The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 332, titled:
2022 Astrology Forecast for the Year Ahead
With Chris Brennan and astrologers Austin Coppock and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on December 18, 2021
—
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
—
Transcribed by Mary Sharonn
Transcription released December 22, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be looking at the astrological forecast for the entire year of 2022. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Leisa Schaim. Hey guys.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.
CB: All right. We’re going to start by giving a little– we’re going to talk for about 40 minutes about an overview and give an overview of some of the major astrological alignments this year. Then after that, we’re going to go into a quarter by quarter breakdown, spending about 40 minutes on each of the four quarters of 2022. Does that sound like a good plan to you guys?
LS: Sounds great.
AC: It does.
CB: All right. Well, let’s do it. And for those that pay attention, this is episode 322, and we are recording it on Monday, December 13th, 2021, starting at about 11:14 AM in Denver, Colorado. So let’s jump right into it. All right. First things first, I wanted to show some of our graphics that we put together to illustrate and sort of visualize some of the transits that are going on this year. Here’s our thumbnail that was made by Paula Belluomini with our planetary movements calendar, which shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the year and how far through the signs of the Zodiac they’ll get by the end of the year. I’ve also got some other graphics that I’m going to be showing at different points, some of which are from the website archetypalexplorer.com. But why don’t we start out first with just listing the bullet points and talking about some of the major main points that we’re going to be talking about the most and coming back to at different points this year. So one of the things as we start off at the beginning of the year with the tail end of the Venus retrograde in the sign of Capricorn. This year also features Jupiter having already just moved into Pisces at the end of December of 2021, and then spending some time in the sign of Aries this year as well. This spring will have Jupiter conjunct Neptune in Pisces, we’ll have the second half of Saturn in Aquarius, as well as the continuation of the Saturn square Uranus transit that we experienced in 2021. Mars will conjoin Saturn in Aquarius this spring in April as well. There’ll be eclipses in Taurus and Scorpio, the Pluto return of the United States will go exactly three times, and then finally towards the end of the year, we’ll have Mars retrograde in Gemini. So those are some of the main points. Where do we want to start? What should we start with or what’s attracting your eyes or what’s standing out to you at this point, both of you?
AC: I think we should start with Saturn square Uranus. Saturn was basically square Uranus all of 2021, and it will somewhat loosely square Uranus all of 2022. So it’s a little bit of what remains the same even if we would like it to change. [laughs]
CB: Here is a graphic for those watching the video version that shows we had those three exact hits of Saturn square Uranus, the last one of which was actually going to take place still a little bit after we record this later in December of 2021, that’s the third exact hit. But Saturn and Uranus are actually going to come back, especially in the later parts, the second half and the third, and a little bit of the fourth quarter of the year. And even though it doesn’t go exact again, the square between them or the 90 degree angle, because they retrograde in such a weird way this year, they actually spend this extended period of time very close to a square with each other for essentially what becomes almost a fourth near exact square between the two.
AC: Yeah, they’re within a degree.
LS: Yeah, within about a degree or one to three degrees for about three months which is quite long.
AC: Which is an aspect by anybody’s definition.
CB: Yeah. So what are some of our main keywords for Saturn square Uranus? It seems like one of them is… We on the one hand have Saturn and the idea of the establishment, and then a square indicating a tension or conflict between the two with Uranus which tends to be more rebellious or destabilizing. So these themes of tensions between establishment in some way versus some sort of upstart or some sort of rebellious tendencies in different levels of the world or society or sometimes in our personal lives, depending on how it’s hitting our natal chart.
LS: Yeah. For some people they’ve had sudden destabilizations as this has gone on in 2021, still could be a possibility in 2022. Anything that’s established, it doesn’t have to be like “the establishment” but basically anything that is a structure compared to things that want to break through structures.
AC: Yeah. If we’re thinking about Saturn in terms of verbs– not that nouns are inappropriate, structure is a good noun– but the act of ordering is Saturn. And so we have Uranus undercutting either through conscious rebellion or sort of environmental chaos the act of ordering. Because Uranus can be someone who is rebelling for reasons whatever good or ill, and trying to undercut the order that someone else is trying to establish. Or it can just be environmental factors like, I don’t know, the price of beef triples. So your attempt to order the beef trade is undercut by [laughs] the sudden spike in beef prices. But it’s that kind of idea. It’s like, “Oh, I’m just trying to make this orderly. I’m trying to create a structure,” and then something changes really quickly or someone changes that really quickly and so my efforts are frustrated.
CB: Sometimes that can be very literal and I remember last year just after the second Saturn-Uranus square, you had used some sort of metaphor about collapsing structures, and not long after that there was the collapse of that apartment building or that condo building in Miami in Florida, I think in late June or early July, which was a really striking literal example of that.
AC: Yeah, we were talking about pressure testing structures. Like how resilient is a structure relative to a sudden shift in the environment.
CB: Right. And one of the pressure tests was when Uranus stationed in August, there was the pressure test of the US starting to pull out of Afghanistan and how well they had set up the government there over the past 20 years since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. And it turned out when that pressure test happened, the answer was not too well.
LS: Right. And a lot of people were really surprised by how quickly it fell and, you know, it was about how firm is your establishment or your foundation versus does it have cracks all over the place and it’s just going to fall?
AC: Right. House of Cards metaphors make a lot of sense here.
LS: Yeah. There’s also ongoing tensions between sort of established things in society versus people wanting to kind of break down established things. And I think one of the things I’ve noticed that’s been kind of interesting as we’ve gone through this so far– there’s been a few squares so far– is kind of people changing sides in small ways. Not necessarily like people at the top, but just people sort of like changing sides at different points and sort of siding with things that are established and then suddenly siding with things that are breaking through establishment. I’ve just noticed that in the social realm with a lot of people.
CB: Right. So initially being part of the establishment and then suddenly seemingly overnight finding yourself outside of that for some reason?
LS: Mm-hmm. Or vice versa. People starting out thinking they want to break through the establishment and then go, “Oh, there’s structures for a reason. Structures are important in society,” and start flipping to the other side.
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think I can probably think of 30 examples of that.
CB: Yeah. And that’s probably more relevant now also with Saturn being in Aquarius. I was listening to a forecast by Christopher Renstrom. He was talking about the social component of Saturn in Aquarius because it’s an air sign. And sometimes that makes sense in terms of like realignment , sometimes of values and sometimes notions of community and what the individual does sometimes in order to contribute to the community or how you’re contributing to larger community efforts.
LS: And the ideal with these two planets is accepting both the need for long-term structures and work on long-term aims that stays the same more or less over time, and also the need for innovation. And it’s just that they’re sort of in a square and so the path to accepting both of those is rocky and it’s sort of more one side versus the other. Eventually, the ideal is to kind of have both of them be honored.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s that positive this-is-a-task-that-can-be-achieved level. It’s adapting those structures or the verb of the active structuring to the pressures of a more chaotic environment. They’re like, “Okay. So if I’m running the institution of Austin, which I am, how is my ordering affected by the pressure of the new chaotic things in my life?” We can imagine the price of beef again. What does my monthly budget look like if beef is all over the place? [laughs]
CB: Which is actually a thing that’s happening right now due to inflation where the prices of everything is going up. And I know that’s going to be one of our major keywords this year with Jupiter going into Pisces and conjoining Neptune is a lot of astrologers are talking about issues of inflation.
LS: The other thing I’ve noticed with Saturn-Uranus for some people is sort of sudden events causing them to take on new long term responsibilities, which is sort of the Uranus leading and then leading to the Saturn instead of vice versa.
AC: Well, and that speaks to the fact that both of these planets are squaring in fixed signs. So these are… When it emerges suddenly or when it seems to emerge suddenly, it’s Uranus acting through arguably the most fixed sign. Taurus is very steady. It’s things that are always there like food. Food is something we have to think about every day. And usually when we do research on it, we find that the sudden thing was a long time coming. But a sudden change to a thing that always needs to be taken into account is significant.
CB: Yeah, so speaking of sudden things. Some of the Uranian portions of the Saturn-Uranus square this year are going to get amplified because we’ve got not just Mars is going to go in there at different points and either square conjoin Uranus or Saturn, but also two of the eclipses since our eclipses and the nodes are moving into the Taurus Scorpio axis, the north node is actually going to be aligning pretty closely with Uranus this year and amplifying some of its disruptive tendencies. Two of the eclipses are actually going to be very closely aligned with Uranus in April, May, and then in October and November. So it may be that the Uranian and rebellious or disruptive or unexpected tendencies of that pair between Saturn and Uranus get amplified and just increased this year much more than last year.
AC: Yeah. When we compare this year and last year if we’re seeing that Saturn-Uranus tension as the sort of historical pairing for this pair of years and then we look at who else is affecting that, for much of 2021 we had Jupiter co present Saturn. It was Jupiter trying to conform and stabilize the ordering principle. Jupiter will be off doing things that make Jupiter considerably more happy in 2022 but that are of no benefit to Saturn. So Saturn in a sense loses Jupiter, whereas Uranus– I don’t necessarily want to say gains Rahu or the north node or the ascending node, but that co-presence is there all year. And I tend to think of the north node or Rahu as being sort of like steroids, like a destabilizing stack for a planet. It increases its strength but it does make it prone to roid rage. It doesn’t stabilize the peace, the calm, the mental efficacy but it does boost raw strength. I dare say that’s not exactly what we want for Uranus, which is already prone to outbursts but it is what it is. [laughs]
CB: Somebody should Photoshop an image of like a Uranus cliff with just really buff arms. And that would be the image for Uranus, especially around the May April timeframe, I think.
AC: Right, trying to contain the roid rage. I think I saw a YouTube video, Trenbolone is the new steroids, but it’s like 10 times as strong and makes you crazy fit and also crazy, crazy, very quickly.
CB: Good times. All right. So Saturn-Uranus, that’s one of our major themes this year and paying attention to themes of disruption versus restriction or the past versus the future in some instances. There’s been some really interesting things with like cryptocurrency, of course, this past year. All the astrologers, we all talked about when Uranus went into Taurus, the possibility for changes in terms of finances and monetary things, but now we’re actually seeing that happen. And it was really interesting just this past week seeing a bunch of CEOs of different cryptocurrency companies went to Congress to like testify and to have public hearings about cryptocurrency and whether it should be regulated, and they were pushing back and saying, if you regulate this, it will not just stifle it, but it will also make our companies just go overseas. And so that was really interesting symbolism as we have this third exact Uranus-Saturn square this month that may continue into next year is tensions between this new upstart technology that’s disrupting previous things versus the tendency on the part of the government to want to control or regulate it.
LS: Mm-hmm. One thing I noticed related to that as well is digital currencies being piloted by central banks of different countries. Apparently the majority of the central banks in the world now have some sort of pilot program going on for digital currencies. And when I found that, it felt really Saturn-Uranus to me, cuz they’re trying to incorporate this new kind of upstart technology or movement into what is already centralized and stabilized and the foundation or the structure. So, yeah, that seems like another example that’s kind of ongoing with that square this year.
AC: Yeah, definitely, and with Uranus and Taurus in addition, and that’s a good example of just a Uranus and Taurus thing is money or repositories of value. We’re always dealing with repositories of value almost every day. If you want to buy something, you need to exchange a repository value currency for that good. And then we also have food, Uranus and Taurus is historically very much about the food, both the mass produced potato chip and the chocolate chip cookie both premiered under previous Uranus and Tauruses. These are like staples, they may not be good for you, but they’re stock foods. And Chris, you were saying to me earlier that you had seen some interesting news about grown meat.
CB: Yeah. I was seeing this really interesting thing in The Economist about bio-grown meat or lab grown meat. That, as well as how other vegan alternatives are really starting to gain market share and are really starting to become major forces in the market economy. And that in itself is interesting and is something we’ve been talking about for a while, but we’re actually seeing it happen in real time. Part of the potential of that that I thought was interesting as well was the fear on the part of some farmers about those lab grown meats or even vegan alternatives displacing basically like the cattle and larger meat industry in general, and the notion of the farming industry being disrupted by emerging technologies is a very Uranian thing and I would expect that we see the expansion of that this year as well as the tensions that that creates and the ripples that it creates in the economy and in other markets starting to become more noticeable as well.
LS: Right. And it’s so perfect that it’s actually specific to beef and cattle because that’s very strongly associated with Taurus. [laughs]
CB: Taurus, the sign of the bull.
LS: The cow, yeah.
AC: Yes, the beef.
CB: “Where is the beef?” “It’s in a beaker being grown in the lab,” apparently is the answer.
LS: Which will be interesting too in how that makes inroads or doesn’t with vegan considerations, because does the lab grown meat suffer? That’s just like a whole new spin into that whole issue.
AC: Yeah, totally. Because it’s a different ethical calculus.
LS: Mm-hmm, right.
CB: They’re taking cells from the animal and then growing it based on that instead of like murdering an animal. So that’s interesting. All right.
AC: I believe the term is slaughter. [Leisa laughs]
CB: Slaughter, okay, not murder. Okay.
AC: I guess if you’re really angry about it, then it’s murder.
CB: Yeah, okay. It’s not premeditated… Well, it is kind of premeditated.
AC: So it is premeditated. [Leisa laughs]
CB: I mean, that’s murder then. I’m sorry, my friend, to get all preachy on you. All right, let’s skip that. Let’s go. Let’s move on to… I want to talk about Jupiter cuz Jupiter’s making some big moves this year. It’s already ingressed into Pisces. We had a dip into Pisces a little bit last summer for a few months, and then weirdly, at least in the US, things started opening up in terms of COVID and it seemed like everything was going back to normal and we were done with the pandemic. And then Jupiter slowed down and retrograded, went back into Aquarius and it turned out the pandemic was not over. That was the time when the Delta variant emerged around the time of the Mars-Saturn opposition when that started when Mars started going through Leo. So Jupiter’s going back into Pisces. It’s going to be back in Pisces for the first few months and we’re going to get this really notable Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, which is one of the most, to me, important or at least stand out alignments of the year in terms of major outer planet alignments that should be very distinctive. Is that one of the alignments you guys are looking forward to?
LS: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely one of the things that stands out the most about the 2022 astrological weather, I would say. I mean looking forward to it, I think there’s pros and cons as with all astrological weather. But it’s definitely notable, especially compared to we’ve had Saturn co-present with Jupiter for what feels like forever at this point, you know, through Aquarius, through Capricorn, it’s been quite a while since Jupiter has been free of Saturn sort of holding it down and restraining it’s want to be buoyant and expansive and hopeful and all of those good Jupiterian things. We just had a little taste of it, as you said, from like mid-May to late July earlier this year, but otherwise it’s been a bit. So I think it’ll be welcome in that respect. It’s also going to be really watery, Jupiter and Pisces alone would be very watery in terms of the element, in terms of that kind of expanding our emotional release or catharsis or things like that. And then adding Neptune on, it just furthers those significations.
CB: You know, there’s a lot of positive and there’s also some destructive because Neptune can be deceptive or illusory and Jupiter can be about truth. That’s always been one of its primary significations in the search for truth. So that’s one of my primary things, especially for the first and second quarter, is the search for truth and meaning or the attempt to find it, I think is going to be a focal point of that conjunction. And sometimes though it can be just misleading in a not very good way. I mean, one of the things that we saw last year when Jupiter dipped into Pisces and started being co-present in the same sign as Neptune was the sigh of relief when things started going back to normal and a bunch of the mask mandates, I think the very first day that Jupiter went into Pisces the United States lifted the national mask mandate. And so was this thinking that like things are going to go back to normal and the pandemic was over, but then we realized that that was not true. And it was sort of like an illusion that things were going to go completely back to normal and we weren’t quite there yet. So the potential for some sort of illusion or deception or just not quite things being not quite what they seem is a heightened potential, especially when Jupiter gets right on top of Neptune in April.
AC: Yeah. Well, and that speaks to one of the historical precedents that we were looking at. Jupiter entered a co-presence with Neptune within a week and a half of the Japanese surrender in World War II. And this was Jupiter Neptune in Libra. And then it began a year of that. And it was like, “Oh, it’s over. World War II is over.” But all the damage had been done. 50-100 million people were still dead. Massive swaths of the world were devastated. It was like, “Yeah, it’s over. But it’s not…” It’s a really good parallel in terms of like, it’s not wrong to be joyful at that moment, but there are a lot of wounds that don’t close immediately just because the killing is paused. And then Chris, you had a really… This doesn’t seem like an immediate parallel, but it does work. The movie Avatar premiered during the last Jupiter-Neptune, which was supposed to be the most awesome thing ever. And it was pretty good. But was it the most awesome thing ever as it was built as? No.
CB: Yeah, yeah. So when I was researching past cycles, one of the things I like to look at is what happens in art and culture in addition to world events. And that was the one that really stood out to me during the last conjunction, cuz it was just as Jupiter was headed on its way out, Jupiter conjoined Neptune in Aquarius and Avatar dropped out of nowhere. And it was this huge cinematic experience that really launched the entire 3D movie craze that then has dominated so much over the past decade. And at the time I remember going to it and it was this experience that you hadn’t had where there was this immersiveness and this creating of a false reality in some sense, but it was one that was really appealing and striking and just like visually and appealed to your senses in a way that was different than anything up to that point in addition to the fact that the movie was entirely 3D generated. So we’re going to see something like that probably in art and culture, and I’m specifically thinking about how there may be some major developments this year in terms of the rise of virtual reality and virtual reality headsets as well as augmented reality. And I keep my eye on Apple is potentially supposed to announce either a VR headset, which would be a major game changer or potentially an augmented reality set of glasses, which would also be kind of important and notable. So changes in technology as well as in movies or other things, artwork, things like that in order to have a more immersive experience that’s deceptive in some way but also just visually appealing.
LS: I was looking back to the last time that Jupiter and Neptune were both in Pisces just to see if there were any parallels that seemed potentially repeatable. And speaking of the aesthetics, sort of like pioneering aesthetics, I found out that the first synthetic dye for clothing was actually accidentally manufactured really close to the, incredibly close to the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction exact in Pisces. And that was really fascinating to me cuz on the one hand, you know, and it was purple, which was sort of like a Jupiterian thing. And that was fascinating to me because it expanded aesthetics. It made that more accessible, brightly colored clothing that wouldn’t fade quickly to the masses rather than wealthy people only. But it also turns out it’s carcinogenic, and it’s still poisoning people today. So I thought that was fascinating in terms of both things. This seemed like this great thing is too good to be true, it took a lot of effort and time getting plants to dye things before that. And so expanded that aesthetics to the masses, but also it had like this illusory thing where it’s too good to be true. There’s actually a problem behind it.
AC: So I was living in Los Angeles during the last Jupiter-Neptune conjunction and I remember people who were in the entertainment industry talking about how Avatar’s going to change everything, theaters were going to be reconfigured. So everything was going to be 3D, and that didn’t happen. Was it a successful movie? Sure. But there were going to be sequels every couple years, it was going to do all this stuff that it didn’t do.
CB: It did for a while though. I mean a lot of theaters did change and installed 3D things. And then there was a bunch of movies that followed that tried to shoot in 3D like the Hobbit series.
AC: And people didn’t like it. Yeah. I watched one of the Pirates of the Caribbean in 3D, and it gave me a headache.
CB: Yeah. None of them ever recaptured exactly what Avatar did. Nobody ever reached that high watermark, but there were echoes of it and like imitations for much of the past decade. And then eventually it’s just dropped off completely I think over the past few years. But interestingly, [Saffron Dennis] in the chat– we have a live chat of patrons who are joining us– thanks everyone for joining us today in the live audience for the recording of this and says, “Isn’t Avatar 2 going to come out soon?” And I just looked it up and I didn’t realize there was a release date. It’s set for release date on December 16th, 2022. So if it actually follows that, that’s perfect cuz that’s going to catch the tail end of the next Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces before Jupiter leaves Pisces for good for the next 12 years. So I didn’t think I’d been skeptical cuz Cameron’s been working on this for a decade and like I was skeptical of the Avatar sequels, whether he was ever going to pull that off and whether he was just wasting time on that. But that actually looks pretty promising if he actually does pull off releasing the sequel under the next Jupiter-Neptune. He may be able to recapture some of or take it to the next level in terms of whatever he’s trying to create in terms of a cinematic experience or an immersive experience for the census.
AC: Or the same overhyped experience. I would say that one sort of quick cautionary phrase for Jupiter-Neptune is probably well summarized by the great American poet, Chuck D, who said, “Don’t believe the hype.” It’s not that it was a bad movie, but if you believed all the hype, you would’ve obtained many delusions that you would be disabused of.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it was the most successful movie financially, I think in the world at the time with like crazy amount of people seeing it. So whatever it did represent at the time, it was part of the cultural zeitgeist that lots of people bought into for whatever reason. Let me show those two charts really quickly. So here’s the original chart for the release of Avatar. Actually, that’s the first one. Yeah. So here’s the chart for the release of the first Avatar, which was December of 2009. And that was Jupiter at 23 Aquarius conjunct Neptune at 24 Aquarius. So pretty close conjunction. So let me then show the chart for the release of the second one, and there it is. So Jupiter’s retrograded at the very end of December, by the end of December, it’s retrograded back into Pisces before, and it’s on its way out, but it’s a little wider this time. It’s not applying, but it’s conjunct Neptune at 22 Pisces right there. So that’s really notable. So I don’t know if it’s going to be Avatar, I would normally be skeptical about that or if it’s going to be potentially Apple, there’s leaks recently about them releasing some VR headset or announcing it at least by the end of the year. I’m sure there’ll be many different things in like society and the world that somehow capture that Jupiter-Neptune vibe. And it’ll be interesting to see how it works out.
LS: I think another important thing about Jupiter-Neptune to point out is dreams and aspirations, especially in Pisces. Excuse me. Yeah, I think, you know, the advent of new hopes and dreams and visions for how the world could be has a lot to do with the Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces. And dreams literally too. Like Freud had Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces for instance, in the fifth house. And there were a lot of things about that that went both ways in terms of, you know, he focused a lot on literal dreams, but there were also a lot of kind of weirdnesses surrounding how true those theories were over time. Did people really have these fantasies as children? That kind of thing. So my favorite thing actually regarding like Jupiter in Pisces with Neptune or favorite analogy is the musical Man of La Mancha, which was inspired by the novel Don Quixote from the 1600s. The author, Cervantes, of Don Quixote actually had Jupiter in Pisces closely sextile Neptune, which is amazing. And the whole musical is about idealism and over idealism and sort of the pros and cons of being an idealistic person in the world versus not seeing the truth and being kind of foolish. And so I think that’s like a perfect metaphor for at least some of the weather that we’re going into. The signature song in there is called The Impossible Dream or The Quest. And it’s all about the value of going after a so-called impossible dream, and is it valuable to try for things that you will never reach but will still go farther in the aspiration of?
CB: Yeah, definitely.
AC: Yeah. Don Quixote is a good one.
CB: So both, I mean, one of the things about Jupiter-Neptune is both have expansive significations of, you know, expanding, lacking boundaries, visionary, having an ideal or a higher purpose in mind, following a higher calling, spirituality, belief, religion, philosophy, mysticism, faith. So it has a lot of those things that should be at a sort of peak during that time, especially in the first quarter of the year and a little bit towards the end. Sometimes the shadow side of that can be things like cults or religious leaders or types of sort of deception that’s in some sense, based on preying on people’s gullibility in some ways, or their desire to believe in something larger than themselves. Additionally, you get these ideas of like the boundlessness of imagination and generosity or compassion as being major themes sometimes in very positive ways and sometimes in ways that can be more susceptible to things, more sensitive to things that could sort of lead it at astray or could take advantage of it.
LS: You can more easily feel connected to other people, which I think is where the compassion comes from, because Pisces is a more connective sign and it’s a water sign. So you feel more emotionally connected to the world or to other specific people. It can also dissolve boundaries or structures that you might want to be solid and cohesive. So there’s still some positives and negatives surrounding that.
AC: Yeah. And there was also an economic note that we wanted to touch on with Jupiter-Neptune, which is things being overvalued. A number of astrologers who focus on the economic look at Jupiter-Neptune with inflation and then generally, an inflation of value. In that moment thinking something is more valuable than it is going to be in the long-term. We were talking about like imagining that something is super valuable. And we can get into like tulip bulb crises or, I don’t know, NFTs or whatever, but if we look at the landscape right now, are there things either existent or just about to happen that people could potentially overvalue? We can think of a hundred things.
CB: Well, it makes me think of the Bitcoin thing cause that was one of the funny things as soon as you know. As soon as Jupiter went into Aquarius last December in December of 2020, the price of Bitcoin just like skyrocketed and kept shooting up and up and up, and some of the Bitcoin astrologers of which I’m not one of them, this is not my main focus or specialty, but it was just an observation I had, was some of them were expecting things to keep going up when Jupiter went into Pisces last summer. But what happened is the price of Bitcoin actually dropped during Jupiter in Pisces last year, and then it started going up again eventually I think when Jupiter retrograded back into Aquarius in the second half of 2021. So I’m actually curious how Jupiter in Pisces, once it returns, will do in terms of the price of Bitcoin. And if that’s not something that’s sometimes being overvalued or at least there’s the perception of it being overvalued during those times.
LS: Jupiter-Neptune can also just be like very literally big lies. Jupiter is expansive and Neptune can be deception. So that’s something to keep an eye out for as well. You have to be discerning at the time in which it is hardest to be discerning with Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces.
CB: Yeah, definitely. So if you launch a network and it’s called Truth or something weird like that, like it might be doing the opposite of that during that transit, but we’ll have to see. So financial stuff, there’s all sorts of talk about whether inflation will continue or whether it’ll get under control. And it’s kind of interesting being at this point in December of 2021 and in the US, at least the government trying to control that and saying it will go down in 2022, but then seeing this Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in April makes me nervous about whether they will be able to control that just because Jupiter-Neptune is just things getting bigger and bigger beyond what is realistic or based on a false premise. And just this idea of something lacking in grounding or substance is the downside of that. But that’s all very somewhat negative, but there’s some positive and optimistic things to be looking forward to about Jupiter-Neptune. I mean, I think when it did initially go in last summer, that did feel different and it did feel like there was a period of like things opening up and like warmth and reestablishing connection or community connection with people that was enjoyable. And that’s something I’m looking forward to.
AC: Yeah. I think it’s much easier to handle on a personal level than on a societal level. When you scale planets up, you tend to get a very, how should we say, average sort of effect, whereas on a personal level, you can do it correctly. You can get the best out of it and avoid the worst.
LS: Potentially, yeah.
CB: Yeah. One of the things is it’s not very like a sober whatever the opposite of sobriety let’s say is, I think Jupiter-Neptune would be the opposite of that also in terms of other metaphors or sometimes very literal things.
LS: Intoxication basically, and you can be intoxicated by so many things. You can be intoxicated by Bitcoin, you can be intoxicated by actual substances. Even spirituality can be a way of kind of getting away from the real world or it can be legitimately like transcendent, but also including the real world. So there’s lots of ways you can be ungrounded or intoxicated.
CB: That’s a great point. So people should think about what house that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction is going to fall in their chart in late Pisces. What’s the exact degree of the conjunction?
LS: I think it’s 23.
CB: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking, 22, 23. So think about what house that falls in in your chart, and that may be an area of intoxication or where you’re sort of lacking in sobriety this year, which could be a positive feeling at the time and could be fine. But also, once you come out of it, sometimes once you come out the other end of Neptune transits and you sort of sober up and you look back, you’re kind of like, “What was I thinking?”
LS: That’s true. I mean, on the flip side, we need some Jupiter in Pisces. After all of this dry, dry Saturn for a long time here, we all kind of need some connection and some loosening up. And so that can be fine sometimes, even if it’s not something you would do every day or that you would do after the next few months or that kind of thing. It can be fine for a time.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And that brings us to my other point that’s actually really important we need to talk about in parallel with this I want to mentioned briefly is that one of the weird disconnects I was having trouble with in preparing for this forecast is the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction kind of roughly in early April coincides with the next Mars-Saturn conjunction, which is a much more harsh aspect that’s not just literal, but can be sort of the opposite of Jupiter-Neptune in some ways. And look at how that coincides. It’s like Jupiter, Mars conjunct Saturn early April, and then right after Jupiter conjunct Neptune. So there’s some kind of difficult thing happening in reality that can be uncomfortable or restrictive or hard to deal with pulling you in two different directions in the sort of material plane, but there’s this kind of like distracting Jupiter-Neptune thing that might be the thing that everyone is focused on or is sort of taking people’s attention away for some reason in some other area.
AC: We get the best and the worst delivered nearly simultaneously there.
LS: Yeah. It’s such a weird month. I mean, we’ll talk about it more when we get to April, but it’s such a weird month.
CB: Yeah. I mean, one of the things, the potentials at least the last time we had that, of course, that was the Mars-Saturn conjunction that occurred during the early outbreak of the pandemic and the early phases of the lockdown, especially here in the US that happened in March, April of 2020. So that Mars-Saturn is the first time that those two planets are coming back to where they started at the beginning of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and in some ways ending that cycle and bringing it to completion. But on the other hand also starting a new cycle of those same energies and setting up what the next couple years are going to be like in terms of that dynamic.
LS: I do wonder, I mean, I don’t know what’s going to be going on with the pandemic by that point, but there is something to be said about the lack of boundaries with Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces meaning like easy spread, the virus. So I don’t know if that’s going to be happening at that point. I could also see, I mean, I don’t think this will be the entirety of the Jupiter in Pisces transit. I think there will be a lot of positives, but given that the exact conjunction is happening so soon after the Mars-Saturn conjunction and loves to be co-present, I feel like that might tip it a little bit more, at least around the exact conjunction into more like tears, tears of frustration, because that can be an emotional release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all because of something that’s happening in April, but there’s been a lot of built up in the last several years here, not just restraint constraints, but people dying and not really having… I mean, it’s been commented on a lot at least in the US, not really having major ways of grieving. And so I do feel like even though I think there’ll be a lot of positives to Jupiter in Pisces, there could be more tears at that point, even if it’s delayed tears.
CB: Yeah. One of the things we’ve seen, of course, in the last two times that Mars has gone through hard aspects with Saturn over the past year is the first one was early last summer when Mars went through Leo and that’s when we had the Delta variant emerge. So a new COVID variant emerged during that time and started making news and leading to some additional restrictions or the reimposing restrictions. And then the most recent time of course, was in November when we had Mars go through Scorpio and square Saturn and oppose Uranus. And then again, we saw the emergence of a new variant. And here in Denver, for example, they reintroduced the mask mandate over the city and all the businesses. So there’s again the reintroduction of some restrictions. So, you know, perhaps something like that happening during that time frame once Mars and Saturn are co-present again and go into that exact conjunction.
LS: Yeah. It’s tough to predict specifically around the pandemic, because on the other hand, we do have Mars-Saturn alignments fairly regularly, every year. So it’s hard to say whether that’s going to be about the pandemic. It very easily could be if it’s still circulating highly, but or it could be something else.
CB: What’s the timeframe on the co-presence again? Cuz we got… When does Mars go back into Aquarius?
LS: Mars goes into Aquarius on March 6th. Is that right? Yeah, I think March 6th. Okay.
CB: And then when does it leave Aquarius?
LS: What is it? Late April or something.
AC: Yeah, six-ish weeks later.
CB: Okay. And then the exact conjunction is fourth through the fifth. So that’s what we’re looking at during that time frame. Let me go back to our outline. God, we’re already 40 minutes into our overview. We were hoping to spend 40 minutes in this initial part. Why don’t we mention just briefly and then maybe should we start going through chronologically or how are you feeling?
AC: Yeah, cause Jupiter-Neptune and Saturn-Uranus with eclipses are the yearly things.
LS: And also some Jupiter in Aries.
CB: Jupiter in Aries, the Mars retrograde in Gemini at the very end of the year, and also the Pluto return of the United States is one of the recurring themes sort of throughout the year. So should we transition into talking about the first quarter now?
LS: You want to just say like one or two things briefly about each one of those or do we not have time?
CB: Well, I want to have an extended discussion about each of them. So I’m just trying to decide whether to do that now or whether to put that off until the time when it’s time to do that in terms of the sequence of the quarterlies. What are you thinking, Austin?
AC: I think we can deal with those as they come up throughout the year.
CB: Okay, cool. All right. Well, let’s do that just for the sake of staying on our schedule today. So we’re recording this in two halves. We’re going to do a two-hour block, take a break. And then do the second half in another two-hour block. So why don’t we do that just for the sake of staying on track? Let me pull up my schedule for where we’re at now.
LS: And I’d like to say while you’re doing that, just as a potential omen, you see that we drifted off during our Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces discussion and entirely got off track.
CB: Yeah. And that brings up one of my phrases, my overall phrase for this year, is the weird road ranging from the tumultuous to the sublime and back again, cuz I think we get a lot of tumultuousness with the Saturn-Uranus square and the repeated activations of that by Mars and by the eclipses. But we also get sometimes the sort of glimpse of the sublime with the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction early in the first and second quarter and then again at the very end of the year.
AC: Yeah. And that’s something when people have asked me to summarize 2022 very quickly, I’ve been like, “Well, it’s like 2021 but the good parts are better and the bad parts are worse. It’s 2021, but more polarized.”
LS: Yeah, separate areas.
CB: Yeah. All right, let’s get into-
LS: I have a phrase for the year. My phrase for the whole year was hope glimmers amidst ongoing tensions.
CB: I like that. That’s way better than mine. All right. [Leisa laughs] Excellent. Do you have any [meat grindery phrases] this year, Austin?
AC: I’ll let you know. We’ll see.
CB: Okay, work on it, work on that in the background. All right. Why don’t we go into quarter one of the year? So first quarter of 2022. All right. So we got Jupiter in Pisces. We are dealing with the later parts of Venus retrograding Capricorn, where there will be a third Venus-Pluto conjunction. We got Venus conjoining Mars, they keep alternating between each other going back and forth conjoining. And then Venus gets enclosed by Mars and Saturn during the later part of that. There’s the Mars co-presence with Saturn in Aquarius as it starts building up to the conjunction later in the first quarter. And then finally we get a New Moon in Pisces conjunct the planet Jupiter. All right, so we’ve already talked pretty extensively about Jupiter in Pisces, let’s talk about the Venus retrograde in Capricorn because that’s something that we’re already right in the middle of as we move into 2022.
AC: Yeah, it starts about less than a week from this recording and then basically runs until the end of January. And it’s worth noting, with Venus retrogrades, you have the actual period of retrogradation and the visibility shift from Western horizon to Eastern horizon. But in addition to that, you also just have Venus in basically the same place or in the same range, often the same sign for like four months. Venus is usually 3, 4, 5 weeks in a given place, but this is Venus in Capricorn November, December, January, February, and then Venus doesn’t leave Capricorn until early March. So it’s just wherever Capricorn is in your chart, Venus is just there forever, backwards, forwards, etc.
CB: So here’s an image from Kyle at Archetypal Explorer that makes these beautiful graphs that show the exact hits on a graph.
LS: It does also make three conjunctions with Pluto since it conjoins and then it retrogrades and has another conjunction. Weirdly, the third conjunction isn’t until early March, March 3rd. So it’s really this extended thing of not just Venus retrograding Capricorn, but also Venus co-present with Pluto and conjoining Pluto.
CB: Yeah. I’ve been paying attention to that because even though the retrograde hasn’t started yet, Venus has already been in conjunction with Pluto, and I’m already seeing a ton of retrograde themes coming up in different people’s lives in like personal lives. One of the key words seems to be dredging up the past. And in some instances, dredging up past wounds from lost relationships or reminiscing about a difficult past, or in some instances, needing to sort of kill past partnerships that should have died a long time ago that maybe have been on life support. You always know it’s like Venus retrograde when I have a family member call me up and start reminiscing about some past relationship from like 16 years ago or something like that from several Venus cycles ago.
LS: Well, and aside from, I mean, it’s obviously relationships given that Venus is general signifier for relationships and love that’s big in terms of reviewing past or present relationships, also just what you want, Venus is also what you want. And so kind of going backwards and revising like, “Do I actually want this anymore? Do I want something different?” And that can be within the realm of relationships or it can be in other areas because of course when you personalize the transit, it’s going to be going through different topical houses for everyone. So it’s not necessarily your partnership. It can bring that up as well, even if it’s not going through your seventh, but it’ll be other areas too. And that can be as simple as even like… Sometimes I think we don’t recognize enough or talk about enough the overlap between Mercury retrogrades and Venus retrogrades, cuz both of them are still going back and I’ve noticed there be some overlap. Sometimes it’s like a Venus retrogrades in your third and your computer breaks. Because it’s still a retrograde in your third, even if it’s not Mercury, that kind of thing.
CB: So you’re saying Venus retrograde, your relationship breaks, and you got to take it to a repair shop?
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: Okay. Hopefully it’s not like an Apple computer and you can’t open it up and repair it. Tech joke.
LS: Yeah. And you know the Plutonian aspect as well, so of course dredging up more messy pieces as I know you all talked about in the December forecast. But dredging up kind of the messy underbelly of relationships or whatever you’re revising, ugly truths that you didn’t want to see, that kind of thing. Or just physically dredging things up, that can happen too.
CB: Yeah. Some of the other themes I was seeing was the need to get away from someone who’s too controlling or possessive or alternatively the desire to manipulate or try to control someone out of love for them or desire to be with them, as well as themes like it’s easier to idealize a difficult past when you’re not living it in the present, but sometimes when you dredge that up or try to bring that back after idealizing it, you then remember and are brought forward all of the difficult things that perhaps you had decided were not worth it before. And you have to remind yourself perhaps it may still not be worth it today.
AC: Yeah. I mean, there are a great number of relational challenges with Venus retrograde and when Venus’s retrograde brings up all of that. It brings up whatever is a relevant challenge. And that relevant challenge might also be illusory, but something that’s important to you. Something you are afraid of. Pluto is very much about fear. There’s like real control and power stuff, and then there is our fear of control. There’s our fear of power. And like you were saying, Chris, with bringing up old shit. There’s the like, “Oh, I remember that one time, and that was awful, and I was 22. And that is, how should we say, a relevant fear, even if it’s not a relevant situation. And so Venus always brings up the old stuff, Venus retrogrades always bring up the old stuff. And it may be emotionally relevant, even if it doesn’t map to your actual situation at all.
CB: Yeah. And there’s a couple legal things going on. I know, Leisa, did you want to mention one of them or both of them?
LS: Oh, the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, this seems very Venus-Pluto that’s happening right now, and probably will extend through that period. It’s supposed to go on for about six weeks I think. That seems very relevant, talking about transgressions, sexual transgressions.
AC: I mean, literally the Pluto myth with Persephone is about kidnapping a young woman. And these are the charges that are brought against Ghislaine Maxwell. So it’s almost too on the nose. It’s like the price of beef with Uranus in Taurus, it shouldn’t be that literal.
LS: What was the other one you were thinking of Chris? I have forgotten it.
CB: The other big one that’s coming up right now is the Supreme Court is addressing and is dealing with abortion and is widely being reported as potentially repealing or essentially effectively potentially outlawing abortion nationally or in certain states where there’s being challenges to it. And now that the court has shifted over the past few years after the installation of new justices, this being the first time where the laws regarding abortion might change for the first time in decades. And that seems really relevant in terms of Venus sometimes as a general significator of women and Pluto sometimes as a general significator, astrologers always say for control. And so it’s interesting having such a literal manifestation then when you put those together in a sentence, like controlling women or controlling women’s bodies or imposing government mandates in terms of women and what they can and can’t do with their bodies is a potential theme of this Venus retrograde.
LS: Yeah, control of women’s bodies and also life and death issues regarding women and other people who can get pregnant, because mortality rates for pregnancy in the US are not good. And so literally for some women it can be a life or death thing. So I think it’s really relevant. I mean, it was weird cuz we’re all waiting for the Mississippi ruling, which is going to come anytime between now and late June, the decision after the hearing was done already on December 1st. But that was just one day from the first Venus-Pluto conjunction that they decided on the other one, which was basically a non-decision. And they didn’t put a stay, the Texas case. And so they didn’t put a stay, and so it’s effectively like abortion is not legal in Texas right now.
CB: Right, cuz it’s after six weeks, but most women don’t know that they’re pregnant until after six weeks.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
AC: So kind of weird coincidence, Venus retrogrades are about six weeks.
CB: Huh, yeah, 40 days and 40 nights. Good point. And this always reminds me, like there’s the Supreme Court coming up with the Venus retrograde is so fascinating to me, because I always remember the summer of 2015 when there was that Venus retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter. And in the US, the Supreme court ruled at the time they made the ruling that essentially nationally legalized same sex marriage. So it’s an interesting contrast having that Venus retrograde conjunct Jupiter and the legalization of same sex marriage versus, let’s say, Venus retrograding Capricorn conjunct Pluto and this other case coming up at this time.
LS: For sure. There’s also a weird repetition of Venus in Capricorn, actually Venus around 18 Capricorn. That was when Roe versus Wade was first argued. So when the decision was announced, which was like a long time later, it was into ’73 when the first argument was in ’71, and then there’s also a Saturn return right now of Planned Parenthood versus Casey, which was actually the case in 1992 that upheld Roe, and it looked like it was about to fall. And that was when Uranus was stationing on Venus at 18 Capricorn. And so it was really weird at the beginning of the hearing for the Mississippi one on December 1st. Yes, I looked at the Ascendant for 10 o’clock and it was 18 Capricorn with Venus at 20 Capricorn. So there’s a lot of repetitions going on. Saturn was at about 18 Aquarius in ’92 when Casey upheld Roe. So that is also the Saturn return which both of those actually were returned to those two degrees in February. So even though the case may not be announced, the decision may not be announced until the end of June as is more expected, but I did wonder about February being relevant at all because the Venus return of that degree and the Saturn return of that degree.
CB: Yeah, and Venus is going to be in Capricorn through early March and we’ll get that last Pluto conjunction in March. So we’ll see how that goes. Okay, so that’s Venus retrograde at the beginning of the year. Let’s talk about other January stuff. What else is going on in January?
LS: There’s a Mercury retrograde that oddly really sets off the Saturn-Uranus ongoing square because Mercury retrogrades-
AC: Yeah, that Mercury retrograde is interesting because it stations on Saturn, and then on Pluto. It goes retrograde right next to Saturn.
LS: It stations on Saturn and really exactly square Uranus too by like zero degrees.
AC: Yes. So they’re more than the Saturn-Uranus, right? It isn’t just this year, it’s also 2021. That’s the ongoing theme. And so Mercury retrogrades may or may not be relevant to historical developments but this one is kind of right on the nose. It hits two of our slow, or really three of our slow outers, right? Coz it’s Saturn, Uranus, and then it’s Pluto on the direct station.
LS: Yeah, there’s actually going to be two Mercury stations on Pluto this year, one early in January and one of the very very end of the year. Which is kind of weird. There are like multiple things. In addition to Venus, there’s multiple transits setting off that ongoing Pluto transit.
CB: Here’s a chart that shows all of our Mercury retrograde periods this year. I know you noticed something interesting about the triplicities involved. Right, Leisa?
LS: Oh, yeah, they all start in air signs and end in Earth signs except for the three main ones of the year that are full retrogrades during 2022. The one at the very, very end of the year on December 29 interrupts that, but the three main ones are all air to Earth.
CB: Okay, and it looks like the three retrograde periods for those listening to the audio version are roughly January 14th through February 3rd, then May 10th through June 3rd, and then September 9th through October 2nd. And then there’s a little tiny beginning of the Mercury retrograde at the very end of the year starting on December 29th for the last three days of the year.
LS: So that happens. The nodes also change signs mid January, January 18th to Taurus Scorpio.
CB: Yeah, so that’s using– I use the true node and that that is the true node changing signs, right?
LS: Um, I believe so.
CB: Yeah. Are you true node or or mean node, Austin? Do you care?
AC: I default to mean node, it only matters sometimes.
CB: Yeah. So either way, I think roughly they’re changing signs within this few week period in the very beginning of 2022. Okay, so that nodal shift will then ramp us up fully for getting the eclipses in those two signs a few months later, and the north node will start moving towards Uranus.
LS: I also wanted to note at the beginning of the month, even though it’s technically the end of 2021, Mars will be crossing the last Sagittarius eclipse degree at 12 Sagittarius the last couple days of 2021 right as we’re starting this new year. That could be relevant. Even though it’s not technically in January, it sort of ushers us into January. And I’m only noting it because it actually happened on the Sibley chart Ascendant degree exactly.
CB: The what? What was that again?
LS: The last Sagittarius eclipse, which shows 12 Sagittarius happened right on the Sibley Ascendant, Sibley chart for the US.
CB: And you’re saying that Mars will cross over that degree?
LS: Mhm, the last couple days of 2021. So ushering us into the new year.
CB: Yeah, there it is. The Moon actually conjoins at that day and it’s like December 31st. All right, good times. All right, so that first Mercury retrograde you guys were talking about Mercury stations at 10 Aquarius around January 14 conjunct Saturn. So Mercury conjunct Saturn stationing that’s similar to the Mercury retrograde station– it was a direct station that we had on election day last year in 2020, where Mercury stationed squaring Saturn and it doubled up themes of like slowness and delays which are both Mercury Saturn themes as well as Mercury retrograde themes. So that could be a potential theme here of something having to do with like slowness or delays and things like that.
LS: Right. It’s also just triggering that Saturn-Uranus really hard, you know? So just additional Saturn Uranus things that we’ve been talking about maybe coming more to the forefront than they would otherwise in January.
CB: Yeah, look at that. It’s even closer. It’s squaring Uranus at 10 degrees so it’s got that disruptive and unexpected and sometimes like technological snafu retrograde tendencies as well.
AC: Yeah. Well, if you imagine Mercury at that time, it’s slowly creeping towards what should be a conjunction with Saturn. Be like, “This is the way it’s gonna be.” And then you have that square with Uranus and Mercury doesn’t actually complete the conjunction with Saturn for quite some time, right? We have to go all the way back to Pluto and then all the way back to Saturn. So it looks like things are gonna be one way but there’s a disruption. We talked about Uranus in Taurus disrupting the desire to order with Saturn in Aquarius. And so that will be doubly emphasised there. Looks like it’s gonna be… No it’s not, we got to go do quite a bit with that Mercury retrograde.
CB: Yeah. So Mercury weirdly retrogrades back into Capricorn around January 25-26th and right around the same time, Mars has just ingressed into Capricorn. So all of a sudden we have a stellium of Mars, Venus retrograde Pluto and Mercury all in Capricorn. Kind of reminds me, you know, last time Mars was there of course, Mars as ingressed into Capricorn was back when Saturn was still in Capricorn and that was the beginning of the stellium in early 2020 that was the outbreak of the pandemic worldwide at that point, and the onset of the lockdowns all across especially in the West and Europe and North America. So we have Mars returning to there and completing that cycle and bringing things full circle, but also the start of a new cycle in terms of some of that.
AC: Yeah. It’s really interesting because if you’re kind of waiting for Venus to go direct, which many of us will be at that point in time, you know. I was looking at these charts and saying, “Oh, Venus is direct?” And now it’s a Mars Venus co presence. Venus doesn’t just get a moment of Venusian glory. It’s like, “No, it’s back to Pluto and its co presence with Mars.” And that co presence with Mars lasts for months and months.
CB: Yeah, because they’re basically moving at the same speed and there’s this really interesting thing where they start trading off conjunctions back and forth over the next several weeks. I’ll just animate the chart for those watching the video version. We see Mars, which is usually much slower than Venus actually catching up to and eventually overtaking Venus right around here around February 16th just after Valentine’s Day. That’s kind of interesting, a nice Venus Mars conjunction on Valentine’s Day. But then Venus eventually starts moving fast enough, starts picking up speed, that she overtakes Mars eventually right around the time that both of them get to Pluto. Right about here around 27-28. Actually, it’s not until they ingress into Aquarius and then Venus overtakes Mars that very same day around March 6th. This was interesting to me because it gave me a real perspective on how the ancient astrologers would have seen this because they would have noticed, you know, observing the skies over hundreds of years, these periods when those two planets hit those speeds and are essentially the same speed and have this interesting interplay of overtaking each other every once in a while very quickly. And it gave me some insight into like the symbolic meaning of Venus and Mars were very much two sides of the same coin and constantly overtaking or giving the opposite of what the other lacks, in some sense.
AC: And this is rare, because usually Venus is much faster than Mars.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Venus is just as a heads up, it’s not happy until April. I was really struck by this when I was looking at the year. So it starts the year retrograde in January, then conjoining Mars in Capricorn, co present with Pluto for February, then when it goes into Aquarius in early March, then it’s enclosed by the malefics. It’s enclosed between Mars and Saturn in Aquarius. So it’s not until early April when Venus suddenly dips into its exaltation sign of Pisces, it’s suddenly like jumping into a hot bath after being constrained for the first three months of the year.
AC: Yeah. Just on a quarterly level, Venus is pretty miserable during the first quarter of the year.
LS: Mm hmm. Yeah. I would like to see an upside for that but that was definitely how it struck me too when I first looked at it. [laughs] I was like, “Wow, Venus is just not happy until April.”
AC: Right. And then Venus in April– which we’ll talk about in April– but it’s best possible case for Venus after a quarter of misery.
LS: Right. Exactly. It’s a really huge contrast. April is just very strange like that.
CB: Yeah, because Venus stationing direct back here in January towards the end of January, but with Mars suddenly co present in it… I mean Mars is anger, it can be fighting, it can be having to separate from something or having to sever something, having something severed from you. So we’ve got that on the one hand in January and then Venus runs into Saturn and you get later over the next month or two these oppressive or restrictive significations for Venus either as a general significator of either both women as well as relationships, and then eventually it gets free of Mars and Saturn when it moves into Pisces and heads towards Jupiter where it can kind of relax and be reinforced or affirmed in some sense.
LS: Yeah, it did make me wonder about the course of the pandemic because as we’re recording right now, the numbers are shooting up again which is really a bummer. We’re going into winter of course in the northern hemisphere and so people are indoors more and so it’s more transmissible. I was just thinking about Venus in terms of not even just specific individual relationships, but like the social realm; socialising, connecting with other people not looking good until April and later April and that. It did make me wonder. Because Venus with Mars can be, you know, like it’s dangerous to socialise. Or Venus with Mars and Saturn, you’re restricted from socialising. I’m not saying it’s definitely gonna be that because I really don’t know, but that is a possibility that appears.
CB: Yeah, it’s weird with Jupiter being in Pisces.
LS: Yes, it is. There’s a contrast.
AC: Yeah, there’s definitely a contrast. That said, with Mars Venus in Capricorn, you know, Saturn isn’t there. There’s the Mars-Saturn with Venus, which has its own story. But you know, Mars-Venus can be rowdy fun. Mars-Venus is interesting, right? If you look at older texts, it is productive of relations, but not lasting relationship. [laughs] You’ll see prudes like [unintelligible 01:12:19] saying dire things about how promiscuous and terrible the person with Mars and Venus is. But, you know, it brings about relations. It’s not, as we say, it’s not isolated. And it’s not necessarily unfun if you’re not trying to uphold a traditional Roman sexual morality.
CB: Yeah. That’s one of the things I kept thinking of in that interchange where they’re like chasing each other at the same speed and overtaking each other is this idea of like, chasing versus pursuit and the sometimes interchangeability in sexual relationships between those two being very literally sort of mapped out here by Venus and Mars in the sky in the first quarter.
LS: Yeah, it could be a very sexual combination. It also can be pursuing things you want. So that can be people you want, it can also be just other things that you want, you know, with Venus. You might more actively go after things you want at that time, so that’s positive. There can also be-
AC: Venus-Mars is where we can just say outside of the sexual, it’s very passionate. It’s not stable, but it’s very passionate.
LS: Yeah, it’s interesting. Some people who work in the arts have seen like Mars-Venus because they’re putting their energy towards the Venusian things for instance. It can be good for that. The flip side is of course there can be a harshness where Venus wants softness or pleasant relations. Mars can be a little bit more direct, which can be useful, like being direct about what you want, but also can be a little bit harsh.
CB: So we get Mercury stationing direct at the beginning of February conjunct Pluto. Over the fall when we had a Mercury-Pluto combination, we talked about ideas of digging down and investigating or getting to the bottom of something, and some major investigative reports came out I think last fall when Mercury was squaring Pluto, I believe. We may have some themes that come up at that time of looking into or investigating or wanting to get to the bottom of something.
AC: Yeah, we had… What was it called? It was the report that it was all the information that came out about sort of secret offshore accounts of many powerful people; Pandora, the Pandora Papers. Which is very Mercury exposing Pluto in Capricorn. And we had Jupiter’s help with that, right?
CB: Right.
AC: We don’t have Jupiter’s help here. [laughs] What’s interesting is Pluto, as we say, by itself is equally productive of concealing as it is revealing. Pluto loves to bury things.
LS: Mm hmm. Yeah. We had that Mercury station square Pluto in the fall, we also had a lot of the January 6th committee reports coming out or more investigative journalism coming out about that event. So I expect to be more of that. I mean, that’s even happened recently with Venus conjoining Pluto. These are also seen as just like triggers for that longer ongoing transit, which is relevant for the whole world, of course, but also particularly relevant for the US since we are in the Pluto return this year.
CB: Yeah. Speaking of, I think it’s time to talk about that, because we get our first hit of Pluto’s exact– Pluto return takes place in the first quarter of the year, right?
LS: Mhm, around February 20th I believe.
AC: One of them.
LS: Yeah, one of three.
CB: One of three this year. Okay. So here’s the US Sibley chart set for July 4th 1776, where Pluto is at 27° 32° Capricorn. So that is a sensitive degree that we’re paying attention to this year when Pluto gets back to that point. And that will be the third, or that will be the first Pluto return of the United States because Pluto is so slow that it takes extremely long period for it to go around the entire zodiac and no human can ever experience that. But countries or maybe corporations could.
AC: Yeah, or books.
LS: Right. It’s gonna be so active this year because, you know, not just the three hits, which would be a lot in itself. But then the two stations are in totally other months, not those months. That’s gonna be in April and October whereas the three exact hits for the Pluto return are February, July and December. I think it’s July, the middle one? And it’s gonna be within about a degree and a half the entire year. So it’s gonna be very active.
AC: Yeah. The thing about a Pluto transit is you don’t look at it like oh, it’s… You can look at the exact degree, but it’s a phase. If it’s only hanging out there for a year, you’re very lucky.
LS: Yeah, it won’t be just a year-
AC: It’s like a year and a half, two years… Pluto will be on those degrees.
LS: Yeah, it’ll be very acute this year but it will still be ongoing.
AC: United States has some transits this year. We’ve got Saturn hanging out by the United States by the Sibley chart Moon, and we have the retrograde of Mars which is also just an extended presence in Gemini, is a super Mars return for the United States too. We’ll get to those things individually but yeah, there’s a lot of pressure on the US chart this year.
LS: Yeah, all of those things. And also transiting Neptune which is a continuation from 2021 has been setting off the natal Mars-Neptune square in the US Sibley chart. We’ll continue in 2022.
CB: Yeah, a funny story I was researching in the US Sibley chart last night on some of the stuff and I found this little blurb on like history.com or something. It said, “Did you know that John Adams believed that July 2nd was the correct date on which to celebrate the birth of American independence, and he would reportedly turn down invitations to appear at July 4th events in protest?” But then it later goes on to say, “However, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.” And I think it’s fair to say that John Adams may have lost that debate ultimately, in retrospect.
LS: That’s pretty good.
CB: Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. That would suck though, in terms of losing out on that debate, if you died on the day two days later that was the one that you protest against. What were you saying Austin?
AC: I was just saying that John Adams was a very contrary fellow.
CB: Okay. Yeah, it sounds like it. So, Pluto return a lot has been said about it in the astrological community by astrologers recently because it’s such a rare and sort of notable event. I was trying to research some of the different historical things that different people say about the Roman Empire in different countries that have potentially gone through transformations during the Pluto return and different things like that. One of the things that it made me think of though is weirdly, and it sounds unrelated at first, but the Fermi paradox and the notion of the Great Filter. Are you familiar with this? Are either of you familiar with this?
LS: No.
AC: No.
CB: So the Fermi paradox is this question in scientific literature of; if life can develop on planets like it did on ours, if it was relatively easy to happen, then the entire universe should be teeming with life. We should see it all over the place, we should see evidence of all sorts of civilizations buzzing about. But for some reason, we don’t when we look out there. And the question is why. One of the answers that is sometimes put forward is the notion of the Great Filter, that maybe there’s some sort of point that most civilizations get to where they become sufficiently advanced, where they have the capability of destroying themselves. And maybe most civilizations don’t make it past that point for whatever reason. Maybe most of them end up wiping themselves out at the point where they gain the ability to destroy themselves. That, of course, legendarily or historically became the case became the possibility shortly after the discovery of Pluto in 1930 when the US or when humans developed the nuclear bomb, and all of a sudden the Cold War started after World War Two and there was the real possibility that humanity, if it launched like a nuclear war, could actually wipe itself out and cease to exist through different countries like warring with each other. And the Pluto return kind of reminds me of that, because it’s like a country going through a similar thing in terms of hitting a filter where it has the possibility of sort of like self destruction of ending one cycle and closing it down, and going through some sort of crisis of whatever it started at the beginning. But then having the choice between those two things once it passes through just like we all have like a Saturn return at the ages of 27 to 30 and we go through this rapid maturation process and cross the threshold from childhood in some ways, the final threshold, into full on adulthood and the second 30 year chapter of our life, the Pluto return in some similar ways seems like that where you’re passing that first 250-year period, and the question of whether you’re going to make it through to the next.
LS: Well, whether democracy will make it through is really the big question, I think.
CB: Yeah. Because to me, that’s what started then. And when I was looking at the Pluto returns of the Roman Empire, I think people were overplaying it a little bit because the main thing that was happening was there were trade offs between switching from some form of democracy to some form of dictatorship, and different changes that were happening like 250-year intervals of sometimes like military coups taking over and running the country, and taking it from the Emperor and different things like that. So it’s no wonder then over the past year, that in the US we’ve had both sides. On the one hand, you have one side arguing that an entire election was illegitimate and that it was stolen or something like that, and then you have another side arguing that the other side was attempting to overthrow the results of a legitimate election. And so there’s actual real debates about whether the democracy that’s been going on for 250 years is now in peril or if it’s still valid, or whether that’s not the case anymore.
AC: I would add another thing to that if we’re just doing Sibley, which I like to do. You know, it’s Pluto in the second house. It’s Pluto in Capricorn in the second house and, you know, as we have a Saturn ruled Pluto in the second house, I tend to think of the US Pluto in terms of the concealed class structure of the US. Because part of what was novel about the United States 250 years ago was that you didn’t have an ensconced nobility. You didn’t have an official class structure. And that’s been very much part of the American dream the whole time, right? It was that basically we could say it’s class mobility. And that seems very clearly imperilled, this question of class mobility. And if we look at the last year or two, one of the results of the pandemic was a massive reinforcement of the wealth of the already extremely wealthy. The cost of all these things was not borne by them. We have reports on billionaires gaining plus 50% over a year or plus 40%, which is extraordinary. And that’s very class based. And so looking at the endangerment of something that’s classically American, I think class mobility and the growth of sort of secret nobility or concealed nobility is a huge thing.
LS: Yeah, economic disparities have definitely gotten worse dramatically over the last few years during the pandemic, and I agree with what you’re saying especially with it being in the second house of the Sibley chart. It’s interesting also, in that, I think a lot of astrologers were worried about sort of an economic crash with Pluto going through the second. And it’s not to say that that couldn’t still happen, but it was interesting that the bills passed last year, particularly shoring up businesses as well as a little bit to personal individuals, I think helped prevent more of what could have happened in terms of an economic crash.
AC: I think there were a variety of economic crashes. Just because the stock market doesn’t crash- [laughs].
LS: Sure, I agree.
AC: Stock market is not where most Americans have their wealth.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
AC:I think we had a concealed economic crash.
LS: I think there were some. I’m just thinking that it would have been worse without some of those bills, which is what you see in the 1930s, the attempts to kind of fix what started the economic crash. Not to say that it hasn’t been happening. But I do think a lot of it seems pretty front and centre with regard to power struggles around democracy that are ongoing, that will not start in 2022. They’re already happening.
CB: I was doing some research in the past hard aspects. One of the things I went to look at was what happened during the Pluto opposition to the Sibley chart Pluto. And that actually happened back around 1933-1934. One of the things that I found was, there was actually a plot to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the time in the so-called Business Plot. This is from a Washington Post article recently but it said, quote, “The nation has never been at a potential brink as it was up until then until now.” Sally Denton, the author of the book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis. So yeah, one of the things I wanted to mention just in passing was that and the potentials for overthrowing the government or attempts to overthrow elected government being a thing that has happened in the past during hard Pluto aspects. And then of course one of the things that shows it prominently in world history right after Pluto is discovered is the rise of fascism in Europe and also all over the world, and fascism being imitated by different strong arm dictator types that were trying to imitate it in different countries around the world especially in Italy and Germany. Because that’s one of the discussion points that’s come up a lot recently with some of the Pluto stuff going on today.
AC: Yeah, and we can strengthen that by just calling it totalitarianism. Because the the Stalin era of the USSR was [laughs] also extremely authoritarian. So right after Pluto, we have authoritarianism of different flavours or totalitarianism of different flavours being very popular throughout the world and throughout people who disagree with each other on everything else.
CB: Yeah. So this year especially though, that makes me nervous– the Pluto return happening– because I think that’s one of the fundamental things, the challenges to democracy, challenges to voting rights and the question of whether some of those things are going to be addressed and voting rights for example are going to continue to be free and fair democratic elections or whether some of those things are going to be subverted and attempts to subvert democracy as being a potential Pluto theme.
LS: Well, a lot of that’s already been happening not just in terms of who can vote. You know, there’s been a lot of changes especially since 2013 when they kind of gutted the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court did, but even more so in the past year since the last presidential election. There’s been a lot of additional restrictions in different states being brought up for bills or laws. And the thing that actually concerns me the most that feels very like Pluto return of the US is there has been intimidation and overtaking of the election officials. The things that you don’t really look at most of the time in the big picture, but like the local election officials, the state election officials… There are people running to sort of oversee the elections in several swing states that believe that the election was stolen last time. So yeah, it’s an interesting time right now. And the thing with Pluto transits I feel like, you know, a lot of everyday people have been yelling about it but hasn’t always looked like it’s been recognised at the top is the thing with Pluto transits is it’s often power struggles and complete willingness to overstep what are normal proprieties around power sharing. And you can’t often– if you respond as things are as usual, you will get run over.
CB: Right. That a softer lukewarm response to those attempts only embolden it and only makes it stronger?
LS: Yeah. And I’m not just speaking ideologically. Literally, I’ve watched that with personal and Pluto transits that I’ve seen in the world and with individual people. That’s what happens, someone tries to push you and you have to figure out how to respond.
AC: Yeah, it’s gonna be a brawl in the US for the rest of the decade because we have the Uranus return coming up, which is probably the single most pivotal thing for the US in history. None of this gets sorted out this year. Nobody wins this year. There might be battles won. The power struggle in the US goes at least through 2032. You know, watch what’s happening, but there’s no resolution anytime soon.
CB: Whatever does happen is the precursor to that Uranus transit of Uranus returning to Gemini and the two historical examples that all astrologers talk about frequently and will become much more big talking points over the next few years is the first Uranus return was the Civil War in the United States, and the fight or the war happened from within. And then the second Uranus return was during World War Two and the US’s entrance into World War Two and the fight was from without. So the question of which of those two scenarios is a fight from within or is it a fight from without that happens in the third Uranus return starting around the 2025 through 2032 timeframe? This is like the build up to the Civil War, sort of. This is the period right before the Civil War in terms of analogies that’s happening right now. And there were so many things that could have gone differently in the build up to the Civil War that maybe could have averted certain things, but that’s where we are kind of at the moment?
AC: Yep.
LS: Mhm.
CB: All right. So I want to mention the electional chart for January. Is there anything else about January before we do that?
LS: No.
CB: All right. Leisa, why don’t you tell us about the electional chart for for January? Let me pull up the chart itself.
LS: Okay, so we’re gonna do a late January as the featured election for January. It is January 27th around 8:25 am, and this lets us take advantage of Jupiter and Pisces finally. Because most of January, Mars is still in Sagittarius and so it’s having an overcoming square from Jupiter. But at the very end of the month, Mars departs Sagittarius and leaves for Capricorn. So now we can actually use Jupiter in its full goodness, which expresses over the next couple months here, Jupiter in its own sign of Pisces in the first house ruling the Ascendant in a day chart. So it’s maximum Jupiter goodness. The Moon is in the angular 10th house in early Sagittarius and it is applying to Jupiter with reception– use Jupiter as its ruler making that application more beneficial. This one does have Mars in the 11th house of friends and groups. That’s the area that could have more trouble, even though Venus is there, but it’s retrograde. Mars is there in a day chart so that would be the most problematic area. But Jupiter is really good here for both first and 10th house things. So 10th House of career, public reputation, business things, basically doing whatever you want for work that you want to go well. And first house just general, you know, the election itself is the first house. The first house you want to make really positive. So this is first impressions, this is just making the overall enterprise go well.
CB: Yeah, so good 10th House election, not so good for friends, alliances and groups with Mars in the 11th house in a day chart. This is also happening towards the end of the Mercury retrograde in Capricorn. The Venus retrograde it’s kind of a little Mercury retrograde but it’s still a pretty strong Jupiter in Pisces electional chart to start off the year with.
LS: We haven’t had a really nice Jupiter election like this since 2019.
CB: Yeah, so that is our first election chart of the year. Otherwise, we do a monthly podcast for our subscribers on Patreon called the Auspicious Elections Podcast and we found four other electrical charts for January. And we release a minimum of four charts each month besides this one that we’re highlighting. You can find out more information about that or sign up to get access to it at patreon.com/astrologypodcast. We also actually just released our full year ahead electional report for 2022, where we went through and looked at electional charts for the next 12 months and we picked that one auspicious electional chart for each month of 2022 and highlighted that in a full two-hour report. You can find out more information about that at chrisbrennan.astrologer.com/2022elections and it’ll redirect you to the core site that has a much longer and not-sayable URL. I’m kind of excited about electional charts this year. 2020 was really rough for elections, 2021 was a little bit better. I feel like 2022 though is the first year in a while where we get some actually really amazing elections. And we found almost one electional chart at least, for each of the traditional planets, which was pretty striking compared to previous years.
AC: Yeah, there are a lot of juicy bets in 2022.
LS: Yeah, it was a much more pleasant exercise looking for elections for next year compared to most.
CB: Yeah, a lot more possibilities for growth, development, taking advantage of the times and starting new things. All right, I think that’s good for January. So we’re only an hour and 40 minutes into this and we’ve just finished January, I think we’re making pretty good progress so far.
LS: To bbe fair, we did discuss some of February and March.
CB: Yeah. Let’s move on to February and March and let’s hammer out some of the other things that we really want to touch on, some of which we’ve already gotten into a little bit but-
LS: We’ve done a lot of February. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Let me pull up a calendar. What’s the next thing you two want to talk about for February?
LS: I do like that– I mean, it’s a simple Sun ingress, but I like when the Sun ingresses into Pisces a little past mid month around the 18th because then it is applying to Jupiter and that is all very lovely. So that’s January up on the screen right now. So we’re going to February.
CB: Mercury direct at the very beginning of the month. We got the Venus-Mars conjunction. Is that correct? On the 16th?
AC: Yeah, so February we have that Venus-Mars in Capricorn which we talked about pretty much all month, right?
CB: Yeah. There’s a nice little Jupiter-Uranus sextile that happens mid month as well. It’s really just the Venus-Mars. It’s the pile up in Capricorn and then we start getting into March, I believe. And we get another Venus-Mars conjunction as soon as the to go into the sign of Aquarius.
AC: Yeah, and so that’s a really pivotal moment. Is where we go from the Venus-Mars in Capricorn to not only Venus-Mars in Aquarius, but it’s the beginning of Venus’s enclosure between Mars and Saturn. Which is really maximum misery for Venus. The retrograde is confusing and the conjunction with Pluto ain’t great, but the Venus between Mars and Saturn actively sucks.
LS: Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s not good for pleasure or relationships. It’s kind of like, just know that you’re going through a desert, so to speak, in March with regard to some of those topics. And you’ll probably bear it better than like, if you’re expecting different. You will get different next month.
AC: Yeah, this is not the time to plan Venusian endeavours. It’s the time to do other things.
LS: And there are other things to do.
AC: Always are.
CB: When a planet is in between the two malefics that was called enclosure in the Hellenistic tradition or besiegement in the mediaeval tradition, and sometimes the astrologer can act really literally as a feeling of being squeezed or sort of like hemmed in on both sides and not having good options behind you and not having great options in front of you but still having to sort of press forward, but having that feeling of constriction or being held back by something.
AC: Yeah, it’s the proverbial rock and a hard place.
LS: Yeah, for sure. It’s also really interesting that the Venus-Mars conjunction is happening at zero degrees of Aquarius, that’s of course where the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction happened as they entered Aquarius. It’s also where as Pluto first enters Aquarius in the spring of 2023 it will enter and then immediately station there first degree of Aquarius. It’s a really important hotspot, that degree of Aquarius, wherever that falls in your chart. There’s a lot of sort of ongoing beginnings or important turning points over the course of several years there.
CB: That’s also where the Mars-Saturn conjunction was in late March, early April of 2020. Right?
LS: Right. Yeah.
AC: It’s the Age of Aquarius.
LS: Right. [laughs] That’s what Aquarius thinks. Anything else?
CB: No, I’m not sure.
LS: That’s really what stands out to me. Obviously, Jupiter is getting closer to Neptune during this month but if we’re not quite at the exact conjunction, you’ll probably feel some of that starting to ramp up. That kind of feels to me like you’re constrained and you feel a constrainment but then you’re trying to sort of distract yourself or you’re trying to immerse yourself in some other reality. I know Chris, you’ve mentioned sort of a virtual reality potential for like, just kind of trying to get into a different world that feels better during that time.
CB: Yeah, just reminds me of just having the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction which seems so positive but illusory, and having the Mars-Saturn conjunction building up during this time in March and April that seems so harsh in terms of the reality of things. It reminds me of some of the dystopian movies and novels about the future, like in that movie Ready Player One and the book where people are living in squalor and trailers that are packed on top of each other, and the material world is just not in good shape. But everyone is jacked into virtual reality machines where they’re just off living in these other worlds that are completely different and are enjoyable. But in the process, the material world is like falling apart in the meantime.
LS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. And that’s part of the quality of this more Saturn co presence period while they’re all these lovely things happen in Pisces. These aren’t benefics and malefics entangled and arguing about how things are going to be, they’re not mediating each other at all. Right? There’s the roughness in one area and then there’s pleasure and ease in another area. The two don’t intersect.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So even if it’s not virtual reality, it’s like there’s one area of your life that feels really tough and constraining and you have to put hard work towards that’s not necessarily paying off immediately. And then there’s a whole other area where you’re like, “Oh, but this feels good for now.”
AC: Yeah. This is going great. This is going terrible.
LS: Right. Exactly. Yeah, it’s like you can enjoy that this is going great while a totally other area is harder.
AC: Right. And so these are adjacent houses so you can, you know, think about it with your charts. Maybe it’s the sixth and seventh, maybe it’s the seventh and eighth, maybe it’s the ninth and tenth. Right. Like I’m having a belief crisis in the ninth, everything I thought was real is fake, but my career’s going super well!” And it’s like one doesn’t mitigate the other, they’re just both what they are.
LS: Totally. And there’s pros and cons to that compared to what we have had, which is like less Jupiter goodness but like better Saturn stuff. We’ve had them all in a mix up to this point and now they’re just really good and really hard. Really hard depending on your chart, of course.
CB: Well, and that happens fairly frequently. Like sometimes in our lives, there’s one area that’s going really well and there’s another we’re having like major constraint or hardship or obstacles and difficulties that come up so you’re having to navigate.
LS: Right. So during this time of the year, you can think about that and look at your own chart and say, “Where is the area that I can get relief or goodness or joy while I have to also do this other thing that doesn’t feel so good?”
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right, I think that wraps us up, because we’re really getting into or worse, we’re threatening to get into the next quarter. So I think we have to, at this point, wind down quarter one of the year. I wanted to mention– we have to mention our first sponsor, which is our friends at the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, which have just released a bunch of new almanacs and things that are being sent out and that tonnes of people are getting for the year ahead, because this has become a really popular way to track your transits. I don’t know how they do it but they have these amazing personalised astrological almanacs where you submit your birth data and they actually either print up a print, either booklet or calendar or even get a digital edition where it’s actually tied into your birth chart. So this is not a generalised almanac like most publications are, but it’s one that’s specifically tied into your birth chart and shows you your exact transits during the course of the year. It’s pretty awesome. I just got the latest calendar, my own personal calendar for 2020. I know you two have used and looked at yours in the past, right?
AC: Yeah, it’s a really wonderful service slash product.
LS: Yeah, it’s interesting now that it does exist. Nothing like this existed before that was so personalised. And it’s sort of striking how it’s both really beautiful with the new artwork that they’ve incorporated recently and also so educational. There’s so many details in there. It’s actually also really good if you’re learning astrology. Yeah, there’s a lot you can keep up with in your own chart that you might not otherwise.
CB:Yeah, so Honeycomb almanacs and calendars are available in print and digital format as I said. It includes natal transits, Hellenistic methods and timing techniques, solar returns, lunations and a bunch of other stuff. The digital almanacs start at only $10 and are delivered by email within 24 hours. There’s also print ones that are also delivered very quickly. They have a new customizable artwork feature featuring a wide variety of artists and different styles. There in that image, they have excellent reading choices in the background. I appreciate it. So it’s available internationally and it ships from printers worldwide. You can find out more information about it at honeycomb.co. Let me show the last image there. I like that one with the zodiac releasing periods and how they visualise the zodiac releasing periods using those bar charts. It’s pretty, pretty cool.
LS: Definitely. Yeah, look at all those graphics.
CB: Yeah, the new illustrations by different artists where you can pick out different community artwork from different astrologers that have contributed art to them is amazing. And you can choose what illustration you want for your calendar in a given year, and they additionally have other print posters and things you can get now as well.
LS: Yeah, I love how customizable it is. Not just with the artwork but other details as well astrologically.
CB: Yeah, I always used to buy calendars and stuff but now having this to put up on my wall that actually shows my personal transits is pretty, pretty cool. So thanks to the Honeycomb people for making that, and definitely keep up the good work.
All right, we have successfully completed quarter one, let’s start talking about quarter two and move into discussing April of 2022.
LS: And I think we’ll have to go through this a bit quicker if we want our break. [laughs] Just fyi.
CB: You know, we could just turn this into like a full 20-hour forecast episode. All right, second quarter of 2022. Major stuff is the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius right away. We also get the Jupiter conjunction with Neptune in Pisces, as well as Venus being there happening at the time almost simultaneously. Not long after that, we have Jupiter ingressing into Aries which is where it stays for much of the rest of the year. Mars moves into Aries and joins Jupiter and we get a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aries very early in that. Afterwards we go into eclipse season, we get our first solar eclipse pair. One solar eclipses in Taurus conjunct Uranus. And then we get our first lunar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio. Quarter two is when stuff really starts moving, I feel like. I think we’re all in agreement about that, right?
LS: Mhm, a lot of action.
AC: It moves in the first quarter, just not in the method I’m going to enjoy. [laughs] There’s plenty that happened, right? We just talked about. It’s just not great, where there’s really like desirable things in Q2 and there is some dynamism especially with a Mars-Jupiter in Aries. So it begins with the Mars Saturn Venus and Aquarius, which we have been enjoying for the the entire month at that point. But as we look at the opening of April, Venus has cleared Saturn and Mars. So even though Venus is still treated to that co presence, we no longer have the enclosure, which is that rock and a hard place dynamic. Venus isn’t between Mars and Saturn. Venus has kicked down the door and running for Pisces. And the ingress of Venus into Pisces, which happens not very far into April– April 5th– is Venus’s reward for enduring months and months of Saturnian signs and malefic co presence. You know, Venus moves into the sign of Pisces where Venus is exalted, which is great in and of itself. At this point, Jupiter, which is the ruler of Pisces, is there and so it’s really best possible situation after nearly the worst possible situation. [laughs] I’m sure there will be some elections in early April because the skies open.
LS: Yeah, it’s so weird. This is what I was mentioning earlier. It’s so weird about April. So we have the Mars-Saturn conjunction that goes exact on April 4 and then immediately the next day, Venus goes into Pisces and it’s just like this big sigh of relief right after this huge constraint. It’s so weird. And that’s weirdness already even before we get to the April 12th Jupiter-Neptune exact conjunction which we also have. So it’s like the beginning of the month still feels like tight, and then everything just like relaxes. Not everything relaxes, I mean Mars Saturn are still pretty close. But many things relax as we get into April.
CB: Yeah. Part of it may just be it’s like the people with fixed sign placements or heavy fixed sign placements especially fixed sign angles of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius, that Mars-Saturn conjunction is probably going to feel heavier for those people, especially if you have degrees around there. Whereas our mutable sign friends, especially with mutable signs rising or heavy emphasis on mutable signs like Gemini, Pisces, Sagittarius and Virgo, then that’s going to feel a little bit lighter and a little bit more positive having that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, having Venus ingressing into that sign.
LS: Absolutely. That’s a really good point to remember.
AC: For a lot of people, that’s where the hard work pays off. That’s when the rewards land. Which is, you know, already a Venus-Jupiter thing, but then especially this year.
CB: Yeah. Maybe that’s even more relevant since also the eclipses have shifted, and it was the mutable people that were getting all the eclipses last year especially in the second half of 2020 and all of 2021 when the eclipses were in mutable signs, but now the eclipses has shifted fully to the fixed signs. So not only are there big catalysts for change and major beginnings and endings happening for fixed-sign people, but we’re also getting some of those- We’re getting the Saturn-Uranus square and we’re getting some of those heavy first conjunctions of Mars and Saturn there and then later the square when Mars goes into Taurus.
LS: And speaking of those eclipses, we get the first one at the end of the month on April 30th, I believe. Which is a solar eclipse in Taurus conjunct by a few degrees Uranus. So we are getting that focal point of Uranus and Taurus getting lit up by those eclipses additionally.
CB: Yeah, and it’s like we had one lunar eclipse in Taurus back in November of 2021 at the end of this current year. This is our second lunation in this sign, this time a solar eclipse a new Moon basically in that sign.
LS: Mhm. And I know when we were talking and were preparing for this we all noted that it was really unique that The Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Pisces goes exact just about the same time as that eclipse in Taurus, which is lovely because of course then Venus rules that eclipse.
CB: Yeah, I kind of like this eclipse and this lunation especially more than some of the ones later this year, even the Scorpio ones or especially the one in November. Let’s take a look at it. So right here it’s at 10° of Taurus and Uranus is at 14° Taurus so it’s like an amped up Uranian solar eclipse. But look at Venus, it’s almost perfectly to the degree and minute conjoining Jupiter at 27° of Pisces with Neptune not too far off at 24 Pisces. And Venus is actually the ruler of this lunation
LS: Mm hmm. This would be a good time if you’re trying to conceive. This kind of random because I’m not trying to conceive but that just looks so bountiful and connecting with the sign of Taurus.
AC: I’m gonna have to strongly dissent on conceiving.
LS: You don’t like that?
CB: Oh, Austin is not a fan of eclipses. He’s anti-eclipse.
LS: Noo. Yeah, we have different feelings.
AC: No, that’s not fair. I just see what they actually do. So another perspective is that this eclipse in this beautiful Venus rule place has the ability to disrupt what should be really good. It has the ability to eclipse what should be bountiful and lovely,
LS: I think in some cases. Because of course it’s gonna hit so many people’s charts differently depending on how the timing in your chart and what the houses are and all of that. So, it’s not to say that this is gonna land the exact same way for everyone. But you know, it can equally be like a surprise pleasant thing.
CB: Yeah, an unexpected beginning that sets off a sequence of events that turns out to be more momentous and more important than it might have seemed at first as sometimes the more constructive or positive versions of eclipses that I’ve seen in practice.
LS: Mhm, for sure.
CB: All right. So we’ve got eclipse number one right here in the sign of Taurus. This is happening just before Mercury. Mercury’s slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde in early Gemini. It does so about a week later at four degrees of Gemini around May 10th.
LS: And Venus leaves, you can see how brief that window is– those few weeks of Venus, Jupiter, Neptune in Pisces. That’s really lovely, enjoy it while it’s there, it’s only going to be a few weeks, you know? It’s like envisioning things and daydreams and so forth and then we’re gonna move.
CB: Yeah, and Jupiter shifts into Aries and so now we get into- That was so brief. Jupiter in Pisces ends up being so brief, only the first four months of the year, and then most of the rest of the year is Jupiter in Aries.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting how parted out Jupiter and Pisces is. We got a little bit in 2021 and then we get about four months at the beginning of 2022, and then we get two months at the end. When you add it all up, it’s almost a full Jupiter in Pisces, but it’s sort of playing with us. It’s teaching us how to miss it.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So enjoy it while it lasts. But you know, it can have lasting effects even if the actual transits are brief. I was remembering Austin, you talking about an end of a conflict and during a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction.
AC: Right, World War Two.
LS: Well, and I noticed also the Crimean War ended during a Venus Jupiter Neptune in Pisces, the last cycle?
AC: Right. Yeah. It’s that same feeling. It doesn’t solve everything but it does solve something, right?
LS: Oh, yeah.
AC: It doesn’t do the rebuilding for you but at least there are artillery shells falling.
CB: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about Jupiter in Aries. So Jupiter in Aries is really dynamic as our first cardinal sign of the zodiac ruled by Mars. It seems really good at getting things going and speeding things up; Jupiter with its growth and expansion and Mars with its tendency to make things go faster. So things start going faster at this point in the year and I think that’s one of our keywords. That’s one of my keywords for the second quarter, especially, is that things start speeding up and start moving in new directions very quickly.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. Feels like go time or action time. You know, Jupiter in Aries, I like the feel of Jupiter in Pisces better but it’s kind of passive. Or it can be anyway. Jupiter in Aries gets things done, initiates things. One of my favourite new things that I know about Jupiter in Aries is do you know that tagline Just Do It that Nike has had for a long time? Apparently that was devised in the very beginning of 1988 when Jupiter was an Aries. I love that.
AC: Oh, that’s good.
LS: Right, isn’t that great? It’s like that. It’s like just do the thing. Just go. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be finished, just go do the thing that you need or want to do.
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect. And this gets amplified of course pretty early in the quarter when Mars ingresses later in May into Aries and then very shortly after that, we get a Mars-Jupiter conjunction at three degrees of Aries around May 29th.
AC: Yeah. The Just Do It quality will become very obvious very quickly.
CB: Yeah, “Shooting from the hip.” Patrick Watson, astrologer with Jupiter in Aries, used that phrase “shooting shooting from the hip” or “shoot first and ask questions later.” Can sometimes be a very Jupiter in Aries type theme.
AC: Yeah, as I was saying to both of you the other day, I’ve been looking at old electional protocols and I was like, “Oh, Mars-Jupiter is like a perfect time to declare war.” And you know, I think geopolitically there will be a lot of sabre rattling during this Mars-Jupiter co-presence, and maybe some little quick wars.
CB: Yeah. During the last one 12 years ago, I was talking to Patrick and he reminded me cuz we were watching this at the time, it was really notable, but when the US found Osama bin Laden and killed him, that occurred under a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aries 12 years ago.
AC: Oh. Yeah, there you go.
CB: Yeah. So sometimes military type things, the expansion of fighting, the expansion of things moving quickly… Aries and Mars are both of course a very fiery sign; so things having to do with heat or with things that are fiery, sometimes metaphorically sometimes very literally. We of course remember last year in 2020 when Mars, in the sign of Aries, stationed I think retrograde in the news that day. All of a sudden the entire West Coast of the US was on fire and there were those pictures from San Francisco where the sky was red and it just looked red out. It looked like people were living on Mars at that point. The sky was so red and sometimes redness is basic signification of Mars in Aries.
LS: For sure.
AC: We could see fires on the hills about 10 miles distant from the house that day. And the air air was choked with smoke.
CB: Yeah, that was scary.
LS: Yeah, so this is a really good transit for sort of abundance or gain from acting alone, self sufficiency, being willing to just go for it. But you know, the flip side, of course, is like blowing up selfishness, like expanding selfishness. So you do have to kind of draw a fine line in there because you know, it is an appropriate time to do things individually. But you don’t want to like overdo that.
AC: [laughs] It’s definitely, I agree, selfish. Or we could say it’s self oriented, but that will turn into amazingly assertive selfish actions for some people. But that’s Mars, right? Mars is about what’s mine, and not yours.
CB: Yeah. Or the need to go it alone, or to charge in first. To be the one to charge in first.
LS: One of my other examples I really like is Garry Kasparov, who was a former world chess champion. He has Jupiter in Aries ruling his Ascendant in the fifth house of games. And he is well known for his aggressive opening strategies, which just fits really perfectly. That’s like how he wins, kind of charging in first and making bold moves.
AC: Yeah. I would say that this is not a time to begin extended campaigns. This is like, “Go in and kick a bunch of ass for a little bit.” In terms of professional fighters who have Mars and Aries, they’re all great in the first round. None of them have very good track records past that. It’s like, go in and get it done or lose. And so with the extremely cardinal nature of Mars in Aries, if you’re going to plan a campaign, like a set of efforts or whatever, get up off your ass and go be selfish. You want it to have a timeframe that fits this.
CB: Yeah, so growth and expansion are starting activities but it’s tends to be things that have very strong initial push are starting point, but then drop off and don’t have a lot of carry through?
AC: Yeah. It’s something you want to be able to get done with a strong burst of effort.
LS: Absolutely. An interesting thing about May is Venus is actually also in Aries for much of the month. And so we just have that theme echoing several times through Venus, Mars, Jupiter. Which also means both of benefics are co present, which was kind of nice, even though they’re not particularly amazing in Aries. But, you know, it’s just echoing that same message of Go for it.
CB: Right. Let’s talk about also our second lunation or other eclipse in May, which is the lunar eclipse in Scorpio that happens on the 16th of May.
LS: Let’s see that one.
CB: Okay, let me pull it up.
LS: So that’s going to be our first eclipse in Scorpio. We’ve already had a couple in Taurus now. This one is going to be… It’s on the what? The 15th? 16th?
CB: Yeah. Scorpios we successfully dodged this eclipse in November timeframe and just ended up with an extra one in the Saj-Gemini access. But now the time has come for the first of the eclipses in Scorpio so 25° of Scorpio on May 15th.
LS: Yeah. Does that go in the November Taurus eclipse since the Sun is at 25° Taurus, which is where the lunar eclipse in November 2021 was the first Taurus one. It’s kind of activating that same axis of like 25 fixed signs. This is also really closely square Saturn. Pretty almost exactly square Saturn.
CB: Yeah, this is a much heavier eclipse than our previous one, the Taurus eclipse, which is a few weeks earlier. That square with Saturn gives this one a much more weighty feeling.
AC: Yeah, this is harsh.
LS: Yeah. And it’s interesting that the lunation is ruled by Mars, which is still in Pisces and applying very closely to conjoin Neptune. It’s like we’ve been talking about all this Aries stuff and Mars hasn’t quite joined at this point in the month, mid month. Yeah, so there’s potentially some nebulousness around whatever happens with the eclipse because of that ruler.
CB: Yeah, I remember there’s a good example last summer of a Mars-Neptune opposition when the US launched that strike as they were leaving Afghanistan, and they launched a missile to blow up somebody that they thought was planning to blow up people that were leaving Afghanistan. And it turned out that they had accidentally just killed a bunch of civilians, including a bunch of children. So one of the keywords we were coming up with then at the time was like the fog of war or making an aggressive action, or a bold action or violent action, but making a mistake out of not having clear information or acting too soon or too quickly in an inappropriate fashion.
AC: Yeah. Not having good intel.
LS: Yeah. That happened almost the same time as like a tonne of flooding. I think it was in New York at that time, but I was just watching it and it was hitting the US chart, you know, because it’s Mars-Neptune around 22° 23° or 21° 22°. So it can also be just like water in a negative sense.
AC: One characterization of eclipses on the south node from some Arabic era astrology texts that I think is interesting is– we have the tail of the dragon and it’s characterised as having a stinger on it. Which, for nerds out there, that’s wyvern in D&D. But that image is older. The tail has its own poison. It’s easy to imagine being attacked by a dragon’s mouth. But you’re like, “That’s the tail, what does it do?” Well, you know, this is an imaginary creature as dragons are and this imaginary dragon has a has a poison tail.
LS: Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, I guess for those listening as we’re talking about all these movements through the zodiac and lunations and whatnot, that we’re kind of trying to simultaneously talk about them in a macro cosmic sense as well as a personal sense. And that even if we’re talking about some of the negative manifestations that may or may not hit your individual chart, it may be reflected in the world at large or vice versa. But just to say, just because there is a negative aspect to a lunation or something, that doesn’t mean that it will hit each and every one of us the same way.
AC: Certainly not.
CB: Yeah.
LS: It’s a good reminder.
CB: So with the Saturn aspect, though, there may be some themes of restrictions of duty of, you know, the burden of obligations, and the tensions that that has in one’s life. The restrictions that may be holding you back and questions of whether to push back against those or whether to put up with them for the time being. I think it’s really important for people to pay attention to this year when it comes to the eclipses, the Taurus Scorpio axis in your chart and what houses that that coincides with, because those two houses are just going to be getting lit up and the lunations will be jumping back and forth between those two houses. And what you’ll see for many people personally is just great beginnings and great endings in those areas of your life that correspond with those two houses. And the major changes that often occur in eclipses are because something is either ramping up in that new area and the seeds of something or being laid that will then grow in six month increments. Or alternatively, there’s something that is winding down that has to be brought to an end in that part of your life in order to make way for something new.
AC: Yeah, and the south node side is going to tend to tell you more about endings, if we’re talking about the structuring or bearing the weight of burdens via that Saturn square. And even though that lunar eclipse in Scorpio is tightest to Saturn, all these eclipses are square Saturn by sign, right? And so you know, with the south node sign, it’s what maybe do you need to let go of because of those burdens? There’s so much pressure on you you can’t hold on to everything. Right?
CB: Right. That’s a really good point. Think about with the south node moving into Scorpio and the north node moving through Taurus. Last year, I really saw themes of decrease coming up when the south node was passing over personal planets and a decrease or disappearance of something. And in some instances, themes of increase when the north node was passing over something. So it might be good for people to personalise some of this to just see what houses and what planets those are passing over in your personal natal chart.
LS: Mhm. And it’s so interesting that these are all tied in with Uranus more than usual this year, because there are some overlapping significations between Uranus transits and eclipses, i.e, things beginning or ending or changing more quickly than you were expecting or sort of coming out of the blue. Both of those can do that. And so when you have both of them together, there’s just like an even greater chance of noticing that kind of dynamic.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: All right. So that takes us out of eclipse season and we finish up May, and brings us to June. We did have a second Mercury retrograde that was from the 10th of May until the third of June. We also have Saturn stationing retrograde in Aquarius. Gets laid in Aquarius, but then it stations and starts moving backwards starting on the fourth of June. That’s notable. Is that one of the Mercury retrogrades we wanted to talk about?
LS: Mercury does station direct. When it does station direct at the degree of the November eclipse, we’re just like activating that again here.
CB: Okay, so we got the retrograde station at 4 Gemini in the middle of May. And then it slows down and stations direct at 26° of Taurus. That is pretty dead on in terms of that eclipse degree, especially if that is close to something in a person’s birth chart.
LS: Yeah, the Mercury retrogrades mean something, but sometimes they mean something more importantly than at other times depending on your own specific chart. But this year, like the Mercury retrograde stations and direct stations are really hitting off a bunch of other like ongoing transits or lunations or what have you, they’re just like making little exclamation points for some reason. So they’re more like reinforcing other movements.
CB: This one in particular, again, another Mercury station that’s closely configured to Saturn. So when the station’s direct at 26° of Taurus, it’s squaring Saturn at 25° Aquarius. And that more closely recapitulates that direct station we saw on election day in November of 2020 when we had those themes of slowness because Mercury was moving so slow and delays and different things like that, that may be a theme here. We’re coming out of that retrograde. It may take us a little bit longer to come out of it. There may be a little bit more post retrograde fatigue or slowness than other retrogrades.
AC: There’s an interesting contrast there between the Mars-Jupiter in Aries. We have a huge push to action. As Leisa said, Just Do It. But our intel is suspect during that slowed down Mercury retrograde square Saturn. We’re probably going to need to restrain our enthusiasm [laughs] until certain facts come in, or at least restrain our enthusiasm for high consequence actions.
LS: It’s really good point.
CB: Would you say ‘Don’t lose your head’ would be advice for that Mercury conjunction?
AC: Yeah, always. [laughs]
LS: Saturn is also stationing early in the month and so that’ll just kind of put a heavier emphasis on whorever Saturn has been transiting in your house. So which house it’s been transiting in your chart. So you know, greater responsibilities or greater heaviness or things you got to do basically, or absences. You’ll feel that a little bit more at the beginning of the month. Interestingly, Mercury’s stationing as Saturn is stationing while they’re square.
CB: Yeah, this is the first time Saturn’s gotten this late in Aquarius. We’re really in the– not fully the end the game, that won’t come into later in the year and early next year– but second half of Aquarius now it’s covering new ground and the second half of the fixed signs are starting to feel Saturn much more intensely than they did last year when Saturn was moving through the first half of Aquarius.
LS: Yeah. The other thing about June I noted with some frustration is that Venus is in Taurus, which normally is a really nice place for Venus to be, but it’s square Saturn the entire time– which I personally was quite annoyed with it for. Because then really you’ve just got these three weeks in April where Venus is really lovely after three months of not, and then you want to expect at least Venus going through Taurus would be better, but it’s constrained here. I mean, it will still be in Taurus, which is good, but there’ll be some constraint to it compared to usual.
AC: Well, yeah. With Uranus and the north node and square Saturn, deal’s off. But what is nice and not horribly constrained for a lot of June, is once Mercury is direct and then moves back into Gemini, we have some very nice looking Mercury in Gemini. And if we’re talking about quick, not only is Mercury in Gemini quick and fun– and this is a morning rising Mercury, which is even more so– but we also have Mercury in Gemini, which is already capable of all these things sextiling Jupiter and eventually sextiling Mars especially by sign. And so what was delayed earlier will then move forward with probably lightning quickness.
LS: Yeah, I like that.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Looking forward to it. [laughs]
CB: So before we get into the second half of the year and get into quarter three, I want to talk about our second sponsor of the year, which is that there’s two astrology conferences happening in-person in 2022. One of them’s happening in Colorado, and the other is happening in Seattle. The first one is our friends at the Northwest Astrological Conference which is taking place just outside of Seattle, Washington, May 26th through the 30th 2020. It’s got a bunch of good speakers. NORWAC is a mid-sized conference and it’s often sort of seen as like a good first conference to have. I know it was my first astrological conference, I think it was both of your first conferences probably more or less too, right?
AC: Yeah, it was.
LS: I went big. I went for UAC as my first conference then went back to NORWAC. [laughs]
CB: Okay. Well, that’s a little much. Nobody should do that. [laughs] But NORWAC is a good mid sized conference, it has a great lineup of 30 different speakers this year from all different walks of the astrological tradition. It’s also going to have a a bookstore with hundreds of different astrology books. It’ll have a trade show with a bunch of different astrology vendors, and that’s actually where I first met the Honeycomb People. It was at NORWAC. They were vendors at a NORWAC conference and I saw their amazing planners are almanacs. Also, there’s going to be some amazing pre and post conference workshops. Which one of us is doing a workshop at NORWAC?
AC: I have a pre conference workshop on planetary pairs.
CB: Okay. It’s like combinations of different planets?
AC: Yeah. Drawing on both lived experience as well as some of the early texts which have like Mars and Venus together give you this or, Mars trine Venus gives you this, etc, etc. Sort of building up from some of the traditional bones and flushing it out and providing a little bit more colour.
CB: That sounds awesome. So that’s an entire workshop you can do with Austin. Leisa, you’re also speaking at the conference?
LS: I am. I’m going to do a brief introduction to electional astrology for people who are hearing about the featured elections here but don’t really know where to start with that, as well as people who may have been following along with the monthly elections but would like to start from scratch and hear exactly how to do it. I’m doing another talk about the timing of when astrologers found or started to study astrology, and kind of what that says about how astrology exists in today’s world.
CB: So like their transits of when they started studying it?
LS: Transits or other timing. Yeah.
AC: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: Nice. I was going through a Uranus transit over my Ascendant when I started.
AC: I don’t remember when I started. I think when I started is less interesting than when I went 100% committed, this is my life, this is my job. Which was Uranus conjunct the natal Sun in the ninth.
LS: Nice. Oh, nice.
AC: Yeah, kind of a gimme transit wise.
CB: Yeah. Well, in-person conferences are so important and this is kind of a big deal that they’re going to be coming back again next year and astrologers are going to be getting back together in person There’s going to be dozens of really amazing lectures with professionals giving beginner, intermediate, and advanced talks on astrology from people that have been doing this for years and really sharing their wisdom in a really condensed form. There’s just something that happens in-person conferences that’s different than the online Zoom conferences and meetings that we’ve been having for the past few years that’s really hard to replicate in the digital space that I’m really looking forward to experiencing again once everyone gets back together in person.
LS: Yeah, I agree. And NORWAC just kind of has a warm vibe. People are friendly there basically.
AC: And the weather’s great in Seattle.
CB: Totally. There’s actually some videos on YouTube you can find. I know Cam White did one at the last in-person conference and if you do a search for NORWAC 2019 recap, you’ll see Cam doing some interviews of different astrologers. You’ll see the hotel and some of the dinners and the bookstores and all of that that happened at different points during NORWAC just to get a sense for what it’s like and what people were saying at the last in-person conference. There’s also a video that Nicholas Polimenakos did– if you search for the NORWAC 2019 Astrology Bookstore review of Nicholas going through some amazing astrology books. [Leisa laughs] Look at that, I can’t believe he happened to pick up my book.
LS: [laughs] That was good timing.
CB: All right. Well, he has very good taste. But he goes through like a hundred other astrology books because Nicholas is really an expert at that, he’s been working in the bookstore for such a long time. That’s one of the cool things about actually being able to go to a physical bookstore that just has hundreds of astrology books. I don’t know. For some of our younger listeners, there used to be these things called bookstores that you could go to physically to pick up and read through books, but it’s really novel experience at conferences so I’d recommend checking it out.
So that is one conference that’s taking place at the end of May this year in Seattle. There’s a second conference, which is the International Society for Astrological Research, which is also hosting a conference next year. This is going to be an even bigger conference in Westminster, Colorado, which is just outside of Denver, from August 15th through the 29th, 2022. The ISAR conference is going to have over 100 different speakers and lectures, which is just a crazy amount of speakers. One of the things about ISAR is that it’s more of an international organisation so the lectures are a little bit more international. There’s more international speakers that’ll be flying in from different countries. And it’ll be at a bigger hotel, so it’ll probably have a lot more people attending it than NORWAC. I think NORWAC is capped at like four or five hundred people in terms of how many people can fit in the hotel, whereas this ISAR conference could get siix, seven, eight hundred or even more. Maybe even 1000 attendees depending on how well attended it is. It should be a pretty amazing conference, I think. Leisa, you’re doing a workshop there, right?
LS: I am. I’m doing an electional astrology workshop. So not an intro this time, but more for people who want to build, although you can come if you’re a beginner. I’ll just sort of be aiming for the middle there. Basically reviewing basic astrological electional astrology principles. We’re going to be looking at how to make judgement calls between different competing potential elections, looking at actual inceptions that went well or badly and what we can learn from them, and also exploring how to find the best possible elections when the weather is just bad. Which I know a lot of people want to know about.
CB: Yeah. We got a crash course in that over the past two years of 2020 and 2021. To a lesser extent, not as much this year although in quarter three, we’re going to get to some difficult electional times like August, which we had a really hard time finding good shots for in our Year Ahead report. But that’ll be helpful heads up for people for that. So you can find out more information about that conference at isar2020.org, as well as a schedule with all the different lecture topics. There’s going to be, I think, six different tracks for pre and post conference workshops, plus over 100 lectures being presented. It’s going to be huge and pretty crazy. People can check out isar2020.org for more information about that. I meant to mention the website or the URL for NORWAC. It’s norwac.net for more information about that conference.
LS: Pretty excited about meeting astrologers in person again, and of course that ISAR one will be just outside Denver so you all can come to visit us.
CB: I am happy about that, that I’ll just drive 10 minutes from my house in order to get there. That’s particularly appealing to me. Are you speaking in ISAR? Are you going to be at ISAR, Austin, attending?
AC: I’m not scheduled to speak. Unless something terrible intrudes, I’ll show up. And who knows? I don’t know, maybe I’ll sub in for somebody if people have to drop out. But no, I’m not scheduled to speak.
CB: Okay. Well, that’s even better. You should just come and hang out with me during the conference so we can get drinks in the bar while everyone else is working.
AC: We can be like the two old men and the muppets. [Leisa and Chris laugh] Just on the balcony seat.
CB: Making fun of people from the balcony. That sounds good. All right, well, that should be amazing and I’ll see a lot of people there in person this year at both of those conferences which I’m looking forward to.
All right, shall we move into talking about the third quarter of 2022?
AC: Let’s do this.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right, here we go. Third quarter of 2022 from July forward. So some of the major things that happens in the third quarter are that Mars moves into Taurus at some point, I think in July, which is a little tricky because it starts making hard aspects to Saturn through a square and Uranus through a conjunction. Then the Sun, Mercury and Venus go through the sign of Leo and set off that Saturn-Uranus square again. Mars eventually later in the quarter ingresses into Gemini where it’s going to start slowing down and later in quarter four will eventually station retrograde, so it’s going to spend essentially large part of the second half of the year in Gemini. Then the Saturn-Uranus square comes back and gets very very close in the third quarter of 2022. I think getting within a degree or less than a degree away. So even though it doesn’t go exact, it gets very, very close. Then we have Jupiter stationing retrograde in Aries and intensifying Jupiter’s transit through that sign. And finally also Uranus stationing retrograde in Taurus and intensifying its significations in that sign. That is the overview. Let’s start by jumping right into July. What’s some of our major stuff?
AC: Yeah, that Mars ingress into Taurus happens very early in July. Does it happen on the birthday of [unintelligible 02:26:58]
LS: It’s at the very end of the night depending on your timezone, on July 4th or else early on July 5th. Yeah, I was noticing that line out too.
CB: And what happened last time Mars ingressed into Taurus. [laughs]
LS: [laughs] Yeah, let’s not talk about that.
CB: That was January 6, 2021, which was the day of the insurrection which is a very memorable Mars ingress recently into Taurus. So yeah, folding practically right on the 4th of July this year for some weird looking reason.
LS: Essentially, it is the same transit on the 4th of July because Mars was like at the very very end of Aries and then switching into Taurus during the process of January 6th. So for whatever it’s worth, that is the same transit.
AC: Yeah, it’ll probably be- If we’re looking at Mars and Taurus as a six weeks-ish period, it’s going to probably be more intense towards the latter half rather than the beginning when Mars ingressed into Taurus. Was that this year? That was 2021. It feels like forever ago, right? Saturn and Uranus were both much earlier and so Mars just a little pinky toe into Taurus was enough to activate that. And we have similar dynamics coming up with Mars and Taurus, but it’s going to be much later, right? It’s going to be more middle second half, because you see that Saturn is most of the way through Aquarius at this point. It’s about 24° and Uranus is at 17°. What’s different this time is we also have the north node in Taurus, which is an intensifier. But our Mars in Taurus moment is a little later on.
LS: Yeah, that’s like the first week of August. It gets really close and exact, but July feels like a building to me because of that factor. Because it’s just ingressing but it’s like not getting to those other planets for a while.
CB: Some listeners sometimes point out that sometimes astrologers, in retrospect, really emphasised Mars going into Taurus with the January 6th insurrection, but that most of the day it was at 29 Aries and the sort of disparity between those. But I think there were so many after effects of January 6th that really got more intense as a sudden of of what happened. I think that’s one of the reasons why we ended up emphasising Mars going into Taurus a little bit more than Mars in Aries, but it’s maybe worth mentioning a little there.
AC: Yeah. One way to summarise it; it was the day of the ingress. Right? And also as far as omens go, the famous picture was a guy with bull horns, right? We didn’t get a synchronicity with Ram stuff. Taurus was the symbolism.
CB: Right. And bullhorns guy I think, was just sentenced to jail for like two or three years in the past few weeks.
AC: I don’t know, maybe.
CB: And of course at the time, the still then President had the arising, so Mars had just ingressed into his 10th whole sign house. So it was also a striking example of this whole sign ingresses sometimes really mattering, even if the build up and the exact alignments later can sometimes become more important.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Let’s go back to July. That ingress, so the build up to that we see the nodes inching closer to Uranus or Uranus inching closer to the nodes in Taurus as Mars moves closer and closer. Because Mars is pretty speedy at this point, even though it’s going to station retrograde later this year, it’s still moving pretty quick as it cruises through Taurus. So that by the end of July, Mars is right up there in the middle of Taurus and gets right on top of Uranus at about 18° of Taurus by the beginning of August.
AC: Yeah. And as you were saying earlier, the Sun’s ingress into Leo puts the Sun in a T square with the Saturn, Uranus and friends stuff. That’s just further volatile during the dynamics. We’ll talk more about Mars, obviously, but you know in 2021, we talked a lot about Mars making angles to Saturn and Uranus and that setting things off. And it does that again in 2022, but it’s conjunctions. It’s Mars with Saturn, and then it’s Mars with Uranus. Whereas after the beginning of 2021, we had Mars in Leo, which is a T square opposing and squaring and then the same with Scorpio. Those T squares brought in sort of a more complicated dynamics, whereas this is just Mars-Saturn and Mars-Uranus. So it’s a little bit more to the heart of the matter and should absolutely pop out all of the Saturn-Uranus themes which have become, I think at this point, unfortunately familiar.
LS: Yeah.
CB: This is the part of the year that I had a really hard time on with electional charts when we did the year ahead elections was especially August. And even though we were able to find planetary elections for almost every planet next year, especially when they go through one of their signs or one of their signs of exultation, the Sun was the one I had a hard time with that I couldn’t really get a good election during this timeframe in late July or early August while the Sun is going through Leo, which would otherwise be a great solar election timeframe because the Sun is both applying to the opposition with Saturn in the middle of Aquarius but also to the square with Uranus and it’s being overcome by that square from Mars while Mars is going through Taurus. It just kind of messes up some of the solar stuff right there in the height of the summer.
AC: Yeah, there will be no Sphere and Sundry operations.
CB: There will be no Regulus and chill during August?
AC: No. [laughs]
CB: [laughs] Okay.
LS: So July is just building up to August. I mean, not that it doesn’t matter in itself, but like August is kind of the main weather and it’s just inching closer all through July.
AC: Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
CB: All right. So the Mars conjunction with Uranus and the nodes simultaneously, all three of them at 18° of Taurus is right there on August 1st. And then Mars separates from Uranus after that, but then it heads headlong into the square with Saturn, which it completes around August 7th and 8th at 22° of Aquarius. That’s really the hotspot range for this summer timeframe. It’s between 18° of Taurus and 22° of Taurus. So if you have anything between 18 and 22 of the fixed signs, then it’s really going to get be getting hit by all of those during that time frame.
AC: I would probably extend that out to just second half of fixed signs. The more precise range is correct but you know, with everything. And also just looking at when the Moon’s in the second half of fixed signs for probably a month, it’s just going to be popping out. Like, Uranus, Mars, Rahu, Saturn, and then the Sun. Just looking at this freshly right now and talking about missing out on solar elections, the Sun is under a lot of stress here. We’ve been kind of focused on what are Saturn and Uranus going to do, but from the perspective of solar things, this is a terrible time for solar things. You don’t want to become the president of a country or a company during this time. You don’t want to assume a leadership mantle with the Sun that beat up.
CB: Yeah, when is our second Pluto return actually? Do you remember that, Leisa?
LS: July. I think it’s July 12th, am I remembering that right?
CB: Oh, good. So right after the Mars ingress on the 4th of July, we get the second Pluto return for the US?
LS: Mhm.
CB: And then look at by July and August that Saturn Uranus square starts really ramping back up. Look at this wave, the final wave. In Archetypal Explorer, this is the last big wave that really peaks just before in late September and early October, but it’s already ramping up majorly in July and especially August.
LS: Mhm, August and September.
AC: We’ve said a lot of things about the United States, which is understandable considering being Americans. But I did just want to point out all this fixed sign stuff just wrecks the EU chart. It’s just right on top of it, especially the second half. And so although we may be primarily concerned with our backyard drama, this isn’t exclusively a US phenomenon.
LS: Sure.
CB: Yeah. One of the things about the Venus retrograde I just realised that’s happening at the beginning of the year is that it’s actually the eight year cycle of when Russia first invaded Crimea or annexed Crimea. It was under the Venus retrograde on the tail end of 2013 and early 2014.
AC: That was the Mars retro and Libra.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah, it was also Saturn in Scorpio waning square for Ukraine declaring its independence, which is now the Saturn return. Though Saturn is in the very beginning of Aquarius so technically, the exact Saturn return was earlier. But it is still within the sign.
CB: Okay.
AC: Saturn in Aquarius is also just the Saturn return for like, non Soviet Union Russia. The new constitution, all that, ratified during Saturn in Aquarius.
CB: Yeah. And the internet of course, we talked a lot when Saturn first went into Aquarius about it being the Saturn return of the internet in some sense, and testing of the boundaries of that, and questions like censorship and control and the limits of some of that stuff. It’s been interesting how some of that’s evolved and developed over the past couple of years as well.
LS: Yeah, that’s popped out so much this past year, it’s been really impressive to see. You could say censorship versus keeping the internet safe, whatever, different points of view about it. But also I’ve noticed people sort of moving away a little bit, at least some people moving away from completely open forums and choosing to socialise in more deliberately boundaried spaces, rather than completely out there. Of course that’s not true for everyone, but I’ve just noticed more of a move towards that. Towards cultivated social spaces online versus wide open.
CB: Yeah. Then some of the questions about some of those cultivated spaces like Twitter or Facebook and how well they’re managing their users and what their users are doing and what they’re letting them get away with or what’s permissible versus what’s not, and both sides of the political spectrum complaints about that and complaints about how companies are dealing with issues of let’s say, censorship.
LS: Right. And then the ensuing– like starting new social media spaces and new ones. That’s been going on a lot.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s ironic then or it’s interesting then that Facebook announces the Metaverse and their shift towards that as a company, and setting up as we’re setting up. Because we’re closing down one cycle, the first 30-year cycle of the internet, we’re opening up the next 30-year cycle of the internet. It may be where some of that’s heading?
LS: It’s true.
CB: Let’s do some keywords really quickly before we move on for Mars conjunct Uranus here on August 1st as like the focal point for that with the north node being there as well. Austin, what do you think about the north node being with Uranus and Mars at this time speaking of planetary combinations?
AC: The north node amplifies, but also as befitting its role as an eclipser, it will energise while at the same time often interfering with vision. Mars and the north node can be a very dangerous combination because you’re amplifying the will to act while also dimming the vision or distorting the perspective. It’s angry and confused. Confused is bad, angry is bad, but it’s quite a poison when you put angry and confused together.
LS: I feel like it can also just amplify the Mars-Uranus. It’s like even more sudden or immediate action needed to take, even more like sudden explosions whether physical or you know, of anger or things like that, sudden action is probably the best case scenario. Sometimes you do need to act immediately, and it’s good for that. But sometimes it’s also just being really impulsive and going off and that sort of thing.
CB: Just thought of a really good Mars Uranus signification would be asymmetrical warfare, like initiating a fight or war or aggression but doing it in a way that’s unexpected or unique or innovative in some way.
LS: Right. Kind of ambushing.
AC: Yeah, this is definitely like if we’ve got this ongoing Uranus-Saturn, right? The sort of forces of order versus those unhappy with the order. Mars with Uranus is very much the revolutionary side, whether it’s good, bad or other. Right, wrong or other.
CB: And the empowerment of that more revolutionary thing that Saturn over an Aquarius, even though it’s in the superior position may have a hard time keeping Mars and Uranus in check at this point, especially as they’re being amplified by the node.
AC: Yeah. When planets have a superior position like that, eventually that planet will likely prevail. But that doesn’t mean it’s quiet or that there’s no contest.
CB: Sometimes the underdog can suddenly get the upper hand unexpectedly.
AC: Or that underdog bites you. You may prevail over the dog, but doesn’t mean you don’t take any damage.
LS: Makes sense.
CB: Yeah. So that’s a really tense part of the year, right away in early August and takes us through the first half of August for sure.
LS: Well, and we get Mars-Saturn right after that, like within the week.
AC: So you think it’ll be distinct, or is it just kind of all that for a couple weeks? Because I feel like it’s all just kind of blend together.
LS: I think it depends on how it hits specific charts, you know, whether-
AC: Yeah, on an individual level definitely. I meant like just sort of in the news.
LS: In the news it may blend together more, but yeah, I feel like in individual charts, it might be more distinct. Because you know, you have this sudden empowerment of everything that’s Uranian at first, and then you get the check from Saturn. Then you get the restraint from Saturn. Then you get the consequences from Saturn.
AC: Right. Or you get the like, “I can do this completely by myself, I’m no longer bound by X Y and Z. And then a few days later, you’re like, “Ooh. Actually, there are all these structural factors and maybe I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, etc, etc.”
CB: Yeah, or maybe it’s one of those things like with the January 6th stuff where there was a sudden revolutionary impulse. But then afterwards, DC was just locked down and that an inauguration that occurred a few days later was like the most locked down DC has ever been for something like that.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense.
LS: Yeah. I feel like it could be one too like that. I also want to say this is– obviously it doesn’t look like the most pleasant weather– but it’s probably good to remember for individual charts or individuals listening and worried about their own charts that these things, even if they’re a little volatile, can be constructive in the end. Things that don’t feel good aren’t always bad for you. I think that’s something to remember since we do have a decent bit of this kind of thing in the year, that just because it doesn’t feel good at the time doesn’t mean that you can’t make good things out of them. Because Mars is what you put energy towards, Saturn is building structures for yourself. They can end up being useful things in some instances, it’s not always bad.
CB: Yeah, we learned I think a little bit from the Mars square Saturn in November, that sometimes it can be a period of sitting down and doing the hard work that you don’t want to do, and having to push through and do sustained effort for an extended period of time. Your nest might speed up the impulse and the desire to push or break through and like knock down some of those barriers a little bit more than at other times, but ultimately the impulse is still the same in terms of having to push through an obstacle or a barrier or something whether external or sometimes internal that’s holding you back from doing something that you know that you need to do.
LS: Yeah, for sure. I myself I’m very partial to astrological weather that feels good. However, I can look back in my own biography and see that some of the moments that felt the least good were actually the most productive in the long term.
CB: Yeah, sometimes certain things have to be cleared out in your life in order to make way for things that are new. And certainly the Saturn-Uranus square is a tension where some things are reaching a breaking point where they might break and fall apart or fall away, but that clearing process sometimes becomes necessary for new growth.
LS: Exactly. And there can be sudden starts to things as well and just because they’re sudden or even feel tumultuous at the time, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad for you in the end. Sometimes they’re bad for you but not all the time.
AC: Yes. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar.
LS: No, for sure. I don’t want to understate it, but I also don’t want to be completely doom and gloom about it, especially since everyone’s chart will react differently to these things.
AC: Yeah, and it’s just a couple weeks. It’s just history.
LS: [laughs] Right.
CB: Yeah. I know that Jupiter eventually stations here and that’s one of our important stations, or I guess it already did station in Aries in terms of one of the turning points this year in terms of Jupiter’s transits. It only gets about eight degrees into Aries when it stations retrograde at the end of July, July 28. Aries, and then it starts retrograding back heading towards Pisces. That could be important in terms of some of our turning points this year with Jupiter and the growth and expansion in that area of a person’s life, you’re going to see an intensification of that at that time whatever house that’s going through in your chart, or whatever planets it may be aspecting.
AC: I see the Jupiter retrograde station as a high water mark. It’s sort of like, “Okay, you’ve made X amount of progress in this area and now it’s time to consolidate that. It’s not time to keep pushing forward and expanding the periphery.
LS: I agree.
CB: It’s time to return to something that was left unfinished in Pisces, which we kind of saw last year when Jupiter dipped into Pisces and we thought the pandemic was over and then it stationed retrograde and went back into Aquarius for unfinished business in the second half of the year, which was pretty stark. There’s sort of a similar thing going on here.
LS: Definitely. I was just gonna say I was so impressed with, you know, I don’t know how many astrologers actually agreed on one thing for once, which was like, “No, this isn’t over,” [laughs] when the CDC lifted a mask order. Everybody’s like, “No, this is not done. It just looks done for now.” I was very impressed with that astrological consensus in the community. We were all like, “Nope.” [laughs]
CB: Right. This thing’s being premature?
CB: So we have the Jupiter station and then I believe Uranus stations at some point as well.
LS: Yeah, near the end around the 25th of August, I believe. Something like that.
CB: There it is at 18 degrees. So again, intensification of Uranus does come a little bit after some of the Mars stuff. It’s like Mars has just left but we’re not quite over the Saturn-Uranus square at that point.
AC: Yeah. And they’re both coming into almost the same degree for months, like Mars absolutely heats it up. But it kind of just stays hot. In some of our other cases, Mars will heat it up but then Saturn Uranus are moving apart from each other. So it’s in the background but it’s not hot. This begins them moving closer and closer while not being very far away at all. And so we’ve got that for a while.
CB: Yeah, it’s like once Mars pushes the boulder and gets it rolling, it keeps rolling even faster down the hill.
LS: For sure. And all of August does that as well. Because it’s not just Mars triggering it, but all the inner planets go through as the Sun goes through the rest of Leo, Venus goes through Leo, you know? You have a bunch of little triggers continually triggering that through August in particular.
CB: Yeah, so that’s August. In September it’s so weird because what I was noticing last year in 2021, I should say, about the three exact Saturn-Uranus hits is they were all relatively brief and relatively quick. But because of the way that the Saturn and Uranus retrogrades are, if you look at this period in September when they start moving together, it just happens in this really weird way so that they stay close for this very extended period of time which is almost more drawn out than it was at any time in 2021.
LS: Right.
CB: Here it is, the September where Saturn’s retrograding back to like 19 Aquarius 18 Aquarius, while Uranus is at 18 Taurus, so they get within a degree of each other by this period in late September and October.
LS: Yeah, it sits there for about two and a half months really close, which is pretty striking. That’ll definitely typify the fourth quarter for sure, and sort of the tail end of the third quarter here.
CB: Yeah, here’s a little readout I got from Archetypal Explorer which shows that Saturn-Uranus square really coming back into play and heading for the top of the peak in September heading into October.
LS: And before we get too much further, I want to note that Mars ingressed into Gemini on August 20th and late August here. So that starts out like this long Mars in Gemini period because of the retrograde later in the fall.
CB: So the entire rest of the year is Mars in Gemini?
LS: Yes, like through… I forget. Sometime in 2023.
CB: Okay, there we go. So August 19th August 20th Mars goes into Gemini for what would normally be a relatively quick, you know, four-week, maybe five or six-week transit through the sign of Gemini a little jaunt through Gemini and instead, slows down and just grinds through Gemini and then eventually stations there and begins moving backwards.
LS: Yeah, and it stations at about 25° retrograde and then it stations direct at eight degrees in January of the following year. So that’s the range of the retrograde.
CB: So here is the station, it’s at 25 Gemini in October 31. This is really one of our major most notable transits of the end of 2022. This is this Mars retrograde periods so even though it doesn’t station retrograde until October 28th, October 29th or October 31st, that’s a really good point that as soon as ingresses, it’s building up to that transit and for all intents and purposes, the events that are going to act as a precursor will start to be put in place at that point.
LS: Yeah, the ingress itself can be important and just like starting to spark those topics, whether that’s in the world at large or in the house that it ingresses to in your own chart, knowing that that’s going to be there for a while. Yeah.
AC: Well, and on a sort of lived level, I found it to be very helpful to start getting used to Mars in the science going to retrograde in, because we’re looking at what? Like eight months, seven/eight months of Mars in Gemini? That’s the energy. And it will go in different directions but just getting acquainted with that before it becomes critical to pay attention to those things if they’re going to be conflicts or irritations or problems, you’ll see those starting to build. If you watch Mars retrogrades or if you watch Mars when it’s coming into the retrograde like two months before, you’re very rarely surprised when the retrograde problems actually happen. You’re like, “Okay, yeah, I knew that was gonna be a problem.”
CB: Well, and sometimes you just have to pay attention to like, what whole sign house is Mars ingressing into as soon as it moves into Gemini and like right there, that’s your area of life that the retrograde is going to be about. And it will peak in intensity especially around the the retrograde station and the direct station, but the events are already building up as soon as that ingress takes place. And a funny example of that last year when Mars went retrograde my third house and somebody plagiarised my book and I found out about it, the forum I was stationed retrograde, and that the book was going to be published. And what was hilarious was it was going to be published on the day of Mars stationing retrograde in my third house of like writing and communication. But I found out about it several weeks before that, so it’s kind of like I knew what it was going to be because the date had been set ahead of time.
LS: Mhm, exactly. Mars in Gemini also can feel really scattered, you know, because it does a mutable sign and so your energy is going in like multiple directions. To some extent that’s the natural expression for that placement, but also it’s good to do maybe some deliberate grounding things, whether that’s food or exercise or whatnot because it’s not a very grounded transit.
AC: Yeah. And if we look at The Table of Essential Dignities we see that Mars doesn’t love being in air signs. We’ve got Libra where it’s actively in detriment, no love in Aquarius, and that scattering power of air or wind and that– what did you say? Ungrounded is a really good way to put it. Mars needs to be grounded. It’s action to create effect, right? You do a thing so the thing is done, rather than just your doing energy kind of going nowhere, can be a problem with Mars in air signs in general. Even more so as you said Leisa, with Gemini being the mutable air sign where it can really go in any direction.
LS: Yeah. For some people or in some situations, they are deliberately trying to do something that involves multiples. My favourite factoid when I was researching Mars in Gemini is William Herschel, the astronomer that discovered Uranus. He was actually working on binary star systems. He discovered over 800 binary or multiple star systems and is the foundation now for modern binary star system theory. He has Mars in Gemini, and Uranus was going over his Mars. [laughs] So I mean, there are purposes to doing something involving multiples that you’re acting on, but oftentimes it’s more scattered energy.
AC: Well especially with this being a retro coming up, right? This isn’t a sort of healthy direct Mars in Gemini. And so one easy way to not set yourself up for frustration is make sure you haven’t overloaded your plate going into this. Are you setting yourself up for burnout and being pulled in too many directions? That’s what Mars in Gemini retrograde would be happy to deliver if that’s what you want to set up.
LS: Right. True.
CB: What are some other Mars in Gemini keywords? One of my favourite examples of Mars in Gemini that’s like an entity is Twitter. The very first tweet happened under Mars in Gemini, and Twitter has a birth chart with Mars in Gemini square Mercury conjunct Uranus in Pisces. So doesn’t that sound like Twitter when you think about the Twitter mobs and like people getting cancelled the way that gets whipped up?
AC: It is literally the perfect technology for gossip and slander, which is negative Mars in Gemini things.
CB: Yeah, the way it’s set up sort of accidentally rewards that behaviour because that’s the stuff that gets passed around the easiest and and sort of shows up in everybody’s feeds.
LS: Go ahead.
AC: Okay. When I was looking at history with Mars retrograde in Gemini, unsurprisingly there were tonnes of accidents and problems around mercurial things. It was like a tonnes of traffic, big traffic accidents, problems with roadway projects, plane crashes… All of the travelling the movement back and forth things that are Mercury-ruled, it was Mars afflicting those. And I was like, “Oh. Yeah, astrology is kind of easy sometimes.” Sometimes it’s not [laughs] but you know, that a gimme.
CB: Yeah, that’s very literal. The last Mars retrograde in Gemini was of course 15 years ago, I believe. Right?
LS: Yeah, although it started in Cancer. But the latter part was in Gemini.
CB: Yeah, so that was late 2007 early 2008, it was the same retrograde and part of that was in Gemini so that could be relevant in terms of people thinking about their personal life and how this might connect to just thinking back to that timeframe?
LS: For sure. And a lot of those, whether it goes more positively or negatively, it doesn’t just depend on… It depends a lot on your own chart, like is Mars your malefic country to sect or is it constructive for you? Are you spending this time writing a lot of words, you know, and sort of like doing that very vigorously? That’s like a Mars in Gemini as well. Or is it just like you’re getting into fights and having verbal harshness with someone else? It’s the downside of Mars in Gemini. But there are constructive uses of it. I would say putting things into words would be one of the better ones, though you might want to do that in private. I think it’d be better for writing than for talking to people.
CB: Yeah, writing a lot can be a good Mars in Gemini thing because Mars can give you a lot of energy and it can speed things up so that maybe you’re able to do a lot more with words or move faster with them than you would normally.
LS: Right. Now on the downside, information warfare or like cyber warfare seems very apropos for Mars in Gemini, I am noting in thinking about that as well– not just in general– that it is making three Mars returns to the US Mars in the seventh house of the other party. So, could be relevant.
CB: Yeah. One of my favourite Mars in Gemini examples is actually Edward Snowden who has Mars in Gemini, I think in the first house with Mercury in Gemini at the same time in the rising sign.
LS: That’s pretty good.
AC: Yeah. And during that last Mars retrograde in Gemini or the during the Gemini portion of that retrograde, we had big events with Anonymous and with… What’s his name? Assange. Who’s also sort of coming up. There may be some interesting developments with Assange’s story during this time as well cuz during the last one he made a big splash. But yeah, it’s not great for the United States. Looking back out, it’s not like there’s one consistent thing. But if we look at that last one, end of 2007 beginning of 2008 was not a great time for the economy and financial well being of the Americans. Then the one before that in the 90s was the declaration and prosecution of the first Gulf War, which is more traditionally Martial. So it’s not like every time Mars goes retrograde in Gemini over the US Mars we have a war. It’s not great, it doesn’t help. Especially with the pressure that the charts that we’ve discussed from other angles, like the Pluto return.
LS: Right. I mean, it seems notable that it’s stationing just four degrees from the natal Mars. That’s virtually like a Mars return stationing.
CB: Yeah, so the natal Mars in the American Sibley chart for July 4th is at 21 Gemini and Mars early next year, it’s going to retrograde back to about 14 and station pretty close to the Descendant, right? At 14 Gemini.
LS: Uh, it stations at eight.
CB: Eight Gemini. Okay, that’s even better.
AC: On Uranus?
LS: Yeah, it stations at eight next January 2023 about 10 days in, I believe.
CB: Okay. Well, and that’s going to take us into quarter four and the midterm elections that have one of our next major really tumultuous looking eclipses. Let’s see. Before we get there, I asked my friend Nick Dagan Best to check out his historical files and let me know how Mars retrogrades in Gemini have gone for the US and he wrote me this this morning. He says, “Mars retrograde in Gemini we had during both the Civil War in 1864 and World War Two in 1943. With the Civil War, it was Sherman’s March into the Sea from Atlanta, and Lincoln’s re-election.” And of course just as an aside, Lincoln’s re-election is the thing that finally sealed the deal in terms of the civil war happening. Then it says, “With World War Two, it was the Soviet that advanced against Germany out of Russian territory and the Tehran Conference with Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill planning the D Day offensive.” That’s sort of some pretty major retrogrades just in terms of US history in terms of showing you the gravity of this retrograde because it’s hitting that Mars-Uranus conjunction.
AC: To be fair though, Uranus was in Gemini as well for both of those. And Uranus in Gemini by itself, you know, US History pivots around just that. So those are kind of double ups. Next to kind of cheating with those examples. [laughs]
CB: Yeah. We’ll see. We all know what the Pluto return with the eclipse that’s going to happen when the midterms conjunct Uranus exactly on midterm day and the Mars retrograde going on, there’s some major stuff going down in US history this year. So it’d be really interesting to see, but that is that is a good point.
AC: And to connect those, some of the themes and stuff that we see during the Mars retrograde in Gemini is going to foreshadow Uranus in Gemini. Period. Which is just around the quarter historically speaking.
CB: The snowballing effect of all these cumulative things as we head into and lead into in the latter part of this decade, Uranus in Gemini?
AC: Yeah. I mean, it isn’t the latter but it’s, you know, do we get an ingress in 24 or is it not until 25? But even so, that’s right around the corner.
LS: It’s pretty soon, relatively speaking.
AC: Yeah, history-wise.
LS: Yeah. You know you mentioning Roosevelt, he is actually as Mars in Gemini as well, which was interesting in that he was involved in that whole process. But I found this really great quote from him. He was famous for doing these fireside chats to kind of reassure the American people like throughout the course of several years of tumult there. So fireside chats was like Mars and Gemini ruling his third house of communication and the 10th House of career and public reputation, like he was known for doing these which I thought was great. But he also said in the first one, he called on the American people to renew their confidence and courage, and to have faith rather than be stampeded by rumours or guesses. I have never heard a more weird but like completely appropriate Mars in Gemini delineation like stampeded by rumours. [laughs] But I thought that was also good in terms of, you know, he was trying to inspire courage in other people through speech and through dialogue. Not really dialogue, but you know what I mean. Yeah, through speech.
AC: And his Mars is retrograde in Gemini as well.
CB: Yeah, it’s actually getting ready to station. It’s two days from stationing. So look at it, this is actually Mars retrograde in Gemini. He was born January 30th 1882, Mars is at 22 Gemini. And watch what happens if I move the chart forward two days. So, one day, two days stationary. So it’s stationary not just in his 10th house, but it’s a stationary planet in his 10th house in Gemini. I always think about World War Two and how his entire life built up to first him having to drag the US and prepare the US for war for so much of his presidency as he sees what’s going on in Europe. He sees what’s going on the Pacific, but there was a huge installation as tendency in the US after World War One. So he sort of starts pushing the US towards it and getting it ready for what he sees coming. And then eventually it happens, Pearl Harbour happens, and all of a sudden overnight America’s in the war and he’s a wartime president and eventually wins the war. But he dies right at the end of it.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So Mars in Mars retrograde stationary in Gemini in the 10th House of career and overall life direction.
AC: Right. I mean, he was the president throughout the Great Depression, did other things, but the planet in the 10th is what people see from a distance. Right? And the two sentences about him are like, “Oh, he was president during World War Two.”
CB: Okay. Is there anything else about quarter three before we move on to quarter four? Did we skip a Mercury retrograde in there? Is that relevant to mention or?
AC: It starts in mid September, I think.
CB: Okay, here we go.
AC: It’s the same elements as the ones before beginning early in an air sign and then backing into an Earth sign. In this case it’s Libra and Virgo.
CB: It looks like at stations at eight Libra around September 9th and 10th. It’s like opposing Jupiter and trining Mars. Then it retrogrades in Libra, falls back into Virgo, and then eventually stations direct around October 1st and 2nd to 24° of Virgo, very closely opposite Neptune and squaring Mars.
LS: Yeah, that’s really striking. All the Mercury stations this year, almost all of them are doing something interesting with the other planets.
CB: Yeah, it’s like the retrograde station’s not too bad at the start. But when it stations direct, it’s like there’s some major stuff going on. One with miscommunication or deception or deceit with Mercury opposite Neptune, but then also Mercury squaring Mars. And that’s like angry or contentious or tense or fighting at the same time.
LS: Yeah, that could easily be miscommunication or fighting over miscommunication, fighting over misunderstandings with the Mars-Neptune hitting Mercury.
AC: Well, and especially just when we’re talking about– was it eight months of Mars in Gemini? It’s a Mercury ruled Mars, right? And so Mars is going to act very differently depending on what Mercury’s doing. We’ll get a couple Mercury retrogrades during that Mars in Gemini period, Mercury going through all different sorts of conditions. Which is distinct from, for example, our Mars in Aries retrograde in 2020 where Mars ruled Mars and so it was just that. Whereas this is very much all over the place and whatever conflicts or frictions, you know, will change throughout this period. It’s not going to be like one solid thing.
LS: It’s true.
CB: Yeah, good point. All right. I think this concludes quarter three. Shall we start talking about quarter four?
LS: Sure.
AC: Yeah, do we have advertisements?
CB: Yeah. Just one last little thing. So for the past several years, I’ve been releasing posters for the Astrology Podcast where we send out wall posters that are the planetary alignments calendar that shows all of the graphics that we use in our forecast episodes in a nice little single page, single poster that you can put on your wall to glance at all of these transits at a glance. Our 2022 Astrology Calendar Posters are now available. You can find them on our new merch page at theastrologypodcast.com/merch and you can get a 15% discount on the Astrology Calendar posters with the promo code JUPITER. So we’ve got that up, and then Madeline from Honeycomb has made us some new mugs, including one that was highly requested and she thought would go very well, which is the ‘Sure’ mug [laughter] which is a nice picture of me saying “Sure” which I used to say way too much and now it’s become a meme on Twitter. Of course, who wouldn’t want to wake up to me saying Sure reassuringly each time you’re sipping your coffee in the morning?
AC: Yeah. You’re ready to start the day? Sure.
CB: Yeah. There’s other less jokey mugs of just like an Astrology Podcast mug, there’s the poster with planetary alignments, I also made a mousepad and I’m going to be releasing lots of other stuff like shirts and other things like that pretty soon on the merch page as well. So check it out at theastrologypodcast.com/merch.
All right, let’s transition into the fourth and final quarter of 2022.
LS: All right.
Cb: All right, here we go. Fourth Quarter 2022. So the major stuff happening at this point is the Saturn-Uranus square is still pretty close at this point as we move into October. On top of that, Saturn stations retrograde in Aquarius which is going to intensify the Saturn in Aquarius energy, especially for people with planets in fixed signs around those degrees. Jupiter is going to retrograde back into Pisces and then eventually it will end the year in Aries. Mars, of course is going to go retrograde in Gemini in the later part of the years, that’s what we’ve been talking about. And then we get our second pair of eclipses; first a solar eclipse in Scorpio, followed by a really important and tumultuous looking lunar eclipse in Taurus that is exactly conjunct Uranus. That happens right on election day in the US in November. Those are our main things for the fourth and final quarter where it seems like it ends with a bang, it’s not like a quiet end of the year.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Agreed. Go ahead.
CB: How are you feeling about October, Austin.
AC: I’m somewhat reminded of what we said about July in that it’s a little bit of a build up to what happens next. We’re just kind of waiting for that Mars to go retrograde closer, closer and closer. We’re waiting for the next series of eclipses, because the end of October has the Mars retrograde. It starts off the eclipses. We’ve got the Sun and Mercury and Venus all moving into fixed signs to ping the the Saturn-Uranus thing. So it’s not that nothing happens in October but from a sort of event density perspective, we’re looking at the end of October leading into November being where the action’s at?
Cb: Yeah, for sure. Is that how you’re feeling, Leisa?
LS: More or less. Although I still feel like October will feel like something, I mean, with the Saturn station intensifying the Saturn Uranus square, which is already still close, and then the eclipse and Mars retrograde at the end. It’s all kind of clustered late. One thing that does happen early in the month is Pluto stationing and a Pluto station on its own, I might not really dwell on but as we’ve talked about it extensively at this point, it is within the context overall at least for the US of, you know, the US Pluto return. So I think anytime it stations could bring up some more stuff.
CB: Yeah, it’s all just clustering up right before and leading into that midterm and it makes it look like one of the more important and pivotal midterms that I’ve seen astrologically anytime recently in terms of the clustering of major stuff leading up to and then right on that day.
LS: Yeah, absolutely. And then we get that eclipse at the very end of the month, which is ruled by Mars right as Mars goes retrograde, which just looks messy.
CB: Yeah, so here it is. It’s at two degrees of Scorpio and Venus happens to be right at two degrees of Scorpio at the same time. So it’s a triple conjunction of Sun, Moon and Venus on October 25th and that is a solar eclipse in Scorpio. It’s a second of our Scorpio eclipses. Mars is just getting ready to station in Gemini, as you said, and it’s the ruler of that eclipse.
AC: It’s a messy mess.
LS: Yeah, it just looks messy to me. That’s my overall impression. [laughs]
CB: Yeah. After that, Jupiter, it’s still barely in Aries but just a few days later, Jupiter ingresses. It regresses back into 29 Pisces right as Mars is stationing at the end of Gemini, which it sets up kind of a weird situation where it’s like Jupiter goes back into Pisces with Neptune but it’s not just like they’re being pleasant with Neptune like it was a little bit at the earlier part of the year, but now it’s got this tight square with Mars at the same time that’s stationary that’s causing some tensions there.
AC: And they don’t quite square or they don’t make an exact aspect because Mars draws back before getting to the very end of Gemini, but that tension’s there and the Mars square Neptune is very real. So whatever sort of maybe real, maybe not, maybe good but overhyped Jupiter and Neptune thing is happening, you know, is very directly in conflict with the Mars in Gemini thing. That could be intense criticism of Jupiter-Neptune things, that could be Jupiter-Neptune trying to bring peace to endlessly sort of critical and manic Mars in Gemini, you know, all sorts of different permutations of that. But that relationship is huge.
CB: And also issues of like truth and veracity and all of those things running the Jupiter-Neptune is coming into conflict with Mars in Gemini which is about communication and speaking and technology and other things like that. So maybe issues surrounding technology and communications and their accuracy or veracity.
LS: Yeah. Things in Gemini they they want facts. Discreet little bits of facts perhaps, but facts. But the Neptune square is not the best for that. I mean, Mars-Neptune at its best can be like inspired action, but it can also be confused action.
CB: Yeah, confused action or sometimes loss of vitality because Mars is a good vitality and forward movement thing, but sometimes Neptune combinations with that can sap the forward movement or the ability of Mars to act decisively.
LS: Which speaking of that, is kind of an interesting coincidence then with Mars going retrograde itself, both of those are happening at once.
CB: Which is also kind of like usurping of Mars’s forward momentum or or vitality in some sense.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Okay. Well, that brings us to our second lunation which is in early November; our second eclipse which is the big one this year, the one that stands out. I want to say the most that I’ve heard other astrologers mentioned. I think Rick Levine was the first one who months ago or maybe like a year ago he was like, “Have you seen the lunar eclipse that occurs on November 8th exactly on midterm election day?” And I was like, “No.” He’s like, “It’s really gnarly looking,” or said something to that effect and I pulled it up and I was like, “Wow, he was not overselling that. That is a really intense gnarly looking eclipse that takes place I believe at 15 16 degrees of Taurus, and the reason is because Uranus is exactly at 16 degrees of Taurus at the same time, the north node is 13 degrees of Taurus amplifying that, and then if that wasn’t enough, Mercury passes over the same degrees of Scorpio at 15 16 Scorpio at the same time, again amplifying that opposition and the tension there. And all of this is square to Saturn, which is it 18 degrees of Aquarius, so it’s a super tight T square involving multiple planets.
AC: It’s a very tense cauldron of changes kind of all happening at once. So Mercury and Venus right are both in combustion. Mercury going into it, Venus just starting to come out. But those conjuncts with the Sun or cycle resets for both of them and we have Mars moving backwards in Gemini resetting things, and you have that really dramatic sudden shift energy with eclipses. It’s very often you see things that are latent happen all at once, right? Like energy that’s been building up all released at once. And then Uranus on top of that it’s messy, but it’s a very mobile mess. It’s a very dynamic mess. And it’s probably not going to be clear at the time what it’s even about. There’ll be some things that are clear but there’s so much in the middle of changing from one thing to another, that I think the story about what happens in November will change multiple times before consensus is reached, if consensus is ever reached.
LS: Yeah, and there is a Mercury retrograde just the following month which may speak to that. Yeah, it just feels like this tight, crucible, and palpable tension and then some explosions coming out of that.
CB: Yeah, the term tumultuous kept coming up for me. 2021 tumultuous is one of my main keywords and this month is one of the months that really makes me think of that. Especially just with the Uranian nature of this eclipse of, you know, at a full Moon in general, things are heightened and things come to light or reach a sort of culmination or a boiling point. And throwing Uranus into that just amplifies it and makes it much more electric and much more destabilising and sometimes revolutionary. I mean, this is one of the last major gasps of the Saturn-Uranus Square at this point when we’re to get into this final phase of 2021. And it makes me think of how in 2008 right on election day in November of 2008, the Saturn-Uranus opposition went exact, and it ended up being this tension between archetypically Obama as the Change candidate– and he became the sort of Uranian figure– versus John McCain who ended up becoming this Saturnian figure who was, I think at the time, one of the oldest candidates that had ever run for the presidency. And in the end, it was Uranus in that opposition won out and Obama won the presidency on the day that Saturn was opposite Uranus. So here we have something similar. We have Uranus squaring Saturn and Uranus really being highlighted in the question of what is the the change archetypally figure at that point? Who is the rebellious or the underdog figure that’s in that position? And which of those two wins out? Is it Saturn which is in the superior position or is it Uranus which is getting highlighted so much by the eclipse and by the north node being there?
LS: Yeah, there’s certainly a lot more attention on the Uranus side.
AC: To what you were saying earlier, if it was just a full Moon that tightly conjunct Uranus, we would still have our eyebrows raised. But it’s a total eclipse or it’s pretty close, and with everything else going on, it’s just a lot.
CB: Yeah, so the eclipse makes it have much more long term impact and long far-reaching consequences, and this is also leading into the third and final exact hit of the Pluto return of the US at the very end of the year on December 28th. So it’s happening in that context at the same time.
LS: Right, which is right when Mercury goes retrograde conjunct Pluto as it has that final hit.
CB: Okay, good times.
AC: Makes you wonder about the economic situation.
CB: Yeah. Do you often– I know there’s some astrologers that think about, and maybe you already mentioned that earlier in terms of it in the Sibley chart, that Pluto placement being in the second house?
AC: Yeah. Well I did mention that 18 hours ago, I think it was. [laughs] But yeah, there are a couple different things we can look at for the crash during the Saturn-Uranus opposition years the 2007 downturn. But one of the things that did happen and time synced up, quote unquote, “nicely” with that economic crash was Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn, which is the beginning of the return that we’re now seeing in exactitude this year.
CB: And that was caused initially by the US and some of the policies towards lenders of homes and things like that, right?
AC: Yeah. It was basically the creation of a financial instruments of investments that were rated as being way safer than they actually were. It was some trickery that made it seem like that was a safe place to park cash and it wasn’t.
CB: Yeah. It’s wild, in retrospect, thinking about that. So there was the economic crash that happened right after Pluto ingressed into Capricorn. But then also when I was watching some of the hearings about Bitcoin this week, somebody mentioned that, you know, Bitcoin was created in the aftermath of the financial crash and the anonymous creator of Bitcoin actually referenced the financial crash that had just happened in the US and worldwide as part of the rationale for creating it because he seemed dissatisfied with how the banks were getting bailed out. And in that time, in the interim since that time, now this thing that didn’t exist prior to 2008, prior to that Pluto ingress, is now worth something like $3 trillion or something like that. That’s a wild thing to happen, an asset like that that came out of nowhere and now is starting to dominate in a small part parts of the world economy and have so much value in currency and money that came out of nowhere and didn’t exist prior to that in the place that it’s at now.
AC: Yeah. Again, like kind of a call back to the beginning. So we have Jupiter-Neptune while all this is happening. And Jupiter-Neptune is things like inflation, overvaluation. If we’re looking at Jupiter-Neptune being excellent at blowing bubbles, Mars is excellent at popping bubbles. And so that Mars tension with Jupiter-Neptune makes me wonder what bubbles are popped, or what is revealed to have much less value than was previously estimated.
CB: Good point. Good point.
LS: Something else related I’ve been thinking about with regard to the Pluto return in the second house or in a financial sector is the issue currently with student loans in the US. The US already is sort of notable outlier in charging so much for higher education and also making people take out so much in personal loans in order to do so. And so it’s kind of like hit a limit where lots of people either can’t afford to go to college, or the people who already have done so and were told it was a good investment cannot pay back their student loans. And so it’s actually been on hold for almost two years or something like that during the pandemic, they paused student loan payments for the Federal ones anyway. There’s all these notices going out now that student loan payments are going to restart in January, which is of course the month before the first exact Pluto return by degree in the second house there of the Sibley chart, and I’ve just seen so many people who were just like, “No, I can’t pay it.” [laughs] So I’m curious where that goes. I mean, it could very well just go the way one would expect where they reinstate it and everyone has to figure out what to do about that. But I am curious, because it feels like it’s hit more of at least an emotional critical mass of this many people not having to pay them during the pandemic, and then going, “No, this is gonna be a third of my income, I’m not paying it anymore.” It’s not to say that everyone feels that way, but I have seen quite a lot compared to before.
AC: Well, and I agree. Also, I think that speaks to a larger point, which is just the sort of temporarily delayed economic pain that’s absolutely coming. What is it? It’s the 13th of December now. For a lot of people the eviction moratorium just expired… 2020 and 2021 cost a lot and not all those bills have come due. And that’s a general statement, but then just to think the US in that Sibley chart has the Moon in late Aquarius and Saturn is just hanging out much later in Aquarius for all of 2022 in a way it wasn’t in 2021. Transiting Saturn over the natal Moon is rough, right? That transit gets its own name in Vedic Astrology, right? That’s Sade Sati. And it’s kind of miserable. It’s not good for money and it’s not good for happiness.
LS: Yeah, I’ve kind of had my eye on that too, but I haven’t tracked the past ones to the US chart.
CB: Something else I want to talk about also a little bit more positively in terms of the Jupiter coming back into Pisces and conjoining Neptune loosely towards the end of the year. We of course have, like I was talking about earlier, the potential release of Avatar, the second Avatar and whatever that’s going to do in terms of if it can recapture whatever the experience was that people had when it first came out with Jupiter conjunct Neptune in Aquarius. We also have the potential for some of those new technologies being released in virtual reality and augmented reality. But one other major news story that’s really become prominent that we overlooked a little bit over the past year is, you know, the Space race that’s really heating up has been a really interesting manifestation of Jupiter dipping into Pisces over the past year, and probably seeing a major turning point when it comes to that. Because we’ve had these two or three billionaires who are all competing with each other with their own Space companies to start putting rockets and start putting some of the first tourists into space over the past year with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and also the the Virgin Galactic company is also doing the same thing. So you’ve got a bunch of billionaires that are competing with each other for the Space race and the commercialization of Space, and then you also have another billionaire who announced in October the plan to send people into digital space with Facebook and the Metaverse. That’s an interesting thing we should probably take note of as being relevant in the early part of the year but also in this last part coz sometimes it’s the final transit of Jupiter where the most important push takes place before it leaves that sign completely. And some of these themes that have to do with travel as a Jupiter theme, not just travel across the world to like a different state or different country, but also travel potentially intergalactic travel– not intergalactic but travelling off of Earth or travelling very large distances is a very Jupiter type thing.
LS: And there will be an intensification towards late November early December of the Jupiter-Neptune loose conjunction because Jupiter actually stations direct towards– it’s about the third week of November and then Neptune stations at the beginning of December. So there is this little extra emphasis on that two planet pair at that time.
AC: Based on Mars in Gemini’s retrograde’s track record with wrecking planes, I probably wouldn’t launch my rocket with that Mars squaring Jupiter-Neptune.
CB: You’re not going to go be the first astrologer to travel to space during that time?
AC: Nope.
CB: Okay. Maybe the following year.
AC: The first astrologer to travel to Space I hope will elect and have an eventful journey.
CB: Yeah, gotta do what you got to do. One of the things that happens that I had problems with in electing charts for the second half of the year is in mid November, all the inner planets ingress into Sagittarius, which is normally fine. But they start running into that retrograde Mars in Gemini. So there’s a lot of tension with that that’s very tense, very hard to navigate in terms of Mars’s retrograde hitting those and the potential for fights, for conflict, and other sorts of difficulties as we have each inner planet one by one running into Mars.
AC: Yeah. Fast forward to that full Moon.
CB: This one?
AC: Yeah. Full Moon is a basically conjunct [overlapping 03:33:20].
LS: That’s not the best.
CB: Okay. And that’s the last inner planet to hit Mars, which is the Sun there on December 7th December 8th.
AC: Right. That’s the dead centre of the Mars retrograde. Mars is also closest and brightest in its two year cycle at that time and the full Moon’s right on it. So if we’re just thinking about lunations, our previous full Moon was that gnarly lunar eclipse and then 29 days later, we have this one exactly conjunct Mars.
CB: Yeah, that’s discordant. That’s like discord or some sort of very tense energy that doesn’t feel very harmonious.
LS: Yeah. Fights, strife.
CB: Yeah, strife is a good keyword.
LS: I mean, I didn’t love especially in electional terms, all those inner planets going through Sagittarius and opposing Mars. On the other hand, we do have a softening at least with all the planets while they transit through Sagittarius applying also to Jupiter with reception, which is nice while Jupiter is still in Pisces. I think that improves things a little bit.
CB: Sure, in terms of trying to balance things out. Eventually, does that bring us to Jupiter’s ingress?
LS: Yes, I think it does.
CB: Okay. So Jupiter eventually is done with Pisces for this 12 year cycle and leaves by December 20th and December 21st, where it moves firmly back into Aries for the rest of the year and the early part of next year.
LS: That’s a little bit of a pros and cons with them moving back into Aries when Mars is retrograde in Gemini because on the one hand, it’s ruled by a retrograde Mars which isn’t the best. On the other hand, Jupiter is then sextiling Mars, which could help a little bit with the reception.
AC: Well, it’s just that Jupiter entanglement with Mars is going to at least help Mars do a more constructive version of, you know, [Germanian] retrogradation. It’s certainly not great for Jupiter but it may help solve some of the problems with Mars, which will likely be a priority.
LS: Yeah, I agree.
CB: Yeah. Eventually, we get the final Pluto return on December 28th right at the very tail end of the year.
LS: As Mercury stations with Pluto.
CB: Okay. Let me show that. Yep, there it is. So Mercury stations at 24. Venus also catches up at the same time, so it’s all conjunct Pluto right around that time at the very tail end of the year, the very final Pluto return of the United States. Not to have another one for another 250 years.
LS: At least not exact, we’ll probably still have some more to come in the coming years.
CB: Yeah, it’s interesting.
AC: Yeah, really close for a while.
CB: Right. So that energy will still be present. Although it’s interesting thinking about just in this time frame, whatever it’s created then lasting or the seeds of that being planted and then grow over the course of the next 250 years, whatever the good things are as well as whatever the bad things are that are sort of planted at that time. In the same way that you can think about some of the things when the country was founded, that were good things that were put in that we think about of the US in terms of the positive ideals and other aspirations that some of the founders had in 1776, from the sort of enlightenment philosophy and things like that, but then also some of the darker things that were sort of built into the whole country at that time involving, like slavery and other things like that at the same time as well.
LS: Mhm, slavery and genocide. We get to revisit them all.
CB: Or women’s rights.
LS: Yeah.
LS: I think we’ll still be sort of working all that out. Even though I agree with you in terms of the exact return, it’s just like 2023, 2024… It’s hovering just so close. Since you know, the US Pluto is so close to the end of the sign and given that the return is near the end of the sign, I feel like getting to the end of the sign is still working things out, you know?
AC: I’m just waiting to do the Uranus in Gemini and be done with that. Because I don’t think the US is going to look worked out at all until we’re done with Uranus in Gemini. That’s a big one. The Pluto return is huge but it’s gonna take Uranus in Gemini to see how things actually shake out. I think you’re gonna see a lot of ‘it looks one way, six months later it looks another way, a year later it looks another way.’ Yeah, I think it’s going to be very difficult to predict what shape things will end up taking for the next 80-something before we’re most of the way through Uranus in Gemini.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I guess I just worry about the Pluto return this year setting up the precursor of the problem that then leads to the major conflict in the second half of the decade when Uranus goes through Gemini, so that this is like the thing that’s put in place that then cannot be avoided and can’t be worked through once Uranus goes into Gemini and really heats things up and then the real fighting begins.
LS: Yeah. I was thinking about the astrology of the several years or five to 10 years before the US Civil War in the 1800s and one of the things that is repeating now, of course not everything is repeating and I’m not saying we’re going into civil war right now, but I was really curious how Neptune was transiting through the fourth house of the Sibley chart and Neptune– as we were talking about earlier on in this recording– you know, it can dissolve walls between people, but it can also dissolve the cohesiveness of a people. And the fourth house can be associated in a country’s chart with the people as well as some other placements but… Yeah, it’s a curious thing how some of those planets can take on those dual roles of like some are more constructive or positive manifestations and some not so much. And so dissolving, you only want to dissolve things to an extent, you don’t want to dissolve everything. It gets problematic. And so, you know, the dissolving of like a cohesive national identity for instance can be a problem.
CB: All right. That’s kind of the last major stuff that happens in this year and what’s crazy is like, there’s some major shifts in 2023 of planets moving into completely different signs that 2022 is like the last phase of some stuff we’ve been going through for quite a while. Can we– because we keep alluding to a bunch of the stuff like Uranus in Gemini and stuff like that– can we just give a little brief preview of what the stuff is that hits in 2023?
AC: Probably the most important thing for 2023 is that I believe it’s in March, we get Saturn into Pisces, and then it’s Saturn Neptune in Pisces for two and a half years. And then it’s Saturn Neptune in Aries for two and a half years. And so we begin the five years of co presence between Saturn and Neptune right around the corner from the end of 2022.
CB: Right. We go from this year of Jupiter conjunct Neptune in Pisces to Saturn Neptune?
AC: Yep. And its just Saturn-Neptune, Saturn-Neptune, Saturn-Neptune, you know? It’s gonna be with time working the way it does now. [laughs] Five years of the same outer planet contact is gonna feel like an eternity.
LS: Yeah. It’s really interesting and actually good to know about I think before we hit the rest of Jupiter in Pisces, to know that Saturn is very soon following after into that same area of your life. Jupiter Neptune is really good for idealism and dreaming up new visions of things, and then Saturn’s like, “Are you going to make that real or is this just an illusion?” And so I think that’s actually one of those good things astrologically where it can be helpful to know astrology where it’s like, “That’s gonna come right after. So think about your daydreams now, think about the things you’re envisioning, and then you’ll reality test it next.”
AC: Yeah, which of those things will pass the Saturn test?
CB: Yeah, and just knowing that there is a Saturn test coming up that if you’re into a year of Jupiter in Pisces and growth and expansion in that house, but then that for the next two years almost three years after that, you’re going to go through a period of contraction in that house with Saturn following up next.
LS: Contraction, but also building and making things real if they can be built. You know, concretizing. Basically, it’s the positive Saturn.
RB: Yeah. Or with Saturn hitting Neptune, building a really funky looking house is my sort of vision of Saturn going through Pisces and hitting Neptune.
CB: Right. Well, it’s can you make your ideals real? You know?
AC: Or dreams. Or imaginations. You can imagine it, but can you build it?
CB: Additionally, knowing that Saturn is going to go into Pisces is helpful because for some of us with heavy Aquarius placements knowing that 2022 is the last phase of Saturn in Aquarius, is good to know in terms of the endpoint of that transit for example. However, as also at Aquarius rising, I have to also point out Pluto dips into Aquarius and begins part of its long transit through that sign very early in 2023 so we have that to look forward to as well as soon as Saturn departs.
AC: And that begins basically two years of Pluto back and forth across that Aquarius Capricorn border.
LS: It’s just flirting with Aquarius, but it’s not committing.
CB: That is not the type of flirting that I like. [Leisa laughs]
LS: Yeah, it just gets into like the first half degree in 2023 and then it goes back to Capricorn.
AC: Chris, we’ve talked about this but you know, I feel like Pluto in Aquarius is an essential ingredient for full cyberpunk dystopia. We’ve gotta have Pluto in Aquarius for that. And we need Uranus in Gemini too.
CB: Yeah, Uranus in Gemini. I can’t believe how soon that is because we’re only like halfway through Uranus in Taurus it seems like, but Uranus in Gemini is not far off at all. We’ve got Neptune in Aries coming up because Neptune is getting very very close to that. And finally, it looks like it does that ingress by here by 2025. And of course, we know that Uranus is going to dip into Gemini in late or mid 2025 as well. So, major turning points coming up very soon in the decade.
AC: And so if we’re doing kind of like decade-ish thinking, Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune are all in their new signs by 2025. There’s flirting between now and then but it’s not decided. They aren’t decisively there and they’re going to remain there.
CB: It’s like first base. [Chris and Leisaa laugh]
AC: Yeah, right. Little heavy padding. It’s interesting because it makes that Saturn Neptune in Pisces period this kind of weird interstitial period. It’s not the Saturn-Uranus times like now, and it’s also not this kind of starkly different second half of the decade where Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are all in different places and will hold those for a minimum of seven years. It’s funny, like the confusion that Saturn-Neptune in Pisces reeks of makes a lot of sense. It’s like, “Where are we going? What?” There’s definitely confusion there, and it makes sense because it’s before all the things have begun. You’ve got that little tip toe. Maybe it’s gonna be this, maybe it’s not. It’s not the Jupiter Saturn Pluto 2020 2021 sort of story, but it’s also not the next big story. It’s very uncertain.
LS: Yeah, that’s true. And speaking of the Pluto-Saturn, I feel like we’re still in that. We’re still kind of making our way out of that conjunction even though it happened exactly in 2020– in the beginning of 2020 at that. It still feels like we’re in that beginning crucible time because it’s such a long cycle.
AC: It left such a giant dent that the territory is still shaped like that. Even if the heavy object is no longer there, it just made such a deep impression. Also, we just did a Jupiter Saturn conjunction at the end of last year, which is a 200-ish year marker. If we’re thinking about the triplicities like the epoch of air, we’re like one year into a 200-ish year thing. Saturn hasn’t even changed sign. Saturn is still in the same sign that began to the shift. So we’re so early, and that’s such a big moment.
LS: Yeah, it feels that way.
AC: Yeah, like the gravitational pull to a year ago. It feels like everything is still orbiting what happened last year rather than what’s happening now or whatever.
LS: For sure.
CB: Yeah. So we have the continuation of a lot of themes from 2021, but also some bringing to completion of certain themes like Saturn in Aquarius by the end of 2022, and really starting to move into the next phase of the decade by the time we get into the 2023 and 2024 timeframe.
LS: So a little preview here.
CB: Yeah, a little preview, a little sneak peek into the future as we get to the end of 2022. I think that’s it for our forecast for 2022 and our year ahead predictions for what’s going to happen over the course of the next 12 months. Thanks, guys. This is amazing. Thanks for doing this with me.
LS: Yeah, quite welcome.
AC: Yeah, thank you. I think it’s solid work.
CB: Yeah. We put in some work, some preparation. We crammed for this, it was like an important exam that was coming up that was kind of hanging over our heads for a while but I think we nailed it in terms of the main points that we wanted to make and the major configurations we wanted to cover for this year. This is great. Thanks everyone in the audience of all the patrons that support us through our page on Patreon and joined us in the live chat. We appreciate you, a lot of your comments were awesome and very helpful as we were guiding through this discussion. What are you guys working on next year or what do you have coming up?
AC: Okay. Do you want to go, Leisa?
LS: Okay, I saw both of our mouths open but not quite speak at the same time. [laughter] Okay, so a couple things. One, there’ll be stuff coming out every two months from Sphere and Sundry. We banked a bunch of good stuff this year that hasn’t come out yet. Regulus and chill actually comes out tomorrow. But we’ve got four more hot stuff, we’ve got probably literally the best Venus selection I’ve ever seen coming out, I want to say February-ish. So eyes peeled for Sphere and Sundry stuff. My self paced classes or my self paced year one will be out in January. And Faces 2.0 of the second edition of 36 Faces edited, revised, and with 36 new custom illustrations will absolutely be out in the first half. I’m in the midst of the edits now, all the illustrations are done. I will promise first half, but I can’t be more specific than that.
CB: Okay, if that doesn’t happen we’re really gonna rile up a mob to drag you out and throw you in a dungeon until you keep typing the rest of the manuscript.
AC: Yeah, you have my full permission to break a beer bottle over my head and then stab me with the jagged glass.
CB: Okay, you got it. Your website of course, is austincoppock.com.
AC: Oh, and the website will be getting an update as well.
CB: Okay. It looks pretty good now, but I’m interested to see where you go with that. And of course Sphere and Sundry is sphereandsundry.com, which always looks like an amazing website. So yeah, get the book out. There’s way too much of a black market for your book at this point, people are literally selling like limbs-
CB: Just wait a few more months, it’ll be normal book price. The secondhand market prices are just– it’s kind of a compliment, but it’s also just primarily absurd. It will be normal book price. [laughs]
CB: Okay, good. All right. What do you got going on next year, Leisa?
LS: Well, as we talked about earlier, we just released the 2022 Electional Astrology report, so you can plan ahead for your whole year. I’m pretty excited about having released that a little bit early this year. That is something to check out. I will be continuing to do the monthly electional podcast here every month. And then just the two conferences are really like the big things that I’m looking forward to because I’m speaking at both NORWAC and ISAR, and especially that pre conference workshop at ISAR. I’ve done workshops before but I have not actually done a conference-related workshop before so I’m actually pretty excited about that coming up. I hope some of you join me for that. That’s going to be, again, on Electional Astrology and getting a little deeper into Electional Astrology. I’m trying to aim it so that both beginners and more experienced people can get something out of it so we’ll start with more of a review and then we’ll move forward from there into more advanced stuff. Other than that, my consultations as of the moment of recording are still on pause but if you join my mailing list on my website, that is probably the only place I will announce again when I have consultation openings again.
AC: Um, kind of samesies. I’m not doing consultations now, definitely sign up for the mailing list so you can hear about when the book actually comes out or any of the rest of it.
CB: Okay. What was your website again, Leisa?
LS: leisaschaim.com
CB: Cool. Let’s see. As for me, my main thing is I’m going to be developing new courses, so I’m working on doing monthly webinars with my Hellenistic Astrology course and students since that’s my main course, is this course on ancient astrology that I keep adding to and expanding and improving. So the Hellenistic Astrology course is suitable for beginner, intermediate and advanced students in astrology, and teaches you the foundations of the entirety of Western Astrology in the first 1000 years of the tradition. So if you want to know where astrology comes from, what its rationale is and how it was originally practised, that’s the course I would start with. I’m also developing a course on Rectification with Patrick Watson, a course on Horary Astrology with Rob Bailey, and I recently relaunched my old sort of legacy horary course, which is just a little mini course on Horary Astrology for those that want to learn just the basics of doing the earliest versions of horary that used whole sign houses, and many of the other concepts from late Hellenistic and early mediaeval astrology, and I’ll launch of new Horary course later in 2022. Let’s see. The final thing is Leisa and I launched our Electional Astrology report which I mentioned earlier, which you can find on the course site along with all of my courses at courses.theastrologyschool.com. And the final thing is just that I’m going to keep doing the podcast and I’m going to transition into a new phase of the podcast where now that the pandemic is hopefully getting a bit more under control, I’d like to start having more astrologers out here to Denver to interview them in person because I can get much higher quality audio and video when people are together here in the studio, and I can also eventually take some of that footage and use it for a documentary that I hope to put together on astrology at some point in the future. So starting to fly people out to interview them in person is the next stage of the podcast and I’m going to start that with my first guest, which is [03:54:37 Kent Bai] later this month, and we’re going to talk about astrology, virtual reality and technology, and how different planetary cycles have aligned with different developments in technology in the past, and then project that out into the future. If you like that, if you want to support this work, then you should consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon at patreon.com/theastrologypodcast and it’ll help to fund this effort to interview all these different astrologers and do these great episodes, but also to continue to expand my work while getting access to bonus content like attending live episodes and recordings like this one as many patrons do today, getting early access to new episodes or getting access to private episodes that will only be released to patrons. That’s it. That’s it for our forecast for 2022. Thank you both, this is awesome. Thanks for all the preparation you put into it and all the work you did today, this was pretty intense but we did it. I’m pretty excited that there’s some major tumultuous stuff coming up in 2022 but there’s also some good stuff and I think this is a really good overview, and now I’m even more excited about it going into it than I was when we started. So thanks for doing this with me.
LS: Yeah, you’re welcome.
AC: My pleasure.
CB: All right. Well, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks everyone for listening, 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 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, and Kristin Otero. 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 Mac OS, 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’d 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 2000 years ago. And 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 100 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. 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 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