The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 278, titled:
Post-2020 US Presidential Election Astrology Analysis and Reflections
With Chris Brennan and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on November 12, 2020
—
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
—
Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released August 28, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is Episode 278. And joining me today is Leisa Schaim, and we’re going to be doing a post-election analysis of the 2020 US Presidential Election with some reflections about the astrology, some of the predictions that were made, and how things have turned out so far.
So today is Tuesday, November 10, 2020, starting at 2:28 PM in Denver, Colorado–or 2:26 PM in Denver, Colorado, with Pisces rising, 278th episode of the show. Thanks for joining me today.
LEISA SCHAIM: You’re welcome.
CB: It’s Tuesday, so that means it’s exactly a week now since Election Day.
LS: Yes, what a long week it was.
CB: Yes, it’s been a super-long, super-exhausting week for everybody in the country, and to a certain extent, around the world. But now that things have started to sort of shake out a little bit and the outcome is starting to become clear over the past few days, I think it’s okay to start looking at some of the factors and the astrological factors that were going on and what made sense in retrospect, what ended up working out versus what things didn’t end up working out as much.
LS: Definitely. And of course we have a couple months to go in terms of the transition and inauguration and everything, but we figured that right now is kind of timely in terms of people still thinking a lot about this right now.
CB: Yeah, so one of my things with The Astrology Podcast has always been to capture and to talk about current events that are happening in the astrological community and things that are happening as they happen and as we’re observing them as astrologers, especially things like the Mercury retrograde that just happened and the major delays in determining the outcome of the election, where it wasn’t determined on election night, just like it was 20 years ago when Mercury went retrograde for the 2000 election.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I think that’s important. And even though this is kind of a delicate topic or delicate area, getting into politics, and it’s something that I have shied away from a bit over the past several years, I wanted to talk about it now just because there’s some really interesting astrology that’s happened, and I’d like to capture some of those things while it’s still fresh to sort of pass it on as part of the collective wisdom of the tradition from our time period to whoever’s watching this now or to whatever future generations that becomes useful as an astrological observation.
LS: Yeah, so interesting astrology going on, and also capturing what the astrology community is looking like around these particular events because that’s kind of an interesting thing to capture as well, historically.
CB: Yeah, historically, and sociologically, and everything else.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so let’s get right into that. This is our little electional chart for today, just barely catching Pisces rising.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so here’s the calendar for those watching the video version that we show on the month ahead forecasts, and this is the major astrological transit for November of 2020. And the main thing at the very top of the month of course was that Mercury stationed direct on Election Day, which meant that it was ending its three-week-long retrograde period through the sign of early Scorpio and then it stationed direct in Libra, and it stationed direct square to Saturn. And that was the main thing that Austin and Kelly and I focused on in the month ahead forecast and that most astrologers focused on. Because what you get with that then is basically two indications for slowness or delays.
LS: Right.
CB: You get the Mercury retrograde or Mercury stationary piece where Mercury literally slows down in the sky and stops moving for a period of time while it’s changing directions. So there’s this notion of it not moving forward or backwards, but it’s being very slow or starting to move forward again but doing so very slowly.
LS: Right.
CB: So there’s that piece and then there’s also the Mercury square Saturn piece, and one of the primary indications of Saturn is slowness, sluggishness, and delays.
LS: Yeah, definitely both of those, and I think a lot of astrologers had been looking at both of those pieces ahead of time. This is one thing that I think most astrologers got right, which is we won’t know the results immediately, that things will take time to shake out. And one of the things–when I was looking at that–with the Mercury station after it had been retrograde all the way up until Election Day was that can indicate not just slowness but also once you start counting everything, things looking like they might be changing direction through the process, which I think played out as well.
CB: Yeah, like reversals.
LS: Reversals, yeah. And then the square to Saturn is really not just slowness, which it definitely is–and I think that’s why it was a pretty easy call for many astrologers to be like this will take some time to know the final result–but also it means kind of painstaking counting. Saturn and Mercury, it’s like painstaking thoughts, painstaking bits of information, really making sure you do it right, which can take time rather than be quick.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. And both of those are also kind of Mercury significations or repeated significations of both Mercury and Saturn, where Mercury is looking at small things and looking at details–like the Virgo archetype–and then there’s Saturn, which also can have a highly critical feature of looking at things finely and rejecting or accepting things.
LS: Mm-hmm, and being really kind of responsible about being careful about it.
CB: Right, but requiring slowness and time and deliberateness.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: So what ended up happening with that of course was–well, there were a couple of things. So that’s important in and of itself because one of the things is a lot of people in the media were already saying and speculating that this was going to take time and there was going to be delays in this election, especially due to the pandemic and especially due to people using more mail-in voting as a result of the pandemic and not wanting to gather together in lines or congregating really super close together for fear of spreading the virus or getting sick.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So the additional emphasis on mail-in voting, as well as the higher expected turnout, was already, practically speaking, expected to coincide with potential delays and people were warned of that ahead of time. But the thing is astrologers have been talking about this I think before then, because astrologers had noticed a long time ago that Mercury was going to station direct on Election Day, on November 3.
LS: Right.
CB: And we all knew that the last time that that happened famously was in…
LS: 2000.
CB: …the year 2000, when the election got split evenly between Bush and Gore. And it came down to Florida, which was so close that they had to start doing a recount, and it took something like six weeks or something. It wasn’t until December 12 that eventually the Supreme Court made a ruling and stopped the recount, which effectively then gave the election to Bush at that point, but up till that point the election was unclear.
LS: Right, right. So a lot of astrologers were wondering exactly how slow will this be. Will it be like that again? Will it be like 2000? At the very least, it will be delayed results. And I think that’s played out in interesting ways so far actually. I mean, not just the obvious, which is that it took close to a week to call it by the AP–which only calls it when they feel really sure of the projected results, that there’s no mathematical way that it’s going to catch up–and that’s part of why it took so much time because I think they were being extra careful this year, so that took close to a week. But we also have the other pieces that I thought were interesting in terms of everyone is focused on the presidential race so much for good reason, but we all vote on Congress–the House, the Senate seats–and President all on one ballot.
CB: Yeah, the three–well, two of the branches of government technically.
LS: Right, exactly. So even though we know the President-elect at this point and the Vice President-elect, we won’t know the Senate until January because two of them were too close in Georgia, and so they’re going to be two runoff seats. So I thought that was actually an interesting piece because there is actually a practical delay there too and it’s from the same ballot. And in many ways, even though the President was what people were most focused on, it’s kind of part and parcel in some ways in terms of people really seeing who won this election, in terms of what’s possible to do after that.
CB: Yeah, so one of the things is a homework assignment; I haven’t fully done this yet. I mean, I remember in the back of my memory, astrologers starting to talk about this over the past couple of years, starting to talk generally. I remember Maurice Fernandez published an article a few years ago about how crazy the astrology in 2020 was going to be. And there were astrologers definitely several years ago–like 2017, 2016 maybe–that started talking about astrology being crazy this year, but also some astrologers starting to notice that Mercury was going to station retrograde on Election Day like it did in 2000 and expecting a repeat of that.
So I’d like people to go out and research, and I’d like to get a list of what are some of the earliest references that people can find or that we can find to astrologers starting to talk about Mercury retrograde happening on Election Day in 2020 and that being a potential for a repeat of 2000, or a potential for some sort of delays in the outcome of the election process. I think that would be really interesting, especially if you could find references from prior to March basically, prior to when the pandemic really hit the US, because that’s one of the primary things that started making the media talk about that there would be delays, but I know there were astrologers discussing it even before then.
LS: Yeah, and part of the practical reason that there were delays, in addition to how many mail-in ballots were being used this year because of the pandemic, were when they could get counted in different states, when they were allowed to, right?
CB: Yeah, so there was a push–I mean, that gets into a whole political thing, so let’s mention the states that it came down to. Because sort of what happened in just recounting the sequence of events was we were all up that night, super late, and the early returns came in for some states and some of the swing states were trending for Trump, and he was up because all year he had been sort of railing against mail-in ballots and telling his followers not to use them and encouraging people to vote in person basically.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And so, in many of those states, the in-person votes were tallied first, and many of the states had rules on the books where they couldn’t start counting mail-in ballots until the day of the election, which led to a delay in starting to count the mail-in ballots, which tended to trend for Biden. He had been encouraging people to use mail-in ballots and hadn’t been discouraging his followers to do so, so they tended to be more in favor of Biden in the mail-in ballots.
LS: Yeah, and I think this is important to know because in terms of that Mercury stationing direct and looking at an expected sort of turn in events, this was also expected in terms of the practicalities and this was actually being widely reported on for a couple weeks at least by the news, which is that this is going to be what it looks like election night and then it may go differently after that and this is why, so that’s an important piece.
CB: Yeah, because now there’s like a conspiracy theory that somehow there was something off about that or that the mail-in ballots were fraudulent or something like that. But the way that it actually went was pretty expected just because in some instances, for example, it was Republican legislators that had pushed to not allow the states to start counting those ballots ahead of time. So it’s kind of not right then. They stopped those ballots from being counted ahead of time, so that they only could be counted afterwards, so that some of those votes for Biden would naturally only be counted after the initial ones for Trump. To then say that that’s somehow fraudulent is kind of sketchy.
LS: Yeah, for sure. And there were some states–because of the pandemic, because it was kind of an unprecedented year–this year that did change their rules in regards to being able to count them early in order to have results on election night, but there were a few states that did not.
CB: Yeah, and some of those came down to the states that started to matter where it was close and where it became important. So the two primary ones were Georgia and Pennsylvania that it really came down to in the end.
LS: That was when it was turning. And that was actually really fun to watch, I actually stayed up late for that. It wasn’t election night anymore.
CB: That was a few nights later.
LS: Right, exactly, and we stayed up late on election night as well.
CB: So let’s give the sequence in roughly chronological order. So election night happened November 3; it was undecided, so the result wasn’t clear. And there were a few states that were still up for grabs after that night, and thus began just this excruciating week of everybody waiting and everything being up in the air and the votes being tallied in some of those swing states, but it was taking an excruciatingly long time for everybody to find out the outcome. And one of the things that was happening all that week that we noted in the forecast was that Mercury was applying to a square with Saturn for like three days.
LS: Something like that, yeah.
CB: Here, I’ll pull up the chart so we can actually look at it, but go ahead.
LS: Yeah, so Mercury was applying to square Saturn after it had stationed direct very closely square Saturn, but it was still applying after that.
CB: Yeah, so here’s Election Day. Let’s say around the middle of the day, Mercury’s stationing direct at 25.53 Libra and Saturn is at 26.22 Capricorn, so they’re pretty closely squared. They’re about, what, a degree off?
LS: Yeah, about a-half-a-degree really.
CB: Yeah, you’re right about a-half-a-degree. So they’re not very far off at all, but because Mercury’s changing directions, it basically just sits at that degree initially for a little bit. So the following day, on November 4, we can see Mercury’s moving forward again and it’s at 26.01 Libra. And then the next day, Mercury’s at 26.19 Libra, so it’s still short of Saturn, which is at 26.29 Capricorn, but it’s starting to pick up a little bit of speed.
LS: Right.
CB: And was it that night?
LS: It must have been that night. Let’s advance it one more day.
CB: I’ll advance it by hours because it was early.
LS: It’s been a long week, so it’s kind of blurred together at this point.
CB: So this is the night where you stayed up late because you were waiting to see if things broke finally when Mercury completed its square with Saturn.
LS: Exactly, which was going to be around approximately 4:00 AM Eastern Time that morning; so that was 2:00 AM here, so that was a little bit more reasonable. So I was waiting to see when the square went exact and then barely started separating if there would be a change at that point, and there was. That was actually when Georgia was called. About 20 minutes later, it started being reported in the news. So honestly, since it was being reported in the news, about 20-25 minutes later, it probably was like right at that square when the result came in, which was that Biden started being ahead in Georgia when they were still tabulating some of the mail-in votes.
CB: Yeah, so here it is. It’s like 2:00 in the morning, 2:30 in the morning here and Mercury exactly squares Saturn from 26.31 Libra to 26.31 Capricorn, and then you said it was right after that that the news came out.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And basically what happened is just that in Georgia, they continued and they started catching up with tallying the votes, especially the mail-in votes from counties that were favoring Biden, so places like Philadelphia.
LS: Yeah, I’m forgetting the county name actually.
CB: I think Atlanta or something.
LS: Yeah, it was around Atlanta, or the Atlanta suburbs, but I’m forgetting the county name right now. But anyway, there were a couple counties that really came in for Biden around that night, and it was between that time and when I went to bed. But between then and when I woke up again, Pennsylvania also did the same thing.
CB: Okay. Right, so it was like the next day after that, which was, what, November 6?
LS: Yeah, and I don’t know what time that was, but it was really quite close to just after it started separating.
CB: Yeah, it was like an hour after.
LS: It was that morning.
CB: An hour after I got up, I saw that as well, that both Georgia and Pennsylvania, the votes had caught up enough that now Biden was leading and leading by increasingly large amounts, so that it was going to be not possible for it to switch again basically.
LS: Mm-hmm. And just as an aside astrologically, it can be fun to watch these aspects go exact like in whatever context you’re looking at. So yeah, you might want to just deliberately do that sometime and see what happens when it goes exact.
CB: Yeah, this has been a really great lesson in the dynamic, flowing nature of astrology, seeing those aspects be relevant in a static sense on Election Day with Mercury stationary squaring Saturn. But then that aspect and its profection between the two–the square, actually something materializing, but also feeling that build up–it’s like we really felt what it was like that week to have an applying aspect versus a separating aspect where there’s an exhale, and it’s like, okay, the outcome is now known or something has broken free.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so that happened, and then not too long after that there were other states as well where the votes caught up, like Nevada and Arizona, and then Biden was also ahead. And then it was basically called–the press started calling it I think a day or so later.
LS: Mm-hmm, it was when the Moon went into Leo.
CB: Yeah, because the Moon was going through Cancer, and it was like squaring and opposing all of the cardinal stuff.
LS: That was actually really funny because that night, it looked, practically speaking, like there was no way for the result to change, and everybody was like, “Why are they not calling it?” And the Moon was applying to the opposition with Saturn that night, and I thought that was really funny because, again, delays or being extra cautious.
CB: Yeah, people started complaining that the media hadn’t called it even though Biden was so far ahead in the votes that it became mathematically impossible for Trump to win, but the media was trying to exercise…
LS: Additional caution.
CB: Yeah, lots of caution.
LS: Which is a Saturn thing, as well as additional delays. And I was actually thinking they might call it the next day when the Moon was in Leo because that’s much more celebratory, and also it’s not tied up with Saturn at that point.
CB: Yeah, so here’s the chart for that. The Moon switches into Leo, November 7, and then Biden’s so far ahead in all the swing states that it’s clear that he has enough electoral votes and he’s going to win the presidency.
LS: Electoral and popular, we should say.
CB: So he was ahead by, what, like four million popular votes?
LS: I don’t remember the number.
CB: Okay, but the Moon went into Leo and then the election was called.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was an interesting astrology lesson. I guess that’s our Mercury retrograde lesson that sometimes one of the things that Mercury does is when it hits that turning point, when it does that U-turn where it starts moving from retrograde-to-direct or from direct-to-retrograde. That U-turn coincides with a period of not moving. And Mercury is the fastest of the visible planets besides the Moon. So when Mercury doesn’t move, one of the issues with Mercury retrogrades is that things grind to a halt and that can be problematic, especially if you’re hoping for a quick answer to something.
LS: Yeah, so that was a great example, so we will be looking for the rest of the results going forward. I mean, I think it’s a little bit notable that there has been delays as well in terms of allowing the transition to go forward, because I think that also may be a piece of the Mercury-Saturn being so tied up on Election Day.
CB: Right. So Trump is refusing to concede, and that’s weird because that’s not really happened before and it’s causing some delays in the transition. And he’s claiming that it was stolen and then it’s starting a bunch of conspiracy theories, but he hasn’t really proven or provided much evidence so he’s not getting very far, so far, in court with any of those claims.
LS: Yeah, there’s been nine or ten suits that have just been thrown out for lack of evidence or standing or different things.
CB: Right, because it’s one thing to claim that it was stolen but it’s another thing to actually have some evidence that that was the case.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So it’ll be interesting to see later this month some other Mercury stuff coming up. We had two Mercury-Uranus oppositions, and we’ve got one more Mercury-Uranus opposition coming up. Also, today, Mercury’s about to go into Scorpio, which will be a shift. And we still have Mercury getting out of its shadow period mid-month.
LS: Is this gonna be mid-November that it’s out of shadow?
CB: Yeah, so it looks like at about 10 or 11 degrees is where it’s stationed retrograde in Scorpio. So once it hits that point again, around the 18-19 of November, it’ll finally be free.
LS: Right, and both of those are important turning points because as Mercury goes into Scorpio–I actually think within about an hour here as we’re recording–then that frees it from the sign-based square to Saturn. And then of course once it clears its shadow, it basically means symbolically it’s starting to tread new ground rather than going over what we’ve already gone over before.
CB: Right.
LS: So that in particular should be important I think mid-November, and a bunch of other active astrology going on between now and inauguration, particularly this week.
CB: Yeah, so this week we’ve got…
LS: Jupiter?
CB: I guess that is what we have to mention at this point. So here’s the calendar again: Mercury into Scorpio on the 10th; but the third and final of the three Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions is coming up on Thursday; and then right after that, almost simultaneously, Mars is stationing direct in Aries, ending its retrograde period on Friday the 13th.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So those are huge. There’s two major things coinciding with it, and I kind of anticipated that and talked about it in the last forecast episode, and it’s coming startlingly, unfortunately true at this point. So one of the things that’s happening is the COVID numbers all over the US are shooting up again, so I had Kyle from ArchetypalExplorer.com, who does this amazing astrology program that has these great visuals, plot the three Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions for me and their exactness on a graph, and then he plotted the COVID test cases, the daily positive test cases for COVID against a graph.
And this is current as of the past couple of days, and we can see the first two waves of COVID in the US kind of coincided with and tended to hit their high points just after the two earlier Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions. And right now, we are on track for the third major wave, which has already surpassed the previous two in terms of diagnosed cases, I guess. It looks like it’s about to coincide with the third exact Jupiter-Pluto conjunction.
LS: Yeah, and this is a really striking comparison I think visually. Everyone who’s looked at this has been like, “Wow.” In general, because astrology is often qualitatively true but not always something that you can prove quantitatively–although some people get into trying to do that–this is actually pretty quantitative, correlating pretty exactly.
CB: Yeah, so part of why people started looking into this was because of the 1918 flu pandemic. There was a really interesting correlation with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction there, especially with the mutation which made the flu more deadly and then led to a second wave of it, and that coincided with a second near-conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto when the majority of the deaths took place. Yeah, so this is kind of tricky and kind of problematic–problematic just to talk about.
LS: Yeah, I mean, it’s been bizarre living through it. I mean, Jupiter-Pluto, of course with these two planets coming together, you can come up with lots of different specific possible manifestations, but this is like ‘big death’, honestly. Like Jupiter is expansive and Pluto can be about those kinds of dark archetypes.
CB: Yeah, I mean, there’s that. There’s another piece of the Jupiter-Pluto I want to talk about in a minute, but in terms of the COVID thing, we’ll have to keep tracking it and see how high it goes basically. Because one of the things that bothers me is that the second wave, the peak and the cases, was actually slightly after the exact Jupiter-Pluto conjunction. So if we’re before that right now and it’s already this high then the question is, how high does it ultimately end up going?
LS: Yeah, that doesn’t look good for this fall/winter, which epidemiologists have also been saying of course.
CB: Yeah, which is another thing. It’s like they’ve been saying this, but here, with the astrology, there’s this thing objectively that’s occurring and that was set to occur before anybody practically started speaking or anticipating that from the perspective of knowing about the virus.
LS: For sure.
CB: The other thing is that when you get a transit where there’s three hits, astrologers generally have a working rule that oftentimes the third and final hit is the most important one. And while that’s not always the case, I feel like that is a general rule that I’ve seen in practice and that I feel like most astrologers, if you put that to them as a question–that the third hit is often the most important and final one and memorable one–that they would tend to say that that’s true. Do you feel like that’s the case?
LS: I feel like sometimes. I mean, sometimes that is the case. This is the way I think people often speak about it, as though the message is finally, finally getting through. It’s first introduced with the first aspect and then you’re like, “Oh, this is an issue.” And then the second aspect is like, “Oh, this is definitely something,” and then the third is like, “Okay, I have to do something about this,” or something like that.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that’s what I meant about it, in that sense that oftentimes the third one becomes the most pivotal in terms of there being a final change in something or a lesson that was learned or doing something differently, and then hopefully moving on from it at that point. But again, you were just talking about quantitative versus qualitative research, and I think this could be an example of that that could be useful to learn from in retrospect, in terms of how to describe and map out the notion of those things coming in threes being a relevant thing in astrology.
LS: Yeah, right, I agree.
CB: Okay, so the last thing, everybody already always asks about other countries, and the problem with the graph and whether it applies to other countries or worldwide. The problem with other countries is part of what’s happening here, and the reason this is so closely-tied into the US is partially because it’s tied into how it’s hitting something in the US birth chart itself, like maybe the Sibley chart. You’re shaking your head ‘yes’ vigorously.
LS: Yeah, because the Pluto return is really what I’ve been thinking about, although it’s hitting other planets first, but they’re very close together. So it’s been hitting Mercury this year in the US chart.
CB: Right, which was initially talked about a lot, with all of the messing up and the attempted destabilization of the post office or dismantling the attempts to slow down things with the post office ahead of time on the part of the Trump administration.
LS: Yeah, that’s definitely one piece. But in the US chart, regardless of what time you use, as long as you’re using that date, I do favor the Sibley chart. Although I can’t swear to it because I haven’t concentrated thoroughly enough to swear more strongly about it, but it does seem to match up with some things. Anyway, regardless of the time of day, that day, there was a Mercury-Pluto opposition. So Pluto’s at 27. Mercury is–do you have the US chart there you show?
CB: I believe I do have the Sibley chart somewhere. Let me see if I can find it.
LS: Yeah, so Pluto got up to almost 25 this year, transiting Pluto did, and so it’s been hitting off that Mercury-Pluto opposition. We’re so close though. I mean, aspects are not just when they’re exact, especially when it’s large-scale like a country, and so we’ve been in the process of the Pluto return of the US for the past several years, I would say. Anyway, I think that was why I was nodding vigorously because that’s part of why I think it’s hitting the US so much more strongly, so many more deaths and so forth.
You can look, practically speaking, to policy, or lack thereof, nationally, but that ties into the US Pluto return, which can be a breakdown of authority. And fights against democracy versus monarchy were back in the beginning of the country and this has sort of been another wave of that. Are we keeping a democracy, or are we going to a sort of strong-man rule? And that can be a Pluto thing.
CB: Here’s the birth chart of the US, the Sibley chart, which I’m becoming increasingly impressed by this year. If you go back and listen to the episode I did with Nina on the birth chart of the US, we started out very skeptical, but I’m coming around, let’s say.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So there’s Mercury, which is at 24 Cancer, and is also retrograde, which is kind of funny in the US chart. It looks like it’s six days away from stationing. And there’s Pluto at 27 degrees of Capricorn.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So it’s really tied into that and I think that’s part of why it’s hit the US so strongly.
CB: Okay, so part of it is different countries are going to have different birth charts. And so, the way that this current Jupiter-Pluto transit interacts with their birth chart is going to be different in different ways in terms of the astrology.
Also, there’s probably something to be said for the way the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction is interacting with Trump’s chart, or the Trump administration as a whole, since their mismanagement of it is part of the reason why these waves are coinciding so well and are getting so big, just because of the slowness and the sort of failure to address it, as well as politicizing wearing masks. Because if mask-wearing was mandated or was more acceptable socially and not a political thing where people were fighting against it then we wouldn’t see the COVID cases being as high necessarily, so that’s also a potential issue.
LS: Exactly. And it’s interesting you mentioning it interacting with Trump’s chart because there is a saying that the chart of the leader, the national leader, can sometimes act as the country’s chart in some ways.
CB: Exactly.
LS: And all of this Capricorn stuff, the eclipses, and Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto–all of that has been in his 6th house, which can be illness.
CB: Yeah, it’s falling in his 6th house of illness. And that of course famously, just a few months ago, coincided with him, when Saturn itself stationed in Capricorn, getting sick with COVID because they had an event where they nominated the new Supreme Court Justice where everybody was standing around in-person without masks during the middle of a pandemic and that was probably when Trump and others got sick with COVID.
LS: Right, right. So it’s kind of acting as both his natal chart of course, but also, by proxy, in some ways the US chart, even though the regular US chart also still applies.
CB: Right.
LS: All the stuff in the US chart’s heading to the 8th house, 2nd and 8th, which is finances, and also mortality goes in the 8th house in the Sibley chart, I should say.
CB: Right now, at least currently, the death count hasn’t gone up as much as it did in March when it first hit and everybody was unprepared, so I’m hoping that that’s the case. One of the things that makes me nervous about looking at the 19…
LS: 1918 one?
CB: …1918 flu pandemic was that the Jupiter-Pluto didn’t coincide with the first wave. There was one exact conjunction, and what it coincided with was, around August of 1918, there was a mutation of the virus, and it mutated and became more deadly, and that’s what the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction coincided with was the mutation. And then there was a retrograde and it separated, and then it came back and got really close and almost conjoined in Cancer or something. So for all intents and purposes, it was a conjunction and that was when the deadly second wave happened in 1918. And I just hope it’s not something weird like that where it’s a mutation that comes out of this conjunction, but instead it’s just the third big wave.
LS: Yeah, we’ll see. I mean, that is an important astrological principle that comes up a decent bit. Sometimes if things don’t coincide exactly it’s because the thing that’s most pivotal is happening right then when the aspect is exact, but you don’t necessarily see the aftermath of it yet or the consequences of it yet.
CB: Right.
LS: So anyway, that’s not the election but is definitely a big piece of the election.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that’s feeding into things and that was tied into some of the delays in the votes and the mail-in voting and all of that stuff. Additionally, at this time, one of the things I was worried about was I noticed after the first Jupiter-Pluto conjunction–if you go back and listen to the forecast for May when I really started observing this–this huge rise in conspiracy theories and conspiracy rhetoric and misinformation was happening. And I started zeroing in on that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction as being one of the things that seemed to be coinciding with it, because at the time it was surrounding COVID and COVID denialism and attempts to attach all sorts of weird ulterior things to it.
And so, that was something I anticipated with the other conjunctions that I mentioned on the forecast this month. And of course what’s happening now is it seems like there’s this weird confluence of conspiracy theory stuff now happening with the election, and I don’t know if that’s also going to get tied into COVID or what, but that’s one of my concerns about the conjunction, the third and final conjunction happening later this week. I read a tweet or an article from Reuters or the Associated Press, and this security expert was being quoted saying that right now there was the largest disinformation effort or something in US history that was taking place this week in the aftermath of the election to try to dispute the results of it or something like that.
LS: Yeah, that was a striking headline. It matched up very well, especially timely right now. Yeah, so we have the last Jupiter-Pluto conjunction this week. That can be tied into some of those conspiracy theories and the reason is because Pluto can be about delving deep into things that are unseen, that can be a piece, or uncovering that which isn’t apparent. I mean, and that can be genuinely a piece of Pluto things, but on the flip side of that, it can also be things like paranoia, because it’s the desire to delve and try to find things that you think are hidden. And so, that can be things that are actually hidden or just sort of getting really obsessive in terms of thinking things are there that aren’t.
CB: Mm-hmm. I found a quote and it was like an NPR thing, but they say: “Experts say that the combination of President Trump’s continued false assertions of a stolen election and rapidly growing social media groups sharing those claims has led to ‘the most intense online disinformation event in US history’.” So I’m really focused on that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction for that and something coming out of that or being formed out of that that might not be good in the long term.
LS: For sure. And the other major thing I see going on this week with those transits, Pluto can also be power or power dynamics, particularly things that are a little bit maybe underhanded, not straightforward. Pluto is sort of like you just want power for its own sake sometimes. That’s not always the case. I mean, that’s simplifying considerably.
CB: And also, the exercising of power in order to manipulate and do things in an underhanded or not clear, evident way. And what’s happening is that people are being manipulated into thinking they’ve discovered a big conspiracy, but they’re just being manipulated in order to achieve political ends to undermine reasonably an election that went fine.
LS: For sure. And I think that’s the trouble with the aspect, at least some parts of it. Everyone’s feeling that, but it’s a matter of what is the actual manipulation or what is the actual attempted power grab because that is I think part of the Jupiter-Pluto. It can also be bigger power, people trying to get bigger power.
CB: Okay. All right, so that’s the Jupiter-Pluto stuff, I wanted to move on. I think that’s good for Mercury. There’s not anything we meant to mention about the Mercury retrograde or the current things that we’ve already experienced so far for just transits this month.
LS: I think that’s it.
CB: I mean, this has kind of turned into a bit of a forecast, but the eclipses are coming up and that’s going to be the major turning point. Well, that actually does lead us into our next topic, so maybe let’s just go there. So we wanted to talk about a review of some of the technical factors that did work out now that we know the outcome of the election, specifically in some of the charts that were relevant, especially the birth charts of the candidates in the US Presidential Election, and that’s the next major topic or major section of this.
LS: Okay.
CB So you and I, at the end of September, we did record a three-hour, work-study session where we sat here for the first time and went over all the charts and employed all the techniques that we would normally look at in order to try to figure out the outcome of the election. And we released that to patrons as an episode of The Casual Astrology Podcast as just a private thing for a couple hundred people.
And I got out of political astrology years ago and part of the backstory was that Patrick Watson and I launched a blog called The Political Astrology Blog back in 2008, and it ran until I took it offline after the 2012 election, in early 2013. I wanted to get out of political astrology because I could see how tense and how vicious politics was sort of getting, and I wanted to sort of get out of that because my thing is primarily just doing astrology and that’s what I enjoy, and getting wrapped up in political stuff has many, many downsides that is not always fun.
So I had a temporary lapse of judgment when I was invited to join a panel in 2016, and I said sure. I had sort of planned to hand it over to Patrick since he kept doing political astrology, but I didn’t and went ahead with it, which was stupid because ultimately there were huge issues. And I did an episode leading up to it about the issues with Hillary Clinton’s birth time and how I didn’t know if I was using the correct chart for her. And I was using the zodiacal releasing primarily, so if I had the wrong birth time everything could be off. And I said very clearly at the time if this is the correct birth time, it looks good for her, but if this is not then it means her peaks were previously and it doesn’t look good for her winning the election.
LS: Hmm.
CB: But I was so wrapped up in a sort of internal conspiracy theory in the astrological community about Hillary Clinton being a Scorpio rising who didn’t want people to know she was a Scorpio rising that I used this birth time of 8:00 AM that came from this older astrologer who had passed away–his name, Francis McEvoy–who swore by it, even though every piece of documentation that I found after that point actually indicated she was born in the exact opposite end of the day, which is 8:00 PM, so I was using literally the exact opposite chart.
So I got that wrong and talked about it. I think I did an episode a week or two after about my reflections of the 2016 election, which is part of why we’re doing this today. And for me, though, I knew that in order to do political astrology well you have to take it really seriously and you have to follow things really closely during the course of the election and leading up to it to really correctly anticipate the trajectory that things are on and then to predict where it’s going to go from there for all of the people involved.
LS: Yeah, you need to be looking biographically, tracking people’s trajectories with their charts. Having good birth times is essential or else you just don’t know.
CB: Yeah, so that was not my focus and that was not anything I was into doing this time, so I just didn’t. I followed the election to a certain extent. I know you were following the astrology way closer than I was.
LS: A bit more.
CB: But getting into it and trying to issue predictions or anything like that was not on the top of my to-do list this year, so we just waited until September till we were gonna have as much birth data as we had. We sat down and we looked at it and then counted up the pieces–and there were some pieces in favor of Biden, there were some pieces in favor of Trump–and then let that sort of stand for itself.
So what I want to do here is just look at some of those pieces that actually did work out well that we had considered either in September in the run-up to this or that we’ve seen since then that are sort of interesting things that I think astrologers can take into account and learn from for future elections.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so let’s start with the eclipses. So the big thing is the eclipses, that’s the thing I mentioned on the last forecast episode for November that we recorded back in October that I thought was the most impressive because it had come up in the last three US presidential elections.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I have a graphic for that, that actually Kyle made for me from Archetypal Explorer, which shows the endgame transits of 2020 as we get towards the end of the year, and we have some of those final big transits. So we have the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction going exact here in mid-November. But then not too long after that, in the last couple days of November, on November 30, there is a lunar eclipse which is going to take place in Gemini. And then two weeks after that there’s a major solar eclipse that’s going to take place on December 14 in the sign of Sagittarius.
LS: Right.
CB: And then finally, just after that, is the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius in mid-to-late December as the final major transit of the year. So the eclipse is important because it’s taking place–the solar eclipse specifically is important because it’s taking place in Sagittarius, and Sagittarius happens to be Joe Biden’s rising sign.
LS: Right.
CB: So that’s important because one of the patterns that we’ve noticed–that I had noticed in the past few presidential elections and that Patrick had noticed–was that when an eclipse takes place in the rising sign or in the 10th whole sign house, in the Midheaven of a presidential candidate that tends to be the guy that wins, because it’s something about connecting the collective energy of an eclipse with the personal birth chart and the sense of self or the most personal part of the chart, the 1st house and the 10th house in that individual’s birth chart.
LS: Right.
CB: So that happened in 2008 when there started being eclipses around the time of the 2008 presidential election in Aquarius, and Obama of course has Aquarius rising. Then in 2012, the eclipse moved a few signs over and started happening in Scorpio, which is Obama’s 10th house. And then in the 2016 presidential election, eclipses started taking place in Leo, which is Trump’s 1st house and rising sign. It’s his 1st whole sign house, which is actually kind of important because if he has 29 Leo rising that the entirety of Leo is his 1st house.
LS: Right.
CB: And most famously, the Great American Eclipse, which occurred six months into Trump’s presidency and crossed over a huge swath of America, ended up being in his rising sign.
LS: Right.
CB: So that’s true for the past three presidential elections. You can also take it further back than that if you want, but those are the ones where I saw it myself up close and personal and was really impressed by it. So that was one of the things we did notice in our study session in September that was gonna be important. And the other reason it’s important is because it’s happening on December 14, and that’s the day that the Electoral College will vote and certify the results of the election or finalize them. How would you phrase that?
LS: I’m not sure. But yeah, either of those, finalize, make official, I guess. I think that is the part where it’s most official, when the Electoral College meets and votes because then it’s a definite vote, because we’re technically voting on electors when we go vote as citizens.
CB: Yeah.
LS: So the fact that the Electoral College meets during that Sagittarius eclipse is really striking and that it’s happening in Biden’s first. And the reason why it’s so important when the eclipses happen in the 1st and 10th is that they’re both the most visible houses in the chart, so you literally are very visible if there’s an eclipse happening in your 1st house or 10th house. You’re kind of like visible in a bigger way temporarily or more long-term. It’s also a change. Usually eclipses in a house bring some sort of change. And an eclipse in the 1st would be change of identity–becoming a president is a pretty big change in identity–and an eclipse in the 10th of course is change of career.
CB: Yeah, and also like a new beginning. Especially a solar eclipse is a new beginning and a lunar eclipse sometimes is a sort of culmination in some sense.
LS: Right.
CB: So here is Biden’s chart. There were some questions because it has a rounded 6:30 AM birth time, so it gives 3 Sagittarius rising. Is that correct, 6:30?
LS: Is it? No, it’s 8:30.
CB: 8:30.
LS: Yeah, I thought that sounded off.
CB: 8:30. So it’s a rounded birth time, but it’s actually worked out really well. I don’t have any questions about whether he’s a Sag rising for sure.
LS: Right.
CB: But even the minutes–I’m thinking it’s actually not far off from 8:30, even though we would take that typically as like a rounded time.
LS: Right.
CB: One of the things I noticed is on the third presidential debate, Biden did extremely well. He did much better than he did in the first debate, where Trump just interrupted him a lot and kind of got under Biden’s skin. And Biden kind of tried to fight back a little bit, and I think he called him a clown or something at one point. But in the third debate, Trump was more restrained and Biden did a better job of just debating basically and did a pretty good job in that debate. And one of the things I noticed is that transiting Jupiter later that night exactly trined the degree and minute of the Midheaven in his birth chart using this time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So his Midheaven is–what is it? 19…
LS: It’s 19.50-something. I can’t quite see.
CB: Sorry, the way they have this setup is weird. So it’s 19.54 Virgo. And Jupiter, if you go back and look at it, exactly trined his Midheaven that night. While it was not a completely decisive thing in the sense that that shaped the outcome of the election, or there was a huge groundswell one way or another as a result of that debate, I did think that was something that helped him ultimately. And seeing Jupiter exactly trine the degree and minute of his Midheaven that night I think was really important and might help to tie-in or lock in this time a little bit more than we might take it otherwise.
LS: I think the time’s very close, and I agree that that helps for sure. Jury’s out in terms of the Lot of Spirit, and that could actually move within the next two minutes, but that’s still quite close in terms of doing most things with the chart.
CB: Yeah, and that’s something we should get to talking about is zodiacal releasing in a minute once we’re done talking about the eclipses.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So we see that he has 3 Sagittarius rising. So whether using whole sign or quadrant or equal or some other goofy house system, the eclipse, the solar eclipse on December 14 will fall in his 1st house pretty much no matter what, I think.
LS: Yes.
CB: And it’s not just that, but it’s also the fact that it falls on the day that the Electoral College is going to vote.
LS: Right.
CB: So assuming that goes through and takes place, since obviously we are doing this a little ahead of time and we’re sort of anticipating stuff that’s going to come up that seems pretty certain at this point or pretty inevitable, I think in the future we can take that as an important thing that needs to be paid attention to. Because people often pay attention to Inauguration Day and the chart for that–or they pay attention to Election Day…
LS: Election Day.
CB: …whenever that falls in early November. It’s like the first Tuesday in November. They pay attention to Inauguration Day. But this day of the Electoral College voting, it seems like it’s an important day as well to the extent that that transit is falling so exact on that day for him, and that was a good indicator here for him winning the election, even though it falls, technically, over a month after Election Day.
LS: Yeah, I agree. And a tie-in to note there as well that’s also important is Kamala Harris, we have an exact birth time for her, and she has Gemini rising. And so, she’s also having the eclipses across her 1st and 7th houses. So that’s important because this one coming up at the end of November, November 30, is actually in her 1st house, though it’s a lunar eclipse. But the solar eclipse then on December 14 will fall in her 7th house, which seems really quite appropriate in terms of a running mate being potentially a 7th house person.
CB: Yeah, I mean it’s literally her partner, her business partner, or as you said, running mate and being like a partner of sorts.
LS: Right. So it’s actually really interesting that it’s happening in Joe Biden’s 1st and Kamala Harris’ 7th on the Electoral College vote.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that was an argument in favor of both of them then from that perspective, not just Joe Biden, but also Kamala Harris, the fact that they have mutable signs rising.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so that was really good. The other thing that’s of course important is that it’s not just the solar eclipse that’s happening. There’s also the lunar eclipse that’s going to happen at the end of November, and that’s kind of like a culmination or an ending point in some sense. It’s gonna take place in Gemini on November 30. And I think one of my takeaways or one of the things that I’m taking that’s important for that is that on the other side, politically, the current President and Vice President both happen to be Sun-sign Geminis.
LS: Right.
CB: So that means that lunar eclipse is falling right on their Sun sign in both of their charts. We know that’s Trump’s 11th house. We don’t have Pence’s birth time, so we don’t know what house that’s falling in his chart. We also happen to know that Trump was born on a lunar eclipse, so that’s also additionally important for him, but it seems like it’s in the sense of coming to completion and endings and closing something down, which in this context, I guess is the four years of his presidency and the peak of his political power and influence presumably.
LS: Right, and I don’t think we or anyone else would have taken that in isolation as to say which way it would go, but it is somewhat striking given all of the factors together that there is that lunar eclipse which is more about endings rather than beginnings. Yeah, and I do think that may be something. There’s a few dates I noticed coinciding near the end of the month around the eclipse, a few other things. And so, I do think that might be an important turning point with regard to the whole transition piece.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
LS: And the eclipse happening the 11th, even though we were more focused on the fact that it was happening in his Sun sign–the sign where his Sun is placed in his birth chart–the 11th house is also your friends, groups, alliances, and social alliances basically. So I do think there may be an ending of sorts that may be important with regard to the transition, in regards to his alliances.
CB: Yeah, so here’s Trump’s chart, and his Sun is at 22 degrees of Gemini, and it’s conjunct his North Node at 20 Gemini, and his Uranus at 17 Gemini opposite to his Moon at 21 degrees of Sagittarius. And since that’s falling on the nodal axis, he was born just after–no, sorry, just before a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. So this is like the opposite. It’s a lunar eclipse in Gemini, so it’s sort of like an inversion or a reversal of what he has in his birth chart.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so that’s the case with Trump. And then, let’s see, there’s Pence’s chart. And Pence has his Sun at 16 degrees of Gemini, his Mercury at 21 Gemini, and his Moon may or may not be in Gemini. It’s either in Gemini, very late Gemini, like the last 5 or 6 degrees of Gemini, or it’s in the first 5 or 6 degrees of Cancer.
LS: Right, and this is important that we don’t have a timed chart for Pence, so don’t pay attention to the houses here.
CB: Yeah, don’t pay attention to houses, and the Moon’s a little weird. One thing that’s funny about Pence is like Trump you can kind of peg as a Gemini; he’s a talker. Pence doesn’t come off that way over the past four years as being much of a talker as a Gemini, just to get really basic, Sun-sign, pop astrology-type keywords here.
LS: Doesn’t talk a lot, yeah.
CB: But what’s actually funny about that–I was thinking in the past few days–he originally first became more prominent because he was a talk radio host in the 1990s, and that was his original sort of platform that gave him a launching off point for politics. So while we might not have that conceptualization now in terms of how he presents himself in public and stuff, that’s still an element there in his life certainly.
LS: Yeah, that’s interesting, and I hadn’t known that before you told me.
CB: All right, so those are the two main things in terms of the eclipses. Is there anything else about that? I think that’s pretty good and pretty straightforward.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so other stuff that we looked at. And that was the thing, the eclipse falling on December 14, for me, was one of the most impressive things that I kept coming back to and was hoping was sufficient, but I wasn’t sure. And I guess the other part of this is, for me, this election was much more relaxing for the first time in a few election cycles, just to sit back and have my preference for what the outcome was, to be idly following the election and to have some things that I was hoping for in terms of my desired outcome, but not otherwise being invested in it in terms of trying to drive myself crazy figuring out the outcome and investing a lot in it more emotionally than I already was personally or anything like that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Because there’s already enough anxiety and just the ups and downs of this whole election and everything else just in terms of being an American living in the country and everything else, it was kind of nice not to have to deal with that in terms of trying to also issue predictions about it or something.
LS: For sure, which I definitely know what you mean. But it’s also really funny to hear you say you’re an outlier if you felt more relaxed during this election versus the last few.
CB: Well, I felt more relaxed in terms of that, in terms of just trying to figure out the outcome. Instead, I enjoyed just having my own personal investment and seeing the outcome that was separate from trying to definitely figure out what the astrology was going to be by studying it intensely 24/7.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that’s a huge element that we’ll have to talk about later that gets in the way of astrologers making predictions sometimes, their political affiliations, and their desire for what they hope will be versus what the outcome ends up actually being, as well as what media sources and news and information are they taking in that are providing the context for their predictions and the context for what they’re expecting to take place.
LS: Right, so we’ll get into that in a little bit here. But just kind of pause to note that this is kind of an example of just because you ‘can’ try to make predictions around something doesn’t mean you always have to–even if you’re an astrologer–in terms of public events, so we’ll get to more of that. Other technical factors.
CB: Zodiacal releasing. So this is one where we have to give you props. I’ve talked about it a few times in the forecast in the past. I think we talked about it in August maybe or the August forecast, or maybe it was the September forecast when Harris was officially given the VP nod by Biden and became his running mate in the presidential election. I told this funny story about how there was this period in late 2018 you just kept talking about.
LS: And you were kind of playing that up.
CB: As a joke. I was supposed to make a joke about how I couldn’t get you to shut up about how eminent Harris’ chart would become around the time of the 2020 Presidential Election when you were looking at her zodiacal releasing periods. It fits one of the classical indicators that came up in different charts, like George Bush’s chart, for example, when he became President in 2000 and 2004 of going into a major Level 1 peak period that was angular from Fortune. And you had discovered at some point, in the second-half of 2018, that Harris would go into a peak period that would start in December of 2020, so right after the presidential election.
And you thought that this meant that she could potentially win somehow–because this was before she launched her presidential campaign–but she was widely anticipated to, and she did in fact launch it not too long after that. And we were both trying to stay out of political astrology, but after much deliberation, you did put a tweet out sort of saying some of what you thought about that not super-cryptically, but pretty clearly in early January of 2019.
LS: 2019, yeah, after looking at it in 2018. And I was actually very careful about that because I don’t actually really want to fully get myself into that, and I didn’t want to be the target of anyone who disagreed with that or anything like that. But at the same time, it was so striking that I wanted to make a public note of it in case things came back later, which they have.
So yeah, I was looking in late 2018 at this, and it was two things–maybe three things. It was the fact that she was moving into a major peak period on Level 1, which is the biggest peak level you can have in zodiacal releasing from Spirit, which is about career and general life direction, and she had already done so much in this very long, preparatory period that was supposed to be leading up to the peak period. She had already done so many prominent things and the peak period is active and important. And so, it’s like what’s more active than being a US Senator? Like how many steps up can you go from there? And so, I figured either running for President, VP, or Cabinet–those were my guesses.
The other major thing I was looking at there was that it’s angular from her benefic of sect. Venus in a night chart tends to be the most positive placement wherever it’s placed and ruling. And so, when that gets tied into being angular from the Lot of Fortune, it means when you go into your peak period it’s also more positive for you, so it was both of those things. And I was like what’s more prominent and more positive than what she’s been doing already? And then I also tracked back through a lot of her chronology with the preparatory period, and it lined up perfectly with all of her career moves, even in one where it should have been actually more challenging because it tied in Mars and Saturn in her prep period.
CB: So here’s her birth chart. And since it’s just talking about the general periods, the Level 1 periods, that’s something where we could actually talk through really quickly how that works. So she, interestingly, like Trump, was actually born at a Full Moon. So both Trump and Kamala Harris were born at a Full Moon. Hers was not an eclipse because it’s not on the nodal axis, but we can see the Moon and the Sun are exactly opposite to each other, from Sun at 27 Libra to Moon at 27 Aries. So when the Sun and Moon are exactly opposite each other, both the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit will both be conjunct the Descendant, and that’s where they are in this chart. They’re both at 24 degrees of Sagittarius conjunct her Descendant.
So the way this technique works with zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Spirit is that since Spirit and Fortune fall in the same sign, you move Spirit forward to Capricorn. Capricorn has a 27-year period based on the period of Saturn. So the first chapter of her life lasts for 27 years, and then she goes into a 30-year Aquarius period, the very next sign in zodiacal order, which is again a period associated with Saturn for 30 years, and that’s the second chapter of her life.
And because she has a night chart and Saturn is placed in that sign, it’s a little bit more of a difficult period for her, but it’s building up to this 12-year Pisces period, which she begins immediately after that. And because that’s the sign of Pisces and it’s her 10th house, and it’s square to the sign of her Lot of Fortune, that is considered to be what we call a peak period that tends to be more active and important for people, especially politicians. It can be a period of eminence and doing some of their most important work in some instances.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So what you noticed is that she would be moving into that 12-year Pisces peak period, and it would start in December of 2020.
LS: Mm-hmm, so just about a month before inauguration.
CB: And here I found a screenshot of the tweet that you put out January 2 of 2019. It says–actually why don’t you read it? Because then it’s in your voice.
LS: Sure. So I said: “I looked at Kamala Harris’s chart/career history, and she’s definitely rising somehow. Her zodiacal releasing will be excellent soon. At the end of 2020: peak periods on L1, 2, & 3. Her whole preparatory L1 period since ‘91 has been a steady climb upwards, matches the timing perfectly, in what should have been less prominent/more challenging period compared to 2021 [and onward]. [She’s] in a completion period now on L2, switches to peak period L2 in July for a year. L1 peak starts 12/25/20. So somehow more prominence and more positive coming up. Look forward to seeing how it plays out.”
CB: Yeah, and then the other night on Twitter, she got up and introduced Joe Biden before he gave his victory speech basically, and you took a picture of Kamala Harris and posted that above your thing on Twitter.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So what’s funny about that of course is she then launched her campaign shortly after you made that tweet and then went through the primaries, but one of the things we were both somewhat surprised and disappointed about in terms of the prediction was that she actually dropped out of the presidential race. And at first, it actually looked like that was going to be a failed, sort of quasi-prediction, but then later, over the course of this summer, she came back into play and was picked as Joe Biden’s running mate, and now is the Vice President-elect of the United States.
LS: Right. I mean, that is kind of one of those things where it’s like if you see the astrology and what’s happening diverging, but there’s still more time left in play, it’s like you should trust the astrology as long as you have a good birth time.
CB: Yeah, I mean, sometimes you should trust the astrology.
LS: I mean, that’s a whole other digression really. I’m just saying this still looked like it had to ramp up somehow, and so we were like how is that going to happen.
CB: Yeah, well, one of the things in our September work session–because this is one of the other things–the eclipse looked really good for Biden, and I thought that was a good thing in his favor. The zodiacal releasing looked really good for Kamala Harris and that was another argument in favor of their ticket. But the only thing that we were nervous and unsure about with the zodiacal releasing that was still a problem is that it was opening a 12-year-long peak period for her.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And so, one of the dangers and the open question up until last week was does that mean she’s going to start becoming eminent now, like starting in December, at the very beginning of the peak period, or is this opening up a whole period of eminence where because she ran and was the vice presidential candidate this time, would she then run and win in 2024 or something. That was the secondary scenario that was a possibility that we couldn’t rule out.
LS: Yeah, it was not a guarantee because it’s sometimes the case that when people start their new Level 1 peak period things start happening immediately, like pretty quickly, like within that first sub-period. But in other cases, it’s more like you’re in that milieu now, and now you have the chance to become more prominent and that still can play out over some time, so it wasn’t a guarantee.
CB: And there’s also different levels of prominence.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Because you can start it and become prominent, but then you could hit the L2 peak. There can be one or two of those, which she actually will hit in a few years…
LS: She will hit later, yeah.
CB: …and could become more prominent during those times.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: But that’s one of the funny things that’s sometimes annoying about people learning the technique. They’ll go into a new general period and then like a day later, they’ll write me and say, “It’s not working because I haven’t become eminent like literally two hours into the start of that new Level 1 period.”
LS: Exactly.
CB: And I have to tell them sometimes it takes a little bit of time, it’s not immediate.
LS: Right, right. Yeah, it’s kind of like mapping the playing out of all the different things. So there were a couple other things about her chart I’m not sure we wrote down here but we did cover that I think are true at this point.
CB: Like what?
LS: So I noted that she was going to start her second Saturn return, and in fact had sort of already started it with a brief ingress of Saturn going into Aquarius this spring, and that’s in her 9th house. Politics can be in the 9th house. Even though 10th house is technically career or people at the top, the 9th house can be politics and government sometimes.
CB: Yeah, I’ve always felt weird about that, but this year more than any other year, I’ve started to really truly understand that in a much deeper way for two reasons: one, because politics has to do with, in one sense, ethics and morality.
LS: What you want to see enacted in the world, values.
CB: And the other is because politics is also sometimes very much not a fully rational thing. It has to do sometimes with belief.
LS: Belief systems.
CB: Yeah, like one’s belief systems. And sometimes those can have rationalizations and be thought out, but other times they can be sometimes more akin to your religious preference of like, “I’m a Catholic,” or “I’m something else.”
LS: Evangelical.
CB: Evangelical, yeah.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So her natal Saturn is in Aquarius, in the 9th whole house. So she did start with that first ingress with Saturn into Aquarius in late March of this year that technically started her second Saturn return, but then that only stayed there until the end of June but that was kind of the tip-off point as we understand it anyway.
CB: No, I mean, that’s actually really interesting and important because that station then…
LS: In May.
CB: Yeah, I’m thinking of the station in May, if I have it here.
LS: It was like May 11 or something? Yeah, May 11.
CB: Yeah, there it is, May 11. But it was right after that in June, during the protests, that I think she became more prominent again politically in terms of where the US was and where the left was, in terms of what was important, and just her what she brought to the table more as a black woman being able to speak to some of those more immediate concerns in the US. Because I know there were debates between Elizabeth Warren or something and her financial savvy or what have you versus other potential VP candidates. So it’s interesting that we often talked about the Saturn ingress into Aquarius as being the preview of what that transit will be about for a lot of people.
LS: It starts off the process.
CB: Yeah, so that was the start of her Saturn return.
LS: Exactly, the start of her second Saturn return in Aquarius in the 9th house. And so, that’s going to come back here now mid-to-later December when Saturn and then Jupiter both move into Aquarius and make that conjunction at the first degree of Aquarius on December 21. So that will happen in her 9th house. And that’s just after the ingresses, right? They both go into the first degree of Aquarius and then there’s an immediate conjunction.
CB: Mm-hmm.
LS: And so, that’s really interesting what I had noted early on. Looking at that, that’s a really interesting kickoff to the bulk of the Saturn return is that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. That’s kind of like a ‘seeding’, since it only happens once every 20 years, the conjunction between those two planets. It’s like a long-term seeding of a new beginning in that area, wherever it’s happening in your chart. And it’s happening in her 9th house and as part of her second Saturn return, so that was kind of striking to me, that piece.
CB: That’s kind of interesting to me from a different perspective. Mike Pence–I was just being reminded in the past week–has Saturn in early Capricorn.
LS: Right.
CB: And so, that means he’s finishing up his second Saturn return right now and has been over the course of the past few years, as he’s been Vice President for the past four years.
LS: Yeah, that’s a good point and comparison.
CB: So that’s an interesting parallel.
LS: Right, exactly. And then the other piece of her chart I had been thinking about is that not only having the Gemini-Sag axis ties into, at least, the Sibley chart, but even if you don’t prioritize a particular rising sign for the US chart, the natal US Pluto is 27 Capricorn. It’s exactly square her Sun and Moon. And so, I thought this really ties into someone who’s going to be dealing with those issues of the US Pluto return potentially, being sort of like personally tied into that process.
CB: Okay. Yeah, so those are some of the things–the eclipses, the zodiacal releasing–that worked out in favor, that are good takeaways from this election. Trump’s ZR is still being weird and there’s still a whole thing about that.
LS: Right.
CB: That was my primary technique in the last election. This election, when we did our work session, we paid attention to the ZR. But one of the things I realized, one of my takeaways from the last election–and you can hear me doing this in the episode that I did like a week or two after that election–is I was just discovering things after that election that other astrologers had said about other techniques, like secondary progressions, that were interesting that I didn’t know about.
LS: Right.
CB: One of the things that it made me realize was I put too much emphasis on one single technique in 2016, and if you used a variety of techniques that gave multiple indications, you could sometimes get multiple indications pointing in a different direction. And if they all cluster up or clump up–like we’re seeing, for example, with the eclipses and the ZR in Kamala Harris’ chart–it can push you in a certain direction that you might not go otherwise, so I didn’t just pay attention to zodiacal releasing this time.
And Trump’s chart is still weird. There was a debate after the 2016 election. Like Patrick Watson, for example, one of his takeaways from what happened with that election was he believed that the zodiacal releasing periods we were using for Trump were wrong. And he had this whole argument–drawing on some other somewhat minor, obscure Hellenistic astrologers–that you shouldn’t reverse the lots, or that you should reverse the lot positions.
LS: Mm-hmm, that you should swap them basically.
CB: You should swap Spirit and Fortune. And so, that’s been an ongoing debate over the past four years about whether that’s true or not. He did, to his credit, issue a prediction about the presidential election primarily based on Trump’s zodiacal releasing that Trump would lose the election, because he found a repetition in the periods that he’s using of Trump having dropped out of like the 2012 presidential election and him having a similar repetition now in November of 2020. And he inferred from that that Trump would drop out or lose the election or something like that, as we’re waiting for him now to still concede the election.
LS: Yeah, so I mean, that’s something to look further at. I feel like I need to do a lot of scrutinizing of this because I had looked at Trump’s regular Spirit periods.
CB: Yeah. I mean, you should say that more full-fledged I feel because both of us have felt very strongly that you don’t need to do that. And you’ve, in particular, followed Trump’s ZR periods really closely over the past four years and you feel like…
LS: Sometimes.
CB: …pretty strongly that they have still been coinciding pretty well, and especially the big thing that was out and undecided for a long time was what was going to happen during his Level 2 loosing of the bond. And the focal point, which came down to a few-days’ time span in the summer of last year, of 2019–the fundamental focal point of the entire loosing of the bond where it was a loosing of the bond on all three possible levels–ended up being two important events: one of them was that Mueller finally testified for the Russia probe, and that sort of ended up being the culmination. And then after that point, the whole Russia probe thing sort of went away in terms of the focus of that and everything else, and he testified basically saying there was weird stuff that happened, but that he had approached it under the premise that he couldn’t bring charges to a sitting president or something weird like that.
LS: Right. And also, the impeachment happened through that whole process. The phone call that tipped off the whole impeachment process to Ukraine happened right at the exact pivotal point in there.
CB: Yeah, that was the second thing that I was gonna mention. So Trump ended up making the call that led to his impeachment, where he called and tried to pressure a foreign government in order to investigate his political rival, who happened to be Joe Biden because he was anticipating Biden being his primary adversary and primary person that he had to beat in the presidential election, which, in retrospect, turned out to be prescient because Biden just actually did end up beating him. But at that time, at the exact dates of those loosings of the bond on all three levels, it turned out, in retrospect, to be when he made the call.
LS: Right, right. And that’s when I was tracking it the most–not so much because I was interested personally in terms of Trump’s everyday existence–because you do have to track it like everyday to see it down to the Level 4s, and some things will of course be public and some things will not; but I tracked it everyday pretty much for several months and it all lined up perfectly.
And I noticed the regular Spirit periods, every single time he hits an Aquarius period, for instance–which is his Lot of Fortune, so one of his major peak periods–even on the most minor levels important stuff happened. So I’m watching that going forward because there are still some things coming up in the next couple months that I’m curious to see how they play out. But yeah, I mean, that is an issue that I’m still seeing that accurately reflects a lot of events.
CB: Yeah, and there was an issue because that would still be the Fortune periods in Patrick’s approach.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: It would be the Spirit periods in our approach. And the Spirit periods are supposed to be more like actions that you take and Fortune is supposed to be more like circumstances and things that happen to you.
LS: Exactly.
CB: And we had a little debate with Patrick at the time about whether that was a Fortune or a Spirit thing, but I felt like it was a Spirit thing because it was an action that Trump took on the exact loosing of the bond, which then had repercussions and led to the impeachment versus something that was just out of his hands or something like that, like a natural disaster or a health thing.
LS: Exactly. And I have seen that over and over every time he hits–particularly the Aquarius periods, but other peak periods too–is that he takes an action. It’s not something happening to him, but he actually takes another action that’s important, more than usual.
CB: Yeah. Okay, so in terms of the zodiacal releasing though coming up, what we were seeing–what you were seeing especially because you’re more focused on the zero periods for Trump–was him entering into a Leo period on Level 3 coming up.
LS: Yeah, starting December 17.
CB: Which is like a peak period, but it’s also one of his most negative periods because his Mars is placed in Leo in a day chart.
LS: Exactly. And so, when he hits those Leo periods, he also does important things, takes important actions, but he gets much more blowback than usual during the Leo periods in particular because that’s the focal point of Mars more than any other sign period in ZR.
CB: And then one of the things that made us–I know it made me unsure in September; one of the counterpoints, I wasn’t sure was in Trump’s favor was his general periods. If we were using the normal Spirit periods, he would move into a larger Leo period in four or five years.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: So that was a little weird because he would move into a larger level peak period, but it would also be more qualitatively negative or difficult. And that made me a little nervous about whether that indicated a Trump win because it was sort of similar to the basis of me and Patrick’s 2012 presidential prediction for Obama, because we saw that Obama would have a loosing of the bonds starting in the spring of 2017, and we inferred then that probably meant he would be having a career transition.
And that would make sense if he was finishing up his second term of office in the White House at that point, to have a career transition immediately after that and that ended up working out. So we weren’t sure then and that made me a little bit uneasy about whether Trump ending a major chapter of his life in four or five years wasn’t him getting a second term in office. But now, in retrospect, it looks like that’s something else.
LS: Yeah, so it’s tricky. We kind of have to see some of it play out, especially that period coming up in mid-December and onward.
CB: Yeah. Okay, so anyway, my takeaway from that is zodiacal releasing is still important, still useful. There can be weird cases and there’s still things that we’re learning about it. I think it’s important when it comes to major predictions that you don’t put everything on one technique, and the takeaway from 2016 is especially don’t do that if you don’t have a solid birth time.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Don’t feel pressured into doing that if you don’t have a solid birth time.
CB: Yeah, basically. And don’t put yourself in a position where you have to, no matter what, if you’ve accepted a speaking position; which was the stupid situation I went into, even though like literally that week, there was a Washington Post article about how astrologers were trying to figure out Hillary’s birth time at the last minute.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, let’s move on. Other technical things.
LS: Biden’s profections.
CB: Oh, man, that one’s so good. So that’s another one that was an indication in Biden’s favor, although we were still a little bit unsure about it because sometimes it can go different ways. Because this famously came up and you gave a lecture about this on Hillary’s chart in 2016.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So using the technique, annual profections, how old is Biden now? Do you remember?
LS: I want to say 78. Is that right? Would that be a 6th house? Yeah, 72.
CB: So he was born in 1942.
LS: He’s gonna turn 78. So he’s still 77 for like a week-and-a-half or something.
CB: Okay, so what we saw then is that we knew Biden was in a 6th house profection year.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Let me see if I can put this up. There’s Biden’s chart again, the Sag rising. So we knew he was in a 6th house profection year activating Taurus, and Venus as the ruler of the year. And what was important about that is one of the things that you can do with profections is if you want to know–okay, so he’s in a Taurus profection year now and he would be during the election. But then later in that month, on November 20, which is his birthday, he would switch to a 7th house profection year.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So with profections, for those that aren’t familiar with it, we’ve done a bunch of episodes on it. So just look at The Astrology Podcast archives at this point for annual profections and you’ll see a few episodes. You just start with the rising sign, whatever sign the Ascendant is located in, that sign is activated for the first year of the person’s life. Then once they have their first birthday, it moves to the second sign in zodiacal order and activates that for one year and just keeps jumping one sign for each year. And since there’s only 12 signs that means every 12 years it’s going to repeat itself over again, and you’ll have repetitions of the same planet being activated and sometimes similar events or similar circumstances coming up in the person’s life.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So when you do that with Biden, if you take it back 12 years of course, then you come back to 2008. So the last time that he was in this profection, he became Obama’s running mate and they won the presidential election, and then Biden became the Vice President 12 years ago when he was under the same profection, so that was an argument in favor of Biden winning. And then we also knew–because I had famously used this as an example in my course–that he was 29-years-old when he became a Senator, when he was first elected to office.
LS: Right, and it was actually considered kind of like a long-shot, but he ran and he won during his 6th house profection year at age 29.
CB: Right, which was also his Saturn return, and he was like super young at the time. He was considered to be super young for winning at age 29 at the time, so it was kind of a newsworthy event. But then famously, after he was elected, about a month later, he turned 30. And so, he moved into his 7th house profection year, activating his 7th house of relationships and activating that Saturn placement that’s there in his 7th house, as well as that Uranus placement. He has a Saturn-Uranus conjunction on his Descendant, so it activated that cluster of placements in his 7th house. And famously, his wife was involved in a major car accident, and his wife died as well as his daughter passed away, and I think one or two of his sons were seriously injured.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that was like a major event in his life, and he thought about dropping out of politics completely and not becoming a senator, but then there were a few other senators that got together and encouraged him just to stick with it. And then he famously did become a senator and went to Washington, but then he would go back on the weekends or something on the train in order to be with his family.
LS: Right, right. So that was another time of the same profection year and him getting elected to major office, so it was like several repetitions at this point. We didn’t see things standing out as strongly in-between, but I didn’t really fully research that either.
CB: Yeah, but part of the problem for me with that was knowing the 2008 one was a positive indication that Biden could win.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But what made me nervous about the first one is that was a positive indication that he could win, but it was also a little bit of a could there be something negative that happens afterwards, which in this instance would be in between his birthday on November 20 and Inauguration Day. And so, that made me a little bit nervous about that, even though it swung towards or inclined more towards a positive indication for winning politically.
LS: Right. And it’s interesting that it’s a 6th house year because it’s normally not like you’re super prominent in a 6th house year, but for him it activates these really nice placements. He has an exalted Moon in the 6th house–the Moon is considered very well-placed in Taurus–and then it’s in mutual reception with his chart ruler, his Ascendant ruler, Jupiter in Cancer, which is also exalted.
CB: Not mutual reception.
LS: Oh, sorry, reception. But he has these two exalted planets and they’re in reception, and so that gets kind of highlighted more than usual in his 6th house years. I just wanted to kind of put that out there because 6th house years aren’t usually necessarily all about career success.
CB: Yeah, and it’s like his Lot of Fortune is also there, and it activates his Venus, which is in Scorpio in the 12th. It’s kind of cazimi. It’s weird because it’s just on the boundary of being cazimi and coming out of it. It looks like it’s coming out of a cazimi with the Sun, so you might actually consider it to be in the heart of the Sun. And it has this what is probably the saving grace of his chart, which is that that Ascendant ruler, that Jupiter in a day chart at 25 Cancer is trining all of those Scorpio planets and really helping to bonify and balance them out.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Jupiter’s at 25 Cancer and it’s trining Mercury at 21 Scorpio and the Sun at 27 Scorpio and Venus at 28 Scorpio. So that’s also probably part of the reason that Venus is doing a little bit better than you might expect it to otherwise.
LS: Definitely.
CB: So anyway, one of the things that we didn’t do that we would have done as part of our due diligence if we were trying to issue predictions instead of just do the informal work session that we did in September is we would have gone through and seen what happened in the intermediate years every time he went into one of those 6th house profection years, because there’s a pretty big gap there between 2008 and 1970-whatever when he had that first election when he was 29. Because when you did this–you did this actually. We all did this during the 2016 election with Hillary’s chart and what we got was mixed results.
LS: Right.
CB: She was going into a 10th house profection year. And in some of those profection years, she would become more prominent and relatively positive things would happen, at least in terms of political power. Like it was in the ‘92 election, or was it ‘94?
LS: It’s fading at this point. I did that a while ago.
CB: Basically, when Bill Clinton became President that was when she was in the same profection year, but there were other years when she actually had a major loss. So I think if you took it back to 12 years before that, they had political power but then were voted out in Arkansas when he was a governor. They lost a major election and she was blamed for it due to some stuff that she had done. So with hers, there was this mixed history of sometimes wins and sometimes losses, and so what ended up happening in that repetition was a loss rather than a win in 2016.
LS: Right, and it’s because the profection years won’t always exactly repeat. A lot of the same themes will come up, but the specifics will depend on not only your natal configurations to that house but also transits happening that year and so forth.
CB: Yeah, transits can change it. Because if there’s a positive transit going on that can offset it and indicate a major positive shift in that context, but if there are major negative transits, it can just completely throw it off and indicate a negative circumstance within the context of whatever is being activated.
LS: Exactly.
CB: All right, so that was another thing that was another example of how important profections can be and how you gotta pay attention to those repetitions, because sometimes it’s as simple as that with that technique. If you want to predict the future then you need to study the past.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so that’s profections. We have profections and transits in Trump’s chart, so that was a major thing. The transits we didn’t emphasize enough, but you’d been paying attention to especially his profections this year, because ever since his birthday, this year in 2020, he’s been in a 3rd house profection year. And you kept remarking and it kept coming up in the news over and over again how his 3rd house kept being activated.
LS: Right, he had a brother die early in the year, which is a 3rd house topic.
CB: Right, so the 3rd house is the place of siblings.
LS: Right, so 3rd house. I mean, looking just at his natal configurations there with the 3rd house, he has Jupiter and Neptune in the 3rd house, the ruler though…
CB: Which is kind of positive.
LS: It’s good. It’s really good.
CB: Let’s just say that from the start.
LS: That was actually…
CB: A positive indication.
LS: Absolutely.
CB: That’s probably the best part of his chart and that’s probably the most overlooked part of his chart, because we often don’t think about the 3rd house as being important. Astrologers are quick to jump to the 1st house and the 10th house and stuff like that, but because he has a day chart, Jupiter is the most positive planet; it’s at 17 degrees of Libra in the 3rd whole sign house. But the other thing that’s really important–again, this is something I started reflecting on a lot after the 2016 election–is that Jupiter is stationing.
LS: It’s stationing. Yeah, it’s stationing direct. It’s really quite good in his chart.
CB: Yeah, so it’s stationing direct. And that Jupiter is also probably helping out some of the other planets in his chart in a way that’s important and notable, like his Mercury, which is applying to a square with it, and his Sun to a lesser extent, which is the ruler of the chart which it’s trined to.
LS: Right, and that was definitely a factor. The fact that he was moving into a 3rd house year with Jupiter there, in a day chart, and stationary and all of those good factors, was definitely a factor in my thinking that could be really good for him.
CB: Right.
LS: But then you look at the rest, you look at the ruler, and what’s happening to the ruler this year.
CB: Yeah, so in profections, one of the takeaways that’s relevant this year in terms of this example that always has to be emphasized is it activates the ruler of the sign that’s activated, which is Venus, but it also activates the other house that that planet rules, which in this context is the 10th house of career. So it’s bringing in not just 3rd house things but also 10th house things, and then they’re gonna manifest especially within the context of wherever Venus is located in the chart, which in his case is at 25 degrees of Cancer, in the 12th house, conjunct Saturn at 23 degrees of Cancer.
LS: Right, right. So it’s a mixed indicator where Jupiter in the 3rd is initially really good, but then when you look to the ruler, it’s Venus in the 12th house. The 12th house is more obscure. It can deal with things going on behind the scenes or loss.
CB: Loss, illness.
LS: Yeah, illness, hospitalization, things like that; like things that take you away from everyday society. So that in itself is very mixed; the Venus in the 12th isn’t great.
CB: And we could see over the summer, we were noting already that he was having problems because we saw two negative 3rd house indications happening right away, one of them that his brother died.
LS: Brother died and that’s a 3rd house in the 12th.
CB: The sibling, like loss of a sibling, that’s really straightforward delineation. The other thing was that his niece, I believe Mary Trump released this tell-all biography which included excerpts from a phone conversation with Trump’s sister, where she was saying a bunch of negative things about him, and nieces would also be like a 3rd house thing.
LS: It was a secret recording.
CB: A secret recording. So a hidden recording…
LS: Yeah, such a 12th house thing.
CB: …of like a sister, and the sister was kind of letting out some secrets. Like one of the things that she said was that he had cheated in order to get into college or something like that.
LS: Right, and was generally just kind of talking pretty negatively about him in terms of his character.
CB: Right, so those were like objectively negative indications that we already saw manifesting over the summer/fall that were kind of like this isn’t just Jupiter in the 3rd house that is manifesting here, but something’s going on with the Venus here in a major way in the 12th house.
LS: Right, right. And part of why that was–which I wasn’t looking at earlier in the year, but then I really realized it later summer and onward–we had Mars and Saturn really just sitting around 25 cardinal. And so, they were both hitting his Venus, the ruler of his profection, this year in the 12th house. And Mars in particular is going to be the harder transit for anyone born during the day, so having both of those at once hitting your profected ruler is a pretty negative indication.
CB: Yeah, and that’s something in our analysis that we didn’t pay enough attention to was just looking at the transits; honestly, just looking at the transits to the candidates’ charts and narrowing them down based on profections and based on paying more attention to the lord of the year and what is happening with the lord of the year and is it receiving positive transits or is it receiving negative transits.
At one point, we went through and we tried to look really quickly because this was at the end of like a three, or four-hour work session. We started looking through the three or four charts for the debates, and we were looking at the debate chart itself as a sort of standalone chart to sort of get a sense of some of the energy surrounding the debate. But it would have been more interesting and better and more thorough to look at the transits to each person’s chart for each of the debates as they were scheduled, and we would have seen things like the trine to the Midheaven in the last debate with Biden. But the other thing you would have noticed at the very end of September was the Mars-Saturn square. Saturn stationed direct in Capricorn at 25.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so that’s like a thing in and of itself. And then simultaneously, Mars was squaring Saturn from 25 degrees of Aries while being retrograde, and that was going exact around the time of that first debate.
LS: Right, right, and we mentioned those. It’s just hard to know how much weight to put on them. We definitely were not thinking at that point about it, because it was also hitting Joe Biden’s Ascendant ruler, which is 26 Cancer.
CB: 25.
LS: Is it 25?
CB: It’s actually 25.
LS: Is it 25? Yeah, so pull that up again.
CB: There’s the thing with Saturn stationing at 29 on the 29th of September. And that was the day of the debate, right?
LS: I think so, yeah. So Joe Biden–is it 25?
CB: It’s 25.08
LS: Okay, cool. So yeah, that’s really exact too and that was part of what we were equivocating about because it’s like hitting both of their charts, but it was Trump’s profection ruler.
CB: It was the lord of the year in Trump’s chart, whereas Biden’s…
LS: It was not, exactly. And that’s a pretty big difference.
CB: Let me–for those watching the video version–animate the wheel and take it back to that first debate around the 29th. That’s not it. There we go. So we see Mars stationing retrograde. It’s stationed retrograde at 28, so it’s not really stationing that far.
LS: I was gonna mention that because it’s basically hanging around the vicinity of his profection lord for a long time, because it’s stationed at 28.
CB: Yeah, so here’s the first debate. And Mars is at 25 Aries, that’s squaring Saturn at 25 Capricorn, and Saturn is stationing. So that ended up being important of course, Saturn’s stationing in his 6th whole sign house, because it must have been right around that time that he got COVID and got sick with COVID famously and then went into the hospital for like a week or something.
LS: Right. I wasn’t really thinking about his health stuff necessarily. With any general chart, if you saw those transits on the 6th, if it were a client, I actually would say be careful about your health, or if there’s a pandemic going on, you want to be more cautious than usual about exposure because those easily can go to health issues, the 6th.
CB: Yeah, totally, exactly. Well, if you go back and listen to our forecast where we did horoscopes in January for every single rising sign, I bet you’ll see us talking about Saturn going through the 6th house and just paying attention to health things and try to be careful about health with Saturn transiting through there.
LS: Right.
CB: So I didn’t get to mention this in the forecast last month because I didn’t get her approval ahead of time, but I had a personal thing that was happening around that time where I was witnessing a parallel event with a person with a similar chart. But my close friend and mentor and teacher, Demetra George, was born not too far from Trump, I think in the same summer, in the same year, and therefore, she has the same Saturn placement almost roughly or very similar in some similar degrees, and she also has Leo rising. And when Saturn stationed retrograde in Capricorn at the end of September, when Trump got sick, it was also stationing in her 6th house. And she had a major heart issue and ended up in the hospital suddenly and ended up having to have major surgery.
She ended up recovering from it and she’s in recovery and she’s doing okay at this point, but that was a really interesting parallel seeing the news of Trump with Leo rising having Saturn station there and having that major health event, and then my friend Demetra, who had some similar chart placements also having a health event at that time.
LS: Definitely.
CB: So it’s an interesting takeaway. It’s also just a good lesson again where we get into some of these elaborate techniques–like zodiacal releasing and everything else–but sometimes you really gotta pay attention to the transits that are happening during crucial periods.
LS: Right.
CB: That can be tough. For example, with Biden’s chart, if you’re just looking at that as the ruler of the Ascendant–let me see if I can bring Biden’s chart up again. If you were just looking at that as the ruler of the Ascendant, he was receiving similar transits to that, but it’s once you layer in the profections that you realize that this is a little bit more important for Trump than it was for Biden.
LS: Exactly. Yeah, so that was important. Let’s see, what else? Yeah, so he had a lot of Mars-Saturn stuff this year. I mean, I think one of the reasons we didn’t emphasize it as much as we could have is because Trump has had this history now–and especially we’ve been able to see it very clearly in the past several years–of things that would normally sink someone else or would be bad for someone else, he seemed to just kind of glide through without as much consequence as most people would have.
CB: Yeah, like water hitting the back of a duck, it would just glide off of him, like some things that would sink any other politician or any other presidency. And so, we had much more trepidation about looking at individual transits and being like, “That looks bad, it’s hitting his 12th house.” One of the themes that kept coming up–I found a delineation in the 4th century astrologer Paulus Alexandrinus once not long ago about Saturn in the 12th house, and it was something about overcoming one’s enemies and dominating them or something like that.
That really made me think about that because if there’s anybody that we’ve ever seen and if there’s anything that we can walk away from Trump’s presidency with and his entire political career in terms of his astrology it’s needing to understand the placements where he was able to survive so many attacks and disasters and mistakes that that would have sunk anybody else basically.
LS: Definitely.
CB: And it must have something to do with, I want to say, some of those 12th house placements and maybe that Jupiter or something.
LS: His Saturn is enclosed, in addition to Jupiter being stationary direct. That Jupiter stationary direct is also already really positive in terms of things just going better for you in general, but his Saturn is actually enclosed between the aspects of Venus and Jupiter, so that significantly makes more positive that placement.
CB: Right, so Saturn’s at 23 Cancer, and on one side is Venus at 25 Cancer and on the other side is Jupiter casting a ray from 17 Libra to 17 Cancer on the other side of Saturn, so it’s enclosing it between the rays and protecting it perhaps…
LS: Yeah, I think so.
CB: …as well as modifying it.
LS: Okay, so moving on.
CB: That’s a good point. All right, so those are some of the things with the transits in terms of Trump’s chart that we saw. Oh, man, the secondary progressions.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we went through this more because secondary was something I got out of 2017. For the greater part of a decade, after I got into Hellenistic astrology in the mid-2000s, I just focused on especially the three techniques that worked really well for me, which were zodiacal releasing, annual profections, and transits, and those are still my core techniques. But I remember after the 2016 election starting to look at some other astrologers’ predictions, and one of the things they noted was by secondary progression Trump’s secondary progressed Sun came up to the degree of his Ascendant.
LS: Right.
CB: I believe that that went exact during the Republican National Convention that year in 2016, when he got up and accepted the nomination. And that was a really impressive indication to me, in retrospect, that I sort of learned from, so this time around, when we did our thing in September, we did start paying attention to what secondary progressed stuff was going on to see if there were any major ones because there is sort of like a hierarchy of important secondary progressed things.
And one of them that’s always been impressive to me that I never forgot–because I’ve seen it happen in astrologers’ charts, I’ve seen it happen when there’s important turning points in other famous people’s charts–is paying attention to when planets station retrograde or direct by secondary progression as being an important turning point, a huge, important turning point in a person’s life.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And especially if they’re stationing direct, that’s even more, I would say.
CB: Even retrograde is important.
LS: Yeah, the stations are always important, but it’s an additional important factor if it’s stationing direct.
CB: So the big thing that we discovered that’s worth mentioning here is we found two planets stationing direct this year in Joe Biden’s chart, and his secondary progressed Saturn is stationing direct and his secondary progressed Mercury is stationing direct, which is a pretty, pretty big deal.
LS: Yeah, it just means that this is going to be a more important time in his life. I mean, that in itself you can’t call the election over, but it does mean that it’s going to be a particularly important time for him compared to many other years.
CB: Yeah, I mean, to give an example of that, to give an example of secondary progressions, the astrologer Alan White, when he had cancer in 2011. And I went out there to see him for like a week and he was dying basically, and we had talked about his life, and I tried to record and document as much of it as I could.
And one of the things I noticed in his chart is he had all these planets stationing and secondary progressions the year that he found Hellenistic astrology, and it ended up being this major thing that sort of changed his life. And a good part of his contributions ultimately ended up being the ways that his unique role helped in the dissemination and propagation of Hellenistic astrology in this really interesting way that Demetra and I have both tried to talk about and give him credit for in retrospect. But that is an example that always really stuck with me about the importance of secondary progression stations indicating an important turning point and a pivot point in a person’s life.
LS: Right, definitely.
CB: Yeah, so seeing that in Biden’s chart. Let me see, you have anything else to say about that while I try to pull up the progressed chart?
LS: I don’t have a lot to say about it other than that secondary progressions, the reason why I think neither of us look at it as much as some of the other things is they don’t inherently move quickly. And so, much of the time nothing super notable is happening with the secondary progressions because they move so slowly, and so it’s only once in a while where something like really stands out. You can watch the secondary progressed Moon in terms of background influences.
CB: Which, by the way, is one of the things that we did notice that came up, that his secondary progressed Moon was squaring Saturn. So it was in Pisces around 5 degrees a few months ago and it squared his Saturn, which is not actually a great secondary progression, but it also conjoined his…
LS: Venus.
CB: …secondary progressed Venus at 6 degrees of Pisces during all of this. So he was having kind of a positive secondary progressed Moon transit.
LS: He was. Yeah, so that is one where you can watch if the secondary progressed Moon is aspecting something else in the chart either natally or progressed planets, but when something stations that’s particularly important.
CB: I mean, that’s a good point though that normally that’s all you can look at is secondary progressed Moon stuff because that’s the only thing typically that’s gonna move or do anything interesting in most secondary progressed charts anytime soon.
LS: Exactly, because the technique is symbolic time-a-day for a year, and so you’re progressing in that motion; only the Moon is going to be fast enough to really be doing a lot or changing a lot. So anyway, that’s why it’s notable when something else changes.
CB: So in this, we can see his secondary progressed chart. I’m just casting it for today, but it’s all still relevant. So November 10, we see Mercury at 24 Capricorn and the ‘S’ next to it says ‘stationary’, and it’s on the Morning Star side of the Sun, so we know that this means that it’s stationing direct. So Mercury’s stationing direct and then we see Saturn down here at 5 degrees of Gemini, it’s also stationing direct.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was a little tricky because those are positive indications of a major turning point in Joe Biden’s life, this being one of the most important years of his life and being a pivotal turning point for him. But it’s a little tricky because if you’re trying to call the election, it can go a little bit either way in terms of, no matter what happened, this would be the high point of Biden’s career in some sense.
Because he had attempted two other times to be President of the United States back in the 1980s and then he had to drop out and failed, and then back in 2008, he had to drop out, even though he’s later picked by Obama to be the Vice President. But this time, he actually succeeded in winning the primaries, was nominated by the Democrats to become the presidential candidate. So it’s like it would have been a high point either way, but now we know, in retrospect, why it’s stationing. It’s not just because he got the nomination, but also got elected.
LS: Right, and that’s the trouble and sort of meta-issue. That’s the trouble with trying to call presidential elections, oftentimes, or at least one of the major issues involved is by virtue of running or being one of the major party candidates and even winning that, you’re going to be prominent and that’s going to show in your chart. It’s going to show a prominent time for you.
CB: Right.
LS: And it’s going to show that no matter what, whether you win or lose. So that’s one of the confounding issues of trying to predict a presidential election or something similar to that.
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right, so that was the main thing. We found other secondary progressed stuff in the US Sibley chart and other things. Do you have stuff to say about it? I was gonna skip it.
LS: Yeah, only that the progressed Moon in the Sibley chart goes into Aquarius just a few days before the 2020 election, which I thought was notable. Not just that it was switching signs, but it was switching signs to the same sign that the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction will happen in the following month, and moving away from it. It means the progressed Moon has been hanging out in the same sign, Capricorn, with the really heavy Capricorn transits we’ve been having–Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto all in Capricorn– that really, to me, looked like a mood shift, a major mood shift. So that was a little bit of a factor in my head in terms of maybe changing parties.
CB: Got it. I mean, there may have been other secondary progressed stuff we saw on the charts, but those two stationing in Biden’s were the two main takeaways of just reminding of those being crucial turning points.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, other things I’ve written down really quickly are just things I noticed. At one point, after we did our work session but before the election, one of the things is we had looked at the inauguration chart. We didn’t really look at it too much or too closely in terms of the transits that each of the candidates was having that day, and I still haven’t done, let’s say, a full workup on this in terms of looking at the transits. But one of the things we did look at was that there would be this really close Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus, at 6 degrees of Taurus on Election Day, and that Taurus is also the rising sign.
LS: On Inauguration…
CB: On Inauguration Day, sorry, and that felt like a great indication. It’s also squaring the pile-up stellium of Aquarius planets: the Sun, 0 Aquarius, and Saturn at 3 Aquarius, and Jupiter at 7 Aquarius, and Mercury at 18 Aquarius. So there’s a lot of stuff there to talk about that we’re not gonna go into here about the inauguration chart and different things, but one of the things I started thinking about–in retrospect, leading up to Election Day–was I realized that if Trump has Taurus rising, or if Trump has Leo rising then Taurus is Trump’s 10th whole sign house.
LS: Of career, yes.
CB: Of career and social standing and reputation and everything else. That means that Mars-Uranus conjunction is happening in his 11th house of career and reputation…
LS: 10th house.
CB: 10th house of career on Inauguration Day, which because he has a day chart is like getting fired basically. It’s like a separation or an unexpected disruption and severing that’s not experienced very well in terms of one’s career.
LS: Yeah, basically. I mean, even Mars just going through the 10th whole sign house in a day chart is like more negative experiences with regard to career at that time.
CB: Sure.
LS: Especially the Mars and Uranus, such a close conjunction, it’s like a sudden separation.
CB: There’s other ways that that could have worked out, certainly other manifestations of that transit that he could have had and that I’m sure he’s had at other points when Mars has gone through Taurus.
LS: Right.
CB: But I think it’s just an interesting takeaway, assuming that that’s what happens now1 given the current trajectory of things that on that day of January 20 of 2020, that he’s losing his job rather than keeping it. And at a very, very simplistic level, Mars going through your 10th house at that time and conjoining Uranus is symbolically pretty fitting for that.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, so that was a side thing. Other tangential charts for candidates or anything else that we noticed that was relevant?
LS I mean, this sounds kind of silly, but because there are so few timed charts I had noticed of all of the family members of Trump, Tiffany Trump had a timed chart, at least as reported from the news. It was rounded to ten minutes, so it could be slightly off like I’m you know slightly off. But anyway, she’s the one that has a birth time, and so I looked at that just to see if anything popped out.
And so, she was moving into a 4th house profection year. The 4th house does speak to family. Parents, in particular, can go in the 4th house. So home, family, parents.
CB: I mean, for only like the past 2,000 years or so, astrologers have put parents in the 4th house, especially the father.
LS: Yeah, so she was moving into a 4th house profection year, turning 27 just a little bit before, I want to say, mid-October. I’m forgetting her exact birthday, but it was soon, before the election.
CB: But her birthday is in October?
LS: Yeah, it’s October.
CB: So it’ll switch right before Election Day.
LS: Yeah, I want to say mid-October. So then she moved into a 4th house profection year, meaning those topics are highlighted that year, and it’s Aries. She’s Capricorn rising, unless the time is very. If it was like nine or ten minutes earlier, it could be a different rising sign. But in any case, Capricorn rising, Aries 4th whole sign house, that’s where the Mars retrograde is happening. Mars stations direct on November 13-14, mid-November here.
And so, the fact that she has a day chart–Mars stationing direct in the 4th whole sign house during a 4th house profection year is kind of notable in terms of something potentially challenging happening with regard to parents. Again, that’s another similar thing where it could be experienced with different specifics, like your relationship with your parent, for instance, versus something actually happening with your parent. But that is one way it can go is something negative happening for your parent at that time.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that’s the most simple and basic and straightforward, and that’s what we’re trying to highlight here with some of these. Sometimes there’s really basic and straightforward and simple delineations that we can take from some of these as examples for the future, but in her case, switching into a 4th house profection year, parents becoming greater part of the focus, and transiting Mars stationing direct in her 4th house. She’s also a day chart.
LS: She has a day chart. So in her 4th house, in a day chart, and her IC–if her time is correct–is 15 Aries, which is the exact degree of Mars stationing direct, which is why I was even noting this because it was really sticking out. It was the kind of thing I was looking to see if anything was sticking out and that does. And I saw that about a year ago or something when I was kind of looking through different charts, and I was like, well, this is pretty tangential. It’s one of his kids’ charts and it’s not even a kid who’s particularly close to him most of the time.
CB: But she has been.
LS: She has been recently.
CB: She wasn’t as much in the 2016 campaign, but in 2020, she has actually played a much larger role, and I think spoke at the RNC.
LS: She did, yeah. Yeah, so she has more recently. But I mean, in a general sense of her usual relationship with him, it seems like she’s not as close either geographically or otherwise.
CB: Yeah, she’s his youngest daughter who was born in the ‘90s, so that’s interesting. So just another example lesson from that is that sometimes you can see events happening in a person’s life by looking at the charts of those around them and that can be another indirect access point for trying to predict the future.
LS: Exactly.
CB: It’s funny, in my book, I think I used an example of a 4th house profection just to talk about how there can be other manifestations. A guy went into a 4th house profection year and then Mars went in and conjoined his IC in the 4th whole sign house, so very similar to what’s happening with hers, and his house caught on fire, and it burned down that night.
LS: That’s crazy.
CB: So that’s a different 4th house manifestation, but it goes back to that very core delineation principle of something bad happening that’s experienced as subjectively negative within the context of 4th house topics, which are primarily home and family.
LS: Home, family, parents.
CB: Parents, and especially father.
LS: Yeah. The other thing I noticed as I was looking at Melania’s chart–and of course she doesn’t have a timed chart like many of the people around him–that her Sun is between five-and-a-quarter and six-and-a-quarter Taurus, depending on when she was born that day. And so, Uranus is actually stationing mid-January at six-and-three-quarters Taurus, so it’s stationed very close, on top of her Sun.
CB: And somebody said recently that she has a Taurus stellium.
LS: She does. So after that she’s got Saturn at 11 Taurus and then two other planets in later Taurus.
CB: Didn’t Uranus get up to 10 or 11 this year?
LS: 10.43.
CB: Okay, so it got very close to her Sun there.
LS: Very close, but not exactly.
CB: It didn’t go exact.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, but it will oppose…
LS: Conjoin.
CB: Conjoin her Sun in January exactly.
LS: It will conjoin her Sun almost exactly or close to exactly, but right on top of that. That’s a major change with regard to your life as a whole when Uranus goes over your Sun, especially by conjunction. Uranus can be sudden change or radical change. Also, this is kind of a holdover, but the Sun can also sometimes symbolize a man in someone’s life. And I think that that actually does still play out sometimes, and particularly in her case where the man is much, much more prominent in the life. So I’m not saying that only, I think it’s also really about her and her core life, but you could see it both ways.
CB: Sure. Okay, that’s interesting. So yeah, there’s just additional things like that that can show some of the different techniques you can take into account that can be extended. Just looking at other people’s charts around the person for indirect indications of is there something that’s gonna be experienced as a positive event happening in that person’s life or is there something that’s going to be experienced as a negative event, to try to do the best you can to get an objective set of indications for what the astrology is telling me is coming up in the future.
LS: Right, and see if there’s some collecting in one direction versus the other.
CB: Right, because ultimately you’re gonna get mixed indications. In anyone’s life, there’s gonna be positive things and negative things that are happening at any one time, and sometimes things can be counterbalancing because a positive event can come out of a negative event and a negative event can come out of a positive event. And part of that is what happens when you get reciprocal positive and negative transits happening simultaneously. But if you have a large preponderance of stuff, you start to get a picture of where things might trend.
LS: Right, and that’s much of what astrologers are doing when they’re looking at any sort of prediction.
CB: Yeah, they’re comparing multiple data points, and they’re trying to infer what that will mean about the future.
LS: Exactly.
CB: All right, so let’s wrap this section up a little bit by talking about techniques that astrologers used or have used.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we’ve already talked a little bit about the importance of using multiple techniques. I think that’s one of the takeaways for me from 2016, and I think 2020 has reinforced that because we’ve seen interesting indicators start to cluster on one side versus the other. Don’t over-rely on a single technique. It’s okay if you have that as your centerpiece, but just try to be careful.
LS: Yeah.
CB: At the same time, I also want to mention, on the other hand, I did see some other predictions, and I do remember doing a survey back in 2012 of predictions and studying other astrologers’ predictions closely. You also have to be careful because there can be the flip side of that, which is that there can be diminishing returns after a certain point if you’re taking too many factors into account.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I have seen some people go kind of bonkers with using way too much stuff, and it being just way over the top and creating lack of clarity rather than helping to indicate something really strongly in one direction or another, so you need to be able to weight your techniques a little bit as well.
LS: Definitely, yeah. Did you want to speak to some that people used?
CB: Yeah, so I didn’t look through them very carefully this time. There was one survey that was done. So the astrologer Mark Cullen from the UK did a survey on the Skyscript forum where he went through and surveyed some predictions that were made, that he was able to find online primarily from different astrologers, and it was kind of split. What was the total? Was it 50 total, or was it 50/50 on each side?
LS: I’m not sure actually. I feel like it might have been 50/50 in terms of not just proportion but number of astrologers.
CB: Yeah, so it was split. I’m glad that Mark did it to a certain extent because I think those surveys are important, and I did my own in 2012, so I support them. I had some criticisms and some issues with the way it was presented because it seemed like his primary focus was just identifying who made predictions last time and what prediction they made last made this time and that seemed to be his primary concern.
But I think people need to be cautious about drawing conclusions from that survey because of the way it was done. It seems like there’s a bias towards Facebook astrologers, like astrologers that he found or that contacted him through Facebook or through forums and things like that.
LS: Yeah, and not necessarily deliberately we’re saying, but just as a happenstance.
CB: Yeah, I know there were some predictions, for example, from some astrologers on Twitter that were not listed there that were missed, so that it’s not fully comprehensive. Also, one of my issues is because I’ve done my own survey back in 2012, one of the things I realized is you need to do weighting, and you need to do a sort of ranking for some of those predictions because not all predictions are equal and not all astrologers took making those predictions as seriously and did as thorough of a job in doing them than others.
And that’s something I want people to realize because I think it would be a mistake. I think that some of those predictions might have either been excluded or would have been much lower down on the list in terms of ones that people could have taken seriously versus the other end of the spectrum. Okay, that person did a really good job. They were really thorough and they tried their best, but they came to the wrong conclusion, and that’s too bad and better luck next time versus somebody that just did a blow-off thing and looked at one indication, looked at it for like an hour, and then threw out a single tweet or a short little video that they recorded on their phone that was like a vlog one day, and suddenly that prediction is supposed to stand somehow as representative of the entire astrological community and entire profession.
LS: Right.
CB: And I don’t think that’s right. And that’s one of the issues where I wish Mark had taken more factors into account in terms of ranking the predictions and explaining what went into them.
LS: Right. And so, we’re not necessarily saying ranking in terms of each and every 1-to-30 or something like that or 1-to-100, but some of the factors that you might want to consider in terms of whether to weight things more seriously or less seriously, in terms of where they’re coming from, where each astrologer is coming from.
CB: Yeah, so back in 2012, I outlined this in the survey that I did. I closed the blog in 2013, but if you go to Archive.org, you can find it at PoliticalAstrologyBlog.com. And the article was titled “Astrologers Predict the 2012 Election Roundup,” and at the beginning of that I outlined some of my methodology for weighting and ranking the different predictions. And these are some of the factors that I would take into account, that I would urge people to take into account in terms of looking at some of these predictions and their relative success or failure, not just for the ones that failed to predict the outcome, but also for the ones that were successful because it was like a 50/50 thing.
LS: Right.
CB: So one of the factors that I took into account was the prominence of the prediction in the mainstream media either by being featured or cited in a news story or an interview because that puts greater pressure on the astrologer. It’s like if you’re doing an interview on this presumably you did your work, which is not always true.
LS: Not always true.
CB: It’s not always true, we’ll say that, but at least there’s greater–not restrictions, but greater pressure on the astrologer to get it right.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: It’s different for a person who just posts something on Facebook and then deletes it after the election as a private thing or a private blog, let’s say. Or let’s say they posted something privately and didn’t release it publicly or something like that versus somebody that gets up and goes on ABC News and makes a prediction. There’s more pressure on them and it’s more public, where the consequences, if they get it wrong, are going to be more embarrassing.
LS: Sure.
CB: All right, so that’s one of the factors I would take into account in terms of ranking. Another one is the prominence of the prediction in the astrological community–either by being featured in an astrological publication or at an astrological venue such as a conference, similar things there–how eminent or well-known is the astrologer who made the prediction either inside or outside of the astrological community.
While it’s true that there can be people that are in the community–somebody responded to me about this recently and was like, “Well, there’s astrologers who are doing astrology technically for 20 years that aren’t terribly good at it versus there’s other people who can be doing it for five years that can become proficient very quickly through dedication and aptitude.” That’s true, but there’s still a difference between if Rob Hand, for example, gets up and makes a prediction, who’s like a very well-known and eminent astrologer in the community. That’s taken more seriously than if there’s somebody that’s just been studying it for a month and then issues a prediction and that should be weighted differently.
LS: For sure. I don’t think any of these guidelines are foolproof at all, but you’re supposed to think about all of them.
CB: Yeah, they’re just different things to take into account. Nobody should take any one of these in isolation into account. But there’s just different things that when I look through a list of different predictions and who got it right and who got it wrong, it’s one of the things I take into account.
LS: Right, for sure.
CB: So another one is how standard are the techniques the astrologer was using versus using non-standard techniques that are unique to the astrologer. Because there’s certain techniques, like transits–a standard technique across almost every astrological tradition–but I saw some weird techniques in 2012 that only a single astrologer came up with or that almost no astrologers used.
LS: Right.
CB: And the standardness or non-standardness is a factor because sometimes there’s just really weird stuff occasionally in the astrological community and that’s not weighted usually the same as something where every astrologer is using that technique, and therefore, there’s a level of standardization to the interpretation.
LS: Right, like tertiary converse progressions or something.
CB: Yeah, to the Vertex of the midpoint between trans-Pluto and Sedna or something like that.
LS: Exactly.
CB: And that’s like the one technique that indicates that Biden would win or whatever.
LS: Right.
CB: All right, how thoroughly the astrologer appears to have researched their prediction. How much work did they put into this? Was this something they put a lot of work into and effort into, or is this something that they appear to have just sort of done on the fly or something like that? How far in advance the prediction was issued prior to Election Day I think is a factor that sometimes can be taken into account–there’s pros and cons either way.
LS: Sure.
CB: Because honestly, in 2012, we issued our prediction I think in April, which we felt was sufficiently far in advance once it became clear in the primaries who was going to be the candidates; we tried to issue it as soon as we could. In retrospect, though, I don’t feel as bad for astrologers now who issue it later and closer, once the vice presidential candidates are clear or other things have fallen into place. So I wouldn’t knock people as much for this as I used to, but it’s definitely relevant.
LS: Yeah, and it’s relative too, like April versus August versus the day before the election.
CB: Versus like November 2 or something.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Because then at that point, the polls are going to be indicating typically one way or another, so there’s an issue where the astrologer could get influenced by the polls and the bias that can sometimes come along with that, which is part of what happened in 2016.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: How far in advance, how detailed the write-up for their prediction was, and how much research they based it on is shared. Did they share their results…
LS: Did they show their work?
CB: …their methodology, or are they just saying, “According to my intuition, Trump will win [or Biden will win],” or what have you?
LS: Right.
CB: That’s kind of important. How clearly they stated their prediction as opposed to either being unclear or hedging. You’ll see this sometimes where people hedge.
LS: Yeah. I don’t know, I personally feel like it’s okay as long as you’re saying the degree of your confidence in it versus just trying to play it both ways. I think there’s some credence to that even though it can go in the direction of them just hedging. But it’s also true that predicting presidential elections is tough.
CB: And that there’s conflicting indications.
LS: Yeah, and so you can actually be like, “I mostly think this way, but I still feel like there’s some wild card factor here.”
CB: Yeah, you can say that. I have this rule because there’s some astrologers that will issue their predictions and they’ll make the conclusion so unclear that it could be read either way.
LS: For sure.
CB: And then, in retrospect, a sketchy person could be like, “I called it,” even though what their prediction was was super unclear and they could have said that they were successful either way even if they weren’t.
LS: No, I agree.
CB: So that’s what I want to be careful about in that instance.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then finally how neutral or non-partisan the astrology appears to be in making their prediction. So this is a major issue no matter what in pretty much every election from both sides. It’s true inside of the prediction itself, like is the person exhibiting a clear bias or a clear preference that’s influencing how they’re interpreting the charts?
LS: Right.
CB: In other instances, it can be things that are around the prediction. Some predictions, for example, are issued on Facebook and stuff, which is not actually great. I usually prefer people to write it on a blog or publish it somewhere, so it’s more clear because Facebook is more temporary and ephemeral.
LS: True, although people do it everywhere really.
CB: But let’s say the person for the entire year is posting a wall of stuff that’s super negative and attacks and conspiracies surrounding one candidate and then they punctuate that with a prediction that the candidate that they prefer is going to win. That has less weight to me and needs to be docked for points if their bias is overwhelming in some way, their predictive capabilities.
LS: Right, and that’s a little tough right now because things have gotten so divisive towards this election in particular. That kind of has a sub-topic and it’s not something you can quantify, which is just observing different people and going, does the person seem to be able to, even if they have a very strong preference? Because almost everyone has a very strong preference at this point.
CB: Mm-hmm.
LS: Do they seem to be able to also try to put that aside while they’re looking at the astrology to see what it seems to be saying on its own versus are they filtering everything they say astrologically through that personal preference?
CB: Right.
LS: And that’s tricky to discern. But I think you can, I mean, if you’re around long enough. Maybe not the first time around that you see a prediction, if you don’t know the people. But if you’re in the community over time, you do know who’s doing that.
CB: Yeah, that’s one of the things you pick up. And it’s something I worry about—new people coming into the community that don’t know that and don’t know the track records of different people.
LS: Right.
CB: So that leads us into our next discussion point, news sources and the role of bias. Some of the discussions after 2016 were about the role of liberal bias amongst astrologers because there were more predictions for Hillary than there were for Trump, and there were some op-ed pieces. I remember one guy that became a conservative astrologer, a very outspoken conservative astrologer over the past four years, who did a whole set of essays about astrologers being biased towards liberals.
But one of the things that was interesting about this election was in some of the people that predicted Trump, in retrospect, wrongly, there was a big chunk of them that over the past four years have been posting pro-Trump stuff and very clearly have a bias, or a political bias towards Trump and then predicted that he would win, and it turns out, in retrospect, were mistaken in that prediction.
LS: Right, right.
CB: So while I don’t expect to see this, it would be nice to see a sort of counterpoint to that at this point in terms of that can cut both ways depending on astrologers’ political predilections and that’s important to take into account.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And that can be a tough job too, to fully set it aside. I mean, different people do it better or worse, I definitely think.
CB: Right, so that leads to our other discussion topic, which is part of the reason this has become difficult is because where astrologers take in media and their political preferences sometimes is causing them to take in news and information from different sources. And if those sources are extremely biased in one direction or another that’s going to create a bias within the astrologer’s context for the election. And no astrologer can issue a prediction without context; it’s very important.
Because part of what you’ve seen us doing in some of these things is you have to understand the trajectory that a person is on both astrologically, practically speaking, in terms of their life story, and then you take that trajectory and you try to predict where it’s going in the future and that’s astrological prediction in a nutshell. But one major piece of that is having a clear understanding to some extent of the person and what their life trajectory is up to this point.
LS: Right.
CB: And if you’re taking into account a bunch of news and information about1 that person that is biased, that is inaccurate, that is misinformation, or conspiracy theories or conspiracy rhetoric, then your context for understanding their chart and their life is not going to be correct.
LS: Right, and that’s become a much bigger problem in recent times here compared to before this year. And we were talking earlier about the Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions and conspiracy theories earlier on, this is of course not an issue only specific to the astrological community, but it has particular bearing on how astrologers do their work and whether they have good information to do the work with.
CB: Yeah, because it’s gonna affect your prediction. And if you’re taking in false information as the context for your predictions then you’re going to have a higher likelihood of issuing a false prediction because you didn’t have a stable foundation to begin with.
LS: Right.
CB: Unfortunately, that’s becoming more of an issue because now things are becoming more fragmented. And now there’s a movement after this election already where some conservatives are trying to get on just conservative social networking sites because some of Trump’s false statements about COVID or false statements about mail-in voting were being flagged by places like Facebook or Twitter as misinformation in the run-up to the election. So now there’s this push to go into these other sites, but that’s not gonna be great because that’s just going to create more of an echo chamber of people reinforcing the same views whether or not that’s objectively true or not, and there’s no scenario where being less objectively exposed to news and information is going to help you as an astrologer.
LS: For sure. Yeah, so that’s kind of a long term–I mean, I hope it’s not too long-term of a problem, but it looks to be a problem right now.
CB: Yeah. And then when we were talking about the conservative context, obviously, that can also be true in a liberal context as well. Like if you’re in a more liberal echo chamber where you’re only taking in news and information, and you’re not taking anything that’s ever critical of your preferred candidate or something like that that’s also going to potentially bias you, and you have to take that into account.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So it’s something that’s important for astrologers, and we wanted to mention it here because it’s one of the dangers that we can see developing that’s going to affect astrologers’ ability to make statements, not just about predictions–like presidential things–but even about mundane astrology. I mean, some of the stuff about COVID and the pandemic got really weird this year as well and can affect astrologers’ ability to accurately forecast that if they’re not taking it seriously, or if they’re like, “Oh, this is just a hoax,” or “This isn’t a big deal.” You’re not gonna be able to accurately forecast what’s coming up in the future.
LS: Right, I mean, that’s always been an issue that I think astrologers must have always had to grapple with, in terms of there’s always personal bias or there’s always leanings and different inclinations for things.
CB: Mm-hmm.
LS: But there’s a different level when it comes to do you have facts, are you basing things on facts.
CB: Yeah, and I think maybe it was more of an issue in the past because of the huge influx of astrologers that came in, in the 1960s, from let’s say the hippie generation; maybe there was more of an emphasis of astrologers having a liberal bias in the past. But in the past, the news networks and things, there was more of an agreed middle-ground.
LS: There was an agreed consensus reality on facts.
CB: Right, so now the consensus reality on facts is breaking apart and people are getting split up into different echo chambers, and that’s creating more of a division and less of a consensus reality on facts, which means we don’t have as much of a consensus about what to talk about. I mean, even this of course, we can already anticipate that many of the points that we’ve made throughout this episode many people that have more conservative or extreme conservative leanings especially are going to object to the very basis of many of the things that we’re taking for granted as facts and news and information in this episode.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But for me, because things are breaking off and because especially conspiracy theories are becoming so much more prominent, I think we need to have more of a discussion, being able to talk more openly about what’s actually going on in the world as a baseline. Because we can’t really have any discussions past that point and that’s one of the reasons I feel more comfortable about talking openly about what actually happened in the past week, for example, right now.
LS: For sure. Yeah, I didn’t really want to get into political talk a while ago, but that’s when things were actually more subtle differences versus now. And now it’s just like let’s just talk about what’s going on.
CB: Right. All right, so I think all of that’s good. There’s stuff that could be coming up about the Saturn return of the internet, which is happening when Saturn goes Again, I think that’s relevant with things going on. I think the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction this week is relevant to what’s going on, and so on and so forth.
Ryan Butler, just in connection with this, had a good tweet recently on Twitter. He said, “I think one question that is worth exploring more is what is the astrological industry’s relationship with science denialism and misinformation? And how can astrologers encourage critical thinking and lived experience without dovetailing into conspiracy theory?”
I think that’s a really important point just to close out that section. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been trending towards this year is trying to encourage astrologers to be more critical in their thinking and to be more careful about the sources of news and information that they’re taking into account because that can really color your thinking and color your predictions and interpretations in a major way, and I think it’s gonna be important for astrologers to lead in that to some extent.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And while I actually didn’t think this was so much of a problem before this year, there are actually a surprising number of people in the astrological community who also have like a science background–or even career, medical background, different things like that, that are not anti-science at all–it has become more of a problem this year and it’s actually kind of surprised me, the level of that. It’s not just astrology, but also people in wellness communities and different things. I think one of the cruxes of the issue is getting into astrology means kind of breaking away from a consensus reality, which is like, can this even work?
CB: Right.
LS: And so, if you’re willing to do that you might have more willingness to question other consensus realities. And you have to be really discerning about when you should do that–excuse me, sorry. You have to be really discerning about when you should do that versus when you’re starting to deconstruct reality, period.
CB: Yeah, just because you’re into astrology doesn’t mean you have to divorce yourself completely from science and rationality, and I think that’s really important for astrologers to remember and to strive to keep in mind.
LS: Yeah, and that could be a whole other meta-discussion.
CB: Yeah, and it is. And I know we’re in a time-frame here. We’ve got about 15 minutes until we have to wrap up. So yeah, just being more skeptical and discerning because if you divorce yourself completely from any sort of objective reality then your astrology will suffer for it is my main takeaway that I want to urge people to be careful about.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I think that’s relevant now because, honestly, some of the astrologers that predicted a Trump win, Trump himself is denying that he lost, which is completely expected; like everybody expected that. That’s exactly what he was signaling he was gonna do in 2016 if he lost; he was saying he would not accept the results of the election. He said, “We’ll see.”
LS: Or if, “I win.”
CB: “If I win, I’ll accept it.” And of course when he did win, he did accept it, but when he lost, he did not accept it. And his setup has been busy, most of this year, creating a set of circumstances, like trying to undermine mail-in voting, that would allow him, if he lost, to create the sort of conspiracy theories and the sort of misinformation that’s happening now.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But what I’m nervous about is that some astrologers that predicted Trump would win, you can see that their sources of news information are primarily coming from extreme right-wing stuff, like Trump, because they’re now repeating some of those same things and they’re refusing to acknowledge that they may have gotten it wrong. Which I feel for them because, four years ago, very openly I got it wrong, and I feel for them being in that position. It’s not a good position. I don’t admire anybody in that position, so I sort of understand it.
But then there’s a certain point, seeing that eclipse falling in Biden’s Ascendant on December 14 and the Electoral College, that’s a really good indication the Electoral College is gonna vote then in his favor. The astrology sometimes is more objective than we are ourselves and that’s something that’s important to keep in mind.
LS: Yeah.
CB: All right, so other things just to wrap this up, we had a whole section about techniques that astrologers use. Did want to make a very brief statement and not linger on this, which is probably for the 7best, that not all techniques are as valid or equally applicable or useful in this context. There’s some techniques that get misapplied within the context of political astrology, there’s some techniques that are not as useful, and there’s some techniques that are probably just overemphasized.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I personally think horary is something that gets misapplied oftentimes within the context of political astrology. Like I don’t care if a person got it right or wrong, it’s often weird to me the notion that there’s like hundreds of astrologers that do horary astrology, casting charts where they have no real standing, asking what the outcome of the election will be and thinking that that’s going to be valid.
LS: Right.
CB: And I think that has to do with a misunderstanding of horary and the importance of the question being personally relevant to you, the person asking the question or the person who’s asking you the question. And I feel like we’ve gotten away from that in the astrological tradition, even though it’s something that’s emphasized very explicitly in many of the older texts from the Medieval tradition.
LS: Yeah, that’s supposed to be one of the foundation rules: Is this a very important thing to you personally? Is it going to impact you personally? And yes, all of this would impact all of us personally if we’re living in the country in particular, but I don’t think it’s personal enough for each and every citizen to ask in a horary. It’s kind of like judicial astrology, you’re making a judgment; that’s what horary is. So similarly, with legal things, you have to have a standing or you don’t even get in there, so it’s like that.
CB: If you’re Joe Biden or if you’re Donald Trump and you’re asking a horary question about whether you win that’s personally relevant to you and that’s valid. If you’re one of millions of Americans or hundreds or thousands of astrologers asking what the outcome of the election will be, I’m not as impressed whether you get it right or whether you get it wrong. And that’s one of the reasons why horary astrologers tend to be all over the place in terms of whether they’re right or wrong when predicting elections.
LS: For sure.
CB: Other things that have become this year even more weird and seem out of place, I wish people wouldn’t put as much emphasis on the ‘first vote’ chart.
LS: Yeah, that one was really kind of messed up this time, I think.
CB: So there’s some for when the polls first open. They’ll cast a chart, like an inception chart.
LS: For like that midnight place in New Hampshire where they vote at midnight, a lot of people use that.
CB: I think that often gets overemphasized. Like maybe if you want to take that into account as one super minor thing, but even that, like I’m not even sure that that’s super useful. Because people had been voting for weeks at that point, right?
LS: Right, and I mean that’s always true, but especially this year.
CB: Right.
LS: There are tons of votes coming in before the actual official in-person vote, and then there’s the early vote. There was just a lot of it.
CB: And then there’s one more that I don’t want to go into as much. Yeah, I’ll skip that one. Last subsection is just about prediction in general, right?
LS: Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this in terms of this entire topic, presidential predictions and what are the umbrella meta-topics or meta-issues towards that. So astrology is often more in the public eye than in any other time during presidential predictions, and as such, people can sometimes take that as the best demonstration of what astrology can do, but I think it’s actually very much not that. And that’s partly due to all of the very many multiple factors involved in predicting something in a mundane sense for like an entire country, right?
CB: Right.
LS: I mean, that’s actually not what astrology can do best, I don’t think.
CB: Mundane prediction?
LS: Mundane prediction, yeah.
CB: Yeah, mundane prediction. What we’ve learned this year is astrologers in 2020 have gotten a huge crash course in mundane astrology, and it’s become much more important. And it was funny, in March, like all of a sudden, every astrologer is a virologist or something and trying to predict what’s going on with the pandemic, even though this is brand new to many of us and most astrologers had not done prior research into the astrology of pandemics.
There were, as we highlighted in our episode in May–I forget what the title was–there were astrologers, like Andre Barbault, who had done major research into pandemics and had issued a prediction prior to his death; he died in the past few years. But he issued a prediction in 2011 saying there would be a major pandemic around this time based on a lineup of planets especially Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn.
LS: Right.
CB: So some astrologers do specialize in that.
LS: There are, but not most.
CB: Not most. And mundane is a very big thing because there’s so many moving parts and it’s extremely difficult.
LS: Right. And so, prediction is inherent in astrology, but it’s not everything that astrology can do. And I think that is kind of like a misconception that can suddenly be put to the public forefront when all of a sudden all these astrologers are trying to make public predictions about the presidential election.
CB: Yeah, and it’s not everyone’s specialty.
LS: No.
CB: Most astrologers don’t even specialize in predictive astrology. They specialize in natal astrology and sitting down with clients and applying astrology in a natal context, often through character analysis and psychological analysis, especially most modern astrologers. But then sometimes they try to pivot to doing predictive astrology and that doesn’t always work the same.
LS: And that can actually be a point in your earlier list too, in terms of weighting predictions: Does this astrologer normally do predictive astrology?
CB: Right, or are they a psychological astrologer. I remember one prediction from 2012 where it was literally just a paragraph, and it was a modern astrologer, a psychological astrologer, and they just said because of this one solar arc direction, it means that such-and-such will win. And I ranked that one super low because it was clear that that wasn’t even their main approach to astrology and they weren’t taking that much into account. They were very much like ‘a fish out of water’ trying to do that.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, sometimes it can seem like the problem was astrology rather than the astrologer, that’s always annoying.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Also, it assumes everything is predetermined ahead of time, which is an interesting philosophical issue that everybody forgets about when election time rolls around. There’s often heavy debates about that in the astrological community, traditionally, for thousands of years, but all of a sudden, everybody starts trying to predict the outcome of the election…
LS: Which is really funny.
CB: …and treating it like everything is predetermined ahead of time. Which is interesting because I actually, philosophically, of most astrologers, have the least problems with that with my Stoic background, but it’s a funny thing that then gets taken for granted sometimes during these times.
LS: Right, which is a really funny contrast. Because most of the time many astrologers, especially modern astrologers, are very quick to say, “Well, not everything is predetermined and that’s not what astrology means,” but then will suddenly go, “Did you call it right?” which means it’s all predetermined.
CB: Right. Okay, so there’s so many moving pieces, it’s incredibly difficult to take them all into account, we kind of touched on that. You literally can’t take everything into account. There has to be a point where you have a cut-off, where you just have to use this many variables and call it, and that’s tough. It means that there’s some level where you would need a God’s eye view in order to see everything that’s going on astrologically, but that’s literally not possible, and so you’re gonna be limited and you’re going to be hindered. Like for example, in this election, not having Mike Pence’s chart, we could look at one side but we couldn’t fully see the other, so there’s a block there and that’s just one sort of example.
LS: Yeah, and thinking about the scope, a horary question is like a whole chart for just one question, an individual natal chart is a chart for like the scope of one person’s life. And so, as you start going up then you get the scope of an entire country or something that will actually affect the entire world, there’s so many variables, and that’s why it’s somewhat easier to predict for an individual.
CB: Yeah, so it’s one of the reasons why predicting elections isn’t the best test of astrologers, but unfortunately, also tends to be when the public pays attention to astrologers the most, which is always fun.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Also, when, by extension, astrologers tend to try their hand at public prediction the most, when a lot of astrologers often aren’t otherwise trying to make predictions publicly.
LS: Yeah, I think if you’re doing something like presidential predictions, you have to weigh your motivations. And that’s one factor that comes in when everyone suddenly throws their hat in the ring because they want recognition for getting it right.
CB: Yeah.
LS: They want proof that they are good at astrology.
CB: The astrologer wants recognition and the glory of getting it right, and they also want to sometimes prove astrology to the public.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that was one thing that was kind of freeing for me in this election at this point in my career. I understand that motivation, but seeing some of the younger astrologers trying to make a name for themselves doing political predictions this time around reminded me of some of those motivations, and also my feeling–which was different this election compared to like 2012–of what it’s like not to have that, not to care; like to be established enough of like I don’t care to try to venture that and try to make a prediction not having all of the variables. It’s interesting to follow it, and that’s kind of an interesting exercise in astrology and something to learn from, which is what we did here today, but it’s not a necessity or something.
LS: Yeah, if you’re an astrologer, you are not required to make predictions about the presidential elections every four years in order to be good at what you do.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah, just want to put that out there.
CB: Okay, yeah, so that’s a misconception out there. Was that it? Was that in this section? Do we have a more positive thing to end on in terms of prediction and the role of astrology or anything like that?
LS: I think it was more just like a meta-issue. I mean, particularly, that’s what I was thinking of anyway in terms of the fate/freewill thing, as well as where does presidential prediction fall in the scope of the entirety of what astrologers do. And we were kind of getting that in terms of it’s not necessarily the best illustration of what we do, but it’s not even necessarily like the most important thing. I mean, obviously, how the presidential election goes is important in terms of impacting people’s worlds, but in terms of what astrologers do.
CB: The majority of what astrologers do tends to be more limited in that it’s working with a single client on a single, typically, birth chart and talking to the person and being able to understand their life in its entirety and ask them any question and understand the trajectory of their life, and then if you’re doing predictive work for them, anticipate what’s coming up. But otherwise, there’s sometimes just a process of talking to them about what’s currently going on and helping to contextualize it in the context of astrology or sometimes contextualizing their past or talking about their character or talking about their relationships and like all sorts of other things, because astrology is such a broad subject that’s so multifaceted and has so many interesting pieces. But that individual, one-on-one component has always been the core of astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: And while there’s elements that we’re taking from that to apply to political astrology, it’s sort of a different, much more complex application. And yeah, it’s just one small piece that happens to come up every few years and gets the biggest media blitz because all of a sudden, the media will start paying attention to what astrologers are saying and sort of feature it as a sideshow thing and as a circus thing. And astrologers themselves unfortunately are also sometimes complicit in that, in using it to boost their signal, which there’s pros and cons. There’s a level in which that’s okay, but not all astrologers do.
LS: Yeah, exactly. And I guess I was saying before too, you don’t have to buy into that, because it is kind of like buying into a different slant that’s not quite correct on what astrology is all about. And something where you don’t even have all the pieces that you normally do, it’s not just that there are more variables, which there are in something like a presidential prediction, but then you can’t talk to the people individually, which you were just saying is usually a major component.
CB: You’re basing it only on external reports, which may or may not be biased about their life and the scope of it.
LS: That plus, there’s pieces that aren’t publicly reported. I mean, I want to be quick to say also that doesn’t mean that you’re not seeing anything specific and objectively in the chart, but again, it comes back to context. And if you have more information, you have more context about everything you’re looking at astrologically.
CB: Yeah, and one last thing I want to say to wrap this up is I do want to say, a) congratulations to those that did get their predictions correct. Good job.
LS: Definitely.
CB: You won one, that’s fine. Take that as a major victory and that will go in your bio if you want to as whatever, if being a predictive astrologer, you make that your main thing. So I don’t want to diminish that in any way, and I wanted to congratulate those that did get their predictions correct, and good luck next time as well if you want to keep doing that. Especially if it’s something that you can build up consecutively over years that does become more impressive potentially.
LS: Right.
CB: But even also to those that got it wrong or that missed this one, it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad astrologer necessarily. I mean, to be fair, some of you may be bad astrologers, I don’t want to downplay that too much, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad astrologer. And either you’ll have another chance you know again in the future to redeem yourself if that’s what you want to do, or you can go back to doing what you do 99% of the time otherwise in the applications to astrology that are typically more within the scope of what we do and that’s okay.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So don’t take it too hard. It’s just a temporary moment and everybody has setbacks and will call something wrong at some point. That’s part of learning and growing as an astrologer, so just try to do what you can to learn and grow from this and adjust your techniques accordingly and take it in stride and learn from it.
LS: Yeah, and whether you issued a prediction publicly or privately, no matter how it came out, it’s still a good exercise personally, as an astrologer, to see what points were kind of on target with in terms of the way it went versus where can I readjust my gauge of how important that factor is, for instance.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So that’s part of what we’ve tried to do here in checking in from our little work session that we did a few months ago and following up on some of the things that we saw then that we now know in retrospect have been confirmed to emphasize and pass those on as part of the tradition. And then the other part will also be assessing some of the things that were not as useful, either to discard or to refine those things going forward into the future. And that, my friends, is how the tradition grows and develops and will continue and has grown and developed for thousands of years, and hopefully will continue for another thousand years past this point.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, I think we have done it. It is now our exact time. You have to run to a consultation. Thank you for joining me today for this.
LS: You’re quite welcome.
CB: Good luck in doing that consultation. And yeah, this was a lot of fun, thanks a lot for doing this.
LS: Yeah, of course, thank you.
CB: All right, thanks everybody for listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, we appreciate you. Thanks to all the patrons that support our work here on The Astrology Podcast. We try to keep growing and developing and doing cool things.
If you want to listen to that other work session that we did back in September then sign up to become a patron on the $10 tier to get access to The Casual Astrology Podcast, as well as many other recordings like that. And otherwise, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast, so thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you again next time.
LS: See you next time.
CB: Special thanks to the patrons who support The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shout-out to the patrons that are on our Producer’s tier, such as Nate Craddock, Maren Altman, Thomas Miller, Bear Ryver, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merillat, Kristi Moe, and Sumo Coppock. Find out more about how to become a patron at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Also, thanks to our sponsors this month, which include the Astro Gold Astrology App available at Astrogold.io; the Portland School of Astrology at PortlandAstrology.org; the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at Honeycomb.co; and also, the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting an astrology conference August 18-22, 2021, find out more information at ISAR2020.org; as well as the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 27-31, 2021, and you can find out more information about that at NORWAC.net.
Finally, the software we use here on The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire Astrology Software, and it’s available through Alabe.com and you can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘AP15’.