Ep. 248 Transcript: April 2020 Astrology Forecast + Coronavirus Discussion

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 248, titled:

April 2020 Astrology Forecast + Coronavirus Discussion

With Chris Brennan, Kelly Surtees, and Austin Coppock

Episode originally released on March 27, 2020

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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 Autumn Brown and Andrea Johnson

Transcription released June 21, 2021

Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is Episode 248, recorded today, on Thursday, March 26, 2020, starting at 11:06 AM, in Denver, Colorado.

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the astrological forecast for April of 2020, and also reflecting on recent world events obviously surrounding the coronavirus and how everything has changed since our last forecast. Hey, guys, thanks for joining me today.

KELLY SURTEES: Hey, guys.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.

CB: Hey. All right, so we recorded our last forecasts. Usually, these are always pre-recorded, and we record them sometimes halfway through or sometimes towards the end of the month before the forecast. We recorded our last one sometime earlier in February, right? The forecast for March?

KS: Yeah, the 23rd of February, I think.

CB: Okay. That’s interesting because things were just starting to really develop and happen at that point, but it hadn’t really taken off as much in western countries. So much has changed over the course of the past few weeks, obviously, right?

AC: Certainly.

KS: A lot has changed. The world is quite different.

CB: Yeah, so let’s talk about that. Usually on the forecast episodes, over the past few months at least, I try to just jump right into the forecast for the month ahead and save some of the other discussion for later, but with so much going on, that doesn’t really make sense here today. Why don’t we just reflect a bit on what’s been going on? That’s also a good opportunity to talk about some of our previous forecast episodes over the past several months and how that sort of relates to what’s happening here, which is always kind of interesting.

One of the trends I’ve seen in astrological circles is that a lot of people have been talking about how astrologers have been talking about some of these major planetary alignments coming up for year, especially with some of the major outer-planet alignments, like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which went exact in January and is still very much in play.

It’s interesting to see some of that stuff finally start to materialize and turn into major world events right in front of our eyes. Is that a feeling you guys have had as well? I mean, obviously, that’s some really slight relief, but is that an experience that you guys have had as astrologers?

AC: I think it’s been shocking how precisely the events in the world have matched the astrology, in a way I think we hoped wouldn’t be true. Astrology is very good at describing things both literally and metaphorically, and there are certain configurations that you really hope will stay firmly in the metaphorical.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sure. One of the things we were all waiting for, to some extent, and even economists in general–not just astrologers–were waiting for a recession and saying that we were due for a recession. Astrologers, seeing all of the clustering of the Capricorn placements and Saturn, were thinking of consolidation and recession as very obvious manifestations of that, especially in terms of the economy, and were waiting for things like a downturn. But seeing the actual, specific reason for having a major worldwide recession right now has been really interesting now that it’s actually happening.

AC: Yeah, there’s been this interesting experience of kind of knowing what kind of things, what kind of experiences were coming. The only thing that saved us from recession last year was Jupiter in Sagittarius; and without that Jupiter, there was nothing to hold it back. But I expected a recession this year; I didn’t expect it to get triggered by a plague crisis.

One of the things that’s interested me, something to learn from this, is you can figure out enough about things that you can know what strategy to take–even if you don’t know why you have to take that strategy–and what metaphors are appropriate.

Just taking Jupiter in Capricorn, co-present with Saturn and Pluto for much of the year, and additionally, afflicted at various points, such as now, if you knew Jupiter was not in a great place for a year, going big and risky would not be a good idea, right? That’s something I think any astrologer would say–it’s something I’ve said, and I’m sure a million others have said.

You don’t necessarily know why. You don’t know that there’s going to be a plague crisis developing in late February/March, but you can look at Jupiter and be like, “Mm, I think I’m not going to go huge and risky and leveraged, in whatever sense, this year,” especially during the time that those configurations are present. And so, that’s been one of my reflections on this; there are certainly a number, but that’s one of them.

CB: Sure. What about you, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, that’s really eloquently put, Austin–the idea that the astrology points to the type of strategy that’s appropriate, even if you’re not sure of the specific circumstances that would need that strategy, if you like.

And it reminds me of when I was doing my year-ahead stuff, and when we had talked, the three of us. I kept thinking, everything goes back to Saturn this year. There’s this pile-up of planets in Capricorn, all ruled by Saturn in one of his own signs. And even with the sign-split, with Saturn having moved into Aquarius and Mars about to follow suit, it’s all still under the rulership of Saturn.

I kept saying to my students at the start of the year, “We just have to do the Saturn thing this year–whether it’s play it safe, whether it’s think about long-term rather than short-term.” And it didn’t seem to make sense when I was talking–I couldn’t see why or how that would manifest back in January–but it was very clearly Saturnian themes.

Given the extreme way that that’s manifesting now, I feel like we’re all getting a master class in the Saturnian approach of things like isolation, staying alone, being more of a hermit, being even more frugal. The idea of just going to the grocery store once a week, that is different for many people–there are some people that go more often–or you have to cook your own food instead of eating take-out.

There’s all of this ‘getting back to basics’, focusing on if there are limitations in grocery stores or supply chains, is it important that you buy that fancy piece of chicken breast, or should you buy some tuna and rice? It’s that idea of getting back to what’s essential, rather than what’s frivolous, and it’s fascinating to see how it’s shown up.

Of course, as you’ve said, Austin, sometimes we’d like it to be more symbolic than literal, but it is very much about the Saturnian. If you’ve got a choice, you just try to think about what is the most Saturn response to that, at this point in time.

CB: Right. And maybe we should actually just re-cap what, practically speaking, has happened in the past month since our last forecast was recorded. As we were preparing for this, I was having trouble thinking of how we should start this episode. But now I realize as we’re doing it, something that might be useful–if anybody ever watches this 10 years from now–is for us to actually describe how much the world has changed in the past 30 days, just from a practical standpoint, and then actually start dissecting it astrologically.

I meant to say at the start of this, for a full disclosure, that I actually got sick about a week-and-a-half ago and lost my voice; so that’s why it’s kind of scratchy, and I’m actually a bit out of it today. We were meant to record this episode last Sunday, but I was actually so sick that we had to postpone it till today. So if I’m a little out of it, or not as put-together, that’s part of the reason why today. But you guys are going to help me pull through this episode, right?

KS: Yeah, absolutely.

AC: Indeed.

CB: Yeah.

KS: And you’re just giving us a demonstration of some 12th house Capricorn themes.

CB: Yeah.

KS: You’ve really gone the extra mile for your listeners.

CB: Yeah, my 12th house profection year that we’d been talking about for a few months got me. So I’m in a 12th house profection year. For anybody that’s good at astrology, it’s a good astrology example–12th house profection year, natal Mars in the 12th house in a day chart, so it’s my most difficult planet.

I got sick the weekend that transiting Mars exactly conjoined my natal Mars at 19 degrees of Capricorn. It was actually the weekend that Arielle was out here to record that episode, and that was the week that everything went crazy in the United States. People started panicking and everybody was starting to implement social distancing and everything else.

But that was the last thing that I did, because she was already scheduled to come out here before all this happened. So that was when I got sick though, when transiting Mars hit my natal Mars in the 12th; so there’s a good example, astrologically.

KS: Yes, so bring on Mars to keep moving.

CB: Yeah. So what happened is, a month ago everything, at least in most western countries, was relatively fine mid-February-ish, like around the time we were planning and getting ready to and then recorded our last forecast episode.

There were reports–and obviously things were becoming more serious–in the news media, and in some other western countries, and there had been reports from China, since January, about the developing virus, about the coronavirus spreading. Then all of the sudden things got really real, starting in late February and the first half of March, sort of developing on a daily basis, right?

KS: Yeah. Actually there was a break week in school here in the last week in February in Europe, in Belgium, and we went to Spain for a few days for a holiday, because it’s sunny and warm down there. And as we were coming home, which is the very end of February, the very start of March, the situation in Italy was rapidly escalating.

People were asking us, “You guys are going to be okay to get home?” etc., etc., and we’re like, “Yeah, we’ll be okay,” and we got home. And then I think Italy was where, in the West, certainly, it kind of went downhill really fast. Italy was the first place, particularly in the northern part of Italy, and that led to other countries in Europe starting to close their borders. In Belgium, we went into a lockdown protocol on March 12, and France followed suit around the same time. Spain’s cases escalated through early March.

The first-half of March, it felt like it was hitting Europe. We were talking to friends back in Canada and the States and Australia, and it was starting to break there, but the response, particularly in Canada and the States and Australia was almost like a 10-day delay from what we had in Europe. So it has been progressive, I guess, in that different parts of the world have been hit almost in waves at different times.

CB: Right. And so, the US and other countries were almost 10 days behind Italy, but then that was giving some real preview and people started really worrying. There was a period in early March, I think, of when people started panic-buying a ton of supplies and stuff at grocery stores, right?

KS: Yeah, that’s when it started to seem a little bit more. I remember it was around the Full Moon in Virgo, which was March 9, that a lot of the material about handwashing was coming out. You think about Virgo as being a sign of hygiene and cleanliness, but you don’t necessarily think there’s going to be a global health campaign about the importance of getting the germs off you and keeping them out of your house and things like that.

CB: Right. I thought that was hilarious at the time, and I made a joke about it, but obviously, it was much more serious. People were trying to wash their hands and actually being concerned about a very Virgo thing, which is tiny microbes or a virus, and little things that can spread by germs and not washing your hands and then touching your face.

I think that’s why it’s a Virgo thing though, because they’re microscopic, little organisms, but powerful.

AC: Right. It’s a perfect fit.

CB: Any other recap stuff that you can think of, Austin, in terms of just setting the stage for this discussion of what happened over the past month?

AC: Well, I think it’s interesting that there was a lot of uncertainty–well, there’s still a lot of uncertainty–but there was a lot of uncertainty leading right up to the direct station of Mercury. And then things literally started moving in a much clearer direction once Mercury stationed direct. Was that the 9th-10th of March?

KS: That’s a really good point, because it was just a few days after that that the World Health Organization upgraded the Public Health International Concern level of coronavirus to a pandemic. That announcement came out on March 12; and that, I think, then started to really snowball. Oh, my gosh, Mercury stationed direct, we’ve had the Full Moon in Virgo–there is something really serious here, and we better start putting more clear information out.

CB: Yeah, and also, even the downplaying and the misinformation surrounding the seriousness of the virus was happening during the Mercury retrograde. I feel like what changed–when Mercury finally stationed direct as well around March 9–is some of the western governments started actually taking it seriously and changing their statements about how it was going to impact people, and how seriously the public should take it.

But also, going back to that, in February, Kelly wrote a really brilliant article about this that was on almost the exact same page that I was over the past couple of weeks, just noting that it seemed like all of this really intensified once Mars went into Capricorn on February 16, and that was when the virus really got serious, once Mars entered the same sign as Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter, and the South Node.

And that’s something that we noted was going to be an important hotspot this year in the year-ahead forecast, but it was interesting to see that that really did seem to correlate with that ingress, as the conjunction between Mars and the other outer planets started building up at that point.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the simplest and most useful pieces of timing, astrology-wise, is that we had the exact Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the end of January; well, in the middle of January. But that’s a slow thing and lasts for a bit and takes a little bit to completely show itself.

And so, Saturn-Pluto, as Rick Tarnas wrote voluminously many years ago, is about all of these themes. It’s about hard times. It’s about tremendous fear. It’s about fear, control, disaster, all the bad things. One of the experiential themes that he draws out is the feeling of isolation or imprisonment.

Certainly, with mandatory quarantines, people are experiencing isolation in a new way. Apparently, my lifestyle has been ‘quarantine’ for a long time because I don’t really leave the house. I have a 12th house Moon ruling my Ascendant, and so, I’m just kind of in my office anyway.

So you have this long-running configuration that speaks to several dimensions of what’s happening now, and then the Mars moving into Capricorn, which Kelly just mentioned, was setting that on fire, really ramping that up. We have a longer-term thing and then you have a more swiftly-moving malefic, Mars, making that very fast, obvious, scary, etc.

CB: Right.

AC: And so, it’s interesting that there’s a million other astrology things we can say about it, but Saturn-Pluto set off by Mars times it perfectly.

CB: Yeah. And the two main things that we’re going to focus on here, in terms of the coronavirus and the current pandemic, is the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which is impending and is about to culminate here very soon, in the next couple of weeks–although it has a longer-term effect than that–and also, the major Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which went exact in January–not long after the World Health Organization first reported the virus–but has a longer-term impact that’s going to come back at different points during the course of this year.

So those are going to be the two main things we’re going to talk about related to the coronavirus or that’s being attributed to it from an astrological standpoint, right?

KS: Yes. In terms of how that’s affecting our experiences at this point, for sure.

CB: Okay, so let’s jump into that then, or let’s ground it in that a little bit more, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. So, Kelly, you had some dates on the virus. When was it first announced by the World Health Organization, again? That date ended up being the most interesting, it seemed.

KS: There was a statement that they put out on January 30 about determining that coronavirus was what they called a Public Health Emergency of International Concern; I guess they had done their research.

Obviously, they’d been following what had been happening in Wuhan in China and realized that, at that point, January 30, that this virus was not going to be contained to China; it was going to become an international concern. I think it was late December that it was first identified as a virus, or that the first cases were reported, but that escalation to this is something the world needs to be watching was January 30.

CB: Right. In Wikipedia, at least, the current version of the article for the pandemic says that health authorities in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, reported a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause on the 31st of December, 2019, and an investigation was launched in early January 2020.

So that must’ve culminated then, eventually, with that announcement you’re talking about, Kelly, by the World Health Organization, which was what date again?

KS: Well, that was end of Jan. By that point, we’re a few weeks after the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, but they’re like, “This thing is going to be big,” basically. I think the first deaths in China–Brian’s just jumped into the chat. China announced the first death on the 11th of January, and Saturn-Pluto had their exact conjunction about 24 hours later.

CB: Okay.

AC: And we had the eclipse then, too.

KS: That’s right. Thanks, yes.

AC: So you can see a lot of the rough astrology of late December and January bearing fruit. It’s very common in evaluating the effects of eclipses to assume that they’re not simply at-the-time–though they do have an effect at the time–but that they will take a while to bear fruit.

And so, with this particular stream of events, you can see this getting started during the eclipse season, which was intertwined inextricably with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. Now we can look back and say that, “Ah! That was the origin period for what we’re experiencing now, but it wasn’t clear at the time.”

CB: Right. Obviously, that’s something that we always say about eclipses, that they have a six-month duration, and sometimes you don’t always see the manifestation or realize what was initiated at that time was important until later.

But it’s interesting seeing that also happen with something as important as the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which lots of astrologers were commenting on and watching back in January; but it’s not until now that we really see what was permeating, or what was getting started at that time that was really ramping up, that would become such a major, worldwide phenomenon just a month or two later.

AC: Mm-hmm.

CB: It’s an interesting lesson, astrologically, in general. Because we also see this as astrologers in natal charts sometimes, where something happens under an important transit in the person’s life or something will affect them, but they just don’t know about it yet. Sometimes they find out later at some point or realize the connection, or sometimes they never do, but it’s interesting seeing that in a global sense, with a global phenomenon like this, as well.

AC: Yeah, it makes certain principles really clear.

KS: Yeah. And I think one of the things that both of you have mentioned that I just want to jump on as well is that idea of Mars coming to join the Capricorn party. We’ve really seen the escalation and the aggravation of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

I mean, the stuff was going on in January, but we’re really seeing it come out. I think it was February 16 that Mars went into Capricorn, and Mars is there until the end of March. And so, it’s been in that time-frame as Mars has passed over the eclipse points and passed over all the other slow-moving planets in Capricorn. It’s like, “Oh, this is what that’s about,” because we’ve got that trigger transit coming through.

CB: Yeah. Somebody messaged me the other day asking if there were any visuals for our podcast episodes, and I had to tell them that we had a whole YouTube channel where we do video versions with visuals of each episode. So if you’re only listening to the audio version, there’s also video versions you can find on our YouTube channel, where you’ll find visuals. For those who are watching the video version, I’m going to put up the chart right now from the past few months, so people can see some of the transits that we’re talking about.

First, starting in January, we obviously already have this pile-up of a lot of planets in Capricorn, which includes Pluto and Saturn and Jupiter and the South Node; so that’s like four, very slow-moving celestial bodies, or major celestial bodies. And then, Kelly, the point that you were making was eventually Mars joined the party and moved into Capricorn in mid-February and that’s when things really started accelerating.

KS: Yeah. It’s not as though the problem wasn’t already there, because it was, but it just seemed as though, to use Austin’s phrase, ‘it sped things up’, and it certainly accelerated the dispersal and the progress of both concerns around economic issues, because that’s sort of part of this.

My thought is we’ve got a health crisis and we have some economic problems, and the two are sort of connected to the same type of event or in the same time-frame; even though going forward, they’re likely to play out differently. And the Mars in Capricorn is just inflaming all of this.

There’s so many nuances to this. It’s the three superior planets in the same place, but it’s also Mars and Jupiter chiming in on the Saturn-Pluto. And then, if you’re taking a total, sort of traditional, you’ve got the three malefics–the South Node, Mars and Saturn–in the same place, and Jupiter really struggling by being so close to all of those.

AC: Yeah.

KS: There’s a number of ways you can approach this and describe this as a very difficult combination of cycles or planets.

AC: Yeah, it’s worth noting that in my Vedic training, when you have multiple malefics, especially Saturn-Mars or Saturn-South Node on top of a benefic, that is considered to take that benefic out of the game.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Basically, Mars-Saturn cancel Jupiter, and then they still have power left over to run around and do stuff. And so, practically speaking, it takes Jupiter out, temporarily, so that just the malefics get to party. That is, I think, a very good description of some of the way that this has unfolded.

We can see Jupiter as the wise council, the doctor, the one who’s capable of helping, right? And so, even if there’s something very difficult happening, if you have somebody that has the solution, then you can keep it from becoming a huge problem. But with Jupiter so burdened, the solutions have unfolded, if they have at all, much more slowly than the problems, right? We can just see it as ‘Team Malefica’ vastly outstripping the power of ‘Team Benefic’.

KS: Yes. And if you think about that–the symbolism is so clear. The industry that has, unfortunately, helped disperse this is the airline industry. Not that the airline industry itself is at fault, but everybody flying around the world so often has helped this move and spread as quickly as it has. But that industry is now completely broken, if that makes sense.

The airlines are grounding planes and there are no flights. We’re sort of seeing some of the Jupiter symbolism, those industries–the education industry–they’re suffering the most: the airline industry, the education, as well as, entertainment, hospitality, events.

AC: People who plan events, yeah.

KS: Yeah, that brings groups of people together.

CB: Literally every industry has ground to a halt right now, that’s what’s so unprecedented about this; literally the entire economy around the world. I mean, obviously, there’s some, like Zoom, for example–which we’re using right now–which is webinar software, is doing incredibly well.

But in Colorado, we’re under mandatory lockdown right now, where you’re not supposed to leave your house, and so, every local business, for example, is basically shuttered at this point. It’s really hard to even estimate or imagine what that actually is going to be like in terms of how many different cross-sections of the economy and the world that it actually affects or has an affect on.

KS: Absolutely. And to go to Austin’s point briefly, the idea of the medical system–if you’ve got a problem, but there’s a solution available, it’s okay. We’ve got a big problem, but the medical and health systems are not able to provide what’s needed at the volume, and I think that is a little bit represented by Jupiter’s condition here.

And then to your point, Chris, most of the economies have stopped, but grocery stores, and therefore, truck drivers who are supplying the grocery stores. In addition, there are talks of nurses and doctors being recalled from retirement to help participate. There’s a few very specific parts of the economy that can’t keep up with the demand right now.

CB: Sure.

AC: Yeah, the pain is not um fully, evenly distributed.

CB: Sure. A lot of this, at this point, especially where we’re at right now, at this current period in time– it’s March 26, 2020–it’s really clear as soon as Mars went into Capricorn that there was a sense of panic and a sense of fear that really ramped up at that point, over the course of the next several weeks.

That’s something that is common or is a theme that sometimes comes up with Mars-Saturn conjunctions. As soon as that ingress took place, it seemed like that was the ramp-up to the Mars-Saturn conjunction that we’re going to have here; I think it was exact at 0 degrees of Aquarius, at the very end of this month, on the last day of March.

Thinking about that Mars-Saturn conjunction and the current pandemic, I keep, over the past few weeks, thinking back to a similar Mars-Saturn conjunction that occurred a few years back in Scorpio, which was the summer that the big Ebola outbreak happened. And I remember it being very much centered on that, and centered on people’s fear surrounding the Ebola outbreak and that becoming a much wider epidemic or pandemic, as well as attempts to stop that and attempts to keep it under control during the course of that summer. Do you guys remember similar themes?

AC: Absolutely. One thing that’s really interesting about that is there have been Mars-Saturn conjunctions since then, but that was the last Mars-Saturn conjunction in a sign that one of the malefics ruled, right? That was Mars and Saturn in Scorpio, which Mars ruled. And then there were Mars-Saturn conjunctions in Sag, but that’s ruled by Jupiter, and so, we didn’t get that outbreak.

But now we’re here, and it’s Mars-Saturn in Capricorn, which is actually the one sign that both Mars and Saturn are happiest in. It’s the one sign that dignifies both malefics at once, and so, here we are again. So it’s Mars-Saturn, but it’s also Mars-Saturn in a place where at least one of them is very strong.

CB: Right. And Mars-Saturn and Mars-Saturn conjunctions, obviously, in traditional astrology, those are the two malefic planets, the two most difficult planets, and were often the two planets in ancient astrology associated with things like pandemics and diseases and negative things–a lot of negative things.

AC: Yeah, pretty much all the negative things.

KS: All the problems.

CB: Yeah. So a conjunction of those, of course, is going to be seen as bad. One of the things that I love that you pointed out in your article, Kelly, is that typically–well actually two things. A lot of us have been re-reading Richard Tarnas’ work, Cosmos & Psyche, recently.

He had a lot of really prescient things to say about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which he was really focused on, because that was one of the primary signatures that modern astrologers associated with September 11, 2001, where there was a Saturn-Pluto opposition at that time between the Gemini-Sagittarius axis. He put a lot of focus on looking at Saturn-Pluto cycles through world history and contextualizing it within the context of that, and actually made some statements that were really relevant about what’s going on right now at this current Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

So I was re-reading that and it’s really brilliant. One of my only minor critiques was that he used really wide orbs, which I actually agree with, but I think he could have improved that if he’d paid attention to those outer-planet aspects coming into effect when the planets were configured by sign. There was a much wider range where it actually starts when there’s a sign-based configuration instead of just a degree-based one, even if it does become more intense once it gets closer to exact by degree.

And I think that’s something that we’ve seen here with the Mars-Saturn conjunction, with that accelerating as soon as Mars went into Capricorn and joined Saturn, which was at the end of that sign. It’s obviously growing more intense, and we’re about to start seeing some of the worst effects of it take place over the next few weeks, probably as that conjunction goes exact.

One of the things you noted, Kelly, is that this one is unique, because usually a Mars-Saturn co-presence, when they’re in the same sign, just lasts for like six weeks. But because this is going to go over into two signs, not just in Capricorn, but also in Aquarius, because Saturn just changed signs, it’s actually going to be a much more extended co-presence than usual.

KS: Yeah, that seems to be one of the unique features. Normally, we have Mars and Saturn co-present for six weeks every two years, and what we have in this first part of 2020 is about 12 weeks, because Saturn changes signs and goes into Aquarius, and Mars joins him.

So we have six weeks of Mars-Saturn co-presence in Capricorn, which we’re coming to the end of now, at the end of March. As we transition into April, we start the beginning of the Mars-Saturn co-presence in Aquarius, which will be all of April and up until about the 13th of May.

And to build on Austin’s point earlier, it’s significant in that it’s an extended Mars-Saturn co-presence, but it is also an extended Mars-Saturn co-presence where Saturn remains the ruler. So Saturn, it’s malefic rulership, giving the malefic dignity or strength, if you like.

So I think that’s a factor here, that Mars is not only co-present with Saturn, but in a sign ruled by Saturn. That really spoke to me of the ‘bound’ quality, and we’re seeing this increasing restriction and limitation on our movement, on our choices.

I mean, we talk about what’s changed in the last few weeks, we’ve got a conference that’s not going to happen in person, that’s hopefully going to happen online. But all of the travel that we might have each individually planned over the next few months, everything’s canceled. It is that sense of the Saturn limitation, the restriction, being heavy; and it’s a weight to carry, but it’s a weight that has to be carried, if you like. So it’s that combination of Mars-Saturn co-presence, as well as the rulership factor of Saturn.

AC: Well said.

CB: Yeah. And in terms of this present crisis, it gives us some interesting dates and time-frames to look at; there’s probably three especially that are important. I’m just going to share the chart again, so that we can see.

So the first date, in terms of the Mars-Saturn conjunction, becomes important. The starting point of all of that is when Mars ingressed into Capricorn and begins that whole phase of moving into the conjunction with Saturn. The exact date for that was, what, February 16?

KS: Yeah, February 16, I think.

CB: Okay. So Mars moves into Capricorn, begins moving into the conjunction with Saturn, February 16. Eventually, it culminates and reaches the conjunction with Saturn on March 31, at 0 degrees of Aquarius; so this is the exact Mars-Saturn conjunction and is then the epicenter. What keyword would we use to categorize that peak period of intensity of the conjunction of that configuration between those two planetary bodies?

AC: Yeah, it’s the peak of intensity as far as Mars-Saturn are concerned.

CB: So that occurs March 31. But the thing that’s important here–and how our doctrine and the way that we’re approaching this might be slightly different than some modern interpretations–is that when Mars gets like a few degrees past Saturn, it doesn’t just immediately fall out of that influence, but it’s probably not going to be until Mars departs from the sign of Aquarius–the sign that Saturn is in–that the Mars-Saturn conjunction is fully over. So then that would be when Mars moves into Pisces, around March 12 or March 13.

KS: May 12, May 13.

AC: May.

CB: Sorry, May 12.

KS: Yeah, I had an analogy of this when I was getting ready earlier today. The Mars-Saturn conjunction is like you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, and you don’t have to climb anymore because you’re at the top–but you’re not home yet either; you’ve got to still come down the other side.

And if you’ve ever seen mountain climbers, for instance, go to the top of Mount Everest, getting down can be pretty gnarly and hairy, and you’ve still got to pay quite a lot of attention to come down the other side; but at least you’re on the home stretch, if that makes sense. It’s not that you’re back into the safe, normal zone, but you are coming out of rather than going into something.

CB: Right. Definitely. That’s perfect.

AC: There are a number of moving parts to this. At the very least, we can reduce it to Mars-Saturn, Saturn-Pluto, and Jupiter being massively outgunned. Although we do get the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius, all of April and almost half of May, the Yama Yoga, we also, the little silver lining is that we have those two planets out of sign with Jupiter; and so, we don’t have the two malefics sitting on top of Jupiter.

Jupiter still has difficulty because it’s in Capricorn, and arguably, because it’s sharing the same sign with the South Node, but it’s a massive decrease in the difficulty that Jupiter is undergoing, right? And if Jupiter is the capacity to help, or to counter difficulty, that’s really helpful; we like that. At least there’s something that can be done on a general interpretive level when Jupiter is no longer completely sidelined, as it has been for a month-and-a-half.

KS: That’s a really brilliant point, Austin. And I think the three key dates, this helps Jupiter out a little bit, and then this helps it out a little bit more. The first one of course is Saturn moving out of Cap, which is going into Aquarius, which happened about March 21. I would say the second date is when Mars leaves Capricorn, around March 30, and then the third date is when the South Node leaves Capricorn, around the 5th of May.

AC: Yeah, the nodes moving into Gemini and Sagittarius is another big piece of, how should we say, untangling all of these malefic influences, which have been piled up in one place for a lot of February and all of March, or most of March, right?

Part of the acute difficulty that we’ve recently been experiencing is that all the ‘do-bads’ were in one place at the same time, right?

KS: Like a concentration of all the ‘do-bads’. They just got together and put all their crap in the same place.

AC: Yeah. And so, even though Mars-Saturn continue to pal around together, it’s not Mars, Saturn, Pluto, and the South Node all sitting on top of Jupiter.

CB: Yeah, and that is one of the aspects that goes exact at the very start of April. I had been leaning towards or hoping that what would be happening there is Pluto magnifying the positive qualities of Jupiter, with that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that goes exact on April 4. Although I’m a little concerned that the flip-side of that may be Jupiter exacerbating the negative qualities of Pluto, especially in a mundane sense, because much of the effects of everybody getting sick, or so many people getting sick here at the end of March, are going to be fully manifesting in the world in early April.

AC: Well, I would say that between Jupiter and Pluto it’s kind of a wash in terms of plus/minus. But one thing that’s very important to note about the first week of April is that the exact Mars-Saturn conjunction is over, but it’s still very tight, and Mars will be applying to a square with Uranus.

We have Mars-Saturn square Uranus, which is very disruptive and malefic, so I would expect a wave of worse news the first week of April. But then once Mars clears Uranus, then it’s not that a rainbow appears and all problems are dissolved; but from an astrological point of view, we’re on the way down the mountain. There’s a de-intensification of malefic configurations.

CB: Right, after early April?

KS: Yeah. The Mars square Uranus aspect is around April 7, which is the same day as the Full Moon in Libra, and that’s just a few days after the exact Jupiter-Pluto conjunction.

CB: That actually reminds me that I wanted to share this image. So this is from the Archetypal Explorer website, which I think we advertised for very early on, when they were first getting started. But it’s a program for looking at your transits through the lens, especially of archetypal astrology, which is Richard Tarnas’ specific type of astrology, or school of astrology that he has a number of students who follow. Anyways, Archetypal Explorer helps you look at long-term outer-planet transits, especially that are active in your chart using that approach. You can find out more about it at archetypalexplorer.com.

Anyway, the author of that program and of that website wrote a brilliant article titled, The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto Conjunction, which he published on March 17, 2020. He had some great graphics that he used that are kind of similar to the ones in his program, the astrology program that he has on that website. But this is one of them that shows the long-term outer-planet alignments–and when they go exact and peak through their exact aspects–put on a graph, as well as what their duration is using specific orbs.

You can kind of get a sense of how this right now is the most intense part in terms of the overlap of some of those specific things, in terms of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, the Mars conjunctions with Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn at the very end of March, beginning of April, and then also, the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction at the beginning of April. So it’s all just happening in such quick succession that it’s overlapping with all these alignments.

KS: Yeah, it’s a great visual to see, the peaks, if you like, because it is easier to internalize that immediately than to try and analyze the data. I know there’s a lot with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, and it’s not all good. But one thing I keep thinking about as we get closer to it is all the relief packages and stimulus packages that the governments are attempting to roll out–they’re not going to be perfect. I know in Canada, they’ve announced some initiatives. Australia is working on something. I’m not sure where the US is at, but I think there’s a bill going through the government processes now.

To think back to what you were saying, Austin, around Jupiter gets a little bit less pressured as we go forward from now–whether that helps the government offer something to people–there’s just something about Jupiter in Capricorn to me that feels like some sort of money, or payments coming from the government because of tough times or hard situations.

AC: Yeah, 12 years ago, that’s when we got a bail-out package that was primarily for corporations, and it looks like we’re pretty much on track to do that again.

KS: Yeah. I remember that from Australia 12 years ago, too.

AC: It looks a little bit better this time, but there’s a lot for corporate entities that bear a lot of responsibility for the fragility of the economy and who have not acted in the best interest of citizens for a long time. It’s Jupiter in its fall.

KS: Yes.

AC: A lot of the help will not go to the right people.

KS: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I remember 12 years ago, the Australian government–anyone who’d paid taxes the previous year just got a lump sum; it was very random to do with the economic situation then. So yeah, just another point on the Jupiter-Pluto piece.

CB: Sure.

KS: We’re sort of getting into early April here.

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s also interesting because so much of that was the 2008 financial crisis, astrologers often associated with Pluto moving into Capricorn, and that major ingress of an outer planet into a new zodiacal sign. And it’s interesting that this one is happening now, towards the end of Pluto in Capricorn, as we’re getting towards the end of the transit of that outer planet through this sign.

KS: It is interesting.

AC: That and Saturn. Saturn was opposite Uranus then, which was a huge piece of that; that pings the Saturn-Uranus square that we’re going to have all of next year and that we’re getting a little bit of a taste of this second quarter of 2020.

CB: The Saturn-Pluto conjunction?

AC: No. So the 2008 crisis was, in part, Pluto in Capricorn, but also, very obviously timed by the Saturn-Uranus oppositions.

CB: Okay.

AC: And we’re coming up on another angular alignment between Saturn and Uranus. We’re coming up on the square by sign and by orb; it started as soon as Saturn entered Aquarius. The Saturn-Uranus square is one of the things we get a sneak peak of this second quarter of 2020, but it is going to be one of the major alignments for 2021 and 2022.

CB: Yeah.

AC: So that Saturn-Uranus coming up cannot be ignored either, as it relates to the last crash or the next couple years.

CB: Well, I mean, we’re already there as soon as that ingress took place. We’re in Saturn square Uranus territory and that square is active. I think that’s something people, especially modern astrologers, might accidentally overlook because it doesn’t go exact, and it doesn’t get into a 1-degree orb. It’s going to get so close this year. Saturn is going to get up to 2 degrees of Aquarius before it turns retrograde in May, right?

KS: 1-something, I think, yeah.

CB: Okay.

KS: They’re very close.

CB: Yeah. But even just the fact that they’re coming into alignment by sign now, and they’ve moved into the signs that they’re going to square in, means that as soon as Saturn went in just a few days ago, on the 21st of March, that we entered into Saturn square Uranus territory.

KS: Yes. I think what’s basically happening is Mars is going to just act as a translator, if you like, carrying the light between Saturn and Uranus. Saturn and Uranus are coming to square by sign; they’re already doing it. And then Mars is going to come, conjunct Uranus, and a week later, square Uranus–sorry, conjunct Saturn–and then a week later, square Uranus. So Mars is sort of helping to activate or give us a preview, if you like, of the Saturn-Uranus square for next year.

AC: Absolutely. Like we said last month, this second quarter of 2020 is a preview of the challenges of the next couple years. I believe I used the Terminator analogy…

KS: You did.

AC: …getting a glimpse of a dark future timeline that we have maybe just enough time to avoid.

KS: If we’re lucky.

CB: One of the positive things for me in looking at some of this has been that we have the Mars-Saturn conjunction that’s about to take place now–basically, in the next few days–at 0 degrees of Aquarius; but then later this year, in December, we have another conjunction at the same degree. The much talked about and very important and very rare conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is going to take place at 0 degrees Aquarius, which, to me, looks much more optimistic and sort of healing or reconciling, fixing some of the things that get broken during this time.

This intense period of the Mars-Saturn conjunction–which is much more tied up in the Saturn-Pluto conjunction as well–will have lessened, and we’ll be moving further away from it by the time of December. So, for me, that’s much more optimistic in terms of the long-term, even if in terms of the short-term, we’re in probably the worst of it right now.

AC: Well, I think we’re in the worst of the plague thing. I don’t think we’re in the worst of the economic situation.

CB: Sure, sure. And relevant to that, let me share one other graphic from the Archetypal Explorer guy– a nice little Pluto-Saturn graphic that he created, which shows the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the middle, which, again, occurred in January of 2020; but it also shows the conjunction when it gets closer by orb versus when it’s moving further away.

There’s kind of this wave or this graph where it starts getting pretty close, into effect, way back around April/May/June of 2019. Then it recedes for a little bit in the fall of 2019, and then eventually comes back and goes exact and peaks in early 2020.

Then the Saturn-Pluto conjunction–because Saturn starts moving away from Pluto–starts getting a bit weaker, but then it comes back. What happens later this year is that Pluto, sorry, Saturn retrogrades back into Capricorn in July of 2020, where it stays for the second-half of the year and gets close enough or gets back into a conjunction with Pluto by the fall. How close does it get? Do you remember, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, 3 degrees, actually. It looks like Saturn comes back to 25 degrees Cap, and Pluto will be at 22 degrees Cap at the time. And that’s that September-October period where the graph has the peak again, so they don’t come back to exact manifestation at that time.

All of our very well-educated listeners will be in the thick of the Mars retrograde in Aries at the time, which will be somewhat tying Saturn-Pluto together again at that time. The wave configuration–I really like that graph. It makes it clear.

CB: Yeah. I really appreciate all the visuals that he uses on that website, so I definitely recommend people checking out archetypalexplorer.com. But yeah, in terms of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction though, what I was going to show was it’s kind of nice in some ways, Saturn having ingressed into Aquarius a few days ago, even if they’re still relatively close by degree; they’re only like 6 degrees apart.

One really quick digression. When random people have asked me what is going on astrologically right now–especially if they don’t have any background in astrology, or little background in astrology–one of the nice things about what’s happening right now and the astrology of it is it’s very easy to just point to the chart and say, “Look at this cluster of all these planets that are actually formed in an alignment, roughly in a conjunction in the same spot in the sky right now.”

It’s sort of that cliché thing of all of the planets are basically lining up right now in the sky, and then some major event is happening on the Earth. Have you guys kind of felt that way in terms of the pile-up of planets in Capricorn?

AC: The astrology is matched to what’s happening; it is not in any way mysterious.

CB: Right. It’s just funny because sometimes other mundane alignments are harder to explain. Like there was the Uranus-Pluto square a few years back that a lot of astrologers were talking about; or I think of funny, wacky ones astrologers in 1986 were talking about, the Grand Alignment or–what was it called?

KS: The Harmonic Convergence or something?

CB: Right, the Harmonic Convergence, and there were a bunch of planets in quintiles or something.

KS: Sextiles or something; like a Star of David or something, yeah.

CB: Yeah. And that gets a little bit more tricky to attempt to explain to someone that doesn’t know anything about astrology.

AC: I would just explain it as astrologers make mistakes sometimes.

CB: Sure.

AC: Not everybody is good at their job. But this one, this current one is nice.

KS: Yeah, you kind of just put a chart together where you’ve got Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Node–there’s a lot of unusual shit going on here. Does that make sense?

CB: Yeah.

KS: You can be really simple.

CB: Throw up this chart right here, and it just shows you that there’s a bunch of planetary bodies– especially the two largest planetary bodies in our solar system, besides the Sun, which are Jupiter and Saturn–all in the same spot in the sky right now, roughly speaking, from our vantage point, and that looks pretty impressive, just in and of itself.

KS: Totally.

CB: All right, so that was a digression that I actually meant to make, but what I was getting at there was just talking a little bit more about the long-term Saturn-Pluto cycle. One of the things that’s nice about Saturn having moved into Aquarius is even though it’s still within a few degrees of Pluto, it’s still roughly in orb, and will stay in orb for a while, giving it a 10-degree orb or a 15-degree orb, like Tarnas does; at least there’s some separation by sign at this point, which gives a little bit of breathing room or a little bit of space between Saturn and Pluto over the course of the next several months.

But the downside or the problem in terms of long-term projections is that to whatever extent the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is tied in with the current mundane or world events–either in terms of the coronavirus, or in terms of the fallout and effect that that will have on the worldwide economy and everything related to it, or anything else–Saturn will slow down and station retrograde in the middle of May, at 1 degree of Aquarius, almost 2 degrees of Aquarius, and then it will start moving backwards and move back into Capricorn in July of 2020. So what’s the exact date?

KS: 1st or 2nd. It’s very early July.

CB: Okay. Saturn goes back into Capricorn the 1st or 2nd of July, and then it’s back in a sign-based and starts moving even closer to a degree-based conjunction with Pluto again. So, Kelly, you said it gets within how many degrees?

