planets – especially when the faster moving planet has stationed recently either retrograde or direct, that makes the recurrence even more important. And part of the reason for that is because it means then that the conjunction in this instance was extended over like, a long period of time. So it both extends the transit, but it also intensifies the transit, and therefore oftentimes will make it stand out more in the person’s chronology. And you know, if somebody was skeptical about the technique and skeptical about the frequency of some of the recurrences, especially of inner planets or faster moving planets, this is one of the filtering factors that you can use in order to try to differentiate and create more of a hierarchy of which recurrences in some instances will be more important than others. 

NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And you know, in the case of Malcolm and his murder, that Mars retrograde, it really was this drawn out affair. Seven days before he was shot, his house was blown up by a bomb. You know, he knew they were on his tail; he knew his days were numbered essentially. That whole period, the last few months of his life, were very sort of frantic but very – you know, very prolific in terms of everything that was happening. But yeah, that Mars really hovered over him for the last few months and right up until that last moment when he was murdered as he was doing a talk. He was giving one of his speeches, and he was murdered by people in the audience. 

CB: Right. Somebody came up and like, shot him.

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Okay. All right, yeah. So that is another heavy example, but again, sometimes I guess we’ve seen that a couple of times now where sometimes a natal signature in the birth chart can happen or recur again towards the end of a person’s life in some instances, which can be an important bookend in and of itself. All right. 

NDB: Most definitely. 

CB: All right, we’re back from break. Let’s go through some more examples quickly, because I wanna jam a bunch more in before we wrap up. We actually still have a ways to go, at least an hour. But I wanna pack in as many examples as we can during that section, especially some of the really great ones that I found. 

So the first one I’d like to show you is a cool part of the technique that taught me something new that I thought was really fascinating. So this is the birth chart of Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain was born February 20th, 1967; he had a Venus-Saturn conjunction in his chart that was very close in the 7th whole sign house with Venus at 26 degrees of Pisces conjunct Saturn at 28 degrees of Pisces. 

So Kurt Cobain was the frontman of Nirvana, and in the 1990s, Kurt Cobain famously got together with Courtney Love who was another musician and rockstar. Now Courtney Love – look at her chart – was born on July 9th, 1964, with a Venus-Mars conjunction. So Venus is retrograde at 20 degrees of Gemini conjunct Mars at 15 degrees of Gemini. Okay, so that means, you know, he has a Venus-Saturn signature, and she has a Venus-Mars signature. Look at what happened the day that they got married, which was February 24th, 1992. There was a triple conjunction of Venus, Mars, and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius. So it replicates both his natal Venus-Saturn conjunction and her natal Venus-Mars conjunction to create this perfect triple conjunction which is like, a recurrence transit for both of them involving their natal Venus on the day that they were married. I thought that was just absolutely astounding. What do you think? 

NDB: Yeah. No, it is astounding. It’s even slightly wilder when they apparently first locked eyes on each other January 12th, 1990, at a club called Satyricon in Portland. Courtney was there with a friend; Nirvana were playing a gig. They interacted briefly. But when they met, Venus and Saturn had recently been conjunct in Capricorn, then Venus had gone into Aquarius and it was retrograde in Aquarius heading back into Capricorn to make another conjunction with Saturn when the two of them met. So even though they didn’t meet like, technically under a recurrence, it was like, really sandwiched in between a couple of Venus-Saturn conjunction recurrences that Kurt had at that time. He had had a hard time during the conjunction prior to meeting Courtney; Nirvana were on tour in Europe and he kind of had a bit of a breakdown there. And then he met his future wife as that recurrence was gearing up to come back. So yeah —

CB: Nice. 

NDB: — but the combination of their two charts in one big happy marriage of recurrences is also, yeah, really, really very interesting. 

CB: Brilliant. Yeah. So that’s a principle then that could be extrapolated elsewhere in terms of like, combined recurrences for two people. One other really fascinating one that I found with respect to them is their relationship began on October 12th, 1991 – and here’s the chart for that – where there was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Virgo that was very close at that time. So here is Venus at like, four degrees of Virgo conjoining Jupiter at six degrees of Virgo. So this is reportedly the day that they got together; it’s the beginning of their relationship. And then – or sorry, their relationship began with a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, and then get this – the following year, their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, is born, and she’s born August 18th, 1992, at 7:48 AM with 13 degrees of Virgo rising and Venus is conjunct Jupiter in Virgo with Venus at 13 degrees of Virgo conjunct Jupiter at 18 degrees of Virgo. So basically, they started their relationship on a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Virgo, and then the result of their union was the birth of their first and only daughter who was born with Virgo rising and Venus conjunct Jupiter in her own birth chart. That’s again, just like, uncanny —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — to me, and just it’s astounding. 

NDB: And what’s even wilder is about seven weeks earlier in late August of 1991, Venus was retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter in Leo. And that weekend, Nirvana played the Reading Festival in England, then another festival on Sunday in Belgium. And Courtney and Kurt did meet up there. There’s a movie that Sonic Youth made called The Year Punk Broke, and you can see Courtney Love backstage at those shows telling the camera that Kurt Cobain makes her heart melt even though they were still, you know, more than a month away from actually becoming a couple. So there’s already that electricituous charge between the two of them. And wouldn’t you know that Sunday, that concert in Belgium, I was there! But I didn’t — 

CB: Oh wow. 

NDB: — see Courtney. But I did see Nirvana open at 11 in the morning. 

CB: Nice. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: I like that. And you’re Leo rising, which is funny. Yeah, well, that’s a good point that I’m glad you made, which is – that I saw come up as well, and is important point – which is that oftentimes, while we’re focused on singular events sometimes in this instance, oftentimes around these dates there’s like, an unfolding of a series of events during the course of the two planets passing through the same sign together, especially if one of them is retrograde and if there’s like, an extended retrograde going on. I’ll actually have a really good example of that with like, Edward Snowden later. But that would be a good example of that then where one of your points or one of the things we can take from that is even though there was this singular date in which they officially got together, which was very close to the exact conjunction in Virgo, there was a build up to that when Venus was retrograde and copresent or conjoining Jupiter by sign over the lead up to that basically, right? 

NDB: Right. Exactly. I guess the other thing in that is the day before I saw them, they played the Reading Festival as an opening act at 11 in the morning with the Venus retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter. And a year and five days later, they played the Reading Festival again, but this time as the headliner as like, a major international rock band, whereas exactly a year earlier they had been the opening act. It really just pointed toward the sort of the meteoric rise, how fast it all happened. My point being they were both Venus – Venus was conjunct Jupiter in Virgo when they played Reading in ‘92; it wasn’t long after Frances Bean was born, so it also ties into there. Sorry, I left out that part to make it relevant. 

CB: Got it. Okay. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. But so to take the main takeaway from this and what I gain from this, though, besides the triple conjunction, which is a blend of their two natal signatures, which was incredible, on the date of their marriage, again we see an example where the start of their relationship itself created a foundation chart. And then subsequent recurrences of the signature of the relationship chart itself end up in turning points in the relationship – in that instance, the birth of their chart. Or which, you know, then harkens back to like, you know, Leisa emailing me on a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, and then that keeps recurring at important times in our relationship. 

NDB: Yeah. Very well put. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s move on to… I mentioned, yeah. I guess I already mentioned it, so we don’t have to like, show the charts, but I was impressed by the Charlie Kirk one and the Zohran Mamdani one recently were just really impressive where it’s like, let me see if I have those charts actually. I do have those charts. Okay. So here’s Charlie Kirk who famously was born October 14th, 1993, with Mercury at 16 Scorpio conjunct Mars at 12 Scorpio and Pluto at 14, and he famously was known for going around college campuses and debating politics with college students, which was fitting in terms of that conjunction. But then he was killed, he was assassinated in September of 2025, and then the following month – I think it was on his birthday, what would have been his 32nd birthday — 

NDB: Right. 

CB: Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is like, the highest – let me pull up the chart – the highest civilian honor basically that you can receive in the United States. October 14th, 2025. And my point here is that look at what was happening in the sky at that time – Mercury was at 11 degrees of Scorpio conjunct Mars at 15 Scorpio in the sky. So there was like, this perfect repetition of his natal Mercury-Mars conjunction happening in the sky at the time that he posthumously received the highest civilian recognition that a person in the United States could possibly receive. 

So this is an example of what I call posthumous astrology, which I wanna do an episode on because I find it really fascinating. But a person’s birth chart continues to work after they die, especially at important moments in which they come up again because the birth time – it’s like a signature in time that echoes through time as long as that person’s memory still lives. 

NDB: Yeah. Sure does. 

CB: Yeah. So that is fascinating. And then by contrast, recently this is — 

NDB: The New York mayoral election, yeah? 

CB: Yeah, which is just happened. So this is – and I’ve only read his name in print; I haven’t actually – I don’t watch cable news, so I haven’t heard it pronounced. I think it’s Zohran Mamdani, right? 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So he was born October 18th, 1991, so a completely different year than Charlie Kirk – two years earlier. And he has Mercury at three degrees of Scorpio conjunct Mars at zero degrees of Scorpio, so he also has a Mercury-Mars conjunction, although it’s interesting because it’s a night chart in his case, whereas it’s a day chart in Charlie Kirk’s case. And he just won in the past week the New York mayor race and became the mayor of New York. Do you know what day that was? Like, how long – this was just like, days ago basically, right? 

NDB: It was Tuesday, I believe. 

CB: Okay. What day is that? Because today’s Sunday. 

NDB: The 4th? 

CB: 4th, okay. So here’s the 4th, because Mars changed signs that day on November 4th. So November 4th, 2025, Mars moves into zero degrees of Sagittarius, and it’s in this conjunction with Mercury at five degrees of Sagittarius, and this is actually more important because Mercury several days later would slow down and station retrograde, which is what it’s doing right now as we’re recording this on November 9th. Here, I’ll put the chart for now. This is now where Mercury’s like, stationing retrograde right now at six Sagittarius and Mars is gonna come up and conjoin it over the course of the next week. But it means that he also had this natal signature of Mercury-Mars, and then he just had this crucial turning point in terms of his life and career and becoming the mayor of one of the biggest cities in the United States under the same conjunction that basically replicates his birth chart. And it’s weird, because it’s almost replicating the same sequence and like, angular distance with Mars natally at zero and Mercury at three, and then here it’s like, Mars is at zero and Mercury’s at five. And then over the next few days, it would close that distance. 

Okay, there we go. So November 4th – here it is for those watching the video version again – just Mars changes signs and moves into Sagittarius at zero Sagittarius conjoining Mercury at five. But Mercury’s like, slowing down to station retrograde, so it’s one of those instances again where one of the planets stationing really emphasizes it and raises the significance of the conjunction, which is important for Mercury conjunct Mars because Mercury conjunct Mars happens pretty frequently – like, once a year at least. But Mercury stationing retrograde conjunct Mars does not happen as frequently, and therefore it raises the importance of this conjunction for him and therefore this conjunction which happens once a year, let’s say, this is arguably and certainly gonna be one of the most important of those conjunctions of his life of coinciding with the week he became mayor of New York City. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So I just think that’s a fascinating example, because it’s two people from extremely different ends of the political spectrum born two years apart, but both of them with Mercury-Mars conjunctions, and around the same few month time period, both of them are thrust into the spotlight and become national figures basically in the news reporting today. And I know, like, I don’t know, five or 10 years from now that’s not gonna be as important, but right now for those of us living at this point in time the last few months, this is a very compelling example of two people that have been plastered all over the news for months now as we’ve been having these successive conjunctions of Mercury and Mars – these two conjunctions right next to each other – due to Mercury slowing down and stationing retrograde. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s an example. That brings me to another example of that that I wanna mention of another Mercury-Mars one that’s more clear and relevant. And that’s the birth chart of Edward Snowden. 

We have a timed chart for Edward Snowden, and I’ve always used him as an example because he was born with Gemini rising and Mercury at 10 degrees of Gemini conjunct Mars at 24 degrees of Gemini. So they’re conjunct by sign, and Mercury’s applying to that conjunction with Mars. And he was famous because in what was it? Like, 2013, 2014, he was a tech guy who worked for the US government, and then he famously disclosed that the US government was spying on network communications — 

NDB: American citizens, yeah. 

CB: Well, on American citizens and people around the world, basically, through monitoring of the internet and of phones and basically everything through these vast networks that the public didn’t know about. And him like, leaking that. He became known as a leaker or somebody that leaked something. Was very fitting in terms of Mercury-Mars as an aspect, but it turns out that what I found is that when that happened, there was this series of Mercury-Mars conjunctions that was happening around that time that really tied in with his story very closely. 

This was all happening between January and August of 2013. So let me do – I’m trying to decide if I should maybe do – I’ll do a biwheel just to keep his natal chart relevant. So the point that I wanted to make with this example is that Snowden, you know, and I was reading up on his biography and refreshing myself on it because it’s been, what, like, 12 years now since all of this happened. But early in 2013, Snowden started getting annoyed with the US government and not liking what he was seeing, and started formulating the idea of leaking things I think starting in January and February. And Mercury we can see in the transits – you can see the transits, right? 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Okay. So Mercury moved into Aquarius and joined Mars there at 19 degrees of Aquarius around January 18th, January — 

NDB: Wait, no, I can’t. I can’t. Switch it over. 

CB: Okay. Well, let me know… 

NDB: Yeah, no. 

CB: All right. So here’s Mars at 19 degrees of Aquarius in mid-January of 2013, and here’s Mercury moving into Aquarius in the middle of that month. So basically, there was a succession because of retrogrades that year of Mercury-Mars conjunctions that were replicating his natal Mercury-Mars conjunction during the course of the year. And the copresence kicks off in mid-January when Mercury moves into Aquarius with Mars, and then the first conjunction happens exactly around here around February of 2013. And then Mercury and Mars continue to be copresent over the course of the next month and into March. Somewhere in there, from what I understand, Snowden made the decision to start gathering all of the data in order to leak it. And he started gathering it up during the course of that spring, basically, sort of like, covertly amassing all of this information with the future plan to leak it to the press. And then eventually, so Mercury and Mars keeps moving; there’s a Mercury retrograde, so Mercury fall back into Pisces, and then while Mars moves on and goes into Aries. And then Mercury catches up with Mars again in the May timeframe. And then there’s this long copresence between Mercury and Mars in May, and this is when Snowden starts leaking the files basically to reporters. And this begins the entire Snowden thing in May of 2013 and June of 2013. Do you remember all that? 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So the Mercury-Mars — 

NDB: And he’s turning 30, of course, in June as well. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So the Mercury-Mars copresences and conjunctions are coinciding with him making the decision, gathering the data, leaking the data, and then eventually he flees and over the summer there’s this long, drawn out drama about him getting stuck in transit and like, seeking asylum. And it coincides with this Mars retrograde during the course of the summer in June. And June is basically when he gets stuck in like, an airport for most of the summer. Mercury stations retrograde here around June 26, 27th, and then it retrogrades back to early Cancer where Mars catches up to it and moves from Gemini to Cancer July 13th. Then Mercury eventually stations direct while conjunct Mars in mid- to late July, and then eventually by August, Mercury gets into Leo and breaks the sign-based copresence with Mars completely and moves on on its own. And it’s in August when Russia grants him asylum and he moves there where he’s still there to this day, what, like, 12 years later. So —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — the entire – it’s like, this unfolding of a sequence of events that’s playing out with Mars degree-based conjunctions and sign-based conjunctions over the course of the first eight months of 2013. And it’s because it’s perfectly replicating his natal Mercury-Mars conjunction of leaking something or of releasing information or secrets, let’s say, to the press that the US government didn’t want released. 

NDB: Yeah. It’s wild. It’s gonna be interesting to see what Uranus in Gemini does in his life. 

CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s true; it’s also his Uranus opposition. We’ll see. 

All right. So that’s important, though, because it’s kind of similar to your example, right, with like, a retrograde where retrogrades can extend these recurrences over a much longer period of time than they would otherwise have. And so that creates a unique class of things that elevates the importance. 

NDB: Yeah. It really sort of draws out and extends the experience of the recurrence. Yeah, what we were saying about the Mars retrogrades in Gemini during the Civil War and the Second World War or the whole thing with Kurt and Courtney prior to them dating, there being a previous Venus-Jupiter when they’re just flirting during the Venus retrograde, and then Venus goes direct, makes another conjunction, and that’s when they actually start dating. So there’s all that kind of stuff that, yeah, you know, draws these things out and is worth focusing on. 

CB: Right. Totally. Okay, so I’m trying to think of where we should go next and what we haven’t covered. I know you had a really good example with Venus Williams, right? Would this be a good time to —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — introduce that? 

NDB: Yeah, let’s bring in Venus Williams. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: So Venus and Serena need no introduction. Well, they’re both tennis players. They’re sisters and they’re tennis players. They’re born just over a year apart, and Venus is the older sister, and Venus was already like, a rising tennis champion and then Serena came on the scene at 17 and really dazzled people. And today, Serena’s record sort of far outshines Venus’s, although Venus was no slouch and was very impressive. 

CB: Right. It was like — 

NDB: I think – go ahead? 

CB: It was like, Venus was the older sister who – they were both raised and trained together by their father and mother to play tennis and to become world champion tennis players. But Venus was the older sister who was able to start competing first, and then Serena was the younger sister that came up afterwards and then they started battling each other for the top spot as the top tennis player in the world, and ultimately Serena kind of edged out Venus, it seems like. 

NDB: Yeah. I’m not a big like, tennis follower, but I’ve always been interested in their charts. But Serena, I believe, has something like, 23 Grand Slam wins. And “Grand Slam” meaning you win all the major tournaments in a given year. So she’s done that 23 times. Whereas Venus did that like, twice, three – five times! Sorry. Venus had five Grand Slams and… I just wanna double check that… Fifth Wimbledon Singles Crown and her 7th major singles… Okay. It was only the second time that she defeated Serena in a Grand Slam final. So basically – sorry, I’m just getting lost in a bit of the tennis scores. Venus is the older sister. Serena is really rising up and overshadowing her. But there’s this one last Wimbledon final that Venus does beat Serena. The fact that Serena is really ascendant, is outshining her. And it’s sort of – it’s the crowning glory for Veus in terms of her own record. So this is the Wimbledon game in 2008. Venus beats Serena seven to five and six to four to defend her title and capture a 5th Wimbledon Singles Crown. It was only the second time Venus defeated Serena in a Grand Slam final. And this was Venus’s final Singles Major, so last time she played the Singles Major, effectively the peak bookend of her Grand Slam Singles career. And… 

CB: What is the — 

NDB: Okay. 

CB: — technical example? It’s a Mars-Saturn conjunction? 

NDB: Oh yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t get – I get lost in the tennis scoring because I wanna get the details right. But you get the idea. I mean, it really is like, sort of this last hurrah for the older sister to beat the younger sister. So Venus was born with Mars-Saturn conjunct in Virgo, and on the day of the game, Mars was again conjunct Saturn in Virgo. 

CB: Nice. Okay. So I like this also because when I was using Serena’s chart in the 5th house example – actually I was focused on Serena’s chart, but this is Venus’s chart, and Venus has Libra rising, Sagittarius is the 3rd house of siblings, and the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings is Jupiter, which is in the 12th house of enemies. And even though they’re not like, enemies, I think it’s amazing that her sister became her primary competition in a way. And this event that you’re talking about, the Mars-Saturn conjunction, was happening at four and five degrees of Virgo. In the actual chart itself, Mars is at two Virgo and Saturn’s at four. But they’re conjoining her natal Jupiter, which is the ruler of the 3rd house of siblings, and it’s amazing that this was her triumphing over her sister in that instance. 

NDB: Yeah. But what’s even funnier, given what you just said, three hours after they played this match, they teamed up in a doubles match and won the doubles Wimbledon competition against two other tennis players. So Venus beat Serena, but then of course like your classic Williams sister situation – yeah, they were adversaries, they fought to win, they played to win, and then they came together as a team and beat the other doubles and won that category, so. 

CB: Nice. 

NDB: Yeah. That also accounts for that Jupiter. 

CB: Yeah. So and it’s like, there’s other transits going on as well. It’s like, one of the things that goes without saying but I guess is worth saying at this point which applies to all of our examples, this doesn’t – the presence of the recurrence transit is obviously not the only thing going on there. We can see from other transits, there’s other ways of approaching that this was a very important day for her. It’s like, the Sun is conjoining her Midheaven exactly. Venus is conjoining her Mercury almost exactly. She’s having a natal lunar return in Leo. Mercury is conjoining the ruler of her Ascendant almost exactly. It’s like, she has a lot of very important transits that are going on. It’s just that there’s this one transit that you otherwise might overlook of the fact that Mars and Saturn in the sky just happen to be repeating the same exact combination that they were in on the day that she was born. 

NDB: Yeah. She had also just turned 28, and 28 is always a nodal half return, which you can see there as well. But yeah, indeed, it’s the whole picture; there’s a lot of stuff going on at once. But that recurrence is very clear, and it points toward this being a really important game for Venus, you know, relative to her career, relative to even the friendly rivalry with her little sister. It’s sort of the last great hurrah on her end. 

CB: Nice. That’s brilliant. Really good example. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So I didn’t originally tie these together, but this is a perfect time to bring in one of my Jupiter-Neptune examples, which is weirdly it’s Jada Pinkett Smith. 

So let me — 

NDB: Keep Will Smith’s wife’s name out of your damn mouth! No, sorry. 

CB: Yeah. You’re incorrigible. 

NDB: I am. 

CB: So here is the birth chart of Jada Pinkett Smith, and this seems like it’s like, a completely out of left field, so I understand. Just stay with me for a few moments, and I’ll bring this around. So this is Jada Pinkett Smith; she was born September 18th, 1971, at 12:38 PM in Baltimore, Maryland, with three degrees of Sagittarius rising. So her Ascendant’s at three degrees of Sagittarius, and she has Jupiter conjunct Neptune like, very close to the Ascendant that was rising over the eastern horizon at the moment that she was born with Jupiter at zero degrees of Sagittarius and Neptune at zero degrees of Sagittarius. In fact, you know, Neptune is at zero 40 degrees of Sagittarius, and Jupiter’s at zero 58. So they’re extremely, extremely close conjunction at the moment of her birth but also rising over the eastern horizon on the Ascendant at that moment. 

So weirdly, I noticed this weird repetition that happened in her life just a few years ago during what is probably one of the more notable things that has happened in her life, which is that a few years ago, Will Smith did a movie where he played the father who trained Venus and Serena Williams, and then he won an Oscar for that role. But that night at the Oscars famously, the host who was the comedian Chris Rock came out and he made a joke about Will Smith’s wife and her hair – that she had a shaved head – and he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. And that night, there was a very close Jupiter-Neptune conjunction that was happening in the sky that was replicating Jada Pinkett Smith’s natal Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. And at first it seemed like when Chris Rock made the joke, Will Smith was laughing, but then the camera cuts away and then it cuts back and suddenly he’s going up on the stage, people speculate after looking at his wife who was offended by the joke, and he goes up on the stage and he hits – he slaps Chris Rock. And then it creates this entire firestorm and this entire really difficult moment after he assaults Chris Rock, because then later that night, Will Smith goes on to win the Oscar. But he gets up, and he accepts the award, but he cries. He’s like, in tears because he realizes that he’s kind of like, ruined the moment in some ways. It was otherwise a high point of his career, but it kind of gets marred by having just assaulted this comedian, basically, in what he says is partially like, defense of his wife. 

So there’s obviously like, a lot of different things going on with that story, but for some reason, it also became a very important turning point for Jada Pinkett Smith because then a lot of the like, commentary and stuff was about their relationship and whether they were dysfunctional and all these other things. And I thought it was very interesting that for some reason it was partially like, a replication for her of that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. 

NDB: Yeah. Very much. If I’m not mistaken, the hair situation – it’s not that her head is shaved. She has a condition, right? Alopecia or something. Like, the hair – I don’t know too much about it, but my understanding, it’s a medical condition; it isn’t merely that she chose to cut her hair short. And that was part of the sensitivity. 

CB: Right. That’s actually – I’m glad you said that; that’s a really good point, because that actually probably – maybe that ties in the natal component for her where it’s like, a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction on the degree of her Ascendant and the Ascendant and the first house can sometimes relate to a person’s body and physical appearance. So maybe that’s — 

NDB: Right. 

CB: — part of why this was somehow relevant for her. Here’s the – let me put the actual transit chart up and make sure you can see – where that night, it was March 27th, 2022. Jupiter was at 20 degrees of Pisces conjunct Neptune at 23 degrees of Pisces. And those conjunctions don’t happen very often at all, right? 

NDB: No. No, no. Every 14 years. 

CB: Got it. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So — 

NDB: Yeah. No, it’s a brilliant example. And yeah, it’s very much like, that’s how it all came about. It’s one thing if you make fun of someone’s haircut; the haircut will grow back. But it was more sort of, you know, what it was effectively bodyshaming, I guess. But yeah. Crazy — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: — night at the Oscars. 

CB: Right. Well, and it was like, that was part of their defense is they said like, that they tried to say that it was due to her sensitivity or bodyshaming, and Will not wanting her to feel that way, and then they tried to claim also that Chris Rock had been maybe harassing her for years. But then it’s like, but then also everyone was like, but you don’t assault a comedian for a joke — 

NDB: Yeah! 

CB: — and there’s no like, good defense of that, basically, is where I think most people — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — came down in the end. 

NDB: And the other thing we learned is that Chris Rock’s last name is very well-earned, because he just stood there like a rock and took it, so yeah. Chris Rock indeed. 

CB: Yeah. He did show remarkable restraint, and yeah. So anyways, that is a weird one that ties in because, of course, he then won the Oscar for the movie with Venus and Serena Williams, and I think they were actually there at the time or they were watching or something. So there’s a lot of weird tension and everything else. 

NDB: Very excellent segue, though, Chris. Very — 

CB: Thank you. 

NDB: — impressive. 

CB: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Well, that’s why – we didn’t really finalize our list for sequence of things, but I thought we would find it as we went by finding the examples that are like, appropriate as we go. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: All right. 

NDB: It’s largely working. 

CB: Largely. We’ll see how it goes, what the rest is. 

NDB: Small-ly working. 

CB: What kind of example do we need that we haven’t filled in yet? I guess I have a quick one with Amelia Earhart. This one is cool, because I’ve looked at her chart for a long time, but I was looking at it recently for the 5th house example because she has this Mars-Jupiter conjunction. She has Taurus rising and Mars conjunct Jupiter in Virgo in the 5th whole sign house, and I was kind of associating that with the 5th house is where you have fun and you find pleasure in things. And I think Mars conjunct Jupiter is partially enjoying being adventurous and like, risk-taking, and things like that. And Amelia Earhart famously was a woman like, very early in the history of aviation that was setting records for flights at different points early in the history of aviation. But what I found is that when she got her pilot’s license, there was a Mars-Jupiter conjunction happening in the sky that was replicating her natal Mars-Jupiter conjunction. 

NDB: Fascinating. 

CB: Pretty good. Yeah. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: And then do you remember what – I’m trying to remember all like, the records and stuff that she set. 

NDB: Oh, I mean, there’s a whole litany of them. I mean, you know, she died trying to circumnavigate the globe, but there were a bunch of achievements. I have a book on her somewhere; I can look. 

CB: Well, here’s the transits, just to like, confirm roughly my argument. So here’s the Mars at 23 degrees of Libra conjunct Jupiter at 15 degrees of Libra. So it’s like, coming off of that conjunction that would have been forming then and would have gone exact as she’s like, building up to and training and getting ready to like, to do this major thing to get her flight license. But I just loved seeing the repetition of that then at such a crucial moment where she gets that license and then she immediately starts using it in really impressive ways. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So that was a good one. Moving on. Other examples… An adjacent one, actually, so we just did Mars-Jupiter. An adjacent one is one you found, which is Richard Nixon. 

NDB: Oh yeah. Another Mars-Jupiter. 

CB: So this is a good one, because it shows a really important point just technically that I meant to mention, which is the sign boundaries. 

So Nixon was born – I’ll let you take the example; I just wanted to make the point that he was born January 9th, 1913. Mars is at 29 degrees of Sagittarius, and Jupiter is at one degree of Capricorn. So there’s a sign boundary there, but they’re just like, two degrees apart, and in the sky those two planets would be almost literally right on top of each other regardless of the sign boundary. And I found a number of examples where even if they’re in different signs, if they’re still relatively close – especially depending on what planets we’re talking about – the alignment is still true. Because functionally, like, in the sky —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — those two planets are right next to each other as stars, even if it’s across a sign boundary. So I did wanna state that and make that clear where both frameworks matter. Like, the zodiacal framework and the sign-based copresences matter. And we’ve seen several instances of the conjunctions being in effect for the entirety of the sign-based conjunction or copresence even when one planet’s very early in the sign and one planet’s very late. But the degree-based alignments also matter with, you know, some standard orbs of let’s say like, seven degrees or something like that, give or take, still matter across sign boundaries as well. In this instance, you’re about to show a great example of it is a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in the birth chart of Richard Nixon. 

