The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 163, titled:
Why Horoscopes Are Still Valid and Important
With Chris Brennan, Adam Elenbaas, and Jo Gleason
Episode originally released on July 9, 2018
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released December 8th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode is recorded on Friday, July 6th, 2018, starting at 2:18 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the hundred and sixty third episode of the show. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit TheAstrologyPodcast.com/subscribe.
In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Jo Gleason and Adam Elenbaas about why horoscopes are still valid and important in the early 21st century. So hey guys, thanks for joining me today.
ADAM ELENBAAS: Hey Chris.
JO GLEASON: Thanks for having us.
CB: Hey. So, yeah, the genesis of this episode today is that, as people who listened to the last forecast episode know, I’ve been thinking about doing a set of horoscopes for a while now, and I always thought for the past few years that it would be kind of like an interesting challenge for somebody who’s used to doing more like, advanced or complicated natal astrology to try to write, you know, a 12-sign, a little bit more horoscope column. But recently I got more interested and more excited about the prospect of doing this after I attended UAC and I saw how many younger people were getting interested in astrology. And I thought about how big of an audience you could reach, or how much bigger of an audience you could reach, and how much more sort of like, community outreach or public outreach you could do if you had a column that was more approachable than you know, most normal episodes of The Astrology Podcast, even the forecast episodes, are. So I was kind of encouraged by that. I also saw Jo, you did a Twitter thread in late June where you were encouraging more astrologers to actually get engaged in doing horoscope columns, and that was really encouraging to me as well, and I ended up actually finally doing one and putting out a series of video horoscopes for each rising sign at the beginning of July on my YouTube channel, which is at youtube.com/theastrologyschool. So a lot of stuff came up, a lot of ideas and a lot of challenges came up in the process of doing my first horoscope column, and I wanted to talk to both of you and sort of process that and talk about the process of what happened, some of the things that I ran into that were unexpected, some of the things I ran into that were expected, and just yeah, sort of record a discussion about this. And I thought you two would be good people to talk to about, because Jo, you are really good recently about outlining sort of the conceptual and philosophical reason for why you think that this is still an important and a valid practice. And I was wondering if you could start maybe by talking a little bit about that or what the genesis of that is.
JG: Sure, absolutely. So I’ll admit that early on in my studies, I was kind of an elitist about horoscopes like, not being quite real astrology. Because you know, I was very enthusiastic. I had just discovered traditional astrology, and really when my mind changed on that was when I started writing daily horoscopes myself. So I was a ghostwriter for a couple different columns, and getting into writing these horoscopes, especially dailies, just kind of showed me how much actual astrology goes into it and gave me an appreciation for how much you can really squeeze out of these symbols when you have to write about them every single day. And that just showed me – like, my astrology is better for having written daily horoscopes, and there’s just no way I really would have experienced that other than actually from writing them. So that’s part of why I encourage people to just try it, even as an exercise if they don’t publish it. Because there’s so much you get out of it. It’s like push-ups, astrological push-ups for your vocabulary.
CB: Right. And I meant to say, I forgot to say as a way of introduction, that you are the Vice President of the Association for Young Astrologers —
JG: Yes.
CB: — and you’ve actually been a shadow writer for several horoscope columns at this point in your career, right?
JG: Yes.
CB: Okay. And Adam, in terms of your background, you of course teach. You’ve been on the show before. You teach and write forecasts through your school, the Nightlight Astrology school at NightlightAstrology.com, but you also write the monthly horoscopes for astrograph.com, right?
AE: Yeah, that’s right. That’s new for me. I started doing some guest column writing for them a year ago. And similar to Jo, I was – I wouldn’t say that I had like, a bad opinion of them; I just kind of thought that what I was doing was like, way more advanced. And then this opportunity came up to write, and it was a good opportunity for a little extra income, and once I started doing it, I was like, “This is really difficult,” and I like a challenge, so. And I feel the same way, like I’ve learned a lot from doing it.
CB: Right. So I guess that’s important because that’s like, a shared phase that almost every new astrologer goes through is horoscopes are usually a person’s first understanding or like, entry point into astrology. But then once you learn about the birth chart and you get into the more advanced forms of astrology, it seems like every new astrologer goes through this phase of initially being almost like, scornful of horoscopes as being “not real astrology” or being too simplistic or not representing what astrologers actually do. And that’s almost like, a shared thing, it seems like, that all three of us went through or that a lot of people go through at some point.
AE: Yeah. I mean, I certainly remember when I was first, you know, you’re first studying, say, archetypal astrology and some depth psychology, maybe you’ve read a little bit of Joseph Campbell, and you’re thinking, you know, your personal psychology is represented in the birth chart and it’s multidimensional and its complex. And then the idea of one aspect of that chart somehow being able to summarize who or what you are feels like, you know, just offensive or something.
JG: It’s like an affront to astrology itself almost to that new astrologer, yeah, totally.
CB: Right. Because astrologers are using like, you know, so many different planets, and they’re using all those, let’s say, seven to 10 to 12 or plus different planetary or other celestial bodies in a birth chart. Each of those can be in a different sign of the zodiac, each of those can be one of the different houses, then you have the aspects, then you can factor in other things like, the Arabic parts or lots or asteroids or what have you, so real astrologers are actually deal with just like, hundreds and thousands of variables in any single birth chart. And so I guess that’s probably the core of the reason why when you make that transition and realize how complex astrology is normally, that when you then look at Sun sign astrology, which is just literally the position of the Sun in one of the 12 zodiac signs, you know, it does immediately, at least initially, seem overly simplistic.
AE: Right, yeah. I feel like the temptation of starting to look down your nose at something like horoscopes is right there, you know. I think one of the ways of thinking about it, as I reflect back in time on how my view has changed and sort of evolved, is that, you know, in the beginning of learning any craft or discipline like a musical instrument or even like a sport where you need a specific skill, in the beginning when you’re getting exposed to like, the wide variety of different styles that jazz musicians have or that different composers have or that different basketball players have, you try to emulate and take on all of it, and you’re inundated by the vastness of the world you’re entering, and sometimes I think we mistake that, in any craft or discipline, the vastness of that world for advancement. But in fact when you study really great musicians or composers or athletes or whatever, they end up refining a more specialized set of skills and actually they become really really good at things that are sometimes very simple. And I feel like I appreciate that about horoscopes if that makes sense.
JG: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah.
CB: Sure. And this was part of – so what happened, and I mentioned this earlier, but last month Jo, you wrote a long Twitter thread that got passed around a lot, which was sort of like this impassioned not plea, but you were sort of encouraging other serious astrologers to take horoscopes more seriously and to actually engage in the process and saying not only is it important and valuable, but it’s more challenging and more complicated than you might think and there’s something useful there. Could you – what were some of your main points there? What was the motivation or what led you to sort of make that argument?
JG: Well, I mean, honestly I was just kind of impassioned one morning. I was like, on vacation, and I was like, “I’m gonna write about horoscopes.” and a lot of this stems from you know, like, I’ll be on Twitter and I’ll see Christopher Renstrom post one of his dailies and like, his dailies – y’all – they’re so good. Like, he’s so amazing at writing these weeklies and dailies. Same with like, Rick Levine. And it really inspires me and you know, it makes me remember, you know, when I was ghostwriting, when I was doing this all the time, it is a lot more work than you expect. So basically, kind of my plea that you mentioned at the end of this thread where I mentioned, you know, this is like astrological pushups, it will expand your vocabulary, it forces you to really dig and flesh out these symbols that you thought you understood, but you know, when you’re writing about the Moon in the 3rd house for like, the 8th day in a row and you’re out of symbols, you have to get creative and you have to flesh that out more. Anyway, this whole experience is so valuable, and there’s no way to get it without doing it. So I issued a formal challenge, that you should just experiment and write a month of daily horoscopes for all the signs. That was really more of just kind of a slightly melodramatic, emphatic way of saying, “Hey, this is really valuable – you should at least see what it’s like to write them.” And to my surprise, like, I wasn’t taking that super seriously, like, “Hey everyone, do my monthly challenge.” But people are doing it! They’re actually, there’s some people experimenting on Twitter now, I know several people who are gonna gear up and write a month of dailies for all the signs for August and for Leo season, so it’s gotten a good response and I’m excited to see people exploring something that maybe they would not have before and having that willingness to experience astrology in a different way. Again, maybe that they had looked down their nose at a little bit or just thought kind of wasn’t as advanced or just wasn’t really something they needed to do. So it really just stemmed from my inspiration, you know, of seeing all these awesome horoscope writers, these awesome astrologers doing a great job with that part of their craft and wanting to share that with people and wanting to share what I could that would help other people have that same experience themselves, if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah. And I like that idea that you made that argument that you made, which is kind of unique, that this actually – contrary to what some people might initially assume or sort of, not like a prejudice but something close to that that more advanced astrologers might have, this is something that could actually make you a better astrologer because it forces you to you know, work some of those metaphorical muscles in terms of your interpretive abilities and your ability to draw information out of the symbolism and think deeply about the core meaning that you might now do otherwise, where in a normal consultation you might be able to rely on other things or easier sort of chart patterns in order to delineate, to draw striking and moving interpretive symbolism, but in a horoscope column you have to focus on things that might be underdeveloped or that astrologers may be are a little bit weaker on sometimes.
JG: Yeah, completely. With a horoscope column, like, you can’t fully flesh out like, someone’s Moon-Saturn conjunction ruling their Ascendant or something. Because in a horoscope, that’s gone the next day. Like there’s an expiration date on everything. And you have to find a way to capture the themes and kind of puzzle out and suss out what themes really will come through for people – capture that, and you only have a limited space to actually write about it or speak about it if you’re doing video horoscopes. And that really pushes you, you know? It makes you really feel into the astrology of a time period, really immerse yourself in it, and kind of almost method write it. Like, that’s kind of how I felt sometimes when I was really in the thick of it was that I was like, really trying to put myself in that position, like, what would this feel like, just for a day? And that connects you with the symbols and like, you know, just seriously just try to write a few horoscopes and you’ll see very quickly like, how special it is. Like, there’s something really cool about that, and it is advanced. It will definitely make you a better astrologer in my opinion.
CB: Sure. And I like that idea of it immersing you in the astrology of a given period, because that’s definitely something I’ve seen just doing the forecast episodes with Austin and Kelly over the past three years, and even just doing it from that higher perspective of what are the mundane transits each month really ties you into that. And I know that’s something that you do and specialize in especially, right, Adam? Because your primary forecasts on your website really focus on that, which is like, what are the major aspects that are occurring in the sky right now and how might that relate to everybody in general, not necessarily in the context of a Sun sign column?
AE: Yeah. So I mean, the horoscope writing really – I’ve been calling my daily forecast “daily horoscopes” for years, knowing that they’re not exactly your traditional like, horoscope column. I’ve been calling them that because of the idea of a horoscope being like, the horoscope was the hour-marker, something that’s sort of relevant and fresh to the day or the moment or the week, and trying to write about the possible archetypal combinations that you might see on any given day. But I feel that horoscope writing is also a totally different muscle, or a different set of muscles or something, and I love the challenge. But I’ve been writing like, 300 plus per year for like, five years now, and that – one of the things that I would say, in such agreement with you, Jo, is that there’s no quicker like, garbage disposal for cliches than having to write something mechanically over and over and over again.
JG: You’re so right. That’s the best analogy, yeah.
AE: Because it gets to the feeling like, I heard one of my students said – she grew up doing a lot of fishing, so this kind of comes from her experience doing a lot of fishing, but she said writing dailies, for her, felt like cleaning and gutting fish. Like, it’s like, a thankless task that just feels like you’re, you know, everyone loves the final product – you bring a nice like, filet of salmon to them or something or whatever, but the dirty work of like, you know, going behind the scenes where you’re just, you feel like a madman and a fraud, you know, just trying to – and then something breaks through that, though, and you start – new insights start coming through, and it’s kind of like, well I imagine it’s very similar for people looking for inspiration with a musical instrument. You play your scales sort of monotonously and then all of a sudden, when you feel like you’re about ready to tap out, something original comes through. And I think doing it so often and so regularly, you begin to develop the kind of inspiration that really good horoscope writers have found a way to tap into with really probably a very long period of commitment or some kind of inner resource that they’re pulling on that you can’t recognise unless you’re actually doing it.
JG: Oh, completely, completely. I can’t tell you how many times it was like, two in the morning, and I was like, “I’ve got a deadline,” like I can’t —
AE: Right.
JG: — say, “The full Moon shines a spotlight” on a certain house topic one more time, like, garbage disposal that, like, it’s done. It’s not fresh anymore.
AE: Yeah.
JG: And sitting there, opening another Word document, and just like, brain dumping as much, just getting as many words out of my head as possible. Not even horoscope-related. And it’s like, that’s when the insight comes in. That’s when the symbols start to speak to you again in a way that, you know, you hadn’t thought of before. It’s just, it really is such endurance work. Like, you have to have mad persistence to do this stuff.
AE: You know what that reminds me of is this idea that I think something in us – and I’m gonna like, just go out way on a kind of esoteric limb here – but why is it that a group of us who are sitting here, you know, mostly we’re into Hellenistic astrology, we definitely have understandings, you know, interest in modern astrology as well, but why would we be all like, pumped about horoscopes and talking about them in this particular way? And I have to say that, what if it’s because there’s something about ancient astrology, coming from the divinatory tradition as kind of the roots of Hellenistic astrology has an astral omen divination behind it – those traditions required basically blood sacrifice, you know? The diviner in the act of reading an omen or an oracle required sacrifice of some kind. You give to the oracle to receive. And I feel like there’s something about the entire fascination with ancient astrology and even what we’re talking about right now that has to do with us saying, “You know, if you really wanna get good at astrology, find a way to bleed a little while you’re doing it.” I don’t know if that goes too far, but do you get what I’m saying?
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a part of it that you don’t realize until you do it, which is that you have the basic, you were saying like, the scales, the things that you have to play, which is just looking at what the transits are, so what the ingresses are relative to the whole sign houses or what the aspects are for the week. But then you have to actually dig deep in order to write something, and there is a sort of creative process there that you’re attempting to unlock in order to not just write like, a monotonous you know, repetition of the same things over and over again. But that question of the divinatory nature of astrology and the potential divinatory nature of horoscopes is actually kind of an important one, because I never realized until I talked to Rick Levine a couple of years ago that that’s almost part of like, the underlying premise that a lot of horoscope writers have to approach this from, that in some ways, the horoscope that the person reads or gets on a given day is the one that’s appropriate for them. And there’s something that’s not entirely sort of scientific about that, but instead there’s some other component. Does that —
JG: I would – go ahead.
CB: Go ahead. What were you saying?
JG: I was gonna say I completely agree with that. Part of kind of my issue with horoscopes early on was that, you know, there are so many of them. You know, which one is correct? You know, this astrologer interpreted this day for this sign this way, and this one interpreted it this way, and like, you know, if astrology has such a strong internal logic, wouldn’t one of those be more accurate than the other? And the answer is no. Like, they can both be accurate. And we’re brushing on the fact that astrology is still a very mysterious practice here. And I think, especially when you get a horoscope writer who really knows how to tap into that creative space and really unlock that like you were saying, Chris, and you were speaking to, Adam – when horoscopes are written from that place, and the writer really allows the symbols to speak to them or through them, that writing buzzes. You know, that vibrates at a frequency, and I do think that the people who are meant to read that specific horoscope will find it. And that’s where you get people who are like, “I read this person every single day. They always nail it.” It’s because there’s some kind of frequency there that happens when the writer is really tapping something or really kind of channeling something. And that’s of course very mysterious. Like, we can’t explain that just with what the transits are. And it’s humbling, and I think it’s really important and valuable to continue to place yourself in situations where astrology evokes that sense of awe again like it did, you know, maybe when we all first discovered it. But yeah, there’s something beyond just technique that makes these go, if that makes sense.
AE: Well, I mean as much as I am joking about like, actual you know, bloodletting while doing horoscopes, I feel like there is like, there’s lifeforce that’s going into someone who’s like Rick Levine or, you know, Susan Miller, even, so like —
JG: Completely.
AE: — one of my clients earlier today, in fact, I said, “How you doing?” She said, “I’m doing well.” She said, “I haven’t been up on your horoscopes lately.” She said, “But I read Susan Miller all the time.” And I was like, you know, not at all, you know, an offensive remark to me because I’m like, “Well, of course,” because my horoscope columns are filled with information that might be better suited to people who are kind of up on the lingo, you know —
JG: Sure.
AE: — but the monthly column is something where a person, you know, often like you’re saying, is getting entrained, like in shamanism they talk about how the way that a practitioner of shamanism teaches their student is through entrainment, and that’s really the way that probably ancient astrology worked in some ways as well. You would’ve entrained yourself to a teacher and their patterns, their behaviors, their ways or modes of practicing and their sort of field of influence karmically or something, what they put out within it, you know, will attract certain people and repel others or whatever. But I think that the idea of there being the feeling of someone who’s in some kind of, they’re in it up to their blood with what they’re doing and they really have to work it, and then you kind of get entrained to that person – that’s really how most people are these days, where like, they have their favorite YouTube astrologer, you know, they have their favorite this or that, and it’s on some level it’s because the sacrifice of work and commitment that an astrologer is giving does have a kind of field of influence that we step into and that we get attuned to somehow. I think that’s totally spot-on.
CB: There’s probably also something about like, the synastry that you have with certain horoscope writers, where there’s gonna be people that you click with or you resonate more with their speaking style or their way of approaching astrology or maybe just their writing style. And something, you know, maybe it’s the synastry with that person or something like that, I don’t even know. But it’s interesting also that there’s different – in writing my first, you know, writing, doing videos of my first column last week, realizing really quickly that there’s actually different styles in which I could have approached the same thing. Like, I could have – I thought about halfway because there’s also like, different gimmicky styles. Like, I thought about, you know, I could do this from the perspective of like, an ancient astrologer and like, how would a Hellenistic astrologer from the 2nd century try to write a horoscope column if he wanted to? And I thought about trying to throw some of that terminology in of like, you know, Zeus is like, hurling rays at Hermes and all that other stuff. And that would be like, a funny – I think I might still like, one month, do that as kind of like a gimmick. I don’t know if I wanna get caught up doing it.
AE: I wanna see Zeus hurl some rays, man.
CB: Yeah.
JG: Please do it just for a month, like, please. As a favor to us all —
CB: Right, right.
JG: — that would be amazing.
CB: No, well, I’ve thought about doing that, because also one of the things I’ve thought about doing is because each horoscope has such different styles, both from a technical as well as from a writing perspective, I’d almost like to do a series of like, one month, sit down and record a set of 12 delineations, like a monthly horoscope, with one horoscope writer. Like, sit down and do it with Adam, and then sit down and do it with like, Rick Levine, and then sit down and do it with Susan Miller, and just see the difference of the styles and how their approaching the same subject but they’re doing it from, you know, I don’t wanna go over the top and say like, wildly different approaches, but sometimes significantly different approaches that are noticeable in different ways depending on what they choose to emphasize or how they choose to present it. Because I realized very quickly that there were, you know, literal interpretations I could give to certain things. There were much more like, archetypal interpretations that I could give. You could interpret some of them like, spiritually, what is the spiritual import of this? There’s a lot of different ways that you could approach it, and that is a sort of creative or interpretive decision that each astrologer is making deliberately in writing their column each month.
AE: Yeah. One thing that was coming to my mind when we were setting out to have this talk today was the idea that this exact diversity that you’re talking about is what makes horoscopes so important and also really subversive. Because they’re emphasizing a certain level of astrology and – again, getting back to this idea of some forms of astrology being more divinatory, so one of the features of divination, which is something I’ve spent a lot of time studying, thanks in no small part to having Geoffrey Cornelius come and speak at my program for a full week a couple of years ago, and he was a big influence and he wrote a book kind of making an argument – you’ve had him on your show, so, but for listeners who don’t know, you know, he wrote a book called The Moment of Astrology, which is kind of an argument that all astrology is a form of divination. It may or may not, you know, be true, but I took a lot from what he had to say and one of the things that I think is unique about divination is that divination works in ways that are very peculiar. So for example, the idea of going for a walk in the woods and your mind is occupied with something that’s going on in your life, and a bird could appear on a limb and it’s a bird – it’s an objective creature that’s not, you know, it’s a part of its own situation, its own field of activities. But that bird has a power to speak as an oracle. Let’s say it’s a white owl, and your grandmother collects statues of white owls and has them all over her house, and you’re thinking about her because she hasn’t been well, and you see that owl lands in front of you. And you know, oh my gosh, your grandma passes away that day. Things like that happen like, actually all the time. And so the appearance of like, an oracle or an omen, it often happens in the way of sort of intruding in subtle ways through things that seemingly have nothing to do with whatever is going on in our heads or our lives. And I think that one of the things that people love about horoscopes and that people love about divination is that we’re often so chained to the monotony of our life and our jobs and whatever, and our own inner patterns that are hard to, you know, be free of or whatever, that something intruding into that and speaking – an appearance that has the power to speak – I think everybody craves that on some level, I think. So in that way, horoscopes are subversive. They have the power to sort of counteract mundane reality because you don’t have to make any kind of real religious or spiritual commitment to flip open a magazine, or to flip open a poetry book to a random page and then some poem speaks to you, or to open up your fortune cookie and take it to heart, or you know. So I think horoscopes can intrude in people’s lives in that way, and so they’re a form of astrology that, in my opinion, something like Sun sign horoscopes will always be around. In other periods, you had things like, you know, popular almanacs that weren’t necessarily treated in the same way as like, astrologers who might have been teaching at universities or you know, people who were considered more like, high-minded astrologers. You’ve always had a kind of folk level of astrology, I think, as far as I’ve learned. And so I think astrology’s ability to sort of pierce through everyday, mundane reality and say something is part of its power. And also, maybe the other thing is that you know, astrology, for many people, that penetration of their everyday reality with a horoscope can be the gateway into a deeper commitment to the entire complex language of the birth chart or other things as well.
CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, that’s a really important point that – because one of the reasons that astrologers get tripped up on and sometimes become resentful of horoscopes is they say, that’s not, you know, looking at a person’s entire birth chart, and so that’s not gonna be accurate consistently because it’s not tied into their actual planetary placements. And one of the things I realized last week in doing mine is that although that’s true, what will happen is that there will be this subset of the people where their underlying natal chart placements are gonna line up with or are gonna be tied into the exact placements that you’re delineating on some months, and so while that might not always be true or might not be consistently true, there is gonna be this element where there’s gonna be a subset of the readers that you’ve written a specific column for where those are gonna tie closely into their natal chart placements in that month, and then it’s gonna line up in a way that will be a hit. And that in and of itself can be useful and relevant and important for some people because they can have that unexpected sort of chance-like experience suddenly of astrology working. And it’s working not because astrology is something that only works part of the time or that astrology itself is not valid, but it’s just that by virtue – sort of the necessity of writing a more generalized column, it’s only gonna line up perfectly in some of those instances and astrologers are almost making the assumption from the start in writing them that for some people it’s only gonna fully line up if their natal chart and their current time lords and other things are matching with that or are supportive of what you’re saying at the time. So yeah. Anyways, but that idea of divination as being that random or chance events have deeper and symbolic importance, I guess I was trying to figure out a way to concisely summarize what you were saying there in terms of that.
AE: Well, I think yeah, a simple summary would be that spiritually speaking, it’s a big commitment to basically surrender your heart to the reality of the cosmos having some say or some mirroring power in your life. To go so far as to learn about what Saturn means or to learn about, you know, this or that. But to read Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone, or to open up, you know, a magazine in the doctor’s office and check out your horoscope column in Elle or you know, some magazine or something like that, it’s just a brief window where something spiritual can sort of enter into your life and you can remember that there’s some larger order to the cosmos without necessarily having to commit yourself to be like, “I believe in astrology.” I think for a lot of people that’s why it remains very popular. Because it’s sort of controversial to really sort of get into astrology, you know what I mean?
CB: Yeah, well, and it does represent a radically different view of the prevailing almost scientific paradigm, which generally holds that life in the universe is sort of random and meaningless and purposeless, you know, has no purpose objectively except for that which we sort of ascribe to it subjectively in our individual lives, whereas astrology seems to posit the opposite – that there might be some sort of broader meaning or purpose to individual lives than sort of exists out there independently.
AE: Right, so it’s sort of like a gateway drug, you know. I mean, I think about it like that in terms of like, for people who are kind of bordering on exploring spiritual life, whether that’s in astrology or somewhere else, I feel like – I can think of people in my life growing up in the Christian church, right, who were pretty closed down to the reality of astrology, who would entertain reading, you know, they would maybe pick up a newspaper thing and read it, and take it in and be like, “Huh, that’s interesting, that sort of applies to me, wow that’s neat,” and then set it aside like, “No, I don’t have to commit to that because that was just for fun.” But it has an effect on people over time I think, too. So I think it serves an important role in that way.
CB: Sure, definitely. All right. So what are some of the other points that we wrote here about why horoscopes are valuable and important? So one of them – which one of you wrote this, that it demonstrates the idea that any one symbol from a chart can capture much larger symbolism than expected?
AE: I wrote that one. Just because, you know, when we write a horoscope, you could read, you know, for your Sun sign, you can read for your rising sign. I think it has the effect of allowing any symbol to become the subject of the – any one symbol can become the oracle. It can become the means by which an entire set of symbols can revolve around placing the Sun in the 1st house, or looking at the horoscope for your rising sign. And there’s something to me about that that’s like, it says something about the flexibility of astrology as a language, that it can do that.
JG: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because I was kind of reflecting on this as we were getting ready to have this talk today, about how I kind of feel like there have been two really, really big revelations for me as far as my studies go so far, and I’m sure many more in the future. But you know, that first initial thing where you find out there are more than Sun signs, and you find out just how deep you can get with natal chart interpretation, and just how fully a natal chart can describe a human being and their life and their circumstances. And that just is mind-blowing at first, like right when you first realize that. And you know, the difference, the huge gap between that and just reading something for your Sun sign, if that’s all you know, is enormous. And astrology feels much more massive than you knew, right, or than you ever expected right when you’re first learning this. But writing horoscopes blew my mind almost just as much because I realized, it was almost like coming full circle – I was like, you know, astrology can describe a person in such a detailed, nuanced way, so multidimensional, so multifaceted, but it can also speak to literally just how your day went. Like, it can do both of those things. And it’s not that astrology’s getting smaller when you talk about only one thing in a chart. It’s almost like astrology is big enough to encompass being able to have all this depth in a natal chart to be able to be so broad yet accurate for different people at different times in a horoscope. It’s just, it’s like astrology just keeps getting bigger, and you see it working in so many different ways. The scope is so vast. And that really blew my mind, that kind of – yeah, that made me think of that, Adam.
AE: Totally.
CB: Right. And there’s something still valuable about that, about dealing with people’s mundane, day-to-day lives. And even though astrologers in like, a natal consultation, you’re used to talking maybe more broadly about, you know, 30 year cycles or 40 year cycles or what have you, and that’s the, you know, frame of mind that people get into or sometimes even when you’re doing like, topical consultations about marriage or relationships or career or something like that, that’s still like, broader life themes. The ability of astrology to also be able to address like, day-to-day affairs in a person’s day-to-day life, there’s something that’s actually incredibly fascinating and valuable about that just in and of itself.
JG: Yeah, and you know, I was kind of thinking about how just, with horary astrology, like, if the cosmos cares about helping you find your keys, and like, what your 3rd house means – it’s like, siblings nad neighborhoods – like, why wouldn’t astrology, why wouldn’t the cosmos be able to like, have something capturable just in a daily horoscope for someone’s rising sign? Like, it’s just the scope’s really big and you’re right – the themes can go from broad to specific to mundane and everywhere in between. It’s just really impressive when you get down to it.
CB: Sure. And what you were saying, Adam, is that it’s like the well of symbolism is actually much deeper than you would think to draw on?
AE: Yeah, you know, any one – yeah, it feels like any one symbol or technique can be taken really far and it’s one of the reasons that I tend to stand on a soapbox with my students sometimes and suggest that they work on refining fewer tools at some point. At some point, just working on fewer tools, because you will find, as Jo was saying so eloquently, you’ll find like, you know, heaven in a mustard seed. It’s just that there’s a whole realm of amazing symbolism and accuracy available to us. And sometimes I feel like, we’ve talked about this before, Chris, but I feel like there’s a tendency, there’s a kind of myth of progress than inundates us, and we think to ourself, well, you know, I have to find more things floating around in the cosmos and incorporate them into my set of delineation techniques or tools in a chart. And I think what we’re saying about horoscopes is that in their simplicity, we can be reminded about something that’s very, very vast. The same thing is true as to what I was saying with divination, where I really – one thing that bothers me about astrology sometimes is I’ll hear astrologers sort of poo-pooing things like runes or tarot cards or other things because they don’t have as much sort of scientific validity. Maybe there’s a point to that, I don’t have the final answer, but I kind of personally believe that there are many different symbolic forms that can communicate something to us that mirrors or accurately describes our experience or can predict our experience. So one simple example – I had a student of mine was testing this, and she was a collector of movie stubs to the theater, so she would keep her stubs of what movies that she went to, and she had them in like, an old school lunch box. And what she would do is when she was facing a question that she might normally go and look at the transits for, instead she would just shuffle around in her box of movie stubs and pull out a movie stub. And she was a big movie buff, and so you know, unfailingly, her choice of a movie stub and the details of the actors and the story and something within the framework of the movie stub that she pulled would speak to her situation, and she would find what she was looking for. She would find some kind of predictive validity in what was being communicated through the pull. And I guess my point is that – another thing that I think horoscopes do is they kind of, because they can penetrate through something that’s small and sort of ordinary and not rooted in your birth chart, they bring us into the world of symbol and divinatory consciousness itself, and I think that’s really valuable because it can only really enhance your ability as an astrologer, because personally I think that what makes a good astrologer is your consciousness as a reader or a quote-unquote “diviner.” so I think horoscopes are something that can teach you to do that because they subvert the temptation to think that because math is involved and it’s more of a science that this form over here is more elite than any other form or something.
CB: Sure. Yeah. And it seems like that’s definitely, there’s an element to that from the perspective of the reader in terms of what they end up with, and when they choose to read it, and this sort of – again, just the idea of a random or chance like, event having deeper symbolic importance of the universe speaking to you, but then from the astrologer’s perspective, it is like, writing a horoscope column, there is a highly technical part to it, where you are actually trying to, you’re looking at where the planets are gonna be over whatever x amount of time that you’re looking at, and you are specifically trying to draw symbolism and interpret meaning based on astronomically like, where certain planets are gonna be placed during the duration of that time, whether it’s you know, the breakdown, whether it’s a daily horoscope or weekly or monthly or yearly.
AE: Yeah, I see it – I mean, for myself, and I know that you and others may not take the view that I take, and I think there’s room for a lot of ways of thinking about this, but I think of astrology as a form of divination that is utilizing the astronomical movement of the sky. I think of it as like, a more mechanical version of a tarot deck that’s just rotating in the sky, and in order to read it, you have a different set of tools that you’re using, and those tools are more analytical or mathematical or they’re rooted in something that is, you know, a physically observable repeating thing. But I think that there’s a temptation in that to elevate that above other forms of divination, whereas I don’t think that astrology has inherently more power as a divinatory tool necessarily than other tools. And I say this because I have also incredible respect for tarot and I Ching over time. I’m just really interested in them, so that’s kind of where my stance comes from I guess.
CB: Sure. Did you want to say something, Jo?
JG: Oh yeah. Well, I wanna say quickly that I agree with you, Adam, on the piece about, you know, astrology being a form of divination, possibly like, one of the very most systematic forms of divination that really indulges our left brains, you know —
AE: Yeah.
JG: — you can like, lean really hard into that. You can get very academic with it, which is amazing, it’s excellent. And I think – okay, so like, I’m super into all forms of divination. Like, that movie stubs story? I was like, yes, that is the best, like, that’s so cool, and you know, it works – that stuff works, of course it does. But with astrology, though I view it as a form of divination, I think it’s super important to make sure, especially when you’re writing horoscopes, that you don’t end up just kind of being like, well, it’s divinatory anyway, I guess I’ll just kind of fudge this and that, and —
AE: Yeah.
JG: — not saying that any three of us are doing that here, but I think building technique is kind of like making sure you’re building a vessel that has no holes. So if we are truly just channels for divinity, and we’re just doing a form of divination here, you know, your technique is what’s going to build something that can hold that. And I think that’s really important when you are dealing with something that is as systematic as astrology, to really honor to technique side and not lean too hard into it and make sure you honor the divinatory aspect as well. But it’s interesting to see how those two can work together, and how beautiful it can get when you do have a strong technique, like a sound vessel and that connection to the divinatory aspect as well. That’s when work really begins to sing, in my opinion.
AE: Yeah, that’s really well said. I’m thinking right now of a friend of mine who has a book coming out in a couple of months. I don’t know the title of it; I should, but it’s coming out in a couple of months, and it’s a book about precognition. And he’s a PhD, a scientist, just an amazing guy, but has this really strong interest in you know, precog and stuff like that. So one of the points of his book, though, that was really interesting was saying that precognitive abilities, the ability to intuit something about the future on different levels of description or prediction or whatever, that one of the things that he writes about it that for example, if you give the – I’m gonna get the hemispheres messed up – it’s the left hemisphere that’s more mechanical, right?
JG: Mmhmm.
AE: Yeah. So if you give the left hemisphere a task, and it has to do a task really repetitively, right? It’s like, okay, draw this square perfectly. Now draw another square within the square perfectly. And it has to pay very fine attention to something in a mechanical task, that while it’s occupied, the right brain will just flare open and things like precognitive ability can just come pouring in. And so I feel like, to just dovetail off of what you were saying, that the way I currently understand technique within the paradigm of astrology as divination, which is kind of a segue, because that’s a topic – I don’t’ mean to hijack this conversation, Chris, with that topic, but – if you are to understand astrology as divination, which not all astrologers do, but if you were to understand it that way, then I think it’s fascinating to consider the idea that technique is a kind of something that has to be done because the left hemisphere of the brain has to be occupied and doing something, like it has to generate a motor, for the right hemisphere to like, open up and tap into that kind of information. Does that make sense?
JG: Complete sense. And I love that – I’ve never thought about it that way specifically, but I’ve had conversations with Rick Levine that kind of tap on that. And yeah, I absolutely think that’s a thing. Like, just myself personally as some Mercury remediation, I often give my left brain something to do so the right brain can have a little space to breathe and like, space to open up. But yeah, I think that’s such a good way to put it, and I love that.
AE: Okay. Well, it makes some sense. I don’t know —
JG: Yeah, yeah yeah!
AE: — if it’s true or not.
JG: Sure, how can we know? But —
AE: Yeah.
JG: Yeah.
CB: Sure. One of the things I’ve been thinking over the past few years, as I get into more and more issues where in astrology and thinking about, you know, in modern astrology, astrology is often associated with Uranus, but traditionally astrology was always associated with Mercury, and this idea of astrology fundamentally being a mercurial subject. And astrologers continually are always running into these issues where you have these divisions between whether astrology is one thing or another, and you get astrologers often arguing, like very aggressively or very passionately, for their version of it, thinking that it’s this like, dichotomy, that it’s one or the other, but oftentimes the truth is probably that as a mercurial subject that’s it’s probably a bit of both.
AE: It can play for both teams.
JG: Right, and how else would Mercury want it? Right?
AE: Right.
CB: Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly how Mercury would want it. So it’s like you run into these issues of tropical versus sidereal, or like whole sign versus quadrant houses, or like, sign-based aspects versus degree-based aspects. Like, in ancient astrology, they built into large parts of the system like, this fundamental issue where you have like, two concepts that look like they’re competing, and it looks like you have to make a choice between one or the other, but the answer is probably both, and there’s some element of both that ends up having some truth and validity. And over the past few years, even though early in my studies I was very influenced by like, Geoffrey Cornelius and the work of Carl Jung and the ideas of astrology as synchronicity, and I think that’s still more what I lean to in terms of the conceptual mechanism underlying astrology, I’ve had to realize – the more I’ve realized that astrology is probably a mercurial art, that there’s probably still this other side to it where even if I still primarily conceptualize astrology as working through synchronicity or something like that, there could be some causal mechanism underlying it at the same time, especially with something like natal astrology or mundane astrology or you know, there obviously is this divinatory component to astrology, but then there could also be this objectively occurring phenomenon that’s occurring out there as well that’s also relevant. And I think that’s part of what astrologers might be tapping into as well when they do try to look at things like transits or even horoscope columns in a more systematic method by saying, you know, this Mercury retrograde period begins on this date and it ends on this date, and therefore that’s when it’s gonna be relevant. And there’s something that is a little bit more objective rather than just purely subjective to that.
AE: Yeah, that’s certainly true. It’s somehow the objective level of the data, whether it’s a card or whether it’s the hexagram of the I Ching, or whether it’s the astrological transit dates or whatever, are somehow necessary and play some kind of causal role. You know, otherwise you could just draw circles in the sand with your hand and then, you know, come up with something and obviously it’s not – you know, maybe there’s some very gifted people who can do that, but in general, yeah, I completely agree with you. There’s some interplay between the objective reality of the planets or the mode of symbols that you’re using and what’s happening.
CB: Sure. So that actually brings up an observation I made recently where I noticed – I was trying to do my like, market research of like, what are other, you know, horoscope authors on YouTube doing in terms of their channels? And I was actually surprised at the number of astrology horoscope channels on YouTube now that rely heavily on tarot cards, and like, a lot of the horoscopes that they’re doing for like, monthlies or dailies or weeklies are just doing tarot card readings for different signs. And I was sort of conflicted about that, about you know, on the one hand, feeling like if they’re not actually looking at any planetary positions, then technically speaking, what they’re doing isn’t astrology, versus on the other hand if there is a divinatory component to astrology itself or to horoscopes whether using some other form of divination and sort of trying to combine it to some extent, even just symbolically, with astrology if it wasn’t some sort of means to an end and I shouldn’t get caught up on the idea of it not being actual astrology. I mean, do you guys – where do you come down on that?
JG: I mean, this is a thing. Because here’s the thing. I mean, it just is.
CB: Right.
JG: You know, feathers get ruffled over it, but whatever, here we are. So like, I think it’s important to, if you are going to combine other divinatory techniques with astrology, to just be real about it. You know, if you are doing intuitive work, psychic work, channeling as horoscopes each month, and you’re being inspired by or incorporating some astrological symbolism, that’s fine. Like, I think that is totally you know, another divinatory means to the same end, right? You’re giving a message that’s capturing something that’s going to be important to a group of people. I completely support that. Is it astrology? No, not in the same way that your monthlies were, Chris. You know what I mean? So it’s just a matter of recognizing that there are different things, you can combine them, but I do think it’s important to say that like, well, you know, if they’re doing kind of like a tarot thing for each sign for the month, then they’re doing tarot forecasts for astrology signs. But that’s not really astrology. I still don’t think there’s absolutely anything wrong with it. It’s just like, just being real about how much actual astrological technique you’re using to you know, create the content or deliver the message. Just be real about that, and otherwise have fun and combine. Because, you know, mix and match is one thing, but learning and combining is better and can often yield, like, really incredible results, so. Does that make sense? How do you guys feel about that?
CB: Yeah, it’s just a complicated issue.
JG: Yeah.
CB: There’s no kind of convenient, like a clear answer, but it’s an interesting issue for astrologers to discuss because it’s sort of relevant to our field, so I love what you —
JG: For sure.
CB: — said about it in terms of that.
AE: For several years, I think probably three years now, I’ve been sometimes for my daily column, I’ll just say, you know, this planet is doing this with this planet, like the Sun is gonna oppose Pluto – an I Ching meditation for the day. And then what I’ll have done is I’ll have cast the I Ching asking the question, “How to make sense of or please offer some reflections on the meaning of this transit?” And then I’ll lay out the I Ching’s sort of response, casting that oracle and getting the response from the I Ching, and I’ll lay it out as a way of overlaying another form of divination on top of the transit in order to try to extricate some deeper symbolism through the language and imagination of Taoism and the I Ching. And I think when people are using tarot cards in a similar manner or any other form of symbolism in relation to thoughtful meditation upon astrological symbolism, I actually love that. I think that’s amazing and I’m really attracted to that. What I don’t like so much is when people do things like, they’ll be like, okay, so, Jupiter is … I don’t know, Venus is square to Jupiter or something. And they’ll be like, okay, well, this is definitely the High Priestess card – the High Priestess card is a Jupiter-Venus square. They’ll try to like, too rigidly assign some, you know, try to equate one symbol to the other, and kind of be like, okay, well this sign is this card, and this sign is that card. And whenever it becomes too linear like that, I’m always just like, my attention just goes – just, I can’t follow that.
JG: It kind of —
AE: Have you guys seen that?
JG: Yeah, it kind of misses the point, too, right? Like, that’s a way you can layer these two systems of divination, but it’s – yeah, you’re kind of boxing it in. It does get like, quite linear, where —
AE: Yeah, like, let the High Priestess, like —
JG: — it just kind of diminishes both.
AE: — have her own voice.
JG: Yeah, like, do her thing, because – yeah, I don’t know. I know, yeah, I’ve seen that as well, yeah. My interest drops way down too; I’m like, “Oh. Okay well.”
AE: Sorry, I’m being critical. But you know, I think there’s room for the interlay of those things. But the other thing that I’m really sensitive about is that I do believe that with divination and like, if someone’s gonna say, “Okay, I cast some cards for this spread, and here’s what they mean, here’s what this is saying,” I’m always like, “Ooh.” Once you start going into, you know, interpretations of what the planets are – what I’m trying to say is that when there’s kind of a hermeneutic component where you’re interpreting the symbolism and what it means or what it’s saying, I feel like that’s a distinctly different move. One of the things that I – going back to Chris’s appeal to some objectivity – is that with astrology, you’re using a shared language that everyone who knows the symbols can basically comment. They can really like, write in your comment section on your facebook feed and be like, “You’re whack. That’s not what Saturn and Venus are all about. They don’t have to do with this or that.” Like, because we all know what Saturn and Venus mean, but when people you know, start using too many forms of divination in a sort of haphazard way or they start becoming the oracle, reading and making sense of it all, like, okay, the angel cards are speaking this, the astrology’s doing this, here’s what everyone’s going through right now. Like, that kind of thing I don’t consider astrology personally, because there needs to be some shared level of technique, and the language needs to be shared enough so that we can be held accountable by each other and come to roughly similar conclusions. Like, I’m guessing that Chris, going back to Chris’s point, if you were to compare Rick Levine, Susan Miller, you know, other horoscope columns every month, you’ll see them all saying something sort of similar about that August 27th lunar eclipse with Mars retrograde, you know what I mean?
CB: Right —
JG: Yeah, exactly.
CB: — I mean, to me, that’s the objective component to astrology is that, you know, somebody talking about Uranus, if you started talking about Saturn and applying a bunch of Uranus significations to it, you would be met with those objections in the comment section of, “Why are you interpreting that specific planet in that way that seems contrary to the way that astrologers normally understand its meaning?” And in that, there’s some sort of shared agreement. But it’s interesting though that – so you do incorporate, because you’re open to viewing astrology as more divinatory, you do incorporate other forms of divination like the I Ching into your general forecasts, so you’re trying to balance a little bit of that objective component from the astrology as well as the more subjective component from a purely divinatory or symbolic system?
AE: Yeah, and my basic reason for doing it is because I believe that there are – it’s very similar to the reason that you were led or compelled to start doing horoscopes yourself. I tend to believe that astrology can be a more elite sort of specialized, intellectual language, and I feel like it’s kind of, to me, it’s like, the I Ching is very similar because it’s all math and numerology centric. Tarot, for example, is I consider to be a more feminine form of divination, specially because it’s more imagistic and it’s more about relating to image in an imaginative kind of way, and so I consider – call it masculine or feminine, just call it yin or yang maybe that’s a better way of putting it, but so I think of a massive amount of people out there are not gonna get so into the headspace of astrology, whereas they may get into a monthly horoscope because it doesn’t require as much commitment. Similarly, there are a ton of people who will resonate with the language of the I Ching because it has a way – when I overlay it and use it to make sense of a transit, what I’m doing is saying, okay, here’s the way that I see the teachings of the I Ching in this particular reading, commenting on or as a reflection upon the transit. I have so many people who love those, who tell me they otherwise can’t digest astrology. So I feel like it’s like a yin-yang balance; that’s why I like to bring it in, and it appeals to more people.
CB: Sure. But you’re pretty clear about saying when you are doing that and sort of demarcating it from the astrology to some extent, versus one of the things that I’ve thought is potentially problematic about the tarotscopes that I’ve seen is maybe the potential for people who don’t know to just sort of confuse what’s happening or to think that it is astrology that’s being done when in some instances it’s just, you know, it’s a video and it says this is a reading and it’s supposed to be for Scorpios, so they’ll cast the cards and pull them for whatever amount of time, the day or the week or the month, and then all Scorpios have that reading. But then I guess the issue or the question is because there’s no actual analysis of any planetary movements involved, to what extent that is astrology or should come off as astrology be presented in that way versus shouldn’t?
AE: Yeah. I turn the channel when that stuff comes on.
CB: Okay.
JG: Yeah, well, I was gonna say —
CB: So for you that is too far.
AE: Yeah, I can’t get into that. To me, that’s bordering on charlatanism, but I won’t be – I don’t want to be judgmental because I’m sure there might be people who are – I mean, I think it depends maybe on some levels on the consciousness of the reader. But I’m not saying it’s impossible; I’m just…
CB: What were you saying, Jo?
JG: Well, I was gonna say, Adam, that’s one thing I really like about your work, is like, you do incorporate the I Ching, and you’re also very clear on the fact that you are, you know, like, you’re incorporating the I Ching as kind of a commentary on the current astrology. And you also literally run an astrology school. Like, we know you’re an astrologer and you know your stuff and you have that toolset. I know that’s kind of like, maybe harsh, but it’s true, you know. Like, it’s very clear where you stand on this. You’re not doing I Ching stuff and throwing in some tarot and throwing in this and that and then calling yourself an astrologer, and you have to like, you know —
AE: Right.
JG: — where’s the astrology? That’s not how it is with you, and I think that’s really important in this case. Because, you know, we’re all astrologers, but we have to realize that from the outside, many people don’t know if there’s a difference between tarot and astrology and being psychic and all that stuff. It like —
AE: That’s true; that’s a really good point.
CB: Right.
JG: — there’s confusion around it, so I think as practitioners, as astrologers, as you know, as people who engage with divinatory arts and techniques, it’s our job to be really clear on how we combine these things, whether or not we’re combining them, the extent to which we combine them, and to hold others accountable as well. You know, like I said, I have no problem with people doing, you know, tarotscopes or whatever. But just be clear that you’re doing tarot readings for the signs, you know, asking the tarot what its commentary is on this sign for this period of time. That’s not astrology —
AE: And not using —
JG: — right. And just being clear so you’re not creating confusion, calling yourself a tarot reader and astrologer. Because like, are you really an astrologer? If you’re not, no big deal. Still engage with astrology on whatever level, and just be honest about what you’re doing. And I think that’s where, you know, I mean it can be hard when you’re just trying to like, get crossover views and stuff like that, like, just honestly really practical things, it’s easier to not be clear. But I think we all have that responsibility, which is why like, I’m glad conversations like this happen. Because it’s important.
AE: That’s really well said.
CB: Yeah. It’s an interesting phenomenon I noticed that kind of surprised me when I was doing research into what people are doing now and like, what was popular, and I was surprised at how popular that was as a sort of approach. And there’s differing levels of integration it seems like, of using tarot or other forms of divination into the astrology, but there was more of that extreme of primarily doing tarot almost under the guise of astrology than I expected. So it’ll just be an interesting thing in the future as that I’m sure continues to grow and become more popular and more influential, how astrologers react to that or what the sort of position is. Yeah, anyway. That’s a whole other topic really. I did wanna talk a little bit about some of the technical aspects of doing a horoscope column before we run out of time here. So one of the things as I was researching this was there’s so many different mediums nowadays in which horoscopes are done. So there’s written columns, which cover a full sort of vast array of different things. I mean, what are the number of different ways that written columns show up at this point? Like, there’s like, newspaper columns if newspapers presumably still exist and some people still read newspapers. There’s like, you know, blog – people have websites and blogs and that’s where they write their like, monthly or weekly or daily columns. There’s like, Twitter horoscopes you can like, subscribe to. What else is there? Where else do, like, written columns show up?
JG: There are like, text horoscopes now. I ghost wrote one of those for a while. Where you just —
CB: Okay, so it’s text right to your mobile phone?
JG: — kind of subscribe and get it – yep.
CB: Okay.
AE: Yeah, I was thinking about a friend of mine who did a horoscope column for – it was some random website, it just happened to include horoscope columns. And I think they’re all over the web, in all sorts of nooks and crannies out there.
JG: Apps too. Like astrology apps, horoscope apps specifically.
CB: Right. Horoscope apps. That’s how David Palmer became really big is I think he was one of the first astrologers that put out an app for astrology a few years ago and built a large following as a result of that. I’ve seen Rick Levine’s stuff. I was sitting in, like, an Einstein Brothers Bagel, like, eating a bagel one day a few years ago, and I looked up at the TV, and one of like, Rick Levine’s written horoscopes for the day showed up on the screen. So sometimes those written horoscopes get like, repurposed in all sorts of different places.
JG: Totally.
CB: So there’s written ones, there’s now over the past 10 years with the rise of YouTube there’s the advent of like, video horoscopes, which are becoming very popular and there’s some YouTubers out there that are doing very well with those. That’s sort of the market that I decided to get into because I was more interested in being able to display the chart and actually like, talk about it as I was presenting the horoscope. There’s also like, audio ones. I know there’s some podcasts that do sort of audio versions of like, the transits or doing a horoscope or what have you. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different mediums. There’s also different lengths of time. There’s yearly horoscopes, there’s monthlies, there’s weeklies and dailies – I think that’s the main breakdown is those four, right?
JG: Also decanlies, if you’re Austin.
CB: Austin Coppock, our good friend, does decanly horoscopes since the decans divide the zodiac into basically 10 degrees or 10 days each, so he’s basically doing a horoscope for every 10 days. Okay so there’s different lengths. And one of the questions, I mean, one of the things that came up immediately was you know, what does one look at or how should one focus, what should you focus on depending on the time frame involved? Because if you’re looking at like, an entire year, obviously you can take a number of things into account in terms of outer planet transits and inner planet transits and everything else. But if you’re doing just dailies, you have a much shorter time frame of let’s say just 24 hours, and this question of, you know, what is gonna change during that time frame that’s relevant to draw on and to look at? And that becomes one of the major challenges of doing this type of astrology, depending on what your time frame is, is you know, what do you actually look at? So was that an initial issue for you guys, or has that been a recurring issue?
AE: Yeah. Well, in the horoscope columns, I find that it’s a matter of narrowing – like, what are your priorities? Like, for example, Henry – who’s the kind of owner-founder of Astrograph and the TimePassages software that I write horoscopes for – he often says that, you know, he likes to pay special attention to the ruling planet of whatever sign is on the Ascendant. So if you’re doing a Sun sign column for, you know, Cancer, he’ll pay extra attention to the Moon. That’s like, that seems to be part of his take and I would imagine other astrologers, other horoscope writers out there, would probably share that idea. Because I’m at this point sort of wired into Hellenistic, I love ingresses. Ingresses play into how I’m already looking at whole sign house sort of transits, and then what I find is that you can in any given month, you know, there might be a huge amount of aspects being made, like exact aspects that are sort of perfecting by degree that you could look at, or eclipses or you know, whatever. And then, if you’re like Henry, who also likes to look at Eris and Chiron and everything else, it’s like, you know, for me, I get overloaded. So I just focus on ingresses and I focus on maybe like, a Full Moon if it’s closely conjoined with a planet or a New Moon if it’s closely conjoined a planet or something like that. You know, so I have my own like, I guess selection process. But it’s evolving too. It’s changing as I see what does and doesn’t work over time.
CB: Sure. Definitely. And let’s actually talk about that because that is the foundation of everything, which is when a horoscope writer is doing a horoscope column, their primary premise is that they’re looking at the Sun sign of the person and that they’re doing whole sign houses, derivative houses, or derived houses depending on what you want to want to call it, from the Sun sign and pretending that the sign that the Sun is in is the first house, the sign after that is the second house, and so on and so forth. And they’re basically in their mind either using that as the premise, or they’re basically pretending as if they’re reading it relative to the rising sign, because they’re basically treating the Sun as almost the Ascendant or the rising sign itself on some level. So all Sun sign columns, or all horoscope columns are essentially doing whole sign houses from the Sun or they’re treating it as if you’re looking at the person’s rising sign on some level essentially, right?
JG: Right, yeah —
AE: Yeah.
JG: — the concept of solar houses.
CB: Solar houses, right.
JG: That’s exactly right. Just kind of assuming the Sun and rising sign are the same sign, and that’s where you get your house significations or areas of life for the horoscopes you’re writing about.
AE: Go ahead.
CB: I was just gonna say really quickly, that’s fascinating to me. Because even though, you know, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Holden published that obscure paper where he pointed out that whole sign houses was an early form of house division in the Hellenistic tradition and then subsequently that was confirmed by Project Hindsight a decade later and popularized by people like Rob Hand. Technically, horoscope writers since the like, 1940s have been using whole sign houses from the Sun sign, basically, in some roundabout way, even though that wasn’t otherwise like, a popular form or a used form of house division in Western astrology until the past few decades essentially, right?
AE: Well, that’s why all of us are here talking about it. It’s the only reason. We like the whole sign houses. I’m just kidding.
JG: Don’t involve me in – I’m just kidding.
AE: I’m just teasing.
JG: Yeah, yeah. Well, and really there’s no other option. When all you have is the Sun sign, you know, house systems in general become completely irrelevant, because you really don’t even have houses. So yeah, exactly, a whole sign perspective using the Sun sign as the rising sign, that first house, was – yeah, that’s what was used. That gives at least some framework when you’ve got very little to root to.
CB: Yeah, well —
AE: I think —
CB: — hold on a sec, though – is that true, though, that house division isn’t relevant? Because are they still technically basically doing houses from the Sun sign basically at that point? I mean, or is it true, I guess what I’m getting at is I’m trying to understand – like, certainly that’s the approach that I took, because I just treated it as I was looking at the 12 rising signs and then doing whole sign houses from there. But really, most Sun sign writers, they will still interpret like, the third sign from the Sun as being the third house, and so therefore —
JG: Yeah.
CB: — they are using a form of house division where they’re using like, derivative houses from the Sun sign, right?
JG: Yeah, yeah. What I meant was any other form of house division, such as quadrant house division, is just impossible to use since there are no degrees involved for the houses. So yeah, yeah, house division is definitely still relevant. Houses are still being used, or house significations. I didn’t wanna – yeah, I wanna make that clear, yeah, I’m on the same page with you, Chris.
AE: You —
CB: Okay.
AE: — you could do something like, okay, like a horary chart. You’re casting a chart at the moment that you write, you know, the column. I mean, it would be absurd, really, but you could, you know, find the time when Taurus is rising and sit down and cast a chart at some point during there while meditating or something, you know, like, come up —
JG: Whoa.
AE: — with some kind of quadrant based form that had a spark in the moment that you wrote it, I guess. But I mean, it’s really not… And I always like to tell people, so they have a technical grasp on what astrologers are doing, okay, so if you’re Cancer Sun, like, that’s my Sun sign, so if you put your Cancer Sun at the beginning of the month, what I would do as I’m writing is I cast a chart for July 1st, and Cancer is whole sign first house. And then what I’m doing is I’m anchoring that chart and then casting a biwheel around it and then watching the transits change day by day through that chart that’s fixed with Cancer rising as a whole sign house. And it’s the interactions of where the planets are moving through all of the houses in the wheel for the rest of the month that horoscope writers are deriving their interpretations from, just in case that’s not totally clear. That’s a big part of how we write these.
CB: Yeah. And I mean, that’s what’s fascinating and why I thought it would be interesting and actually doable for me is that’s essentially what I’m doing anyways when I’m doing transit analysis is looking at the whole sign houses relative to the person’s rising sign, and then you do pay attention to like, if Saturn has just ingressed into their 4th whole sign house – is that having some symbolic significance for their home and living situation or what have you? So it’s like, Sun sign writers are kind of doing the same thing. The audience is typically reading it from the perspective of their Sun sign, although more and more I’ve seen more, you know, astrologers at this point also encouraging their readers to read it from the perspective of their rising sign because that’s probably more tied in with how they would read it if they were able to actually look at the person’s birth chart.
JG: Yeah, totally.
CB: And that sort of raises the side issue of I always thought that perhaps there’s gonna be some people like, perhaps people with day charts, that respond more strongly to their Sun sign, whereas there might be other people, let’s say like, people with night charts or where the Moon is more prominent in the chart that might respond more strongly to their Moon sign or something like that. And I always wondered if that was part of the reason why you sometimes will have people that really strongly respond to like, their Sun sign column versus other people who that doesn’t resonate as much with them.
AE: Go ahead, Jo.
JG: Oh. Well, I was gonna say, sect definitely has something to do with it. The natal chart definitely has something to do with it. You know, if you’ve got an angular Sun, you know, chances are you’ll relate a little more to your Sun sign, same with the Moon. And you know, infinite, infinite mitigating factors for that.
CB: Right.
JG: But also, solar houses, whole sign houses starting from the Sun sign are not the kind of only technique utilized, at least for when I was writing daily horoscopes. When you do write these horoscopes, a lot of times you’ll get kind of a combination of solar houses. So those’ll be the interpretations of the parts of the horoscope that will talk about areas of life, so you know, like, “Oh, your boss might be cranky today.” They’re probably talking about a transit through the 10th house, you know, potentially the 6th, depending on who’s writing it. But another technique that you can use when you write these, or that’s often used, is just the idea of where these transits or configurations are happening relative to the Sun sign by aspect. So you know, let’s say there’s a New Moon in Cancer. You know, for Capricorn, that’s gonna be angular, that’s gonna be square – there’s some kind of cross purposes square energy to where the event is this happening, versus for a Pisces, that would be configured to their Sun sign by trine, and that changes kind of the flavor and the way you write about what that could mean for that sign. So what’s interesting, and the reason I encourage people to read for both their Sun sign and their rising sign, is that often for the area of life, like where that new seed is being planted or whatever if we’re talking about like, a New Moon – the area of life will strike more of a chord if they read from their rising sign. So it’s gonna be way different if that Cancer New Moon is in the 10th or in the 12th, right? But as far as Sun signs go, you know, how that energy interacts with that solar energy in themselves might describe more of a general mood or like, how it’s hitting them, you know, more deeply, you know, like, for what their Sun sign describes about them. So I personally think – oh, and this varies a lot, writer to writer. Some writers lean very heavily on solar houses. Some lean very heavily into the archetypes of the signs and you know, how different transits are configured to that Sun sign and how those energies interact, but that’s why I think it’s important to you know, read for your Sun, Moon, and rising, because you’ll get something from different writers for different reasons, and that’s part of why – and I do like to emphasize that when people ask me, you know, “How are horoscopes even written? Like, how do you figure out what to write about?” And you know, “Which one should I read?” And you can get a lot out of both of these things for these reasons.
AE: I also —
CB: Sure.
AE: — I also feel like, and tell me what you think about this, Jo, but, do you feel like – I get people that write to me, and they say specifically, “I don’t know which one to read for, and if I read for my Sun, Moon, and rising, I get overloaded.” So in that case, I feel like, what I usually say in the same spirit is like, “Well, read like, three months in a row and see if one of the three really stands out, you know. And then maybe just narrow it down to that one if you’re feeling overwhelmed.” And I always mention sect. I’m always like, “If you were born at nighttime, try the Moon and see if that fits first; if you were born at daytime, try the Sun.” I use it as a general technique, not that it’s, you know, not that it works in every single instance. And then I always say, I almost always tell people to read additionally for your rising sign as well. I feel like that’s – for me, anyway – I just, I always have seen some compatibility between the rising sign and whether I’m reading for the Sun or Moon, so I don’t know.
JG: Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, like, it is easy to get overloaded. Especially if it’s like, a whole monthly column, and it’s pretty long —
AE: Yeah, like if you were to read all three —
JG: — it’s like, a lot to read.
AE: — Susan Miller’s like, you know, you might as well, you know, make a bag of popcorn and sit down.
CB: Yeah —
JG: Yeah, make a cup of tea.
CB: — I was reading hers the other day. I was really surprised. She had like, five pages for each sign!
AE: Yeah. That’s —
JG: Whoa, dude.
AE: — all she does every month. Because when I was in New York City, my first astrology teacher, Rebecca Gordon – who has been on the Dr. Oz Show doing astrology and has a book out about medical astrology and so forth – she was my first astrology teacher, and fantastic horoscope writer, and she was a student of Susan Miller’s for a long time in New York City. And she told me one time that basically like, you know, Susan spends basically all month writing those horoscopes. It’s like, that’s her sole thing. And obviously she’s like, wildly successful at it. So I guess if that’s like, the only offering that you’re doing, you could give a ton of attention to like, five full pages for each sign.
CB: Sure. Yeah. And it is interesting how things are shifting, though, in terms of – I don’t think in like, 10 or 20 or 30 years ago especially that that was articulated as much, that you could read it from the perspective of your Ascendant sign. It was always just presumed that people were reading it from the perspective of their Sun sign. But now you do have columns where even people, like popular columnists like Chani Nicholas, you know, says explicitly, like, read it from your Sun sign or your Ascendant sign, like at the top of each of her sections for each sign. But also, I’ve been surprised seeing how many more, how popular the concept of just the rising sign, or how many more young people know what their Sun, Moon, and rising sign are because it’s so much more easy to calculate at this point through you know, astro.com or through Cafe Astrology or what have you. And just like, yesterday, I was reading this like, a pop astrology Twitter account, and they were just like, “Post your picture and your Sun, Moon, and rising sign,” and there was just like, hundreds of people in their like, teens and 20s posting their Sun, Moon, and rising sign and then a picture of themself, and it just blows me away how much more accessible astrology like, more advanced levels of astrology have become, that the knowledge of one’s rising sign might become at some point, you know, just as common knowledge as your Sun sign, perhaps. Maybe not that much, that may be going a little bit far. But at least it’s getting up there much more than it was even five or 10 years ago.
AE: Right.
JG: Yeah, it’s just so much easier, you know? You don’t have to calculate it by hand. You don’t have to deal with like, tables of houses and logarithms. Like, you literally can in like, three clicks – like, you have it and you know it. So yeah, it’s huge. It’s a huge change in just how astrology is perceived, which is actually awesome for you know, horoscope writers. We can say, “Read for your rising sign” or for your Ascendant and people will be able to know what that means easily and be able to do that, so it’s really cool stuff.
CB: Right. That seems really crucial, but it’s interesting your point then about sometimes the fact that you’re looking at the transits as aspects to the Sun sign, using like, sign-based aspects or even degree-based aspects if they happen to be close enough in the person’s natal chart, that perhaps some of the Sun sign interpretations or Moon sign or what have you would still be relevant because those are still sign-based aspects to the natal Sun sign, and so therefore that still has some independent value, and you might not want to completely forget about the Sun sign even if you know your rising sign.
JG: Yeah, I would say so. And it really does vary writer to writer, so like, for the kinds of questions you get, Adam, you know, for your work specifically, you might be able to advise them one way or another, but just generally for people who get overwhelmed reading for all of them, just kind of start reading one. Start reading for your Sun, start reading for your rising, start reading for your Moon, and if one really sticks and resonates, just read for that one, and just know that if you check out another column, it could be that if your Moon sign, you know, someone does a really good job writing horoscopes for your Moon sign, and that’s what you read from there, it might be your Sun sign for another one or your rising for another one, just because you’re always gonna get these unique perspectives and flavors with these different voices.
AE: Yeah, and I think it’s also important to recognize the tendency that we have. I know that I had this tendency when I first read horoscopes to bounce around online looking for a column that I thought was gonna give me some goodies. You know, like —
JG: Oh yeah. Hundred percent.
AE: — you know? And it’s valuable to actually, if you’re gonna look for a column that you like or whatever, make sure that it addresses some of the difficult things that you go through as well as some of the enjoyable. It’s not just something that makes you feel good, but it’s something that describes your journey for the month in an accurate way, the ups and the downs. I think, because otherwise I think there is a tendency to gravitate towards – it’s not even that the horoscope writers may be fluffy, it’s just that you gravitate toward a tone or a mood that you like but that may not challenge you at all. And I think being a little bit challenged by astrology is part of the point, I think, because it’s here to help us grow. That’s my feeling about it, anyway.
CB: I mean —
JG: Yeah, totally.
CB: — that was a legitimate issue that I ran into in trying to do some of the delineations is sometimes I would start looking at something that seemed like more of a negative or a challenging placement and interpreting it that way, and then I would start worrying about how, you know, hundreds of people were gonna interpret that, and if making negative statements would freak people out, and how to frame some of that. And then it was an interesting then process for me thinking about some of that, because then it made me wanna fall back on more of sort of less on my like, ancient astrology training and more on my psychological and like, modern archetypal astrology where they’re a little bit more used to being able to couch some of that stuff in more constructive or less dire sounding terms.
AE: Yeah, I remember when I first started writing for Henry at the beginning, you know, I was like, just going full-on Hellenistic in some of the writing, and he was like, “Man, this is kind of a bummer.”
CB: Right.
AE: And I was like —
JG: Same thing happened to me, Adam. When I first started ghostwriting, I had the astrologer and their editor – they were like, “Look, Jo – like, you’re improving and these are good, but like, some of them are doomscopes.”
AE: Right.
JG: And they literally called some of them “doomscopes.” They were like, “All right, these are doomscopes, like, you need to redo these.” Just because I would like, I would be like, really feeling into the transit. I’d be like, “Oh, you know, there are some challenges here,” and I would write it as I felt it. And I’ve got traditional training as well. Like, you know, I came from Chris’s Hellenistic course. But yeah, it’s so funny. It’s interesting to explore how to language these things with honesty, but also realize like, you’re writing basically for the general public or for astrology enthusiasts who may not have the same familiarity with some of these more dire terms —
AE: Well —
CB: Right.
JG: — it’s a trip.
CB: Or might take it more seriously, whereas astrologers —
JG: Yeah.
CB: — or people in the astrological community for a few years understand to take interpretations with a certain grain of salt. And I’m not sure how to frame that, but it’s almost something that you learn once you get into astrology in terms of, “This is somebody’s interpretation,” and there’s gonna be like, a range of accuracy depending on how closely it’s tied into your birth chart depending on your transits and your time lords and mitigations and all sorts of other variables that are outside of the control of the person doing the interpretation, even if you’re interpreting a birth chart. But somebody in the general public just coming to it and reading their horoscope for the first time may not know that and know how seriously to take some of those statements.
AE: Yeah. I recently read something written by an editor of a horoscope writer, and the editor was talking about the horoscope writer was no longer working at the newspaper, and the editor was saying something that made this writer’s horoscopes very popular and successful. And he said, you know, “I read all of them over many decades” or something, and he said that the thing that made the horoscopes successful was a simple formula, he said. And he said, you know, basically, “Dear Aquarius” or whatever sign, “There are some challenges this month. But don’t worry, you’ll get through them because you have the inner resources you need to do so.” and he’s like, you know, that was it. That was his summation of what the horoscopes were. Whether that’s fair or not, you know, I don’t know, because I hadn’t read these before. But I read that and I was struck by it, because personally, I think horoscopes – sure, that’s not a bad accomplishment for a horoscope. But if that’s all the perception is, then I do think there needs to be some more accurate delineating. There needs to be a little bit more predictive accuracy so that someone could say, “Well, it wasn’t just a simple formula of ‘here’s some challenges, here’s how to feel good.’” It was, you know, these are maybe the specific types of challenges, or these are where you may have some good fortune or you may be experiencing something that’s more enjoyable or positive. And we should have some ability to speak to that without going to the opposite extreme and making the person feel like they don’t have the inner resources to overcome challenges.
CB: Yeah. And it goes back to your original point, which is that you feel like it is important to acknowledge some of the challenges or the difficulties that will arise in whatever the given timeframe is that you’re talking about.
AE: Yeah, or to say like, you know, okay, you’ve got Venus opposite Neptune across your first and seventh house – you may have a romantic encounter, or you might want a romantic holiday, something that’s kind of fun or whatever, but watch out for, you know, some kind of, you know, be sure that you’re clear on what’s fact and what’s fiction. I don’t know, some standard Venus opposite Neptune transit. I think you can be flexible enough to address some things that might happen in the negative or the positive with the prediction as well. So it doesn’t have to be too, like, concretely predictive, but I think some concrete, predictive value in horoscopes that may be good or bad, you know, without being a joykill is necessary. And yet, one of my frustrations with some horoscope columns is I think that that formula the editor mentioned is sort of the standard, where it’s sort of, it’s filled with sort of cliches about, you know, becoming more personally empowered, setting your strong intention and following through. I mean, just this sort of… Do you know what I mean?
CB: Sure. The intent to be sort of empowering. I mean, that was an overwhelming thing in modern astrology in general was the attempt to use astrology for self-actualization or personal empowerment, so I assume that’s part of where that’s coming from, although having written one last week and realizing that issue about saying negative things, I now understand why somebody might wanna err towards that. And this sort of issue that you run into of that versus being more realistic, or – I ran into an issue even just delineating the 12th house, where my initial impulse coming from Hellenistic was to talk about, you know, contrasting the 11th house and somebody having a lunation or a Mars retrograde there in the 11th house of friends, versus like the 12th house of enemies and starting to talk about enemies within the context of a person’s Sun sign or a horoscope column and then quickly realizing like, that’s a little bit weird or that might not be as useful or appropriate or could freak people out and feel more disempowering rather than empowering. And I couldn’t decide between that versus to what extent it might be accurate. And a person runs into issues with somebody who’s, you know, agenda is contrary or crosses paths with theirs in a negative way in that month. I don’t know, I just, I ran into funny issues about also just, you know, literal interpretations versus more broad, symbolic interpretations of certain placements, like the 12th or the 3rd house.
JG: Well, and I think a lot of this is how we massage the language, and how much vocabulary you have to describe these things, because like, you’re right – the 12th – I’m like, “Oh yeah, hidden enemies.” and I forget that people are like, “Wait, what do you mean? Like, what about hidden enemies in my life?”
CB: Right.
JG: And I’m like, “No no no, I mean, maybe not, but maybe,” and then you’re like, “Oh great,” you know, like, do better next time, Jo. But you know, there’s a way to tell somebody to watch out for something like that without being like, “There might be a hidden enemy waiting around the corner.” It could be something, you know, you can combine some of these more modern things like, the 12th house being, you know, a place of meditation or having good alone time, or also just being, you know, it could be a time, like when there’s 12th house stuff, that you just feel lonely and it kind of sucks. Anyway, back to the hidden enemies – favorite topic. You can tell someone to look out in an empowering way. Be like, “You know when to trust your gut, and you should do that now,” because like, you know, without saying there’s literally someone out to get you —
AE: There’s a creeper in your bushes!
CB: I mean, even that, the way that you framed that and reframe that is interesting because it was more process-oriented about what they should be doing and giving almost sort of an advice and phrasing it —
JG: Proactive.
CB: — proactive, yeah.
JG: Yeah, like how can you be —
CB: Which is very interesting.
JG: — right, because like, there’s a big difference between telling someone their weekend’s gonna be bad and telling someone, “All right, time to start being proactive about how to set yourself up for success, because like, it’s gonna be hard. And you can do it, though, but it will be hard.” That still empowers people and it gears them up to draw on the resources they have without you just saying, “It’ll be hard, but you have the resources.” You can be realistic but still make it about being proactive or make it about how their strengths will mitigate the creeper in the bushes.
CB: Yeah, it’s really interesting and important to me just because it’s, you know, there is a way where it could be just straight predictive of “this will happen,” and then like, period, that’s the end of the sentence, versus this is probably what you may encounter and this is the advice in order to surmount it or get around that or you know, get through that in your life.
JG: That’s your fault, Adam! Okay. We’re okay. We’re back, Chris.
CB: I’m still laughing about the creeper in the bushes in the 12th house.
JG: I just keep looking at Adam.
AE: No, I know.
CB: That’s gonna become the title of this episode. I’ve been trying to come up with —
JG: Well, we have the title, Chris!
CB: Right!
AE: But you could also say that, you know, you could kind of combine both. You could be like, there could be a hidden enemy, but you may also be your own hidden enemy as the 12th house is also the house of, you know, self destructiveness. I find that —
JG: Right.
AE: — there’s also ways, usually, of like, melding themes together in a way that kind of can get at the multivalence of possibilities in any house, too.
JG: That’s —
CB: Definitely.
JG: — yeah. Exactly. And again, this really all comes back to kind of language and experience and how you flesh it out. Because like, the whole goal here is to, you know – all right, I’m just gonna cover that part of the screen so I can’t see you laughing. But the whole goal here is like, you know, as astrologers, we can think about the 12th house and we can think about the huge, you know, range of experiences ppl can have with transits to the 12th. Our job is to communicate that to someone, you know, who wouldn’t. So if we can draw on multiple options or multiple possibilities like you were saying, Adam, with, you know, there could be a hidden enemy, but that hidden enemy could be you. And like, the more you can flesh that out, the more you can give people the tools and say things that are evocative enough that the reader gets a sense of the theme as well and starts to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. So the more we can do that as writers, I think, the better. Again, this kind of circles back to like, why writing horoscopes is so valuable and such a good exercise: it teaches you how to do that, how to be evocative with these themes, and how to focus on more than just one theme, Adam.
AE: I know, I’m sorry!
CB: Well, and it brings up issues that are relevant. These are actually all issues that are relevant for astrologers in general doing natal astrology. It just almost is a more intense and immediate way to force yourself to deal with some of those issues, because one of the other ones that we’re dealing with here, of course, is also you know, how to make – sometimes the tension between wanting to make very specific statements but not wanting to be overly specific so that it’s not actually applicable to the majority of your audience or who you’re talking about, versus not wanting to go in the opposite extreme of making overly general statements so that whatever you say could be applicable to just like, anybody that reads the column, which is one of the allegations often against Sun sign astrology, both by astrologers as well as by skeptics who say that it’s just, you know, the Barnum effect or it’s just confirmation bias and all horoscope writers are saying is things that anybody could pick up and agree with that statement because it’s written in such a general way that there’s a real tension between those two extremes of the spectrum and trying to find the middle ground between them.
JG: Right. And that’s really the work here. I think that’s what I see a lot in like, really excellent horoscope writers is that they know when it’s getting too broad, and they know when to dial it back to be more specific, but really how to strike that balance. But anyway, you were gonna say, Adam?
AE: I find that part just absolutely maddening sometimes. I think that’s like, one of the core challenges that I have in writing my own monthly horoscopes is like, you know, okay, let’s say you have a transit across your 3rd and 6th house, you know. Like, okay, that could be like, you could have communication – I’m thinking of course the 6th house is like, the joy of Mars, for example, like – so you could have like, some kind of laborious or heated or intense or some kind of mental drudgery, you know what I mean? But then there’s a million other things that could happen. Like your neighbor could get in a fist fight with the person who’s painting your house! Like, I always think of like, all of the very specific things, and then I find that I’m like, all of these specific things are very appealing and interesting but then the general – how to dial it back in the general without becoming too generic and how to be supportive and encouraging without being, you know, phony. The balance of those things is part of why I think horoscope writers sit there and feel like they just stare in front of the screen and just like, oh my god, can these just be done?
CB: So you do dial it back though when you met with? Because one of the things I started doing – because I just like, sat down, I thought I was gonna record like, a series of 12. And this is like, the first time in my life where I’ve really objected to the founders or whoever came up with astrology having 12 signs because I really think that did a disservice to all of us that have to do 12 signs. Because that sounds like so much when you actually sit down to write like, a column for whatever the length is, for 12 – like, if it was like, five or seven, that would be much more approachable, but of course it has to be 12.
JG: Yep.
CB: Anyway. So, sitting down and wanting to – like, a transit of like, Mars through the 7th house – because for example, like, for the Leo rising people, Mars is retrograde in Aquarius, so it’s like a stationary retrograde in those people’s 12th house this month, so sometimes I wanted to say instances like perhaps I’ve seen an instance in the past where somebody had a major breakup under Mars transiting their 7th house and that being a possible specific manifestation, but then that does become like, overly specific versus trying to bring in a more archetypal or like, symbolic interpretation of saying like, well, Mars can represent severing and separation, and so you may encounter situations in which in terms of personal relationships during the course of this month that there are some themes of severing and separation that arise for you. I mean is that always the trick that the astrologer needs to push themselves to interpret it more symbolically in that way, or can there be instances where mentioning – obviously we’re met with like, space limitations here, so maybe this is something that’s unique to me since I was just like, talking for 15 minutes about each rising sign. But you know, do you always need to try to remove it from the specific?
JG: Well, I mean, for me, not always. I mean, again, you have to be honest; you have to be realistic. And for me, it’s like, you know, in general, Mars opposite someone’s Ascendant or Sun is probably not gonna be super comfortable, like a Mars retrograde in general. So you can feel safe and accurate being like, it’s not gonna be a comfortable time. You can’t sugarcoat that too much. But as far as like, specifics like that? I mean, I think you can get a little too specific sometimes. I mean, it also depends on the timeframe. If it’s a monthly, that’s one thing. If it’s a weekly, that’s another. If it’s a daily, that’s a whole other —
CB: Right.
JG: — but like, also, this is where I bring in personally more of like, the archetypal stuff as far as like, how would, let’s say, a Leo Sun or rising deal with something like a challenge from a more malefic planet, right?
CB: Okay, right.
JG: How would like, this Leo archetype face something like a challenge? Versus, you know, if it’s a Mars retrograde in the 7th but we’re talking about a Cancer rising, how are they going to approach the conflict? How are they gonna read and receive and hear the idea of, “You have a really tough week coming up?” Or a really tough month, you know, regarding relationships? So I lean into that as well, if that makes sense. That’s where I start drawing from other things other than just the house significations to see how I can’t kind of like, nuance that or language it to be more appropriate, and let that inform how specific or how general I go. Does that kind of make sense?
CB: Yeah, you put that as a point in the outline. I actually wanted you to expand on that because it’s really important and unique point about how you will attempt to actually make an effort to gear the interpretation around something that actually makes sense in the context of whatever sign of the zodiac you’re delineating it relative to and how they would be inclined from a psychological or character perspective to deal with that or how they might either productively or not productively sort of receive that energy.
JG: Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, a New Moon conjunct Uranus in Aries is gonna maybe feel like, super electric and exciting to fire signs, who are like, down with that anyway. Like, there’s something about them, something about their character, their essence, that really vibes with that like, completely crazy, you know, New Moon vibe. But you know, to a water sign maybe, it could be like, overwhelming and maybe you wanna take some time out during this New Moon to set some intentions. Like, you tailor the language to those archetypes. And yeah, and it’s very general, it’s very broad. It’s not gonna apply to every Sun sign. But that can help you get some nuance and inform that. And you know, earth signs may just think like, “All right, listen. Like, my friends are acting crazy – like, everyone needs to calm down.” And if you write from that perspective, that can again inform the way you write it and you know, how specific you get and what you focus on, so.
AE: Yeah. I find like, every month when I write and I do that, I’m also careful to try – because sometimes I see myself doing this, and I’ve seen it in other horoscope writers where you’ll lean into the most obvious weakness of the sign. For example, like, okay, Capricorn – you’ve got, you know, Mercury in Cancer in your 7th house opposing Saturn in your 1st house, right? You know, you might wanna open up emotionally. We know you like to go get it, but make sure that you also like, have a heart. You know, like, some super – that might be a good way to go, but I find that like, well, poor Capricorn! If every single month, I’m hitting them over the head with this idea that they’re invulnerable, opportunistic, like, workhorses. I always am asking myself, what’s some other angle of Capricorn that I can address? Because I think sometimes, yeah like, you know, you’ll see, every Cancer column I read, I’m not necessarily feeling needy every month, you know what I mean?
JG: Well, sure. And that’s when it comes down – well, right, it comes down to the person writing it to not lean too hard into that and let some things go down the cliche garbage disposal, because they just – it’s time for them to go, right?
AE: Right.
JG: But I mean, you can go so much farther into it other than, you know, Cancers are needy and Capricorns are heartless and opportunistic. I think it’s a good thing to dig into as a layer for how you go about writing it, and even reading it, I guess, I suppose if you’re trying to figure out, you know, what point in your chart to read for. But no, I totally agree with that, though, Adam. This gets into like, you know, horoscopes are valuable, but there are some bad horoscopes out there —
AE: Yeah.
JG: — that just aren’t very good. And like, this is kind of, you see a lot of this generic, kind of like, boring stuff like that where they lean too heavy into that in some of these kind of less amazing horoscope columns. So yeah, I agree.
AE: Dear Cancer, you’re getting over your mommy issues this month. You know, like that, just like, oh my god, I can’t even read it if it gets that cliche, you know.
JG: For sure, yeah.
CB: Right. Dear Cancer, stop being so crabby. Like that?
AE: Dear Scorpio, stop being such a creeper.
CB: All right. I’ll stop creeping in the bushes.
JG: You’re freaking out Libra rising.
CB: All right. So the last things in terms of just wrapping up the technical side of this, so we’re looking at things like ingresses, we’re doing whole sign houses, basically derived houses from either the Sun or from the rising sign or in some instances the Moon sign, transits relative to the Sun by aspect or relative to that sign by essentially sign-based aspect. Also looking at things like retrograde stations, like when a planet stations retrograde or direct as being a period of greater importance for whatever that transit it relative to that sign. Exact aspects that go exact during the time frame as well as lunations. So this month was a little bit easier for me because there was like, two eclipses this month, so that obviously gives you a lot to talk about, especially when one of the eclipses was one of the biggest ones that stood out for the entire year, which is that lunar eclipse at the end of July conjunct Mars and square Uranus, which so many astrologers have talked about in their yearly forecasts, that sort of made it a little bit easier to look at you know, where is that gonna land relative to whatever zodiac sign I’m looking at, whether it’s the rising sign or the Sun sign. So all of that’s though dependent on the time frame. And I’m just doing monthlies because that seems approachable to me. I feel like I would have a really hard time doing dailies. And what would you look at or what do you look at when you’re doing dailies? Like, Adam, I guess you don’t use dailies, but Jo, you’ve done dailies, right?
JG: Oh, I’ve done dailies.
CB: You say that with like, a thousand yard stare, like somebody who comes out of a war zone.
JG: Yeah, kind of. No, I’ve had several months off; I’m pretty recovered from the dailies grind. So for dailies, it’s interesting, because you still hit on all those major things, but like, you can’t talk about how like, “The eclipse is soon” for five days in every daily —
CB: Right.
JG: — until the eclipse is there. So what you end up leaning really hard on is the Moon, because that’s the only thing that’s moving quickly enough to make aspects to planets, move through the signs, move through the solar houses and that kind of thing. And when I first started writing them, it was really exciting. I was like, “Oh, cool,” you know, like, “When the Moon’s in the 9th, I can talk about like, lusting after travel and stuff, and like, ‘you can’t wait to get off work,’” and blah blah blah and like, that kind of stuff. But like, you run out of significations pretty quickly, which is again, this is why dailies specifically are so rigorous and so good for you as an astrologer to write. But yeah, it’s mostly the Moon. And with bigger configurations like the Uranus-Pluto square that we had going on like, you know, that got hit by the Moon several times a month —
CB: Right.
JG: — right? Or any larger configurations. And what you end up doing is really getting intimately acquainted with sign significations, first of all, how the Moon behaves or does her lunar things in those signs, what that really looks like, feels like, and means, and also what major configurations look like and feel like when they are hit by the Moon from different signs of the zodiac and from different areas of life as far as the solar houses go. And that’s what you really dig into, in my experience, is that kind of stuff. You know, what is a square to Saturn, you know, by the Moon – what does that look like when the Moon is in Aries? What does that look like when the Moon is in Libra? You know, it’s still a square, but like, you really can frame that so much differently, and pair that with, you know, the Moon separating aspects and applying aspects. And so you get super into that. Like, it feels – it almost has like, horary vibes a little bit with how much you pay attention to the Moon. It’s really really interesting.
CB: Right. And that brings you just all the way back to your original point, which is this really does is like, lifting weights as an astrologer by forcing you to learn how to be able to interpret the nuances and details of every single possible placement and combination at their deepest level of that, you know, the Moon square Saturn is gonna be experienced differently or might manifest differently if it’s in one set of signs versus another. And while astrologers know that sort of abstractly, you might not have ever in your studies forced yourself to go through and interpret and delineate what that would be like for each individual sign combination.
JG: Right, right. And if you write dailies, you can be like, “But I lived it!” You know. Like, “I lived it for month after month writing this Moon square Saturn!” But yeah, that weight-lifting thing, it’s really true. And what’s interesting too is like, you can’t repeat. Like, you can’t repeat these significations. You can’t say like, “Oh you feel like authority figures are bearing down on you” for every sign. You know, you have to figure out what the difference is between these signs and how they’ll experience it is and you know, that’s just one more level to it forcing you to explore this symbolism a lot. And then also like, week to week and month to month, you know, you have to find a way not to repeat yourself there as well. And yeah, you get to know the Moon very well when you write dailies. It’s really cool.
AE: I was gonna say, yeah. I think there’s a similar thing about – one of the things you were saying is that you can’t write about the same thing in your dailies, you know, every single day. And I think one of the – I mean, I can certainly see how it would build your muscle because of the need to keep it novel and fresh. One of the things that I’ve done that’s been really stimulating for me writing dailies that are about – not for every sign, but just an overall take on the daily weather so to speak – is that you can for a week. Like right now, like, Sun is opposite Pluto. So I might write like, three different columns in a week about that, but from totally different angles, and it provides some of the flexibility to, you know, so I feel like sometimes I’m like, inviting readers into a week of meditating on a transit that’s perfecting that week. And I feel like, in that way like, my grandiose thought has been that that’s a form of horoscope writing that I certainly had never read anywhere else, and that was what compelled me to do it was like, a lot of the times in, you know, horoscope columns that are by sign, one of the things that you don’t get is getting to hear the same transit talked about, you know, whether it’s a daily or a monthly or weekly or whatever, that you may not get to move into a deep meditation with a certain kind of aspect that’s perfecting, because they only have a paragraph, you know, per 10 transits in a month or something that they wanna cover or whatever. So I don’t know – that’s part of why I’ve always sort of defiantly called my columns horoscopes even they’re not for every sign, but yeah.
JG: Yeah. And I like that about your horoscopes as well, Adam, is that you do allow that kind of deepening into and that feeling out of an aspect, which is so important. And it’s cool that you can do that, because you know, if you’re writing for a website or a publication, oftentimes they just want it to be able to grab people and for people to be able to come and go whenever. And so having kind of a space held for a project like that is really neat, and it’s really valuable, and it’s cool that people are able to find that somewhere and access that, because it is something that you don’t see everywhere. Just because practically not a lot of sites really want to publish something like that.
AE: I was just thinking like, you really couldn’t do it if you were writing for anyone other than yourself, because that wouldn’t go with anyone. And probably readers who are taking in horoscopes would also be sort of like, “We’re talking about the same thing five days in a row?” You know what I mean?
JG: Right. You’re not really hitting – I mean, with dailies, like, you’re not necessarily always looking to hit the demographic that’s gonna wanna meditate on planetary —
AE: Right.
JG: — placements, right?
AE: Exactly. Betraying my past life as a contemplative monk somewhere, I’m guessing.
JG: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
CB: That’s a really good point, though, that the advent of websites and blogging and astrologers essentially publishing their own horoscope columns has allowed for a lot of innovation and like, diversity and like, new ways of approaching this in terms of doing forecasts for like, monthlies or weeklies or dailies. And even though a lot of the structure is still fundamentally the same as it has been for decades, there are some little ways in which that’s being tweaked in interesting ways, like with your column, Adam – yeah, I really appreciate and just to echo that, like, your delineations and I’m always really impressed by how you’ll go into and expand on some of those planetary aspects and try to get to the core meaning in a really interesting way. And you’re right that that’s something that you wouldn’t have seen, you know, two or three decades ago in a horoscope column just because there wasn’t necessarily space for that.
AE: I always tell, you know, Becca Tarnas – I’m always like, mentioning how I’m indebted to her father’s use of adjectives in Cosmos and Psyche like, forever, because —
CB: Right.
AE: — it’s formed like, the bedrock of how I structure my horoscopes to try and kind of, you know, dig in and keep turning the jewel of the transit, but he’s really really good at that. He’s got that Pisces Sun up at the Midheaven, so I feel like – it’s not totally original, I feel like if I had to credit anyone with the kind of moving the symbol around like that, it would probably be him.
CB: Yeah. Cosmos and Psyche, that where he gives the delineations of the significations of the planets, and he has like, a page or a page and a half for each planet that is basically like a thesaurus for astrology writers who are looking to not repeat. I mean, it’s the same issue that any writer runs into if you ever work with an editor or if you ever write like, a essay or something where if you see that you’ve used the same word three times in the same sentence or three times in two sentences, you obviously need to switch it up and switch it out with like, a synonym or something just so it doesn’t look like a repetition. And that’s basically one of the core problems that we’ve been talking about here with writing these horoscopes is using appropriate synonyms for explaining the astrological symbolism.
AE: Yeah, I like to think of it like, when I read his writing – not just in those passages, but when he’s exploring like, mundane transits of you know, Neptune-Uranus or something over a long period of time. The way that he has of trying to get into the core of the archetype, it feels to me like he’s circumambulating the planets, like chanting or something with adjectives. So I think about it like that in my imaginal way of framing it in my mind, but yeah, that’s —
JG: That’s a great image. Circumambulating the planet while chanting adjectives.
AE: Yeah —
CB: Right.
JG: Yeah, straight to the vision board with that!
AE: Right! Well, you know, I feel like actually there’s a lot of us doing that these days. And especially when you’re actually talking to somebody, and you’re in front of somebody having to – to speak of writing, which is very difficult when you’re on a deadline, but – when you’re with somebody in person and you have to try and describe something, I feel like often times you just keep circumambulating it until all of a sudden something springs out.
CB: Definitely. All right. Well, this starts to bring us around – I mean, I think the final point just to end on is one of the things that you were encouraging, Jo, is that you wanted to see more. And one of the things that I think is interesting about this is I sort of announced on the forecast episode that I was seriously thinking about doing this and doing a horoscope column, and most of the feedback was encouraging, but there were a few people that were like, “Why would you do that? There’s lots of people already doing that,” or, “Your skills are better used doing some other, more advanced astrology work that can better expand the field” or something like that. And while I understand that perspective, on the other hand, the extreme opposite end of the perspective is like, wouldn’t you want like, all of the best astrologers in the field being the people that are on the frontlines like, writing the horoscope columns and therefore being the people that are interfacing with the broader community outside of the astrological community and that sort of entry point into the astrological community where you’re meeting the public and giving them a sort of taste of what astrology is actually about. And I think that was part of your argument as well, wasn’t it?
JG: Yeah. And…
AE: Haters gonna hate, man.
JG: Honestly, it gets lonely up there on your high horse at some point, and you’re just gonna have to realize that horoscopes are astrology too, and it’s okay when prominent astrologers write horoscopes or record horoscopes. And for you specifically, Chris, I commented on the forecast video, but you know, we all have to think about our brands and if we’re watering down our brands or strengthening them – I get that. But I think what’s unique about your approach to this is like, you’re approaching it from what I can understand is kind of in the same way you approach this podcast, which is to kind of like, display different ways of doing astrology, different approaches, and basically be all about educating the community. If someone, you know, like you who has never really delved into this part of astrology gives it a try and like, describes their experience, it’s only going to provide more perspective and insight to your listeners and allow them to kind of understand the scope of astrology in general. I think the comments about like, “Why would you do that?” You know, “Your time’s better spent elsewhere.” I mean like, I wouldn’t suggest you start like, writing dailies full time and like, abandon the podcast or something like that, you know, like —
CB: Right.
JG: — definitely don’t do that. I don’t think that’s something you would really want to do or be passionate about doing anyway, so I don’t think we have to worry. But you know, definitely give it a shot. And it’s not gonna… Your time is not better spent elsewhere, as long as you’re authentic in how you approach it, which you have been completely thus far. You know, you’re having this conversation with us, you did your monthly forecasts, and you know, I don’t know, maybe do the challenge. Do a month of dailies just to see what it’s like. But I think stuff like that is just kind of coming from probably a well-meaning but slightly ignorant place —
AE: Yeah.
JG: — maybe a little arrogant?
AE: Yeah.
JG: I don’t wanna make too many assumptions, but —
CB: I understand it because there is a – obviously, you know, with me or with any of the three of us, there’s a weird range of you know, writing a book on ancient astrological history and like, doing translations of ancient texts and reading like, scholarship on history of transmission of astrology and all that other… Let’s say, it’s not arrogant to say that but like, high level sort of work on astrology, where there’s high level work being done in different areas of the astrological field, whether it’s on ancient history or on translation or on psychology or medical astrology or what have you, and then there is the other, more practical like, getting down and getting your hands dirty and like, doing astrology type work, whether that’s doing consultations with one-on-one individuals or whether that’s doing forecasts, that’s like the actual practice of astrology. And I can see people sometimes having this tension or sometimes wanting people to focus more on the quote-unquote advanced work, but it’s just making room for the realization that all of those are sort of important in different ways, I guess.
AE: Yeah. I certainly think that, you know, there’s a funny way in which the stuff that we consider to be really high is sometimes, you know, if treated in the wrong manner or expressed in the wrong ways, is really lacking substance. And I think what you’re doing is all about substance. I think that you have nothing to prove for yourself as a researcher, as a historian, as a sort of quote-unquote high academic or intellectual astrologer. But the fact that you’re compelled to do something that’s very hands-on, that’s actually a modern form that you bring your Hellenistic into it, I mean that’s – personally, what I’m really fascinated by is how can we take this ancient material, this Hellenistic stuff for example, or medieval astrology or Renaissance or horary or anything, and how can we make it part of something that’s accessible for more people? I mean, that’s why – that vision has shaped the way that I do business for a really long time, but it’s starting to inform my actual sort of pedagogy, where I want to try to build in-roads for modern astrologers to understand – modern astrologers or general modern astrology audience to understand more about ancient astrology. I think you’re already doing such a good job with that in how you educate and inform people and the different guests you have on your show, but your horoscopes were awesome. I loved my Cancer horoscope; I thought it was bang on and really good. And it was fun to see the Hellenistic astrologer that everybody knows like, being a wizard at something else. Like, I just thought that was really cool, and I don’t think you should give it up. I don’t know about the dailies either, but I think you should keep —
JG: You guys!
AE: — going with it.
CB: Yeah, I simply don’t have the – not patience, the – what is it? Like, not self-reliance, the word’s escaping me – discipline! I don’t have the discipline to do dailies. Like, I’m always in awe of people like Austin —
AE: Or Jo.
CB: — who’s doing that constantly or like you two that are able to do that with such regularity or … I remember so many times like, being at like, a conference with Rick Levine, and we’re staying up like, arguing in the lounge about like, whether astrology was causal or acausal until like, two in the morning. And then he would look at his watch and say, “Oh, I have to go write my daily.” And having that type of discipline to just drop everything and do that every day is a skill that I have not quite developed yet, but I don’t know, we’ll see maybe.
JG: That literally happened with me and Rick at UAC. He was like, “Jo, this is awesome, I just – you know, I gotta, you know how it is. Gotta go finish dailies.”
CB: Right.
JG: And he was like, “You wanna write some dailies?” and I was like, “No.”
AE: Well that’s what I was —
JG: Not at UAC!
AE: That’s what I said to Chris, too – there was a gathering going on, what was it for? What was the organization that was holding that little party at UAC? And I said, “I gotta go! I got my Pisces horoscope I still gotta write and I gotta try to do a little yoga before I go to bed” and da-da-da.
CB: Yeah, you literally did that UAC. You left a party because we dragged you up to the AFAN suite to hang out at UAC just a month ago, and you said, “I have to go. I have to write the rest of my column for this month – it’s due.”
AE: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, that is impressive. So that’s the other like, superpower that you develop by doing an astrology column on a regular basis is the discipline as a writer, as an astrologer, and a sort of content producer, but also this feeling perhaps eventually also of having some sort of obligation to your audience. Because that’s been an interesting observation over the past decade as well, like, the audience really does get attached to their horoscope writer after a certain amount of time, and sometimes if something happens or if that doesn’t deliver —
AE: Oh yeah.
CB: — they can get pretty upset, which —
AE: Oh yes, I get – it’s feisty!
CB: Yeah. In some instances, that’s not pretty. Like, I saw some pretty nasty stuff with Susan Miller’s audience like, several years ago when she was having health problems, and so she had to like, not write for a period of time. And people got really pissed off, like, pretty quickly about that.
AE: Yeah. Yeah, no, I get that – I mean, having done 300 plus per year for going on five years now, I have gotten so many people who – first of all, you’re an open target because people can offer you all sorts of criticism, and it’s also people will send me sometimes like, three pages worth of a response to something that I write, and I don’t have the time to respond to that, you know? And if I don’t, if I say something that’s, you know, shorter than they would like, you know, it’s like I’ve offended someone. Yeah, it’s definitely, there are some treacherous parts of being someone who writes. I kind of envy you, Jo, in some ways of being a ghostwriter. Having that like, not necessarily having to interface personally with people, because sometimes it’s a really drain. In fact, in my yearly fundraiser, one of the things that I say is, the amount of time that I spend interacting with readers is part of what I’m asking you to help me fundraise for because it’s time consuming. It’s a lot.
CB: Right.
JG: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting, then additional, little behind-the-scenes thing. And I know there are some horoscope writers that do like, pen names or like, Austin for a long time when he was first writing his column was using like, a pen name for several years, and it was only in like, 2010 that he started using his real name finally. So it’s interesting sometimes those choices that people make in terms of interacting with the public and the connection that the reader has with the writer and so on and so forth.
All right. So I think that brings us to the end of this discussion. So thanks a lot, guys, for joining me on this today. This was really a lot of fun, and I’m glad we got a chance to do this.
AE: Yeah. Thanks —
JG: Yeah, thanks for having me!
AE: — for having us. Sorry I couldn’t control my laughing for a while there, guys; I just lost it.
CB: No, I mean, sometimes when – that’s the 12th house. When it hits you, you gotta…
JG: Hey, laughter is like, the best medicine right now.
AE: I know, totally.
JG: Actually, for always, but especially now I’d rather us be laughing uncontrollably.
AE: My heart feels so full from all of that, so I’m really thankful for spending this time with you guys.
JG: Yes —
CB: Awesome. Well —
JG: — ditto.
CB: — so just to reiterate, so Jo, where can people find out more information about your work? You actually launched last year and the past few months a new YouTube channel with Ryan Butler, and you guys are killing it with some great astrology videos over the past few months, right?
JG: Yeah, we actually are in the middle of rolling out videos for a series on the six main components that go into zodiac signs that give them their meaning. The YouTube channel is called Cups and Crowns so just search for that on YouTube and you’ll be able to find that channel of ours. And myself, my website is AmyJoGleason.com – you’ll find blog posts and maybe more stuff that I may or may not roll out, I’m gonna roll stuff out for this horoscope writing challenge that I guess created almost inadvertently so be on the lookout for that. And I’m on Twitter as well – AmyJoGleason, making threads, having conversations.
CB: Awesome. And recently became the new vice president of the Association for Young Astrologers?
JG: Yes. Yeah, super excited about that. And our website is youngastrologers.org if you’re interested in finding out more about what we’re up to, what we have in the pipeline there.
CB: Awesome. Cool. And Adam, where can people find out more information about you and your various writings?
AE: Right, so simplest way would be to go to my website, which is NightlightAstrology.com – not night life, some people think I run a dance club. It’s actually an astrology school, it’s called Nightlight Astrology. So you can go to NightlightAstrology.com or you can just check me out on Facebook at Adam Elenbaas.
CB: Brilliant. And your column actually appears on the Astrograph website, which is astrograph.com, right?
AE: Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah, my monthly horoscope column is at astrograph.com and click on the horoscopes tab and then there’ll be glyphs for all of the horoscopes at the top of the page and just click on yours and you’ll find the monthly there.
CB: Okay. And you’ve also been producing a ton of videos on YouTube over the past year as well, and that’s something that you’re putting more time and energy into, right?
AE: Yeah. I started – basically wanted to mix up my dailies with video blogs. So I do maybe two, sometimes maybe three a week video blogs, and just trying to reach out to people who aren’t as inclined to read, so yeah, there’s been more development on that. So you go to Adam Elenbaas at YouTube and find the video blogs. Those are on my Facebook page and on my website as well.
CB: Okay. Brilliant. Well, people should check those out, and I think all three of us are gonna do different videos. I’m gonna post this video on my YouTube page, but then we might do other follow-ups on Adam’s, and you guys are gonna do one on Adam’s and other combinations, right?
AE: Yeah, I think – hopefully —
JG: Yeah.
AE: — I want Jo to come and talk about Association for Young Astrologers and tell people about that a little bit more.
JG: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: All right. Cool. Well, thanks again for joining me today, and thank you, everybody, for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to give it a good rating on iTunes. Be sure to like and subscribe, et cetera, and we will see you next time.