The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 317, titled:
September Astrology Forecast 2021
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock and Rick Levine
Episode originally released on August 31, 2021
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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 Mary Sharon
Transcription released September 14, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the astrology of September of 2021. Joining me today are astrologers, Austin Coppock and Rick Levine. Hey, guys. All right, I’m going to give a little bit of an overview first of the month of September and then we will jump down into a week-by-week breakdown to give you an overview of the astrology of next month. Here’s a little graphic for September and here’s our astrology calendar that lists them in ingresses and lunations and retrograde stations. The first thing that happens is we have a new Moon in Virgo on the sixth of September followed by Venus ingressing into the sign of Scorpio on the 10th. Then the following week, Mars goes into Libra on the 14th of September. Our second lunation of the month is on the 20th which is a Pisces Full Moon, followed of course by the Sun’s ingress into Libra on the 22nd as it does around this time of the year which is the fall ingress in the Northern Hemisphere. And then finally, at the end of the month, Mercury stations retrograde in the sign of Libra on September 27th. Here’s a circular chart that shows some of the motions of where the planets will start and where they will end up by the end of the month. And as we go through this episode, we’ll do a more detailed breakdown of some of the closer inner planet sign ingresses and aspects during the course of the month.
All right. Hey guys, thanks for joining me today. Austin as always, we’ve been doing this for five years now and Rick is joining us as a special guest co-host this month filling in for Kelly who’s still moving back to Canada. Thanks for joining us, Rick. This is your first time doing a forecast.
RICK LEVINE: It is. What a pleasure! And you know why it is taking Kelly so long? It’s a long swim.
CB: That’s true. It’s a little bit not quite as long as the swim from Australia, but still Europe is no-
RL: You got it. You got it. Yeah, the Atlantic it’s a tough one to swim across. It’s treacherous.
CB: For sure. Rick, of course famously has his own YouTube channel where he does monthly and weekly astrology forecast which you can find at youtube.com/ricklevine and Rick actually for years, you used to co-write the Barnes & Noble Year Ahead astrology booklet, right? I remember seeing one time going to a Barnes & Noble and there was like a cardboard cutout of you at the bookstore and I always wish that I got one of those. Do you still have one of those or is that like a hard collector?
RL: I’ve never got one. Never got one, unfortunately. Yeah. Jeff Jawer and I did eight years of those and they were brutal. They were 140,000 words a year for an hour of fame and fortune.
CB: Yeah, and you were also doing daily horoscopes for astrology.com or something at the time and so I remember-
RL: For tarot.com, I was writing 1200 words a day, seven days a week. I did that for 17 years. It’s insane.
CB: I remember hanging out with you late at night during Kepler symposiums in the mid-2000s and we would stay up late talking about astrology and getting into deep conversations about synchronicity and things like that and then it would be 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and everyone’s turning in and you say, “I have to go off and write the horoscope column for tomorrow,” at about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.
RL: That would be me.
CB: Okay. So that is your accolades and your background going into doing this forecast. And Austin, of course, we’ve been doing this together for five years now. How are you feeling about September?
AUSTIN COPPOCK: I believe it’s six, 15 to 21.
CB: Six, that’s true. It is 2021.
AC: Yeah. And I did the junior version of Rick’s grind, I wrote like four yearly almanacs and I only wrote a horoscope column for 11 years.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s not quite as much but still impressive.
AC: It’s still a grind and it takes a commitment.
CB: It is. Yeah. In this episode, I wanted to start first by talking about and doing a little retrospective of some of the interesting astrology that happened last month and some of the notable things that happened in the news that fulfilled some of the things that we were talking about in the previous forecast, especially some things that were grouped around Uranus stationing retrograde in Taurus around the middle of the month that seemed to coincide with some major changes and shakeups in the world. And then after that, we will get into the week-by-week breakdown of the astrology of September. How does that sound to you guys? All right. Let’s talk a little bit about August. There was a few major things and what was interesting to me is that Uranus stationed retrograde in Taurus on August 19th and there were some major news stories that really seem to tie into that and it seemed to bring up some of the Saturn square Uranus themes that we’ve been talking about as the major outer planet activity this year, but that station of Uranus really seemed to reignite or reenergize that square between Uranus and Saturn more towards the Uranus chaos and destabilization side of things in some instances. The big news story, of course, was what happened in Afghanistan and the sudden and unexpected fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban and the somewhat chaotic exit of the United States from Afghanistan after almost 20 years. The new stories about this started happening and got really intense and the government fell within four days of the Uranus station in mid-August, and I thought that was really striking and really compelling in terms of some of those themes. Did you guys notice that or tie that into the Uranus station?
AC: Yeah, I did and I also thought it was interesting and very unexpected or it had an interesting unexpected relationship to Venus’s ingress into Libra, which happened in very much the same time period. And this is interesting for two reasons. One, Uranus in Taurus is in a Venus ruled sign and so is going to respond to the ruler of the sign being in a strong position. And then two, even though certainly my initial reaction and anyone’s initial reaction is not oh, what an act of Venus, at the same time, it is the end of a 20-year military occupation, right? It’s the end of a military action and so this is interesting. It’s important and useful to get beyond just the raw stereotype archetype version of what a planet in its strength does.
RL: Yeah, I was also intrigued by the fact that not exactly to the day but in a way this is a close, not necessarily a graceful close, but it’s a close to the Saturn-Pluto opposition to conjunction because we invaded Afghanistan as a result of the September 11 Saturn-Pluto opposition trade tower bombings and it’s now that that has come to a close even though we’re technically after the conjunction. It really has been a process that then just became abrupt with this Uranus station.
AC: That’s such a good long cycle take on it Rick, I love that.
CB: Yeah, because that was originally when the World Trade Center attacks and the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred, that was the main thing that astrologers pointed to at the time was the relatively close within 2° Saturn-Pluto opposition from Pluto at 12° of Sagittarius to Saturn at 14° of Gemini that was happening at the time, especially because the United States Sibly chart has 12° of Sagittarius rising. So, for many people, the chart or the Ascendant of the United States is at 12° of Sagittarius and it was getting hit by that Pluto transit almost exactly on that very day.
RL: And remember, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction opposition cycle has tracked the centuries long battle between Christianity and Islam, that means going all the way back to Mohammed’s declaring Mecca the state of Islam– all the incursion of the Muslims into Spain and then the retaking of that. Those are all Saturn-Pluto conjunctions or oppositions. It’s crazy that this theme is almost like a wildfire that becomes subdued and then goes underground and then it flares up every few hundred years for several cycles and then it goes away again and then it comes back.
AC: You can track the Reconquista and all that using the Saturn-Pluto? That’s really interesting. I haven’t looked at that.
CB: Yeah. One of the things that came to mind though just seeing because it seemed like everybody knew the US pulling out of Afghanistan was not going to be graceful and there was no scenario where that was going to go super well on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of comparing it to Vietnam and there are a lot of analogies to what happened with the end and the whining down of the Vietnam War. But it seemed like it caught the US government and a lot of people much more off guard, the rapid advance and rapid fall of the capital of Afghanistan as well as the other provinces in Afghanistan to the Taliban over the course of basically a month leading up to mid-August. And it really brought to mind some of the keywords or the main keyword it brought to mind for me was some of the things that we had talked about last month in connection with the Saturn-Uranus square and I’m looking for a little summary that I wrote about that which is the sudden collapse of that which seemed stable, revealing structures in our lives that were built on an unreliable foundation. And that was the main thing that kept coming up to me this month with that Uranus station in mid-August, not just with the Afghanistan situation, but also with some other things. And I know previously, Austin, you used this phrase of stress testing which turned out to be really apt for that as well, I think.
AC: Right, to use a bit of a cliché the house of cards that you have set up, if you shake the table a little bit, the whole thing falls, right? It’s a good example of what would fail stress testing and so now we know. But yeah, you’re right. The Afghanistan situation is a really good example of Saturn-Uranus dynamics with Uranus being not the leader, but being the more active of the two; doing a station, having a ruler go into a really strong place, etc. etc. And also, I suppose we can’t ignore the fact that Uranus got a nice trine from Mars. Uranus and Mars, if Uranus likes to shake shit up, Mars has no qualms with that.
CB: Yeah. What’s funny about the Uranus station as well is there was another in the reactivation of the Saturn-Uranus square through Uranus becoming empowered through that retrograde station is you saw this coming up in other areas of the world as well, even just in memes and fads. And one of the ones that I thought that was really funny was the milk crate challenge which went viral on TikTok and Twitter and other places where the challenge was that people would build a pyramid of milk crates that are stacked up like stairs higher and higher and then a person was supposed to walk across it all the way to the top and then walk down. But in many instances, it was completely unsteady the higher and higher they got and it would topple over eventually because it wasn’t on a very stable foundation leading to sometimes like major injuries and major bones being broken and other things like that so that TikTok eventually on August 27th banned the trend and banned the hashtag because there were so many injuries that were happening to people over the past few weeks.
AC: That’s hilarious, when you also have the bow vine tie in with Uranus and Taurus and they’re milk crates. [laughs]
CB: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.
RL: Oh, isn’t astrology wonderful when it’s so literal?
AC: Yeah. And it doesn’t need to, right? It’s astrology winking at us.
RL: Yep, that’s a lot of bull.
CB: Well, something we see over and over again, we’ve seen it for years now, which is just sometimes when there are these major outer planet alignments that there are different ways in which the archetype of that alignment manifests in cultures. Sometimes in popular culture, sometimes in major world events, and sometimes in people’s individual personal lives in very highly specific ways, but there’s always these weird echoes of the energy of the times that are happening if you pay attention to it in the news. It reminds me of back in like 2016 when there was that Saturn-Neptune square and we were marveling at this trend that took off where everyone was using virtual or augmented reality to play like a Pokémon game that just became really popular for that one summer as that square was going exact and then once it passed, it was like the fad was no longer around anymore.
AC: Right, the Saturn-Neptune troubling the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and people going on hunts for Pokémon at your post office or in the middle of the park or whatever.
RL: Yeah, the boundary thing with Saturn is really important. I think it was Rob Hand who wrote somewhere, I can’t recall where, that when Saturn and Uranus get together by a hard aspect, it’s like an irrepressible force meets an immovable object and something’s got to give.
CB: Right. Or there’s like another Rob Hand quote that I think you mentioned Rick, which is something like “Saturn is the perception of the boundaries of reality–
RL: Oh, that’s Saturn and Neptune. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, yeah. What was that quote?
RL: I think that was something he wrote in essays way, way, way back. It’s something like we used to believe that Saturn was reality and Neptune was illusion whereas now we’ve learned that Neptune is reality and Saturn is the illusion there is one.
AC: That’s funny. I would like to quote you, Rick, on Uranus. I don’t know if you ever wrote this down, but it was something you said to me in conversation 10 plus years ago.
RL: I’m still saying it.
AC: Okay. It did have that kind of sound to it. You said that “Uranus represents that which is impossible to repress.”
RL: Okay. Well, that’s slightly different than the thing that I often say in class. I’ve been known to say, if you only write one thing down during this entire class or presentation, write this down. And that is Uranus only has one job on its job description and that is the instantaneous resolution of irresolvable opposites. And, of course, that has the paradox of Uranus built right into it and the whole idea that like, for example, when lightning strikes, it’s because the positive and negative ions have nowhere to go that it’s reached a maximum tension and at that moment of irresolvable no way to resolve the tension, crash. And in that one moment, in that one brief moment, there’s no tension there.
AC: Right, which is a condensation of what happens with storms in general. Storms are warm front, cold front, right? A storm is the winds resolving their tension with each other.
RL: Yeah. And you know Austin that the warm front is usually higher in moisture and when you have moist air or moisture agitating against itself, that creates negative ionization, which of course is positive, I mean, that feels good. So that’s why waterfalls or the ocean or a good rainstorm, these are all energizing and the cold, dry air mass which is positive ions which is like that agitates, that’s not good, that’s the old phrase an ill wind blows no good. And so, when you get these two different electrical charges, the negative ions and the positive ions, the more they try to work it out, it’s that this is proof that the psychology axiom, if you have a problem, talk about it and work it out. Well, that’s usually a good thing. But there are some things that the more you talk about, the worse it gets. The more you talk about it, the greater the tensions are. And that’s what happens in a storm is that the negative and positive ions rub up against each other, the negative ions become more negative, the positive ions become more positive until it’s stretched so far that the lightning strikes instantaneous. And although you know that lightning might strike any moment, true to form with Uranus, you know something’s going to happen, but you don’t know where and when.
AC: Right. You can you can guess, right? Like, what’s the tallest building with a metal thing on it, but it could be the tallest building over there.
RL: Yeah, but then you look away and the lightning strikes over there.
AC: Yeah, yeah. That’s great.
CB: Yeah. With the Uranus station, one of the things that it brought up for me is like the Afghan government fell early on like the 14th or the 15th I think of August and this is a few days before Uranus technically like its exact station as we like to conceptualize it on the 19th. But one of the things I think Ronnie Gale Dreyer pointed out on Twitter is just that a planet stationing is not an exact point because it’s more like a curve. So really, once you get within like a few days or like a week of a planetary station, especially when it’s really slow-moving outer planet, it’s pretty much already stationary because it stopped going anywhere in terms of its forward or backward motion in the zodiac.
RL: Yeah, I checked about Uranus when this was all unfolding and Uranus was within 1° of its station position for a week before and a week after. And what’s interesting though on the 14th-
CB: You mean 1 minute, right?
RL: I’m sorry, what?
CB: You mean 1 minute?
RL: I meant 1 minute. Thank you very much. One minute. And the other thing though about the 13, 14, 15 leading up to the Uranus station, is that man we were driving down quincunx lane. I mean, they were one quincunx after another after another from Saturn to the Mercury, Mars and from Venus back to Jupiter and from the Sun to Neptune and then Chiron on the other side of the Mars, Mercury. It was like total quincunx land and it was like just totally irritating.
CB: Driving down quincunx lane would be a great album name I think if anybody wants to take that for the future.
AC: I’m going to just jump back to the language of the planet stationing being on a curve cause what that evoked for me immediately was like a race car on a racetrack doing a tight hairpin turn. And if you’re in that car, the centrifugal forces and the G forces they generate, that’s a moment of serious concentration for the driver, things can spin out of control. There’s a lot more to do there and there’s a lot more potential energy there than when you’re just on a straightaway so I really like that language.
CB: That’s a good point. And this was also a retrograde station. Uranus was moving forward and then it slows down and does a U-turn and begins moving backwards in the sign of Taurus, which is ruled by Venus. And I kept noticing things related to Venus coming up as being tied in with this. One of them that I’m thinking of right now, of course, that a lot of people were concerned about in terms of the Taliban coming back into power after 20 years was the plight of women, basically, in Afghanistan and the Taliban historically being a really repressive regime, especially towards women, due to some of the religious background and other fundamentalist background and if that wasn’t also part of what was being indicated by that retrograde station in the sign of Taurus. Yeah. That was something that was going on. In other weird completely unrelated news, but also coinciding with that to the day actually, it was within 24 hours of Uranus stationing retrograde on August 19th, there was also this across social media like news report that went out across Twitter and everywhere else saying that the website OnlyFans had announced that it would ban sexually explicit content which then caused an uproar among sex workers and other people that use the site for their income which would suddenly be shut off as thousands of people suddenly who use that to make money or what have you would suddenly income would cease to take place. Did you guys see that?
AC: Yeah, I saw that. I’m glad you brought that up because I saw that and I was like, really, I was like, I don’t think Venus in Libra is going to let that happen, right? Anybody who works with desire, beauty, aesthetics, etc. etc. is at least an unofficial child of Venus. You’re working within that profession, within those range of professions. And I was like, really, I don’t think Venus in Libra is going to let that slide. And so, it was very interesting to see how after Venus clear the aspect with Saturn, that was not going to be the case. That was reversed pretty quickly.
RL: Yeah. It was also the week that Cuomo resigned. Yeah. And another Venus-
AC: Yeah, as a result of bad actions within relationships or attempting to relate in a way that was rather rude.
CB: Yeah. Well, and one of the things that came up this month, I did the Venus episode with Becca Tarnas, one of the things that was mentioned in passing was just that Venus had historically in ancient texts in traditional astrology been associated with sex workers and with sex work in general, and it was interesting seeing such a big story tied in with that with Uranus’s station in the sign of Taurus. And one of the things that was also interesting in tied in about it is we talked about Uranus and Taurus over the past few years and the gig economy and people working as independent contractors for different things like Lyft or Uber or different food delivery places or things like that and being self-employed, but like working for some larger corporation and having a certain independence within that but also relying on that larger structure of whatever that company is and being subject to the whims of that company. One of the things that was interesting about that story that I think is relevant to the long term is that it was the payment process or supposedly like the credit card companies that were putting pressure on OnlyFans to stop making sexual content available on their website, even though that’s what it was designed for because they viewed that as like a higher risk thing or due to moral issues or what have you. So the credit card companies put pressure on OnlyFans to change that policy. It caused huge backlash. They did end up walking it back I think within a week or a week later, but the damage had been done. And I wondered if this isn’t part of a longer-term issue with one of the things we’ve talked about is Uranus and Taurus and the rise of cryptocurrencies and things like that and if that’s not also tied in with part of this larger narrative in terms of the control that some of these centralized banks and credit card companies have over certain businesses versus the decentralization of some monetary things through cryptocurrencies.
RL: Yeah, I totally agree with that analysis. And there was another thing that also happened that was not exactly that day, but it was bubbling over the last week, the court case that declared that Uber and Lyft drivers actually are employees, that the companies can’t get away with shuffling them off and saying that they’re contractors. That was another big deal. And in some ways, it was similar to the OnlyFans fiasco because again, it was driven by Venus, by finances, by money.
AC: This plays in perfectly to one other thing that I wanted to bring up which is very Uranus in Taurus and hits a theme that y’all been talking about or we’ve also spoken of directly, which is Uranus in Taurus, especially in the context of the square with Saturn and labor and both the redefinition of labor in a different technological context in the context of mid-Corona, post-Corona, whatever you want to call it. But there are also two large strikes happening. The workers of Frito-Lay and Nabisco have by all reports been treated like mules for the last year or so and so there are like national-level strikes beginning. And those are huge companies, right? Those are some of the most, how should we say, popular crap factories. They make like all of the bad food. And so, these are not small local issues
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the recurring themes is just many people realizing how unstable their foundations are or in some instances their financial foundations are. And in some instances, the sudden collapse and just things, the floor falling out from underneath you, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, with some of the energies that are going on this year and that will be part of a continuing, ongoing narrative and story that we’ll keep seeing because we’ve got a few more hits of Saturn and Uranus as they keep going back and forth in their dance during the course of this year and on into 2022.
RL: Certainly, on into 2022. Another thing about that Uranus in Taurus, and I think Austin brought this up, but I want to just take it a step further and that is the relationship between Taurus and basic needs, food. And, obviously, aside from the larger issue of climate crisis, the Colorado River was basically turned off so to speak or at least will be severely limited and there are places in the Central California Valley that grow something like 80% of the cantaloupes in the United States and the farmers are basically saying the crops are going to just die. They don’t have the water for them. And so, I think that this Uranus and Taurus, we’re going to also see more of that, but that’s another thing that’s tied up with what’s going on right now.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And both the one thing we’ve talked on this podcast about with the Saturn-Uranus is just disruption of logistics, which is also another comfortable given. Of course, there will be cantaloupes at the supermarket, right? Of course, there will be cantaloupes. And then the food thing is overwhelming. And so, what’s interesting is in all of these cases, what is being stress tested for is how sustainable this thing or that thing is.
RL: And we’re failing every one of those stress tests.
AC: I don’t know about we, but the society is definietly failing.
RL: Right, not you and me.
AC: Yeah, I’ve got well water, Rick. But yeah, because if you were like, what would be a virtue of Taurus? I’ll be like, oh, it’s the fixed Earth sign that which is sustainable that which can continue even under an immense amount of stress, right? And a stress test reveals the sustainability or lack thereof.
CB: Yeah. And so, a lot of people are having that private stress test in their own lives. Why don’t we transition at this point since we’re 30 minutes into the show into talking about September and starting to break down the first week of the month? How does that sound? I’ll show the charts, but I also wanted to show a new graphic that was designed. Shoutout to Brenda Castaneda from zatana.net or Zatana on Instagram, who is a graphic designer and astrologer and she had designed some weekly Astro forecast graphics and I asked her if we could incorporate some of those in the forecasts and she said, “Sure.” So, we developed some specifically for this episode just to give an overview and a more detailed breakdown of some of the astrology of September. This is the weekly Astro weather for September 1st through the 4th, and we open up right away at the very, very beginning of September with that Mars Neptune opposition, where Mars in the later portions of Virgo opposes Neptune in Pisces and it seems like that’s one of the first major aspects that we have to talk about in terms of opening up September, right?
RL: Yeah, I agree. And as the proud owner of a natal Mars opposed Neptune, I can say good news, bad news.
CB: All right, give us the good news first and then hit us with the bad news.
RL: Well, the good news is that I think that there’s inability at times to manifest one’s illusions, but they’re for better and for worse. And I think that often the way things manifest are not the way you planned and so there’s almost like a juxtaposition of the energy of the, it’s not the who we are, it’s the where we’re going and the where we think we are going. And it’s almost like we get all charged up to go somewhere, and I don’t mean somewhere necessarily physically, it can be somewhere metaphysically, but we’re all charged up to go there and yet there doesn’t turn out to be there. And I think that’s the downside. But I think that there’s a potential whenever Mars and Neptune get together, Grant Louis somewhere wrote about Mars-Neptune as the shape shifter because there’s that sense of the physicality of Mars is impacted by the illusion and an illusion isn’t necessarily untrue. It’s just something based upon a wish fulfillment because illusions become dreams become real. Bill Clinton had a Mars conjunct Neptune and of course, Venus was in the picture also, but it was like when he was on, he seemed 10 feet tall and when he was not, he just seemed like he was invisible. And so, I think this Mars oppose Neptune can work either way, but I think it puts us in a very delicate place because what we believe actually can manifest whether or not it manifests the way we think it’s going to.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good summary. I did an episode on Neptune with Laura Nalbandian last week and we talked a lot about Neptune and the illusions that it brings, which can sometimes be deceptive or misleading. But then there’s a flip side of that coin which is that sometimes people need something to believe in and sometimes that which is illusory is a belief that carries you forward and can push you forward even if it’s not correct to the tee, sometimes those things are necessary in order to inspire us to achieve great things.
RL: Yeah, William Blake wrote what is now proved was once only imagined and that’s Neptune. Neptune can certainly be complicated and difficult. I like Caroline Casey who says that imagination or Neptune lays the tracks for Saturn or the reality train to follow. Neptune creates a scaffolding that then we can build structure upon not always and again, it’s often the dreams are either unreachable or just plain ridiculous.
AC: Yeah, I would say that a dreamed reality or an imagined reality is proven later down the line to be true or false in terms of what’s inside the Saturn fence, right? If I imagine that I can do a thing and then 10 years later I do it, then my dreams look prophetic, right? But if I imagine I can do a thing and then I fail spectacularly, well, that was he was just a delusional, right?
RL: It’s prophetic or pathetic.
AC: Yeah, right?
CB: Yeah, and I guess that’s the real danger with the potential downside of a Mars-Neptune opposition is that Mars likes to have clear goals and objectives and it’s very good, especially at accomplishing short term objectives as long as it has a clear line of sight of what it needs to do so it can get it done, but Neptune is not very good at giving a clear line of sight and if anything, it blurs things so that Mars doesn’t necessarily know where it’s going and can be punching or reaching around in the dark, which is not going to be as effective in accomplishing those Mars type goals.
RL: Yeah, it’s like being in a boxing match blindfolded.
AC: Yeah. One thing I like about Mars-Neptune, just on a quick transiting energetic level, is that Neptune a lot of times just blunts Mars. I see the ambient level of aggro often go down when Neptune gets in Mars way. Right. Sometimes you have that like taking up a dream with the Mars energy especially more on other aspects, but there’s a little bit of just mist or fog aerosolized water just putting out some of the Mars’ fire which is often useful for just a dip in contentions. Sometimes it appears as if Mars disappears energetically for a few days before coming back.
CB: Yeah, it can sap some of Mars’ energy and energetic-ness. Another good Mars-Neptune phrase that’s coming to mind is the fog of war which is used as a phrase, but that’s a very good Mars-Neptune thing in terms of the actions that you can take as long as you have a clear sight line, but there’s so many things that you don’t know that might be around you in terms of enemies lurking in the corner or in the dark.
RL: But there’s something very interesting about this particular Mars opposing Neptune. Could you put the chart back up again for a moment, Chris? Is that possible? Because what’s happening as Mars is opposing Neptune, we also have the Moon opposing Pluto and in fact, Mars is coming into a trine with Pluto. And so, there’s a bit of a kind of good news wrapped around this opposition that if this was a natal chart, we would probably call that or some people would call that a mystic rectangle where you have the trine sextile trine sextile with the two planets in opposition, but there’s a potential here to manifest it and Mars even though it might be a little bit lost or a lot lost with Neptune is getting some power from that trine to Pluto.
CB: That’s a good point. Definitely, so it’s moving into that trine over the next few days which will eventually go exact, it looks like around the fifth or the sixth of September.
RL: Yeah, interesting this first few days aside from the Mars opposing Neptune, we have several trines. We have Mercury trining Saturn. We have Mars trining Pluto. And we have Venus trining Jupiter. And then we have the Sun trining Uranus, all within a four- or five-day period of time. And it’s almost like there’s the potential for something good. Wouldn’t that be lovely? We need it.
CB: Yeah, that brings us into our first lunation basically which happens very early in the month and it’s that new Moon at 14° of Virgo on the sixth of September and that new Moon at 14 Virgo is very closely trine to Uranus which is at 14° of Taurus. Yeah. I’m liking that that new Moon. It is taking place with Mars so there’s like a Martian and a somewhat fiery quality to it, but the trine-
RL: But Mars is part trine to Pluto also. I like this new Moon a lot.
CB: Yeah. What are you thinking about it, Austin?
AC: Oh yeah, it’s fine. I wish Mars wasn’t there with it. I have a slightly different take on the first third of the month. I really like the Venus-Mercury, which is there until the 10th. Venus gets boost from Jupiter and Mercury plays nicely with Saturn. Right. They’re much more compatible than Venus and Saturn. Mercury likes analysis and Saturn does structure. They’re both capable of being dry without their functions being impeded. But with Venus ruling the sign Mercury’s in, Mercury’s in good hands. There’s just a lot of nice potentials for that Venus-Mercury. And again, the new Moon looks to Mercury and Mercury is doing this thing with Venus and then everything goes back to Venus there. And so, I just like that as a wedge of generally positive potential. There’s just a lot you can do with Venus and Mercury. It’s good for arts and crafts and making peace and having fun, pleasant and useful things.
CB: Yeah. That Mercury-Saturn trine that you mentioned is one of our early aspects that goes exact on September 4th so that’s one of the nicer aspects that’s happening at the beginning of the month and it actually takes place a few days before the lunation and right at the same time that new Moon in Virgo happens, Mercury actually enters its shadow because 10° of Libra is the degree that it’s later going to retrograde back to in October, which is an interesting setting up or foreshadowing of events that are going to take place later in the month when Mercury stations retrograde towards the end of September.
RL: Yeah, and it does that while it’s quincunxing Uranus and that aspect repeats three times both on October 11th then on October 24th because that is the beginning of that shadow period then Uranus moves slow enough that Mercury is going to hit it by quincunx three times.
AC: Before we get on to Mercury, because there’s a lot to tell there, I would just like to point out that this first 10 days of the month is the last time that Venus is going to rejoice for many, many, many months because we’re going to go Venus into Scorpio where square Saturn opposite Uranus, not the most comfortable place. And then Sagittarius is okay there with the south node. But then most importantly, when we get Venus moving into Capricorn, it’s Venus in Capricorn for long months and for almost a month of conjunction with Pluto. We’re not going to have happy Venus for more than six months. And so that’s part of why I’m interested in taking advantage of the perfumed wind of the [fair of a New Zealand] weather while it’s here because it’s not coming around for quite some time.
RL: Yeah. And there’s another thing that is easy to miss. If we could go back to the new Moon chart for another moment, there’s something really fascinating about this because if you look at the new Moon chart, you have Mars at 24° almost 25°, Venus at 25°, Pluto at 24°- 25°, and Jupiter at 24° almost 25°. It’s like crisscrossed trines and the outer part of this is a quincunx, so this actually becomes a symmetrical trapezoid with a quincunx, a semi-sextile, a square, and a semi-sextile again, and all the midpoints all end up creating trine sextile trine. It’s just a fascinating geometry in this because the midpoint of Mars and Venus is 10° of Libra, that’s Mercury. The midpoint of Jupiter and Pluto is nine plus Aquarius, that’s Saturn. And then the midpoint of Mars-Jupiter is 9° 55 minutes Sagittarius. And the midpoint of Mercury-Pluto is 10° Sagittarius. And you take those midpoints and they’re all trine and sextile to one another. And again, a lot of it comes back to Venus, I agree with you, Austin. But I like this new Moon. There’s an irritating factor to it though, but I think ultimately, there’s some deep structure that really, really works out. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
AC: Yeah. And intersecting with that point, one of the ways I’ve been thinking about especially the first half of September to a certain degree overall is shoring things up, doing some building, figuring out how to get ready for the next round of stress tests because October gets progressively rougher and then November is a storm and so you got to batten down the hatches for the storm. You can’t do repairs and upgrades in the middle of a storm. And I think that as you’ve illustrated rather beautifully with the midpoints in addition to the aspects, that looks like trapezoid is a solid shape, right? You can place that on the ground and it’s not going to get knocked over easily. Building out whether it’s business plans or financial arrangements or friendships and relationships or health stuff, just building out some nice reliable trapezoids and so they are mundane trapezoids as opposed to the mystical rectangle. There’s mundane trapezoids and I think-
RL: Austin, what you’re saying is really true. The Hubers point out that this particular trapezoid basically has trines internally. In other words, the trines are between Mars and Pluto and Venus and Jupiter. That’s internal. External, there’s a square, a semi-sextile, a quincunx, and a semi-sextile. That’s not nice. It’s stable, but it’s irritating as hell. As a matter of fact, the Hubers call this particular pattern of trampoline because we’re bouncing about but internally, we’re stable. Inwardly, we’re idealistically. Outwardly, we’re hypersensitive and stressed. Interesting.
AC: Yeah. And so, just to riff on that, it’s interesting to think in terms of the external angles of a shape, right? If we took a Grand Cross which is hard aspects inside now, two oppositions, four squares and you look at the side, it just makes a box, right? I got obsessed briefly with World War Two era tanks tank design a couple of months ago, and one of the things that came up that actually I think taught me something about aspects was sloped armor. If you want to have maximum impact like penetration power against the surface you’re firing a shell or you’re exerting any force, if you have a right angle, if you have a 90-degree angle, that’s maximum impact, right? That’s the worst kind of car accident to get into is getting T-boned, right? And so, for military vehicles, you do sloped armor because things will tend to bunk off. You’re either trine or usually sextile armor, right? Because you’re not creating an angle that can be intersected with in a hostile way. It’s literally a friendly angle.
RL: It’s like the difference between square, sextiles and trines, isn’t it?
Austion Coppock: Yeah, it’s kind of exactly like that.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up one of the things we’ve mentioned in passing Rick was the Venus-Jupiter trine which is one of the other characteristics of this new Moon because there’s something very affirming about that that’s like saying yes to or firming up plans in a very positive and optimistic way. But then at the same time, Venus is also squaring Pluto. So there’s also this intense or obsessive quality to some of that new Moon energy and some of the Venus energy at the time which is a little bit complicated.
RL: Yeah, it’s a complicated new Moon and it’s easy to look at this new Moon and go new Moon trining Uranus, wow, it’ll be changed, it’ll make things happen in a way that might move us in a better direction ultimately. But then when you start looking at the complexity of that Mars-Pluto, Venus-Pluto, Venus-Jupiter, and the Jupiter-Mars quincunx, all of a sudden this becomes a lot more complicated.
AC: Well, about the Sun and Moon exactly trine Uranus, right, we talk about Uranus as initiating change or catalyzing change. Catalyzing is one of my favorite words for Uranus. But there’s also part of that dance is adapting to changes that have already happened, right? And I see a trine especially as a very, oh, I see what’s happening here, I’m going to make these changes in relationship to the changes that already happened. Right. That process of change begetting change, right? Oh, I have a new job. Now I have to wake up at a different time so I’m going to rearrange my evening. Right? Or there was an earthquake and so now, I’m going to think about what I’m going to do with my next month which has changed because of a sudden thing. And yeah, again, this keeps coming back to me as like an opportunity to adapt to the data that’s come in and build that nice stable trapezoid upon which to bounce which is good, bounce something which has bounce like that’s shock absorbers.
RL: And there’s also the Mercury opposition to Chiron in this mix, too. It’s a complicated dance.
CB: Yeah. And I also noticed that we’re halfway between in September when we hit this lunation, the eclipse cycles, so we’re three months since our last set of eclipses in the mutable signs and we’re about three months out from our next set of eclipses in mutable signs. We’re at the midpoint between eclipses, which can sometimes be a little bit of a turning point as well relative to whatever was started in the last set of eclipses and relative to wherever that’s heading in the next set that’s coming up later this year.
RL: That was a cool graphic.
CB: Yeah, so that’s from Archetypal Explorer who’s our sponsor this month, which we’ll get to later, but they have lots of cool graphics like that such as this which shows the Sun and Moon conjunctions, especially when they get close in latitude and longitude, which is what eventually leads to an eclipse. All right. One thing I should mention at this point because it happens really early in the month when we’re getting all of those nice combinations with planets in Libra, especially with Venus in Libra and with Mercury in Libra is our electional chart, our auspicious election for this month which actually takes place, I believe, on September 9th, 2021 around 6:15 p.m. with 24 Aquarius rising. We’re taking advantage of a triple conjunction of Mercury, the Moon and Venus in the sign of Libra. Here’s the chart set for Denver roughly, so this is going to be an Aquarius rising chart. You want to adjust the chart for your location on September 9th until the Ascendant is at about 24° of Aquarius. And if you put the Ascendant at 24 Aquarius in your location, then Jupiter should be exactly conjunct the Ascendant in this chart in a day chart, so you have an Aquarius rising chart. Saturn is the ruler of the Ascendant which is still retrograde but is in its domicile in the first whole sign house in a day chart, which is a pretty good ruler of the Ascendant. But instead of placing Saturn right on the Ascendant which can slow things down a little bit, we’re placing Jupiter right in the Ascendant in this electional chart. The Moon is up in Libra in the 9th whole sign house and it’s applying to a nice conjunction with Venus in the 9th house, which is in the very last degree of Libra at 29° of Libra. Mercury is also there in Libra at 13°. It’s just coming off of that nice trine with Saturn that Austin had mentioned previously. And the Moon is technically enclosed between the two benefics because it’s separating from a trine with Jupiter and it’s applying to a conjunction with Venus. In some locations, the Moon may still be applying to a trine with Jupiter, but that’s just as good and that would be pretty good as well.
This is a good Jupiter election, a good Saturn election, a good 9th house election for education, philosophy, and other 9th house activities. It’s not a very good chart for shared finances and other 8th house topics, shared resources because it puts Mars in the 8th house in a day chart which can lead to strife when it comes to shared resources or other people’s money. But otherwise, it’s a pretty solid chart as a general-purpose election on September 9th and we’re doing it early in the month because then it’s also clear of Mercury’s retrograde station which happens later in September which is a decidedly less great time to initiate new ventures and undertakings.
AC: Yeah, Mercury still has plenty of speed and brightness at this point.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. And it’s also the last period not just before it gets retrograde, but also before Mars moves into Libra and joins the party and begins that co-presence with Mercury again, which will eventually culminate I believe in another conjunction eventually, so just a kind of period to take advantage of additionally, like you said, Austin, the last little bits of the good smelling period of Venus in Libra.
RL: Yeah, this is like a get it while you can chart.
AC: Yeah, going out of business sale.
RL: Going into business sale, whatever. Yeah, it’s good.
CB: Yeah, get it while the getting is good. That is the main electional chart that we’re highlighting this month. Leisa Schaim and I picked out four or five other auspicious electional charts on the Auspicious Elections Podcast this month, which is available through our page on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast, sign up for the $5 tier or any of the ones above that to get access to that podcast which is available now. All right. Let’s go back to that first and second week. We’re really getting into the second week at this point of September. And we’ve covered the lunatin, we’ve covered the lunation and its trine with Uranus. Where do we go after that at this point? I mean, eventually Venus does a few days later on Friday the 10th move into Scorpio, which is-
AC: Yeah, we should talk about the ingresses because it really changes things up.
CB: Yeah, the ingress of Venus in particular or other ingresses?
AC: Well, Venus and then Mars.
CB: Right. Mars takes place just a couple days later when it moves into Libra on Tuesday the 14th.
AC: It’s a pretty significant vibe shift.
CB: Yeah, so vibe shift around late second week, early third week of September between the 10th and the 14th, basically?
AC: Right. Venus goes from Libra into Scorpio, right? And we can talk about the different outfits that planets wear in signs and how they interact with the territory. Obviously, Venus in Scorpio is much more classically golf couture, but I think what’s more important for the last couple or for at least the first couple of weeks of Venus in Libra is that Venus is going to be playing the Saturn-Uranus game, right? Venus has to square Uranus–
RL: You mean the first couple of weeks of Venus in Scorpio not Libra.
AC: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I misspoke, but yeah, in Scorpio Venus has to play the Saturn-Uranus game, right? And I would say that outweighs whatever essential dignity or lack thereof Venus has in Scorpio
CB: Yeah. Just to set the foundation for that, what is Venus in Scorpio like? It’s Venus opposite to her domiciles or one of the traditional places associated with Venus which is Taurus. It’s in the sign of Venus’s what some of the traditional texts called exile or another word I’ve been using is antithesis just because the sign opposite to a planets domicile often has what we consider to be opposite or almost antithetical qualities to that planet. What are some of the antithetical qualities that Venus has when it’s moving through the sign of Scorpio?
AC: Well, so Venus’s time in Scorpio is an interesting example of exile because you still have Venus as being a trigon lord or having some triplicity dignity in Scorpio because it’s a water sign and Venus does water. And that’s different than Aries with hot dry, not a drop to drink. And so, Venus in Scorpio isn’t lacking in sensitivity or feeling, but the idea is that there’s sort of a macabre menagerie of things to enjoy or instead with that preserved sensitivity be grossed out by so I said goth, right? It’s like, I don’t know, are graveyards beautiful? I might think so. But generally speaking, a lot of Scorpio significations line up with what most people regard as gross or repulsive or scary rather than attractive, calming, harmony producing.
CB: Right. Venus in Scorpio likes things that are different than or not the things that most people would consider to be appealing.
AC: Right, in a position to either be annoyed by or to find the hidden beauty within the potentially grotesque or macabre or frightening.
RL: Thomas Moore, the guy who wrote The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino and wrote all the soul books, the first book he wrote was a book called Dark Eros. To me, that’s Venus in Scorpio. And dark isn’t just bad, it’s just the other side of the Venus in Taurus where love is simple and lovely and it feels good and there’s sensual pleasure. And in Scorpio, one of the case histories that he used in that book on Dark Eros was Marquis de Sade. He had pleasure. I’m not promoting this, I’m just saying that Venus in Scorpio has that darkness attached to it which of course can be transmuted like Scorpio does, but it’s certainly the opposite of where Venus would prefer to be.
AC: And I like to use the term can be transmuted because I think can be transmuted is a really good statement because I often hear difficult configurations in astrology spoken of as if they could not possibly be worked with or on the contrary that they will automatically be transmuted, right? If we’re talking about transmutation or we’re talking about alchemy, we’re talking about a very conscious and classically like nitpicky process where the transmutation of a substance into something else doesn’t just happen by itself and it doesn’t happen without knowledge and effort.
RL: Right. I think of it like being in Olympics and certain things like diving you get two scores, you get a score on the execution and then you get a separate score on level of difficulty. And sometimes it’s the highest levels of difficulty that can create the highest overall scores if you execute them correctly and I think Venus in Scorpio is like that.
AC: I think some charts are like that.
RL: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
CB: That’s one of the things I like about astrology is just anything that can happen will happen and there will be somebody that will manifest some version of a combination in a constructive way and there will be somebody that manifests that in a destructive way as well as every possible shade of gray in between. So sometimes, I think that’s one of the charming things, but also one of the difficulties with older astrological texts is they’ll have a tendency to put everything in terms of extremes and to just say what the most extremely negative or possible manifestation of any combination is and you’re supposed to infer what the shades of gray are in between. When it comes to Venus though traveling through Scorpio over the next month or so, you pointed out Austin that it is first going to encounter, one of its first encounters is going to be that square with Saturn in Aquarius, right?
AC: Yeah. And it’s rough to be in the whatever the graveyard gallery after cloud floating through Libra and you’re dropped into the cremation grounds, it’s like, okay, well, there’s some here and then you have Saturn and then you have Uranus. And we could say, honestly, when you encounter Saturn at this point, you’re encountering a very stressed-out Saturn who’s been waging a war with Uranus to try to keep things under control for at least the whole year.
RL: And I think you said this or alluded to it that Venus squares the Saturn on September 16th and then opposes Uranus on the 23rd and then at the very end of the month, Venus squares Jupiter, so Venus has her work cut out for her for darn sure.
CB: Right, running through the gauntlet or running across the milk crates, metaphorically.
AC: Well, it’s the milk crates while Saturn’s yelling at you.
CB: Yeah, to get off the milk crates.
AC: And it’s Venus. So, Venus is like my primary role within the solar system is not to be the American Ninja Warrior. It’s to create works of haunting and uplifting beauty and to redeem creation through joy. It’s like why am I on these milk crates and why are you shooting at me? But yeah, on a practical level, Venus Saturn in whatever relationships a person and especially if they’re erotic or romantic to whatever degree, its boundaries. Venus Saturn will like point at and probably poke at whatever boundaries aren’t working perfectly mutually in a relationship.
RL: Yeah, to the extent of sending someone running for the hills saying none of this is worth it.
AC: My boundary is actually the county line and you need to get the fuck out.
CB: Yeah, that’s the first thing that Venus runs into in Scorpio is that hard boundary or wall with Saturn and that can have like a dampening or a cooling effect on Venus and on Venus’s otherwise tendency to want to merge things to suddenly run into a wall where Saturn is pushing it away or is saying no to something that Venus otherwise wants to be doing. But then it’s weird that we shift from that very quickly to a very opposite energy of a much more freeing and a much more destabilizing but also liberatory energy of Venus separating from Saturn and then immediately applying to that opposition with Uranus in Taurus.
AC: Right. And so that’s an interesting set of days, that’s what? Around a week?
RL: Yeah, the 16th through the 23rd.
AC: Yeah, where we have Venus between the rays of Saturn and Uranus, between the structural requirements and the various changes, right? Like maybe we throw out all the old rules and rewrite them from beginning, maybe we just rewrite this one thing. But there’s that uncertainty of what do we change, what should change. It’s the factor that is in a sense calling for a rewrite or a rebuild of the Saturn walls or structure.
CB: Right or even the Venus hitting Saturn and there being like a boundary and a no and even a rejection or the rejection or loss of a relationship in some sense. But, out of that, Venus then walks into Uranus and starts to experience a freeing from those restrictions of Saturn. And instead maybe it’s the being liberated by being suddenly single and not having those restrictions holding it back. And what is it like in that context?
AC: Yeah. I just wanna say I think Uranus plays well with Venus in some ways, but Uranus often liberates Venus from relationship itself which is not always positive or what Venus wanted. But there’s a difference between being liberated from the shitty parts of a given bond and just being liberated from the whole relationship, right? There’s babies and bathwater happening there.
CB: Yeah, which initially might seem liberating. But then at some point there might be looking back and sort of wistfulness of the support and the sort of structure that the relationship itself gave.
RL: Yeah. Yeah, well, into this mix there’s a number of other trines that happen in between and around those squares on the same day as Venus squares Saturn, that same day on the 16th the Sun is trining Pluto. And then Mercury trines Jupiter just a few days later followed by Mars trining Saturn. And so it’s really interesting because although the Venus stuff is really difficult, it’s almost like there’s some place to go but not to Venus.
AC: Right. Well, I like that because especially with that Mercury-Jupiter trine we’re really looking at like, “Okay, so not feeling very good about this. But what kind of situation do the planets give us to work it out?” Mercury-Jupiter in air signs is opening the airwaves for sort of fair-minded communication, but we also have Mars having moved into Libra making trouble as far as delicately balanced situations go.
RL: Yeah. And you know that the Mercury trine Jupiter is another one of those aspects that because of Mercury’s retrograde, Mercury will trine Jupiter on September 20 then again on October 3rd while it’s retrograding and then again on Halloween on October 31st on the third final pass. And so there’s something about that Mercury trining Jupiter because it extends over a period of a month and a week or so that kind of gives us a little bit of additional blessing from that aspect.
AC: Yeah, it’s like three opportunities to kind of figure it out.
RL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’ll need it.
AC: No doubt. There’s a lot to figure out.
CB: You don’t usually figure things out on the first pass. The first pass is like your first attempt. But sometimes it takes that second and the third attempt to get it right.
RL: Yeah. Yeah, agreed.
CB: All right, so let’s back up to the other ingress that we mentioned. So it’s like Venus goes into Scorpio, and all of that begins that we’ve just been talking about on September 10th. The other major ingress that happens right after is Mars going into Libra on September 14th. So that’s the other side of the coin in some sense compared to Venus going into Scorpio is Mars doing the same thing and moving into one of its opposite signs or its exile or its antithesis or what have you because it’s moving into a sign ruled by Venus which often has opposite or antithetical qualities. And that’s what Mars has to work with this month once it makes that ingress for the entire second half of September.
RL: Well, yeah. And that mutual reception is kind of interesting. But what I find interesting about Mars in Libra, it always makes me think of martial arts. Because Mars is obviously combat and martial and Venus relating to Libra. Mars doesn’t like being in Libra, but there’s something about that that can work if Mars can figure out a way to play nicely to get along with others which it doesn’t wanna do.
AC: Right. Well, and that’s part of the challenge with Mars in Libra is that, as I said earlier, Libra is a place where things are exquisitely and delicately balanced, whether it’s the design of a web page or the dynamic in a working relationship. And Mars doesn’t do well with delicate things that it can’t bump into, right? And so it’s like on one side you have, how do you keep Mars from fucking up all the nicely arranged Libra things? And the other side it’s like, well, what do you give Mars to do so Mars doesn’t go fucking crazy? And so when you were talking about the martial arts examples, the first thing that came to mind was capoeira which is very beautiful and where you don’t hit each other. There’s a timing and sparring practice, but it’s done rhythmically to music, their traditional instruments. And you don’t kick each other in the face. And so it’s like, “Oh, Mars can do that.” It’s a hell of a workout. They’re handstands, they’re flips, they’re high kicks, there’s rhythm. And there’s some contest, but you don’t have the the crude impacts of the purely martial. And so, yeah, just figuring out what to do with Mars that one is good for Mars and also preserves all the things that Venus just set up in Libra, right?
CB: Yeah, and so that Mars doesn’t just come in like a wrecking ball and knock all of that down?
AC: Right. We don’t want the iron fist training Mars which is like, “Yeah, I can punch through this wall where all these paintings are hanging.” It’s like, “That’s amazing that you can do that. Please don’t punch through the wall. ”
CB: Right.
RL: It’s a ram in a China shop, a bull, yeah, whatever.
AC: Yeah, going through giant halberd forms in a China shop where there’s an eight-foot whirling blade. And there are irreplaceable paintings on the wall, and there are delicate and beautiful statues set up perfectly.
CB: Yeah, so one of the shifts that we’re having then as we went from last month we had the Mercury-Mars conjunction in Virgo which we talked about is like one of the metaphors that we used was editing and how a good editor can sort of use a scalpel to slice a piece of written work and to improve it as a result of that incisive quality of Mars and the sort of constructive quality of knowing when to cut something out or when to edit something out that all good editors have. So here we’re switching to a Mars-Mercury co-presence especially because Mercury is gonna slow down and retrograde and go back towards Mars earlier in Libra, and I think they’ll meet up again. What’s a better metaphor than for Mercury and Mars conjoining in the sign of Libra compared to that conjunction in the sign of Virgo?
AC: Hmm. Well, if you wanna be viciously passive aggressive in a socially acceptable way, I suppose that it’s strong for that.
CB: Viciously passive aggressive in a socially–Yeah, so like gossiping is a Mercury, Mars, and Libra thing perhaps?
AC: Absolutely.
CB: Which is like the spreading–
AC: But don’t actually do that, right?
CB: Yeah, don’t use the electional chart to gossip. That would be a funny use of electional astrology. But no, that’s a good metaphor for that in terms of the spreading of things. Because Libra is a social sign, and all of the air signs are more social signs. So that’s a good analogy.
RL: Yeah, it could be someone or it could be a situation where someone is verbally aggressive in a relationship.
CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely. And–
AC: Yeah, it’s gonna sharpen tongues.
CB: Yeah. So Mars is ingress into Libra sharpening tongues for the rest of September in the second half of September and then perhaps that Mercury station later in the month when Mercury stations retrograde just emphasizing that in terms of miscommunications that could lead to sort of verbal sparring or verbal altercations of sorts especially in relationships.
RL: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, there’s a little bit of even more than the normal than you would have with a standard Mercury retrograde, your Mercury Retrograde incoming situation. You really wanna do the think twice before you send the angry email, think twice about maybe how you interpreted a communication. Maybe you reacted, and they didn’t actually mean that, etc. etc. But that think twice about what you say and what you hear I would say goes double with Mars co-present with Mercury during this period.
CB: Yeah, you might have that initial impulse to fire off the quick, sharply-worded email letter.
AC: The strongly-worded letter.
CB: Right. Yeah, and that might feel good in the moment or it might seem like the right thing to do that initial impulse, but you may regret and have to walk that back later.
RL: Yeah, and you might not want to. You might resist doing that.
CB: Yeah, that’s always the hardest part is having to own up to that once you’ve made a mistake and you’ve done the impulsive thing that looked like the right call at the time. But clearly in retrospect, you ended up being the jerk in that instance.
AC: Yeah, you can totally dig a hole with your tongue.
CB: Mhm. Right.
RL: I’m not going there. That image just doesn’t sit right.
AC: Well, no. It’s an image that’s supposed to discourage, right?
RL: Yeah. Okay, it did. I’m not doing that.
AC: Good. Or repulse might be the right term.
RL: Mhm.
CB: Speaking of repulse, so let’s see. We’re into the September 12th through 18th time frame.
AC: Sorry, Chris. We gotta talk about the fact that Mars is basically invisible now. Mars is deeply combust. You might be able to just barely catch a hint of red with it being where it is and on the western horizon right at sunset if you have clear skies. But Mars is in the process of disappearing if not disappeared entirely. And we’re gonna have invisible Mars for quite some time, right? And that means that we’re heading into the Mars-Sun conjunction which has its own meaning. But as a piece of a cycle, it’s exactly the halfway point between Mars retrogrades. I think we all remember last year’s Mars retrograde.
CB: Mhm. Yeah.
AC: I believe it was 19 months in Aries. It was Mars’s retrograde. And so this is interesting. This is the halfway point. This is the Cazimi, the being in the furnace heart of the Sun for Mars. This is the end of a two-year cycle. This is the beginning of another two-year cycle. Mars disappears on the western horizon and in several weeks will reemerge and become visible again on the eastern horizon as morning Mars. Because this is a longer cycle, right? It’s not that everything about the cycle will become clear in one moment, but this is the phase of Mars that we’re in. It’s sort of the end of a series of campaigns and adventures and challenges. And I would say for cohering with this, the right angle is looking back on the challenges you took on, the challenges that came and found you, the monsters you slew, the monsters that made off with your fingers and toes and how you acted, what your tactics were, what to learn from this series of campaigns. And I don’t know what to say. And to keep an eye out if we’re talking about a couple weeks here. Keep an eye out for what is the next cycle of campaigns, adventures, and challenges. What do you think, Rick?
RL: Yeah. I don’t know that I would have said that as clearly as you, but I think that that makes a lot of sense.
AC: Okay, well thank you.
RL: Yeah, I don’t have anything to add to it. I think that this whole period of time. Like you say, Mars was in Aries almost as long as March lasted last year. And now that it’s in the opposite sign obviously not thrilled about being so far away from its home and being lost behind the Sun at the same time, yeah, is not a happy camper.
AC: And that’s a really good point that the spirit of invisibility and the exact conjunction happens in Libra, right? And this makes a lot of sense on them. If some of this Mars conjunct the Sun this reviewing a whole two-year chunk is gonna have to do with grappling with feelings of powerlessness. Cause Mars doesn’t have much power in Libra. And I think that a lot of people have grappled with feelings of powerlessness over the last two years. There’s been a lot of big malefic shit that a single individual couldn’t turn the tide of more so than on average.
CB: Yeah, the other thing is that Mars under the beams does better and will have a tendency to act more behind the scenes. And some of the actions that take place won’t be out in the open and won’t be necessarily out front but instead will be done in private and may only become clear later on.
RL: Yeah, and I think that that probably is supported by the fact that one of the things that Mars can do while it’s in Libra is strategize. It may not be good at delivering a punch, but it’s good about thinking when the best time to do it might be. And maybe that’s because it doesn’t have the power or the impetus to deliver that punch. Of course I don’t mean physically, I mean any sort of way. And so I think that Mars does become doubly invisible.
AC: And I think that’s great and reminds me of an MMA fighter whose Sun and Mars in Libra, and that’s Holly Holm who famously defeated the seemingly invincible Ronda Rousey. And what Holly did and how Holly did that and I think what that Mars Sun in Libra is good at is it’s not so much about how cool are my punches. It’s the know thy enemy. It’s to understand what you’re up against which is usually Mars is very self-focused and it’s like, “I’m going to work on my potency, my abilities, my whatever.” But in Libra there’s that, what are their abilities? What am I dealing with here? And whether that’s career challenges, relationship challenges, or creative challenges, whatever it is, whatever you’re up against.
RL: Yeah. Austin, you’re the expert here in martial arts. But when I talked about Mars in Libra as a martial artist, I was kind of thinking maybe aikido from what I know more than other forms is you’re really working with the energy of your opponent. You’re relying on your opponent to expend energy that you then make work on your behalf. And so that’s kind of like how that Mars can actually be effective in an ineffective position.
AC: Yeah, I like that because a lot of the aikido training is literally sensitivity and being able to anticipate. Because the classical aikido moves are you’re not doing something to a person, you’re dealing with what they’re trying to do to you. And, again, in a sort of more rough and tumble context, if you watch the short fight between Holly Holm and Ronda Rousey, it kind of looks like that Ronda with Mars in Aries conjunct Rahu literally charges at her several times. And there’s almost like a matador’s ole as Holly’s side steps and kind of gives her a push and Rhonda stumbles. It’s not as pretty as like a rehearsed aikido form but very much that principle. And also aikido is where we have the goal of the conflict is to stop the conflict rather than to triumph. There are some contexts where you want to be the champion, right? And the set parameters of the contest are either you are lying at their feet or they are lying at your feet. Whereas the set parameters, the goal in aikido and different arts as well is to extinguish the conflict itself so nobody’s fighting in the–
RL: More Libra. More Libra.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody’s fighting in the beautiful art studio, right? Cause that’s the point. It’s not to win the fight of the art studio.
RL: At the expensive paintings on the wall.
AC: Yeah, it’s stop fighting in the art studio.
CB: I was looking through examples to see if I could find some natives with Mars and Libra examples, especially with combinations with Mercury in Libra and the Sun. And one of the funny ones I just found in searching through my database was AOC or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has a Mercury-Mars-Sun conjunction in Libra and just had some really sick burns on Twitter when she’s getting into verbal sparring matches with other politicians and stuff like that. I think that’s a really good example of some of that energy of a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Libra.
RL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, so the Mercury-Mars conjunction though in Libra or that co-presence could be a good time for sick burns. But with the retrograde later on in the month, just be careful that it’s not something that you’re gonna have to walk back cause that’s not fun.
AC: Right. Don’t spit into the wind. Don’t spit hot fire into the wind.
CB: Yeah, or just know that it might come back around at some point. And even the wittiest thing, the thing that seems wittiest and the most searing can sometimes come back ten fold on you.
RL: Yeah.
CB: All right. Because that puts us at the halfway point through the month, I wanted to mention our sponsor since I’ve already showed one of his graphs which is from archetypalexplorer.com. And this is an online astrology program. It’s a subscription service that you can subscribe to, and it gives you the ability to look at your transits and to generate some pretty sweet transit graphs both for mundane events–So for example, this is one of the graphs we’ve shown showing the exact hits of the Saturn-Uranus square over the course of the year and to put in different planets and things like that. So you can do that both for mundane events as well as for personal transits to your birth chart. And it also has the ability to generate some interpretations and some delineations that come from the work of Richard Tarnas, and he also recently integrated some delineations from the astrologer Renn Butler in his book The Archetypal Universe. So that’s pretty cool, and it also gives you access to that entire book now online which is available as part of Archetypal Explorer. So you can sign up for a free seven-day trial by going to archetypalexplorer.com, and it gives you full access to the program so that you can generate charts and export them as images and do all sorts of other fun stuff. So I definitely recommend checking that out. And I want to say thanks to Kyle who makes the program cause we’ve been using those graphics for the past year, and it really helps to visualize some of this stuff a lot better. All right. So we’re moving into the second half of September at this point I believe, right?
RL: Well, we’ve been talking about the second half or the middle. We’ve been talking about the middle portion for about 45 minutes. I would say we’re on our way to the finale.
CB: Yeah, so we’ve talked about Mars and Libra which begins on September 14th. We mentioned Venus hitting that square with Saturn which goes exact on Thursday the 16th. That’s all–
RL: And also there’s a Sun trine Pluto that exact same day within just a few hours.
CB: Right. Correct. So then we start getting into eventually our second lunation of the month which is a full moon in Pisces on the 20th of September, right?
AC: Yes. Yeah, and it’s at the very end of Pisces. End of Virgo, end of Pisces. So I was looking at this and kind of hemming and hawing, and then I realized it was interesting. And I was like, “Okay, so what planets rule the Sun and the Moon in this lunation?” And it’s Mercury and Jupiter, Mercury for Virgo, Jupiter for Pisces. And then I said, “Oh, goodness. They’re trine. Thatt’s wonderful.” So the–
CB: They’re exactly trine?
AC: That happy, first of three trines that we were looking out for Mercury trine for Mercury and Jupiter earlier also has the job of kind of stabilizing this lunation and I think making a happier, full Moon and a more fortuitous full Moon than it might otherwise be.
RL: I don’t think it’s enough to make it a happy full Moon though.
AC: Yeah, a happier.
RL: I think it does ameliorate it a bit, but you can’t go to the Mercury-Jupiter trine without noting that Mercury is also squaring Pluto. And although many astrologers don’t use semi sextiles in work like this, the fact of the matter is that a semi sextile means that if a planet is nice to one it’s not nice to the other. And so we have the Mercury making this lovely trine to Jupiter while it’s making a square to Pluto. And I think that makes it a little bit more difficult. And on top of that, we also have the full Moon itself that is being semi squared and sesquisquared by Uranus. And so there’s almost like there’s no out. What’s interesting is that the new Moon had all these sweet trines all around. And this instead, it’s not a mystic rectangle. It’s actually a misfit rectangle. Because we have a semi square sesquisquare semi square sesquisquare. In other words, Uranus is a square and a half to the Sun. The Sun is a half a square to Venus. Venus is a square and a half to the Moon, and then the Moon is a half a square to Uranus again. And so there’s no easy out on the Moon itself. The Mercury-Jupiter is very cool. And thank you very much. We need it. But I don’t like this one nearly as much as– And in the Mercury-Jupiter, it’s 1/30th of a degree. It’s two minutes of arc at the moment of the full Moon, so it’s nailed.
CB: Yeah, that is extremely close. Mercury is also 6.2 days away from stationing retrograde at this point. So it’s already slowing down, and it’s gonna have–Cause usually if we had a trine between Mercury and Jupiter, it would zip by. But it’s actually elongating that trine and also elongating the square with Pluto at the same time.
RL: Yeah, yeah.
CB: It’s also interesting in terms of outer planets that this full Moon in Pisces is pretty close to conjunct Neptune as well. It’s seven degrees off, but that’s the other major energy that’s giving a tinge to this full Moon in Pisces.
RL: Agreed.
CB: So some of those themes we talked about earlier in terms of Neptune of things being illusory and sometimes that being problematic or other times that being a good thing. So–
AC: Yeah, one thing I would say for Neptune and illusory is that sometimes it’s wisest to just do something that you know is illusory but enjoy.
RL: Mhm.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Instead of all this, I don’t know, confusing ontological judgment about what’s real and what’s not just being like, “Yeah, I’m gonna play some video games on that full Moon.” or like, “I’m going to read an imaginative novel, and I’m not going to pretend that it is a recounting of facts.” You’re gonna enjoy the Neptune without having to worry about, “Is this going to be revealed to be false? Or this or that.”
CB: Earlier this month Leisa and I were rewatching movies for our astrologers episode, and one of the ones that we watched was the first Matrix. And halfway through–Spoilers, but it’s a 20-year-old movie at this point. Cypher goes back into the Matrix who becomes the bad guy. And he wants to be put back into the Matrix because he doesn’t wanna live in the real world, and he has a famous scene where he’s eating a steak. And he says, “I know the steak isn’t real, and I know this is just my brain synapses being fooled into thinking that it’s real. But I don’t care. And what’s most important is my sensory experience of this is something good instead of being subjected to the reality that everything is bad.” So maybe that’s a interesting analogy or what you’re saying made me think of Austin in terms of the choice.
AC: Oh, in that choice. Two-thirds of American culture right now is like, “Play a game on your phone, play a game on your computer, watch a movie, watch a show, watch YouTube.” Taking a break from reality is certainly a good thing in moderation.
CB: In moderation. Right.
RL: Yeah, but we’ve taken a break from reality culturally on a semi-permanent one-way street into some sort of schizophrenic cultists.
AC: Yeah. I don’t know. How many decades do you think the break has lasted for?
RL: I’ve begun to develop a notion that Jupiter and Neptune are actually the same planet.
CB: Mhm.
AC: This is very Neptunian.
RL: No, wait. That Neptune is simply Jupiter who’s escaped from Saturn. That’s all. That Jupiter and Neptune are actually both expansive, but Jupiter has to remain logical. Even in its opinions, it has to remain grounded enough to answer to dad or to logic or to Saturn or to authority where Neptune is the exact same thing but there’s no one home to say stop. Just a thought.
AC: No, I like that. I think that also spotlights the advantage of Jupiter is that Jupiter brings things that can become real within time and space whereas Neptune is like, “Maybe. We’ll see.” So I think that’s Saturnarial.
RL: But playing the devil’s advocate, Austin, when Neptune manifests something, when it becomes real, it’s way more awesome than whatever Jupiter gets.
AC: Yeah, I would say that Neptune always needs help from those within inside the Saturn fence.
RL: I totally agree.
AC: But, yeah, I agree.
RL: But it’s like a grand trine or some of the aspects that I like to work with, they’re totally valid but they need a good square or something to anchor them into reality. Otherwise, they just fly off and no one notices.
CB: It’s a good point though that there’s a freedom component to both Jupiter as well as Neptune. And Jupiter has that optimism, but it’s a little bit more grounded in reality typically whereas Neptune’s optimism is boundless and often not grounded necessarily.
RL: And Jupiter can’t get away with shit.
AC: I also wanna say this about Neptune cause I don’t think it gets talked about enough. Neptune is also limitless fear and paranoia and pain, right? The negative sensitivity and negative dreaming is also completely unbounded. It’s the blood ocean. Yes, and I would say even the compassion that Neptune usefully provides can sometimes be without limits.
RL: Yeah, I totally agree.
AC: But when you start having compassion while you’re reading a history book, it starts becoming a slaughterhouse nightmare. No matter what period you’re reading or what part of the world. And that’s Neptune unlimitedness.
CB: Right.
RL: Well, the Neptune association with fear is–The word confusion etymologically means with melting together which is ideal if you’re in love. That’s confusion. But the problem is that the ego don’t like losing its perspective. It doesn’t like it when Saturn’s gone and there’s no boundary. And it can’t tell where I end and where you begin. And so with Neptune, we have this existential fear that kicks in because we don’t know where we are, when we are, who we are because there’s no boundary. Saturn’s not there.
AC: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s really nice etymology.
CB: Yeah, so Neptune ups the sensitivity and ups the compassion. And that can be a positive thing and channeled into very good things, and sometimes that can become overly sensitive or overly compassionate to the extent that you don’t take care of your own needs or what have you. So that’s one of the things that’s gonna be highlighted with this full Moon taking place later in September conjunct Neptune in Pisces on the 20th of September. Let’s see if there’s anything else we need to mention there. We mentioned the Mercury-Jupiter trine.
RL: Yeah. There’s one other thing I’d like to mention, and that is the fact that Mercury, Saturn, and the Moon, so we got a full Moon. Mercury, Saturn–I’m sorry. Mercury, the Moon, and Pluto. Let me do this again. Mercury, the Moon, and Saturn, sorry, are really really tight, all less about a half a degree orb septiles, so they got a septile triangle three points on a seven-pointed star that creates a symmetry. And this, I believe, makes this particular full Moon again more complicated than it appears. The Moon to Mercury is 22 minutes of orb, the Moon to Saturn is 25 minutes of orb, and Mercury to Saturn is almost a degree. It’s 47 minutes of orb. And so we have something here coming in that’s unexplainable, that’s alien, that’s other than normal. And I think it puts a little bit of a discomfort and maybe even a–I don’t wanna say sinister, but something that’s hard to grasp that’s at this full Moon that I think is important to mention.
CB: That’s funny. It reminds me of in late June when Neptune stationed. There was a disclosure about unidentified–
AC: I was just thinking about that.
CB: Yeah, about aliens or about just the government just was just like, “Yes, we’ve identified 20 incidences of unidentified objects flying around. And we have no idea what it is.” And it was the confirmation of the unknown. I think that was the key word that we took from that.
RL: Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s part of the Neptune component. Before we move on from the Mercury trine Jupiter, we have the Mercury trine Jupiter and the sort of optimism of that. But what is a Mercury-Pluto square like? Since we’re not just dealing with the full moon and Mercury being trine Jupiter and square Pluto at the same time but also Mercury really slowing down and grinding into that Pluto square at the same time.
RL: Yeah. It pretty much holds that position because when it turns retrograde, that square is perfected again on October 1st and then a third time on November 2nd. But what that really means is that between September 20th or so all the way through somewhere around October 3rd that Mercury is holding that position that is square Pluto. And this can be some intense verbiage. This can be some real power plays verbally out in public that may bring some things out that we thought we knew and all of a sudden it’s not true at all or we didn’t know was true and all of a sudden we learn it. There’s something here that dredges things out and upward that I think can shift a little bit of a power game.
CB: Mhm.
AC: Yeah, I agree with the dredging things out and upward. The combination of nearly simultaneous aspects from Pluto and Jupiter. Pluto is what’s down there to be dredged or considered, but then Jupiter has a very buoyant upward moving energy, the moving upward to that like looking down from the clouds like having a big perspective. And so on one level I would just say, “Oh. Mercury-Pluto, it brings paranoia to Mercury.” It’s like, “What is out there that I can’t see that might be a problem?” Whereas Jupiter does the opposite and gives confidence in one’s ability to deal with a situation to bring it to a good place or whatever. And so there’s a little bit of a cancellation or just, yeah, mutual cancellation in terms of like the mindset cause we’ve got Jupiter buoying and Pluto paranoiaing.
RL: Paranoing.
AC: Yeah, paranoing. And it’s also worth noting that we have Jupiter on a very strong star for all of this. We have Jupiter on Spica this whole time, and Spica does a good job of just reinforcing a lot of Mercurial significations. Yeah, in a natal chart, it can give a great talent for design or the sort of structural mathematical side of music. It’s a very Mercury boosting star. And so Mercury has a lot of power.
CB: Do you mean Mercury on Spica?
AC: Oh, go ahead.
CB: Do you mean Mercury conjunct Spica?
AC: Yeah, is that not what I said?
CB: You said Jupiter, so I just wanna clarify.
AC: Oh no. I’m sorry. Jupiter is on Deneb Algedi.
CB: Got it.
AC: But, yeah, Mercury’s most concerned with Spica and Mercury on Spica. Because it’s a very pro Mercury, Mercury supportive star. And Mercury’s on it the whole time. So even though there are certainly challenges here, there’s also a lot of Mercurial strength to sort through all this stuff especially on a personal level. Collective zone is worse.
CB: Well, and Mercury-Pluto adding Pluto to it gives this compulsive quality to Mercury’s desire to dredge these things up and to find the truth which is a Jupiter signification. So maybe this sort of compulsive quality to figure things out then becomes intensified at that time right at the start of a three-week Mercury retrograde period basically.
RL: Yeah. The problem though of course is that we can become obsessed with something that’s Neptunian. That’s just made up.
CB: Yeah. That’s one of the problems with Mercury-Pluto combinations or Mercury in Scorpio stuff is the sensitivity to the subtle-like hints and the subtle goings-on behind the scenes can sometimes lend itself to, in the dark sense, a paranoia of seeing things where they aren’t happening or thinking the worst about things and jumping to conclusions about things that are unwarranted.
RL: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s almost like it can dig a hole deep enough that then it can’t get out.
CB: Right. Yeah. Cause once you go down the rabbit hole’s certain ways, you can’t dig upwards in order to get yourself out.
RL: Exactly.
CB: Right. So that will be interesting. That will just be opening up at the end of the September cause we’re talking about Mercury stationing there and sort of staying there, but that’s just the beginning part of the process.
AC: Yeah, and so let’s look at the station degree and then sort of the fate of the Mercury retrograde so we can see a little bit about where things are headed at the end of September.
CB: Sure. So Mercury gets to 25 degrees of Libra by September 23rd 24th. And then it’s really slow, and then it stations on the 26th and 27th of September at 25 Libra. And then it begins moving backwards. And what’s interesting is by that point, the Sun and Mars are both moving pretty fast because the Sun’s approaching Mars. So that means Mars is moving very swiftly in terms of its planetary motion, and both of them are headed headlong into the conjunction with Mercury eventually in October. So that’s part of where Mercury is heading. It’s moving back into a triple conjunction with the Sun and Mars which takes place on October 9th at 16 degrees of Libra. And that’s only at the halfway point.That’s the turning point, the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle. Eventually Mercury begins slowing down again and stations direct around October 18th and begins moving forward at 10 degrees of Libra.
AC: Yeah. So all of that kind of reviewing the last war Mars Sun halfway between retrogrades, the end and beginning of a two-year cycle. The moment of that meeting between the Sun and Mars is attended by Mercury.
CB: Right. And amplified by Mercury?
AC: Yeah.
CB: It’s one of the funny things especially in traditional texts. The role that Mercury always played was to amplify whatever combinations it was with in terms of other planets. One thing that’s funny about this Mercury retrograde is there’s already been a Mercury retrograde reversal which is the OnlyFans thing which was originally scheduled for October 1st which is just a few days after Mercury stations retrograde. So there’s already been like somebody attempting to schedule something on the Mercury retrograde and then already having to walk it back.
AC: Yeah.
RL: Yeah.
CB: So that’s something to be aware of and I guess hopefully careful about for other people not doing things at the very beginning of that Mercury retrograde period that you have to walk back for some reason if they were poorly planned out or not, sort of logical conclusions in terms of where to go.
AC: Yeah, one thing I see with Mercury retrograde stuff and it working out good, bad, other is if you don’t have to nail something to this exact day. But you can be like, “Okay, let’s see how this phase goes.” And you set yourself up with some flexibility to kind of follow what needs to be done as revealed by the Mercury retrograde. It tends to be a lot less upsetting and go a lot smoother than if you’re like, “No, I don’t give a shit what Mercury’s doing. It’s got to happen on this day.” And then you push like crazy, and it still can’t happen on that day. Or it happens, then you have to redo it like building in some slack around Mercury retrograde projects.
RL: Oh yeah. Mercury retrograde loves false urgency.
AC: Yeah. Oh. Yeah.
RL: That’s what it thrives on. 90% of what people say is bad about Mercury retrograde, it all stems from that sense of like, “Oh my god, I gotta do something right now. Oh my god, I gotta buy the car. Oh my god, I gotta do this.” Whatever it might be. “Oh, shit. I missed my turn. I’ll get off here. Oh, now where am I?” That kind of–Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so the feeling like this has to be done now and you have to take this action. But later you end up realizing when you end up having to return to and take a second or a third attempt to doing the same thing that you could have just waited or had patience and then that would have allowed you to stop, not have to do that thing several times but instead only do it once. Although, that being said, one of the good things about Mercury retrograde I think one of the recurring lessons that I’ve learned about it is that usually the second or third time that you do the thing or you make the other attempts, you always do it better like the second or third time cause you’ve had that one first failed attempt or that second failed attempt. So by the time you do it a third time, usually you nail it at the end of the retrograde.
RL: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. And so let me just give what has been a real life example that I have experienced many times. So if you play video games especially if you play video games on a computer platform like you download them from Steam, you’ll be like, “Oh, the launch date is blah blah blah.” And then they launch, and it’s buggy as shit. And it gets an initial deluge of bad reviews even though it’s a good game, and then it takes another two or three weeks to fix all that. And everybody’s like, “Oh, okay. This is actually pretty good.” But they had to deal with the stress and the negative press that came from launching it in an unfinished state whereas if you imagine yourself with the programmers and the project leads and whatnot, you’ll be like, “You know what? We have these problems.” Instead of getting all these like, “Let’s just delay the launch a little bit.” And people might say,”Boo!” But it’s so much better than launching and getting the deluge of negative input and then having to fix it where it’s not good until the same date anyway. And you are doing it over again.
RL: Mercury thrives on false sense of urgency.
AC: Makes sense.
RL: Mercury retrograde.
AC: Mercury is the fast, frantic planet.
RL: Yeah.
CB: What you just said also, Austin, is exactly what happened. Remember like 10 years ago when they launched the Obamacare healthcare.gov website.
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: It was rolled out, and it was just like a disaster. And the website wasn’t working, and it kept crashing under the weight of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people trying to visit to sign up for health care cause there was a time limit on it. And it became this whole fiasco that then was worked out during the course of the Mercury retrograde. And then eventually by the end of the retrograde and once Mercury started getting out of its shadow, they had redone the website and fixed a bunch of the leaks, a bunch of the holes in it. And eventually it was workin, and people signed up for health care. But the rollout itself, they launched it right as Mercury was stationing retrograde. So it was just kind of a disaster.
AC: That’s a wonderful example. It’s like how much wiser would it have been just to be like, “You know what? It’s gonna be another two weeks.” Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
CB: Right. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so that’s what is being set up at the end of September in terms of the retrograde starting.
RL: We skipped over the equinox. Was that intentional or do we wanna touch base on that or did we kind of cover that enough with the full Moon?
CB: Yeah, we can touch base on that. So the Sun moves into Libra on Wednesday the 22nd. That’s the same day I believe that Mercury square Pluto goes exact.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Let me put the chart up for that.
RL: And it’s also really close to the Venus opposing Uranus kind of offering hopefully a bit of resolution from the Venus square Saturn.
CB: Mhm. So the Sun moves into the sign of Libra the Venus-ruled sign just as Venus herself is moving into the opposition with Uranus.
RL: Mhm.
CB: Okay. How do you feel about that ingress into Libra, Rick?
RL: Well, again, there’s always good news and bad news. We have the Mars pushing toward the trine with Saturn that’s close enough to matter. We have Mercury kind of hanging out not quite retrograde but still trining Jupiter, but we have the Moon on the equinox itself sweeping through a T-square as the Moon kind of exacerbates just a few hours after the equinox. While Mercury is squaring Pluto, the Moon will oppose Mercury and square Pluto. So I don’t know. Again, there’s good news and bad news. I’ll let Austin decipher it.
AC: Yeah. So I hadn’t sat down with the equinox chart yet. It’s the first thing that comes to mind. And so there’s that T-square, and then we also have Jupiter playing a pivotal role on not only trining Mercury but also in a happy little sextile with the Moon in Aries. But we have the–
RL: Yeah, and that point is actually referred to–And I don’t know where this comes from. I know it’s modern, but people refer to that as the point of Thales. It’s almost like a T-square. Pluto is at the apex hard aspect to the opposition of the Moon and Mercury. But Jupiter is a release point. Jupiter basically takes the pressure off it, releases the energy. And I don’t know why it was named after Thales. All I know he was a Greek mathematician. You guys may know more about him than I do. But that Jupiter really does play a pivotal role, I’m agreeing with you. It took me a while to get there. But I agree with you, Austin.
AC: Yeah. Oh, and so one thing. This chart will be much more relevant for certain regions and countries than others. There’s a rule of thumb that if the Aries ingress chart in a given location or for a given nation has a fixed sign, then that Aries ingress chart is good for thinking about the events of the entire year. But if it’s got a cardinal or mutable rising, then you’re gonna jump either once to the Libra ingress here or to every quarter depending on what kind of sign the rising’s in. So this will be the operative chart for the next three to six months for a number of different regions of the Earth.
RL: Hmm. Interesting.
AC: Yeah, the old Persian-inspired history of the world yearly chart stuff.
CB: Yeah, so that is the ingress and the beginning of the fall season in the northern hemisphere. Then the Mercury retrograde of course starts on Monday the 27th. Sun trine Saturn goes exact on Wednesday the 29th, and on the very last day of the month Venus squares Jupiter on the 30th of September.
RL: You slipped over Venus trining Neptune on the same day that the Sun trines Saturn, the 29th. That’s an interesting day. I guess there’s trines to Neptune and Saturn which are actually ridiculously close to being semi square.
CB: Yeah, there it is. So Venus hits 21 Scorpio on the 29th and trines Neptune at 21 Pisces.
AC: We’ll have a nice little grand water trine there with the Moon in Cancer. That sounds like a very pleasant evening.
CB: Yeah, there it is. So grand water trine at 22.
AC: Like a jacuzi and a few cocktails.
CB: Yeah, and Venus is almost partile with Jupiter at that point squaring it. So that’s a nice little end to the month on September 30th just as that Mercury retrograde is ramping up but hasn’t really fully gotten into the full swing of things yet.
RL: Do you think–
AC: Go ahead.
RL: On the 30th with Venus squaring Jupiter and the Sun sesquisquaring Jupiter, do you think it’s possible that it feels so good that we go out over indulging, that we do too much, that we take on too much, we say yes when we should have just said, “Wait a minute, Mercury retrograde.”
AC: Well, I think that, as you pointed out earlier, we’ve got nice Sun trine Saturn there and Sun in the sign of Saturn’s exaltation. That looks like a very productive day followed by a very pleasant night to me.
RL: Okay.
AC: That Sun-Saturn will help us, I think will carry us through our duties and obligations. But then we have a nice night to follow that. And maybe it’d be useful to hold that clarification in mind, but that looks like a nice setup for like, “Oh, I had a super productive day or week up to this point. I will have a super, enjoyable evening.”
RL: Okay, what time should I be there?
AC: As the Sun sets beneath the horizon.
RL: Ah, that moment.
CB: Well, again, on October 1st there’s a hangover of the Moon goes into Leo and it opposes Saturn the next day on October 1st.
AC: Yeah, that pleasant night configuration is literally just that pleasant night.
RL: Yeah, I have a friend who calls that kind of aspect or that kind of astrology a pause in the disaster.
CB: Mmm.
AC: Yeah, I like to find those moments in otherwise horrific periods of time. And it’s like when you see somebody who’s running a marathon stop and have a little water bottle, just like rehydrate a little bit. And even though those moments don’t characterize the actual period of time, they’re actually in contradiction to them. They’re really important because it’s that just 10 seconds of rehydration is gonna change your body’s capacity to finish the rest of the marathon.
RL: Yeah. If we could take Coca Cola out of this, that would be the pause that refreshes.
CB: All right, guys. Well, that brings us basically to the end of the month. And that’s actually a really nice note to end on at the end of the month. A very refreshing grand water trine, I think we would all agree.
RL: Mhm.
CB: Yeah, so that brings us to the end of September. Any final thoughts or final words about the astrology of September before we wrap up this forecast?
AC: I would just say I would re-emphasize what I said a couple times which is the first half, use that to get your shit together as much as possible. And any little things that you can see from here that would be best scraped into a neat pile, first half of September is a really good time to do that. October and November and December, it’s not quite like a roller coaster from here on out. We’ve got several months in a row where there’s not going to be a lot of opportunities to slow down and put things back together and reimagine. It’s a little steep. And so use this functional enough time.
CB: Definitely, when winter is coming. And there’s some intense astrology later this year, but the first little bit of September that first week or so is definitely some nice stuff to get some things done before things start getting complicated later in the month.
RL: And I think the temptation is just because we’ve been going through such a difficult, crazy, uncertain time. The temptation is when we get a few days of like, “Oh, this is okay to just put our feet up and float downstream.” And that’s the wrong time to do it.
AC: Right. Well, and it’s like that in of itself is restorative but then to not use the whole time, right? To just be in the inner tube.
RL: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, agreed.
CB: Right. All right, guys.
AC: Or it could be like, “Oh, this is how it is now. Crisis averted. Now things are just fine, they’re gonna be fine.”
CB: Yeah, it’s always part of an ongoing story. But we’ll have to leave it there to continue that story since a lot of stuff that gets started in September is gonna carry through into October, so I have to save–
RL: And November. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, November. So I have to save that for next month. What do the two of you have coming up? Do you do have anything coming up in September? Any events or anything, Rick?
RL: I’m gonna be participating in a weekend event at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. And I’ll be there with a few other astrologers including Anne Ortelee, Maurice Fernandez, Kathryn Andren, and Kay Taylor. And we got a nice little weekend program put together. It’s not introductory, but it doesn’t require a whole lot of astrology knowledge to get something out of the weekend because we’ve put together kind of a whole thing about the process of change, cultural change. And so I’m looking forward to that. And, yeah, that’s pretty much the aside from my ongoing Patreon duties, and I don’t know if you mentioned, but I do write a Daily Planet Pulse which is on Instagram and Facebook. And its Instagram is @ricklevineastrologer. You can always find me there. And, yeah. And I’m busy. Just finished writing a feature article 5000-word article for the Mountain Astrologer’s December issue that will be a 2022 forecast, and that was an interesting exercise. And, yeah, that’s pretty much what I got going right now.
CB: Yeah. You mentioned the astrology of November of 2022 to me. And I took a look at that chart, and that’s pretty wild for the midterm elections.
RL: Oh my god. Yeah, yeah. Austin, I don’t know if you’ve looked at this yet. But Mars is retrograde on election day, it’s a full Moon total lunar full Moon eclipse. Total eclipse. And the full Moon is partile conjunct Uranus square Saturn.
AC: We’re looking at 22 right, Chris?
RL: Yeah, we’re looking at the midterm elections in 2022. And all I can say is that if we thought any of the other elections that we’ve had recently are strange, man, this one does not look promising. It does not look promising for just a plain ordinary–
AC: Yeah, it’s making promises.
RL: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Look at the full Moon lunar cclipse going exact at 16 Taurus, and it’s conjunct Uranus at 16 Taurus.
AC: Yeah, very closely.
RL: Yeah. Yeah, 20 minutes less than that of orb.
CB: Good times. All right, Well, and people should also check out I wonder–
AC: Ruled by retrograde Mars.
CB: Right. Yeah, so that’s something we’ll have to talk about more in the year ahead forecast. And we’ll have to check out your article rake in The Mountain Astrologer later this year. I also wanna give a shout out to your YouTube channel which is really amazing at youtube.com/ricklevine.
RL: Actually, correction. It’s not slash. You have to find it by searching for Rick Levine astrologer. It’s a screwy naming thing. Doesn’t matter, but it’s not Rick Levine slash. It’s not youtube.com/Rick Levine. You go to YouTube, and you do a search.
CB: Okay.
RL: Yeah, for Rick Levine astrologer. That gets you there.
CB: Okay, cool. Thanks.
RL: Yeah. Sweet.
CB: And what do you have coming up in September, Austin?
AC: Well, so first my self-paced with live sessions support year one curriculum is finally gonna come out first 10 days. And Sphere + Sundry has a release coming up. And this is a particular configuration of Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter which in Vedic astrology makes a Saraswati yoga. And the idea was to do a little bit of planetary magic that would make you pretty witty and wise. The idea is bringing the three together for eloquence and imagination and being particularly good for good times and the arts. And so that’s sort of code-named Project Quick Silvertone at this point. I don’t know if it’ll launch with that name. But I’m excited for that to come out, and I’m excited to open enrollment for my year one.
CB: Brilliant. That sounds amazing. Let’s see. As for myself, last week there was a group of astrologers that came in who are organizing the ISAR astrology conference that’s gonna take place here in Denver in August of 2022. And I started picking off astrologers for interviews in the studio for some of the first in-person interviews that I’ve done since the pandemic hit a year and a half ago. So I’m pretty excited about that, and I’ll be releasing some of those interviews and rolling out further interviews in the series on each of the planets over the course of the next month. I think, Rick, you might be coming through Denver. And we’re gonna do–
RL: I’m planning on it.
CB: Okay, an episode on Uranus hopefully when that happens. So if people wanna support that work, of course, please be sure to sign up for my page on Patreon since that’s what allows me to keep cranking out the episodes as quickly as I do. And other than that, my book on Hellenistic astrology is always available. And you can find it at hellenisticastrology.com/book, and it’s available on Google Books or on Amazon. And it goes very nicely with my online course on Hellenistic astrology which is at theastrologyschool.com. All right, guys, I think that’s it for our forecast for September. So thanks a lot for joining us as a co-host this month, Rick.
RL: It was a lot of fun. Thanks for inviting me. And good to see you, guys. I haven’t seen you for as long as we’ve been in quarantine, so this was nice.
AC: Yeah, totally.
RL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, it’ll be nice to get back together in person again next year either at NORWAC in Seattle in May or at the ISAR conference in Denver in August.
RL: Yeah.
CB: Totally. All right.Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Please be sure to like and subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube or drop us a comment in the comment section below. Thanks to all the patrons who attended the live recording of this episode, we appreciate you. And that’s it for this forecast, so we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Bye.
RL: Bye.
CB: Special thanks to all the patrons that supported the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, thanks to all the patrons on our producer’s tier including Nate Craddock, Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Sumo Coppock, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Morgan MacKenzie, Kristin Otero and Sanjay Sreehari. For more information about how to become a patron and get access to bonus content such as early access to new episodes or private subscriber only podcast episodes, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast. Special thanks also to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer magazine available at mountainastrologer.com. The Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at honeycomb.co. Astro Gold astrology software for the Mac operating system which is available at astrogold.io. And you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 for a 15% discount. The Portland School of Astrology available at portlandastrology.org, Astro Gold astrology app for iPhone and Android which is also available at astrogold.io. And finally, the Solar Fire Astrology software program for Windows which you can get from alabe.com, and you can use the promo code AP15 for a 15% discount.