NDB: Yeah. We’ll have another one soon with Michael Jackson and his Jupiter-Neptune in adjacent signs, but yeah. It’s a very close Mars-Jupiter despite the fact that they’re in different signs. And when Nixon was elected president in November of 1968, there was a Mars-Jupiter conjunction happening in Virgo in Nixon’s first house. 

CB: So this was November 6th, 1968? 

NDB: I believe so. Is that what’s on the note here? 

CB: Here it is. So I put the transit chart up, as long as you can see it —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: So we see —

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: That’s incredible. So it’s to the degree. Mars is at 28 degrees of Virgo conjunct Jupiter at 28 degrees of Virgo. So the day he was elected was an exact conjunction of those planets. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: That’s repeating a natal recurrence of a natal conjunction that’s only literally like, two degrees away with Mars at 29 and Jupiter at one Capricorn. 

NDB: Exactly. Yeah. And this was a comeback for him, you know? He had lost the election to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier, so there is an element of rising back up. It’s Pluto along with Mars and Jupiter in that recurrence, and so that’s coming into play. 

CB: Right. And he thought he was finished after losing to Kennedy in the 1960 election, right? 

NDB: Yeah, he absolutely thought – well, he ran for governor in ‘62 and lost, and that’s when he told the press they wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, and he thought he was finished. Or at least he gave people the impression he was finished; some people thought he never thought he was finished. But yeah. So there is this element of like, coming back from nothing, coming back from losing. And it’s a Mars-Jupiter conjunction. The transit is Mars-Jupiter with Pluto, whereas in his natal chart, he has Mars-Jupiter opposite Pluto. So there’s this extension of, you know, Pluto does find its way – I know we’re only talking about conjunctions in this podcast, but you see this happen sometimes too where, yeah, a triple planet combination will be a conjunction of two opposite a third, and then something like this. Those same three planets come together. And so there’s an extended — 

CB: Go ahead and mention that. Like, this is a good excuse for that digression briefly — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — that it’s not — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: You pay attention to when there’s an alignment of like, let’s say, a conjunction that sometimes conjunctions and oppositions can be relevant as well, right? 

NDB: Oh yeah, absolutely. There are some other good ones, like Frida Kahlo’s death chart and things like that. Different combinations of two planets conjunct opposite another one that’s opposite, and then you could on a transit chart, you might have those same three planets, but one’s conjunct where it was opposite in the nativity and vice versa. So yeah —

CB: Or her injury chart as well. You saying that is like, she was born with a Mars-Uranus conjunction very close — 

NDB: That’s the one I meant, thank you. Yeah. 

CB: So she was born — 

NDB: Yes. 

CB: — on the Mars-Uranus conjunction in her 6th house natally, and then the day of her terrible bus accident that altered her life was a Mars-Uranus opposition. 

NDB: Correct, yeah. Thank you. 

CB: Okay. So the principle – to extrapolate the principle really even though we’re artificially limiting it and maybe in some sense like, hobbling the technique in order to make it more compelling for the purpose of this, but the more advanced levels of the technique is you could take it to when a person has a natal signature in the chart of let’s say a conjunction, then the recurrence of not just that conjunction between those two planets but also sometimes oppositions between those two planets can be important as well. 

NDB: Absolutely. You see that a lot. You know, like, for instance, right now Saturn’s making a conjunction to Neptune, but I’m having clients who were born in 1980 who have Saturn square Neptune, and you can see how the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction still lights up their natal square, because there is a relationship between those two planets. There are a lot of different variants on what you can do with this. So yeah, I thought it was worth pointing out since Pluto – this is a reasonably simple one nonetheless. 

CB: Remind me to do Biden next, then, because that’ll be the one example where we’ll demonstrate what you’re talking about of other aspects besides the conjunction. 

NDB: Sounds good. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: So yeah, Nixon was born with Mars conjunct Jupiter opposite Pluto, and when he’s elected, all three of those planets are conjunct in his first house. 

CB: Got it. So that was not the only Mars-Jupiter conjunction that was important for him, though, right? 

NDB: Right. There’s another one that happens in 1973. April 6th, 1973, there’s a conjunction in Aquarius. And this is the day that his attorney, John Dean, who has been sort of doing all the dirty work behind the scenes with Watergate on Nixon’s behalf. John Dean starts cooperating with the Watergate investigators because there’s an investigation going on. And this begins — 

CB: So it’s like the Watergate scandal has broken out, and it’s been going on for how long now? 

NDB: The Watergate break in was about nine months before this. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: And the burglars have already been to trial and been convicted, and then one of the burglars has told the judge that they – what’s the word when you lie in court? They perjured themselves by covering up the real reasons for the break up. And right as that’s happening, John Dean, who really was sort of like, a major player in this whole cover up up until this point, he starts cooperating with the investigators, which is the beginning of the cracks happening in Nixon’s own staff. And within a couple of weeks, Dean and two of Nixon’s closest aides will all be fired, and the beginning of the really unraveling – you can say like, this moment when Dean is on April 6th when this recurrence happens, the Mars-Jupiter, this is the first thread being pulled that’s gonna tear apart the Nixon administration over Watergate. This is the first thing that goes wrong that really is gonna lead to Nixon being hurt. Dean winds up giving testimony on television, and — 

CB: So it’s like, Nixon is protected in many ways even though this whole thing has become a firestorm, but all of a sudden on this conjunction, his lawyer flips on him, and — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — this is the beginning of the end of Nixon’s presidency in really tangible ways. It’s interesting that this Mars-Jupiter conjunction at seven degrees of Aquarius that’s exact this day takes place in his 6th house, and it’s like, somebody that worked for him. It’s people that worked for him. It’s his lawyer that flips on him, and that’s the beginning of the end. 

NDB: Yeah. His lawyer flips on him, and then like, the two guys – his two right-hand men, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, he has to fire them, too. So he’s really like, this leads to him having none of the people he’s been trusting and confiding in up until this point. They’re suddenly they’re gone. So you know, everyone else is sort of more remote to him, and he’s suddenly without his sort of security team, the people who’ve kept him safe. 

CB: So that really does bring up something we were seeing over and over again, but it’s worth just mentioning for a moment that the house that the recurrence takes place in often seems to play a major component in describing the quality and the nature of the event that occurs at the recurrence, which should be obvious – that’s pretty straightforward – because those two planets are transiting that house in the person’s chart at that time. So of course they’re gonna be bringing up in his instance like, 6th house topics of those that work for you. But it’s worth stating as an additional interpretive principle for how you interpret these things. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So this is the beginning of the end, and then eventually Nixon ends up having to resign and be the first president in history to resign as president in disgrace for Watergate. And this was the turning point. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Nice. All right. Well, those are two amazing literally – Mars-Jupiter conjunction, and you have literally the day of Nixon’s becoming president basically, or at least winning the election, and then you have the day that he would start his downfall to lose the presidency in some ways. 

NDB: That’s right. 

CB: Brilliant. All right. Good example. 

NDB: Thank you. So Biden? 

CB: Biden. Thank you for reminding me. Okay, so here’s the birth chart of Joe Biden, and he was famously born on November 2nd, 1942 — 

NDB: November 20th. 

CB: November 20th, 1942, at 8:30 AM in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with Sagittarius rising. And he has this Saturn-Neptune conjunction on the Descendant with Uranus at — 

NDB: Saturn-Uranus. 

CB: Oh man! Sorry, I’m starting to get tired, and my mind’s starting to slip. 

NDB: No worries! 

CB: So he has Uranus at two degrees of Gemini and Saturn at nine degrees of Gemini conjunct the Descendant at around let’s say three degrees of Gemini. So that Saturn-Neptune conjunction’s in his 7th house, and you had noticed a major recurrence transit that happened in the late 1980s when he ran for president and Saturn and Neptune conjoined in the sky, right? 

NDB: Saturn-Uranus. 

CB: I’m talking about Saturn-Neptune! I have to – yeah. Saturn-Neptune is very… I’ll let you take the example from here. 

NDB: Okay! I’ll try not to say Saturn-Neptune! So yeah. So Saturn-Uranus conjunctions only happen every 44 years or so. So there’s one in 1942, ‘43 and Biden’s born at the end of ‘42. And then the next conjunction happens in 1987 to early ‘88. And during that period in ‘87, ‘88, there’s basically – I mean, two things go terribly wrong in Biden’s life. He announced his candidacy for the presidency in June of ‘87, so by this point, he’d been a congressman first starting in ‘72, and now he was a senator and he wanted to run for president. So he announces his candidacy in June of ‘87, and he’s already having the Saturn-Uranus recurrence. Saturn and Uranus are about seven, eight degrees apart at this point. But about two weeks – sorry, three months into his campaign in September of ‘87 on September 17th, ‘87, Biden is forced to admit that he plagiarized some of his work when he was in law school. And within a few days, this is a big scandal he has to withdraw his bid for president. And this probably means that poor Joe Biden will never get to be president; he’s missed his chance, and he’ll never get another one. I’m kidding, of course. But then after this, something else terrible happens. He is diagnosed with having an aneurysm, and he undergoes two surgeries in early 1988 while the conjunction is still happening – one in February of 1988, and the next in May of 1988. So yeah. You know, that’s sort of the extent – sorry, the second one is like, May 4th, ‘88, if you’re looking for an exact date. 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Just so much — 

CB: I think it’s amazing — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: It’s amazing that this one’s happening in his like, first house in his rising sign. It’s like, so — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — prominent. But this is literally the next Saturn-Uranus conjunction after his birth, like — 

NDB: That’s right. 

CB: — you know, over 40 years earlier. And he has it, and he runs for president, but he fails. He has to pull out of the race, and then he like, immediately has an aneurysm and a major medical issue at the same time. 

NDB: Yeah. It probably would have helped his political career if he had the aneurysm before the plagiarism was discovered. But either way, it ruined his shot at the presidency. 

CB: Right. So then you were talking about that example, and then when I was thinking about it, it immediately made me remember what happened when he did first get into office, though, which is famously… What was the night of the presidential – on the night of the US presidential election in 2008 when Joe Biden was elected vice president and Barack Obama was elected as president, there was famously an exact Saturn-Uranus opposition at the time. Do I have the date there? 2008? Do you know the date? Was it the 5th? 

NDB: It’ll be the 4th. It’s a Tuesday. You know, it’s always — 

CB: Yeah, November 4th, okay. So here’s the chart. So look at this. Saturn that day on November 5th, 2008, was at 19 degrees of Virgo and it’s opposite to Uranus at 18 degrees — 

NDB: 18. 

CB: — of Virgo. So they actually — 

NDB: Right on his Midheaven-IC, too. It’s angular. 

CB: Right. Yeah, because his Midheaven’s at 19 degrees of Virgo. So this is that principle you were talking about earlier where sometimes if a person is born with a natal conjunction – in this instance, he has Saturn and Uranus conjunct in his birth chart – it’s not just the conjunctions that are important recurrences like that one in 1988 was – ‘87 – was a conjunction in his rising sign. But it’s also the oppositions. In this instance, literally the day – within 24 hours of him becoming vice president, there’s a Saturn-Uranus opposition exactly on his MC-IC axis. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: And I remember when — 

NDB: That’s how it works. 

CB: I remember that at the time, because it was such a moment of having Saturn opposite Uranus and this sudden like, break from the past with Obama being elected. And yeah, I always associated it with that Saturn-Uranus opposition as being the main aspect that day, but it’s fascinating that part of that was replicating Biden’s own Saturn-Uranus conjunction. 

NDB: Yeah, totally. And then, you know, of course that Uranus in Pisces as we know at inauguration two months later, Venus would be conjunct that Uranus. And you know, somewhat opposite that Saturn still. So that’s also pulling in too the reference we made earlier – talking about making good segues insofar as the Venus-Uranus at Obama-Biden’s inauguration in 2009 being a sort of a counterpoint to Trump in 2025 with his Venus-Saturn. But indeed, in 2009, it’s Venus-Uranus basically opposite Saturn. So that really reinforces that mirror of the 2024, ‘25 result as well. 

CB: Well, and look at his natal Venus. It’s at like, 28, so it’s actually applying to an opposition with Uranus pretty closely. So that’s — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — almost in a way another example of that where he’s born at the natal Venus-Uranus opposition and then there’s a Venus-Uranus conjunction when he is inaugurated vice president. And that is not the end of his story, because of course then we jump forward to January 20th, 2001, which is inauguration day, and this is the day that Biden is inaugurated president. And on this day, Saturn is at three degrees of Aquarius in the sky, and it’s applying to a square with Uranus at six degrees of Taurus in the sky. So there’s a very, very close Saturn-Uranus square the moment he actually becomes president. So that’s just absolutely uncanny. So he has just to — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — summarize, he was born on a Saturn-Uranus conjunction. He ran for president and had to drop out on a Saturn-Uranus conjunction. He is elected vice president on a Saturn-Uranus opposition, and then he becomes president on a Saturn-Uranus square. 

NDB: Yeah. And you know, in 2024, there was no Saturn-Uranus configuration going on, so it didn’t work out. 

CB: Yeah. So it’s like, well, I mean, that’s actually a whole interesting thing in itself because it was a Saturn… Saturn in Pisces stations in his 4th actually ended up being really important for that. But so this is our one more or less example of this, because I was worried about the technique getting muddied, and I deliberately restricted us to conjunctions. But the more advanced form of the technique can actually work like this where, you know, the natal signature in the chart can set up a signature for all sorts of recurrences of other aspects between those two planets as being important at critical turning points in the life. And you know, at some point we’ll have to do a follow up on that where we go deeper or we can do a workshop on that or something to go into the more advanced application of the technique. But this is just to give people a taste of that. 

NDB: That’s right. Yeah, there’s all kinds of fantastic examples with other aspects that we could have included and maybe we will in another – in a follow up. 

CB: Yeah. Let us know in the YouTube comments if you’d like to see us do a follow up on the more advanced things, and we’ll see what people think, if they want that, and then maybe we’ll do a follow up. 

NDB: You gotta want this, people! No one else is giving it to you! 

CB: All right. I wanna take another break, okay?

If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com. 

All right, we’re back from break, and this is going a little bit longer than I expected, as usual, like, any time I say something it’s gonna be a little bit – it’s called the Brennan Constant, I think is what Austin called it after our last forecast, is if I say it’s gonna be two hours, there’s some equation that projects it out to be like, three or four. But this feels really good —

NDB: I think it’s a Fibonacci exponential kind of thing, yeah. 

CB: Right. There’s like, a diagram of my head and like, a golden ratio being projected from it that’s like — 

NDB: Something like that. 

CB: — chiseled in an ancient stone somewhere. So this is good, though. This feels like, important life’s work contribution type thing that we’re doing right now in introducing this to everybody and trying to lay a solid foundation for this technique to grow and flourish after this point. So I’m willing to do what it takes to make this good, and I think anybody who sticks with us and watches this, it’s sort of like, a self-filtering mechanism. It’s like, those who are meant to get this information will receive it, and those who don’t wanna sit for a few hours to hear a workshop on one of the most amazing techniques ever that you’ve never heard of will not receive that information. 

NDB: That’s it. [speaking French]

CB: All right. So one of the examples I wanna get into is a really good one that you found that’s an impressive new development of the technique that I thought was cool is the Beatles example of a Saturn-Uranus conjunction. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, two of the Beatles, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, born right around the same time as Joe Biden. Paul is a few months older than Joe, and George is a few months younger than Joe, but they’re both born with that same Saturn-Uranus in Gemini. 

CB: There’s further set up, because the full set up is like, all four of the Beatles have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction by copresence —

NDB: Saturn-Uranus! 

CB: Oh my god. Sorry, when I start getting tired, it’s part of the long covid. 

NDB: Yeah. I do that. Yeah. 

CB: I’m just telling the audience that that’s part of the thing I struggle with is my mental facilities start fading. So all right, let me focus this, because I wanna be really clear on this example because it’s so good. All four of the Beatles functionally were born on a Saturn-Uranus conjunction in the 1940s, and two of them were born with the Saturn-Uranus conjunction very close in their birth charts. But by sign, all four of the Beatles have a Saturn-Uranus conjunction, and the example is that in the – just like Joe Biden, you said, because they were born with the same Saturn-Uranus conjunction as Joe Biden. In the 1980s when all four of them had their first Saturn-Uranus conjunction return, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 

NDB: Correct. The Beatles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in January of 1988 when there was a Saturn-Uranus conjunction in the sky. By this point, of course, John Lennon had been dead for over seven years. Ringo and John were born with Saturn and Uranus copresent in Taurus. They had more like, the Jupiter-Saturn zodiacal conjunction with Uranus copresent in Taurus. But Paul McCartney and George Harrison — 

CB: Let me show them. So who’s the first sign-based one, to start with – who did you just mention? 

NDB: Ringo. To start with, Ringo, and then John. 

CB: Okay, so for those watching the video version, here is the birth chart of Ringo Starr, who was born with Saturn at 12 degrees of Taurus and Uranus at 24 degrees of Taurus in the 3rd whole sign house. And you know, that’s not – I mean, I know you’re more focused on two of them in particular who come into conflict during the recurrence, but that’s a, you know, still pretty close conjunction to me of Saturn at 12 and Uranus at 24. It’s certainly a copresence by sign. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, I certainly agree. And think about it – these are the Beatles. The Beatles – they’re central to the 1960s culturally, but the period of 1965 to ‘66 when Saturn and Uranus were opposite was a real sort of like, that’s a period where the Beatles really sort of shot ahead in terms of their use of recording technology and innovation when they stopped touring and became a studio band. 

CB: Right. And just that generational —

NDB: And also when – yeah. 

CB: Like a generational —

NDB: And also when they were — 

CB: — generation-defining talent and like, a shift in terms of music and ushering in that era of rock and roll. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, literally changing the culture with every little thing they did. George Harrison picks up a sitar out of curiosity, and suddenly sitars are a thing in western music. And a lot of things like that. So yeah, really just having – being in the middle of the whole culture spurt and everything that’s happening in that period. 

CB: Right. So this is Ringo, born July 7th, 1940. He has Saturn at 12 Taurus and Uranus at 22 Taurus. And then the next one —

NDB: 24 Taurus, yeah. 

CB: 24. And the next one is Lennon? 

NDB: John Lennon, yeah. 

CB: Okay, so this is John Lennon, born October 9th, 1940, with Saturn at 13 Taurus and Uranus at 25 Taurus. Again, still very copresent, and if you looked at them up in the sky, those two planets at night would be – well, you could see Saturn. Uranus can only be seen under certain conditions. But nonetheless, they would be like, right next to each other. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So that’s Lennon. And then the other two are here’s George Harrison, who was born February 24th, 1943, with Saturn at five Gemini and Uranus at zero Gemini. So that’s a much closer conjunction; we’ve now changed signs. But it’s even closer in degree. 

And then finally the fourth Beatle is a man named Paul McCartney who was born June 18th, 1942, with Saturn at five degrees of Gemini and Uranus at one degree of Gemini. So all of them have this Saturn-Uranus conjunction, and then I just think – what is the date of their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? 

NDB: January – sorry, I don’t have the… Let me go to the document. Beatles. 

CB: There it is. January 20th, 1988. 

NDB: That’s it. 

CB: So I’m gonna share it as a transit chart. And we see Saturn at 27 degrees of Sagittarius and Uranus at 28 degrees of Sagittarius. So like some of our earlier examples of like, faster moving inner planets, this is something all four of them share in common, and then it’s like, very closely exact when they’re inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which is one of those… You know, obviously, they didn’t need it or they already had made a huge impact and whatever. But still, for many bands, this is like, a singular thing when you’re inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and it’s a real landmark moment typically in let’s say a musician’s career. 

NDB: It is now. This was the third annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, it was — 

CB: Oh wow. 

NDB: — still a fairly new thing, yeah. You know, they inducted Elvis or whoever in the first one. Bill Haley and the Comets, and probably Buddy Holly and Little Richard by the second or third. But yeah, with the third, it’s the Beatles are being inducted, and of course John Lennon is dead by this point. But only two of the Beatles arrive on this evening – George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono come to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But Paul McCartney doesn’t attend, which is very – you know, there were some legal battles still going on between the different Beatles, and Paul didn’t feel like going up and making a fake play of them being friendly at a time when they weren’t. And there were all kinds of ironies in this. George Harrison enthusiastically participated; he had a new album out in the past year called Cloud Nine, and he was really sort of – George Harrison usually was the Beatle who eschewed the Beatles in his post-Beatle life. He didn’t really like to talk about them or didn’t have the same kind of rosy, rose-colored view of the Beatle years that the other guys did. And but for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame thing, he was very present and a real sort of participant and happy and what have you, whereas Paul – who usually was the one who was more keen to like, put on a happy front even if things weren’t entirely happy behind the scenes and who was always enthusiastic about the Beatles and their legacy, he was the one who didn’t feel right about participating for a variety of interpersonal reasons at the time. 

So there’s even kind of like, a role reversal between George and Paul when they’re both having this – I mean, to some extent, they’re all having the recurrence transit, like you say. But since Paul and George are the Beatles who have them zodiacally very close in the conjunction, it really sort of sparks the hard feelings between the two of them, I guess. 

CB: Right. So this was – especially because of the legal issue where they were – Paul McCartney was in a legal battle with the others, this was the worst their relationship was post —

NDB: Right. 

CB: — the breakup of the Beatles any time after, and then even up ‘til now, because they would eventually patch things up. 

NDB: Yeah. When the Beatles broke up in 1970, they were really mad at each other. Paul sued the other guys. But eventually they worked it out. By 1973, ‘74, they were all friends. They had signed a legal document to end their partnership so they weren’t locked up that way. And they became friends for a while, you know? They didn’t need to worry about being in a band together. But they were friendly for a bit. But then things did go a little – like, John Lennon, of course, was murdered in 1980, and then in the ‘80s there were some residual or new sort of legal issues that they were battling over. Yoko Ono, of course, was now in charge of John Lennon’s estate, and that made things complicated. And so — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: Yeah, so this very specific period – 1987, ‘88 – is the one period apart from when the Beatles actually broke up and freshly were mad at each other, this is the one time – the hardest, the darkest it got between them, the roughest their relationship was in what were generally good post-Beatle years. 

CB: Right. It’s interesting just, even just all of them having Saturn-Uranus as a signature and just the instability of the group and the fact that their eventual breakup and demise would itself be such a legendary part of their entire story. Because the Beatles weren’t actually together or famous for a very long amount of time when you add it up, right? 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, they were incredibly prolific and productive. So it makes it seem like it was epic length. But from the first recording session to the last, it’s eight years, you know? “Love Me Do” recorded in September of 1962 and Abbey Road finishes recording in August of ‘69. Sorry, seven years, not eight. Seven years from beginning to beginning. Think of every single Beatles song you’ve ever heard the Beatles recording, and it was recorded in this very short seven-year period of time. These days, some bands take longer than seven years to release a follow up album. So it was really, you know, they did a lot in that short period of time. 

CB: Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, it just speaks to the… Because they also during that time went through a lot of different like, phases and eras and constantly reinventing themselves and like, pushing the limits or pushing the edge. I’m thinking about the nature of Saturn conjunct Uranus, but also the inherent instability of that is that it’s something too hard to hold together with Saturn and Uranus so prominent in all of their charts. 

NDB: Yeah. What’s funny is during the Beatle years, the four of them were like, always together. And so when they did break up, it really was – like, if you’ve ever had a romantic partner that you were just with constantly and then there’s a break up, it goes from intense closeness to intense separation. But there was a lot about them that was Saturn-Uranus, you know. They were countercultural and challenging the status quo, but to like, real counterculture types, they seemed kind of safe and manufactured. You know, they were always sort of like, a polar opposite to whoever was looking at them, you know? Too rebellious for the real straight arrows, and too straight for the really rebellious people in a way. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: And of course – just little things – you know, imagine you get a new haircut and then the rest of the world wants to have your haircut. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s what I’m thinking in terms of like, the Saturn-Uranus conjunction and just being trendsetters and setting the standard for like, an entire generation and for an entire genre of rock music. I mean, looking at this conjunction and them starting the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and then having two other years of inductees first, but then like, you know, as soon as they could basically inducting the Beatles into that as such genre-defining, and the reason that there probably even was a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to begin with in some sense, inducting them into that at that time. There’s something about that that’s really striking to me. 

NDB: Yeah. It’s a really curious year to choose them, no doubt. And yeah, just the way it all played out, you know? Like I said, George being really involved and keen and Paul being reluctant and a bit sour, it was kind of like they were taking on each other’s role in that bit. 

CB: Yeah. All right, I think that’s good. Why don’t we move on. 

Let me hit some — 

NDB: Do we go to Michael after we’ve been talking about Paul? Is that another segue? Going to the guy who owned their music at one point? 

CB: Oh right, yeah. I actually tried looking up that incident to see if that was around the same time, and it wasn’t. Let’s do Michael, because then that’ll go along well with the other one I found, which is Madonna. 

NDB: Okay, yeah. 

CB: What time – we don’t have a confirmed time for Michael Jackson, I think we have to state from the outset, right? 

NDB: Well, I mean, we do have — 

CB: What do you use? I haven’t looked at it. 

NDB: Yeah. Here, I’ll pull it out. When he died, his nephew did say he spoke to Michael’s mom and they got the birth time, and it is 7:33 PM with a Pisces rising, Pisces Moon. 

CB: But wasn’t there – 7:33 PM?

NDB: 7:33 PM. There was another chart quoted by Basil Fearrington for 11:53 PM that gave him Gemini rising. 

CB: Right, that was the one that was just showing. So I just remember – there was something in the Astro Databank notes about the Pisces chart that still expressed a doubt of skepticism about the — 

NDB: Yeah. I’m not gonna swear by anything. I wouldn’t find it hard to believe he was Pisces rising. But yeah —

CB: Sure. 

NDB: — it was when he died, I think his nephew went on Twitter or something like that as I — 

CB: Right. Well, let’s just say for the sake of this, I don’t know because I haven’t looked it up or researched it in a long time, so I don’t know — 

NDB: That’s okay. I mean, again, we don’t have to swear by it, you know. 

CB: Yeah. No, I mean, that’s what I’m saying. It’s just for our purpose, it’s not relevant because we’re just looking at his Jupiter-Neptune conjunction where in his birth chart, Jupiter was at 28 degrees of Libra and Neptune was at two degrees of Scorpio. So in the sky, they were very close together even though it’s across a sign boundary.

NDB: Yeah. And definitely, you know, the Michael Jackson example is also kind of a nice companion to the Steve Jobs one because it’s another one of these examples where we look at the regular Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions, every single one that Michael lived through, and much like Steve Jobs with Jupiter-Uranus, for Michael, Jupiter-Neptune, the conjunctions sort of make these chapters of a book that if you wrote a book about Michael’s life you could start the sections at the different Jupiter-Neptune transits and it would kind of make sense. 

So the first one obviously, he’s born – yeah, he’s born in 1958. And that’s the conjunction. And then the first transit he has is in 1971. In 1971, Jupiter and Neptune come together in a conjunction in Sagittarius. And while there are a few things that happen – the family moves to California, for instance, things like that – but the main thing for Michael, just the one takeaway, is that it’s in 1971 that he makes his first solo TV appearance and records his first solo single. And so it’s the beginning. Of course, Michael Jackson is eventually gonna be a solo artist; the Jackson Five and later the Jacksons – you know, this is the group with his brother that helps him rise to stardom, but ultimately he’s gonna be just too big a star to be tied down to his brothers. And that solo artist career starts in 1971. First he’s on a Diana Ross TV special and he sings a song without his brothers being on stage or what have you. And then later that year, he releases his first solo single – a song called “Got to be There” – in October of ‘71. So — 

CB: So here’s the chart for that. On October 7th, 1971, Neptune’s at one degree of Sagittarius and Jupiter’s at two degrees of Sagittarius. 

NDB: Right. And like I said, yeah, there’ve been a lot of things in his life this year that signify that Jupiter-Neptune, but certainly breaking out as a solo artist is the single most important one. So — 

CB: Right. Because that’s one of the things about once we start getting into the slower moving outer planet ones is conjunctions like this, you know, are sometimes in effect for like a year. But certainly this one’s very close by degree at the time when he records his first single. 

NDB: Yeah. Exactly. And releases it. So then jumping ahead to January 27th, 1984, on this day Jupiter was conjunct Neptune at the beginning of Capricorn. They had just been conjunct; Jupiter’s just passed Neptune in Capricorn. It was on January 27th, ‘84, that Michael was burned badly because of an accident that happened when he was taping a Pepsi commercial. His hair caught fire. And because of this accident, he wound up taking painkillers and basically beginning his, you know, the drug problem that would ultimately contribute to his passing in 2009. He had been very strictly anti-drug up until this point, but hey – as one does when you’re a burn victim, you want painkillers, and one thing led to another. 

CB: And what were the degrees again? The internet cut out. 

NDB: Oh! Neptune was at zero Capricorn and Jupiter was at one Capricorn. 

CB: Okay. Very close. Nice. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Okay. Next? 

NDB: So then we jump ahead another 13 years to 1997. On February 13th, 1997, 1:17 AM in Los Angeles, a baby named Prince Michael Jackson I was born; this was Michael Jackson’s first of three children that he had with Debbie Rowe, his second wife. And it was sort of announced very suddenly. Now, Neptune and Jupiter were in different signs, but on the day the kid’s born, Jupiter is at five Aquarius and Neptune’s at 28 Capricorn. But this was all done, you know, with a lot of secrecy. And yeah, you know, the conjunction would have been within a few weeks before the birth, and it was one of these things like, no one knew a baby was coming until the thing actually happened. 

CB: Was this his first child? 

NDB: Yeah, his first child. 

CB: Okay, got it.

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: All right. Next. 

NDB: And then there’s just one more is the fact that 13 years after this in 2009, Michael Jackson was declared dead on the 25th of June 2009 at 2:26 PM in Los Angeles. And Jupiter and Neptune were conjunct at 26 Aquarius. 

CB: Like, exactly conjunct? 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Both of them at 26 Aquarius – that’s crazy. 

NDB: Yeah. He really is just Jupiter-Neptune. Again, much like Steve Jobs where it’s so – we’ve almost just told the story of his life in a fairly complete way. I mean, okay, we didn’t talk about “Thriller” or this or that, but a lot of those big markers you can really see how they just sort of outline the contours of his timeline. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. I mean, especially the accident under the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in ‘84 that led him to start having to take painkillers and then the recurrence in 2009 of that exact conjunction and his death and the fact that he died partially through complications through some of the drugs that he was taking, right? 

NDB: Yeah. Well, he was using the same drug that surgeons use to anesthetize people for surgery. He was using that like as a sleeping aid, which is insane. It’s interesting; when he died, Pluto was at one degree of Capricorn, which is where that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction had been when he got burned. So there’s little things like that you can look at as well. But yeah. It basically – Michael before the burning accident never would have used a drug to help him sleep or anything like that. But then after the accident and the painkillers, it just, you know, he starts to – and of course, he’s trying to keep up with being Michael Jakcson, so he starts to use things to help him sleep, to help him be awake. The old Elvis strategy. 

CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s really striking and, yeah, that he just dies from a freak sort of like medical accident through overdosing basically on drugs and painkillers.

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. I noticed recently that they just dropped the first trailer for that new biopic that they’re releasing of him, which is interesting. So there’s gonna be a new —

NDB: A resurgence. 

CB: — movie about his life, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes and yeah, how they cover everything. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So an adjacent one – because Michael Jackson was born August 29th, 1958, and Madonna weirdly was born very close to him, right? 

NDB: Yeah, 12, 13 days earlier. Madonna – I think 13 days earlier, because Madonna is 10 years minus two days older than me. Yeah, there she is. And it’s funny – and then Prince is born like, a few months before Madonna, you know? So like, all those – the three biggest pop stars of the ‘80s were all born in that summer of ‘58 with that Jupiter-Neptune. 

CB: Yeah. Exactly. That’s what I was thinking. So Madonna has Jupiter at 26 Libra conjunct Neptune at two degrees of Scorpio. And there were two main ones that I found about Madonna that I thought were really impressive how her life was tied into these Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions. There’s basically like, three or four of them. But the first one is that there was a series of conjunctions around 1984, and that was when she first became a big hit and released her first big album that made her a worldwide sensation basically at that time, right?

NDB: Yeah. That was when “Like a Virgin” came out, and the very first MTV Video Awards in September of ‘84 was when she was rolling around on the stage in a wedding dress and everyone was very shocked, and yeah that was an out-of-sign Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. Neptune at the first MTV Video Awards in September of ‘84, Neptune was at 28 Sag and Jupiter at three Capricorn. So yeah. Very much. All the whole “Like a Virgin” ascendancy to stardom, because she became famous pretty fast with that one. 

CB: When was that first MTV Video Awards again? 

NDB: The first MTV Video Awards were September 14th, 1984. And it was like — 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: — the shocking thing that she’s wearing a wedding dress and singing the song in a wedding dress and then rolling around on the floor in the wedding dress. The ‘80s! I gotta tell you, man! 

CB: Of like, what was edgy at the time. 

NDB: Right. No, I mean, because I was 16 when this is coming out, and I’m thinking, “You know, the 1970s were just a few years ago. Why is this freaking people out?” But for some reason it was. 

CB: Right. Well, yeah. And so I used her chart maybe it was like, one of the houses episodes, but I thought it was really interesting how – so one of the things she got a lot of flack for earlier in her career was the use of some religious imagery or the perception of doing — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — things that was like, blasphemy or things like that or being accused of. And there’s some debate about her time; I use this Virgo rising chart where it has Mars in her 9th house in a day chart, and I think it’s really solid. But back to your point. Here at the MTV Music Awards, we see Jupiter at three degrees of Capricorn conjunct Neptune at 28 degrees of Capricorn, so it’s a really interesting replication of her natal Jupiter at 26 Libra and Neptune at two degrees of Scorpio. And that entire year, basically, is the year that Madonna blows up and becomes Madonna. 

NDB: Yeah. And you know, I was in high school at the time, and like, overnight all the girls were wearing Madonna hairstyle, Madonna clothes, you know, fishnet everywhere. 15-year-old girls in fishnet stuff, yeah. It was 1984. Lot of hair gel. Yeah. 

CB: Nice. So jumping forward to the next conjunction, which happened in 1997, January 9th, 1997 – that same month of that conjunction, just 10 days later, she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in the movie Evita, and this marked a major career high point for her and her highest critical acclaim as an actress, which was also coming just three months after the birth of her first child which is also an important turning point. But we can see when she wins that Golden Globe that Jupiter’s at 29 degrees of Capricorn conjunct Neptune at 27 degrees of Capricorn. 

NDB: Yeah. The movie was still pretty new. It premiered in the US Christmas of ‘96, so it was still in theatres when she won that Golden Globe, I believe. 

CB: Yeah. And that’s kind of like, the pinnacle of her 1990s acting career, because I remember earlier in the ‘90s you had like, A League of Their Own, the baseball movie with Geena Davis, where she played a pretty significant role in that. But this was her winning like, actual awards. 

NDB: Yeah. No, I don’t think her acting career ever really topped this one, you know, in terms of acclaim or reviews of what have you. There was a movie when she was first becoming famous called Desperately Seeking Susan that was kind of popular, but she wasn’t gonna win a Golden Globe for that. But a lot of her movies had been sort of hit and miss. Yeah, A League of Their Own was bigger, was more popular than some of her others, but yeah. This really – she never got higher with her acting career than what she did with Evita.

CB: Sure. Well, yeah, because I don’t remember her doing many acting roles after this in the 2000s; do you remember any? 

NDB: No. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: No, she married Guy Ritchie after this, the film director who did Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and things like that. But yeah, no, it’s true. Actually, what she did do after Evita is the following year, she made what I think is by far her best album, Ray of Light, which is just excellent. And you know, this from someone who had never been that into her music. You know, I liked some of her singles, but Ray of Light was a really solid work of art, you know? Like, she really made a great, great album there. 

CB: Right. Do you remember when – it’s funny that you mention Guy Ritchie and her getting together with him, because that actually brings us to our next conjunction where we jump to January of 2009. And unfortunately in January of 2009, she gets divorced from Guy Ritchie. So Jupiter’s in early Aquarius and Neptune is later on in Aquarius at like, 23. But this marked the finalization of that divorce for her, which is an important turning point. It also – the conjunctions later that year bracketed the finalization of her adoption of her daughter Mercy James, and she also had a major tour that made her the highest grossing tour by a solo artist at that time in 2009. 

So then finally, we jump forward to the next conjunction, which is April 12th, 2022, and this was the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces. And that year, the year of this conjunction, she released a major career retrospective album that was titled Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, and yeah, so she does basically like, a career retrospective in this year of the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, which I thought was brilliant because it kind of bookends her career in this pretty significant and notable way, which began under a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. 

NDB: Yeah. Well, it certainly took off under one, yeah. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: Absolutely. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. All right. 

NDB: Well done, Madonna. 

CB: All right. Where should we go from here? What conjunctions have we not covered, or what alignments have we not covered that would be good to that are in our research list? 

NDB: Well, you have the Charles Manson Mars-Neptune. 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: If you wanna do that.

CB: Mars-Neptune; that would be a good one. Okay. So let me pull up Charles Manson’s chart. I just found this so it’s a little tricky, of course; we’re dealing with a noted murderer or people that instructed people to murder other people. I had used him – I think I mentioned him maybe in the 5th house example recently as a Mars-Neptune conjunction in the 5th house. And I was really fascinated by that partially because one of the ways I was interpreting it before I looked at his recurrence transits was as somebody who – he started a cult, but it was like, a cult of younger people. And you often find younger people in the 5th house, and that was part of how I was interpreting that I think in one of the recent 5th house episodes. But then when I was researching this episode, I actually found that responded a lot to Mars-Neptune conjunctions at different points in his career. But maybe you can help to verify this for me, because I don’t wanna do his entire chronology or something. But basically there were three conjunctions I think that were important for him. And one of them is that he gets out of prison in early 1967, and he ends up going to San Francisco and that summer, which is famously known as the summer of love, right in the middle of that, there’s this Mars-Neptune conjunction in August of 1967. And this is when he’s first gathering together his so-called “family,” his cult, basically – the Manson family – in San Francisco, right? 

NDB: Yeah. So what’s interesting seeing how these things can be extended when you have a retrograde, Manson’s release from prison – March 21st, 1967 – and Mars has just gone retrograde at two degrees of Scorpio. So it’s already copresent with Neptune even though it’s on the other end of the sign. That Mars retrograde – so he’s released from prison; Mars is copresent with Neptune in Scorpio. The Mars retrograde is gonna wander back into Libra and then go back into Scorpio so that by the end of July – July 28th, Manson’s actually arrested for having a teenage girl with him basically. But you know, there’s something about Manson’s life at this time which we don’t need to get into now, but he keeps getting away with stuff that he legally shouldn’t be getting away with, and people have theories about why that is. But yeah, certainly by July and August, he’s putting together that family. As Mars is now back in Scorpio even by the end of July, and throughout the summer – that summer of love – Mars is back copresent with Neptune. So again, it’s that matter of, you know, Mars after a retrograde moving slowly, spending a lot of time in the same sign so that copresence with Neptune is really drawn out. And yeah, over a short period of time, he assembles what people call his “family” – a ragtag gang of runaways and other countercultural wanderers, and yeah. And this is the crew of people that he’ll be with over the next two, three years as he goes on to become this cultural icon of murder and terror. 

CB: Right. Because he eventually instructs his followers to murder people and they go off and do it. And one thing about his Mars-Neptune conjunction I didn’t know until last night when I was researching this in his biography is that prior to this point, he was involved in – like, the Wikipedia biography says he was involved in pimping, basically, and having women prostitutes that he was in charge of and was putting on the streets. And that this was like, a significant part of his biography and he actually married one of the prostitutes that he was working with at a certain point. I thought that was a striking manifestation of his Mars-Neptune conjunction in the 5th house that I didn’t know about until yesterday. 

NDB: Yeah, no, I know he was arrested for pimping in 1954 a couple of times. And you know, even with the Manson family, like the runaway girls in the Manson family, I mean, he more or less pimped them out as well. He would have them working in strip bars and bringing him the money. The ranch that they stayed in was, you know, basically their rent was paid to the old guy who owned the ranch through favors from the girls in the Manson family, most likely Squeaky Fromme. So yeah. I mean, it was always kind of pimping. Even, like, the whole thing about the Manson family was it was Manson’s hold over the women that made the family enticing to the men who hung out in the family. You know, the men wanted the women; Charlie controlled the women. So even within the family, there was an element of him being a pimp of sorts. 

CB: Got it. Okay. That makes so much — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — more sense of just, I had always seen just his birth chart and this emphasis on the 7th house with that whole stellium of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Sun, all in the 7th house, and then that – because he has a day chart, he was born a little bit before a sunset, the ruler of the 7th house of relationships and other people being that Mars in Virgo in the 5th house of sex and sexuality conjunct Neptune, and that being the most difficult planet in his chart. But I had never fully understood why that was until I was reading that about his biography, but suddenly it makes just like, a ton of sense. So — 

NDB: Right. 

CB: All right. So to jump forward — 

NDB: It goes — 

CB: — to not dwell on that, to jump forward.

NDB: Okay, no, yeah, but I just wanted to say there’s one other thing is he was a very talented musician and songwriter. So there is that Mars-Neptune is there just, you know, as you would expect. He was good. You know, people like Neil Young or whoever have said, you know, yeah, he’s a crazy killer, but he wrote some good songs. Which is objectively true despite what one thinks of his character.

CB: Okay, I’m glad you mentioned that, because that is the set up for the next Mars-Neptune conjunction after this one in 1967 which occurs two years later in 1969. And the context for that ties into what you were just saying, because he was a musician, and he was trying to get – there was a music producer that he was trying to work with, and this music producer almost signed a deal with him but ended up backing out at some point, right? 

NDB: Correct, yeah. The Beach Boys did record one of Manson’s songs; they rewrote some of the lyrics. And it was this producer, Terry Melcher, who produced that record. 

CB: Got it.

NDB: So yeah. You know, he even had a song on a Beach Boys record, so that’s something.

CB: So two years later, it’s February 22nd, 1969; there’s another conjunction that month of Mars and Neptune in Scorpio this time. And he instructs – one of the things he’s going to end up doing later that year is he instructs his followers in his cult to go and kill the music producer because he knows where the guys lives and he knows his house. But what happens at the conjunction in February of 1969 is the music producer moves out of his house, which Manson doesn’t know, and this other couple, which is Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, move into the house in February of 1969 at the time of this Mars-Neptune conjunction. And then they will famously later be murdered when Manson sends his crazed followers to murder them in this grisly murder later that summer. But that’s what’s so crazy about this conjunction to me is that the primary event – there may be other events, but – the primary event that I noticed is that Sharon Tate and Polanski move into that house at that time. And there’s a Mars-Neptune component to that, because it’s like, they literally get murdered almost on accident — 

NDB: Not Polanski. Yeah. 

CB: Well, yeah, Tate gets brutally murdered while she’s pregnant because of a mix up basically, because they didn’t know that they would be there and they thought they were going after this other guy. 

NDB: Yeah. That’s basically what happened, yeah. 

CB: Okay. So that happens later that summer. And then get this – Manson and his family are arrested and put on trial, and then two years later – because these Mars-Neptune conjunctions happen at about that rate – two years later on January 25th, 1971, there’s a recurrence and Manson and his codefendants on this date are found guilty. And this marks basically the end of his career and the end of his life as a free man, because he would then spend the rest of his life in prison from this point forward. And on this date, Mars is at one degree of Sagittarius conjunct Neptune at two degrees of Sagittarius. So he ends up having again this recurrence of Mars and Neptune when him and his cultists basically are sentenced to life in prison. 

NDB: Yeah. And think about it. He’s got the Mars-Neptune conjunction, and Manson’s conviction is very unusual in law. It is incredibly – it is very, very hard – to convict someone of murder if they weren’t even in the house or the vicinity of where the murder occurred. What they proved was that he instigated it and he had an influence, so it’s very Mars-Neptune! Like, he didn’t personally kill anyone. He just sort of, you know, yeah, entranced these followers into doing it. So it’s even interesting on that regard, you know. And that was acknowledged. No one —

CB: Right. 

NDB: No one thought he was there. It’s very well-established he wasn’t. He brought them there; he told them what to do, and then he left. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: You know. 

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible —

NDB: I think there was a follow up murder the next night or two nights later, and for that one, he did tie up the people. But even then, he left and the other people went in and killed him. So yeah, you know, it’s a very hard thing to do to convict someone of murder when they’re not even in the vicinity. But that’s what you get with him. 

CB: Yeah. Totally. And that’s a good example for another digression of things we learn from this, which is that sometimes by doing this recurrence transit work, you learn more about the specific manifestations of certain planetary combinations. And like, right here, we’re seeing a really good example of what Mars and Neptune can mean when they come together in some instances. And it’s a really great empirical way of learning what the planetary alignments actually mean and what different planetary energies mean when they’re blended together. 

NDB: Yeah. There’s one you missed. Can you just go to his chart in September 24th, 1984? On this day – so you see Mars and Neptune are again in a recurrence in Sagittarius, but at the opposite end of Sagittarius as to when he was convicted. On this day, he was assaulted by another inmate at prison and set on fire. He came close to dying. 

CB: Okay. Wow. 

NDB: It’s in the whole sign 8th house, and you know. Yeah, just thought I’d throw it in there! 

CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Good example. Yeah, that’s crazy. So that is… And that’s such a weird combination, because I don’t think – have we looked at a Mars-Neptune before? I think this is our first one, right? 

NDB: Yeah, it is our first one, yeah. 

CB: Okay. Yeah. So just all sorts of different combinations work for different people in these unique ways that’s symbolically resonant with the nature of the combination. 

NDB: Indeed. 

CB: Couple other combinations that we haven’t covered yet that I wanna make sure that we do briefly – one of them is Saturn conjunct Pluto. And with this one, I have a really good example where — 

NDB: You found the Meghan Markle one, right? I was looking at that too; I was glad you found that. 

CB: Exactly. Because I was thinking about Saturn-Neptune, and one of the news stories I remember, because that conjunction went exact at the beginning of 2020. And before covid really ramped up, one of the news stories I remembered about that year that was very close to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced that they were leaving the royal family at that time, or that they were stepping down from official duties. And what’s fascinating a bout that is that both of them were born with a natal Saturn-Pluto conjunction in different signs, in adjacent signs. So —

NDB: Meghan was literally born like, less than a week after Harry’s parents were married, just to — 

CB: Wow. Okay. 

NDB: Yeah. Little spin on that. They were married —

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: — I think July 29th, ‘81, and she’s born August 4th, ‘81. So. 

CB: So here’s her chart. So she has Saturn at five degrees of Libra copresent with Pluto at 21 degrees of Libra in the 4th whole sign house. And you know, Saturn rules the 7th house of relationships; it’s in the 4th house of family and parents. So it’s a —

NDB: And let’s actually – there’s also she’s got Saturn-Jupiter copresent with Pluto. And really, when we get to this period in 2020, that’s really relevant again. 

CB: That’s a good point. Also Saturn-Jupiter copresent in the same sign, and Jupiter-Pluto copresent, because of course all of those would recur in early 2020. So that’s her chart. And then Prince Harry’s chart is here – September 15th, 1984 – and he has Pluto at zero degrees of Scorpio copresent with Saturn at 12 degrees of Scorpio. So again, like, a sign-based copresence really not that far off in terms of degrees. 

But so both of them have that signature of Saturn-Pluto natally, and then what happened is at the beginning of 2020, on January 8th, 2020, they made their first public announcement basically that they were starting to pull back from doing official royal duties and things as part of the British royal family, which Harry was part of and Meghan married into, of course. So here is the chart for that. Because what’s so striking about that date is it’s extremely close to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that went exact just a few days later, but here we see Saturn at 22 degrees of Capricorn conjunct Pluto at 22 degrees of Capricorn. So it’s on the same degree, and then all of a sudden, they begin this process basically of starting to remove themselves from the royal family. And over the course of the next several months, there’s this increasingly public and increasingly tenuous break between Meghan and Harry and the royal family, including Harry’s brother William and his father Prince – or was he King Charles at that? I guess just Prince Charles at that point. 

NDB: No, he was still Prince Charles at that point, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So I thought this was incredible just because then the Saturn-Pluto recurrence for them is this huge break between them as a couple and the royal family. And then there’s all sorts of accusations lobbed back and forth from both sides eventually about why this happened or whose fault it was and et cetera, but we don’t have to go into all of that so much as just noting that this very public rift in this family came about during this Saturn-Pluto recurrence. 

NDB: Yeah. Simple as that. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s pretty good. 

So you know, this brings us back to the 2020 one, which is just this huge pile-up of planets that happened in the first few months of 2020 – this stellium in Capricorn that was like, you know, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto – at different points, there were different outer planets. And this reminded me of a point I meant to make, which is that this is why stelliums in the sky in mundane astrology or in world astrology are important. Because when a stellium happens in a certain sign, when there’s a cluster of a bunch of planets that move together into a conjunction by degree or by sign, all of a sudden a bunch of people are gonna start having recurrence transits all at the same time. And it starts drawing in everybody’s chart to this like, weird energy vortex that’s almost like a black hole because like, the mass of all of those planets being together is causing a bunch of people to start having recurrence transits if they have those planets in close alignments in their own birth chart, especially conjunctions. 

NDB: You know what looking at this chart reminds me of, Chris? Actually this is gonna be worth it. So going back to 2016, and we’re predicting the election, you mentioned why you didn’t think of Trump then. In 2016, I’m thinking, well, Trump is a 2024 guy; he’s not a 2016 guy, so I don’t think he’s gonna win. I thought Hillary was gonna win. And when I predicted Hillary would win, my reasoning – and this is where this can bite you in the ass – I was looking at this cluster of planets in 2020. I was talking about it in 2016, and I was thinking, “Oh, something bad is gonna happen in early 2020, and Hillary has a Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and she’s gonna have a recurrence transit, and so this is gonna be this big moment in her presidency.” That’s what I’m thinking in 2016. And being hilariously wrong while also, you know, sort of burying the lede. A lot of astrologers – we knew that early 2020 looked really crazy even if we didn’t know what to make of it. But I did think something big was coming, but I thought it would be President Hillary Clinton who would be dealing with it because she had that natal Saturn-Pluto. So it’s – you can learn when you get things wrong as well. I think everyone who’s been listening to this episode can fathom why I would have thought – why I would have used that reasoning. It wasn’t necessarily unsound even if it was ultimately wrong. But looking at this reminds me now of like, since we’re on the subject of recurrence transits, I was thinking, “Oh, well, Hillary, if she wins, this will be her big moment,” you know? And it probably would have been had things been different. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Well, and it was in mundane astrology, of course, this was the recurrence – you know, the 2020 covid pandemic on the Saturn-Pluto conjunction – the last time there had been a Saturn-Pluto conjunction was in the early 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was breaking out. Yeah. So good times. But stelliums are important, because the point you were making was like, you know, Harry was getting a recurrence, but Meghan especially was getting a recurrence because she didn’t just have Saturn-Pluto, but she also had a Jupiter-Pluto recurrence later that year, of course – well, actually, already. There’s already copresence, but Jupiter-Saturn recurrence, so she’s having like, three major — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — outer planet recurrences by conjunction in her chart. 

NDB: And in her particular chart, the chart ruler is locked in with those planets as well. She’s Cancer rising; the Moon in Libra is a degree from conjunct Saturn and two from Jupiter, et cetera, et cetera. So it really is like, it’s a big part of her chart even more than your average person born in 1981. A lot of people born in 1981 have that Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto – hello, Beyonce; hello, Britney Spears; many others, you know. A lot of them would have been having recurrence transits like that. But even in Meghan’s case, because the Moon is there and it’s a chart ruler, it’s just that much more of the case for her even relative to her peers.

CB: Absolutely. Well, and to take that a step further, it’s like, look at what house this recurrence of planets is falling in. That entire Capricorn stellium in 2020 is falling in her 7th house of relationships, and — 

NDB: Right. 

CB: — you know, of course, squaring her 4th house stellium of family, and they’re having this huge falling out with her partner’s family. 

NDB: Yeah. And her partner’s family are part of like, a millennia-long institution, you know, that once ruled the world. 

CB: Right. 

NDB: So it’s not just anyone’s family! 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the royal family. Give me a break; it’s, yeah, an institution in many senses of the word. There are all these people behind the scenes who actually decide what’s acceptable and what’s not. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So that is my example of that, of like, Saturn-Pluto. Because it became really like, dark in terms of the tension, in terms of being Saturn-Pluto, it was a major thing. It seemed like, not pleasant from the reports that I saw. 

NDB: Yeah. The only thing that was gonna make this story go away was for something even worse to happen to another British royal, so. There you go. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So you mentioned somebody – you mentioned Beyonce, and that actually brought up – because she was a Jupiter-Saturn one that I noticed. And this one’s good because we recently got Beyonce’s time not too long ago, and she has Aries rising. And so that Libra stellium in her chart is actually in the 7th whole sign house because even though the Ascendant’s at like, 29 Aries, the Descendant is at 29 Libra, but she has this whole Libra stellium then that’s in the 7th whole sign house which is like, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Pluto. So absolutely packed 7th house. And part of that 7th house is that she has a very close Jupiter-Saturn conjunction with Saturn at nine degrees of Libra conjunct Jupiter at 12 degrees of Libra. And the primary thing I wanted to point out about this that I thought was fascinating is we, of course, famously had – after she was born, the next time that Jupiter and Saturn would conjoin and replicate her natal conjunction is Jupiter and Saturn do that every 20 years. So around the ages of like, 19, 20, she – there’s a replication when there’s a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that takes place in Taurus.

NDB: If you go to February 15th of 2000 is when Destiny’s Child announced their lineup change. Because there was the original four piece that recorded the first album, and then half the group left, and they brought in a third singer and that was the classic Destiny’s Child lineup. And that was announced on February 15th, 2000 – the Destiny’s Child we know with Michelle Williams. 

CB: Got it. Okay. 

NDB: And Kelly Rowland. Yeah, the three piece. 

CB: So and that’s the major thing that I noticed about this timeframe of, you know, around a year of this Saturn-Jupiter conjunction for Beyonce is that basically this is when the group that she was in, Destiny’s Child, releases two major albums which really make them a huge hit. So there’s like, one that’s released in the middle of 1999 that had that hit, “Say My Name” — 

NDB: The Writing’s on the Wall? Yeah. The Writing’s on the Wall. 

CB: Yeah. And then the next one — 

NDB: And “Bills, Bills, Bills.” 

CB: Right. Classic. And then in May of 2001, “Survivor” is released, and this eventually wins Beyonce her first Grammy as a songwriter for the title track. So basically, like, around this time, Beyonce is becoming a huge superstar as part of the group that she’s in in Destiny’s Child, but also sometime around this time, I believe, is when her and Jay-Z get together. And Jay-Z’s like, a famous rapper, and they got together and became this power couple with Beyonce being a huge superstar and Jay-Z being a huge superstar. And that’s the other piece that I think is important that was happening around this conjunction is just that that relationship, that famous relationship that she was in, was starting to get going at some point around that Saturn-Jupiter conjunction. And — 

NDB: Yeah. I have a chart of Destiny’s Child and Jay-Z performing together at the Hot 97 Summer Jam 2001 at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, on Long Island. So they certainly were hanging out on that night, and that was still Jupiter and Saturn copresent in Gemini. 

CB: And what day was that? 

NDB: June 28th, 2001. 

CB: Yeah. There we go. Because right – because the copresence gets extended not just Saturn and Jupiter in Taurus but also Saturn-Jupiter in Gemini for a little while. 

NDB: Yeah. It was really great. Back in the day, the MTV website would report every little thing about these celebrities, and so you could – it was really great for the astrology, and I would just save these events and things like this, and they come in handy 25 years later! 

CB: Right. Yeah. So that was the main thing I wanted to point out. There’s other recurrences with her with like, Venus-Uranus stuff, because her and Jay-Z end up getting married on April 4th, 2008, near a Venus-Uranus conjunction and then – like, for example, Venus and Uranus move into a copresence very close to the famous incident with Solange attacking – her sister – attacking Jay-Z and some of the stuff surrounding their relationship. And then she releases the Lemonade album April 23rd, 2016, on a close Venus-Uranus conjunction. And the album partially focuses on issues with like, Jay-Z’s infidelity and stuff like that. So it’s like, replicating the natal Venus-Uranus conjunction of their wedding chart, basically. 

Yeah. So that was that example but I just wanted to mention it because you mentioned Meghan Markle and that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in her chart and how that gets partially replicated in 2020. But for Beyonce, that first Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was a really defining — 

NDB: Show me that wedding chart — 

CB: — turning point. 

NDB: Show me that wedding chart again? 

CB: Sure. So let me animate the chart. I don’t have a time or anything, so I’m just gonna approximate it, but the date that I wrote down in April 4th, 2008. What I have on April 4th, 2008, is Venus at 28 degrees of Pisces conjunct Uranus at 20 degrees of Pisces. 

NDB: Right. I had a brain fart, but Jay-Z was born with Venus-Neptune conjunct out of sign, not Venus-Uranus, so I was thinking for a second maybe he had a recurrence in there, but he doesn’t. 

CB: No. It’s one of those like, you know, an event creating a new foundation chart in this instance. It’s like, their marriage beginning on a Venus-Uranus in Pisces, and we see that Venus-Uranus conjunction and then here – this is the release of the Lemonade album. On April 23rd, 2016, we see Venus like, right at 22 Aries conjunct Uranus at 21 Aries. And it was a high point for her artistically in terms of most people’s regard of that album, but it was also dealing with some pretty heavy stuff in terms of their relationship. 

NDB: Right. That was also right when Mars had just stationed retrograde in Sagittarius copresent with Saturn. Very rare double retrograde in a sign. 

CB: Okay. 

NDB: Mars and Saturn. Yeah. 

CB: Nice. 

All right. What have we not covered at this point, my friend? 

NDB: Oh, my man, I’m not sure. I mean, we can go on and on. 

CB: Have we – I don’t know if we’ve demonstrated it at this point. 

NDB: What? 

CB: That recurrence — 

NDB: The whole —

CB: That there might be something to the recurrence transit thing. 

NDB: Yeah, maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. I’m kind of on the fence. I’m kind of on the fence with those astrology thing! I don’t know if I believe any of it anymore. 

CB: Right. Can you imagine? I mean, I’m sure statistically, there’s gonna be somebody at this point that’s like, “I’m not buying it,” but I cannot. If you’re not buying it at this point, I can’t. There’s nothing else we could do at this point to convince anyone, I believe, right? 

NDB: No. No. But it’s there for people to find for themselves. Like I was saying, I think recurrence transits, if Michael hadn’t told me about them, doing the work I do, I might have just stumbled across them anyway. They’re really obvious. If you’re paying attention and you’re thinking just a little outside the box, they creep up everywhere, you know? And even someone like you, Chris — 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: — who was resisting them eventually, you know, you see in astrology that you just, you know, it begins really clear that transits do operate this way. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Because it’s a different way of thinking about transits and thinking about what’s possible. And at first, there’s naturally gonna be a resistance to that from those that are used to thinking about transits in a certain way. And it forces you to expand your conception of what a transit is or can be. And you know, I understand having some resistance to that; there might be some people that have resistance to that, I don’t know. But for me, it’s been very valuable learning this technique and really diving into it and starting to get a sense for how it works, because it has expanded my understanding of transits and my conceptualizations of transits in a really constructive way that’s giving more information without necessarily messing up something or changing things in a significant way. It’s just adding additional information of something that’s there that you could overlook pretty easily if you’re not aware of it. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Gotta be paying attention. 

CB: Okay. Well, I think then instead of killing myself trying to share like, the rest of the examples that we found, I’m gonna save these for a follow up episode – probably of The Secret Astrology Podcast. I’ll record that as like, a bonus – maybe you and I will record that as a bonus ep — 

NDB: Yeah! 

CB: — just for patrons at the end of this month if people want more. 

NDB: Yeah. And we should mention to people, you know, we do these Secret episodes – I’m not always doing them with you, but you do them every month. I’m often a guest on them. And that’s where the really juicy astrology is done, folks. I mean, this podcast thing for the general public, you get the general pablum. The real stuff is on The Secret Astrology episodes that are for patrons only, so pony up, folks, if you want the real stuff – the high-octane astrology coming — 

CB: No, I mean, I appreciate your promotion of me, but I do wanna say I actually put all of the best stuff out in the public episodes, which is why they’re so long. Because I get so excited about like, doing all the research and then wanting to share as much of it as possible and to contribute to the astrological tradition and a genuine excitement about our findings and passion for astrology and love for the subject and for advancing the field and expanding the knowledge of the astrological community. I actually put way too much out for free just to the public episodes, and then when we have other leftovers, we do put those in The Secret Astrology Podcast or other things for patrons, which there’s like, gonna be some really good examples there that I actually am struggling not to like, spend another hour recording today, but — 

NDB: Oh, likewise. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. I think — 

NDB: Not to mention doing other aspects. Like, we’ve only done conjunctions! I’d love to do one on just trines or just squares, you know, and what have you. I mean, it’s all doable; there’s enough. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So we’re gonna go into some conclusions here, but we’ll just say that yeah, this is a foundation and we’ll save some of our other episodes for The Secret Astrology Podcast that we’ll record probably later this month. 

Hey, so quick interjection while I’m editing this episode in post, but Nick and I did end up recording a follow-up episode on The Secret Astrology Podcast where we ended up covering 16 extra chart examples that ended up being cut from this episode. So in that episode, it ended up being a great follow-up because we covered a bunch of planetary combinations that we weren’t able to make it to in this episode. We also covered multiple planet recurrences with a couple of example charts that I actually meant to include in this episode, but I forgot to. And then we even covered one intergenerational recurrence transit example, which was really amazing to cap off that episode. So it ended up being a two hour and 40 minute follow-up discussion, so if you’d like to get access to that episode, you can sign up for The Secret Astrology Podcast at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast, and that’s one of the ways that we help to support and fund this work is through the paying subscribers that sign up for our Patreon and help us to fund this research. So yeah, check it out at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. All right, thanks! 

And then if people would like us to do some follow-up episodes on other aspects, if this creates enough excitement in the astrological community, let us know in the comments section on YouTube, because that’s the main place to get feedback at this point, to give us feedback if you liked this. And let us know if you’d like to see that episode, because then if you do, we’ll do a follow-up on other aspects in the future for the public podcast. And I do wanna say if anybody has a good example, that’s another one that I would like to do is I wanna put out a survey and ask people let’s say especially for conjunctions – let’s keep it more restricted to conjunctions at this point to keep with our theme. But if people have a good example of a recurrence transit, either in their own birth chart or in a celebrity chart that they’ve found, let us know in the comments below this video on YouTube because I’d like to do a follow up where we share some stories of submissions that we’ve received from listeners. Because I think that would really help to flesh out some of the celebrity examples that we’ve been getting where, you know, we focus oftentimes on the surface level of major visible events in a person’s life, but this technique is actually even more impressive when you know the behind-the-scenes story and you know the like, the emotional and other things that were going on surrounding some of these alignments where actually it’s actually much more powerful when you have that behind-the-scenes experience of them. And I’d love to hear some of those stories from people, and then we could do a follow up on those as well. 

NDB: And another follow up episode we could do on this theme is synastry recurrence transits. For instance, when I met you in 2005, that was right when Saturn came into Leo – my Sun sign – and you are someone who has the Sun and Saturn copresence in a sign. And my experience of Saturn being copresent with my Sun, I recognize I said to you at the time – of course, you didn’t believe in recurrence transits, but I was like, look, I got the Saturn-Sun and you have a Saturn-Sun in your natal chart. And so sometimes transits are like that. You’re having a certain kind of transit, and someone comes into your life or becomes central in your daily life who has the same combination that you’re having as a transit; they have that as a natal configuration. If you have Mars – or let’s say, yeah, Mars is conjunct your Neptune; you start dating someone who has natal Mars conjunct Neptune. That kind of thing happens so often, and is another really sort of unsung, uncovered facet of this. I’d say it’s adjacent to what we’ve been covering in this episode. But it really gets into the weeds of synastry, so that’s another interesting one if folks wanted us to talk about that as well. 

CB: Yeah. That would be really amazing to do. As well as just, you know, I’ve seen – one of the examples I left out was Francis Ford Coppola being born on a Sun-Saturn conjunction like you mentioned, and then his most famous daughter, Sofia Coppola, being born on a Sun-Saturn conjunction in his 5th house. So that’s another variation of what you were just talking about sort of. 

NDB: Yeah. Sofia Coppola was born while Francis was filmed The Godfather, and she even appears as a baby in the movie in the final scene where the baby’s being baptized. And you know, there’s all the shooting going on. So there’s even like, this – she has the Sun-Saturn conjunction in his 5th house, and his wife is having a baby while he’s filming this film that’s very consequential to his career.

CB: I love it. That’s perfect. 

All right. So let’s wrap up and let’s summarize – let’s restate some points, but let’s also summarize some things that we’ve learned that are important. So to restate my premise that I said at the beginning, my formulation of what we’re seeing here is that if a person is born under a specific celestial alignment, then important moments in their life will happen when the same celestial alignment reoccurs in the sky. So that’s what I said at the beginning, and now I think we’ve demonstrated why I said that and that that premise is actually true. That like, scientific principle and premise I hope now we’ve made a compelling case to show people that that is true and that’s like, a valuable very core astrological principle that you can use in practice in different ways.

All right. 

NDB: Indeed. 

CB: Let’s see. Other things. One of the cool things is that the technique is birth time independent. While knowing the time and house placement and sect and other things provides additional info as well as like, what house the recurrence will land in, which we’ve seen to be important several times, it’s still theoretically something you could use and get some information from even if you don’t have a birth time. So that’s very good news for like, you know, a significant portion of the population that doesn’t know their birth time that there is a predictive technique that you can use that’s pretty useful in terms of still making predictions about important events in the future. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s true. By extension, this is also… While the copresences are really important, and that’s been something really core, I think, that we’ve seen consistently, there’s also another level where this technique works independent of zodiac. And so to some extent, you could use it sidereally, for example. You could also use it even if you’re not using a zodiac, for example. There’s things about this technique that while you can layer additional things like the zodiac in ways that I think are important and useful, there’s also a certain way in which you could use this technique even independent of what zodiac or any zodiac, and I think there’s something compelling about that as well from a practical and conceptual standpoint. 

NDB: Yeah. Like with synodic cycles, it’s part of this sort of proto-astrology – proto-horoscopic astrology, anyway. You know, before there was horoscopic astrology, there was just that sort of omen type of astrology. And things like recurrence transits and synodic cycles were probably part of how that was done. You know, it’s a reasonable inference to make. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And that you know, retrogrades for example, especially with visible planets, are something that they were paying attention to in the sky because you literally see one of the planets – like, let’s just say especially a fast moving one like Mercury or Venus or Mars – slows down and then suddenly spends an inordinate amount of time let’s say in a conjunction with a slower moving planet like Jupiter or Saturn or what have you. It extends and emphasizes that transit, which in this context we understand why that can be even more important because of how it can relate back to the natal signature that different people have in their birth charts.

NDB: Yeah. There was a great example of that at the end of last year, 2024. Mercury went retrograde in Sagittarius while Jupiter was in Gemini, which makes a mutual reception. But because Mercury went retrograde in Sagittarius, you had like, six, seven weeks – like, from late November to early January – of Mercury in Sagittarius, Jupiter in Gemini and that really extended mutual reception between those two planets. And it was interesting to watch. 

CB: Yeah. Definitely. 

Let’s see. A lot of this I’ve said a few times, but it’s been teaching me things about the nature of certain planets individually, but also especially certain planetary combinations, which I found fascinating and I found educational, because it’s given an access point for understanding what the planets mean, which is independent of other conceptual or mythological or other types of things that astrologers sometimes use as access points to understand the planets. This is a much more direct, empirical way of understanding planetary combinations and the significations and symbolism of the planets, like, almost than anything I’ve ever seen before. There’s something about it that just feels different and gives me a much more empirical and direct sense of the planetary meaning. And that’s something that excites me from a research and studying standpoint. 

NDB: Yeah. I’ve often said this to clients when I’m pointing things like this out. You know, when we’re learning astrology, we learn a language. We learn the archetypal language that gives us the ability to communicate a universal idea but make it feel very personal to everyone at once. But when you start getting into this kind of astrology, you’re really transcending that level of universality, and you’re really getting down to what a particular planetary combination means to the individual. You know, it becomes something very specific; there’s nothing symbolic about it. It’ll happen to fit itself into this larger symbolic scheme, but for that individual person, these combinations mean real things – real experiences, real people, real aspirations – all that stuff. And that’s exactly – I mean, you’re right. When you’re looking at them this way, it allows you get past that archetypal level where you’re trying to look at something that applies to everyone at once, and you know, narrowing it down to what does this combination mean to this person. 

CB: Right. And it’s like, who has this natal combination of planets in their birth chart, and then what happened to those people when those combinations recurred as a filtering mechanism, and then you could filter it further by saying what happened when that recurred and there was also a retrograde? And so on and so forth. But it starts getting — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — very, you could rebuild your entire understanding of what the planets mean in astrology just from using this technique, and you would get to the same or a very similar place to where astrologers already have gotten just from their own empirical understanding of the planets and certain planetary alignments. But it’s a fascinating way where you could rebuild everything from scratch if you needed to with just basic principles. 

NDB: Yeah. You can fathom like, for instance, Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto for Meghan Markle or Beyonce can mean wildly different things. We have a sort of code where we can attribute a certain number of traits or descriptions to both, but ultimately, they’re these very specific individual meanings. And it’s really like, the life itself delineates the chart. And this is where the recurrence transits really do that. You know, it’s the transit that tells you what the planetary combination means, not what some astrologer interpreting it says it is! It’s like, the thing itself, you know? Whatever it was – a car accident, a wedding – that’s what that combination means. 

CB: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s like, you could bypass even the entire long two, 3,000, 4,000 year tradition of astrology of accumulated astrologers contributing observations of what they think the planets mean, and you could like, rebuild everything from scratch if you wanted to to get a fresh understanding. And in some ways, that would be valuable, but in other ways, you’d actually end up coming back to where you started, which is that astrologers have been doing this for such a long time we actually have figured out the planetary meanings pretty well. And this technique actually demonstrates that in pretty concrete ways. 

NDB: Yeah, I agree. 

CB: Yeah. So you mentioned consultations, and before I forget, I wanted to mention that because — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — you do consultations using this technique, and I really want to, if people are curious about it or wanna see it applied in their chart or need some help understanding the application, that’s something you’re available to do for consultations, and I definitely recommend you for consultations because I don’t know anybody – you know, obviously there’s nobody else that I know in the world who’s been using this technique as extensively and knows how to use it in a consulting setting as effectively as you because you’re the one that’s been working on this for most of your career at this point as an astrologer. 

NDB: Yeah, I have. I mean, that class with Michael was in 1999, and I just got right down to researching them a lot, and yeah, gave that talk at UAC in 2012. I think in 2016 because of the whole Hillary thing, I got a bit like, you know, ooh! I burned myself. Obviously redeemed that a bit, but — 

CB: Right. 

NDB: You know. 

CB: Yeah, this last election. 

NDB: Since then. Yeah. But yeah, you know, you gotta lose to know how to win, I suppose. But there you go! I mean, that’s what’s actually really important to me – the shame of getting a prediction wrong is fairly minor because what’s really important is for you and your viewers to understand what I was thinking when I made the mistake. Like, oh, you made the wrong call, but everyone understands why or hopefully understands what my thinking was in doing that. So that to my mind is just as important — 

CB: What was that last part? 

NDB: — as getting something. Everyone understands why I made the call I did, you know?

CB: Right. Yeah. That it was – it’s like, we learn from every prediction that we make. I mean, if you’re a good astrologer, if you’re conscious, you recognize mistakes and you learn something from them. And that’s the only way you grow and learn as an astrologer is by doing that and having that self-reflection and then building on that, which is really cool. 

So but you do consultations. Your website is NickDaganBestAstrologer.com, right? 

NDB: NickDaganBestAstrologer.com – absolutely. I’m available for consultations, rectification, and yeah. I mean, recurrence transits – they’re not something I look out for specifically; they just present themselves all the time in any number of consultation circumstances. 

CB: Yeah. It’s one of those things that goes to a point that’s like a recurring lesson about if you know what to look for, there’s things in astrology that are doing crazy impressive things. But sometimes you have to know what to look for. Like, your eyes have to be open to something. And there can be things where if it doesn’t fit like, your paradigm of how you think things work, you can not quite get it. And I think that was one of the blocks that I had for a long time is it not quite fitting the paradigm of how I learned what transits are, but one of the things that we’ve done here today is sort of expand the definition of what transits are in a sense and what they can be. And I hope – yeah, I think that’ll be a useful contribution to contemporary transit theory and contemporary predictive work using transits in astrology from this point forward. 

NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s funny to me – you know, when I was taking that class with Michael, Michael had this fantastic library – the Joanna Shannon Library – in his office in New York City, and I was reading all these astrology books during that time I was with him, because you know, that library was there. I could take new books out every week, and I most certainly did. But when I left Michael’s class and I left New York, I basically put – you know, largely put reading astrology books behind me. Your fine work, of course, notwithstanding. From that point on — 

CB: It’s under your pillow each night. 

NDB: Yeah! Right! From 2000 onward, I really made a point to just work on my database, do my own research, make my own observations, and build my knowledge base from what I was finding rather than – like, I felt I had just exhausted what I could get from books, you know? And if I wanted to grow as an astrologer, I had to go out there and see the astrology myself. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, shout out again once again to Michael and yeah, to think of him and to give him credit as your original teacher who passed this down to you. And yeah, to give a shout out to him in terms of his memory and commemorating him on this day, you know, one year since he passed away tomorrow. It’s a credit to him where I was rewatching a workshop that he did from 2017 on predictive techniques, and I was reminded that he was oriented towards psychological astrology, and he thought that was very important, and that was where his emphasis was. But I was surprised in rewatching this predictive techniques workshop that he was also very grounded in real predictive astrology as well, and that there’s element of modern astrology – of 20th century astrology – that had some very strong predictive elements. And while a lot of the emphasis of my career and a lot of the excitement over the past 20 or 30 years has been around going back to ancient astrology and recovering a more let’s say pure form of predictive astrology, you know, there’s a lot of great stuff from modern contemporary astrology as well that needs to be reunited with the ancient traditions. And you know, arguably, this is probably something that’s been in some of the ancient traditions potentially or could have been conceivably that others have noticed stuff like this long ago and like, maybe there’s some Babylonian astrologer from 3,000 years ago that’s like, rolling our eyes at us right now, saying like, “You’re just rediscovering this now? Like, this is a new thing to you?” But I think it’s just important. There was good work done in 20th century astrology just like there was good work done in ancient astrology, and that’s one of the reasons why in the conclusion to my book in the final page of my book, I encourage people not to give into fundamentalism because there’s something valuable to be learned from all of the different traditions, whether it’s ancient astrology versus modern astrology. Whether it’s whatever other divisions that we have in the astrological community – like, whole sign versus quadrant houses. There’s validity to both. Tropical versus sidereal astrology – like, there’s things to be drawn from both. There’s all these different ways in which I’ve tried to emphasize in that work, and even though my passion became ancient astrology, I’ve also tried to demonstrate through this podcast the usefulness and validity and the importance of being open to all different styles of astrology to learn something from. And I hope this is another instance of that where we’ve learned some valuable things today in this interesting fusion of modern and ancient astrology that we’ve kind of demonstrated here. 

NDB: Yeah. No matter what, even if you’re really set on a certain kind of path with your study of astrology, I encourage anyone to always branch out as much as possible. Just in a casual, curious, absorbing kind of probing investigation into what other people are doing, you know. Don’t get stuck in your lane. Even if you have a lane that you always go back to, you know, get out there and look at things in different ways. Especially to be able to break out of certain sort of systemic ways of thinking, you know, like… Yeah. And challenge every preconception you have. I mean, that’s a big part of developing your astrological mind is having some pet idea, getting really enthusiastic about it, and then destroying it! It doesn’t work! And moving on. Or trying to destroy it, and it doesn’t, and then you’ve got something more robust. So yeah. You’re meant to keep growing if you’re gonna get good at this. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s okay to research widely and then to pick a lane and to really specialize in something and be able to be proficient in that, but also feel like you can defend that as “this is my approach and I think this really works.” It’s just valuable also – I think it’s really important to also be able to recognize the assumptions or the paradigms that you have adopted and how sometimes you can step outside of that and understand what is the paradigm that another astrologer has adopted and to be able to look at that and step outside of that sometimes to understand where different astrologers are coming from. And even if you don’t agree or even if you’re not on board with certain techniques or what have you, understanding the value in different approaches and different ways of speaking this language of astrology that we all speak, even if we use different dialects or different versions of that language. 

NDB: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, this is what astrology represents is the greatest generalizations until the most minute individual slices of that. You know, everything from the macro – the very macro – to the very micro. And so with that in mind, yeah. You know, no matter how much you know about astrology, you still just know this like, sort of one version of it or this one perspective of it. You know, it really is something that virtually certainly every ancient culture had some form of astrology. Not everyone devised it into a horoscopic system or what have you, but everyone had some kind of astrology. And it always spoke to them, and it was always true in the way that astrology is. So there is something… I’m always trying to get to that universal thing, and maybe that’s part of what drew me into the Babylonian ideas to be able to look at things in that really essential way. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and it’s like, there’s this code that is underlying our universe and it’s underlying our reality. And it’s like, out there doing stuff. And I saw this discussion very briefly – I was watching that Neil deGrasse Tyson video briefly where they diss astrology and they make that like, the thumbnail and stuff to draw in viewers. But like, earlier in the discussion before they got to astrology, they had this brief digression about simulation theory and the idea – the theory – like, what if this is a very advanced simulation that we’re all living in. I thought it was so funny, because like, he was treating that as a possibility. He was like, you know, we can’t rule that out; that’s actually possible that we’re living in a simulation. And he was like, but unfortunately there’s no way to know that because there’s no way to see – we’d have to see the code underlying reality. And ironically, I was just thinking the irony – that astrology — 

NDB: Right! 

CB: — which he later would reject because of different reasons, but he rejects just sort of out of hand. And I’ve never in interviews seen him to have more than a passing surface level familiarity with it, so of course you would reject the surface level of what you’re not that familiar with. But I always think it’s so fascinating that in instances like that, like, astrology would be one of the most compelling arguments of something like —

NDB: I know! 

CB: — simulation theory because it’s literally showing this like, code that’s operating underlying the events in everybody’s lives and world events and interrelationships between people. And it’s showing that things are more interconnected and there is, you know, the ancient word for describing this let’s say using modern language this “code” or this let’s say language is fate. Like, that was the ancient way of conceptualizing that was the term “fate,” which meant an ordering and sequence and interconnection of events, and it’s the reason underlying why certain events are interconnected in this very strange and mysterious but important way. And that’s what ancient astrologers always conceptualized themselves doing with astrology is that they were studying fate, and that fate is the interconnections underlying our reality that’s connecting together events that appear disconnected but are actually connected in these very interesting ways. And so I’m not like, fully advocating for simulation theory necessarily. I wanna do a separate episode talking about — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — that at some point and just talking about different ways that you could conceptualize astrology if you wanted to try to like, put a broader philosophical model on it. And I think that’s one that you could use, but there’s also of course others. But you know, I think there’s something there. 

NDB: You know what I find funny about that is the reason he can’t see astrology as being that code, it’s the same – we had this conversation in that Secret Astrology Podcast episode we did – the scientists, they think that we think that the planets are making us do things.

CB: Right. 

NDB: They think astrologers believe that planets influence us. I don’t think I’ve met an astrologer who thinks planets influence us. Or I mean, maybe people have random theories, but no hard conviction. The planets are, you know, mirroring what we do, but I don’t know any astrologer who actually thinks that we’re being compelled to act by the planets. If there is some kind of mechanism involved, it would be a mechanism that is turning the planets and turning us, but it isn’t the planets turning us, so to speak. Yeah, no, just as – simply that. If there is a mechanism involved, the planets aren’t the mechanism; the planets are also being turned by the mechanism as we are, if that is in fact what’s going on. 

But that’s why he can’t see it as code, because he doesn’t think of it as being – if someone could just, you know, point that out, then it could be more feasible for them to consider. But I think they just can never get over that hump of, you know, they think we think the planets are making us do these things. 

CB: Right. Yeah, I think that’s a really – that’s true. That’s a good point that that is the stumbling block that causes a lot of people to reject astrology outright, rather than looking to see what astrologers actually are doing and thinking. And the majority of contemporary western astrologers for the past century do believe that the planets are coinciding with or correlating with – the celestial movements are correlating with earthly events, but not that they’re directly causing it. And you know, there are – I’ve tried to remain more open because that’s my conceptualization of astrology as you’re describing and has been for a long time now. I still try to remain open, because of the mercurial nature of astrology – of Mercury being the ancient ruler of astrology that usually when there is like, a dichotomy between two sides in astrology, that usually it’s like a both situation like I was explaining before. So I’ve tried to remain more open in recent years that perhaps there are different – some like, causal mechanisms at play that could be relevant. But for the most part, I’m on the same page as you that it’s happening more through something like synchronicity or through a correlation, and that it’s more like a code that’s underlying reality where the planets are like — 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: — mirroring things that are happening down here in this mysterious way that astrologers, you know, frankly don’t fully understand yet and haven’t worked out the entire system in terms of the like, broader cosmological implications of what this means. But we have found a lot of very compelling techniques that show the result of whatever it is that’s behind the astrology that’s doing that, and this is one of those techniques where you can use it and operate this weird advanced technology in order to see things in the future that you shouldn’t otherwise be able to see. But we actually do need help from other smart individuals like, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson who I wish we could have those conversations with in order to get more help integrating the implications of astrology into the broader cosmological frameworks that have been developed by contemporary scientists and physicists and things like that. And you know, that’s what people like Ptolemy were back in the day, or people like Kepler or Galileo or other people like that is like, these very smart scientists but that were also seeing astrology working and operating and were doing their best to reconcile it with the contemporary scientific paradigms of the time. And that’s part of what the next step is gonna be for us and for the astrological community is to do that with the prevailing scientific paradigms of our time. But we have to do the groundwork first in understanding how astrology works, and this is a key moment in that because it’s really getting to the heart of one of the most important techniques in astrology, which is transits, and expanding our understanding of how it can work and what it can do. 

NDB: Yeah. Very well said. 

CB: Yeah. And it’s like, I’ve always thought that transits was the most compelling way to demonstrate astrology in the first place that I wish more skeptics of astrology looked into, because I think it’s the part where astrology gets really compelling and doesn’t become —

NDB: Always! 

CB: Yeah. 

NDB: Yeah. 

CB: It’s not as like, subject in terms of subjective character analysis or what have you where you have this element of subjectivity. With this, there is this much more objective component, I think, that’s much more compelling. 

NDB: Yeah. It gets more to the idea of astrology being this map of time. Once you’re looking at transits, that’s really, you know, coming alive, as opposed to if you just have the nativity – well, that’s just one slice of time. It’s like a photograph as opposed to an epic movie. So that’s, yeah. That’s always been – from day one – transits were what drew me into astrology, what proved astrology to me, so to speak. It was looking through an ephemeris and really piecing that together. That was really how it spoke to me. So yeah, it always astonishes me when I’ve come across astrologers who go, “Eh, transits, shmansits!” You know? “It’s all in the natal chart; just look at the natal chart.” I’m sure that’s true at some level, but I’ve always just been too compelled to think otherwise, I guess. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. All right, my friend. I was looking at my other points, but they’re just reiterations of things we’ve said many times here, so I think we might be good, and I think we are coming towards the end of this. 

So thank you so much — 

NDB: And I think we have like, a five-hour episode or something, don’t we? 

CB: Okay. Well, it’s turned into another epic, legendary episode, but I’m okay with that because this is like, you know, our life’s work. And this especially – I say this a lot. I’ve said this a lot over the past couple of years of episodes you and I have done, but I think this is one of the most important episodes in the history of the podcast. And yeah, I think I stand by that, because this is really good. Thank you for teaching me this technique; you were my teacher of this technique. Thank you also for your patience with me as a, you know, reluctant student of this technique over the years. But I came along. I caught up eventually. It just took 20 years, I think, of us talking and everything, but I hope I’ve made it up to you by us today putting this together and putting my own research of charts into this to help share this technique with the world together. It feels really special to me, and I’m glad we got a chance to do this. 

NDB: I couldn’t agree more, brother. You know, it’s the funny thing. It’s true. 20 years ago, you and I were parallel. You know? We were both on our own path, and we were both like, “Oh yeah. You’re good; I like your path. You enjoy that path. I’m on my path.” And now it’s 20 years later, and we’re both very like, far more familiar with the other guy’s path. With what was the other guy’s paths 20 years ago. We’re far more like each other than we were when we first met, as astrologers in terms of what our focus is. 

CB: Yeah, that’s true. 

NDB: We always joke that back in the day, Patrick was, you know, kind of amazing, because he knew all your stuff and all my stuff, and so he was this sort of like, Libran bridge between it all. Our love child, we used to call him. But – and you know, Patrick is still dazzling me to this day with where he goes with that mind of his. But you and I have caught up to where Patrick was where, you know, there’s more of a sort of a broader grasp of things, and it’s not just this one little wheelhouse that we keep, you know, tinkering with obsessively. So yeah. Speaking to you this way also helps me gauge like, my growth, your growth, you know, where we’ve come in these 20 years. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that; you’re right, because Patrick had like, my love of zodiacal releasing and your love of recurrence transits and synodic cycles and things like that, and he’s been synthesizing that for years, and now the two of us have been catching up and coming back to the same place. 

NDB: Yeah. Exactly. You and I are becoming more Patrick-like in that way, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. Totally. 

NDB: Right on. Well, thank you, brother. It’s been fantastic. Yeah, these episodes really… Yeah. Just making them helps me grow and get to the next level that I’m trying to get to, so thank you always for having me back. 

CB: Yeah. Thank you. 

All right, everybody check out our two episodes we did on eclipses two years ago – “Eclipses in History.” Check out our Venus retrograde in Aries episode, and check out our Saturn conjunct Neptune episode, because all of those go into other recurrence transits that we didn’t hear today. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks everyone for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next time. 

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