The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 134, titled:
Astrology Forecast and Election for December 2017
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on November 30, 2017
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released February 13th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Tuesday, November 21, 2017, starting at 3:49 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 134th episode of the show. Joining me today are Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for December of 2017. For more information about how to support the podcast—or to subscribe to the podcast and support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. All right, hey guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I can’t believe we’re already doing another forecast episode. It seems like the last few weeks flew by.
KELLY SURTEES: Totally. Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Yeah. Nice to be back.
CB: Yeah, this is always my favorite time of the month. So in this episode, we’re going to first do some news and announcements briefly. Then we’re gonna talk about a couple of general topics, one of them is mundane astrology and the other is horary astrology. And then later in the episode, we’re gonna jump into the astrological forecast for December, and also I’m gonna mention one auspicious electional chart for December that Leisa Schaim picked out for us this month. So if you want to jump ahead to the forecast—and you’re listening to this now—then just look at the description on the podcast website and there will be a timestamp for jumping forward to those different parts of the discussion. So let’s start with some news and announcements. So first things first, I do have a plug for Moses Siregar who was featured on Episode 123. He’s actually teaching a class in 2017 on locational astrology and Vedic astrology for Western astrologers. So for more information about that visit astrologyforthesoul.com. Kelly, what do you have coming up this month?
KS: So in December, I’ll be focusing on client consults. So I tend to do a lot of year-ahead, one-on-one sessions in December and in January. And I realized I do have one final webinar for the year—which I’ll be part of a panel discussion through Astrology University—on December 18. December 17-18, depending on where you are in the world. It’ll be 5:00 AM for me in Sydney, Australia on the 18th. So that’ll be a fun discussion. I shall be honoring Saturn’s dedication to getting up early.
CB: That’s exciting.
KS: Yeah, that’s it for me.
CB: Okay. And your website’s kellysastrology.com.
KS: Yes.
CB: All right.
KS: Thank you.
CB: And, Austin, what do you have coming next month?
AC: A whole lot of writing. As you know, I do a column every decan, and I also do a paragraph on the configuration of every single day. But when special things happen, I have to address them. And so, Saturn’s moving into Capricorn, that needs a lengthy treatment. And we’re about to begin a new calendar year, which also needs a lengthy treatment. So I’ll be spending a lot of time in ‘writing’ prison. And like yourself, I fund some of my labors with Patreon. And although the daily delineations come out for free in the morning everyday, anyone who is a supporter of my Patreon gets all 30-31 days of the next month as a PDF on the first of the month. And there are other benefits as well.
CB: Nice. Awesome. All right, and your website is austincoppock.com, right?
AC: Yep.
CB: All right, brilliant. And as for myself, I’m working on podcasting primarily and going to be doing a webinar coming up for students of my Hellenistic course, where we’re gonna be reading through the text of Vettius Valens and talking about his treatment of annual profections. So we’ve been doing a lot of those live read-throughs of different ancient authors recently, and it’s been a lot of fun talking about the texts, looking at their example charts, and applying some of the techniques in practice. And I did the ‘Saturn in Sagittarius, Saturn returns’ retrospective earlier this month, and we actually covered 13 charts with Leisa and Patrick. But I had so many ‘Saturn return’ stories—a lot of listeners actually submitted them—that I wasn’t able to include them all in that discussion. And additionally, what I ended up doing with that episode, I went back and forth between retelling those stories—so we could get a bunch in and I could do short, bullet-point versions versus doing actual interviews with people—and we ended up doing the first one where I just retold the stories. But in the end I felt like I was missing a lot of the nuances and the details surrounding some of those stories, which were very vivid in a consulting or a client setting. When you’re talking to somebody about their chart, and they’re telling you about their Saturn return, the nuances and the details and the emotion behind it, that carries a lot of weight that you miss when you’re just another person retelling someone else’s story. So I’m thinking about doing a longer workshop or a class or a webinar or something where I do some interviews with some of those people who submitted ‘Saturn return’ stories in order to be able to capture the essence of some of those stories a little bit better than we did in that episode. So if I end up doing that, I should have more information about it pretty soon here. All right, I think that’s it. And speaking of that, I mean, now that we’re ending Saturn in Sagittarius, did you guys see some pretty good ‘Saturn return’ stories, in retrospect? Or do you feel like you did?
AC: Yeah, it’s been sort of constant for years now, so I don’t necessarily have one that jumps to mind. It’s just been an ongoing thing.
CB: You’ve had people in your life who have that placement, so that you got to see some up close and personal.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we know several of the same people with Saturn in Sagittarius, Watson being one of them.
CB: Yeah, Watson was our first case study.
AC: Who shared his tale of adulthood and woe—and whoa.
CB: Right. And I meant to go back on that, cuz we ended up focusing a little bit too much on some of the hardships that he went through. But in retrospect, in talking about it, some positive and some constructive things came out of that as well. So it wasn’t all depressing.
AC: Right. Like living beings.
CB: Yeah, I mean, he has children. And while that was a large part of the difficulties, there were also some very positive things obviously that came out of that.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. What about you, Kelly? Any notable ‘Saturn return’ stories that you’ve seen over the past couple of years?
KS: Look, like Austin, I’m sure there have been none that come to mind immediately. The transit that I’ve seen clients struggle the most with, with Saturn in Sag, has been when that’s corresponded with a 2nd house transit for them. So the idea of maybe Saturn being in the sign of Jupiter. So natally, it’s an area of life that is normally a little bit more abundant or flowing, or they’ve got a bit of luck. But people really noticing when Saturn was in Sag and the 2nd house, the contraction or the limitation or the tightening of the belt around money and cash flow. So that’s the thing that pops to mind immediately.
CB: Sure. Definitely. And I’ve been surprised since the ‘Saturn in Sag’ episode—as Saturn’s getting closer to and gaining speed to move into Capricorn—how the Saturn returns of people that have Saturn in early Capricorn are already getting queued up right away, and you can see how that’s about to start very, very soon. It’s like one of the ones I was watching in the news—Kevin Spacey has Saturn in the first few degrees of Capricorn. And when that story about him first broke, I was like, “Oh, that’s weird,” cuz at first it was just one, isolated thing and it wasn’t clear what was happening with that. And I saw that he was about to start his second Saturn return, and I’m like, well, that almost implies this is gonna be more significant for him than it seems. And then over the course of the next week, his career imploded, and this is all happening right before he starts his second Saturn return, with it in early Capricorn. So there’s some interesting stories queuing up like that already.
AC: One thing that’s interesting about that is that because Sagittarius and Capricorn flank the solstice, the points in late Sagittarius and early Capricorn are in an antiscial relationship to each other. So you would get an antiscial conjunction between Saturn at 25 Sagittarius and another planet that’s at 5 Capricorn.
CB: Sure.
AC: I think it’s one of the factors that may be leading to not premature—well, I don’t know. Yeah, things happening a little earlier of a ‘Saturn return’ nature for those people who have an early Capricorn.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And somebody was asking me about this, also, cuz it also has to do with just the difference between and the challenge sometimes of integrating sign-based versus degree-based aspects. And in that episode, I was really trying to emphasize the sign-base portion, cuz people aren’t used to thinking about the Saturn return in terms of it returning to your natal sign, and it being in effect for the entirety of that period that it’s going back through the natal sign that you had Saturn in. But then it’s also true that the degree-based aspects with orbs are relevant. And if a person has Saturn at the very beginning of a sign, or Saturn at the very end of the sign, you’re still gonna see crossover while transiting Saturn is within orb of making a degree-based aspect to that natal position, so that’s relevant as well.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve used a whole sign parameter for Saturn since probably my Saturn return back in 2007-2008. And I have Saturn at 10° of Virgo, and I remember hoping that the ‘sign-based’ thing was wrong. Cuz it was like, “All right, Saturn’s at like 25 Virgo right now. This shouldn’t feel like this.” No, it still feels like it.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Still going.
AC: So Saturn ingressed into Libra in the fall, and then I was like, “Oh, my God,” and I just felt the weight lift. Saturn’s still ‘Saturn-ing’, but it’s not in my face. And then it moved back into Virgo, and I was like, “I’m still done with my Saturn return. That was like two years ago.” No, no, not at all. Neither event-wise nor on an affect level. Even that last bit back into just a couple of degrees of Virgo—even though it was 17° away from my natal Saturn—the experience and the events were very ‘Saturn return-y’. So as much as I wanted it to be wrong, the sign-based general parameter for the Saturn return was unfortunately accurate for me.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s so crucial just because that’s taking something that’s more from ancient astrology and integrating it into modern astrology; just the concept, something as simple as sign-based aspects. But then it can really change how you approach the interpretation of simple, modern concepts, like the Saturn return.
AC: Yeah, I’ve been getting more and more into whole sign aspects in general for a variety of reasons. But, you know, the implication is that the signs really matter, that they’re real territories, and they’re separate in a meaningful way. The transitions between them aren’t vague.
CB: Right.
KS: No.
AC: And there’s probably no piece of astrology that is as widely-known and is widely-used as the signs, right? And so, it makes sense that those bones would be firm, right? Cuz why would we keep referring back to that interpretive structure? You know, why would it have endured for thousands of years if it wasn’t rather sturdy?
KS: And that sounds like a pretty ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ kind of statement. The bones. The bones, the structure, the sturdiness of that foundation.
AC: The boundaries are real.
KS: Yes, totally. On that point, I haven’t noticed yet, necessarily, Saturn return for ‘Saturn in Cap’ clients, but in the last few weeks I have had a run on clients with Mars in the first 2° or 3° of Cancer. So the idea of as soon as Saturn goes in, they’re gonna start flipping or getting the opposition transit. So it doesn’t have to just be the Saturn returns. If you’ve got a planet in those first—well, I think Saturn in Cap’s gonna cover the first 8° of Capricorn in 2018. So if you do have an early planet, not only will it be in play by sign, but it’s gonna be maximum strength at that degree placement very, very soon.
CB: Right. And it got pretty late before it stationed retrograde earlier this year, didn’t it? Was it at 26 or 28 Sagittarius?
KS: 27, maybe.
CB: Okay.
KS: I shall check. Yeah, that was in March.
CB: That’s hugely relevant as well. Cuz that’s already kicking off some transits, even far back then, in terms of the degree-based aspects, especially for those people that have placements in very early Capricorn or whatever other cardinal signs.
KS: Absolutely. Well, particularly the ‘Sag/Capricorn’ link that Austin was talking about. Saturn did retrograde at 27 Sag in early April. So the antiscia connection was there for planets at 3° or 4° of Capricorn way back in early 2017.
CB: Right. That makes a lot of sense. All right, cool. So that was one discussion topic. The other discussion topic I had for our little pre-forecast segment that we always do is I got in a debate with somebody recently on Facebook. They were questioning the legitimacy of looking at mundane world transits and then applying them to essentially current events in the news and saying that you’re taking something that’s very general and you’re applying it in an overly-specific way to something that’s going on in a certain country or with a certain group of people or in a certain part of the world, and that’s like an overly-narrow and not-justified application of astrology. Especially if you’re not showing how it’s linked back to a natal chart or an inception chart or a country chart or something like that in order to demonstrate how it’s actually relevant to or linked to that specific group or country or what have you. And the debate didn’t really actually end up going anywhere—not useful or productive—but it did raise some interesting ideas for me or some interesting issues, because that was actually something I struggled with and also had a similar perspective on.
I always thought it was a little bit weird or a little bit generic when astrologers would talk about mundane transits and try to personalize them without linking them back to a person’s natal chart, cuz I sorta started astrology with Astro-Dienst already being around and their ‘personal daily transit’ thing being very linked into your natal chart. So anytime that you’re looking at transits, it’s always with respect to your own natal chart, so it’s very personalized. But over the course of the past two years—I think it’s been two years, or maybe it’s been three years now since we’ve been doing these forecast episodes—I’ve really developed a much greater appreciation for the way in which you can look at what’s going on in the sky right now and link that to current events and have that be personally or very relevant and very valid. And I think part of the reason is just that it often is hooking into the chart. There’s often many charts that are operating. There’s thousands or millions of charts that are operating at all times underlying events. And you don’t always have access to those, cuz you don’t always have birth times for them, or you aren’t always aware of them, but they are getting linked into those mundane transits in a very specific way. And that was part of my justification for why what we do sometimes with these forecast episodes is valid from a conceptual standpoint. I know both of you have written columns like that for a long time. But did you ever struggle with that issue? Or did you ever have a point of transitioning from personal transits and astrology that’s directly connected to individual charts to doing it and talking about it in a more general sense?
AC: Well, I’ll go first. I would say that that’s something that I’ve thought about every time I’ve written a column for the last 12 years. Because the question is, I don’t have the chart of the person I am writing to.
CB: Right.
AC: You know, I don’t know. And so, what can I say? Cuz you wanna give as much generally-valid information as you can, but you certainly don’t wanna overstate your case, right? I would delineate, let’s say, Mars’ ingress to Scorpio generally in a different way than I would delineate that for someone who had the Moon at 2 Scorpio, right?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: And who was in a Moon-ruled profection, right? You know, the transits are a vital piece of the ‘prognostic’ engine, and you can delineate what the impact of that piece is. But of course if you want to get more specific, you need more layers, and that’s true in every branch of astrology. Another thing that I will say is that there’s a difference between transits as triggers for big changes or installments in big stories that are already underway for a person or a culture versus the planet just being there and offering its potential if you want. It’s easier to have a good time when Venus is in a place of great dignity and not afflicted by malefics. And if you reach out to Venus, it is easier to get handed a basket of fruit when Venus is in Libra than when Venus is in, say, Virgo. And that is one of the principles that traditional planetary magic operates under, that you can pick the right ‘fruits of the heavens’; I believe that was a metaphor Al Cummins had that I really liked. You know, you can reach out and grab the fruit off the tree, you don’t necessarily have to sit there until it falls on your head, right? Whereas a more predictive transit is figuring out when the apple will fall on someone’s head, but you can reach up and grab some fruit, and the transiting conditions of the planets give you an idea of what’s available and what will be easier or harder to access. Does that make sense?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, but I could see somebody making a counterpoint. In those instances, like with traditional electional magic, if you really want to make, let’s say, a talisman or something, you’re supposed to lock it into a specific time, like, let’s say, when Venus is rising in Libra and that becomes the way that you specifically unlock the power of that general transit at that time. So it’s like what is the difference then between—
AC: Well, that’s one piece of traditional astrological magic. The extremely-specific elections for a talisman cast in stone and metal is one thing, and that is, I would say, the most technically-exacting form of planetary magic, because you’re taking, for lack of a better term, the ‘energy’ or ‘spirit’ of that moment and giving it a durable metal and stone body to endure for as long as possible. There are a variety of other operations, such as planetary petitions, which don’t have the same level of rigor required in order for them to be effective. You know, the ‘super-exact, electional talismanic’ stuff is real and important, but that defines one edge; that edge being the most exacting. There are a variety of other methods which are less exacting, where you don’t have to have the perfect chart.
CB: Sure. Just the general point is that the general state of the cosmos at that time—and the fact that, let’s say, Venus is transiting through Libra itself—is gonna imprint it with some of the quality of that transit.
AC: Yeah, I mean, that’s literally there. It’s part of what’s happening. You know, obviously you’d probably want to reach out for that when it’s on an angle or when it’s the day and hour of Venus or when the Moon’s conjunct it, or whatever other secondary/tertiary/quaternary techniques you want to use to further focus on that, where it’s easier to get to that, or it’s easier for it to get to you. But, you know, that’s sort of a thing. The planets’ current positions and configurations with each other is what’s on offer, and just because you don’t have a life-changing event doesn’t mean that the planet’s current condition and position isn’t impacting or texturing your experience to some degree.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah.
CB: What do you think, Kelly?
KS: I tend to think of it as describing the astrological weather, which is maybe a metaphor that’s been done to death, but it seems to be relevant in this situation. The cycles that we look at, say, a month ahead or a year ahead, we’re describing the nature of time or the quality of experience that is available based on the symbolism. And, you know, just like a weather report, we live in a very cold part of Canada. So in the middle of winter, there can be a horrible ice situation going outside, which doesn’t affect me, cuz I don’t work outside the house. So that’s the weather, but it doesn’t affect me personally, but it would affect my husband because he’s part of a larger organization where transport is a big thing. And so, I didn’t struggle with this, cuz I sort of understood from the get-go that there are some limitations. When you’re talking about the astrological cycles of a month or a year ahead, that is by nature going to be more general and less specific than if you talk specifically with an individual about their chart and what’s being activated, in terms of whatever cycles or timing techniques you want to use. So to my mind, I’m sort of like that’s the nature of the beast and it has value in. As Austin was saying, we’re describing what’s available, what we can reach for. You know, so if Venus is in Virgo, this may not be the best time to throw a party where it’s all about eating sweets and cakes. But Venus in Virgo could be a great time to throw a party where you’re gonna eat raw veg or green juice or something. So it’s just sort of understanding the vibe that’s out there, and then to the extent that you’re interested in connecting with that, going for it. But of course when you work with your own chart and the way things are triggering you and your sensitive points, that’s going to be much more specific, maybe more accurate, more dramatic, or more significant.
CB: Sure, yeah. And, I mean, the thing that’s really important—that I’ve noticed as we’ve been doing this more and more on the podcast over the past few years, just by paying close attention—is that you really do see the symbolism, especially of certain outer planet transits, come up when those planets start moving through different signs. And in that sense, looking at events in the news or looking at world events does become hugely relevant, because you can see that symbolism playing out. I mean, we’ve all seen the way that Saturn in Sagittarius has played out with many of those themes—some of which we stated in that ‘Saturn in Sagittarius’ episode—as expected or probable manifestations. But then, you know, I’ve kept remarking over the past few months just how literal some of that has been over the course of the past few years in terms of capturing some of that symbolism. But even before that, like Saturn going through Scorpio, that transit started out with the head of the NSA or the CIA at the time, Petraeus, was caught having an affair, and the FBI investigated, and then all these stories started coming out about privacy and online communications and stuff. And it turned out that that was just a preview for a bunch of discussions that would happen over the next few years, because then, six months into Saturn in Scorpio or so, the ‘Edward Snowden’ thing happened. And suddenly there’s these disclosures about the NSA spying on worldwide traffic and all of the subsequent discussions about secrecy and privacy and other things that came along with that over the course of the next year or two. So some of these things are tied into specific events, but sometimes it’s like a series of ongoing events that are interconnected, that are all connected to a similar theme or echoing a similar theme, and you can see that in world events.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
KS: Totally.
CB: Sure. I guess one of the things is it might be hard to see that if you’re just coming into the field. One of the discussions I had on the last episode with Adam Elenbaas was the difference between ‘book knowledge’ of astrology—like when you get into astrology and you’ve been doing it for a little while, and you can interpret what a Saturn return or something means theoretically, and you’ve read other case studies and things like that—versus the wisdom that is accumulated from experience of either going through the transit yourself and coming out the other end of it and developing some deep, personal understanding of it, or observing it happening contemporaneously through events or people that you know and the immediate gut-level experience that you get from seeing it play out in somebody’s life over the course of a few years or what have you. There’s something very different about those two types of knowledge.
KS: Totally. It’s funny you bring this up. I was just talking with my students last night, in our last online chart interpretation class, around book-learning—the ability to regurgitate a theory that you read in a textbook, or a series of keywords or concepts. That takes you so far in your astrology, but it will not take you all the way. The way that you really deepen and integrate your understanding of astrology is through the doing. So the idea of talking with people about their charts—whether you do it in a professional, paid capacity, whether you’re the go-to for your social network or your family—you do learn things about the way the cycles operate, both personally and collectively, only through that experience and that observation. So I completely agree with you, Chris. That’s a point that I’m really passionate about. If you want to get better as an astrologer, you need to start using the astrology in some way. Whether you’re consulting with people, whether you’re blogging about it, you need to create some kind of feedback loop where you’re getting other people’s stories and experiences, as well as paying deep attention to your own when you go through those cycles.
CB: Right. And that’s so tough because it doesn’t seem evident that it should be that way necessarily, because you think you should be able to just study past experiences or read books or study other case studies. But then there really is something unique when you’re seeing clients and talking to them about their charts. And a weird thing that most practicing, older astrologers know—but you assume most newer astrologers don’t realize is the case—is that every consulting astrologer continuously learns something new from every client they see or every chart they see. And that’s true for people that have been in the field for 10 or 15 years—like the three of us have—or 20 years or whatever, but also even for much older astrologers, like Steven Forrest or Robert Hand or Demetra George. It’s like every chart presents a unique case and a unique constellation of placements, and therefore, sometimes a unique manifestation of placements that you’ve seen in other instances.
KS: Yeah. The nuances are phenomenal. So your book-learning gets you into the topic; you can scratch the surface. And your client will share a vignette or a story or make one comment and you will just get this whole other level of understanding about how that configuration can come together that you could never have read in a book anywhere, because it’s too specific to the uniqueness of that chart. Because of the nature of our book-learning, it’s a little bit more like ‘this planet in this sign or in this house’, and you can’t cover every configuration, I guess.
CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, it still fits the overall archetypal, let’s say, general feeling of the placement. It
KS: Yes.
CB: It’s just that the specific manifestation itself is often so highly specific that it’s not something you would usually look up in a book and it’ll describe that exact scenario.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KS: And that’s kind of the magic of astrology. But yeah, what do you think, Austin?
CB: When did you make the transition? Or did you make a hard transition from doing astrology privately to seeing clients, or was it a gradual transition?
AC: It was gradual. I would say the only hard punctuation mark was when I decided to do astrology full-time and swore not to get a normal job, but I’d been doing charts for people for years at that point. I think I started in college. I think I charged like $8. No, I charged one order of General Tso’s chicken for a reading.
CB: Nice.
AC: That was my price—
CB: That’s a good deal.
AC: —when I was 23. Yeah, well, I don’t know. I was a little bit more hit-and-miss back then.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I think it was probably a fair deal. It’s like I want to say ‘hair’ college—that’s not the right term. But for people who are training to be aestheticians and beauticians, you can pay half as much and let a trainee work on you.
KS: Yeah. Same with naturopaths and massage therapists, you know, all the natural therapies. When they’re doing their apprenticeship the last year, you can pay half-price, and you’re just understanding they don’t have the experience but they’re developing it.
AC: They’re like, “Listen, I’m learning.”
KS: Tots.
AC: And that’s an important thing to say. You know, that’s actually something I was just talking about with some of my students. I was like, in order to get to a level where you’re comfortable and professionally-competent, you’re gonna have to read a lot of charts and talk to a lot of people. And so, it’s entirely reasonable to not want to accidentally say a bunch of dumb or wrong or hurtful stuff, and to, therefore, avoid saying things when you’re not sure of your competence.
CB: Right.
AC: But, you know, there are a lot of circumstances where you’ like, listen, I’m learning. This might be useful. I might just be stupid, but I need to practice. Is that something you’re interested in? Do you understand the parameters? And there is that sort of ‘apprentice-journeyman’ framework that’s necessary to get from apprentice to master. And I mean ‘master’ in the old ‘guild structure’ sense, somebody who’s competent at a craft and can teach it. Not somebody who is the world’s best. I did want to say one thing about the associating events with planetary positions. Obviously I think it’s just a piece of watching astrology happen. It’s a piece of astrology. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done poorly.
CB: Right.
AC: And I think some of the people that I’ve seen complaining about that particular method are probably referencing some astrologers or students of astrology who are not very rigorous and who are just sort of throwing everything into the same basket, if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah. And that is a legitimate objection that sometimes astrologers can be too quick to ascribe whatever thing just happened to whatever transit is happening in the sky; or sometimes not-good astrology that’s not very discerning can sometimes have a tendency to do that. So this discussion that happened was originally about Jupiter in Scorpio, and a lot of people were associating—I don’t know. It’s become such a big thing, I don’t know what to refer to it as, but it started with the ‘Harvey Weinstein’ thing, when Saturn was still in Libra. And already, very early, people were saying, “Well, this must be what Jupiter in Scorpio was gonna be about.” And at that point even I was like people might be jumping a little bit too quick, cuz Jupiter was still in Libra. This is one guy, and we don’t really know where this is gonna go. But then over the course of the next few weeks, it really did blow up into this huge thing that’s covering a lot. It’s not just Hollywood, but also there’s reporters. There’s people in the media. There’s musicians. There’s a lot of different people now and a lot of different things surrounding this that are happening. It’s become a much bigger event that clearly is associated—at least in part—with that transit of Jupiter through Scorpio. But sometimes it’s true that there can be a tendency for astrologers sometimes to mis-assign meaning or to over-assign it. You know, sometimes Mercury retrograde can be one of those things where, yeah, sometimes Mercury retrograde stuff goes amiss or things go wrong. Other times, maybe some astrologers do have a tendency to overdo it occasionally.
AC: Yeah. Well, one of the points that I saw raised—and I didn’t follow this terribly carefully—somebody was like, “If it’s Jupiter in Scorpio, and Jupiter’s in Scorpio for the entire world. Why is this all just centered in the United States?” The thing is sometimes you can say general things, like we did for Saturn in Sag—the boundary between the native and the foreigner, right? You know, the familiar and the alien. And that particular wall or boundary or bridge being highlighted and troubled during Saturn’s time in Sagittarius, that was true all over the world, right? Or on every continent where we could perceive patterns, we could see that pattern, right? Whereas with Jupiter in Scorpio, if we’re talking about the ‘blessing of revelation’ or ‘speaking up’, so far that pattern has been located primarily—I don’t want to say exclusively, cuz I haven’t been paying enough attention to international news, but primarily in the United States. So then we might say, well, what’s going on in the US chart? Oh, wow, Scorpio is the twelfth whole sign house, with the Sag rising. That makes even more sense. And we just had this eclipse, and the eclipse seemed to be tightly tied into at least some of the charts of the people who are falling from grace, as Patrick Watson pointed out. Louis CK’s Venus is in a position where the eclipse over the summer was right on top of it. And so, you know, we can go through there. You can say here’s a ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ pattern, but in order to point to the country or the people that it is going to impact most deeply, you do definitely need to bring up other charts. So I don’t know. It all ties together. I don’t feel like there’s a real ‘this is invalid’ or ‘that’s invalid’.
CB: Right.
AC: Just do it. Do it well, and know the limitation and strength of every particular gear. You know, we’re only able to use a certain set of gears without having charts to interlock them with.
CB: Right. Well, and the other thing is that sometimes there’s a weird middle-ground or transition point when something is initially just something that’s happening in a single person’s life versus when it expands to a group of people versus when it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. And sometimes very early on in the transit, you don’t realize that this is gonna become a much bigger phenomenon than it ends up eventually becoming. So the ‘Arab Spring’, for example, started out or is often traced back to a single guy setting himself on fire in protest, and then this sparked a series of other protests that then engulfed the area, and then eventually had a worldwide effect. I remember back when Saturn went into Sagittarius initially. It dipped into Sag, then it went back into Scorpio, and then it moved back into Sag. And I remember around that time that was when a lot of the immigration started happening from Syria, which had become this war-torn area over the course of a few years up to that point. And then the immigration to Europe started happening as a trickle, and then it became a huge thing over the course of that summer, and then that had ripple effects over the course of the next couple of years in different areas of the world based on that, in different positive and negative ways. So one of the things I learned from that is just that sometimes when you have a new ingress that takes place—if you start seeing events early on in that that seem to symbolically match what that transit is supposed to be about theoretically or abstractly or conceptually—sometimes those can become much bigger, or you can anticipate those becoming much bigger and having a larger ripple than they might otherwise, if it’s just after an ingress has taken place. Because when an ingress takes place, the events surrounding however long that transit is gonna be start being put in place right at the start of it, oftentimes. So this ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ thing might be similar. Cuz we’re only, what, like a month or so into it at this point, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger rather than something that’s dying down or something like that.
KS: Totally.
CB: All right. So the only other thing I meant to mention with the ‘mundane’ thing is as soon as a planet ingresses into a new sign, every lunation chart, every lunation that occurs after that point, every solar return chart, every inception chart then has that sign placement baked into it. So that’s probably relevant here as well. It’s not that it’s not tied into actual charts as soon as the ingress takes place. But in fact it starts being integrated into charts as soon as that ingress happens, whether you’re aware of it and paying attention to those charts or not. So that’s probably relevant here as well.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right. So moving on, the other preliminary topic—if you guys still want to do it at this point—we were gonna mention briefly this debate on horary astrology that’s come up over the past few days. I should specifically pull up the page because I should cite him, but I was aware that there was a sort of debate in the horary tradition. My observation, 10 years ago, was that I thought there was a discrepancy between a lot of the older texts on horary, where some of the earliest, complete textbooks on horary astrology and asking horary questions, the surviving ones, only go back to the 8th and 9th century in the Medieval Arabic tradition. And most of the questions in those texts are framed as the querent asking ‘will ‘x’ happen in the future?’ Like, will I be married in the future? Or, will I get this job? So it’s a question about whether an event, a specific event, will or will not take place at some point in the future. And more recently the discrepancy that I noticed is that most of the questions are framed that way in the early horary tradition, but in the modern tradition, contemporary horary astrologers are much more comfortable taking questions that are framed more like ‘should I do ‘x?’ So, should I take this job? Or, should I get married to this person, or what have you? Or sometimes choosing between Option A and Option B. Should I do Option A, or should I do Option B? So it’s not just that it’s more free-will-oriented, but there’s something different about the technical assumptions that are being made about how horary is being applied.
And in noticing that discrepancy 10 years ago, I sided more—for conceptual and practical reasons—with the earlier approach, where you should probably restrict horary to ‘will ‘x’ happen?’ because the majority of the ways that you’re answering most horary questions is by looking at the significators and whether they’ll perfect. So you look at the ruler of the ascendant—which represents the querent—and then you look at the ruler of the house in question to see if that planet is applying towards the planet that represents the querent. And if they are moving towards an exact aspect, then it usually indicates an affirmative answer, that those two things are coming together in the future. And if they’re separating or not aspecting, it indicates a negative answer, because those things are symbolically not coming together in the future. That, therefore, made more sense to me within the context of just a straightforward, ‘will ‘x’ happen in the future?’ So I thought I was one of the only people who had that approach or had that viewpoint, but I’ve seen that debate both on Facebook and Twitter in the last few days, where apparently there’s more people who hold that view or that approach than I thought. Whereas I thought in modern times that the prevailing viewpoint for most horary astrologers that I’m familiar with—which is mainly just the people that practice Renaissance astrology—tend to be much more open to saying that ‘should ‘x’ happen?’ questions are perfectly valid and that that’s they’re preferred or more typical approach to horary at this point. Have you guys heard of this debate? Or is this something you’ve thought about at all?
AC: I think that’s really interesting. I suppose I’ve approached those same sorts of questions for longer through tarot. One of the things that I commonly do is I’ll do a ‘forked road’ spread. I’m like, all right, well, if I go down this route, what does it look like? If I turn right here, if I decide not to do that, what does that look like? And I guess I like that better than ‘should’ with horary. Cuz it’s like, okay, so if this is the road that I go down, what does that road look like? If I go down this road, what does that road look like? Of course you’re gonna get some answers with probably any divination system, which are like, “You’re not really gonna go down that road. So stop asking dumb questions.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: I think there’s value to using your tools to look a little further down one route or another.
KS: Yeah. So answer your questions, Chris, I’ve never thought about this, so I’m sort of like, hmm, but I certainly have taken horary questions from clients—as I’m thinking about it, while you guys were talking. Most of the questions that come in, by their nature, are ‘will’. Will I ever? Will this happen in a certain timeframe? Will this thing come together? But I do get a smaller group of clients who are wondering should they do this or should they do that. Should I keep doing what I’m doing in whatever scenario, or should I make a change? And I guess even though the word ‘should’ has been in the question, I’ve approached it probably similarly to the way you have used tarot, Austin. Okay, well, if you go down this path, this is what you’ll be dealing with, which might be Saturn in detriment on the South Node; so that’s the energy if you go in that direction. And if you go in this direction, we’ve got Venus in dignity sextile Jupiter. Because I guess the issue here is I don’t really necessarily want to say to the client, ‘you should do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that,’ because, I don’t know, they can choose. Sometimes clients want to go down the more difficult route because they want the experience, or they want to try it out, or they need to prove it for themselves. But I think from a divinatory perspective—which is really what horary is—there is that option to say, ‘it looks more like smooth sailing’ or ‘things will come together more easily or with less effort in this directions, whereas if you go on this path, you may not be successful’ or ‘you may just have to deal with some massive boulders along the way,’ and if there’s an option to provide that information to a client, I think that can be really useful. So I would use the tool that I have to provide what insight I could. Cuz I think there’s something very sacred about the client presenting to the particular astrologer or healer or insightful person at a particular time, and I think there’s something very powerful about how we connect with and either commit to the clients that we do and don’t work with. So there’s a very sacred thing when somebody shows up at your proverbial ‘door’, whether it’s in your inbox or on your voicemail and says, “Can you help me out with this thing?” So yeah, that’s probably what I think about that.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
AC: The ‘divinatory duad’.
KS: Yes.
CB: Right. And that’s a tricky thing, cuz the astrologer is always implicated in the question with horary. The question is posed from the querent, but the astrologer is always the 7th house. And that’s one of the reasons why some of those considerations before judgment exist, like Saturn is in the 7th because the astrologer might be making a mistake or something like that as part of the implicit notion underlying that consideration.
KS: Of course. And I can’t remember what the consideration is, but the one that says ‘the client won’t listen to what you tell them anyway’, do you guys know what I mean? There’s a consideration where if this thing is happening in the chart, the client is unlikely to take onboard whatever you say. Whatever it is that you’re gonna say, they’re just not going to hear the info.
CB: Right. Yeah, I forget if that’s Saturn in the 1st or Saturn in the 10th. I mean, Saturn in the 1st is usually like there’s something wrong with the querent, or maybe they’re not telling you the full story or something like that, so that could be it. The other is Saturn in the 10th, that the outcome of the exchange of the question between the astrologer and the client is not necessarily good, or something negative happens as a result of that.
KS: Totally.
CB: Yeah. So let’s see—oh, yeah, so the genesis of this discussion was a post on Facebook, and there’s this new book titled Horary Astrology: The Practical Way to Learn Your Fate by Petros Eleftheriadis. So he started this discussion, cuz apparently he has a very objection to ‘should I’ questions, which I was surprised at because I thought I was one of the only people that even thought about that or took issue with that sort of approach. And then he’s already gotten quite a bit of pushback from other astrologers who are arguing against that, saying ‘should I’ questions are valid, partially, for philosophical reasons, because they want to emphasize free will and choice, and also appealing to the earlier tradition, like in William Lilly, where there are some questions like that. So yeah, it’s an interesting discussion topic. We don’t need to linger on it too long today. But I just wanted to bring it up for people to think about, since it seems like—especially for horary practitioners—an interesting question to contemplate. Cuz it really gets to the roots of what you’re trying to do with horary. And if you don’t know the answer to that, then it can be very difficult to figure out which way to go when presented with an issue or a question like that. All right, so I think that’s it for preliminary stuff. Why don’t we jump into the forecast? So we’re 52 minutes into this episode, so I think that’s good timing. Let’s start from the very top, then. What’s the very first, notable astrological event that happens in December of 2017, as far as you guys are concerned?
AC: Mercury’s retrograde station.
CB: Okay. So it’s already slowing down here in November. We’re already in the shadow period as of a while ago, but that’s your first thing. Cuz it stations retrograde in late Sagittarius on December 3, right?
AC: December 3 in your timezone, late on the 2nd in mine.
CB: Okay.
AC: Saturday night.
CB: Right.
AC: How’s that?
CB: So that’s right in Sag. And we talked about that a little bit last month, because that means that Mercury is stationing right next to Saturn, which is on its way out of Sagittarius and moving into Capricorn. And as a result of that we’re gonna get a second conjunction with Saturn—as Mercury is retrograde—later in the month. When is that?
AC: No.
CB: The 22nd?
AC: Mercury conjoins Saturn retrograde on the 5th, and then will eventually conjoin Saturn, once Saturn has crossed the boundary into Capricorn, but not until January.
CB: Oh, right, right, okay.
AC: And it’s worth noting that Mercury conjoined Saturn for the first time on the 27th of November and then gets just past Saturn, stations retrograde early on the 3rd, late on the 2nd, and then conjoins Saturn again perfectly a few days later. So these details are useful, but it’s also worth noting that Mercury will be within a degree of Saturn from I think about the 25th through the 8th, right? I mean, we’re basically looking at two weeks of Mercury conjoining Saturn very tightly.
KS: Yeah. And you’re so right, Austin, because we can all get ‘Saturn in Virgo’ about the details, which we all love to do.
AC: You and I can.
KS: We totally can, Austin. We can smash out those technicalities. But yeah, Mercury-Saturn for basically two weeks. So there’s this feeling of maybe mental pressure or pushing hard to a deadline. When I was thinking about December as part of my pre-show prep, I’m thinking, Mercury-Saturn, there are documents. There are contracts. There are agreements that are being put under the grind. Is this really gonna hold up? Have we got it the right way? And then because we’ve got the station retrograde, it’s that deep review. This is a detailed pulling apart of agreements or contracts or commitments. And as much as Mercury will come back to Saturn—I think it’s January 7th or 8th when they’re both in Cap—there’s something very unique just about this ‘Mercury-Saturn Sag’ period that kind of stands alone unto itself that’s significant. And the only extra tidbit that I’d throw in, that’s relevant to this piece, is that on that same weekend—December 2-3—we have a Full Moon in one of Mercury’s signs, in Gemini; which I think is interesting because that will happen basically in the middle of that two-week ‘Mercury-Saturn’ period. So there really is this feeling about the data, the contracts, the ideas, and running the ideas or the deals through every check and balance, you know, pushing it, testing it. How can this be attacked? How can we make it safe? Yeah, I don’t know if you guys want to add to that, but it’s definitely a unique period.
AC: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you’ve said. I would embellish one of those points, which is the ‘review’ aspect. So what’s really interesting about this is that we’ve got Mercury stationing retrograde on Saturn two-and-a-half weeks before Saturn changes sign. And so, it’s natural when a planet has been in a position for a long time with Saturn on and off for three years that in the very last few weeks we would review what happened and how we dealt with it, right? And so, Mercury in this case is really forcing this review. You know, Mercury is right on top of Saturn for weeks. And so, I think that there’s gonna be a lot of looking back on a personal level, looking back at the last couple of years. Sort of a performance review with Saturn in Sagittarius, right? You know, to what degree did it correspond with things you did on purpose—such as a discipline you tried to enact—and how well did those work? To what degree did it correspond with things you simply had to endure? And how effective were your coping strategies for what you had to endure? You know, there’s a real review here. And then one other point that I wanted to add is that we have a pileup of things here which have the signification of slowness, right? Saturn is always the prime indicator for slowness, and Mercury grinding to a halt on top of Saturn, certainly Mercury’s cessation of apparent motion is an indicator for slowness, right? So we have this double-slowness right here, but it’s in Sagittarius, which is one of the few signs which is explicitly connected with speed, right? There’s no other sign which has a lower body specifically designed for transport, right? It’s not like ‘the fish’ or the ‘sea-goat’; that’s a really rapid animal. And so, I think there’s a certain frustration emanating from this, cuz there’s like wanting to get it done, right? Especially with Saturn so late in the sign, Mercury so late in the sign. Wanting it to be over with, wanting whatever it is, but needing to spend a lot of time. I’ve been writing about this, and one of the images that came to mind was speeding through the terrain till you hit a giant wall. And it’s not that you can’t tunnel under the wall, it’s not that with the right ropes and pulleys and such that you couldn’t climb the wall, it’s not that there are no cracks in the wall, but it’s gonna take a little time. It’s not something you just blaze through. And I think people’s ‘walls’ or ‘fortifications’ they find themselves up against will be different, but there may be an experience which is parallel for a lot of people. Maybe it’s a swamp rather than a wall, but something which creates slowness and requires that the path move from linear speed to exploratory, finding the way through it.
KS: Yeah. I think the ‘wall’ is a great analogy, because we’ve got the Saturn, and the idea of ‘station’, too. It’s like stopping. And then, while you were saying all that, Austin, the idea that came to my mind is it’s like the galloping horse across the pasture and then coming to a halt. And if there’s a fence, then maybe it’s a little higher than the horse is capable of jumping over. So if you’ve ever watched a horse get up to a fence that it can’t immediately get past, it runs up and down the side of the fence for sometime trying to figure out a way forward. And that is the feeling of those two weeks. You are the horse. And instead of going forward—as you said, Austin—in a linear way, you are now going back and forwards in a sideways formation to try and figure out a way. And that’s perhaps a good symbol for this idea of this energy of going over the same ground or treading water or taking it deeper with where you are.
AC: I really like the ‘horse’ analogy. Also, part of what you end up doing in this is mapping the boundary, which is very ‘Mercury’, mapping the boundary.
KS: Oh, that’s a beautiful phrase.
AC: Well, I was just thinking about the horse. And most fences are not 100% straight lines. So not only are you no longer moving straight forward, you’re following the contour of the boundary and trying to find the weak spaces.
KS: Yes.
AC: Maybe you’re defending that boundary and you’re trying to keep stuff from getting in. And maybe you’re ‘aggressing’. One of the images that came to mind when I was thinking about this was sieging a fortress, right? You don’t just march your army up to the gate, right? You can dig under the walls, you can try to widen cracks in the walls, but regardless, you kinda sit back and have to sit with and come to understand the structure before you can get through it. Or if you’re defending that fortress, you have to understand the weak points and maybe buttress those. But both of them—those are just two understandings on opposite sides of the same boundary.
KS: Totally.
CB: Right. I mean, one of the things that’s weird here is Mercury in Sagittarius, in and of itself as a placement, you would normally think of placement where its issue is communicating too much or talking too much or trying to do too much as a typical issue or a problem, or sometimes it’s something that people with Mercury in Sagittarius are able to use to their benefit. You know, one of my favorite ‘Mercury in Sagittarius’ astrologers is Rob Hand, and at any moment Rob Hand can just launch into a very long discussion that will have many detours and interesting anecdotes and side notes and things like that, that will last for like 30 minutes. And his lecture career is largely about that, because it’s usually very interesting when he goes on those kinds of tangents. But this is an interesting placement because you have two separate things that are inhibiting Mercury from doing that. On the one hand, you have it hitting Saturn, which is usually holding back or causing blockages or issues with communication, and then you have it stationing retrograde, which is essentially doing the same, which pretty much just reinforces what you guys are saying. But I’m trying to think of specific scenarios in which I would imagine Mercury having the inclination to want to go overboard—and that’s part of why sometimes Mercury in Sagittarius is traditionally interpreted as a difficult placement or a problematic placement for Mercury in terms of its usual significations—and then how that would work out in terms of it running into blockages and doing that, or perhaps having negative or challenging results as a result of that tendency.
KS: The one thing that comes to my mind—cuz I was thinking, too, of what are some of the real-life examples of this. Maybe you’ve got some paperwork that you need processed, or you’re looking for an approval of something. And you’ve submitted the documents, and you’re waiting impatiently for an answer, but what happened was that you submitted the documents either prematurely or they’re incomplete.
CB: Right.
KS: And it’s around this time that you get the feedback that whatever you were waiting on has been delayed or that more paperwork is required.
CB: Right. And then it takes longer than you expect or there’s delays.
KS: It takes longer than you expect. Yeah, the delays come in because the paperwork is incomplete. It reminds me of when I had to fill out my permanent residency application here in Canada for the first time years ago, which was basically like doing a PhD on my relationship to prove that it was a genuine relationship. And I remember being told—obviously the person from immigration did not use these words, but they basically said, “You have to ‘Saturn in Virgo’ the hell out of this.” Because if you ticked the wrong box, or you used the wrong color pen, they would just send the application back and the whole 18-month thing starts over. So it’s that kind of feeling where some small technicality or one small piece of information or data is missing or not where it should be. It’s not where it should be and that causes part of a delay or the problem.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. As far as Mercury retrogrades generally corresponding to delays go, this one triply so.
CB: Yeah. So this is gonna be one of ‘those’ types of Mercury retrogrades versus some of the other ones we were talking about earlier this year, where Mercury was stationing with Neptune and there were issues of lack of clarity causing the issues. Or when it stationed with Uranus and some sort of unexpected disruption happened. This is more of the stationing with Saturn, major delays and sometimes obstacles or errors that come up during the course of attempting to do ‘mercurial’ things.
AC: Yeah, definitely. I would also just say with Mercury being conjoined to a malefic, Mercury will have bad news to deliver to some people. You know, Mercury communicates and is said to take on the qualities or the nature of the planet which it is conjoined to. And so, you know, what does Mercury have to say conjunct Saturn? It has Saturn’s ideas to communicate, which might be like, ‘get better, you’re not good.’
KS: Yeah.
AC: I mean, I can also just see it being like kinda depressing. I mean, that’s not the only thing that’s gonna happen. But as far as what Mercury has to say when he’s delivering ‘Saturn’s’ mail to you, unpleasant communications will no doubt be a part of this set of stories.
CB: Right. One of the things that’s been tricky just over the past few weeks with Mercury—as it’s already been in the same sign as Saturn—is it’s been occurring after sundown; at least as the Sun was in Scorpio. If you had Gemini rising shortly after sunset, then it was like Mercury applying to Saturn, or Mercury in the same sign as Saturn ruling the ascendant. And that was causing some problems with elections during that time in terms of attempts to make an offering or something to a ‘7th house’ party but then being rejected or rebuffed in some sense, because of Saturn being in the 7th house in a night chart, and just that concept of saying ‘no’ or negating Mercury’s significations.
KS: Yeah, things being declined or turned down or rejected. And I think this is where maybe the fact that Mercury is retrograde—maybe if I stretch I can spin this into a positive if it gets declined. Say you make a pitch or a proposal, and you send it off and you just get ‘no’, or it’s not quite what we’re looking for or it doesn’t match our audience, whatever, there’s an opportunity I think to rework it and then resubmit. And so, I don’t know that I’d be doing that in this two-week period, because the message that Mercury is sending when it’s on Saturn is more of decline or ‘no thanks’.
AC: Now I would be thinking on it during this two-week period. You know, one of the things that I get from this is if you wanted to move in harmony with this configuration, it’s looking slowly, carefully, thoughtfully at the nature of a structure or a blockage or a wall, and, like we said earlier, mapping the boundary. So what is the nature of this limitation? You know, I couldn’t get through when I tried to run through it, but maybe I need to slow down and think. You know, maybe I need to tunnel under it.
CB: Right. Or sometimes you need a do-over and sometimes that’s hard and annoying; that’s one of the ‘archetypal Mercury retrograde’ scenarios as well. You initiate or you attempt to do something and it fails, or it doesn’t work out, or there’s an error that does not allow it to be brought to completion, and then you have to do the whole process over again. And that’s a very ‘Saturnian-type’ thing that I could see being emphasized here as well—having to go through the hassle of having to do it again once you get to the other side, when Mercury is closer to stationing direct—and then eventually meeting with success, or being able to bring to completion that which was blocked for whatever reason earlier in the cycle, closer to the retrograde station.
AC: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
KS: Totally.
AC: And that Full Moon in a Mercury-ruled sign, in Gemini, a day later, it just sort of turns up the volume on pretty much everything.
KS: It does. And I believe that it’s kind of square to Neptune.
CB: So where’s the Full Moon?
AC: 11, I think.
KS: I think it’s at 11. Yeah, come back in a couple of hours.
CB: Just for our audio listeners.
KS: Yeah, so the Full Moon at 11 Gemini. And the Sun and Moon will be square Neptune at 11 Pisces. As if that weekend, December 2-3, hasn’t already got this weird punctuation around it, yeah, we’ve got a little bit of Neptune in the mix. So maybe that just adds to the confusion, or it highlights a way of dealing with whatever heavy mental or detailed thing is just to take an escape. I’m not sure exactly how people will navigate it, but it’s definitely creating that see-saw.
AC: Yeah, I would just not bank on swift, clear communications for that weekend.
KS: Uh-uh.
AC: You know, don’t put your eggs in that basket during that time period.
CB: Right. Or if you do something that doesn’t work out, and you need to do it over again, just get over that sooner than you might otherwise. Cuz sometimes you can have a tendency to dwell on that and be like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe that didn’t work or didn’t go through.” But sometimes during the early phases of those Mercury retrograde periods when that happens, you sometimes just need to—I can’t think of a better way to say it, but just submit to it and just go through the process and go through the motions, and sometimes that’s all it’s about.
KS: Well, and I think the one concept—as you’ve been saying, Chris—that really comes up for me is it’s about quality control. And I always think that maybe the underlying intention of Saturn transit or a Saturn aspect like this is that it is looking to weed out lower-quality specimens or projects or plans. And if something does get rejected—or as you say, you’ve gotta go back over—maybe the Saturn in Virgo in me is like you’ll do it better the second time. You will have something that is more substantial or is stronger or has more substance.
CB: Right. The ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ scenario.
KS: Yeah. Or you might have been really attached to it, but if it didn’t quite hit the mark, put your energy into something that has more of a chance.
CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, how do you guys give advice during those times? Because sometimes it’s like you have scenarios where the person really has to start something, or they have to at least try during the early phase of Mercury stationing retrograde.
KS: Oh, yeah.
CB: And sometimes it doesn’t work out and then they have to do it again. And then later, once Mercury has stationed direct, like two or three weeks later, then it goes through. But I’m often met with an interesting question about would it have been better to just put it off until three weeks later, or did you need to go through that process? Was there something useful or constructive about through that process of trying and failing and then trying again?
AC: Well, I mean, both of those happen. I do find that a lot of times people think—myself included—that they absolutely have to do something by the station.
CB: Right.
AC: And in retrospect that was just being dumb.
CB: Right. There’s like this sense of urgency about it. But then later, once you look back, and you look at all the troubles you went through, you realize you could have just put it off.
AC: Yeah. You know, I love to put things off. Half of the art of timing is racing to hit a particularly fertile piece of time. And then the other half is slowing yourself down and being like, you know what, even though I would like the idea of this being accomplished by this day, that might be a product of my impatience rather than wisdom.
CB: Right. I guess I sometimes just wonder how much is it that versus I need to think deeply about this and whether I really do need to do this right now versus are we just being neurotic at a certain point if you’re putting off some activities or some minor things until Mercury is not retrograde. It’s often—not often, let’s say sometimes there’s an ambiguity about where to draw that line between what are valid things that you can put off, if you’re thinking deeply about something, versus what you should just do and this is not something that you need to wait until an auspicious astrological alignment in order to accomplish.
AC: Yeah. Well, I think that the answer was encoded in a way that you phrased the question. The more important something is, the more seriously you should consider its timing. The less important something is, the less it matters.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah. One of the pieces of advice that I often do give to clients—it’s very common for me to get a lot of email queries or clients needing some reassurance or just insight, “I’ve gotta sign these documents,” or “I’ve gotta make this submission and Mercury’s gonna be retrograde or Mercury is stationing.” And the piece of advice that I’ll normally say is if you have to do it, you have to do it. Mercury retrograde is not a terminal thing. It’s more of a frustrating ‘thorn in your side, stone in your shoe’ situation, maybe this particular Mercury retrograde aside. But the practical piece of advice is if you do have to submit something—particularly around a station, the station retrograde—be proactive and follow up. Call or email three or four or five days later to make sure that what you sent got where it needed to go. So I think in those situations where you do have to go ahead, I wrote a post on my blog earlier this year around Mercury retrograde and real estate, because I realized we actually bought our first home in the middle of a Mercury retrograde period. So we signed contracts to buy a house, we signed contracts to take on a mortgage with the bank, and we did all of this in the middle of a Mercury retrograde. And we held that house for five years, and it worked, it was fine. It did what it needed to do. So I think if you’ve gotta go ahead, you’ve gotta go ahead. But I do recall we were actually traveling internationally, and the paperwork for this deal had to get faxed to a hotel, and it was very complicated getting the paperwork to the right place at the right time. So you can certainly work with it. I don’t think it has to be an absolute preventative. But as we were saying—even to go back to the pre-show discussion—this is the astrological weather, so be mindful and maybe adapt your strategy accordingly.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I really like that advice, Kelly, the follow up. I would also say if it has to do with signing things, read the fine print. Make yourself read the fine print. If somebody says, “Yeah, it’ll be fine.”
KS: Totally.
CB: Right.
AC: And I would add to that if you gotta initiate something important near a Mercury retrograde station, be adaptable moving forward. Don’t be shocked if there are some changes. You know, sometimes the Mercury retrograde—it’s not that everything is totally reversed and what you thought was wonderful is terrible. It’s just that there’s a certain instability and things get a little wiggly, and they might look a little different than what you thought they were gonna look like. They might not be horrible, but Mercury is not in a stable or stabilizing position during that part of its phase. And so, just setting expectations accordingly.
CB: Sure. And that Full Moon that you guys mentioned early on the 3rd, at 11° of Gemini, that really does put even more focus on that Mercury station there at 29 Sagittarius around the same time.
KS: Oh, yeah.
CB: And also, Saturn getting ready to leave that sign, in the sense of this being one of the final culminations of what Saturn in Sagittarius has been about in a reflective sense for some people, in terms of taking stock of what that transit has been about, both collectively, as well as individually, for a lot of people over the past two-and-a-half, almost three years; but then also an intensification of one last ‘Saturn in Sagittarius-type’ event that gets amped up by Mercury stationing there, with the Full Moon in a Mercury-ruled sign. Sort of an intensification of that last bit of Saturn in Sagittarius, like Austin was saying.
AC: Yeah, I’m curious to see what it’ll look like on a mundane and political level. I don’t think it will be a quiet December. Just to tie this into a very simple thing—just looking at the balance of planets in signs of different elemental qualities—as December begins, we have four planets in Sagittarius. Uranus is still in Aries, the North Node is still in Leo—we’ve got quite a bit of fire in play. Although it won’t be moving into a fire sign, Mars is moving into arguably its strongest place in the zodiac shortly after the first full week of December ends, where we have Mars moving into Scorpio. Is it on the 8th?
KS: I think it’s around the 8th, yeah.
AC: That looks like the 9th, okay. Or maybe it’s night on the 8th.
CB: It’s like late on the 8th, early on the 9th.
AC: Okay, great. And, you know, Mars not being in a fire sign, Mars inarguably has a distinctly fiery quality. And so, as far as the stage being set for rancor publicly, I expect there to be some public brawls in December, more so than the average level of contentiousness which we live with right now. A spike from the baseline of contentious time.
CB: Well, and it’s interesting Jupiter in Scorpio. So it’ll be at 12° of Scorpio by the time we get there, till December 9. You know, even though it’s been bringing up terrible things in the news, there’s been more of a general theme across all of them of seeking justice for past misdeeds, and past misdeeds being brought to light for the sake of justice or healing or other keywords for that, that’s been more of a positive process for many people, obviously.
AC: Yeah, Jupiter’s ingress into Scorpio didn’t time when these acts were committed, this is one of the factors involved in timing the exposure. And the exposure is creating more justice, not less, right? So we see Jupiter’s fundamentally-benefic quality there. Exposing bad things is a way of turning them into good things.
CB: Right. But with Mars ingressing into Scorpio late on the 8th and early on the 9th, it seems to bring more of a contentious or ‘conflict-filled-type’ quality and a sort of intensity to that area and to that transit, which then builds up over the course of the month as Mars gets closer and closer to actually conjoining Jupiter in Scorpio. So I’m curious if that will change the nature of some of the discussions that have been happening up to this point.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that Mars is considerably more punitive than Jupiter, especially in Scorpio. And by the way, on a ‘fun, essential dignity’ note, for Mars’ time in the first several degrees of Scorpio, it has every dignity except exaltation. It’s the triplicity ruler, it’s the ruler, it’s in its own bound, and it’s in its own decan.
KS: Wow.
AC: Yeah. And so, it’s peak Mars.
KS: I like that. But I do think you guys are right, that we’re getting this sort of more military—it’s not ‘Mars in Aries’ aggressive, but there is this sort of drive or sense of what are we gonna do about all of this stuff that has been coming out, and will there be punishments that are handed down. And I think just from simple timing we’ve got in December Mars coming into Scorpio and having lots of dignity. But it may be in January—when Mars actually catches up to Jupiter, which will be around the time of its sextile to Pluto—that we might get the real stirring of the pot, so to speak.
CB: Okay, there it is. So it’s about 17° of Scorpio around January 6th or 7th. That’s where Jupiter and Mars conjoin?
KS: Yeah. And then we’ve got that sextile to the Sun-Pluto. So that feels like part of the ‘Mars in Scorpio’ story might peak or come to its full intensity through that period.
CB: Got it. I’m just animating it to see. It looks like it happens at 17°55’ Scorpio on January 6. Okay, so that’s obviously one of our major trends this month, Mars ingressing into Scorpio.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And then of course later in the month, which we’ll talk about—I think we’ll have to put it off a little bit longer—Saturn ingresses into Capricorn. So we’ve got two major, major ingresses taking place. But just to back up a tiny bit to the very top of the month, the very first transit that actually happens is that Venus ingresses into Sagittarius on December 1. So that’s one of the early transits happening at the beginning of the month. Simultaneously—or almost simultaneously on December 2, Jupiter exactly trines Neptune. So that Jupiter-Neptune trine is actually one of the stronger or more prominent. Even though it’s not a hard aspect, it’s one of the more prominent outer planet alignments that’s happening at the very, very beginning of the month. And that’s a little interesting or might be a little bit more pertinent because it’s tied into that first lunation that we have, where the Full Moon occurs at 11° of Gemini, and that’s exactly squaring Neptune. And then Neptune is pretty closely trining Jupiter at that point.
KS: Yeah, the Jupiter trine Neptune aspect, it’s actually one of only two outer planet aspects that Jupiter in Scorpio makes. We’ve just got the trine to Neptune this December and then we get the sextile to Pluto in 2018. So it’s significant in the context, particularly, of the ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ story. This is the first time we get Jupiter in Scorpio interacting with a more outer planet. You know, I’m interested to see what floodgates might open, whether there is more that comes out of the ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ pipeline. But I also think this is a ‘Jupiter-Neptune’ combination and there’s some kind of healing or emotion or compassion or soulfulness or sensitivity that strikes me as coming forward from this. Whether that’s about finding meaning through compassion or healing people through water or energetic stuff, I think there’s maybe a soft side to this that might be a nice counterpoint to a lot of the other energy in that early December period. But I’m very curious to hear particularly what you think, Austin.
AC: Oh, I agree. One of Neptune’s primary actions will be to soften Jupiter in Scorpio a little bit. You know, Jupiter in Scorpio feeds growth or the expansion of understanding via revelation and acceptance of things which are ugly or dark. You know, Neptune is very much about acceptance and sometimes forgiveness; you know, just bigger, vast understanding. You know, Neptune’s orbit encloses all of the rest of the planets. So in a sense it creates a space big enough for all of them. I consider this a background factor, I consider it a pleasant one, but I don’t think it’s a particularly ‘event-producing’ configuration. I think it just sort of softens Jupiter. And it’s not that Jupiter doesn’t trine Neptune now.
KS: Yes, exactly. Late November, it’s coming in.
AC: Yeah, so, you know, again, it’s worth noting. And, you know, I think poor Venus’ entrance into Sagittarius is going to be completely overshadowed by the ‘Mercury-Saturn’ business, as well as the Moon in Gemini. I mean, it’s a slight difference in tone. And again, it’s another planet in a fire sign. And so, there’s a slight difference in affect with Venus in Sag versus Venus in Scorpio, but I don’t see it being one of the star players of this month.
CB: Sure. And I was just mentioning it cuz I wrote it down on my list of what ingresses are taking place this month, to hit them chronologically. Is this the first of three Jupiter-Neptune trines? Are we gonna get three of them, or does it not quite happen?
KS: I’m gonna double-check.
CB: It’s like I would assume we’re gonna get three of them, but I don’t know how far back Jupiter’s gonna—
[crosstalk]
AC: I think the direct station is really close.
KS: The station direct is at 13 Scorpio in July, and Neptune at that time will be—
AC: 16.
KS: 16, yeah. So we will get a trine in August. Yeah, Jupiter-Neptune, and then we’ll have a retrograde here in May, 16-16. Yeah, so this is the first of three.
AC: It’s part of the background for really most of the next year.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right. It’s hard with those easy types of transits between relatively easy—I don’t know, can’t think of a better word—planets. Because it’s hard to generate, or they don’t typically generate many sparks, and so there’s not much to really focus on when it comes to them. But it’s sort of an interesting background transit that will be present, as something that’s unique about this Jupiter transit through Scorpio, that wouldn’t be true about other Jupiter transits through Scorpio.
AC: Right.
KS: Totally.
AC: Speaking of Scorpio, let’s say some more things about Mars’ time in Scorpio, because we talked about how it may affect ongoing ‘Jupiterian’ themes on a collective level. Again, this is ‘prime-time’ Mars and it’s there for most of January. And so, if you do well with ‘Scorpio’ stuff, and you like ‘Mars’ stuff—like I do—I love it when Mars is in Scorpio. It feels fantastic. I have more than enough energy to do everything I dream of doing. I tend to be really good about whatever exercise routine I’m doing. You know, if you like pretending you’re a freight train, Mars in Scorpio can be really good for that.
CB: Right. Robert Zoller told me once in an analogy he used—he said that Mars in Aries is like a machine gun, whereas he said that Mars in Scorpio was like a sniper rifle, or that’s the analogy that he used at least.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s interesting and true in some sense. One of my go-tos was ‘ninja versus samurai’, like I will meet you out in the open field (Aries) versus I will kill you at night. But in terms of how I experience the shift in energy levels with Mars in Scorpio, I definitely get the fixed water, like having a consistent fixed river of power just carrying you forward towards your goals. But because Mars is a malefic, it’s very different to be on the receiving end of Mars versus the acting end of Mars. And so, people tend to have extremely-polarized experiences around powerful malefics, right? And that’s true with natal charts, as well as by transit.
CB: Right.
AC: So I would probably—if you have some knowledge of astrology—go on Planet Watcher and just look at the last two or three times that Mars was in Scorpio and ask yourself whether you liked it or whether you disliked it, because you probably have very consistent response to that energy input.
KS: And just for those who might need a quick guide, Mars was last in Scorpio from January 3, 2016 until early March. March 6, 2016. That was a little bit of a unique situation, cuz we had the retrograde.
AC: Right.
KS: At least it’ll give you a taste, for sure.
AC: Right. And then two years before that, and then two years before that, and then two years before that.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Reaching from a handy ephemeris. Or a strategically-placed ephemeris.
KS: I think I have to replace this one. I’m gonna have to replace it for the second time.
CB: What have you done to that poor thing? What’s happening on the front?
KS: Well, that was the Egyptian terms, and they’ve fallen apart.
CB: Oh, okay.
KS: I stopped at Mercury’s terms in Leo, and I’ve got nothing underneath that. I’ve had to put a copy inside.
CB: That reminds me of Ptolemy’s story, the story about finding a set of new terms or bounds. He said he found an ancient, very tattered manuscript that had a different set of bounds, and everyone kind of assumed that he was making it up the whole time. But it’s actually making me think otherwise. Maybe he just found—
KS: Totally. He found it, and he had to fill in the blanks.
CB: Right. There was an equivalent of a ‘Kelly Surtees’ at the Library of Alexandria, and she slapped her terms on her ephemeris and carried it around and then it fell apart.
KS: Yes, it fell apart. Well, I mean, it’s very handy to have them altogether.
CB: Right.
KS: So now I’ve had to put them inside. Anyway, you’ve just made me laugh. And people should know we do use books. I mean, it’s nice that we have our great software. This is fantastic.
CB: Yeah, I did a video on top six book recommendations for new astrologers, and one of them was buy a print ephemeris and start reading it regularly and learning how to use it.
KS: Absolutely. It’s so critical. I will just say one quick thing on Venus in Sag. I know she gets quite overshadowed, but Venus is in Sag for most of December. And this is a happier vibe than Venus in Scorpio. So from a ‘Venus’ perspective, she’s just a bit lighter. I know she’s in the sign with Saturn and etc., etc., but I’d rather have her in Sag than in Scorp, I think.
CB: Yeah. In the last webinar I did with the Hellenistic course, we went and read through the earliest-surviving delineations of how astrologers would interpret planets in signs of the zodiac. And one of the things that was pretty consistent is that their primary interpretative principle was looking at the planet and then looking at what the ruler of that sign is and then interpreting or merging their significations together. And that became the reason why Venus in Scorpio was interpreted as more problematic in some instances. It was interpreted as Venus being given significations from Mars, and Mars’ significations often being contrary to her own versus Venus transiting through Sagittarius and being given significations from Jupiter and that being a little bit brighter, let’s say, than significations from Mars and Scorpio.
KS: And it’s a more comfortable fit. Because Venus and Jupiter have more similar qualities if we just think benefic, heat and moisture. You know, Mars being dry, Venus perhaps being moist or what have you.
CB: Right.
KS: So it is a background influence. I didn’t necessarily need to push it to the front, but I think it’s gonna be nice. I’m looking forward to Venus shifting into Sag.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
KS: Should we move to the second-half of the month? I know we’re like this is so exciting what’s happening in the first-half.
CB: Yeah, I guess we’re an hour-and-a-half into this, so we should press forward and get out of the first week of—
KS: The first four days of December.
CB: Right. Okay, so on our list we’ve got the retrograde, we’ve got the Full Moon in Gemini on the 3rd. Then eventually we have the Mercury conjunct Saturn, which takes place December 6.
KS: And that’s two of three.
CB: Right. Two of three, and the third will take place in Capricorn the following month.
KS: Yes.
CB: We’ve talked about Mars ingressing into Scorpio on December 9. Actually the only thing I have written down doesn’t take place until like nine days later, and that’s the New Moon in Sagittarius. Is there anything I’m overlooking there?
KS: The only thing I’ve got is that on the 12th, Eastern Time—and it’ll be the 12th for you guys as well—the Sun is conjunct Mercury. So just that phase shift with Mercury retrograde conjunct the Sun. Unless you would add anything else to that mid-month period, Austin.
CB: That’s hugely important. So the midpoint in the Mercury retrograde phase is when Mercury is retrograde and it conjoins the Sun, and that’s the halfway point in the retrograde cycle. And so, that takes place on the 12th.
KS: Yeah, I’ve got it on the 12th, 8:48 PM Eastern. So that would be 6:48 for you, Chris, I think.
CB: Yeah, that looks about right. So it happens at about 21° of Sagittarius.
KS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
CB: Got it. Okay, anything else? Did you notice anything else that we’re overlooking, Austin, between the ingress of Mars into Scorpio on the 9th and the New Moon in Sagittarius on the 18th?
AC: Not in particular. There is a Mercury-Venus conjunction. What day is that?
KS: That is on the 15th, at 9:08 AM. So 7:08 AM for you, Chris.
CB: How did you have the times?
KS: Oh, I was just writing up a blog post this morning for December, so I had printed this from Solar Fire.
CB: Okay, so you generate not just the dates, but also the times from a Solar Fire report.
KS: Yeah, it’s just the dynamic report. It’s totally default, and it comes out with the times. The date, the time, even the position in the zodiac. So, you know, Mercury’s conjunct Venus 15th of December, 9:08 AM, 17 Sag. One’s retrograde, one’s direct.
CB: Okay.
KS: It’s very detailed.
CB: Yeah, I’m still new to the ways of generating general transit reports and stuff that I’m learning from.
KS: Like I knew about them, but I just started using them, and it’s just so much more efficient.
CB: Sure.
KS: So we can debrief afterwards if you want.
CB: Yeah, I’ll have to get you to do a tutorial. Maybe we could do a tutorial video, and we could record it for YouTube and show people how to use Solar Fire to generate that or something.
KS: Totally. Yeah, it’s the kind of thing that when I meet with clients in person—and when the client knows a little bit about astrology—I will give them a year’s worth of big stuff.
CB: Sure. Okay, so that Mercury-Venus conjunction takes place on December 15 at 17° of Sagittarius.
KS: Yes.
CB: So the next thing after that would be the New Moon in Sagittarius. And when does that take place?
KS: That one I do not have a time for, because I did not do lunations. You’ve got it.
CB: Yeah, it looks like it’s very late on the 17th, at least here in Denver.
KS: Yeah, I might have it. Here we go, I do have it on a different page.
CB: So it’s at 26° of Sagittarius, the New Moon in Sagittarius. So it’s right there with this huge cluster or pileup of planets in Sagittarius. Saturn is still there at 29°46’ Sag. Venus is at 21, and Mercury is still retrograde at 15 Sag. So that is the New Moon in Sagittarius right in the middle of the month.
KS: Yes. And so, it’ll be the 17th for you guys, 18th over here in Oz, just before the solstice, just before Saturn ingresses. So that lunation—the next four weeks after this New Moon—that’s when we have the Saturn ingress.
CB: Right. It’s so interesting that you have a New Moon there. And then Saturn is still there, but it’s getting ready to leave the sign. It’s like the first New Moon in Sag that’s almost free of that Saturn transit. Although it’s not really free at this point, cuz it’s still barely in the sign.
KS: Yeah. And I think cuz the Moon is then just gonna go straight from the conjunction with the Sun to the conjunction with Saturn, I mean, that’s quite a maltreated Moon, is that not?
CB: Right. Yeah, good point. What do you think, Austin?
AC: I agree. I mean, I think that New Moon is of the theme that we delineated earlier, which is this reviewing Saturn just before it leaves, right? You know, with the Mercury station there, then we have the New Moon there, and then it’s gonna leave. And then we’re gonna enter this new ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ phase like a day after the New Moon.
CB: Yeah, two days. It looks like almost exactly two days later, Saturn makes its ingress into 0°0’ Capricorn.
KS: Yes. Yeah, cuz mentally I’ve got the 20th as when that ingress happens.
CB: That’s pretty wild. So yeah, it’s like those two lunations are really the two last gasps of Saturn in Sagittarius reminding us of what it’s all about and giving one more hit before it makes its way into the next sign and leaves Sagittarius for the next 27-some odd years.
AC: Yeah. You know what’s interesting—and this will show up in horaries—is that we have the Sun very close to conjunction with Saturn, but the Sun doesn’t complete its conjunction with Saturn until just after Saturn has moved across that boundary. That conjunction will be complete and perfect in Capricorn, even though it looks like it’s just about to happen in Sagittarius. And on a transit, experiential level that’s like sitting and looking at something and thinking about the nature of your responsibilities, obligations, your discipline and all that, and then getting closer to it. But when you actually reach it, when you get as close as you’re gonna get, when you get your fullest view, it will be from a very different angle, right? It’ll be that ‘Capricorn’ angle. And so, we really have the old boss becoming the new boss by the time you actually arrive at the meeting.
KS: Yes. And so, it’s the idea that something has changed form or substance or shape by the time you get there, because as you were approaching it for quite some time, you were seeing the ‘Saturn in Sag’ version. And by the time you get there, what you get is Saturn in Capricorn. Very, very different.
CB: Right.
AC: So let’s talk about—
CB: Hold on. I just pulled up a chart. So this is an example. If you had a horary chart during that time, where you had Leo rising, Sun is the ruler of the ascendant, so it represents the querent, and you have Aquarius on the 7th house. If it was relationship question, like ‘will I get in a relationship with ‘x’?’, and the Sun is down there at 26 Sag, and it’s applying within 3° to Saturn at 29, normally that would be a ‘yes’ answer to the question. But then, like you said, Austin, Saturn moves into Capricorn before the conjunction can be completed. So there’s gonna be a few horary questions or even electional charts or other things during that time that’ll have that specific configuration.
AC: Yeah, where it’s gonna end up different from what it looks like.
CB: Right. And so, this is actually called ‘evasion’ in Abu Ma’shar. So this is from Charles Burnett’s translation. He says: “Evasion is if there’s a Planet A going towards application to another planet (B), and before it reaches it, the planet (B), to which it is applying, removes to another sign. Then, since the pushing planet (A) changes sign, if another planet (C) is closer to it (A than to B) than its application is to the other planet (C), and its application to the first planet (B) is aborted.” So then it becomes a question of, does another planet catch up with and perfect the aspect with Saturn before the Sun catches up to it in the new sign? And if so, then the question ends up being ‘no’. But if the Sun is able to make a clear application to Saturn before other planets catch up to it, then the answer might still be ‘yes’, even though there’ll be a change of circumstances because of the change of signs.
KS: Totally.
CB: Sure. So yeah, anyway, just connected with the whole horary theme from the beginning.
KS: I was gonna say we’re totally on the horary theme tonight. It’s fantastic.
CB: Well, it’s just sort of relevant because this would be one of those answers where—I’m trying to think of a scenario. You know, the ‘will I’ scenario is very clear here. It’s like will me and this person get married, let’s say.
KS: Yeah.
CB: You’re looking at the application of those two planets. And if they’re gonna complete the aspect in the future, then the answer’s ‘yes’. If they’re not, or if the aspect is destroyed in some sense or aborted, then the answer ends up being ‘no’. Whereas if it was more of a ‘should I’ question, then you have a question of how would you interpret this chart if it’s ‘should I get into a relationship’ or ‘should I marry this other person’.
KS: Yeah.
CB: We don’t have to go there, but that would be the actual and very technical terms, the terms of the debate, or the difference.
KS: Yes, yes. And we probably should do a show on horary, cuz we clearly all have a lot to say there.
CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely we’ll do that at some point. I haven’t done much on horary. I did finally do one show introducing it with Lee Lehman this summer, but I’ve been meaning to do some follow-ups.
KS: Yeah, horary’s fun. So we have to talk about Saturn going into Cap.
CB: Yeah, I think it looks like we are at that point. So after the New Moon in Sagittarius on December 18, as Austin said, it’s just like a day or so later that Saturn moves into Capricorn around December 19.
KS: Yeah. This is really ‘the’ news, not just of the month, but of the quarter.
CB: How long is it there for? When’s the final ingress out of Capricorn?
KS: It’s three years. And I’ll get you the final ingress date from ephemeris that doesn’t have terms on it. It leaves Capricorn for good in December 2020. Yeah, it will pop in and out throughout 2020, but it leaves for the final time in December. Almost three years to the day, like the 17th of December 2020.
CB: Okay. So this is gonna be a full-fledged three-year transit of Saturn through this sign.
KS: Yeah, usually Saturn does spend three years. Like when it first went into Sag, it was early 2015, and it’s leaving now. You do have to think about it, particularly, doing a whole sign transit or what have you. Like Saturn’s in Sag and that’s my ‘x’ house. I find clients have to think about that three-year window.
CB: Yeah, that’s just something I meant to and I don’t think I emphasized in the ‘Saturn returns’ episode. You know, the starting date is the first time that it ingresses into the sign, even if it retrogrades out and comes back in, and then the final ending date is the last time it leaves that sign. Even if previously it had left the sign and then comes back in, it’s the final time and the first time that really counts as the bookends to that period.
KS: Totally.
CB: Sure. All right, so I know that we’re gonna do a whole separate episode, or at least that was the plan. And, Austin, you said that you were hoping we could put it off until January to give it a little bit of time to percolate, but we’ll still plan on doing a full ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ episode here before too long.
AC: We don’t have to wait until January, but I would like Saturn to have entered Capricorn before we sit down.
CB: Sure. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I’ve become much more comfortable with that. Cuz I forgot when we did the last ‘Saturn in Sag’ episode, it had ingressed in late 2014/early 2015, and then it retrograded back into Scorpio, and then it went back in. And it was when it went back in the second time that we actually recorded the ‘Saturn in Sag’ episode. We had already started to get some sense of what that was gonna be about, and I think that makes sense in this context as well. So you guys, though, have already started seriously thinking about this and writing articles and doing your research. So how are you feeling about this, or have you started to get a sense? Austin, I know you were coming up with some really good keywords already for this transit as an overall meta-interpretation, right?
AC: Yeah, I have some things. I’m not satisfied with what I have yet. I mean, one of the difficult things about interpreting Saturn in Capricorn is just differentiating it from ‘raw’ Saturn, because it’s so ‘raw’ Saturn in the way that people think about Saturn. You know, Saturn’s rulership is equally strong in Aquarius, but I think people tend to associate more of the ‘Capricorn’ side of Saturn significations with the planet itself. I mean, everything that you associate with Saturn—‘limitations’, ‘boundary’, ‘responsibility’, ‘building things to last’, ‘enduring’, ‘strengthening’, etc., etc.—all of these qualities apply in spades to Saturn in Capricorn. You know, Saturn punishes, right? Saturn in Capricorn will certainly punish. Saturn in Capricorn is also the sturdiest of support, right? It’s the structural dynamics you get with Saturn, where you can be trapped by a structure or you can be empowered or protected by a structure. And fortunately, or not, the week after Saturn’s ingress really gives us a chance to both see and feel it. When the Sun crosses the boundary from Sagittarius into Capricorn—which is the equinox (the solstice)—it immediately encounters Saturn.
KS: Yes.
AC: And that’s the beginning end of the Sun-Saturn synodic cycle, right? That’s the New Moon in a sense for Saturn. And so, the Sun’s just looking right at Saturn, and vice-versa.
CB: Right.
AC: So there’s a really nice opportunity to just sit back and look and see what there is to see. And then a few days later, on Christmas, we have Venus conjunct that Saturn in Capricorn.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, that’s a chance to feel it. It may not be the most joyous Christmas configuration, but take it as an opportunity to understand the direction that things are going in. And to see the pattern that will unpack itself over the next three years, those two subsequent conjunctions provide us an opportunity. To add to something that we’ve said a number of times about watching an outer planet’s ingress on a mundane level, looking for early events which signify themes, I always do that on a personal level as well. It’s like, okay, that will be Saturn moving from my 6th into my 7th. What is that gonna look like?
CB: Right. And sometimes you’ll start seeing events happening right away. But sometimes they’re really subtle if you’re not paying attention to it.
AC: Yeah, it’s definitely something that you’ll probably only glean any wisdom from in retrospect if you’re not paying attention. If you’re not making an effort to pay attention.
CB: Right. You know, occasionally it’s not always subtle. I mean, for some people it’s gonna be very prominent, like if that’s activated by annual profections already, or if it’s moving into a prominent part of the chart. But yeah, as a long-term, three-year transit, sometimes it’s a good idea to start paying attention to those little changes. Just little, subtle changes that start happening in your life at that time, cuz sometimes they’ll snowball into much larger themes before you know it.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, just looking at the chart of the last third of the month—where we have Saturn in Capricorn and Mars in Scorpio—we have two, big strong malefics. Both of the malefics are in signs that they rule and are very powerful there. And what’s interesting is we have the benefics in the signs of the malefics. We have Jupiter in Mars’ sign of Scorpio and Venus in Saturn’s sign, Capricorn. I’m just noticing that, so I don’t have any tremendous insights into it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Kelly, what do you think about Saturn in Capricorn?
KS: Yeah, look, like you, Austin, I almost feel a little premature on my ‘Saturn in Cap’ thoughts. They’re not fully formed.
CB: Have you been reading up on this? What’s your process, Kelly? Do you go back and look at past instances? Do you look at client charts? Cuz I know both of you are writing your ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ columns at this point, right, Kelly?
KS: Yes, absolutely. And I’ve already written horoscopes for next year that have got Saturn in Capricorn. One of the first things that I do to get a feel for it—because that’s what I need—is I look back to the last time Saturn was in Capricorn, and that last few times. So I’m starting with the collective, if you like, or the big picture before making it personal. And of course the last time that Saturn was in Capricorn was from early 1988 to early 1991. Now that was a unique time because Saturn was in Capricorn with Uranus and Neptune, and we had the collapse in the Eastern bloc states in Europe and the Soviets. We had the Wall come down. There was a huge shift in Europe at that time.
CB: Right. A lot of mundane astrologers associate that transit as one of the primary mundane things.
KS: Totally. And I do recognize it wasn’t just a pure ‘Saturn in Cap’ energy, because Saturn was there with Uranus and Neptune, which is highly unusual. I mean—yeah, go, Austin.
AC: I was just gonna say precedents are always important. Yeah, I don’t like that, cuz it’s ‘dirty’ data, cuz there was so much else going on.
KS: Totally.
AC: You know, one thing—if you just look at Saturn in Capricorn in the 20th century for the United States—it’s not good for money.
KS: No. And I think that’s not even unique to the US. That’s a collective thing. I think Saturn is a ‘contraction’ energy.
AC: Absolutely.
KS: It restricts things. It limits things. Capricorn represents banking institutions and the financial foundations that our society operates on. Whether you agree with it or not, we all live in a society in which the banking systems have a huge amount of power and influence. And I do think collectively we will see tightening of credit. We will see tightening and an increase in limitation or regulation around borrowing. And I also think one of the collective areas we will see that contraction in is around real estate and property.
AC: I hope so.
KS: Yeah. I mean, in some areas there are bubbles. I mean, there are parts of Sydney, there are parts of Vancouver that are just priced out for the average person, whatever the median wages are. And to go back to one of the other themes of our ongoing conversation tonight, how it shows up collectively and how you experience it personally will be different. While I’m saying Saturn in Capricorn can have a collective impact on banking and finance, if Saturn in Capricorn isn’t somehow connected to your personal 2nd house or your personal 8th house of money, it may be that it’s got nothing to do with money for you personally. So you do want to filter in these are the collective, big picture symbols and themes. But if Saturn in Cap is 7th house for you, this has got a hell of a lot more to do with your commitments and obligations to other people, how you conduct yourself in partnerships, that type of thing.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. Just a really quick review, so Saturn enters Cap late ‘29-early ‘30s, right? So there’s the beginning of the Great Depression. And then it goes in again the end of the ‘50s-early ‘60s, there’s an economic downturn in the United States; it’s not epic, legendary, or historical. And then you have another small recession early ‘90s with Saturn in Cap for the United States. But what I was just saying is that you do have a consistent correspondence with economic downturns or contractions in the United States with Saturn in Capricorn, but the degree of those downturns is very different, depending on which previous instance you’re looking at.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
CB: Well, I mean, I actually don’t really have a preference on the US chart. But it’s funny that you’re mentioning that stuff, since of course with the ‘Sagittarius rising’ chart that you were mentioning earlier for the US, Capricorn would be the 2nd house, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s worth noting that Saturn puts pressure on the United States’ benefics in early Cancer. The ‘Declaration’ chart has a Venus-Jupiter in early Cancer. And so, that puts Saturn in Capricorn in a position to oppose them early on in its time there. And that’s a factor that Ray Merriman has done some nice work on. Basically, when you get multiple stressful malefic things that are gonna be around for a while, targeting America’s benefics in that ‘Declaration’ chart, you generally have economic problems.
KS: For sure. I think there’s one particular article that I would happily share with our listeners, which has formed part of my own research for this. I didn’t write it, so I don’t want to take any credit for this, but it’s written by the mundane Australian astrologer Ed Tamplin. In his most recent weekly column, he does a full treatment of Saturn in Capricorn, and he’s got some amazing historical notes here. Just to quickly mention a couple of things, he says: “The US Federal Reserve is also a Capricorn Sun chart, as the act was signed off on by Wilson on December 23, 1913 at 16:02 PM.” So the Sun, for the US Federal Reserve is right at the very start of Capricorn opposite Pluto in Cancer.
AC: That makes sense.
KS: That’s significant. Ed is just wonderful for these historical references. He’s gone back to the 1500s, 1517 to 1520, when Saturn was in Capricorn, with Pluto in Capricorn. So he’s done exactly what we’re talking about, Austin, where he’s looked specifically not just for Saturn in Cap, but Saturn in Cap, plus Pluto in Cap. And he talks about that period in the mid-16th century, or the early 16th century, about Magellan going off on his ‘round-the-world’ tour, sort of reshaping, as you said, and mapping the boundaries, earlier. And what’s interesting about that period—between 1517 and 1520—is we also had Uranus going into Taurus, or Uranus in Taurus at that time, which is another one of the unique signatures that we will be dealing with as we get into 2018. So I’m happy to get you that link, Chris, if you want to post it in the show notes. We can share it with people, if people just want to look at it. The research there, it would probably take me half-an-hour to go through all of it. Things about different banks, the Bank of New York, how they’re all connected to this ‘Saturn in Capricorn’ cycle.
CB: Yeah, what’s his website, again?
KS: So it’s edtamplin.com. And it’s the November 19 weekly horoscope column.
CB: Okay, good. Yeah, people should check that out at edtamplin.com. He used to have a running list of his latest articles, right?
KS: Yes, he has had that. And he’s been a little unwell this year. I don’t know if he’s got the running tally, but he’s still putting out his regular columns that are amazing.
CB: Yeah, that is really great. He actually wrote a really nice, kind review of my book in the FAA Journal earlier this year. So one of the things I wanted to mention goes back to the beginning of this conversation, when you were bringing up how the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Saturn was in Capricorn, was such a unique configuration because it had Uranus and Neptune there at the same time. And then the one of course that astrologers keep coming back to, that’s unique about this one, is Pluto being there, and Saturn gradually catching up to Pluto over the course of the next couple of years before conjoining it. With some of the different things that you guys are talking about, on the one hand, Pluto can be associated with this process of things ‘breaking down’ and ‘decay’ and ‘transformation’, there’s also this other side of Pluto, which is more about the ‘consolidation of power’. And I’m not sure that that’s not the direction that it’s gonna go in a number of these areas as well. Instead of seeing the breakdown of some of these structures that are built into society, in other instances, you’re gonna see this real consolidation, and things that are already powerful drawing more power, sucking more power into them and starting to wield that power in different ways. I don’t know, that’s a theme I keep coming up with. Cuz sometimes I see astrologers talk very optimistically about the breakdown of bad, existing structures in society, but I wonder about that Pluto transit hardening some of them in some instances.
KS: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Chris, the idea of consolidation of power. I mean, maybe it’s odd for me to say this considering the perspective I often take, I do think we’re gonna see destruction of power centers, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily gonna always be a good thing.
CB: Right. What do you think, Austin?
AC: Oh, I have a lot of thoughts about this. So let me reduce those into a few statements. And we’ll talk about it more when we do our ‘Saturn’ talk.
CB: Yeah, we’ll do a whole two hours on that.
AC: Right. So I think that Pluto in Capricorn is at this point pointing towards ‘zombie’ institutions which are operating on a logic that may have made sense 60 or 150 years ago, but have become increasingly irrelevant to the current state of things. This can be seen in other countries, in other regions of the world. But in the United States right now—with the United States having Pluto in Capricorn in its natal chart—we can see that the US education system, healthcare system, system of taxation, not to mention justice system—
CB: That’s a good one. Patrick Watson said that Saturn in Capricorn has a lot to do with prisons as well.
KS: Yeah, I don’t think it’d be justice, but the imprisonment process.
AC: Well, that’s what they call it. Ironically, the prison industrial complex is referred to as part of the justice system.
KS: Yeah.
AC: But wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But I think that the ‘Pluto’ part has been going on for a while, and this is Saturn joining it, we’re looking at all of these ‘zombie’ institutions. And this hooks into a much larger thing—which, again, I’ll attempt to be very brief about now—which is that Saturn in Capricorn is going to play us out, not only of this decade, but over 200 years of Jupiter-Saturn in earth signs.
KS: Yes.
AC: We are in the last three years of an era that began in 1802. This is the earth cycle. You know, we’ve learned a lot about natural resources and how matter works. We’ve had all of the industrial revolutions during this period. And both the advantages—what we’ve learned from this period—as well as the giant disadvantages of the patterns that we collectively have adopted I think will become increasingly clear. I see Saturn-Pluto as a retrospective on the last 215 years.
KS: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Austin. Because when we have Saturn moving into early Aquarius, we’ll have that next Saturn-Jupiter conjunction, and that is actually the triplicity shift. We did have a taste of the air conjunctions in 1980, I think—or ‘81; ‘79, ‘80, ‘81—when they were both in Libra. So we’ve had a taste, and then in 2000, we went back to earth for the final 20 years. So I think that’s a really good point, Austin, that it’s not just this current Saturn-Pluto conjunction. Put it into context of this larger 200-year cycle. And it really begs the question around even decentralization of industrial power, if you like.
AC: Okay, I’ve gotta jump in on that because I’ve been looking a lot at the triplicity cycle. And every other time that we moved from earth to air—which is what we’re doing—you get big, solidified, concretized empires broken up. So there are a couple of different ways to count the beginning and ending—because there are ‘mutation’ conjunctions, there are ‘mean’ conjunctions’, there are ‘parent’ conjunctions—but roughly, about 400 AD, is when you get a shift from earth to air. And so, you have the end of the Western Roman Empire. What’s interesting is before that, in the 4th century BC—they repeat about 800 years—you have Alexander sweeping through the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia and breaking up the Persian Empire. And Alexander did not leave behind him an empire. I believe his empire endured for about two years, and then soon it was five, six, seven different competing areas. And then finally, you go from 400 plus 800 and then we get to 1200, and we have Genghis Khan. And what’s interesting is the Khans come in and they establish the largest land empire ever, which doesn’t last at all and breaks up. And so, what’s interesting is we have this ‘scattering like the wind’. Even though there’s a force like Alexander or Genghis who seem like they’re conquering and holding, really what they’re doing is breaking up an existing structure. And the time period which follows it, well, it’s the Hellenistic period. It’s what begins Hellenism during that 400. Genghis’ conquest ended up connecting lots of areas. So there’s this weird disruptive conquering. Disruptive conquerors actually breaking up structure and allowing things to circulate is appropriate for air. And there’s more to it. Again, I’ve been working on triplicity stuff. But the Saturn-Pluto—these next few years just ties in so tightly to these much larger historical patterns. And I think it’s so clear that we’re in the death throes of an age just before the birth of another.
CB: Yeah, I need to quickly throw in the electional chart, cuz I forgot to mention the election. It actually takes place at the very end of the month. So I’m gonna throw that in really quick, so we can wrap up. So this is the electional chart I’m gonna show on the screen right now that Leisa Schaim came up with for this month, and it takes place on December 28, 2017. So the deal is basically there’s some pretty good ‘Mars in Scorpio’ elections, because it’s one of the few dignified planets this month. And that’s something that we talked about a lot earlier in this episode, how in the second-half of the month, we’ve got Mars in Scorpio in its own sign with Jupiter, and then we have Saturn in Capricorn in its own sign with Venus later in the month. So this becomes a timeframe where you could choose between which malefic you wanted to use in an electional chart. Typically, when malefics are dignified, it’s a little bit easier to use them constructively and for their more positive sides to come out, as long as you situate them properly in your electional chart. You can kind of wield that power for good, or at least for some constructive benefit to yourself. Which is something I think that you started to say at one point, Austin, but we didn’t fully go into. I don’t know if you want to expand on that here.
AC: No, I think that’s sufficient.
CB: Okay. So the chart that Leisa came up with is this one. So it’s December 28, around 2:30 in the morning, 2:30 AM, with early Scorpio rising. So this is a night chart. It has Scorpio rising, with Mars in Scorpio in the first whole sign house, and Mars is applying to a conjunction with Jupiter. So this is basically trying to take that Mars in Scorpio and make it the focal point of your electional chart, and make it so that the ruler of the ascendant is in its own sign; so it’s able to draw on its own significations. It’s in the 1st house, and it’s applying to a conjunction with a benefic in the 1st house while being a night chart. So Mars is much more constructive and much more positive than it would be otherwise. So the Moon in this chart is exalted in Taurus. It’s just recently ingressed into Taurus in the seventh whole sign house. From that point, its next aspect is separating from a trine with Saturn at 0° of Capricorn, and it’s applying to a trine with Venus at 3° of Capricorn, which is actually its domicile lord. So Venus is the ruler of the 7th house, and the Moon is in the 7th house applying to a trine with Venus within 3°. And since this is a night chart, Venus is actually the more positive benefic in this chart. So the tricky thing of course is that in this electional chart, you have that stellium of planets in Capricorn, which are Saturn, Venus, the Sun, and Pluto, but it’s a night chart because the Sun is in the third house below the horizon. So that’s one of the tricky things during this time period. Somebody sent in a question about dealing with both of the malefics being in their domiciles during this time in late December. And it’s one of the tricky things, cuz one of them is gonna be contrary-to-the-sect or opposite to the sect of the chart, and therefore, is gonna exhibit its more destructive or more problematic significations. In this instance, that’s gonna be Saturn. And so, there’s the potential for some 3rd house difficulties that is offset slightly by Saturn being in its own domicile, and Venus being co-present there in the same sign in the 3rd house. But I’m still not sure that I would otherwise recommend this as a major 3rd house-type electional chart. Instead, I would really emphasize it primarily for ‘Mars in Scorpio-type’ activities. Like I’m trying to think of a better situation in terms of Mars, or a better electional chart for Mars, and I’m having trouble really thinking of one in this. I mean, can you guys think of a better setup for Mars in Scorpio, or something that would be more auspicious?
AC: I mean, Mars in Scorpio on the rising, that’s great.
KS: That’s pretty good.
CB: Yeah.
KS: The only thing I can think of—to go back to what you were saying earlier, Austin—is if it was happening in earlier degrees, when Mars still had more dignity maybe. But that’s a very ‘Virgo’ splitting hairs thing.
AC: Yeah, as far as splitting hairs go, Moon opposite Mars—even by sign, even though it’s not the applying aspect—makes me slightly nervous.
CB: Yeah, we had another one. The initial one we were gonna go with—and this is one we’re gonna recommend in the ‘auspicious elections’ episode, which is 24 hours later—looks like this, where the Moon is already separating from Mars, and it’s applying to Jupiter through the opposition. The only reason we didn’t recommend that is just because on the West Coast, you can’t get the application, so you would miss it. So we were a little nervous about recommending that as our primary election this month. Whereas if you go with the day earlier, at least the next application is that very positive Moon-Venus trine.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s totally workable.
CB: Sure. But yeah, that’s a good point. One of the things that it does have is the Moon opposing Mars, but at least you get the trine from Venus. And it’s a night chart, so that Mars is not as malefic, and it’s the ruler of the 1st house. So some of those keywords that we were using earlier about Mars in Scorpio—Austin, you were using keywords and terms like ‘tremendous drive’ and ‘focus’ and things like that, because it’s a fixed water sign ruled by Mars, right?
AC: Yeah, ‘ferocious determination’.
CB: ‘Ferocious determination’, I like that. So that would be a good keyword. If there’s something that you need to do that requires that kind of ferocious determination, then this would be a good election to do it. Of course you’re either gonna have to stay up very late, or you’re gonna have to get up very early to use this election at 2:30 in the morning, but sometimes that’s the cost of doing electional astrology. So I have other little things built into this chart. Like Mars is in the 2nd house—or sorry, Mercury is in the 2nd house at 14° of Sagittarius. And I would recommend if you can, in your location, adjusting the time so that the degree of the midheaven is trining Mercury in order to give it a little bit extra power, even though it’s in the 2nd house, which is in aversion to the 1st house. But yeah, otherwise that’s the chart, about 2:30 in the morning, on December 28, at the very end of the month. So that’s the primary election that Leisa found for this month that I would endorse for our main or our best electional chart that we could find. There were a few other charts that we’re gonna talk about on the ‘auspicious elections’ episode, which is available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast on the $5 or $10 tiers, including some Saturn in Capricorn elections, which we’ll get into in that episode. All right, so that’s the electional chart, and I’ll put that on the website for those that are listening to the audio version of the podcasts. And I think that pretty much brings us to the end of the month. Are there any other final things that we need to mention towards the end of the month? I mean, we did mention that Mercury stations direct December 22, right?
KS: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, just in time for us to turn our full attention to Saturn in Capricorn.
CB: Yeah. So that will be the last final thing that dominates the end of the month. And we’ll save the full discussion of the broader mundane and personal implications of Saturn in Capricorn for another episode that hopefully we’ll do pretty soon. So you’re thinking maybe we could do it later in December, Austin? Or how are you feeling about that at this point?
AC: Yeah, anytime after the ingress, I’m good. I don’t have a busy, ‘travel-y’ Christmas.
KS: Yeah, I might run into some issues with doing more than one show then, but we can chat about scheduling.
CB: Sure.
KS: Cuz I will be traveling.
CB: Yeah. And then of course our next forecast episode that we’re gonna have to record at the end of December is gonna be the year ahead; since at the end of each year, we always do a full ‘year ahead’ episode. So we’ll have to keep that in mind as well, since that’s always a much bigger one to do than our usual monthly, ‘let’s look at the next four weeks’ episodes.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, well, I will stop the screen-share here and turn the video off. So I think that brings us to the end of this forecast episode. So yeah, thanks a lot everybody for joining us. Thanks to all of our patrons who joined us for the live recording of this episode. And thanks, Austin and Kelly, for joining me for talking about December. And I’ll see you guys again next month.
KS: Have a great month, guys.
AC: We’ll see each other quite a bit. Yeah, I hope everyone has a nice month.
CB: All right, I will end it here. All right, thanks everyone for listening, and we will see you next time.