The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 284, titled:
2021 Year Ahead Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan and guests Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on December 19, 2020
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released January 3, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be looking at the astrological forecast for the entire year ahead of 2021. So joining me today are astrologers Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock. Hey, guys, welcome aboard.
KELLY SURTEES: Hi.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
CB: Thank you for joining me today. We have a live audience of over 200 patrons who are joining us. So thanks to everybody who’s in the audience. This is Episode 284 of The Astrology Podcast. We’re recording it on Thursday—sorry, Friday, December 18, 2020, starting at 11:35 AM in Denver, Colorado.
So the structure of this episode—especially for those listening or just watching it on YouTube—is we’re going to spend the first forty minutes doing kind of an overview and talking about some of the major points—three especially major points—about the astrology of 2021. And then we’re going to transition into doing a quarter-by-quarter analysis of 2021, breaking up the year in three-month chunks, and then talking about what the major highlights are for each of the next twelve months, then eventually we’ll do a sort of conclusion and wrap it up.
We’re shooting for a three-hour episode in order to do really a deep dive into this topic. Although I’ll put some timestamps eventually on the YouTube version and on the audio version on the podcast website for those that want to jump around.
All right, I think that’s the good introductory stuff. So first, a round of applause—I think both to us and everybody—that we have just about made it through the year of 2020. So congratulations. We did our forecast last year in November of 2019, and we knew it was going to be a big year, but I think it definitely ended up meeting expectations. What do you guys think?
KS: Yeah.
AC: I think that saying that we thought it would be a ‘big’ year is underselling it a little bit or perhaps sugarcoating it. You know, we thought it was going to be a ‘shit’ year.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And it’s funny because our discussions about that…
AC: And it met expectations.
CB: Right. And it’s funny because our pre-discussions about that—because we all met up here in Denver—we actually prepared for that episode. Luckily, that forecast last year—much more than usual—did a relatively good job.
But one of the debates that we were having amongst ourselves was how much to tell people and how seriously to put the news—to give the bad news that 2020 was going to be a rough year—versus how much to hold back.
And we really didn’t hold back too much, I don’t think, but it’s funny in retrospect having had that discussion and interesting as we’re going into 2021. Because I think even though there’s still some seriously rocky points about 2021, there were some higher notes of optimism we all agreed on last year in some places, right?
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s a mixed bag, which is a huge improvement.
CB: Yeah, optimism. Kelly, do you have some things you’re optimistic about?
KS: Yeah. Look, I think there are some things to remain cautious about in 2021, but there are more things to be maybe hopeful or welcoming of. I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, but yeah, there’s a couple of planetary cycles that I think are going to be much nicer than anything we had in 2020.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so let’s see, first, I wanted to share an image. This is designed by our graphic artist and astrologer Paula Belluomini. This is just an image that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the year and then how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the year, including the different retrograde cycles during the course of it.
So this is one of the posters that we just released on The Astrology Podcast website. But it’s nice to get a sort of snapshot of where all the planets will be over the course of the next 12 months.
One of the things that we need to talk about that’s happening right now in the next few days as we’re recording this—but the energy is going to carry forward into next year—is the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that’s actually taking place in Aquarius on the 21st of December, I believe, right?
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And then the solstice.
CB: And this is something that if you go outside right now, you can visually see these two planets, where there’s these bright, little twinkly stars that are lined up right next to each other. And I know a few nights ago when Saturn went into Aquarius, the Moon actually caught up and conjoined both of them that very night, which was a really striking, sort of visceral thing to see in terms of planetary alignment happening in the sky.
And I think we could all feel that energy sort of culminating in a sense—which was interesting—at the end of 2020, but maybe we should talk about how that’s going to lead us through into 2021.
KS: Yeah, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction with that air signature.
CB: Yeah, so in the air sign of Aquarius. So Aquarius is a fixed sign. It’s a ‘masculine’ sign in ancient astrology. Austin, you say a ‘yin’ sign, right?
AC: That would be ‘yang’.
CB: Yang, okay, sorry.
AC: Hey, it’s okay. There are two; there’s one of them.
CB: That’s one of the two. You can be 50/50. And it’s a Saturn-ruled sign in traditional astrology. So let’s talk a little bit about that: Aquarius is one of the main signatures of this year. Because it’s not just that that Saturn-Jupiter conjunction happens in December, but also, Saturn and Jupiter then will be transiting through that sign for the entirety of this year and that’s one of the main signatures of 2021. So what is the energy of a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in Aquarius?
AC: Well, I think maybe we should back up a half-step and point out that this particular conjunction and Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in general are one of the ‘tent poles’ of history in traditional astrology. And this conjunction in, as you said, Aquarius, an air sign, begins a series of every 20-year conjunctions in air signs that defines an almost two-century period.
And so, we’re basically leaving one two-century period where the conjunctions were predominantly in earth signs and then moving into a whole new era; like a two-ish-century era where they’ll be in air signs. And so, 2020 really was the end of an era, and 2021 really is the beginning of an era—and not necessarily in a sort of upward spiral, ‘history always gets better’ sort of way, but in a more horizontal way where we’re changing from the patterns of earth to the patterns of air.
CB: Yeah, I like that. So the ending of cycles and the beginning of new ones. So it’s the ending—at the most local—of a 20-year cycle because the last time we had a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was in 2000. So you can think of it in that context of opening up a two-decade-long period of life. But also, because it’s moving out of a triplicity, it’s opening up 200 years of conjunctions all in air signs in general.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, it’s a substantial shift on so many levels. And so, I think to create that context that we’re crossing into a new year, it’s the start of a calendar 12-month period. But energetically or from a cycles perspective, there’s a number of other things that are going on that make the transition from 2020 to 2021 more significant and more important perhaps in terms of that reset. You know, we’re coming out of 20 years—the last Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was in Taurus—and now we’re going into Aquarius.
And Austin, you were saying, that shift from ‘earth’ themes or ‘earth’ qualities, or an era and time that is kind of infused with ‘earth’ stuff and going into an era and time, yeah, it’s just under 200 years. The qualities of air have a lot more to do with movement and mobility, to do with dispersion, maybe even decentralization of things.
One of the images that I woke up with this morning thinking about—which is what astrologers do, we just wake up and astrology’s always in our brains. I was thinking about the way the wind blows the sand and creates sand dunes, and how over time, over the course of a week or a month, the sand dunes can shift; and over the course of a year or decades, the sand dunes actually move.
And maybe it’s hard to predict, but you can see it happening. You may not see the wind moving, but you see the sand being in a different place to where it was. So that idea of how air or wind moves and changes things is sort of the time frame that we’re entering into.
CB: I like that. That’s a good metaphor.
AC: Yeah, I liked you used the word—what is it—‘dispersing’. I have in my notes that I often think of ‘scattering’.
KS: Yeah.
AC: If you have a nice pile of leaves raked up, and a strong gust of wind comes, it scatters them all over the yard.
KS: Same thing, yeah.
CB: The other shift from having all of the conjunctions for 200 years in earth signs—and moving from earth signs to air signs—is a feeling of moving from something that’s more material or tangible to digital.
And one of the episodes that I did earlier this month was on the astrology of Bitcoin. And I’m getting reports from friends and from the guy that I interviewed earlier this month—Robert Weinstein—that Bitcoin just hit another high and went over $20,000 for the first time in history in terms of its value.
So Saturn has just shifted into Aquarius, and Jupiter and Saturn are conjoining in the early degrees of that sign in the next few days, and all of a sudden there’s this digital currency that doesn’t have any material value, like let’s say gold or silver or something like that.
It doesn’t start as a physical essence, it starts as something that is more abstract or digital as a currency, and yet, that currency is rising to be very valuable at this point in time. And I think that’s a really interesting metaphor for this period that we’re moving into.
AC: Yeah, things being ungrounded is certainly a theme. And grounding can be good, grounding can be rooting, but grounding can also be trapping or being tied to something. I think in general if we’re looking at earth-versus-air periods of history, one useful angle of investigation is social organization and the organization of civilizations.
And earth is very heavy, pyramidal shapes where we have hierarchies. You’ve got to stack things on top of each other. It’s sort of the first tall thing that you can make because you just keep stacking. And so, there’s a movement away from heavy hierarchy and towards network, which is more horizontal, but also, more unstable. Historically, the air periods are unstable.
And instability is a boon if you are trapped in a stable system that you hated, right? But it’s this question and issue of structure. Structure can be a trap, can be a prison, but structure is also shelter, right?
And so, we’re getting a much more shifty, not as reliable structure and that’s great in some ways, but that also exposes us to risk in other ways. And obviously, this is 200 years for the whole world, so we can’t just say, “Oh, and it’s this one thing.” This is the background, right? The background is wind rather than earth.
CB: Yeah.
KS: And we do get quite a strong introduction, I think, to the quality of the wind in 2021. If we come back to 2021, it’s the start of this longer cycle, but we have Saturn and Jupiter together in Aquarius all year, and we’ll also have the Mercury retrogrades in air signs for 2021, which just adds another quality of emphasis in the air element, if you like.
And we’ll talk about more of that when we get into our quarterly overviews, that idea that we’re getting this real sense of what it is like to live in a wind or an air era versus living in this anchored earth, stable structured kind of quality.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, I like what was said about the increasing value of the social and social spheres, as well as intellectual spheres. One of the things we saw in the first quarter and second quarter of 2020 that was a preview of when Saturn first went into Aquarius was during the worldwide lockdowns due to the pandemic, everybody all of a sudden was only able to connect and was connecting through the internet and through things like Zoom—like we’re using right now—through online webinars and things like that.
And there was a lot of innovation and a lot of push to be social and do what you could socially through digital means. And the fact that that was kind of a preview of Saturn in Aquarius I think is going to become somehow more important or more relevant as we get further into the first full year of Saturn in Aquarius in 2021, and perhaps a broader theme for this whole cycle that Saturn and Jupiter are starting right now.
But since that started under a Mars-Saturn conjunction—which is a little bit more negative, a little bit more oppressive—I’m looking forward to the more optimistic side of that with Saturn and Jupiter now conjoining in Aquarius this week and over the course of this year.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Here’s the image of that, just with December of 2020. And Saturn went into Aquarius on the 17th of December, Jupiter went into Aquarius on the 19th, which is today—or tomorrow, I should say. And then the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction taking place on the 21st of December is coming up.
AC: So one more thing that we should just mention about the Jupiter-Saturn being an epochal shift is that in the mundane astrological tradition, where we get the Jupiter-Saturn as a yardstick of history, we also get texts saying that years that have that conjunction are actually not good. Well, not that they’re not good, but that there is a difficulty there—that on a small-scale basis, a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is unfortunate—and I think what that is pointing to is the difficulty of making shifts in changing patterns.
Even if we were to imagine that the next pattern or set of patterns—the next environmental pattern would be much more positive—re-gearing in and of itself takes a lot of time and energy out of the day, right? It’s almost like how we think of cadent houses: there are a lot of problems to solve. One, having to remap your environment takes time, and then once you’ve remapped the environment then you have to rethink your path through the new environment. And so, that’s an energy-intensive and mind-intensive process.
CB: Problems to solve.
AC: Also, institutions in the world don’t pivot and change very swiftly, right?
KS: No.
CB: Yeah, change is slow. And I like that keyword or that phrase of ‘problems to solve’ because that makes me think of Saturn-Jupiter in Aquarius and especially problems to solve through technology.
So for example, coming out of this pandemic year, one of the things that’s happening right at the end of it—so close to that Saturn-Jupiter conjunction—is all of a sudden the new COVID vaccines are being rolled out worldwide, and it’s something that was developed rapidly in order to attempt to solve something that had just brought the world to a complete halt at different points 2020.
So maybe that’s a broader theme that we might be looking at in the long term, which is attempts to solve problems through technology, and some of the ways that that either becomes helpful or sometimes issues come up in the process of trying to implement that.
AC: Yeah, I think we can see a need to pivot dramatically and swiftly in almost every sphere, right? For a lot of people it’s literally, what are you going to do for work?
CB: Right.
KS: Well, and the individual can pivot or adapt faster than a larger organization that’s quite entrenched or has embedded systemic structures or protocols, for instance. So I think that speaks to your point, Austin, about how it takes time to update your map—both practically and internally—when we go through such a substantial shift.
And at an individual level versus at an organizational level, the pace of that updating will be different, and that’s why sometimes these rollouts or this major structural shift—like this ‘tent pole’ in history, if you like—astrologically, can take many years to really make itself known or manifest those changes because when you’re trying to bring that change down through an organization—or a structure or a system—it does require a lot of many small steps and changes along the way.
CB: That’s a really good point. I remember in ancient electional texts, they say fixed signs—like Aquarius—are really slow to get started, but if they do successfully get moving, they can be long-lasting once something is initiated. And with the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction, we’re of course talking about the end of a long cycle and the opening up or the laying of seeds for a new one.
AC: Yeah, it’s the end of the world as we know it—and I feel deeply ambivalent.
CB: That’s our working title for this year.
KS: Deeply ambivalent.
AC: Yeah, that’s a misquoting of that REM song. I want to go back to something you said, Kelly, about the wind shaping the earth. I think those are called Aeolian patterns. But I was just thinking from a mapping perspective, there’s not only the territory which is reshaped by the wind currents. But if we’re just going to carry this earth-to-air metaphor a little further, the most relevant set of data or map might be a map of weather patterns and wind currents rather than a topographical map.
KS: Of the land itself.
AC: Height and depth and the texture of the soil is very relevant when you live in the soil. But when you live in the air, the wind currents, that shifting map of currents might be more relevant. Just a thought.
KS: Yeah, it’s like thinking about what a pilot needs versus what a farmer needs essentially.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Take a look at this diagram I got from ArchetypalExplorer.com yesterday—and our friend Kyle, who runs Archetypal Explorer—which I really love as a program; you can put in whatever transits you want. But one of the features it has shows long-term, mundane, outer planet transits and when they go exact versus when they start to subside and the planets move away from the exact aspect.
And when you plot some of the major outer planet stuff happening in late 2020 and early 2021, you get this weird nexus of overlapping transits that are either starting or ending or culminating at this point in mid-to-late December of 2020. And I haven’t seen anything else like this. This just really emphasizes how much of a nexus in time this is that we’re at right now, as well as a sort of turning point where it’s clearly ending some cycles but then starting to really ramp up other cycles.
KS: That’s a great diagram.
AC: The way that it maps that complicated crossroads is pretty nice.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s a great keyword. ‘Complicated crossroads’ would be good keywords for where we’re at right now. So the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction culminating—we’re coming out of the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction; the series of three, which we’ve luckily just almost completed.
Here are some updated graphs with currently hospitalized people in the US with COVID and how that ended up mapping out in retrospect with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions, at least in the US, and to some extent worldwide over the course of the past year, which has just been stunning to see.
Then we have some new cycles that are going to start that we haven’t experienced yet—like Jupiter square Uranus going exact in January, Saturn square Uranus exact in February, the Saturn-Pluto cycle ending finally, thank God. That was kind of a rough, rough transit.
AC: Yeah, that was—I’ll let you finish, but there was something that I wanted to drill down on there.
CB: No, go ahead.
AC: Okay, I was just going to say one of the themes for this year and the next year is Saturn square Uranus, however, I think it’s really important to contextualize that with where we’ve been. So for the last two, almost three years, we’ve been doing Saturn-Pluto increasingly tight, right? So if Saturn is structure, organization, law, etc., etc., Pluto takes that to an extreme level.
I believe you and I and Patrick discussed years ago you get things like famous prisons being built. The structure of Saturn becomes brutal and despotic, right? And so, we’ve had Saturn, in a sense, over-intensified by Pluto for a while, right?
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: Not only are we losing that—fare thee well—but also we’re getting what is in many ways a completely opposite influence; we’re getting Saturn configured to Uranus, right? Whereas Pluto kind of corrupts and intensifies the structuring action of Saturn, Uranus throws into question whatever structures are proposed, right? Uranus is like, “Yeah, well, maybe no structure would be better,” or “Yeah, what if we did it this way? Yeah, what if we did it a new way?
It’s a questioning and I would say challenging of Saturn consistently rather than that corrupt intensification we saw with Pluto. And that’s a huge part of just the atmosphere of the next two years—and even the next two months.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great point and great transition into talking about Saturn square Uranus, which is our major outer planet signature, or one of the main outer planet signatures that goes exact three times over the course of 2021.
Here’s another diagram from Kyle at Archetypal Explorer where in 2020, earlier in the year, in the first or second quarter, it kind of got close when Saturn dipped into early Aquarius, but Saturn and Uranus didn’t get close enough to make an exact aspect.
But in February, we get our first exact square between Saturn and Uranus from Saturn at 7 Aquarius to Uranus at 7° of Taurus. Then it keeps going, then eventually retrogrades and comes back. There’s another square on June 14 at 13 Aquarius to 13 Taurus, and then finally one more exact one that occurs on December 24 of 2021 from Saturn at 11 Aquarius to Uranus at 11 Taurus.
We do have some return of Saturn-Uranus the following year in 2022, so we’re not completely out of the woods, but it never goes exact again after 2021. So I think that’s a good thing to keep focused on in terms of one of the main keywords and one of the main signatures for 2021.
AC: Yeah, as we plan to get into the quarterly overview, a lot of 2021’s—can we just call it ‘21’?
CB: ‘21?
KS: It’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?
AC: It feels like we’re using too many syllables.
KS: Yeah.
AC: But a lot of the most interesting and dramatic configurations of ‘21 and ‘22 are anchored to that Saturn-Uranus square.
KS: So I think—setting up a theme—it is probably good to lay out what you just said, Chris, about the exact dates for 2021 with Saturn square Uranus. But as a tone or a theme or this kind of background cycle—although it’ll be very much in the foreground in 2021—Saturn-Uranus, we’re doing that for the next two years really.
CB: Yeah.
KS: That is the theme of the next two years.
