The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 253, titled:
May 2020 Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan and guests Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on August 30, 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 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. Today is Tuesday, April 28, 2020, starting at 11:15 AM, here in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 253rd episode of the show.
In this episode, I’m going to be talking with astrologers Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock about the astrological forecast for May of 2020. Hey, guys, welcome to the show.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey, guys.
CB: Hey. So for those just starting the video version of this episode, usually we try to jump right into the forecast first. But we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking and catching up and reviewing the past month, and then, eventually, we’ll get into the astrological forecast for May.
So for those of you that just want to jump straight to the forecast, just look in the description either below this video or on The Astrology Podcast website on the description page for this episode. If you’re listening to the audio version, there you’ll find a timestamp, so that you can jump straight forward the forecast and skip the preliminary talk that we’re going to have the next, I don’t know, 30 minutes or so.
All right, so here we are. We are back again after, what, a month? It’s been a really crazy month in the world in general and in our lives in general. I’ve been sick for the past month. It actually turned into a six-week-long illness, and I’m just finally fully coming out of it now, and the last lingering issue is just dealing with fatigue and getting tired.
But I’m starting to get back to doing podcast episodes after a really long gap there, because I actually got more sick after we did our last one and sort of took a few steps back, which I wasn’t anticipating. How have you guys been doing?
AC: How are things in Belgium, Kelly?
KS: Yeah, it’s very quiet here in Belgium. Just like everyone else, lockdown conditions. Being someone who has worked online for a really long time, there’s a sense of kind of familiarity, because I’m working in ways that I would have been otherwise.
So it’s sort of a weird thing of like, yes, there’s a lot that’s different and new that’s going on, that is, of course, affecting us. We were supposed to have a trip back to Canada to see family in April, which we clearly didn’t do so. It’s just been sort of a weird, surreal experience of some things being really familiar–working online as normal–but other things just being very weird and very strange and very different. How about you guys? Austin?
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can relate to that. I’ve worked online and from home for a decade-plus. And so, there’s some things that are utterly normal–obviously, travel plans got smashed–but it’s still, experientially, really very different to be doing the same thing while the entire rest of the world is not, or it seems like that. The context is a little bit different.
I would say, it’s been really interesting to me to see people in mass engaging with the self-scheduling challenge that I, you, and you as well, Chris, have been living with for a long time. And self-scheduling–it is its own skill set; it is its own monumental challenge. It’s not something you just know how to do and are great at. And so, it’s been really interesting to see other people engaging with something that’s just been part of my normal, and seeing my normal from a new angle because of that.
And I’ve learned some things about it. I don’t live up to my own standards, but I’m better at it than I used to be. I don’t know–it’s been kind of fun to be like, “Oh, so I use this trick to get myself to do the right thing, at the right time of day,” and so, that’s been part of it.
CB: Yeah. And we’re all extraordinarily lucky we happen to have jobs where we can work from home for the most part, in terms of me doing the podcast, or you guys teaching online classes or doing consultations through Zoom. Yeah, everybody’s starting to use Zoom and other online platforms suddenly, but it’s something that we were a little ahead of the curve on.
KS: Yeah. But I have noticed that I have been slightly less productive than normal. Taking time and energy to process myself, all the emotions, with everything that’s going on collectively, I have noticed my productivity has come down a percentage. And I’ve just sort of said, “You know what? These are not normal times.” Even though, as we’re saying, working from home is our baseline of normal, it’s not happening in an environment or, as you said, Austin, a context that is normal.
And I’ve just reduced a couple of things. I need to be mindful that some of my energy is going to manage myself in this global pandemic space, and I just can’t go at that level, work-wise, that I might normally when things are more familiar out there.
CB: Well, it’s fascinating how much of the Mars-Saturn conjunction we talked about in the year-ahead forecast for the entirety of 2020, during this part of the year. I think I used the analogy of Mars-Saturn being like pressing the gas in your car and the brake at the same time, and like wanting to move forward but also being stopped and being immobile at the same time.
That ended up being a really evocative description of most people’s experience of this time, especially over the past month, during a worldwide quarantine, where lots of people are stuck at home or being forced to not do what they otherwise would do, due to the restrictions, or due to the fear of getting sick or what have you.
AC: I’ve actually…
KS: Yeah…
AC: Oh, go ahead, Kelly.
KS: Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, the timelines are different. You can’t make plans for six months from now or nine months from now. You can kind of focus on the next week and that’s about it. So there’s been a real adjustment in planning, and that Mars-Saturn–Mars/immediate; Saturn/long-term– we’ve had to really shift and not do both at the same time, that’s for sure.
CB: Right.
KS: So, Austin?
AC: I’ve had sort of the opposite response to the same stimulus, Kelly. I’ve been more productive.
KS: Oh, interesting.
AC: Yeah. The ambient, I should say, danger/risk/dark time makes me feel like, okay, well, I definitely need to get shit done. It’s motivating for me. When there’s lower risk in the environment, where I perceive that, it makes me lazier. Whereas, when there’s risk, I think this is me having a Mars-Saturn opposition in the natal. It fires that, and it’s like, okay, let’s survive; let’s survive super well.
I’ve been more disciplined about my diet. I’ve been more disciplined about strength training. And I’ve been noticing people who have Mars-Saturn conjunctions or oppositions having a similar response, where they’re like, “Okay, yeah it’s serious. Let’s do this.” It makes sense that if you’re a Mars-Saturn person, that Mars-Saturn time would feel not comfortable, but familiar.
KS: Familiar, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KS: That’s a really interesting point.
CB: And just to wrap things up in terms of the health thing, a lot of people were writing in to ask me, after last month, what was going on, and then I didn’t do any podcast episodes for several weeks. We think that I got COVID.
I did end up going into the urgent care or an emergency room at one point due to a pain that developed in my right lung, and I needed to get x-rays. But I wasn’t able to get tested because they were reserving the tests only for people in critical condition, which was kind of an interesting experience.
It made me realize that despite how many people have been tested, and how many confirmed cases there are, those numbers are probably lower if they’re not even testing people unless they have the most severe cases in some areas, or in a major metropolitan city like Denver. But luckily, I’ve been coming out of it and doing all right.
It’s been an interesting thing in terms of a 12th house profection year for me. And, Kelly, you made an observation about that, where everyone’s quarantined at home right now. But I’ve got an even more extreme 12th house version of that, where I’ve been stuck in my room for the past six weeks, not going out, because I’m trying not to get my partner Leisa sick, and that’s been a challenge
KS: Yeah. It just seems like, well, if everybody else is already at home, what’s the more 12th house iteration of that, I guess. And being stuck in a bedroom for such a long time, there’s a lot of isolation themes that come up with that.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, it’s been really–go ahead.
CB: No, go ahead. What you’re going to say?
AC: It’s been really interesting to see how these transits are landing in individual charts and how that describes the experience. So for example, I entered 6th house profection topics, such as health, on March 5, right before all this got going. I was going to be focused on health anyway, and so, this has rather sharpened that focus.
But I did want to add just one tiny, little, happy side of a 6th house profection. The 6th house is also where we see pets, and I think we’re finally going to get a new kitten. We’re talking about this; we were looking at potential candidates yesterday.
This morning I woke up horribly under-slept, right around dawn, and there were some deer out in the front yard, and there was a little cat. I opened my office door and I said, “Hey, little cat.” He just came right into my office, just started meowing and inspecting everything. I have a scratcher in here for my cat, and he just laid down, got to work on the scratcher, etc.
And it’s funny because it’s like, “Oh, it’s pet time.” It’s a 6th house profection–it’s pet time. I’ve never had a cat just walk into my house and be friendly, within 12 hours of literally, not ‘kitten shopping’, but looking at the new batch from a breeder. 12 hours later, boom, new cat in the office.
KS: Wow.
CB: Yeah, that’s a pretty good 6th house profection.
KS: I love it.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So as I was sitting in my room for the past six weeks, thinking about my 12th house perfection year, one of the things that I realized is…
KS: It’s the best example. I mean, it’s a horrible situation, but the symbolism.
CB: Well, one of the things I realized is that the 1st house isn’t just the self, which is really common across astrological traditions, but it also has to do with self-agency; agency of the self. And if that’s true–if you look at the entire angular triad of the sequence of the12th, the 1st, and the 2nd–if the 1st house is self-agency, and the 2nd house is rising up towards the 1st and is increasing, then the 2nd is the increase of self-agency, which is kind of interesting.
One of the things that allows you to have an increase of self-agency is if you have greater financial means; that’s something that sometimes people associate with the ability to do what you want or call the shots or have greater control. Whereas, the 12th house would be the declining house relative to the 1st house angular triads.
The 12th is the loss of self-agency, which then becomes a perfect archetypal descriptor for many of the things that you find in the 12th house, such as prison or hospitals or other things. It would mean the combining factor, the overarching archetype for all of those is the loss of self-agency or situations in which you find yourself with a loss of self-agency, and that’s what ties together all of those 12th house topics.
AC: Yeah, that’s really good. Almost this exact topic came up in my year-two class on Sunday. I literally ended up ranking the houses in terms of how ‘agentic’ or how much agency you have there; the 1st house, obviously being number one for agency, and either the 12th or the 6th being last on the list as far as places where, 1) you have power, and 2) places where you can expect a planet to be something that you do.
When a planet is in the 12th, there’s some of what you do or what you accidentally do; same with the 6th. They will very often tend to mark events that are not under your control; things that happen to you rather than things that you happen to.
CB: Right.
KS: It’s funny, all this focus on the 12th as well; I did a webinar at the start of April looking at the 8th and 12th houses. And that setting of the 12th house, the loss of agency, is such a poetic description, and of course, the nature of the planets in the 12th. Are you in the loss-of-self agency’s space because you personally have lost your agency? Or are you in that space acting as a helper or a support for other people who have lost their agency?
CB: Right, which is the positive manifestations that you see oftentimes with 6th and 12th house placements, especially if they’re career significators.
AC: Yeah, people working in helping professions.
KS: Yeah, I had an example this morning, and it was a long-term client of mine. It was so good, and I was like, “Oh, my god. Do you mind if I use your chart for teaching purposes?” And they were like, “Absolutely. Go, right ahead.”
They have a daytime chart with an Aries MC, and Mars is in Gemini, in the 12th, and they work with female victims of abuse and trauma. They work as a therapist in that environment. And they’re very passionate about giving people in those situations a voice, which I thought was just such a poetic symbolism of the Mars-Gemini 12th house. “Let me be your advocate and help you find your voice as you recover from these very horrific Mars situations that you have survived.”
CB: Yeah.
AC: Right. It makes a lot of sense.
CB: I have an example like that in my book of a doctor that I met once, who was a client, that had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 10th and the 6th, and they focused on patient care and improving the care of patients in the hospital.
KS: That’s right. I remember that example from your book. It’s a great one.
CB: Yeah, but think about all of the doctors right now. I’ve read stories about all the doctors eventually needing to get therapy, due to just the trauma of what they’re witnessing right now and the scale of deaths that are taking place just over the course of the past month, which is something they deal with on a regular basis, but not to this level.
People that have 6th and 12th house placements, we’re talking about a positive manifestation of that. But still, there could be negative effects of working in that environment in some extreme instances, just in terms of what you’re being exposed to.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Absolutely.
AC: In a past life, maybe 15-20 years ago, I worked in mental health in a variety of jobs, and the wear-and-tear on the people, at every level, working in mental health is huge. A lot of people can only do it for so long, and I’m sure that that applies to people working in physical health situations; although the two are very often paired.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s kind of upsetting to have your physical body hurt. And when the mind is not doing well, the body rarely thrives.
CB: Right, or even just being exposed to things; like right now, all of the doctors and nurses and other medical professionals being exposed to COVID and putting their lives on the line and their health on the line, as well as families, in some instances, by trying to help people.
KS: It does strike me a little bit as representative of the Mars-Aquarius/Saturn-Aquarius. I often think about Mars in an Air sign as describing what could be disturbances in the mind or disturbances in the thinking processes, and that aggravation that Mars does which can see an increase in things like anxiety and other mental health concerns.
And that’s something that is starting to get a little bit of press right now for the health workers and just for the general population with the levels of isolation and disconnect. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that being talked about and discussed, particularly, as we look into May and see Mars making a few changes. But that idea of talking more about mental health and taking care of our mindset seems very much connected to some of this Air sign emphasis.
AC: Definitely.
CB: Sure.
AC: I especially see that with Mars in Air signs. Mars in Air signs–it’s like the ambient anxiety levels are always higher.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mars kind of spins its gears or its wheels or propellers in Air signs. It’s not the right element to get traction. And so, you have that getting spun-up and not necessarily have anything to do about it, which results in the experience of anxiety.
CB: Sure. All right, so just to check in, since it’s been a month now. I wanted to do a little news segment. Part of the news is checking in about where things have come over the past month since we did our last episode, in terms of the pandemic, with COVID-19.
So I was looking up some numbers on the Johns Hopkins University website today, before we started this episode, and here’s a little map that they have on their website to show–for the video viewers–confirmed cases
They’re saying that there’s over 3 million confirmed cases worldwide as of today, April 28, 2020. There’s been over 212,000 deaths. Almost 1 million cases have been diagnosed in the US alone. There’s been over 55,000 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States, and most of these occurred within the past month.
And some of those numbers are coming from the Washington Post that has a graph and a list of the number of deaths that have been reported, as well as the number of new reported cases that have been reported each day.
So I wanted to mention that just because that kind of sets the tone for what the last month has been like in the world in general and sort of where we are going into May–before we get to the forecast–as well as checking in, in terms of any statements that we made last month, where we were focused so much on the Mars-Saturn conjunction and the continuation of that co-presence that we’ll come back to and talk a lot about in this episode. Other news, though, before we get there.
Last month, we weren’t sure yet–because it hadn’t been finalized, I don’t think–but the Northwest Astrology Conference did formally announce that they were canceling their in-person conference, and they were switching it to an entirely online conference due to the pandemic.
So they took a major financial hit due to the hotel and due to some of the contracts and negotiations with the hotel, but it’s actually kind of an opportunity now for a lot of people. They’re opening up their ability to sign up new registrants so that anybody could sign up for the conference.
They’re going to have all of the same lectures–which actually had a really amazing lecture lineup this year–available as online webinars, and it’s going to be streamed live, the day of the conference. And then if you sign up for the full conference, you get access to every lecture for a two-week period after the conference is over, which is something kind of unique that you never would have gotten previously if you attended in-person and you could just see a certain number of lectures while you’re there.
So you guys are both speaking at that conference this year, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yes, we are.
CB: Okay. So that’s kind of a bummer that the in-person conference isn’t happening, but I’m glad at least that they’re still doing an online conference.
KS: Yeah. I’m totally bummed not to see everyone and hang out in the bar in between, but it’ll be fun to at least be able to share the material and have those connections online. I think it is kind of cool that everyone will have access to the lectures for two weeks after the fact. I don’t know about you, but when I attend a conference live, I can get to only just a few lectures, not all of them. But over two weeks, I’d have the chance to see them all, which I think is kind of cool.
And then Austin and I are actually both giving workshops at the end of that conference; so Monday, May 25. I’ll be teaching on the Predictive Pot of Gold: How to Combine Transits and Progressions in your forecasts. And Austin, what are you presenting? I think something special.
AC: The decans.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. We’re going to spend an afternoon going through all 36, and then going over some decan- specific techniques that we can find in traditional texts.
KS: Yeah. And so, the conference itself is $275 for the full conference, US dollars. Austin’s workshop and my workshop, if you want to attend as part of the conference, it’s $100 to add that onto your conference registration. If you just want to come to either Austin’s workshop or my workshop, you can do just that, and it’s $130. So lots of options.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad that they’re doing that, and I hope that works out. I’m sure it will work out. I mean, it seems like it’s working out pretty well so far. Here’s the website, which is norwac.net, if you want to get more information, sign up for the newsletter or what have you.
I hope they get a decent turnout. Because of what a huge financial investment these conferences are, that’s one of the reasons they happen not that frequently. I know there was one in 2008 that happened where a single guy was organizing it. It happened right around the time of the financial collapse, and he lost a lot of money, and then he never did any more of those conferences.
So I’m hoping people take into account–when they’re looking at NORWAC and thinking about signing up–wanting to support it and not just to get the information involved and everything; but also, in terms of things to help the community keep going. You can find out more information about that at norwac.net.
In other news, the other major conference this year, the International Society for Astrological Research is still saying that they’re going to hold their conference in Denver, Colorado, in September. They’re still waiting to see what happens, but they’re not going to make any final decisions until June or July, is what I’m being told.
Things are still tentatively scheduled to happen. They’re looking into other options and other contingency plans, but it sounds like it’s another situation where they’re even more tied into contractual stuff with the hotel.
So it could be disastrous if it didn’t happen for some reason, in terms of both ISAR and ISAR’s financial situation, as ISAR’s ability to contribute to future conferences, like the next United Astrology Conference, where talks are already starting to happen about having that take place in 2020 at some point. And if the ISAR conference completely fell through, it might essentially remove their ability to be a player in that conference.
Yeah, so I’m hoping the ISAR conference still happens to some extent. Although it’s interesting that if it was to happen in September, they’re talking about how to do a conference safely in this context, and
what safety looks like in terms of what you would have to put in place in order to do a conference safely and still make it fun and like it was normally.
KS: Yeah, it’s a tricky one because I know it’s a little further out. Some countries have announced travel restrictions. I think it’s going to be very hard for people to get into the States from outside the country at that time.
And most countries will potentially still be insisting on a quarantine period. So you that in and of itself could be prohibitive for people wanting to come into the US to attend that conference. I don’t envy them. They’re in such a tough position to try and make a decision around this.
CB: Yeah. I was thinking if they did do it in person, what do you require? What can you require? I’m thinking about 50-60 people being packed into a small lecture room. Remember some of the lecture rooms at UAC?
Do people need to wear masks? Is that something that’s optional? Is that something that should be required? Should everybody be wearing masks? Thinking about some of those logistical issues was starting to hurt my head in terms of what you would do in that instance, and obviously, they would have some really tough decisions to make there as well.
So we’ll check in again about that at some point in the future. But in the meantime, that’s where we’re currently at in terms of that news. Have you guys had any other news or things going on in the past month that you wanted to mention or talk about?
KS: We could talk about baking recipes maybe. I mean, this is what Zoom calls with everyone is like. “So what have you been up to?” “Just hanging out at home.”
AC: I actually have a point connected to the baking surge…
KS: The baking surge.
AC: …of April 2020. I was just thinking about that and a couple other things, and how it is not Uranus in Taurus which timed this epidemic–it was Mars-Saturn-Pluto, but maybe some Jupiter too. But you can see what has been happening and what will continue to happen sort of executing on all of Uranus in Taurus’ historical moves.
Big volatility and disruptions in food supply and in food production methods, so there’s that. There were disruptions around labor. Not only are a lot of people not going to work, but people are also rethinking work.
KS: Yeah.
AC: A lot of what were referred to as ‘shit’ jobs two months ago are now essential jobs, and you see what kind of work is actually necessary for a society to not fall apart and then.
CB: ‘Essential’.
AC: Right, and there’s some questionable choices being made there; lots of questionable choices being made these days. And then, also, on sort of a deeper level with Venus–not Venus in Taurus, Uranus in Taurus–questions of what is valuable right, what is actually valuable. What should we be prioritizing?
I think a lot of priorities and ideas about what’s valuable and necessary have been thrown into stark relief. A lot of people are reassessing what they thought was essential within their own lives even, and that’s all classic Uranus in Taurus stuff.
CB: Yeah, that’s great.
AC: I see that as a rider on all this.
CB: That was a great list. I just saw a story about Tyson Foods–announced in a story just in the past day–that the food supply chain was breaking down, and that’s a great Uranus in Taurus manifestation in terms of some things. Also, lots of people in industries that were only done in person suddenly find ways to do a variation of that industry online, in order to make money online and change to that, to speak to your point.
Yeah, that’s a lot of really interesting manifestations of Uranus in Taurus that are coming out in not some surprising ways, but ways they make a lot of sense right now.
AC: Yeah, this just occurred to me yesterday as I was going over what do I have to say on the podcast. And I think this is, in part, more obvious because we just had a New Moon in Taurus on top of Uranus, and so, it’s kind of right there.
But yeah, Kelly bringing up the baking surge made me think of it. Kate did some successful and some unsuccessful baking experiments, Uranus in Taurus baking experiments recently. There is a keto pizza crust recipe which had rave reviews and was in one of the greatest disappointments of our shared life.
KS: Oh, I’m so sorry to hear. We’ll have to trade.
AC: Yeah, it’s a real tragedy.
KS: We’re going to have to trade. I have some gf/df–gluten-free/dairy-free–pizza crusts recipes that would definitely qualify as keto. And the thing with baking is that people are making stuff from scratch, which I think is so Uranus in Taurus. People are trying to do sourdough starters at home, or baked goods, not from a box, but actually mixing the ingredients.
Peter and I do like to cook a lot, but there’s recipes that are a little bit more complicated that we had never previously attempted. One of the ones we’re so proud of is an Indian butter chicken dish. It has ghee in it, but other than that it doesn’t have cream. And it was amazing. Easier than we expected it to be. So things like that we normally wouldn’t make the time to do; totally correspond with the Uranus in Taurus rider.
AC: And what you were saying there about making things from scratch. Being inventive, innovative, original–these are all Uranus keywords–with very material, basic things.
KS: Yeah–flower, eggs.
AC: Not everybody who was born under the sign of Taurus is basic, but Taurus does connect us to a lot of basic or we could say fundamental things: What are you going to do about food? Where does the food come from?
KS: Yeah.
AC: If the restaurant will not make you the food you like, how are you going to get the food you like? So I love that, yeah.
CB: In terms of supplies breaking down, one of the things that’s interesting that I only noticed, just because I’m a podcaster and trying to do interviews this month, is you cannot get webcams and microphones that I’ve been trying to send out.
I’d normally just order on Amazon, and they’d be there in a few days. I can’t send them out to guests because everybody is now talking online, using Zoom in order to communicate or do their job or everything else. And all that stuff is just sold out, which is a really interesting thing that I only happened to notice as a podcaster.
But going back to your point, Austin…
AC: Actually…
CB: What? Go ahead.
AC: I just had one quick thing to add. I think that’s really interesting. Business as a whole is way down, but there are certain goods and there’s certain services that now are in massive demand, and that’s the Uranus in Taurus thing.
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s not like everything is sloped-down.
KS: No, it’s spiky.
AC: It’s volatile and spiky. One company is going to have three-times the profit that they expected, whereas five others are going to have one-third. Anyway, I just wanted to add that.
KS: No, the spiky is good. There’s a particular company in Canada that I get some of my natural health food products from, and for about a full-week period, they’re like, “We are only taking a certain amount of orders a day, because we’re overwhelmed right now, and we need time to get through our backlog.”
And I was like, “How can you not be taking orders?” But they were so overwhelmed that they just couldn’t keep up. Chris, sorry. I was just throwing out something about the spiking.
CB: Yeah, and there’s something I want to come back to later–when we get to the forecast that’s happening this month–about Jupiter station and conjunct Pluto and just the immense shifts in wealth and amounts of money that are shifting around right now that I think are very much connected with that conjunction in Jupiter-Pluto. Yeah, I definitely want to talk about it later.
But just going back a little bit and following up on some of the predictions and the statements we made in our last forecast that have been working out in interesting ways, as the Sun moved into Taurus and started to conjoin Uranus over the past week, I remember you, Austin, saying that you were expecting people to start getting a little stir-crazy by that point or something to that effect due to the lockdown.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And over the past week, we’ve really started to see not just that happen, but then, suddenly, this push, at least in the US, for a lessening of the restrictions and some of the arguments surrounding that.
AC: Yeah. I mean, we literally saw right around that New Moon, I don’t know, a dozen in-person protests about this all over the US.
KS: That’s right.
AC: It was very literal. Yeah, I think I said something about Uranus is very “give me freedom or give me death.” It stirs up that Mel Gibson, Braveheart energy. And so, you know with that Saturn squaring Uranus–which we’re going to get a lot of next year, but we’re getting a preview of now–seeing the Sun and Moon on top of Uranus, I just guessed that people would be fucking over it, or a noticeable amount of people would be fucking ready for something.
CB: Which was tricky because some of that was just astroturfed or was being manipulated by whoever was trying to push for opening up the economy again, in order to create artificial protest movements. But then, obviously, some of it, a lot of it, was genuine as well, in terms of after a month, a decent segment of the population wanting a lessening of the restrictions and the tension between those two polar opposites really manifesting around the time of that New Moon and Taurus that went exact on April 22.
AC: Yeah.
CB: There’s a little Washington Post story–just to give some objective evidence for that; the date was April 25–and it just says, “Reopening of America accelerates as states prepare to relax coronavirus restrictions.”
So what we’re seeing there is obviously not just the New Moon that took place on the 22nd–conjunct Uranus very closely, within 3 degrees–but also, we’re at the halfway point by then of Mars making its way through Aquarius and finally getting some distance.
By the 22nd, it was up to 15 degrees away from Saturn, and by May, as we’ll start talking about soon, Mars will finally leave Aquarius and move into Pisces in the middle of May, finally completing at least the sign-based conjunction or co-presence with Saturn, which so much of the lockdowns, at least in the US, have been centered around.
AC: Yeah. And the timeline we gave for when the hard quarantine phase would be over most places was when Mars left co-presence with Saturn in mid-May; and things appear to be, should we say, on their way to validating that prediction.
KS: One other quick recap from April. I think, Chris, you had picked April 18 as the election for that month, where we had those double-sextiles with Mercury-Venus and then Mercury-Mars.
CB: Leisa picked that.
KS: Leisa picked it, sorry. Yeah, you had shared that and that’s Leisa’s work; so definitely, let’s give Leisa the contribution there. But that was when that big ‘together at home’ concert, where a number of top musicians and artists around the world came together and performed. I think they were live-streaming on YouTube. I saw a performance that had Celine Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Lady Gaga, and John Legend, and I think there was a series over that weekend.
I just thought we had picked–well, Leisa had picked that weekend as the election, and we had talked about that being a weekend where there were a couple of decent aspects that month. We didn’t have the in-person gathering, but there was this sort of musical community coming together online.
CB: Yeah, that’s really cool.
AC: Mercury-Venus sextile is great for the arts.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I love when that happens. We pick out the elections each month, looking at, not just the best chart, but sometimes the most notable or dynamic chart for starting something, and then sometimes important events fall on that date just of their own accord.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Mm-hmm. Somebody either has an astrologer or good intuition.
KS: Yes.
CB: Sure. And I saw a tweet by Maren Altman–who’s a listener and a patron–the other day saying that she loves waiting for the release of our auspicious elections podcast each month, where we put out four of the best electional charts we can find for the next month.
She likes to see how the electional charts that she’s picking out each month stack up against the ones we’re picking out. And it’s always interesting seeing different astrologers comparing and contrasting what the best day they think for starting different things is in a given month. Sometimes you’ll end up with overlaps like that.
All right, let’s see. So other news before we get onto the forecast. I don’t know if you guys want to go into this. I was sick and not paying attention to anything for weeks and was off social media. I came back, and I was actually really shocked by the surge in crazy…
AC: It’s been a madhouse.
CB: …conspiracy theories. I mean, I realize that there’s just news and lots of stuff happening each day, but glancing at Facebook was a shock because there was just a lot of crazy stuff. I should be clear that I’m talking about, not mainstream conspiracy theories, but more like extreme, wacky stuff about 5G being the cause of the coronavirus, and Bill Gates trying to enslave humanity, and all sorts of weird stuff that was going on.
And I don’t know if we get greater exposure to it because we’re in the astrological community, which has more alternative-type views, or if this is just something going around in general. But it was a very weird experience for me to come back from not paying attention to what was going on very much, and then, all of a sudden seeing that.
AC: So a couple things on that. I’ve been thinking about what’s been happening in the world, like literally, all of us, and one of the things I came to–and this came about through a discussion with my patrons that I did four or five days ago–was that there is a great hunger to figure out what the story is right now.
This set of events broke a lot of what people thought the story was. It’s like, “Oh, we’re doing this, and society’s doing this, and we’re going in this direction,” and the events of the last two months have blatantly invalidated a lot of the timelines people had.
The stories are not primarily entertainment; they are literally how we set expectations and think about ourselves in the context of the world. Anytime you connect multiple events in a sequence where there are conscious beings involved, it’s a story.
One story is the Sun rises in the morning. If that story got disrupted, it would fuck up not only my expectations about the day, but it would also mess with all of the other stories that little unit plays a role in.
And so, I see people, and myself as well, just like, “So what is going on?” There is a simple thing like, “Oh, there’s a plague going on,” but there’s a ton of other shit happening. Trying to figure out what the shape of that is, what it means, what it means for all these different people and different layers and all of that, that is not simply a thing that we’re curious about.
This is a giant, and in many ways, dangerous thing on a lot of different levels, whether we’re talking about physical danger from the disease or the danger of our societies getting reshaped in a way that is very much for the worse.
We have highly suspicious things, like the movement of trillions of dollars, like you were saying, Chris, with the Jupiter-Pluto. Boy is there a lot of money moving around. And so, you add that to everybody’s trapped on the internet for a month, and you get all kinds of stories.
CB: Right. As a Scorpio, I was telling Nina in the last episode that I just recorded–I’ll actually release it before this one. We did a whole discussion on the birth chart of the United States. It’s actually going to be a really great episode; I’m excited to release it probably today or tomorrow.
But towards the end of it, we started talking about what were the actual documented times that could have been the birth chart of the United States, that were plausible times based on whatever historical primary evidence we have versus some of the weird charts, like the Gemini rising chart for the United States set for 2:00 AM.
Basically, it requires some weird Freemason or occult-type conspiracy in order for that to even be plausible. It doesn’t really make sense and probably isn’t plausible, because the Founders of the country probably were not up at 2:00 AM doing some sort of weird magical thing in order to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Anyway, the point that I made towards the end of that is I’m often torn, as a Scorpio stellium, as somebody who, on the one hand, is open to and interested in those occasional instances in history where you see occult or divinatory topics being used by people in power in weird ways that have actually been documented–like Reagan using an astrologer, or Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, being found with like a Jupiter talisman when he died, for example.
But then there’s also just a lot of other instances where that stuff gets overapplied, and the Scorpio function of people to dig in deep and find the truth, or find the hidden truth underlying things sometimes goes berserk or malfunctions, and people do that too much.
They try to find or uncover, or sometimes invent a more elaborate conspiracy than what’s actually happening, where things are often much more simple and much more straightforward than you want to believe or than you realize. That was a little bit of what I was feeling.
AC: I will just say Ben Franklin wrote an astrologically-timed almanac. So there were people…
CB: Well, no, we actually talked about that in that episode.
AC: …who had the idea of timing.
CB: That’s a misapprehension, because Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical thing where he attacked astrologers. And he’s sometimes mistakenly believed to have been an astrologer in modern times, but that’s because there’s Facebook memes that circulate of him saying something positive about astrology.
But, in fact, if you read the full context, he was actually a mocking other almanac-makers who actually believed in it. So that’s one of those conspiracy things where sometimes people have a perception or believe that the Founding Fathers were definitely into astrology, but we don’t have as much evidence for that as it would be nice to have, ideally, as an astrologer, myself.
AC: Okay. I didn’t get that off Facebook, but I’d be interested to listen to the episode. I don’t really like the 2:00 AM time anyway. I’m a little ride-or-die with the Sag rising chart.
CB: The Sibly chart?
AC: It just works so well.
CB: Do you guys have strong opinions about the birth chart of the US?
KS: I probably don’t have as strong an opinion as you guys.
AC: I actually don’t. I think that, one, it’s a nation. Nations are different from human babies, and you can have multiple charts applying and being useful for different purposes for a nation in a way that’s not true as for a human baby. What I have found is that the Sag rising chart for the US is tremendously descriptive and also has a lot of predictive value.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Which isn’t to say that no other chart can, but I have been convinced of its efficacy over the years.
CB: Sure.
KS: That’s a beautiful point, Austin, what you were saying about countries are a little bit different to people. In Australia, we have a similar thing where there’s two commonly-used charts–one of them is the first settlement landing of Captain James Cook in 1788, which my dear friend and now deceased colleague, Ed Tamplin, was a big proponent of.
But there’s also the federation chart of January 1901, when Australia achieved a level of independence, defining it as its own nation under the British crown; but in a way, that was more self-governing.
And that 1901 chart works very well when you’re doing timing for Australia in modern context, if you like. It was the founding of the government rather than founding of the land by white settlement, if you like. So that idea of different charts, yeah, it’s very interesting.
CB: Yeah, and just the debate over them and sometimes astrologers coming to different conclusions based on what their preferred chart is that seems to work better in their opinion, based on whatever interpretation or timing they’ve done.
Anyway, you guys should check out that episode. It’s a good episode. My entire point though with this little segment, one of the things I wanted to say is that becoming an astrologer doesn’t mean that you have to leave your critical thinking at the door.
And I think that’s kind of important, and it’s something I want to remind people about in this age, where a lot of crazy conspiracy theories are going around. It doesn’t necessarily mean you subscribe to some of those things or have to just because you’re into what other people might classify as New Age-y or alternative or other type of thinking when it comes to astrology.
I think that’s something I’ve always tried to do here on the podcast, not by experience, but leading by example, in terms of trying to put in research and have good reasons, and not just pull stuff out of thin air, even when you’re talking about a subject that’s often treated less seriously in the world in general, such as astrology.
So that’s my little soapbox for that. I think that’s it in terms of major topics that we covered. I also did the Alan White lecture. Kelly, you never had the opportunity…
KS: I did not.
CB: …to meet Alan White, sadly. Austin, you did. Do you have any major memories or recollections worth sharing?
AC: Oh, let’s see. You know what was great about you putting out the Alan White episode? I just taught a 15-minute, Alan White thing in my year-one class. I believe. Yeah, it was in my year-one class, like the day before.
And so, I was telling people about Alan White and then you came out with that. It was beautifully-timed.
KS: I love it.
AC: Let’s see. I don’t even remember what bit it was–the ‘septiles and reptiles and flooring tiles’ bit went over quite well.
CB: Right. It was one of his classic lines. He would be dismissive of modern astrologers using a bunch of minor aspects. He would say, “Everybody’s using septiles and reptiles and ceiling tiles these days.”
KS: Oh, my god, that’s brilliant. I haven’t had a chance to watch that episode yet, but I look forward to it.
AC: And his cadence made it even better.
CB: Yeah.
AC: He had this, you know, “Reptiles and ceiling tiles.” And it wasn’t Pluto, it was “Pluto.”
KS: I love it.
AC: He had this sort of drill instructor quality.
CB: Yeah, like the guy from Full Metal Jacket. And Libra, he said “Lib-ra.” I always loved his pronunciation of Libra. So yeah, I’m glad I finally released that. I was a little nervous. I recorded a long intro, because I was not trying to get flamed by my audience for any gruff or harsh comments that he made, since I might make them differently or maybe not that strongly.
But I hope I didn’t go too far in saying too much stuff like that, because I wanted to still give him credit and honor his memory by putting that lecture out. So that was the other thing and the only other episode I’ve done this month.
I basically did a bunch in the past week with Becca Tarnas, once I started getting better and started being able to record episodes again, and we focused a lot, in the later part of the episode, on the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which obviously is something we talked about extensively in the last episode.
But one of the things that was cool that we did towards the end of it–that I hope people stuck around the entire time for–was focusing on how if this is the conjunction that we’re going through right now, and this is setting the stage for the next 30 to 40 years, then what dates exactly are the next hard aspects which will be extensions of that cycle?
If we’re setting the seeds of the foundation for the next 30 or 40 years now, either geopolitically or otherwise, when is the waxing square, when Saturn squares Pluto? When is the next opposition between Saturn and Pluto, halfway through the cycle? And when, eventually, is the waning square and the next following conjunction that closes down and completes the cycle?
Identifying some of those dates and how far in the future some of it is was really interesting to me, in terms of thinking of the long-term projections for this, in terms of us seeing the opening of a chapter that’s going to last for a very long time in world history, in the same way that the conjunction in the 1910s opened up a period of world history that didn’t end until just after World War 2 was over. But you could see everything that started at the beginning of that conjunction, around the opening of World War 1, set up the history for everything they would occur over the course of the next 30 years.
So that’s something that was a lot of fun and was interesting. Have you looked at the future cycles or long-term planetary alignments?
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s something I spend time with. I haven’t looked a lot at the quartering of the Saturn-Pluto cycle forward, from here. I’ve been more interested in thinking about the next 20 years of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle as not exactly bite-sized. Two decades is not bite-sized at all, but it’s less.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And also, just the next 10 years, it has a lot of astrology.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s more approachable too.
AC: There’s a lot to remark on.
CB: The further you get into history, obviously, the more difficult it becomes to predict, because you get further and further away from the context and the trajectories that you currently know; so certainly, focusing on the next 10 to 20 years is more manageable than 40-50 years out.
AC: Yeah. And sometimes, for example, with Saturn-Pluto or Uranus-Pluto as well, what the conjunctions and oppositions mark is usually some crazy shit that traumatizes the world and changes everything for the next 10 or 20 years.
And so, you can know that something like that might be due at a given time. You know that something of that nature happens, and you don’t know what it is, but you do know that whatever timelines and event structures you can project up to that point will be disrupted and then will go in a different direction.
CB: Right. One of the things I didn’t realize that was really solid when we were talking about the previous Saturn-Pluto conjunctions of the 20th century, the one that started with World War 1 was really on the nose and was really close, within a year of starting World War 1, or within a few months. Then the one that happened just after World War 2, when the Cold War was really getting started, was pretty on the nose, and it was pretty close.
The one in 1981, people often treat as, “Well, nothing major happened during that time.” But one of the things that was really interesting is that 1981 was really the year that the AIDS epidemic became a full-blown thing and was fully classified and discussed and eventually announced by the World Health
Organization at that time.
And I think the parallel with this current conjunction is really interesting, where very close to this current conjunction, we have a new health pandemic that gets officially recognized around the same time as well.
AC: Mm-hmm. And the previous two both had big disease things as well. It was polio…
KS: Polio.
AC: …in the late ‘40s.
KS: The Leo one.
AC: And what later was called the Spanish flu didn’t come from Spain. It actually developed in the horrid health conditions of the trenches in World War 1, so we have big disease for all of those. The Saturn-Pluto in Libra, it’s Saturn in its graceful exaltation.
And so, a lot of these are big power moves, because Saturn-Pluto is always big power moves. The big power move then was, how should we say, the corporatization of culture, which is culture and governmental structure, etc., which has become normal in the United States. That’s when all of that started.
There are a whole lot of things that are just kind of normal now in our hyper-capitalism/late capitalism, whatever you want to call it, and all of that was getting going during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, in the early ‘80s.
CB: Sure. And it’s even just interesting with AIDS in 1981, and the sign that it took place in being Libra, and just the effect that that had on relationships and sexual relationships and everything else. I’ve heard some older people talk of there being a 10-or-20-year period between the advent of birth control in the ‘60s and ‘70s versus the extreme change that suddenly happened then in the ‘80s, when a sexual relationship with somebody could be a life sentence or could result in the death.
KS: It could be a death sentence, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: There were consequences to irresponsible sexual behavior before, but they did not use to include death.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure. So it’s interesting, I don’t know, just thinking about the sign placements, because that’s something that’s not focused on, for example, in Tarnas’ approach, who probably has the best approach to treating outer planet cycles. And it’s the approach where everybody is rereading Cosmos and Psyche right now. I know there’s some younger astrologers doing a book club on Cosmos and Psyche this month on Twitter, which I definitely encourage everybody to read and join. I’ll see if I can put a link to that.
And I may re-release my old episode that I did with Richard Tarnas on the 10th anniversary of the release of Cosmos and Psyche I did back in 2006. I don’t have a video version, but I’ll try to create a video version this month to release on YouTube.
He focuses primarily on more of that Keplerian approach to astrology that’s aspect-based and based on planetary cycles and doesn’t focus on the signs of the zodiac as much. But it’s interesting comparing–if the AIDS epidemic was a Pluto-Saturn conjunction in Libra–what the contrast is with the Pluto-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn and what we’re seeing now.
AC: Yeah. Well, to begin, the nature of what happened during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn is not sufficiently clear yet; we’re going to need a little bit of distance.
CB: Sure.
AC: But with Saturn being in its home sign, it’s just blatantly Saturnian. It’s plague. It’s control. It’s big money. Read it negative Capricorn things out of any book and it’s kind of where we’re at. Thinking about the signs, the one that happened in the late ‘40s, following World War 2, was in Leo.
KS: Yeah
AC: The containing/boundary thing that happened there was the modern boundaries for a hundred different countries were set then.
KS: Yeah.
AC: All of these borders happened. A lot of countries were rearranged then. And so, we have the Sun, we have Leo. What is the exact space over which this country is sovereign?
KS: Yes.
AC: Where does that end?
KB: Yeah, I forgot that many of our Pluto in Leo friends have that Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Leo from the 1940s.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
AC: My Mom has that.
KS: Yeah, my Papa, the same.
CB: Yeah, between 1946-47 and 1949-ish.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right. What were you going to say, Kelly?
KS: I’m just thinking about so many things. You guys are just sharing such a really deep, rich material. The Saturn-Pluto now, Austin, your point around Capricorn and the really negative Capricorn things, Pluto is sort of intensifying and creating this extreme quality to money and power, but big money and big power, like government control or the power that a company has because they’re just bigger, or they have more money than anyone else; so there’s this real concentration there.
When supply chains were starting to be disrupted–in February and March, and then through April–certain bigger companies were able to grab market share because certain smaller companies maybe couldn’t meet demand or keep up.
There’s just been this real rearrangement with money and power that it will take some time, as you said. We need a bit of distance to actually see what has gone on with these new alliances or new concentrations of power and control having been formed.
AC: Yeah. It rearranges the chessboard or the game board significantly. And so, just on an anecdotal level, I’ve gone out and the big-box store/national chain is open, but the small businesses are closed, which has upsetting implications if that carries forward.
KS: Yes.
AC: We don’t need more monoculture. We need more small businesses.
KS: Yeah.
CB: The keyword that I came up with in my episode with Becca, when we were talking about Saturn and Pluto cycles, was ‘stress testing’. In the world in general or in the economy, if there’s cracks in it, where the foundations or some part of it is unstable, what happens when you put an extreme amount of pressure on that area?
Does it hold up and does it survive that period of an extreme amount of pressure, or are the cracks serious enough that it actually reaches the breaking point and falls? And this being that period where there are cracks in society, then this ‘stress test’ becomes the point where it becomes unstable and not sustainable.
AC: You probably can’t see it, but I literally wrote down and circled ‘pressure testing/pressure tests’ for things I wanted to talk about.
CB: Okay.
AC: I have a little point about that that I’d like to make. But, Kelly, please feel free to go first.
KS: I mean, I was just going to say it’s sort of these weird extremes of the big is getting bigger, but some of the smaller companies or organizations, almost at a micro level, are able to pivot and move a little bit more quickly. There’s something really weird about being on either end of the spectrum and that being a way of managing, but the people in the middle that aren’t super-big aren’t small enough to change quickly, or organizations.
And then the second point is about the pressure testing and the stress testing. Something like this really reveals the weaknesses in social structures and government protections or lack thereof. Something that I think is being revealed is what is happening to the undersupported and the marginalized, for instance. It’s devastating and hopefully it can be revelatory and change-inducing.
CB: Right. You have so many people living paycheck to paycheck. What happens if the economy is shut down and everybody can’t go to work?
KS: And all of the sudden, you have no notice and no paycheck.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. I would say it’s revelatory, whether that’s good or bad…
KS: That’s exactly it.
AC: …in the original sense of revealing or the sheet getting pulled back. So one really useful way of thinking about how things respond to big pressure and big stress comes out of the work of Nassim Taleb, who I would strongly suggest exploring. He’s the person who popularized–he pulled it from Roman literature–and basically coined the ‘Black Swan’ term, and did an excellent job of predicting the last economic downturn.
And one of the things to think about is just in relationship to how things respond to stress. Are they fragile, where they can’t tolerate much pressure? Are they robust, where they kind of remain the same regardless of how much pressure is around, or are they antifragile? Do they actually gain from being stressed?
He gave as an example, there are certain qualities of the human body, such as muscles, that actually gain from being very strongly challenged.
KS: Yeah.
AC: There are other things, like this mason jar, that do not gain from being challenged at all; it’s fragile. And so, it’s just a quick, 1-2-3-category way of thinking about how something responds to stress. Is this part of my life fragile, robust, or antifragile? Is this business fragile, robust, or antifragile? And he’s got a bunch of lectures on YouTube and a bunch of very good, but very dense books.
KS: Yeah, on your recommendation, I’ve been following him on Twitter, and he is incredibly thought-provoking and clear. I can see why you like him, and I love that you’ve pointed me towards him. So that’s a great tip to share with everyone.
AC: He’s also not afraid to–I believe they call it ‘shit post’ on Twitter about abstruse, mathematical probability calculations.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Good times. All right, guys, shall we transition into talking about the month of May?
AC: Sure.
KS: Yeah, let’s do it.
CB: All right, that was fun. We’ve reverted back to our old format that we did for many years of catching up and talking about all of our stuff, as we would do if we were just three astrologers sitting around in person regularly, but we only get to do this once a month.
Hopefully, at some point, once things calm down, and there’s less important, pressing stuff to catch up on, we’ll revert back to the old format of doing the forecast first. But now that we’re 1-hour-and-11-minutes into this, why don’t we jump into it.
AC: That’s the plan.
CB: That’s the plan. All right, let me share the chart first, for those watching the video version. So this is our artwork for the month, made by our friend from Brazil, Paula Belluomini, who’s an astrologer. And this chart is actually from our yearly calendar, which shows where the planets will start in the signs of the zodiac at the beginning of the month and where they will end up by the end of the month. It sort of shows you how fast or how slow in many instances some of the planets are going this month and what signs they’ll be moving through.
The other chart, of course, is from our planetary alignments calendar, which just shows primarily the conjunctions and the lunations and the planetary stations and ingresses during the course of the month of May; so there’s a decent amount of stuff.
There’s a lot of stuff going on this month. Most of its really concentrated to, what do we call it, the second week basically, with the second full week, which is between May 10 and May 16, where we have Saturn stationing retrograde in Aquarius, Mars finally departing from Aquarius and moving into Pisces, thus completing the full Saturn-Mars conjunction, Venus stationing retrograde in Gemini, and Jupiter stationing retrograde conjunct Pluto in Capricorn.
So it is a relatively packed month, but it’s kind of weird because it’s all concentrated; at least the major stuff is really concentrated over that second full week of the month.
AC: Yeah, it’s very Part 1 and Part 2. There’s before that week and then after that week.
KS: Yeah. There’s a lot that goes down in a few days, in the middle of the month.
CB: Yeah. I mean, we’ve all been looking forward to this period. The two primary things you mentioned, Austin, when we were preparing for this were the Venus retrograde and then the Mars-Saturn conjunction finally wrapping up; and those are the two big signatures that we’ve been looking forward to and identified in the yearly forecast, but also, in last month’s forecast.
We were kind of expecting the Mars-Saturn conjunction and the cessation of that to coincide perhaps with some of the lessening of the restrictions that have been happening with the quarantine. We weren’t sure if that was one of the main signatures with what was going on with the coronavirus and some of the things that were peaking in general. But it’s interesting how things are lining up so far here, at the end of April, with some of that, at least in terms of the restrictions and Mars getting ready to depart from Aquarius in just a couple weeks now.
AC: Yeah. I think it’s going to end up timing it really well.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
AC: I’m…
KS: Sorry.
AC: Go ahead, Kelly.
CB: I guess the only question that we don’t know that I’m nervous about is the releasing of the restrictions–which seems like a breath of fresh air–and some concerns about whether there will be a second spike or a second peak of people getting infected with a coronavirus and then what happens at that point.
I don’t if we can call that, but it’s just interesting that the Mars-Saturn conjunction is lessening at that point, and then what comes next after that as we head into the summer.
AC: And we know what comes at the end of the June–whatever it is, it’s not good. It might be economic, it might be medical, it might be both, but we do know that there are a lot of very difficult configurations at the end of June and early July.
CB: Right.
AC: So as far as that, that’s what’s next.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That’s what’s after what we get to at the end of May.
CB: We move into the period of the interim between the most tense parts of the year and the second, aside from this whole pile-up of planets in Capricorn and the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which has been taking place over the past couple of months, that we focused on in the yearly forecast.
The other part of the year that we really focused on as being the most tense part of the year I think you said starts in June-July, when Mars moves into Aries, and we get the ramping up to the Mars retrograde in Aries that is square to the Capricorn planets.
AC: Yeah, that’ll be fun. That’s September.
KS: Yeah, we’ll have a good time.
AC: I would say I, with the ISAR conference being originally scheduled during that very difficult piece of astrology, just that timing, to me, as an astrologer, I’m like, yeah, probably not going to happen. Hopefully, everything’s great and it does work out. It’s not a wish; it is a suspicion.
CB: Yeah. I was not going to mention that. I know even before all of this last year, we had all agreed that that was not the finest piece of electional astrology, putting the opening of the conference right on the day that Mars is stationing retrograde in Aries square Saturn and Pluto and Jupiter and everything else. I don’t know. Let’s hope for the best, and we’ll see what happens.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
AC: So doom properly placed at various points in the year, but I really like the second-half of this month. I think the first part of the Venus retrograde, where Venus is square Neptune, is going to be fun. There may be some positive expectations set which are not met later, but as far as a ‘take it day-by-day’, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.
I think people are going to go nuts doing all of the social things and going to the beach things and all that. Neptune doesn’t help Venus find true or lasting pleasures, but Neptune can help Venus find pleasures.
CB: Some positive expectations that are not met later. What a euphemism you’re using here for Venus. You’re being very gentle about this Venus stationing retrograde square Neptune.
KS: I’m like who are you, and what have you done without Austin?
CB: Right.
AC: I’m just trying to use structural language.
CB: Okay. You don’t have a ‘meat grinder-like’ analogy for Venus square Neptune?
AC: No, I don’t think it’s a meat grinder.
KS: Oh, no, no, no.
CB: A similarly poetic turn of phrase for this configuration?
AC: It might be like being abducted by the Fae, where you’re taken off to a fantasy realm for a while. And it’s really interesting, and there are a lot of experiences that are kind of magical, and then you wake up in a cornfield and your wallet’s missing.
CB: Your wallet–hopefully, not your liver.
KS: That’s beautiful.
AC: Or your dignity.
KS: Or your dignity. There’s going to be a lot of overindulgence in things, whether it’s seeing people, shopping, spending money. It just feels like some of the pretty, shiny things that have been inaccessible for people, they’re going to not have boundaries about that.
AC: Right. Neptune is very anti-boundary.
KS: Yeah. I’m going to have all the things because I had no things for two or three months.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It was really interesting how March’s events made what the Venus retrograde was going to be about so much more clear. It’s like, well, yeah, of course there’s going to be excessive and not necessarily responsible relating and spending, or not necessarily, let’s say, not necessarily farsighted; there’s some short-term, pleasure-based decisions.
I think that the North Node/Rahu’s ingress into Gemini and sharing that space with Venus is in and of itself a rather lustful and debaucherous influence; and then with Neptune as well for the first part, you’re going to have a lot of that. But I like that a lot better than June’s part of the Venus retrograde, where Venus is tightly square Mars, which is much more contentious and a lot less partying with the Fae.
KS: Yeah. I like that acknowledgment of the North Node coming into Gemini, Austin. The Nodes change signs on May 5–North Node into Gemini, South Node into Sag–and that’s really going to amplify that Venus ‘hunger’, whether it’s connection or pleasure or indulgence.
We have two Venus square Neptune aspects this month–one around May 3, before Venus goes retrograde, and a second later in the month around the 20th, after Venus has gone retrograde. And Venus is really just squaring Neptune through that whole period; she doesn’t move much by a degree there, so there really is that feeling of a hunger.
And with Neptune, you can’t be satisfied, and you don’t actually know what you really want, so you just take in, or you say yes to many things, hoping one of them will satisfy you or quell the craving, quench the thirst. But it’s hard to find that real sense of, “Oh, this was this was really worth waiting for.”
CB: Yeah. It’s such an overly-idealistic aspect putting Venus and Neptune together, especially in the hard aspects–over-idealizing something, especially something that you haven’t attained yet and thinking that it’s really great, and then once you have it that feeling a disillusionment that sometimes sets in when the reality eventually sets in.
And I’m not sure if we already see the reality this month, or if a large part of this month, in the second-half–with Venus stationing retrograde there, so close to conjunct Neptune–is still just the honeymoon phase or the disillusionment phase.
AC: Let me speak on behalf of Venus-Neptune. I would say that if you expect to be able to keep a lot of the experiences that that gives you, it’s not going to be good. But if you go into experiences to have experiences and don’t expect to be able to have a solid whatever at the end of it, it’s fine; it could actually be fun. It’s good for pleasure, but it’s not good for lasting gain.
And I think people should be careful setting expectations around Venusian topics during that period, because it will be very hard to see where things are going to end up. If you don’t marry yourself to, “Oh, well, we had this experience,” or “I’m going to go do this and it has to be this at the end of the day,” if you expect in two months to be able to look back at it and be like, “Yeah, it’s still there and it’s exactly what I thought,” there’s a much higher chance of disappointment. But if you’re just doing stuff to do stuff, that’s very good; Venus-Neptune is fun.
Also worth pointing out, Neptune here is in the sign of Venus’s exaltation. So what fantasies Neptune can produce will be pleasing to the Venusian nature.
KS: That’s a beautiful point. So there’s these periods of maybe being able to relax and let go or be at ease, even if it’s not sustainable or long-lasting, but certainly, in the moment, having that release of tension.
AC: Yeah. And I imagine the stock market and economic predictions will probably follow that. “Oh, everything’s fine, everything’s great. We’ve got all this money. Everything’s going to be great. All the stocks will soar. It’s going to be fine.”
Those are predictions about the future based on a delusional moment, or a moment with strong illusory potential, so those kinds of things will almost certainly be wrong. But if you just want to go hang out and get drunk and whatever, and not expect much to come out of it except for that, then you’ll probably be in good shape.
KS: Yeah. One of the things I thought of with that Venus-Neptune vibe throughout May was this uncertainty about exactly what you can and can’t do and when. So Belgium’s not every country–every country is doing this differently–but I’m hearing information from New Zealand and Australia as well, and there’s sort of this staggered roll-out to do with reopening. “We think we’re going to have this happen on this date, and then a week or two later, these other things will happen. But we’re not giving you all the detail, and we’re reserving the right to change our mind right up until the last minute.”
So there’s this hopefulness of Venus-Neptune. Maybe we can get together, maybe we can do this, but never really knowing until the last moment whether it’s actually going to happen or whether you’re going to have that letdown or disappointment, which unfortunately is a side effect of Neptune, because things aren’t quite what we hope them to be.
CB: That’s a great point, Kelly. So maybe one of our keywords for Venus retrograde here is ‘the restructuring of social norms’, as people emerge from the Mars-Saturn conjunction and the quarantine, and the question of what does society look like at this point, what’s appropriate socially, or how do we structure society in a post-COVID situation for the second-half of the year.
KS: Yeah, and how much do we wear masks.
AC: Yeah, and inhabiting that ambivalence. I don’t know what the fuck’s happening to the world. Let’s take these pills.
KS: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think about too, just as another topic here, is given my husband’s role in the education industry, there’s a lot of discussion now. Every country has different school years; kids are in school at different times of the year.
And one of the big topics is, are the kids going back to school? Under what circumstances? How will that be structured? Can we manage social-distancing when we have a group of five-year-old or six-year-old kids in a classroom?
Venus being in Gemini, there’s a bit of a theme there; also being aware Mercury’s going into Gemini this month. What does school look like? What does education look like? The young children, how are their lives going to be structured with this going forward as well?
CB: Sure. Yeah, that was really good.
AC: They’ve been pretty weird. A good friend of mine has a good-sized family.
KS: A tribe of kids.
AC: Yeah, it’s been very Saturn-Mars-Pluto. So they’re doing school remotely, but the school was asking him to videotape his children doing the Pledge of Allegiance and send that to the teacher, because that was required, which was utterly bizarre.
Now that’s pretty Saturn-Pluto. I hope that that’s not a national policy, that that is an eccentricity of that particular school. But we were just catching up, and he’s like, “Yeah, let me tell you about what’s been going on with the kids’ school. I’ve been having to videotape them.” That’s the Saturn-Mars-Pluto and we’re moving away from that for a while.
CB: Right. I feel like it’s going to be connected with all of this and get set up immediately with that Venus station. So here, just looking at the animated chart, for those watching the video version, starting in late April, we can see Mars starts out at 20 Aquarius and Venus starts out at 18 Gemini; and Venus is slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde and Mars is headed towards the end of Aquarius.
And then what happens is weird because it’s almost simultaneous, but Venus slows down and it stations retrograde right there at 21 Gemini; but then pretty much within the same day, Mars switches signs and moves into Pisces.
Why that’s relevant is because of that weird Neptune signature that’s tied in with it. It means that the square with Venus and Neptune then is really heightened and is really activated at that point. So that Neptunian aspect of things and that social aspect of Venus is really heightened at that point, starting in the middle of May.
But then that means that it’s also setting off the very beginning of and the build-up to that conjunction between Mars and Neptune then, which will eventually take place later. And the contrast between completely opposite or opposing significators hitting Neptune and how that manifests–Venus-Neptune can sometimes be a bit more pleasant than a Mars-Neptune conjunction, especially in the different ways that it can manifest.
Anyway, it starts at that point, Venus completes a second exact square with Neptune around May 20, which is actually right around the time of the New Moon, which takes place on the 22nd. But then Mars makes its way towards Neptune and then eventually conjoins it, and the Moon actually catches up at the same time at 20 degrees of Pisces, around June 12.
So this is taking us a little far into the future as we start to get into things in June, but I think that’s going to be relevant, in terms of whatever happens in the middle of May initiates a period where we’re not going to see the full results of that until the middle of June. But it’s almost like there’s something happening that’s seemingly positive in the middle of May, but then it has a negative or a downside that comes out by the middle of June.
AC: Yeah, I see the same thing; I’m timing it a little bit differently. I’m more concerned with Venus and Mars’ exact square. That really takes us from Venus right in that square with Neptune, which is a mellow, if, potentially, illusory vibe, to Venus square Mars while Venus is retrograde, and with Mars in the superior position. That puts a lot of antisocial fire into whatever fun was happening.
CB: Right. It looks like that square happens halfway through the Venus retrograde, when Venus conjoins the Sun at 13 Gemini, on June 3. And both of them are basically squaring Mars right around that point, around June 1-2-3.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good point. The Sun’s doing that as well. Yeah, that’s martial.
KS: There’s some friction there, some tension.
AC: Yeah. The story will pivot there.
CB: Yeah. It looks like that’s also the Full Moon or very close to the Full Moon of June 5.
KS: Which is an eclipse, possibly. It’s on the borderline.
AC: That’s one of those, “I guess it’s an eclipse,” but it pales in comparison to the one that comes two weeks later.
KS: Yes, that’s true. That’s the one to watch. So for May then, there’s a sense of hope that maybe you can enjoy a few things, but enjoy them because they’re not going to be around forever. This may not be a permanent state of pleasantness, but enjoy the passing phase where and when you can. Is this to summarize?
CB: I guess. I don’t want to be too much of a downer, but Venus and Neptune, sometimes its most extreme manifestation is ‘false hope’; and I feel like that’s one of the keywords we’re dancing here. Obviously, that’s not going to be the same for everybody, but the illusory nature of Neptune is such that the optimism of Venus sometimes is, not misconstrued, but misapplied sometimes in very extreme ways.
And that’s not always the case. Certainly, there will be more moderate or light manifestations of that that are even positive or good.
KS: Well, one thing to add in that I’ve been mulling over is the changing quality to Venus in Gemini based on what Mercury is doing.
AC: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. thank you.
KS: Yeah, he’s moving a fair bit. We’re going to have the first part of May with Venus in Gemini and Mercury in Taurus. Then we get a couple of weeks, in the middle to the second part of the month, where Mercury’s in Gemini too; and then at the end of the month, Mercury goes into Cancer, which is the start of its own retro cycle, which is something different altogether.
But I do wonder about something enjoyable. Technically, the theory says that Mercury in Gemini is going to help Venus in Gemini out in some capacity.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I also think that it’s another factor that points to a burst of manic activity.
KS: Huge. I mean, and May 11 is the start of reopening things in the countries that are managing or ready to take those steps. The frantic thing I think is going to be really key; there’s so much information. Can we do this? Can we not do that? It’s going to be a lot of mental buzz.
AC: Right. A lot of the commerce as well.
KS: Yes.
CB: Speaking of Mercury, that was one of the things I noticed when I was looking at the lunations this month, which is that there’s a New Moon that takes place at 2 degrees of Gemini, around the 22nd. But what’s weird is that it’s also around the time when Mercury, which is moving direct through Gemini and is moving very quickly, catches up with and conjoins Venus; and it does so at 20 degrees of Gemini…
KS: Square Neptune.
CB: …square Neptune. So it means that once those two significators and once the domicile lord of Venus in Gemini actually catches up with it, it happens to do so at that same, problematic and illusory degree, which happens to be exactly square Neptune, which just makes me nervous.
It kind of brings me back to that last Mercury retrograde we had in Pisces, where so much of it seemed like it ended up having to do with either false information or misinformation going around or being put out about the pandemic that was just growing at that point and was getting serious.
That was the point where more active measures could have been taken in some of the Western countries to deal with it, but instead, we were dealing with it being downplayed or saying it’s not going to be a big deal or what have you, until Mercury stationed direct and some of that false information sort of went away like mist and suddenly dissipated. And then, suddenly, the reality of the situation was right in front of everybody, and everybody had to start dealing with it at that point.
AC: Mm-hmm. In statistical models that were happening at the beginning of March, some things have been massively revised upwards, some have been massively revised downwards. When we look at how the statistics were being interpreted by leading medical institutions, vastly different by the middle of April relative to the beginning of March. That whole Mercury-Neptune–everything looks different, both the mainstream, as well as everything else.
CB: Sure, even with some of the things with the projections. One of the things I want to say is just that, in the US, 55,000 people have still died, and that was with the entire country being closed up and grinding to a halt and the entire economy almost stopping. That was the best-case scenario. With all that still happening when it did, we still lost 55,000 people.
And so, some of the higher projections, obviously, not the highest projections, but I just imagine if the economy hadn’t stopped or if those orders hadn’t been put in place, we would be talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths just over the course of a month. I mean, that’s the craziest part of that 55,000. We’re talking about most of that taking place in the span of four weeks’ time, which is just insane to think about.
KS: The numbers are huge, and the numbers aren’t accurate yet.
CB: Yeah. I mean, if anything, the numbers are probably underreported to the extent that the testing isn’t as widely available as it could be or should be.
AC: Right, so back to May, if you guys don’t mind.
KS: Mercury in Gemini.
AC: This is a better position for Mercury to tangle with Neptune from. Mercury was tangling with Neptune in February and March, from the position of its own fall and detriment.
KS: Yeah.
AC: So it’s already in a place where it had minimal ability to sort things out, and it was also sharing that space with Neptune, which is absolutely Mercury ‘kryptonite’. Now we do have an entanglement between Mercury and Neptune again, here at the end of May, but the two are not in the same sign, which helps a little bit. And Mercury is in a very fit position. Mercury is in a position where it’s very strong.
To a certain degree, Mercury is always trying to solve Neptune, and Neptune is trying to ‘dis-solve’ Mercury. The last tangle they had, Mercury was super outgunned. In this next entanglement, Mercury is much better armed. And so, if we’re looking at it in terms of trying to solve or make sense of a giant, amorphous, powerful thing, Mercury is in position to do a much better job this time than last time. Does that make sense?
KS: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that, Austin. I do agree that Mercury is dealing with Neptune, but it’s a very different kind of Mercury. It’s like a qualitatively-different creature this time around. And for me, I’m thinking maybe plus or minus 3 degrees as Mercury comes into the square with Neptune and then moves to separate. So Mercury is moving through about 17 to approximately 23 of Gemini.
Yeah, there may be some cloudiness and foggy facts then, for sure, but I guess I remain hopeful that the period prior to that, where Mercury is moving through Gemini. This is the first time we have Mercury in dignity since this whole palava started. And, Austin, you mentioned commerce briefly. I’m really interested to see what happens with business and trade when Mercury gets into Gemini.
In addition to talking about Mars leaving the Saturn co-present/Saturn rulership, seeing Mercury–the traditional planet of negotiation and deal-making and business interaction–seeing him come into one of his home signs does make me really get curious about what’s going to happen in terms of businesses coming back online; businesses now having tweaked or moved in ways that they need to. So I guess I’m seeing a little bit of productivity with the Mercury in Gemini piece.
AC: And just on a personal level, not necessarily speculating about what the entire world is going to do, it’s a good Mercury there with the Sun and Venus. Venus is kind of ambivalent as to whether it’s helpful, but that’s a burst of energy. I’m probably going to try to get some writing done and get way more writing done than I normally do.
KS: Yeah, I have a couple of big writing projects. Basically, that May 11, when Mercury goes into Gemini, it’s like, “Back at the desk.”
AC: Right.
CB: Thinking back to Alan White, I think about configurations like this, where Neptune’s the one in the ‘superior position instead of Mercury. Alan would always phrase it as “who’s on top and who’s topping who,” so to speak.
KS: Who’s dominating who.
CB: Right.
AC: I remember it being phrased differently.
CB: How do you remember it? My memory is not very good right now.
KS: You’re fulfilling your Scorpio cliche there, Chris, with your bedroom metaphor.
CB: It’s not my metaphor.
AC: It’s Alan’s. and he used the f-word.
CB: But that as opposed to if Mercury was in the opposite sign of Sagittarius–where it obviously doesn’t have dignity, but it would be in the superior position overcoming Neptune–and that difference of is Mercury winning out, is the message winning out, or is the illusion winning out.
KS: Winning out.
CB: Yeah, that’s the question.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So it’s interesting and funny that we’re basically just jumping to all of the most important stuff, but we’ve kind of jettisoned any chronological approach to this month.
KS: We have, and we missed something. I don’t know if you guys want to just speak briefly about the Full Moon earlier in the month, in Scorpio. I know it’s not a main event, but it is the Full Moon this month.
CB: Yeah. Well, I was wondering if we could just back up and quickly just go through, chronologically, so we don’t miss anything.
KS: Sure. Go for it.
CB: Okay. So let’s just back up and quickly go through, starting May 1. One of the things I thought was interesting, right away, at the beginning of the month, is the month actually starts with a Mercury-Uranus conjunction right at the top of the month, with Uranus being at 6 degrees of Taurus and Mercury being at 7-ish degrees of Taurus, just coming off of that late 6-degree conjunction with Uranus. What do you think of that, Kelly?
KS: I think there will be a new explosion in baking at that time.
CB: Okay. A baking-focused forecast.
KS: Yeah. Get all your good cake recipes here. No, I think there’s something very much about Mercury in Taurus having to do with making things by hand or making things, whether it’s cooking or gardening or carpentry or what have you. And Mercury-Uranus, I think the word Austin was using before was ‘experimenting’. So it’s almost like people are more willing to engage with different food or different self-care things based on this.
The other thing that I’m kind of curious about, since Venus went into Gemini, within 24 hours of that happening, I had three or four conversations with different people about beauty and skincare products and devices and things, and I’m just interested about Mercury being the ruler of Venus in Gemini coming to Uranus. Maybe people are doing different things there, which I know is maybe a very specific manifestation; but then the symbolism we often talk about with Mercury-Uranus it’s Uranus has got the megaphone, so it is a little bit more about that innovation.
And I think for us, as individuals, it’s April 30-May 1. Think about the kinds of things that you’re thinking about, who you’re talking to, what the topic of conversations are, because it will help you get a sense of what the longer Uranus in Taurus trend has to do with you, personally.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And also, maybe an acceleration of some of the things that we were seeing when the Sun went into Taurus and started conjoining Uranus–that sort of push or urge for freedom or the loosening of restrictions–and Mercury coming in and heightening some of the message surrounding that in some way when it completes that conjunction with Uranus.
KS: Yeah. There’s a beautiful quote from Brené Brown, in her book, Rising Strong, where she says, “We’re born makers. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts, through our hands.” And this, to me, somehow expresses the essence of Mercury in Taurus around how getting your hands physically into things can help you connect to whatever you’re doing, but also be more grounded in the moment in ways that other things can’t.
AC: I think that’s really beautiful, Kelly.
CB: There’s a funny manifestation–I didn’t check this out because it happened when I was sick and not paying attention to the news. But a listener–and I can’t remember their name–sent me this afterwards saying that it was around the time of the Mars-Uranus square, which we had mentioned in the last forecast, that some of the crazy conspiracy theories about 5G towers peaked, and some people in Europe and stuff were setting the towers on fire.
KS: Yes.
CB: Some of those stories came out around the time of the Mars-Uranus square, which is really interesting and funny; not funny–actually kind of dumb–but an interesting manifestation of that transit.
AC: And that’s just on a very simple, structural level, Mars square Uranus attacking technology.
CB: Right.
AC: I attack your device.
CB: Setting ablaze cell phone towers.
KS: God, I dropped my phone.
AC: Chris, I’m really envious of you having been tuned out over the last month, month-and-a-half from social media. It’s been terrible.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I got glimpses of it, but I actually feel bad because I didn’t have the same quarantine experience as everybody. Everybody else was like Animal Crossing.
KS: I know.
CB: We were baking and exploring. I saw you and Peter.
KS: We did go walking.
AC: You were in literal quarantine. I would say you actually had the preeminent quarantine experience of being ill and being afraid of infecting people. That’s kind of the archetype, which the rest of us only merely resembled.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah. And my poor partner, living in the other half of the apartment, trying to stay away from me for a month-and-a-half, trying not to get sick as well. I did get a Nintendo and killed some time at one point playing Zelda and stuff.
But yeah, I didn’t have the same experience, so I kind of envy some of the people that will always remember the past several weeks as this pretty weird time, where everybody was jumping on Zoom calls and having lots of internet interactions and things like that. It looked like a lot of fun.
AC: I had a very mixed feeling. I feel, primarily, very grateful and fortunate that the source of my livelihood was not disrupted. At the same time, I did have occasional feelings of jealousy for people who weren’t going to go to work for two weeks, when I heard about what they were doing.
And I wouldn’t trade places at all, but simply being grateful and knowing what is ultimately best and true did not stop my feelings of jealousy. Somebody was like, “Yeah, my company is going to be fine, but I don’t have to go in for three weeks.” I was like, “Uh, motherfucker.”
KS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
KS: It’s just been weird and surreal, that’s for sure.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: Sure. But yeah, that’s why I’ve gotten back into a sudden explosion of podcasts. I wanted to put out material during this time, but my body just wasn’t there yet. So now that it’s starting to get there, I’m getting back to rolling out the podcast again.
All right, so let’s make attempt number two to go through the month, chronologically.
KS: We were at the start of the month. We got one thing done, chronologically.
CB: Okay, so we talked about Mercury conjunct Neptune, which we open up the month of May with. Let me just get the chart back up there for the video version.
KS: Mercury conjunct Uranus, yeah.
CB: Mercury conjunct Uranus. Then it looks like the Sun-Mercury conjunction on May 4 is our next big thing. So we’re halfway through the Mercury cycle before we hit another Mercury retrograde station, which, thankfully, is not for another 44 days it looks like.
Shortly after that, Kelly, you originally pointed out in our notes the Nodes change signs. The North Node shifts from Cancer into Gemini, and the South Node moves from Capricorn into Sagittarius, which, as we noted earlier, is going to primarily and most importantly set us up for shifting the eclipses out of the Cancer/Capricorn axis. And soon we’re going to start getting eclipses for a couple of years in the Gemini/Sagittarius axis, so make note.
The Venus retrograde this year acts as an interesting precursor in highlighting the Gemini part of our chart, whatever house that falls in. And the Nodes switching into that sign at the same time, it’s almost setting something up or announcing that shift that’s going to become more important over the next couple of years when those eclipses start taking place in those signs as well.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so after that, we get our first lunation of the month, which looks like it’s a Full Moon in Scorpio, right?
KS: It is.
CB: So it looks like this is happening at 17 degrees of Scorpio–yeah 17 degrees of Scorpio. It looks like it applies to the next planet after that. The Moon applies to, what? An opposition with Mercury at 20 Taurus?
KS: And then a square to Mars. Yeah, Mercury first.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad Mercury’s there to provide a little bit of a boundary, because, otherwise, the Moon’s in a Mars-ruled sign and then applying to a square with Mars, and I think we could do with some lunations that don’t have that tension for a little while.
AC: That’d be nice.
CB: All right. Anything else about that Full Moon? Anything you guys want to mention? A lot of people wrote in and liked the anecdote last month and sort of confirmed hospitals or bars or other places often having a frenetic energy or a peak in activity around the time of Full Moons, and I thought that it was interesting hearing different people write in about that.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah. I mean, the basic symbolism could be a lot more deep or intense emotions, that weirdness between the illumination/bringing-to-light quality of the Moon in a place that deals with things that can be very private or kept close to the chest.
And I did see that square to Mars. It’s not the first aspect, but it’s certainly not a 15- or 20-degree orb aspect; the Moon’s going to get to Mars in relatively quick succession. So it does feel a bit like deeper emotions surfacing in a way, where there is some tension or discord, or there is some disagreement.
There’s a little bit of emotional discomfort here, where it’s intense and it’s a release point, given that many people have maybe been holding on to a lot of stuff or just coping in situations that are more pressure than usual. It just feels like a lot coming up and a lot that needs to either be processed or released.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah. I mean, that Moon’s configured to a lot of planets.
KS: Busy.
AC: We have a sign-based square to Mars. We’ve got a sign-based sextile to Jupiter. We’ve got an opposition to Mercury. We’ve got a trine to Neptune. So there are a lot of different competing features here; it is not clearly focused on one thing.
I think you’re probably right, Kelly. It’s a lot of feelings coming up about a lot of things because a lot of things have happened, and all those have implications for a future which is more difficult to see than it was three months ago for most people.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I guess, as usual, we have to tie this Full Moon into the New Moon that preceded it, which was that New Moon conjunct Uranus and some of the feelings of wanting to loosen restrictions or seek liberation or approach things in a new and unique or revolutionary way.
Some of those initial impulses in moving towards that probably first fully came to light in people’s lives at this time, two weeks later, once we hit the Full Moon in Scorpio opposite to that.
AC: That’s a good point. I bet that some of this, on a collective level, is going to be people getting ready to leave quarantine in the next week or whatever, making this lunation spotlight that transition, especially on an emotional level.
Okay, so I’m not just staying in my house and playing Animal Crossing or worrying about my financial future or any of the hundred things people have been doing. I’m going to go back out into the world again and I have a lot of feelings about that.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And some of the increased communication, we see the first opposition with Mercury, then the trine with Neptune, but then, eventually, also the square with Mars followed by a sextile with Jupiter–just speaking to your point, Austin, about there being so many aspects and so many things the Moon then encounters once it moves into that new phase.
AC: Yeah. There’s just a lot that bears upon that Moon.
KS: And that Moon will make all those aspects that you just listed, Chris, within a 24-hour period, so it does make it a level of busyness.
CB: Wow.
KS: On the anecdotal, the increase in activity from the Full Moon we talked about last month. As an astrologer, I have also noticed that there is a higher demand or requests for people wanting consults around the time of the Full Moon as well.
So something about this Full Moon being in Scorpio just feels like people might want to go a little bit deeper with their own personal reflection or personal healing experiences as well.
CB: Okay. All right, so that brings us to, I believe, the next major thing we need to mention. That basically takes us into that second week where all of the most important stuff happens or starts happening.
And the first thing that happens is on the 10th–well, there’s two things that happen simultaneously–but the big one is that Saturn slows down and stations retrograde at 1 degree and 57 minutes of Aquarius. So this is the very first station of Saturn in Aquarius since it moved into that sign very recently, just a month or so ago. One of the keywords for a station, especially an outer-planet station, is an ‘intensification’ of the energies of that planet.
So I think this is interesting. On the one hand, I talked a little bit about this last month, thinking about how this whole thing that’s happening right now is either the bookend of the later phases of the Saturn return of those with Saturn in Capricorn, and this is what’s capping off their transition into adulthood, or this is just the beginning phases of the Saturn return for those with Saturn in Aquarius and the very initial shot or chapter of that journey for them over the course of the next two-to-three years.
But here, we get a really important turning point within that for not just the Saturn return people, but also, with Saturn just having moved into a new sign and potentially a new whole sign house for everybody.
AC: Yeah. Saturn sort of dipping its toe into Aquarius has very much been a preview period for everybody about what Saturn in Aquarius is going to be like, most impactful generally for those who have Saturn in Aquarius.
When I think back to my Saturn return, mine had the same staggered ending. I’m Saturn in Virgo. And so, Saturn moved into Libra for six months and then came back into Virgo. To me, it felt like my Saturn return was over; there was reprieve. As soon as Saturn got back into the natal sign–so in this case, it would be Saturn moving back into Capricorn–it was like, “And one more round.” Like, “No, you’re not done yet.”
CB: Right.
AC: It felt like it was over when it had moved into the next sign.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So you’re not done yet, for the Saturn in Capricorn people, is part of the message. This is where Saturn turns and starts heading back towards that to make sure whatever the point was that you got it over these next six months; basically, the second-half of 2020.
AC: Yeah. Kelly, did you have that experience with your return?
KS: I was just trying not to sound old. That was, what, 2010? No, not that late.
AC: It was.
KS: Hang on.
AC: It was 2009.
KS: Was it 2010?
AC: It was the fall of 2009, when Saturn ingressed into Libra, and then it came back into Virgo.
KS: That early part of 2010 returned, yeah.
AC: Yeah.
KS: I had recently moved to Canada, which I did as part of my Saturn return, just for shits and giggles.
CB: Perfect vacation for sightseeing.
KS: And so, there was a lot for just blowing your life up or for sightseeing, yeah. I wasn’t sure; I wanted to really understand the meaning of the word ‘cold’, so I went to the coldest country in the world.
CB: That was a great Saturn manifestation.
KS: Honestly, based on being with my husband, I’ve lived in places with really extreme climates; you don’t read that in the books about Saturn-relationship stuff. Anyway, I don’t have a lot of specifics there. I apologize, Austin. That’s a very long-winded way of getting to your question.
AC: Yeah, I’m always curious.
KS: It’s one of the things that makes 2020 just that year of straddling things. Saturn is just dipping his toes into Aquarius for a bit, but he’s not done with Capricorn yet. The image that I’ve been describing of this Saturn going into Aquarius is you open a door to a room, and you think you’re ready to go into the room or the space, and then you realize there’s a fair bit of shit you’re going to have to organize in there.
And Saturn going retrograde is the proverbial just taking that step back. I know what this is, but I know it’s not the time to go fully into this space yet.
CB: Yeah. There’s something I forgot in the other room that I need to go back and get.
KS: Okay
CB: No.
AC: That’s a metaphor. It wasn’t meant literally.
KS: You do that so well, Chris.
CB: No, I’m saying metaphorically.
KS: That’s exactly the metaphor. That’s exactly so. Your deadpan dryness got me there.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is; like, “Oh, I thought I was ready.” Oh, my god–completely. That’s it. Perfect.
CB: So everybody could think about what house, especially what whole sign house Capricorn represents and think about Saturn forgetting something and needing to go back into that other room to grab it, before it moves back into Aquarius permanently for the next two-and-a-half, three years.
KS: Yeah. But Saturn’s not going back to grab something. He’s like, “There’s a wall that I need to move,” or something.
CB: Right.
AC: I tend to think of it as some sort of building inspector. Capricorn’s had a rather thorough inspection, and Saturn’s like, “I’m going to leave, and then three months later, I’m going to be back to see if you made the renovations necessary to bring this up to code.”
KS: To code–I like it.
AC: Yeah. There will be fines if it is not up to code.
KS: There will be consequences if you have not put the effort in.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Well, at least, here, with the Saturn station, we can also say this is an intensification of Saturn; it’s the very first station of Aquarius. If you didn’t already start to see some of the themes that are going to be happening in your life with Saturn’s ingress–with it first moving into Aquarius at the end of March–then this station and the events surrounding it may give you a much clearer preview of what Saturn in Aquarius is going to be about for the next two-and-a-half-to-three-years, just due to that intensifying effect that can sometimes come with stations.
KS: And one little aspect that I think is just going to help with clarification around this Saturn in Aquarius is that the very next day, Mercury and Gemini will make a trine to Saturn in Aquarius. It’s not a life-changing aspect–it’s just a quick little trine from Mercury–but you’re going to get some information, a piece of insight, or maybe just this sense of internal clarification about that Saturn in Aquarius.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: It looks like the Moon at a Saturn and conjoins at the same time.
KS: Yeah, it’s just a nice little thing.
AC: That’s a really nice point of clarification. Yeah, that’s beautiful.
CB: Wow.
KS: You just get something that helps you go, “Ahhh.” That’s what that’s going to be about.
CB: That’s cool. All right, so retrogrades. Then we, of course, get to the more intense phase of everything, where by the 13th, Venus stations retrograde at 21 Gemini, as we’ve already discussed extensively.
Mars simultaneously moves from Aquarius into Pisces. So it completes its–what has it been–two months’ trip through Aquarius.
KS: Six weeks in Aquarius, yeah.
CB: Six weeks, okay.
KS: 12 weeks with Saturn.
CB: Okay. Right–we had that accidental, extended co-presence or sign-based conjunction because Saturn happened to switch signs and move from Capricorn into Aquarius right around the same time that Mars did.
So we ended up with a huge extended period of Mars-Saturn in the same sign, which finally comes to an end at this point. And this is the final end of the Mars-Saturn conjunction; some of the lessening of the restrictions or restricted actions are very simple keywords for Mars-Saturn that might be indicated by that, ‘curtailed actions’.
KS: Yeah, frustration and thwarted will.
CB: And then, weirdly, right around the same time, we get the other aspect I had mentioned at the very top of this episode or sometime earlier, which is Jupiter stations retrograde at 27 degrees of Capricorn, also around May 13-14, and it is closely conjunct Pluto, which is at 24 degrees of Capricorn.
So one of the things I mentioned in terms of that, Austin, we mentioned the major shifting of huge amounts of money that is taking place at this time in the world in general, in things massively either going down or massively going up.
And one of the things that was interesting that I noticed when I just happened to be preparing for this episode–for some reason, I don’t know why, I guess, I’ve used him as a chart example before. I think I used him as a chart example in my book because we have a time chart.
But we have the birth chart of Bill Gates, and it’s interesting that he has Cancer rising and a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Leo in the 2nd whole sign house, in the place of finances and wealth, and at various points is or was one of the richest people in the world. So it’s interesting to see that sort of aspect in the chart of a mega billionaire and seeing a similar sort of signature going on. I think that might give us some idea of the signature that’s going on right now.
AC: Yeah. I mean, Jupiter-Pluto, it won’t make you super rich by itself, but a lot of the richest people in the world have that. Warren Buffett has it in Cancer. Carlos Slim has it in Virgo. It does other things, but one of the things it does is ‘big’ money.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And it’s really interesting to see huge moves, money-wise. right now. What was the initial bailout package? Two trillion dollars? That is a very large sum to move all at once.
CB: Right, and that was just the first bailout package in the US. And they’re already in the process of talking about or negotiating like a second one.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So here’s the chart of Warren Buffett, since you just mentioned it. August 30, 1930.
KS: Do we have a birth time for him?
CB: I don’t know. It says 3:00 PM. Let me check the source.
KS: If that time’s correct, then Jupiter-Pluto is in the 8th house. Wow.
CB: Yeah, I can’t tell. It sounds like somebody’s claims to have gotten it from a friend of Buffett himself, but they’re anonymous. So who knows if it’s accurate or not, but we do at least know that he does have a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, which is very similar to Gates.
KS: Yes. I mean, you’re talking about the bailouts there. Virgin, the airline company, they have a Virgin Australia iteration, and they’re asking from the Australian government for a $1.4 billion bailout to keep their company up and running.
I know that governments around the world are offering support and relief offerings to their citizens, but there’s also the businesses that either have gone from extremely lucrative, high-cash turnover businesses to nothing, and some of them are looking for some support too.
CB: Right. And you mentioned last month, Kelly–I wasn’t trying to dismiss it, but you made a point about Jupiter in Capricorn and Jupiter not doing so well lately, and how hard the travel industry and the airline industry is being hit by all of this, which is, in retrospect, actually a really good point.
I always meant to say that, but I think I said something at the time like everything’s falling apart or not doing well right now.
KS: Yeah.
CB: But you were right that that area of the travel industry–or the airline industry in particular that’s not doing so well–we might especially associate with Jupiter is not in good shape.
KS: Yeah. Look, there was a lot to talk about last month. And I know we all have a lot of ideas. We don’t always get to flesh out every single one of them.
CB: Right. But when we do, we end up with episodes like this.
KS: Which are going to be three-hours-long.
CB: Two-hours-and-eight-minutes, yeah, and we’re only halfway through the month.
KS: Yeah. Just quickly on the Jupiter piece. I guess I was thinking a lot about the various ways Jupiter got slammed in terms of its aspect configurations.
CB: Right.
KS: And the two industries that I could see–maybe it’s a little bit of a personal bias, but I could see so much unraveling in the travel industry and in the education industry. If you think about what’s happened to school education, I know university-level education has had an impact as well. So you could certainly factor that in, but those two industries are classically Jupiter, and they’ve had the ground pulled out from underneath them.
The way teachers are having to try and teach a group of five-year-olds on the internet, I mean, these things are not sustainable; they’re definitely temporary. It’s just phenomenal how much has changed. And we’ve just had some photographs come out of Australia today, where airlines have grounded their whole fleets. This is billions and billions of lost revenue.
And the planes–I mean, the planes themselves are hugely expensive. There’s just a hundred of them parked on a runway. And it’s just phenomenal to me how different that is compared to these things.
AC: They don’t own those planes.
KS: That’s true. They’ve got leases and payment plans.
AC: Exactly. They’re $80 million loans each.
CB: Right. And the questions of how do you do social distancing on a plane, where everybody’s crammed in a small tube that’s airtight, and flying for hours, you can’t do social distance like that.
KS: With recycled air.
CB: Right.
AC: I would add that in doing the Vedic program with Freedom Cole the last couple years, one of the significations for Jupiter that I hadn’t encountered before, that I thought was really interesting, was that Jupiter was relevant whenever you were going to get a bunch of people together for a big event.
Jupiter would tell you about the space necessary to hold a bunch of people, and also, the cohesive spirit necessary to get a whole bunch of people to do one thing. And seeing Jupiter just get smashed this year, I saw that very literally that you just can’t get a bunch of people together. So I just wanted to add that because I thought that was very simple, but very dead-on.
KS: That’s a brilliant point, Austin. And this is one of the things that makes me very dubious about any type of large gathering thing happening over the next few months.
CB: Right.
KS: When you look at some of the virologists and the medical personnel, while governments are willing to allow people to go back to work, there’s a level of safety and control. One of the last things that I think is going to come back is large group gatherings.
AC: I agree.
KS: The astrologer in me is like, well, that has to wait till Jupiter goes into Aquarius, unfortunately.
AC: And even then, it’s under pressure.
KS: Still, yes.
AC: Go ahead. Chris.
CB: That brings up a point I was just going to make, which is something I noticed in preparation for this episode. One of the things that’s easy to overlook, but it’s actually really notable, when Jupiter stations retrograde at 27 degrees of Capricorn, it’s the closest that it’s going to get to the conjunction with Saturn at this point in time. But by stationing, it actually doesn’t reach or sort of aborts the conjunction, basically.
It’s like there’s something that almost happens in the aligning of the two biggest planets in our solar system in May, that gets very close to happening, but they’re just a few degrees away, whether they’re 4 or 5 degrees away.
And then they retrograde apart, and the distance between them gradually increases over the course of the next several weeks or the next few months. But then, eventually, in December, they will come together and form that conjunction in early Aquarius.
So it’s like there’s something that almost happens, like a rejoining or removing together–not removing, a reuniting that almost comes back together this month, but then it doesn’t, and it takes another six months before we fully see that manifest.
AC: That’s a really good point. It’s as close as we get to the great conjunction before it actually happens.
CB: Yeah. But maybe it has to do with the desire, but then, suddenly, the realization of the restrictions lessening perhaps as a result of the Mars-Saturn conjunction finally leaving, but then the realization that life isn’t fully back to normal; that we’re not just all going to be able to like crowd into sports or arenas or something like that again. Instead, there’s still this period of awkwardness of getting used to whatever the new reality is for the next six months.
I don’t know. Eventually, Jupiter does catch up with Saturn in December. I know with some of the projections, they were seeing it would take at least a year to come up with a vaccine for COVID. So perhaps the conjunction has to do with finally coming up with something that could help to make it so people could do things like that again, like getting in large groups.
AC: Yeah. One simple but useful way that I think about the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, every 20 years, is that they remake the world together.
KS: Beautiful.
AC: Their conjunction sets a tone for 20 or 200 years. Them getting as close as they can, or as close as they’re going to before they do the actual conjunction in December, it’s like this is part of what the new world is going to look like, but you’re not actually going to see what it looks like until we get to the conjunction in December. And then I had one anecdote that I wanted to share that’s thoroughly astrological about this, about getting together for sports.
So as you all know, I’m a big fan of mixed martial arts, and mixed martial arts is in a different category than most sports because it’s not a team sport. You just need two people in a cage to fight.
KS: Yeah.
AC: The president of the UFC, which is the biggest organization, is a rather cantankerous fellow named Dana White. And Dana’s been like, “Fuck it.” He’s like, “I’ve got a secret island. We’re going to have fights with no crowds on ‘Fight Island’.”
Somebody pointed out to me that that was the most Saturn-Mars conjoined in Aquarius thing ever. We’ve got a crazy, secret island where there will be fights. And he wouldn’t reveal its location. He’d be like, “I can’t tell you where it is.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: They’re actually going to be the first big sports thing to happen. There’s a huge card on May 9, and they’re going to do it without a crowd. They’ve got a huge testing protocol. But it’s going to be fights with no audience, which is kind of eerie. It’s appropriately plague-creepy.
To be fair, a lot of fans, including myself, are kind of excited there will be no crowd noise. There will just be the silence of two people locked in combat and the occasional grunts.
KS: I mean, it won’t be completely silent though, will it? It will be the sounds of pounding–I mean punches.
AC: I wasn’t even going there, Kelly. It will be the sounds of attempted violence.
KS: Attempted violence.
CB: This is a family show, you two, just to remind you.
KS: Sorry.
AC: Yeah, take it to Fight Island. Get out of here with that.
KS: Take it to Fight Island, I love it.
CB: All right.
KS: What we’re sort of alluding to and jumping around with here is that the Mars-Saturn stuff is a shorter pace of a longer Jupiter-Saturn thing, basically. Potentially, we get some of our freedoms, if you like, back in this month of May, essentially.
But Jupiter and Saturn are still doing their thing; I don’t think international borders are opening up anytime soon. So there are pieces that are not opened up yet, but there are some smaller levels that come back. Like, Austin, you can go back to watching people kick the shit out of each other, for instance, just in a different environment.
AC: Exactly.
CB: That’s a great point. That’s the other Jupiter side of this, just to continue expanding your whole point about Jupiter not being in great shape this year, Kelly, which you mentioned travel and education.
And then, finally, the other major and always traditional Jupiter theme is international relations and relationships between foreign countries. Not just travel to foreign countries, but also, just international relations in general…
KS: Trade.
CB: …and the tension and closing off that’s occurred as a result of all of this; the separation that’s occurred.
KS: Yeah, and it’s very separate. Australia and New Zealand have an open border situation in the same way as Canada and America. If you’re a Canadian, coming into America is very different from any other person from any other country coming into the US. So country agreements where there’s normally very free-flowing movement of citizens, they’ve all shut them.
I mean, the US-Canada border has been effectively closed, coming on six weeks or something now, which is the longest land border in the world; and to have that shut, these things are significant.
CB: Right. Yeah, definitely. All right, so let’s get out of that second week of May, and let’s get into the third and fourth and final weeks and start to get towards the end of this.
KS: If you look at the number of astrological things that happen in the first two weeks of May, we’ve got about half as many things going on in the second two weeks of May.
CB: Okay. So the next major thing is the Sun’s ingress into Gemini, which it always does around…
KS: The 20th.
CB: … May 20. And then shortly after that, we have our second lunation of the month, which is that New Moon at 2 degrees of Gemini that we mentioned earlier, correct?
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yes.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, once we get there, I mean, everything’s in Gemini. This is that manic burst period in full bloom.
CB: Okay. And we talked more about the Venus-Mercury conjunction that simultaneously squared Neptune when we touched on this earlier, but the other part we didn’t touch on is this is a full-on, Mars-touched lunation.
The Sun and Moon conjoin at 2 degrees of Gemini, but then the very next aspect that’s made immediately after that is the Moon applies to a square with Mars, which is at 6 degrees of Pisces at that point. So that raises the level of tension and anger and angst and problematic–not decisive necessarily–but separating types of energies than one might expect from a lunation that are much more heightened than normal.
KS: Yeah, like the boat is rocking.
AC: Mars definitely adds a contentious piece.
CB: Right, contentious. That was the word I was looking for.
AC: Yeah. It’s going to be in the context of Mercury and Venus, the Sun and Moon, and the North Node all in Gemini. Mars is going to be throwing a little contentiousness. Mars will add a little ugly fire to a situation, but it’s not the only planet with input. That Moon-Saturn, or excuse me, Sun-Moon is also very tightly trined Saturn.
And then with all those co-presences, it’s kind of a lot again. It’s a very different version of a lot than the earlier Full Moon in Scorpio, but it’s still a lot; there are a lot of things going on—good, bad, and other.
CB: Yeah. Maybe the contentiousness is connected with or arises out of the misunderstanding or the illusion that’s being brought on or indicated by the Mercury-Venus conjunction square Neptune. We’ve already talked about there being something illusory, or that Mercury square Neptune can sometimes be an illusion or even a misunderstanding or a lie, and something that comes out of that which causes contention or vice versa.
AC: Yeah, I think that’ll definitely be part of it. Another way to put it, Neptune–it’s the mystery; it’s the dream. And in Pisces with Mars, I think it’s like, to dovetail back to what I was saying at the beginning, fighting over what the story is.
People don’t feel neutrally about what’s happening, nor should they, and there’s a lot of like, “No, I think this is what’s really going on.” “No, no, no, I think this is what’s going on,” and there are a lot of different stories, and a lot of them are mutually-exclusive.
So I would expect the ‘story wars’. Somebody in the comments said ‘story wars’. I would expect the ‘story wars’ to be vociferous around this time.
CB: Yeah–or the ‘blame wars’. Some of the things that are coming up are blame and attempting to push blame on different parties, or people looking for somebody to blame for what’s going on.
AC: Stories need villains.
CB: Right.
KS: You’ve got to have a ‘goodie’ and a ‘baddie’, yeah.
CB: So then the question is, is it being correctly identified, or is something or someone being scapegoated, would be the questions that I would have seeing something like that, seeing a tense lunation tied in to Mars and the contentiousness of that, with the ruler of the lunation being simultaneously square Neptune.
AC: Yeah, I think we’ll get all sorts of varieties of ‘figuring out’ stories that match the facts. I don’t think we get one; I think the event is ‘story wars’. I don’t think that there will be one, dominant narrative which takes hold. I think it will be the very opposite of that. It’ll be like a gladiatorial match with 20 different contestants.
CB: Maybe I should state, just to be clear, that while sometimes events happen around the time of something like this, since it’s a New Moon, it may be something that’s initiated at that time, that doesn’t grow and develop and become fully clear until two weeks later, when you have the New Moon in Sagittarius. So it may be the start of something that grows after that point.
And that was such an important distinction that we all learned from the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, earlier this year in January. Back during that time, around the time that the Saturn-Pluto conjunction went exact, around the second week of January, there were a couple of things happening in the news.
The Australian wildfires were happening, and the US assassinated an Iranian dictator, and all of a sudden, everyone was very tense about whether World War 3 was about to start. But other than that, there wasn’t other major stuff going on. I remember some astrologer writing a series about how Pluto’s not important–and the Saturn-Pluto conjunction was overhyped during that time–and was being very vocal about that.
But what we now know in retrospect, a few months later, is at that time, a little piece of news that kind of flew under the radar was that the World Health Organization announced that there was this new virus that had just been identified, and they announced that it was something to pay attention to and was growing and spreading very rapidly, and would eventually become a worldwide thing.
So maybe we already mentioned this in the past episode, but it was just a very striking lesson or reminder for me that sometimes the astrology indicates things that are starting and developing, but you may not be fully aware of it yet, and you may not fully understand the significance of it until sometime later, in retrospect.
AC: Yeah. That’s triply-true with the lunations around that time, which were eclipses, which are often given much longer durations for their expected unpacking.
CB: Yeah.
KS: And a stronger quality of things being obscured.
CB: But even just for…
AC: Yeah, what is born in shadow.
CB: …any planetary cycle, especially a conjunction, as representing, symbolically, the start of something or the start of a new cycle, with respect to the properties or archetypal qualities of those two planets.
Sometimes you have a really long cycle that takes a while to fully develop, because it’s indicating something that’s massive or has a lot of moving pieces like a Saturn-Pluto conjunction. But other times, like this month, you have a smaller cycle that’s more self-contained, that’s going to be indicating things happening over the course of a lunar month, with the Sun and Moon conjoining in early Gemini; and then the Full Moon indicates a sort of culmination or coming into visibility; and eventually, over the next two weeks, that closing down in preparation for the next lunation.
So some cycles are just smaller, and you see the manifestation quickly, because it has a shorter timeline or a shorter life cycle.
AC: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
KS: Yeah. One of the other ways that I can’t help but think about that New Moon in Gemini is just this extreme concentration in Gemini. So for each of us, the Gemini house in our chart, there’s a New Moon which is under tension from Mars, but there’s that restlessness of like, “I want to move forward; I want to take steps,” and maybe having to deal with tension around doing that.
But at the same time, Venus is retrograde there, and there’s that call to review or go back over material or topics from the past. So there’s this weird tension between a little bit of a push, or this idea of trying to look forward, with this call of having to reflect or to go back over things from the recent or old past.
AC: I absolutely agree, and I think we can fold that into earlier delineations very easily. Everybody is like, “So what the fuck just happened?” since February. What’s going on?
KS: What are we living in right now?
AC: People meeting in a bar for the first time in a couple months are like, “So what the fuck do you guys think is happening?” Where’s this going? How long is this going to last? What does this mean about the economy?
As I think the length of this podcast has demonstrated, it’s very easy to talk about this for a very long time because there are a lot of questions, and their answers are not trivial.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, so back to the animated chart. We’ve got the New Moon, which was our second lunation around the 22nd. One of the last things, as we’re heading out, I know Mercury moves into Cancer and departs from Gemini.
KS: And Mercury, just before it goes into Cancer, it will pass over the North Node in Gemini, but they’re the last couple of things.
CB: Okay. And then it moves into Cancer, and that happens on the 28th of May.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Is that really it? I’m not sure if we’re overlooking something.
KS: I mean, there are no other ingresses or planetary aspects after that to the end of the month. There might be a little Moon thing here or there. Austin, are we missing anything?
AC: I don’t think so. We’ve spent a lot of time on this. I mean, the big stuff is Mars moves into Pisces, which ends the co-presence, Venus goes retrograde, and then there are things that add and detract from that.
There really is this kind of relatively simple bifurcation into the beginning of the month before that stuff happens; and then, in the middle of the month, that happens and then that’s the second-half.
KS: May 13 is the mood shift date.
CB: I guess the point to emphasize is just that all of that stuff starts–or ends, in some instances–in that second week of May between the 10th and the 16th, but so much of what starts then is in effect for the rest of the month.
So it’s not that there’s nothing happening in the later part of May, it’s just that all the crucial stuff started at that point and then will continue for the rest of the month, in some instances, leading all the way into June.
The Venus retrograde, Jupiter stationing, Mars going into Pisces, Saturn stationing retrograde in Aquarius and now heading back to Capricorn–all of that stuff is going to be in effect for the rest of the month.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah. There’s a mood change. There’s a shift in focus and priorities. There are changes around plans and projects that were moving forward that are now moving backwards. There are things that have been very stagnant and stuck that all of a sudden start to be less stagnant and less stuck.
When we were doing this brief summary, I really looked at that four-day period, from May 11 to May 14, where everything just spins and turns, and the way you’re facing after that period is different. So there are new things that you move forward into that just weren’t available before then.
AC: Yeah. It’s a real gear shift.
KS: Total gear shift.
CB: Brilliant. All right, guys, well, we’re at about two-and-a-half hours, so I think we’re getting towards the end of this episode, and I think we’ve pretty comprehensively covered most of the major points of the astrology of May that we meant to touch on.
Of course people should go back and check out our entire year-ahead forecast–where we actually all got together here in Denver, back in November, and we outlined a very broad strokes forecast for the entire year of 2020–if they’re looking for more information about what’s coming up in the future from a big-picture perspective.
But in terms of the details, I think we’ve covered May pretty thoroughly, and we’ll have to wait a few weeks and get back together again to discuss June, next month.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yes.
AC: So, Chris, what would be the most auspicious moment to begin an important project this month?
KS: Yes.
AC: I’m dying to know.
CB: That’s so funny that you mentioned that because I completely forgot to introduce the auspicious election for this month. And part of the reason for that is it’s actually a really tough month, similar to last month, for electional charts.
Leisa spent a lot of time on it. Leisa Schaim, our in-house election astrologer extraordinaire, spent a lot of time on it this month and had a really hard time finding charts, but did eventually find one that we wanted to highlight for this month. And it actually takes place on May 2, 2020, around 9:30 in the morning, with Cancer rising.
So for the video version people, let me pull up that chart. All right, so May 2, around 9:30 in the morning, with Cancer rising. Thanks for reminding me of that, Austin.
AC: Yeah, no worries.
CB: My brain is still not fully working. All right, so we’ve got Cancer rising in this chart. Part of the purpose of that is to make Jupiter one of the only angular planets. So Jupiter’s angular in the 7th whole sign house, at 27 degrees of Capricorn in a day chart.
The ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon, which is in a Virgo. And the Moon is not receiving any hard aspects from Mars and Saturn, which is part of what we were going for here; but instead, it’s actually in the 3rd whole sign house. It’s applying to a trine with Uranus and a trine with Mercury with reception, which is its domicile lord, which are up in the 11th whole sign house.
So this is a pretty good 3rd house election for things, like communication, perhaps teaching, and other 3rd house topics. Since the Moon’s in Virgo, it might be a good Virgo election for Earthy-type things or work that involves attention to detail and other Virgo type keywords, like minding the details and other small things.
Let’s see. It’s not a great chart for 8th house matters because Mars and Saturn are both in the 8th house. And so, matters involving shared resources, other people’s money, or the partner’s financial assets may not be very good in this chart. Otherwise, it’s relatively decent for 3rd house topics, with the ruler the Ascendant in the 3rd.
Do you guys have any comments about this chart or about what you might use a Virgo-focused election for?
KS: I mean, this screams editing to me, going back over something that needs to be reworked or polished.
CB: Yes, editing. Our Virgos are the expert editors of the zodiac. I always make sure I have a Virgo handy, as many people know, for editing my book, or have somebody with heavy Virgo placements handy for book editing because they’re just math masters of that.
KS: Yeah. It could be a little bit of scheduling or planning. Moon in the 3rd is just a really nice placement for using the mind–could be a bit overactive sometimes, Moon in Virgo–if you’ve got to do a lot of thinking or writing, or you’ve got a lot of paperwork to plow through, for people who still have paperwork.
CB: Yeah. Obviously, there’s complications, but it’s got not just 3rd house vibes, but good 7th house and 11th house vibes to some extent as well; with Jupiter in the 7th house of partnership and Mercury and the Sun and Uranus forming a trine with the Moon in the 11th house of friendship.
We did set the time on this in order to try to mitigate Venus, because we don’t really like having to relegate her to the 12th house; so in our location, in Denver, we adjusted it. So we just put Cancer rising, and then we tried to put the degree of the Midheaven as closely configured to or squaring Venus as we could.
Obviously, by doing that, it gets it pretty close to Neptune, since that Venus-Neptune square that’s happening all month is unavoidable. But at least by putting the Midheaven square Venus, we sort of mitigate it so it’s not as poorly placed in the 12th house as it could be, and it will instead have some constructive manifestation.
But like I said, we were really struggling to find good charts this month. And I guess after this whole discussion of some of the tensions and things going on, we kind of understand a little bit better why that is now.
We did find three other electional charts, which are available in the auspicious elections podcast for patrons of The Astrology Podcast on the $5-plus tier; I just released that yesterday. So if you want access to that, you can find out more information at patreon.com/theastrologypodcast, or maybe it’s just ‘astrologypodcast’.
All right. Yeah, thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun. What do you have coming up, Kelly? I know you did webinars all weekend. Do you have more stuff like that coming up?
KS: Yes. I have a couple of weekends off, and then I have more stuff.
CB: I guess the biggest thing to remind people of is both of you are speaking at NORWAC.
KS: Yes.
CB: Kaitlin Coppock is also speaking at NORWAC; Leisa Schaim is also.
KS: Leisa is as well.
CB: Basically, everybody’s speaking at NORWAC. It’s going to be a ton of amazing lectures. And it’s actually a unique opportunity if you wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise, because it’s so expensive to buy flights, plus a hotel, plus food, plus take off work. Suddenly, you have an opportunity to attend a world-class astrology conference from home, so it’s kind of a nice opportunity.
KS: Yeah. There were a couple of comments about that in the chat earlier. As many of us that are disappointed we can’t be there in person, there are just as many people who are excited that they can now at least connect into and participate with the NORWAC experience. They couldn’t have taken the time or the money to fly across the country, and as you said, Chris, all the extra cost.
There’s a difference between just paying your registration money versus having all the extras on top of it.
CB: Right.
KS: And then you also have the two-week period to take in all the lectures as well, which means even if you can’t give a whole weekend, you can see what you can on the live broadcast and then just watch a couple a day for the few weeks after.
CB: Right, because that’s always the most annoying thing for me, once you actually get there in person. There will be five, six, or seven lectures going at the same time, and you have to pick one of them to sit in on; and sometimes, it means picking between five great lectures. But here, you can actually attend all of them.
KS: Yeah. If I have to pick between Leisa and Austin, that’s really hard. But now, I can actually get both.
CB: Right. Yeah, I can’t I can’t say who I would choose in that instance.
AC: It would be a toss-up.
KS: The choices at this event are even more compounded because I have to choose between Kaitlin and Austin or Kaitlin and Leisa at this instance as well.
CB: That’s actually funny. Were their conflicts? Had you prepared your schedules for which ones you were going to attend and identified which ones were going to be hard to choose between?
KS: No, I didn’t go through that, thank goodness.
AC: No.
KS: Austin?
CB: I remember, Austin, when you gave your first lecture at NORWAC. You were speaking at the same time as two of my other friends. So I had to split and sit in for you for 15 minutes and then sit in for somebody else’s for 15 minutes.
So you’re excited about NORWAC. Are you doing just a talk? Are you doing a workshop, Austin?
AC: I’m doing two talks and a workshop.
CB: Okay.
AC: I’m going to talk about gemstones and astrology–I think I named it something clever, like the Celestial Lapidary, or something like that–from the angle of a couple different traditions, what stones correspond to what planets and how have they been used in magic and in remediation and other things.
And then my other lecture is about derived houses, looking at the chart and drawing houses from points other than the Ascendant, such as the Part of Fortune; taking any perspective on the chart, as we might in certain techniques. We want to look at the chart from the perspective of Mars. What’s 4th from Mars? What’s 10th? What’s 7th? What’s 9th? So we’ll be doing houses from houses.
And then my workshop is on the decans. We’re going to go through all 36 and then talk about how to use them and how they’ve been used historically.
CB: Nice. That sounds awesome.
AC: Thanks.
CB: And, Kelly, you’re doing a talk and a workshop, or just two talks?
KS: Two talks–a keynote and a workshop.
CB: Oh, okay, so not much.
KS: Not much. It’ll be a breeze.
CB: What’s your keynote?
KS: It’s on friendship, love, and community, and it’s inspired by the Venus retrograde in Gemini. So I just wanted to look at the different ways we can interact and create affection and connection, which has taken on a totally different context in meaning now to when I conceived the talk a year ago, but there’s plenty of time to factor in current circumstances.
CB: Nice.
KS: And I’m doing a talk on how to combine the progressed Moon with transits. So it’s just one piece of some of my predictive astrology approach, looking at the progressed Moon and how that can qualify your experience with major transits, like Saturn return or midlife transits, or just Pluto square your Sun or what have you.
The other talk I’m giving is called Lunar Lovin’, and the subtitle is Five Things You Should Know About the Moon but Probably Don’t. And it just goes into some of those extra considerations that are really important to know with the Moon, in terms of things like speed of the Moon, phase of the Moon, aspects, whether the Moon is kind of hanging out in the part of the sky by itself. So we’re just going to go into little pieces of some of the older material on the Moon that just gets totally overlooked today.
And then my post-conference workshop is on the Predictive Pot of Gold. So I’m going to present a lot of my work around combining transits and secondary progressions together, which I just love teaching on, so that’s going to be a really fun day.
Laura was very kind to adjust the time of my workshop, just to honor the fact that I’m in Europe. So we have a slightly earlier start time on Monday, the 25th. I’ll be starting at 8:30 AM, and I think most presenters, like Austin, will start at 10:00.
CB: Cool.
KS: What else? I’m also doing a webinar as an intro webinar to sect on May 16 for Astrology University. So that’s something else I’ve got coming up this month. Just an intro to what sect is and how you can factor it into your chart interpretation work.
CB: Awesome. That’s exciting, and that’s for Astrology University. And then I meant to mention the URL again for NORWAC is norwac.net. It looks like Leisa’s talks are on zodiacal releasing subperiods, which is really exciting, because I don’t think there’s a lot of information or talks on that out there at this point. And then she’s doing another talk on weird chart combinations, or the astrology of the weird.
And Austin, Kaitlin’s giving a talk on astrology and magic, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah, I was just wondering what’s her topic.
AC: Let me think. It’s definitely on astrology and magic. It’s sort of living astrology and magic, like how do these things combine in practice, what is the relationship, what perspective does astrological magic lend to astrology, and how do we apply that. The title is Taking the Lead with Astrological Magic.
KS: Oh, you’re getting this scheduled. Excellent. There we go.
CB: Yeah, NORWAC has a great schedule. Their website, they just updated, and it’s actually really good now.
KS: Yes.
CB: So Kaitlin’s talk is Taking the Lead with Astrological Magic. “Astrology can sometimes feel like a one-way exchange–us looking to the sky to discover what it has to say about our inner worlds and manifest realities. But how can we introduce more agency and influence over how things unfold, in order to build a life and cultivate a character more in alignment with our choosing. Learn how practical applications of planetary magic shift us from passive interpreters to active participants in the dance between fate and free will.” That was very well-written.
AC: Yes.
CB: As somebody that’s had to write a lot of lecture descriptions, I can appreciate how it. You only have 75 words, and so, you really have to pick each one carefully, and that’s very well-crafted.
KS: Kaitlin is an exceptional writer.
AC: Much better than my mumbling description.
KS: Yeah. There’s many things about Kate that we love, but her writing skills I have been in awe of for a very long time. Oh, you’re going to put the speakers up too, Chris. That’s great.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the rest of the speaker list. Colin Bedell. Lynn Bell, who’s been on the show. Gemini Brett, who’s been on the show. Christine Caudill, who’s a fan of the show and is a big supporter. Wade Caves. Austin Coppock; I’ve heard of him before. Kaitlin Coppock. Our friend, Benjamin Dykes, who’s been on the show many times. Steven Forrest. Demetra, of course. Diana Rose Harper; I’m excited that this is her first talk at NORWAC, I believe.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Judith Hill, who’s known for her work on medical astrology. Lawrence Hillman. Jason Holley is great. Mark Jones has been on the show a few times. Jessica Lanyadoo. Alejo Lopez. Martin Sebastian Moritz. Grace Morris, a financial astrologer. Gregory Nalbandian. Lauren Nalbandian. Giulio Pellegrini, who’s the new president of AFAN or the chair of AFAN.
Sam Reynolds. Vernon Robinson. Oh, that’s great, he’s a Denver astrologer I’ve been wanting to have on the podcast, and I’m hoping to pretty soon here. Bear Ryver is awesome. Sonal Sachdeva. Leisa Schaim. Nadiya Shah. Somebody named Kelly Surtees. Kira Sutherland. Simon Vorster. Patricia Walsh.
I thought this was going to be a shorter list. Robert Weinstein. Arlan Wise.
KS: That’s okay.
CB: And finally, another friend of this show, Jenn Zahrt. So that’s actually a really amazing lineup.
AC: It is.
CB: It’s just reminding me of what a great lineup it was going to be, and how I was going back and forth about whether to attend because I was not speaking there this year. But now, I think I will definitely attend.
KS: Yeah. The lineup is really cool. There’s a lovely mix of new people coming in to speak that I’m very excited to hear about. I think it’s Kaitlin’s first conference talk–Diana Rose Harper, Bear Ryver–so it’s going to be great to get some new voices as well.
AC: Definitely.
CB: Brilliant. All right. And Austin, you launched a bunch of stuff. So you’re knee-deep even in teaching courses now, right?
AC: Yes. I’ll be teaching month two of eight during May. Other than that, some of the stuff I elected for Sphere + Sundry, some of the secretly good moments that were hidden during the not generally good moments in the first part of the year, I think Kate’s going to release a thing or two; we’ll see. And other than that, I’ve got NORWAC and trying to keep up with classes and readings.
CB: Brilliant. All right, Kelly’s website is kellysastrologyastrology.com.
KS: Kellysastrology.com, yeah. Don’t forget the ‘s’ in the middle. It’s a common mistake.
CB: Kellysastrology.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And Austin is austincoppock.com. I’ll put links to those in the description below this video. As for me, I’m just going to be slowly getting back to work. I’m going to start getting back to grading student papers.
There have been a lot of people during quarantine, because they had a lot of time to kill, decided to learn and invest in knowledge. I’ve had a lot of people sign up for my Hellenistic astrology course. So I’m excited to work with some of those people and get back to work on the course and maybe start doing webinars again and generally getting into helping people to learn ancient astrology and learning the type of astrology that we use here on the podcast. People can find out more information about my courses at theastrologyschool.com.
Yeah, I think that’s it for this episode. This is our most well-attended, live recording ever, I believe, where we had almost a hundred participants join us for the live webinar for this episode, which is one of the benefits of becoming a patron of The Astrology Podcast on certain tiers.
So thanks a lot to all the patrons who joined us in the live recording. There’s been a live chat, which has been a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to follow and some of the comments have been really great. Sorry if we didn’t get to everybody’s questions or interact as much. It’s always tough juggling both while we’re getting into discussions between the three of us.
But thanks, also, in particular, to all the patrons who support The Astrology Podcast and have continued to over the course of the past month since I’ve been gone and sick, and now that I’ve come back, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the ability to keep producing material like this, even during times like this, just due to the freedom that that’s given me.
So I’ll be back again next month with a lineup of some great episodes. And yeah, I look forward to seeing everybody again next month, so thanks, guys, for doing the forecast with me.
AC: My pleasure.
KS: Thanks so much. Thanks for having us.
CB: All right, well, thanks everyone for listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck next month, and we’ll see you again next time.
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, Maren Altman, and Irina Tudor, 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, and you can use the promo code AP15 for a 15% discount on that software.
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