KS: Within 3 degrees. Yeah, Saturn will retrograde back to 25 Cap, and Pluto will be at that time at 22 degrees Capricorn. So they won’t form the exact conjunction, but they will come within–yeah, that’s it. They’ll be within 3 degrees of each other for a couple of months: September, October.

CB: Okay. And it looks like it stations.

AC: Yes, which is the time that Mars will be squaring them in retrograde.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah, that’s the other worst part of the year.

KS: That’s part two.

AC: I would say that there are two meaningful shitstorms in 2020, with something medium-nasty in between; we’re in the middle of shitstorm one. The beginning of July, when Saturn returns to Capricorn during a Mercury retrograde–during a pair of eclipses, with Mars entering Aries–is our intermission poo-pile, and then the finale is that September, October, November period.

We went over this as diplomatically as we could in the yearly, but this is 1-out-of-2.5 very difficult sets of configurations in 2020.

CB: Yeah, the year-ahead forecast. A lot of people watched our March forecast or went back and watched it, because they wanted to see what we were saying about everything that’s going on now. And one of the things that’s important is there’s a lot of major outer-planet alignments going on now, and we try to not repeat ourselves in every episode.

Oftentimes, especially when we’re doing the monthlies, we’re doing it in the context of assuming that you’ve already watched the year-ahead forecast, where we’ve outlined a lot of the major outer-planet alignments to give a broad term or overall outlook. And not even just that, but also on previous forecast episodes, when a major outer-planet alignment goes exact, we’ll often talk about it a lot then or when it first starts, like when an ingress first takes place.

So if anybody wants to understand the full context of everything we’ve said about some of the world events that are going on right now and the outer-planet alignments that affect them, I’d actually recommend going back to the December forecast episode, and then working your way forward in order to be able to cover most of the major things that we’ve talked about, right?

AC: Yeah, absolutely. We’re speaking in context. I wrote a huge piece on the astrology of 2020 with a walk-through, that’s a written reference, as well as my piece on Jupiter in Capricorn. Kelly, I’m sure you did some yearly writing as well.

KS: Yeah, I haven’t done as much as you. I did see your detailed, year-ahead piece, and I would highly recommend that to people. Mostly, I’ve just done something on the current piece, which I didn’t call ‘part one’, but is part one, yeah.

CB: And we even did Episode 140 of The Astrology Podcast, which we recorded a while ago now, titled Saturn in Capricorn: Major Themes From 2017-2020, and that was mainly focusing on just Saturn in Capricorn unto itself. But we also touched on the Saturn-Pluto conjunction as being a major part of the tail-end of that transit, which we’re just now experiencing.

AC: The tail-end of?

CB: The tail-end of the Saturn through Capricorn transit, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction…

AC: Oh.

CB: …because it didn’t go exact until recently; but we’re having a broader discussion about just Saturn going through Capricorn, starting in late 2017 in general.

AC: Yeah. Well, based on the time dilation so far this year, Saturn leaving Capricorn for good seems about, I don’t know, one century away in December.

KS: Yeah, 25 years from now.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. I guess, just to finish making that whole point that we started with, Saturn will station eventually in the fall, in Capricorn, and then eventually start moving forward again, and will eventually, at the very end of the year, leave Capricorn when it moves into Aquarius on–what was the exact date again, Kelly?

KS: Oh, Saturn into Aquarius, I think it’s about the 15th-16th of December? Let me double-check. 17th of December. If Leisa’s in the chat, correct me if I’m wrong, but I saw a tweet from Leisa in the last week or two. You know, things flash by your eyes on social media, but I’m sure she was saying something along the lines of, “The best thing about 2020 is when it’s over.”

CB: Sure. Not just to be flippant, but literally…

KS: Not to be flippant.

CB: …because that nice alignment of Saturn going into Aquarius and Jupiter going into Aquarius at the same time and conjoining happens literally at almost the very end of the year.

KS: Yeah. And I wanted to make just a brief point too about how the Air signs are known as ‘humane’ signs and tend to speak a lot to what goes on to humans and even human bodies. I was reminded of this in an article that Nina Gryphon wrote recently about Saturn in Aquarius, and I think there is something to that with two conjunctions in Aquarius this year, the Mars-Saturn followed by the Jupiter-Saturn.

There is a lot of focus on human stuff, and Mars-Saturn is going to be more about human problems, or problems for humans to deal with. The Jupiter-Saturn is going to bring perhaps a little bit of help or support, whether it is that we figure out how to do this new reality better, whether it is that there is more medicine or vaccines available. It’s just an interesting juxtaposition between, yeah, as you were saying earlier, Chris, the Mars-Saturn in early Aquarius followed by Jupiter-Saturn, but just to make that point about the Air signs and the human-humane connection.

CB: Yeah. I don’t know if anyone agrees. I put this out and I wasn’t sure how people would react to it, because it’s a somewhat controversial topic in the astrological community. But over the past few weeks, as Saturn was getting to the later degrees, like the last few degrees of Capricorn, I felt like we started seeing some of the themes that will become more prominent as Saturn transits through Aquarius, that we were anticipating as being Saturn-in-Aquarius themes starting to come up already, and being like a preview of that.

Going back to an episode that Austin and I did previously about the question of sign cusps and whether there is any sort of transitional stage between signs–like if at the end of the sign, you start getting any of the qualities or a preview of the next sign at all, or if that’s a very firm demarcation and there’s no crossover between the two–astrologers seem to take really extreme positions about that.

For me, some of what we were seeing over the past few weeks kind of implied that there might be something to that, or there might be more overlap than sometimes astrologers are used to thinking about. Did you guys feel that way at all? You don’t have to say yes or no. I don’t know. That was just something I observed.

AC: I think that’s really interesting, and I’m probably going to have more bandwidth for that during the next ingress/regress. There’s just been so much to keep track of, that in particular didn’t show up on my radar–not because it wasn’t there, but because there is a lot on the radar.

CB: Sure. And I guess I should define what I was seeing–because I tried to put it in a paragraph at one point–but it was something about the emphasis on social distancing, and people going into their homes and trying to stay away from each other and suddenly having that feeling of isolation, which is a very Saturnian theme; like an intensification of Saturn themes, a Saturn-Pluto thing.

The social distancing coupled with people finding alternative ways through technology to connect, by leveraging new technologies–so lots of classes and meetings suddenly moving online. The New York Public Library opened up their online catalogs to everybody. Astrology groups, first starting with the one in Washington, the Seattle group, they made their meeting an online webinar, which was free to attend for everyone and. And my group in Denver had to follow suit, where suddenly, for the first time ever, we switched our local, in-person meeting to an online webinar, and lots of other instances like that.

There was this weird distinction between humanity paradoxically being more isolated, yet more connected than ever, through leveraging new technologies. That was something that I’ve been anticipating for Saturn in Aquarius for a few years now, and it was interesting to see some of that come into play over the past few weeks.

KS: That has been interesting. And I want to give a shoutout to Sam Reynolds who tweeted about how, as all this was happening, all of the sudden, our entire lives were shifting online. He mentioned that the birth chart of the World Wide Web, when the internet first became publicly and freely available, it’s having its Saturn return.

It was sort of born in CERN, in Switzerland, I think, or in Geneva, in Switzerland, August 6, ’91, about 4:00 PM in the afternoon. And the chart has Saturn at 2 Aquarius, which was just really interesting that this is the first Saturn return for that, and all of the sudden, there’s a massive spike in usage of the internet, based public schools offering classes online, for instance, people doing meetings by Zoom and other video messaging/video meeting platforms rather than in person.

CB: Right. I meant to write down a list of all the different things, because I can hear some people immediately dismissing that and saying, “Well, lots of webinars were already offered,” or “People have been using the internet; it’s been a big thing for a while now.” But, no, something happened over the course of the past couple of weeks where there was this huge intensification of that.

I don’t think we’re going to fully understand the full implications of that until later on in the future, because right now we’re dealing with the effect of it happening due to a crisis. But it seems like there was an uptick in attempts to use and a push towards using the internet in innovative ways in order to connect people, over the past few weeks, right?

KS: Yes.

AC: Oh, certainly. Every educational institution…

KS: That’s new.

AC: …that’s a very large, quantifiable.

CB: Right. All of my local gyms, for example, like Planet Fitness, got shut down, but then they started offering free webinars to do personal training from home or something like that.

KS: Yes.

AC: Oh, yeah. So you know, I do martial arts and I like MMA. In that world, on YouTube, there are all these “Okay, you can’t go to your gym?”, because it’s very difficult to practice fighting people without people to fight or wrestle with. And so, there’s just been this huge shift of, “Okay, everybody, let’s practice this footwork combination at home.” There’s all of this ‘you can do this at home’ stuff, which there was some of that before, but it’s very different.

A friend of mine teaches at a gym, and they’ve never done an online thing before; and now, they’re doing it online, which is great. It’s Nerd Strong. They do workouts that are gamified and have role-playing game themes. It’ll be like you lift up the weight and it’s like “Okay, kill the goblins; we’ve got to kill the goblins 10 times.” Anyway, it’s great.

KS: Oh, my god, I love it. It’s nerd central.

AC: Yeah, it’s the Nerd Strong thing. I think it’s on Twitch.

KS: I love it.

CB: Nice.

AC: My friend had been trying to convince people, or convince the owners of the gym to do it online for a while, but it just got online for the first time. So it’s an example of that wouldn’t have happened, or it would’ve happened on a much delayed timeline if there wasn’t this crisis push.

And then education has been slowly moving more online, but now, a lot of programs are just online to avoid being completely decimated. I don’t think it’s as subtle as you were making it out to be; there’s been a huge push.

I know also people who are like, “Yeah, I’ve been trying to convince work that I can be just as productive from home for three years, and now, I get to.”

CB: Right. And now, suddenly, out of necessity, everyone’s switching to that and switching to working from home. I’m seeing some great comments from different people in our chat. We have a live audience who is joining us for the recording of this episode today of patrons; so thanks, everybody, who’s joining us.

Wendy Hill says, “This includes telehealth getting a huge push forward,” so that’s a really important one; doctors seeing patients and sometimes diagnosing things like the coronavirus from home. Brian Stuppe says, “Psychotherapy over Zoom has exploded,” so that’s a really good one and a good point. Christina Holmes says her yoga studio has all live streaming classes now.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Did you have other good ones, Kelly?

KS: I agree with what Austin’s saying, that, yes, I appreciate people might try to play devil’s advocate here. But there are so many practitioners who used to meet people in person, to avoid complete financial ruin, are trying to pivot and see what they can offer online via video conference; I know, personally, because I work online on Zoom all the time.

The first Monday, it was like the first level–maybe California had gone to shelter-in-place–and it was the first stage where more countries were like “Okay, we have to do this.” I normally teach a live class on Monday nights, and I record to the Zoom cloud.

Normally, it takes about an hour-and-a-half for the recording to process and it’s available, and then we send it out to the students. It took two-and-a-half days for that recording to process, due to demand on the Zoom servers, and that was a real clue to me. That might have been the first Monday, where Zoom in the US said public schools could use Zoom.

So from the experiential end, if you were already doing a lot of stuff online, you’ve seen that some of your services have had these temporary glitches as they’ve tried to manage the huge influx. Now, I taught my class last weekend, my mentoring group, and the recording processed as quickly as normal, so I suspect Zoom has added extra server space or extra capacity to cope with this.

But I agree that it probably wouldn’t have happened out of necessity, and it’s happening as fast as possible. And somebody in the chat does talk about or mention–and I’m very passionate about amplifying this point–this is preparation for the Jupiter-Saturn Air cycle, which is much more about mobility and freedom to move and not being locked into the same place.

And so, thinking sequentially, Mars-Saturn is activating in preparation and stirring up. Mars-Saturn is almost showing us what’s broken, and then Jupiter-Saturn is like this is how it’s going to look if we do it in the new way, and this is a taste of that.

CB: Yeah, definitely. There’s something about this crisis right now, with the Mars-Saturn conjunction that’s about to happen in Aquarius, and forcing people to use technology through necessity and through having no other choice in order to connect.

Especially, later this year, when we have that conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius, it’s probably going to lead to the birth of something new–some new way of connecting or new innovation– and the next level in that will set a new epoch-defining starting-point that we may not even be able to fully anticipate at this point, but will nonetheless clearly come out of the challenges that people are experiencing and will have to start wrestling with now.

Even things like virtual reality, I can think of as being one of the technologies that would probably get accelerated and become even more of a necessity and have more emphasis or more work put into it as a result of things that are going on right now.

AC: Yeah. I imagine that’ll be up and running and ready for Saturn-Neptune in Pisces starting in 2023. I mean, it’s around now, but I won’t get into that; but that’s when I would expect virtual reality to become a part of people’s lives rather than something cool you can do.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah, there’s so much. Somebody is making a comment here, and I want to read it out to honor it: “Disabled communities have had their requests for work-from-home accommodations largely denied for many years, and all of a sudden, workplaces and universities are open to accommodations when the health of abled-people is at risk.”

And I had a client–who is differently-abled themselves and works on government portfolios for that in Australia–talk about how all of the sudden it’s okay to get what they need. Not saying that it’s happened in the right way, but there is that advancement of honoring different ways of working, I guess.

CB: Sure.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right. So where are we at?

AC: Let me suggest a topic.

CB: Please.

AC: So one of April’s chief features is that Venus is in Gemini virtually the entire time, and one of Mars’ chief features was that Venus was in Taurus almost the entire time. And even though there was this hyper-concentration of malefics at the end of Capricorn, we still had Venus, the other benefic, in a good place for a lot of March; certainly not in a place where it could undo the work of Mars, Saturn, Pluto, South Node, etc., etc. But there were these little ‘blooms’ and nice moments that I think were really visible in the midst of a difficult time that I would credit to Venus in Taurus–a lot of people reaching out to friends, and family, thinking about how much they value the people in their lives once they’re threatened.

We’ve also seen so many people talk about trying to do something productive and fun with their mandatory time at home. I was listening to a podcast and one of the people was like, “Oh, how are you doing with all this?” and they were like, “Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my kids, and I never get to see my kids. And we’ve been watching movies that I always wanted to show them.” There have been these little ‘copper linings’ that Venus has brought during this spike of difficulty.

But Venus is going into Gemini for most of April, and so, that’s an important part of the background. We have Mars-Saturn in Aquarius for all of April, and then we have Venus in Gemini in April–and it’s not just any Venus in Gemini, right? This is going to be four months of Venus in Gemini with…

KS: Yes.

AC: …six-ish weeks of retrograde beginning in mid-May.

CB: Right. So let’s do that–let’s crank out the astrology of April now that we’ve talked about the ‘elephant in the room’, and talked about all the major long-term planetary transits. Here’s the major alignments, just really quickly; I’m going to show the graphic from our planetary alignments calendar for April.

So Venus ingresses into Gemini on the 3rd of April, then the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction goes exact on the 4th of April. Then there’s a Full Moon in Libra on the 7th. Mercury ingresses into Aries on the 11th. The sun ingresses into Taurus on the 19th, as it does around that time every year.

There’s a New Moon in Taurus on the 22nd. Pluto stations retrograde in Capricorn on the 25th, and Mercury moves into Taurus on the 27th. Does that sound like most of the major alignments to you, Austin?

AC: I mean, the Mars-Uranus is up there, but, yeah, that’s a good overview.

CB: Do you know what day that goes exact? I’ll pull that up on the chart right now. But do you happen to know it offhand?

AC: I think Kelly said it was the 7th. That sounds about right to me.

CB: Okay. Let me see.

AC: 7th of April–oh, which is the Full Moon.

KS: Oh, yeah, that’s a big day.

CB: Great. All right, so our first lunation of the month is the Full Moon.

KS: Sorry–that’s a big day.

CB: The Full Moon at 18 degrees of Libra. So the Sun will be at 18 Libra–or the Moon will be at 18 Libra at its fullest, and the Sun will be at 18 Aries. And Mars, on the same day, will be at 5 degrees of Aquarius, squaring Uranus very, very closely, pretty much exactly at 5 degrees of Taurus.

KS: Yes.

CB: Brilliant. So that’s all happening in such quick succession. It’s like the Mars-Saturn conjunction is just a few days earlier–those two planets are still only 4 degrees apart–then Mars squares Uranus, and we have a Full Moon happening at the same time, and the sense of culmination and of everything coming to light at that time that happens normally during a normal Full Moon.

KS: It does have a dramatic quality. The Mars square Uranus, of course, has kind of an explosive shock or surprise–you know, the rumblings underneath the surface. I’m also intrigued that on that same day, Mercury will make a sextile to the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, which is just starting to pull apart. I’m interested to see if there is maybe information. It’s like something about the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction starts to disseminate or disperse with that Mercury activation.

CB: Right. What are some good keywords for Mars square Uranus? Just really quickly, rattle some off.

AC: Freaking out.

KS: Rebellious. Restless. Unexpected turns. The shock or the surprise, I guess.

AC: Yeah, shock, surprise.

KS: Explosion.

AC: Yeah. They’re both planets that give us suddenness, things that are too quick to react to, shocking, yeah.

KS: Disturbs.

CB: Right.

AC: I was 10% joking with ‘freak out’. Mars-Uranus often brings the kinds of things that elicit a freak-out reaction, however temporary. This is definitely not a Full Moon where everyone’s like, “Oh, everything’s okay;” that’s not what this Full Moon is.

We talked about the Mars-Saturn pulling apart, and it does that throughout April, but I wouldn’t look for a ratcheting-down of difficulty until well after this Full Moon.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Collectively, just practically speaking, everything is culminating at this point, in terms of all of the thousands of people that have been infected around the world and them hitting a critical period over the course of the next few weeks; we don’t know what those numbers will actually look like, but obviously, a lot of people will be passing away around that time.

And the Full Moon, in and of itself, makes me think of those anecdotes that you always hear from time to time, about people that work at hospitals saying that Full Moons are when they tend to see the most people showing up or the most emergencies coming in. I don’t know if that’s ever been statistically proven, and I’ve never worked at a hospital myself, but I think we’ve all heard things like that, right?

AC: Yeah. I actually had a professor in college–he was a professor of philosophy–who owned a nightclub. He investigated the ‘Full Moon’ effect on police calls and things like that for many months in a row and found it statistically very significant, which was interesting. He wasn’t into astrology at all; he was just an insightful, critical thinker.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah. And anecdotally, many, many years ago–I was in my early 20s–my boyfriend at the time worked in the finance industry, on a stock market trading floor. They had a joke when people would call up wanting to put trades on, and they’re like, “This is nuts, these trades. What are these people doing?” And all of the people on the trading floor would just look at each other and go, “Is there a Full Moon happening?” So even though they weren’t really into astrology in any way, shape or form, they had a sense that the Full Moon was certainly going to stir up.

It’s like an agitating influence. I think in nature, it raises sap levels in trees and things like that as well; so it really just amplifies. And that agitation, the Mars-Uranus, it’s disturbing. It’s angsty; it’s not comfortable. It’s unsettled. It’s unpredictable.

CB: Sure.

AC: It’s both high energy and high volatility.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I mean, the Full Moon itself would bring things to culmination just in and of itself; I guess that was the point that I was making. But then we have to layer in that it’s coinciding with that Mars-Uranus square at the same time, and the unexpected disruptions and the tendencies that that has on top of the Mars-Saturn conjunction–which is still in effect–and the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that’s happening pretty much simultaneously.

AC: Also, note that Venus is between aspects from Saturn to aspect with Mars; so the social component, Venus is moving from trine to Saturn to trine with Mars. Usually we like trines, but that traps Venus between Saturn and Mars, in terms of what to communicate and feel, etc., etc.

There is both the concrete, likely, ‘un-good’ news that will be delivered at this time, whether about plague statistics, economic outlooks, or both. And then there’s also, how should we say, the stage, the set for human reaction to what is happening; the stage that is set is for a very volatile response, as well, which is not great.

I mean, the nice thing though is this is, astrologically speaking, a little bit of the last, ‘Oh, god!’ configuration for at least a while. The Moon’s conjunction to Saturn and Mars a week later is unpleasant, but it’s just one day; whereas Full Moons happen on one day, but they lead events to them, and to a certain degree, they speak strongly about the events of the next fortnight.

CB: Sure. Definitely. And this Full Moon is the culmination, of course, of the monthly cycle that began with the Sun-Moon conjunction, the New Moon, on the 24th of March, which was in early Aries. So we have that culmination at the Full Moon in Libra, of course, two weeks later. Do we want to start moving away from the first week and into the second week or third week of April?

AC: Yeah, let’s continue on.

KS: Yeah, it’s worth mentioning Mercury finally leaving Pisces on April 11.

CB: That’s a great point. I was completely overlooking that–that actually opens the month. We open April with the Mercury-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, which is interesting because that’s also the end, finally, of Mercury ending its shadow-period. I think that’s the degree it stationed retrograde at, right? Like 16?

KS: It’s very close to it, yeah. I’m going to double-check.

CB: Okay. So you’re going to double-check.

KS: 12, yeah. It’ll be a little past it.

CB: 12, okay.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So we’ve just gotten out of the shadow-period at the very end of March. It looks like March 29, it gets back to 12 degrees of Pisces. But then a few days later–it looks like April 3–we have the exact Mercury-Neptune conjunction. The conjunction that almost happened back when Mercury stationed retrograde at 12 Pisces, before conjoining Neptune, finally happens at this point in early April. And then Mercury cruises through the rest of Pisces over the course of the next week, before ingressing into Aries–it looks like on April 10.

KS: Yeah, I’ve got April 11, Eastern time, but overnight on the 10th to the 11th.

CB: Got it, okay. Another important layering in terms of what we were looking at in that first week of April is the tail-end of a Mercury-Neptune conjunction.

AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s a mess. The first week of April is a mess, right? We’ve got Mars-Uranus.

KS: And that’s a technical term in all the books.

AC: Yeah. I mean, it is–that’s what it’ll look like. Fortunately, that mess does not continue throughout April.

KS: Thank goodness.

AC: And one thing about Mercury-Neptune, especially in Pisces, but in general, is that Neptune, I would say more than any other planet, contradicts or sometimes ruins; but it messes with Mercury’s ability to be very clear and fact-based and logic-based, and also, to remember things and to do context.

Mercury-Neptune–it’s really hard on most of Mercury’s clear-thinking, communication functions. I think Kate’s suggested this: start calling it a ‘goldfish yoga’.

KS: I love it.

AC: A goldfish only sees what’s right in front of it.

KS: Yeah.

AC: That’s been an issue for this whole Mercury-Neptune co-presence–not having proper context in threat assessment. Back when Mercury first entered Pisces, this isn’t going to be a big deal, possible over-reactions in the middle of it, all this back-and-forth; we’ve had goldfish yoga for most of this time.

And so, it’s really nice to get Mercury in a different sign than Neptune, because Mercury-Neptune–it’s just not great for clarity.

KS: Not at all.

CB: Yeah.

KS: And especially, Mercury just does not like being in Pisces, from a technical, doing ‘Mercury things’ perspective. It’s like a combination of messy wetness. I was going to say ‘wetty-messness’ or something, which is a Mercury-Pisces point.

CB: Yes.

AC: Yeah, Mercury in Pisces is by itself afflicted…

KS: Yeah.

AC: …or not afflicted, but it has essential dignity problems. I don’t know. Maybe this will be more clear in retrospect, but I’m sure you both notice that Mercury in Pisces is a planet in its fall, ruled by Jupiter, which is also a planet in its fall…

KS: Yeah.

CB: Interesting.

AC: …which can’t be good.

KS: No, and it’s very different. I was reflecting on this actually. We had Mercury in Pisces last year. We had that long Mercury retro in Pisces conjunct Neptune in 2019, March 2019, but it was ruled by Jupiter in Sag, and that was very different, in terms of what we’re dealing with now; we’ve already talked about how restricted and minimized Jupiter has been. There’s lots of comments in the chat, and I know we’ve all experienced it.

Australia has just had a debate. The Prime Minister has issued numerous statements about what constitutes a safe COVID-19-appropriate haircut. Are haircuts essential services? And if so, 30 minutes, is that enough time? This was literally the debate in Australia in the last few days. So much press and attention has just gone to something that’s really quite inane and not the core story, but it’s an example of getting lost in the muck, which is Mercury-Pisces-Neptune.

CB: Yeah. And I feel like…

AC: Sorry, just a breakthrough signification, real quick, Chris. So Mercury is travel. Has Mercury been horribly afflicted? Yes.

KS: Horribly afflicted.

AC: How many people’s travel plans have just gone? All right, please go on.

KS: Everyone knows I travel a lot, so I always have flights queued-up that I’ve paid. I’ve gotten an email from Expedia every four or five days, updating me on why they have call delays, and can people please not call unless they’re traveling.

First, they said, “If you’re traveling in the next seven days,” and then they’ve said, “If you’re not traveling in the next three days, please don’t contact us, we can’t handle the volume.” So travel, shipping, distribution, freight, logistics, all of these Mercury things–which is why I’m so excited for Mercury to get into Aries.

CB: Yes.

KS: And one of the first things Mercury does, first of all, he’s going to dry out; so we lose the negative fall and detriment, the double-whammy combo that Mercury has.

CB: Before you move into that…

KS: Yeah.

CB: …I’d like to say something a little bit about…

KS: Oh, go for it.

CB: …the Mercury retrograde first. So originally, I was collecting Mercury retrograde stories, because I’ve actually got a few really good ones as examples from this, but it’s hard. I was going to actually say them on this episode, but it almost seems so trivial now given everything that’s going on. I don’t want to bore people with going into those in detail, but I will just mention the highlights really quickly.

One was an example from another astrologer, Bear Ryver, who bought a car during the course of the Mercury retrograde, and tried to pick out the best electional chart he could find in short-term because he had to buy a car at that time.

He drove away with the car, and then it was like a few days or a week or something later, the car company wrote him a letter saying that they were canceling the deal and they wanted the car back for some bizarre reasons, and he literally had to return the car later, during the Mercury retrograde.

KS: Wow.

CB: Another person I know had Mercury go retrograde in her 5th whole sign house–I remember that it was conjunct Neptune–and had a pregnancy scare because her period was extremely late. Eventually, she ended up having her period 17 days later, towards when Mercury started wrapping up the retrograde cycle and basically stationed direct, and it turned out that she wasn’t pregnant. I have a bunch of stories like that, so I’m not going to tell them all because it seems trivial at this point.

To me, it seemed like, from a mundane perspective, that so much of the Mercury retrograde was some of the Western governments, especially in the US, not taking what was happening with the virus seriously, or issuing false statements and saying it wasn’t a big deal to not take it seriously.

And then so much of that they had to start walking back and saying the opposite of once Mercury stationed direct; it started getting serious, and it was clear that people were going to die, and they needed to lock down the situation. But it seemed like a lot of the Mercury retrograde conjunct Neptune ended up coinciding with a larger-scale perspective.