CB: Yeah, if the 1920s were like the ‘Roaring 1920s’, then the early 2020s with Saturn square Uranus is like the ‘Rebellious 2020s’…
KS: That’s nice.
CB: …is one of my phrases.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
KS: There is this sort of radical reshaping or questioning or pushing back. I mean, these are very strong and different symbols when we think about Saturn versus Uranus. And I loved how you put it into context, Austin, around Saturn-Uranus is a strong signature regardless.
But relative to what we’ve just had—which is three years of Saturn-Pluto co-present—it’s very, very different because Uranus pushes Saturn to break apart or to update or to modernize, or to come into the now rather than to hold on to the past and to maybe disperse some of the structure or even the power. So it’s really going to be a very different tone and it’ll run through the next couple of years.
CB: Yeah. One of the previews we had early last year when Saturn went into Aquarius and started squaring Uranus was there were two waves of protests—at least in the United States—that might give us some clue about some of the types of things we might see in the future.
The first wave, initially, there was some pushback—especially in the more conservative quarters—against the lockdowns and people wanting to sort of rebel against what they viewed as government overreach in trying to keep people at home during the course of the pandemic to stem the spread of the pandemic and of the virus.
And so, the first wave of protests with Saturn in Aquarius last year was a bit of that, were sort of anti-government-type protests. And then the second wave was in June—was more of the social protests after the murder of George Floyd—and a lot of people wanting to seek social justice and equality, especially for Black people in the United States. And that became an even stronger signature as we went into June with Saturn still in Aquarius, and I think it stationed sometime around that time, right?
AC: Yeah, I think it maybe stationed. I don’t remember when it stationed, but it went back into Capricorn at the very beginning of July.
KS: Beginning of July.
AC: But I think that shows us something. So Uranus square Saturn is—I guess the play term is ‘civil unrest’, right? But it’s demonstration. It’s public demonstration, public discontent, and it’s not particularly partisan.
Like in our preview period, we saw two very different protest movements, and that’s just within the United States where we divide everything neatly into two. But there were protests in Europe. India right now is having one of the largest protests in history. And so, it’s going to hit different states and nations and continents differently, but it’s unrest.
It’s Uranus. Uranus is very ideal—or excuse me, idealistic—and is willing to contend in order to either make something that does get close enough to the idea or to improve it. But Uranus’ approach to Saturn is ‘this isn’t good enough’, but it’s ‘this isn’t good enough’ in an active, disruptive way. It’s not like, “Uh, I don’t love it, but I’m going to go over here now,” right? It’s not passive.
CB: Yeah. Are there any other Saturn-Uranus core keywords that you can think of, Kelly, that are important here? Another thing that’s going to accelerate the Saturn-Uranus and emphasize it this year is the fact that it’s not just Saturn-Uranus on its own like it was back in the spring and early summer, but also, Jupiter is going through Aquarius at the same time and will also have a series of Jupiter-Uranus squares this year, right?
KS: We will, yes. I mean, it does feel like the last couple of years there was a real focus on Pluto, so we had a lot of Pluto keywords and concepts coming through. And so, looking forward, the outer planet that dominates the landscape is very much Uranus.
We always hear about those two keywords of Uranus, ‘revolutions’ and ‘rebellions’, and these are the kinds of qualities or experiences at both a personal level and a collective level that are starting to gain traction. So the idea of holding Saturn to a standard or challenging Saturn to do things differently, it’s like this radical reshaping of things that have been around for a long time.
And so, one of the other keywords that I often think about for Uranus is the idea of ‘freedom’, and that can apply personally, it can apply collectively. And so, the idea here is, what is important in terms of freedom to individuals, but also, collectively or within society? And then how do we move forward to create something that reflects that, I guess?
AC: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because I think one of the simplest things that you can point out with the square between Saturn and Uranus is Saturn is order and safety, and Uranus is liberty or freedom, right? And those are both important human things…
KS: Yeah.
AC: …and they continually come into conflict.
CB: And in the audience, Elion points out that there’s only one Jupiter-Uranus conjunction—or square that happens this year. It retrogrades and comes back and becomes close, but only one exact hit.
KS: Only one exact, early in the year.
CB: So that’s actually a really good point. And they also point out that the Uranus-Jupiter square has been important or coincided with important moments in Black history, such as the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion, the Emancipation Proclamation, and other events. So that’s a good point as well for additional context coming up this year and what those important turning points can be when Jupiter joins the party at the same time, in addition to Saturn squaring Uranus.
AC: Yeah, I would just add that the Jupiter square Uranus is, how should we say, sort of a more constructive moment in the longer Saturn-Uranus story. But there’s only one and Jupiter moves on, whereas Saturn does it for a couple of years, and we’re going to have even more emphasis on that Saturn-Uranus dynamic in ‘22 because of the eclipses highlighting it. And so, we just have one Jupiter early this year, but this story goes on for a solid two.
CB: Yeah.
AC: We can comfortably say Jupiter might hopefully intervene briefly, but doesn’t really get to steer the narrative there.
CB: I mean, I wonder if that gives this year more of a potential for sudden opportunities for growth and bursts of breaking from the past in ways maybe that are more successful—or less tense or difficult—compared to just Saturn squaring Uranus on its own once Jupiter leaves that sign and is no longer there to lend sort of a smoothing out or an optimism or a stability and confirmation-type factor to Saturn’s tendency to just reject and negate things?
AC: Yeah, I think Jupiter being part of that for a while maybe offers some more positives—or should we say makes some of the structural reform a little easier. And that’s like a more governmental term, but I mean that on a personal level as well, right? What is the structure that we’ve decided on?
There’s how we fill the structure, but there’s like, “I’m going to do this on Fridays and Saturdays. I’m going to do this job. I’m going to not do this job.” Those are structural/life architectural decisions, and I think Jupiter’s participation will make some of that re-blueprinting a little bit easier, and also, give some good ideas for not just in a sense structuring for security, but also, structuring a building so that it’s something that you want to live in, right?
CB: Yeah. One of the things this is making me think about of course is Jupiter works in 12-year cycles. And so, if you take it back 12 years to see what Jupiter in Aquarius was like last time, or if you want to know what Jupiter in Aquarius was like, you look back 12 years. And this was around the time when Obama was first elected in November of 2008, which famously, there was an exact Saturn-Uranus opposition at that time. And one of his main campaign keywords was ‘Change’, and that ended up being the ‘Change’ election where that theme of change and Uranus ended up dominating over the more Saturn theme, which tends to be more resistant to change.
So that is one signature, but then also by the time he was inaugurated, Jupiter had gone into Aquarius, which was also Obama’s rising sign famously. And one of his famous keywords during his first election was ‘Yes, We Can’.
So even if you didn’t agree with him politically and regardless of his successes or failures, he had tapped into something in that moment that was kind of like in the airwaves at the time, and part of that was Jupiter in Aquarius, I think. Again, it gives us some previews and some ideas of what this Saturn square Uranus and Jupiter in Aquarius dynamic might be over the course of the next year especially.
AC: Yeah, I think this is a somewhat less hopeful addition.
CB: Well, we will see. All right, the last thing that we needed to touch base on—just to keep things moving because we’re going a little over time—is just there’s a major shift away from cardinal placements this year and a shift more towards the mutable signs and more towards the fixed signs, which is one of the ways that people might be able to conceptualize how some of these major transits over the course of 2021 are going to affect them personally, or how they’re going to correlate with major changes and shifts in different parts of your life depending on where you have the cardinal signs, the mutable signs, and the fixed signs.
So on the one hand, we have a shift away from cardinal signs where we had the huge pileup of planets last year in Capricorn, as well as eventually a Mars retrograde in Aries that lasted for six months, or at least Mars’ transit through Aries lasted for six months. There were also eclipses that took place on the Cancer-Capricorn axis.
So we just had a huge amount of emphasis and tension and tense aspects in the cardinal signs, which was kind of tricky and tough for many people with heavy cardinal placements in their chart—which is Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn.
So there’s going to be something of an alleviation or at least a moving away of energy from that sector of the signs of the zodiac this year. And the nodal axis and the eclipse series has already started to shift into the mutable signs of Gemini and Sagittarius, while Saturn and Jupiter moving into Aquarius shifts that focus more towards the fixed signs of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. So that’s a pretty notable shift that’s kind of personalizable in a way, right? What do you think, Kelly?
KS: Yeah, I definitely think that’s something depending on how much you know about astrology. If you are a fixed sign—Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, or Aquarius—you can just kind of understand that you’re starting a pretty big two-year cycle. And some fixed signs have already been in a pretty big cycle if they’ve got early fixed planets to do with Uranus having moved into Taurus, but there will certainly be an increase in intensification or focus or energy.
And if you know your own astrology chart of course you can look into the houses in your birth chart where you have those four fixed signs—particularly, Aquarius, but the other fixed signs as well—as topics or areas in your life that do need to be updated or reworked. Particularly, the Aquarius part of our charts I think about the restructuring.
But as a general shift, yeah, we’re moving from a cardinal emphasis—which has been really heavy the past two years—into a fixed sign emphasis. And 2021 brings in a lot of fixed energy straight out of the gate, and Austin, as you mentioned, that increases when we get to ‘22, as we get the nodes coming to the fixed signs as well.
So 2021, I’ve really conceptualized it as a fixed sign year focusing on the air element, which we’ve talked about; but there is this side of mutable energy that comes up this year, but it is primarily fixed for the year.
CB: Here’s a diagram for those watching the video version—again, made by Paula Belluomini—that shows the eclipses in 2021. So a total lunar eclipse in Sagittarius on May 26, then a solar eclipse in Gemini June10. At the end of the year, we get a shift to Taurus, and there’s a lunar eclipse on November 19 in Taurus, and then finally, a total solar eclipse on December 4 towards the end of the year. So we can see that shift. First, it’s in mutable signs all year and then it starts shifting to fixed signs by the end of the year where it’ll continue that shift into 2022.
AC: Yeah. And so, basically in 2022, we get the eclipses lining up with the Uranus-Saturn, but for most of this year, most of 2021, they’re going to be separate. And so, I would just say there’s the personal level of if you have cardinal planets, they got the shit kicked out of them this year and that’s moving on and some of the difficulties are handed off to fixed. But what is occurring for the fixed signs is not as intense as what happened for the cardinals, but they also just speak to the quality of time of the massive, overabundance of planets in cardinal signs in 2020.
Cardinal is beginning, ‘here’s a new thing’ energy, and boy, do we get a lot of new things in 2021. It’s like here’s forty new problems to solve, right? Whereas, as you said earlier, Chris, about fixed signs, there’s a very strong continuing energy. Well, that’s not what you said, but I know that you think that because it’s true.
But we’ve kind of been handed a lot of the situation and it’s fixed. The fixed signs—they’re going to keep this going, right? None of the problems which were presented—you know, cardinal presentation—in 2020 are gone, right? We’re going to be working on all of this. A lot of these things were the beginning of arcs, not momentary blips.
And so, I’ve been trying to think about how to encapsulate or evoke the fixed Saturn in Aquarius for the next two years—more than the next two years, but especially the next two years—as being very fixed. Are we in a fixed crisis? It’s ongoing. Fixed signs—it’s something that’s ongoing. It’s not new and it’s not about to change. It’s ongoing. As I said, I’ve been working on it, but I don’t have the phrase yet, I don’t think.
CB: Yeah. Well, at least we know our cardinal friends can breathe a bit of a sigh of relief, I think. Either of you with heavy cardinal placements? Austin, are you especially ready for a vacation?
AC: Something like that, yeah.
CB: Something like that.
AC: I’m ready to go into exile, not just a vacation.
CB: Okay. Well, we might need you to navigate the astrology of next year, so don’t check out completely. All right, so we’ve gone a little over time for our initial, introductory overview, but I think that’s pretty good. Is there anything that we forgot to mention in our brief sketch of the major things that are happening in 2021, before we jump into the first quarter?
KS: I feel like we could jump in and anything else we’ll have time to go into.
AC: Yeah, I feel like that’s more than sufficient as far as a thematic overview.
CB: All right. Well, in that case, let’s do it and let’s jump into the astrology of January of 2021, which sounds really futuristic and bizarre to say. Here we go.
AC: Where’s my flying car?
CB: Yeah, exactly. Where’s my flying skateboard? I really feel robbed by Back to the Future, Part 2. The closest we got was like…
AC: Well, we got Biff as President.
CB: We did, that’s true. We got Biff as President. We got roving—for a little bit before the pandemic—scooter gangs with e-scooters. That was the closest we got, which is okay, I guess.
AC: The segway is not a good replacement for the hoverboard..
CB: Right.
AC: I do not accept.
CB: All right, well, let’s see where we’re at by the end of the decade. Maybe they just missed a digit or something like that. Here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar that Paula Belluomini and I designed for January of 2021. So this is from our poster, which I just finally released on The Astrology Podcast website for this year, and people can order at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2021Posters.
So we can see the main sketch of January features Mars moving into Taurus on the 6th, Mercury into Aquarius on the 8th, and Venus into Capricorn the same day. We’ve got a New Moon in Capricorn on the 13th, Uranus stations direct in Taurus on the 14th. Jupiter square Uranus is the biggest outer planet transit, which is taking place on 17th. Sun ingress on the 19th to Aquarius, Full Moon in Leo on the 28th, and Mercury stations retrograde on the 30th of January.
So that’s a lot of stuff going on right away, right from the start. I’m not sure if it’s as big as last year where we had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction like right at the top. And that’s right when The New York Times posted their first report about COVID, I think, within a day of that. I guess our main signature is that Jupiter-Uranus square for January.
KS: And Mars moving into Taurus.
AC: Yes, I would say that Mars moving into Taurus and hyperactivating the Uranus-Saturn right away is what I’m looking at.
CB: All right, well, let me pull up the chart, and let’s look at the actual chart for that time period.
KS: Yeah. And that’s something to keep in mind as people are conceptualizing the year. Mars through the fixed signs is going to really amplify, stir up the Uranus-Saturn square, and yeah, we get it right out of the gate.
CB: Right. That’s so funny. So we’ve all been dying for Mars to leave Aries finally. It’s been in there for six months now, we could all use a break. But then the downside is once it moves into Taurus finally, in January, all of the other inner planets and outer planets have moved into Aquarius. So it just sets up this powder keg where Mars starts moving up to conjoin Uranus in Taurus at 6° and squaring all of the fixed sign placements in Aquarius, which is Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and so on.
KS: Yeah, I think the other ingress that’s important in early January is Mercury into Aquarius because that will set up an unusually long stay of Mercury in Aquarius, which will roll into its retrograde, which is just more fixed activation.
CB: Do we get three? Because I see Mercury squaring Uranus as soon as it goes in on January 8 at 0° of Taurus to 0° of Aquarius. When Mercury retrogrades in Aquarius, does it hit Mars again, or does it just come close?
KS: Sorry, we get three. Yeah, we do get two to Mars.
CB: Stations retrograde in late January and comes back, and then, yeah, it hits Mars. So it looks like the second square is at 17 Aquarius to 17 Taurus on February 10. And then eventually, Mercury stations direct, moves forward again. And much later, once they both move into Pisces and Gemini, we get the third square on March 23. So that’s opening up a nice sequence of events of three Mars-Mercury squares over the course of the first quarter of the year. So that’s a nice little signature.
KS: From memory, there’s a fair bit of Mercury-Mars action throughout the year, just based on where Mars is when Mercury does its retrograde cycle, but this one is riding on the fixed stuff.
CB: What are your Mercury-Mars square keywords, Kelly?
KS: Oh, Mercury square Mars—I always think about ‘discord’, ‘disagreement’. Like that idea of a heated conversation or even sometimes being attacked with words or facts or data. Sometimes it can prompt a soft-spoken person to speak up more. So the heat of Mars can stimulate Mercury. Sometimes people blurt things out and at times it may feel a little premature or inelegant. But often there’s a rawness or an honesty to Mercury-Mars that can be very clarifying even if it can be a bit sharp or uncomfortable to swallow in the heat of the moment.
CB: Yeah, those are great keywords. Because sometimes the argumentative or need to speak out against something even forcefully is necessary, but other times it can manifest as more of a verbal combativeness and a negative exchange, or a fight that sometimes you might wish that you hadn’t had once you’ve cooled down.
KS: Yeah, you do just want to have a little bit of caution about what you say, how you say it, or who you say it to usually when it’s a square aspect or some difficult aspect.
CB: All right, so Austin, the pileup in Aquarius and the square and tension with the two planets, Mars and Uranus and their conjunction in Taurus. What’s the vibe you’re getting off of that?
AC: Yeah, so that basically sprinkles gunpowder on the longer Saturn-Uranus themes. We got a taste of demonstration, unrest, revolt energy during the preview period last spring—or last Northern Hemisphere spring. And as we’ve just spent a fair amount of time talking about, those themes are going to be a consistent part of the next two years, and Mars’ ingress into Taurus just kicks that off right away, right? Just sprinkles gunpowder all over it.
And so, this is Mars with Uranus, right? So Uranus is always like something to revolt over, something that’s not good enough. Like this needs to be upgraded, this needs to be better, right? And Taurus, it’s…
CB: Right. Just to interject, the United States birth chart has a Mars-Uranus conjunction by sign at least in Gemini, doesn’t it?
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: So just think about a country born out of a revolutionary war and what have you fitting in with your keywords.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good example. And so, Uranus in Taurus—Taurus is about grounded things. It’s about food and shelter and money, right? And so, I think actually one of the best examples of Uranus in Taurus has just happened recently, which is the massive farmers movement in India, right? Literally, revolting farmers is Uranus in Taurus and it’s about food production.
And so, I’m not as familiar with the statistics in other countries, but I know in the United States, for example, we have an eviction and foreclosure crisis looming and there’s sort of a ‘tsunami’ held behind a very thin and cracked dam. And so, there’s a lot of damage that was done in 2020, which the impact has not been fully felt.
And I think this Mars-Uranus-Saturn thing is going to see that start to—I don’t know—more than trickle. It may not be a full dam burst, but it’s certainly some of that very Taurean, simple damage—food, shelter, etc., etc.—starts coming through. I don’t know. People are pretty good at getting pissed en masse when they don’t have food, shelter, etc., etc. There may be some food supply and logistics issues which come through. Yeah, but food and shelter I would say are the trigger points for contention there.
And to bring the Mercury-Mars square in, what does Mercury have to talk about? What do Mercury and Mars have to talk about or fight about? On a macro level it’s going to be these issues, right? And then the question will be, for Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius, okay, Saturn, structure planet, what do we do about this? What is the policy that deals with this huge disruption to these Taurean things that we really don’t like disrupted? We like a little volatility, a little surprise in some areas of life, not so much with the food and shelter.
CB: That’s a really good and interesting point about Taurus as being associated with the material, and it makes me think of the Bitcoin episode. So many astrologers have been discussing that ingress of Uranus over the past couple of years into Taurus and changes in currency, and how something like Bitcoin comes along—a digital currency—but it’s also a digital currency that is very volatile and fluctuates very wildly, up and down.
And having Mars go in there with Uranus in Taurus—one of the things that makes me think of is currency volatility and some of that coming up as being relevant, in addition to some of the things you were saying about food and shelter and other basic material necessities, thinking of Taurus.
AC: Yeah. And that’s a really good point about currency, one, because Uranus in Taurus in the past has coincided with big disruptions to currency as stores of value. I think what shows it as a Taurean thing is that it’s something that likes to be stable, right? Like food supply and shelter. Some things benefit from volatility; food, shelter, and money do not benefit from volatility.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah, they’re really the core things that give people a sense of safety or security and interfering with those will definitely bring about reactions. And I think as we’re talking about the symbolism of this Mars in Taurus, I think it’s also important to put this timing piece together, which is that Mars is in Taurus making the aspects to Uranus and Saturn in January, as Saturn and Uranus are moving towards each other.
So there is that real link between January and February where Saturn and Uranus form their degree-based square in February, but Mars comes in kind of stirring things up or activating. I mean, I always use the phrase ‘tilling the soil’, but it’s literally like stirring things up as we’re getting into that first Saturn-Uranus activation by degree.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I keep coming…
AC: As—oh, go ahead.
CB: I keep coming to when the conjunction occurs. And one of the things that makes me nervous is just the Mars-Uranus conjunction at 6° of Taurus conjoins on January 20. And the Moon catches up and then moves over that at the same time, and that’s squaring the stellium in Aquarius of the Sun, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury.
But January 20 of course in the United States is Inauguration Day, so that’ll also be Biden’s inauguration. So that makes me a little nervous because, as we were saying, Mars-Uranus is kind of a volatile aspect to have that conjunction going exact then.
AC: Indeed.
KS: Yeah. I mean, and that…
AC: Go ahead.
KS: Sorry, Austin.
AC: I was just going to say one thing about the macro situation there. It is helpful that Jupiter is with Saturn because Jupiter really helps Saturn be a little bit more constructive. If we take sort of a raw archetypal Saturn, and we say, “Oh, my God, there are all these problems, fix it,” the archetypal Saturn might say, “Suck it up. Toughen up.” Jupiter is ‘kindlier’, right? It’s like, “What can I do to help?”
And it’s still a very ‘Saturn-y’ Jupiter. It’s like, “Well, what can I do to help with some policy things?” and this and that. It’s not all-embracing and oceanic in its bounty, but Jupiter is there at least trying to help.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, that’s something I’ve said a few times to students in my membership over the last little while. If we’re going to have this strong Saturn in Aquarius signature or these Saturn-Uranus activations, it’s nice to have Jupiter involved just as a little bit of a helper or greasing the wheels or a little bit of support. Limited as it may be, it is a small boon to have Jupiter in the mix rather than to have this going on without Jupiter there.
CB: Right. Because otherwise Saturn is really good at negating or critiquing things and saying, “You’re not doing a good enough job in this area. This is broken, this isn’t working. You need to do better in this area.” But Jupiter is much better at growing things through affirming them and like pointing out the good things or the things that you can do, or this is an area where it would be easy for us to work on and have growth in that area.
So hopefully, it will be able to balance out and create a nice synergy there in terms of the critical portions, as well as the more affirming portions working in unison. The only problem is that with that square with Uranus and Mars happening—especially in the first quarter—there’s some sort of conflict or needling or tension that is making it a little bit harder for that pair to operate than it would otherwise.
AC: In addition to that, I would say one of the things that Mars does is it speeds up the time frame, where it’s a hot crisis rather than a slow, ongoing thing. Mars is like, “Yeah, but this needs to get done this week.” And Saturn’s like, “Well, we’re going to go to committee for three months and then we’re going to debate it, and we’re eventually going to come to a thing.” Mars is like, “I’m literally getting shot at right now, ching-ching.” You know what I mean? It’s a quick thing, and so, Mars speeds things up.
CB: Definitely. So a greater sense of urgency and a push to do something in a much shorter time frame, whereas Jupiter and Saturn as the two largest and slowest visible planets otherwise tend to move much more gradually.
AC: Yeah. And even when they’re constructive, especially in a Saturn-ruled sign, it’s a little bit more committee-shaped. It’s the hero we deserve, unfortunately, rather the hero we need.
CB: Right.
AC: They don’t parachute in through the window with food stuff and cover your rent.
CB: Let’s see, so two more things we have in the notes to cover for January to keep us moving—one of them is the tense Full Moon in Leo towards the end of the month, and the other thing I need to mention is the election, which is at the beginning of the month. Which one makes sense to do first?
AC: With the Full Moon, I think we can just say it just highlights all the stuff. It’s a fixed Full Moon. It gives Full Moon visibility and activation to these tensions that we’ve been talking about. It’s kind of a little bit more of the same.
CB: Yeah, because here it is. It’s at 9° of Leo opposing the Sun at 9° of Aquarius. The Sun, interestingly, is closely conjunct Jupiter at 9° of Aquarius at that time, which sounds nice and optimistic. The only issue is that Mars has hit about 10° of Taurus and it’s still separating from that conjunction with Uranus at 6° of Taurus.
So it creates a pretty tight T-square for a lunation, and lunations themselves tend to be a culmination of events or a bringing to light of something. And having Mars right there at the apex just seems tense, like conflict or stress or discord or something that’s being heightened at that time—around the time of the Full Moon—when things are already heightened in some sense.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah, it looks like outbursts.
CB: ‘Outbursts’, that’s a good keyword. Because this year ahead forecast doubles as our forecast for January, I need to mention our electional chart for January, and it actually happens really early in the month.
Our electional chart that we wanted to highlight, which is the best date for starting new ventures and undertakings—using the principles of electional astrology that I found with Leisa Schaim—is set for January 1, 2021, with early Aquarius rising. So like 2° or so of Aquarius rising. So let me pull that chart up back to January 1, with the time…
AC: That’s a very calendar-convenient election.
CB: January 1? Right.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And it’s a little annoying of course because anybody listening to this later in January will have missed it. But since we’re releasing this towards the middle of December, hopefully, enough people will be able to use it. Part of the issue is just the best election falls at the beginning of the month. Mars is still in Aries at that point, and it hasn’t moved into Taurus where it starts squaring all the Aquarius planets.
So we did something a little tricky with this election by basically allowing you to try to skip the tension of the ‘Mars squaring everything’ month by getting your election in early on January 1 to try to take advantage of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction before that square with Mars gets within 3° or gets too terribly close. So set the electional chart for January 1, 2021, adjust it to about approximately 8:40 AM in your location. Then adjust the chart until in your location you have 2° of Aquarius rising, which will put Jupiter and Saturn right on the degree of the Ascendant, especially Jupiter.
This is a Saturn election. It’s a day chart, with Aquarius rising, and Saturn is in the 1st house ruling the Ascendant, and it is conjunct the benefic Jupiter, who is fully benefic since it’s a day chart. The Moon is in Leo and it’s not really applying to major planets, except for a very wide trine with Venus, which is at 21° of Sagittarius in the 11th whole sign house.
This is kind of a continuation and a reusing of the Saturn election from December, closer to the conjunction that we used last month—or earlier this month. But it would be good—a Jupiter-Saturn-type election—for long-term things that might start off slow and be slow to develop. But if they’re successful, then they will become successful in the long-term, and you’ll find some good stability in things with a Saturnian- and Jupiter-themed-type nature.
Now it’s a little hard to get away from the Uranus square, since Uranus is at 6° of Taurus, but at least it’s more than 3° away. And while that might introduce some element of instability, if you’re able to use that in a way that’s unique or innovative, I think you should be able to incorporate it into whatever you’re doing in a successful way.
So this is our one electional chart that I’m going to highlight for January. Leisa and I found three or four other charts for January that we’re going to introduce in the Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is available for patrons through our page on Patreon.com.
And we also just released our Yeah Ahead 2021 Electional Astrology Report, where we went through each of the next 12 months, and we released one electional chart for each month, finding the most auspicious date we could for each of the next 12 months. So you can find out more information about that on my website, which is ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com.
All right, so that’s the election for the month. Are you guys starting anything? I know you’re recording a podcast tomorrow, Austin, and I think I’m going to release this episode. Are you guys going to try to initiate any projects with the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that’s happening over the next few weeks.
KS: I’m attempting to initiate some rest.
CB: Initiate a nap? Okay, electional chart for a nap.
KS: Yeah, just some kind of slow unwinding. So nothing new launching for me.
CB: I like that. Nap time electional astrology is a long and venerable tradition going back to Guido Bonatti.
KS: Yeah, I’m kind of like Rip Van Winkle with the Saturn maybe.
CB: Okay. Austin, are you making any talismans or magical potions or anything like that?
AC: No. I actually considered it and came up with a few elections and then read cards on it. The divination gave it a very emphatic ‘no’. There will be plenty of things that have Saturn supported by Jupiter, but I got a set of resounding ‘nos’ about making stuff with that conjunction.
It got me thinking about how there are some configurations which are worth saving and giving them a little physical body. And then there are other configurations which you don’t want to save, but are very important to observe, like eclipses, right? The eclipse talismans do lots of things, most of them harmful or just strange, but it’s not something you want to save; they’re nonetheless very important to observe.
And so, through my thinking and divination around it, it was something worth observing. And I mean, observing in a quasi-religious sense, like in an observation. So I think I’m going to be doing a little ritual thing, just kind of coming together, but I don’t think that we’re going to make anything.
CB: Okay. Well, there will be other opportunities for Saturn in Aquarius and Jupiter in Aquarius elections during the course of this year, and I’m actually excited. Because 2020, honestly, was very difficult for electional astrology because everything was just in Capricorn or retrograde in Aries for pretty much the entire year, and it was really hard to work around the tense portions.
But this year, there’s definitely some optimistic sections and some little bubbles where you can get some great electional charts in, like when Jupiter dips into Pisces for a little bit, Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions that are a little bit wider later in the year in Aquarius and so on and so forth. So with that out of the way, why don’t we move into February, so that we can keep moving here. We’re a little bit behind on time.
AC: Yeah, we can pick it up a little bit.
CB: When were we supposed to take our first break? Was it at 1-hour-and-20?
KS: In about fifteen minutes.
AC: Yeah.
CB: I think that’s in six minutes. We’re at an-hour-and-fourteen right now. Anyway, let’s jump into it.
KS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do it as fast as we can.
CB: All right, February, Saturn square Uranus, super-Aquarius stellium, and Mercury retrograde in Aquarius. So those are our three main things to talk about. Where do you want to start?
AC: Let’s just talk about…
KS: Aquarius.
AC: Yeah. We’re of the same mind, Kelly. You go ahead.
KS: Yeah, it’s so unusual to see so many planets—visible traditional planets—in one place. And February’s unique because for most of the month, we’re going to have five planets—Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Sun, Mercury—all in Aquarius, and then of course the New Moon in Aquarius. We will have the Moon there as well, which is six out of the seven traditional planets, or visible planets, all in the same place.
CB: Look at that. That’s amazing. That is an amazing stellium and lineup. That reminds me that I haven’t seen a stellium like that. There was one in 1962 in Aquarius.
KS: Yeah, I was just re-looking at that because I have a client who was born in 1961 or ‘62, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this was the last time we had the super-Aquarius.” Because that was like Saturn, Jupiter, and a node was there. Plus, we had the Sun in Aquarius period, and it was Venus or Mercury, or maybe both actually.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah. So if you’re curious or confused—if you’re confused about what Aquarius might mean for you personally, or what themes it might bring out collectively, I think just pay attention to what comes up in February. It’s a very simple way of approaching it without getting too granular. You can’t miss whatever Aquarius is for you in February because so many planets are just bringing that message home.
CB: It’s just going to be in your face at that point and clustering very closely in that sector of your chart, just like the Capricorn stellium last year in March, which piled up in my 12th house. And then I got sick and was stuck in my house for like two months being sick. Did you guys have similar pileups in some house-type events?
KS: Yes.
CB: Okay, we don’t have to go into it.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I don’t want private details about different houses. But yeah, so Aquarius, think about what house and what sector of your chart that pileup is going to be in. Obviously, there’s other things you can layer on top of that like what profection you’re in and other things like that in terms of whether it be super-heated for you, but it should be a nice concentration of whatever that energy is going to be this year.
AC: And so, something to add is that with the Sun going through Aquarius with all these planets, we’re seeing the Sun in Aquarius conjoin lots of planets or other planets conjoin the Sun. And so, oddly, even though we have a sky full of Aquarius, almost all of this is going to be hidden behind the Sun’s beams, right?
So there’s just going to be a tremendous amount happening literally behind the scene, behind the scene of the Sun. And those conjunctions with the Sun—they’re recycle resets, right? So we have cazimi, cazimi, cazimi, cazimi. We have all these cycle resets where the planets, metaphorically, travel through the fiery heart of the Sun, and I think that it’s at all scales—individual up to macro.
It’s the Sun and all the other planets visiting with Jupiter and Saturn who’ve got a new plan to remake history. They’re like, “Okay, next 200 years.” This is really the adjustment to the rest of the year and the planning for the rest of the year in a lot of senses, right? This is like, okay, what’s the new plan?
I think to a certain degree some of the ‘how are we going to start this off’ type of thinking that we usually do in January or we try to do in January is going to get delayed by the Mars-Uranus-Saturn thing. It’s like, “Oh, we’ve got to take this into account.” But then by the time we get to February, we’re like, “Okay, all of the data—good, bad, and other—is in. Let’s think and plan on this.”
And it’s funny, I believe that the lunar or the lunisolar—commonly called the Chinese New Year—is going to be a more accurate beginning of things in 2021 rather than the calendar month of January beginning the year. Does that make sense?
CB: Yeah. And that analogy you’re using made me think of in Hellenistic astrology, the term they used for when planets get within 15° of each other is ‘an assembly’. And it’s like all those planets in Aquarius are getting into an assembly to talk and discuss about what the plan is and what they’re going to do.
Although it’s kind of interesting because Mars is squaring that pretty closely at the same time, having come off of the conjunction with Uranus. So it’s almost like they’re getting together and saying, “What are we going to do about this guy who’s causing all these problems in Taurus?”
AC: Yeah.
KS: I mean, the visual that just came…
AC: Mars is like, “I hate your plan.”
CB: Right.
KS: …that came to my mind was I went to a school where we did have a lot of assemblies. Schools in Australia, you wear a school uniform. So there’s six hundred kids in new uniforms in your grade groups. The principal’s talking to you about whatever the plan is or whatever the rules are, and there was always one kid that would just do something crazy. They would be making noise and it would just disrupt the whole thing. That’s what that Mars in Taurus feels like, the disruptor of the assembly.
AC: Like the big, loud fart sound.
KS: Yeah, exactly. If we were in grade nine or ten, it would always be one of the boys that would be doing fart noises or something. But I’m glad you mentioned the visibility, on a slightly more serious note because I had thought about that too. And I think it’s about the 9th of February that Saturn will start to—I didn’t check the dates of whether that’s 8° or 15° from the Sun.
In about the middle of the month, February 16, Jupiter steps away. Oh, no, February 16, that’s Jupiter. Yeah, so they are there coming up from out of the Sun beams. So it does feel like we’re going to need to get into February—well into February—before the emergence of Jupiter and Saturn from that reset, that cycle reset that you mentioned, Austin.
CB: Okay, I see what you’re saying. So you’re pointing out how—especially in the second-half of February—you’ll start to see all of these planets emerge.
KS: In the morning.
CB: In the morning, they’ll start appearing. And they’ll rise before the Sun, shortly before daybreak, and start emerging into view again. So there’s almost something that’s hidden, especially in the first-half of the month and maybe in late January. The Sun’s…
KS: Late January too, yeah.
CB: …traveling through Aquarius and eclipsing all of these planets that become hidden and can’t be seen. And then all of a sudden, in the second-half of February, in the morning, they all start emerging into view, and some themes start to show themselves and become more clear.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, the announcements.
CB: Hmm. That reminds me of the term phasis from Greek, which is the term for planets that make an appearance. It’s like an appearance that speaks or says something, and it says something as a result of coming out onto the world stage and making itself known.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Well, that will be fun. There’s been so much great astronomy, like visual astronomy stuff lately.
AC: I had a look. It’ll be fun.
CB: It’ll be fun, okay. Somebody was…
KS: That was your dry sense of humor.
CB: …talking about this, my dry sense of humor on Twitter yesterday and thanking me for it. Fun, yeah. That’ll be tense, but it’ll be good to have things become known. And sometimes it’s the problem that you can’t see that’s harder to deal with than the problem that you’ve at least identified and has become clear and then you can start to wrestle with it versus the thing that’s just causing problems, but it’s not in your field of vision, so you can’t deal with it.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, what else about February? Saturn-Uranus second—or, no, first exact square of Saturn-Uranus. That’s huge. So the Saturn-Uranus—which was already ramping up—is going to be heightened or at its peak. So that first square happens—the opening square—on the 17th of February.
