The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 514, titled:

December Astrology Forecast 2025

With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock

Episode originally released on December 1, 2025

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/12/01/december-astrology-forecast-2025/

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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 in this episode is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrology of December 2025. Hey Austin. Welcome back. 

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. Nice to be here. 

CB: Yeah. We’ve got a lot to talk about. We’re gonna spend the first hour of this episode talking about news and events that happened over the past month since our last forecast, and the astrology behind those news stories. Then in the second hour, we’re gonna jump into a deep dive into the astrology of December and look at all the major planetary alignments over the course of the next four weeks. So as always, if you wanna jump ahead straight to the forecast and skip the news section, you can use the timestamps that are either in the description below this video or on the podcast website. But otherwise before we get into the news section, I wanted to give a quick overview of the astrology of December to give you a preview of what we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. 

All right, so first things first. As we open the month of December, Mercury has just recently stationed direct in Scorpio and ended its three week long retrograde period, but it’s still moving slowly, and it’s gonna be in the process of coming out of that post-retrograde shadow period over the course of the next few weeks until it finally leaves its shadow degree at six degrees of Sagittarius on December 16th. 

Here’s the Planetary Movements Calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and where they’ll end up by the end of the month. And here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar that shows our ingresses, aspects, and lunations this month. So we open the month with a Full Moon in the sign of Gemini on December 4th, and then two days later we get this really lovely Mercury-Jupiter trine on December 6th, followed by two days later on the 8th our most difficult aspect of the month, which is a Mars-Saturn square which is gonna be a really tense alignment that we’ll probably spend the most of this forecast talking about later on. Two days after that, Neptune stations direct in Pisces for the final time before it ingresses into Aries early next year. The same day, there’s a surprising and unexpected Mercury-Uranus opposition that takes place on December 10th as well. And then the following day, Mercury goes into Sagittarius on the 11th. 

We move into the next week, and on December 15th, Mars enters into the sign of Capricorn. Then the following day, the Sun squares Saturn, we get our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Sagittarius on the 19th. Then Venus squares Saturn the next day. We get the Sun moving into Capricorn on the 21st, Venus into Capricorn on the 24th, and finally we end the month with a very brief Mercury-Saturn square on December 30th. 

So that’s the jist of the overview of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about more deeply later in this episode. But why don’t we first talk about the news section and like, catch up and just check in on some of the things that happened over the course of the past month. In terms of news stories, the biggest things that happened this month to me – we’re not gonna attempt to cover everything, of course; we could never cover all the major news stories. But I wanted to focus in particular on the Mercury retrograde that happened this month in November where Mercury stationed retrograde around the 8th and 9th, and it was conjoining Mars at the same time, and we expected a lot of classic Mercury retrograde things like miscommunications, delays, technological snafus. And I have to say, I feel like it delivered even more than we could have hoped for in terms of that, and there was just so many instances to me of just feeling like, you know, a classic Mercury retrograde, like, “I told you so” type situation. Did you see a lot of Mercury retrograde stuff this month, Austin? 

AC: Yeah. I not only saw but felt it. It was very original recipe. You know, it was the type of Mercury retrograde that made you remember how cliches become cliches.

CB: Exactly. So the two main things that happened – one of them that was maybe the biggest thing in the US was due to the government shutdown, it started really affecting the airline industry, and this really peaked around the time of the Mercury retrograde station in that first week of November. And there were thousands of airline flights that were being either canceled or seriously delayed all over the country because the air traffic controllers were basically having to go into work without being paid. And a bunch of them stopped going into work or quit or called in sick or things like that, and so airline companies had to start canceling thousands of flights. And it really reached this peak around the weekend of the Mercury retrograde station itself, which I thought was incredible. 

AC: Yeah. I think the people flying were a little bit less awed by the majesty of astrology, but — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — it was definitely – again, it was one of those cliches. Right? Like, oh, you’re flying out – you shouldn’t have scheduled your flight around the Mercury retrograde, says your annoying astrology friend every time. 

CB: Right. 

AC: And this time, they were more right than they ever could have known. 

CB: Absolutely. I saved this screenshot from like, this was on the front page of The Washington Post from like, I think the day that Mercury was stationing retrograde or within a couple days of that. But it said, “Flight Reductions Begin at the Nation’s Busiest Airports on Friday,” and it just has this map that shows all of the major cities around the US that were affected by it. And yeah. So that was one aspect of the Mercury retrograde, although interestingly that was one of the primary things that then accelerated some sort of government shutdown deal being done and eventually averting that. And then the air traffic stuff slowly started going back to normal over the course of the next three weeks, basically, as Mercury went through the retrograde and then conjoined the Sun and eventually stationed direct. Now for the most part, things are sort of back to normal. 

So that was one major thing that happened. Another major thing that happened is the following week, not too long after Mercury stationed retrograde and I think around the time that it was opposing Uranus – it might have been the same day that it opposed Uranus – yeah, it was at 29 degrees on November 18th. There was this massive Cloudflare outage that took down tons and tons of major websites around the world that use Cloudflare as this protective filter to filter out spam and malicious traffic from major websites. But it’s so widely used that when Cloudflare went down, it took down services like ChatGPT, Spotify, Twitter, and tons of other huge, huge websites and things like that all over the world. And that was early in the Mercury retrograde right when Mercury I think retrograded back and opposed Uranus basically – retrograded back into Scorpio and opposed Uranus. So it was an interesting blend of like, Mercury retrograde but also Mercury opposite Uranus and some of the tech disruptions, basically.

AC: Yeah, making it more jagged and disruptive. 

CB: Yeah. And I was surprised at how widespread the disruptions from that – even that morning, I was like, trying to place an order for food at a local restaurant in an app, and their app wasn’t working because Cloudflare was down. So just the level of disruption that that caused was incredibly and sort of surprisingly widespread. 

AC: Yeah. This was a rough one. And then what day was the big AWS outage? The Amazon Web Services? 

CB: AWS was last month on I think the Mars-Uranus opposition, but then there was some residual thing that happened this month that seemed like it was associated with AWS, but I didn’t have the date on that. But it was not too far after the Cloudflare one. 

AC: Okay. Yeah. I thought it was around there as well. Mercury was certainly in shadow, if not actually retrograde.

CB: Yeah, no, it was still in the retrograde itself for sure. 

AC: Okay. 

CB: During the second possible AWS hit. There were even Mercury retrograde things even closer to home, because right around the Mercury retrograde station, I woke up one day – it might have been the day of the station itself – and I opened up the AstroGold astrology app that I usually use on my phone to animate charts, and they had rolled out an update, but it removed the ability to animate charts and move them forward and backwards in time, which is like, 90 percent of what I use that for. And I panicked immediately, and also like, Leisa panicked because we both use that all the time as electional astrologers. And luckily I wrote the programmer, the owner of the program, Steph from Australia, and she said it was just a glitch and that they were gonna roll out a new update soon. But it was really funny one, because then like, the rest of the day I kept pulling up this app and it just didn’t work and it was like, losing a major thing in your life. 

AC: Yeah. I had again an extremely trite Mercury retrograde experience. I needed repairs on my laptop, and I thought I would be clever and get it in just a few days before Mercury turned retrograde, which I —

CB: Oh no. 

AC: — kind of, I knew it was fake. But I did it anyway. And — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — the like, quick, same week repair has turned into about a month. Because there was another thing discovered, and then the initial fix to that thing wasn’t gonna work, and so the part needs to be ordered, but oh! It’s actually – that part’s incompatible, so we need to order a different part. And the tech fellows have been very kind about things. It’s not like, it wasn’t a cascade of incompetence. It’s just one thing after another, and so I’m finally gonna get my computer back for the quick, same week repair in the 5th week next week. 

CB: Nice. Yeah. That’s totally how it goes when you start something early in a retrograde. Sometimes even though it doesn’t seem like there should be any issues with it, there can just be these delays and these issues that cause the entire project to take much longer than you expect. And it’s funny that you thought you could get it in like, three days before, because that’s the thing I commonly run into as well, which is sometimes like, you think you know a difficult transit’s coming up, but you think you can just like, get something in a little bit before it. But then oftentimes that ends up being the thing that spirals out of control like, a few days later when the transit actually fully goes exact. 

AC: Yeah! I mean, maybe if it was two weeks before, but you know, it’s a common lie that we tell ourselves, even at my advanced age with so many mistakes behind me. I was like, yeah, maybe? 

CB: Right. Well, yeah. I mean, that’s true with retrogrades, but it’s also true even sometimes with a difficult transit. Like you see you’ve got a bad Mars transit that’s coming up, and sometimes I’ll try to like, get stuff in before that starts. But then the last thing that you do sometimes will end up running into issues that you don’t expect and then there’s this peak of residual difficulty that comes from it that peaks with the transit itself. 

AC: Yeah. It’s not that one should never try to prepare or that forewarned is not forearmed. It’s just that, you know, having a good idea of when difficult time periods are due to occur doesn’t make you invincible. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. That’s a whole — 

AC: Much to my chagrin. 

CB: Right. That’s a whole topic. All right, other things. One last Mercury retrograde thing that was funny that like, even local stuff – this restaurant I go to all the time for breakfast, they rolled out a new website on the day of the Mercury retrograde that had a completely different ordering system. But then it was just, like, it didn’t work, and they were having customer complaints and it lost a bunch of functionality, and then they had to go through this entire three-week process of trying to fix all the problems that the new system introduced. And it was such a funny classic thing for that that was like, really local for me. And it’s like, you sometimes as an astrologer, you wanna be like, well, that was a Mercury retrograde thing. But you know, people experience Mercury retrogrades even if they don’t know what that is, but sometimes it’s interesting to see somebody that doesn’t normally think about the world in those terms have an experience like that but then realize that it did coincide with a Mercury retrograde or something else like that. 

AC: Yeah. I mean, if they were all like this, I’d think astrology would be 35 percent more popular.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it was just that Mars. It was that Mars energy. 

AC: It was Mars and then Uranus, right? Both of which are disruptive and a pain in the ass, which Mercury retrograde is very happy to do, but won’t necessarily go all the way by itself. But it had multiple partners in making that happen this time. 

CB: Yeah. Definitely. One of the things that I’m working on right now that I wanna do is going back through our transits of old forecast episodes and just putting together a typology of every type of Mercury retrograde depending on what planets, especially outer planets, it’s in a hard aspect to at the time of the retrograde station. Because we’ve seen those color the nature of the retrogrades so much over the years, it would be nice to put together like, a master list of all those. 

AC: Yeah, that would be fun. I mean, like, Mars and Uranus both increased the like, disruption out of nowhere pain-in-the-ass-ness. The Saturn ones all create just unbelievable delays. Because Mercury already wants to delay. Saturn loves delays. 

CB: The slowness. That was the 2020 election when Mercury stationed square Saturn or conjunct Saturn or something, and then it took forever to count up the votes and to find out the outcome of that. 

AC: Yeah, just tapping the watch. 

CB: Yeah. And then the Mercury stations in a hard aspect with Neptune are always the one where there’s greater confusion and miscommunications and things like that. The ones that are aspecting Pluto by a hard aspect, those were really interesting because often those are like, the disclosure ones — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — or there’s some investigative reporting where some underworld activities suddenly come out. 

AC: Yeah. And then a lot of times with the Venus-Jupiter, there’s some “I thought it was gonna be better than it is, but it’s actually still not that bad.” Like, those tend to be the more mellow ones, but they can still be disruptive because you expect better than you get. Or sometimes there’s an unexpected good that you weren’t aware of but the benefics definitely mellow them. And then the nodes give a bonus confusion effect, not unlike Neptune but with their own twist and energy. 

I had one more think about the Mercury retrograde – the Mars portion of this. There were two major sports betting scandals that broke early in the retrograde. There was one with the UFC with a fighter potentially throwing a fight, an investigation by FBI, which links into the larger issues around how gambling centric UFC and Mixed Martial Arts have become. And then right after that, there were two Major League Baseball players were charged with money laundering in a sports betting conspiracy. And we talked last month about Mercury-Mars and like, lying, cheating cheaters, which is a delineation that goes back as far as our texts go back with the like, Mars bringing out the sneaky thieve-y side of Mercury. 

CB: Yeah. That’s a really great point. That’s a great example in terms of that and just how yeah, when Mercury and Mars get together in a challenging way it can sometimes emphasize that aspect of both of their archetypes. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. That’s a good one. 

AC: It’s an attack, right? It’s Mars. It’s an attack. But it’s like, a Mercury sneaky attack. Don’t need to like, knock you down and steal your purse; you know, I’ll fix the sports betting. I’ll swipe your information. You know, it’s Mercury. It’s informational and it’s clever and it’s less direct, especially when Mercury’s retrograde.

CB: Yeah. That makes sense. One last one that doesn’t sound like it should have been related to the Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars and yet was was at the very beginning of the month, there was a ton of coverage on November 4th of the New York City mayoral election where Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral election in like, a really highly contested election. And what I thought was really interesting about that is he won the election while Mercury and Mars were conjunct in the sky. And in his birth chart, he actually has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in his birth chart in Scorpio. So that was an example of a recurrence transit, which is a major like, an obscure technique but a major one that Nick Dagan Best and I just released a whole episode on a couple days ago that I’d really recommend everyone watch because it’s really important and powerful technique. But the premise of the technique is that when you have an aspect between two planets in your birth chart, that sometimes really important events in your life are gonna happen when the same aspect between those same two planets is repeated by the planets in the sky at the time of the event. And that’s a much different way of thinking about transits than we’re used to thinking about transits, because usually transits are, you know, a planet in the sky to a planet in your birth chart. But this is different, but it really works. So that was a great example of a recurrence transit. And it shows how sometimes people that have a certain signature like Mercury conjunct Mars in their birth chart can rise to prominence at times when that same conjunction recurs in the sky because of course we saw that the previous month in October, in September as well, which is the other person we had just talked about in one of the last forecasts was Charlie Kirk who had that Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio, and then that recurred in October shortly after his death and was really close in the sky when Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on his birthday in October. So it’s like, you have two vastly different people from completely different sides of the political spectrum with Zohran Mamdani and Charlie Kirk, but both of them have Mercury-Mars conjunctions in Scorpio, and both of them came to greater public prominence at a time when Mercury and Mars were conjoined in the sky over this two month period. So I thought that was just an amazing set of examples. 

AC: Yeah, that’s a great example. And I too would recommend everybody watch the video that you released. We were talking about it the other day; I think it was Nick Dagan that turned me onto recurrence transits. It was so long ago that I don’t remember. But it was probably Nick. But yeah, it was interesting when you were telling me that it’s sort of unused and kind of obscure. And I realized that you were correct but that I had assumed that it was a thing for decades now. Everybody who is interested in astrology should also assume that it’s a thing and watch Chris’s video. It is in some ways as simple as these are Mercury-Mars people, and it’s Mercury-Mars time. Right? If you were a Jupiter-Mars-North Node person, when it’s Jupiter-Mars-North Node time, that’s important for you. Right? Like, this is the kind of time that you were born in. And if it’s configured to the natal, that’s great, but like, it’s that kind of time. The logic of planetary combinations gives consistent results even when they’re not in the same place. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Exactly. It’s kind of like – I was using the analogy in the episode that you know in like, Game of Thrones everybody had a theme song. Like, Daenerys had a theme song and Jon Snow had a theme song. And then at certain points later in the series when they would do some of their most important stuff in their life, their theme song would come on and start playing, and that’s when you know stuff is really going down. Somebody in the YouTube comments said that’s just like the concept of a leitmotif in music, but I thought that was a way of thinking about it or another commenter made a comment that it’s kind of like when you see the Bat signal in the sky in Batman, you know the Batman’s gonna show up or he’s being called to do something and will show up shortly after that. I thought that was a really funny analogy as well. 

AC: Yeah. Right? Like, an emblem, an icon, a heraldic device. So if you have the hedgehog combination, when you see the hedgehog hit the sky, you know you’re being called. It’s your time. 

CB: Right. Exactly. Yeah. So check out that episode, and yeah, in terms of other news, there was one other – we were really focused on the Mars-Uranus opposition because that looked like one of the other really difficult aspects of the month that went exact on November 4th. And that day, there was this major plane crash of this UPS plane that crashed shortly after takeoff. And it was this huge fiery explosion that just like, videos of it went viral all over social media that day because not just because it was a catastrophic cargo plane crash, but because the left engine actually separated from it, sparked a fire in mid-air, and then the plane crashed into some fuel tanks. So it created this even huger like, fireball that we were seeing videos of all over on social media that day, and I thought that was really striking instance of, yeah, just having a really difficult combination like that of Mars and Uranus, which is sometimes associated with explosions. And that was one of the primary keywords that we used. And then seeing like, these visuals of this crazy explosion that day. 

AC: Yeah, it’s very on the nose. We’ve seen a lot of – over the years, we’ve seen a lot of explosions under Mars-Uranus oppositions and conjunctions and squares, to a lesser extent, but it really is – like, it takes that volatility present in both to the next level. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and that was, you know, in the recurrence transit episode, that was the most crazy one of that was the first time the atomic bombs were used was a Mars-Uranus conjunction. So of course that’s one of the things I said in the last forecast that I’m not excited about next year is we get our first Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, which is a recurrence of the US Mars-Uranus natal conjunction. So that’s something I’m actually researching and Nick and I are talking about doing an episode on like, Mars-Uranus conjunctions in US history in Gemini and what they’ve coincided with to get some insight into what’s coming up in the future. So if people would like to see that episode, let us know in the comments. 

AC: I’m glad you’re doing that. That’ll be really nice to fold into the yearly. 

CB: Right. Exactly. I’ll come back to that, but that’s what we’re starting to get prepared for and you and I are starting to do our training montages for right now. 

Also in the news, one of the things you had mentioned when we were talking and planning yesterday is there’s been this explosion of concerns about there being an AI bubble that’s being talked about over the past several weeks especially; it seems like it’s grown more intense, right? 

AC: Yeah. It started in October, and it’s really continued through a lot of November. And with the addition of a lot of other economic indicator concern, jobs reports and firings and slowing house sales, et cetera, et cetera, it’s really interesting because we looked at the September eclipse in particular as well as a couple other things that had in the past – I think we had like, four or five things – that had all coincided with economic trouble, right, to varying degrees ranging from the great crash of ‘29 itself to the crash of ‘37 or the depression of ‘37 and a variety of other time periods as well as the lead up to the 2008 crisis. And so it’s been really interesting to watch in the time since that eclipse so much attention turned to “Is everything gonna fall apart tomorrow?” and even getting to the point of – and to some degree I’m sure it’s some of my algorithm, but it seems like there are an increasing number of pieces that ask the question, “Why haven’t things already crashed?” Like, based on X, Y, and Z indicators. In the past, this would have been a crash. And so things certainly seem to be going in that direction, but as I said to you yesterday, like, economic trouble might not look the same now as it did 90 years ago or even 20 years ago. But I think we were certainly on the right path. It’s not that there’s been a glorious renaissance and a real spring where job growth is strong, houses are moving, people are secure in their retirement. Like, the movement has definitely been in that direction and decidedly so since that eclipse, but exactly what crashes and pops look like and when and how is, I don’t know, still unfolding. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think I tie in the explosion of stuff with artificial intelligence over the past few years with Pluto going into Aquarius in 2022 and 2023. And then the sort of bubble that we’re in right now – one of the major keywords that came up when we did the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history episode earlier this year was bubbles. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: And so I think this Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s been building up over the past two years ever since Saturn went into Pisces in March of 2023 is really the bubble that’s been forming. And of course, that’s gonna peak in February when Saturn and Neptune finally conjoin exactly. But I was really struck by how at the beginning of November, as soon as Mars went into Sagittarius on November 4th, it started building up to a square with that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And that’s when a lot of the fear about the bubble popping soon really started to ramp up. So I’m gonna be really curious to see this month in December around December I think 8th and 9th when the Mars-Saturn square goes exact and then Mars squares Neptune shortly after that if we don’t see a peak of intensity of some of those discussions and fear surrounding the bubble actually popping. 

AC: Yeah. And how – the phrasing is usually “the bubble,” but usually there are a variety of bubbles which are interdependent upon one another, and I have a hard time imagining that no bubbles will pop at that time. But I think we’ll still have some left over for the more dramatic Mars-Saturn-Neptune stuff early in 2026. But there are – I mean, I was gonna say there are definitely needles present next to the bubbles for that Mars-Saturn this month, which makes me think that basically Sagittarius as an archer has pokey things. It’s one of the only signs that literally is represented by someone armed with pokies. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that was one of the funny things like two, three years ago. During the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, I remember Mars came up and like, squared it at that time, and there was that funny – like, very literal example of a bubble popping where there was this huge aquarium in a hotel — 

AC: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 

CB: — in like, Germany or something. And somehow it got punctured and the entire aquarium collapsed and all of the fish, you know, ran out and died, and it was pretty terrible but also very like, vivid example of bubble popping with Mars hitting a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. So it’ll be interesting to see what the parallel is this month in December, and a lot of stuff in the market has already started to drop quite tangibly. So there’s an interesting – on the one hand, there’s like, fears and talk and worries about it that is in the mental space, but then also in the physical space there’s also been a noted decline over the past month in some of the markets. 

AC: Yeah. People are trying to prepare their positions and not get caught holding the bag. 

CB: Yeah. But to your point earlier, one of the points that you’ve made to me is 2008 and 2009 wasn’t a singular event; it was a succession of important events that led to that crash. So it’s not like… So that could be what we’re seeing here in terms of seeing the December thing, but then also knowing that there’s this bigger alignment in February that’s right on the horizon. 

AC: Yeah, and then again in April. Yeah, like our eclipse in September this year very closely resembled the one in September of 2007, which is a very important point in the timeline of the financial crisis which got to its maximum extent in 2008. But in retrospect, it was very clear that some weaknesses were exposed and the deterioration was beginning then, and so yeah. It certainly seems like we’re on the road to whatever the bottom is going to be this time. And we are not there yet. And yeah, just to restate it, that Mars-Saturn square in the early middle of December has got to be one of the noted points on the timeline. It’ll be part of the history of the crisis on the Wikipedia page. 

CB: Yeah. 

So adjacent to that – actually, on a completely different topic, on more of a pop culture type topic but related to something I just said, which is in mentioning the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction a few years ago, that happened when the second Avatar movie came out. And it was weird at the time, because we noted how when James Cameron released the first Avatar movie in 2009, that Jupiter and Neptune were conjunct in the sky in Aquarius. But then Jupiter and Neptune are on, what, like, a 12, 13, 14 year —

AC: 13. 

CB: — cycle. 

AC: 14, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 13, 14 — 

AC: 14 year —

CB: So it took one exact cycle of both of those to come all the way back around, and then James Cameron released the second Avatar movie back in 2022 on another Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, this time in Pisces. And Patrick Watson had noted how the first movie was a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius, an air sign, and it was focused on this air element of them flying around on these dragons or something. The second Avatar movie was Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, and it was called The Way of Water and it was set in the ocean. And now that Neptune, it’s been going back and forth between Pisces and Aries – a fire sign – the third movie is about, it’s called like, Avatar: Ash and Fire or something like that. It has some sort of fire theme, which is funny. But the difference now with this Avatar movie release that’s about to happen that I’m curious about is it’s not a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, because it hasn’t been another 14 years. But instead, we have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So I’m really curious what the inversion of the previous two conjunctions look like. If the first two movies that were so wildly successful and just made insane amounts of money as the most successful movies of all time making over a billion dollars I think each with Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions, you know, what does a Saturn-Neptune conjunction with the third installment look like? And is it gonna be as successful as the first two? Or you know, is it harder to translate that into a third installment and continue the excitement and magic surrounding the novelty of the initial two where the 3D experience was so new and different. 

