The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 521, titled:

February Astrology Forecast 2026

With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock

Episode originally released on January 30, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/01/30/february-astrology-forecast-2026/

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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 February 13th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for February of 2026. Hey Austin; welcome back. 

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. 

CB: Hey. So yeah. It’s been a really big month, and in the first hour of this episode, we’re gonna talk about news and events that have happened over the past month since we did our last forecast episode. Then in the second hour, we’re gonna jump into looking at the forecast for February and doing a deep dive into the transits this month. As always, there’ll be timestamps if you wanna jump forward to the forecast section. But otherwise, before we get into the news, why don’t we go ahead and do just a quick overview of the astrology of February to give you a preview of what we’ll be talking about later in this episode. 

So here is 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 we’ve got so many major transits this month. We have an eclipse season that gets started around February 9th and peaks with the first eclipse around February 17th, but then that’ll continue through the rest of the month. We have the major outer planet alignment of Saturn and Neptune forming an exact conjunction for the first time that goes exact around February 20th. There’s even a Mercury retrograde that gets thrown in for good measure, as well as a bunch of other transits. 

So here’s the planetary alignments calendar that shows all of the major aspects and ingresses and lunations this month. We open the month with a Full Moon in the sign of Leo on February 1st. Then Uranus stations direct for the final time in the sign of Taurus on February 3rd. Mercury squares Uranus on the 5th. Then it moves into Pisces the very next day. Venus squares Uranus on the 8th, then Venus moves into Pisces two days later on the 10th. Saturn makes a major ingress and moves from the sign of Pisces where it’s been for three years into the sign of Aries on February 13th, and then a few days later, the Sun squares Uranus on the 16th, followed by the first solar eclipse in the sign of Aquarius in a new series of eclipses that will last all the way until 2028. 

Then the Sun moves into Pisces the following day on the 20th. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction goes exact on the 20th of February. Mercury stations retrograde on the 26th. Mars squares Uranus in one of the most difficult aspects of the month on the 27th. And then Mercury makes a retrograde conjunction with Venus on the final day of February. 

So those are some of the major transits that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode, but before we get into that, why don’t we spend a while talking about all the news and events that have taken place over the course of the past month since we did our year ahead forecast at the end of December. And it’s been a really scary month collectively, I think, on a number of different levels. And in the year ahead forecast when we did the monthly breakdown, I described the two main aspects of January as “a peace-shattering Mars-Jupiter opposition early in the month and then this somewhat violent Mars-Pluto conjunction late in the month in Aquarius.” And I think we can see how some of those keywords ended up coming to pass now in retrospect. 

So it’s been really sobering with everybody suddenly realizing the times that we’re living in, and for astrologers I think even more so because we know that there’s still so much more to come. That was kind of my reaction to it this month. What was your reaction, Austin? 

AC: Pretty similar. I would say that January was as important as I expected it to be, that a lot of things that will take years to play out got set in motion. I didn’t think that the beginning – like, the beginnings of these things – would be as loud as they were. I expected – I was a little surprised at, again, how loud the things were, not that they were significant and quite upsetting things that occurred, but I was a little surprised at how loud and obvious it was. 

CB: For sure. Yeah. I think the triple conjunction of Venus, the Sun, and Mars ended up being much more important, and it turned out that it was more rare than I even realized where because it was so close with that triple conjunction all happening within a few days, the next time we’ll have a one that’s that close is actually like, a century from now to give you some perspective on the rarity of that. And that was something I realized better when just like, 10 days into the month, Nick Dagan Best and I decided to go through and research that and do a whole like, five-hour episode deep dive on it to get some perspective. And then once I had looked into that triple conjunction, it started making a lot more sense. 

AC: And so that’s the Venus, Mars, and Sun; that’s not even factoring in the fact that Mercury a little bit later in the month caught up and traveled with Mars and Venus and the Sun. Because I hadn’t done the research, but I assumed it was quite rare. We just don’t see that many planets with the Sun all clustered up at the same time. 

CB: Yeah. I have a diagram for one of those. So here’s a diagram showing the triple conjunction earlier in the month, and then followed by that Mars-Pluto conjunction. But then I’m glad that you mentioned the Mercury-Mars conjunction, because that’s also relevant because we’re in a rare sequence of five of those conjunctions that are happening in relatively quick succession. And in researching that recently, I realized that that only happens every 15 to 17 years, based on the planetary periods of Mars especially, where sometimes you’ll get this succession of five conjunctions in quick succession over like, a six-month period, which this series started in October and now we’ve had three conjunctions. But then there’s two more coming up. 

AC: Yeah. And each one of those is an exclamation point – X marks the spot – moment in March and April. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Anyway, so in terms of news stories, there’s too many news stories that happened this month, frankly, to cover them all. So we’re gonna focus on the ones that we have something to say about astrologically since this is an astrological program and where we have some sort of compelling observation to make about the astrology behind major events. So that’s gonna be our guiding sort of light here. And it turns out that many of the news stories this month were recurrence transits of previous triple conjunctions between Venus, Mars, and the Sun that acted as like, precedents or precursor events to many of the things that happened this month. And that’s part of what I’d like to point out about many of the news stories that happened. 

All right, so the very first news story happened right at the beginning of the month; it was the day of the Full Moon on the 3rd where on January 3rd, the US attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro and then took over the country seemingly. And Trump initially claimed that it was about drugs, but then later kept talking about oil once the country had been taken over. In the November forecast, I had noted that if that was to happen, then it would be a repetition of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that occurred in 1989 when the US did something similar by invading Panama and arresting the leader of Panama at the time, who was Manuel Noriega, on drug charges. So that ended up being part of the repetition there. And what’s interesting from an astrological standpoint and researching this more, is a year ago when we did the Saturn-Neptune episode – Saturn-Neptune in History – we had noted that Venezuela first declared independence in the year 1811, and this was during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So part of what happened this month was there was a recurrence transit, essentially, for Venezuela as well as a number of other countries. And this chart for July 5th, 1811, is actually really interesting – the initial declaration of independence of Venezuela as a Spanish colony – because it has a number of surprising similarities with the US birth chart. And one of the things that was interesting about that is in our prep meeting for the year ahead forecast episode, you had actually noted this, Austin, because you were interested in the Mars-Uranus conjunction in the Venezuela birth chart. But we just didn’t end up, we forgot to talk about it, basically, in the year ahead forecast. 

AC: Yeah, there was so much. You know, in November-December, I was just sort of looking – I wanted to see if the astrology thought that any of the sabre-rattling around Venezuela like, was real. Like, does the astrology of next year intersect with the chart of Venezuela? And one of the simple things was one, that there was a Mars-Uranus – that the Mars-Uranus conjunction which occurs on the United States’s birthday or within a day or so in 2026 also occurs within a day or so of Venezuela’s birthday. And then I saw that Venezuela’s nativity or independence day also had a Mars-Uranus conjunction in the first house. And so that just told me that that was – Venezuela was not off the table. It was not just fanciful sabre-rattling. But didn’t mention it. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: But one thing that I think that that does say is that we’ll see a significant development in the Venezuela story, which is I think in a place of mysterious chaos right now. Like, we know what happened, but exactly what things are going to look like moving forward looks like a giant fan of questions. But I would expect that Mars-Uranus in early July this year to be a significant inflection point in that story. 

CB: Yeah. The Mars-Uranus conjunction, but then also just seeing that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions are so important as a natal signature really puts this Saturn-Neptune conjunction happening this month front and center as well as over the next couple of years as that conjunction continues to be present by sign, eventually you’ll get the exact phase recurrence of the birth chart here where Neptune is at like, eight degrees of Sagittarius and Saturn is at 21. So that’s important. The other things I noticed also were just, you know, the Sun is – this is July 5th, 1811, so that means the birthday of Venezuela is just one day after the US birthday of July 4th. And just like the US has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer in its birth chart, I thought it was interesting that Venezuela has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in its birth chart, in addition to both the US having Mars-Uranus in Gemini as a conjunction and Venezuela having Mars-Uranus in Scorpio. And you know, what’s interesting about that is the US was the first country in North America to break away as a colony from England – from a colonial empire – and Venezuela was the first country in South America to declare its independence completely from a colonial empire as well. And this was part of like, a wave of countries declaring independence around that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1811 and 1810. But there was like, a technicality where Venezuela was technically the first to declare complete independence at the time, which is interesting seeing that parallel with the US. 

AC: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And it reinforces the fundamental meanings of the Mars-Uranus being that struggle for freedom and that struggle being necessitated by violent contending forces. And both the United States and Venezuela have that Mars-Uranus signature in an angular house of the chart signifying its importance and pivotal nature in the establishment of each country. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And of an armed rebellion, basically, that — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — led to the birth of the country. 

So the other thing I wanted to point out, though, that was very striking about this month aside from some of the outer planet alignments is here is the chart for January 3rd, 2026, and we can see that triple conjunction is so close with Venus around 12 Capricorn, the Sun at 13, and Mars at 14, and they’re opposing Jupiter at 20 degrees of Cancer. So what I found astrologically as I was researching this that was really surprising is that it turns out that Maduro was elected on April 14th, 2013, and this was during a very close triple conjunction between the same three planets where the Sun was at 25 degrees of Aries, Mars was at 25 degrees of Aries, and Venus was at about 29 degrees of Aries. So that means that Maduro became president on a very close triple conjunction of those three planets, and then he was deposed like, 12 or 13 years later on another very close triple conjunction of those three planets. 

AC: Yeah, that’s really striking. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s pretty crazy. And then like you said, the ongoing Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the upcoming Mars-Uranus conjunction will probably mark important continued developments in that story over the course of the next year and two years essentially. 

AC: Yeah. For a while, unfortunately. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So the next major story that happened is that immediately after Venezuela, after that happened, Trump immediately started talking about annexing Greenland and the Trump administration started talking about this in a number of different ways. And at first, he proposed to buy it, but then he also started making threats to use force. And the discussion became about how this would essentially be the end of the NATO alliance if this was to happen and if Trump was to use force to take over or to invade another NATO country who was part of the North Atlantic treaty essentially and how this would cause a major end to that, I think, the biggest military alliance in history up to this point. 

So as a result of that, European countries pushed back and started to essentially to stand up to him, and several countries started sending troops there to either deter or to defend if an invasion did happen. And then when Trump made threats to put tariffs on different European countries to retaliate, he was met with strong immediate counter-tariffs. So they were really pushing back very hard, and there was all this talk about how the international rules-based order was breaking down, which was very reminiscent of like, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction where last time we had like, a physical version of that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that idea of structures dissolving. And Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney said essentially that the US-led rules-based international order was over in a speech, and it really made me think that this may be part of our like, Berlin Wall essentially moment, or at least part of that. 

AC: I couldn’t agree more. When I was sitting and thinking about February’s astrology yesterday, the thing that the completion or the climax, the one exact hit between Saturn-Neptune and what it would probably be remembered for was exactly that. Like, the turning point in what has been up ‘til now like, a slow but meaningful dissolution of the post-Cold War geopolitical arrangement as well as, you know, timing with a Uranus cycle the post-World War II set of agreements. And I couldn’t agree more that that structure – which has been fraying and under attack from a variety of angles for a while – will probably be remembered as sort of finally collapsing or finally no longer accurately describing the set of relationships internationally that it did for decades. 

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s causing a lot of countries suddenly to both rethink their alliances with the US as well as different countries around the world starting to reconfigure different alliances with each other, including a major trade agreement between Canada and China this month that seemed to result from some of the things that had happened with tariffs and other things over the course of the past year. So certainly, there are some things that’ll change that just probably can’t go back after this, you would think. 

AC: Yeah. I think that a lot of, I think we’re probably entering a period where a lot of long-standing relationships dissolve, but it’ll take years for things to recohere into a stable shape. I think that’s part of the Saturn and Neptune in Aries part, right, is that there’s gonna be a little bit of each nation for itself and having to rethink who their dance partners are. Sort of like, everybody goes to the dance party single for a while instead of having these established networks. 

CB: Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to bring up is that I noticed in doing the research on triple conjunctions is it turns out that the triple conjunction this month between, again, Venus, Mars, and the Sun was a recurrence transit both for Greenland but also for NATO this month. 

So the first one is that the US gave up any claim to Greenland to Denmark in the year 1917 in exchange for getting the Virgin Islands, or what we know as the US Virgin Islands now. And this transfer had a specific day; it was called Transfer Day, and it occurred on March 31st, 1917. And this is the chart just approximately; all the charts I’ll show are always approximations for that moment. But look at this. It’s an exact Venus-Mars conjunction at three degrees of Aries with the Sun not too far away at 10 degrees of Aries. And you know, Mercury is also there for that matter as well, so it’s actually a quadruple conjunction that replicates what was technically a quadruple conjunction this month even though I’m focusing on the triple conjunction aspect most of the time. 

So that’s there. And then also, of course, since this was 1917, we can also see the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s forming and is already within 10 degrees as well at that time. So this was the point at which the US had some minor possible claim to a part of Greenland, but it completely relinquished it at this time in exchange for getting the Virgin Islands. So this is a recurrence of that that’s happening right now, especially in January but really with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that extends it for most of the rest of this year as being active. 

So get this, though – so that’s Greenland. But then the more I researched, I found that the NATO treaty was signed that brang NATO into existence, this huge military alliance, and this was on April 4th, 1949. And there again we see a triple conjunction with the Sun at 14 degrees of Aries conjunct Venus at 11 degrees of Aries and Mars at 10 degrees of Aries. 

AC: Just wild. 

CB: Incredible, right? Like, that’s just stunning. 

AC: Yeah. And there’s Mercury again, too. 

CB: Yeah. There’s Mercury once again, so it’s a quadruple conjunction, which again, all four of those planets were like, very close together this month and formed conjunctions very close apart, and that’s when suddenly Greenland and the US and Denmark’s relationship with Greenland becomes the focal point. And then as a result of that, also NATO and the alliance between all these different countries becomes the focal point as well. 

So but get this – that’s not all. It turns out that this wasn’t the first time that Trump brought up Greenland, but in fact the first that Trump brought up trying to buy Greenland was in August of 2019, and it was also under a triple conjunction where on August 15th, 2019, the Wall Street Journal broke a story and was the first to report that Trump was trying to buy Greenland or wanted to. And on that day, the Sun was at 22 Leo conjunct Venus at 22 Leo, and Mars at 28 Leo, and they were moving towards a conjunction that would take place about a week later. And so the story breaks at that time, but then there’s this back and forth where it caused an international incident with the Danish prime minister who said publicly that the idea was absurd, and then Trump got offended and canceled a state visit a week later close to when the exact conjunction between the three planets hit. So it turns out that even his first bringing it up was also a triple conjunction recurrence. 

AC: Yeah. Just crazy. Great work.

CB: Yeah. Wild, wild stuff. So where we’re at at this point is that, you know, Trump recently appeared to back down a little bit. However, in researching this, I noticed that the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1946 was one of the first times that the US attempted secretly to buy Greenland and was rejected. And then in 1978, there was again a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and Greenland at that time voted to have greater independence from the Danish. So that ties Venus retrograde in Scorpio into this whole thing with the US attempts to buy Greenland and obtain it as well as Greenland having questions about having greater independence. And as we know, there’s a Venus retrograde in Scorpio coming up again later this year especially in October and November, which implies that that should be important. 

And when we were doing our prep meeting, Austin, you actually reminded me that we already were talking about this a year ago in connection — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — with an eclipse, right? 

AC: Yeah. Last year, we noted that Vice President Vance’s first visit to Greenland coincided with a solar eclipse casting its shadow over Greenland. And that is, as I noted at the time, that was almost cartoonishly ominous. But sometimes it gets cartoonish. And so here we are almost a year later with that shadow beginning to take shape. 

CB: Yeah. And the dates on that were that Vance visited Greenland on March 28th, and that eclipse happened literally the next day on March 29th which crossed Greenland. And I went back and looked at the transit for this where we talked about this in the April 2025 forecast, but one of the things I had forgotten about that we noted in that forecast at the time – that I noted – was that there was gonna be another eclipse in 2026 over Greenland that would be even more visible and would cross more important like, tracts of land. So I was looking that up, and it turns out that that’s the Leo solar eclipse that’s gonna take place on August 12th, 2026. So — 

AC: Yeah. And you know what I just realized about that when you were going over the first attempt to buy Greenland is that that eclipse occurs within a degree-and-a-half of where the Sun-Venus conjunction was during that first attempt to buy Greenland or yeah, to obtain Greenland in 2019. So that’s, like, the Sun is in almost exactly the same place. We have some synastry with that past event. 

CB: Right. That makes sense. Yeah, and it makes me think of the first eclipse was in Aries, and that’s, you know, Trump and Vance’s 9th house of foreign places and foreign lands. And of course, as we’re gonna get into in a little bit, Saturn and Neptune are both moving into and forming a conjunction in that house this next month in February, which I think is gonna be really important in terms of certain countries – like, especially Iran. But it makes me think of that as well in terms of the 9th house component with some of these things. 

AC: Yeah. No, that’s a good read from a natal perspective, right? If somebody who holds a high office has a bunch of transits that are really interested in foreign lands and those transits are malefic in nature, such as involving Saturn, right. Anyway, it makes perfect sense. A lot of this —

CB: Yeah. 

AC: Yeah. You did a lot of great work here, and it ties together beautifully – or maddeningly, depending on whether you’re in the basement and you have the pictures taped to the wall and whether you have enough string. 

CB: Right. Yeah. Well, I’ll get to the string part next in just a minute of the meme of the conspiracy — 

AC: Yeah, we’re not done! You’re not done. 

CB: It’s not over! Well, yeah, and Nick and I did this whole five-hour episode where I did like, a one-hour breakdown of the history of each of these topics, so I’m just giving you the highlights. But be sure to check out that episode for more. 

So to wrap up this section on Greenland, I mean, all of the upcoming transits imply that this is not over yet and there’s more to come, unfortunately, which is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in February, which is like, a recurrence of the 1917 conjunction. There’s the eclipse in August, which is over Greenland, and then there’s the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in October and November, and I would expect all three of those to be important in different ways. 

AC: Yeah. Those are great points, and regardless of the attempt to temporarily calm down the situation around Greenland, I don’t think the astrology agrees that the matter is settled and will move forward smoothly. 

CB: Yeah, unfortunately. All right, so moving onto the next topic. One of the things in the year ahead forecast, Austin, you really emphasized the hidden and behind-the-scenes component of especially the triple conjunction with Venus and Mars forming those conjunctions, but it happening so close to the Sun that they couldn’t be seen and were combust or under the beams. And one of the things that’s really interesting about that is that in December, Congress passed an act requiring the release of the rest of the Jeffrey Epstein files. But then basically what happened in January is the Department of Justice has been refusing to release the files all month, and a lot of the news stories this month ended up distracting from this in a way that I realized that part of the symbolism was that it was like, the blinding rays of the Sun were kind of overshadowing the Venus-Mars conjunction. And so I thought that ended up being an interesting way in which that worked out for a story that was like, hidden or obscured by other things. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And there were some other points of obscurity or opaqueness that I noted, and so what’s interesting is we had both Venus and Mars invisible all month, and we had Mercury invisible for a lot of the month. And with those four planets, the Sun and those three, all together you can still see the Sun, and the Sun is as blinding as ever, but you can’t see the other two or three. And so it was interesting to reflect on the seizure of Maduro in that light, because it was a little – it’s not completely out of nowhere, but it was pretty concealed as far as that major an operation goes. Like, you just woke up and that had happened. You didn’t have like, a giant gathering of forces and then an invasion; like, a lot of it was underneath the beams. It was concealed or hidden. 

And then later in the month when all the planets conjoined Pluto in early Aquarius just happened to time with – and we use the term “assembly,” as that’s often a term used in historical astrology texts for a bunch of planets gathered in one place. And so that largely concealed assembly of planets conjunct Pluto in Aquarius happened to coincide with Davos this year. And it was during that that Trump said that he’d had some conversations, and Greenland was chill and it was gonna be fine. Right? And again, it’s like nobody could see those conversations. People have since said we did not have those conversations. But again, you have the Sun part of the assembly visible, but everything else is concealed. And so yeah, it was interesting to see what you could see versus what was concealed was a big part of this – the events this month. And one of the things I had in my notes that I don’t think I said in the yearly was just that it’s gonna take a while to figure out everything that happened in January, because so many of the planets were concealed behind the Sun. Right? There’s the thing that happened, but there are all these details and mechanics and plans that led to that and plans branching from that that will probably take at least until all of those planets are visible again to understand. 

CB: Yeah. I was thinking about that as well, because one of the things is that conjunctions are always seed moments where it’s the end of one cycle and sometimes certain things are ending. Like in the case of Maduro, for example. But then in other instances, a conjunction is the beginning of a new cycle. So sometimes there’s things that are planted, and when you plant a seed you can’t see what it’s gonna grow into yet; it takes a while before you see that. And I was seeing that in a bunch of instances with a lot of these conjunctions this month. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Like, and I think one to follow up on that analogy which is one that I used in class the other day when I was teaching a lesson on combustion is that, you know, the point where you see the first shoots break the ground we can liken very easily to the moment when the planets first reappear after the invisibility of the conjunction. Which for Mercury is pretty quick, but for Venus and Mars, it takes a while. Like, the two are still very combust, very hidden behind the Sun. Will need most of the next month and even some of the month after that for them to become clearly visible by themselves, to shine with their own light, and to communicate what happened exactly and what it means. Like, what is the — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — that’s another thing is like, what is the trajectory that’s established by that seed moment? Like, you know a thing happened, but where exactly it’s going from here rather just a general direction but with some like, idea of momentum and trajectory, et cetera, et cetera. You need to be able to see the planet to track where it’s going. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. We should keep going, because we’re gonna go over time if we get on this section too much. But you did also mention another point to me privately that the internet blackout in Iran was another instance of that where suddenly the internet was cut and all of a sudden, all these protests were happening, but then all of a sudden nobody knew what was going on, and it just sort of hid everything behind this cloud. 

AC: Yeah. It’s another thing where you can see the Sun, right? Like, the Sun doesn’t stop being visible under these combust conditions. But and you know there’s stuff going on behind there, right? You know it didn’t stop the second the internet got cut. But there’s an opacity; there’s an inability to see what’s going on. And I didn’t check it today, but as of a couple days ago, the blackout was still in effect. 

CB: Right, yeah. Yeah. So that was a major component, and then surprisingly there’s actually a triple conjunction component here as well with the entire Epstein thing, because it turns out one of the things that came out this month on social media that was blowing people’s minds and blew my mind is that in 1917, remember that chart where I was talking about the US relinquishing its control or any claim to Greenland on March 31st, 1917, to Denmark? Well, it turns out that part of that treaty was that this was the day that the US officially got in control of and bought the US Virgin Islands. Well, it turns out that the US Virgin Islands includes what’s now known as Epstein Island or the island that Jeffrey Epstein owned. So it was right on this triple conjunction where it’s Venus conjunct Mars exactly at three degrees of Aries, and then conjunct the Sun at 10 degrees of Aries and Mercury at 12 degrees of Aries, as well as Saturn conjunct Neptune within 10 degrees. So that’s one piece of it. But then get this – so then that means that a few decades later, Epstein himself is born on January 20th, 1953, and of course as we’ve talked about previously he was born on an exact Venus-Mars conjunction at 16 degrees of Pisces as well as a Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 23 and 27 degrees of Libra. But and you know, sidenote, like, fun fact but Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew were also born on Venus-Mars conjunctions. But that’s not the weird part; this is the weird part. Remember if you jump forward to that same week in August of 2019 when Trump first brought up buying Greenland and it caused this diplomatic problem between the Danish and the US, this flare-up, Epstein died in jail the same week on August 10th, 2019, under the exact same triple conjunction where in this chart, you know, Venus is at 16 Leo, the Sun is at 17 Leo, and Mars is at 25 Leo. So that triple conjunction recurrence was present basically the week that he died under, you know, mysterious circumstances in prison. 

So that’s just wild to me, because like, it’s just, you know, I feel sort of like the meme of the guy standing in front of the board with a bunch of strings connecting all these dots, and yet at the same time somehow it actually is all connected, at least astrologically, through some of these recurring themes that keep coming up and echoing at important points in history when the same planets keep coming together again in different ways. 

AC: Yeah, it’s definitely… Yeah, that’s pure madness, while being very clearly connected in time, those conjunctions, the Sun-Venus-Mars don’t happen all that often. It’s not like there’s one of those every year and Chris is just cherrypicking. Like, those don’t happen very often, and yet they tie together Greenland and not just Epstein’s death, but also the acquisition of the island. Like, crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. 

CB: Right. Yeah. It’s absolutely insane. All right, so we’ll shelve that. Like, that I’m sure is gonna continue to be a thing in the future, but we’ll revisit it I’m sure in the future. 

Moving onto the next topic, so in December, Trump began sending thousands of ICE immigration agents to Minnesota and the Department of Homeland Security claimed that it was “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” And the ICE agents were wearing masks which shields them from accountability, and as a result of that, many legal observers around the city would document and record their activities. 

So on January 7th, they shot and killed one legal observer in Minneapolis whose name was Renee Nicole Good. And this was the exact day that the Venus-Mars conjunction went exact in the sky. So Renee was 37 years old, she was a mother of three, and she was also an award-winning poet who had won an award in 2020 just a few years ago. And in the video that I watched, she was driving away when an agent stepped in front of her car and then shot her multiple times, including one shot that went through the side of her head. 

So this killing immediately led to mass protests and tensions the rest of the month, and when I was looking at other precedents astrologically, it was really reminiscent of the Kent State shootings which also happened on a Venus-Mars conjunction, and you had these famous images back then during the Vietnam protests of a woman being shot and going viral and impacting the nation. Or more recently in 2009 on a Venus-Mars conjunction, there were protests in Iran after an election, and there was a woman named Neda Agha-Soltan who was shot and killed, and she became like, a martyr for the protest movement at that time. So it was also reminiscent of that from a Venus-Mars standpoint. 

But after that point, there were increasing calls for Governor Walz to step in and call in the National Guard, but then it said that he hesitated because Trump would have nationalized the National Guard, and then tensions continued to mount. 

So after that point, so that was centered on the Venus-Mars conjunction and the triple conjunctions. But then tensions continued to mount all month and then eventually on January 23rd, Mars moved into Aquarius. And the Mars-Pluto conjunction was building and came within three degrees on that day. And the following day on January 24th, videos went viral of ICE killing another civilian in Minneapolis whose name was Alex Pretti who was also 37 years old, and he was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. 

So multiple videos from different angles were released, and what happened in the videos that I watched was that he was recording on his phone when ICE approached him, and then the agent knocked down the woman next to him, and Alex tried to defend her. But then they pushed him down, they took his legal firearm from its holster and then shot him about nine times is what I’ve been reading or what I counted. 

So immediately, that day the words “execution” and “civil war” were trending for a couple of days on social media in places like Twitter and Threads. And it was insane, especially because immediately after that with the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, officials immediately started attempting to lie about what happened. And the blatancy of it was really obvious. So it sort of became like that 1984 quote where it was like, you know, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” So even many on the right pushed back because it was so blatant and the evidence for it was right there in front of everybody’s faces from so many different angles. 

AC: Yeah. And the protests that swelled immediately afterwards were extraordinary in number. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely — 

AC: I’ve heard various estimates and I’ve seen the footage, and it’s just a sea of people. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, and there was a lot of scared people who then also started buying guns, or people started showing up with guns in order to defend their community and different things like th at and the tension escalated in a way that I’ve never seen before, especially between the state and the federal forces, in my entire life. 

So you know, some of the attempts to lie about the situation afterwards, though, it raised questions about immigrants that have died in ICE custody over the past year as well as stories of abuse of people in detention there. And suddenly some of the terror that had been directed at many immigrant communities and minority communities over the past year and even prior to that were being directed at other citizens or, you know, frankly like, yeah, citizens that were not minorities or immigrants so that all of a sudden it seemed like a lot of the white citizens started actually paying attention to what was going on and being more concerned about it. But for me, it kind of made me think of that really famous post-World War II poem of like, “First they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a socialist. But then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” Like, it was a real turning point moment where I feel like there was a sea change and suddenly people started paying attention because they realized often it’s easy for people to other immigrants or other people that they don’t conceptualize as part of their community. But then when something starts happening closer to home, people start taking it more seriously. And even though that’s a really stupid thing that humans do, I could kind of see that that was part of what was happening this month. 

AC: Yeah. There’s also, as I was telling you about when we met a couple days ago, a lot of the meaning of this really sank in at a larger collective level around the Mars-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius. And you know, we had been waiting – perhaps dreading – what the Mars-Pluto conjunction would bring. And very often, Mars-Pluto conjunctions or oppositions bring events that usually go into the category of terrorism. But as Pluto changes signs, Pluto relocates the site of terror. And I think that it’s hard not to categorize like, masked anonymous agents killing civilians as – it’s hard to not call that state terrorism, right? And so, you know, it’s like, yes, there was Mars-Pluto terrorism, but not from people in planes from half the world away. And so it’s interesting to see Pluto in Aquarius beginning to show us what sort of face it wears, or what sort of lack of a face it wears. 

CB: Yeah. We had talked about that before, just about how Mars-Pluto always takes the violence principle of Mars and it takes it to an extreme that is often shocking to people and that people react to. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: So just a couple days after that, Neptune entered Aries two days later on January 26th, returning back to where it was when the Civil War broke out in 1861. And I was just seeing a lot of really scared people, especially on the left, starting to buy guns. There was images of people standing with guns on the streets of Minneapolis all month and people feeling this need to defend their communities. And there was also just this real reversal where Trump and some conservatives were saying that – they were saying things that went against the 2nd amendment. Like, saying that he shouldn’t have been there at a protest with a gun or shouldn’t have brought a legal gun to a protest, versus suddenly this role reversal where people on the left were suddenly seeing the value and like, embracing the 2nd amendment. And I think this is gonna continue to be an important theme with Saturn in Aries, because I suddenly remembered this article that Patrick Watson wrote back in 2019 where he had done this whole study on Saturn in Aries and the history of gun control. And he had pointed out that the 2nd amendment was created with the Bill of Rights during Saturn in Aries back in like, the 1700s, but then historically – especially over the past century – a number of instances of attempts to institute gun control were instituted at different points with Saturn in Aries. So there’s something about that that’s kind of important and that will probably become more relevant. And actually, we’ll talk about that more later once we get to the Saturn in Aries section.

AC: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So to round out that, it’s like, you know, January was the first time where the Civil War repetition suddenly became much more tangible than anything I think we’d seen up to this point. And I’ve never seen such a conflict between the states and the federal government in my life. And I feel like – I was talking with Leisa about this, and we had watched that documentary about the Revolutionary War recently, and one of the points that she made is that when we were talking is that it’s kind of like, all of the worst nightmares of some of the Anti-Federalists from the time of the Constitution are sort of like, coming true, and that’s very striking thinking about the Pluto return coming back to Aquarius where it was when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were first created, as well as the Uranus return coming back to that point as well as the points of the Civil War and World War II. So you have like, citizens arming themselves all of a sudden, and a powderkeg all month just waiting to explode further. 

One other side point about that that’s interesting is that Minnesota it turns out – I learned this month – was the first state to volunteer troops in the Civil War back in the 1800s. And so it’s weird that suddenly Minnesota has suddenly become this flashpoint right as Neptune is going back into Aries as a recurrence of that transit from the 1800s. 

AC: Yeah, it’s really interesting with Minnesota also being the site of the George Floyd slaying. It made me wonder a lot about what charts do we have for Minnesota, because this is I think probably similarly poignant, will be remembered. 

CB: Yeah. I was looking at it a little bit with Nick, and Nick Dagan Best pointed out to me that the Minnesota chart has an exact Mars-Jupiter opposition. So that’s part of what was happening this month is that there was a recurrence of that, and they also have Neptune in late Pisces from the 1800s and one of the nodes in late Pisces. So those are some of the recurrences that were happening this month, although I’m sure there’s other astrological connections that I’m not aware of that are probably relevant as well. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: So you know, unsurprisingly, the perception of having a masked paramilitary force running around executing citizens is not playing well with the public. So Trump has temporarily backed off. However, it seems clear that with all of these transits just getting started that it implies that tensions will continue to rise and that this is still just the beginning of this era of American history that we’re entering into now with Neptune just beginning this transit in Aries from where it was when the Civil War broke out, with Saturn entering Aries in February where it was when the Bill of Rights was created, with Uranus entering Gemini in April where it was during the Revolutionary, Civil War, and World War II, and then finally the Mars-Uranus conjunction coming up in July as a recurrence of the natal Mars-Uranus conjunctions that have coincided with important points during each of those different eras of the Revolutionary, Civil, and World War II. 

AC: Yeah, this is not a one-off. Right? Like, as you said, this is the brutal foyer to a period of history that we’ll be in through the end of the decade and more. 

CB: Yeah. At least through Uranus in Gemini, for sure, which doesn’t end until, what, 2032, 2033? 

AC: Yeah. There’s like, a little bit left in ‘33, but it’s mostly done by ‘32. 

CB: Got it. Yeah. I think the last Mars-Uranus conjunction is ‘32 as well. 

AC: Yeah. It’s seven long years in America. 

CB: Absolutely. All right. And I meant to mention as a sidenote, I have a cold or something. I’ve been sick, so my voice is a little off today. So I apologize if I either sound weird or if I’m a little unfocused. 

AC: Oh, I think you’re doing great. 

CB: Cool. Thank you. All right. So the last major news story that I wanted to make sure we covered is that beginning in December, protests broke out in Iran after a severe economic crisis as well as a currency collapse. And in the first week of January, these protests exploded across the country in many different regions. But then as quick as they began, a government crackdown began, and the internet was eventually cut completely on January 8th, which was the exact day of the Mars cazimi. 

So thousands of people were killed, and the protests ended up being suppressed. And at one point, they were able to cut even the Starlink satellites which were being used to get around the internet blockade. So it just created a complete blackout over the country. 

The US seemed like it was about to intervene in January, but then it didn’t. And part of that is probably because there was no aircraft carrier in the region, but there’s at least there’s one or two of them that are headed there now, and I think one has probably either arriving today or in the next day or two. 

So this is important, because there’s really major echoes of the 1953 Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And that happened when in 1953 the Shah was installed in a CIA-backed coup. So there’s some reminiscence there in terms of us again having a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and this being important for Iran. 

So the Shah was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the Shah ended up fleeing the country on the exact Sun-Mars conjunction on January 16th, 1979. And this was a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn, which we then suddenly had a recurrence of this month when there was again a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn. So here’s the one for January 16th, 1979. And the recurrence of that this past month in January of 2026 is tied in with a 47-year Mars cycle, which is something that you’ve been researching a lot recently, I think, as well, right, Austin? 

AC: Yeah, I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I will not derail us with all of our findings. I will just say it’s interesting, because I didn’t realize until I was halfway down the rabbit hole, but that is the cycle that I was born under. I was born about a month before Iran, and so my 47th birthday – my early 47th birthday – gift has been a greater understanding of this cycle and what it brings. 

CB: Nice. Yeah. So the repetition of that cycle where on the one hand, that Sun-Mars conjunction, the Shah fled the country at that time, and that the end of his rulership that had started at least in 1953 under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, although actually going back further. And then the repetition all of a sudden happened this month, then all of a sudden the son of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, resurfaced and was encouraging the protests. So that was part of the repetition I was seeing this month with that 47-year connection. And then as I was researching this — 

AC: And I would just also add, you know, many observers and many news outlets are just saying this is the largest protest against the administration since 1979. Like, people without a direct link to the understanding of the astrological cycle are making that connection. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: Just in terms of scope. 

CB: Yeah. As well as there’s like, debates over the number of people that were killed, but even the official government numbers that are like, three or 6,000 put it still at the largest number of people killed in protests since the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1978 and 1979. 

AC: Yeah, that’s a wild amount of violence out on the streets.

CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s the lower end of the spectrum of the potential of number killed with other numbers being, you know, 20 or 30,000 or something like that. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: So this reminded me that a year ago when Nick and I did the Saturn-Neptune conjunction episode in history, one of the things we had pointed out was during the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1989, the original leader of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, died at that time. So that Saturn-Neptune conjunction was a very important turning point because of the loss of the leader of the Iranian Revolution. But then so it was like, the end of a cycle, but then it was also the start of a new cycle because at that time, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, came to power. And that was the beginning essentially of his rulership as the Supreme Leader. So now we’ve reached the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction. 

And last year, Austin, you and I, we were really focused on that eclipse which we thought that the eclipse in Aries in March and April was an omen of the US striking Iran. And what ended up happening at that time is all of the assets were moved into place then and a deadline was given to Iran to negotiate with the nuclear program or something like that. But then the trigger of the attack that eventually happened didn’t happen until June immediately after Saturn moved into the sign of Aries on May 24th, 2025. And then the 12-day war began just a couple of weeks later, two or three weeks later, on June 13th when Saturn was still at one degree of Aries conjunct Neptune at two degrees of Aries. Because we had previously established that Iran kept responding to transits to Aries, partially because the Supreme Leader of the country had a stellium in Aries, as well as including Saturn in Aries natally and a solar eclipse in the sign of Aries natally. 

AC: Yeah, and the country was – the 1979 establishment chart has the Sun in Aries, which is also the ruler of the Leo rising. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So it’s really important. So as a result of all of that, I mean, to me, the likelihood that a strike is about to happen of some sort or that the US is about to attack Iran seems very high given all of those repetitions with Saturn entering Aries again, the same as June, the Saturn-Neptune repetition, which is a repetition of 1953 when the Shah was installed in the coup by the CIA and the British, and then in 1989 when the leader of the revolution passed away. And then even like, Trump has a loosing of the bond in zodiacal releasing February 10th through 14th, which is right as eclipse season is beginning. So there’s major stuff going on from a bunch of different perspectives here in terms of what seems like is about to happen, and obviously practically speaking with the US sending two carriers there and moving all of this military stuff into place seeming to threaten that they’re about to do something. 

AC: Yeah. And I would just add to that considerable pile that the transits to Iran’s chart look miserable. Not just next month, but in March and in April. There’s a lot of stress put on the chart and a different thing every month for months, for the next several months in a row.

CB: Yeah. And the other piece I’ll add to that is that when I was researching it, the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 1978 was a really important turning point for the Iranian Revolution where it was like, there was already a fire, but then gas was thrown on that fire and then it wildly got out of control from the perspective of the Shah who completely lost control of the situation at that point. But in 1979, it was weird, because the Venus retrograde in Scorpio came first and accelerated the revolution, and then the Sun-Mars conjunction hit in January, and that was the moment where the king fled the country and it was like, the end of the monarchy. But this year, it’s reversed for some reason where the Sun-Mars conjunction came first and just happened in January, but then the Venus retrograde in Scorpio will happen later this year in October and November. 

So to me, that kind of implies that the ripple effects of what’s about to happen in February and March are gonna continue to play out later this year when that Venus retrograde in Scorpio happens, especially in the October and November timeframe. 

AC: Yeah. I think that’s a great insight. And we have the same two Venus and Mars things, but the order is reversed. And so we’ve had the first but not the second. 

CB: Right. And it’s like, it’s so weird because you can see how that’s happening and that’s operating in Iran’s history, but then it was also operating in like, Greenland’s history where Greenland, you know, the US first tried to buy Greenland under Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1946, and then Greenland voted for independence in 1978. So there’s these weird echoes that are happening right now with some of the different planetary repetitions for different countries where that was important in their past. 

AC: Yeah, really good finds. 

CB: Yeah. So to wrap up the news section, I mean, to me, this month it became clear that we’re in unfortunately, like, the worst case scenario timeline where we’ve always talked about how we’re going through the Uranus return to Gemini from the time of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, that Neptune’s returned to Aries this month where it was when the Civil War began, we’re back to the Pluto return of when the system of government in the US was created in the 1780s, which includes not just the Constitution but also the Bill of Rights, and the conclusion that we’re often drawing from that over the past few years historically based on those cycles was that either a internal conflict or an external conflict was possible. But obviously now we can see that both are happening and somehow this is still just the beginning. So that was one of the unfortunate conclusions that just seems obvious at this point after this month.

AC: Yeah, it’s the grimmest possible version of the “why not both” meme. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. 

Okay, well that’s actually it, I think, for the news section. Do you have any final thoughts or things about that before we take a break? 

AC: I think it’s a bit much to just sum up. I don’t think I can add to it right now. Maybe if you let me sit quietly for an hour I would have something useful to say. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. I could use a break of like, a month. 

Okay, well, I think that’s good for the news section. So let’s take a little break. 

AC: All right. 

CB: If you’re looking for good dates to do things this year, then be sure to check out our 2026 Electional Astrology Report, which is a guide to the most fortunate dates in 2026. You can get it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report. 

All right, so let’s transition into talking about the forecast for February at this point. And there’s so much major, major consequential stuff this month. It seems like both a very busy month astrologically but also just a very monumental month because of some of the significant outer planet alignments that are taking place. 

So we have – just to give you a short list of the major things – we have Uranus making its final direct station in the sign of Taurus after a transit that began way back in 2018. We have eclipse season beginning in Aquarius and Virgo with the first eclipse in a new series of eclipses in the sign of Aquarius taking place right in the middle of the month. Then we have Saturn entering Aries, where it’s gonna stay for the next couple of years. We have the Saturn-Neptune conjunction completing a 40-year cycle essentially and beginning a new one which goes exact this month. Then we have a Mars-Uranus square towards the end of the month. And then finally, if that wasn’t enough, we also have a Mercury retrograde that begins later in the month to top everything off. 

So this is gonna be one of those months that both just feels incredibly busy from a personal standpoint and news standpoint, but then also will feel incredibly monumental in terms of the significance of some of the historical events that we’re about to witness. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. You know, the second half of February especially looked so bonkers that I expected some of the wildness of January to not occur until February. But now knowing that the somewhat quiet part that precedes February was as loud as it was, it sort of resets expectations for February’s blatant, completely unconcealed configurations. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. I think that was what we all started realizing pretty quick in January, which is like, if this is the pace at which things are starting out already at the beginning of the year, then projecting that out into some of the more monumental alignments that would still take place in the future in like, starting in February and March just seemed kind of insane. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So let’s – I’m gonna do a mixture here of going through things chronologically but then also trying to focus on so that we give enough emphasis on the big things and talking mainly about the big things while also giving the chronological breakdown. 

So let me just show one more time the planetary alignments calendar that shows the specific dates of some of the different alignments involved that we’re gonna be talking about. And I want to… I’m gonna open things up by showing the chart for the month, because what we kind of open with is three things happening right at the top of January – or right at the top of February I should say. One of them is that we still have this stellium of planets moving through the sign of Aquarius, where we have Pluto, Mars, the Sun, Venus, and Mercury all still moving through Aquarius, and they’re now separating from that really intense conjunction with Pluto which was dominating so much of January. But now each of those planets as they move into the later degrees of Aquarius is gonna start squaring Uranus, which is at the very end of Taurus, and then Uranus is gonna station direct already on January 3rd. Or sorry – again, on February 3rd. So a lot of the themes this month are gonna be tinged with Uranus and this Uranian component of unexpected things, sudden disruptions, erraticness, things that come out of left field, things that are like, wildly disruptive and shake things up. It’s just gonna be this recurring theme throughout the month that Uranus is a major player this month. And right at the top of the month, we also get a Full Moon in the sign of Leo taking place right away on February 3rd. So we get our first lunation of the month, which is emphasizing some of those same themes because of how it’s activating the Aquarius stellium. 

So that’s a lot to synthesize together, but that’s kind of like, the opening of the month. 

AC: Yeah. Having that Full Moon right on the 1st, opposite and to a certain degree illuminating – highlighting – once again the Sun, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto all in Aquarius, it’s sort of like a reverberation of all that they brought into being together during January. And so yeah, it’s interesting; I think we’ll see another round of the repercussions of and where things go immediately from where they got started in January. And I think that includes almost all of the big news stories we covered, all of which occurred at different points where there were these, you know, Venus conjoin Mars, Mars conjoin the Sun, Venus conjoin the Sun, Mercury conjoin all of them, et cetera, et cetera. And then all them conjoin Pluto. And so not only do we have the Full Moon reflecting all of that, but we also have the beginning of Mercury, Venus, and Mars and Pluto all slowly departing from the Sun and moving not into great visibility, but beginning to move towards visibility where we’ll get to see each of these planets individually and see a little bit where things are headed rather than merely contemplate or wonder or fear where they are going. 

CB: Yeah. I think there’s still something, especially with the Full Moon in Leo and the Sun still eclipsing Venus and Mars, there’s something loud and distracting still that’s distracting from the Venus-Mars conjunction that’s happening behind the scenes. And you know, with Leo and Aquarius, we have this tension between the collective versus the singular, as well as this tension between like, belonging versus being cast out or alienated or in exile. So some of those themes are the themes I’m looking at, especially for this Full Moon in the sign of Leo. And whatever the Aquarius sector is in each of our charts, especially whatever whole sign house that coincides with, is just getting so much activity at this point in the first half of February. And it’s all building up to especially the solar eclipse that’s gonna take place in the sign of Aquarius when really major things will start happening in that sign. So I think continuing to pay attention to that sector of each of our charts is gonna be really important in terms of the opening of the month, for sure. 

AC: Yeah. And it got started maybe two-thirds of the way through January, but it’s not over. Like, there were four planets that conjoined Pluto in early Aquarius in that last 10 days of January, and in a normalish year, that would be the highlight. But there is more to come. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. 

So I wanna move things forward to February 3rd, where we can see Uranus stationing here at 27 degrees of Taurus, and I wanna talk about this a little bit because that’s actually a really important transit that’s happening right at the beginning of the month because it’s the final time that Uranus will station in the sign of Taurus in this entire 84-year cycle through that sign that it’s completing, just capping off about eight years of radical changes in the Taurus sectors of our chart that started way back in 2018 and 2019 when Uranus first moved into that sign. 

And you know, like I said, everything moving through Aquarius after this point – after February 3rd – all of those fast-moving inner planets start squaring Uranus shortly after this. So I think we should expect to see a lot of Uranian keywords throughout this month, which includes things like unexpected disruptions, surprises, things that are shocking or come from out of left field. Things that shake up the established order of things, as well as things that are erratic or unstable. Uranus is classically associated with revolutions and rebellions and pushes for freedoms, having been discovered back in the 1700s around the time of the American Revolution. Uranus also quickens the pace of events so that there’s always a lot happening at once. And sometimes there can be like, rapid technological advancements or glimpses into the future when it comes to Uranus. And these are some of the things I think we should pay attention to keyword-wise, just when Uranus is stationing, because there’s usually an intensification of its energies and its keywords at that time. 

AC: Absolutely. And as you pointed out earlier, this is the last station of Uranus in Taurus. And so this is Uranus’s chance to sort of have the final word on a variety of things. And yeah, this is the final statement; this is the closing argument of – or this begins the closing argument of Uranus in Taurus. Because it will continue to be in that sign until the end of April when it moves into Gemini, but it will not be going back from here. Right? We usually get a direct station, we get a retrograde station, back and forth through a sign. This is the – there’s no going back through these last degrees of Taurus. And so the quality of some of these shocking changes, some of this volatilized ground, these breakthroughs or innovations, and sometimes empowerments or freedoms that a person obtains in a certain part of their life – like, this is all the concluding statement, right? There’s a finality to a lot of this that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with a Uranus station last year or the year before. Because this is the last station in Taurus. 

CB: Yeah. And this diagram, for those watching the video version, shows the initial ingresses of Uranus into Taurus back in 2018 and 2019, but it also shows all of the retrograde and direct stations. And you can see this like, sequence of like a dozen of these stations that we’ve been going through over the better part of a decade and how this is the final one that’s taking place in the Taurus sector of our chart. And for a lot of people, like especially let’s say Taurus rising people, I started seeing them making major radical liberatory changes in their life when Uranus first moved into that sign in the 2018, 2019 timeframe or having things shaken up in that part of their life not long after that. But now I’ve noticed a number of them, things are sort of like, coming full circle in terms of what those changes were all about, and putting a final bookend basically on that chapter of life as we get ready to move into this new seven or eight-year period of Uranus in Gemini. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. I’m seeing the same thing. And there would have been – there will be – echoes back to July of 2025 when Uranus entered Gemini for the first time, but just as a toe dip for about four months before coming back into Taurus. So this is the end of that going back to make one last set of changes, to lock in changes that occurred over the previous six, seven years. Like, this is that last bit. And you’ll see the end of a lot of the – we see the beginning of the end of a lot of the Uranus in Taurus stories. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. 

So you know, with it hitting Taurus, you know, we’ve seen a lot of changes also and there may be some final note that has to be struck regarding the financial, the material, and the tangible aspect of things in terms of commodities and things like that that relate to Taurus and Uranus’s transit through that sign over the past seven or eight years. And this includes things like, you know, cryptocurrency as we’ve talked about, but also money, the dollar, precious metals, the markets. Right now, things are happening where crypto has surprised a lot of people by dropping while at the same time the price of all these precious metals is like, skyrocketing right now as the international stage becomes more uncertain and as the fear of conflict and war starts to grow. And other countries are also in some ways accelerating away from the dollar, and I know this is something that you’ve been doing a special study of this month, right, Austin? 

AC: Yeah. I got really into it at the beginning of the month, and in addition to Uranus, which Uranus in Taurus has consistently seen significant changes around the way banking is done, the way currency is conceived and supported – the current skyrocketing of precious and other metals at this point is tied really tightly into the same Mars cycle that Mars is. And when I was looking at the price of silver, the history of it, all signs pointed back to 1979. And at the beginning of 1979, silver as well as other precious metals were quite high. But by the time we got to January of 1980, the next year, when we look at the Mars retrograde station one year after the conjunction in Capricorn – we had the conjunction in Capricorn just like we did at the beginning of 2026 – a year later, Mars retrograde station in Virgo just like we’re gonna have in 2027 – you had silver at an all-time high as well as other precious metals being ridiculously high. During that period of time, silver basically went up from a little earlier, from like, late 1978 to January of 1980, silver was up tenfold; gold had quadrupled. Platinum was five X, and palladium was six times what it was 13 months earlier. And I followed that pattern, and every 47 and 79 years before – which are the numbers by which the cycle repeats – we have really shocking changes in the relationship between the dollar and precious and other metals. It’s a whole hour-long book report, but just as an example, 47 years before 1979 was 1932. And during the retrograde a year later, the gold standard that backed the United States dollar was changed so that it went from 20 dollars and change per dollar – or excuse me – yeah, 20 dollars and change per ounce of gold, and it was changed to 35. Right? Which instantly dropped the value of the dollar versus gold by 75 percent and therefore made gold 75 percent more valuable per dollar. And we had multiple acts going back all the way to the beginning of the United States Treasury that have similar pretty jarring relational changes between precious metals and often industrial metals too and the US dollars. And the root of it, which I finally found a few days ago, was that the US Treasury was established in this cycle, which also happens to be the same year that the Constitution was made official. The Treasury is about six months younger than the Constitution. And so yeah, it was shockingly consistent. There wasn’t a single instance of us being in this Mars cycle where there wasn’t a significant renegotiation of the relationship between precious metals and the dollar. The only instance that we’ve had post gold standard and therefore the only tight parallel we have is 1979 through ‘80 and ‘81 where we saw silver hit its absolute height and then drop off, but not drop off to pre-1979 levels. 

CB: Got it. Yeah. And that’s fascinating that it’s tied in with Mars cycles and some of those like, goal year periods of like, 47 years or 79 years — 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — and — 

AC: Really tightly. 

CB: Right. And so you know, with Uranus also this month doing its final station in Taurus, it’s like, one of the questions is do the markets finally start reacting to the AI bubble that we’ve been in for a while as well as to some of the chaos that’s happening in terms of international relations and things like that? Like, what effect does that have as a disruptive effect in terms of some of those different financial things?

AC: Yeah. And one of the things that I saw when I was looking back at this cycle that sounded just like now is that you always had this precarious international relations, so people concerned about wars, about potential wars, high inflationary environment, and a couple other things where it was like, oh, yeah, that fits. And one of the interesting connections with crypto, especially Bitcoin – the sort of poster child of crypto – is that a lot of people have been surprised that Bitcoin has not benefitted from the uncertainty about the geopolitical order and the dollar. But all that concern seems to have gone into the metals. And you know, one of the things that we’ve been looking at with Uranus in Taurus is that it’s been very tightly timed with crypto’s sort of skyrocketing. Not its beginning, but Bitcoin really took off starting with Uranus’s ingress to Taurus, and you know, I’ve thought and I think you have as well that we would kind of see where crypto was going to land by the end of Uranus in Taurus. And so right now, it looks like – some people are surprised that it’s not working as the hedge against chaos that they hoped it would. But we’re not even at the Uranus station right now, so we shall see. I don’t know how the story ends; it just seems like it’s timed with Uranus’s travels through Taurus. 

CB: Yeah. We’ll definitely see. I mean, it certainly became mainstream to the extent that like, the president was promoting it and hocking coins and stuff a year ago, but then it also became associated with scams. And what’s happening with precious metals right now partially is like, people are scared at the threat of war and other instability and are starting to put money into things that have tangible value. And that’s something, yeah, that it seems like the cryptocurrencies are struggling with a little bit here, which is in and of itself interesting and is somewhat of a surprise to some of the people that invested a lot in some of that. 

AC: Yeah. And all of this is very much in motion as we speak. I don’t think anybody thinks the recent rise in silver and gold is the end of the story or that Bitcoin being at kind of a low right now is where it’s just gonna be. Like, this is all like, a snapshot in the middle of, I don’t know, like, a wild auto race. 

CB: Yeah. As well as – I mean, that brings up a weird correlation I found this month because you were working on the 47 and the 79-year cycle and I was also working on an episode on those Babylonian goal year periods and the 79-year cycle of Mars. And one of the things in researching things this month that I realized was we’re in this unique period of, like I said earlier, these five conjunctions between Mercury and Mars, which doesn’t actually happen very often. It only happens every like, 15 to 17 years. And here’s a diagram to show you the current set of ones that Paige Herbert made me for this episode where we see the first Mercury-Mars conjunction that happened in October. Then there was another in November. And then we just had the third one in January. But then there’s two more that are gonna happen – first in the middle of March, and then another one in the middle of April. And it turns out that these repeat every 15 to 17 years in alignment with the Mars cycle, but one of the last times this was happening was during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. And then exactly one 79-year Mars cycle earlier, using the Babylonian goal year periods, that was another sequence of five Mercury-Mars conjunctions and that’s when the 1929 financial crisis happened. So that blew my mind this month that the 1929 market crash as well as the 2008-2009 market crash were connected using this Mars cycle of 79 years, and how it also tied in with the Mercury-Mars conjunctions that rarely meet up that frequently according to that cycle. 

AC: Yeah, that’s fascinating. 

CB: So we’re in a weird little 15- to 17-year repetition of that right now that ties us back into the 2009 period that makes me a little nervous, but we’ll see how those new two conjunctions go. 

AC: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think we need that to make us a little nervous. I think the little nervous is solidly established! 

CB: Yeah. Well, if it wasn’t already established, then I found another fun one to add on top of everything, so there you go! 

AC: Yeah. It is – being a little nervous is a very reasonable response. 

CB: Yeah. 

All right, so back to the charts. After Uranus stations, at the same time that Uranus is stationing, Mercury gets to the later part of Aquarius, and then on February 5th, Mercury will square Uranus, which is the first of a series of outer planets that will be squaring Uranus the rest of the month. So I wanted to mention that just because a Mercury-Uranus square, even as a quick aspect, can be unexpected news or communications that cause sudden disruptions as well as disruptions with technology or communications in general. And it’s striking that it’s happening right as Uranus is stationing, just emphasizing that station at the time. 

So that happens on February 5th. February 6th, Mercury then departs from Aquarius and moves into Pisces, and Mercury’s gonna spend forever in Pisces because it’s gonna slow down and go retrograde later in the month. So whatever the Pisces sector of your chart is, get ready for an extended Mercury transit through that sign which will really heat up later in the month, and we’ll get to that in a little bit. But this is the starting point of a long Mercury transit. 

AC: Yeah. Just to underscore how long that’s gonna be, right, Mercury’s gonna be in Pisces until April 14th. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s a long, long time. 

AC: Yeah. That’s like, two months and a week plus. 

CB: Right. So on February 8th, then the planet Venus gets to late Aquarius where it squares Uranus. So sometimes this is like, an unexpected event involving a woman or like, a femme figure in the news. Sometimes it can be in people’s personal lives like, a sudden exciting romantic encounter that disrupts previously laid plans. Those are some of my keywords for a quick Venus-Uranus conjunction on February 8th. You got anything else? 

AC: Yeah. The square – it’s interesting, because it can be favorable and it can be unfavorable. It could be that yeah, we were gonna go out for a date; it was gonna be really good. We were gonna get together, and then there’s the need for a sudden cancellation. But the thing that – the path that opened up as the replacement ended up being more fun than the first thing. You have like, a disruption and you might have a new opportunity or a new way things go, and maybe that’s better and maybe it’s worse. The thing you can say consistently with Uranus squaring Venus and Mercury is that it’s not kind to carefully laid plans, but what replaces those plans may not necessarily be unpleasant. And so generally speaking, it’s better to approach those days with a little bit more flexibility rather than like, a graven in stone kind of plan and set of expectations. 

CB: Definitely. That’s great advice. All right, so moving onto the next day, February 9th. At this point, what happens that’s really important is that eclipse season begins around this date. And based on the historical research that Nick Dagan Best and I did a few years ago, I realized that the range when eclipses start to get really intense and you start seeing world events that coincide with them, it really kicks in at about the point when the Moon hits the square to the Sun that precedes the eclipse. And based on that reckoning, eclipse season is gonna begin around February 9th this month, and then we start getting the buildup to the first eclipse, which is gonna take place on February 17th in Aquarius. And then we got into that intense period where the eclipse season tends to be heightened the most in between the two eclipses until we get the second one, which occurs on March 3rd at 12 degrees of Virgo. And then about seven or eight days after that around the 11th, eclipse season will officially end. 

So this is a really important turning point as we move into eclipse season. Part of it is a new sequence, especially that Aquarius one – a new sequence of eclipses in Aquarius that will begin here in February of 2026, but it’s gonna last all the way through January of 2028. And that’s important, because you know, eclipses as I always say represent major beginnings and major endings. But they’re always these really powerful catalysts for change, and major events will start taking place at this point around February 9th that has major import, both in terms of our personal lives as well as in terms of world events. We’ve seen that incredibly consistently over the past several years of doing the forecast and really starting to document those periods of eclipse season more carefully. 

So we’re gonna see major events taking place. The pace of events is gonna quicken. There’s gonna be major endings and beginnings, pivot points where we’ll see in some instances the fall of prominent and powerful people who suddenly fall from power for some reason or fall from public favor. In some instances, that’s coincided with periods of the death of famous figures has always traditionally been one of the major symbolic things associated with eclipses. But also the sudden rise of previously obscure figures who are suddenly thrust into the limelight is a major theme we’ve seen over the past few years. And then finally, momentous beginnings that seem small or have humble origins at first, so that they become like, seed moments where something is planted that doesn’t seem significant at the time but in retrospect we’ll look back and realize that that was the starting point of something huge. 

AC: Right. Just to call back to earlier in the episode being Vance’s visit to Greenland not quite a year ago and the shadow of the eclipse falling over Greenland at the same time where, you know, it wasn’t like anything happened to Greenland that week. Right? But looking back not even a year later, that’s much more obvious and significant. But yeah, that something or someone coming out of nowhere as well as someone or something that was previously like, bright and seemingly fixed in the firmament falling and going back to nowhere. Like, the disappearance and fall of figures quickly and the rapid ascent is very much the language of the eclipses and the nodes. It’s been – I feel like I use this analogy too much, but it’s still useful. Like, it’s dragons and it’s Game of Thrones. It’s like, figures coming out of nowhere to dominate the scene, and it’s also the rapid fall. The game of dragons is quite dramatic. And internally, there’s often — 

CB: I like that analogy, not just as a Game of Thrones nerd, but that’s actually a really good analogy because in like, season one of Game of Thrones, like, all the people are fighting amongst each other in Westeros and you have all of these kingdoms that are vying for power. But meanwhile, over in the east, you have Daenerys and her dragons are being born at that time, and then — 

AC: Right. 

CB: — that will come to be the actual major threat later in the series. But everybody’s too busy like, fighting about their own internal politics and scheming to realize the greater threat or greater danger, essentially. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. Right? You have the old king dies, right – eclipse – and then the new potential queen empress is meaningfully born as the dragons are born at about the same time. It is actually a really good – Game of Thrones, for all of its imperfections, really does demonstrate the way that eclipses and nodal cycles intersect with people’s rise and fall from power. And I would just — 

CB: Yeah.

AC: — say internally often there might be – excuse me – internal to a life on an individual level, sometimes there will be something that disappears. Right? Like, “Oh I thought I was headed towards that, but that’s not happening,” just as something new coalesces internally. Like, a new direction or a new desire or a new opportunity. It’s the – what is it? When god closes a door, he opens a window? But you know, dragon style. And often much more confusing. And I will just say that there’s always an element of confusion, because the obscuration is what eclipses are. It means you can’t see the Sun fully during the day, or on the night that the Moon is supposed to be brightest, its light is compromised. And so there’s very often confusion around these swift rises and falls and appearances and disappearances, and not knowing exactly what any of it means until afterwards is par for the course. 

CB: Absolutely. So I wanna pause on the eclipse discussion; we’re gonna actually come back to the eclipse discussion when that actually hits in the date. Because I want to just note that eclipse season is starting then by February 9th and we’re gonna start seeing these themes ramp up dramatically over the course of the next week from February 9th forward. 

AC: Yeah, it’s crossing the event horizon. You’re not there yet, but you’re not – the pull of the black hole has got you. 

CB: Yeah. You can feel like, the gravitational pull of the black hole; I really like that. Or like, you can see the storm on the horizon and that you’re like, sailing right into the heart of the storm. But this —

AC: Yeah. 

CB: — is the point where you start hitting the edge of the storm and the waves start getting really choppy. 

AC: Yeah, “Captain, there’s no sailing around it.” 

CB: Yeah. All right. So but before we get fully into the heart of that storm, one of the important things – the electional chart for this month for the best chart Leisa Schaim and I could find for electional astrology purposes for taking actions and doing things. The one we favored was before eclipse season starts to kind of like, squeeze in things before we get to that point where things start getting really chaotic and crazy. And the best we came up with was this chart, which is set for February 5th, 2026, at around 3:35 PM local time with late Cancer rising. 

So if you cast a chart for this time, but change the city to your location and then adjust it so that you have Cancer rising in your location, you should end up with a chart roughly like this one. And this chart has Cancer rising, and it’s a day chart with Jupiter exalted in Cancer in the first whole sign house, which is very positive and auspicious and protective. And the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon, which is placed in Libra in the 4th whole sign house where it’s applying to a square with Jupiter with reception. 

So this is kind of a 4th house focused chart, so it might be better for things either focused on like, 4th house things pertaining to the home or the family or the living situation. But it can also kind of be sometimes things that are done behind the scenes in private rather than things that are meant to be done in public, which is more of a 10th house type thing. 

There is a whole stellium of planets in Aquarius in the 8th house, and especially Mars there in a day chart, so this would not be a good chart for 8th house things having to do with other people’s money, shared resources, taxes, loans, debts, and other 8th house things of that nature. But otherwise if you want a relatively decent chart for taking significant actions and trying to ensure a successful outcome, then this is one of the best charts and dates that we could find next month in February. 

AC: Yeah, it’s nice to have the Moon down there supporting the Ascendant and with Jupiter there in the first. 

CB: Yeah. Exactly. And just providing that role of the 4th house just in terms of creating a stable foundation or roots for something I’ve been understanding as so much more important over the past few years when looking at electional charts. 

AC: Yeah. It can be a really wonderfully literally and figuratively supportive house. 

CB: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So that is the election for February, and if you’d like other electional charts for February, Leisa and I have already released our electional astrology podcast for February of 2026, which is available through Patreon at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. Or if you’re looking for longer term elections for later this year, we have our 2026 Electional Astrology Report where we pick out the two best charts for each of the months of 2026, and you can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report. 

All right, so back to our chronology. At this point, the next important thing that happens is we get to February 10th, and Venus is one of our planets – our second planet now – that changes signs and moves into the sign of Pisces where it meets up with Mercury and temporarily with Saturn. But one of the things that’s nice about this ingress and why it’s notable and worth mentioning here is that this is the onset of one of the most positive aspects of this month, which although it’s not gonna completely counteract all of the chaoticness and difficult aspects of this month, to me it is the one silver lining where Venus moves into the sign of its exaltation in Pisces and it starts forming this very nice trine with Jupiter in Cancer with reception that it will eventually complete later in the month. And I think that’s a pretty nice aspect that will attempt at least to offset some of the other things going on this month. 

AC: Yeah. If this were the chief feature of the month, we would sing the praises of February. The Venus-Jupiter trine which begins forming now is not only received, meaning there’s a great relationship between the signs the two planets are in, but it’s also Jupiter in its exaltation while Venus is also in her exaltation. And so it’s both benefics exalted. But we have the historically complicated configurations; we have the Saturn-Neptune; we have this big eclipse. There’s a lot of other stuff going on, but it does legitimately silver the lining, and it does speak to some really nice things happening at the edges of and in the spaces between all of the big, loud, and potentially stupid and depressing things that will also be happening this month. 

CB: Yeah. For sure. And you know, one of the things we saw last year – like, a year ago – sometimes Venus entering the sign of her exaltation signifies a famous woman or a woman who’s in a high station in society or visible or is sometimes literally raised up to a high level. There was that funny, you know, a year ago it was Venus stationing in Pisces with Saturn, and you had that space shuttle thing where all of those women went up in a space shuttle with Amazon, but it wasn’t like, well-received and they kind of got criticized for it given everything that was going on. And one of the things that’s interesting to me about this ingress which is different is that Venus goes into Pisces, but Saturn’s gonna depart from Pisces just days after this and move into Aries. So it’s gonna be one of the first times in like, three years since March of 2023 that you’ll get an almost clean transit of Venus through the Pisces sector of the chart that doesn’t have Saturn there kind of mucking things up. And I think that’s gonna be a really welcome feeling as part of the like, departure party of everybody experiencing Saturn and Neptune finally getting out of Pisces and now being able to experience what it’s like to have, you know, positive transits like Venus there for once on its own. 

AC: Yeah. It is nice. And at the same time, Venus is getting further and further from the Sun, and is getting closer and closer to full visibility, which Venus will obtain while in Pisces – just not the first day. 

CB: Right. Yeah. For sure. So all right, we’ll come back to that later when the Venus-Jupiter trine goes exact. 

But moving on, the next day, Mercury hits about eight degrees of Pisces and this is an important but it may be easily overlooked transit because what happens is that Mercury enters its shadow degree at this point at eight degrees of Pisces, which is the degree that it will later retrograde back to towards the end of the retrograde and that it will station direct on. So I wanted to note this date, because from February 11th forward, actions taken after this point may have to be revisited. And sometimes there’s something that’s done or sometimes where you’ll take an action that you think should be one and done, but then eventually you’ll have to redo it or to revisit it once or twice more at some point in the future. 

AC: Yeah. And I think we need – I would double underscore that, because when Mercury returns to this degree on March 17th and 18th and then sits there for a little bit, it will be with Mars right there. And so we have, as Chris mentioned earlier, we’re in this series of Mercury-Mars conjunctions. And so the end of this Mercury retrograde and thus Mercury’s return to this point is conjunct Mars and the North Node, right, which gives us the dramatic draconic storylines we were talking about earlier with eclipses. And so yeah. The return here will be more dramatic than the – much more dramatic by far than this initial seemingly innocuous pass-by. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Okay, so let’s transition to talking about the next major transit, which is a big one, which is on February 13th, Saturn moves into the sign of Aries, completing its three-year transit through the sign of Pisces and starting this more than two-year transit through this sign. And here’s a graphic just to give you some timeframe of what we’re looking at here that was designed by Paige for Saturn through Aries where this ingress on February 13th sets us up for a transit that’s gonna last all the way until April 12th of 2028. And there’s gonna be four important stations throughout the course of that in July of 2026, December of 2026, then August of 2027, and December of 2027. 

So from a personal standpoint, this is important because suddenly the Aries sector of each of our charts is going to get more serious and heavy and feelings of responsibility as well as restrictiveness, and all of us got a preview of what this is about back last year between May 24th and September 1st when Saturn first dipped into Aries for several months before it retrograded back into Pisces. So for many of us, we have to kind of like, think back to that period of time and some of the new themes that were starting to arise at that point and realize that for better or worse, some of those themes may return again at this point when it comes to that Saturn transit. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, this is the beginning of a new Saturn chapter that’ll last another I guess two years and two months, and it’ll be I’m predicting a very long two years and two months, though the pace of it will no doubt be exhaustingly rapid. It is worth noting that Saturn has a very unique and not particularly favorable relationship with Aries; it is the sign of Saturn’s fall or depression. And what you see is that the significations of Aries – fast, youthful, virile, assertive, et cetera et cetera – are a really poor match for the like, slow, mature, responsible, maybe even over-considered and wary nature of Saturn. And so you get a variety of bad matches, or like, this bad match plays out in a variety of ways historically and personally. 

You often see things that are supposed to be structural and slow-moving and competent if a little rigid, like institutions in a given society, moving very quickly, moving incompetently. You see – yeah, like, you see youth and exuberance where you would really like to see sobriety and care. You also tend to see historically embarrassed leaders or embarrassing leaders. The last time Saturn was in Aries was the significant embarrassment to the United States presidency of Bill Clinton’s second term where much of it was spent in the hearings around his affair with Monica Lewinsky. As a totally different example from a different part of the world, we had the last emperor of China who was two years old when he ascended the throne in 1908 four cycles back, and people were not particularly impressed with the rulership of a two-year-old and obviously the two-year-old was not really making the decisions. But it’s often a low or difficult point as far as leadership is concerned, which makes sense given that the Sun’s exaltation is in Aries, and it’s supposed to be the place where solar figures are at their most competent and magnificent. And instead, we have Saturn at its most challenged and problematic. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And one of the things that’s really interesting about this transit – I’m starting to get a better handle on it suddenly this month, and some of the ideas of individualism and the relationship between rules and structures and individual like, freedoms basically as being part of the dynamic of this transit. And when some of the gun stuff started coming up this month, I had this sudden memory of like, our friend Patrick Watson writing this article years ago that was titled, “A History of Gun Control and Saturn in Aries,” and everybody should check out this article because it’s really brilliant in the way that he goes through and looks at Saturn in Aries through history going back to when the 2nd amendment was ratified on December 15th, 1791. And Saturn was stationing at that time at 12 degrees of Aries, and so you get the famous initial amendment, which was like, the 2nd amendment which gives Americans the right to carry guns where it says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” So this is the entire thing that all of the modern and contemporary debates over the past decades about gun control really hinges on. And what Patrick showed is that every time Saturn has come back to Aries, there have been instances of gun control being introduced in different stages. So he points out that for example, the FBI was founded in 1908, marking the institutionalization of federal enforcement to attempt to contain violence and to try to like, fight violence as an organization. But then you have 1938, the Federal Firearms Act established the first federal gun licensing system and acted as a precursor to the ATF. It also banned felons from owning firearms. There was an important Supreme Court decision in 1939; I’ll skip over that, but the Gun Control Act of 1968 is another major one that Patrick pointed out, because it established the modern Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives and expanded the bans on who could own guns. US background checks, the FBI’s national instant criminal background check system is officially launched in 1998 under Saturn in Aries. And the UK ban happened in 1997 where following a massacre, the UK passed laws effectively banning private gun ownership. And also in Australia, following a massacre there, Australia enacted the National Firearms Agreement and a massive gun buyback program. 

So I thought this was incredible, because all this stuff started coming up with guns already this month in January with like, Neptune moving into Aries. And like I was saying, you had this sudden weird role reversal where on the one hand, there were Republicans saying that people shouldn’t be carrying guns to protests in a radical departure from what’s been happening over the past decade where Republicans taking guns to protests, even like machine guns, has been a major culture war thing. And then on the other hand, you’ve had groups of Democrats buying guns and realizing the original value of the 2nd amendment. So one of the things that’s funny about that is, you know, “funny” I guess – funny is maybe not the right word for it, but – if the correlation continues, it implies that there’ll probably be some form of gun control introduced soon or some new form of gun control would be the inference just based on those historical cycles. And it’s weird how that’s worked out to see how that exactly, you know, ends up working out basically. 

AC: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. I will have to avail myself of Patrick Watson’s article. And it speaks to another point that’s pretty consistent with Saturn in Aries is it often points – Saturn in Aries very often or I would say every time brings up rule by force alone and the degree to which the raw application of force underpins law, but also tends to erode the rule of law. Right? Because there needs to be more than just somebody with a gun behind rules, or they don’t last. There needs to be agreement, or else those – and maybe even principles of justice or fairness – or else those laws last only as long as the gun is pointed in someone’s direction. Whereas the exaltation of Saturn in Libra points with both hands towards the importance of agreement and compromise, Saturn in Aries – the fall for Saturn – very often shows us the raw force side of things. 

CB: Yeah. That’s — 

AC: Right? The like —

CB: — a great point. 

AC: To quote – I wasn’t planning this, but to quote Bill Clitnon from what he said about the Monica Lewinsky affair, like, “Why’d you do it, Bill?” “I did it for the worst reason that a person can do something; I did it because I could.” Right? Just this like, raw power. And that simply having the power to do something is not – it is not a justification for doing that. But that always comes up and gets challenged or transgressed during the Saturn in Aries periods. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. Well, and it’s just weird that it’s not just a pure Saturn in Aries, but it’s also Neptune there. And so now you have this weird ambiguity and this weird role reversal where it may be Republican administration introducing gun control. And it will be interesting to see how that works out in terms of like, Democrats’ response to it essentially. 

AC: Yeah. And you know, that could be, that might not be. But I would say that that would be like, that sort of historically surprising thing is going to be very par for the course for the next while. This is very much a funhouse, house of mirrors, little micro period of history that we’re entering this year and next year especially. 

CB: Yeah. No, I mean, you actually had a quote specifically like that – I wanna say it was in the year ahead forecast last year for 2025 – that was about reversals like that and people being on one side of a political thing suddenly finding themselves on the other side. And I don’t have the quote, but it was a very specific thing about this period that we’re entering into. 

AC: Oh, I’m glad you remember it. I don’t! But yeah, good for past me. But yeah, that like, topsy-turvy, “Really? They’re in favor of this? Oh, I thought -” you know, that kind of thing is gonna be very normal. 

CB: Yeah. So an important point about that, though, and something Leisa mentioned to me and pointed out, which is that the 2nd amendment was introduced during Saturn in Aries, but it was part of the Bill of Rights which is the first 10 amendments to the Constitution that were all introduced at once on that Saturn station in Aries. And this is really important, because a bunch of the – for two reasons. One, I think it’s really interesting and to some of your points earlier, it’s like, as I was researching the history of this, the Constitution itself was passed when Saturn was in Aquarius conjunct Pluto. And it’s trying to set up this new form of government with checks and balances and to give the power to the people through democracy. But then there was this tension at the time between Federalists who wanted to have a centralized, strong federal government versus Anti-Federalists who wanted the power to be more in the hands of the states and the people. And part of the resolution that they came to at the time was to pass the Constitution back in the 1700s with Saturn in Aquarius. But then just a few years later, to immediately pass the Bill of Rights, which specifically outlined some of the individual rights that individuals had which is not just the bear arms, but it also included the 1st amendment, which is the right to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, as well as the right to assemble peacefully and to petition the government and you know, by extension to protest. And some of these different other amendments are actually coming up in the news lately, because there’s been major challenges to them and major lawsuits involving some of them. Like, the 3rd amendment somehow is coming up that restricts quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner’s consent back from a period where like, the British were forcing colonists to put up soldiers. And this has come up in the news recently this past month with some of the hotels having the ability to say no to having ICE agents like, stay there, for example, and whether that’s something they can turn away or not. So it actually like, invoked this amendment. Or the 4th — 

AC: Yeah, that’s – I just wanna pause on that. That’s really wild, because usually when the Bill of Rights or the amendments are discussed, it’s always like, “Oh, and this is just this weird historical thing that was a hangover from people having British soldiers up in their shit and it’s not really relevant now.” But as like, the cycles are coming back again, that’s somehow meaningful and relevant and part of the news. And that’s just really interesting, because that’s very often pushed to the side and away from the really important ones like the first and the second and et cetera. 

CB: Exactly, yeah! Or another major one is like, the 4th amendment which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires warrants to be supported by probable cause. And there’s this whole thing about probable cause and not having warrants involving ICE over the past several months where they’re often coming in without warrants. 

The 5th amendment guarantees the rights in criminal cases, including the right to a grand jury, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, and the requirement for due process. That’s been coming up over the past year when a lot of immigrants are having their right to due process basically ignored, and instead of going through courts are just being immediately deported or other things like that. 

6th amendment – the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial journey, the right to confront witnesses, and the right to legal counsel – is everybody getting legal counsel for things. And that’s become an issue. 

7th amendment provides the right to a jury trial in civil cases involving a certain value. 

8th amendment prohibits excessive bail and fines and cruel and unusual punishment, which is coming up recently with some of the detention centers and whether people are being treated right. 

The 9th amendment states that the listing of specific rights in the Constitution does not mean that other rights retained by the people do not exist. 

And then finally the 10th amendment declares that any powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or to the people. 

So there’s so many things like this, and this is really important because it turns out that Saturn in Aries historically, as I was researching it more in the past couple of days, is not just about gun rights and restrictions on gun uses basically historically over the past century. But Saturn in Aries also consistently brings up foundational questions about the Bill of Rights specifically and defining the hard limits of what the government can and cannot do. So that’s the other broader thing about the Saturn in Aries period that’s even more interesting and actually gets to the heart of what Saturn in Aries is all about that I find really interesting. 

AC: I think that’s fascinating. And the fact that Saturn in Aries and when the Bill of Rights was introduced is the Saturn opposition of the Declaration of Independence. So it’s the first like, big Saturn transit that the whatever-you-wanna-call-it that emerged with the Declaration gets challenged. It’s the Saturn in Libra with the Declaration of Independence, but then Saturn in Aries – what’s interesting, it’s not “Here are new rules.” It’s instead “What is the limit of those rules?” It’s defining the negative space where the law cannot and should not reach in a lot — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — of cases. 

CB: Yeah. It’s like, checking in on some of the like, “All men are created equal” things from the Declaration and instead getting to some other things by defining what some of the individual rights are and how are people gonna keep those rights in some instances. 

So it’s not just about defining the rights of the individual, but it’s defining the rights of the individual, which is Aries, against the structure of the state, which is Saturn. 

AC: Yeah. What are the limits of the Saturnian structure reach? 

CB: Yeah. So we’re gonna be seeing a lot more of those questions coming up then is what the implication of this is where several of these rights have recently come up in the news because they’re being violated in different ways, and battles surrounding that will surely continue to be an ongoing theme in the next couple of years of this transit through 2028. And I think if that’s true, then the Saturn stations will mark some of the most important turning points with some of those questions surrounding the Bill of Rights and some of the issues associated with whether they’re being transgressed. So we should pay attention to the Saturn stations, and if that prediction is correct, the important target dates are July 26, 2026; December 10th, 2026; August 9th, 2027; and finally December 23rd, 2027, as pivotal turning points for some of these issues coming up and being addressed. 

AC: Yeah. I think that that’s a very good set of calls. 

CB: Yeah. So that is one piece of things is like, the Saturn going into Aries piece of things. But then the other looming thing that’s much more immediate for us this month in terms of February is as soon as Saturn moves into Aries, it very quickly after that forms and completes that conjunction with Neptune, which goes exact on February 20th. And this is our biggest and most important aspect of the month, at least in terms of long-term planetary cycles since this is the ending of a cycle that started way back around 1989 the last time those two planets came together in an exact conjunction. And then it’s also the beginning of a new cycle that will last all the way until the next conjunction in the year 2061 to give you some idea of the foundational chapter and the opening of this chapter and starting point that February marks. 

AC: Yeah. And the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions are about 36 and change years away from each other, and each time that we check in with the world during a set of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, we see really significant things. Our last instance being the events which set in motion the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall being probably the single most memorable of those many things that occurred that year. And then previously in the early ‘50s, we had in the Soviet Union we had the death of Stalin and a huge change in the direction of that nation. We also had in the United States the height of McCarthyism as well as the installation of the Shah as you researched in Iran. You know, and then the previous one we’re looking at the late teens; we have the Russian Revolution as well as a variety of other things. I don’t want to recap the entire history of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction with Russian history, which we’ve talked about a lot, but it deserves to be said that the correlation between pivotal events in Russian history and the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is striking and that every time – or excuse me, during the last one, two, three, four, there has been a change in leadership which signified a very big directional change for governance and international relationships for that country. If we go five conjunctions ago, in the first half of the 19th century, we don’t have leadership change. But we have to go five deep to get to a time where there wasn’t a change of leadership, through either violent or natural causes. And so it’s — 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: — very interesting to see, it’ll be very interesting to see what happens with Russia during this Saturn-Neptune conjunction. 

CB: Yeah. Not to just Russia but also Ukraine and the history of Ukraine, both with the late ‘80s and early ‘90s conjunction, but also going back even further like, centuries. Some of the major things between Russia and Ukraine were very potent and relevant at that time in terms of important turning points. 

So we’ve already talked a little bit about how the collapse of the old world order and the emergence of the new world order is part of the theme of these conjunctions historically and how we already see this being talked about over the past month in very significant ways as old in this instance, like, alliances and structures about how the world is like, supposed to work are starting to break down and people are suddenly having to adjust to whatever this new thing is that is emerging at this time.

So some of that is those themes of like, erosion and dissolution. And you’ve mentioned – and it’s worth emphasizing – that we’re seeing all these repetitions and echoes and past event connecting with the present, especially from 1917, 1953, and 1989. And for anybody that was born with one of those conjunctions around those years, especially 1953 and 1989, this is a recurrence transit then that’s activating that placement in the birth chart and marking and noting an important turning point oftentimes in many of these people’s lives. 

So this is true sometimes for, you know, individuals. Like, two of the ones that we saw just this past month who were both 37 were, you know, Renee Good in Minnesota and Alex Pretti who both had that Saturn-Neptune conjunction within 10 degrees in their birth charts. But then as we’ve mentioned, there’s also world leaders that have that conjunction prominent, such as Putin and Xi Jinping from China and Russia. We have Iran having those recurrences from 1917, 1953, and 1989, as well as Venezuela and a number of other South American countries originally declaring independence from Spain during that time. So that’s why we’re seeing so many different things come together now because of that recurrence transit effect.

AC: And it’s also worth noting that during the instances of Saturn-Neptune conjunction during the 20th century, there was also a trio of conjunctions which occurred over the course of six or so months. But for our version of it, there is just one conjunction. Like, there’s no leadup; there’s no retrograde conjunctions, so there’s just this one perfect conjunction. And that’s in February this year. 

CB: Yeah. It’s like, we’ve had some leadup with like, the sign-based conjunction that started in March of 2023 so this certainly represents the culmination of some of those things. But it is really striking that usually the one degree aspect and the exact aspect in any transit represents the most intense expression of that aspect, and so that is really weird that we only get one of them that really punctuates this month so dramatically in February. 

AC: Yeah. Yeah, it is. There was one of those in the 19th century as well, but usually you get a couple. Another thing that’s a little bit unusual about this set of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is that instead of being copresent in the sign for two-and-a-half years and then having the exact conjunctions and then moving on, this time we’ve had that copresence where the two are in the same sign but not exactly atop each other beginning years ago at this point, more than almost three years ago. And instead of it being over soon, we get the exact conjunction, and then we have the two planets both being in the same sign – the sign being Aries – until April of 2028. And so it’s very extended. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That is a really important part of this, so that the sign-based one essentially get extended over like, a six-year period or something like that rather than what might be – if you were doing a sign-based one in a single sign – like, a three-year period. 

AC: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it’s a very – even though we’re very excited/afraid of the Uranus in Gemini, which are also beginning, which is seven years, this next two-and-a-half years with Saturn and Neptune with each other is a very important discrete portion of that. And like we both said, the sort of living in the dissolution of the old world order and seeing the new starting to emerge but I think a lot of this next couple years is gonna be the space between the dissolution of the old and the emergence of the new. Like, it’s gonna be a little bit of the chaotic and the unknown between old boss and new boss. 

CB: Yeah. You just think of… When Nick and I did the Saturn-Neptune episode and there were so many empires that ended and sort of fell apart around the time of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions or even thinking about Russia and the Soviet Union under the last one that then broke up into all of these smaller states, but that you just have this period of individuals in that context just thinking like, “What do I do?” And sometimes having the dream or the illusion or the philosophical ideal of the previous like, what we believed in and what we thought the state was about suddenly crashing down. Like, in that instance, it was like, with Russia, the dream of Communism that really started ramping up with the 1917 conjunction into physical form, but then having the idealism behind that sort of like, falling apart at that time. 

AC: Yeah. And not immediately transitioning to a whole new thing. Having years of confusion and chaos as what would come next slowly became clear. 

CB: Yeah. And also the problem with these conjunctions – so actually two things to mention. One, here is the other diagram again, because we’re emphasizing that this is the only exact conjunction, but we did have this conjunction come almost — 

AC: So close. 

CB: — exact last year in the middle of the year around July and August especially when Saturn and Neptune came within a degree. And so it’s almost like there was something that almost happened last year during that time range, especially between June and the end of August, but then it didn’t come to completion. But now all of a sudden, it comes back and it comes roaring back and comes to completion or to fulfillment at this time, especially around the February-March timeframe once this conjunction goes exact. There’s gonna be some news stories that happen this month that will fit that delineation surprisingly well of something that almost happened or almost came to completion in the middle of last year, but didn’t, and now it will at this point in 2026. 

AC: Yeah, bang on. 

CB: Yeah. 

AC: I’m curious and also prepared to be depressed by which things that almost happen and got fulfilled. I don’t remember the June through August period being a spectacular one. 

CB: Well, unfortunately, one of them I think that’s already on that track was that was when the Iran – the 12-day war – took place in June shortly after Saturn moved into Aries and joined Neptune there. But then that was weird, because it happened – like, it finally happened – that the US and Israel struck Iran, which had been expected and we’d been anticipating for months and we talked about a lot in the year ahead forecast. But it ended abruptly, and it was in this weird ambiguous stage where it wasn’t clear what the outcome was or if it was over and if it would escalate further. And now that we have Saturn and Neptune coming back very quickly into that sign and now actually forming the conjunction, that’s one of the reasons why it seems like that’s about to take place from our vantage point right now just from an astrological standpoint. 

AC: Yeah. I think that’s a good call. 

CB: So the other side of this that is huge, though, of Saturn-Neptune that I keep emphasizing is this keyword of the reality distortion field that Saturn and Neptune create when they come together is going to peak at this time. And having a really hard time telling the difference between what’s real versus what’s fake or what’s true versus what’s a lie. And in some instances, I was reflecting and realizing this month of some of the previous ones, like 1953 is sometimes there’s a lie that becomes real that’s not true at first but that when people not just believe something hard enough but when sometimes people try to make other people believe something that’s not necessarily true, it can have a way of changing history. So in like, 1953, for example, the coup that installed the Shah was failing and wasn’t being successful. But then all of a sudden they took over a radio station and told everybody that the coup was successful, and then all of a sudden everybody started flocking to the people that were doing the coup and then it became successful. So sometimes there may be something that’s like, not true that suddenly as a result of the lie or the lack of truth suddenly changes things when it becomes real. 

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And like, some of the cultural moments that we see with that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions also fit that. You know, the second Red Scare during the McCarthy era may not have been true, but it impacted a lot of people’s lives. The peak of the Satanic panic in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. You know, there may have been a lack of truth to a lot of the claims, but it certainly that didn’t stop it from impacting people’s lives. 

CB: Exactly. Or even further back, like some of the witch trials that happened around Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. 

AC: Right. 

CB: So, you know, some of that sometimes ends up being like, official narratives being distortions and the need to exercise skepticism. But the not just inability, but sometimes the lack of ability to truly know what’s real and what’s not being heightened at this time is gonna be one of the really tricky things. 

AC: Yeah. And that’s a major ingredient in what I was saying earlier about just entering kind of a funhouse era where things don’t make sense. And maybe it’s because they were unexpected but real but maybe it’s because they’re not real. Or they’ve only become real because people believe in them, and the second that they stop imagining that to be the case they won’t be real, but they are for now, right? Like, all of this ontologically imperiled territory. 

CB: Yeah. So one thing that does often happen under Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is like, popular uprisings. So like I said, a lot of the South American countries first broke away and declared their independence under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1811. Sometimes, though, there’s also this element of shadowy conspirators that are working behind the scenes to tear something down, and sometimes structures collapsing as a result of that. 

There can also be lines and boundaries and borders that are being redrawn, as well as attempts to redraw boundaries that are kind of ambiguous for some reason. There’s also attempts to restructure the world based on a religious or philosophical ideal. And you know, sometimes that involves bringing one’s beliefs and higher ideals into physical form by creating a community for them. And sometimes that happens in different ways, but one of the ones I saw frequently was like, religious communities, for example, being created surrounding that, which sometimes has positive sides and other times you end up with like, theocracies, for example. So one of the things about Iran, for example, is it’s one of the main theocracies in the world, and it was created in 1979 under a Saturn-Neptune square. So that square was important as well as some of the other conjunctions that have taken place in Iranian history as being important as well. 

Or you have like, the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions that were so important in Russian history and the importance of like, Communism during the course of the Soviet state where there’s like this philosophy that’s informing the structure of the government, for example. And Communism itself was introduced under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction by a Saturn-Neptune native, basically. 

AC: Yeah, and ironically, that is the – we have to go exactly to that Saturn-Neptune conjunction to find the last time that Russian leadership did not change during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But even that one which seems like the exception to the pattern, like, an ideology was promulgated at that time that would end up massively changing the course of Russian history. 

CB: Got it. Yeah. 

So you know, this also has a positive side in terms of sometimes there’s people that are just very driven by their beliefs and their idealism of having an ideal about wanting the world to be a certain way that they feel like would be better and being driven to try to change structures in the world in order to bring about that ideal better world that they could see happening. And sometimes there is a tension in terms of whether when it comes down to the practicalities of things that ideal can be implemented as well as it existed in somebody’s mind or in abstract. But nonetheless, you’ll find people who are sometimes very idealistic like, wanting to make changes at this time and in some instances being successful in doing that. 

AC: Yeah. You definitely see the like, a critical point in the organization around a utopian ideal, but then you also see the dissolution and the giving up of yesterday’s utopian ideals. Like, the profound establishment of structure in order to support a belief as well as the final giving way of a structure that was founded on a belief that people no longer have faith in. Or no longer have —

CB: Absolutely.

AC: — faith in the structure to create the reality promised to realize the dream. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So and then finally also as we saw sometimes like last summer, there are sometimes people that have Saturn-Neptune conjunctions that just are not in the worst case scenarios with the negative manifestation just not connected with reality, or where the lack of connection with reality as a malfunction gets exacerbated and like, worsened at this time. So there’ll probably be some notable instances of that as well that we’ll have to pay attention to in the news. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So yeah, that’s the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that peaks on the 20th of February, and if that wasn’t enough, right almost virtually simultaneously on February 17th, we get that solar eclipse in Aquarius that is going to just absolutely magnify all of the things that are going on surrounding the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in this very striking and important way. 

AC: Yeah. And it’s like, literally Saturn has ingressed into Aries and is less than half a degree away from conjunction with Neptune. In that one week that it takes to make the exact conjunction, we get this big ol’ eclipse, and it’s worth noting that this is in Aquarius, whose ruler is Saturn, and so this is as dramatic as possible lunation that looks to the Saturn of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction directly, and so will be exaggerating the impact of the exact Saturn-Neptune conjunction and supporting that with a significant solilunar tide. Right? The Saturn-Neptune conjunction held aloft by the dragon. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the things that’s unique about this conjunction is that it’s very closely square Uranus where the conjunction itself is taking place at like, 28 degrees of Aquarius and it’s squaring Uranus at 27 degrees of Taurus. So there’s a major unexpected disruptive Uranian component to this eclipse that’s gonna throw some major curveballs in terms of empowering the unexpected disruption side of Uranus which is already being activated this month first by Uranus stationing direct at the beginning of the month, and then again later in the month when Mars comes up and squares Uranus as well. We just have at least three major ways in which the Uranian unexpected disruptive component is being reemphasized over and over again this month. 

AC: Yeah. While the reality distorting mind-bending empire-dissolving dream-establishing Saturn-Neptune conjunction is taking place. Yeah, it is wild and surreal territory. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the points I made in the year ahead forecast is that this eclipse is also copresent with and happening in the same sign as Pluto, where Pluto’s been transiting in Aquarius since 2022 and 2023. So it will probably accelerate and magnify some of the Pluto in Aquarius themes that we’ve seen over the past few years, which most tangibly we’ve seen in artificial intelligence and probably accelerating some of the trends in artificial intelligence and massively accelerating some of the changes and impacts that that has on society as a result of that. And I kind of wonder if it’s not some sort of like, massive unexpected development in AI that’s taking place around this time that’s part of that, either on this eclipse or part of the sequence and series of eclipses that it’s gonna be opening starting this month. 

AC: I think that’s a very safe bet. And if we look back to what was happening last summer with Saturn-Neptune in Aries, we also saw a lot of AI stuff for a lack of a better term that was peak slop. And so Saturn and Neptune are both on their way to making exact aspects with Pluto while we get this eclipse in the same sign as Pluto, the first of a series which will get progressively closer to Pluto. You know, this month brings in virtually all of the major players in this period of history – the Pluto in Aquarius, which is gonna take us to like, almost 2040, the Neptune in Aries, which will take us almost to 2040, and Uranus just before it goes back into Gemini, which takes us into 2032 or ‘33. Like, all three of the slow outers are pulled into this month’s events.

CB: Yeah. That’s a really good point. 

So some of the other things we’re seeing with like, Pluto in Aquarius have been that the eclipse will probably accelerate and will open up a window of acceleration over the next couple of years is like, central figures having control over the masses where you have, you know, these small groups of people that have control over these powerful AI companies that are affecting things so much and affecting large groups of people, or making choices for large groups of people about what the AI does or can say or cannot do or say. And by extension, we’re also seeing things involving like, control over social media companies. Like for example, the transformation of TikTok recently, and suddenly there’s a bunch of things like politically that now suddenly can’t be said there that it’s under the control of new people. So we have social media as well as different media companies now being under control of small groups of people, and some of this is the Pluto in Aquarius theme that I think we’ll see accelerated by some of these things. 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And again, this cluster of events really, in that it pulls in all three outer planets and an eclipse cycle and Saturn, it should involve kind of all of the big themes that are going on right now. Like, there have got to be financial repercussions to all of this. Like, this has to show up in terms of what money is doing. I doubt all of these political and technological and historical things happen and money doesn’t notice and behave differently. Yeah. It’s a pretty – I was gonna say powerful start to the year; the year’s already had a powerful start. But this will kick it up a notch. 

CB: Yeah, totally. And then finally some of this is accelerating the Pluto return of the United States when a lot of the governmental structures were put in place and probably the continued breakdown of some of that, including the checks and balances from the Constitution and the things that were put in place as safeguards by the founders. 

More personally though, each of us has to think about this Aquarius eclipse as opening up a new sequence in the Aquarius and Leo sectors of our charts and the axis of houses that those eclipses are gonna be hitting over the course of the next few years where suddenly we’re gonna start focusing on the Aquarius sector of our chart much more as having a series of major beginnings and major endings. And then starting in August six months later, we’re gonna get the second shoe dropping which is the eclipse in Leo, which will put the focus on that house. And then from that point forward, you’ll see this going back and forth or like, teeter-tottering back and forth between putting emphasis on one house and then putting emphasis on the other house over and over again in six-month increments in terms of the way that these eclipses will be personalized for each person. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So that is eclipse season really peaking there, and then it will be intense for two weeks after that point before the next eclipse at the beginning of March. After that, we have on February 18th, the Sun immediately moves into Pisces. And then February 22nd, we have that silver lining when Venus exactly trines Jupiter with both of those planets being in the signs of their exaltation, which to me some of the keywords I was thinking of was like, the principles of love and peace attempting to offset some of the chaos and uncertainty that’s happening this month, or people in high positions stepping in to attempt to offset or alleviate things, as well as people working together to attempt to uphold shared values.

AC: Yeah, I think that’s a really good summary. Yeah. There’s a sweetness and a decency and a compassion to both of those planets, especially in configuration like this. 

CB: Yeah. Then a few days later on February 25th, Mercury stations retrograde, and if like, all of this wasn’t enough already, then we get the typical Mercury retrograde things, especially this time in Pisces in a sign that Mercury is not super great in, including miscommunication, delays, technological snafus and failures. There will be – Venus will be applying to a conjunction with Mercury during the retrograde, which will try to offset some things so that you’ll have some scenarios of like, shortcomings in communication made up for by aesthetic value. But you know, putting a Mercury retrograde on top of this with the typical or cliche miscommunication, delays, technological snafus is just not something I’d like to see during this part of the month. 

AC: Yeah. And at the same time, a period of deep confusion seems like the inevitable result if we’re half right about what we’ve been seeing during the second half of February, then of course people are going to be super confused. And although Venus is there for that first part of Mercury’s retrograde, Venus disappears very quickly, and Mars joins the party in very early March. And so most of the Mercury retrograde will be with Mars and the head of the dragon. So. Which is, yeah. Which again seems entirely appropriate for what is set in motion as to what would follow what February has in store. 

CB: Yeah. So for individuals, we’re gonna get some of the typical Mercury retrograde stuff involving like, reviewing, revising, reassessing, redoing, rethinking, and reconfiguring things. For many people, if it’s hitting a important part of your chart, this is gonna involve revisiting the past for some reason and things coming back from the past into the present, which can be like, running into people from your past or people from your past reaching out to you suddenly or sometimes finding things from your past that you thought were lost. 

We commonly talk about the three act story that occurs during Mercury retrogrades where you take an action, and you think it’ll be done, but then you encounter a problem that complicates things and forces you to go back and do it over again in order to resolve things. So this is gonna be playing out over that three-week period especially between February 25th through the next three weeks following that during the actual retrograde itself. 

And finally, people also sometimes go through that internalization process of like, introspection and internal process and editing things, basically, because emerging from that period. 

AC: Yeah. And just as a follow-up to all that, it makes a lot of sense that it’s time to rethink the Pisces part of your chart after both Saturn and Neptune have just left and are not coming back. 

CB: Absolutely. That’s a really great point. 

All right. So if that wasn’t enough, like, all that stuff we’ve been talking about, at the end of the month on February 27th, Mars squares Uranus. And this is a – we’ve talked about this aspect at different points, both Mars-Uranus alignments that I did a whole episode on Mars-Uranus conjunctions back in December. But the squares in particular have shown up as particularly difficult over the course of the past several years where it’s often sudden disruptive and often violent events take place around the time of these alignments. So sometimes this is like, in recent times it’s been political violence. There’s been assasination attempts on Mars-Uranus alignments. There’s been military conflicts, especially like, surprise attacks are things we’ve seen under this alignment. Sometimes insurrections or unconventional warfare – like, guerilla type warfare. Advanced technology suddenly being used in conflicts. Big explosions. Civil unrest. Protests. Breaking free, and the push for freedom and liberation are common Mars-Uranus themes. Many things happening at once, like, usually the week of a Mars-Uranus alignment is just like, there’s back-to-back news that’s taking place like, all over the place that’s hard to follow. And finally technology breaking and sometimes technological failures have been really common under this alignment in the past. And it makes me think of like, you know, something in the technology sphere breaks something in the financial sphere, or vice versa. Something — 

AC: Right, which breaks something in the something sphere, which then breaks something. And it’s – yeah. And I would also say that this will probably also give us maybe some hint of what the Mars-Uranus conjunction in July will be about, because it’s the last hard configuration of the two before the conjunction in July. But yeah, it’s the last of the four planets to all square Uranus, and it is the most jarring of those four squares. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And you know, of course, this is happening – this square is also very close to Trump’s Mars again, which is in late Leo. So it’s activating that as well. And we’ve seen that come out in some pretty dramatic ways, especially in 2024 in the middle of that year when there was that conjunction that took place in Taurus that was squaring that. Yeah, so it’ll be no doubt personally very important for him as well. 

That kind of brings us to the end of the month, because the very last aspect is on February 28th – Mercury is retrograde and it forms that exact conjunction with Venus, which is like, a little light, positive thing in the midst of everything else where it’s like getting help to fix delays or technical snafus is one of the things that comes to mind for me. Or like, a woman or a female figure that tries to rectify something that has gone wrong is one of the images for me. 

AC: Yeah. And I think it’ll give a probably illusory sense that maybe everything’s gonna be fine! Right? Because Mercury heads back, and it’ll be like, “Oh, but it’s into the arms of exalted Venus! Maybe this is gonna go smoother than I thought.” And it — 

CB: Right. 

AC: — might for three or four days. But we’ve got another eclipse. We’ve got Venus leaving Pisces. We’ve got Mars coming into Pisces. We got all sorts of things ready to happen in the next week. 

CB: Yeah. So that brings us to the end of February, but it leaves us on a cliffhanger because we’re still right in the middle of eclipse season and the second eclipse doesn’t take place until March 3rd, which is gonna be another major pivot point and intensification in terms of all of those eclipse significations. Venus and Mars are gonna start to emerge from under the beams of the Sun by late February and early March, so that some of those themes that were previously hidden will probably start to become very obvious and very visible all of a sudden. And we basically leave the month in the middle of waiting for the second shoe to fully drop and we’ll have to check in about in late February again for the next forecast to see where things are at at that point. 

AC: It’s gonna be tricky to pick an auspicious day to record the podcast —

CB: I know!

AC: — at the end of February! 

CB: Well, I mean, maybe it’ll have to be that Mercury-Venus conjunction on February 28th — 

AC: Where we get to – we’re like, “Actually, it’s fine. This is all for the best.” 

CB: Right. Yeah. Which will be like, a day after Mars square Uranus. Yeah, we’re gonna have our work cut out for us electionally next month. 

AC: Yeah. 

CB: All right, my friend. Well, that actually surprisingly brings us to the end of the forecast for February and our attempt to break down all of the crazy astrology as best as we can next month. Thanks for doing this with me and going in as depth as we did. It feels like a really, it’s gonna be such a momentous month that I’m glad we gave it as much time as we did, so thanks for doing that with me. 

AC: Yeah. You’re welcome. It’s worth doing. It’s not any ol’ month. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, speaking of any ol’ month, what are you gonna be doing? Are you gonna be bunkering down? Are you gonna be doing stuff? You have anything coming up, or what are you up to? 

AC: Let’s see. I’m teaching my classes. Working on my things. With Sphere and Sundry, at some point over the next month, not immediately but we’ve got a new series coming out with the fixed star Spica, which is a brilliant and benefic star that is strongly associated with real excellence and precision, both in the arts but also in engineering. It’s sort of this star of perfect fabrication and design of both aesthetic and mechanical things, and we’ve been playing with the materia created and really looking forward to it. It’ll be a nice counterpoint to the madness out there in the world. Yeah, so you can find that as well as a seed bank of pretty much all the planets in their own signs and exaltations at SphereAndSundry.com. And then at my website, which is AustinCoppock.com, you can find dozens of lectures and classes and workshops that I’ve given over the years. 

CB: Brilliant. I’ll put a link to —

AC: And I’ll be in the bunker, as you —

CB: You will also be in the bunker? Okay, good. Good. Yeah. Well, I am gonna be – as for myself, I’ve got my, of course, Electional Astrology Report – just to plug again one more time – if people need good dates to do things for the rest of 2026, you can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report. 

I’m gonna keep doing the podcast, and if people would like, there’s two possibilities for episodes this month. One, after seeing some of that stuff with Saturn in Aries, I’m strongly thinking about doing a Saturn in Aries in history and especially a Saturn in Aries in US history episode. So if people would like to see that, let me know in the YouTube comments. I’m also working on a long-term planetary cycle Babylonian goal year period episode that I was thinking about doing this month, but I’m trying to decide if the Saturn in Aries thing isn’t more pressing. So let me know in the YouTube comments which you’d like to see, and as always, I’m gonna keep releasing episodes that I do for early access first to patrons of The Astrology Podcast since they’re the ones that fund this research. So if you’d like to get early access, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. 

And yeah, I will also do my best to continue to document news and events as things happen and to point out the astrological correlations in order to try to give people some perspective on what’s going on, because that’s the one thing that I feel like I can do as an astrologer is at least point out some of the alignments that are happening and how it speaks to the moment.

So thanks everybody for watching and supporting this work, and for yeah, just being part of this entire process of us that we’re all going through collectively together. So good luck, everybody. Stay safe, and look out for each other and for your communities. Thank you, all the audience who joined us for the live recording today of patrons; I appreciate you. Thank you, Austin, for joining me for this; I really appreciate it. 

AC: My pleasure. 

CB: All right. I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks everyone for watching, and we’ll see you again next time.

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