So to whatever extent we got like a little preview or something of some of the protests and some of the social instability last year when Saturn just barely dipped its toe into Aquarius, we’re getting a serious, much more intense version of that in our first hit of it. Our first full experience of it should be around mid-February with that first exact square.
AC: Yeah, I think January just leads right into that. I don’t think we wait till February to see what Saturn-Uranus is about. Mars will be ‘carrying the light’ between the two. I think it’s more like, “Okay, what are we going to do about this?”
So on an internal level, if we’re thinking about that assembly, it’s like, okay, we’re going to get our Mercury, we’re going to get our thinking. We’re going to get our Jupiter, which is our hopes, aspirations, how might we grow from this. We’re going to get our—how should we say it—survival-oriented Saturn together. We’re going to get our Venusian passions altogether with the Sun and think about the situation. We’re assembling everything except for Mars.
And even though Mars is in a ‘fart noise’ aspect to these planets, Mars is nonetheless…
KS: That’s going to be the hashtag.
CB: I want to profess that by saying anybody that has that in their natal chart will come up by the end of the show with a better analogy for what that means natally—unless it does mean that, I don’t know.
AC: I mean, Mars conjunct Uranus, it’s squaring things.
KS: I mean, there’s definitely noises with Mars square Uranus.
CB: There’s definitely noises.
AC: There are bellicose protestations. But anyway, it’s everything except for Mars, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, there’s this internal assembly as well as external assembly to basically set policy and that’s going to look lots of different ways, lots of different places, and with lots of different people.
CB: Here’s the diagram for that Saturn-Uranus conjunction, again, from Kyle at Archetypal Explorer. And I keep giving him a shout-out because he’s just great; he’s not sponsoring this episode.
But the past year, when the COVID pandemic hit, and we started dealing with all those outer planet transits and how to present them, using his graphics has been one of the biggest things I’ve been happy and grateful for this year—using his website ArchetypalExplorer.com.
Plotting something on a graph like this and being able to see it as part of a continuous movement or wave or something that comes in waves rather than just seeing it as a single, discrete point or date or something like that I think is so valuable in understanding that it’s a process that you’re going through over a period of time, which is something we always try to describe on the forecast, but it’s sometimes hard to visualize. So Saturn-Uranus, anything else about that?
KS: I feel like we’ve touched on a lot of the main themes there, so I feel okay about that for now.
AC: Even though we get the Sun leaving Aquarius on, what, like the 19th—something like that, towards the end of the month—we’ve still got Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, and Saturn all in Aquarius until the 25th, and Venus moves; but then we still have Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. And so, that overwhelmingly…
KS: Into March.
AC: …Aquarian theme really runs into March.
CB: Yeah.
KS: There is a little bit of an energetic transition as we get into March, though, because Mars will move into Gemini early in the month, and the Sun of course is then in Pisces. There’s still a lot going on with Aquarius, but we no longer have that Mars square from Taurus pushing onto it. And we do get a little bit more—whether it’s that mutable quality—of ‘easy come, easy go’ or fluctuation. So there is a bit of a tone shift once we get Mars into Gemini in March.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And we go from overwhelmingly fixed to fixed and mutable, slightly more mutable, right? We talked a lot about cardinal and fixed earlier. Mutable is adaptational. It’s like, “I don’t know. Let’s see what happens.” Cardinal is like, “I want to do this, let’s begin it.”
KS: This one thing, yeah.
AC: Fixed is we’re in the middle of the flight, the train has left the station, let’s manage the process, whereas mutable is like let’s see how it goes, let’s maybe make some changes, get ready for the next thing, and also, bring whatever this little arc is to a conclusion. It’s just a different energy, like you were saying.
KS: Just a different quality.
CB: That ingress of Mars…
AC: Sorry, one thing I want to jump back to is in addition to our Aquarius stellium (assembly)—I really like assembly, Chris—being overwhelmingly fixed, our planet that is protesting (Mars) is also fixed, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: So it’s still fixed.
CB: In Taurus.
AC: We’re not getting away from the fixed.
CB: Yeah, it’s a huge amount of fixed energy. And also, I don’t know if we emphasized this enough, but we’re dealing with a Mercury retrograde all the month of February, and it doesn’t station direct until the 20th. So that’s complicating or adding a complication to the whole mixture.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
KS: Yes.
AC: And it’s all of that. How much needs to be rethought? It’s such an appropriate time and portion of the sky for Mercury to retrograde through. And I would also just add as a keyword for fixed—positive would be ‘enduring’, negative would be ‘stuck’, right? The negative side of being fixed is feeling stuck.
KS: Stagnant.
AC: And so, there will be that. Yeah, stagnant, stuck, “Uh, I don’t know what to do.”
CB: When we were looking at the elections, this came up: I like when Mercury stations direct at 11° of Aquarius around February 20 and starts moving forward again. It starts forming this conjunction with Saturn for several days between the 20th, and it doesn’t get going fast enough to complete it until around March 4.
So there’s just this very long, very slow-moving Mercury-Jupiter conjunction for a couple of weeks that will happen in the morning sky around that time. And by that point, Mars has moved into late Taurus, so it’s not squaring those early Aquarius planets as much; and then eventually, it even moves into Gemini by March 3 or March 4.
So I kind of like that Mercury-Jupiter conjunction. It’s something, to me, to be a little bit more optimistic about or pertaining to the rectification and affirmation of a situation. Which should be somewhat helpful, especially coming out of a Mercury retrograde.
AC: Yeah. Well, there’s a sense of two things. One, it’s Mercury spending a lot of time in the space between our two history planets—Jupiter and Saturn—as far as experienced in sequence as part of a story. Mercury spending all that time moving towards Jupiter is like, “Okay, I think the plan’s going to work.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: “I think I’ve got some answers for this.”
KS: Yeah, we’ve got agreement about how to move forward, or there is that sense of a coming together. I always think of a decent Mercury aspect like that as we’re on the same page. We can agree to similar things or we can move forward from here.
CB: Yeah. All right, so let’s move fully into March then. I think we basically have, but here’s the graphic for March. We see that Mars ingress right at the top into Gemini—which is a pretty big shift—on the 3rd. Lunations—New Moon in Pisces on the 13th, Full Moon in Libra on the 28th. What else is going on in March that’s really important and notable that hasn’t been mentioned already?
KS: The Sun-Venus conjunction, if you want to talk on that.
AC: Yeah, it’s conjoined in early…
CB: 26.
KS: Aries.
AC: …Aries.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I think it’s worth noting that before that, we have the Sun and Venus in Pisces together. And this is interesting because Pisces is Venus’ exaltation, right? It’s a place that Venus does very well in and can provide all of the seashell jewelry and extravagant dinners that Venus likes to provide.
But Venus is so close to the Sun that we don’t see Venus; Venus doesn’t have much brightness. And so, there’s still enjoyment, but it’s quiet. It’s private. It’s more muted. It’s literally hidden beneath the Sun’s rays.
KS: Yes. So people are thinking, “Oh, Venus is in Pisces. That’s fantastic.” Just do take into consideration that proximity to the Sun. It’s not quite as outward or expressive as Venus in Pisces can be when she’s a little further from the Sun.
CB: Sure. And then we get that conjunction on the 26th when Venus goes into the heart of the Sun and starts a new cycle because Venus is moving direct. So the conjunction has shifted to Aries at that point, as was said earlier, but that’s an important reset in terms of setting a new foundation for the relationship between the Sun and Venus that will then evolve over the course of the next several months. And then eventually we have another Venus retrograde coming up the tail-end of the year, right?
KS: Yeah, in December.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So this will be connected with that in terms of being the opening of the new cycle between the Sun and Venus. So that’s at 5° of Aries, that conjunction.
AC: Yeah, setting the stage for a new—I don’t know—10-month cycle of passion.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Of attraction and disgust, and enjoyment and revulsion, like these relating sort of passions.
CB: Yeah. Interestingly, it looks like Mercury completes its third square with Mars around that time, at 12° of Pisces, where Mercury’s at on March 24, and it squares Mars at 12° of Gemini. So it finally completes that set of three with Mars at that point.
KS: Yes.
AC: Yeah, I don’t love that.
CB: No. Speaking of revulsion.
KS: Speaking of tension.
AC: Yeah. And so, the same Mercury square Saturn—or excuse me, Mercury square Mars keywords that Kelly brought up earlier, it’s contentious speech and angry thinking. What is a little unlovely about that is that we have Mars right on the head of the dragon, right on the North Node; good old Rahu.
And so, especially in Vedic astrology, you see Rahu, the dragon’s head, being associated with confusion, right? It’s the power to eclipse, which means we can’t see clearly. And the combination of anger with Mars with confusion is a little bit of an infernal synergy, right? It’s one thing to be angry, it’s one thing to be confused. Angry and confused are unfortunately a potent cocktail.
KS: Yeah, rash choices is the combination I guess that comes to mind.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
KS: Ill-informed choices or something, yeah.
AC: With Mars speeding up the time frame with the shadowing power of the North Node, you can’t see what’s the right thing to do, but you have to make a decision in the next ten seconds, right?
KS: Yes. Yeah, feeling like there’s a pressure situation and you’ve kind of just got to fly by the seat of your pants.
CB: Yeah. So one of the big signatures of March is just that shift in mutable signs. And people should pay attention to in their birth charts the Pisces and Gemini square, not just in terms of the tension between those two signs, but also in terms of the shift of emphasis a little bit away from that fixed pileup of Aquarius that is much more pronounced in February.
AC: Yeah. And one thing that occurs to me as we’re looking at this—because we just came off the Mercury-Jupiter time at the beginning of the month—is when we’re talking about a shift into a mutable mode, we’re talking about adaptation.
And although, ideally, we pivot or change our strategy in order to improve it so that it’s more coherent with whatever the situation is, sometimes we can make a rash choice and disrupt or break an arc that was actually going in a good direction. And that Mercury-Mars square with Mars on Rahu seems like an opportunity to steer off a good path. It’s like a deer runs out in the road and instead of keeping on a given path, you end up somewhere else.
CB: Right. And it’s an interesting contrast that the month opens with a much more peaceful, let’s say, Mercury-Jupiter conjunction around March 4, but then by the time we get to the end of the month, we sort of end March with that Mercury-Mars square.
AC: Yeah, it’s like an opportunity to fuck up a good thing.
CB: Mm-hmm. That’s a good analogy.
AC: Negative adaptation.
CB: Right. And then by the very, very end of March, Mercury even conjoins Neptune at 21° of Pisces and pretty much ends the month with that.
AC: Yeah, it’s like, remember how you were thinking when Mercury was conjoined Jupiter and go back to that rather than trusting the intel that Mercury in Pisces square Mars and conjunct Neptune gives you.
CB: Yeah, the combativeness or strife of the Mercury-Mars square and then the lack of clarity and uncertainty and sort of nebulousness of Mercury conjunct Neptune.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, I think that’s the end of March. And we’re running a little over time, but I think we should take our first break.
[break]
CB: All right, so we’re back from our break. And I wanted to mention our sponsor today, which is the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, which we first started using last year and debuted I think on one of our later forecasts.
But they keep expanding and improving their product, where it’s basically a personalized almanac that’s keyed into your birth chart. And you actually enter in your birth data and then they create a whole personalized report that you can get either in print or digital form.
And Version 2.1 of their almanac is now available. Instead of just being like this publication that you buy and it applies to everybody and just tells you the astrology of the entire year in general, this actually tells you your personal astrological transits for the entire year, so it’s super useful. I’ve still got my printed, spiral-bound book form one, but I know a lot of people like that digital version.
And they also released a wall calendar version of the same personalized approach, but then integrated it into an actual wall calendar that you can put on your wall. And it lists the ephemeris, the transits, and it can also be used to do zodiacal releasing periods, planetary condition, annual profections, solar return charts, and other things using their Hellenistic plug-in.
So it’s based on the Swiss ephemeris, which uses data literally from NASA, and it’s pretty affordably priced, starting at $10 for the 6-month digital almanac, $25 for the 12-month printed wall calendar, and $35 for the 12-month printed almanac. So you can find out more information about them at Honeycomb.co. So thanks a lot to them for being our sponsor.
So that completes quarter one. We’re doing pretty good. Like usual, we’re being very verbose and we went over time, but we’re getting into some good stuff. Let’s dive right into quarter two and get into the astrology of April. Sounds good to you, guys?
KS: Perfect.
AC: Yeah, let’s do it.
CB: All right. Let me find and put up—for those watching the video version—the calendar for the month of April from our Planetary Alignments Calendar this year, which you can get a wall calendar poster version of.
Here are the alignments for the astrology of April: Mercury into Aries on the 3rd, New Moon in Aries on the 11th, Venus into Taurus on the 14th, Sun-Mercury conjunction on the 18th, Mercury and the Sun simultaneously into Taurus on the 19th, Mars into Cancer on the 23rd, Full Moon in Scorpio on the 26th, and Pluto stationing retrograde in Capricorn on the 27th, the one lone hold-off planet that is still all by its lonesome back in Capricorn.
So Pluto’s still doing things there. I was talking to Leisa last night, and she was reminding me of how Pluto is still all over some of the things in the United States birth chart, which is having its Pluto return during this time period and still very much active and relevant despite the rest of the planets having left that sign.
AC: Yep.
KS: Yeah, Pluto transits will continue even if they’re happening without any accompaniments.
CB: The Pluto transits will continue. Austin, I think you know that phrase. What’s the phrase? There’s a phrase like that.
AC: Oh, ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’.
CB: Yes, exactly. That’s what that reminds me of. The Pluto transits will continue until morale has improved.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Well, let’s move into April. What are the highlights? What are the main things we need to touch on in April?
AC: Well, I would say, first off, the beginning and end are very different. The first half-ish of April, Sun and Venus in Aries, Mercury gets into Aries by I think the 3rd. And so, we’ve got a little bit of that cardinal energy, a little bit of that ‘let’s begin again’ Sun in Aries energy, a little boost to the spirit.
Venus is not terribly happy being burnt by the Sun in a sign that’s not high on the list. So there’s some difficulty in knowing how to feel about things or not being able to harmonize with things on an emotional level, but it’s not really big stuff, it’s just planets in Aries.
And then starting in the middle in the month—but especially when we get to the 20th-21st—we start getting planets piling into Taurus (fixed sign again) where they will be conjoining Uranus and squaring Saturn and reactivating our not just yearly but next two years’ pattern—our Uranus-Saturn square—but this time from the Uranus side rather than the Saturn side.
KS: Yeah, that’s really my standout feature for April, just how we do get that shift later in the month. And we start to see more of that fixed focus, which is going to pop up periodically throughout the next couple of years, but that’s one of those times—late April and into May—where we do have, as you said, Austin, planets on the Uranus side rather than the Saturn side. But because they’re quicker-moving planets, they’re just feeding into the longer themes that are already being activated by Saturn and Uranus.
AC: Feeding is a really good way to put it.
CB: Yeah. So first-half, cardinal emphasis, but second-half of the month, definite shift towards fixed emphasis. And people can personalize that especially in their own charts by paying attention to where Taurus is in their birth chart, and you’ll get a little mini-stellium there in the second-half of April with the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Uranus all piling up in that sign.
KS: Yes.
AC: And so…
CB: So…
AC: Go ahead.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: Okay. So what does this Uranus-Saturn thing look like when we feed the Taurus side versus when we feed the Aquarius side, the Uranus versus the Saturn? So the Saturn side is security, order, planning, etc., etc., and then the Uranus side is the freedom, innovation, etc., right? It makes a lot of sense that this is going to be end of April, well into the Northern Hemisphere spring.
All of these planets piling into Taurus and then conjoining Uranus—that’s a lot of we’re going to go outside like we’ve never gone outside before, especially Venus, right? So it’s going out and doing the fun things, experiencing—it’s Taurus—the physical world. Enough digital pleasures already. Let me go literally smell the flowers.
CB: Right, the reimmersion in the material world.
AC: Nice.
KS: It’s very hands-on, like hands in the dirt in the garden.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: It’s interesting that Uranus, though; that there’s something revolutionary or innovative about that. The reimmersion in the material is something that’s innovative or rebellious.
AC: That’s a pretty revolutionary act, right? The funny thing that I said a couple of years ago…
KS: A couple of years ago.
AC: …when we were talking about Uranus in Taurus, I was like, “Oh, yes, in a digital age, meeting up in person is a revolutionary act,” which ended up being much more interesting a statement than I meant it to be; and so, I think we can carry that forward.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Going to the park, getting together with friends for, I don’t know, ice cream.
CB: Yeah, that ended up being much more prescient and I’m sure an ongoing concern, as we talked about in our pre-show chat. What does returning back to normal life look like, and what are the time frames on that?
And what are the different ebbs and flows in terms of the success or failure of that, as presumably the vaccines are rolled out worldwide and the threat of the pandemic starts to subside? What does the new ‘normal’ and the new return back to the physical world of physical interaction look like over the course of 2021?
AC: As our long cycles show us, whatever normal is doesn’t look like 2019.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Whatever the new normal is will have to reintegrate the physical world, but I think it’ll take us, I don’t know, all of Saturn and Aquarius to figure out what normal might be.
CB: But being reacquainted with it, there’s something new and interesting about it; even the analogy of those using a physical book versus a digital book or an e-book and that being something at some point where there’s a flip and that becomes unique in and of itself. Like preferring the physical over the digital as a sort of act of rebellion.
AC: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s not quite antiquarian, and it’s not quite Luddite necessarily. But yeah, there’s something about re-encountering an old form and realizing that an old form actually has the perfect answer for new problems, which I think is very Uranus in Taurus.
CB: Right.
AC: Like, “Oh, this printed book is an amazing data storage device; it doesn’t depend on a volatile internet connection; it’s so organized,” right?
KS: It’s reliable. It’s available all the time.
AC: It’s not giving me cancer by holding it right up to my face.
CB: Right.
AC: It can’t be hacked.
