Ep. 243 Transcript: Relationship Placements in the Birthchart

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 243, titled:

Relationship Placements in the Birthchart

With Chris Brennan and guest Leisa Schaim

Episode originally released on June 29, 2012

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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 Transcription Team

Transcription released December 8th, 2023

Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Alright, let’s go ahead and get started. So welcome everybody to the February 2020 meeting of the Denver Astrology Group. Uh, if this is your first time attending the group, we always hold our meetings on the second Saturday of each month, always right here at the Mercury Cafe from 3-5pm. There’s very rarely– I don’t think we’ve missed a meeting in over 10 years, so you can pretty much always know that you’ll find us here on the second Saturday. Sometimes we schedule our meetings kind of late because we like to keep things flexible because sometimes we’ll be able to catch a speaker who’s coming through from out of town. Um, other times we schedule ahead a few weeks, this time was kind of a short notice meeting but you can always find out about what the next meeting topic will be as soon as we announce it, as long as you sign up for our group on Meetup.com. Any other news and announcements?

LEISA SCHAIM: We do have 2020 astrology posters back there in a bundle for $20 if you haven’t gotten yours already. It says all of the different astrology alignments coming up for the year, and so forth.

CB: Yeah, so, this meeting today we’re going to be talking about astrology in relationships and specifically, placements in a birth chart that indicate different factors that will come up in relationships in a person’s life. So we’re going to focus especially on planets in the 7th house, the condition and placement of the ruler of the 7th house, and then also the condition and placement of Venus in the birth chart, as general indicators for relationships. And as we go through, we’re going to go through and touch on, very briefly, a few other factors like synastry, transits, and other timing techniques as we can get to them. So, this is – if all goes well – this may end up being released as – the recording of this – I’m going to record the video and audio, and it may be released as episode 243 or 244 of The Astrology Podcast on Youtube and on theastrologypodcast.com. So we’re gonna both, Lisa and I are going to be talking about sharing some charts from our private files for relationship placements but we’re also hoping that people in the audience would feel comfortable sharing some of their stories if they have a good retrospective placement that they wanna share about how relationships have worked out in their life. So because we only have two hours we’ll have to keep the stories somewhat concise but nonetheless, hopefully once we get into it, you’ll get a hang of what we’re looking for in these charts. If you have a placement like that in your chart that matches a specific story that you’d like to share with the group, then please feel free to come up and use this microphone in order to share it.

LS: Mhmm.

CB: Any other preliminary announcements about the topic?

LS: Um, no I don’t think so. I think we’re gonna go through some chart examples first and the concepts, and then we’ll go through some sharing after that. And just be sure that you are willing to have your story on the podcast potentially if you do share your story.

CB: Alright, so, here’s the chart for the moment. Ironically, Venus is like right on the Midheaven at the highest point, at its highest elevation right now, in the middle of the sky. So that seems fitting, and our venue just finished decorating for Valentine’s Day here at the Mercury Cafe. So that’s part of the reason why we wanted to do this episode, this meeting. It’s been a few years since we did another relationship talk. I think back in like 2010 we did a Valentine’s day talk on Venus, since it’s been 10 years we thought it would be a good time to reprise that topic. Alright, so let’s talk about um relationships in the birth chart, and how they show up, and how you can find out information about how a person’s relationships, and specifically their romantic or their love-life will go based on their birth chart. Since that’s one of the biggest questions I feel like people come to astrology with, is not just questions about career, which is another big one, but also questions about relationships and navigating relationships is just a major topic that astrologers have always dealt with historically in the past two or three thousand years.

LS: Definitely. Yeah, it’s definitely a common topic that people bring up for questions.

CB: Did I introduce you, or myself?

LS: Uh, no we didn’t do introductions. [Laughs]

CB: So, joining me and co-hosting this meeting is Leisa Schaim, co-organizer of the Denver Astrology Group.

LS: Hello!

CB: And I’m Chris Brennan, and I’m the host of the Astrology Podcast, as well as founder of the Denver Astrology Group. We’re gonna be doing, me and Leisa have a background that is a mixture of both ancient astrology and modern astrology. We try to synthesize those ancient and modern traditions to take the best of both worlds, and sort of bring them together. That’s part of what we want to demonstrate here today, is how we’ve created a synthesis that’s been useful for looking at relationships in client charts but also in celebrity chart examples as well. And this is something you’re always applying, because you’re still doing consultations, like a few…at least, what, two a day?

LS: Yeah, so I’m doing consultations full-time.

CB: Okay.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Alright, so let’s jump right into it. There’s three main factors that we’re gonna look at and focus on when it comes to relationships, and indicators for that. The first one, and the one that everybody focuses on initially, and probably the most prominent and easy one to call is when a planet, when a person has placements in the seventh house in their birth chart, since historically or traditionally the primary place that one looks for relationships in the birth chart is the right side of the chart which coincides with the Western horizon, where the planets set and sink out of sight each day, and there’s a sort of merging of the sky and the earth. So the Ascendant, which is the Eastern horizon on the left side of the chart in the first house, represents the native, your sense of self, and the person who was born at that specific moment in time. And the first house is the house that’s most closely connected with you in the birth chart, whereas the rest of the 12 houses tend to signify or tend to indicate other people in your life, and not necessarily you directly, but instead those that are around you.

LS: Mhmm. So when we’re looking at the seventh house, the seventh house tends to typify the type of people that you attract for relationships, the types of qualities that you tend to experience in relationships, and those sorts of things. And, as we go, there’s other things you can sometimes see with the seventh house as well.

CB: Yeah, so if the first house is the sense of self, the seventh house is the opposite of that, and it’s the sense of other. So there’s different ways to look at that depending on if you’re coming from the modern or ancient approach. So in the ancient approach it tends to be more objectively describing the type of people that you will tend to run into or potentially even have long term relationships with in your life. And, in some instances, it may only be, you may have a specific placement in the seventh house that just speaks primarily to one important relationship that you’ll have at some point in your life, for better or worse. And in some instances that might be a positive placement that indicates some really positive relationship, or event in relationships that might occur at some point in your life, and in other instances it might be a more challenging placement that indicates something difficult that comes up in the sphere or relationships, or when it comes to relating to other people in your life and that’s generally the more ancient approach. The modern approach tends to see the seventh house more as parts of a person’s psyche that are somehow hidden or submerged, and sometimes where that which you don’t identify in yourself is imported into your life through other people. So that sometimes it shows the types of people that you might tend to attract as recurring themes throughout your life.

LS: Mhmm, yeah, and I think that early part is important in terms of not just, concretely, the type of people you attract, but that’s sometimes it can be focused more– a placement in the seventh house can be focused more on a particular relationship you have sometime, and not necessarily all the relationships throughout your entire life. Sometimes it’ll be more focal.

CB: Right, so we want to, as we’re going through some of our stories, keep an open mind to that, as there’s different scenarios. There’s one scenario where there’s a specific placement that just indicates this one relationship that happens at some point in a person’s life that’s defining. Like, think of somebody who is well known, like a celebrity, who had a particularly important relationship once in their life that ended up defining what they became known for or ending up being the defining relationship of their life. Versus, think of somebody else or maybe somebody you know who has had specific types of relationships that represent recurring themes, where they keep having the same relationship over and over again, and it’s not like a one time thing, but instead it’s a variation of the same song or the same experience.

LS: Mhmm, and I think proportionally, of those two approaches you were talking about earlier, the modern and traditional takes on the seventh house, I tend to lean more heavily on the traditional, in terms of it representing the concrete partners that you have. I do sometimes, I don’t discount the other piece, you know that sometimes it can be about how you approach relationships or something about yourself that gets drawn out in relationships. But for the most part I lean more on the first part. I don’t know if that’s where you lean?

CB: Yeah, I think it varies just depending on the person, and depending on what placements. For example, if somebody has the ruler of the Ascendant, which represents the person’s sense of self but also their life direction and what they tend to focus on, if they have the ruler of the Ascendant in the seventh house, then sometimes their sense of self is defined in terms of their relationships and the people they get into relationships with. So sometimes that can be more of a recurring thing versus other instances where it’s just a planet that’s in the seventh that’s not the ruler of the ascendant. It can sometimes just be like a one-off type event.

LS: Right.

CB: Why don’t we throw some charts up in order to start getting some concrete examples.

LS: Okay.

CB: All right. So we threw together some different chart examples. And let’s start with some of just like seventh house placements, or let’s start with just some positive ones because we’re going to alternate between like some extremely positive ones and some extremely negative ones in order to give you guys the full spectrum. And that’s one of the things maybe we should state right from the start in terms of in terms of like a warning that we’re doing more of like a work session amongst astrologers and – while there’s obviously a lot of people will be interested in and focused on this more from the perspective of maybe like their own life or applying it directly to their own birth chart – we’re speaking more as practitioners here and trying to understand all of the various manifestations that can take place when you’re applying astrology as like a technical discipline. And sometimes that means being able to look at and objectively understand the extreme ends of the spectrum of human experience of both sometimes extremely positive things that happen to some people who are particularly fortunate when it comes to relationships versus other times there can be instances of extreme misfortune or challenge or even tragedy in the context of relationships, and being able to identify that as astrologers. And what signified that in the birth chart is important to us, as a practice and in order to become better as practitioners.

LS: Yeah, definitely. And also sort of as a tag on, to that, if there are placements in these charts that are similar to your own, don’t worry too much if it is like a negative example because while we’re going over some of the main interpretive principles about these placements, it’s certainly not going to be going over all of them. And so they will most likely still be differences between your chart and theirs.

CB: Yeah, and we’re going to be picking out individual placements and focusing in on them and not giving the entire delineation and that’s one of the things that you won’t be able to do is take any one of these examples and apply it directly into your chart because it would be taken out of the context of your chart as a whole. And every placement needs to be interpreted in that complete context.

All right, so let’s start. This is one of my favorite examples. This is actually a client chart and they gave me a release to use this as a chart example but it was actually a couple that came in for a consultation at one point. And one of the things that I loved is they both had the same placements. They had different charts and I think they were born like a year or two apart. But they both had the most positive planet in their birth chart in the seventh house of relationships, and they were both in their 70s or 80s at this point, and they had been married for over 60 years. So they had a long and successful and healthy marriage. And part of the context is that so interpretive rule number one, if you have a date chart, then the most positive planet in your chart, other factors aside, is Jupiter. Whereas if you were born at night with the Sun anywhere in the bottom half of the chart below the horizon when it was still dark out, then the most positive planet in your chart was Venus. So in this chart, this person was born with a night chart, the Sun is in the bottom half of the chart in the sixth house. So the most positive planet is Venus, and Venus is located in Cancer, and he was born with Capricorn rising. So using whole sign houses, where you just find what sign the Ascendant is located in and then that sign becomes the first house. The sign after that becomes the second house and so on and so forth. Venus because it’s placed in Cancer, which is the seventh sign from the rising sign is in the seventh house of relationships. So sometimes, the delineations can be very simple like that, which is just simply if the most positive planet in the chart, based on that concept of day and night, which is known as the concept of sect, if the most positive planet is in the seventh house, then it may be good indication other factors aside, that some of the most positive events that will happen in that person’s life, especially subjectively positive will happen in the sphere of relationships. For him it was that he met the love of his life, relatively early, when he was like 18 or 19 years old and they spent the rest of their lives together

LS: Mhmm, and all other factors being equal, that is the context in which you often see very long marriages or long, long term relationships that are happy is that Venus in a night chart, in or ruling the seventh, or Jupiter in a day chart, in or ruling the seventh.