AC: Yeah. I don’t know. Saturn-Neptune seems pretty hard on over-hyped bullshit. 

CB: Well, yeah. So we’ll see – I don’t know. I liked the first two. I liked the first movie and then with the second movie, it just reminded me that James Cameron knows how to do sequels. Like, he has a formula down where he just does the same exact thing. Like, he does the same thing, but he just amps it up and expands the themes that made the first movie good. You know, that’s what he did with Aliens II; that’s what he did with Terminator II; and then that’s basically what he did with Avatar II. But I’ve never seen him do a third movie in a trilogy and like, does he just use the same formula of repeating the same stuff but amplifying it? Or is he able to find something new? And I think that’s gonna be the interesting question with this third movie in terms of like, can he complete a trilogy. 

AC: Yeah. I think the astrology is not good. He probably should have waited until Jupiter entered Leo in the summer so he could at least get a Jupiter-Neptune trine. 

CB: Yeah. So what, we’ve got Jupiter in Cancer right now, and we’ve got that trine – a little bit of a trine – with Saturn and Neptune. So we’ll see if that helps out. But yeah. Time will tell. 

Okay. So those are the major news things that I wanna cover. I’m not gonna attempt to cover everything else because there’s always too much; I know. Sometimes people – a couple people wrote me in that I didn’t cover different news stories last month, but I just – we’re not gonna attempt to. I only attempt to cover the news stories that I have something interesting to say about the astrology of, so just a proviso for the future that that’s our focus here. 

But the last piece is that you and I now are in the home stretch since it is now December for getting ready for our big 2026 year ahead forecast episode, which we’ve scheduled a date for and we’re gonna record in the final days of December and then release in the last I think day or two of December is the best electional chart that we could find. So you and I are now in our like, Rocky training montage stage of the year where we’re like, benching ephemerides and we are getting ready to do our forecast for next year. 

AC: Yeah. Already pretty deep in. You know, last year I started really early – started immersing myself really early – and I really liked how that felt, so I’ve done the same this year. You were telling me you’ve done the same. Yeah, I don’t think I could be more ready by the time the end of December rolls around. I’ve looked at every day of the year already. We could probably do it tomorrow and do a good job, but good is not enough! It’s a really big year, and I think that “good” is like, two levels down from what we’re shooting for and what we’re preparing for. 

CB: Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot of major astrology next year. One of the biggest things I was struck by is just how all of the outer planets are finally fully in new signs, which means they’ve finally fully completed the signs they’ve been transiting through for many years. And one of the keywords for that that I’m workshopping right now and the phrase is “There’s no going back” is one of the phrases for me for 2026 that we’ll expand on more there. And it reminded me of this poem I heard like, 20 years ago in a poetry battle by a poet named Ken Arkind, and the main phrase in it was he said, “Life is like Mario Brothers: You can’t go back.” And he was talking about like, Mario Brothers I, remember, where it was like, a side scroller, but you couldn’t walk backwards to the left on Mario Brothers because it was just like, old eight-bit technology. So you always had to go forward, never backwards, in time. And 2026 feels like that to me where we’re not going back anymore; we’re now fully into whatever this new era is that we’ve entered into. 

AC: Yeah. I agree with that a hundred percent. It makes me think of a lot of the older games where not only could you not go back, but there was a mandatory scroll. Like, you were being pushed. 

CB: Right. 

AC: Like you couldn’t even stay neutral, right, and then decide when to go forward. 

CB: Yeah. You just gotta jump and like, leap to every platform available to try to not fall into the pit. So people can look up that poem; it’s really good. It stuck with me for 20 years; it’s called “One Up” on YouTube, and I remember him just like, absolutely killing it at the Mercury Cafe poetry battles back in the day in like, the early 2000s with that one. 

So speaking of 2026, though, one of the things I’m doing to prepare is I’m preparing in like, three phases. And the first phase that I just accomplished is that Leisa Schaim and I just finished our 2026 electional astrology report, and we just released it yesterday. So I’m really excited to finally announce to everybody that that is out and available for purchase now through The Astrology Podcast website. So that was one of my preparation things, because in that, Leisa and I go through each of the next 12 months of 2026, and we give an overview of the astrology of each of the next 12 months. But then we also pick out two of the best electional charts that we can find in each month of 2026 and give those to people as some of the most fortunate dates of the year. 

So we started doing this report back in 2019 because people that listen to our monthly electional astrology podcast would sometimes ask for the best dates further in the future in order to plan out big things like weddings or launching a business or going on a major trip. And so we started offering the report in order to give people the best dates 12 months in advance in some instances when you’re talking about later in the year. So the interesting thing or the good thing about this report is we actually expanded it, because in all previous years we’ve only given people the single most auspicious date for each of the next 12 months. But in this year’s report we expanded it so you get two charts for each month of 2026. So it’s a nice little —

AC: That’s nice. 

CB: — way to give, yeah, give people more options. You know, if one chart doesn’t work for them, they can use this other backup chart. And then we also expanded it and did it more as a forecast as well to give people a head’s up about the astrological weather during different parts of the month. So it also doubles as a nice like, early preview of the year ahead forecast for 2026 if you don’t wanna wait a whole month until Austin and I do our year ahead forecast at the end of December. 

So I just launched it. The price of the report is 49.95, but I’m actually doing a 10 percent discount if you use the promo code ‘JUPITER’ only for the first week of having the report released until December 7th. So if you use the promo code ‘JUPITER,’ you’ll get a 10 percent discount on the report. And you can get it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report. 

Yeah. So that was a big piece of my preparation for the 2026 forecasting is getting that done, which is like, a huge task in and of itself. 

AC: Yeah. That’s such good preparation. And it’s so much work, because you have to – I mean, realistically, you’re looking at 12 different potential rising signs for every single day’s configurations. So we’ve got 365 and a quarter times 12 possibilities, not even getting more specific than that. And then you have to make them fight it out and figure out what would be preferable. And so yeah, it’s a huge amount of work. And unless you have like, an extra 60 hours laying around to do that, it’s a tremendous value. It’s so nice that you’ve done that and made it available for people at such a reasonable price. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s great also because for me, like, I use all of these charts to release podcast episodes, to launch major projects or to record things like our forecast episodes. We always release on an electional chart and record on an electional chart. So it’s like, something I use myself, so it’s good for my own planning. But then I kind of share the charts that I would use and the best dates of the year with everybody else. So yeah. Check that out at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report, and yeah. 

So my next preparation after this is to do horoscopes, though. I’m gonna try to do horoscopes by the second week of December for each of the 12 rising signs. And that’ll be like, my second phase of researching and preparing for the 2026 forecast by personalizing it for everybody. And then once I do that, then I’ll turn around and prepare for our big 2026 overview episode that you and I will do at the end of December, and that will be the final big thing is those predictions. 

AC: Nice. Yeah, you’ll be prepared. I’ve got – as I slowly meandered through the year making notes and charts and tables, I noted a few rabbit holes. I’ve got a list of rabbit holes that I’m going to be exploring thoroughly between now and the forecast. I would love to get back to doing a big writeup for every year, which I did for many, many – I don’t know – at least a dozen years. But certain other writing projects take priority right now. So I can’t justify that. Although I don’t know…. Yeah, I have an ironically like, wildly irresponsible urge to just write about the year, which doesn’t sound wildly irresponsible! But I’m in a very Saturnian period of life, so that’s what “wild irresponsibility” would look like, would be — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — carefully writing up the year. But yeah. No, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. I’m excited about where we’re gonna be in our assessment of 2026 by the time it’s ready, by the time it’s time to record. 

CB: Yeah. I’m excited as well because there’s so much major stuff. And one of the things that’s nice is there’s a lot of like, tense chaotic stuff, but then there’s some really nice points during the course of the year as well, which is good from an electional standpoint, but also I’m glad there’ll be a few opportunities for like, breathers in between the major history-changing things at different points as well. 

AC: Yeah. They’re breathers. I wish they were longer and more numerous, but yeah. It’s not a 365-day sprint, though there may be a couple hundred days of sprinting. 

CB: Yeah. For sure. All right, I think that’s good for the news section, yeah? 

AC: I think so. 

CB: Cool. All right. Let’s take a little break. 

All right, before we get into the forecast, I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the new software program called Astrotheoros. So today’s episode is sponsored by Astrotheoros, which is a new cloud-based astrology charting platform that’s beautifully designed and intuitive to use. Astrotheoros runs seamlessly across all your devices. Install it on your laptop, phone, tablet, or access it from any web browser all under a single account. Whenever you log in, you get the same clean, consistent experience with all your charts ready to access. It’s built using the Swiss ephemeris and the ACS Atlas, so the charts are accurate and trustworthy. One of the things that makes Astrotheoros stand out is how intuitive it is to explore charts. There’s a dial that lets you smoothly rove through time and animate the chart, and a chart lock feature that keeps the chart steady while the planets move, which is really great for studying transits especially. If you only wanna follow a few placements, the planet isolation controls make this super easy. It also includes a really well-built and interactive zodiacal releasing module, a novel declinations chart that you can access with a swipe, solar returns, secondary progressions, minor asteroids, and lots of thoughtful touches like dark mode that makes life a lot easier, light mode, and even a left-handed mode. You can also save transit charts on the fly with a single tap. And for astrologers who work with clients, there’s a live session feature that lets you share a clean version of the chart without exposing sensitive details, which is a huge improvement over just, you know, blanket screensharing. 

Astrotheoros currently supports tropical astrology and is continuously updating, and because it’s subscription-based, you can get new updates seamlessly. So listeners of The Astrology Podcast can get one free month on the monthly plan or an extra free month on the already discounted yearly plan by signing up with the promo code ‘ASTROLOGYPOD’ before January 15th. Plus you’ll be supporting the show when you do. So check it out and start your free month at Astrotheoros.com. 

So this is a really cool program, and I’m excited about this because it’s a good example of how, you know, when people are creating some of these new programs from scratch like the owner of this – Brandon – is over the course of the past year, that it’s implementing a lot of newer sort of features that make sense in a modern context. Like, having dark mode for example rather than the big white Solar Fire charts that are emblazoned into your eyes like the Sun that I usually show on my episodes. But also it shows what it’s like if a program’s not, you know, programmed like, 20 or 30 years ago, which many of the other software programs are today. So I’m excited about a lot of the features, especially the zodiacal releasing feature where it integrates some of the interpretive principles that I first came up with in my work – like the idea of culminating periods, which is the 10th sign relative to a general period on a sub-period. So there’s lots of cool stuff like that to check out, including of course the animate feature, which is my favorite. 

AC: Yeah. It looks really good. I got really interested in what the name translates to because I’m a nerd. And it’s actually really interesting. Did the promotional material include a translation? Because I was like, that seems like it actually means something rather than just sounds cool. And yeah, theoros refers to an envoy sent to consult an oracle, and the “theo,” right, you’d think the “theo” was god, but etymologists think that it’s actually from “thea” which is sight, view, or perspective. So it’s going to see what the oracle thinks. So that’s actually really clever. Nerd props to whoever named Astrotheoros. 

CB: That is the highest compliment one can receive is nerd props from Austin Coppock, so that’s pretty good. Yeah. Well, shout out to Astrotheoros. Check out the program; you can get a demo and you can get a free month on it by using that promo code ‘ASTROPOD’ [ASTROLOGYPOD] – all one word – before January 15th, because the code stops working after that. So I’ll put a link to the website in the description below this video on YouTube, as well as on the podcast website in the entry for this episode. So shoutout to them and thanks for sponsoring this episode. 

All right. So my friend, it is time to get into the astrology forecast of December and do the deep dive into the transits of the next month. We got some tough stuff coming up this month, especially in the first half – that Mars-Saturn square looks a little rough and it’s gonna be some tensions. There’s gonna be some energies pulling us in different directions. We’re also, as I said at the beginning of the episode, we’re still coming out of the Mercury retrograde. So there’s still some slowness to resuming the forward movement and ironing out miscommunications, technical snafus, and delays and other things that were thrown up in the air during the course of the Mercury retrograde. And interestingly, that process is still ongoing at least until the middle of December when Mercury passes its shadow degree, which is the degree that it stationed retrograde at in Sagittarius. And it’s interesting that that coincides with about when Mars will depart from Sagittarius and complete the square with Saturn and move into Capricorn. So there might be some resonances there in terms of just the experience of the first half of the month being very distinct and kind of similar to some of the stuff that’s either we’ve already been experiencing or that have been building up already most of November, versus the second half of December where we’re moving into new territory in many ways. 

AC: Yeah. The first and second halves are really distinct. And it’s a good point that you make that a lot of the first half is nothing new, but instead is things that have been building, a tension that has been building – a tension, a friction, a grind that’s been building, such as in the case of the Mars-Saturn square. Or issues that we’ve been dealing with and things that we’ve been wrestling with and trying to untangle for several weeks now that in many cases will finally get to a clarified place in the case of Mercury, which really is just beginning to move forward again at the beginning of the month. 

One of my favorite things about the first portion of the month, which is true up to the 6th, is that Mercury now moving forward again in the last decan of Scorpio until the 6th is applying to a trine with Jupiter. So it’s moving forward, but with help from a dignified benefic – Jupiter – more than capable of giving help when petitioned. And so that’s a really nice basically week for getting a good result out of the difficulties that this Mercury retrograde has brought. I know in my case, that’s when I’ll finally get my laptop back after a month. And it will be literally improved in ways that I didn’t originally intend when I brought it into the shop. And I’ve had to wait, but it’s going to be glorious. 

CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And that really gets to the heart of the phenomenon. I saw discussions about – somebody was asking about on Reddit what was the origins of shadow periods or shadow degrees, and it forced me to think about it and to write out a history and a chronology in my mind and research it a little bit more. So I learned a bit more about the origins of it. But I know sometimes people express skepticism about the shadow period, but at its core, it’s trying to address an objective astronomical phenomenon, which is that during a Mercury retrograde sometimes, if you have a natal planet that’s in the retrograde degrees that Mercury will cross over, then it means that Mercury will hit that point in your chart three times. And the exact aspect during the retrograde itself is often the most intense and characteristic one, but that’s only one of the hits of Mercury, and there’ll be one exact hit before the retrograde and one exact hit after the retrograde. And realizing that that’s part of like, a sequence of events that’s unfolding over an extended period of time rather than just a singular thing that happens in the middle of the retrograde itself. And I think that articulation’s important, because sometimes people think that shadow periods is just means that we’re extending the retrograde so that the entire thing is just like one long retrograde, but that’s not quite what it is. It’s just an acknowledgement of a build up, an intense experience during the retrograde itself, and then there’s like, a bringing things around to completion phase that comes right after, I think, right? 

AC: Yeah. I think you could say that the total extent of the shadow, the date ranges, are mapping the time – the process – as a whole take. And the retrograde is a part of the process, but the process extends beyond the retrograde. 

CB: Right. Exactly. So I wanted to show that graphic again actually – that new graphic that was designed by Paige last month – for visualizing retrogrades and visualizing the retrograde loop that gets you closer to understanding what the actual astronomical process of the retrograde looks like, which is you used the analogy it’s like the retrograde when it stationed November 9th, that’s like being on the rollercoaster when it gets inverted and you go upside-down. And then it’s retrograde for three weeks as Mercury is backtracking in space going back to and eventually stationing direct from our vantage point as a visual phenomenon earlier in the signs of the zodiac before it stationed direct at the end of November. But then there’s this entire period after that that we’re gonna be experiencing in early December of Mercury starting to pick up steam again, going over the later degrees of Scorpio and then eventually into Sagittarius before eventually it departs from Sagittarius at the very end of the month, at the final day or the first day of January. 

So that is one long transit of Mercury through two signs of Scorpio and Capricorn that we’re gonna be coming out of during the early part of this month. And then we’re also talking about – there’s one other thing that’s carrying over that’s important to contextualize the opening of this month, which is that Saturn just made its final station direct in Pisces at 25 degrees of Pisces at the end of November, and we’re still very much in the midst of that only a few days later now at this point. And I’m seeing a lot of people with heavy Pisces placements having a really intense experience of that transit, because it’s the final push, it’s the final message, and it’s the final purpose of what that transit’s been about ever since March of 2023 since Saturn first went into Pisces and started transiting especially that house in your chart or that whole sign house. I’m seeing a lot of people experiencing a culmination of events with respect to that transit at this time with this final station. 

AC: Yeah. And so we’ve got about two-and-a-half more months from the date of this recording of Saturn in Pisces. We’ve got until February 13th, and then it will go back into Aries. 

I experienced the direct station pretty positively. You know, I live in Pisces. It felt — 

CB: Day chart. 

AC: What? 

CB: You have a day chart. 

AC: Yeah, I have a day chart. And it just felt like, it was not too dramatic. It’s not like, right on top of anything. But it just felt like, okay, things can start chugging forward again in a disciplined and timelined way. But I noted a little bit less chaos, little bit less that’s been getting in the way of just doing what hard but fair Saturn is requiring of me. And Saturn is not always fair. It’s usually hard. But yeah, there’s definitely a quality of okay, let’s finish this part out. Yeah. Let’s just finish this out. And it’s nothing unfamiliar; it’s not a wholly new set of disciplines that I must take on. It’s not new responsibilities. It’s “let’s finish out this portion of time,” right? You’ve been working on carrying these things with some degree of grace for years now; there’s a little bit more to go before we get back to the fresh madness of Saturn in Aries. And this is what is – I have seen for other people during this period of time, it’s “oh god, I’ve gotta do it for a couple more months.” There are definitely some people who are in my orbit who’ve been like, “okay, god, can I do this for another two-and-a-half months? I guess I have to.” So my semi-positive experience shouldn’t be over-universalized, but there is nonetheless this sense of “okay, gotta do this for another two-and-a-half months.” Either with some enthusiasm, or with a begrudging acceptance. But there’s like, in all the cases I’ve seen there’s a clarity to the necessity of doing this a little bit longer. 

CB: Yeah. I’ve seen people that are experiencing this transit of Saturn in Pisces intensely right now of just having to take on so much extra responsibility and having so much weight on their shoulders with something they’re having to carry right now. But it’s been helpful to be able to tell people that there is an endpoint in sight of Saturn departing from Pisces early next year. And while things are the most intense right now and they’re having to bear that weight probably the most intensely right now that it won’t always been like that and to just take things one day at a time and one step at a time in order to get through that. Because some parts of our life, some time periods are just more heavier than others, and for some people, this is one of those times. And it’s important to mention that, I think, because I’m seeing an intensification of some of this in early December because of one, we had Saturn station direct in Pisces for the final time, but in December on the 10th, we’re gonna have Neptune stationing direct on Pisces for the final time, which is gonna intensify some of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s been happening in Pisces the past few years. And then on top of that, we also have the Mars-Saturn square, which is gonna hit at about 25 degrees of Sag and 25 degrees of Pisces. So especially if people have natal planets around 25 degrees of those two signs or the mutual signs in general, that’s gonna add a little bit more responsibility on top of things and a little bit more expenditure of energy on top of things. Maybe I should show the calendar just to give people an overview of what that looks like and just the sequence of some of those dates that are taking place this month or to reiterate that. 

So here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar, and you can see that square between Mars and Saturn hitting there on the 8th and going exact at 25 degrees of those two signs. And then just two days later, Neptune’s stationing at the same time. And you know, part of the Neptune-Saturn conjunction is we’ve talked about bubbles, but there’s also this sense sometimes of fatigue because Neptune can give you this sort of diffuse feeling of sapping one’s energy to a certain extent, and Saturn also has some themes like that. So when you put them together, there can be a little bit of just like, tiredness as well, especially if you’re having to deal with a lot of extra responsibility in some area. 

AC: Yeah, definitely. There’s also a particular form of, I don’t know, spiritual emotional fatigue that comes with Neptune-Saturn conjunctions, which is often the result of some sort of dream or vision or hope that ended up dashed or not possible – a bubble that got popped. You know, “I thought we were going in this direction, and then it just ended up that we’re not doing that.” A crashing back to reality. If Neptune can provide enchantment, Saturn with Neptune very often provides a disenchantment or dissolutionment, right, which it’s important to note can feel like “oh now I’m no longer deluded. Now I’m here with reality.” But very often the state of disillusionment is like, an active disappointment and rejection and is often not a state of perfect clarity. It’s its own kind of confusion. But a disenchantment with narratives because they didn’t pan out. Like I thought the story of the world was this; I thought the story of our love was this. I thought the story of this – and then like, getting that checked hard, which we’ve seen an awful lot of when that bubble pops or that story gets chopped mid-arc and doesn’t have the conclusion you thought it would be, there’s often a sense of despair. It’d be like, well, if it’s not this way, then what am I gonna do or where am I going? And that is also enervating. 

CB: Yeah. Despair and disappointment. 

AC: Disappointment, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So I think that’s important because this Saturn-Neptune conjunction, one of the things I realized in the context of the recurrence transits episode and one of the reasons I even did the recurrence transits episode was I was seeing all summer when Saturn and Neptune came really close within a degree of that conjunction in Aries this summer that a lot of the people that were born with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions were having this really intense activation of some of those themes in their life, especially those people born in the late ‘80s under that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn. And in some instances, there was, you know, one of our keywords for Saturn-Neptune is the reality distortion field seems like it’s grown more and more intense over the past few years in many different areas of life. Like, the AI video generation has been one of the most stunning areas, and I’m still really impressed – because I know early on we identified that Saturn moving into Pisces and beginning the sign-based conjunction with Neptune was coinciding with some of the earliest phases of the AI video generation stuff that was really janky at the time. But I need to go back in the transits and find how early we called this, but I know we called this and we said at one point early on that if that was true, if that was what was happening was this was Saturn and Neptune becoming copresent, then it would probably peak and get the most intense and become the most impressive around the time of the exact conjunction of Saturn and Neptune. And I think that’s absolutely come true, because the AI video and picture generation is almost at the verge of being perfected so that you really can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. And that’s like, one aspect of things that when Mars moves in and squares that, there may be some bubble-popping that takes place this month. But more importantly, in people’s personal lives, there’s a lot of areas where there may be idealism but there may also be a sense of deception where there’s something that’s not true that’s playing an important structural role in a person’s life, and then how do you react when some person or some scenario or situation comes along and suddenly pops that bubble for some reason, and you realize that there was something important that you believed that was built on an illusory foundation. And I think that’s — 

AC: Right. 

CB: — gonna be one of our questions of December. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Like, this all falls apart if X isn’t real. And I would add to that that part of this sort of disillusion of a story, of believing that a certain thing is true, is what we then fall into – especially because it’s Saturn-Neptune and things are unclear – is very often I see disillusionment with one thing, it’s like, “well, that’s definitely not true,” but that disillusionment doesn’t lead us to what is definitely true. There’s often a period of sort of wandering the wasteland of like, “well, I know that’s a lie, but I don’t know what is true. I don’t know what the story is. I know that that’s not the story.” But being in a position where we’re uncertain. There’s like, ontological uncertainty and crisis. And — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: I just wanted to reinforce what you said about heading into like, peak confusion over images and video generated by AI being timed to the exact Saturn-Neptune conjunction. I do think that’s quite likely. Worth noting that Pluto in Aquarius, which has been our indicator for artificial intelligence, it’s in Aquarius which is ruled by Saturn. And so this Saturn-Neptune has been fueling that and characterizing the action of what Pluto has been doing. And I think, you know, even though the technology may continue to improve past February of next year, if what we’re looking for is the maximum amount of confusion caused by that when people are – you know. Then I think that’s probably a good target, because although the technology may continue to improve, people will be adapting to it as well. And that like, perfect moment of max confusion being first quarter next year sounds pretty good to me. 

CB: Totally. Yeah. And it’ll be a turning point in humanity where it’s like, how do you live in a world and what do you do when you realize that you cannot trust what you see? And even if you see something that looks real, it may actually be fake, and you have no real ability to tell the difference so that you have to just like, suspend judgment sometimes is like, the interesting turning point that this Saturn-Neptune conjunction happens to be coinciding with. And one of the things about that I realize, though, is like, so many people – especially so many younger people and college students are using generative AI programs like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to write research papers, to research things, to look at facts. They’re using it as a search engine instead of Google at this point or even Google search results have AI automatically integrated. But one of the things that’s really interesting about that is occasionally if you use it, you’ll notice that the AI still hallucinates and it will just like, make up facts that aren’t true. And it’ll tell you things like, quite confidently that if you look into it and check it out, it’s actually not accurate at all. It’s just something it completely made up due to a glitch and due to the way that they’re currently designed in order to, you know, if it doesn’t know the answer sometimes to just like, make it up if it doesn’t in some instances. 

So one of the things I was thinking about and reflecting on recently with that that’s so fascinating is this Saturn-Neptune peaks over the next few months is just they’re a bunch of instances right now in humanity where millions of people are learning things from AI that’s actually false and not knowing in some instances when the AI is just hallucinating and making something up or glitching. But it’s still be incorporated somehow into their memory and their dataset of what they think is true. And that’s a really fascinating, obviously like, not good, and bad and sort of horrifying scenario that we’ve found ourselves in. But it’s interesting that that’s the place of where this early phase of Pluto in Aquarius is as well as Saturn and Neptune taking place at the same time. 

AC: Yeah. It’s definitely where we’re at. We’re not gonna have it all figured out and know how to live with it and be appropriately skeptical and have great habits of verifying things. Like, all those adaptations take a lot more time than we have right now. And so yeah. And that is interesting, just the point that so many of the imperfections and errors in the output of the LLMs are being then incorporated into people’s thinking. 

CB: Right. 

AC: Right? And you do get a little concerned when you think of – when you wonder about people who are in the process of trying to educate themselves or learn and like, having the LLMs feeding you this kind of material while your little brain is still learning and growing. And it’s like, are we integrating – how much of the faulty architecture of the output is getting literally imprinted into people’s neural pathways? 

CB: Yeah. Because well, because the thing is you only know and will be able to spot it if you happen to already be an expert in that topic. So like, I was using one AI thing to search through passages of Valens because I was searching – I stumbled across when I was just reading his book a reference to retrograde transits that I’d completely overlooked or forgotten about years ago where Valens actually mentions the technique in the 2nd century. So I was looking for other parallel passages with the AI, and it returned some, but then it started making up some things that I just knew Valens didn’t say. And then when I checked the document through a simple search, I could also see like, he didn’t say, but it was just inventing things out of nowhere. But I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t already have, you know, basically not committed to memory but I know The Anthology pretty well. 

AC: You’re very familiar. 

CB: I’m very familiar! But it’s only my familiarity. If I didn’t have that familiarity, I would have thought that Valens had said all these things that he basically didn’t. So I realized you could generalize that and realize that millions of people are having that experience right now, but most of them are not experts in the fields and therefore can’t tell when it’s just making stuff up. 

AC: Yeah. And a lot of those errors would be catastrophic if you acted on them or built something that incorporated. And it’s not like, “well, it’s right 95 percent of the time, so that’s 95 out of 100 – that’s great.” Like, a lot of the hallucinations if put into practice, like, are dead wrong and would lead your entire hypothesis astray, or if it was an engineering project would mean that the bridge doesn’t hold or the car doesn’t run. Yeah, it’s really interesting that what is suggested then, it’s like, oh, well, what do you do? Well, you need to increase your level of ambient skepticism, and then you get back to this Saturn-Neptune thing. Like, the skepticism or disillusionment or “I don’t trust it” is such a part of Saturn-Neptune history. Like one very simple example being the dissolution of the Soviet Union and really the mass disillusionment with the Soviet project at the time. In many ways, it’s told as a story of disillusionment with a grand goal and story. And then people being left in a state of deep skepticism, which pervaded for decades to come. 

CB: Yeah. Or another even more tangibly, like, sometimes Saturn-Neptune can be the foundation of religious communities is one of the things Nick and I found in the Saturn-Neptune episode, but then the flip side sometimes skeptical organizations were founded under Saturn-Neptune conjunctions which are literally critiquing things that they think aren’t real or that aren’t real and pointing out the flaws or things in them. 

AC: Yeah, yeah. That skeptical organizations is a great example. It’s interesting, right, because during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, we have people believing wildly inaccurate things, and the natural response to that is like, an extremely strong skeptical response. But both of which tend to be ultimately quite distant from reality. But it’s hard when you’re lied to or fooled or led into belief in something, and then it’s so disappointing. Like, it’s hard to not have a tremendous reaction to that. One of the Saturn-Neptune things that I was looking at this month was moral panics in the United States. Like, the Satanic Panic in the United States peaked right around ‘89, ‘90 when Saturn-Neptune were conjoined. There was a lead-up to it that was earlier, and it still continued afterwards. But the peak was the Saturn-Neptune. And you know, the Satanic Panic involved I believe over 12,000 cases of kind of wildly hallucinatory child abuse were filed, where it was like, “Oh, my daycare center actually has a Satanic cult in the basement and they’re doing all this stuff,” and there were a number of very coached hypnotic regressions where kids were recalling things that didn’t happen, which is interesting considering that we keep using the term “hallcuinate” for the AIs. Right? Or for the LLMs – that they’re “hallucinating” these things. That imagination is like, filling the gaps. Because of those 12,000 cases that were filed during the Satanic panic, the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction, zero out of 12,000 were found to be legitimate or have any evidence of the allegations. Which, of course, if that led us to believe that child abuse doesn’t happen, right, that would be the wrong conclusion. But you have the same believing crazy shit that in retrospect is literally a function of hallucination. And then the previous Saturn-Neptune conjunctions were Red Scare one and Red Scare two, where the Communists were hiding under the floorboards and corrupting our precious bodily fluids. 

CB: Yeah. And that goes back – Nick and I talked a lot about those, and it goes even further back to some of the witch trials and other things like that during previous centuries in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries as well. 

AC: Which as astrologers we’re very excited for. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the other reasons why I’ve been nervous for a long time about this period from the perspective of the astrological community and we have been seeing glimpses of that in different ways recently that I’m not gonna go into. But I think that’s a good phrase – like, a polarization over what is real as a core keyword for what’s going on right now and what’s happening in previous Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. But some sort of bubble popping experience this month as Mars swoops in and hits both of those, because Mars has always traditionally been – in ancient Egyptian astrology, they actually used a symbol which was a knife for Mars. So Mars has always been like, the knife, the sharp sword, you know, a pin or a needle or something that comes in and jabs or hits something. And if what it’s hitting is a bubble – literally like, Saturn and Neptune – then you get a bubble popping. 

So let me animate the chart and show visually what we’re talking about and get more into the sequence here. So here’s December 1st when we start out the month, we see Mercury’s just stationed direct in Scorpio. We see Mars there at 19 degrees of Sagittarius. We see Saturn at 25 Pisces and Neptune at 29 Pisces getting ready to station. And if we just move the chart forward a little bit in time, we see Mars heading right into very quickly – because it’s near the Sun right now, so Mars is actually moving incredibly fast in terms of its daily motion. And right here by December 8th, Mars gets to 25 degrees of Sagittarius, and it squares Saturn at 25 degrees of Pisces. So that’s one of our main signatures this month, and then a little bit later, Mars gets to 29 Sagittarius around December 13th and 14th, at which point it squares Neptune. 

So that’s why we’re talking about this so much, because that is really the energy of the first half of December, and that aspect is gonna peak first at the end of the first week of December and then next at the end of the second week of December, causing that bubble popping motion. 

In isolation though, let’s just talk about those aspects in isolation – like December 8th when Mars squares Saturn. We’ve always used that notion of like, you know, pressing your foot down on the gas and the brakes at the same time, which creates this inherent tension between Mars wanting to move forward and be decisive versus Saturn wanting to hold back and be more slow and more cautious, and what happens when you have those different impulses pulling you in different directions at that time and how it can result in a feeling of internal tension and problems as you’re sort of paralyzed with indecision in some instances. 

AC: Yeah. Or your vessel is bearing the stresses of those contending forces. Sometimes it’s needing to move something heavy very fast, right? Because you can move something heavy, and you can move something fast, but moving heavy things fast is a good recipe for injury. Right? But —

CB: Right. 

AC: — sometimes life says, “oh, you’ve gotta move all that by Tuesday.” Right? And so it is Mars-Saturn configurations such as this that put us between a rock and a hard place. Instead of move fast or move things that are heavy, you have to do both at once, and there’s danger to the vessel. The image that popped into my mind for this – so for, you know, individuals who are not necessarily inflated stock markets, we may be more realistic than being a completely inflated bubble. And so this is a bit of a – this is a test, right? It’s like, we do have the potential for piercing or cutting with the Mars, but the membrane may be considerably more durable than the skin of a bubble. And it makes me think of every naval vessel is kind of a bubble. We have a coating, and then there’s air inside it, right, instead of water. And the enclosed vessel full of air is buoyant and is on top of the water. And it’s almost like, does the hull get pierced? Do we get a hole in the boat from Mars pressing on Saturn in Pisces? The boat being order, being the skeleton of our discipline, being our capacity to carry those burdens which are ours at this particular period of time. Right? Does Mars fuck up our schedule? Does it pierce our hull? Do we start taking on water? 

CB: Yeah. I like what you said about that there is – the constructive side of that is just having a huge amount of burdens and having to expend a huge amount of energy over an extended period of time, and that being exhausting but something that you push through and you realize that you can handle more than you ever thought that you could, and that becomes the most intense period of exertion where you hit the peak of that and the peak of the exhaustion. But then eventually it will recede after that week and especially once Mars changes signs and moves into Capricorn. So there’s that aspect of it, but then there’s also the other side of that, which is expending a huge amount of energy but then something breaks and realizing that there’s the rubberband effect of what happens when you pull a rubber band too far and then there’s a snap and like, the structural integrity gives out. 

One positive side about this, though, that I like is that Jupiter is still in this nice trine with Saturn from 23 degrees of Cancer. And it’s not as close as it was in November where like, those were very close to the degree when Jupiter was at 25. But we still have Jupiter lending this help to 25 degrees of that range of Pisces, which is gonna be counteracting things a little bit or at least providing a helping hand that’s attempting to balance things out. But yeah. If you’ve got stuff at 25 — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — degrees, that’s a heavy transit around that time. 

AC: Yeah, I agree. Jupiter supplies some extra structural integrity. My sort of go-to model for how to reconcile the demands of Mars-Saturn periods as a Mars-Saturn person myself is generally the serial killers from early ‘80s horror movies like Michael Meyers or Jason Vorhees where they just keep coming. Right? They don’t chase after the campers. You know, they don’t get winded. They don’t gas out because they’re running. They just keep coming. You don’t stop, but you also don’t hurry yourself past your capacity, right? Because hunting down the campers is – it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And you know, taking on the visage, contemplating the virtue of being relentless. Not necessarily the fastest, but being relentless in your pursuit of goals tends to be really useful. 

CB: Right. It’s like a slow-moving zombie, or remember like, zombies before the 2000s used to be slow-moving, and you just had to like, walk a relatively brisk pace and you could stay ahead of them. And it wasn’t too bad before the zombies turned like, really fast in the 2000s. 

AC: Right. Yeah. No, it is – it’s the old zombies where it’s not that they’re that fast, but like, every time you stop, they don’t stop. They’re still shambling forward. And so yeah, sometimes Mars-Saturn, you can feel pretty undead, but you just keep shambling. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s Mars-Saturn, and that’s kind of imprinting basically our first lunation of the month, which was that – it’s a Full Moon that takes place in Gemini on December 4th, but we can see that Mars is already at like, 22 degrees of Sag squaring Saturn at 25 Pisces, so it’s really imprinting that signature as part of it, that first lunation. Although with that first lunation ruled by Mercury, since the Full Moon is in Gemini, it’s interesting that Mercury hits about 22, 23 degrees of Scorpio at that time, because then it’s also gonna imprint that Mercury-Jupiter trine which you had mentioned that looks so expansive and positive and like, rectifying some of the previous Mercury retrograde delays and miscommunications, kind of imprints that on this first lunation which would extend our experience of that a little bit longer than it might happen otherwise. 

AC: Yeah, Jupiter’s doing a lot of work to offset the very real harshness of the Mars-Saturn. It doesn’t negate it, but there is a lot of – a lot of the difficulty is offset either by “and there’s a way to get it done despite how difficult it is,” or there’s just enough support to not quite crack or break. You know, to be strained but not broken. Jupiter’s doing a lot of work in the background here keeping a couple things from falling apart. 

CB: Yeah. Definitely. And also just rectifying some of the Mercury retrograde delays and snafus that happened in the Scorpio area of your chart especially in terms of that retrograde. And we see over the next day or two after – because Mercury’s still moving very slowly, so that means from the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, it looks like around the 6th is where Mercury finally completes the trine with Jupiter. So we just have this extremely long acting exact trine with Jupiter that’s playing out over that several day period in that first week of December, which is really positive and affirming and like, a fix-it type energy. But then after that, we get the Mars-Saturn square on the 8th and 9th, and then Mercury I’m still paying attention to because here around December 10th, it’s gonna exactly oppose Uranus, and that aspect is the aspect that was happening when the Cloudflare outage happened this month in November. So there was a major sudden technical disruption of the internet and of computer systems, so I’m gonna be paying attention to what kind of like, technical disruptions and unexpected electronic upsets or communication surprises happen on that day especially. 

AC: Yeah. And that’s exactly right. Like, it’s Mercury opposite Uranus. It loves to disrupt tech things. It loves to disrupt plans, you know, whether it’s like, oh I was supposed to meet with blah-blah-blah on Wednesday but they had to reschedule. And then I went and decided to work on my book, but the power was out. Or the internet was out, and so I wasn’t able to retrieve these files. It just disrupts regularly scheduled Mercury things, and it disrupts the connections between things which our world increasingly depends upon. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So the same day, of course, December 10th, Neptune is stationing direct as we discussed. And then Mercury moves into Sagittarius on the 11th and 12th, so it’s back into that sign but still moving through its shadow degrees because it stationed at like, six degrees of Sagittarius. Mars then comes up and squares Neptune exactly on December 14th, it looks like, so we get that aspect, and maybe we should give some keywords for that. I mean, one of the things with Mars-Neptune is like, fighting something and swinging at something or trying to punch something, but sometimes having the wrong target and making a mistake by directing one’s aggression towards the wrong object inadvertently. And sometimes we’ve seen that with Mars-Neptune hard aspects in the past have been like, you know, military mistakes and misadventures. Like, I remember there was one striking one several years ago where like, the US bombed or sent a missile or something at somewhere, but then it turned out that that was like, the wrong target and they just hit and killed some civilians that had nothing to do with what they were trying to target. And I don’t remember the exact situation, but that always really stuck with me because it was on an exact Mars-Neptune aspect. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve used the term “fog of war” a number of times in relationship to Mars-Neptune. 

CB: Right. 

AC: Like, the confusion of battlefield contact. The accidentally striking the wrong target or something or someone that’s not supposed to be a target, right? Lashing out at the wrong person is what that looks like on an individual level. You also have on a more maliciously, the use of confusion in order to stage an attack or do harm. 

CB: That’s good. Yeah. Totally. What’s the phrase for that? It’s like, not little green men, but it’s like, yeah, like, using deception for aggressive or militaristic or fighting conflict purposes. 

AC: Right. Or like, I guess one example would be a false flag in order to have a cause for war would be one example of that. But it’s also literally “hey, look over there,” and then you punch the person in the face. Right? It’s just confuse, and then do whatever attack thing. But yeah. Like, the entanglement of the martial principle and deception is very real. And I think that this is also where we should locate a number of our bubble-popping things, because to a certain degree it’s just the Mars-Neptune conjunction is doing that. But Neptune is the thin skin, delicate, sort of it’s only real for as long as you believe in it — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — sort of portion of that, and so Saturn is wrapped up in that, but Saturn has thick and heavy bones and has a meaningfully different interaction with Mars. Whereas like, the Neptune depends entirely upon belief. Like, the dream fades as soon as you wake up. 

CB: Yeah. All of us has Neptune somewhere in our chart, and there’s some area in our life where we don’t have a realistic take on reality, basically. Where there’s some area where each of us has some little deceptions that we live with that are part of our life story where sometimes we get swept up in the illusion. And sometimes that can be very beautiful and necessary and inspiring, but from an objective standpoint, sometimes it can mean that we’re not fully in touch with what’s actually happening. And sometimes when Mars comes along, that’s one of the things about Mars or people that have Mars prominent or martian type people is they tend to speak bluntly, and they tend to speak from the hip and they tend to be very direct. And sometimes the abrasiveness of Mars is because Mars people will tell it like it is even if it’s rude or uncomfortable or offensive or even if it shatters somebody’s illusions about what they think is happening or happening in reality. And that’s part of the energy here with the bubble-popping aspect of Mars hitting Neptune is like, what happens if you have an illusion surrounding something, but some guy comes along who’s kind of a jerk and points out that you’re totally deluding yourself, and suddenly you have that dream or that image sort of shattered and you face the cold hard facts. 

AC: Yeah. Crashing the hype train. 

CB: Yeah. So that peaks on December 4th, and then immediately, it’s like, Mars by the 15th goes into Capricorn and it begins to first separate that by breaking the sign-based square. And then over the next several days, it will move out of even like, the three-degree range of Saturn and Neptune so that it’ll start – we’ll see the downslope in a graph in terms of Mars and the bubble-popping moving and starting to recede into the past, especially by like, the 18th, 19th, 20th once Mars gets out of the three-degree range with Neptune, which is the most intense range. That kind of brings us to our second lunation, it looks like, though, which is that New Moon in Sagittarius that looks like it goes exact on December 19th, yeah? 

AC: Yeah. One thing I’d like to mention is that what’s been happening all month very slowly but consistently is that Venus and Mars have become less and less and less visible to the point where by the time we’re halfway through the month, nobody is seeing them in either the evening or morning or night or day sky. They’re both closing in on conjunctions with the Sun, which they will not make ‘til January. But that process starts quite noticeably in December. And so by this point, you’re not seeing Venus or Mars rise or set. They’re slowly making their way to very important meetings with the Sun on roughly January 10th, and they both end up conjoining the Sun almost at exactly the same time. They actually all three are at 17 Cap one day, and then all three are at 18 Cap for a portion of the next day. And so it’s a quite noticeable and interesting secret meeting that happens behind the rays of the Sun. And so what that combustion does, that being close to the Sun from an individual perspective is it moves things into a more internal place. It moves them – it makes them more private, right? Because Mars and Venus will still exist, but you won’t be able to see them. And so both the desire for peace, harmony, optimal relationality with Venus and the need for independence and conflict and friction with Mars are both moving into a more internal, harder-to-see-from-a-distance place. And this often brings these topics into a more introspective place where we are likely over the course of their invisibility and combustion to reflect on those topics and have some shifts in our perception that will lead to later cognitive and behavioral changes, but quietly and slowly. And so we’re just going into this invisibility, this going behind the Sun, right? Behind the rude and loud daylight to make some shifts. 

CB: Right. That seems really important and that internalization process with both of those planetary energies. And as you were talking, I was animating the chart to see when they went under the beams, and it seems like that was late October, or maybe early November. So this is part of an ongoing process that’s happening over the course of this time that culminates, like you said, around January 10th when that exact conjunction takes place. 

AC: Yeah. They’re both under the beams when the month begins. You could still see them; they’re still far enough that you could get – if you really watch the horizon before and after sunset, under good viewing conditions, you can still catch them. But that becomes vanishingly rare and then impossible. So it’s kind of last light at the beginning of the month. 

CB: Yeah. Okay. So this is the descent into the underworld in like, the Inanna myth, for example, but then Mars is experiencing the same thing. And it’s interesting that they just happen to line up in their synodic cycles so that they’re both kind of disappearing around the same time, and then they will both hit that sort of lowest point in the underworld when they both conjoin the Sun at the same time in early January. 

AC: Yeah, it’s really not that common that they both make that conjunction with the Sun so close to each other. I think the exact conjunctions are maybe a day apart. And it’s interesting to look at in the chart, because it looks like Mars is backing into the Sun while Venus is speeding towards the Sun. So like, Mars and Venus are kind both heading towards the Sun from opposite directions, and they both conjoin it at almost exactly the same time. So and it’s not like, a big event that happens on one or two days this month; it’s been happening throughout November. It reaches the point where you’re definitely not seeing them ever in December. And then we get the completely invisible conjunction in January, but you won’t see them – like, they don’t emerge immediately after the conjunction. It’s weeks and weeks for them to appear again on opposite sides of the horizon than the ones that they disappeared from in February. 

CB: Right. That’s interesting, because like, you know, Venus and Mars – we’ve seen a few months ago, I think during their last hard aspect with each other, which was the square, that was the peak of some of the weird stories in the news about sexual abuse and improprieties and things like that. And then we’re having both of those disappear and like, become hidden. And it seems like so much of that stuff has been in the news and dominating the news for so many months now, I wonder if part of the symbolism of these two planets going under the beams and being hidden isn’t like, some of that stuff being swept under the rug or attempts to do that or something. 

AC: Yeah. Swept under the rug or there are things that are happening behind the scenes where some of that stuff is getting processed, and we’ll see the results when Venus and Mars reemerge. But I think that’s like, one of the things that this times is the careful consideration of that behind the scenes. Right? By minds nefarious and otherwise. And on a personal level, right, Mars-Venus has a lot to do with relationships. Like, it’s literally the tension between conflict and separation with Mars, and like, reconciliation and make-nice-ness with Venus. And the tension between those two is real in any long-term human relationship. And so it’s really interesting that those are both going to this quiet place of consideration for a while. And so people may find themselves sort of rethinking – like, thinking and rethinking and kind of retrospecting and introspecting about how those powers are balancing and not balancing in their personal relationships. 

CB: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and that balance between independence versus union and like, the drive that each of us has for both of those – on the one hand, to be independent and to do and get what we want from Mars, versus Venus and the tendency or desire to be in partnership with others or specifically with a companion, and to merge and blend one’s desires to make them so that they can go together with somebody else, or even to subsume your own desires and independence for the sake of relationship, and the tension between those two. But both of these planets coming together at the same time over the next few months and trying to find or trying to seek a balance in that internally through the internalization process that combustion sometimes entails. 

AC: Yeah. That’s really good. Yeah, the me and the we, right? And we’re always “we”s in some parts of our lives, and we’re always “just me” in other parts, and there needs to be good relationship between the “me” and the “we,” or we’re unhappy. 

CB: Yeah. So I’m glad you brought that up. So that’s gonna be an ongoing process over the course of the month of December and heading into January where we see a culmination of that at the cazimi of both of those planets that you mentioned around January 10th. But in terms of this month and this lunation I wanna have us look at really quickly, we have those themes for sure, but we also have this exact conjunction taking place between the Sun and the Moon at 28 degrees of Sagittarius, which is putting it in this on the one hand a square coming off of a square with Saturn at 25 Pisces, as well as applying to a square with Neptune at 29 Pisces. So this lunation partially seems to be re-emphasizing and continuing some of our Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Pisces themes that we’re talking about from earlier in the month. 

AC: Yeah. It sure does. 

CB: Just when we thought we were free. 

AC: Well, it’s interesting, right, because the Sun doesn’t put the same aggressive stress on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that Mars does, but it does shine a light on it. Right? Like, it does point to it. And sometimes simply by drawing attention to something or illuminating it, you do change it. Right? Like, you know, if you shine a flashlight into a cave, the creatures react. Or if I were sleeping and you turn all the lights on in my room, I would react. It’s not Mars; you didn’t kick me. But just turning the lights on is its own form of action, and it’s interesting – you know, if we’re talking about Saturn and Neptune, there being a capacity for deception, some illumination may serve not necessarily to pop a bubble but to reveal how flimsy something might be. You’d be like, oh, this was quite convincing in the shadow, but I am considerably less convinced when the lights are on. Like, it looked monstrous in the shadow, and now it looks kind of silly. 

CB: Yeah. That makes sense. One of the core differences between this lunation, if we contrast it with the last one, is the last one was when Mars was still very closely configured to Saturn and Neptune. But look at Venus. Venus is at 24 degrees of Sag, so it’s very closely squaring Saturn and then applying to the square with Neptune as part of the signature that’s imprinting this lunation. So it’s like, earlier in the month, we get the bubble popping of Mars square Saturn-Neptune imprinting on the Full Moon lunation in Gemini. But then during the second lunation, the primary signature is Venus square Saturn and Neptune. So that’s a really even more tricky energy, because that’s not the bubble popping. Like, Venus-Neptune is the having – like, being in love with the idea of love and being swept away by ideas of romance, sometimes in really good, inspiring ways that can be amazing. But then also sometimes in ways that are disconnected in reality and having a tendency to over-idealize or romanticize a situation and not see it for what it is. And at the same time, Venus squaring Saturn, which is more like, running into the cold, hard reality and what happens when you experience coldness or distance or separation in relationships. So this is a very different energy in our second lunation of the month compared to our first one. 

AC: Yeah. And Venus – yeah, it might be the last gasp of enchantment or the last gasp of a particular like, being enchanted by a particular narrative. Like, you know, Venus getting one last hit of Neptune before the supply runs out. And it occurs to me as we’re looking at this, Chris, is in these – at this point with Saturn still earlier in degrees than Neptune, because we are previous to the exact conjunction, the order of aspects is Saturn first and then Neptune. And so we’re hitting – it’s like, oh, this cold, hard necessity and all the constraints of the situation, but then immediately afterwards we get a little Neptune. Right? It’s like, ah, but it’s all meaningful; it’s all part of the story. It’s all part of the plan. Whereas once we get to the point in February where the two conjoin, and then Saturn is later in degrees, they will hit the Neptune, and then immediately that’ll get stomped on by the Saturn. 

CB: Right. That’s a really good point. I’m glad you said that, because it’s – what’s funny is like, this is December 19th is the Avatar release day for Avatar III — 

AC: Oh really? 

CB: Yeah. Which is better than if it was like, earlier in the month and it was Mars, but you talking about the Saturn and then feeling the Neptune, I watched this interview with James Cameron recently because he’s promoting the movie, and he said his goal with the Avatar movies was always to convey an experience in the theatre through the 3D glasses of dreaming while you’re awake. And I thought that was such a powerful Neptunian type phrase to convey there, you know, originally with Jupiter-Neptune, but now with Saturn-Neptune, and that could be relevant here as we’re looking at this square between some of these planets as well is it’s like that idea of dreaming while you’re awake. 

AC: Yeah. Well, and that’s what we want for a piece of entertainment. 

CB: Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly, to be swept away. So we’ll see if – yeah, I don’t know. You know, earlier – I know you’re not a big Avatar fan and it’s hard – we’ll have to see. But you know, usually betting against James Cameron is not good in terms of his track record. So we’ll have to see if he can pull it off a third time. But yeah, we’ll see how it goes. 

AC: Yeah. It’ll be interesting. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. 

All right, so that’s gonna take us into the later phases of the month. And I should… What should I mention? I wanted to mention our auspicious election for this month I think, just to make sure I get that in there, because I wanna make sure I mention this chart. 

So our auspicious election for this month is set for later in the month because we wanted to wait and get away from like, the Mars-Saturn square and the Mars-Neptune square and the tension surrounding that, and get Mars fully into Capricorn away from that conjunction. And this is the best chart that Leisa Schaim and I came up with for this month. It takes place on December 26th, 2025, at around 10:30 in the morning local time with early Pisces rising. So set your chart to December 26th; set it to about 10:30 AM, and then adjust the rising sign until the Ascendant is in early Pisces, and you should end up with a chart that roughly looks like this. 

So the positive parts of the chart is that it has Pisces rising and Jupiter is ruling the Ascendant, and it’s exalted in Cancer in the 5th whole sign house. And it’s actually in a mutual reception with the Moon, which is in Pisces in the first house in Jupiter’s sign. And the Moon is actually in Pisces applying to a trine with Jupiter. So we wanted to take advantage of that mutual reception this month by making Jupiter the ruler of the Ascendant and really putting that front and center in terms of taking advantage of those two temporarily dignified planets. 

So it’s good for 5th house things. Jupiter is, of course, now retrograde in Cancer, so that may indicate some delays in the eventuation and the completion of some of the things that you initiate, but I don’t think that’s a huge, huge deal in terms of major afflictions. We are starting to build up to the Mars-Jupiter opposition that’s gonna go exact in January, but it’s far enough away by degree that that’s not like, the biggest dealbreaker in terms of using this electional chart. And I know you and I later in the month, we’re gonna start using some charts like this in Aquarius rising in order to record the yeah ahead forecast episode. Yeah? 

AC: Indeed. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: It gets a little tricky, but like, that Jupiter’s got a lot of juice. I think we’re gonna see throughout this month Jupiter being the saving grace for a lot of the harder edges, and putting that Jupiter in the position as you have to rule both the first and the 10th to fuel the Moon and to offset some of the difficulties is – it’s kind of the move right now. Well, it’s kind of the move right now and will continue to be the move up into December as you have us here. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So the challenging part of the chart is that Mars is in the 11th whole sign house in a day chart, so there could be some issues with tensions or conflict involving friends or groups or alliances. So I wouldn’t use this chart for 11th house focused activities. But otherwise, it’s a good general purpose election, especially for 5th house activities related to like, children, fun and games, hobbies, and other 5th house things like that – like, pleasures in general. 

So that’s the best chart that Leisa and I found this month. And then we already released our electional astrology podcast for this month for the month of December that features I think at least like, 10 other charts if you’re looking for other dates in December to do things. And you can get access to that through our page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast if you wanna get access to those other elections. 

And then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, if you’re looking for elections for next year, we just released our 2026 Electional Astrology Report yesterday where we have two electional charts for each of the next 12 months. And you can get access to that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report and make sure you use the promo code ‘JUPITER’ for the first week to get a 10 percent discount, but that only last until December 7th. 

All right. So that’s the auspicious election for the month, and then that takes us into the end game in terms of December where we get our final planetary alignments of the month. What is important at the end of December that we need to make sure that we mention at this stage? 

AC: Well, so it’s just worth noting that we get Mars, then Sun, then Venus all into Capricorn, and so that’s three planets in Capricorn for — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — the last portion of the month. And this assembly of planets, you know, with Sun-Mars-Venus, which will be joined by Mercury shortly in January, is pretty significant. That’s a lot of weight to the chart. That’s a lot of weight as far as what house in your chart is being transited, and it’s also a lot of weight in terms of what the general vibe, what the atmosphere feels like. It’s a lot of Capricorn. And so there’s the heaviness, the seriousness, the pragmatism of Capricorn will be very evident. But like, in this two-thirds of it is hidden, right, and is up for reconfiguration and kind of in this process of introspection. 

Let’s see. We’ve got — 

CB: That three planet stellium – so by December 24th, Venus goes into Capricorn, and that’s when that three planet stellium in Capricorn really fully kicks off. And then the energies of that basically sign-based conjunction between those three planets will be building up and then culminating around January 10th. And anybody that has a triple conjunction of Sun, Venus, and Mars in your birth charts, this is probably gonna be a really important alignment for you because it’ll be a triple planet recurrence that will culminate in January but the events surrounding it will probably start happening and start to fall into place from December 24th forward. 

AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, people who are Mars-Venus-Sun people, like, this is a lot of Mars-Venus-Sun. And it’s worth noting that those three more or less stay in the same sign until about February 10th, because they go one, two, three into Aquarius over a period of about four days, but they’re all in Capricorn and then they’re all in Aquarius, and then on February 10th, Venus pulls ahead into Pisces and starts making some distance. But like, yeah, this gathering is going to hold for a while. 

CB: That’s a great point. Because what we learned in the recurrence transit episode is that the recurrence transit begins and is operative the entire time the two or in this instance three planets are in the same sign together. So it creates this – in this instance – a period of like, what, a month or two, but then oftentimes the most important event or the culmination of it happens at the exact aspect. So you know, it’ll start December 24th when the three become co-present for the first time, but then it’ll culminate around January 10th. And then there’ll be a continuation and a drop off all the way until that point in February you mentioned. And interestingly, another aspect that’s then forming as soon as Mars goes into Capricorn on December 14th or 15th is that the Mars-Jupiter opposition starts forming, which will eventually culminate around the time of that triple conjunction January 10th. But that means that anybody that has a natal Mars-Jupiter opposition, that’s gonna start getting activated and kicked off as soon as Mars moves into Capricorn in the second half of December. 

AC: Yeah. It’s a very important signature, and it’s worth noting that in both Capricorn and Aquarius where those three will be, and for much of that time also joined by Mercury, those are Saturn-ruled signs, right? And what’s Saturn doing? Saturn is with Neptune in Pisces. What is Saturn and Neptune in Pisces mean? We spent about an hour talking about it. Right? This is our illusionment and disillusionment, our inflating and popping of bubbles, and one of the last I think notable aspects of December is Mercury square with Saturn. Right? Just like Mars did earlier in the month and then the Sun and then Venus did later in the month, Mercury once it gets to the end of Sagittarius squares Saturn and then Neptune. And so it’s more attention given, yet again, to what is the situation with Saturn and Neptune? And again, the emphasis on Saturn continues with all these planets being in Saturn-ruled signs. Like, the Sun, Mars, and Venus at the time that the square takes place, but then for another month and a half. And so this question with Saturn-Neptune is “What can endure? What is real? What has bones?” Right? “What has reality density?” as opposed to like, “What is a dream or a nightmare that we will swiftly wake up from?” Like, “What is a bubble? What is merely a fanciful vision?” Like, this process that we’re in of separating those two is emphasized from a lot of different angles, both this month and over the next couple. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. And some of that gets re-activated very briefly with Mercury squaring Saturn on the 29th and 30th of December, and then eventually squaring Neptune around like, December 31st and January 1st as Mercury is on its way out of Sagittarius and into Capricorn. So those become our final aspects of the month as we get basically the third round of inner planets pinging that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that we’ve had all month that started with Mars squaring Saturn-Neptune at the beginning of the month in the first week and then next we had Venus squaring Saturn-Neptune around Christmas, and then finally Mercury squares Saturn-Neptune and that’s the third hit at the very, very end of December and beginning of January, so — 

AC: And don’t forget the Sun. And the fact that the New Moon – right, so basically the Sun and the Moon at its most important point, or — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — one of its most important points also squared it. So almost everybody is doing that square with Saturn-Neptune. And it’s such an interesting last check-in with that pair in Pisces before they leave in not very long. Right? Neptune’s out for good at the end of January; Saturn’s out for good on February 13th. And this is – you know, it’s the end of the Saturn in Pisces years, which is about two-and-a-half years, but it’s also the end of the Neptune in Pisces years, which began in April of 2011. Right? And — 

CB: Wow. 

AC: — like, so what are we left with that’s real after the Neptune in Pisces years? Because a lot of shit has happened, and a lot has been thought and said. A lot has been dreamed. And some of it will stay with us, and is real, and then some of it’s just going to dissolve like morning dew.

CB: That’s so crazy. I can’t believe we’re ending such a long planetary cycle. It seems like Neptune’s been in Pisces forever. You said since what month in 2011? 

AC: The first ingress was April of 2011, I believe. Either that or end of March. 

CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. That’s insane. So that’s a huge era of all of our lives, all of our personal lives, that Neptune’s been transiting through Pisces for so many years now and creating some really beautiful things in some instances and in other instances creating some deceptive or illusory things. And then having that Neptune, the final Neptune station and the final exclamation mark put next to Neptune this month is gonna be super important in terms of wrapping up whatever that transit was about for each of us personally. And one of the things that’s gonna be funny that everybody’s gonna notice next year as soon as Neptune goes into Aries and then we spend our first full year with Neptune not just in Aries but having it no longer in Pisces is suddenly having the veil sort of lifted on a bunch of things that we’ve been experiencing in the Pisces sectors of our charts since 2011 over the past 14, 15 years now. And suddenly — 

AC: I gotta add something to that. 

CB: — suddenly having greater clarity in an area where we’re not gonna realize until – you don’t realize until you step out of the cloud that you’ve been traveling through a cloud for such a long period of time. 

AC: And it’s actually wilder than that. I was thinking about my transits the other day, Chris, and Pisces has not been without an outer planet – either Uranus or Neptune present in it – since like, 2003. 

CB: Wow. Okay, yeah, because —

AC: 2003, 2004. Because I was just going through, and I was like, oh yeah, it was like, 2003, 2004 – that’s when Uranus entered Pisces, and Uranus left Pisces in I think March of 2011, which is exactly like, and Neptune entered Pisces a few weeks later. And so basically, Pisces is always, it’s easy for Pisces to get strange. But Pisces has had either Uranus or Neptune present there for over 20 years. 

CB: That’s crazy. Yeah. 

AC: Maybe my Pisces brethren and I are slightly more normal than we suspected. 

CB: Right. I love that. Yeah. I remember, because Uranus went into Pisces in 2003; I was only like, a few years into my astrological studies at that time, and I remember noting that ingress. And that’s crazy looking back on that now like, over 20 years later. 

AC: Yeah. I don’t remember – it was sometime earlier this year I was just sort of sitting and thinking and going through things, and I was like, holy shit. You know? And so again, maybe we’re less strange than we have been for 20 years. I don’t know what Pisces normal is; it’s probably still kind of odd, but we’re gonna find out soon. 

CB: Yeah. And then what Neptune in Aries is all about that we got a preview of over the summer, and some good things and some not good things about that. But maybe we’ll have to save that discussion for our year ahead forecast, which at the very end of the month under that Mercury-Saturn square you and I are gonna be expending a lot of mental energy to finalize our outline for that and our research for that, and then to spend a long day getting that recorded. Which I believe we’re recording on December 29th, then I think I’m gonna try to turn around and release on the 30th if I can pull that off, because that’s our very narrow electional window. But that’s what we’re gonna be doing during that Mercury-Saturn square.

AC: Yeah, trying to figure out what’s real. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So yeah. So everyone can look forward to that. We’re gonna be recording that then. We’ll record it with a live group of patrons as we did today for this forecast episode for everybody on the Patreon livestream tier, and that’s gonna be really good, and then we’ll get it released by the end of the year just in time for 2026. But other than that, I think that’s it for our forecast for December. I think we’ve covered all of the transits that we can cover as exhaustively as we can in this limited timeframe. What are you gonna be working on this month, Austin? What do you got going on? What’s coming up? 

AC: Okay. The thing that I’m most excited about is that Sphere and Sundry will be releasing its first ever Jupiter in Cancer series. We did some Jupiter in Cancer stuff back in 2014 privately, but that was well before anything was available to anyone else. I found a truly glorious moment for Jupiter in Cancer this fall. It was right after the Full Moon in Aries applying to Jupiter, Jupiter’s rising in its hour and unafflicted, and we uncorked what we made then and it is truly glorious. The feeling I got was I had some stones, and we had some oils that we played with, was just having a fully charged battery, which sounds kind of non-dramatic but for the overworked parent of a toddler, it was an experience I hadn’t had for years. And it was interesting, because we thought it might be a little aggro because of the Jupiter in Cancer being ruled by the Full Moon in Aries, but instead there was this feeling of just being like, battery at 100 percent, but not being impelled to rush or to waste energy. I’m really, really happy with the results. The materia is going to be available through Sphere and Sundry on December 8th and of course throughout the holidays. It’s really good. I believe at this point, the code name for the project is the sublime dynamo. I wanted to call it something “generator,” because it really feels like having a backup generator and that operation timed with us getting a backup generator installed so that like, the house would never run out of power. But generator doesn’t sound as cool as “dynamo.” We also have like, 30 or 40 other names that almost work but didn’t. I think we’re going with sublime dynamo at this point. But that materia will be available. Very, very, very happy with it. I would be shocked if anyone was not impressed; it’s really good stuff. We were waiting for a long time to be able to make Jupiter in Cancer materia. 

Let’s see. I’ll be working on my normal stuff — 

CB: I’m so glad – could I just say I’m so glad you’re capturing some of those Jupiter in Cancer elections and bottling them up, because yeah, we’ve only got Jupiter in Cancer for another six months, and then Jupiter is out of there and it’s in Leo opposing Pluto right away next summer. And that Jupiter in its exaltation is gone for the next like, 12 years. So I’m glad you’re on top of that and you’re preserving some of those. 

AC: Yeah. Like, the project is almost like a seed bank in some ways. But yeah, and this one – the Jupiter with the Full Moon in Aries – that’s when Saturn is not in Aries and interfering with Jupiter. And we get Jupiter, you know, we’ve still got Jupiter for another six months, but when Saturn returns to Aries, it complicates a lot of the elections. It’s not that they become impossible, but it’s complicated. So anyway. Yeah. I’m glad you’re excited. I’m excited that we’re gonna have Jupiter in Cancer for the years to come, because Jupiter does run into a lot of problems next year. And as I said earlier, I kind of feel like it’s holding a lot of things together just barely now, and without that really strong Jupiter position, a lot of things would look a lot worse. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: I will be teaching as I always am this month. In the latter part of January, I will be doing another enrollment into my Fundamentals of Astrology program; more details forthcoming. And that’s about all the professional stuff that I have planned. 

Chris, you made posters for this year, didn’t you? 

CB: I did! Thanks for reminding me; I completely forgot to mention those earlier. I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to do them this year because I could no longer host them on my website due to the website issues before, but I found a work around, and they’re hosted on the print-on-demand site now. And I just released my 2026 astrology calendar posters. You can find out more information about them at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Posters. I use – it’s basically the graphics that we use in these forecast episodes, but turned into a full poster for the entire year so you can see the entire year’s astrology at a glance, including ingresses, lunations, aspects, retrogrades and all sorts of other stuff. So it’s really, really handy as a reference and I actually have it on my wall behind my monitor. And when I like, do the forecast episodes, I’m sometimes glancing at that or using it when I’m writing up the outline in preparation for things. 

AC: Yeah, it’s so helpful. 

CB: For sure. So that’s awesome; people should get those. I also just discovered that Patreon has a membership gift option, which I didn’t know about, but apparently if you wanted to you could gift somebody a membership to The Astrology Podcast Patreon where they would get access to all sorts of benefits and bonus content, like the ability to attend these live episodes. So if anybody’s looking for a good gift for an astrologer this year, then definitely that would be a good one. You can find out more about that at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast/Gift. So it’s just our Patreon page, but if you add slash gift to it, you’ll go to the gift page, and you can gift somebody a membership to our Patreon to get early access to new episodes, bonus episodes that are only released to patrons. We do writeups sometimes; like, I put up a document in some important episodes. You even get access to the electional podcast or The Secret Astrology Podcast, so lots of good stuff there. And then finally, the last thing is also just to reiterate, we just released our 2026 Electional Astrology Report of all of the most fortunate dates and times next year. It’s a much more extensive report than we’ve ever done, not just because we offered two charts for each month of next year, but also because the writeup was much more extensive than usual with lots of additional tables and other stuff to figure out the astrology of next year. And like I said, the launch price, which is only true for December, is 49.95, and then it’s gonna go up in January. But this week for just the first week of launching the product, we’re giving just listeners a 10 percent off promo code, which is ‘JUPITER’ to get 10 percent off the price which drops the price down to 44.95 if you use that promo code before December 7th.

So you can sign up for that or find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report. And I will put links to all of the stuff that we just discussed in the description below this video on YouTube or on the entry for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website including all of Austin’s stuff as well.

AC: And I forgot to mention one thing. I was reminded by gift certificates. Sphere and Sundry also offers gift certificates, so for — 

CB: Nice.

AC: — the astro magic curious in your life, if you would like to get them something nice, Sphere and Sundry provides many things that are quite nice. And the wrapping is beautiful and gift-worthy in every order, so. 

CB: Beautiful. Yeah. That’s an awesome option as well. So lots of good gift-giving stuff for astrologers this year. So, you know, spouse or other significant people who’s like, listening to this episode being played by their astrologer significant other in the background, take note of that. Yeah. But I think that’s it. Thanks for doing this forecast episode with me. This was really good; we covered so much, but it was really good to do this last forecast, this last installment of 2025, as we close this chapter and we get ready to open up the new book of 2026. 

AC: Is it a horror novel? Maybe it’s adventure. Is it a love story, Chris? What genre is —

CB: I mean —

AC: — 2026?

CB: Oh, we’re gonna have the whole gamut of like, love, romance, excitement, war. Like, you know, I’m sure tragedy. Other crazy things. Like, if you thought 2025 was crazy, 2026 is gonna amplify so many of those themes so much more. It’s gonna be – it’s not gonna say “good,” you know, because obviously a lot of that is actually terrible and has been for a long time now and is getting worse. But I will say from an astrologer good standpoint of us being astrology nerds and being impressed at how well the astrological transits align with some of these most important events in history, that it’s definitely gonna be one of the most interesting years that we have to do a forecast episode yet. So I am at least excited about it from an intellectual standpoint of seeing all of that play out over the next 12 months. 

AC: I think it’s gonna be a very stimulating year. 

CB: Very stimulating? Okay. That’s all you’re gonna give us for the next month so that you’ll have to wait to hear the rest of Austin’s thoughts and beautiful poetic metaphors for 2026 one month from now when we record that forecast episode. And then I’ll get it released as soon as possible. 

So thanks a lot for joining me today, Austin. 

AC: Oh, it was my pleasure. 

CB: Cool. All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck in December. And we’ll see you again later next month for the year ahead forecast for 2026! So thanks for watching, and I’ll see you again next time. 

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