CB: You could theoretically even have a physical location that could have many of these physical books, which perhaps you could purchase or check out.
KS: Or just borrow.
CB: Or borrow, right.
KS: The piece that keeps coming up for me—as you guys are moving through this Taurus piece—is that there’s maybe a new or emerging respect for the nourishment that comes from that tangible, hands-on piece.
You can order food on the internet and have it show up the next day, but you could also put some tomatoes in a pot in a sunny room in your house or on a balcony if you happen to have one, and there might be something of value to that even though it’s not as fast perhaps.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, yeah. But just to go back, Chris, to what you were saying, ‘the reimmersion in the physical’, because we have Uranus, there’s like a shocking return to the concrete, where you’re surprised at how the book works.
And this is pinging the Uranus-Saturn, right? So there will be some disruption around this; there will probably be another serving of social unrest. I was going to say ‘revolting activity’. I don’t mean disgusting.
KS: Activity that is a revolt.
AC: Right, or a contestation.
KS: Yeah.
CB: It’s so funny you use that term because I was thinking about the original meaning of the term ‘revolution’, which we think of as an act of rebellion and breaking away. But revolution is also a cycle. It also means returning back to something and the starting of a cycle over again.
And so, in some of the Medieval translations on solar return charts, they’re sometimes translated as ‘solar revolutions’ because it’s the Sun coming back to where it started when you were born; and so, the notion of returning back to something that’s old and revisiting it again in a new way.
AC: Yeah, totally.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, worth noting that the Full Moon in Scorpio at the end of the month—is it the 26th?
KS: Yeah, that was one of our featured things for April that’s probably worth a mention.
CB: Before you move on from the Taurus theme, let me just drop one…
AC: I was going to say this emphasizes all the Taurus themes.
CB: Okay. Here, let me put that up then. So here’s the chart for the Full Moon at 7° of Scorpio on the 26th of April. And we see—for those listening to the audio version—the Moon at 7° of Scorpio, the Sun at 7° of Taurus. There’s still a stellium in Taurus, with Uranus at 10, Venus at 15, and Mercury at 16, so a pretty packed stellium. And all of them are squaring Saturn, which is down there at 12° of Aquarius.
So one of the things I was going to mention, we had talked in the future abstractly—back in May of 2018 and May of 2019, when Uranus first started dipping into Taurus—about wouldn’t that be funny if it was like very literal and it was something like new innovations in food technology or something like that or in meat. But I actually saw in The Guardian a news story about this recently where it said, “No-kill lab…
KS: In Singapore, yeah.
CB: Yeah, “No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time.” And the subtitle says, “Singapore’s approval of chicken cells grown in bioreactors is seen as a landmark moment across [the] industry.” So I thought that was really funny and something we’ll continue to see, obviously, as Uranus moves through Taurus for several years. But as we start to get some of these pileups in signs like Taurus here in April, it might be relevant in a more localized fashion in some ways as well.
AC: Yeah, definitely. I have to say if I had a no-kill chicken meat company, I do not think I would refer to the incubators as ‘bioreactors’.
CB: As bioreactors.
AC: That is extremely off-putting.
CB: You would come up with a better euphemism? What would be a better euphemism for ‘bioreactor’?
KS: I’m not sure.
AC: Their marketing department can email me and I’ll help them with it for a fee. The only time we use ‘reactor’ is generally around nuclear reactors.
CB: Okay.
AC: Makes me think of like ‘a meltdown in the bioreactor’ where it just starts producing glorious monstrosities.
CB: Becky in the chat says, “Chickenator.” I like that. That’s catchy.
AC: Yeah, it’s fun.
CB: Right. All right, so back to the astrology here. Full Moon in Scorpio, April 26, at the end of the month. Kind of a tense Full Moon, honestly, to me, due to the square with Saturn, and also, proximity with Uranus. So it’s almost highlighting that Saturn-Uranus square a little bit, even though they’ve moved apart and they’re 2° separate, but again, just emphasizing that fixed axis.
One of the things we’re going to start talking about even more as the year progresses is that it seems like the tension points this year are in the fixed signs more than anywhere compared to last year, where the real tension points were in the cardinal signs, and this Full Moon kind of highlights that again in a way.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yes.
AC: It moves the big story forward again.
KS: Yeah, it’s another one of the check-in points.
CB: Right.
AC: We’re feeding the bioreactor of Uranus.
CB: The Chickenator, yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, so I think that’s it. So Mars moves into Cancer also on the 23rd, and that’s an important shift of Mars out of Gemini and out of the mutable axis into the cardinal axis. Is there anything else you guys want to mention about that?
KS: I mean, the big news for me in this quarter is the stuff happening in May and June.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah. I will just add one note that will mean something that’s not clear to me right now. That Full Moon in Scorpio is in a mutual reception with Mars in Cancer.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And I don’t think we need to belabor that, but that’s interesting and it’s going to do something.
KS: Make a note.
CB: This is in my notes about Mars in Cancer that we discussed in our planning meeting. One of our famous phrases from last year was in March, we said something about ‘no hugs’, the ‘no hug’ aspect that was happening in March in our year ahead forecast. And then that of course famously became the lockdowns where everybody was separated and ‘no hugs’ took on a very literal manifestation. One of our keywords that we threw out—I think Austin threw out—or came out of that was ‘aggressive hugs’ with Mars in Cancer in this part of the year.
KS: Yes. Although it is tied to the Jupiter ingress a little bit, I think.
CB: Into Aquarius?
KS: No, the Jupiter into Pisces in May, just in terms of how that creates a different cycle setup, and then how the Mars in Cancer feeds into the touching that could be going on then with the wetness, the hugging.
AC: One thing we can say about the transition…
KS: This is a family show.
AC: …from Mars in Gemini to Mars in Cancer is Mars in Gemini is very frenetic and fast, fast, fast, whereas Mars in Cancer is much slower and more subtle. Some of the conflicts which emerge under Mars in Cancer are potentially very painful emotionally, but it’s not like a big, bright surface thing. It’s not all over the interwebs as Mars in Gemini will be. We’re going from Mars in a Mercury-ruled sign to Mars in a Moon-ruled sign. Much more intimate conflicts or irritations.
CB: Good points. So here is the calendar for May where we can see Mercury and Venus moving into Gemini, New Moon in Taurus on the 11th, a big move of Jupiter ingressing into Pisces on the 13th of May. So it really just zipped through Aquarius pretty quickly, but it will come back later in the year. And Saturn stationing retrograde in Aquarius, and then an eclipse—a lunar eclipse on the 26th of May in Sagittarius, and Mercury stationing retrograde on the 29th of May at the very end of the month.
KS: Yeah, I mean, the big news for me this month is the Jupiter into Pisces ingress. I’m totally biased.
CB: Why? The big news for the Pisces stellium is the Jupiter ingress into Pisces.
KS: Jupiter ingress.
CB: Yeah.
KS: I mean, personally, I’m biased, but I know that you will all share in the goodness and the slightly more hopeful qualities that Jupiter in Pisces will bring. This, to me, is definitely one of the bright spots of the year. We’ve got Jupiter in Pisces from mid-May to late July, I think.
AC: Yeah, it’s late July.
KS: Yeah. And it’s just a preview, but is a sense of we have a benefic in one of its home signs. There is this sort of taste of ‘cosmic goodness’ or that sort of soothing water for the soul or the emotion, and it just creates a little bit of a protection or possibly an uplift. But the reason I was talking about touching and hugging is Jupiter in Pisces is the opposite of Mars and Saturn in Aquarius, which was the ‘anti-hugging’ thing from 2020.
AC: Yeah.
KS: If you meet me in person, and you’re like a friend of mine, I’m so happy to see you, I’m going to give you this big hug because that’s how Pisces rolls. I don’t even have Jupiter in Pisces, but I know that there is that close connection quality, so we’re going to be looking for a lot more of that. And in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, we’ll have the seasons on our side in terms of health because it’ll be late spring and coming into summer.
CB: And remember the last time we had Jupiter in one of its domiciles—which feels so long ago now, a little bit over a year ago—that was like 2019, and basically, Jupiter was going through Sagittarius. And you guys came out here and we met up in person, but then that shift happened in December of 2019. Jupiter went into Capricorn and that is when the time of troubles began. Dark times.
KS: The time of troubles. Troubled times, yeah.
AC: So one thing I would add with Jupiter in Pisces, Jupiter in a sign that it rules, that it’s strong in, and of similar importance, Jupiter is no longer having to be flat mates with Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn have been roomies for a long time at this point. So every time Jupiter’s like, “Hey, what if we did this?” Saturn’s like, “Yeah, that’s not prudent.” Jupiter gets to move out, at least for a while, and have its own place.
So Jupiter operating on its own terms allows us to see what’s possible and see what possible goods there are without immediately thinking of the negative, which is what happens when Saturn’s right there, right? Saturn’s like, “Yeah, well, what about this?” And it’s like there can be a balance there sometimes, but sometimes it’s useful to not have the immediate Saturnian commentary.
So if we’re talking about on a collective and individual level, looking at workable solutions for the time of troubles, looking at solving personal or collective problems, and also, looking at how the landscape has changed and maybe seeing opportunity or something good, some benefit as a result of a changed landscape rather than just seeing what was washed away, right? Seeing like, well, maybe there was a flood and it washed this away, but now there’s a clearer path to ‘x’ or ‘y’ rather than just seeing what was lost.
CB: All right, so the summary of all of that I’m going to go with—for the keyword for this month—is ‘aggressive hugs’. Some of the other notes that we wrote down were things like return of travel and the question about whether this would be more of an explosion of travel with Jupiter returning back into its sign, bookending that period in late 2019, when Jupiter was in its sign, and then moved into the sign of its depression or its fall—opposite to its exaltation—in Capricorn.
I know, Kelly, that was something you were interested in and something you talked about a lot earlier this year with Jupiter being in the sign of its depression in 2020, just the massacre of the travel industry when Jupiter (the planet of travel or most associated with travel) was in the sign traditionally that was said to be for 2,000 years the one where it had the most problems, so that’s one thing.
KS: Yeah. And I think to bring in some of the points Austin was making, I defined Jupiter as having three strikes against it in 2020: it’s in fall or depression, it’s co-present with Saturn, and it’s in a sign ruled by Saturn. Because it can be co-present with Saturn without also being in a sign ruled by Saturn.
And so, there’s this real compounding factor in all of those things: co-present with Saturn, ruled by Saturn, and in depression. They’re all Saturn factors restricting, impeding, inhibiting, blocking Jupiter.
And so, in 2021, Jupiter in Aquarius is not in fall, but still ruled by Saturn and co-present. So there’s like two strikes and one tick. It’s an improvement, but still a level of caution. But then we come to this mid-year period which I’ve described elsewhere as like a bit of an oasis in the middle of the desert. There’s the wetness or the connection, whether it’s a feeling or a solution.
Jupiter is not in a sign ruled by Saturn. It’s gone from being depressed, in fall, to the power of rulership. And so, we really get this sense of something coming forward with a level of flow, maybe a mobility, but now we have the mutable kind of flexibility/adaptability with a purpose or with a way forward; it’s like this is the way through.
And I like what you were saying, Austin, about it hasn’t just been a flood, but something has been revealed. And it does take me back to the beach where sometimes after a big wave has come through or a high tide disperses, and you might see these beautiful shells, or now you can get out to this place that wasn’t accessible before. So there is this very changing dynamic, I guess, that has a quality that is perhaps positive or hopeful to look forward to.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: One of the things that makes me nervous, though, is that it’s only temporary, and it’s like a temporary taste of Jupiter; a temporary return to Jupiter being in good shape again and being free from Saturn. But Jupiter only stays in Pisces this year for like…
KS: For a month.
CB: …a couple of months and then it goes back into Aquarius where Saturn is not only, as you were saying, its roommate, but also, its landlord at the same time. So it’s like you’re rooming with your landlord and they’re kind of stern, and you’re not throwing any parties while you’re staying there.
KS: Yeah, so it is a short-term taste of something that will return for a longer or more enduring way in 2022.
CB: 2022.
KS: So when we talk about things like travel and things like that, I’m a little unsure as to how much we get open, or whether it’s like this is the plan for what will happen with travel returning, more with a view for that to come into 2022.
CB: Especially because the Mercury…
AC: I would say we need to remember that the whole world doesn’t do one policy. This will be the return of travel some places. There are probably other places that won’t do that or will have more restrictions, right? This is going to be considerably more open, not absolutely open, but they’re certainly going to be more open. And with travel, one of the things that we were talking about is the fact that Mercury is in Gemini during this period of time. And Mercury also likes to travel.
KS: Yes.
AC: Mercury loves to go here and there and bop around. And so, between those two, it does not look like people staying in their houses; it looks like people going everywhere. Someone in the comments said, “So it’s spring break.” I think that’s a great sort of concentration of a lot of this stuff. Second-half of May, absolutely, the planets look like spring break.
CB: One of the things that makes me nervous, though—I definitely agree with all of that, with Jupiter being in Pisces and then Mercury in Gemini also liking to travel and emphasizing those themes in May, but then Mercury stations retrograde. It stations at 24 Gemini around May 29-May 30. And that degree range of Gemini is really close to and similar to where Venus stationed retrograde in 2020, in the late spring or early summer and it was squaring Neptune. Similarly, Mercury stations at 24 Gemini and it’s square Neptune at 23 Pisces.
And it just makes me think of there being something illusory about that, and then Mercury having to station and then turn around and move backwards. And similarly, Jupiter eventually stationing retrograde and moving backwards makes me wonder if it’s a mistake thinking that everything just goes back to normal and everything’s great, and then there’s some sort of U-turn that has to take place or a revision of that in some way.
So Mercury then retreads its steps in Gemini and Jupiter retrogrades back into Aquarius. And there’s this revisiting and retooling and replanning effort until Jupiter fully emerges back into Pisces late in the year, and Mercury eventually stations direct in Gemini three weeks later at some point in June.
Those are some of the things I was thinking about—that station around that time and balancing both the optimism of those placements, as well as this sort of retooling or retrograde phase that also happens at the same time.
AC: One thing I would add with the Mercury retrograde, because we have Mercury retrogrades in air signs this year, it means whenever Mercury enters an air sign, it’s going to be there forever, like almost two months.
And so, I think one scenario where the Mercury retrograde makes a lot of sense—it’s Mercury retrograde in a sign where it’s really strong—is that there’s going to be an overwhelm on travel stuff because everything’s been shut down or toned down. And so, what happens when there’s a crazy spring break surge through all of the transportation systems?
Which reminds me, there was something about a transportation strike that I saw on the news the other day—but this is six months from now, or five months from now. But that’s another thing, right? When you go from zero to sixty, you’re likely to get some snafus and I think that might be part of it. Because it’s not only retrograde, it’s strong.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right. And that was part of what we saw in the retrograde, at least in the US. The Venus retrograde in May and June was the attempt to return back to normal and the lessening of the restrictions. But then the second wave happened and some of the restrictions ended up having to come back or be reimposed as a result of that.
So we should mention the lunar eclipse, since we’re moving back into eclipse season once we get to this part of the year, which takes place on the 26th of the month in Sagittarius. Especially since a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius, again, probably emphasizes potentially some of these themes of travel, whether literally or metaphorically.
KS: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And Austin, when you were talking about—well, both of you—about the potential messiness with Mercury and the movement and going from zero to a hundred. It also makes me think about staffing.
A lot of airlines—and even transport and logistics companies—they’ve laid off staff. Airline companies have laid off a lot of staff, whereas transport and logistics companies might have hired staff because more stuff is being shipped rather than people going to stores.
So I just wonder about staffing for things like that. If you lay off all your staff and then you have to pull them back quickly, is there a rustiness? Or do you have to hire people that haven’t worked in the industry? So I do think there’s a lot of messiness and that lunar eclipse…
AC: That’s an awesome point.
KS: Thank you. Yeah, and the lunar eclipse in Sag, I think that’s important to mention. It’s going to be—is it a total lunar eclipse? It’s close-ish to the nodes, I’m not sure.
CB: Pretty close.
KS: It’s just it’s going to pick up some of the themes of the solar eclipse from December 2020, just that we’re now back into Sag for an eclipse.
CB: Yeah, I think it is total. I have it listed on mine as a total lunar eclipse.
AC: That makes sense.
CB: So that’s a pretty heavy eclipse.
AC: So one interesting thing to note is that’s a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius, which is ruled by Jupiter. And so, the ruler of the sign that the Moon is eclipsed in is that super-strong Jupiter in Pisces.
KS: Mm, good point.
AC: And what’s interesting is the Sun also has its ruler in domicile, right? The Sun’s in Gemini and Mercury’s in Gemini. I’m not sure how to parse that at this moment, but that seems significant.
CB: Yeah. So it’s this huge emphasis on mutable things at the very end of May going into early June. So let’s talk through some significations of that really quickly. Gemini is communicative, talkative. There’s a lightness to it and a socialness to it. There’s a lunar eclipse—which is like a sort of culmination—and the Moon is at peak brightness at that point.
So it’s really shining a light in Sagittarian-type themes, and as you were saying, Jupiter-type themes especially, while Jupiter itself has emerged out from its long, arduous journey through the two Saturn-ruled signs, and just barely started to emerge back into its own domicile, or back into its own throne in Pisces.
So it’s like a reassertion of the Jupiterian themes, perhaps, of things like optimism, of travel, of growth, expansion. What are some other Jupiter themes that become prominent in a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius, with Jupiter having returned back to its own sign?
AC: That’s a good list of themes. And so, like you said, it’s the Moon as bright as possible in this Jupiter place, but then it’s entire face is shadowed, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: It speaks to something obscuring what would normally be a point of brightness.
CB: Right. Maybe that’s also reiterating at the same time or along parallel lines the thing that happens immediately after this, which is Mercury stationing retrograde square Neptune. Maybe there’s something that’s not clear that sort of throws a wrench in things shortly after this point.
AC: Yeah.
CB: That’s what takes us into June.
AC: Yeah, there’s something there. There’s something not just fully, happy Jupiterian, right? A piece of that is stained, as the Moon’s face is stained.
CB: Yeah. I mean, because Mercury square Neptune is sometimes like dishonesty or lies or misinformation or misunderstandings or miscommunications.
KS: And overwhelm—like not being able to juggle details for a variety of reasons. But I think that ties into the idea that it’s not just a regular Full Moon in Sag. It is an eclipse where there is that sense of ‘what are we not seeing’ or ‘what did we miss’.
And I can’t help but keep thinking about airlines and travel industry, rushing to ramp up again, and a few things getting missed along the way.
CB: You know what I just realized? This is a Sag eclipse, so this is the follow-up to what started or what happened at the previous Sag eclipse in December.
KS: Yes.
CB: And there’s two things that happened that were major things in the news that day: one of them of course was the Electoral College. And the US voted, and Biden was awarded the electoral votes, and therefore, officially won the presidency; and that Sagittarius eclipse was in his rising sign. The other major thing that happened of course—literally the same day, I have a screenshot I wanted to share—was the first patient was given the vaccine supposedly in the United States on the same day, in Sagittarius.
So those are just two news stories of two major events that happened on the Sagittarius solar eclipse on December 14 of 2020. But we should mention that there were probably other things that happened that the solar eclipse series started that will come to culmination or completion or be connected to the other end of this lunar eclipse here at the end of May.
AC: I would see this as the next installment in the series, which is going to have some thematic continuity, but I don’t see it as the solar handing over to the lunar, where it’s the same stuff. There’s going to be some overlap, but I think this eclipse gets to do its own thing as well.
I really get the sense that there’s something here—that in addition to continuing some of the timelines from the present—there’s also something that happens that I think we can’t see very clearly from here.
CB: Sure.
AC: I don’t think it’s just a repetition of what we saw at the end of 2020.
CB: But there’s at least some sort of connection possibly between, let’s say, something that happened in December and then something that will happen in May.
AC: Yeah. 2020, we had one of those borderline kind of eclipses…
CB: In June.
AC: …that was lunar and in Sagittarius last June if somebody wants to sit down and think about connecting all of those dots.
CB: I mean, that was in the middle of the protests that were happening at the time. And I always associate that eclipse in retrospect with the protests because that eclipse fell on Breonna Taylor’s birthday, and that was a really striking…
AC: Oh, right.
CB: …moving part of that exact one. Here’s the screenshot that I took of The Washington Post on the morning of December 14. We knew the eclipse was coming up, we had been talking about it forever. Even in our pre-election one, we were talking about this being the final point where the election is sort of settled.
And there was just this one story of “Electoral College Convenes to Cast Ballots for Biden as President,” and then on the other side, it said, “First Vaccine Given in [the] U.S.” And I just thought that was such a striking couple of news stories to happen on the day of that major solar eclipse in Sagittarius, falling in the Sibley chart—one of the proposed charts for the United States—in the rising sign potentially of the United States, if the Sibley chart is correct. 2020 has really brought me around. I think I’ve said before on the forecast the past few months, you’ve talked me around on that. And I know, Austin, you’re a pretty big proponent of the US Sibley chart.
AC: I think it’s really useful. So you’re a ‘Sibley truther’ now?
CB: I’m becoming a ‘Sibley truther’. I feel like a ‘9/11 truther’ for the Sibley chart, and I’ve never been a diehard, any US chart. If you listen to that episode that Nina and I did, we were very skeptical about it. But after I thought about it more after that episode, it kind of falls in the range of it happened that afternoon, towards the end of the day, when the Declaration of Independence was sort of put together and signed.
So it kind of makes sense practically, and I just keep coming back to it this year. The fact that we just elected a President who also has Sagittarius rising and Jupiter in Cancer—just like the US Sibley chart does—is a little compelling at the same time.
AC: Yeah. We should probably move on, but I will just say a nation is not the same thing as an individual. An individual has one clear moment of emerging into the world. I think it’s entirely feasible that there are other charts that work for the United States, but the Sibley is one chart that works very well. Not actually a truther, it’s quite useful. It doesn’t mean other things aren’t.
CB: Right. I don’t know what the ‘fire can’t melt steel beams’ of the Sibley chart truther version is, but let me know if anybody thinks of that. So shall we move into June?
AC: We should.
KS: Yes.
CB: All right, here are the planetary alignments for June. The major things: we can see that Gemini solar eclipse on the 10th of June, Mars going into Leo on the 11th, the second of three Saturn-Uranus squares going exact on the 14th of June, Jupiter stationing retrograde in Pisces on the 20th, on the summer solstice, when the Sun moves into Cancer, Mercury stationing direct in Gemini on the 22nd, a Full Moon in Capricorn on the 24th, Neptune stationing retrograde in Pisces on the 25th, and Venus going into Leo on the 26th.
AC: Yeah.
CB: I like doing that because it makes me feel like a weatherman, which was an aspiration at one point. This is like the astrological version of being a weatherman.
KS: The ‘astro’ equivalent.
CB: Yeah. All right, what are you guys feeling? I guess we’re still in the midst of eclipse season. Is that Gemini solar eclipse on the 10th really the first thing and one of the main things we need to talk about?
KS: There’s that, and then there’s Mars back into a fixed sign, and Saturn square Uranus.
CB: Yes.
AC: So one note before we get to those, just before Mars moves into Leo—back into a fixed sign—we have a Mars-Pluto opposition. Mars-Pluto gives shady power dynamics, contention, anger, etc., etc.
I don’t want to make this too much about the US, but that late Cancer is where the United States—in the Sibley chart—has its natal Mercury, which is opposed to Pluto natally; so that hits that point in the US chart. And if it hits your chart closely, that might be an unpleasant couple of days, but it’s not something that we need to dwell on, because there’s more important stuff.
CB: Yeah, 26 Capricorn and 26 Cancer. 26 in the cardinal signs is a sensitive point. And that’s relevant because that aspect has been building since that lunar eclipse that we just spent a bunch of time talking about. And the Mercury stationing retrograde, it builds up and builds up and then goes exact here—it looks like June 5-June 6.
AC: Yeah. And then we have the solar eclipse just a few days later.
CB: Yeah, there it is. It looks like a 19 Gemini solar eclipse. Mercury is retrograde at 20°, so there’s a close triple conjunction of the Sun, Moon, and Mercury, between 19° and 20° of Gemini. They are squaring Neptune at 23 Pisces, which gives a sort of otherworldly, illusory-type feel to that eclipse.
Which is kind of an interesting signature to put together with it because Mercury in Gemini—and Gemini in general—is usually about facts and communication and exchange. Having Neptune squaring that at the same time is a contradictory sort of dynamic in some ways.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yes.
AC: I would say as far as Mercury is concerned, Neptune is a malefic.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah, they do represent opposing principles or functions. So Mercury is never as clear or as specific or as organized when Neptune’s about.
CB: I mean, on the other hand, to give it a somewhat positive spin, Mercury-Neptune is great at building worlds and fantasies and creating very vivid, alternative realities or alternative facts in some way.
KS: Yes, fantasy land.
AC: Yeah, it’s good for writing poetry, it’s not good for doing your taxes.
CB: Yeah, good point. Or if you’re like George RR Martin or something like that, and you want to create a whole Game of Thrones fantasy world or something like that, but not as good if you’re trying to count coins, count numbers, like you were saying, Austin.
AC: Right, right. And so, this eclipse kicks off things getting cooking again. We’ve got some nice things with this Jupiter in Pisces, but things start to get complicated again, right? We have a solar eclipse on Rahu. It’s within a degree-and-a-half of Mars in the Sibley chart—I’ll say nothing more than that.
But then Mars just—was it the day afterwards—moves into Leo, and that puts Mars on another reactivation crash course with the Saturn-Uranus square, which is also tightening again too. I believe that Saturn-Uranus make another perfect square in June, just as Mars comes in to contest with both of them, and feed that already somewhat volatile configuration, some gasoline.
KS: Yeah, that’s something that I definitely have my eye on. And what’s interesting to note is that once Mars comes into Leo, it is setting up a pattern that runs through the middle of the year. So even though we’ll look at second quarter/third quarter, Mars in Leo is really like a June-July kind of vibe. And in very early July, Mars, Saturn, and Uranus will form the tightest by degree conjunction, so that’s starting to build.
As we’ve said, it’s an ongoing pattern throughout the year. It’s not going to be new, but we’re just getting some heat that we haven’t seen quite with those three so close together. Oh, and there’s a nice diagram to show this.
CB: A lovely diagram from Archetypal Explorer showing the second Saturn-Uranus square peaking in mid-June—early-to-mid-June—and then those exact aspects that you’re both talking about, the exact Mars-Saturn opposition on July 1 and the exact Mars-Uranus square on July 3. So as soon as Mars moves into Leo here in June, those aspects really start building up and start to percolate.
AC: Yeah, I think as far as Uranus-Saturn as a ‘civil unrest’ signature, Mars in Leo isn’t shy. Mars isn’t shy, period.
KS: No.
AC: Mars in Leo is loud and proud.
KS: Bold, brash.
AC: Yeah, there will be some action, especially towards the end of June, early July.
CB: Yeah. Okay, Mars ingress is one of the things that happens. And that doesn’t peak, but the tension starts building up and building up between then and July—pretty much the rest of June—once Mars goes into Leo.
We do get Jupiter stationing retrograde and changing course around June 21, which is notable and important, because the preview phase of Pisces starts to be over and it starts to change course and head back because it has unfinished business to complete with Saturn in Aquarius. And this becomes the turning point where it’s not gone and done with Pisces yet, but it starts heading in that direction, remembering that it forgot something with its old roommate and landlord back in Aquarius.
AC: Yeah. And you can see—as testified to by other planets—you can see some of that expansive, hopeful, “Oh, maybe this can go in a good direction,” or “Maybe this is workable.” You can see some of that optimism disagreed with by Mars-Saturn-Uranus. And so, it’s entirely fitting that Jupiter is like, “Eh, all right, I’m going to head on home. It’s not quite time for this.” There’s more of that to do.
CB: There’s more work to be done in Aquarius.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, so that’s bringing us, I believe, into July.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so…
KS: Third quarter.
CB: …here’s the calendar for July. Good point. We’re beginning the third quarter at this point. So we’ve got lunation, New Moon on the 9th of July in Cancer, Mercury goes into Cancer on the 11th, a bunch of other ingresses. Full Moon in Aquarius on the 23rd. A major one is Jupiter returning back to—making a retrograde ingress back into Aquarius on the 28th, and then Mars almost simultaneously shifting and moving out of Leo and into Virgo on the 29th.
Other major things about July, or other major points we meant to mention, aside from how tense it looks very early in the month with those Mars aspects going exact, with Mars squaring Uranus and opposing Saturn in early July?
KS: Yeah, I think we’ve covered that. And then it’s a month that a really different vibe at the start and the end, because at the start, Mars is with Saturn and Uranus—just pouring gasoline on a fire essentially—but at the every end of the month, Mars and Jupiter will oppose each other just as they’re both about to change signs.
CB: Yeah, so super tense at the beginning of the month. And then as you pointed out, Mars and Jupiter oppose right as they’re changing signs. I remember when we were preparing for this, that was such a notable shift because we see Mars headed out of Leo and into Virgo, and we see Jupiter walking backwards from Pisces into Aquarius.
And both pretty much simultaneously change signs at the same time and oppose each other as they’re going in opposite directions into those different signs. So here is Mars completing the opposition with Jupiter from 29° of Leo to 29° of Aquarius. It looks like they complete that on the 29th of July.
KS: Yes, right at the tail-end of the month. Whether that’s enough to create a little bit of positive lift or whether that’s just more of the fire and the fight and the passion, I’m not sure.
CB: Like a parting shot of Mars out of the fixed signs.
AC: I think it’s less contentious than, let’s say, the first third of the month. I don’t necessarily think it will be creating great peace on Earth, but Mars-Jupiter is less contentious than Mars-Saturn-Uranus.
KS: Yes.
CB: That’s a good point. And then, also, with Jupiter regressing back into Aquarius, it’s like it’s coming back to bring the peace into the fixed signs where there’s been the most tension, especially in early July and late June, with Mars moving through Leo and Saturn and Uranus squaring each other again for a second time.
But then it’s like, buddy Jupiter returns back to Aquarius and sort of tells everybody to start settling down, and simultaneously, Mars moves on and removes some of the antagonism that it was bringing to the table as it was moving through Leo. So Mars starts moving through Virgo by late July, early August.
AC: Mm-hmm. And Venus has preceded Mars into Virgo, by what, about ten days?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Or a week? And so, yeah, we have this shifting out of fixed signs and into that more mutable, calculating, analytical Virgo, for both Venus, and then a week later, Mars.
CB: Yeah. And of course since it’s July, we get the Sun moving into Leo, July 21-22, and Mercury moves into Leo by the 27th-28th. I don’t know, it feels a little bit like a cleaning up of some of the tensions and the conflict and things that were happening in the fixed signs up to this point.
So once Mars gets out of Leo, we’ve made it through one of the tenser parts of the year. Which I think we had identified Mars going through the three fixed signs this year being some of the more tense parts of the year, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
KS: And there’s still one more to come.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: The best is saved for last.
KS: Yes. And the Sun in Leo—I think this is setting up a pattern that we’re now going to deal for a couple of years, which is planets in Leo opposing Saturn. We’ve already had planets in Leo squaring Uranus.
So the Sun in Leo can definitely work to try and stabilize things. Part of the nature of the Sun is this steady, constant light relative to the other planets. And it’s the Sun in a fixed sign. So it is that sense of how we can maybe solidify our ground here, but the Sun will have to negotiate with Saturn.
And that’s an interesting opposition because we have both planets in domicile or in one of their home signs while they’re standing on opposing sides of a topic. I think that aspect is technically into early August.
CB: Yeah, it looks like August 1, the Sun conjoins Mercury at 9° of Leo and opposes Saturn at 10° of Aquarius.
AC: So it is a repetition of what we saw with Mars in early July, but with the Sun and Mercury in early August. And even though it is activating Saturn-Uranus again, the Sun’s fire is less extreme than Mars. So this is probably going to be revisiting whatever the issues were but from a somewhat more moderate angle. I don’t necessarily know that it’ll be pleasant, but it will be less intense and the passions will be less violent than when Mars was activating all that.
KS: Yeah, it strikes me—thinking about some of the concepts of like a planet in its home sign—and even just the idea of the Sun having a potentially steadying influence and Saturn being more thoughtful and long-term focused. It seems like there is still tension there. It’s not that heat of a fight or a revolt. We disagree, but we have to work through this disagreement in more of a measured or perhaps mature way.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I see it in Game of Thrones terms, right? We have the monarch or the king or queen as the Sun negotiating with the leader of the rebellion, with Saturn in Aquarius, the outsiders, versus the Sun at the center. But there’s a more negotiating quality there rather than blatant contention, like we get with Mars.
KS: With Mars. Yeah, absolutely. And what else do you want to say about August, Austin? What are your highlights for that month?
AC: I would say that once we get past that Sun’s opposition to Saturn and then the Sun square with Uranus—which happens really early in the month—the Sun is done with that, done with exact aspects.
KS: At the start of the month, for sure.
AC: Yeah, by the end of the first full week—the end of the first seven days—that one’s in the books, and I think that, one, we’ll get more generally positive solar stuff. One nice thing about Jupiter back in Aquarius is as Mercury and the Sun head towards the end of Leo, they both get to make an aspect to Jupiter. And it’s not Jupiter in Pisces, but it’s still a constructive, “Okay, what could be done to improve things?”
And then we have that Mars and Venus in Virgo for a while, which is much more analytical, right? It’s much more like, “Well, let’s think about this.” And then once we get to the middle of the month, we get, I think, one of your favorite things and one of my favorite things.
KS: Yeah, it’s like the second really juicy thing from a benefic perspective, which is Venus coming into Libra. And this is the first time in three years where Venus can enjoy being in Libra without a square from Capricorn.
So we’re going to see a period, if you like, of perhaps an attempt to create connection or find common ground. It might allow for more constructive planning or connections within our personal dynamics, and we might see that play out collectively as well, but we have a benefic coming into another one of its home signs.
This is another one of those ‘here’s what’s a little bit better about 2021 than what we had in 2020’—we can actually get Venus in Libra and get some of the potential goodness coming through from that.
CB: I like that. So one of our themes this year in 2021 is the benefics suddenly, in certain spots—it’s not the entire year—but in some spots of the year, the benefics are less encumbered or more unencumbered than they were in 2020, where even in the bright spots of 2020 there was always something sort of overshadowing it as an overarching theme.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that in so far as dispute and contention is going to be a big theme, spots of big dispute and contention will be a continuing theme throughout 2021. An unencumbered Venus in Libra allows for some negotiations, some truces, some agreements to be arrived at, right?
Venus in Libra is very much a peacemaker. With the symbol of Libra being the scales in both commerce and in society, the ideal solution is what is fair, right? And Venus in Libra does a nice job of trying to negotiate things that are fair.
CB: One of the side effects of that is that it starts forming trines—these very nice superior, overcoming trines—when it gets to 8° of Libra on August 22, it trines Saturn at 8° of Aquarius. And then eventually, later, once it gets to about 24° or 25° of Libra in early September, it forms a trine with Jupiter.
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Both of those are quite nice aspects. And I particularly like the Venus-Saturn one because there’s a lot of positive, I don’t know, connection there. I mean, I think about Venus being in the sign of Saturn’s exaltation: Saturn being dignified, Venus being dignified.
There’s a real sense of two people that have negotiating power or have the ability to create deals. There’s that sense of let’s come together and we can make something happen because we have the tools we need at the right time to put something together.
CB: Yeah, especially intellectually.
AC: Yeah, Venus in Libra is ready to make deals.
KS: Yeah, so there’s a couple of nice things.
AC: It’s a nice counterpoint to the rather ferociously analytical Mercury-Mars conjunction that we have in Virgo during the second-half of the month. Mercury is going to dominate there, so it’s going to be more rational than furious, right? If Mars got to lead, then it would be more aggressive than analytic. It’s Mercury’s domain, but it’s still like ferocious analysis. And so, Venus being in Libra is a nice counterpoint to that.
KS: To that. Yeah, that’s—sorry, Chris.
CB: Is Mercury moving fast? Yeah, Mercury’s moving fast during this period in mid-August when it conjoins Mars. So you could say—using your keyword, Austin—‘furious’ for Mars. Could we say it’s the ‘fast and the furious’, mid-August?
AC: Ooh.
CB: Thank you.
KS: Nicely done, Chris.
CB: Thank you. So that conjunction’s on the 18th of August at 12° of Virgo, Mercury and Mars.
KS: Yeah, and I also think about that as being something technical or mechanical or something with a scientific component; diagnostic or a system. Virgo is the master analyst, but Virgo loves to solve problems. And putting those two planets together, there’s definitely a lot of overthinking. But knowing that Mercury has just got the upper hand here, can we get some sort of tangible solution or decision or outcome from this?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I regard Mercury-Mars as an engineering combination.
KS: That’s the word, yes.
CB: And this is a very positive interpretation here of Mercury and Mars partially because it’s mitigated, since there’s some reception between Mercury and Mars, with Mars being in Mercury’s domicile, as well as some innovation actually. Because if you look, they’re both trining Uranus at the same time at 14° of Taurus, so like mechanical innovation or technological innovation or something like that.
A Mercury-Mars conjunction can still be a little bit divisive of an aspect in terms of mentioning that in mid-August, although it’s not as bad as the three Mercury retrograde squares that we had earlier in the year.
KS: Or the Mercury and Mars aspects that will come up later in the year.
CB: Right.
KS: This is probably one of the most productive Mercury-Mars aspects for the year, I think.
CB: Nice. That’s a good point.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s right. And then by the end of the month, Mercury has ingressed into Libra. And so, we have a short period where we have both Mercury and Venus in Libra.
CB: Nice. I like that.
KS: Which is kind of nice. We’ll enjoy that for the few days that we have it.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really nice pocket. I think that was the word I was searching for earlier. There’s just some nice benefic ‘pockets’ in different parts of this year.
KS: Yeah. And we get the Mercury-Saturn aspect before Mars comes in too, which is nice.
CB: Yeah, the trine from 7° of Libra to 7° of Aquarius on September 4, it looks like.
KS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Mercury trine Saturn. And that’s simultaneous almost with Venus trining Jupiter a couple of days later. So that’s all very nice, very positive social movement, positive social exchanges and things like that—interactions. I can see Mars wanting to crash the party, though, as it’s inching closer and closer to the end of Virgo and the beginning of Libra.
KS: Mm-hmm. And that is the next big story.
AC: Yeah, that’s really the shift, right? We go from Venus unencumbered in Libra—with a little help from a little conversation with Mercury—to our next phase, which is going to begin in the middle of the month where Venus moves into Scorpio, which is a fixed sign. So it will activate Saturn-Uranus again, and Mars moves into Libra. And so, we go from Venus-Mercury in Libra to Mercury-Mars. And because all of our Mercury retrogrades this year are in air signs, we’re going to have a lot of Mercury-Mars in Libra.
And so, one of the things that I was thinking about is that we have all these nice things happen in Libra, and then we have a lot of contentious stuff happen in Libra. And so, some of those agreements, some of those deals, some of those peace accords and truces are going to get torn up. Some of them will make it through, but a lot of those accords will not last into the fall, or very far into the fall.
CB: So we are in September at this point. Here is the artwork—for those watching the video version—for September. New Moon in Virgo on the 6th. Venus ingresses into Scorpio on the 10th. Mars goes into Libra, completing that shift that Austin was just talking about on the 14th. Full Moon in Pisces on the 20th. And then the other notable thing is Mercury stationing retrograde on the 27th of September.
KS: Yes. And so, there we’re doing Mercury and Mars in Libra, which is, as you said Austin, a sort of pulling apart of what was done earlier, and it’s bringing back that contentious disagreement/dispute quality of Mercury and Mars. Which until we kind of sat down and went through it, I hadn’t quite really got my head around how often we’re going to see that next year.
AC: Yeah, it’s certainly one of the features.
KS: Yeah.
AC: One way to say it with the lovely Venus in Libra shifting into the extended Mercury-Mars co-presence in Libra is a lot of the accords, deals, points of balance that Venus creates or facilitates get challenged significantly in the following period. And some of them will come through just fine, but some of them won’t.
CB: So some deals are off that we thought were made earlier with Venus in Libra.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And it was funny because I’m looking at the course of that retrograde of Mercury, and it looks like the focal point is around that New Moon and just after it that happens in Libra in early October. I don’t know if that’s getting ahead or if it’s okay to look at it as a continuous story.
AC: Well, we have a break before we talk about October.
CB: Okay, right.
KS: Yes.
CB: Stay away from October.
KS: Yeah, the Mercury-Mars and then the Sun—the thing that I had was this constant debating, this back-and-forward; the negotiating, the renegotiating, just really struggling to find agreement. So separate to how things may come undone from earlier or what have you, some things will hold. But there’s also this sense of what’s coming forward as a new development. Perhaps this latter part of September has got more disagreement around it.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And it has to do with revisiting something, since Mercury stays in that sign and it starts retreading those steps. And then it hits Mars by the end of September. There’s just something that people or some people have to return back to and revisit and revise that’s contentious, that you thought was finished and you were going to move on from, but you end up having to come back to it.
AC: Yeah. Well, you’ll notice that Mercury stations retrograde just after a trine to Jupiter.
KS: Yeah.
AC: So we’re going to be rethinking what seems like, “Oh, this is great.” And as September ends, we’re really just beginning this Mercury-Mars co-presence, which is going to take us through a lot of October. It’s going to take at least another three weeks for that to play out. And so, as the equinox comes—or comes and then passes—we’re just starting to be like, “Well, maybe this isn’t going to work.”
CB: Yeah, that’s so funny because it’s like Mercury is direct. September 18 it trines Jupiter, and you’re like, “This is great, let’s move on,” and Mercury keeps moving forward. But then all of sudden, it does a U-turn, stations retrograde at 25 Libra, and starts moving backwards, and then it hits a Jupiter trine second time.
So it’s like, “This is still great,” even though we’re going back and revising things, but then there’s something looming ahead in the future in Mars that comes towards the later part or the mid-part of the retrograde cycle.
AC: Yeah, there’s a point of contention that needs to be taken into consideration before a clearer movement forward can take place—or a lasting movement forward.
CB: Yeah. Are there any other things we need to mention—I know Venus opposes Uranus a few days later, Mercury also squares Pluto—before we wrap up September and go into the second break and final quarter?
KS: I think the big stuff is into October at this point. And the last quarter is interesting.
CB: Okay. Let me do our spot then before we take our break. Or maybe I’ll do it once we get back. Let’s do it once we get back.
KS: Okay.
CB: Let’s take a break because I know it’s been a while.
AC: Okay, great. Yeah, I’m starting to trance out.
CB: Yeah, yeah. So a five-minute break everybody. Get refueled and take a little walk or something like that, and then we’ll be back in like five minutes.
KS: Perfect.
AC: Do some jumping jacks.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Throw some punches in the air.
[break]
CB: All right, so we’re back and we’re getting ready to go into the final quarter of the year. I wanted to mention really quickly our second sponsor for this episode—our second-and-last sponsor—which is The Mountain Astrologer Magazine.
So The Mountain Astrologer is one of the world’s most respected and widely-circulated astrological magazines. It’s been in business for over 30 years, and it’s been a staple of the community for quite a while. They have both a print magazine that’s in major bookstores like Barnes and Noble and sometimes in Whole Foods and stuff like that. They also have an online version or a digital version you can read online as a PDF.
It’s a really great magazine especially for beginner and intermediate students, and I always recommend it to people just because it can give you sort of a broad overview of a number of different astrological traditions.
TMA is kind of like The Astrology Podcast in that it’s very inclusive, and they try to bring in a bunch of different astrologers under one roof in their magazine pretty regularly. I think all of us have written articles for TMA at one point or another, right?
KS: Yes, I have.
AC: Yeah, I believe so.
CB: Yeah. So anyways, I interviewed Tem Tarriktar, the founder, in 2018, in Episode 149, before he passed away last year. TMA has since been taken over by a new team, with some people that were on previously and some new people. And I’m excited about some of the directions that they’re taking the magazine.
So not only do I think it’s a really great product for astrologers, but it’s something good to support in the community—to have both digital and print publications that talk about current events in the same way that The Astrology Podcast does. So you can subscribe to it either in the print version or digitally at MountainAstrologer.com.
All right, why don’t we jump into the final quarter of the year and get right into October. So let me put up the calendar for October. And we’re pretty much talking about the continuation and the next phase of the Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars at this point, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: Yeah, there’s still a lot of distance between them, but that’s what’s begun, right? Mercury is turned around, it starts heading back towards Mars, Mars is heading forward. There’s some unease where there was grace and harmony only weeks before.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yes, definitely. So in terms of the main things this month, Mercury retrograde, the halfway point through that cycle is on the 9th. Saturn stations direct on the 10th. Jupiter and Mercury station direct simultaneously on the 18th. And Mars goes into Scorpio on the 30th.
So what other things do we need to touch on? We have the continuation of that cycle and the culmination of it in terms of Mercury stationing and Mercury conjoining Mars and the contentiousness of that. I guess that’s one of the major signatures of the first part of October.
AC: Yeah, and that actually takes a little while to play out. They’re moving closer and closer together on our New Moon on the 6th. We have Sun-Moon-Mars-Mercury altogether, right? So whatever that challenge to accord and equilibrium is will be very clear at that point. And that New Moon tells us that’s going to be a big theme, right?
And what’s interesting is all these planets in Libra are making that same pair of trines to Saturn and Jupiter, so all this action. Just like Venus in Libra—it’s all sort of informed by and informing the larger shape of things, which Jupiter and Saturn are responsible for.
CB: That makes sense. So I see that New Moon at 13° of Libra exactly conjunct Mars on the 6th. And then not very long after that we get Mercury retrograde conjoining Mars as well on the—what is the exact date? Sorry. A few days later, it looks like it’s at 16° of Libra, around October 9.
KS: Yeah, and then they start…
AC: That’s all—go ahead, Kelly.
KS: …pulling apart. Sorry, you go.
CB: What were you saying, Kelly?
KS: Just that then we get at least a little bit of breathing room, where Mercury is now separating from Mars after that date. It’s not perfect, but it just turns the heat volume down a little bit.
CB: Yeah, definitely. So we get the separation of that. Mercury eventually stations direct around October 18, and it’s kind of interesting that Jupiter’s stationing direct simultaneously at 22° of Aquarius on the same date. So that seems positive to me. That seems like a little bit of resolution and a little bit of moving forward again after a contentious and somewhat confusing period with the Mercury retrograde.
AC: Well, I think that we need to get to the Full Moon in Aries…
KS: Yeah.
AC: …which is basically a day later, which opposes that Mars, as well as the Sun.
CB: Yeah. One day later, on October 19, it looks like the Full Moon takes place—is it 26 or 27, Kelly?
KS: It’s probably 27 actually. Yeah, 27 Aries opposite that Sun-Mars conjunction. But there’s a little bit of heat and volatility there in that lunation as well.
CB: Okay, so 27. October 20, 27° of Aries, opposite to Mars. Mercury is now stationed direct at this point. And Jupiter is direct at 22 Aquarius, trining and kind of helping out a little bit, or making a wide sextile to the Moon at 27 from 22° of Aquarius. But yeah, it’s still a tense Full Moon opposition with Mars.
KS: Yeah, it’s got that square to Pluto kind of just in the mix. The Mars square Pluto aspect is building and the lunation kind of spotlights that a little bit.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: I would agree that Jupiter’s trying to help and will be able to help somewhat. It’s very, very classically Libran in symbolism, right? It’s like, “Well, there’s this and there’s that. Can we keep this from toppling over? Maybe we need to move this from this side of the scales.” It’s—what’s the word? What’s the word when something is prone to topple, but maybe it can stay balanced? It’s a little precarious, but not doomed.
CB: Yeah. Saturn is also stationing this month. It gets as far back into the early degrees of Aquarius—at 6°—as it’s going to get. So people that have placements in the early degrees of the first decan of Saturn, this is the last pass that it’s going to get early in that sign, and then it’ll start moving forward again.
All right, that brings us basically to the end of the month where the last major thing is we get the shift of Mars into Scorpio on October 30. And thus, commences the final pass of the tense fixed sign transits that are going to take place this year, and this will take us through into November.
AC: Yeah, we get Sun into Scorpio on the—what is it—22nd, and then Mars about a week behind. And that sets up to take a big strong look at the Saturn-Uranus.
KS: Yes.
AC: We’re going to feed the Saturn-Uranus square yet again.
KS: Yeah, November is definitely a month. Where do we start?
AC: I’ll just say November is my least favorite month of 2021.
CB: Okay.
KS: That’s a bold statement.
CB: Big words. We were trying to look for elections. We wanted to do like a Mars in Scorpio election during November, but it’s like you can’t because you run into one of the main signatures of November, which is as soon as Mars goes into Scorpio, it starts applying to this tight square with Saturn at 7° of Aquarius, and after it clears Saturn, it starts opposing Uranus at 12° of Taurus. So that is the tension I think that you’re talking about—that T-square this month.
AC: That’s an important component of it. And so, what we’re doing is the same feeding that Saturn-Uranus square Mars, as well as a few other planets. Again, Mars most importantly inflaming the tensions and hostilities, just like we’re going to do in January with Mars in Taurus, and late June, first part of July with Mars in Leo, and then here we are one last time this year with Mars in Scorpio.
We also have the Sun hitting the same aspects with the planets and then Mercury’s going to catch up to Mars. And so, we’re basically going to do Sun-Mars-Mercury all in sequence hitting that Saturn-Uranus square. And we have a nice little eclipse at the end.
CB: Look at that Mercury and Mars conjunction at 7° of Scorpio squaring Saturn at 7° of Aquarius. That’s a tense little aspect, little fireball aspect.
AC: Yeah, it is.
KS: Yes, it is.
AC: One thing that we can say is those peaceful accords that didn’t make it through October are likely to get very nasty in November.
CB: Okay. So you already mentioned this takes us back into eclipse season, and one of the notable changes that brings in something brand new here, at the very end of the year—towards the end of the year—is we get our very first eclipse in a fixed sign. So the eclipses start shifting as the nodes inch closer and closer to Scorpio and Taurus, and we get a Taurus lunar eclipse on the 19th of November.
KS: Which is adding agitation into the fixed sign places. And this is also going to be the first eclipse across that axis that will then take us into 2022. So it’s a little bit of a transition in the eclipse story, but just further stirring up some of the fixed signs. Not Aquarius, but Scorpio-Taurus.
CB: Yeah, so a major culmination of events in fixed signs at the end of the year, after this year of tension in fixed signs between Saturn and Uranus, but also, between Mars and Saturn and Uranus, and occasionally Mercury.
So that’s going to set up this culmination. The fixed sign of Taurus is going to set up a sequence or a domino effect then as we move into 2022, where the fixed signs start becoming even more of the focus.
AC: Yeah. In a sense, this eclipse is a sneak peek, literally, a foreshadowing of the 2022 eclipse cycle. The solar eclipse two weeks after this will be in Sag—and we’ve been doing Gemini and Sag for a while at this point—but this Taurus one, like you both said, foreshadows the 2022 eclipses.
And this one is particularly worrisome because it’s an eclipse within a degree of Caput Algol, which is one of the gnarliest fixed stars, and historically, is an indicator of some nasty business. And so, with that happening in the same time frame as the Mars activation with the Saturn-Uranus, that’s why November wins my ‘worst month’ of 2021 award.
CB: Okay. It looks like it’s squaring Jupiter at the same time at 24 Aquarius. I don’t know if that’s helping at all.
AC: It’s helpful.
CB: A little helpful?
AC: It’s helpful.
CB: It’s trying. It’s doing its best.
KS: Doing its best.
CB: What is that that you get in school that’s like an award for when you tried? You didn’t come in first or anything.
KS: A participation award or something.
CB: Yes, Jupiter’s getting a participation trophy in November.
AC: Well, at least he’s not farting at the assembly.
CB: That’s true.
KS: That’s true.
CB: All right, so I think that is going to take us then headlong into our final of the year, of 2021, as we move into December. Here’s the image for December. So we have Neptune stationing direct on the 1st in Pisces. We have a solar eclipse in Sagittarius on the 4th of December. Mars moves into Sagittarius on the 13th, and Mercury into Capricorn on the same day. A Full Moon in Gemini on the 18th.
Venus stationing retrograde on the 19th. The Sun into Capricorn of course—as it does every time that year—on the 21st. And the third and final Saturn-Uranus square on the 24th of December, followed by Jupiter finally making its full and final ingress into Pisces on the 28th of December, completing its year-long trek through Aquarius. So this is our final chapter of the year, which is pretty packed and pretty notable, just like December of 2020 was, right, Kelly?
KS: Yeah, that’s what really strikes me. December of 2020 was sort of like the end of the year that had been, but also, the start of what was to come with Jupiter and Saturn ingressing into Aquarius. And we see a little bit of that in December 2021, again, where we do have the final Saturn-Uranus aspect that’s exact to the minute, not just by degree but to the minute.
But Jupiter does make its ingress into the next sign where it’s going to spend the first five months or so of 2022, and we have the start of Venus retrograde, which is going to carry us into the first few months of 2022 as well. So December really feels like wrapping up what’s been going on all year, but also, already diving headlong into the cycles that will carry us across the threshold of the calendar year.
CB: Yeah, I like that. The calendar—as we’ve talked about before—doesn’t always line up with the astrology, and often the astrology is not in alignment with the calendar, and the calendar is more arbitrary than the astrology. But this is another one of those years—like with 2020—where for some reason the astrology is lining up kind of cleanly with the calendar.
KS: Yeah, it’s kind of helpful for planning purposes when it does happen, but 2022 it won’t happen because Jupiter’s going to change signs in the middle of the year just to throw us off, but that’s okay.
CB: So here’s an image from Archetypal Explorer with the three exact Saturn-Uranus aspects or squares, and the third and final exact one goes exact on December 24, which is a nice way to end the year; well, it’s culmination of that in some sense, having the third and final one.
But more widely, it’s like that aspect—even though it doesn’t go exact again—is going to come back.
KS: Really close.
CB: Yeah, it comes really close.
AC: It’s not over.
CB: So it’s not over. So that’s why I wanted to ask you, how much can we be—I don’t want to say be optimistic—but how much can we treat this as something that is a final culmination in the third and final exact aspect on December 24 versus how much can we not do that? Because Uranus will retrograde back—or Saturn will retrograde back and get so close to Uranus again during the course of 2022.
AC: Yeah, I think it would be folly to treat it as if it were over. They spend nearly a month in squared degrees in 2022, and the eclipse cycle will have moved on, so that half of the eclipses are happening in Taurus, right on that Uranus. And so, I think that the dynamics described by the Saturn-Uranus square—they run right into and through 2022.
CB: Okay. So what we’re looking at is like waves of revolution or waves of change that keep coming and maybe are at their most rocky in some ways and most distinct in 2021, but they’re going to continue on into 2022.
AC: Well, I need to spend more time with it, but I might bet on 2022 to be more rocky than 2021.
CB: Okay. What else? In terms of the eclipse that happened early in the month, do you…
KS: Yeah, December.
CB: Yeah, similar to the Sagittarius eclipse that’s taking place—or just took place—in December of 2020, obviously, in a different degree. But will that be the completion of that eclipse series then in Sagittarius and Gemini? Does it move entirely to fixed signs in 2022? Kelly, is furiously looking through her ephemeris.
KS: Yeah, I’m madly page-flipping. It is the last, yes.
CB: It is the last, okay. So we have the completion of the Sagittarius-Gemini eclipse series and then that’s it. So after this point—certainly six months later into 2022—we’ll get the full shift into fixed signs, and then the changes and the new beginnings and endings and culminations indicated by the eclipse series in Sag and Gemini will come to a completion.
KS: Yeah, because the nodes will change in early 2022 as well, which I think is something that Austin’s got his eye on. So yeah, this will be the end of the Gemini-Sag eclipse cycle this go-around, early December.
CB: Let me take a look at that eclipse. Austin, you won the debate—a year later, I can say this—about the eclipse that occurred in December. We were looking at it in December of 2019, but it ended up…
AC: No.
CB: No, it occurred in December of 2019. It was the eclipse that was conjunct Jupiter in Capricorn. And I was hoping for some optimism with Jupiter being there with the eclipse, but you were like, “No, this does not look pretty.”
And it turned out as we were speaking, there was this virus that was like developing in different parts of the world that then would just come out onto the world stage and eclipse everything for the next six months, between that eclipse in December and the next one that would take place, I guess, in like May or June. So good call. We should have bet on that or something at the time.
AC: Well, thank you. That’s very gracious.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, that was the Christmas Day eclipse.
CB: Right.
AC: That was what I proposed as a good time to give birth to the Antichrist.
KS: Yes.
AC: And apparently, a petri dish or some sort of bioreactor—something terrible grew. But yes, thank you, that’s very gracious.
CB: I am not above admitting when I’m wrong, and I’ll give that one to you. So this eclipse—how are we feeling about this eclipse? It looks like it’s happening at 12° of Sagittarius on December 3-4. Mercury is there; it’s direct in Sagittarius at the same time. Mars is at 23 Scorpio squaring Jupiter at 25, which is not terrible; it’s a sort of mixed bag, goes either way.
But one of the major things that’s happening in December of course is the Venus retrograde, where it stations retrograde conjunct Pluto. And that is a distinctive and interesting aspect forming around that time.
KS: Well, Venus spends about a month with Pluto, I think, just because she slows right down almost to his pace. There’s this drawn out Venus-Pluto signature that comes through.
CB: Yeah. So that is one of the signatures of the month of December then, the Venus-Pluto conjunction.
AC: The Venus-Pluto pairing in Capricorn is not terribly upbeat.
CB: No, that’s very intense. There’s the high versions of being in love and then there’s the depths of your soul-type versions of being in love, which is the gut-churning, heart-ripping-out version which sometimes Venus-Pluto can more coincide with, or sometimes the obsessive versions of that.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And then in Capricorn, we can say it’s depressive, just like, uhhh. If Venus sort of shows us what there is to enjoy at a given point, Pluto doesn’t offer too many delights. Occasionally, there’s a well-lit underworld scene, but it’s pretty downbeat. But to go back, you asked me about the eclipse—or brought up the solar eclipse.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s just another one of these, right? We just did one just now. It’s not super-tightly configured with anything dramatic. It’s not too far from Antares, so that gives it a more martial and contentious quality. But Mars is still in Scorpio, so martial and contentious.
What’s interesting is if we look at these sort of inflammatory points with Mars earlier in November, those fires don’t really go out. They’re not in the process of ignition by the time we get to December, but we have the eclipse near a very martial star, Mars is still in Scorpio.
And then even later in the month when we get Mars into Sagittarius, we’ve got a Mars-South Node conjunction, which also inflames Mars. And then it’s Mars moving into conjunction with Antares, another martial star.
Again, there’s not a whole lot to fully put out those fires. Maybe Jupiter in Pisces will dump the ocean on them at the very end of the year, but there’s a continuation from the November Mars stuff into December.
CB: Yeah, there’s just so much, like Jupiter into Pisces at the very end of the month, which is actually very nice and somewhat hopeful, but we’re still going through the Venus retrograde. The Venus retrograde has only just started when we’re ending the year. And there’s also a Full Moon as Venus is stationing direct there—a Full Moon in Gemini, as the station is happening.
AC: Stationing retrograde?
CB: Venus is stationing retrograde, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: Right.
KS: Retrograde, yeah.
CB: Okay. Yeah, so Venus retrograde in Capricorn conjunct Pluto. Any other Venus conjunct Pluto retrograde archetypes or themes? Kelly, what does that bring to mind for you?
KS: I mean, I also think about the fact that it’s happening in Capricorn, which can be a real feeling of being bound because of the Saturn rulership. So when you put the compulsion of Pluto with the bound quality of Capricorn, that’s sometimes how we get the manifestation of things like obsession or compulsion, where you’re sort of bound or controlled by the desire or the craving.
There is an extreme imbalance, if you like, because we’re very focused, intensely or obsessively, on one or two specific things. And there is definitely a melancholy—what is that face about?
CB: Just you keep using the word ‘bound’, and it’s giving me the image of that book or the movie 50 Shades of Grey. So this is like the ‘50 Shades of Grey Venus’ retrograde.
KS: Oh, gosh, okay. Maybe. That wasn’t quite the context that I was using it.
CB: I thought that was where you were going with it, but we’ll see.
KS: You told me earlier this was a family show.
CB: That’s a good point, right. Thank you for reminding me.
KS: I was thinking more like I wanted to say chains, but not in sexual way, just in like a restrained kind of—this is not getting any better.
CB: Yeah, let’s back it up.
KS: We can move on.
CB: So Venus retrograde conjunct Pluto. We’ve got the eclipse in Sagittarius, the last of the Saturn-Uranus exact hits, and the peak of destabilization at the same time. But then do we get optimistic? Let’s leave this on some sort of optimism with Jupiter moving back into Pisces—and the little preview that we had earlier in the year that was just like the taste of freedom of Jupiter into Pisces—but then possibly things going a little bit awry with Mercury squaring Neptune at the same time.
I wonder if this is not the forward-thinking, positive, optimistic thing that we have to look forward to, to the extent that there’s some things to look forward to in 2022. What do you guys think?
AC: Yeah, I think the Jupiter in Pisces just before the New Year—it’s a little bit like we might just make it despite all of this.
CB: We might just make it.
KS: It’s worth getting to the end of the year.
CB: Especially for my two Pisces friends here, I assume you’re looking forward to that. And also, with the eclipses shifting out of the mutable signs—and some of the instability and changes that would have—I would think that things are looking much better for mutable signs as we move into 2022.
KS: Yes.
AC: Oh, yeah.
KS: I think I would have to a hundred-percent agree.
AC: It’s the rest of you that I’m worried about.
KS: Yes.
CB: Oh, yeah, fixed signs.
KS: We’ll be fine, it’s everybody else.
CB: Right. No, no, fixed signs—like myself—with the Scorpio stellium or other fixed signs, we’ve still got a long haul ahead of us. And to the extent that last year was the Capricorn ‘time of troubles’, we’re moving more firmly into the fixed sign ‘time of troubles’ after this. But I’m happy at least for the Pisces and other mutable signs: Gemini, Virgo, and Sagittarius.
KS: Yeah, we touched on this earlier when we talked about Jupiter in Pisces, but it will bring a return to more Jupiter-type things in general. Because once Jupiter makes this shift, he doesn’t have to hang out with Saturn for quite some time, so Jupiter is free from Saturn for quite a while..
CB: So a return back to what happened—the shift that happened in December of 2019 when Jupiter went into Capricorn and a return back to what was happening before then when Jupiter was in Sagittarius. I think we can all sort of think back to and remember and imagine what that was like. I’m hoping that by 2022, we can have an in-person astrology conference again. That’s one of my long-term hopes.
AC: Yep, I think so.
CB: Kelly, are you hoping to fly to Australia?
KS: Yeah.
CB: You’ve been completely grounded this year.
KS: Yeah. And I’ve said almost from the get-go, it’ll be 2022. And I just prepped my family, managed expectations. And as you mentioned earlier, Austin, restrictions and rules are different everywhere, and Australia has some of the most strict quarantine requirements and things right now. So even if they’re still there in 2022, we’ll be in a position that we can go for long enough and we can manage that.
But yeah, I’ve just always thought of 2022 for big travel, in-person astrology conferences, as well as other big events as well. Not that everywhere in the world will wait until then, because I think there will be some places that might open up sooner, but in general, more countries are moving in that direction. That’s what 2022 feels like.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense.
AC: And if you’re going to plan a big international thing, then it matters whether the Europeans and Australians can come, even if it’s held in the United States.
KS: A hundred-percent. A hundred-percent. And I don’t think that’s going to happen in 2021.
CB: Yeah.
KS: But that’s okay, we’ll get there. What was it? The 28th of December?
CB: We’re making progress at least. Maybe a good theme or a good keyword is ‘making progress’ this year in 2021.
KS: Heading in the right direction.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good one.
AC: Yeah. And just as sort of a summation or look back at 2021, it’s very patchwork, right? It’s a very mixed bag. There are mousetraps in the bag, and some months when you reach in, your fingers will get snapped. There are also valuable jewels, there are pearls. The Jupiter in Pisces will provide some of the bounty of the sea.
KS: Yes.
AC: Some of the bad moments are pretty bad, right? They’re not quite, but really rivaling some 2020 bad moments, but they’re inter-cut and balanced out with legitimately nice configurations. And part of what made 2020 so difficult was that it was sort of like nine months of horror and three months of, ‘I guess this is not terrible’, but not necessarily actively improving things.
KS: There were no jewels in the bag in 2020.
AC: Or very few. There was like a week here and there. Because good is not just things don’t get worse, right?
KS: Oh, no. Good, to me, is things are actively improving.
AC: Exactly.
KS: Like not getting worse is just neutral.
AC: Yeah. And so, the proportion and ratio in 2020 was very off, whereas 2021, I think, has a much equivalent ratio. It’s a little bit more fair. It’s not just one thing after another.
CB: Yeah. And there’s more occasional goodies in the bag—in the Halloween treat bag, metaphorically—in the year compared to last year. Last year was just like when somebody’s giving out toothpaste or something for Halloween.
AC: Yeah, not every piece of candy has a razor blade hidden in it this year.
CB: Right. Okay, that’s good. Awesome. I think we did it then, guys. Are there any other final thoughts about 2021 that we need to mention before we wrap up? This has been a monumental year in 2020, and I’m glad that we did the forecast last year and prepared for it as much as we did, and that we’re doing that again this year.
I’m trying to think if there’s any major things. We’re always looking at these things archetypally and looking at the movement of planets and trying to describe what that means as an archetype and anticipate some of these things based on where things are headed now and where they may head in the future. But it’s always interesting to see how the specifics actually play out over the course of the next twelve months once we get there.
So hopefully, we came up with a few good—not just catchy—but poignant one-liners similar to how we did last year in terms of the ‘no-hugging’ configurations in March. We’ve got some aggressive hugging happening this year. Are there any other themes or any other keywords that stand out to you as our main themes of the year?
KS: I can’t remember them now, but I know there’s a few that came up as we went along.
CB: Yeah.
KS: I mean, the assembly.
CB: People in the chat—the assembly of planets in February. That big lineup of planets that happens in Aquarius, that’s a good one. There was Mars being the farting part of that, which is kind of ruining the party a little bit—or at least attempting to cause some disruptions in the square.
Kelly, you were mentioning the Jupiter in Pisces preview, when it dips in. I guess that was part of the aggressive hugging. I was thinking aggressive in terms of Mars.
KS: I mean, I think that Jupiter in Pisces does not hug aggressively. I think that was very Mars in Cancer or something; maybe the combination of the two.
AC: Jupiter in Pisces unfolds you.
KS: It does. It envelopes you, and it brings you in. And as a result of that, you feel inspired or uplifted, but I don’t have any catchy phrases. I think, Austin, you said ‘jewels of the sea’ or something.
AC: I just keep hearing in a pirate voice, “The bounty of the sea.” There’s a recipe in the Picatrix for a Jupiter in the first decan of Pisces talisman for ‘miraculous excellence at fishing’—that you will gather the fish together—and I just hear ‘bounty of the sea’.
KS: Bounty of the sea, yeah.
AC: That’s probably because I just watched The Lighthouse last week. So I just hear Willem Dafoe talking about the bounty of the sea.
KS: Love it.
CB: I love it. All right, guys, thank you so much for doing this, this year. Speaking of this year, what do you guys have going on? Kelly, what are you doing in 2021, for those listening to this now or in the future?
KS: Yeah, absolutely. I will be continuing to teach online. I have my Become an Astrologer training program which is available. You can start anytime and move through the training, plus, I’ll have a variety of live classes. In addition, I’ll be focusing more on my Monthly Astrology Guide, which is a Patreon-style subscription, but you don’t sign up on Patreon, you sign up on my website.
And if you just go to my website, KellysAstrology.com, and check out your Astrology Guide Monthly, there’s some exclusive videos and special subscriber-only content that I create there. So that has been going for a couple of years, but we’re looking to take it to a new level in 2021. So that’s me.
CB: Awesome. And your website is KellysAstrology.com.
KS: Yes, thank you.
CB: Brilliant. Austin, what do you have going on?
AC: Well, I’m going to be teaching yearly classes again and that will probably be announced the end of early February. Classes are going to be April through November, as they were this year. I’m going to get some books done. And Kait and I have plenty of nefarious plans for Sphere + Sundry. We’re already eyeing a number of elections. There will be a number of strange and miraculous offerings.
CB: I love it. And your website is AustinCoppock.com, and Kaitlin’s is SphereandSundry.com.
AC: Yep.
CB: Excellent. So people should check those out. As for myself, I’ll put posters out. So most of the graphics used in this episode, you can get a poster version to put on your wall to look at the astrology of 2021. That’s being done through print-on-demand. You can find those on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website. Leisa and I put out our 2021 Auspicious Elections Report which is out now, and you can use it to get the electional charts for each of the next twelve months.
I want to give a shout-out to all the patrons that support The Astrology Podcast and who joined us today for the live recording of this. It’s awesome to have people join us live for these episodes. It actually always contributes something, and sometimes we go in directions we wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
We have also been able to improve our technical setup this year. And Austin’s nice-looking new camera is as a result of that, so thanks to the patrons for supporting that. And we’re going to get Kelly set up on a new one very soon as well, so we keep doing this.
One of the things we also put the Patreon towards is doing transcripts. I’m actually paying somebody to do transcripts of The Astrology Podcast episodes to make them more accessible both to people with different languages, as well as people with disabilities that can’t hear the podcast episodes. So you can support that effort and also get access to new episodes ahead of time and other bonus content through our page on Patreon.
So I think that’s it. I’m going to keep doing The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll be back again for the next forecast, which I think at one point will be the forecast for February which we’ll record and release sometime in early January. But I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast, so thanks a lot, guys, for joining me for this today.
KS: Anytime. Thanks for having us—or having me.
AC: Yeah, thank you.
CB: All right, and thanks everyone for listening to this episode. Please be sure to like and subscribe. And good luck in 2021, let us know how it goes. And we’ll be back again in a year to look at the forecast for 2022. So thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
Thanks to all the patrons that supported the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon. In particular, thanks to the patrons on our Producers tier, including Nate Craddock, Maren Altman, Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merrilat, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Sumo Coppock, and Nadia Habhab. For more information about how to become a patron or have your name listed in the credits, please visit Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Also, special thanks to our sponsors, including the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening online May 27-31, 2021; find out more information at NORWAC.net. The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which you can find out more information about at MountainAstrologer.com. The ISAR Astrology Conference happening August 18-22, 2021; more information at ISAR2020.org. The Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, which you can find out more information about at Honeycomb.co. Also, the Portland School of Astrology; more information at PortlandAstrology.org. The Astro Gold Astrology App, available for both iPhone and Android, available at Astrogold.io.
And finally, the primary software program that we use on episodes of The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire Astrology Software, which is available at Alabe.com. And you can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘AP15’.