The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 22, titled:
The Astrology of 2015
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on January 7, 2015
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released January 12, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, this is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. You can find the show at TheAstrologyPodcast.com, and you can also listen to us on iTunes. Today is January 7, 2015, and this is the 22nd episode of the show. Today, I’ll be talking with Austin Coppock about some of the major astrological trends and alignments in 2015. He was on the show just a few episodes ago to promote his groundbreaking new book on the decans titled, 36 Faces, and today he’s joining me to promote his 2015 Astrological Almanac, which is available through his website at AustinCoppock.com. So, Austin, welcome back to the show.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Thanks, Chris.
CB: All right, I’m excited to do this. This is the first time I’ve done a podcast that’s been more topical in terms of—I mean, I guess Patrick and I have talked about, you know, the alignments that were going on with the presidential election. But this is the first time we’ve done sort of a forward-looking, quasi-predictive show that’s looking at upcoming astrological trends, and I think you’re a great person to do that with given how much time you spend each year literally looking at the year ahead or the following year and trying to anticipate what the major trends will be in the world based on specific astrological alignments. So first, before we get into it, what’s your process for writing your astrological almanac, and how much time do you spend on it each year?
AC: Well, that’s a good question. So this year, the 2015 almanac, was the fifth time I’ve done this project. And it’s changed a little bit year to year, but I think, for at least the last three, I start with looking at every day of the year individually. And so, you know, I kind of start with the microscopic and, you know, just kind of look at the rhythm of every day. And I usually write out most, if not all, of the daily delineations before I move onto the monthly, and then I kind of build up from there to larger ones, you know, something like the Uranus-Pluto squares, which isn’t a monthly or a daily thing, or even a yearly thing. And so, I kind of start small and get big, and that usually bounces back down to the small, you know. ‘Cause when you’re looking at things on a daily level like that—you know, just for example, the Uranus-Pluto square or the upcoming Saturn-Neptune square—you know, you see the Moon making a T-square to those positions twice a month, right? You see inner planets hitting them, so you’re like, “Oh, what’s up with this Saturn-Neptune thing?” You know, it’s kind of a way of pressing the same button over and over and over again.
CB: Sure.
AC: And so, when you do the dailies, you get really curious about what the connecting thread between all these different moments that you’ve delineated is.
CB: Okay. And that leads you to some of the broader trends in terms of the outer planet transits and placements and things like that.
AC: Yeah, yeah. You know, sometimes I’ll have an insight about something big, you know, just in the midst of doing the dailies, but, you know, I try to start small and let the big grow out of that. When you do it the opposite way—when you kind of decide ahead of time what the big stuff is gonna be like and then try to make the individual moments conform to that—I think that you run a risk of fitting everything to a procrustean bed, if that makes sense; you know, trying to make things fit the formula, you know, you think is gonna be dominant. So I don’t know. It’s a back-and-forth, but I like to start small and then get bigger.
CB: Sure. That makes sense. So what then—based on the work you put into your almanac for 2015—what are some of the major trends? Or what’s a good starting point for the discussion in terms of what we can expect out of 2015?
AC: Well, there are a lot of things to say. I guess the primary theme, you know, if we’re gonna look at the year as a whole is that it’s a transitional year, and it’s transitional for a lot of different reasons. You know, on a very simple level it’s the middle of the decade, and we see some of the configurations which have characterized the first half of the decade: such as the Uranus-Pluto squares sort of—not quite breathing their last—but climaxing and then beginning a sort of fallout/integration period. And then we see some things that are really going to dominate or have a lot to do with the next several years beginning to take shape this year. 2015 is placed between—it’s not that the first half of the decade is over and all those themes are done, but those are sort of winding down at the same time as other things are cycling up. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of transitional imagery. And I think it’s also—yeah, we’ll get into more of the details. I think if I go on much longer I’ll end up all over the place.
CB: Sure.
AC: Deep into one detail or another.
CB: Right. Well, in terms of transitions, so I think one of the ways that I’ve seen both you and other astrologers—such as Kelly Surtees—characterize this year is as being a much more dynamic year in some ways than others because of a heavy emphasis on fire placements or fire signs. Is that right?
AC: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s not gonna be a gentle, smooth transition necessarily. I think that the new themes will jump out and grab people. You know, as you’ve said, we’ve got a lot of planets in fire signs this year.
CB: What is that again? Or what do we have?
AC: So Uranus has been in Aries for years now, so that’s nothing new. Jupiter has been in Leo since the middle of July last year and will be there until August of 2015. But those two are joined by Saturn who moved into Sagittarius on December 23, right? So we’ve got a minimum of three of one planet in every fire sign until mid-August when Jupiter moves in. And Saturn does briefly slip back into Scorpio over the summer, but the summer sees Venus in a fire sign, Leo, for almost four months straight. So, you know, there’s always going to be fire, and there are certain moments—such as in the late winter and March—where you have Mars and Venus rampaging through Aries; and, you know, it just pushes the proportion of planets in fire signs, I don’t know about over the edge, but to a white-hot flame.
CB: Nice. Okay, so we’ve got a minimum of three planets most of the year, with Saturn and Jupiter and Uranus in fire signs. And then at various points we get a bunch of inner planets clumping up there as well when they start going through fire signs, especially Venus going retrograde in Leo so that it has an extended transit through that sign, with Mars catching up there about the same time.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then Venus and Mars going through Aries at the same time early in the year and then Sagittarius roughly at the same time later in the year. Yeah, I guess then you would characterize that as a year in which the dominant element is fire, and therefore, the dynamism or whatever keywords you wish to use for fire would be more prominent this year than, say, last year when we had Saturn in Scorpio and Jupiter going through Cancer.
AC: Absolutely. You know, one particularly important part of that is Saturn, you know, Saturn having moved into Sagittarius about two weeks ago. You know, Saturn is often sort of syncretized with Kronos, the ruler of time. We know that Kronos and Cronus were actually different gods in Greek mythology, but our astrological Saturn does seem to have a tremendous amount to do with time. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve noted about Saturn is, in a sense, Saturn lays down the drumbeat; you know, Saturn lays down the pace of a given period of time. And Saturn in Sagittarius is a much more rapid pace than we’ve seen with Saturn in Scorpio. And, you know, as some astrologers who’ve made a study of music could tell you better than I, the types of music that people listen to, or that are popular during Saturn in Scorpio, are different than those that get popular with Saturn in Sag. Saturn in Sag is fast. There are lots of different styles that were popular during Saturn in Sag during the 20th century, but none of them are slow. Saturn in Sag is somewhat frantic. If we look back at the late ‘80s, we have ‘hair’ metal, for example.
CB: So we can expect a resurgence of Poison and other ‘hair’ bands.
AC: Oh, God, I hope not, but it’s definitely not slow. You know, one of the things that’s occurred to me just in the last two weeks when Saturn entered Sag is that the way I’ve experienced the Saturn and kind of watching that shift in people’s lives, you know, if Saturn sort of demands that we endure a particular set of experiences for a given time, Saturn in Scorpio seemed very much about kind of sitting back and trying to emotionally process various poisons which infect our world system. You know, Saturn in Scorpio brought out all of this kind of grotesque stuff about race and class and gender. You know, we’re sort of subjected to this horror show of what some might call the ‘shadow elements’ of our collective life. And, you know, in a corresponding way horror movies, horror shows, horror stories are very popular during Saturn in Sag, or Saturn in Scorpio, at least as far as the 20th century is concerned, and that’s where monsters come from.
And when you’re watching a horror movie, you know, there’s not much you can do. You’re just sort of subjected to it, and it’s about how you can deal with it or not. Whereas Saturn in Sag, I’ve noticed, again, just, you know, on a small level, Saturn in Sag seems to be demanding people get up and do things. You know, it sort of demonstrates the idea that, you know, water signs are inherently passive relative to fire signs, which are relatively active; this yin and yang thing. You know, Saturn in Scorpio was kind of like, “All right, deal with it,” whereas Saturn in Sag is like, “All right, now go do all of these things,” and you’re being timed.
CB: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, in terms of that shift with Saturn moving into Sagittarius, for what, the next three years, that’s definitely one of the biggest shifts that’s taken place that will I expect to be much different or will be indicative of the type of differences and a sort of starkness in the differences compared to the last two years where Saturn’s been in Scorpio. And one of the things I’m actually looking forward to about that shift is just seeing how some of those placements, of Saturn going through Sagittarius, play out literally. Especially with Saturn in Scorpio, I found it really interesting just how literal many of the global news stories were as Saturn was moving through Scorpio in terms of bringing out some very Scorpionic, very classic Scorpionic types of situations and news stories and things like that. And pretty much from the very start of Saturn in Scorpio in late 2012, all the way until the recent past, we had news stories dealing with privacy, issues of secrecy, issues with spying, issues with hacking; sex scandals that started with one of the US generals. I think it was Petraeus or somebody in November of 2012, and that was actually one of the very first stories within a month of Saturn going into Scorpio.
What came out of that was that he and his mistress were corresponding through Gmail or something, so some of the stories that came out of that sex scandal originally were things about privacy and how to have better privacy or not get hacked or what have you. And then of course we had the Snowden leaks that came out the following year in June, right around the Saturn station in Scorpio. And then finally, more recently, we had the North Korean hacking scandal with the whole debacle over the interview movie and Sony getting hacked and things like that. So the literalness of some of the manifestations of Saturn in Scorpio was really fascinating to me, and I’m interested to see if it’s just as literal with Saturn going through Sagittarius now.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, if any planet has a reputation for being literal, you know, I think that’s Saturn.
CB: Right, right. Yeah, and that’s brilliant because it’s not subtle. You know, we’re not reading between the lines here; it’s all very straightforward. And even now with Saturn in Sagittarius, in the last few days—just today actually—one thing that sort of struck me, and I hope I’m not stretching it too much, was the murder or the assassination of the French cartoonist and the shooting that just took place today in Paris over the cartoonist drawing depictions of Muslim prophet Mohammad. And what’s interesting or what’s come out of that—or what I’ve been noticing in the news media in The New York Times and CNN and on Reddit and places like that—is it’s sparking this whole discussion about religion and criticism of belief or criticism of Islam, and of course criticism especially about religious zealotry. And I think that’s kind of fascinating, and I wonder if that’s not the start of a Saturn in Sagittarius trend that we’re gonna see become a lot more prominent in the next couple of years until Saturn leaves Sagittarius in 2017, in the same way that we saw some inklings of what Saturn in Scorpio would be like with the Petraeus sex scandal, right at the beginning of Saturn in Scorpio.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s actually very insightful. And I don’t think it’s out of bounds to look at questions of belief or a hardening of religious—or just a hardening of belief, whether it be religious or ideological with Saturn in Sagittarius. You know, as you well know, Sagittarius is traditionally ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter, especially in traditional astrology, is seen as the ‘religious’ planet, right? And so, if you have religious concerns—or we can just say concerns surrounding belief—anchored in Sagittarius, you know, it’s Saturn’s job to harden and to concretize the territory that he’s placed in, right? And so, what do we call those people? We call them hardliners, right, for whatever their belief system is; and so, yeah, I think that will certainly be a part of Saturn in Sagittarius.
You know, one of the things that I came across when I was doing my thinking about Saturn in Sagittarius before it had actually ingressed was, I don’t know, I was seeing a lot of articles being posted by astrologers using the metaphor of ‘going on a spiritual quest’. And so, this for personal astrology; you know, they weren’t necessarily speculating about the collective. But, you know, you do have this mobile, armed figure with Sagittarius, which is really, you know, essential to any quest motif. You have somebody searching for something that has meaning in overcoming challenges, right? They have to be mobile and armed.
CB: Sure.
AC: But as I was thinking about it, you know, it seems like there are kind of two questions that Saturn in Sagittarius poses on a personal level and also a collective level, and one is, you know, do you have a meaningful, long-term goal? And meaningful, long-term goals have to be anchored in bigger pictures of the world, right? Like what is the point of doing all of this, right? ‘Cause you have to have a point to want to do things, right? You know, if we’re looking at the metaphor of the archer, like what are you aiming for, right? And so, that’s where a lot of the big stories or grand narratives that people anchor their lives in come into play. Whether it’s, you know, a Christian narrative or an Islamic narrative or a hermetic narrative or an atheist narrative, right, they’re all stories about the whole world. And then once you have a story there are certain tasks that make sense, and then there’s the question of, you know, do you have the grit and determination to accomplish what needs to be done according to the way you see yourself in the world, right?
And although there are a number of people who have the grit and determination to accomplish what they see as their work, I think Saturn in Sagittarius will be revealing for many people an error in the way they’re seeing the world or an error in the very quest that they set out on. You know, I think that people will be discovering after being, you know, ‘victorious’ that they actually were on a fool’s errand. And I think that, you know, the attackers in this case in France are a good example. You know, they certainly had the necessary qualities to accomplish what they wanted, but I would argue that—as I think most people would—the entire quest was worse than a fool’s errand, right?
And so, you know, with these kinds of questions burbling throughout the micro- and macrocosm people will be questioning ideologies, on one hand, they’ll be questioning their beliefs, but also defending them and digging in, right? The question is sort of where to dig in and what path to follow, right? And a lot of people when their beliefs are questioned dig in defensively, right, rather than allowing themselves to be uprooted from what might actually be, you know, unfertile ground. And I think, you know, as you and I were saying earlier, these questions that I think can be subsumed primarily just under Saturn in Sagittarius are really exacerbated by one of the bigger configurations that starts this year—it doesn’t really get going till the fall—and that being Saturn in Sagittarius’ square to Neptune in Pisces.
CB: Oh, right.
AC: Yeah, which we’re gonna see a lot of in 2016, but there will be strong precursors this year.
CB: ‘Cause Neptune’s only at 5 Pisces right now. So Saturn does get pretty close before it stations; like 4 Sag before it stations this spring, right?
AC: Yep. Yeah, it chases it. You know, right now it’s a 4° applying aspect. That’s a real aspect.
CB: Yeah, that’s in effect.
AC: Yeah, it was in effect as soon as it went in.
CB: Right.
AC: And, you know, Saturn and Neptune are going to roughly pace each other. So Neptune will pull ahead to 5 by the time Saturn gets to 4. Then Saturn will head back and Neptune will do its thing, and they actually meet in the fall. You know, one thing I guess for everybody to remember when you’re looking at a square in the sky that’s gonna hold for a while, you have to remember the 30 different moments where they’re gonna be T-squares. You know, if we’ve got Saturn in early Sag, and Neptune in early Pisces, you know, what about the time periods where all of the inner planets go through early Gemini? What about when they go through early Virgo, right? You have all of these T-squares that are promised. You know, you get two a month just with the Moon.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And then you get the activation or the triggering of those outer planet configurations that are lasting for so long sort of narrowed down in this specific timeframe.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Okay, well, that’s interesting. And then just obviously on a more personal level for a lot of people, at least from my perspective, a way that people can relate to that shift from Saturn in Scorpio to Saturn in Sagittarius to their own chart is, at least for myself, using whole sign houses. When you start using whole sign houses you realize that an ingress of a planet into a new sign is not just a shift of a planet into a sign, but it’s also a shift of that planet into a new house. And actually one of the ways that you can test whole sign houses to see if there’s anything to it is when you have major outer planet changes like this, if you start seeing different topics or different areas of a person’s life starting to become activated.
It’s been, for the most part, very entertaining over the past two years for me to observe all of my Leo rising friends who have all had major changes or many of them have met major changes in terms of their home and their living situation over the past couple of years as Saturn was going through Scorpio because it was going through their 4th house. And now, all of a sudden, we get Saturn, for the Leo rising people, shifting into their 5th house; and so we have topics related to—let’s say children is one topic coming into play and becoming more prominent for the next two or three years. But just about everybody can do that in order to sort of personalize some of those transits. And then some instances, especially if that part of your chart’s being activated through other ways, you’re gonna see that Saturn transit through that new house emphasizing new topics. So that’s one thing in terms of personalizing it. The other personalizing thing of course—and this blows my mind—is that all of the Saturn in Sagittarius kids who were born in 1986-1987, up to 1988 are now having their Saturn return.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s November of ‘88 when it shifts.
CB: November of ‘88, okay. Is it ‘86? Yeah, I think it’s ‘86 to ‘88, somewhere around there.
AC: Yes.
CB: Okay. So all of those kids that were born then, they’ve just begun their Saturn return as Saturn has ingressed into Sagittarius. And all of the Saturn in Scorpio people, such as myself, are rejoicing because their Saturn returns are almost over. But unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple because Saturn of course will come back into Scorpio, will retrograde back into Scoripo June 15, and it will stay there this year all the way until September 18.
AC: Yeah, it’s almost exactly the summer quarter.
CB: Right. Oh, yeah, that’s a good point.
AC: Yeah, it’s like solstice to equinox within a few days.
CB: Fantastic. So it’s like another summer of Saturn returns for the Saturn in Scorpio people, especially those that got nailed by it over the past couple of years. Great. So I had a keyword for that, but I forget what it was, but it was something like, you know, ‘not quite finished yet’ or checking to make sure that you learned what you were supposed to learn during that transit.
AC: Yeah, I always think of it as ‘one last thing’.
CB: Right. Yeah, you’re finished and out the door, or Saturn’s heading out the door, and you’re saying goodbye to him, it’s been nice hanging out. Then he’s like, “One last thing.”
AC: Yeha, he’s, “Oh, I forgot.” I mean, it only goes back to 28. Saturn only goes back to 28 Scorpio before stationing direct. So it’s only like the very end of people with Saturn in Scorpio that are gonna get a direct hit.
CB: Right.
AC: In my experience when I was having my Saturn return, and Saturn returned to Virgo for a little bit after he ingressed into Libra, I didn’t have, you know, big events take place, but I instantly felt like I was in my Saturn return again. You know, with the Saturn in Virgo I had this sort of blanket of worry and anxiety that I was snuggled up in for a couple of years. It went into Libra and I just felt it disappear; I was like, “Great.” And the Saturn went back into Virgo for just a little bit and I was like, “Oh, it feels like this again.”
CB: Yeah. And I already have a great example of that even though it hasn’t happened yet, which is one of my friends unfortunately had a parent who passed away. They were Leo rising and they had Scorpio in the 4th house. And so, Saturn transiting through Scorpio was transiting through their 4th house and their mother passed away. And their mother is an orthodox Greek or was in the orthodox Greek church, and apparently there’s something where there has to be six months before they can hold the final funeral services; or there’s some funeral services that take place six months later. And the way that it ended up happening was that that got scheduled for exactly June 16.
So their mother died at the very end of Saturn in Scorpio in their 4th house and then it leaves and moves into Sagittarius and then transits over. And then June 15, the transit comes back, Saturn comes back for sort of a final visit through their 4th house, and presumably during that time will be the final, like you were just saying, reminder of that, and they’ll be back to that feeling of where they were. And then gradually over the next few months it’ll go away once Saturn leaves that sign. So that’s like a really concrete example of exactly what you were talking about for many people. For some people it will be that concrete in that they’ll probably return to some of the issues that they have been dealing with when Saturn was in Scorpio over the past couple of years. And for others it might be more of a metaphorical or more of a sense or an emotional sense of whatever that time was for them.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Actually I have a great example of Saturn’s ingress being really obvious, so I just want to back up to that very briefly for one story. So I was traveling on December 23, the day that Saturn ingressed, and my host is a person with Cancer rising, right? And so, that meant that Saturn ingressed into his 6th house, you know, of health issues on that very day. As I was approaching in the car, this was a bit of a drive, there was a call, and he was actually in the hospital because he had a problem with his foot that had gotten inflamed for no reason that anybody could tell, but it was so bad he couldn’t even walk.
CB: Wow.
AC: And so, what’s interesting is he finally got out. It was a bit of a drive. When I got in late that night, he greeted me on crutches with one leg up, right? You know, one leg held up.
CB: Okay.
AC: So what’s interesting about that is, one, it’s a really obvious ‘Saturn is now in your 6th house of health problems’ transit. And also, you know, if you look at how Saturn is depicted especially in alchemical manuscripts, it’s a cripple with a crutch and one leg up; like he’s got a bum foot.
CB: Okay.
AC: And so, I see my friend, I’m like, “Oh, Saturn has marked you.” You know, this couldn’t be clearer. This is the traditional iconography on the very day that Saturn enters your house of, you know, health problems.
CB: Right. Right, that’s brilliant. Yeah, I mean, I probably already belabor this point too much, but really the whole sign houses sometimes are just so stark, it’s hard not to pay attention and not to find that compelling. And I think that’s why a record number of astrologers are adopting that as a system; at least as a secondary system, if not they’re primary one. Okay, so that’s one of the major themes of course this year is Saturn going into Sagittarius and then Saturn returning for a quarter of the year to Scorpio to have a reminder or check up again on everybody in whatever house it was going through for you.
The other thing that takes place this year, one of the other major characteristic and unique things about this year is the Venus retrograde in Leo this summer. And this one’s—well, I don’t want to say it’s more important than any other ‘cause different people respond differently to different ones. But I remember this one because it’s the one that stations in early Virgo, and this time it’s gonna station at 0° of Virgo and then retrograde back into Leo and station direct somewhere in mid-Leo. And this is taking place between July 25 and August 2, but the last time this specific retrograde happened was during the summer of 2007. So basically we’re having a repetition of an exact retrograde period from 2007, which should coincide with a repetition of some similar themes for many people or similar issues or similar situations from that retrograde during the summer of 2007. So that’s kind of interesting and exciting ‘cause I actually remember that retrograde. Yeah, actually I think I was hanging out with you during that retrograde at one of the Project Hindsight conclaves.
AC: Indeed. I believe that was the last conclave.
CB: That was the very last major Hindsight conclave. Yeah, ‘cause they elected it for the day that Venus stationed retrograde and everyone said that was a bad idea, which more or less turned out to be correct.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: I’m going to avoid recounting too many specifics.
CB: Okay.
AC: But yeah, I would agree that in hindsight, and for many of us with foresight, that was not a fortunate election. Yeah, you know, as some of your listeners probably know, you know, the Venus retrogrades are really easy to look up in your own life. You know, the Venus retrograde that starts in early Virgo and spends most of its time in Leo, it happens, you know, in the summer every eight years. So 2007, 1999,1991, and 1983, and so on and so on and so on.And so, you can really get a sense of whether it’s really not a big deal for you, or, you know, whether your life changes dramatically for the better or worse.
CB: Right. Like if you go back in eight-year increments and every single one of those was a major event in your life then you can anticipate that this one probably will be as well.
AC: Yeah, and, you know, hopefully you can learn something too. You know, if the last couple of times in a row you’ve made really questionable decisions about relationships, and then it bit you in the ass a couple of months later, well then, you know, this time if a sort of questionable situation comes up hopefully you can say, “I don’t want to do this one again,” right?
CB: Sure. Although, I mean, it doesn’t even have to be Venus-related or relationship-related. I mean, for some people Venus retrogrades are acting as an important marker that’s denoting important events taking place at that point in their lives. Nick Dagan Best I think has talked about during previous episodes where some people are just really tied into that eight-year cycle and important turning points occur in their lives under those Venus retrogrades basically every eight years.
AC: Absolutely. Yeah, Venus can have any priority in a chart; you know, Venus can rule any pair of houses. If Venus rules your 10th house then it’s probably gonna be something career-related, right? If Venus is in your 7th, ruling your 7th, it’s probably gonna be relationship-oriented. You know, Venus has her themes, and so, oftentimes, you know, relationships bear on that house. If it’s 10th house, it might be, you know, meeting a new contact that then gets you a different job, right? You know, Venus still does her work by means of those affairs that she rules, but the outcome can affect any area of the life depending on the chart. But yeah, it’s easy to look up and see what it means for you.
CB: Yeah, and what house it’s going retrograde through and if it’s a prominent angle or if it’s not a prominent house, and so on and so forth. One of the things that’s weird about this one though is, especially in early August, there’s like a bunch of important planetary movements that’ll take place around the same time, especially in that first week or two of August. Yeah, I guess I’ll just list them off. Venus stations retrograde at 0 Virgo in mid-to-late July, July 25-ish, but then it retrogrades back into Leo by the first week of August. And then at the end of the first week of August or beginning of the second week, Mars ingresses into Leo. So for some reason we’re getting this heavy emphasis on the sign Leo that summer basically, by the second week of August, where Venus is retrograde there then Mars shows up to the party, and then Jupiter, just a few days later, by August 12, departs from Leo and actually moves into Virgo I think permanently.
AC: Yeah, the retrograde doesn’t take it back into Leo.
CB: Okay. And then at the same time, in the first week of August, we have Saturn stationing direct at 28° of Scorpio; so Saturn makes his final direct station in Scorpio. Yeah, it’s just crazy. There’s a lot of weird outer planet movements happening during that time.
AC: Yeah. Well, if you look at August 5-6-7, you have Venus at 28. I’m looking at the 6th. You have Venus at 27 Leo, Mercury at 28, Jupiter at 29, right? And so, they’re all making conjunctions with each other or have just made conjunctions, right?
CB: Okay, yeah.
AC: And then all of those are square Saturn, about to station at 28 Scorpio.
CB: Okay.
AC: So that’s a lot of goodness. And so, part of what I get out of my going through every year, day-by-day process is what are ‘hot’ degrees, you know, for good and bad during a year, right? And so, for the summer, like the last couple of degrees—let’s say the last 5° for simplicity’s sake; the last 5° of fixed signs are lit up, right? And that’s not all bad stuff. You know, Saturn can be difficult, but you also have Jupiter there, right? You know, Mercury is Mercury. And then you have a retrograde Venus who does all sorts of things, you know, facilitating cyclical shifts in regard to what she rules is mostly what the Venus retrogrades do. But, you know, those are some intense moments, and they’ll probably be intense for the collective as well as for individuals who are hit by them directly.
CB: Yeah, especially anybody who has Leo activated somehow this year through profection or some other time-lord technique, or somebody that has Leo or fixed signs otherwise prominent in their chart. It’s just an interesting pileup of planets. And then we get a New Moon there I think by the 13th or 14th. So the Sun and Moon are both there as well. Yeah, it’s just very active. So that was definitely one of the parts of the year that stood out to me in terms of that. And, let’s see, what else? So aside from that, aside from August, one of the things that you had mentioned is that the final Uranus-Pluto square, or exact Uranus-Pluto square, is also taking place this year, right?
AC: Yep.
CB: Okay.
AC: That’s in the middle of March.
CB: March, okay. So the middle of March we have the final Uranus-Pluto square. And it’s already 2015, so we’re in the middle of this decade, and the decade, as you’ve pointed out, began with Uranus-Pluto square. So this has been a long-running series of seven or something, right?
AC: Yeah, this is the seventh exact square. If we’re gonna do square by sign and then by, you know, applying orb, you know, Uranus had a preliminary ingress in the spring of 2010 and then went back into Pisces. And then it was, gosh, it was March 11 I believe, in 2011, when Uranus moved into Aries for keepsies, right, you know, until the end of the decade. You know, that was the Arab Spring, that was the ‘Occupy’ summer. The storyline of, you know, the fed-up people vs. the evil empire has really been the main story in the news, in one form or another, all over the world since then.
CB: Sure.
AC: There’s been this ongoing, you know, tension between thesis and antithesis. Like, “We can do it this way.” “We have to do it this way. This is the way things work.” And what’s interesting about that is with Uranus and Pluto, you know, they’ve certainly made what needs to change very, very, very clear in a lot of cases. I think that if we compare the average American’s awareness of issues that the United States is facing now vs. five years ago, the problems haven’t emerged in the last five years, but people are aware that we’ve got basically a crisis in both lower and higher education, we’ve got a crisis with our healthcare, we’ve got a crisis as far as our standing in the world and what role the United States should be playing. We could probably talk about this for an hour, but it’s very clear what the problems are. But the Uranus-Pluto square, it seems like it’s done a good job in some cases—especially with other countries demolishing or disrupting previous systems that were not working, like when you look at the Ukraine where they got rid of the guy that they hated, right? Or in Libya, they got rid of Gaddafi.
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: But has anything replaced it?
CB: Right.
AC: Is there a new order which conforms to Uranian ideals which began said revolutions? And in almost no case is the answer ‘yes’, right? Egypt is another good example. They got rid of, who was it, Mubarak, quite some time ago, and it’s kind of like, “Eh, I don’t know. I guess Egypt’s doing okay. They have different problems than they did five years ago.”
CB: Well, no, they had democratic elections, the majority elected the Muslim Brotherhood to power. And then after, what was it, a year—if even a year—the military stepped in and forcibly removed the democratically-elected president and outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. And now the military is in charge again, which is what was the case when Mubarak was in power.
AC: Yeah, you have very similar stories to that in almost all of the nations that had a really obvious Uranus-Pluto event.
CB: Yeah.
AC: You know, one thing that’s really interesting is even though, oh, this is the last Uranus-Pluto square and we’re entering this time of aftermath, they’ll still be in squared signs for a while, right? But it’s no longer applying; they’re no longer gonna touch, right? This last one should actually hit the United States the hardest. Because if we look at, you know, the July 4 chart, this last Uranus-Pluto square is at 15° of Capricorn and Aries. And so, that nails the US Sun, which is right there. If you look at July 4, it’s 14° or 15° that year—I don’t remember—but it’s within a degree, right? And, you know, we haven’t had a revolution, right? I’m not suggesting we’re gonna have a revolution this March, but, you know, I think a lot of the other countries kind of had their Uranus-Pluto thing a little earlier because they were sensitized to those earlier degrees. Whereas if you do national charts based on the founding of a government at all then, you know, this year is really when the US gets its most direct hit, which is I think pretty interesting.
CB: Yeah, that will be interesting, especially given the things that seemingly had been the focal point of the Uranus-Pluto square prior to this. It was a little bit before, but first intimations of it might have been the Tea Party movement, which is more of a 2009 thing, but that even bled into 2010. And then especially 2010-2011 we had Occupy Wall Street and things like that maybe a little later but basically coinciding with the Uranus-Pluto square. I mean, in all of these instances though it’s fascinating, like you said, with Egypt, it’s like we had, not reactionary, but these sort of rebellious groups, or these groups that were trying to make sudden changes that were springing up sort of spontaneously and attempting to make changes in well-established systems, and then a lot of them just either getting co-opted or getting suppressed in some way, so that the powers-that-be in many ways came out on top in the end anyway.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few years as I’ve been watching that and wondering if that’s not due to Pluto still having the superior position in terms of that aspectual relationship, where this is just the waxing square; where Uranus is still just now building distance between itself and Pluto for the first time since the 1960s when the conjunction took place and it finally hit square. But Pluto is still in this sort of superior position in this relationship because it’s earlier in zodiacal order, and it’s not really until you hit the opposition and then finally the waning square that Uranus eventually gets the upper hand.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So I don’t know, that’s kind of a downer or a bummer.
AC: I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that since, I don’t know, 2011-2012, and I feel pretty good because I had discussion with people who thought that this was going to transform the world and all these problems were gonna get solved.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I was like, “I don’t think so if Pluto is in the superior position.”
CB: Right.
AC: And that may have been pooh-pooh.
CB: How dare you?
AC: I am not horribly disappointed with the way things turned out. I might be unhappy with the way that my country works in certain aspects, but at least I wasn’t horribly disappointed. I didn’t spend all of my energy trying to do something and then have an outcome which was contrary to that. I would also point out that, you know, it’s not really Uranus or Pluto’s job to set up functional systems, right? That’s Saturn’s job, right? Uranus is never gonna, you know, create a functional healthcare system; that’s not what Uranus does, right?
CB: Right.
AC: That’s not what Pluto does. Saturn creates order, right? And we can hate him if we dislike the order which has been created and where we feel trapped in that, or we can appreciate it if we’ve got, you know, our systems running things smoothly. But it’s Saturn’s job to create and stabilize order. And so, you know, one of my bigger thoughts about this year, this year in context with the decade, is that, you know, we know that the first half of this decade had as an ongoing theme the destabilization and criticism of those systems which were not doing their job, and that has been accomplished, right? Now we then ask the opposite question, when will systems get built, right? When do we see the return of order?
And again, some people like order, some people don’t. You can like the order that returns or not, but when does the order come back? Well, it’s obviously when Saturn moves into Capricorn and then Aquarius, you know, which is basically five years where he’s in the signs that he rules and is incredibly strong, right? And Saturn’s time in Capricorn—which is like 2018 through 2020 roughly—will see Saturn in the same sign as Pluto, right? And Saturn and Pluto in a Saturn-ruled sign certainly describes order. And then when Saturn’s in Aquarius, Jupiter finally gets back to Saturn, and then we have a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction.
And as you know the Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions were the primary tool for the mundane astrologer for a thousand years. You can do a lot of really interesting history with these 20-year sections that occur consistently in one element for about 240 to 260 years, and then they go to the next element and do that for 240 or 260 years. And so, not only is that a seed of new order—our last Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was in 2001—in a sense we’re still living out that 20-year program. This year will be exactly three-quarters of the way through with what began in 2001, right?
CB: With the square, I think.
AC: Right. We have Jupiter square Saturn this year, so that’s three-quarters of the way through. But, you know, that next one—which is like the next 20-year chapter—is not till 2021. And that not only begins a new 20-year chapter, it actually begins a new several-hundred-year chapter because, as I said, Aquarius, which is an air sign, begins hundreds of years of conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter in air signs.
CB: Right.
AC: So that’s a pretty big shift. It’s not necessarily one you’ll see in 2021. It’s not like the whole hundreds of years of history will just bloom out from there, and you’ll say, “Oh, everything’s different now,” but it’s the beginning of a very big, very long trajectory for the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, which, again, are of tremendous use for actually looking at the astrology of history.
CB: Yeah, this shift into the air triplicity is the beginning of a new 200-year period. And we had some preview of that of course and there’s some debate about when it started because we had the first conjunction in Libra back in 1980 and 1981.
AC: Right.
CB: But then it went back into earth in 2000 to 2001 and now will have the final shift into that new triplicity in 2020.
AC: Yeah, there’s the blurring at the edges of these periods where you get a preview of air, right, ‘81 to 2001. Although, you know, not everything that happened in those 20 years was great, you did have, you know, the Cold War ending, kind of a good thing; no more constant threat of nuclear annihilation. We did get the internet out of that, kind of good. Like no nuclear annihilation plus internet is pretty good. You know, you may or may not like some of the people who were in power at that time, but, you know, that’s a good thing and the erasure of a very large bad thing, you know.
CB: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the introduction of the internet during that period of that initial preview of the shift into air signs I think is a really interesting preview of what, you know, the next 200 years is gonna be like as that continues to be where all of the conjunctions will take place in 20-year increments for the next two centuries.
AC: Yeah, you know, and then the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction was in Taurus in 2001 and it was back to battling over various goods and land.
CB: Resources.
AC: Yep.
CB: Yeah, that’s brilliant.
AC: So anyway, you know, that’s coming up, right? That’s coming up in almost all of our lifetimes, this bigger shift, but that’s not for another six years. You know, and even Saturn in Capricorn—which will be orderly, if oppressive—you know, that’s still years away; we’ve just started Saturn in Sag. And so, we’re in this period where, you know, we’re most of the way through this cycle that we began in 2001; we’re aware of a lot of the problems of it. But, you know, it’s Saturn in a mutable sign; Sag is mutable. And when you look at it historically—you know, I think I was telling you this a month or two ago when I was working on it—that it makes just as much sense to interpret Saturn in Sag as the lead up to Saturn in Capricorn, right, ‘cause when Saturn goes into Capricorn things change, just looking at American history, right?
The last time Saturn went into Capricorn, the very end of ‘88—you know it was November of ‘88—and then it’s ‘89, and boom, the world changes. The time before that it’s the end of the ‘50s and then Saturn goes into Capricorn—and the ‘60s begin. And probably most dramatically, or least dramatically, you know, Saturn’s in Scorpio or Saturn’s in Sag at the end of the ‘20s and people are, you know, crazy and speculating, just like they were at the end of the ‘80s. And then, boom, Saturn goes into Capricorn, “Have some Great Depression, Americans,” right? Like things just change. You know, there’s a new boss when Saturn gets to Capricorn, and I think that’s simply a result of Saturn being so strong there. And so, Saturn in Sag—it’s these frantic, last days before the boss comes.
And so, with Saturn in Sag, on a macro level you see a lot of people just trying to get away with what they can financially, right? Like you have the massive speculation at the end of the ‘20s; you have massive speculation at the end of the ‘80s. It’s mutable Saturn. It’s kind of like what can you do? How can you work this? Like the new rules haven’t really gone into effect yet. And Sagittarius is one of the few zodiac signs whose symbol is synonymous with speed, right? You know, crabs don’t go very fast. We don’t know how fast virgins go, or scales, right? But, you know, Sag is the image of a man with horse legs. Like what is that good for but traveling far and fast? And so, there’s a little bit of scramble to Saturn in Sagittarius.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that was an interesting point of Saturn in Capricorn kind of being in that pileup in the late 1980s, early 1990s in Capricorn and was also the fall of the Soviet Union, which is interesting in terms of basically the Saturn return also hitting about the time that Saturn hits Capricorn and Aquarius, especially given some of the things that are happening in terms of geopolitics today.
AC: Actually I have two more things I want to sneak in really quickly that are directly related to this.
CB: Okay.
AC: So I was talking about, you know, Saturn in a mutable sign and the ‘get what you can while the getting’s good’ or just try to figure it out ‘cause it’s not gonna stay this way. Try to figure out the terrain for now when negotiating it, and negotiate it as it shifts. As you and I have talked about, there are a number of planets moving into mutable signs, and we’re gonna be dealing with more mutability over the next couple of years. Just as there is an emphasis on the fire triplicity this year, there’s an increasing emphasis on the mutable modality during the second half of this year and then especially in 2016.
CB: So Saturn in Sag. Jupiter going into Virgo. Neptune being in Pisces.
AC: And then the nodes shift into Virgo and Pisces at the end of this year in November.
CB: Okay.
AC: You know, we’ll have South Node on Neptune, which is interesting. Whenever you get one of the nodes on an outer planet, you get interesting stuff happening with that planet.
CB: And that’s partially tied to some of the eclipses that we have coming up, which are kind of weird because they kind of straddle different axes between multiple signs and cardinal signs. So March of 2015, March of this year, we have our first solar eclipse at 29 Pisces, and then right after that we have a lunar eclipse at 14° of Libra. And then in the fall of course it’s reversed so that the solar eclipse occurs in Virgo and then the lunar eclipse occurs in Aries. But those are the good target points for people for a nice opening and closing typically of some topics related to whatever house that falls at in your chart, just in terms of the solar eclipse or the New Moon as being sort of like an opening or a starting point, and the lunar eclipse often being more of a culmination or a closing point. Anyway, those eclipses will be in mutable signs as well, which will kind of kick off some of the mutable stuff that you’re talking about.
AC: Yeah. And then in 2016, they’ll be more solidly in the mutable; in mutable Virgo and mutable Pisces.
CB: Okay. Right, ‘cause the nodes will be fully in those signs at that point and then it’s just all eclipses in mutable signs.
AC: Yeah. I’ve actually done some wondering without coming to many conclusions about the first solar eclipse in Pisces and that’s because it is in the very last degree of Pisces, and then the Sun and Moon both move into Aries, you know, a couple of hours later. And so, if you’re doing some mundane astrology, and you like to look at Aries ingress charts, you look at what is the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere chart every year for a statement about the year, right? And so, you know, the Sun isn’t eclipsed in that chart, but it’s eclipsed like, I don’t know, six hours before that. And so, you know, what does it mean to have an eclipse so close to one of those angles, at a point in time that is so heavily emphasized by traditional mundane astrology? I don’t know what that means but I think it’s very interesting, and hopefully I’ll learn something about it this spring.
CB: Yeah, definitely, that is interesting. All right, so let’s see, in terms of the year though I think that we’ve touched upon most of the main themes that we wanted to touch upon. And I’m trying to think if there’s anything that we didn’t cover. We talked about the emphasis on fire signs. We talked about Saturn’s shift into Sagittarius and then its return to revisit some of the themes of Scorpio for three months basically throughout the summer. We talked about the important Venus retrograde and how that’s connected to the retrogrades of the summer of 2007 and 1999. We talked about that pileup in August of planets and stations and everything else in the first week or two of August. The final Uranus-Pluto square goes exact in March, although they’ll still be sort of square by sign for the rest of the decade. So even though it’s not gonna be as intense as some of those exact points were, I think we’ll still get some residual effects of that Uranus-Pluto square for the rest of the decade probably.
AC: Yeah. Although I would like to say one thing about that, and that’s how people are gonna experience that on a personal level. Instead of getting Uranus and Pluto at the same time—for the last several years—basically a person is having, you know, a Pluto transit and a Uranus transit to the same point in their chart simultaneously or nearly simultaneously.
CB: Oh, right.
AC: The rhythm is going to become Uranus, next year, Pluto, which is different. Maybe not better, but different.
CB: Sure. Yeah, that definitely was not pretty in many instances where people with stuff in early-to-mid cardinal signs were getting hit at the same time by both, so I can understand how that might be a little bit better. Although you still have sort of a sequence of a double-punch that you’re getting but just spaced out a little bit, I guess.
AC: It’s gonna be more of this than that.
CB: Okay.
AC: But to be fair, you know, one of the things I see in a lot of my clients’ lives and charts is that a lot of them are pretty good at handling life and they can handle one thing at a time. But with the Uranus-Pluto, it’s like, you know, there’s a certain management threshold that I think everybody has of like how much they can manage to deal with.
CB: Sure.
AC: You know, it’s the simultaneous stuff that pushes a lot of people beyond that management threshold. And so, even though, you know, it might be, “Oh, now I’m gonna have this Uranus thing,” and we get all excited, “and then Pluto’s gonna crush me,” right? It’s gonna be one thing at a time. So at least you’ll have the space to do one thing at a time rather than just, you know, all at once.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s see, Uranus-Pluto square. The mutable mess that we’re moving into in the second half of this year and the early part of next year. The Jupiter-Saturn square we talked about briefly in terms of the context of the greater 20-year cycle and how we’re three-quarters of the way since the one in 2000. And then finally the eclipses in the spring and in the fall. Yeah, did you have any other points that you wanted to mention or touch upon about I guess just the general outlook for this year or general trends or themes or things that people should be aware of?
AC: I guess I’d like to take just a second to kind of explain why I’ve subtitled my almanacs for the last several years, and I have a penchant for kind of obscure things, sometimes in Latin.
CB: Right.
AC: And people always ask me like, “What does that mean? And why did you pick that?”
CB: Right.
AC: And so, last year I picked Casus Belli.
CB: Oh, yeah, that ended up being like really appropriate just a few months in, right?
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, casus belli, for people who aren’t familiar with it, you know, it’s a Latin term, but it’s been used for a long time to describe ‘the case for war’ or the ‘pretext for war’.
CB: Right.
AC: The casus belli is the reason you give for going to war, right? And so, I don’t know, it just kind of looked like people would be examining the case for war. Not necessarily going to war, but thinking that there’d be ‘almost war’ in 2014. And so, you know, with the whole Putin-Ukraine-US, you know, that whole mess, there was tons of looking at the case for war, right, so I felt pretty good about that one.
CB: Yeah.
AC: This year’s title is actually more about the next couple of years than it is about this year, but this theme is introduced this year, and so I picked Interregnum. An interregnum, you have reg and rex, you know, these Latin words that were for the kings, and inter is ‘between’. And so, an interregnum is classically the period when the old king dies, but the new one hasn’t taken office yet, right, and so they’re interesting periods. And I guess metaphorically I’m seeing the last of the Uranus-Pluto squares as killing the last of the kings, right? Getting rid of some of these structures, you know, these particular types of order and the people that represent them; you know, like Mubarak in Egypt or Gaddafi in Libya, or whatever that asshole’s name was in Ukraine.
But as I tried to make clear when we were talking about bigger patterns, there’s not necessarily gonna be a new order that arrives immediately; that’s really the end of the decade and the beginning of the next. And so, I think on a bigger level we’re entering this period of interregnum where there’s no clear king, right? Like in world affairs, for example, the United States is not the undisputed heavyweight of everything anymore, but it’s not like another nation has become that, right? These kinds of shifting alliances, you know, it’s unclear who’s gonna come out on top and what things are gonna look like. And that’s really characteristic of an interregnum, of a time between, you know, stabilizing central forces, whether you like them or not, right? We didn’t like them, so we rebelled for the first half of the decade against a lot of things. But like we said, that got rid of things, but it hasn’t replaced them.
CB: Right.
AC: So yeah, that was my thinking on that.
CB: Brilliant. I think that’s a good descriptor, a good summary of where we’re at right now. Okay, great. Yeah, so you’ve just finished and published the almanac for 2015, what, a few weeks ago. And people can get a hold of it on your website?
AC: Absolutely. We’ve got paperback editions and then there’s also an ebook edition; a really nice bookmarked PDF that you can play on just about any device.
CB: Perfect. Yeah, I like the PDF edition particularly, although I love your printwork in terms of the layout and design and everything else as well. Do you have any other major events or things you’re doing this year that you wanted to promote?
AC: Yeah, I probably should talk about that, eh? So I’m going to be giving a lecture for NCGR. I’m going to be part of a three-person, big afternoon of workshops. And that’s on—oh, I think it’s February 23—if it’s not then it’s the day before—and I’m gonna be talking about my recently published book on the decans, 36 Faces. So that’ll be all the decans you handle; the decans of course being the division of each sign into three. And so, that should be fun; it’s material I really like. And then in early April, I will be speaking at—what is it?
CB: We’ll both be speaking at the American Federation of Astrologers conference…
AC: Exactly.
CB: …in Phoenix, I think in late April.
AC: And I’ll also be doing some work on the decans there. There’ll be a little bit more of a general discussion of the use of images in astrology and sort of looking at the way that we use words to delineate things, but we also use images. It’s very hard to do astrology without a huge catalog of images. And so, looking at sort of the way we do that and some of the way that it’s been done historically and using the decans, which are a particularly visually-rich part of astrology as a jumping-off point. And then finally the last thing that I’m certain that I’ll be doing this year is I’ll actually be speaking at a tarot conference in Denver, I believe June 26-28. And there I’ll be talking about the historical interrelationship between the decans and the tarot cards, especially the minor arcana and the way that the decans were used to actually build a lot of those meanings in the Rider-Waite deck and the Thoth decks, which are the most popular decks in the English-speaking world.
CB: Okay, awesome. Excellent. Well, yeah, and then when you’re in Denver of course I’ll be hosting you for a workshop on hopefully something interesting that we’ll figure out pretty soon as well. Great. All right, well, thanks for coming on the show today to talk about upcoming trends and themes. And yeah, I would definitely recommend that people check out your website and order a copy of the almanac. It’s like other people do almanacs, kind of, but this is different. Like you really put a lot into this and it’s very insightful in sometimes surprising and interesting ways, so I really recommend that people check it out.
AC: Well, thank you. Yeah, I also recommend people buy a copy. I recommend that they buy like three to five per person.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But yeah, I mean, I analyze literally every aspect that occurs between every pair of planets the entire year.
CB: Yeah, so this is no ‘slouch’ almanac. And yeah, definitely multiple copies for just different parts of your house I find is good, like one for the kitchen, one for the bedroom of course for reading it out loud to your romantic partner during intimate moments.
AC: Yeah, yeah, or preceding them to, you know, really set the stage.
CB: Right. All right, well, on that note, I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. Thanks everyone for listening to The Astrology Podcast. And I guess if you enjoyed this episode, and you’re listening to us through iTunes, then be sure to go on and give us a good rating. If you’re not a subscriber already then subscribe to the podcast through the sidebar, so that you can get an email announcement when new episodes are posted. And yeah, I hope to be recording some more episodes soon, after like a three or four month break because I got hit by my Saturn return and didn’t feel like recording any episodes. So I’ll be back shortly with some other episodes on various topics. So stay tuned and we’ll see you next time.