KS: Yes.

CB: Do you feel that way?

AC: Yeah. Certainly, the confusion surrounding the thing that’ll go down in the history books will be the most remembered part. The “I hurt my finger,” probably won’t go down in the history books.

CB: The misinformation, you mean?

AC: The misinformation–just the entire mercurial clusterfuck.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sure.

AC: The people not getting tests; there being issues with some of the tests–just all of it because there’s been a lot of confusion.

CB: One of the issues–in terms of it also having a major impact on people–is if the government or parts of the government, wings of the government, aren’t taking it seriously, then not as many tests were produced and ready when it became necessary to start testing everybody; so that has a real, tangible impact.

Over the years, as astrologers, you can collect different, interesting Mercury retrograde stories when it affects large groups of people; I remember one of them from the last administration, just to balance things out. When the Obama administration launched the healthcare website, I think that day, Mercury stationed retrograde…

KS: That’s true.

CB: …and it was just a complete disaster. And over the next few weeks, they had to do all these things to attempt to fix the website and get it on track and everything else. By the time Mercury stationed direct and started moving forward again, they were able to get things working properly, eventually, but it was this whole fiasco at the time. That’s sort of what this recent retrograde has been like in many ways.

KS: Absolutely. And Austin, when you were having your travel breakthrough, I’m like, of course.

AC: Oh, yeah, travel.

KS: Oh, yeah, travel. But also, where a lot of this started in the beginning–cruise ships; literally people traveling on the water.

AC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good call.

KS: Do you remember? It was sort of earlier in the piece.

AC: Was it the Diamond Princess?

KS: The Diamond Princess, the Princess cruises. It’s a little more current, because, of course, I keep an eye on the Australian press, and they just had a ship with nearly 3,000 people dock in Australia in the last week.

My husband has a really classic Mercury retro problem where he was driving home from our trip in Spain, over two days; and I always say that’s because he’s Canadian, and Canadians think a road trip is 24 hours of driving, or something insanely long.

But he was about four hours, five hours from home–he was in France–and his car broke down. He had to stay overnight, because it was a Sunday in the wilds of France; not in the wilds, but outside the major cities; there were no mechanics available. Got the car to a service station and made his own way home by train.

And we still don’t have his car back. At one point, it was going to be fixed in France and then brought back to Belgium, and then it was like, “No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to bring it back to Belgium and then fix it here, but that’ll be a 10-day hold at the border.” And then all the borders closed because of coronavirus.

So his car–we’re not actually quite sure where it is at the moment. And it’s very minor; we’re both working from home and we don’t need it. But it’s just a classic, Mercury retro travel/car sort of situation, and I can see so many stories…

AC: Yeah, absolutely.

KS: …in the chat about it, so I think it was definitely worth mentioning, Chris. We really have to wait until Mercury gets into Aries to kind of move out of that. Mercury’s been in Pisces since early February so it’s a long time.

CB: Yeah, it’s another one of those things, like when you’re taking into account the entire sign-based transit, it becomes a much more extended period, sometimes. Anyways, I just wanted to slip that in, but thanks for moving us on. So let’s continue with where you were going with that originally, Kelly, which was Mercury going into Aries.

KS: Oh, yeah, and just the drying out, so the improvement from the dignity perspective I think is good. As soon as Mercury moves into Aries, he’s going to make a sextile to Saturn in Aquarius. And it’s not that that’s a defining aspect of the month, but I do think it’s interesting to see what type of facts or data, or maybe scientifically-approved information starts to get disseminated over that weekend and beyond that point.

AC: And Mercury in Aries is very interested in actionable information.

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s very tactical. It’s very, “So what do we do?”

CB: Yeah, and the necessity to act quickly and decisively; and especially with Mercury no longer being co-present with Neptune, anything that has been obscuring the picture suddenly falling away and the reality of the situation being much clearer and much more stark.

KS: Yeah. I like the actionable info point that you mentioned, Austin, because it does feel like we will get a clearer sense of steps and timelines once Mercury shifts signs.

AC: Yeah, it’s an improvement. And it’s interesting also because it connects to Venus, right? Mercury is the ruler of Gemini, and Venus is in Gemini in April, and in May, and in June, and in July. So part of that is, “Oh, it’s Venus in Gemini the whole time;” direct sometimes, retrograde at others. But because it’s in Gemini, Gemini is very mobile; it’s ruled by Mercury. And so, that means as Mercury does different things, it’s going to very strongly affect what Venus is doing.

Kate and I were sitting around the other day, and she was like, “Oh, so everybody’s on the internet right now, and people are kind of enjoying it, and Venus is in Taurus. What happens when everyone’s stuck on the internet together for 6 weeks?” And I was like “Oh, Venus retrograde in Gemini happens.”

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Everybody suddenly gets back together, you mean? What happens when everybody gets back together at the end of that?

AC: No. I mean everybody gets cabin fever, and the cabin is the internet for quite some time.

CB: Okay. You mean in the immediate future, over the next few weeks, before it stations retrograde?

AC: That’s the leading into the retrograde.

CB: Got it. See, I was thinking of what happens when everybody gets out of quarantine, and then suddenly, it’s a Venus retrograde. I keep seeing this phrase mentioned, ‘Coronials’, which is the idea of all of the babies that are going to be born in nine months, after both this period of everybody being quarantined with their significant others for several weeks, but also perhaps what happens in a few weeks from now, when everybody gets out and begins being able to socialize again on some level.

AC: Right. Yeah, I think that the Venus retrograde will time that shift.

CB: Sure.

KS: So we’re building into that through April, because the retro isn’t till mid-May itself.

AC; Right.

KS: We will talk a lot more about Venus retro in next month’s episode, but this is the prep month, I guess.

AC: Yeah. And Venus goes into the shadow early in the month.

KS: Very early, by the 9th or the 10th.

AC: Yeah. And so, note that with Venus in the shadow of the retrograde–meaning degrees that it’s destined to return to–early in the month, it does that between aspects from Saturn to Mars, right? And Mars actually stays a little bit ahead of Venus for quite some time because Venus is slowing down.

KS: Yes.

AC: And so, we keep Venus between Saturn and Mars, which is literally enclosure by quarantine, for pretty much the whole time–actually the entire month, now that I’m looking at it.

KS: That’ll be the whole time Mars is in Aquarius.

AC: Yeah, because Venus never completes that aspect.

KS: No.

CB: Yeah, you’re right. That’s really great, enclosure.

KS: I mean, it’s not great for Venus, but it’s a great example of a technical, astrological thing.

CB: No, you’re right.

AC: I mean, literally, being on the internet because you’re not allowed outside, or not allowed to be more than in your yard outside.

KS: Don’t touch anybody, talk to them via video.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Right. Venus is constrained between the rays of the two malefics. And that’s a really good translation of that original Greek term for that concept the Medieval astrologers called ‘besiegement’, which the Hellenistic astrologers called ‘enclosure’; but ‘quarantine’ would be a good translation of that.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, so that’s really interesting. When Leisa Schaim and I were doing the elections for the year ahead, we actually had a really hard time finding elections for this month, and I don’t know if I want to transition into introducing that chart yet.

This month and next month, we remember just having a hard time finding good charts, in general, and just having to grasp whatever the best thing was that we could find. But one of the things that we did note was that the Venus-Mars trine–which is forming and is so close all month–never goes exact. Venus slows down enough that it can’t fully catch up to Mars, even though it normally would at it’s normal speed.

KS: Yes.

AC: Yeah, it’s a rough month for elections, for sure.

KS: The one saving grace, I thought–and I don’t do a lot of electional work these days–well, the Sun isn’t overcome by a square from Saturn while it’s in Aries…

AC: Yeah, agree.

KS: …which we haven’t had for a couple of years.

AC: I mean, the Sun is kind of what there is to work with in a lot of April–and the Moon’s doing the rounds–but it’s the one planet that is consistently in good dignity and isn’t beaten up by malefics.

KS: Which is a refreshing change; we haven’t had that version of the Sun in Aries for a couple of years.

AC: Yeah, it’s been some time. I think three centuries, experientially?

KS: Yeah.

CB: I’m just pulling up–and I might as well just give the electional chart for this month…

KS: You should. Yeah, we’re talking about it.

CB: …since we’re talking about it, and so I don’t forget it. So this is the best we could come up with. And honestly, I’m not going to lie, this is not a great chart, but we were just grasping for anything. One of the things I distinctly remember focusing on–when Leisa and I picked out one good chart for each of the next twelve12 months–was seeing that trine between Venus and Mars, and trying to focus on it a little bit.

And there’s this one time-frame where Mercury gets into the action and sextiles both Mercury and Venus while those two are relatively closely trined. Honestly, that’s more of a modern electional thing to look for, which is just nice, soft aspects, or an aspect pattern between three planets like that; but that was kind of what I was left to use, to try to find anything for a good electional chart this month.

KS: Oh, I love that you picked that. When I was doing my information for my monthly subscribers, I was like, “There’s a couple of fun aspects on April 18, and this is the best of the month” kind of thing,” those sextiles.

CB: Yeah, exactly. So the chart is set for April 18, at around 8:45 AM, with about mid-degrees of Gemini rising; so let’s say around 15 degrees or so. Venus is in Gemini, conjunct the Ascendant and in the 1st whole sign house. The ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury, which is in Aries at 12 degrees, in the 11th whole sign house. It’s overcome by a superior sign-based square from Jupiter in a day chart, which is somewhat helpful or affirming. Mercury is applying to a sextile; it’s technically separating from a sextile with Venus, and it’s applying to a sextile with its domicile lord, Mars, with reception.

The Moon is in Pisces, in the 10th whole sign house; it’s applying to a square with Venus, in this chart. So the best that we could get is a square with Venus; at least it’s an aversion to Mars and Saturn. It also has a very wide, sign-based but applying sextile with Jupiter, with reception, since it’s in Pisces.

I think that’s about it. Mars and Saturn are both in the 9th house, so don’t use this for 9th house type things, especially due to Mars being there in a day chart. But otherwise, this is the electional chart that we came up with. So what were you recommending it for, Kelly?

KS: So in the subscription, I just kind of highlight the different aspects, and this pair of sextiles, the Mercury-Venus, Mercury-Mars; it just looked a little bit lighter. I always try to pick the aspects that I think look the funnest, or the lightest, or the best that month, as well as the aspects that I think are the most difficult.

In April, there are a lot of choices for the most difficult aspect, but there were very few options for other good, happy, playful aspects. So those were the ones I picked just because I have a little bias to the Mercury-Venus sextile. I think that’s really fun; there’s an artistic, creative, but also, connected, collaborative piece, and I liked the Mars energy coming in. I hadn’t factored in–I just mentally blanked on the fact that the Moon was involved in that as well.

I think, in the best-case scenario, there is some level of increase of interaction that happens around then, but it could just be people are figuring out how to have parties on Zoom, as well, or FaceTime, or GoToMeeting, or WhatsApp as well.

CB: Yeah, definitely. So anyway, that’s the electional chart for the month. We’re going to have our electional episode, where we have a few other charts for April, sometime in the next few days for patrons. I think Leisa might be recording that one on her own–because I think I’m going to collapse after we’re done recording this episode–but you can tune in for that if you’re a patron of The Astrology Podcast.

And the electional charts, they’re not better in May, but there’s definitely an improvement once we get to June, when the electional charts actually start seriously improving again. But it’s interesting how that ended up coinciding with everything, because I don’t think we were thinking about it with that focus when we were having trouble finding charts in this part of the year, in April, specifically.

AC: Right. Why is it not a good time to plan things, right?

CB: Yeah. Like why can I not find any good electional charts for this time period?

AC: That’s what I was kind of trying to say at the beginning. You could know that, “Uh, if I’m going to plan a big thing, and I want a really good chart–not then,” and you can be correct in ‘not then’, even though you had no idea why it would not be a great time.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You can get the right course of action, even if you don’t know why. It’s like a blob on the radar, and you’re like, “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want to be there.”

KS: I don’t want to anchor anything into that.

CB: Definitely. All right, so back to the forecast. We’ve covered Mercury’s ingress on the 11th of April, the Sun’s ingress into Taurus. We’re now getting into the second lunation of the month, I believe, which is the New Moon in Taurus on the 22nd, right?

KS: Yes.

CB: Okay.

AC: Mm-hmm.

KS: Second lunation of the month–both lunations ruled by Venus this month. Venus is in Gemini all month. First lunation has the Full Moon in Libra, ruled by Venus, ruled by Mercury in Pisces. Second lunation in Taurus, ruled by Venus. Venus in Gemini, but Mercury is in Aries at that point. So there’s sort of a different tone when you get into the rulerships, but it’s just an interesting, sort of weird thing that both the lunations are Venus-ruled this month.

CB: Yeah, that is interesting.

KS: Oh, and it’s conjunct Uranus.

AC: Yeah. Remember talking about this on the yearly?

KS: Do you remember what we said, Austin?

AC: No, I just remember this. It would be interesting to look back. What’s funny, this lunation is…

CB: Wait, Kelly, is there something specific? No? Okay.

KS: No, I just wondered. Austin remembers that we highlighted it, and I’m like, “What did we say?” because I didn’t remember at all.

AC: It’s very significant-looking, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s a Sun and Moon conjunct Uranus, and also square Saturn, but moving…

CB: Right.

AC: …from Saturn to Uranus. So this looks like people so ready to leave quarantine…

KS: Yeah.

AC: …like literally moving away from Saturn, right?

KS: Yes.

AC: That mandatory solitude or whatever, limited socialness.

KS: Hermit, yeah.

AC: Uranus is revolutionary, and is very, “Give me freedom or give me—well, just give me freedom.”

KS: Give me freedom.

AC: You can see that’s like houses and apartments bursting at the seams; people are going to be so ready. The poor extroverts–a prayer for the extroverts.

CB: Look what happens as soon as the next aspect, as soon as the Moon clears Uranus.

KS: Yeah, hello.

AC: I didn’t say it was going to be good–I just said that’s the vibe.

CB: It squares Mars after the conjunction with Uranus. So the sequence would be New Moon, Moon then hits Uranus, and this, like you were saying, thrust for liberation, seeking freedom or an urge for freedom. But then the Moon squares Mars immediately after that and you get the Mars significations, which are problematic and negative.

AC: Yeah. I don’t know. This is just speculation at this point, but it may be that there are some places where people go into protest mode against quarantines, or there’s chaos. That Mars in Aquarius–Mars also does not like being contained or locked up. Mars stimulates action, and on an emotional level, Mars stirs anger; so we may have that towards the end of the month as a result.

CB: Yeah, because one of the issues that we’ve been having over the past few weeks is people not taking it seriously. There were a lot of videos of spring-breakers going out to beaches and partying, and all of these young people just basically getting infected, or potentially spreading around the virus.

And that’s one of the concerns if people leave the quarantine too early, and then there’s a re-spreading of the virus prematurely, sooner than, at least health officials would like at some point. I’m not sure how long those different quarantines are going to last, or what’s going to be extended, or what the advisories are going to be, but that would be unfortunate if needing to get free and get out of the restrictions leads to greater problems in terms of that.

AC: Yeah. I think that we can say that where there are quarantines still in effect, people will be ready to get mad around that lunation.

KS: Yes, I agree–the wearing thin of patience about the restriction. And then I’m also holding the space the Saturn-overcoming square is now applying to planets in Taurus, as is the Mars-overcoming square. So even when it’s not active by degree…

AC: Yeah.

KS: …there is still that sense of pressure, or containing, or holding, to a certain level.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s not Mars conjunct Saturn/conjunct Pluto, with the South Node there, but in a normal year, we’d be like “Ooh, that’s kinda gnarly.”

KS: Yes.

AC: It’s just that we have to grade on a 2020 scale.

KS: Yes, that’s true. That is true. I liked how you spelled that out there, Austin, because of the volatility, to go back to the words we were using for Mars-Uranus. To see the Moon kind of moving between Uranus and Mars in the hours following that New Moon, it does have this feeling of like ‘the uprising’, or ‘the rebellion’. Whether we’re allowed out of our homes, or whether it’s the voice of the people, there is that resistance movement, I guess.

AC: One thing that I bet we said in the yearly as a clear focus–as we’re going to have on the Saturn-Uranus square this year–is that Saturn-Uranus square is a huge part of 2021 and 2022. We have both the Sun and the Moon translating the light between Saturn and Uranus. And so, in terms of a sneak-peek into dynamics that are going to be going for a couple years, that New Moon in the following two days, that’s a big part of what it’s going to look like. Because it’s not just the Moon translating light, or carrying the…

KS: It’s the Sun, too.

AC: …completing that square; it’s the Sun, too.

KS: Yeah, that’s a beautiful point.

CB: Yeah. And it’s interesting that with the New Moon taking place in between the degrees of the two of them, the Moon and the Sun are both separating from Saturn and then applying to Uranus.

So that really does give that flair or that taste, that feeling that you were talking about, Austin, of that transition coming from or coming out of separating from isolation, or separating from being locked down or restricted, and moving towards having the Uranian-like push for freedom, loosening of restrictions, or what have you.

AC: Yeah. And I bet we’ll see some telling economic stuff around then, too…

CB: Okay.

AC: …as a preview of the Saturn-Uranus, which has a lot of economic implications.

CB: Right. You’re still thinking about that in terms of the Saturn-Uranus opposition as being one of the main signatures of the 2008 financial collapse.

AC: Yeah, and it’s relatively consistent. The Saturn-Uranus alignments have a whole lot to do with how capitalism works and doesn’t work.

CB: Okay. All right, so that’s the New Moon that’s happening in Taurus. And just a few days later, basically, around the same time, Pluto is actually stationing retrograde in Capricorn, as well, right?

KS: Yes.

AC: Yeah, we get that station.

CB; There it is at 24 degrees of Capricorn, 24’59”. So it almost makes it to 25 degrees, but then just barely doesn’t. It’s 24, but basically, almost 25 Capricorn. Most stations, I tend to interpret them as an intensification of the planet and what it’s signifying in the sign that it’s transiting.

So in this instance, it’s partially intensifying its transit through Capricorn, but also, it very closely conjuncts Jupiter at this time. Jupiter’s only at 26 degrees of Capricorn, so just a degree-and-a-half or 2 degrees away.

AC: Yeah. And look at Mercury being pretty much exactly square both of them.

CB: Right. Right at the same time at 26 Aries.

AC: So Mercury’s happy to articulate that message, whatever loud bass note that Pluto sounds at that time.

CB: Right. What were you looking up, Kelly?

KS: So many things–I wanted to clarify the date of Pluto’s station retrograde. And I’m also thinking about that New Moon with Uranus in Taurus and changes around food and food supply and food distribution, food innovation.

AC: Oh, yeah.

KS: I was looking up when was Uranus in Taurus last time–1935 to 1942–and just remembering people were growing their own vegetables; but also, there was a lot of advancements with food technology, particularly to do with supplying meals to the military, and people that were on postings and things like that. So I wonder if we’ll see something escalating on the food technology front.

AC: When I did my research on Uranus in Taurus themes, god, a year-and-a-half ago, two years ago…

KS: Yeah.

AC: …food was there every time.

KS: Every time.

AC: Both the chocolate chip cookie and the potato chip were invented while Uranus was in Taurus, and of course, much more significant changes to the way that agriculture is conducted and food supply and logistics. But chocolate chip cookie and potato chip–you put the mad scientist in the…

KS: It’s so Taurus, isn’t it?

AC: It is. It’s so Taurus.

KS: Oh, my god, salt and sweet.

AC: Right–which are the two real food groups.

KS: Totally.

AC: But yeah, that’s a great point.

CB: Maybe to compliment that, Mercury then eventually goes into Taurus on the 27th, where it will eventually, the following month, meet up with Uranus. I don’t know–is it moving fast enough? Does it make the conjunction with Uranus before the end of April?

AC: Let’s see.

KS: Yes, on the 30th.

AC: Yeah. It’s last minute, on the 30th.

KS: Very end. It’s just sneaking in.

AC: It’s very co-present, and it’s applying to a conjunction as soon as it goes into Taurus. That’s interesting because that’s Mercury doing the same thing that the Sun and the Moon did the previous week…

KS: Yes.

AC: …that going between Saturn and Uranus, and going from Saturn to Uranus.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I don’t know if we’re figuring out when quarantines are likely going to end. This last week of April has a lot of Saturn-to-Uranus symbolism–that’s literally what the planets are doing. And we’ve got the Mars-Saturn conjunction loosening and loosening and loosening; that looks highly probable, or maybe that’s when things get announced.

I mean, it’s like, okay, first week of May, everybody can leave the house or whatever, but there’s just a lot of that moving away from Saturnian restriction and seeking Uranian freedom.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I hadn’t looked at that before we sat down. I hadn’t looked at that in as much detail, as we’ve gone over it together.

KS: Me neither, yeah.

CB: Yeah, me neither–or like unexpected communication, as a Mercury-Uranus manifestation on April 30th with that conjunction.

AC: Yeah, just a pile of messages related to the Saturn-Uranus topics for that entire week.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yes.

CB: All right, so that brings us to the end of the month. Are there any major things that we haven’t mentioned, or that we overlooked about the astrology of April? It’s not fully a ‘this month’ thing, so we didn’t focus on it a ton, but we did spend a sufficient amount of time talking about the upcoming Venus retrograde, which we’re going to start getting a preview of here. Venus hits its shadow as soon as it hits 5 degrees of Gemini, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah…

CB: What day is that?

AC: …I mean, pretty much the whole time.

KS: Like the 9th or 10th.

CB: Okay. So yeah, by the 9th or 10th, Venus is already past the degree that it will retrograde back to later, which means that some of the events and circumstances that people will be experiencing during the course of the Venus retrograde in their personal lives will already start being set up by the second-half of April.

KS: Yes.

CB: Okay.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Are there any other major things like that that we should’ve touched on or that we should mention before we start wrapping up this episode?

KS: I think we’ve done a really thorough job.

CB: Okay, good. Any other discussion topics? I’m going to check the outline very quickly. But are there any other things that we meant to mention in this episode?

KS: Anything on your mind, Austin?

AC: Well, there’s just so…

CB: Obviously.

AC: Is there anything else to talk about?

CB: Right.

AC: Could we go into more detail about anything? One thing I will just say, just a couple things real quick–this is the last year of a 200+-year cycle. We’re moving from…

KS: Yes.

AC: …the Earth triplicity into the Air, as numerous astrologers have noted, among them, the illustrious Kelly Surtees. Disease is a thing that lands more in the Air triplicity time than in any of the other three–that’s a thing.

One of the reasons 2020 is hard is we’ve got a couple of giant things happening–one is that switch from Earth to Air; another is the Saturn-Pluto conjunction happening in the same space. Saturn-Pluto conjunctions are traumatic, culturally. Like Rick Tarnas said, they often bring about feelings of isolation, building of walls.

The one thing I noticed looking back is they’re also great for disease. The last one in Libra brought us the AIDS epidemic.

KS: Yeah.

AC: The Saturn-Pluto alignments also tend to be points of state overreach. The last alignment we had was the opposition between Saturn and Pluto, which occurred right in the middle of 9/11. And so, then we saw in the United States, as a reaction to that trauma, we had a Patriot Act, which offered security agencies powers that they’d never seen before, which has been re-ratified every year since then.

And if we look back at the history of the Saturn-Pluto conjunctions and oppositions, we have traumatic events. We also have totalitarian reactions to traumatic events. The Department of Justice, last week, already put forward a motion to be able to detain people indefinitely and to suspend normal due-process.

As we’re reacting to real threats and trying to keep everybody as safe as possible, we need to keep an eye on these things, and if there are emergency powers that are granted, that they have an expiration date, rather than just go forward forever like the Patriot Act. This is a theme with Saturn-Pluto, but it’s tied in with this 200-year transition; there’s so much to discuss. Did we talk about subsumption, Chris?

CB: No.

KS: We did not.

CB: I’m so out of it. I’m glad you guys have been carrying me through this episode. I have a bunch of stuff in the outline…

AC: You’ve been doing great.

CB: …that we didn’t even touch on. Yeah, it’s really funny, because I’m going to probably give off the impression that I’m more well than I am, but I’m actually in terrible shape right now. So thanks for your help today, and thanks to the audience who joined us today, who’ve also been very helpful with their comments.

That is one topic I did want to mention as a topic of discussion, which is something called ‘The Doctrine of Subsumption’, which was actually first defined by the astrologer CEO Carter in 1945, in an article in an astrological journal in the UK that he edited at the time.

CEO Carter is one of the major astrologers of the 20th century. He was a British astrologer, and he wrote that article in 1945, just after the end of World War 2. The purpose of the article was to define something that was taken for granted in the astrological tradition but not usually given a name, and it’s this idea that each individual birth chart is subsumed under a series of larger charts of increasingly large magnitude in the context of mundane astrology or in the context of astrology in general.

So for example, you can have your birth chart, and you’re having good transits on a specific day; but if you’re in a building, that building itself has a birth chart. But then if the building collapses, and there were 30 people in the building, and all of them die at the same time, in some way, they were all a part of its chart acting as this larger entity that they’re all sharing at that time. It ends up overruling, in some way, or being the dominant chart signature at that time that then can almost override their own, in some sense. And I’m not sure if that’s actually a good analogy, because I just thought of it off the top of my head, but the more relevant analogy is there’s also charts for cities or a chart for a country.

So when I say larger-scale charts, we’re talking about how sometimes, in mundane astrology, charts or astrological signatures–or let’s say influences, for lack of a better term–that are affecting the collective can end up influencing larger groups of people and indicating something that’s more overriding or pressing than whatever the individual natal charts are indicating at that time. Does that make sense?

AC: Yeah, absolutely. The way that I interpret it and see it is that it changes the baseline. For example, you’re in a super fortunate year, but you’re in a country that has just been invaded in a war. So maybe you’re safe and manage to get away with food from the frontlines or whatever, while your friends or family do not. That’s fortunate. You’re still having a fortunate year, but it’s in the context of the baseline for the collective in which you live.

It’s not that the individual destinies and karmas don’t matter, but it’s relative to the baseline of the larger thing that you’re in. I will have a good or bad year, but relative to the baseline of being an American right now. And so, you could have a year that’s, let’s say, great for profession, not that my year is.

Quick note: Kelly and I both entered 6th house profections–which are about health and disease–right before all this shit started. It was kind of weird to feel like these themes started popping up for me, because I’m in a 6th house year, and the entire world feels like it entered a 6th house year. But anyway, sorry, that’s an aside.

Yeah, it changes the baseline. If it’s a bad year, it’s bad in that context; if it’s good, it’s good in that context. There are a lot of years when the society that you’re in is sort of in a neutral place. Then you really see the individual fate, or destiny, karma, or whatever; you see the individual baseline assert itself very clearly. But when there’s big stuff happening, good or bad, in the collective in which you are part of, that becomes your baseline rather than your individual baseline.

Sorry, that was not terribly articulate, but I think…

CB: No, that was good.

AC: …I made my point.

KS: I thought it was great.

AC: Okay.

CB: That’s the importance then of mundane astrology, and it’s one of the reasons why we try to do what we do each month and with the yearly forecasts–even the long-term forecast–to try to describe as best we can the archetypal signatures that are going to be prevailing in the collective.

Sometimes, in some instances, especially with major outer-planet alignments, that can end up influencing large groups of people all at once, or at least in larger clumps, or larger collectives than usual; and sometimes, that can affect everybody’s chart. Even if you don’t have a specific transit in your chart that’s getting activated, that’s showing that specific thing necessarily, as a part of society, you’re still getting affected in some crucial way.

AC: And you also see the exceptions. Is this a good time economically? No. What if you own a factory that makes ramen noodles?

KS: Yes.

AC: There’s the baseline. We could say, “Oh, the baseline is negative,” but there are some situations where you’re even further below the baseline. Let’s say, you have a sports team, or you’re part of a sports team that had its season canceled. So it’s like, “Oh, missed a month of work, rent’s going to be hard,” literally the entire season is wiped, or “I make ramen noodles, sales have actually been really good.” There’s always deviations…

KS: Or you’re a toilet paper producer.

AC: …from the baseline.

CB: Right, I was thinking that.

AC: Right, exactly.

CB: I really missed out on not investing in toilet paper stocks a month or two ago.

AC: Yeah, that’s funny.

KS: Your point, Austin, around, yes, generally, it is a bad economic time, but there are certain industries and areas that will flourish, that are counter-cyclical; grocery stores are usually one of those types of industries. When the general economy drops, people just go to the grocery store because they’re not paying for air flights or going on holidays.

AC: Yeah. Or if you make chili, cans of chili, I personally have been keeping you in business. We did an ‘apocalypse’ Costco run, I don’t know, a month-ish ago? I was like, “What will I be happy eating? What will keep me alive and be acceptable that is canned?” And I was like, “I would like 60 cans of chili right now.”

KC: Oh, my gosh, yeah.

AC: Toilet paper, down on the list, I can do without that, but I’m going to need some chili, going to need some protein.

KS: Totally.

CB: There’s some joke in there, but I don’t want to go there.

KS: You’re not quick enough on the ball to make it today, Chris?

CB: No, I’m not. Next month, I’ll come back with a joke about that.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So to wrap up that discussion, I just wanted to mention it, because it’s something that’s relevant when we’re talking about something that’s happening for thousands of people, where the entire world is being affected right now.

Obviously, it’s not just a single transit. There’s a lot of things happening, where some specific, long-term outer-planet cycles could be indicating something that’s affecting the entire world, like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, the eclipses, the Saturn-Uranus square, or what have you–all of the many different things that are going to be happening this year.

KS: Yeah, it’s a lot.

CB: It probably goes back to the idea of root charts and other things. There’s a lot of things tied in there, but maybe we’ll do an episode on that separately, at some point. Kelly, did you have something?

KS: Just to the point that Austin made earlier about this being the last year in this 200+ year of the Earth grand conjunctions; I do think that is worth just making sure people are keeping in their mind. Saturn and Pluto are conjunct every 40 years or so, 31 to 37 years, I think is the exact number.

And I’m not saying Saturn-Pluto is happy, but it’s very interesting to have a Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the end of a longer 200-year cycle. It’s sort of like deconstruction on multiple levels of larger cycles all happening at the same time, and I think that highlights why 2020 is such a massive transition year on so many levels: socially, culturally, financially, government, but also, internally as well.

People talk about the idea of a New World Order or new priorities emerging and the egalitarian. There’s a French word–I think it’s également or something. I hear people say it like an ‘also for you’, and it’s sort of like we’re all in this together, and that’s been something that’s emerging more and more.

I don’t know that we’ve ever recorded a show like this, where everybody has spent the last however many days or even weeks just at home. We don’t have anything exciting to talk about because we haven’t been to the movies, and nobody’s taken a trip recently. We’ve just been getting creative with cooking at home, basically.

CB: We didn’t have an extended…

AC: I wouldn’t say that we don’t have any excitement. Go ahead.

CB: We didn’t have an extended, 30-minute digression at the start of this show about Austin having a Mercury retrograde story, trying to get his passport or something like that.

KS: Exactly. That was twelve months ago

AC: We didn’t even talk about how when Mercury went back into Pisces, it conjoined my Mars again. And instead of hurting my toe, I hurt my finger; I slammed it in the door. It’s right hand, right foot, and then right next to the pinky toe, right next to the pinky finger. I hurt my foot the first time, and I slammed my finger in a door during the second conjunction.

But I have one more grim, but useful astrological note. So transit-wise, we have already moved beyond Mars, Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter all in one place, but the Aries ingress chart is one of the major historical methods for looking at the astrology of the world for a year.

The Aries ingress chart locks in Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto all at the end of Capricorn. And so, there is a little bit of keeping that. If only the equinox had occurred three days later, but it didn’t. For yearly charts for a lot of countries, we’re going to keep that all year.

KS: Yes, that’s a good point.

CB: And then that becomes a root chart or a precedent chart in and of itself.

KS: The chart that does the subsuming.

CB: Right, exactly.

AC: Yes.

CB: So that’s an interesting thing to think about, both in a mundane sense, as well as in your own lives. CEO Carter, he used an example of a marriage chart, and how the marriage chart then subsumes everything that comes subsequent to that in the family unit, or how if you do an electional chart, sometimes everything that comes after that relative to what you’ve initiated gets subsumed under the original chart; so it’s just something interesting to think about.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Other topics related actually to what you were talking about, Kelly–I was re-reading Tarnas’ treatment of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and how he was outlining it very clearly as defining these different epochs; the first one of the 20th century coinciding really closely with World War 1, or with the start of World War 1, and then the second one coinciding with the start of the Cold War. It very clearly outlines these different phases in history and sets the stage for what will then come over the course of the next 30 to 40 years between one conjunction and another.

Realizing that what’s happening right now, around the time of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, we’re literally seeing the start of a new 30-to-40-year phase and the foundations of what will come over the next few decades being laid during the course of this major event, or this major catastrophe. And it’s really wild to witness that in our lifetimes.

KS: It is.

AC: Yeah. We’re back to participating in history rather than just reading about it.

KS: Just observing it.

AC: I agonized over what to call my 2020 article, and I just settled on The Bridge because it’s the rough transition.

CB: What is it again?

AC: The Bridge.

CB: The Bridge, okay.

AC: 2020–it’s a rough transition between epochs.

KS: Yeah. The image that I used in my 2020 lecture/tour that I did in January, it was two cliffs, and the bridge between them was a butterfly, sort of indicating the transformation to get from where we are to where we’re going. And while a butterfly is kind of a pretty-looking image, it basically indicates the complete destruction or destroying of what is to become a totally new entity, with different levels of movement and capability.

CB: Right.

AC: Yeah.

CB: I like that.

AC: Right. Transformation is, on a bodily level, very uncomfortable.

KS: Very.

CB: Definitely.

KS: On these happy notes…

AC: Well, it is what it is.

KS: Yeah. Other really quick bullet points. I mean, under normal circumstances, we would talk a little bit about how all the people with Saturn in Aquarius have just started their Saturn returns–that’s a thing. We’ll probably save that maybe for next time.

Under a more darker note–one of the realizations I had around the time that Saturn moved into Aquarius made me nervous. Robert Zoller passed away a few weeks ago, who was a prominent astrologer and one of the founders of Project Hindsight. A lot of those major astrologers of the Pluto in Leo generation were already getting older, and I already had that push that I’ve talked about several times on the podcast, over the past year or two, to get interviews with a bunch of them, to get their life stories documented.

But I just realized when Saturn ingressed into Aquarius, I hadn’t thought about it, but that starts a Saturn-Pluto opposition in all of the Pluto in Leo charts. So that entire generation of the Baby Boomers that were born with Pluto in Leo, from 1939 until 1957, all started a Saturn opposition, or transiting opposition of Saturn to their natal Pluto by sign, and eventually, at some point, by degree. And of course, they’re all part of the people that are most susceptible or most vulnerable to the coronavirus right now just in terms of that age group.

AC: Yeah, that’s a really good, sad point. Also, a number of those sicknesses are due to occur– Mars-Saturn both in Aquarius, opposing that Pluto–over the next month-and-a-half, which we already know.

CB: And I know we need to wrap up soon. Last point–there was a new comet that’s been discovered. I think that actually might become more important, because it was discovered at the end of December. They first spotted it on December 28th or 29th through telescopes. It started growing in brightness rapidly after discovery, and it may become visible to the naked eye over the course of the next month or two. That’s kind of weird. It kind of reminds me of some of the traditional omenology surrounding comets, often which is not very positive.

I remember one instance, from my own life, and I’m sure there’s others, but I remember that time when there was a comet that appeared right after the death of Saddam Hussein, around 2006, if I’m remembering like the time-frame correctly; maybe it was 2005. Yeah, you probably know some of the omenology surrounding comets, Austin?

AC: Well, I mean, they herald disaster.

CB: Yeah. So as that starts to become visible over the next few weeks, that’s an interesting thing to pay attention to and notice, especially if it does become visible to the naked eye, over the course of whatever ensues over the next month or two coinciding with that.

All right, I think those are all of the major things that I wanted to note from the outline. What do you guys have going on over the course of the next month? Kelly, you’re going to be traveling and giving lots of workshops?

KS: Oh, yeah, I’m everywhere. No–I’m, so grateful I went everywhere last year. Okay, I’m going to do this quickly because I know we’ve got to wrap up. I did give a talk on the Saturn conjunct Jupiter cycles last year at an Astrology University event, the 2020 Summit. Tony has actually made that available free for a few days. So there’s about 8 or 10 lectures that are just available free online right now–Demetra George, amongst a bunch of other people–but my talk is available free there.

Coming up in April, I am starting my next class. It’s a four-part training on the 10 planets in astrology. That begins Monday, April 13, online, of course. And I’m giving a webinar called Diving into the Darkness: Exploring the 8th and 12th Houses, on Saturday, April 4. I’ve got a live Q&A for my members on April 3 as well, if anybody wants to become a member and join us there. So I do have a few things going on in April, online.

AC: Nice.

CB: And your website’s kellysastrology.com?

KS: Yes, thank you. Sorry, I forgot the important part.

CB: I wasn’t sure if you had mentioned it. I just wanted to mention it again if not. Austin, what do you have going on?

AC: Well, my yearly classes are due to begin in April. My Fundamentals of Astrology: Year 1 and Year 2 gets started in April. If people want to be part of it, they should sign up sooner rather than later. I will leave late registration open until the first meeting, on April 12. But homework and videos–class starts April 1.

CB: Awesome. And your website is austincoppock.com?

AC: Mm-hmm.

CB: Okay, cool. As for me, I’m just going to be sleeping probably and surviving, and I’m hoping I get back to normal. The Mars-Saturn conjunction is going to be in my 1st house, which I’m not sure what that is about, and I’m hoping for the best.

But if that goes well, hopefully getting back to normal and then just keeping the podcast going is going to be my main thing. I’m hoping to do an episode on outer-planet cycles here, in the not-too-distant future, and I’m talking to Becca Tarnas about recording that; but otherwise, we’ll see how things go. So you can find out more information about that, of course, at theastrologypodcast.com.

And if you want to support the production of this episode, or any future episodes, consider becoming a patron through our page on Patreon. Thanks to everybody who has been supporting the podcast. I really appreciate it; especially as times get more difficult, that can be tough. But yeah, I’m going to keep the podcast going.

I think that’s it, guys. I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks a lot for doing this with me; I’d been really looking forward to it. I was bummed to miss the episode last Sunday, but I’m glad we were able to get it together and do it today.

AC: Yeah, me too.

KS: Yeah. I’m glad you’re better and hopefully on the mend.

CB: Yes, hopefully. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll check in again next month, a few weeks from now, for our forecast–whatever the next forecast is–the forecast for May. Hopefully, the world hasn’t changed as radically by then, but we’ll see what happens.

AC: Yeah. I’m sure there will be a lot to talk about.

CB: Yeah. All right, well, thanks everybody for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks to all the patrons. This is our biggest attended episode ever, with over a hundred patrons attending in the live audience. Thanks everyone for your comments, they’ve been great. Sorry we couldn’t read all of them, because there were so many, but we appreciate it.

Please be sure to subscribe to the channel, or like this video if you haven’t already. And I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So good luck, everyone. Try to stay in and stay healthy, and we’ll see you again next month.

KS: Take care, everyone.

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, a shoutout 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.

The production of this episode of the podcast is also supported by the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting a major astrology conference in Denver, Colorado, September 10-14, 2020. More information about that at isar2020.org. And finally, also, Solar Fire Astrology Software, which is available at alabe.com. You can use the promo code AP15 for a 15% discount on that software.

For more information about how to become a patron of The Astrology Podcast and help support the production of future episodes, while getting access to subscriber benefits, like early access to new episodes or other bonus content, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast.