The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 325, titled:
November Astrology Forecast 2021: Mars Square Saturn + Taurus Eclipse
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and special guest co-host Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on October 29, 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 November 9, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with astrologers, Leisa Schaim and Austin Coppock about the upcoming astrological forecast for November of 2021. So hey, guys, thank you both for joining me today.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey, Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: No problem.
CB: All right. I’m going to give a little bit of an overview of the month ahead really quick at the very top of the video and then once I do that we’ll introduce you both a little bit more in more detail, and then we’ll go into a deep dive into each of the next four weeks of November. How does that sound to you?
LS: Sounds good.
AC: Good work.
CB: All right, here we go. Here’s the planetary alignments for November. We begin the month with a new Moon in the sign of Scorpio on the fourth of November. Immediately after that, Mercury ingresses into the sign of Scorpio and Venus ingresses into Capricorn on November 5th. The following week, we have one of our main configurations of this month, which is that transiting Mars in Scorpio squares transiting Saturn in Aquarius on the 10th of November in one of our most difficult aspects of the month and potentially of the year. Then the following week, transiting Mars opposes Uranus continuing some of the tension of those transits from the previous week. And then immediately after that, we have a culmination of events when there is a lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus on the 19th of November. After that, things settle down a little bit, although we’ll talk about the asterisk next to that statement later when the Sun ingresses into Sagittarius on the 21st, Mercury into Sagittarius on the 24th, and then finally, there’s a Sun-Mercury conjunction on the 28th of November. That is the broad overview. We are heading into eclipse season with the beginning of the eclipses in the Taurus-Scorpio axis at the end of November, and here’s the round planetary movements calendar that shows you where the planets began at the start of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they get by the end of the month. That is the basic overview of November. Welcome, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome Austin, and welcome Leisa. Leisa is joining us from Ohio as her first time co-hosting the podcast, even though you’ve appeared on many other episodes in the past, so thanks for joining us today.
LS: Yeah, thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah. I felt like you had hosted a forecast episode before and I was almost shocked to hear that you hadn’t, but you’ve appeared briefly to do the auspicious elections for each month, but this is actually your first forecast.
LS: Yeah, first forecast. Yeah.
AC: Yeah. Didn’t you sit in for a little bit when we did them in Denver altogether?
LS: Oh, I did pop in I think to do the in-person election description. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. But that was a brief appearance, so you’re going to join us today for the full forecast. And you and I just got done working on our yearly 2022 election report, which we just released today, and so we actually looked a lot at the astrology of next year and a little bit at the astrology of November because we have an electional chart for November that we’ll introduce later, but it’s at the very end of the month.
LS: Yeah. And as we’ll talk about in a bit, November leads into a lot of themes that continue into the next year.
CB: Right, for sure. And Austin, how are you doing? How is our cat friend Sumo Coppock, who’s one of our producers on our producer’s tier, how’s the cat doing?
AC: Large and in charge comes to mind. She’s about a year and a half now and I think two weight classes above.
CB: Okay, that is gigantic. Hopefully, Steven our editor can place in some pictures or some B-roll of Sumo in the final version of this for the video viewers just to get a picture of how gigantic this cat is at this point, but some listeners have asked so I wanted to inquire.
AC: And her winter coat has come in and so she looks twice as massive. She’s a catsquatch.
CB: Nice. All right, good times. Well, let’s start by doing some review of what’s happened in terms of world events since our last forecast episode a month ago because there’s actually been some really interesting astrology and fulfillment of some statements and some predictions that we made in the last forecast episode. We’ll do a little bit of review at the beginning of this and then we’ll jump into looking at the astrology of November. For this first segment, I wanted to start by first doing a little segment called How About That Mercury square Pluto Mercury retrograde because that was pretty wild and there was some pretty literal things that manifested during the course of that, right? I mean, one of the things we talked about in the last forecast with Kelly was Mercury square Pluto and getting to the bottom of things or investigations and things like that. One of the things that happened right around the time of Mercury station was the release of the Pandora Papers which was like this big, huge exposee of billionaires having money in offshore accounts in order to avoid taxes and stuff like that and it was supposed to be one of the largest investigations by a consortium of different newspapers and journalists that had ever happened before, which is pretty striking.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
AC: Yeah. We were trying to articulate what that Mercury station would mean with it being both square Pluto and trine Jupiter at the same time. Right, we’re like, “Oh, it’s something facts from the hidden deeps with Pluto and then with the trine to Jupiter. But for a good reason or towards truth or there’s something brilliant about Jupiter.” And that leak and all that information I think fit that absolutely perfectly.
CB: Totally. And that’s a great keyword, truth. I keep seeing that as a recurring theme this year over and over again about how much Jupiter that’s been one of its main significations for 2000 years now. I mean, if you go back and look at Vettius Valens of the second century, he says, “Truth is one of the basic significations of Jupiter.” But to see that come out so explicitly is really striking to have like an investigative report that uncovers the truth about something. And there’s actually been a more recent manifestation of that in the news that’s coming up next year, I think that you noticed, right, Leisa, with the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction that’s happening in Pisces in the first quarter of next year?
LS: Oh, yeah, so it goes exact in April, even though that’s transiting from actually the end of this year through May 10th of next year, but I guess Trump just announced a few days ago that he is trying to launch a new social media network called Truth. And of course, there’s the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction happening next spring and illusions of truth that can be with Neptune and Jupiter, although it can be other things. And I just find it really striking because Trump himself has a Jupiter and Neptune together in Libra in the third house with Jupiter ruling the fifth house of entertainment basically. But also they’re both stationary in his chart so it’s just like a really exclamatory Jupiter-Neptune. So, the recurrence would be more important for him next year.
CB: Right. It’s a recurrence of the same thing, but it’s just interesting the combination of Jupiter and Neptune and yeah, the truthiness of Jupiter. And yeah, we’ll see how that goes.
AC: Chris, one thing before we move on, just back to the Mercury retrograde stationing in trine to that Jupiter. Jupiter has truth as a longtime signification. Jupiter is also just sitting on the fixed star Deneb Algedi, which is about lawfulness and decency and more moral lawful rather than simply not illegal. What’s interesting about the Pandora Papers is much of what it exposed is totally legal yet clearly unethical and unfair. And for those of you who’ve studied or worked with Deneb Algedi, Deneb Algedi is like it’s pro-legality, but it’s really more pro-decency. And it’s like, yeah, this is legal, but this isn’t decent. It’s not fair. And I would say Jupiter is in alignment with what’s actually right versus what is simply not technically illegal. There’s a difference between the two.
CB: Yeah, using the companies or people that are super wealthy using the laws or loopholes in the laws that are available in order to skirt paying taxes.
AC: Yeah, right, like legal but not decent.
LS: Right, right. Yeah, there were a number of other ones around the Mercury-Pluto square that came out. There was one I just read that was like the oil and gas company, BP, paid an exed M16 firm to spy on climate activists, which on the one hand is not shocking because these things happen, right? But it also just came out just this past week, which meant it came out during the Mercury station and was probably being investigated during the whole Mercury retrograde square Pluto. Sorry, Plutonian.
AC: What is an M16 organization?
LS: Spy, a British spy organization.
AC: Oh, okay. I thought it was MI6, it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they just all are armed with M16s.
CB: That makes sense. Other things, there was a listener that wrote in at one point last month, [Beth Bashmore], and she said that there was a documentary about the cave divers where they rescued that group a few years back I think it was in the Philippines, and yeah, there was like a whole documentary that was released around the time of the Mercury station square Pluto about that and about the rescue of that group with the help of cave divers, which is a surprisingly literal manifestation because I think that was one of the metaphors that we were using, but we were using as a metaphor not as like literal cave divers.
AC: We talked about tunnels and caverns for like 15 minutes.
CB: Right, on the last forecast. I love it when that stuff happens. And it brings up a thing Chani Nicholas wrote on Twitter the other day where she was like, “Whatever the most literal or obvious manifestation of something is, that’s often what happens with the astrology. Sometimes it can be subtle, but sometimes it’s just completely lacking in subtlety and is just the most literal thing you can think of.”
LS: Definitely, yeah, I love literal astrology. It’s really funny.
AC: Well, let’s hope November is more metaphoric.
LS: Right, that’s true on the other hand.
AC: Looking back at October, there is no real separating the Mercury retrograde in Libra from the Sun-Mars conjunction in Libra. And the two literally conjoin the Sun at almost exactly the same time and there’s a real entanglement of the significations. And I believe part of the way that we discussed that last month was simmering, like pots on the stove, like they’re not quite ready to boil over but you can see what is likely to boil over in this next cycle. And so in terms of simmering, we have in the United States like in a sense of the beginning of a new labor movement would be a dramatic way to put it, but like big strikes either happening or getting ready to happen across a wide variety of industries. There were lots of protests all over Western Europe. You can see what’s on the stove and getting heat.
CB: Right. There are major tensions between the rebelliousness of Uranus and whatever the establishment is of Saturn and that’s only going to intensify as we basically head into the third and final exact square between Saturn and Uranus that’s coming in December, but we are definitely ramping up to that at this point. Here’s the image I’ve been using all year since your head forecast from Archetypal Explorer of those three exact hits of Saturn square Uranus and how we are on the upward slope heading into the next one right now.
AC: Yeah, and you look at how steep that acceleration from where we are to the exact hit at the end of December. Saturn is now direct very recently and Uranus is very retrograde, and so now we have mutual application. Instead of one chasing the other, they’re both moving towards their fated interaction. Right. There’s both the disruptive Uranus and the attempting to bring order Saturn are moving towards each other, right?
CB: Yeah, and that’s about to get accelerated in just a few days here as soon as Mars ingresses into the sign of Scorpio on the 30th of October and then just start speeding up and pouring gasoline on that fire, which then will culminate in the November and December timeframe. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves though. To back up just a little bit some of the other review stuff, we had Saturn and Jupiter both station in Aquarius. And one of the things that I had been saying for a few months about the return of Jupiter to Aquarius is that there was going to be some revisiting of things that began last December when Jupiter first went into Aquarius and conjoined Saturn. And one of the things that I noticed and was looking for because there was such a notable coinciding of events last December, December of course is when they first rolled out the vaccines in the US and started administering them to the public, and so Jupiter left for a few months over the summer when it dipped into Pisces and that’s when some of the mask mandates suddenly were lifted and it seemed like things were going back to normal, but then Jupiter stationed retrograde in Pisces early in the summer and retrograded out and went back into Aquarius which seemed to imply that there would be some revisiting of things as Jupiter returned to Aquarius that needed to be returned to either review them or in order to redouble those efforts from way back in December when Saturn and Jupiter conjoined. It seemed like two of the things that I noticed was one, booster shots, there’s this huge discussion about booster shots over the past month and a lot of people, I know a number of older people, that actually started getting their booster shots because it was six months out since their second one. And I think that was eventually approved or some public agency started actually saying it was okay to get booster shots. Do you remember what that was, Leisa?
LS: I don’t know when the actual okay was. I know that just a few days ago as Jupiter was going direct a few days after its direct station, they extended the approval of booster shots to more people, so greater eligibility basically. And also, Pfizer just asked the FDA for approval on the same day on the 21st for children from ages five to 11 with a reduced dosage shot.
CB: Okay. So, it’s being expanded to other age ranges.
AC: Yeah. And in terms of just like a revisitation of the project, I know that there was a report that came out. The FDA is very critical of some of the Johnson & Johnson data. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but they were like, “We’re not sure about all of this that you’ve fed us. We need to revisit it.”
CB: Okay. Yeah. Those are two things that were really interesting in terms of a return to that was just it seemed like an expansion of the vaccine efforts, which is an interesting echo of the start of that back in December when they first started the project. So I guess that’s part of what Jupiter in Aquarius was about, which we’ll see then what happens when Jupiter goes into Pisces and if that’s not more hopeful or a little bit more hopeful during the first half of next year for returning to more normalcy, which is what it almost seemed like we’re headed towards last summer when Jupiter first dipped into Pisces, but we’ll talk about that more later. All right. Are there any other review things that we want to touch on that are major things? I know we wrote down a bunch, but maybe we don’t have to cover all of them unless there’s really important ones that we wanted to make sure we mentioned.
LS: I just wanted to mention some of the Mercury-Pluto things again. The John Eastman memo came out September 21st actually was interesting and that was the Mercury-Pluto first square and it was called Peril was the book that it came out in and then all the newspapers picked it up. And so basically, the Eastman memo was part of the legal attempt at a strategy to overturn the election, the last presidential election. And so of course, that’s very Mercury-Pluto. But I also found it striking that it was leading into the Mars-Saturn. It was applying within about three degrees when all of that was happening before the January 6th insurrection. And so, this was part of the Mars-Saturn that we’re going to be talking about again, those kind of dynamics of different forces trying to battle each other basically and insurrection-type of energies versus establishment-type of energies.
CB: Yeah, that’s something that we’re going to be talking about a lot as we talk about the Mars-Saturn alignments for November that really ramp up and heat up this month. So, why don’t we go ahead and jump right into that then since it seems like we’re eager to get into that astrology and we’re already moving in that direction. All right. Let me put the chart up just to show you what the chart looks like at the very start of the month. Here it is for today as we’re recording this episode, and here’s the chart set for November 1st. The main thing that happens, it’s already happened technically by the time we start November, but it happens just a few days before we begin at the end of October on October 30th. We have Mars departing from Libra and ingressing into the sign of Scorpio on October 30th, where it’s going to be for the entirety of the month. And as soon as it makes that transition into Scorpio, it begins the culmination of one of the last really major tense aspects of the year that we talked about and really focused on in the year ahead forecast, which is the beginning of the Mars-Saturn square, which will go exact when Mars hits seven degrees of Scorpio around November 10th, and then the Mars-Uranus opposition which will go exact when Mars reaches 12 degrees of Scorpio around November 17th. That’s really the main aspect I think we’re going to be talking about and focusing on during this episode because that’s the most tense aspect and it’s the most standout alignment I think that happens all month. What are we feeling about that or what are your initial feelings about Mars squaring Saturn and opposing Uranus?
AC: Well, I think that the most useful way to think about it is just to first start with the fact that what we’re doing is we’re bringing heating, inflammatory, dangerous fierce Mars energy to bear on a problem that we’ve had all year, right? Saturn-Uranus is just there and has been authoring a variety of tensions that really describe the period of time that we’re in. And so, we know what Saturn-Uranus is and maybe we should take a second to remind everybody, but what we’re doing is we’re adding something to what’s already there, right? The Saturn-Uranus as, Leisa, I think you just mentioned, it’s that the Uranus has this rebellious, disruptive, anything but continuing on the way we are energy whereas Saturn is the order maker, right? And so, one of the ways that I’ve been thinking about this with both Mars in a superior square to Saturn, angry at Saturn and then Uranus on the other square undermining Saturn, fourth house relative to Saturn with these disruptions and rebellions is it really shows the difficult task of trying to make an order that works at this point in time. And I think that’s very clear collectively because there’s the pandemic which was an event, but then there’s all of this human response to it, right? And when there’s a disruptive thing, we’re like, “Okay, how do we make things work? How do we make order?” And then there are also a variety, in a lot of countries especially the US, there are a lot of problems with the order that’s been created in the US for the last 40 years. That order doesn’t work for a lot of people. And so you see with both Uranus and Mars poking at Saturn, you’re going to see a boiling over of frustration and anger with we can say inadequate attempts to make order or inadequate attempts to make the order that works for people that they desire.
LS: Yeah. And the different orders that different people want and are expecting or feeling let down by, those can look differently for different segments of people.
AC: They certainly do, yeah. But it’s like, what do people agree on? This ain’t great.
CB: Well, and it’s like one of the things that with the energy is because it’s setting up this dichotomy between Saturn which is like the establishment and Uranus which is the rebellious tendency, it’s just making it so whatever the established authority is in a given context, that’s what people are rebelling against and they’re rebelling against the attempt of the establishment to impose order on the non-establishment or whatever the establishment is ruling over. The ordered. Yeah, that’s a good one. The ordered versus the orderer. Yeah. Those tensions have been there and it’s come off and on all year. We saw a major version of that earlier this year that was accelerated. We already had an instance of that the day that Mars ingressed into Taurus in January, which was January 6th, and that was the Saturn-Uranus square, and then it was Mars ingressing into that and then just throwing flames onto the fire and that was the insurrection on January 6th and whatever it was the rating of the capital that occurred and the almost like a coup attempt on the US government. What was interesting, and I keep thinking about that, is that Mars was in the inferior position at the time at zero degrees of Taurus. So Saturn being earlier in the order of signs actually had the upper hand over Mars and got the upper hand over Mars. But part of the thing that’s weird about this month is it’s finally reversed. So, we went through that square I was just talking about, we went through the opposition of Mars and Saturn over the summer I think that would exact like July or late June and now we’re at Mars in Scorpio, where suddenly Mars has the upper hand and is in the superior position astrologically over Saturn.
AC: And it’s in a sign where it has a lot more power. Mars is somewhat defanged in Taurus, but Mars is clawed and armored in Scorpio.
LS: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, although it’s interesting that that day January 6th actually started with Mars in Aries at the very, very end of Aries and so that was the impetus to it all, I can imagine it moving into Taurus where it didn’t have good dignity being like a damper on how well it went. But certainly, in Scorpio, it’s not just in good dignity just like it is in Aries, but it’s more strategic in Aries, for sure.
CB: Right. One of the questions is just what does it look like when Mars is the one that’s doing the inflaming or the rebelling in some sense against the establishment or doing the attacking even, in some sense, suddenly gets the upper hand over Saturn and exacerbates those energies but also is able to use them to its own benefit in some ways?
AC: Yeah. And so this will obviously play out in a variety of ways, but I think a good example of that is some of the large-scale labor strikes which are either about to take place or are ongoing, etc. There are a lot of industries that just can’t run when people are striking. It’s not a bunch of people like cosplaying rebellion. There’s real power in the larger unions, right? If we’re looking at Martial feelings like, “No, we’re pissed that we’ve been working 10-hour days with one day off a month.” There is a fixity to that anger which is very well described by Mars in Scorpio. And another interesting part of this Mars in Scorpio activating Saturn-Uranus is that Mars having very recently made its once every two-year conjunctions with the Sun was its invisible lots doing that and so Mars is literally going to come into visibility for the first time in this new two-year cycle right in the middle of the configuration to Saturn-Uranus
CB: Nice. When it gets like 15 degrees away from the Sun.
AC: Yeah, like here’s what people are angry about like being revealed.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. With regard to the strikes, a lot of the things actually this past month were authorizations to strike. There are people on strike in some of the companies, but there’s like a whole bunch more that authorized a strike actually right around that weekend that Saturn was stationing. I think it was October 9th-10th. And so, a bunch of those authorized them, but like haven’t done it yet and so I can easily imagine that happening in November.
AC: Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. I have a hard time imagining that November is going to cool off any of these things back to the kitchen and the stovetop. Whatever there’s been heat on is not going to simmer down, but is going to flame on.
CB: Yeah. And one of the Mercury retrograde ones actually is there was like a film actors or guild strike that was about to happen at the beginning of the retrograde, but then I think over that three-week period by the end when Mercury stationed direct, it was called off or they reached some agreement.
LS: Yeah. They tentatively reached an agreement, but they haven’t ratified it. What that means is the union leadership accepted it, but the rest of the workers have not yet. And actually, I was reading that a lot of the workers were actually really pissed at the leadership for accepting the deal. And so, they can still not ratify it and then that would be a strike, and I imagine some of that’s going to happen in November, probably
AC: Yeah. And that disagreement within leadership versus membership of unions is not confined solely to that union. That’s an interesting one fractal level down of the Saturn-Uranus and the ordered versus the ordering even within an organization.
LS: Exactly, exactly. So, there was the strike dynamic and the Saturn-Uranus dynamic between the companies and the workers or the unions, and then there’s the union leadership versus union workers themselves. Yeah, so a lot of them were like, “I don’t think we’re going to ratify this.” I haven’t seen a date yet. I was looking for a date.
AC: Right. And so if we’re looking for what kinds of things the Uranus in Taurus has been doing, especially square to Saturn, we talked about the demonstration, rebellion saying this order doesn’t work for us, but also we’ve seen really consistently the supply chain issues, currency valuations bouncing up and down, the whole crypto story is in a sense a Uranus and Taurus story. And you think about workers striking and could that possibly play into supply chain issues? Right? Like absolutely, right. And then, you pointed out, Leisa, that Uranus in Taurus is in the sixth of the Sibley chart, which would position it perfectly for describing labor.
LS: Right, because I was seeing that a lot of US unions were striking, but obviously I’m going to see that more than other countries’ news. But yeah, it is actually the Uranus transit exactly is in the sixth house of workers, labor, etc. in the Sibley US chart so that just puts further emphasis on that issue here.
AC: Yeah. And what’s interesting is this like wave of labor activism is, in a sense, a more acute set of events that speak to trends that have been happening, people talking about the great resignation. There’s been a lot of talk and a lot of feelings about what it’s like to work in the United States and people rethinking that, which is a Uranus thing, right? Uranus, part of rebellion against a given order is also rebellion against a past order of thinking about things. It will be like, well, this is the way I think about having a job, right? And the forced pause in labor that a lot of people experienced, triggered, or catalyzed is a better word catalyzed or like maybe I’ve been thinking about this whole thing wrong or maybe I’m going to rethink my whole paradigm about what it means to work, what it means to labor, etc. And the strikes are like the obvious part of that.
LS: Right. Well, and I know that you’d mentioned recently that happening within the larger context of Pluto in Capricorn, which I’ve absolutely been thinking about as well because during this pandemic, the biggest earners actually got much richer and most people did the opposite. And so that’s just a furthering of the Pluto in Capricorn trend. And I had wondered because Pluto is already so late in Capricorn by degree, it’s like when is the other side going to happen? We’re almost at 26 this year, 26-27 in the spring. But this has also happened after other pandemics in the past that workers get more rights because there are fewer workers, basically.
AC: Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the big stories about the Black Plague.
LS: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you could think of that as part of the Pluto in Capricorn transit ongoingly. You could also think of that as the Saturn-Uranus square. Saturn literally the reduction of laborers and therefore they can rise up because they have more power.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting. It makes me think of just the fact that they’re both in Earth signs and that they’re both referring to material conditions with the Pluto in Capricorn speaking to the pyramidal structure of things and what it’s like at each floor of the pyramid and how the nice things keep getting rides on the elevator to the top floor. It’s hard to find a place where that’s not true to some degree, but it’s been pushing further and further and further in that direction for, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years in the United States and it’s gotten to a point and then that intersecting with the whole sign trine with Uranus, right, also an Earth sign.
LS: For sure. For sure.
CB: Yeah. Speaking of Earth signs, one of the other ones that you mentioned that’s relevant potentially for some of the transits that start this month, especially the Mars ingress into Scorpio, is Biden’s chart and how that’s hitting some of Biden’s chart and activating it not super great ways because that ingress of Mars into Scorpio goes into his 12th house and into his Scorpio stellium where he will be having a Mars return. And as soon as it ingresses, it opposes his Moon down there in Taurus in the sixth house. So, we were talking about this a little bit in the pre-show chat, just the extent to which sometimes the leader of a country’s chart ends up reflecting some of the things that are happening in the country at the time or that their transits become transits for the country in some sense, which again, is just reiterating some of the tensions that are really probably going to come to a head over the next month or two as we get that Mars transit through Scorpio.
AC: Right. And as far as things in October setting us up perfectly for November and with Biden’s chart being so heavily invested in the fixed and so much pressure about to be exerted on the fixed, the approval for the Biden’s administration is like half of what it was six months ago where it’s obviously not heading into a great time for the administration.
CB: Yes, it’s a really crucial period. He, of course, is going to have a birthday, and I think we’re calculating this, and he’s moving from his seventh house profection year to his eighth house profection year, so that Moon is going to be more activated as well as his Jupiter placement, and the Jupiter placement’s actually pretty good, but it also activates the eighth house, which can be some challenges. One of the things that was interesting during the Mercury retrograde is the result of talks about a government shutdown, but eventually, that got forstalled and I think they kicked the can to December, right?
LS: I think so, yeah.
CB: So that’s great with that Saturn-Uranus square going exact later in December around that time, so we’ll see how that goes.
LS: Right. Yeah. And it’s interesting that Biden has the same rising sign as the US Sibley chart, and so it just really reiterates the theme of yes, a leader’s chart often does reflect something about the conditions in the country at the time, but this is just like doubled up because it’s the exact same houses.
AC: That’s a great point. And then there’s also, in terms of bigger charts with bigger implications that are activated by this, the chart of the European Union gets nailed by all this fixed stuff. The EU has like five planets fixed, something like that.
CB: Okay. All right. Why don’t we get into our weekly breakdown? Here’s the weekly astrology alignments that were designed for us by Zatanna again this month. And we start out the month of November with a Mercury-Pluto square, which goes exact on November 2nd. So, we’re coming out of the retrograde and we get one more square before Mercury eventually goes into Scorpio. Then we get our first lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in Scorpio on November 4th. Maybe we should talk a little bit about that lunation and take a look at the chart for the lunation at this point. Let me pull that up.
LS: Yeah, this New Moon is actually, even if you don’t normally put a lot of emphasis on the particulars of the lunation chart, this one is actually crazy and leads us into the rest of November, what most of the rest of the November feels like. Because it’s a New Moon exactly opposite Uranus in Scorpio opposite Uranus. Yeah.
CB: Look at it. It goes exact at 12:40 Scorpio on November fourth, opposite very closely within seven minutes of Uranus at 12:47 Taurus. So, we have a rebelliousness, some unexpected element to this New Moon. But at the same time, it’s square to Saturn so there’s some tensions of things, something trying to hold it back or keep it in check, keep it under something’s thumb or cool it down in some sense. Yeah, the attempts to keep it under control and the tension between the closer aspect is to Uranus. It’s almost like in some ways, the rebelliousness is the more intense of the feelings. And then at the same time, Mars has just ingressed into Scorpio, so it’s building up to that and it’s moving into it and bringing some speed and some quickness and some urgency to some of those impulses.
LS: Yeah and Mars is ruling you both of the luminaries and it’s square Saturn by about four degrees, so there’s a lot of frustration in this chart for sure.
AC: Yeah. With Mars-Saturn just by itself, you get this deadly serious quality, where it’s like, “Okay, this has to get done and we’ve only got so much time, it’s super important,” which as we said, it can be stressful but can be productive. And what makes this difficult is we have Uranus then throwing monkey wrenches, right? Throwing random or seemingly random disruptions into what’s already a very tense, focused, no room for error feeling process.
CB: Right. Because we’re trying to come up with some good keywords of Mars square Saturn, and one of them was like that which requires sustained effort and having like put in work and exert yourself over an extended period of time. It’s like something that would normally be a sprint, but having to do it over a long several week period, let’s say.
LS: Yeah, test of endurance basically, but like that frustrating edge where you want to go faster, but it’s just not going to go faster than it has to go, which is the Saturn.
AC: Right. But you can’t go too slow either. It’s not just a purely Saturnian thing, where it’s like, “Well, I have to walk 400 miles in my timeframe.” It’s like, “No, you have to do those 400 miles in two weeks or your firstborn dies.” And if you go too fast and sprain your ankle, well then you’ve just slowed yourself down. It makes me think of fight camps that boxers and other combat athletes go through, where it’s like that eight weeks to try to get the person at peak performance, peak lethality, where you can’t take it easy, but what often happens, you go too hard and you get knocked out in sparring and then you’re walking into the fight with a concussion or a torn ligament or an ankle or whatever that is. And so it’s like the golden mean between Mars and Saturn is tricky because you’ve got too fast Mars on one side and too slow Saturn on the other.
LS: Yeah, for sure. And they’re not really trying to be compatible since they’re at a hard aspect, so it’s like you have to provide that yourself if at all possible, try to melt them.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Right. So, lunation-wise, other things happening with that lunation, I mean it’s weird because the other two inner planets are just about to change signs so they’re not fully there in the party yet, but they are about to be. Mercury is about to change signs and go into Scorpio, where it’s going to finish and complete some of those aspects with Mars right at the same time as Mars is completing its aspect with Saturn. And then Venus is getting ready to ingress into Capricorn, where it will begin its long build up to the Venus retrograde station and the conjunction with Pluto that will take up most of the winter here in the Northern Hemisphere.
AC: Yeah, once Venus moves into Capricorn the day after the New Moon, and it’s going to be Venus in Capricorn until March 6th.
LS: Yeah. And then Venus enclosed by the malefics for another month. Right now, right before this New Moon in November is the last chance for frivolity, I would say, for a while.
AC: Yeah. And as we’re talking about Earth signs and tangible things collectively, Venus also has a special role during this period of time as the ruler of Uranus because Uranus is in Venus’s sign of Taurus, right? And so, one of the things we’re very much primed for even without November’s special sauce is supply chain disruptions around the holiday season, where supply chains are normally overloaded, right? And so, what’s Venus? Venus is the nice things, right? It’s like, “Oh, it’s the thing I ordered, the PlayStation Five I ordered three months ago.” It’s the, “Oh, they’re out of stock of the thing. Oh, I got my Christmas presents for my kids came on February 17th.”
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Right. All right. So, that is that first lunation for the month of November. And then as we said, everything starts changing signs and we get the last basically immediately after that lunation, the following day, the final pieces of November fall into place when Mercury goes into Scorpio and Venus moves into Capricorn. The very next day on Saturday, November 6th, Mercury forms a sextile with Venus from early Scorpio to early Capricorn. There’s one little nice, soft aspect before we get the hard aspects. And shortly after that, we get into the second week of the month when Mercury starts hitting Mars in Saturn and basically making hard aspects with everything, which is going to amplify some of those difficult alignments that were already tense on their own. And it just reminds me of how in many of the ancient astrological texts they’ll use Mercury as an amplifying factor. They’ll say this indicates this condition and Mercury if it gets involved will just double or intensify whatever is already indicated in some way.
AC: Yeah, and Mercury taking on the nature of whatever planets it’s an aspect to.
CB: Right. They say if it’s with good planets, then Mercury will be benefic. And if it’s with malefic planets, then it will just become malefic. So, it’s like a chameleon in that way, but also an amplifying factor.
AC: Yeah, I think of it as the mailman. What is the mailman delivering? It’s like you go to the post office and it’s like, “Oh, it looks like you have a partially decomposed decapitated head,” if Mercury’s delivering the malefics. Or a nice birthday cake or a wheel of Parmesan cheese if it’s Venus, whatever it is.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, this is just really intense because the Mercury-Mars conjunction happens just about the same time as the Mars-Saturn square goes exact. And then later the Moon in Aquarius actually triggers all of that. You know how sometimes when the transiting Moon will trigger something exact a few days ago and then it’ll like reactivate it, but this is triggering it almost immediately.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s funny as the Moon is there actually at five Aquarius already and it’s coming up to seven right when Mercury is hitting Mars.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
AC: Yeah. And just on a very simple timing level, Moon in fixed signs is extra rough this month.
LS: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah. What are some good, for this first culmination of Mercury conjoining Mars in Scorpio on November 10th, what are some good Mercury conjunct Mars keywords?
LS: Angry speech, frustration and anger and impatience affect the mind, affect your words, affect how you interact with other people.
AC: Yeah, sharp tongues, angry thoughts. On an external level, whenever Mercury is badly afflicted like this, we get external results that are reminiscent of what people associate with a Mercury retrograde. It’s the Mercury thing’s not working. It could look like travel not happening or a letter not being received, those miscommunications, system is down for a while, etc. etc.
CB: Yeah. And sometimes also people having the impulse to communicate and say the first thing that comes to your head not necessarily being the best thing to do in that instance. And maybe in some instances, getting really angry or saying something in the heat of the moment that you might later regret once you’ve cooled down.
LS: Definitely, yeah. There’s an idea about not believing your thoughts all of the time in Buddhism, and this would be like a prime-time period in November to enact that, to second guess your thoughts before you say them. Of course, the impulse will be to do the opposite.
AC: Right, to act on them.
CB: Yeah. One of the best pieces of advice that I’ve always found useful during Mercury-Mars transits is like if you’re writing an angry response or email to somebody, to like put it down for a day and come back to it a day or two later and then see if you still feel like sending that same email. And if you still feel like wording it exactly the same way or if getting some distance from it doesn’t make you rethink what you originally wrote.
LS: Definitely.
AC: Yeah. And maybe it’s write out the angry version and don’t send and then reread it the next day.
CB: Yeah. Someone in the chat of our live audience of patrons that’s joining us, Nicola Phillips, mentions road rage, which is really good keyword for Mercury-Mars. Mercury is not just communication but also short distance travel, and I’ve been really enjoying like understanding how Mars speeds things up. And one of the things that it can do is push people to want to go faster and sometimes driving faster or driving more aggressively is a pretty straightforward Mercury-Mars combination, but that can also be dangerous if a person does that as well.
AC: Most definitely.
CB: All right. That combination is going exact on November 10th. And then pretty soon after that, Mercury squares Saturn at the same time, so it’s weird because it’s like going from Mercury stepping on the gas pedal which is Mars to suddenly hitting a brick wall immediately after that, which is Saturn, in some sense so to speak or encountering the limitations of a hard stop and a wall or a boundary that you cannot pass beyond further almost immediately afterwards, which could be an authority figure, it could be a limitation, it could be just a hard stop in some way.
AC: Yeah. Or a boundary, a significant boundary crossed which one might regret. Because with Mars in that position, as we say, all those Saturn’s boundaries are not going to be impassible by Mars, right? I think of like that action movie trope where the vehicle blasts through the gate.
CB: Right. Or it’s making me think of like the consequences. It’s something that Diana and I talked about in the Saturn episode earlier this month, which was sometimes Saturn represents the consequences of past actions, whether positive ones or sometimes negative ones. And I think that’s why in modern astrology, some astrologers in the late 20th century started to associate Saturn with the concept of karma, which I don’t fully go for because I think if you’re going to use the idea of karma like everything in a chart is karmic. But there might be a reason for that maybe because of the notion of past actions and the consequences of those coming to fruition at some point. That is a much more Saturnian type thing.
LS: Right. And this feels like quick consequences because it’s all happening so simultaneously almost to that day. It’s like you send the angry email and then the person rejects you or the person says no to what you want anyway or that sort of thing. Ideally, with everything applying to Mars and Saturn, you moderate that yourself, but it’s not a very moderate combination so it could be the other people. And I was thinking about that a lot about this month is like because they’re all in like squares or oppositions, all of these hard aspects, it’s likely to be enacted through other people in your life and you will probably be playing one or more of those roles to someone else at the same time.
AC: Yeah, at least like in the moment, you might be like oh and that’s part of the waking up and being like, oh, I’m doing the Mars in that planetary configuration or oh, I’m being Saturn, which you have to break some of that accidental identification to get a better result than is just promised by the transiting skies.
CB: Yeah, that makes me think of somebody else. If you’re Saturn, then it’s like somebody else is the Mars figure that crosses a boundary that’s not okay for you and you having to put up and establish what your boundaries are and enforce them. Or alternatively, going back to the driving metaphor and a reversal of that due to the sequence here, it’s like Mercury hitting Mars is driving too fast and going over the speed limit, but then when Mercury immediately runs into Saturn, you get pulled over by the cops and have to deal with the consequences of that, of going too fast.
AC: Right. But then Mercury moves right into Uranus so then it’s like maybe none of these counts at all, maybe this whole game is broken, right? And the thing is they’re all going to get hit over and over, activated again and again in different order throughout the month.
CB: Right. Here in this second week though, we’ve got this sequence of Mercury hitting Mars on the 10th then Mercury squaring Saturn and Mars squaring Saturn both on the 11th, and then eventually, Mercury opposing Uranus on Saturday the 13th.
AC: Yeah. And I would just point out that the profection of the Mars-Saturn, which is also the profection of Mercury-Mars and then Saturn, that lays out the peak tension of the month, that begins that. The time between Mars aspecting Saturn and then Mars exactly aspecting Uranus and then getting the eclipse, it’s really that middle 10 days would be a quick way to abbreviate it as the most tense. It ratchets up pretty quickly, that New Moon makes most of it pretty clear, but peak tension is Mars between aspects to Saturn and Uranus with Mercury there, with an eclipse on the way in Uranus’s sign.
CB: Yeah, I’ve actually got an image from archetypalexplorer.com which shows the clustering of those aspects around the middle of the month, and it really gives you a good idea if you’re watching the video version of when some of this stuff peaks and intensity around the middle because you just see all of the most tense aspects clustering around that second and third week, I guess of November.
LS: Yeah, this just looks so combustible to me, the middle, the Mars-Saturn and then the Mars-Uranus. It could be explosions, whether literal or metaphoric. Yeah. And going from the Mars-Saturn to the Mars-Uranus, it makes me think of like explosions after being told no for some reason, just that pent up frustration just suddenly gets released rather than confined by Saturn after it goes past Saturn. Yeah. It also looks like contrary actions to me. The middle of the month, I could easily see people just behaving really erratically and in a way that you might feel as irrational because there’s just so much pent-up energy and then everything hits Uranus after Saturn, and so there’s like a little bit of potential control first but then it all just like breaks loose. So, contrary action is a pretty neutrally worded Mars-Uranus thing. And there can be contrary action for good reasons like the labor strikes and things, right? There can also be people just acting contrary because they feel like it, and so they’ll probably be a lot of both.
AC: A lot of people are going to be pretty wound up. And even if it’s not you, if everybody around you has a lot going on, that’s the atmosphere. And stress and tension are very contagious.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That’s a good month for your chamomile.
AC: Yeah, that bomb shelter chamomile, it’s my favorite strain.
LS: special high level chamomile.
CB: I mean, what are some things like that that are good soothing type things one can do when you’re dealing with really tense Mars-Saturn aspects, really tense Mars-Uranus aspects, tense Mercury-Saturn-Uranus aspects? Chamomile, that’s a good idea of sympathetic magic or the idea of doing something that is the opposite to ameliorate or soften something that’s hard, it’s like a long running strand in the astrological tradition system of that might be good advice for this month.
LS: Yeah, magnesium baths and chamomile and lavender and all of those good calming things. I mean, you could try to do the opposite. You can also try to work out your frustration through exercise, it’s a good Mars thing. But you have to be careful not to be injured because that has more of a propensity for that. Do like moderate exercise, even though that won’t quite be what you feel like.
AC: Yeah, and there’s also just like having a frame on it and how long does this last. I find that during periods of time that are just obviously gnarly, as I say, bringing a military mindset to it where it’s like, “No, this part isn’t fun, there’s a job to do. There’s danger around. I’ll need to deal with whatever else later.” But just, I don’t know, a nose to the grindstone knowing how long it lasts rather than looking around and being like, “Oh, this is life.” Well, if this is life, this fucking sucks, blah, blah, blah. Because that’s not most of life, but it is some periods and just a little bit of blinders on discipline enacted etc. etc. for a set period of time.
LS: Right. When I was looking at November ahead of time, I was just thinking if all your experience in November is severe frustration and grunt work that you don’t feel like doing and internal anger, you’re actually doing well. That’s like the best-case scenario, I think.
AC: Yeah. As I was telling both of you earlier, I made a pact with myself to do a death march on finishing the faces edits so that will be my Mercury-Mars-Saturn is just being locked in a room and unable to leave until X number of hours every day are put into finishing that. So hopefully, that’ll be an appropriately unpleasant container for some of the transiting energies.
CB: Yeah, that’s a tension I still have as an astrologer even at this stage 20 years into it, sometimes you have to distinguish between there’s some version of really difficult transits, which is that you need to buckle down and do something that is unpleasant but necessary and requires sustained effort or is even like super uncomfortable that you don’t enjoy like going to a dentist, and getting major work done can sometimes be a really literal manifestation of a hard transit to your chart or of something that’s happening in the sky versus from an electional standpoint, sometimes when you should actively avoid doing things that could be more likely to go wrong or where something could go bad if you do it right at the peak of the difficult transit. Like if you’d had something scheduled for November 10th this month at the peak of the Mars-Saturn square, and there’s often an ambiguity between whether you should really avoid certain dates or whether you should really lean into them when they actually match the energy of what you’re doing.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And so, part of my choice was took that into account, part of it is that the Mars in Scorpio is in a relatively useful place. It’s a transit through the fifth, is the ruler of the fifth for me, right? So, there’s like literally a capacity like there’s a strong suggestion there. They’re like, “Oh, you can use this in a useful way.” And I didn’t commit to this or I’m not committing to this particular death march in the middle of that. I actually started it on a very nice election a few days ago. This period of time includes the Mars-Saturn, but I didn’t start it with Mars on the Ascendant if that makes sense. But they’re worth calculating. If it looked like this configuration had my number, like it was directly on top of my X,Y or Z, then I probably wouldn’t set up a thing that I would be doing. I would leave flex time to deal with the problems. Does that make sense?
CB: Yeah. Well, and I like yours because yours is not exactly even though that’s going to be a march as you said, you’re not in danger by sitting down and like writing your book or something so there isn’t like the threat of mortal danger like death. I mean, I guess if a stack of books fell on top of you while you’re editing your book, that would be tragic.
AC: Just viciously bleeding paper cuts.
CB: Right, so we never know. I mean, weirder things have happened with astrology sometimes, but versus if somebody was actually doing something that could be risky or something like that and maybe that not being the best idea during the culmination of some of those difficult transits.
AC: Right, like I wouldn’t get in a knife fight.
LS: Yeah, try not to get in a knife fight.
CB: Save the knife fights for Mars-Jupiter trines or something like that.
AC: Yeah, exactly, Mars trining my natal Jupiter.
CB: Right, then you’ll get in a knife fight? Okay, that’s good advice. All right. We’re at an hour into this episode, and we’re halfway through the month. So I think we have to break and regroup and also mention our sponsor this month, which is The Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac, because it’s that time of the year and it’s almost Christmas time so all the astrologers are going to start scrambling to find gifts for the astrology lovers in their life, and they sent us a beautiful little promo video, which I want to show. The Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac is launching a new feature that they’re really emphasizing for their almanacs, which is they’re integrating a community artists design section, where you can actually get custom design work for each of their almanacs that come from different artists in the astrological community, which is a pretty cool feature. We were just looking at this right before the show, right?
AC: Yeah, it’s really cool. I mean, each image set by itself is pretty darn cool, but then the fact that you can choose which style and which artist’s work you’d like on your calendar, it’s honestly fantastic.
LS: Yeah, you can already customize the honeycombs like a lot, but this is just like next level.
CB: Yeah. For those that don’t know or haven’t heard us mention them before, The Honeycomb, it’s a personal astrological almanac and calendar and it’s actually tied in specifically with your birth chart. They have you submit your birth data to them when you order it that it’s completely personalized to you and your transits. It does both natal and mundane transits in the time zone of your choice. That gives you unique data visualizations for different Hellenistic techniques like zodiac releasing just one of the things I love about it as well as profections. And prices start at $10 for a digital almanac or $22 for a printed almanac or $30 for a wall calendar, which is pretty affordable and pretty nice way to start the next year of 2022, just in terms of getting personalized version of your transits for the next year. So thanks to Honeycomb. You can find out more information about that or order an almanac at honeycomb.co, or you can see the new artwork and the different options for that at art.honeycomb.co. Cool.
AC: Yeah. That’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. I’m excited about that. It’s cool to have like actual sponsors and products that we actually like and enjoy. And that’s one of the things I always try to shoot for with the podcast.
AC: Yeah, it’s nice that you’re not selling dick pills.
CB: Right. I mean, yeah, if that ever happens, people can criticize us. But so far–
AC: I mean, we could probably make it pretty funny, but yeah.
CB: All right. We’ll have to–
AC: Probably better that we’re doing Honeycomb.
CB: We’ll think about that and we’ll brainstorm for future episodes. But in the meantime, everyone should get an almanac. All right. So we are halfway through the month of November, which just happens to be not a resting point, but happens to be like the culminating point of the entire month. I think we need to now transition into that third week, where we get the I believe the Mars-Uranus opposition and we get the eclipse, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so it’s interesting with the Mars-Saturn. You have that peak tension between Mars and Saturn, Mars is pushing, Saturn is resisting or Mars acting and Saturn is attempting to order Mars and Mars doesn’t like that. And then you get Mars-Uranus. And then the Uranus is often… One of my go-to metaphors for Uranus is you’re playing the board game, whatever it is, Monopoly, and Saturn says, “These are the rules.” And then Uranus just flips the board. And so some of the tensions that we’re seeing Mars-Saturn like, yes, no, yes, no, will just kind of, how should I say, become obsolete because the board gets flipped or will go out of control.
LS: Yeah. Those simmering tensions will suddenly boil over.
AC: Well, and also another thing that Uranus does is it adds sort of something from left field. We’ve got, as we talked about with sort of the lead end to November, there are all of these known tensions. It’s like, well, that’s not gonna go great based on where it is and what’s coming up, but then Uranus will just add something that’s out of the blue that again changes the whole thing. Usually for the worst in a configuration like this, sometimes for the better. But there’s often a game-changing thing or a catalyzing thing. I was thinking about this earlier, we’ll probably get some exciting weather disaster. There’s got to be some natural thing in addition to all of the human things.
LS: Wasn’t there that like fire in the ocean during the last hard aspect?
CB: Yeah, that was in July when we had the, what was it? It was Mars transiting through Leo and it opposed Saturn and squared Uranus. And that was also one of the Saturn-Uranus squares. It was in June, and there was that building collapse in Florida. And then there was also that weird oil fire in the middle of the ocean, I think it was down in the, not the Pacific, but in the Caribbean. And it was like a huge hole that was like on fire in the ocean.
AC: Yeah, yeah. They assumed the [astral] weather is literally the weather.
CB: So that Mars-Uranus opposition goes exact on November 17th. What are some other keywords for Mars-Uranus?
LS: Unpredictable action, revolutionary actions, sudden breaking away.
CB: Yeah, like fighting against something and the rebelliousness or the need to almost take up arms in rebellion against something can sometimes be a very literal manifestation of that.
AC: Yeah. Well, and the, what should we say? Mars already has a lot of rejection energy. Like, “No, I don’t want to do that, fuck that.” And then Uranus also has a lot of rejection energy. And so sort of when we talk about Mars and igniting things or dealing with what’s combustible, Uranus when it’s presented as a fuel source, it’s highly refined. It’s not gasoline, it’s jet fuel. And when Mars and Uranus come together, there’s often a sudden release of a tremendous amount of energy. Mars on its own can set a fire and keep it burning and spread it, but it’s not necessarily as explosive and as sudden. The energy, a large amount of energy gets released all at one time when Uranus and Mars are involved, which is we talk about explosions.
LS: Yeah. Explosions can be sudden accidents. Unfortunately, there are few manifestations that you can’t really fully control, even if you’re doing what you can.
AC: Well, and what you can control to some degree is when you call it your risk profile. How exposed to randomness are you? Because one of the things astrology shows you is it gives you a good idea of what the probability barometers are. And sometimes the randomness is more likely to condense into treats and good fortune. And sometimes the randomness is happy to throw out some unpleasant surprises. It’s the difference between staying home or just going to a heavily populated, crowded, open-air area, where you could have a thousand different interactions versus if you’re home, you have a baseline of order for your interactions with yourself and those who commonly visit. You’ve got a lower risk profile.
LS: Yeah. That actually reminds me of during the last hard aspect between Mars and Uranus in the summer, I actually told my dad, “Let’s not go visit…” My mom was in the hospital for a bit this summer. “Let’s not go and drive out to visit,” cause it’s like an hour drive. Because there’s this hard aspect, it can be accidents. And so he was like, “Sure.” I mean, I’m glad that my parents believe me and these things. And so we didn’t. What happened the next day was that one of their company’s cars, they got into an accident, and the car was totaled. And so it wasn’t us. We were trying to kind of take it into account that risk profile, but it still can be in your sphere of influence or sphere of living, I guess not influence.
AC: Yeah, your biosphere.
LS: Yeah.
CB: You mentioning the bombs makes me think of the classic example astrologers talk about of the development and the first use of the atomic bomb, I believe was under a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini by the United States when the bomb on Hiroshima was dropped, and that was a replication of the Mars-Uranus conjunction that’s in the United States birth chart in Gemini.
AC: Yeah. And they were both in Gemini, and it was two bombs, pair of twins.
LS: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s some of the energy which sometimes can manifest in a large mundane sense and other times in a more personal sense depending on how it’s hitting a person’s birth chart. I guess we’re talking about what, 12 degrees of the fixed signs still when we’re talking about the sensitive degrees for that opposition.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I believe so.
AC: Yeah. And on sort of living with it. The experience when it’s internal of Mars-Uranus is like a lot of times it feels like something which is irritating, has become unendurable. I just can’t take this anymore, I’m gonna lose my shit. And just like making a note that like, “Oh, those are you might feel like losing your days, and it might be right to quit that job, quit that relationship, whatever, but it’s worth waiting a day or two and see if you still feel the same way.
LS: Yeah, definitely, just like the Mercury-Mars conjunction. Yeah. And I think this is just keyed up so perfectly that that Uranus energy is really emphasized that week because we do have the Mars-Uranus, and then it’s like two days later that the eclipse happens in Taurus as well. So it’s activating that Taurus-Uranus energy twice within a couple days.
CB: Yeah. And look at this, the Moon the same time that Mars is opposing Uranus. It’s like the Moon swoops into Taurus so that it really highlights that. It’s weird how the Moon shows up in the sign that we’re talking about almost every time this month.
LS: Yeah. That was one of the reasons I was thinking this month would be… It already looked intense, but that just furthered it because the Moon triggers it almost immediately every single time.
AC: Yeah. Right, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s the day before the eclipse.” Right. It’s like, “No, it’s same energy.” With pretty much all of the Moon and fixed signs this month, it’s just this whole, I don’t know, mix, this Saturn, Uranus, Mars and friends thing.
CB: Yeah. So that brings us to the next major event of the month, which is the lunar eclipse in Taurus at 27 degrees of Taurus, which looks like it goes exact here November 19th. It may still be the 18th on the East Coast, so it’s basically November 18th through 19th. We get that lunar eclipse in Taurus at 27 Taurus.
LS: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting that the Sun squares Jupiter just a couple, few days before cause that was one of the things I was looking forward to towards the end of the month. It’s like, “Okay. But things then start applying to Jupiter, and that should lighten things a little bit.” But in this case, since that is so close to Jupiter and both the Sun and Moon are at the eclipse time squaring Jupiter, it’s almost just makes whatever’s been going on even bigger. It inflates the conflagration or whatever.
AC: Yeah. Or perhaps it’s an invalidation of what Jupiter’s been trying to do. Cause this eclipse energy is very contrary to Jupiter in Aquarius’s sort of method of trying to help or improve things.
CB: Like keeping the peace.
AC: Yeah. So I believe this is a partial, it’s partial, but close to total. It’s not an exactly total, but I think it’s as complete as it can be without being technically a total. I could be wrong, but–
CB: It’s getting pretty close there to the nodes.
AC: Yeah. And it occurs very close to the fixed dark Algol, which has a pretty gnarly reputation, especially in terms of mundane charts and historical events. There are humans who can work with it somewhat more, how should I say, constructively, but when it shows up in history, it often shows up at some particularly nasty moments.
CB: Tell us about Algol. Regale us with stories of Algol’s history.
AC: Oh, well, have you heard of the bombing of Guernica?
CB: Yes.
AC: Yes, that was an Algol moment. And what’s interesting was that Picasso, who has Algol-related things or had Algol-related things in his chart, then did the painting to commemorate the massive civilian death that happened then. But yeah, it’s nasty. The Chinese name for it, the name in Chinese astrology translates loosely to a trench for corpses. The symbol which is commonly used is the severed head of Medusa. The name Algol is like Ra’s al Ghul, so that’s the Arabic version. And it’s the same, the root is ghul, it’s the same root as our word ghoul, an undead being who devours corpses. It’s also just called the demon’s head in some texts. And so Algol, it’s a lot to handle. It’s a very primordial potentially violent, often out of control energy, which is interesting cause we’ve been talking about this things getting out of control or poor Saturn trying desperately to maintain order. And so we have this sort of, how do I say this, downpour of potentially out of control energy. One thing I will also say about Algol, Algol’s also very sort of anti-civilized in a conscious sense of being like, “What is the price of all this? Was this even worth it? Should we have done the agriculture and built a class structure?” And it’s sort of there’s something sort of primitivist, meaning that there’s a critical take on this whole civilization project. And so that heavy rain coming down in the same sign as Uranus, there seems there’s a lot of, how should we say, agreement between Uranus and this eclipse on Algol in the same sign. And this is of course the first of the Taurus-Scorpio series. And so it’s a big event in and of itself, but it’s also the introduction of a cycle that’s gonna run for the next year and a half basically.
CB: Yeah, that’s really important because even though the fixed signs have already been having some heavy transits, and for example, Uranus has been transiting through Taurus over the past couple of years, past two or three years. This is the beginning of a new eclipse series that’s gonna bounce back and forth in six-month increments between Taurus and Scorpio that should be very important for those with heavy fixed sign placements or those that have the Taurus-Scorpio axis important in their chart or prominent in their chart for some reason, whether it’s through one of those being the rising sign or what have you, if those are angular signs for you, that’s gonna be the beginning of a sequence of opening up those topics in your life and some major new developments in that area.
LS: Mm-hmm, yeah. Eclipses often have some overlap with Uranus transits, in that eclipses often do bring unpredictable things, things you weren’t expecting or weren’t expecting yet. And those can be good unexpected things, as well as things you don’t want. And so it just has that overlap just like we’re talking about again with Uranus being in the same sign and Uranus also being things you were not expecting or sudden or unexpected things. So yeah, there’s just gonna be a lot of that piling up.
AC: Yeah. And in terms of what notable charts that that hits, as I was saying before, the EU chart has the Moon at 24 Taurus. And so this eclipse is exact two and a half degrees away, and that’s in the 10th house of the EU chart. And so the suggestion there is within a couple weeks of the eclipse, who knows maybe on the day of the eclipse, but some of the eclipses take a little bit to play out, we would expect serious challenges to the sovereign integrity of the EU project. 10th house in a nation or a combination of nations is the sort of centralizing power or the centralized power. So we would expect with an eclipse there, that there’s some bumps in that road, some challenges to that idea of unity.
CB: Yeah. On a more personal level, I always talk about eclipses as being great beginnings and great endings. And it’s interesting that this eclipse series begins with a lunar eclipse, which is typically more of a culmination of something that started earlier. So think it about what house Taurus falls in your chart, especially what whole sign house, and what some of the significations are associated with that house. And you may see a culmination of events or potentially in some instances, some kind of ending in order to make way for a new beginning that will really ramp up six months later once we get the next set of Taurus-Scorpio eclipses during the middle part of next year. Here’s some significations of the houses diagram for those watching the video version just for what significations might be more prominent to you with this eclipse.
LS: And we’ve been kind of talking about it in dire ways for the last few minutes or so, but it is important to know that sometimes the beginnings or endings can be many culminations. They can be culminations within a larger project or within a larger experience or within a larger relationship or things of that nature. And so it can be chapters being bookended by the eclipses, it’s not necessarily 100% beginning or end. Sometimes it is, but not always, just to alleviate worries.
CB: Yeah. Sometimes it can be the end of a paragraph within a chapter instead of being the end of an entire chapter of your life.
LS: Exactly.
AC: It’s certainly a very strong introduction to the Taurus-Scorpio series. It’s worth noting that this is one of those, this eclipse cycle season is one of those sort of between signs, where two weeks after this we have the last Gemini-Sagittarius eclipse, and that’s paired with the first Taurus-Scorpio eclipse. So this is sort of between cycles, and this is kind of one of the fun things about eclipses, you get not irregularly this situation where you’re sort of beginning a new 18 months just before you end. The beginnings and endings are kind of, how do you say, entangled and don’t necessarily go A, B, C. Sometimes it’s C and oh yeah, we need to finish B, and then we move on to D.
LS: For sure, yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s really important because it’s like the mutable signs then are wrapping up that eclipse series in December, and some of those great beginnings and great endings are gonna be finalized, especially when the nodes then move out of the Sagittarius and Gemini axis. But then the fixed signs are ramping up some new major phase of their life as the eclipses move into that sector of their chart. So one thing I always have to mention once we start getting into talking about eclipse season is that Leisa and I actually did a workshop at the Mercury Cafe once, and I released a recording of it for the podcast. And that was episode, I think, 215. It was titled interpreting solar and lunar eclipses near birth chart. That’s available on our channel on YouTube. And it was actually a really good workshop on eclipses. Cause what it was on was talking to audience members and having them share their story about how transiting eclipses, when they were bouncing back and forth between pairs of houses in their chart for a year and a half or so, what sort of events came up actually in their life? And it was a good demonstration, I think, of how sometimes eclipses work as indicating part of an ongoing sequence of events or a story about a certain chapter of their life that then unfolds as the eclipses are happening in those signs. So people should check that out. Yeah.
LS: Yeah. And it really is that textbook. We didn’t screen ahead of time for good stories, we just threw it out there and heard what they said, and it all really lined up.
AC: Yeah. So eclipse stories are good. And in terms of thinking about them as sort of key points in narratives, one thing to note is that they tend to be, the shifts tend to be jarring, they’re not necessarily a smooth ride. Thinking of some of the stories, it’s like, “And that’s when I moved all the way across the country to a place where I didn’t know anybody,” or “That’s where this thing that I thought I’d been doing for a long time just totally fell from under me. When we’re looking at the sort of natural language of eclipses, they’re rare, dramatic, and intense. And what always sort of fascinates… One of the things that’s fascinating about them is that while visually they appear as an anomaly, most New Moons and Full Moons aren’t eclipsed. If we sort of back up and look at the Sun, Moon, Earth system, they’re are actually more perfect. They’re actually more perfect alignments between the Sun, Moon and Earth. It’s actually the imperfection, the fact that the Moon’s a little high or a little low, that allows for what we would call normal. But an eclipse is actually a most perfect alignment. And that’s part of where the power comes from. You can just draw a straight line Sun, Moon, Earth, whereas usually you got to wiggle the line a little bit during a New Moon or a Full Moon.
CB: Yeah. It’s funny that you were just throwing a hypothetical example of somebody moving across the country, but I remember a Taurus eclipse way back in late 2004, and at that time I made the decision to move from Denver to Seattle to study so I could be closer to Kepler college and access their library. And that was also the beginning then of another major move that happened six months later when I was invited to go out to Project Hindsight, and then I moved to Maryland and lived there for two years. But it all started with a Taurus eclipse. I believe it was this eclipse right here around October 27th, 2004. And with my Aquarius rising chart at the time, I was debating whole sign houses at the time cause I was actually skeptical for the first year after I heard the concept from Rob Hand, and I rejected it cause I used Placidus. But this was the first time where because I ended up moving shortly after that eclipse, that was one of the first things that made me look at whole sign houses and realize there was something to it because my IC’s in Gemini and so I shouldn’t have been moving then if that eclipse in my fourth whole sign house wasn’t indicating something about my living situation.
AC: Yeah. And that was a return for you too, that was your nodal cycle.
CB: Yeah, with north node in Taurus, yeah. So eclipse is major beginnings and major endings. That was an example of a major beginning for me in moving across the country and beginning a sequence of moves that would change my life. And I would shortly as a result of that be introduced to Hellenistic astrology and then go study a translation project. And actually, while living at that translation project would meet you, Austin, when you came out for one of the first conclaves at Project Hindsight. Yeah, so good times. All right. So that is that eclipse that’s taking place. I did mean to show the eclipse graphic since we’re wrapping it up here at this point. We had our first two eclipses in Sag and Gemini earlier this year in May and June, we’ve got that Taurus eclipse on November 19th at 27 Taurus, and then our last eclipse of the year will take place on December 4th in the sign of Sagittarius. And that will be the very last of the Sag-Gemini eclipses. All right. So let’s move on. So once we get past that eclipse, I feel like things start calming down and we start moving into a little bit less tense phase of the month, right?
LS: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to the end of November. And I think that’s what people have to kind of keep their sight out for is just make it to the end of November. Whatever is kind of getting stirred up in the middle, it will get better.
AC: Yeah. I don’t necessarily know that we would be grateful for the configurations at the end of November during another month, but because we’re grading on a November sliding scale bell curve, it looks less unfavorable and maybe even slightly favorable relative to the rest of the month.
CB: Yeah. I mean, if anything else, it’s just some of the planetary activity dies down. I mean, if you look at this Archetypal Explorer readout, there’s just so much going on in that second and third week of November, and then we start to move out some of the intensity of all of those really major aspects happening.
AC: Yeah, I mean, so the things to like is we have the Sun just moving out of Scorpio is useful cause it’s just the less we have in fixed signs, the better with this particular setup. And then Mercury following the Sun out is nice. Just depressurizing the fixed sign axis cause there’s already been way too much there.
LS: Right. And then as soon as everything moves into Sagittarius, one by one they suddenly are ruled by Jupiter, which while is in the fixed sign is still benefic. And yeah, and then you can see on that graph earlier that the activity just goes down. You can relax a little bit from probably what will be a little too frenetic before that point.
CB: Yeah. So we see Mercury–
AC: I’m getting a sense of sort of processing the things that all, everything that got activated and put into play.
CB: Yeah, and also just exhaling. I mean, there’s so much tension that it seems like a big inhale, sort of holding your breath and grinning and bearing it to get through the middle of the month, but then having a moment to exhale, especially once the Sun and Mercury get out of Scorpio and get out of that axis of the fixed signs. Mars starts moving away from Uranus and Saturn, and yeah, so we do finally at this point, and this would be a good opportunity to mention our electional chart for the month because Leisa and I did the auspicious elections podcast, which is one of the private podcasts we do for patrons through our page on Patreon each month. And we are trying to find… We usually try to find a good selection of charts throughout the month. So you have at least one electional chart for each week, but we had a really hard time recommending anything, frankly, in the middle of the month that people start any like getting married or starting a business or something like that in terms of major ventures. And most of our best electional charts we ended up focusing on the very end of the month once some of that stuff moves into Sagittarius as just a better time for beginning new ventures and undertakings.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s the only time we’ve ever done that since we’ve started the electional podcast, skipped the entire middle of the month.
CB: Yeah, not had more of an even distribution. Well, that’s sometimes the advice if we’re giving advice about when to start things using electional astrology. Sometimes the advice is do not start things during this time, which makes me think of ancient Babylonian astrologers, and finding cuneiform tablets like tell the king to do nothing during this period of time or what have you.
LS: Definitely, yeah.
AC: Yeah. Well, there’s that case for the negative space of electional astrology, where the positive side is doing or initiating something at the best possible time, but that is no more and no less valuable than simply not doing things at terrible times. If you can just cut out like the worst 20% of your timing, you’ll have huge benefit.
LS: And that’s often what really you’re doing is kind of chiseling out marble. You’re cutting away the things that are bad times, and you’re finding the least bad times.
AC: Yeah. Or you’re going through the potatoes that you bought, and you’re just cutting out the rotten parts or throwing away some of the fruit that’s actually gone off.
CB: Yeah. So much of the time we think about electional astrology as telling people when to act, but sometimes it can be also when not to act. So in terms of when to act, what is our electional chart for this month, Leisa?
LS: It is November 27th. Oh, sorry, that’s the 29th, November 29th, around 4:15 PM. And this is gonna be an early Gemini rising chart.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So we’ve got that. And then also there’s a couple variations for this month. There’s also the Moon trine Jupiter, one. Let’s do both of them. So the main one let’s do the Moon trine Jupiter. So it’s November 30th around 4:15 PM just before sunset in order to make this a day chart. So take this chart and set it for your location on November 30th, and then set it for 4:15 PM, and then adjust the Ascendant until it’s around, let’s say, four degrees of Gemini, definitely, no later than eight degrees of Gemini in order to keep this as a day chart since it’s just before sunset. So it’ll create a chart where the ruler Gemini is rising. The ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury, which is over in Sagittarius in the seventh whole sign house coming off of a conjunction with the Sun and a sextile with Saturn. The Moon is in later Libra and it’s applying to a trine with Jupiter in a day chart, which is pretty auspicious. We have the degree of the Midheaven here in Colorado is around the degree of Saturn and just past it, which is acceptable because it’s a day chart. We’d like to put Jupiter on the degree of the Midheaven, and that is possible, but you just have to be careful about an hour later that you don’t do things early so that the Midheaven is squaring Mars. So we also run into an issue cause it switches to a night chart at that point, which is more problematic in terms of Saturn, and less benefic in terms of the Moon’s application to Jupiter. So that’s why we’re probably recommending keeping this as a day chart just before sunset on November 30th.
AC: You’ve got the Moon is between aspects to Venus and Jupiter. Depends if we count Pluto.
CB: We’re gonna ignore Pluto for the sake of this experiment.
AC: Traditional rules only. Which is it’s very nice for the Moon to be protected like that, but moving between one benefic and the other.
CB: Yeah. And especially since the day chart moving from the benefic contrary to the sect and applying to a trine with the benefic of the sect in favor is pretty favorable. What are some of the things that this chart might be recommended for?
LS: Well, ninth house things for sure with Jupiter in a day chart in the ninth and Saturn in its own sign there. So things involving higher education, learning that is supposed to take a long time would be a great ninth house thing. It can be long distance travel, but it would be more for work rather than pleasure with Saturn there. Astrology actually would be a great… Someone just said I’ll start a cult. Oh yeah, you could do that.
AC: Wait for Jupiter in Pisces to start a cult.
CB: Right. Conjuct Neptune?
LS: Yeah. Astrological ventures with the ninth house also would be good, and maybe even ninth house things that involve client work, of course, because the Ascendant ruler is in the seventh of the other party, one-on-one interactions. And also there’s that emphasis in the ninth house. So there can potentially, at least for some people, be a blend of consulting or one-on-one work and ninth house matters which certainly would be astrological consulting would be great.
CB: Yeah, education. It’s not a bad chart for finances as well because the second house is ruled by the Moon which is applying to that trine with Jupiter while the Moon itself is placed in the fifth whole sign house which is in Hellenistic astrology the place of good fortune. So you can’t always get that where the ruler of the Ascendant and the ruler of the second are decently placed. But sometimes when you can, it’s nice to take advantage of it. Yeah, so that’s our electional chart for November. We found a few other charts during the course of the month, there’s a couple at the beginning of the month. Most of them, honestly, are at the end of the month once you get out of all of that stuff and some of those aspects are separating rather than applying. And people can access those other elections through our page on Patreon if you go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast. We also just finished our year ahead electional report where we went through each of the next 12 months of 2022, and we picked out one auspicious electional chart for each of the next 12 months, where we actually tried to find what is the single best chart for each of the next 12 months of 2022. And that was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time on it, but we actually just launched that report today.
LS: Mhm. Yeah. We actually put it out really early this time, relatively speaking, in late October instead of December. So there’s lots of good time for planning ahead with the report. I think we actually give a lot more variants this year as well. I counted up the total number of charts, and there’s actually 19 not 12, so with the next day variants and so forth or alternate charts. So there’s a wealth of options in there to plan ahead for your 2022 year.
CB: Yeah. In order to adjust for certain time zones where our primary chart looked good but wouldn’t work in some time zones, we gave variant charts. There’s a chart for just about every month, so people can find that. We released it through the course site on the astrologyschool.com this year. So go to courses.theastrologyschool.com/courses/2022elections, how’s that for a URL, to find that report. You’ll get immediate access to it as soon as you purchase it, and you can download it as an mp3, a video and a written report. All right, so that is bringing us to the homestretch of November of 2021. What are some of the last aspects that we have to talk about as we talk about the very end of the month and before we head into December? I think one major one that I think you mentioned Austin early on that’s really building up at this point by the time we get to late November is the Venus transit through Capricorn and getting ready for that station, that retrograde station conjunct Pluto, right?
AC: Yeah, Venus has really slowed down at this point. And even though the retrograde station doesn’t come until well into December, Venus is approaching the degrees that she’ll be in for quite some time. By the end of the month, Venus is already at 20 and so sitting right there with Pluto. And so we’re kind of getting introduced to what’s going to be basically a solid month of Venus conjunct Pluto direct and then retrograde, and that’s a tone that’s just going to be there through the holidays.
CB: A Venus retrograde is a vibe in and of itself, but Venus retrograde very closely within a degree conjunct Pluto is a whole other vibe.
AC: Well, I would say it’s almost a doubling down. When we’re looking at Venus retrograde stories, it’s very underworld caverns of the heart, Venus in terms of the visuals that then lead us to a metaphoric underworld interpretation what this is going to look like, and you can watch this all through November, is Venus being present and bright in the western horizon just after the sunsets and then syncing and dimming a little bit every day until there’s a disappearance and then a period of absence. And then later towards the direct station side, you’ll see Venus rise again in the east. But the visual is on the planet’s brightness, dropping, dropping, dropping to the western horizon, disappearing, and then appearing again on the other side of the earth. And so you have that like Inanna Ereshkigal story and structure.
CB: The descent into the underworld.
AC: Yeah, and it’s similar to Mercury retrograde. A Mercury retrograde has the same visual structure. In Mercury’s underworld are all of the mail you forgot to open, the conversations you let drop on purpose or accidentally. But Venus’s underworld has significantly more emotionally impactful material, right? It’s the ghosts of lovers’ past, passions unrequited, desires, etc, etc. It’s all Venus stuff, and it’s all feeling dense. And so if we’re just doing what’s in the underworld and then we add Pluto to that, I would say it’s not a different vibe. It’s a double down on that vibe.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. It also looks to me like the uncovering of secrets with Venus-Pluto leading into the retrograde, the uncovering of secrets that can then cause you to reevaluate relationships or things like that or the attempts to keep secrets. Just working through all of the-
AC: Yeah, those don’t tend to go as well during this period.
LS: What did you say?
AC: I said which don’t tend to go as well. That’s what Venus retrograde is about. It’s like, “Oh, what was buried? Let’s find out.”
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So obsessions, taboos, things of that nature.
CB: Obsession is a really good keyword. That’s one that always I think of when I think of Venus-Pluto, that it can be really obsessive especially for love interests. And sometimes that can go in a good way of being taken to extremes. It’s like the Romeo and Juliet scenario of being willing at least to go to the ultimate extreme of dying for somebody, let’s say, in a version of that that’s romantic.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know if suicide pact teenage love is qualified as…
CB: I’m just saying there’s a version of that that might be romantic in a certain context versus there’s the version of that that is not romantic, that is the going too far in relationships of being obsessed in love but is the object of your desire. Is that returned? Is that reciprocal? Or is it one person being overly obsessed and attached to another person and not being willing to let go of that? Or not, let’s say, taking it to inappropriate extremes.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
AC: Yeah. And with this one, I think there’s also a lot that speaks to some of the pain of… Like you said, the pain of non-relationship, the pain of isolation when you would like to not be isolated. Because this is Venus and Pluto in a Saturn-ruled sign, and there can be something a little grim. And if we’re talking about the underworld caverns, there’s being stuck down here emotionally and not being able to connect to people.
LS: Yeah, that’s a really good point.
AC: And if you have a depressive bent as I do exactly half the time, it’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna be prepared to deal with those kinds of feelings.”
CB: What’s interesting about it though is this is still building up in late November, so we won’t see the culmination of that. It’s like the direction that that’s heading, you’re getting there by late November because Venus ingressed a while earlier. But it’s like some of the relationship or the sequence of events running relationship or love or attachment or what-have-you is still being set up, and it’s right on the verge of coming to the culmination that it comes to at some point in December. But it’s not quite there yet. The pieces, the chess pieces are still being put in place.
LS: Mm-hmm. For sure. I was thinking also with the need for long-term planning and Venus in Capricorn’s like, “What’s the plan here for us?” And especially with regard to potentially tying into finances with a Pluto in Capricorn transit overall having so much to do with finances and disparities and income and things like that. I could see the Venus-Pluto as a natal signature can be attraction to wealth or power. And so there could be elements of that coming into play as well.
AC: Yeah. I think there’s going to be a lot of that in terms of how it looks collectively, those structures and how the resources are allocated or controlled or whatever. I would also add that with the Saturnian influence here this occurring in a Saturnian sign, sometimes you can have that like, “I’m walled in. I’m stuck. Nobody can see me.” But then you can also have the like, “I’m walled in to this structure of relationship with a person.” Or you’re like, “Oh, I have feelings of being stuck in patterns that need to be revisited.” Will definitely be something X number of people are going to get out of this one.
LS: Right. Yeah, I can see that.
CB: Yeah, so that’s building up. And the Venus retrograde, of course, is famously 40 days and 40 nights. And we don’t see that station until later on in December, but it’s interesting that there’s going to be this low key build-up of this that actually begins on November 5th as soon as Venus moves into Capricorn because then it begins its slow build-up to that conjunction with Pluto. And it begins its co-presence in the same sign as Pluto. So people should pay attention to that because it’s going to be one of those instances where you have that… One of the things I talked about on the podcast on aspects with Claire Moon earlier this month is just that difference between sign-based aspects and degree-based aspects. And it’s true that the degree-based aspects often coincide with the actual event and with the greatest intensification of the transit where things are the most acute and the most obvious. But if you pay attention, the events that culminate at that exact aspect often start to build up as soon as the two planets move into the sign-based configuration. So people should pay attention to this Venus ingress just because there’ll be some background events that lead into things even if they don’t come to full culmination until the actual Venus station in December.
AC: Yeah, and it’s interesting if we want to look at the span of the Venus retrograde, Venus will go back to 11 for the direct station. And so for looking at when does Venus pass 11 degrees, it’s November 18th. So we’re in those degrees which will be visited three times. In this case, very literally, ghost of Christmas past, present, and future.
CB: All right. That’s beautiful. So right around the time of the Mars-Uranus opposition and the eclipse is when Venus enters her retrograde shadow?
AC: Yeah.
CB: Good catch. All right. And then December we see Venus stationing retrograde there conjunct Pluto at 26 degrees of Capricorn December 18th. And then it begins its 40 days and 40 nights of the retrograde period where it starts moving back towards the Sun, begins its whole descent into the underworld phase which is doubly emphasized as Austin was saying by the conjunction with Pluto, the god of the underworld, at the same time, eventually conjoins the Sun in January, and then eventually at some point emerges from under the beams of the Sun and the underworld and eventually stations here, it looks like, in late January.
AC: Yeah. As everyone’s living through Venus slowly edging towards the actual retrograde turn, I’ve often found it very helpful to just pay attention. Because if you’re paying attention, you’re often not terribly surprised by whatever events are part of the retrograde proper. These things brew for a while. And if you’re not paying attention or trying to not pay attention, then you may get a big surprise. But if you’re just keeping an ear to the Venusian in your life and whatever house area that is for you, you’re less likely to be shocked and more likely to be ready to do that even if you don’t love it.
CB: Yeah. Isn’t that basically being an astrologer? It’s just sitting there and sipping your tea and saying, “Oh yeah, that makes sense. That’s not a surprise.”
AC: It’s the not being surprised, right?
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Developing a detached sense of non-surprising, non surprisal.
AC: Well, it’s one thing to be in a fight, it’s another thing to be ambushed.
LS: True. True.
CB: And then, of course, we have to mention with a Venus retrograde one of the ways to not be surprised, of course, is to think back the eight years earlier. And you’ll see that there was a Venus retrograde in roughly the same spot in the zodiac. So this would have been in the December 2013 timeframe was the last time that Venus stationed retrograde in Capricorn. So you can take it back to that or you can take it back to eight years prior to that or eight years prior to that. And sometimes you’ll see echoes of the same Venus retrograde especially if you’re tied into that cycle and have personal points around those degrees, then it can be much more important for you.
AC: Yeah. One thing that’s interesting is that this one not too long ago used to start in early Aquarius, but it’s climbed back so that the start is in late Capricorn. And I noticed the difference because I have Venus in very early Aquarius. And so this cycle when it used to start in Aquarius was actually much more impactful. And I was happy when it moved back into Capricorn where it was… It’s still a Venus retrograde. It still matters, but it’s a little bit different. So if you go 16 years ago, then you’re looking at an Aquarius start. But I think that eight years ago was the first Capricorn-only start.
CB: Okay, yeah. I think you’re right because it moves about two or three degrees every time.
AC: Yeah, just slowly inches.
CB: Yeah. Well, we will talk more about that and probably do a much deeper dive into Venus retrograde and retrograde periods when we do our next forecast episode which will be sometime later in November when we do the forecast for December. And then the following month we will do our entire year-ahead forecast for 2022 which usually doubles as the January forecast. All right. I think that brings us to the end of this episode and the end of our discussion about the astrology of November. Is there anything else that we missed?
LS: Just at the very end of the month, Neptune stations.
CB: All right, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point.
LS: Just forgetting about Neptune. That’s a good–
CB: Always overlooking Neptune. Yeah. So here, let me pull that up.
LS: Neptune stations, and also Venus is configured to Neptune by sextile.
CB: Yeah, sextiles it on the same day at 20 degrees.
LS: Yeah. And it’s also kind of sextile Mars, not exact yet but very close within about a degree. So it feels like there’s a little bit of cooling off. I feel with the Neptune station at the end especially after so much eruption potential eruption this month, it’s like either a sigh of relief or a numbing out or both.
AC: Yeah. Well, it’s like it doesn’t necessarily change the events in play. But it’s like, “Here, take these two ibuprofen. And then see what you think about exactly the same things happening.” It’s just like a little bit of a painkiller.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, or R&R, little rest and relaxation with Venus sextiling Mars and sextiling Neptune and just the piece of taking a little bit of a break before we head into some of the more important and again a little bit more tense aspects of December which are the eclipse and the third exact Saturn-Uranus square. And also the Venus stationing retrograde conjunct Pluto.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I feel like the end of November is like, “Take a couple days off, watch movies all day.” It’s that kind of energy.
CB: Right. Yeah. Get a massage, and take it easy. And gear up for the last month of the year. One thing we didn’t mention at all that we meant to actually in terms of that was just in other months so much of the pandemic has been the hard aspects between Mars and Saturn and that we’re heading into the last two months of the year, we’re heading into the period where we would already expect the cold and flu season to exacerbate things in the Northern Hemisphere and in the US. And with Mars and Saturn again moving into a hard aspect, we would expect with some of the COVID stuff an increase of that presumably as well during this time, during this month and a half or two-month period.
LS: Yeah, for sure. It’s lined up like clockwork in the past. I went back and looked when all of the original shutdowns happened at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was all within a few days or so at least in the US. All of the different states did their shutdowns within a few days of the Mars-Saturn conjunction, and then the squares had smaller blips of that as well. So some greater restriction potentially around that or precautions even if not restriction outright.
AC: Well, and that plays into all the other stuff that we’re talking about, right?
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Something that I think these last two years has made extremely clear is when you’re looking for rough situations, you don’t just look for one planet misbehaving. You look for where a bunch of stuff all comes together at the same time in, I don’t know, a delightful synergy, a complicated, nuanced, delicate hell broth where it’s not just one ingredient.
CB: Right. Can that be the title of this episode? I’ll attribute that to you. Delightful synergy of hell broth.
AC: Yeah. Hell broth on the stove. Hell broth’s almost ready.
LS: Yeah, that’s fine.
AC: Shit layer cake is pretty good. But there has to be maybe medical waste on one layer and then human shit on another. You need to have multiple ingredients. The hell broth is served. A ladle full of hell broth.
CB: Okay. Well, thank you for ending with that metaphor. Well, everyone, good luck and stay safe during the course of November. I hope everyone has a good month and makes it through all right and gets what they have to get done during the middle parts of the month. And just remember that there will be an end to it. And that’s one of the most positive things about astrology and the helpful things is just knowing sometimes the timeframe in which things are the most intense can sometimes give you some idea of the duration and that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel in most instances. So that’s always something that’s good to keep in mind.
AC: Yeah, it’s huge. I think it’s huge. When you don’t have a timeframe, all suffering threatens to become infinite. We’re like, “Oh, this is just what it is.” It’s like, “No, this is what it is for exactly nine and a half more days.” Can you do nine and a half days? Probably. Can you do an infinity? I don’t know. Probably not. I found that to be very helpful on a mental health level. It’s like with push ups. If someone says, “Do push ups until, well, there’s no end point.” You’re like, “I don’t know if I can do that many.” Where somebody is like, “Okay. Do a hundred. You can break them into sets if you want.” You’ll be like, “That’s a lot of fucking push ups. But there’s an end in sight.” And I think from managing your cognition point of view there’s an infinite difference between might never end versus just do a hundred.
LS: Right. Yeah, I think that’s huge for November of this year and months like November where it’s boxed in and you know when it begins and when it ends and you’re like, “Okay, I can get through that.” versus if you have no idea which is the great thing about knowing astrology. Otherwise, you have no idea. And you’re like, “Oh my god, life is terrible forever.”
AC: Yeah, right. I read about that in some Buddhist texts a long time ago as the mistake of eternalizing a particular experience, and then that was like an error of the mind to be on the lookout for.
LS: Right.
CB: All right. Awesome. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thank you both for joining me today for this. This is great. Thanks Leisa for joining us for this forecast episode.
LS: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great.
AC: Yeah, this is not an easy episode to premiere on.
LS: Yeah, it’s fine.
AC: You did great.
CB: Yeah. All right. What do you both have coming up this month? Austin, I believe Kaitlin said there’s an article on the Sphere + Sundry site about remediating eclipse things that might be useful for people.
AC: Mm-hmm. Yeah, Kate did a really nice write-up of a variety of different strategies for managing things during eclipse season. I’m going to be locked in a steel cage manacled to the text I need to edit to get the second edition of Faces actually done. Let’s see. Kate will be preparing to release a new Regulus series. Not in the next couple of weeks, maybe under the month, maybe beginning of next month. But other than that, I’ll be teaching my classes and chained to my workbench.
LS: Mm-hmm. Sounds good.
CB: Brilliant. That sounds good. I know people are dying to get that book. That book is so scarce–
AC: Well, I have now joined them and I will be dying to get it done.
CB: Okay. It’s going for hundreds of dollars on the… There’s a black market surrounding your decan’s book at this point, I think.
AC: Yeah, the second-hand market is absurd. But in a way that’s kind of complimentary.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah, totally.
AC: Yeah.
CB: You were telling me the other day that you mentioned to a high school friend that your book was going for hundreds of dollars on eBay right now, and he didn’t believe you.
AC: Yeah, it was somebody I hadn’t talked to in a long time. And he was like, “Oh.” He was talking about what do I do for a living and how do I pay bills. And I was like, “Well, it’s classes and books.” And he’s, “What? You wrote a book?” And I was like, “Yeah, look it up online.” And he’s like, “Why is your book $400?”
CB: Right. Because it’s very scarce because there was a limited print run at the beginning, but you’ll be rectifying that soon. And I know you’ve redone the illustrations, and it looks really good.
AC: Thank you. Yeah, I’m really excited about the work Grant Hanna did.
CB: Yeah. Speaking of books, I see a very rare typo book for part two of Demetra’s book sitting on your bookshelf Leisa that you’re proofreading right now with your Virgo Moon that knows no bounds.
LS: Right. Yeah. So one of maybe like a few proof copies available right now.
CB: Okay. Well, that’s very highly prized then at some point. So that book, hopefully, it’ll be out before too long. You’re doing final proofreading on that. You’re actually so good at proofreading that you mentioned before we started chatting that you reached a new Virgo Moon achievement or unlocked one where you found a typo in the ephemeris.
LS: I did. I found a typo on the ephemeris for next year which is ridiculous since it’s an entire book of numbers and symbols, and that is all on there in tiny print. But yeah. So heads up for anyone who has the American Ephemeris 1950 to 2050 at noon, Next December there is a typo in the retrograde of Mercury. I don’t actually exalt in this. It’s just something that happens. I see them easily. It’s not something that’s desirable.
CB: Yeah. Well, that is bizarre. And I’m both impressed and terrified by your ability to notice minute details like that. What do you have coming up that you’re gonna be working on in November?
LS: Well, we did, as you mentioned earlier, just finish as of like last night the year-ahead electional report. So we just got that out today. I’m pretty excited to launch that. And so that has an election for every month. I actually also just got invited recently to give a workshop at the ISAR conference next year on election astrology. So that’s pretty cool. It’ll be a pre-conference workshop, hopefully, in person this time. It’s been put off for a couple years. But it’s going to be in Westminster, Colorado just outside of Denver. So it’s kind of nice for us. It’s in late August. I don’t remember the exact date. It’s something like the 25th, the 29th, something like that. So yeah. So I hope some people who’ve been interested in elections from watching the podcast or watching the electional podcast in particular come and join me and talk elections before the conference.
CB: I think they just opened registration for that. So it’s isar2022.org. And it looks like the dates are August 25th through the 29th, 2022 in Westminster, Colorado. And, Austin, I think they also recently announced NORWAC. And you’re doing NORWAC next year in Seattle in May, right?
AC: Yeah. I’ll be doing a pre-conference workshop and two talks.
LS: Nice.
CB: Brilliant. The website for that is norwac.net, and the dates are May 26th through the 30th. I am really looking forward to conferences happening in person again and seeing a lot of friends in person for the first time in a few years next year. That should be really good.
LS: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, it’d be really good.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So as for me, I’m moving towards that. I’m getting excited about Jupiter moving into Pisces next year, and I want to start interviewing people in person more. One of the things that I did recently in order to move towards that is I restructured and refreshed my Patreon tiers. So if people like the podcast, they watch it regularly, and they wanna support that, I’m gonna, hopefully, next year start flying people out for in person interviews here in Denver just because you can get so much better audio and video quality when people are sitting here in person as you can see on some of my previous studio episodes. So if you wanna support that, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast. And you can see some of the different benefits you can get by becoming a patron and supporting the work that I’m doing here on the podcast. I think I’m also launching a rectification course with Patrick Watson sometime in November and an intro to astrology course sometime in November as well probably later in the month. So keep an eye out for that. And I’ll have more information available soon. All right. Thank you both for joining me today, and thanks to our audience. We had a lot of people join us, patrons joining us for the live episode and adding stuff to the conversation which has been really fun and helpful. Thanks everyone for joining us. Thank you, Leisa and Austin for doing this episode with me and good luck in November. That’s it for this episode of the podcast. Thanks, everyone for listening or watching, and we’ll see you again next time.
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 producers 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. If you like the work that I’m doing here on the podcast and you would like to find a way to support it, then please consider becoming a patron through my page on patreon.com and in exchange, you’ll get access to bonus content such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the month-ahead forecast each month, access to a private monthly auspicious elections report that we put out each month, access to exclusive episodes that are only available for patrons, or you can also get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast. The main software we use here on the podcast to look at astrological charts is called Solar Fire for Windows which is available at alabe.com, and you can use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we use a similar set of software by the same programming team called Astro Gold for macOS which is available from astrogold.io. And you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount on that as well. If you would like to learn more about the approach to astrology that I outline on the podcast, then you should check out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I traced the origins of western astrology and reconstructed the original system that was developed about 2,000 years ago. In this book I outline basic concepts but also take you into intermediate and advanced techniques for reading a birth chart including some timing techniques. You can find out more about the book at hellenisticastrology.com/book. The book pairs very well with my online course on ancient astrology called The Hellenistic Astrology Course which has over a hundred hours of video lectures where I go into detail about teaching you how to read a birth chart and showing hundreds of example charts in order to really demonstrate how the techniques work in practice. So, find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com. And finally, special thanks to our sponsors including The Mountain Astrologer magazine which is available at mountainastrologer.com, the Honeycomb Collective personal astrological almanacs available at honeycomb.co, The Portland School of Astrology available at portlandastrology.org, and the Astro Gold astrology app which is available for iPhone and Android. You can find out more information about that at astrogold.io.