CB: So here’s his partner’s chart. And she was also interestingly born with Capricorn rising. They both have roughly the same ascendant, basically within a few degrees late Capricorn and her Sun is in the seventh house, but because her ascendant degree is at 25 Capricorn that means the descendant which represents the horizon is at 25 Cancer. So she was born about an hour or so after sunset. So this is firmly a night chart. And again, she has Venus at 22 Cancer in the seventh whole sign house, so similar placement. She has a night chart with the most positive planet in the chart in the seventh house of relationships. So we’re already seeing some interesting things here where we found a couple of two people that were born in different places, but they ended up meeting up when they were 18,19, or 20 years old. They both had the same rising sign and they both had the same Venus placement in a night chart in the seventh house. They found each other and then they spent the rest of their lives together in a relatively happy and successful marriage.

LS: That’s lovely. It’s nice to start on such a good example. That’s definitely the positive extreme.

CB: Yeah, and we’re gonna vary, so let’s not get too comfortable, but this is the positive example. This is always one of my most favorite example charts for that reason.

Alright, so other placements of planets in the seventh house. Sometimes something that can indicate that relationships is important… I already mentioned the ruler of the ascendant being in the seventh house because in ancient astrology the first house was called the helm, which is sort of like the helm of a ship like a boat or like the steering wheel of a ship. So the first house was called the helm and the ruler of the Ascendant, the planet that rules the zodiacal sign that is rising at the moment of birth, was referred to as the captain of the ship or the steersman of the ship. So whatever house it’s placed in, it can sometimes send the native on a course towards those topics in the life and make those topics more prominent or more important in the person’s life than they might be for somebody else, or for anybody else, that doesn’t have that placement. So that’s one thing that can show relationships are going to be more important in your life. If you have the ruler of the ascendant in the seventh house. So an example of that is Carl Sagan, who has Taurus rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus because Venus rules Taurus, and Venus is placed in Scorpio in the seventh whole sign house of relationships. So his chart though is unique because he has one of the other indicators that can sometimes indicate that relationships are very important in the life, which is that he has a stellium of more than three planets in the seventh house. So it’s not just the ruler of his ascendant, which is Venus but also Jupiter, Mercury and the Sun are also placed in his seventh house of relationships, thus indicating that relationships would be a major focus in his life. So he ended up having– he was married three different times and the third time ended up being important because it was somebody that he ended up working with very closely on projects later in his life. And they collaborated on things like the Cosmos series, which became very important or very prominent in the 1980s, where, like, over a billion people watched it or something like that. And then after he died prematurely of illness, his wife ended up carrying on some of his other projects from that point forward and continued to be a consultant for some of those subsequent things.

LS: Yeah, and I would say when there’s a stellium in the seventh house, people are usually aware that partnership is important to them. I think sometimes when the ascendant ruler is in the seventh, some people are very conscious of that and some people aren’t because sometimes they they already know, “Yes, partnership is an important topic to me,” but just having the ascendant ruler directing your life towards that can also just mean that your life is being directed before its partnership, at least at some point in your life, in a way that will kind of not overshadow that’s not the right word, but you know, in a way that will be very central to your life at least during some portion of your life, and you may not actually be trying for that but it still ends up that way.

CB: Right. Yeah, and depending on the planet also, there can be different ways that the person behaves in relationships or how successful they are or what they actually bring to the relationship that can be characterized by the planet as well.

LS: Right.

CB: So yeah, we don’t have to go too far into that. But depending on the planet, like Venus, for example, in his chart could be… in a night chart could be more of a positive influence that he’s bringing to relationships and bringing into his partnerships. There might be other scenarios where what if you’re bringing something challenging or bringing sort of baggage to the relationship in other scenarios is a different sort of placement that sometimes comes up.

LS: For sure. And some of the placements I don’t know if we’re gonna get into some of these examples. Some of the placements you can look at in the seventh house can refer to either the illustration of the general significator of that planet, like, “What does Jupiter mean in the seventh?” You know, all other factors being equal, even without house rulerships. And we can also bring in what houses they rule as well.

CB: We’ll get to house rulership in just a minute. Alright so, that’s an example of the ruler of the Ascendant as well as a stellium.

Should we switch to challenging examples?

LS: Sure.

CB: Okay. So, Biden’s a good example because — This is Joe Biden’s chart, who’s a former vice president. He’s also currently running for the presidency in the Democratic race primaries right now. He has a rounded time, but it’s an 8:30 am time, which gives him early Sagittarius rising. And he has Saturn in the seventh house conjunct Uranus, right around the Descendant, in a day chart. So, what ended up happening is when he turned 30, he was going through his Saturn Return and he was elected to public office for the first time and basically began his career as a politician. But about a month after he was elected, his wife and family were driving and running errands or something for Christmas and they were involved in a car accident, and his wife, and I believe daughter, died.

LS: Yeah. At least one child.

CB: Yeah. But he lost his first wife basically in a car accident around the time of his Saturn return and he has Saturn in the seventh house, as well as Uranus. So, this is kind of a challenging placement and it brings up another factor of interpretation when it comes to relationship astrology, which is that sometimes when you have planets in the seventh house when you have a transit that goes through the seventh house, it can indicate a major event that happens within the context of relationships. In this case, since it was an outer planet transit, it was a major event. Other times, if you just have a fast-moving transit of an inner planet, like Mercury or Venus, it can sometimes just be a very quick low-level event, but still notable within the context of relationships. But just the general idea of transits through the seventh indicate events and circumstances in your life with respect to relationships at different points.

LS: Right. So, with Uranus here in the seventh, it could indicate sudden events with regard to relationships, or with regard to your partner. And then Saturn, it’s a day chart, so it’s usually a more constructive Saturn. Although Saturn, even in itself, regardless of sect, can be about things that are challenging or heavy experiences, or at the very least, heavy responsibilities, or something like that. And so, I don’t think the Saturn/Uranus alone, although it does describe some of this, would’ve ended up in a car crash. I think to do that, we have to go to the ruler of the seventh house.

CB: Mmhmm.

LS: Yeah.

CB: What’s the ruler?

LS: So the ruler’s gonna be Mercury since Gemini’s the seventh house. Mercury’s placed in the 12th house and it’s kind of loosely conjunct Mars, and Mars is the more challenging planet in a day chart. So, that in itself would already kind of bring more of the challenges, adding on to the Saturn in the seventh. But the fact that it’s also in the 12th, the 12th can sometimes be loss, and certainly, if you have the more challenging planet between Mars and Saturn in the 12th, that can go that way more with that confirmation.

CB: Yeah. Other times I think you had client chart examples that you mentioned that somebody had the ruler of the seventh in the 12th, and they just met their partner within the context of a 12th house circumstance, right?

LS: Yes. Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll have time to go into any of the rulers of the seventh in the houses, but sometimes it can be about where you meet people, it’s not always just like– Sometimes, it can describe the person themselves and sometimes it can be just about where you meet them, and not all the time. I had one where they met someone while bottoming out from addiction and literally dying in a rehab center, and the person they met was the nurse. And that’s now their partner. So that’s a 12th house kind of extreme ruler of the seventh in the 12th getting triggered.

CB: Right. I mean, what are other 12th house or like more neutral —  12th house can tend to be like places of isolation, like hospitals, like ashrams.

LS: Yeah. I mean, I’ve known or had clients with a bunch of people who have the ruler of the seventh in the 12th, and their partners are just very reclusive for one reason or another. Sometimes, just personality-wise reclusive. Sometimes, because their partner has a health issue and so they have to stay home more. But either way, reclusive is often a word I use for the ruler of the seventh in the 12th.

CB: Yeah. I’m looking through to see if I have any other seventh house ones lined up. But I think in terms of just placements, where we don’t get into the ruler, that might be it. So we might go to– Oh yeah, there was actually one other positive one. So Richard Nixon, regardless of what one thinks about his politics or what his place was in history, in terms of stepping down from the presidency, one part of his life that actually went relatively well was his relationships. And again, looking at his chart, he has a night chart, with the Sun in the fifth house; so it’s below the horizon. He was born at 9:35 at night. And so the most positive planet in his chart is Venus, and Venus is actually in Pisces, where it’s exalted, in the seventh house in a night chart; which is the place of relationships. And he ended up having a long, multi-decade-long marriage that ended up being relatively successful.

So, again, just sometimes placements in the seventh house can describe how a person’s relationships go, for better or worse, and whether some of the most characteristic things in the person’s life are gonna be positive occurrences or if there’s gonna be some challenging occurrences that become somehow characteristic traits of the person’s life. If you were to try to write a biography about that person’s entire life and put it all in a single book or a single even paragraph, what things would stand out and what would you mention?

Alright, so first things first, this might be a good point to see if we have any examples. Does anybody have a good example, especially in terms of like an extreme like that of a placement in your seventh house, especially your seventh whole sign house, that’s really characterized something major, something notable, in terms of your relationships at this point in your life?

Anyone? That you feel like sharing? Do you feel like sharing it?

KESTREL (audience member): I can share it.

CB: Okay. Yeah that’s okay. Do you wanna come up to the mic? And do you mind if I put up your chart up really quick?

K: No, that’s fine. July 27th.

CB: July 27th.

K: ‘75.

CB: 1975. What time?

K: 9:41 am.

CB: Okay.

K: Fort Collins, Colorado.

CB: Alright, and is your Ascendant 17 Virgo?

K: Yes.

CB: Okay. So your rising sign is 17 Virgo and you have Pisces on the seventh house and the Moon is in the seventh house, in a day chart.

K: Mmhmm.

CB: Okay.

K: So really simply, well, I’m married now, but my first love/partner — I might tear up. I’ve actually been talking about this a lot lately — died when Uranus hit my Moon.

CB: Okay. So when Uranus is going through Pisces and it conjoined your Moon exactly at 23 Pisces, you lost your first marriage partner?

K: No, my first love. I wasn’t with him when it happened, but he was raised here; my good friend. It was one of the most pivotal, formative relationships of my life — yeah it’s just kind of colored everything for me and it’s been a lot to reconcile, even to the point where I recently did an interview on grief about it. Just, how do you reconcile losing somebody when you’re not with them, but yet they’re truly the most formative person to being in relationships and all that’s really having that relationship with this person, that was so positive, has infused every other relationship in my life.

CB: Sure. Do you mind if I ask how it happened or what happened?

K: Yeah. He was tragically killed in China in 2009, with three other men in a climbing accident.

CB: Okay. So it’s just a freak, unexpected thing?

K: Yeah. It was unexpected but there’s some speculation that they were just going to retrieve their equipment. They were actually trying to get off the mountain and in the process, they were killed by a major avalanche, and only two of the three men were found. Well, that’s really vulnerable to share with all of you guys. But, I think the other thing that’s really interesting about it is, it’s played into me becoming a psychotherapist and also given me a lot of leverage in the work that I do. Like, it’s just really helped me understand what grief really looks like and be able to be a really great ally for people in that process. So, it’s colored my life in multiple ways. Yeah.

CB: Probably made you more empathetic to people in similar circumstances?

K: Yeah. Mmhmm.

CB: Okay. And Uranus was like right around, yeah, late Pisces in 2009.

LS: Mmhmm. I think so. Yeah.

K: Yeah, I actually went to the timeframe because they’re not exactly sure of the exact day they died. It was either anywhere between May 25th to June 6th, 2009, because it took us several weeks to know that their bodies were missing — their people were missing. And Ray and I were actually together when that happened, so it’s kind of cool that she’s here today.

CB: Yeah, so it’s interesting. So, on the one hand, the Uranus transit was going through your seventh house and it was actually going back and forth and getting ready to go in your eighth house because Uranus was getting ready to go into Aries. But also this is one of the instances where paying attention to the condition of the ruler of this seventh house is important.

LS: Mmhmm. Yeah, so I mean, the Moon in the seventh definitely speaks to all of the motion that you’ve had all around this and you know you saying that that has lent itself to becoming a better therapist, which is very moon in the seventh. You know like, emotionally relating to other people one on one, and client work is often seventh house, in addition to partnership. The ruler of your seventh is that Jupiter in the eighth house. And you know, it’s not the case for everyone that has the ruler of the seventh in the eighth that their partner will, you know, die well before them, but mortality is one of, among several, eighth house topics. So it is something that does come up for some people.

CB: Sure and so Jupiter’s in the eighth house, which one of the significations of the eighth can be related to mortality and its opposite to Uranus, natally, which can sometimes be something unexpected and then it’s also closely squaring Saturn at 24 Cancer, is squaring Jupiter. But then at the same time, it’s a day chart, so Jupiter is also the most positive planet in the chart, so it’s also indicating or promising something positive in terms of coming out of that placement at the same time instead of just being purely negative.

LS: Mmhmm. And that’s actually kind of interesting as well with regard to what you were saying about you growing as a therapist through that because eighth house placements can sometimes, for some people, be about helping others through crisis. So, yeah that’s interesting.

K: Yeah and if anybody wants to watch it, I did a 30-minute interview on that experience, and then Jupiter has become like that placement. So my current husband — it’s brought a lot of abundance and you know, of course, a lot going on with money and we’re currently building a house together, so it’s just interesting to see both sides of it.

CB: So you’re getting the – because that’s the other side of the eighth house. There’s like other people’s money or the partner’s money and Jupiter in the eighth, ruling the seventh can sometimes be like financial benefits that come through partnership.

K: It’s been both. Yeah.

CB: Okay.

LS: Yeah, that’s interesting. Thank you for sharing. And that’s such a good example of how it can work out differently at different times in your life too.

CB: Right. And you can sometimes get the challenging things coming up, but otherwise also the positive things. But that Uranus transit, of course, Uranus takes 84 years to go around the zodiac, so that was basically like a once-in-a-lifetime transit, having it conjoin your Moon at that time.

LS: Right.

K: Yeah.

CB: Thanks for sharing.

K: Yeah, absolutely. Cool.

CB: Alright. Was there — did you have one that you wanted to share? Was there another person that wanted to share a seventh house placement?

Okay [audience member speaking] A transit? … Yeah, as long as you’re pretty certain about the dates… okay. What — if you want to come up to the mic. What’s your first name?

MICHAEL (audience member): Michael.

CB: And what’s your birth date?

M: January 13th, 1985. 2:32 pm. And it’s Killeen, Texas.

CB: Alright. Is your Ascendant nine Gemini?

M: Right.

CB: Okay.

M: And then, I don’t know if you want to do a bi-wheel but —

CB: Sure. What is the target date?

M: July 1st of 2010.

CB: What time? Or  —

M: It would be just like noon. That’s fine.

CB: Okay. So inside wheel is your natal chart. Outside wheel is the transits for July 1st, 2010.

M: So the way I read this was, Mars was aspecting like a square with Uranus and the seventh and I abruptly ended a long-term relationship and moved across the country, like all at the same time.

CB: Yeah. Yeah, that can definitely happen when — that’s one of the things about transits that go through angles is they tend to hit all of those angles at the same time. So in your instance, it would be Mars transiting through your fourth house of the home and living situation, but then, squaring both your Ascendant/Descendent axis as well as that Uranus placement in the seventh house at the same time.

M: Right. Right.

CB: Was it like a thought-out thing? Or was it an abrupt —

M: No, it was super abrupt.

CB: Okay.

M: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, so abrupt, unexpected are common Uranus traits.

M: And it was kind of negative too because like I regretted the move after it happened. So Mars being the more malefic —

CB: You’re born with a day chart —

M: And with the square as well, right?

CB: Yeah, a square can be more challenging aspect and then it was also opposing Mars/Venus conjunction, which is in Pisces in the tenth house, around the same time.

M: Right.

LS: Mmhmm. Yeah, that’s a lot of triggers at once, since you have them close in degree.

CB: Yeah, that’s a good example then.

LS: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

M: Right.

CB: Thank you.

LS: Thank you.

CB: Alright, let’s set up a few more of the example charts just for the ruler of the seventh house, as well as Venus as a general significator. Let’s see. So… not completely depressing ones. Aretha’s is kind of interesting. No. Okay —

LS: Well if you were looking for not depressing —

CB: One of my favorite ones was a singular example because this is actually Steven Spielberg’s timed birth chart and this is originally posed to me as like a challenge by another astrologer who said that doctrine of sect, the difference between day and night charts didn’t work because he said that this is the birth chart of Steven Spielberg. He has a night chart. He was born just after 6:00 pm with the Sun in Sagittarius in the sixth whole sign house, a good 14 degrees below the horizon. So it’s firmly a night chart and he has Saturn in the second whole sign house of money and finances, and of course is one of the most successful directors in Hollywood. He’s also very rich. So the challenge that was posed to me at the time was why is this super rich millionaire have Saturn in the second house? That obviously doesn’t make any sense. And I had never looked at his chart before, so I pulled it up and I said, well what houses does Saturn rule, and is that in any way connected with an event that has happened in his life at some specific point in time?

And what I found very quickly is that Saturn is in the second house in the night chart, so it’s supposed to be his most difficult placement, but Saturn is the ruler of the seventh house of relationships and the eighth house of shared resources and it’s placed in the second house of his personal finances. And what happened is at one point in the 1980s, that placement was activated, I believe through annual profections. It was like he was in a seventh house profection year or something like that. I can explain that later. But, basically, his seventh house was activated and he went through a very highly publicized, at the time, divorce where him and his wife split up and they’d been married for a while at that point. And what was interesting about that case at the time, in the 1980s, is they had a prenuptial agreement when they were married in California, but it was like written on a napkin or something like that. And the judge looked at it and he said what is this, like this isn’t valid. And he rejected the prenuptial agreement, which then made it so that his wife was then given half of his fortune at the time. And at the time it ended up being the most costly celebrity divorce in history, at that point in like the late 1980s, which is something that at least for him, subjectively, he was not very happy about and viewed as a negative event that occurred at some point in his life when that Saturn placement was activated in his second house, with it ruling the seventh house and the eighth house.

So that’s one of those instances like we were talking about earlier where, while it’s true that some of these placements can indicate persistent or recurring themes in relationships in a person’s life or even something that’ll come up several times, there can be other placements that don’t come up persistently but instead may indicate like a one-time major event that happens at some point in the person’s life that can come to characterize it in some significant way or if somebody wrote a biography about his life and his relationships, in particular, they would have like a section on this divorce and the circumstances that happened when they went through it.

LS: And so that’s really good to know that some of the things can be episodic, that they’re not throughout your entire life typifying your relationships, particularly if you have challenges with regrets to your relationships. I knew someone else who had Mars ruling the seventh in the 12th conjunct Pluto in a day chart. And so you have the most challenging planet in a day chart, ruling the seventh house of partnership and placed in the 12th house. And she had a very abusive relationship for some time, but then later on in her life she was happily remarried and it was not abusive and some of that showed in the timing. So it’s important to know that if there are challenging placements that it won’t always be equally so throughout the entire life necessarily.

CB: Right. I don’t have a diagram for profections but that’s one of the timing techniques that we commonly used to figure out when different parts of the chart are going to be activated or when specific house placements are going to be activated or specific transits. So all you have to do is start with the rising sign, whatever sign your Ascendant is located in, and that sign and its ruler activated for the first year of your life. Then after that first year is finished, it moves downwards to the second sign in zodiacal order, the sign just after the rising sign and it activates that sign and its ruler for the second year of your life. And you just keep counting forward one sign each year for every year that the native is alive. And it comes back to the rising sign every 12 years. So, at 12 years old, at 24 years old, 36, and so on and so forth. So Steven Spielberg, it activated Capricorn in his seventh house in the year that this divorce took place. It’s one of the timing techniques that you can use to figure out when the specific parts of the chart or the specific placements and whatever is promised by those placements, will actually be delivered or will manifest.

LS: Some of the quick ways you can check that are the 7th house years which are always going to be age 18, 30, 42, etc., keep adding 12 years. The 7th house years should bring out more of the seventh house placements and you can also look at the profection years that highlight where the planet that rules the seventh is because sometimes that will activate that as well.

CB: I think back in my first example, the guy that had the really positive placement in his seventh house for relationships, he was 18 years old when he met the love of his life and 18 years old is a seventh house profection year, so it’s activating Cancer, and that Venus placement in his seventh house. But another example is Joe Biden, going back to that one. He was 30 years old when he lost his first wife in that car accident. That was activating Gemini but also the two planets in that sign, which are Saturn and Uranus. So seventh house profection years are 18,–

LS: — 18, 30, 42, keep adding 12, 54. Yes.

CB: So everybody can think of those years in your life and think about, especially if you have important placements in the seventh house, then that could have been an important year for you for relationships. So, 18, 30, 42, and 54 –

LS: Mmhmm. 54, so 66, and 78.

CB: Yeah and I did on TheAstrologyPodcast.com, one of the episodes is on annual profections and it has a diagram and a worksheet for people to calculate their profections if anyone wants to check that out later.

LS: Mmmhm. And when I was mentioning also the profections years where the ruler of the seventh is placed. I had a client just the other day with the ruler of the seventh in the 12th, and I said one of the things that means is you might have more relationship activity during 12th house years. So that’s 11, 23, 35, 47, etc, then asked later about when she met someone who was a long-time, on-and-off relationship, and she said “23.” I said, “Oh okay, good.” So, it really does work.

CB: Okay. So let’s throw some examples up of the ruler of the seventh and it indicating something about the context of relationships at different points in the person’s life. This is my friend, an astrologer Nick Dagan Best. He actually came and spoke for the group several years ago. Probably –

LS: —  Early on.

CB: Yeah, very early maybe 2011 or something like that. He has Leo rising and Aquarius in the seventh house and the traditional ruler of Aquarius is Saturn. If we look to where Saturn is placed as the ruler of the seventh house, it will carry out the topics of the seventh house of relationships wherever it’s placed in the chart. So we find Saturn in his chart in the ninth house of travel, foreign places, also the place of religion, astrology, education, but the ninth house is especially the house of foreign places and foreign people. What ended up happening is that several years ago, he went and attended an astrology conference in South Africa – he’s originally from Montreal, Canada. He attended this Astrology conference in South Africa and he ended up meeting a woman there from South Africa. They ended up falling in love and getting married, and now he’s lived abroad in South Africa for the past several years.

So basically, if you were to try to boil down this placement to a specific sentence, if you were just looking at this chart and this client walks in off the street, one of the most simple things you could come up with as a delineation of this placement is that with the ruler of the seventh house of relationships in the ninth house of foreign things, the native might be married to a foreigner or meet an important relationship partner in a foreign place while traveling at some point in their life. If you were to make that statement to him when he was 15 it might not be true and it might seem like a wild statement, but at some point in his life, that statement would have become strikingly accurate when it was eventually activated.

LS: Yeah. I’ve seen that combination go that way over and over. People married to someone from another country or going on a trip to another country and then meeting someone they get in a relationship with.

CS: Yeah. It also sometimes works in the reverse, when the ruler of the ninth is in the seventh. This is Gisele Bundchen, who has Capricorn rising. She has Virgo on the ninth whole sign house of foreign places and foreign travel and the ruler of the ninth house is Mercury, the ruler of Virgo, and Mercury is placed in Cancer in the seventh house exactly conjunct the degree of the Descendant. She’s originally from Brazil and she became a supermodel, and she ended up marrying an American quarterback. So the delineation is that she ended up marrying someone that was from a foreign country from where she grew up, with the ruler of the ninth house of foreign places and foreign people in the seventh house of relationships.

LS: Mm-hmm.

CB: Alright. So is that clear? Are people understanding the general point in terms of looking at the ruler of the seventh house and where it’s placed? And that sometimes indicating something important about the context of relationships or where they might meet an important relationship partner at some point in their life. Let me see if I have… Did we have other examples like that that we meant to share?

LS: I had Macron. Emmanuel Macron.

CB: Okay.

LS: If it’s good for this, it’s good for a couple things.

CB: So he’s… Go ahead.

LS: Emmanuel Macron is the head of France right now and he’s kind of famously known for being married to someone who’s about 25 years older than him, who was his French teacher in high school. [laughs] So it’s a kind of unique circumstance, right? So that made me laugh when I looked at his chart because he has Jupiter in Cancer in the seventh house of partnerships and one of the houses that Jupiter is ruling is the third house. The third house is the house of education that’s not higher education, so before that. [laughs] While that could have meant a classmate, it happened to mean his teacher. What actually made me laugh some more is looking at the ruler of the seventh, it’s the Moon exalted in Taurus in the fifth house. The ruler of the seventh in the fifth isn’t always super specific, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But I was reading an article that said she also taught a drama class on the side and he took her drama class where they were co-writing a play together and that’s how they fell in love. [laughs] That’s the fifth house, it’s creative pursuits and arts often goes in the fifth house. Both of those placements, with the ruler of the third in the seventh and seventh in the fifth, fit very well with the circumstances of how he met her.

And the other thing that’s really interesting about this one is you would normally not think that would necessarily last. He has the ruler of seventh, the Moon, exactly opposed Uranus. That’s often about exciting things that are unconventional relationships but maybe fleeting. But what struck me is the Moon is exalted in Taurus and it’s the most stable Moon that you could have in Taurus. So even though it’s opposed to Uranus, in this case, they’ve been married for quite a while at this point. It just typified a very unconventional relationship with a major age difference but one that has stayed steady so far. I thought those several things about this chart, with regard to relationships, really stuck out.

CB: Yeah. So when you have a placement in the seventh house, pay attention to what houses that planet rules because sometimes it will import the topics of those houses into the context of relationships.

LS: Mmhmm. And if you look at her… actually go back to his just for a second. It’s wide by degree but he does have a Venus-Saturn square by sign as well, which can sometimes also indicate age differences in relationships. And I’m only pointing that out even though it’s quite wide by degree, because if you go to hers she actually has that really tightly.

CB: What is her name again?

LS: Brigitte Macron. It’s up further, about number 14. So she has Venus at almost 23 Aries opposed Saturn by a degree, so a similar sort of Venus placement, which we haven’t brought up yet, just the general significator as Venus.

CB: Yeah. So that’s the third thing to look for is… So, number one is planets in the seventh house, number two is the ruler of the seventh house, but the third thing is just Venus as the general significator for love and relationships in a person’s life in general and sometimes it’s placement in the chart, it’s condition by zodiacal sign, and especially its aspects, especially close aspects in the chart will typify something about the general theme of love and relationships in their life and the type of relationships they’ll tend to gravitate toward.

LS: Mmhmm. Yeah. So she has a tight Venus-Saturn opposition and Venus-Saturn can be age differences. And then if you look at the ruler of her seventh house, it’s Jupiter in the ninth conjoined the Midheaven. And that’s kind of interesting to me as well because they met when he was not the head of France, he was 15 years old. [laughs] And so, that’s another good example of how some of those placements can be really important in describing a partner or a partnership at some point in your life, but it’s not necessarily obvious throughout your entire life. But now she’s married to the head of France.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

CB: So this is a good example where Venus-Saturn hard aspects, especially like a conjunction, square, or opposition, are very commonly typified by – or one of the classical ones that’s been true for most of the tradition – is age disparities. Sometimes when a person has Saturn prominently connected with the relationship sectors in the chart, which can be the seventh house or the ruler of the seventh, but especially Venus. Especially Venus-Saturn aspects have that age disparity or some sort of major disparity can occur or be present in the person’s relationships.

LS: Yeah, and it can go either way. You could be much younger or much older.

CB: Right. So typically a person that either tends to date people that are much older than them or a person that tends to date people that are much younger than them is pretty common of Saturn-Venus aspects. In some of the older, traditional texts they also talk about class disparities and other things like that, or having a partner that has some sort of issue or disability as a potential delineation comes up in a lot of the traditional texts. But definitely, age disparities is a common one for modern delineations.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. Okay. Do we have other chart examples of just general Venus?

LS: Yeah. Elizabeth Taylor is a great general Venus one.

CB: Alright.

LS: So, Elizabeth Taylor has Venus in Aries and it’s tightly conjunct Uranus and I thought that was a really interesting one because she was married eight times. That would be notable in itself, right? That’s a lot of marriages but in addition to that, at least several of them were people she met and started dating before she was… basically, while she was still married to the previous person. So, Venus in Aries can be a little bit more impulsive. That’s where you’re paying attention to the sign, and then the Venus-Uranus combination obviously can be sort of prone to want novelty in the relationships. Yeah.

CB: Sure.

LS: So it can be an unconventional relationship; it can just be the on-and-off kind of thing, where you’re suddenly excited and then suddenly done.

CB: Yeah. So anytime there’s a very close, especially Venus-Uranus aspect in the chart, especially hard aspects, it can be things like that like relationships that start out very suddenly or very rapidly. But also, relationships that cool down or end very rapidly or unexpectedly. What else? Relationships that are eccentric or unique or where the person is attracted to a relationship partner that has some sort of eccentricity or something highly unique about them from a societal standpoint.

LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

CB: What else?

LS: Sometimes it can go the way of the Venus-Saturn in terms of age differences but it’s usually lots of different differences. It’s not specific to age, only in that it’s one way that a relationship can be unconventional.

CB: Yeah, and part of that is that Venus as a general significator of love in relationships can tend to indicate the types of things that a person is attracted to or the types of people or the types of relationship scenarios you’re attracted to. So that’s why it’s important to pay attention to if Venus is very closely aspected by a planet in a chart. That’s going to color or just typify the relationships they gravitate towards in very distinct ways.

LS: Mm-hmm.

CB: Alright. So that Venus-Uranus at 17 degrees of Aries is super close. Obviously, there’s other stuff going on in her chart. Venus is also trining Jupiter and there’s lots of relationships, but also Venus is squaring Pluto so there’s some struggles there and some difficulties.

LS: Mmhmm. Yeah and then if you extend it to the seventh house ruler, that’s Mercury in Pisces in the fourth house and it’s opposed pretty closely by that Neptune. And many of her husbands, although not all of them, were also movie stars – which is not terribly unique if you’re also a movie star because that’s how you tend to meet people, but I can see that kind of starry-eyed, kind of glamor coming over the next person she met even though she was already married, which is the Neptune.

CB: Sure. Any other statements? We’ve talked about Venus-Saturn, we’ve talked about Venus-Uranus. Venus-Neptune, even though it’s not connected with Venus it’s connected with the ruler of the seventh. Maybe some significations for that.

LS: Venus-Neptune? Yeah, idealistic love, I would say. And oftentimes seeing the best in people but needing to get the feet on your ground or needing to remind yourself to get your feet on the ground more than average, in order to see the grounded reality of what’s really there – either with the connection with the person or with the person themselves.

CB: Right. That’s the most ideal scenario but more commonly [laughs] –

LS: [laughs] That’s the advice.

CB: That’s the advice sector but the reality is more frequently is if you were that person’s friend and they’re coming to you and saying they literally just met the love of their life at the train station and they’re pretty sure they’re going to be together for the rest of their life and this is the one – but this is fifth or 10th time [audience laughs] that they’ve done that just in the past month or something.

LS: [laughs] Mmhmm, yeah. Venus-Neptune can fall in love or fall in the illusion of love really easily. It’s very romantic. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. But sometimes it’s not realistic and they can tend to see more of the illusion or more of the ideal scenario of the partner that they’re looking at sort of rose-colored glasses, rather than what’s actually in front of them or sometimes overlooking the cracks and the shortcomings or ways in which that relationship is not ideal.

LS: Right.

CB: But then eventually oftentimes what will happen is that at some point the reality will start to seep through in the relationship and sometimes it can be a switch that happens suddenly where the person can go from over-idealizing the relationship or the relationship partner to the opposite, and just focusing entirely on their sense of disillusionment and the person being all of these negative things that suddenly they realize. And sometimes it can become skewed in the opposite direction of only seeing the negative things so that they can sometimes just flip and then go out of the relationship feeling the other way.

LS: Yeah, exactly. Neptune can just struggle to keep proper perspective, so with Venus-Neptune conjunctions or hard aspects in general, it can be either illusion or disillusionment, but not necessarily the middle ground of seeing exactly who the person is very clearly. And all of these combinations can also be extended then; we’re talking about the natal chart or the natal placement combinations, but those can be extended to transits to some degree if you have those transits to your natal Venus at some point.

CB: Yeah. If transiting Neptune is going over your natal Venus, especially through a hard aspect, it’ll come out very strongly – or if Neptune is going through your seventh house, especially if it’s conjoining a planet in the seventh house or conjoining the degree of the Descendant or even if transiting Neptune is making a hard aspect to the ruler of your seventh house, then some of those themes can become present in your life even if you don’t have a natal predisposition or tendency towards that. Everybody has that experience at some point in their life and it can be when you have a heavy Neptune transit like that.

LS: Yeah, exactly. So not seeing something until later on even if it was maybe right in front of you.

CB: Alright, the last one we didn’t cover is Pluto in connection with relationships.

LS: Venus-Pluto?

CB: Like Venus-Pluto, or to some extent Pluto in connection to the ruler of the seventh or in the seventh.

LS: Venus-Pluto is known for intensity in relationships. That’s a very generic statement that can often be true. I’m saying it generically because it can be positive intensity or less than positive intensity. Sometimes it can be very intense highly sexual relationships, for instance, where you’re super drawn to each other and obsessed with each other. But then it can also be the negative side of Pluto such as… oh what are like Venus-Pluto… Like, intense jealousy, intense… what else?

CB: Obsession

LS: Yeah, obsession can feel positive or negative, I guess.

CB: It can be positive in the sense of like your undying love and focus and devotion to a person. But if you’re on the receiving end of that and you’re not feeling that intense, it can be like the stalker-type scenario, where somebody intensely is attached to somebody and it’s not reciprocated, for example.

LS: Yeah, definitely. Betrayal can also be a Venus-Pluto thing, like dealing with either worrying about being betrayed or being actually betrayed.

CB: Not to emphasize all the negative things. The positive things is that the intensity, when properly channeled, can be somebody that’s willing to go to great lengths for love or for relationships, beyond the normal boundaries that anyone else would ever go. And that can certainly when channeled properly, be a positive thing or a positive trait.

LS: Yeah, for sure.

CB: Alright, so those are most of the- I did a podcast episode with Kay Taylor titled “Outer Planets and Relationships” and that was a really good treatment of the outer planets when connected to some of these things if you want to listen to more about that. What are some other examples that we wanted to- or should we take some charts?

LS:  I think just some of the other topics that we wanted to mention at some point are some of the timing things. We did mention perfections and transits. Zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Eros is also something that we use for timing with relationships, and I find that it’s super important. We’re not gonna be able to really get into the details of it today. But I find it very important in terms of, almost being an extension of the birth chart in terms of how much it determines whether there’s opportunities or not opportunities for some of those natal placements to manifest with regard to relationships. And so I just see that a lot with client charts, in terms of the windows of time within which they either meet people or don’t meet people, basically.

CB: Sure. So there’s just other techniques like zodiacal releasing that instead of focusing on narrow spans of time, it breaks the entire life up into chapters and subsections as if the life was a book and you could identify the different chapter breaks, and some of the more active chapters and some of the chapters where there’s not as much going on, and that techniques like that can sometimes be useful for setting a much broader context for understanding where in the overall chronology of a person’s life, a person is for relationships. Which is just useful if you’re trying to see things from a bird’s eye view as opposed to transits, which tend to be narrowed down to more narrow or specific frames of time.

LS: And we did a whole podcast on that as well.

CB: Yeah. On zodiacal releasing–

LS: –on zodiacal releasing. So it’s not specific to relationships in that one, but you can apply it to relationships.

CB: Okay. Does anybody have a good example or story of any of the placements that we’ve been talking about with like, a close Venus aspect in your chart that’s connected with Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto, and a story that’s stood out in your life?

…You have one? All right. Come up to the mic… Let’s put your chart up.

LS: What’s your first name? …And your birthdate?

Chelsea: December 15th, 1979 at 11:30 AM in Denver… So I have a little bit of everything.

CB: Okay. So you have Pisces rising, and Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and the North Node in Virgo, in the seventh house.

C: Just a few. Yeah, I also have Venus square Pluto in the 11th and the eighth.

CB: Okay, so Venus is at 21 Capricorn in the 11th house and it’s squaring Pluto within a- actually, almost exactly to the minute. And Pluto’s at 21 Libra in the eighth house.

C: And the Saturn-Pluto conjunction was directly on my Venus.

CB: Okay, right. Venus is at 21 and the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, was at 24?

LS: Yeah, 23.

CB: Yeah, 23. Okay. Yeah. So that happened just recently.?

C: Yeah. I’m just gonna take full credit for the full conjunction because it really doesn’t really matter at this point. I actually had a couple questions primarily with sect and mitigating factors. Because I have a day chart and Jupiter is going to be the most benefic in the day. It’s also conjunct Mars, which is the malefic of the day, on my descendant, in the seventh.

CB: Okay. For everyone else, because I hadn’t mentioned the negative correlate to the positive ones. So I’ve said in a day chart, Jupiter’s the most positive. In a night chart, Venus is the most positive. But then for the malefic, the challenging planets in a day chart, Mars is the most challenging planet, whereas in a night chart, Saturn is the most challenging planet.  And so this is one of those instances where you have the most challenging planet, Mars, and the most positive planet, Jupiter, in the seventh house. So there’s extremes of both challenging things as well as some of the most positive things in the same sector of your life.

C: And it’s on an angle too.

CB: Right, so it’s super prominent because it’s right on the degree of the descendant.

C: Yeah, It just, it kind of feels like I’ve had a hard time when looking even at my chart, let alone telling other people with confidence like, “this is what to expect.” Because I, in my own chart, get a little lost. Saturn is actually, I think sextiling Venus in my chart?

CB: Trine.

LS: Trining.

C: Trining, yeah, which then affects the Pluto thing. Everything is so tightly connected with mine, I tend to get a little lost, but I did want to talk primarily about sect and mitigating factors, just because I have that and so I just wanted to– I know there’s so many things on there that relate to relationships that you guys were talking about, but primarily just that and how to, kind of, appropriately interpret that when you have something like that.

CB: What has your experience been so far? What are some of the characteristic things?

C: I am patient to a point, and then I am just kind of like, “Go ahead and just get it done.” I seem to attract people that are more reserved, which is good initially, but over time tend to kind of allow me to do more of that. And then there was a little bit of frustration in just, “Why can’t you just do this? Why can’t you just do it?” You know? I tend to be more action-oriented in relationship. And so for me, I tend to run into that often where I’m like, “Okay, but can’t you just do it? Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you just do that?”–

CB: –in a sense of like, not impulsivity, but well–

C: –like from the daily routine, right? The Virgo piece, just on a day-to-day basis, just kind of getting things done. Just one step and just kind of more orderly and everything seems to, I tend to take more of that on.

CB: Sure.

C: So that’s usually what I tend to default to is like, “Okay, I’m just gonna do it.” I’ll just do it. Then I get burned out.

LS: I’m curious, you know, because you were asking about Mars and Jupiter being both the most positive and the most challenging in the seventh house. Oftentimes people, if they have both in the seventh, they, over the course of their lifetime, at least experience some of both. And sometimes that’s in the same relationship and sometimes that’s in different relationships.  And I’m curious since we were wondering about the anecdotes with regard to your life experience, have you had major relationships that really have been evocative of either or both of those placements? Like really strongly positive or really strongly challenging?

C: No, I think it is just, kind of felt like a grind. Just a grind kind of overall.

LS: Well, and Saturn’s in there too.

C: Yeah. But I mean like I kind of like that to a point. So that’s where I’m like I’m good until I’m not. And then it’s just, I’m not.

CB: What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you in relationships?

C: The best thing is tied with the worst thing. So there you go.

CB: So what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in your relationships?

C: The worst thing… Honestly, it actually hasn’t been in romantic relationships. I actually, I mean, I guess you can- whatever. I got divorced a couple of years ago, but as I was getting divorced, my whole family and all of them sided with my ex-husband for whatever reason, still fairly unclear. I was very close with my family, like really, really close with my family. And now I don’t talk to them–

CB: –So you suffered like a–

C: –that could be the Pluto-Saturn thing, honestly, but yes.

CB: So a traumatic divorce where you had a separation from not just your marriage partner, but also your family and other people that were connected with you at the time.

C: Yeah. It’s, yep. Okay. It’s kind of like that’s where everything gets a little lost because it’s easy to see it in a couple of different spots in my chart. So, especially with the transit.

CB: Part of it’s coming through the connection because one of the rules we didn’t explain earlier was that you pay attention to the ruler of the seventh house, but also sometimes the other house that that same planet rules will bring those topics into play when it gets activated. So in your instance, Mercury is the ruler of the seventh house, but it’s also the ruler of the fourth house. That activation can activate both relationships and family at the same time.

LS: Yeah. And it’s actually applying to square Mars as the first aspect in a day chart. That actually is a perfect description of that, unfortunately. But that’s where some of the Mars has showed up, I think, right?

CB: So in terms of mitigations though, you do have two mitigating factors. One of them is that while you do have the most positive planet and the negative planet in the seventh house, Mars is actually applying to conjunction with Jupiter within three degrees. And that’s a condition known in the ancient Hellenistic text as bonification, where the positive planet has the upper hand and is able to kind of force the more negative planet to be better or at least somewhat more mild than it would be otherwise.  While, Mars in the seventh house would still indicate that that’s where you’re gonna have some of your greatest challenges or difficulties, It’s not gonna be as extremely negative as it potentially could be, without that mitigating condition. The other mitigating condition that’s relevant is while Venus has that close square with Pluto, Jupiter has a superior sign base trine overcoming Venus. Even though it’s not very close by degree, that’s actually still very important and very relevant because Jupiter’s earlier in the order of signs, it’s again, able to balance out the condition of Venus and make it more positive than it would be otherwise. And there’s actually one–

LS: -there’s one more.

C: Yeah. Reception. Yeah, that’s what I was just gonna ask you about–

LS: –because Mercury is ruling all those Virgo planets and it’s in Sagittarius. So while it is applying to square Mars next, it has reception with all of those since it’s an applying aspect to all those planets and rules them, and so it kind of tempers what would otherwise be a more extreme situation, particularly of the Mercury-Mars.

C: Do you see Saturn having reception with Venus and Saturn?

CB: Yeah, that was actually the reception I was going –

LS: Oh, okay.

CB: Cause Venus is in–

C: –but that’s good. I didn’t see that one.

LS: Yeah, you have multiple receptions.

CB: Venus is in Saturn’s sign and it’s applying to trine with it. I mean, one of the questions that I have, and if it hasn’t come up so far in your life, it may at some point, is just with the ruler of the seventh house of relationships and the 10th house of career, that there may be a relationship that comes up at some point in your life that is connected with your career, your work, or that somehow your relationship or your love life becomes tied in with your career, like through working with a partner at some point.

C: Right? And then, that has not happened yet. So I’m thinking that’s hopefully coming, hoping that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction on all of this, basically triggering everything, is kind of clearing the way for a serious reboot.

CB: Why did you say that that conjunction was relevant recently? Because that was only within the past month?

C: Well, I’ve felt that. Just kind of coming with Saturn transiting Sag , you know, leading up to it. It’s kind of been like a slow buildup. It’s been a slow and then it’s accelerated in terms of the things that have kind of had to leave or have just left without, you know, me having any sort of control over it. It’s been kind of a slow tilling of the garden and then now it’s just been like a bulldozer. So I think it’s just been leading up to it. Now that it’s happened, I’m hopefully on the other side of it. I know Saturn’s going to come back and revisit, but I think the worst is over, I think. But no, I haven’t met anyone at work or anything like that.

CB: When was the divorce?

C: 2017. It was final July 17th, 2017.

LS: So that would’ve been Saturn square Saturn in the seventh. Yeah. Saturn in Sagittarius square Saturn in Virgo. Yep. Yep. Okay.

CB: So, and that was probably the end of a process.

C: It was actually a fast one. Pretty quick.

CB: Interesting.

C: That was the least painless, painful part of it.

LS: So you have a really complex, I know, interconnected thing going,

C: That’s why it’s like, this is so the one I need to go to today. But yeah, I just had a hard time primarily with the Mars-Jupiter conjunction on my descendant in the seventh. So thank you.

CB: Sure. Mmhmm.

LS: Yeah. Thank you.

CB: Just some of the most positive things, and some of them are challenging things would come up in the sphere of relationships. But that’s also one of the most important areas of your life because the ruler of the ascendant, the ruler of the 10th is located in that house.

C: So, and I think you did a podcast on that recently where you kind of have to take the good with the bad within the last year. So that was helpful. But yeah, I was like, how does this relate? So thank you.

CB: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. All right. Does anyone else have any other good retrospective examples? You have a good story you wanna share or?

Lynnette: I just have [a] very quick placement and a story.

CB: Okay…What’s your first name?

L: Lynnette. L-Y-N-N-E-T-T-E.

CB: What’s your birth date?

L: February 7th, 1982.

CB: What time?

L: 8:12 PM. Albuquerque, New Mexico. A-L-B-U.

CB: Yeah. Sorry,

L: It’s a hard oe. [Laughs]

CB: How do you spell it again?

L: A-L-B-U-Q-U…

CB: U-Q, okay.

L: Yeah, U-E-R… wait.  [laughter from audience] U-E

LS: A-L-B-U-Q-U-

L: Yes!

LS: E-R-

L: Q-U-E

CB: Q-U

L: I’m also really bad at spelling.

LS: E-R.

L: Q-U-E.

CB: Q?

L: What are we missing? No. Is it–

LS: A-L-B-U-Q-U-E-R-Q-U-E [laughter from audience]

CB: Q-U-E? Yeah. [laughter from audience] Okay. New Mexico.

L: I think there’s an extra U in there, but it looks like it.

CB: I think it works. Yeah. Solar Fire may have-

L: Cool. Yeah. There you go.

CB: Alright. 21 Virgo rising?

L: Yes. Okay. So my Venus is square Saturn slash Pluto. Also, with the Saturn Pluto conjunction over my south node. My, basically the only relationship I’ve had since I was 22 years old was with someone who was 22 years older than me. And we… basically we’re still in the process- but we just started separating like right around the… 12th? When it was exact.

CB: The 12th of last month.

LS: Of January.

L: Yeah. That was like actually like-

LS: -the day of the conjunction.

CB: That’s a really great example.

L: It’s so great. [Laughs]

LS: We’re sorry.

L: It’s amicable.

CB: Astrologer good.

L: But it’s the, it’s actually the age difference that has led to the separation.

LS: Oh, interesting because that is a Venus-Saturn thing we were discussing earlier.

CB: So that initially, that was something that was present or that’s always been present in your relationship, but then eventually it became like an issue or a point of strain between you?

L: Yeah. And we also, like you were talking about the Pluto- and I’m not sure how strong this is- but we’ve obviously been together a really long time and we were in long distance for three and a half years of that as well, across the course of the relationship. That was interesting too.

CB: If anybody’s listening to the recording of this, your Venus is at 23 Capricorn, and its square Saturn at 22 Libra and Pluto at 26 Libra. And the recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction was at 23 Capricorn. So it was right on top of that. And that was when just a month ago you guys decided to split up?

L: It’d been in the works, actually, for three years. The main thing is that I want to have a baby and he’s older and at different life stages. So, we started talking about it three– it’s been very slow but as of a month ago, it was kind of the deciding thing.

CB: That’s actually perfect also because Venus is in the fifth house, right? Which is the place of children.

LS: And Saturn is ruling the fifth house.

CB: Saturn is ruling, but it’s just that, it’s also like that whole transit. This is a good demonstration of sign-based transits, how they start as soon as the planet goes into the sign, but then they usually culminate at the exact hit. Saturn moved into Capricorn back in December of 2017. So that was about two, three years ago now. Saturn moved into Capricorn and sort of some of those issues probably started to come up and continued to grow more intense the closer and closer the transit gets to the exact conjunction with Venus until it finally hits it there at 23 and then that’s when the sort of culmination of the events. Yeah. Cool. Thank you for sharing that. That’s a great example.

LS: Thank you for the example.

L: Yeah, thank you.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Alright, so, where are we at right now? We’ve got about 30 minutes left.

LS: Yeah. A little more. I’m trying to think of any of the pieces we haven’t talked about. I mean, we could go into all of the different house connections, I don’t know if you want to or not. In terms of how that can show up.

CB: In terms of just delineating all 12 houses?

LS: Mmhm. Yeah.

CB: Maybe. That might take up a lot of time though.

LS: Yeah. We could do it quickly. But, I don’t know if there was anything else that you wanted to bring in conceptually besides that.

CB: Conceptually, relationship stuff because we wanted to cover basically a little bit of everything today. So we’ve covered placements in the seventh, ruler of the seventh, Venus as a general significator, transits. So transits through the seventh house, transits to Venus, transits to the ruler of the seventh house. We talked very briefly about zodiacal releasing. We talked briefly about profections activating the seventh house especially. What else? Synastry is something we didn’t really touch on. So, comparing two charts to each other. And especially sometimes when you have the same placements on the same degrees, that’s going to indicate a sensitive point when a transit goes over that because then it’s going to be hitting both of your charts at the same time, which is part of the reason why synastry is important because then your timing becomes inextricably interlinked with events in your life, sometimes happening around the same time.

What other relationship concepts are there?

LS: I’m sure we’re forgetting something, but I’m not thinking of it right now.

CB: Okay. Does anybody else have any good retrospective examples like the last ones that they want to share with us? Is it a… You have one? Is it a good example? You seem a little hesitant.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to make sure everyone was… because I talk a lot.

LS: Is it a quick example?

CB: Yeah, it’s gotta be quick, that’s the only thing.

AM: Okay, cool. January 25th ‘89. 11:23 PM. Denver.

CB: Got it. 21 Libra rising?

AM: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

AM: I just turned 31, so now I’m in an eighth house profection, but I was just through a seventh house profection year. The last few months were definitely – between October and then all the way up until recently, in January – were very active, regarding love relationships, for me. It started off with the Full Moon that happened in October, in Aries. I was like, “Okay, something is going to happen, it’s a Full Moon in the profection house.” And then about a week or so later I met somebody on the internet and we started talking and about a week later he was like, “I want to move in with you.” And it was the first time probably in like 12 years since I had lived with somebody. It was kind of scary and nerve-wracking to me, but I took a chance and so I ended up moving in and the relationship only lasted about two months because then the eclipse that followed, the Capricorn eclipse, fell on my natal Uranus and trined my natal Mars. So what ended up happening was, is we had a very, you know, it was a happy relationship, it was actually very harmonious, we had a lot we got along with, but then he started to become like a financial burden to me since Mars rules my second house. It was starting to become a thing where I was like, “Hey I need you to get a job.” And he was like, “Oh no, I’ll try.” So that started becoming a problem.

CB: So he did move in with you?

AM: Yeah, he did. And he moved all the way from Louisiana to move in with me.

CB: After like how…

AM: A week.

CB: A week of talking? Okay.

AM: A week of dating.

LS: So this is Mars ruling the seventh house, exactly trine Uranus.

CB: And it’s a seventh house profection year, so the seventh house is activated, and it’s activating the ruler of the seventh house, which is Mars, in the eighth house of shared resources, and also ruling the second house of personal finances.

AM: Yeah, so I was like, you know, spending credit cards and stuff to try and help him have clothes for the winter because he came from the south. And so it was just becoming like a burden, you know? I started feeling some strife and conflict with that. And then the eclipse that happened made it so that way, the break up was very smooth and very peaceful, which is very not usual for what I’ve experienced with having Mars, you know, ruling the seventh, in the eighth, square Mercury and the Sun. I’ve had a lot of abusive relationships in the past, so for one that wasn’t traumatizing, and to break up very peacefully and it wasn’t like we decided we were done, it was just a school opportunity got presented and he was like, “I need to take this position.” And I was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to hold you back.” It was a very caring…[laughs]

CB: This was after, you’re talking about the Capricorn eclipse in December?

LS: The one at four degrees?

AM: Mmhm. Yep.

CB: So that was in your fourth house-

AM: Yeah wasn’t it like Christmas or something?

LS: Yeah, December 26th, yeah.

AM: Yeah, yeah, so that was right around the time that he got the acceptance letter and stuff like that, from the school. It was very, you know, we’re still friends and he moved out peacefully, but it has been… it’s one of those things, where it was like, you know, I thought I wanted a relationship and it was very, you know, had a lot of positive experiences from it, but it was very swift, you know, I learned a lot of lessons real quick and it turned out to be one of those things that was like, I don’t… it was a burden or like it felt like a… I liked the relationship but I didn’t like the relationship. It was a very conflicting, you know, almost a frustrating feeling of dissatisfaction. So, you know, I’m kind of glad that that’s over. It’s not like it was abusive, but it was definitely different from what I had went through usually.

CB: And the timing is great, in terms of, so the eclipse happened in your fourth house, in December, and then not long after that then he moved out, so your living situation changed, and then just a few weeks later, at the end of January, you ended that profection year and it moved out of your seventh house and into your eighth house. So that whole relationship year was over and the relationship itself came to an end.

AM: Yeah, yeah. And that was like, you know a very major thing for me because it was the first time in a very long time I’d been in an actual, like Facebook official, serious relationship where we were actually intending on, you know, but it was just so sudden and swift that it ended, too, with the eclipse falling on Uranus, on my natal Uranus.

LS: That was a good example of a transit as well, with Uranus transiting over Mars in a seventh house year, where Mars is activated as the ruler because Uranus has, of course, been going through the first few degrees of Taurus back and forth and so it would have been around that maybe, when you met. And then it went back to about two and a half when it stationed in January.

AM: Yeah, yeah.

CB: When did it station?

AM: Definitely was impulsive.

LS: It stationed around that three-day span.

CB: The 10th.

LS: Yeah.

CB: That’s a really good point. It stationed at two degrees of Taurus.

LS: Yeah. So all before that it would have been right on top of your Mars.

CB: Conjoining Mars.

LS: Yeah.

CB: The ruler of the seventh.

LS: Yeah, yeah.

CB: That’s good. And I forgot because you, we used your example in one of the previous meetings last year, but part of the reason that seventh house profection year and that greater activity of relationships is notable for you is because you hadn’t had a major relationship in quite a long time up until this year, right?

AM: Right, exactly. A serious, like real relationship, or yeah. I actually felt like it was something that meant something to me. There were like passing dates here and there, like I don’t care, but they weren’t meaningful like this was, and the way that it meant to me. I felt like it was like a catalyst in my life for growth and feeling like, hey you know, I now know I can have healthy and successful relationships. Now it’s just deciding whether or not I want to be in one. You know?

CB: Definitely.

AM: So yeah.

CB: Thanks for sharing that. That’s a really good example.

LS: Thank you.

CB: Alright, so were there any other celebrity charts that we really wanted to share, or needed to share?

LS: Let’s see.

CB: So we have like, a recent one was Meghan Markle, who is married to Prince Harry, of course, and she has the ruler of the seventh house of relationships in the fourth house of the home and living situation, which is kind of interesting recently because they decided that they were going to relinquish some of their titles as royals and move abroad to Canada, or I’m not sure if it’s been decided yet, but…

LS: Right. Just to move away from England. So it’s really interesting because she got into a relationship with someone from overseas and she has the ruler of the ninth, Jupiter, exactly conjunct Saturn, the ruler of the seventh. So that’s another way that can bring those topics together, besides being in each others’ houses. And then, yeah, I mean the entire world is like watching which continent they’re going to move to, you know, or that’s sort of like a very serious decision about moving away from England after a few years of living there with Prince Harry.

CB: Well, then part of it is also that it was motivated the changes that they’re making – their living situation, their titles – was motivated due to just a constant barrage of attacks from the media and from the press and paparazzi that she’s experienced since marrying him in the past few years and a lot of this has been coinciding with Saturn transiting through Capricorn and through her seventh house of relationships.

She also has a night chart, so it’s a little bit more challenging of a transit for her, but then it culminated in January when they made that decision and made that announcement, and that was right around the time of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction at 23 Capricorn, which is right on her Descendant at 24 Capricorn.

LS: Yeah, the timing is pretty exact with this one. And it’s also interesting because it was the Saturn-Pluto conjunction and those transits through her seventh were squaring her natal Pluto, in the fourth; she has a bunch of fourth house placements here. And you can see that kind of dredging up both the conflicts with her father, but also, Pluto in the fourth being like dealing with a very powerful family, and all of the decisions they were making were in the context of that. And it was her partner’s family.

But I just thought that was an interesting thing as well, and with all of those fourth house placements, you know, and all of the publicity, I could see someone like her really wanting her private life. I feel like that’s kind of what those transits, triggering those fourth house placements were attesting to.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And also, his chart was interesting as a profection example just because when they got married a few years ago he was in a 10th house profection year and he has Venus in Libra, in its own sign, in the 10th house, natally. So that Venus placement was really being activated in that year and they had [a] major public marriage, which then, now evidently we know in retrospect is, would then affect in a significant way, his career and his social standing in the future.

LS: Mmhm, yeah. And of course, since he’s Capricorn rising, and she’s Cancer rising, they’ve both been having eclipses across their first-seventh house axis.

CB: And that’s a really common theme that we see in this couple’s chart, which is that they have their Ascendant and Descendant axis reversed. And I think that’s partially the modern concept of people tending to attract or look for what’s on the seventh house and what’s on the Descendant. So sometimes you will see, whatever your rising sign is, pay attention to if you tend to attract people that have the opposite rising sign because that will sometimes happen and sometimes stand out as an important relationship. Or sometimes the other two signs that are square that, can be more prominent as well.

LS: And their Ascendants being reversed are really interesting in the context of the Saturn-Pluto transits as well because with the seventh house transit, it was not only, you know, this very serious relationship and marriage and then eventuating in this major break with or at least half break with his family, but that, you could see that kind of happening in her seventh house meaning he was in some ways really grappling with it. And here that’s transiting his first house, mirroring that this is a major identity shift for him and you know, so his first house, her seventh house partnership. Because he’s the one that’s really tied into this, she’s kind of implicated in it by marriage, but-

CB: Well it was funny though, in one of the papers that people laughed at was, it said, it was referring to like Meghan Markle and they referred to Harry as like Meghan Markle’s-

LS: Husband?

CB: Yeah. Meghan Markle’s husband, or something like that, instead of like, Prince Harry, it was reversed a little bit. And we might be seeing a little of that coming through this axis of her having this seventh house transit and then having this heavy first house transit.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. Alright, other ones, we pulled up a bunch today. One was interesting was like Monica Lewinsky has a day chart with Mars in the seventh house of relationships. So she has, again, the most difficult planet in the seventh house of relationships and had that become a major part of her life. It’s still a dominant theme, years later, even though technically in terms of the time frame of her life when she was involved with Bill Clinton was relatively small, but it’s had repercussions or echoes for the rest of her life.

LS: Mmhm.

CB: Who else? I don’t want to bum people out with negative examples or too many negative examples. We had one positive counteracting one I thought was interesting, which was the chart of Bill Gates. So he has Cancer rising and Capricorn on the seventh house. And Saturn is ruling the seventh house and it’s at 21 Scorpio, in the fifth house, in a night chart. So the ruler of the seventh house is actually technically the more difficult planet or the most difficult planet in his chart, however, he’s got some major mitigations going on.

One of them is that Saturn is closely conjunct Venus, which is the most positive planet in his night chart. And Venus is helping to counterbalance Saturn a little bit by bringing this sort of positive energy to that placement by a close conjunction within a degree or so, but also there’s a square coming in from the other side from Jupiter, which is at 27 degrees of Leo, squaring Saturn from a superior position earlier in the order of signs, so that the other benefic planet is also trying to balance Saturn out at the same time.

LS: Mmhm.

CB: So for him, of course, he got married to Melinda Gates and they formed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had a relatively happy, but also very productive and successful marriage where he transitioned away from being the CEO of Microsoft to heading up this major non-profit organization with his wife and they have this sort of, not just romantic relationship, but also serious partnership and like business relationship with each other at the same time.

LS: Mmhm. Yeah, that’s a really good example of the mitigations and also Saturn being used productively. I’m trying to remember if their foundation focuses on children at all. Do you know if it does?

CB: Yeah, especially vaccinations is one of their big things.

LS: Oh, okay. Because I was thinking about the ruler being in the fifth and sometimes, every now and then, I’ve seen a placement that looks challenging like this one, like the Saturn, even though with the two mitigations, but I’ve seen it sometimes describing something about what they’re doing with it. And that could be something like, they’re trying to help children who are in a bad place.

CB: Yeah. So always pay attention to mitigations because even sometimes more difficult placements can be significantly offset and not be a huge issue if there’s major offsetting factors present.

LS: Mmhm. I mean… yeah, nevermind.

CB: Which one do you want to go for?

LS: We could do Amanda Knox.

CB: Ok.

LS: Amanda Knox has Saturn in the seventh house and it’s ruling the ninth and the eighth. And of course, I’m sure she’ll go on to have a much longer life and other relationships, but one of the things she was known for already was when she was going through that trial in Italy, as she was a foreign exchange student and there was like a murder trial, if you know who this is, where they were accusing her and her boyfriend at the time, her Italian boyfriend, of murder. And so it was just in the news a lot and she kept being connected to like this boyfriend. And so even though I’m sure that’s not her legacy forever, it was just kind of a prominent thing. And there was a question, I’m forgetting the details of the case at this point, but there was a question of like whether he might have been lying or something like that.

So anyway, Saturn ruling the ninth of foreign places and also the legal system. Yeah.

CB: Yeah and she was in a ninth house profection year, it was activating her ninth house when she went to Italy to study abroad for a year, and then her roommate was murdered, and her and her boyfriend were charged and imprisoned, and then later acquitted of the murders.

LS: Right, so you get the topics of the legal system, of foreign places, foreign countries, as well as mortality with the eighth house.

CB: And then…

[audience voice inaudible]

CB: William?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Right.

LS: In terms of relationships?

AM2: [inaudible]

CB: Yeah. I mean, I had William’s chart, but the only reason I had it up was partially because he has a relatively well-placed ruler of the seventh [house], in terms of zodiacal dignity and not being terribly afflicted and I thought that was a good example just in terms of, if the ruler of the seventh house is relatively well situated in the chart it can indicate that that area of the life will go relatively smoothly, or will be relatively lucky or successful. So he has Gemini on the cusp of the seventh house and the ruler is Mercury, which is in Gemini, in the seventh house, not making a hard aspect with Mars or Saturn.

LS: And it’s interesting that both of them also have Venus in really good dignity. They both have Venus in rulership. So Venus in Taurus here, for Prince William, and Venus in Libra for Prince Harry.

CB: Right. Alright and then I don’t want to… there’s so much speculation surrounding his relationship with his brother and everything, that I don’t want to get into that too much, but that’s certainly another aspect of synastry, which is not just romantic relationships, but how you relate to different people around you, which can include parents, siblings, co-workers, friends, and even enemies or people that you don’t get along with.

LS: Mmhm. I noticed when I pulled up the Macrons’ charts that they had really strong synastry in terms of Emmanuel Macron’s Ascendant ruler is Saturn… where did it go? Saturn in early Virgo. And then she has an early Virgo rising. And Saturn conjunct an angle of someone else’s chart can sometimes mean like a long-lasting bond.

CB: Mmhmm

LS: Yeah. So, it was kind of notable because her time was otherwise sounding kind of rounded even though it was supposedly from the birth certificate but was like 3:00 p.m. even. So, I was always a little concerned about that being definitely the exact time. But when I saw her Ascendant being an early Virgo rising and his Ascendant ruler his early Virgo rising, I was like okay.

CB: Right. All right. Does anybody else have any good examples from your personal life like past examples that you feel like sharing? Do you wanna do it?

Rhiannon: Yeah

CB: Okay. What’s your first name?

R: Rhiannon. R-h-i-a-n-n-o-n.

CB: What’s your birth date?

R: December 2nd, 1987.

CB: What time?

R: 6:39 p.m. Topeka, Kansas. T-O-P-E-K-A, yeah.

CB: All right. And is your Ascendant five Cancer.

R: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

R: So, I have that fun Venus-Neptune conjunction

CB: So your Descendant is at five Capricorn, Venus is at six Capricorn, and it’s conjunct closely Neptune at six Capricorn, as well.

R: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

R: So, the illusion and disillusionment rings true. I think starting out as like fairy tale and then having a sudden moment of ‘what is actually going on here?’ I think I have a lot of love stories, but the biggest one would be the one in my Saturn return since the ruler of my Venus is Saturn. I lived off the grid with my Capricorn boyfriend and it was an abusive relationship that ultimately, well the kind of interesting factor is the sixth house can be pets. So, we got two dogs together and that still connects us to this day. But what ended up happening is I ended up in the hospital and almost dying but I didn’t and I’m still connected to that person through the co-parenting, which I kind of attribute to the fact that I have that Venus-Neptune forgiveness. So, even though there was an intense situation, I still can kind of manage with boundaries a relationship, not a romantic relationship, but one in which I can still have contact with the dogs which he has.

CB: Okay.

R: So.

CB: That’s great.

R: Yeah

CB: With the ruler of the seventh house of relationships in the sixth house and one of the classical indications of the sixth is pets, which oftentimes when people read it sometimes sounds like a blowoff signification of like why is this, why do we need to know about this in the chart? But in reality pets can oftentimes play a major role in a person’s life.

R: Yeah. I mean it sounds silly, but the fact that my Venus and Saturn are connected, I love my dogs. So, it’s enough of a motivator to stay connected. And the sixth house being health, just thinking about the hospital, Saturn with the isolation and like actually being in the mountains off-the-grid, kind of brings in those Saturnian themes, so.

CB: Definitely.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And then, in terms of the Venus-Neptune conjunction you said that’s been like a recurring theme or something you’ve experienced other times. Like how well, like—

R: Yeah

CB: We tried our best to describe that but how would you like describe that sequence in terms of did you feel like we did a good job of adequately describing that, or is there any aspect of it—

R: Yeah. So, for instance dating artists, dating children of famous artists, that kind of thing. Sort of fairy tale scenarios that like, you know it starts off in a way that sounds like it should be in a movie so like the Neptune kind of thing. But they’re always being like you know you’re talking about a friend that’s like I just met someone at the train station, and this is the person that is definitely true of like, it really seems like that in the beginning. But then there might be like a substance abuse issue with Neptune so that kind of comes out over time. And then the rose-colored glasses are off, so.

CB: Okay.

R: Yeah.

CB: Perfect. That’s great. Thank you for sharing that, we appreciate it.

R: You’re welcome.

LS: Thank you for the example.

R: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Cool. All right. So, I think we’re getting towards the end of this. Does anybody else have one last really good example? No, okay. That’s all right. So—

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: What’s a bad example?

CB: I mean I have my classical ones like…

LS: You have Eva Braun in there.

CB: Yeah. I have like, well we have birth times for both Hitler and Eva Braun. And even though it’s kind of cliché to use Hitler as an example because astrologers use it way too much historically. If you were to look at his chart he has areas on the seventh house and the ruler is Mars, which is in the eighth house of mortality. And it’s in a day chart so Mars is the most challenging planet in his chart. And of course one of his earlier lovers was like a niece who ended up committing suicide potentially in order to escape from him. And then he famously got married and then subsequently his honeymoon was him and his wife committed suicide together in a bunker as World War II was coming to an end. So not the most pleasant example, but descriptive or evocative of you know extreme version of that placement, let’s say worst case scenario.

LS: Mmhmm

CB: Weirdly, we have her chart and she actually has a night chart, the Sun is down in the fourth house, and she was born just after midnight with Scorpio rising, and Saturn is placed in the seventh house of relationships. So, she got married to Hitler with Saturn as the most difficult planet in the chart in the seventh house of relationships. And I think we could accurately say that was probably one of the more difficult areas of her life. Although, it’s interesting because she has the ruler of the seventh house as Venus, which is the most positive planet in her chart in Capricorn applying to a trine with that Saturn and attempting to offset it to make it more positive.

LS: Mmhmm

CB: But ultimately you know questionable whether Venus was successful or not.

LS: Right. Yeah that’s a good description of you know like objective look at the relationship versus like subjective. So, maybe her subjective experience was like offset by that Venus ruling and applying by trine. And then the objective would be like literally married to Hitler. Saturn in a night chart in the seventh. [Laughs]

[audience laughter]

CB: When also that she did get married at some point—

LS: Yeah, it is saying yes to a marriage.

CB: Technically, technically she did get married.

LS: Right.

CB: But it was just married to Hitler.

LS: Yes.

CB: Okay. So, those are like bad examples. There’s other– a similar one is like Aretha Franklin because hers is interesting because it’s a similar situation where she has a night chart with Saturn in the seventh house of relationships. And so, some of the most difficult things in her life came in the sphere of relationships or it was an area that she struggled with throughout her life. But then Venus is the ruler of the seventh house and it’s actually placed in Aquarius at 20 degrees of Aquarius in the fourth house applying to a square with Saturn. And they’re actually exchanging signs in a mutual reception.

So, there’s this interesting mitigation going on where Venus is trying to offset Saturn and is having some success because she was actually married eventually I think a few different times in her life. But two of the marriages broke up. One of the marriages was abusive. One of the marriages she left due to her having to tend to like her sick father and that causing like tensions in the marriage that eventually caused it to fall apart. And then finally her third marriage, she was together with this guy towards the end of her life for a very long time, but they never officially got married. And they almost came to doing it at one point several years before she died. But they didn’t but they still stayed together as a romantic partnership that was relatively successful. But it was almost like her final way of getting around that issue she had always run into was by not making it official and just having it as this relationship that was a positive force in her life. But just not officially tying the knot.

LS: Mmhmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so hers has an interesting interplay of several different factors that we’ve been discussing.

CB: Yeah, because one of the questions that sometimes comes up is will the native ever be married or will the native have any relationships ever in their life? Because there’s extreme scenarios where you have to realize that there’s some people that either let’s say not just never get married, but let’s say never have a single significant romantic relationship in their entire life as the most extreme scenario, so. But one of the questions that sometimes you have to ask is will this person have relationships or will this person be successful in relationships, or have successful long-term relationships. And sometimes that’s where the mitigating conditions can make a big difference.

LS: Mmhmm, for sure. And you know it’s a really good example, or a lot of people like clients will come and sometimes if they’re really successful in other areas of their life, they think you know why what’s wrong with me I’m not having relationships. But you can really see clearly I think in a lot of these examples the seventh house is a distinct area. It’s not about you unless your Ascendant ruler is there you know. So, sometimes it can be a really, it can be typified really differently than other areas of your life, or even your life overall. And it really does come down to what are the placements related to your seventh house or your natal Venus? What is the timing going on overall in your life as to whether relationships do happen or not, or whether you’re happy with them or not?

CB: Yeah. And depending on the timing that’s another thing is relationships might not be a major factor in your chart or may not be a hugely prominent factor. But at different points in your life when major transits start going through the relationship sectors of your chart or you have other significant activations, that may still bring significant relationships into your life during those times.

LS: Mmhmm

CB: And that’s sort of important to note as well.

LS: Yeah, definitely. So, we’re mostly focusing on the placements related to them in the natal chart related to relationships today. But there’s a huge interplay with the timing as to what happens.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

CB: All right. Does anybody have any questions before we wrap up here in the next five minutes? General questions about relationship astrology. Yeah.

[Inaudible]

CB: Yeah, to some extent in terms of like fixed signs tending to start very slowly. But eventually once they get going it can tend to be more fixed or more long-lasting as well as a propensity to want to stick with the same thing for longer and like not getting bored. Cardinal signs being good at like initiating things but not having as much staying power necessarily. Or mutable signs being sort of a mix of the two and a little bit in between.

LS: Mmhmm. I’d meant to bring that up with Elizabeth Taylor’s because she not only had that already extreme Venus-Uranus conjunction and then in Aries, which can be a little impulsive. But her angles are mutable: Sagittarius Ascendant, Gemini Descendant. So a Gemini Descendant could lend itself towards more you know going back and forth or having multiples of relationships.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: What if your ruler of the seventh is in your first [inaudible].

CB: It sometimes comes up similar to the ruler of the Ascendant in the seventh in that there can be– the relationships in the native’s life can have a much greater role in shaping their sense of self than other people. That sometimes like the native sense of self, and who they are and what they’re about really becomes informed by their relationships. And sometimes that can be a good thing and a stabilizing thing. And other times it can mean that the personality gets merged into relationships in a way that’s not healthy if they completely give over their sense of self to their partner. But it just depends on how it’s situated.

LS: Mmhmm, for sure. I would say pretty similar things with just a small addition that for some people the seventh house isn’t only personal relationships, but can also be if their work has to do with lots of one-on-one interaction. Then sometimes the ruler of the seventh in the first or the ruler of the first in the seventh can indicate that there’s some focus in your life on lots of repeated one-on-one interactions or client work or something, yeah.

CB: Yeah. All right. So, the last thing is just even though a lot of these indications are very stark in retrospect, I think there’s still a level potentially of negotiability if you know about what your placements are, and what your predispositions or what your propensities are to see if you can navigate those in constructive ways. And so that’s always going to be one of the greatest challenges for everybody is once you know what your tendencies are, what the possibilities are, how much can you try to either lean into that or how much can you try to mitigate that and do what you can to deal with those scenarios constructively? So, that goes for both the negative placements or the challenging ones, as well as the positive ones in terms of learning how to use the positive things that were given in a way that’s constructive or to their fullest extent.

But I don’t want anybody to walk away from this thinking that just because you have such-and-such placement that you’re doomed to some specific scenario, or some specific outcome. But instead for a lot of these scenarios there was a sense of like co-creation between meeting somebody and some objective circumstances happening in the life. But also, sometimes certain things arising out of desires or wants or choices that were made on the part of the native. And that’s a really important element that always has to be taken into account in relationships, is what choices are you making and what are you contributing to the relationship, and what choices can you make in the future in order to alter the outcomes if you want them to be different than they were in the past? Because the older each of us is and the longer we’ve lived the more experience we’ve built up so that we have a greater sense of freedom to make choices as time goes on. And that’s what this is about is just making those choices as consciously as we can.

LS: Mmhmm, for sure. Yeah, and just also remembering that these are not static placements even though they kind of look like static placements when you’re just looking at a birth chart. And so you might think, “Oh this placement is forever how my seventh house plays out.” But I think you’ve seen with some of these examples here even some of the notable relationships that people are known for having weren’t necessarily like the only relationship they had. Particularly, you know I’m thinking of it that was like a challenging piece of their life. Sometimes they went on and had other relationships that we’re just not talking about now because it wasn’t in the news or something. So, always remember that as well.

CB: Definitely. All right. Well, I think that’s it then for this meeting and talking about relationship astrology. I hope everybody learns something or one or two useful things. And at some point, maybe we’ll reconvene and do more chart sessions. Because one of the things that was cool is hearing Joseph’s story because we talked to you like a year ago when we did the profections example and you were just going into that year. So, it’s interesting then to hear your retrospective analysis of what happened after the fact. And that’s something that we’re very much interested in with this group, is these types of work sessions where we keep learning and growing as astrologers, and as a community by sort of pooling our efforts and pooling our research and sharing those stories just so we can improve as practitioners and as people that do astrology. So, let’s all plan to meet up again at some point in the future and maybe do another one of these meetings where we share charts and share experiences just for the sake of learning and growing as a group. So, thanks everybody for coming today and for joining us in this process for this meeting and hopefully we’ll see you again next month.

LS: Thanks for coming.

CB: Thanks to the patrons who helped to support the production of this episode of The Astrology Podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, shout out to patrons Christine Stone, Nate Craddock, and Maren Altman, as well as the Astro Gold Astrology app available at astrogold.io, the Portland School of Astrology at portlandastrology.org, and the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at honeycomb.co.

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