The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 349, titled:
May 2022 Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and special guest co-host Steph Koyfman
Episode originally released on April 29, 2022
—
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 Nicole Miller
Transcription released May 3, 2022
Copyright © 2022 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 talking about the astrology of May of 2022, and we’re going to start the episode by doing a little bit of a review of some things that have happened over the past month and their astrological relevance, then we’re going to jump right into the forecast for May. So yeah, welcome both of you. Thanks for joining me today.
STEPH KOYFMAN: Thank you so much for having me, so happy to be here.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.
CB: Yeah. Hey, Austin. Steph, this is your first time on the podcast. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience for people that are not familiar with your work?
SK: Sure, yeah. I was going by the moniker of The Daily Hunch for a few years and I recently rebranded to Lady Cazimi, so I guess if you’ve seen me on Twitter or Instagram. That’s probably how you know me. I am a consulting astrologer and currently I’m also a contributor for CHANI app and that’s kind of the majority of I guess my practice at the moment.
CB: Nice. And you are an awesome writer, I have always noticed, so I was wanting to have you on the podcast because you have some really good metaphors and we’ll get into some of that here later today.
SK: Thank you so much. Yeah. I was a writer before, I was an astrologer, and so to me astrology and the language of astrology is kind of like what you said, it’s a way of decoding the layer of metaphor that sort of encapsulates our experiences.
CB: Right, for sure. Austin, how are you doing? Welcome back.
AC: Thank you. I am underslept and ready to go.
CB: Excellent, that is the best way to be. I am underslept and not ready to go. I’m feeling a little under the weather today so just a heads up for everyone. I got food poisoning last night. Hilariously, I walked into the sandwich shop right as the Moon-Mars conjunction was going exact in Pisces, and I was like, “Surely that’s not going to be a big deal, I need to buy a sandwich. What am I going to do, get murdered by a sandwich or something?” And lo and behold, I did actually get sick from it and was up all night. I’m gonna be a little out of it today but I still wanted to do the show and I know this is going to be a good forecast episode. Why don’t we spend a little bit of time doing some review first and then we’ll jump in the forecast. So in terms of news and events, speaking of Moon-Mars conjunctions, we’re super late to the party at this point because it happened immediately after our last forecast. But I know one of the things that everyone was talking about about a month ago since the last time we met was the Will Smith famous slap thing. And there’s been literally thousands of takes on it so I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time on it, but there were just a couple of interesting transits that all the astrologers observed and so I wanted to document that just for the sake of it being an interesting astrology example here before letting it go and hopefully everybody moving on, because I think most people are kind of over it at this point. Did you guys watch it live or were you aware of it?
SK: I saw Twitter erupt. So…
AC: I was alerted shortly after it happened.
CB: Okay. I was, too, because I just saw Twitter explode and it was like one of the biggest sort of social media things that I’ve seen. So there’s a little bit of uncertainty, I think, still surrounding his birth time but this is the provisional chart for Will Smith and it has the Moon right there at 21 degrees of Scorpio and the midheaven at 14 degrees of Aquarius. What’s interesting about that is the night of the slap, there was a Moon-Mars conjunction that was taking place around 14 to 16 degrees of Aquarius, which is right on his midheaven. And the midheaven represents success and career and reputation and all sorts of other things like that.
AC: What is most visible in a life is the midheaven, right?
CB: Right. And then the other major transit that I noticed was transiting Saturn at 21 degrees of Aquarius squaring his Moon. And if this chart is correct, he was born at night sometime after 9:00 pm-9:47 pm so the Moon is actually his sect light, which gives it more importance in terms of the overall chart and his personality and different things about the life as a whole. That’s a pretty rough transit to have, to have transiting Saturn squaring one’s Moon at the time of this event. The main thing because I didn’t have a specific take, my only takes were one, I was impressed by how divisive it was and I thought that was interesting as a Moon-Mars thing that just like, people had wildly different opinions and everybody had an opinion about it and there’s so many different angles that people approached it from. For me, the primary thing I noticed was just as an astrologer, it was an interesting case study to see somebody who hits what otherwise should be the highlight of his career, which is like finally getting an Oscar after many many years of working towards that as an actor and that being kind of seen as the pinnacle of success. But then due to one split-second decision kind of ruining that and then seeing him that he realized that, it seemed like that night when he got up 10 minutes later after slapping Chris Rock, the comedian who told a joke about Smith’s wife, and then like 10 minutes later he wins an Academy Award, which is just wild but it seemed like he immediately knew that it had been messed up and he was crying during the entirety of the speech. So I think it’s an interesting example from an astrological standpoint, just from that perspective to think about what could it mean to hit the highest point of one’s career yet to have that overshadowed by something, you know, in some way. And that’s sort of the extent of my take on it.
AC: Chris, could you put the chart back up? I just noticed something that speaks to your observation. So the Mars on the midheaven and there being a slap jumps right out, but also if you look at his Moon, which as you said if he’s a night chart, that’s his sect light, that’s the Moon base of operations for the chart and it’s getting squared by Saturn rough. It’s also getting perfectly squared by Venus so that’s a benefic, and it’s getting a perfect Trine from Jupiter. Right? So it’s double benefics but then you also have double malefics, which one way of saying like, “Oh, it was the best and worst night of my life,” or there was an extremely auspicious thing happening and also a lot of trouble. I’m sure it’s on other levels of the chart in addition to transits, but you can see the transits speaking to that as well.
CB: Yeah. And that’s a question that astrology students sometimes have, which is what happens when I get both a good transit and a bad transit happening at the same time? And often the answer is you get both. They don’t necessarily cancel each other out but you’ll experience both extremes in some instances.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. Anything else in order to not dwell on this, anything else before we move on?
AC: Nope.
CB: All right. What’s the next story that we meant to review that we should not forget to before we move into the forecast?
AC: Well, I had a few quick observations about the Ukraine-Russia war. I talked for a while last month about the besiegement of Venus, Venus being between Mars and Saturn. And we also noted that the degree of the exact conjunction between Mars and Saturn was the exact degree of Ukraine’s Moon in the independence chart. And so for quite some time the capital city, Kyiv of Ukraine was besieged literally, right. So we had this besiegement in the sky and then besiegement on the ground, and it was literally the day that Venus escaped besiegement– which was March 29th– that the Russian troops withdrew from the besiegement of Kyiv, where literally besiegement ends above and then the besiegement of the capital city ended within a day, right? And so that’s pretty hard to ignore. And then last month, I’d also have speculated about some of the conflict, the military actions taking to the water once Mars moved into Pisces. There was this curious thing where the day before Mars moved into Pisces- Oh, I forget what the name of the class is but it was the second largest battleship that the Russian Navy has. There’s one class larger but it’s one of three, it was a flagship that was struck by Neptune missiles. I believe they’re like shore to ship missiles from Ukraine. And then it didn’t sink until the next day, and what’s really interesting was the next day which was April 14th. When it sank, Mars was not in Pisces yet, but it was going to move into Pisces in a matter of hours and so it was the day of ingress into Pisces. That made me think immediately of the events of January 6th of last year where the January 6th stuff happened the day of Mars’s ingress into Taurus, and therefore a conjunction with Uranus and beginning of the square to Saturn and all that stuff. And you know, we had the iconic image from that is the guy dressed like a bull-man, like a minotaur. But it began with Mars in Aries that was the day of the ingress, and so it just got me thinking about the power of the day of the ingress. And, you know, it’s like the signs significations starting that day rather than on the actual ingress. I don’t know, I just thought it was interesting. Those were both very tight correlations of above and below.
CB: Right. Yeah.
SK: One thing people were kind of saying too, is that once Venus is no longer besieged then there’s nothing getting in between Mars and Saturn. And I noticed that some of the worst brutality that we were kind of hearing about in the news in Bucha was culminating a couple of days right around that conjunction.
CB: Right. They were finding mass graves and different things like that.
AC: Okay, that was the timing of that.
CB: Yeah. I don’t have much additional take on the Ukraine situation astrologically right now so, yeah. But those are good correlations to note. And then, I know we had mentioned and we talked about it in our pre-show chat that there has been some additional unionization stuff and we’re continuing to see some additional waves of pushes for unionization in different parts of the US at this point that’s coinciding with the Saturn-Uranus square that we talked about last year and this year, as well as a little bit. Steph, I think you had a point about the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction being tied to that.
SK: Yeah, I actually did a little bit of mundane predictions for New York City and I said that like in April, you know, the Pisces pileup kind of looks like unexpected coalitions forming or like a mood of celebration amongst laborers and amongst workers. And so I kind of couldn’t help but notice that Amazon union was in Staten Island. That seemed kind of on point.
AC: No, that’s a really good take. Like, those benefics and Pisces with Neptune have a huge ability to create, to coalesce– I was gonna say solidarity but I’m gonna use liquid metaphors like to gel people with shared interests for a union to gel, for things to come together to coagulate. That’s really good. I like that because so many of the Jupiter-Neptune takes, it’s very difficult to not end up being a space cadet or going too far off of literal things. Like, a coalition forming is a much more concrete thing than, I don’t know, some sort of vague predictions about enlightenment or having a really wild revelation or experience or dream. I mean, that happens too, but…
SK: I think it’s just maybe the nature of Jupiter and Neptune, is that you can’t really describe it concretely all the time.
AC: Yes, especially with Neptune. I remember in my early days of just teaching basic astrology classes, I started noticing that every time I would do the, “Okay, so here’s Neptune,” I would end up just totally spacing out and losing my train of thought or sometimes I kind of stumbled on really wild metaphors that I hadn’t planned on. But I was like, “Oh, that’s…” You know, you enter the planet’s sphere by really trying to understand it and convey that understanding, and I was like, “Okay, whenever I attempt to delineate Neptune, just be ready to be dragged under the waves.”
CB: Right. Let’s see other stuff in recent news. Steph, I know you mentioned Elon Musk just bought Twitter successfully literally in the past one day or 24 hours under this big pile up in Pisces, which I thought was kind of interesting because we have the chart of the very first tweet on Twitter, which in some ways might be the birth of Twitter in a sense. And it has Gemini rising and Pisces as the 10th hole sign house, which is kind of fascinating that we had this pileup of five planets in the past few days, and all of a sudden it is basically owned by new management. That’s where you would look for that, which is the 10th house.
AC: Yeah, that’s great. That’s a really tight correlation, right? Like you see 10th house is who’s calling the shots. It’s the government. If it’s a nation-state, it’s who’s the boss if it’s a corporation, in fight charts, it’s who’s the champion.
CB: Right. Yeah. Unfortunately, we don’t have a birth time for Elon Musk still but yeah, that’s otherwise interesting and we’ll see how that goes and whether it ends up being a terrible thing or a good thing. All right, anything else about that that you meant to mention, Steph?
SK: Oh, yeah. I was just gonna say I had kind of a deep-cut take on that because I was looking at the timeline because there was a lot of back and forth like will he or won’t he. And at one point, Twitter’s board of investors tried to deploy a poison pill strategy to devalue his share of the stock. And it turned out that the actual official SEC filing of that motion took place right when the Moon was in Scorpio conjunct the South Node and I just thought that was such a South Node in Scorpio trying to kind of pull and push against Rahu and Taurus.
AC: I think that’s so good. In older material and in Vedic material, poison is one of the themes that’s very important for both of the nodes. And you actually find it in… I want to say Mashallah, but it’s that era of astrology where the dragon’s tail is characterized as having a stinger. It’s an image and an idea that I’ve been vibing on. For D&D nerds, right, like that’s a Wyvern, which is like kind of like a dragon except it’s only got two legs and it has a stingy tail. But just thinking of dragons, which we’re going to definitely be doing this month with the eclipses, right, the Sun and the Moon with the head and the tail. I’m thinking of the danger of both the head and the tail or the mouth and the tail. The dragon breathes fire, noxious fumes, lightning, whatever. But then, you know, it’s like, “Well, what does the tail do?” The tail slaps, the tail sweeps. But adding the idea of a stinger I think brings a greater richness there and it shows you that there’s a hidden danger or intoxication with the tail as well as the head.
CB: It’s funny that you said the tail slaps because one of the live people in our audience earlier when the Will Smith thing came up pointed out that the South Node is transiting his Moon at this time as well in Scorpio.
AC: Oh, wow. Okay, good catch.
CB: Not to keep dredging this up over and over again but it just made me laugh.
AC: That’s funny, I wasn’t intending that.
CB: Well, we’ll have to add that to the list of things we learned today. All right, and here’s the chart for Twitter on the inside and just those transits yesterday when the news came out that Elon had bought Twitter and just that pile-up of stuff in Pisces; of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Neptune, and Jupiter all up there in the 10th whole sign house.
AC: One quick observation. So the Moon was on the Part of Fortune for Twitter, right? And Part of Fortune is super important for all material bodily things like who commands the will and the health? If we’re looking at a natal chart, looking at releasing from Fortune, who’s in charge of the body? Or you know, what is the- Yeah. Anyway, that’s interesting. And Mars on the natal Uranus are coming up on the natal Uranus, and Mars-Uranus combos spur quick change here in the 10th house of leadership or executive direction.
CB: Right.
SK: I still can’t get over Mercury and Pisces being the chart ruler of Twitter.
[crosstalk]
AC: perfect sense retrograde and conjunct Uranus.
CB: Retrograde conjunct Uranus and squaring Mars which is conjunct the degree of the ascendant in Gemini.
AC: I mean, what says people popping off with bad spelling better than that?
CB: Yeah or Twitter mobs have become like a famous thing and that’s also sort of a thing, and it’s interesting seeing that they’re in that chart in a sort of explosive way. But then again like with the last chart we’re looking at, there’s dueling indications because it also has a pretty nice trine from Jupiter at 18 degrees of Scorpio trining that Mercury which is helping to probably stabilize it and at least make it successful even if it can be kind of a tough place to be sometimes.
AC: And the ruler of the 10th is getting a transit from the South Node. That’s wild, I hadn’t really looked at this.
SK: Looking at this and now I’m just kind of wondering what’s going to happen during that Mars retrograde in Gemini this fall.
AC: Oh, yeah. Good call.
CB: Yeah, I think someone in the chat mentioned that Mars is gonna go retrograde in Gemini in the entire second half of 2022-
AC: And the first couple months of it’s still in Gemini for the first couple months of 2023. So it’s a big Mars return for Twitter.
CB: I didn’t really notice this but it’s also Gemini rising chart just like the Will Smith chart, which means the midheaven in this chart is also around the same degrees which is 21 Aquarius to Saturn is also hovering around that at this point. But if this time is correct, this is a day chart whereas Will Smith had a night chart, which can make Saturn transits more tricky.
Anyway, so that is the Twitter news. Let’s see other news we need to touch on. COVID, the only thing there is just everything is just opened up across the board. Across the country in the US at least, the mask mandate was dropped unexpectedly on airplanes, I think for the first time since the pandemic started, which is pretty notable. So we got some of the Jupiter in Pisces Jupiter-Neptune conjunction stuff that we were expecting. Jury’s still out about the Mars-Saturn conjunction because there were two scenarios for that we don’t know which one is true yet, which is the last couple of times have been hard Mars-Saturn aspects. There’s been a new variant that came out a few weeks later and then became a big thing. And then for example, in November, we found out that that variant was first identified around the time of the Mars-Saturn square. So one of the things we’re waiting on was to see if the Mars-Saturn conjunction Aquarius if there would be a new variant that came out at that time. It’s been a few weeks at this point so I don’t know what the deal is with that or if that’s happening. Or alternatively, the other scenario was– the more optimistic and hopeful one that I was hoping for was that Mars-Saturn conjunction was the first one since the beginning of the pandemic in March-April 2020. So in some ways, it was kind of like the end of a cycle and I was hoping maybe that would indicate the end of these past two years of difficult illness. And well, obviously, it’s not completely the end because it’s also the opening of a new cycle and there’s going to be new challenges that come up during the course of that. Hopefully, the worst of that last cycle that we experienced over the past two years is over but, you know, in the year ahead forecast we were kind of nervous about the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction because we knew that would probably indicate everybody was feeling pretty good and there’s a lot of optimism and hope and about things going back to normal and being good again. But the question is still with Neptune being so prominent, to what extent is that hope not fully realistic or not fully grounded in reality as much as people might think at the time. And that’s the sort of open question that we’ll have to see over the course of the next month or two.
AC: Yeah, right. That Mars-Saturn is a sort of New Moon for the ills that afflict humankind, right? It’s very clear that war and famine are in, and the question is, is plague out? Or is plague also going to stay?
CB: Yeah, Mars-Saturn fashion styles.
SK: Well, one thing I also noticed is that in Shanghai in China, they’re undergoing severe lockdowns again. And so even though that’s not really happening all over the world, we’re seeing how at another conjunction of Mars and Saturn, there’s lockdowns but then this time it’s kind of interfacing with everything else that’s kind of going on right now with Jupiter-Neptune being about inflation and then the Saturn-Uranus squares having to do with the supply chain issues. And so just how there’s a lot of, I guess, cargo ships that are just kind of waiting right now.
CB: Right. I think there was a picture that was circulating around Twitter about that of tonnes and tonnes of cargo ships and other ships being sort of stuck in ports around Shanghai due to the extreme lockdowns and stuff. And then we were talking about that as possibly being connected to some of the Uranus and Taurus stuff and disruptions in trade and in the transfer of goods and different things.
AC: Yeah. I think it’s 100%. So Uranus in Taurus is still doing what it’s been doing for years, but now we have the dragon’s head on it. We have Rahu on Uranus and Taurus and we’re about to get a big dose of that here just in a few days with the first solar eclipse in Taurus. And, you know, one useful simplification of what the North Node does is it injects a planet that it’s with, with performance-enhancing supplements that are bad in the long term but make the planet extremely overactive in the short term. And so, you know, Uranus in Taurus in that square Saturn has been doing labor movement. And that’s gotten to a whole new level with the Amazon. The sort of move towards Amazon unionization, Uranus in Taurus has been big on disrupting logistics that’s, you know, with a war on now, with another big war on that’s already up another level with huge important cities like Shanghai shut down, that’s also amplifying the logistics thing. And then also with Uranus and Taurus disrupting food in particular. We have Russia and Ukraine as massive exporters of wheat, you know, the situation as it is being a massive disruption to the world wheat supply. As well as being, especially Russia being a massive exporter of both fertilizers and the necessary materials that go into fertilizers, which means that we’re looking at not only the upcoming harvest being disrupted in its distribution, but like the next harvest and maybe the next harvest. Because there’s so many places that are deeply reliant on fertilizer to make the soil rich enough to grow. Kate and I were talking about this the other day and she summarised the kind of food logistics concern with Uranus and Taurus really well as like, “Hey, where’s lunch? What happened to dinner?” And that’s an appropriately grounded Torian mode of speech, I think. And it’s really important, right? There’s somebody, I forget who, there’s a notable quote that says, “All civilizations are nine meals away from pure anarchy.” And they met anarchy in the violent form, not the cooperative, collaborative anarchy. [laughs] But people miss meals for a few days and there’s no society on Earth that’s immune to that. And what is that kind of revolt? Well, that’s Uranus too. Right? It’s Uranus bringing about Uranus moments through Taurus things.
CB: Yeah. And that’s something we’re definitely going to talk about more later in this episode because of the eclipses really amplifying that Uranus this month. We’ll bookmark that and we’ll come back to that later. One other piece of news I wanted to mention because I have an interesting astrological anecdote about it is that Demetra George’s book, Volume Two of her two-part series titled Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: A Manual of Traditional Techniques just came out a few days ago on April 20th and was released after a very long writing process that started back in 2002 when she first started seriously learning Hellenistic astrology. But in some ways, in a podcast episode I recorded with Demetra that I just released late last night about the book, we recorded that the day the book was released and I noticed I knew that about 30 years earlier, within a month that there was a United Astrology Conference, which was like a huge astrology conference in 1982 in Washington, DC, and that it was there that Robert Schmidt and Robert Hand and Robert Zoller met up and started having some of the first conversations that led to the founding of Project Hindsight. But what I didn’t know is afterward, a listener, Rodney Gill Dryer, wrote me and said, “It wasn’t actually in May of that year, it was actually April on the almost exact same dates that you recorded that interview, and that Demetra released the book, like April 20th, 1982.” So she ended up releasing this book exactly 30 years to the date almost of the first conversations that led to Project Hindsight, which then led to the translation project where all of these ancient texts were translated, and then eventually to the revival of Hellenistic astrology over the past 30 years. I thought that was really cool correlation and little astrological anecdote about what a Saturn cycle can be like, and the ending of one initial phase of the traditional revival and moving into whatever the next 30 years look like in terms of that.
AC: It’s a pretty good Saturn Return.
CB: Yeah, it’s pretty constructive, pretty Saturn in Aquarius. It’s the Saturn placement itself. So yeah, Saturn returns, I’m always a big fan of seeing how those work out in different ways for people or in this instance, sometimes things or movements or events or what have you.
All right, I think that’s it for news announcements and recap of things that have happened over the past month. Shall we transition at this point into looking at the forecast for May?
SK: Yeah.
AC: Let’s do it.
SK: Let’s do it.
CB: All right. I forgot to show the planetary alignments calendar at the very beginning of this episode, but here it is for May. One of the things you need to know about because we bumped it from talking about it last month to this episode is that the very first thing we’re going to talk about is the solar eclipse that’s happening in Taurus on April 30th, because that’s really tied into basically a pair of eclipses, which is first that Taurus eclipse and then two weeks later a lunar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio on the 16th of May. So we’ll spend a lot of time focusing on that this month because eclipse season is always a big deal and this is the first set that’s fully in the signs of Taurus and Scorpio. Other than that, Venus moves into Aries on the second of May, there’s a Jupiter-Pluto sextile on the 3rd, Mercury slows down and stations retrograde in Gemini on the 10th, and the same day Jupiter leaves from Pisces which it spent not enough time in and moves into the sign of Aries. Then the Sun goes into Gemini on the 20th, the Sun conjoins Mercury on the 21st, Mercury retrogrades back into Taurus on the 22nd, Mars goes into Aries on the 24th, Venus into Taurus on the 28th, and then finally there’s a New Moon in Gemini on the 30th of May. So those are the main things we’re going to be talking about today. Let’s see… Here’s one more diagram for those watching the video version that shows all of those planetary movements through the signs just depicted on a circular wheel chart in terms of where they will start at the beginning of the month versus where they will get by the end of the month. So, where to start? Shall we start with eclipses and eclipse season?
AC: I think we should.
SK: How can we not?
CB: Yeah, that is the looming thing in the room, it’s there’s two major eclipses, especially for people like myself that have things in Scorpio or Taurus. That’s going to be the big thing this month, I think, is the opening of the full series of eclipses in those signs. Because we got a little bit of a preview of it last November when there was a lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus. So there’s a little inkling of it and some events did start for some people in that sector of their life that coincides with Taurus, but now we’re gonna get the other side of that which is that anytime eclipses start happening in one sign, they kind of bounce back and forth between the opposite sign for a period of a year and a half or so. Here’s a diagram that shows dates of those lunar eclipses this year and it’s just all Taurus and Scorpio in six months segments, and I think we discovered yesterday that the series actually lasts for quite a bit longer than you would expect, where there’s still some Taurus or Scorpio eclipses taking place all the way into like late 2023. Right?
AC: Yeah, into November October. Both of the sets of eclipses next year in 2023 are sort of halfies where it’s one foot in the Aries-Libra axis and one foot in the Taurus-Scorpio. And so they’re mixed. Usually, you have one set of eclipses that’s transitional like that but in the case of next year, we’ve got two that are transitional.
CB: Okay.
SK: It’s not over till it’s over.
CB: Yeah, it’s not over until the very last bit of that. So that’s going to be extended to eclipse. Where should we start in terms of that? We start with the Taurus eclipse on the 30th of this month. Let me put the chart up for that because it’s actually kind of important what things it is configured to in terms of the nature of the eclipse and some of the things that will be happening during that time. There’s the Taurus eclipse at 10 degrees of Taurus on April 30th. All the astrologers immediately have noticed and commented on the fact that this is happening simultaneously the same day as the Venus-Jupiter conjunction is going exactly 27 degrees of Pisces, which I think is a somewhat positive counteracting or counterbalancing influence. At the same time, the Sun-Moon conjunction there and Taurus is very closely conjunct Uranus at 14 degrees of Taurus, which seems like it’s really amplifying that transit of Uranus which has already been going through that sign of Taurus for several years now and shaking things up but now all of a sudden, it’s going to get supercharged this month as we get eclipses taking place there very close by degree.
AC: Yeah, I think there are a couple of different angles you could look at this from. The simplest and probably the one to start with is just its conjunct Uranus in Taurus. Even a normal New Moon that close to Uranus in Taurus would just amplify the same significations we’ve been seeing with Uranus in Taurus like logistics disruption, foodstuff and you know, et cetera, et cetera, labour… these ongoing fixed stories. And then as you point out, it’s occurring at the same day as the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, and Venus is the ruler of Taurus. So we’re looking to Venus as the lady of the lunation. Also worth noting is that the lunar eclipse at 10 Taurus is in its tightest aspect by degree technically as a sextile to Mars. And so there’s a lot going on there. And it’s the first solar in Taurus in the Taurus-Scorpio series.
CB: Right. It was a lunar eclipse last November and this is the first New Moon solar eclipse in Taurus. So, what’s your take or how are you feeling about this eclipse, Steph?
SK: Austin and are kind of split between like, it’s a good thing versus it’s a bad thing. Or maybe not quite, but I don’t know. I guess my take on it is that with the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, I guess because Venus is ruling the eclipse and because they witness each other by aspect that it is kind of describing the nature of the disruption in some way. And so exalted Venus, Jupiter in domicile at the degree of Venus’s exaltation is almost kind of classically as good as it gets. But I do think that eclipses being by their nature kind of malefic or disruptive that it makes me think of how sometimes getting what you want can actually be kind of distressing or upsetting to your nervous system. A really extreme example of that is when someone wins the lottery and ends up somehow being the worst thing that ever happened to them. Obviously, I don’t think that’s going to describe most people’s experiences, but I do think it is kind of that sort of situation where sometimes having a good thing happen can feel kind of upsetting to your, you know, if you have an identity around, like, things don’t work out for me, or this is just kind of how my life goes.
AC: Sorry, I like that as sort of with Uranus interfering with a narrative that is not benefic enough, right? And that interference in and of itself could be disruptive or unpleasant or whatever at the time, but it might be something that is ultimately useful that it gets disrupted or bathed and dragon fire.
CB: Yeah, I definitely think you’re right in terms of alignments and in terms of looking at whatever alignments are happening in this chart. If there’s going to be a softer or more constructive or positive eclipse in terms of it hitting transiting planets in your chart or just as a general chart itself, then this is kind of as close as you can get to having an eclipse in the sign of Taurus ruled by Venus and having Venus conjoining Jupiter at the same time. So in eclipses, my keyword is always that they represent major beginnings and major endings, usually in the house that they fall or the houses that they fall as eclipse pairs. So just thinking about a major beginning or a major ending taking place in that sector of your life over the course of the next month, although as part of a sequence of events that will happen in the six-month increments. But for some people, yeah, I think it could be positive for them with that Venus-Jupiter conjunction happening so closely at the same time.
AC: Yeah. I look at them less as beginnings and endings. Like there is a particular sort of narrative arc for the series of eclipses in a given set of signs, right? There’s like a year and a half-ish storyline, usually. But generally, I see eclipses as– what should we say– disorienting and some wrenching shifts in that particular area. And it can ultimately be a shift for the more positive or the more negative, but even if it’s positive, it comes out of nowhere or requires change more quickly than we can keep up with. There’s a certain roller coaster, sort of “wooo!” to the drops and rises. That’s challenging even when it’s positive. You know, that nodal dragon gear is its own kind of ride. It’s not walking across a flat plane. And then as far as that configuration to the Venus, another way that I can see it working out is that it’s kind of fucking up what should otherwise be a perfect moment for Venus. It’s like everything’s going great, except there’s this one thing that happens. It has the ability, it’s in one of Venus’s two domains. And so even though things are going really well for Venus overall, it’s not affecting what’s happening in Pisces or Libra. But there’s a wrenching shift in Taurus that doesn’t quite accord with the completely exalted and conjunct Jupiterness.
CB: Yeah. One of the things you said at one point in a tweet, Steph, was that eclipses can create quantum leaps that land us in new places and I thought that was a really good way to frame it sometimes how I see eclipses as well.
SK: Yeah, I like that language. And also sometimes when I talk to my clients, I describe it as flipping the circuit breakers on and off again. You’re just disrupting whatever that flow of energy was, and it’s starting the electric impulse from a new place.
AC: That’s interesting. I’ve seen a lot of power outages around eclipses, that’s often literally true as well.
CB: Yeah, kind of like a reset. I like that. For those that are curious about this, I actually did an episode, episode 215 was a workshop that Leisa Schaim and I did in front of a live audience of how to interpret transiting eclipses based on what houses they fall in in your birth chart. And we took examples from an audience just to hear some actual stories of how a certain eclipse series had worked out when they fell in pairs of houses in different people’s charts. People can check that out just by Googling The Astrology Podcast, Interpreting Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Your Birth Chart then you should find that episode.
All right, that’s the first eclipse and I know it occurs later in the month but should we also mention this together with the other half of that, which is the Scorpio eclipse that occurs two weeks later?
AC: Yeah, I think so.
CB: All right. Steph, you had a really good analogy for that one for the Scorpio eclipse, I think, right?
SK: Yeah. Just to lay out the basics, we have the South Node eclipse squaring Saturn pretty close to the degree and then the ruler Mars is conjunct Neptune in Pisces. And so altogether I was looking at that and I was thinking that this just looks like sacrifice of some kind or loss of some kind, and just kind of having to, you know, thinking about what your Scorpio house and whatever those topics may be. I think it’s probably likely that that’s an area of your life where you try to exert a lot of control, or you are just kind of like… It’s not an area where you are necessarily easy going like easy come, easy go. And so the nature of losing control and allowing something that you might have been having a strong attachment to, you just have to leave something behind in order to keep going. Some of that might be intangible too because I was thinking about what the South Node in Scorpio might mean for people and it’s almost like letting go of the forever war you’ve been waging in your mind because you’d just rather do something that makes you feel good instead. That’s the North Node in Taurus.
CB: Yeah, that’s maybe tying it back to that “be careful what you wish for” component that you were talking about with the Taurus eclipse earlier in the month or two weeks before this and here it’s been a little bit of what you have to give up, perhaps, to make up for the things that you’re gaining under the previous eclipse.
AC: One of the metaphors I’ve used for a long time with part of eclipses like these transits is that you have two hands and if you want to grab on to something with both hands– North Node– if you want to attach, if you want to possess, then you have to let go of something else– South Node– if you want to use both hands. If you want to hold on to the South Node thing, then that occupies one of your two hands. You have two hands and they can only be allocated so many ways. So often there’s a necessity of if you want the North Node thing, then you may have to let go of some of the South Node thing. But that Saturn aspect is pretty rough on this one. I think a lot of people will not experience this as a gentle releasing. The combination of Saturn in the South Node on the Moon while the Moon is in its fall makes me think of deprivation, which is a state of not having, of not being able to grasp the thing that you want or need or think you need, but it’s a more extreme Saturnian version of that.
SK: It just seems like putting your body through a harsh detox of some kind. I don’t know about you guys, but every transiting Scorpio Moon since the South Node moved in there has just been so feral and raw. I’ve been noticing people commenting about that. It’s almost like didn’t feel that way when the South Node was in Sagittarius necessarily. Having the combination of the South Node and a fallen Moon is just a lot. It’s almost like the extent of the detox is so strong that we can only micro-dose it for a couple of days each month.
AC: I see with the South Node when the body let’s go… Well, Chris might have done some of that last night. You’re right, when the body lets go, expels poisons, or what it regards as poison, it’s generally not a great night. It’s a real thing. What I often see with South Node lunar eclipse is people have diarrhea stories, there’s indigestion stories. it’s a thing. It’s true in terms of like psychic poisons as well as material ones, but that’s a big theme.
CB: Yeah. Just with the square with Saturn, we’re getting a theme of negation of something has to be negated from that because that’s one of the Saturn’s primary roles is to say no to something and sometimes it can be that scenario of in the long term, Saturn closes one door which then opens up another sometime later on. But in the immediacy of that experience, the negation is often not viewed or experienced as a super fun thing.
SK: This might be a gross story. Feel free to cut this later. But I know a Scorpio rising who recently was talking about how he found the idea of getting a colonoscopy really appealing. He’s like, “Yeah, man, that would be so great just to get cleaned out. I feel like I’d feel amazing.”
AC: That’s the part of the region of the body that Scorpio rules. Makes a lot of sense. I’ve seen Scorpio risings recently just be interested in cleaning up their act in terms of diet and exercise, just wanting to run cleaner. [inaudible 00:04:17] have just one general point about the nodes transiting to areas of the life for a year and a half versus the moment of eclipses is that you’ll see these changes, that letting go cleaning up one area, doubling down, getting down and dirty in the opposite area. From that year and a half long perspective, that’s often relatively not gentle but doable. It’s often the moments of eclipses themselves in the surrounding days that bring that somewhat latent courage of change to the surface with such immediacy and intensity that it’s often overwhelming and somewhat incapacitating. It’s part of a larger process that isn’t necessarily overwhelming or incapacitating, but it’s like all of everything that’s been stored up is released out into the visible world. The invisible becomes or overwhelms the visible around those eclipse moments.
CB: With this one in particular, in terms of configurations, the first eclipse in Taurus is more closely configured to Uranus through that conjunction within three or four degrees, but then the second one is closely square Saturn. So in some ways, it’s actually reactivating or reconnecting the Saturn-Uranus square which is already in some instances disrupting or causing tensions between maintaining the status quo versus throwing off the status quo and going in a new direction with Uranus and Taurus in those sectors of a person’s life. I think these eclipses are really going to bring back some of those feelings that may have been suppressed last year when the same Saturn-Uranus square is going exact over the course of 2021. But in some instances, people may have been successful and maybe suppressing some of that. But once eclipses come along and start taking place in these same signs, it’s hard to ignore some of those energies and hard not to move in some of the directions that they’ve been asking you to go up to that point.
AC: Another way to get to a similar place is in looking at the Saturn-Uranus squares and this tension between, as we say, normalcy and security with Saturn and, as we say, rebellion and freedom-seeking and disruption with Uranus. The two were, as we say, similarly matched, but Saturn’s in the superior position. But now we’ve got Uranus and the dragon versus Saturn, right? So if we’re looking at it from a contest point of view, now it’s two on one. It’s two in an inferior position versus one with the high ground. But as we said, the dynamics, the odds, the betting odds would change at that point. That’s where we’re at for the next year.
SK: Also, just having the advantage of unpredictability with Uranus in the North Node.
AC: Right, double unpredictability.
CB: And that’s going to be a recurring theme because there’s a Taurus lunar eclipse later this year in November that’s going to be I think very close to conjunct Uranus at the time as well. So, paying attention to these eclipses as not necessarily being singular isolated events, but oftentimes connected to a broader sequence of events that will happen in people’s lives in six-month increments that have major bookends or major chapter breaks where one chapter starts and another ends, but it’s still part of the same overall narrative I think it’s really important. For some people, that narrative already started late last November when we had the first eclipse in Taurus. But now with the Scorpio eclipse taking place at the same time, I think we’re really going to see the emergence of that narrative in a way that’s much more clear and much more obvious and hard to ignore at this point.
AC: Just one more area to look for this. Steph pointed on the yearly in a couple other places or times, the EU chart has a Taurus-Moon at like 25 or so and Saturn in Aquarius and Mars in late Scorpio. This set of eclipses nails that so does the next one, which makes sense, right? The EU is at a point of having to reckon with a situation that it hasn’t since its birth. That makes sense that there would be stressful transits.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, those are the two eclipses. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else we meant to mention in terms of those. Austin, you mentioned some of the Scorpio rising people, Scorpio or Taurus rising people, dealing with if it’s falling in the first house, sometimes bodily matters or things that they’re focusing on with respect to their body. Or in some instances, it can be connected to their spirit or characters as sometimes it can be an internalization process of getting a better sense of oneself or having some internal changes that relate to one’s sense of self. Then that gets tied into the opposite eclipse in the other sign because then it falls in their seventh and then they’re having some redefining of relating to other people and direct one on one relationships in their life at the same time.
AC: Right, and the dragon ties those two together. So it’s like if I want to value other people more and focus on them more, that means I have to take some of my attention off of myself or vice versa.
CB: What’s funny about eclipses is there’s a tendency in that year and a half or two-year period to swing between extremes like a teeter-totter where it’s like, they’ll focus on one for a while, but then they’ll be imbalanced in the other, or they’ll focus on the other and there’ll be imbalance. It’s this year and a half process of trying to find the correct balance between those two, especially as major changes are taking place in that area of the life or those areas of life. Some of the other axes that maybe we could mention is the second and eighth house, which can be your finances versus partner’s finances or other people’s finances. Are there any other contrasts between second and eighth that you guys have seen come up?
AC: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of the time with the Rahu side of it in the eighth people taking out a lot of debt. Or South Node in the eighth where it’s paying back debt or what’s owed.
SK: Yeah. I guess I’ve been noticing it shifts the locus away from like, “It’s North Node in the second, I’m going to be focused on making a lot of money this year. I’m going to be focused on punching a clock.” With the opposite North Node in the eighth, it’s like, “How can I maybe just be supported in new ways so that it’s not so much about me constantly putting in the 40 or 50 hours a week?”
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. We had an example like that at the Denver Astrology Group recently in an episode I’m going to release next month where somebody shared a chart example of that of catching up and achieving more stability financially like you’re saying, and then also trying to buy a house, so taking out additional debt, but that still being like a major turning point for him to be able to get to that point and to own a home. That’s second.
Eighth house, third and ninth, there was another example at the Denver Astrology Group meeting of a woman who during the early pandemics when the eclipses started taking place in Sag and Gemini in her third and ninth house, one of the things she ended up doing was having to homeschool her daughter, her teenage daughter, and learning how to teach and communicate. But then also because she was also an astrologer, integrated some astrology into the curriculum of like her daughter learned astrology and she taught her daughter astrology during that time, which I thought that was cool.
AC: Which node was where?
CB: I don’t know which was where, I can’t remember what the rising sign is. I just know it was in the third ninth-house axis.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense.
CB: Just thinking of simple examples, other ones for third and ninth may be the balance between learning versus figuring out how to communicate something that you’ve learned.
AC: Another one is short- and long-term goals and tasks. Ninth house is very much a quest. The third house is an errand. Sometimes we need to do a little bit less epic questing and just handle daily business. Sometimes we need to clear way daily business so that we can get back to the epic quest.
SK: I think ninth house sometimes I see it as being about like the… I guess the religious or spiritual experience in the third house is just the ritual or the daily practice that supports it.
AC: Yeah, that’s nice.
CB: Nice. Fourth and 10th public life versus private life and your career versus your home and living situation. Sometimes major changes at home with the fourth house or sometimes major changes with your parents, which are other major fourth house topics. Fifth house can be like children versus friends, fifth house versus 11th house. What are some other contrasts of fifth versus 11th that you’ve seen?
AC: In the charts of creative professionals, I see a lot of fifth-11th as what they create fifth and their audience 11th. When South Node is in the 11th and North Node is in the fifth, I see people heading away from being out and on the surface and get back to the lab. Then the opposite with South Node in the fifth and North Node in the 11th, it’s like I’m finally going to release the project. Which will be true for me because the second edition of faces will come out with a South Node in my fifth and the North Node in my 11th. But I’ve seen that for years with clients who work professionally creative lives.
CB: You can single-handedly kill the black market for that book, which at this point people are selling like body organs like limbs at this point to get a hold of.
SK: I guess I’ve seen those eclipses show up as like shifting interests and shifting I guess because sometimes the people you associate with have to do with what you’re into. If you fall out of love with a passion or a hobby and then find a different group of people because you don’t really associate with them as much anymore.
CB: That makes sense. That’s a good one. Then finally, sixth and 12th house, which is a little bit more tricky. I can-
AC: I got it. I got one.
CB: All right, go ahead.
AC: On a simple level in terms of which problems you’re focused on solving, sixth house is like financial and bodily. You’re like, the problem is the bills that my knee hurts, right? Whereas 12th house, it’s mental health, it’s addiction, it’s spiritual crisis and so invisible problems and concrete problems and switching your focus, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve been really working on my mental health and haven’t really exercised much. Or my body isn’t great. My mind feels a lot better, but it’s time to switch focus. Or I’ve been so focused on getting fit that I realized I’ve been covering up massive anxiety by running 10 miles a day.” Maybe I should just address the anxiety on its own terms.
CB: Right, for sure. It’s interesting how because the eclipses in the nodes move backwards, the sixth house and 12th house eclipse has always come after the first house, seventh house set. So it in some ways can be a continuation for some people of some of the dealing with bodily themes that already came up during the previous set of eclipses, but sometimes dealing much more directly with acute issues that you’ve been putting off or not dealing with and needing to address those in order to improve things overall. Which, speaking of, Biden is the one that we’re a little nervous about because last November, there was that Taurus eclipse in his Scorpio rising, so it was the sixth house. That was the time where, for that very brief 24-hour window, he went and had that procedure done and they put him under anesthesia so that temporarily Kamala Harris was president for a brief period of time. We always wondered about that, just the fact that that was the first of a series of then eclipses that would be bouncing back and forth between sixth and 12th over the course of the next year or two.
AC: Yeah, the chart doesn’t have a clean bill of health for some time.
CB: Yeah. Then finally, that’s also like the people you don’t get along with axis traditionally is the sixth-12th house axis, as well as sometimes 12th house, can be ways in which the native undermines themselves or works against their own best interest. Those can be themes to pay attention to and make sure if they’re brought to light that are addressed.
AC: Right, you may need to switch from visible unknown enemies to searching for unknown or concealed enemies or vice versa.
CB: Yeah. All right, that’s pretty good coverage of eclipses. I feel pretty good about that. We’re about an hour into this episode. I did want to mention before we move on to the second half of this episode and the rest of the month, our sponsor for this month. Kirah Tabourn reached out to me and is in the process of starting and recently started a new project called the 11th House. The 11th House is actually hosting pretty soon, a free summit called the Emerging Astrologers Summit on Saturday, May 21st, 2022 from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time. This seems like a really cool project because it’s a continuation of something she had done previously that was a really great community contribution in helping to highlight or spotlight up-and-coming astrologers in the astrological community and different voices in the community.
The description is that the Emerging Astrologers Summit highlights a diverse group of up-and-coming astrologers in the field who have yet to speak publicly. You can join them for an exciting all-day summit to support and learn from five talented astrologers who are eager to share their work with the world. The Summit takes place virtually on Saturday, May 21st between 11:00 and 8:00 p.m. Pacific and is completely free to attend. Registrants can access the replays of each of the talks for 24 hours after they’ve gone live. There’s also an option to purchase an all-access pass for unlimited access to the replays from the five lectures, which then helps to support the speakers. The all-access pass is $65, up until the day of the summit, and then it raises to $75 after the summit. You can register for free and attend the talks completely for free at Kirah’s website, which is thestrology.com, and then there’s a page there where you’ll find more information about the 11th House and some of the other things that she’s building with it which are cool, which have to do with building community, connecting different astrologers, a bunch of really cool stuff that I think is going to be a great project and is a great continuation of the great work she did previously of organizing some other webinars over the course of the past two years that really brought to my attention, some different astrologers that are doing great work that I’d never heard of or hadn’t seen or just wasn’t familiar with their style yet up until that point.
AC: Yeah, Kirah does great work.
SK: She also just organizes the best spaces. If you were lucky to be in New York City before the pandemic, she used to organize a lot of dinners for astrologers. 100% can vouch for any community or group thing that Kirah organizes.
AC: Well, and it’s a nice first course before NORWAC. It’s the weekend before NORWAC and so for people who are doing both, it’s a nice way to begin a solid two weeks of astrology download.
CB: Yeah. Or alternatively, for people that aren’t able to attend NORWAC to be able to attend a free series of astrology lectures is a pretty cool thing.
AC: Yeah, free is good.
CB: Free is very good.
SK: I would have loved to have a community like this one when I was just getting into astrology.
CB: I know, right? I feel like we older astrologers are getting robbed of all of the amazing things that are available to astrologers just in the past three to five years. This is such an amazing time to come in the field and just have so much available that you can draw on and so much knowledge and information and wisdom just available at your fingertips to a certain extent.
AC: Yeah, it’s an embarrassment of riches. At the same time, I perversely value basically being the only person I knew who even knew astrology was real and just starting with a pile of charts and a hole in the ground for years. The advantages to that form of education though, I wouldn’t recommend it nor would I inflict it on other people. But there were certain Saturnian lessons. But objectively speaking, this is vastly superior to my hole-in-the-ground method, my day cave.
CB: Carry the ephemeris upwards in the snow uphill and downhill and snow and things like that?
AC: True.
CB: When did you get into astrology, Steph?
SK: I would say probably for me, it started like late high school to date myself. That was like 2006. I took the same path a lot of people take is that I saw something that resonated with me and then I got curious and I spent most of my undergrad years just reading about it a lot and learning about my birth chart and stuff like that. It wasn’t cool or trendy to be into astrology at the time so I think I got a lot of weird looks or ridicule, but I had a couple of friends who thought it was neat.
CB: Yeah, the friends that you read charts for where you’re like the astrology person?
SK: Yeah, kind of.
CB: It’s more common experience years ago. Now it’s like everybody has some basic knowledge of their Sun, Moon, and Rising which is just really wild in comparison to 10 years ago.
AC: It’s nice to not have to do all the framing of like, “So this is astrology?” No, it’s not really. It’s like your newspaper, but not really. There used to be all this extra work you had to do to get to actually looking at the chart with someone. Now people are like, “Yeah, I’m into astrology. What can you tell me?” There’s like a half an hour of careful work that you don’t have to do anymore in most cases, which I don’t miss that. It’s nice to be able to just get right to it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, well people can check out thestrology.com for more information about that. It should be a great event. I’m looking forward to seeing other events like that in that series in the future. Why don’t we then move into talking about, we’ve literally on paper only talked about one thing that’s happening astrologically this month and it turns out that there’s a lot more than just the eclipses happening this month, even though that is certainly the most important thing. Let me pull up the planets [inaudible 00:10:13].
AC: In a sense, we can summarize all the rest in two statements. One, Mercury Retrograde. Two, lots of stuff moves into Aries.
CB: I was going to say boom as the keyword for that, Mars in Jupiter.
SK: I think May is like the acceleration month.
CB: Like speed up?
SK: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, go ahead.
SK: No, just like the combined effect of all of those things just eclipses, Mercury Retrograde, stuff going into Aries, it’s just timelines warping and speeding up.
AC: It’s very roller coaster.
CB: Yeah, I like that speed because I finally started my zodiac series where I’m going to do a deep dive like a two-hour at least episode into each of the signs of the zodiac. We started with Aries with Rick Levine. It’s one of the things I was really thinking about that really not just made a lot of sense, but helped me understand the archetype of Aries better as the notion of speed being a core underlying thing and impulse. That manifests in so many different ways of heavy areas placements liking to go fast or liking to drive fast or eat fast. That’s a good one. Or other things fast. There’s many different ways in which the notion of speed and just moving faster. Even in ancient texts, they would say that Mars is a fiery planet and it heats things up and makes them move more quickly. Whereas Saturn is a cold archetype and it slows things down and grinds things to a halt. That’s a really good keyword as we’re moving out of just years of stuff piling up in Capricorn and Aquarius and just the slowness and the grinding to a halt sometimes very literally of the pandemic and the lockdowns versus now, we’re moving into a sign where things start to move much more quickly or much more rapidly.
AC: Just to speak to that, two of the most famous MMA fighters who have Mars in Aries, Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, during their championship runs, it was first-round finishes all day long. The fights didn’t go to decision. They weren’t slow wars of attrition. Ronda would grab people and then break their arm and Conor would just run up and knock people out. Aries is a cardinal sign so it’s about beginnings, it’s about how do you start energy. What’s interesting is both of them obviously had a lot of we say speedy-off-the-blocks energy, and similarly with their careers, but both of them just petered out after championship runs. So you see that Mars in Aries’ brilliant first-third opening, but then both their careers fell off at what should have been the midpoint rather than the end.
CB: Aries it’s like a very strong beginning and burst of energy, but not a lot of staying power in the same way that most of the fixed signs have, which is more their role.
AC: It’s a sprint where you get tired when you sprint, but you’re really fast.
CB: Rick Levine used a really great point about that where he said like, “If Aries is playing in a game against somebody, if you’re playing against an Aries, the Aries will just destroy you early on right out of the gate.” But that the difference between Aries and Scorpio is that if Aries doesn’t just completely decimate Scorpio in the beginning, they’re in trouble because the Scorpio will go back and research things for the next 10 months and then will come back much stronger because of that staying power. I had a funny example of that recently with like playing somebody Mario Kart where they just demolished me the first time in 20 years and then I had to research and come back stronger to avenge myself.
SK: You researched Mario Kart?
CB: I’m not going to lie, I did research. I watched some of the YouTube videos. There’s a lot of… It got complicated. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll play Mario Kart. I’m sure it’s the same as it was 20 years ago when I was playing Mario Kart 64.” But it turns out there’s a lot of new tricks. If you just go on YouTube and Google top 10 tips for how to play Mario Kart, then-
AC: You learn to drift.
CB: Oh man, I got the drift. There’s more. But there’s also like you can jump off jumps and if you jump at the same time with the jump, you get an extra boost. There’s just all sorts of little tricks like that. I had that up my sleeve so that I won the rematch.
AC: Nice. So two things really good, one, in combat sports, people who are super strong right out of the gate, they talk about if you’re facing someone like that, you just need to weather the storm. You don’t try to win the first round. You just stay safe and let them get tired. Two, I spent most of my teenage years playing Axis & Allies where like a 10-hour World War Two board game against a Scorpio stellium friend of mine. The way to defeat a Scorpio is let them invest deeply in their brilliant long-term plan and then spoil it two-thirds the way through the game. He had great plans. But if I could figure it out and then spoil it, he would just literally quit. It was literally just letting them do the fixed and then breaking that.
CB: All right, I’m never going to play that game with you now that I know your strategy. The reason why we’re talking about all of this is we have both benefics going into the sign of Aries this month and really shifting the energy and then eventually Mars catches up as well. Here’s the transits where Venus will move in by the second of May into the sign of Aries. Then shortly after that only about a week later, Jupiter moves in by May 11th so then we get this pretty nice transit of just having both benefics moving through that sign for pretty much the rest of the month.
Now, eventually, Mars does catch up and crashes the party and returns to its home sign of Aries by the 24th and 25th of May, at which point, we get a little stellium going through that sign and things become a little bit more tumultuous or gets sped up even more and the heat and volume gets turned up on that sign in that sector of our chart. But that’s where a lot of the action is taking place this month is in that sign.
SK: It was a couple of days, just look rude. Because Mars and the Moon both ingress around the same time. Then the Moon actually ends up conjoining Venus as it’s squaring Pluto in the late degrees of Aries. I just thought it was interesting how there’s that sequence. Then basically Venus leaves Aries right before Mars and Jupiter perfect. There’s no longer any Venus to buffer any of that.
CB: Right, Jupiter is left on its own to deal with Mars.
AC: Let’s drop back to the timing of these three ingresses because it’s really spread pretty widely throughout the month. Venus’s ingress is on the second? All right. Part of the story here is planets in Aries, but the other side of it is planets not in Pisces. Because as the month begins, we’ve got all these planets in Pisces doing the lots of Pisces thing that we’ve been doing for a month. So it’s one Venus on the second and then two, Jupiter on the 10th and then three, most emphatically Mars on the 24th. This is like slow planets crawling out of the primordial sea and growing ram’s horns one, two, three throughout the month.
CB: That’s a good point. And just Mars being left to its own devices and Pisces, which already there’s an interesting shift over the past month when you had both benefics there and things are going relatively well. It was interesting to see the additional co-mixture of Mars when Mars moved into Pisces, and all of a sudden, things were not as calm or stable or peaceful as they were prior to that.
SK: Yeah, it’s like it was just a dream but then Mars came in, and now it’s a fever dream.
CB: I liked when you mentioned sound or loudness, maybe you said that Steph, but it was something or it made me think of that, which is I realized Aries and Mars… Mars in general is just loud. That’s one of the things that it can do is loud noises or amplify the volume of things. It made me remember and think back to some of Vettius Valens’s significations of Mars in the second century. One of the significations he says is screams, which is not just like a morbid thing in terms of screams metaphorically but also that Mars especially when it gets connected with things like Mercury is loud piercing noises, and the notion of Mars being piercing and what does that sound like when Mars does something piercing related to sound? It’s like something that’s really loud that hurts your ears because the volume is just amplified and turned all the way up.
AC: Right. It’s a battle cry, it’s a key eye. It’s also if you think of martial scenarios, even let’s say a productive one where we’re looking at industry and metal and blacksmith and you have like the clanking of metal on metal or the clash of swords or the screech of a blade against a piece of armor, they’re all piercing sounds.
CB: Right. Are there any other things? I thought there were some other things we meant to mention about Mars and Pisces or how the two of you experienced that recently or things that you observed or noticed?
AC: I’ve fallen back in love with kicking stuff.
CB: Right, although also injuring yourself a little bit.
AC: Yeah. Well, that was I was overdoing it and my footwork was a little too fancy, and my left… This is interesting. I’m in Aquarius perfection, Aquarius rules basically between the knee and the ankle. Pisces is the feet. I was just overtraining and I did a particular kick. When I landed on the base leg, it felt like the entire left calf cramped really suddenly and was super tender the rest of the day. That was Friday night. It’s almost back to normal now, but it was coming right up to the edge of… It wasn’t a muscle tear but it was a mild strain, which was mild but I was literally walking like Saturn. The next day, I had to hold it totally stiff. I was like, “Mars, how could you do me like this?” Then I was like, “Oh, it wasn’t Mars. It wasn’t the feet. It was literally Saturn.” I’m in an Aquarius perfection. Saturn is there, there was the calf. What is Saturn saying is, “Slow down. I’m glad you’re excited, but slow down.” I have Mars opposite Saturn natively so my Mars is perfectly set up to get regulated on by Saturn.
Almost back to full functionality, but quite the speed bump. I was experimenting with recording things because I have no record of being able to do things. I was like, “When I’m 80 I might want a video.” So I have a video of me doing a kick and then grabbing my leg and going, “Oh, oh, fuck shit.”
CB: Nice, nice. One of the things maybe worth mentioning about Mars and Pisces before it departs from there is it is going to catch up around the time of one of those eclipses to Neptune. We’re going to get a Mars-Neptune conjunction in the middle of the month around May 17th. We’ve talked about this idealization previously of Venus-Neptune, or even Jupiter-Neptune, but Mars-Neptune is tricky energy because Mars usually wants to go forward and it wants direct movement and to just quickly get to the point, sometimes to the point that can be experienced externally as brusqueness or something like that. But Neptune because it has this archetypal quality of making everything less clear can make the route forward less clear and can make you have to go in a more circuitous route than Mars is usually comfortable doing. Sometimes that can be confusion surrounding actions or even mistaken actions that are made impulsively.
AC: Yeah, it could be aggressive deception. It can literally be the fog of war.
CB: Right, that happened last summer. You remember that one?
AC: It’s ringing a bell.
CB: I think it was the Mars-Neptune opposition I want to say, but it was during the US the chaotic pull out from Afghanistan. They authorized that missile strike. Because there was the bombing near the airport and then the US freaked out and was on high alert of the US military and then they ended up doing a missile strike, which they said initially and they put out the announcement that day saying it was insurgents or somebody that was going to bomb the airport again. But then later, like a week or two, it came out that they actually just killed a bunch of random civilians because they mistakenly thought that it was something that it was not. So when you mentioned the fog of war, it just made me think of that.
AC: Yeah. Part of Mars and Neptune are it’s very for Neptune to interfere with Mars incorrectly. Because if you’ve got a gun and you are intent on firing it, it’s really important that you know exactly what you’re firing at or a missile or whatever. That lack of information when you’re dealing with an active monolithic. You don’t swing your kitchen knives around randomly in all directions. You just chop the carrots. So that Neptunian fog becomes much more dangerous when closely associated with Mars. Thank you for remembering that. I was like fog of war was tickling my mind, but I couldn’t remember the incident that was doing the tickling.
CB: I’m now thinking of trying to chop carrots with your hands but doing it if what’s in front of you there’s just like a fog covering it. You’re going to chop some carrots, but you’re probably going to cut your hands as well potentially at the same time.
AC: Steph, you have Mars in Pisces, right?
SK: I do, yeah.
AC: What observations do you have?
SK: Mine’s at the last degrees. Like you, I’m having my Mars return. I don’t know if I’m completely clear on what that’s going to be about for me just yet. I’m just waiting and seeing. Because usually, my Mars return to my Mars opposition is not a good time for me. I’m a day chart. But maybe with the presence of the benefics there right now it’s helping until they leave.
CB: Yeah, right. What are some of your Mars-Neptune culmination keywords or metaphors or things that come to mind with that culmination?
SK: Well, going back to the eclipse, just like sacrifice. I think especially in that third decade of Pisces, there’s just giving it all.
CB: That’s a good one because it likes to be courageous. If you combine that with Neptune, you get that sacrificial quality combined even more of being willing to do something for the ideal.
SK: Well, to go back to what was in the news like the man who set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court to protest governmental inaction on climate change, I think that really felt very Mars and Pisces to me. But I mean in terms of the conjunction that’s coming up, I think one thing that I thought was notable was just that Mars and Pisces has two distinct chapters where the ruler is at home with Mars in Pisces and then it goes into Aries, and then they’re not witnessing each other by sign anymore. That conjunction happens with Jupiter in Aries. So I feel like there’s a little bit of losing the plot a little bit or maybe just I guess temporarily running out of steam in some ways or just having the… The Jupiter in Aries part is getting hyped up, but then not really being completely sure how you’re getting there until those two planets are together again.
CB: Right, that makes sense. There’s a little nebulous in between period before the direction forward starts becoming clearer again later in the month when Mars moves into Aries.
AC: Yeah, with Neptune. Well, it’s one way to it. Another angle on it is we have Mars is applying to a conjunction with Jupiter for a lot of the time in Pisces, but then Neptune is between the two. Jupiter changes signs, they’ll both change signs before they complete that conjunction. There’s the feeling of the big move, the big victory, the bold, triumphant, whatever, which is Mars-Jupiter energy. But your sign’s saying, Steph, there’s a Neptune in between and there’s a sign change in between. It’s like how are we going to, what are we doing here? Then a hog into Aries.
The sacrificial thing with just the third deck in a Pisces is full of that symbolism and Mars is the ruler and then add Neptune and then add Mars as the ruler of what you called, Steph, the lunar eclipse of sacrifice. There’s a symbolic solidarity going on there.
CB: Something also before we move fully on from Jupiter in Pisces but the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, a lot of astrologers have commented about the inflation rates and how inflation has just skyrocketed and that being a Jupiter-Neptune thing.
AC: Right, that was the stock. As long as I’ve studied astrology, Jupiter-Neptune on a mundane sense always the stock answer is inflation and proven correct. For lots of different reasons, it’s one of the things I’ve been noticing is how it’s sometimes easier with astrology to predict the result than the causes that go into it. Sometimes when we think too much about well, but how could that happen, we will end up fucking up predictions. It’s like, “Oh, why would we be so expensive?” You didn’t know that there was going to be war with major wheat producers. Maybe you couldn’t have guessed that, but you get these… Go ahead.
SK: I was just going to say like, why would the economy tank in 2020? It seems so great now.
CB: Right. Which is what we’re all saying in the year ahead forecasts. What was the word that you just used, Austin? It wasn’t outcomes, but it was?
AC: Results.
CB: The results. The original word for the study of astrology and Ptolemy’s original title for his book was APA telematics, which means the study of outcomes or the study of results. That was one of the words that was used for astrology back in the day is this notion of studying outcomes or results of things and that that’s what you could do with astrology potentially. It made me think of that.
AC: Yeah, that’s nice. Then in a lot of the Vedic astrology texts, the term that’s used is studying the fruit. It’s like there’s this plant, there’s this tree, it’s in this environment. But what is the fruit? What is the nature of what it produces? What is the result?
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, let’s move on to Jupiter in Aries because I know we got a bunch of stuff to talk about there.
AC: We didn’t say anything about specifically Venus. Venus in Aries, I see the aesthetic focus shifts towards dynamic, sometimes jarring, kinesthetic, the demonstration and performance of ability and power. It’s very much like the spectacle of individual power. It’s not a gentle universal Venus. There’s an appreciation for the brash, the loud, the swift, et cetera, et cetera.
SK: Venus in Aries is like sugar and spice, not necessarily everything nice. I think it’s very allergic to people-pleasing. There’s maybe a special charm that comes from being a little rough around the edges.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And doing something well but also having an interest in having enjoyment from something that people don’t otherwise usually conceptualize sometimes is enjoyable, which is a little bit of a theme you get with Venus in Scorpio, especially where it’s much more clear and defined like a love of the Gothic or something like that, which is not seen as mainstream or can be seen as morbid or what have you, but having an interest in the aesthetic appeal of that, Venus in Aries is some of that but taking out some of the morbid component or the darker component and instead focusing on the kinetic, the fast, the rough and tumble, the athletic and other things like that sides of Mars.
AC: I think of Aries as gladiatorial glory. It’s Marshall, but on full display. It’s the sign where the Sun is exalted, let’s see what you can do. Venus in Aries appreciates the perfectly timed strike.
SK: I was just going to say it could be showing affection by playful ribbing or just pushing each other’s buttons a little bit like play fighting.
AC: Right, bonding through busting balls.
CB: Let’s see. I’m trying to think of any famous Venus in Aries people. I mean, one of the ones I think of that always comes to mind is Robert Downey Jr. who has a Venus-Sun-Mercury conjunction in Aries and becoming really famous over the past decade for Iron Man and stuff like that, which is a brash character that he embodies in some ways. That’s one of the Venus in Aries that comes to mind for me. Do either of you have any that you think of?
SK: Doesn’t Rihanna have Venus in Aries, or am I making that up?
AC: She actually has Mars in Aries.
CB: Not sure, I don’t have… Let me see if I have her birth time. I don’t have it saved. Venus in Aries, that’s pretty much all month because Venus is transiting through Aries until the very end of May and it doesn’t leave and move into its home sign of Taurus until the 28th of the month.
AC: Right. Then on the 10th, we get Jupiter which is on and off for a year. It’s a pretty major and lasting shift.
CB: Right. There was somebody on Twitter recently, Ari from @saltwaterstars on Twitter that was talking about people having a misconception of expecting Jupiter to be in its home sign being great external goods in a sudden windfall with external things, but instead not realizing that with Pisces, it can be more of an internal growth or an internalization of things. That made me think of then Aries then switching to an odd sign being perhaps again, some externalization of something rather than the internalization that’s more common with even signs.
SK: I think they said that people are expecting diurnal results instead of nocturnal possibilities from Jupiter and Pisces, which I thought was really beautiful.
CB: Right, that was really brilliant. Jupiter in Aries, the externalization or the diagonalization of things. You had a funny thing about a TV show that Jupiter in Aries reminded you of?
SK: Yeah, this is my dumb personal association. Because when I think of Jupiter in Aries, I think about everyone who was in the grade above me in high school, and just makes me think of the boys who were obsessed with emulating jackass when that was the thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily specific to Jupiter in Aries people. I think if you were a high school boy at the time that that was in the cultural zeitgeist, you were probably into that on some level. But I guess one of the things that did stand out to me though is that both Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera have Mars in Jupiter co-present in the fire sign. So maybe not like Jupiter in Aries itself, but once we have Mars and Jupiter together, it’s going to be like real jackass energy.
CB: Because Aries is a risk-taker sign. One of the things that Rick Levine and I were talking about on the Aries episode is he said that sometimes there can be a penalty for being first and sometimes that can work out like the first through the breach or the first to come up with a new idea, which could be innovative. That can be good to be the first. But other times, you can fail or there can be blowback for being the first to do something to go out on your own. But hopefully, with Jupiter here, we’re talking about more of the successful side of being a first or being innovative in some way.
AC: Another good example of being first not being great is being involved in trench warfare. Being the first to charge the enemy trench is not a coveted position, whereas being the first across the finish line is a coveted position.
SK: It’s like, did you watch Squid Game? Where they were like, “Oh, is it a good thing to be first or not?” Then it was like depending on what the challenge was, it was like you’re either setting yourself up for-
AC: Is it a Mars game or Saturn game?
CB: That’s one question people have to ask themselves this month as we move into this Aries energy and things speed up and that there will be some instances where there could be opportunities and benefits or rewards for being the first to do something or for charging headlong into something if it’s a good idea. But then occasionally sometimes that impulse to just go and do it from instinct can backfire if your instincts are misfiring for some reason.
AC: Another angle on Jupiter that I like to take is Jupiter is associated with teachers and wisdom and the opportunity for growth or improvement in an area. I always like to ask myself, “What is Jupiter teaching in the sign? What kind of teacher or mentor is Jupiter in a given sign?” In Aries, it’s the coach, it’s the Sensei, the Sifu, it’s the teacher who wants to teach you to be better in action, to endure the rigors of action, to be bold and fearless in the moment. It’s a coach for action. It’s not teaching transcendental mysteries. It’s not about whatever the mystery of magic, pondering a sedentary mystery. It’s like here’s what you need to do to perform better. There’s that externalization. Aries is very much in action. That’s part of how I see the exaltation of the Sun. The Sun in Leo was like, “I am what I am.” But the Sun in Aries is like, “I will show you what I am. I will prove it through action.” Aries loves plans and Aries love to prove themselves in action in front of people.
SK: Yeah, it’s almost like gaining wisdom from trial and error. You don’t know until you do it.
CB: Right, right. Then also, I think Steph you had mentioned that we have to also pay attention to the Pisces-Aries crossover where there were some maybes dreams that came up in the Pisces, but then now there’s something elsewhere it’s made concrete or the action is taken?
SK: I saw a completely unrelated tweet earlier in the year where someone said, “I don’t care how unrealistic it is. I’m going to accomplish it in 2022.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, that’s what Jupiter’s basically doing. It’s moving away from the pipe dream to let’s just go, let’s just do it. Let’s just see what happens.” Something that maybe you would have been a little bit too shy or too timid to attempt in a different environment, this might be the year where you just do something just to see what happens even if it feels like a stupid decision. I feel like Jupiter in Aries, there’s going to be an increase in both bravery and stupidity, which is two sides of the same coin. Because sometimes a willingness to be or look stupid can be beneficial if you are normally the type of person who misses out on things because you’re playing it safe all the time. It’s not a guarantee of anything working out, but there is an optimism around just taking the risk and being able to say like, “Look, at least I tried,” and maybe just feeling a little more confident that you’ll be able to bounce back if it doesn’t go the way you want it to.
CB: Right, that makes a lot of sense. Eventually, we have to also bring in our third component that comes up later in the month, which is that Mars joins the party on May 24th-25th and moves into Aries where shortly after that, it gets really close and forms a conjunction with Jupiter by the 28th and 29th. That’s a little bit of a hard read because there’s two possible scenarios for that that I’ve wondered about. One of them is Jupiter expands things and Mars is sometimes about conflict. So one of the questions is that like heightening of tensions or conflicts or an expansion of conflicts? Of course, the past few months in terms of geopolitical stuff have been really tons and there’s a lot of really crazy stuff going on and a lot of brinkmanship and different countries fighting like proxy wars and things like that. That’s one scenario where for example everyone was really worried about whether what NATO and what the western countries would do, and if they would cross that line into doing something that brought them into direct conflict with Russia.
But then, the other side of that is, are the benefics to some extent going to help settle down or restrain Mars to some extent? Jupiter, one of its significations is peace and creating a chord and stability between people and things. So is a Mars-Jupiter conjunction on the other hand then a bit more peaceful and a bit more constructive in bringing the cessation of some conflict, especially with that reception between Mars and Jupiter? Those are two scenarios to think about around the time of that conjunction.
AC: I think that the answer as to do we get Jupiter mellowing Mars down or Mars marshaling Jupiter really depends on the sign location. If Jupiter is stronger, Jupiter is going to mellow Mars. If Mars is stronger, I think Jupiter ends up eating Mars. I wish I could say that that looks more peaceful than it does to me if we’re looking at an ongoing conflict, which we can’t ignore if we’re talking about Mars. One thing about Mars and Pisces is it’s in a mutable sign. Mutable is adaptive. You see what’s going on and then you try to adapt to it. While Aries is very cardinal or initiatory which in warfare looks like an offensive like, “Okay, they’re doing this and this whatever, we’re going to do this and make them adapt to us.” I don’t know how stunning or offensive that is, but that looks very offensive to me. It looks like maybe it’s Ukraine going on the offensive. Maybe it’s Russia. Maybe it’s another party, whatever. But that’s pretty straightforward. I don’t see how Jupiter can really slow Mars down in Aries like that.
CB: One of the things that’s really important is this is all taking place within the context of a Mercury Retrograde that lasts three weeks of the month. Mercury actually stations retrograde the same day that Jupiter goes into Aries. There’s something about that element as well because of the potential for miscommunications or crossed wires or things like that at the same time.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I just think worth noting in terms of the general tenor of the month is Mercury Retrograde is it makes things more confusing. Things don’t get delivered on time. You thought the appointment was 11:00, the person you were meeting thought it was 1:00 because they wrote it down wrong and the meeting doesn’t happen as scheduled. You add that to generally somewhat disorienting quality of the eclipses. There’s potential for a lot of confusion or seeing things not very clearly. Things are moving fast but the field of vision, the visibility isn’t good.
CB: What are some of your Mercury Retrograde keywords, Steph?
SK: I think of it as just like your mind computer is defragmenting or just making space for new information by reconfiguring things a little bit. So review recalibration. I guess reflection, all the rewards.
CB: I like that. That’s really good.
AC: Yeah. Let me tie that into some of the Aries, Steph. We have this boldness boost which starts on the day of the Mercury Retrograde because Jupiter moves into Aries the same day. Then we have Mars moving into Aries two weeks later while Mercury is still very retrograde. The spirit may be with you, but maybe wait until you can see where you’re going before you charge headlong into whatever fray.
SK: I don’t think that’s what people are going to do though.
AC: You’re right. Well, except for the listeners of this podcast. We’re going to contemplate this and wisely time their actions.
CB: Yeah, like buying a sandwich on a Moon-Mars conjunction last night. But sometimes [crosstalk 00:48:20] Right, so brashness. But it’s like sometimes with Mercury Retrograde, you have to fail. You have to make the first step. But then you learn from it and that becomes the process of the three-week retrograde period is making the mistake but then learning from it and going back and having a do-over and trying again.
AC: Yeah, 100%. Also, counterpoint, a lot of times people feel like things have to happen now during Mercury Retrograde and they absolutely don’t. It’d be way easier if you just delayed it two weeks and got it right the first time.
SK: Same with the eclipses honestly.
AC: Both are in truth though.
CB: Right, but it’s hard. Because in that moment early on in the retrograde, it does feel like there is this need for it to happen right then. Even though you sometimes know that it could be a little risky or maybe you don’t even anticipate the risk, you still have that internal impulse to do that thing immediately because it looks like it needs to be addressed or the crisis needs to be addressed. But once you get to the end of it like a month later, you realize in retrospect, you could have just put that off.
AC: And figuring out. That’s just a good question is do I need to do the whole third time’s the charm journey? Because sometimes you do. Or could I just save myself some trouble and just schedule this later? It’d be great if I could get it done by May 13th, but in reality, it’s not going to kill me or anyone else if it’s done by June 5th.
CB: Yeah, you do learn from it. I always learn something from the Mercury Retrogrades when I have to do the do-over, even if it is annoying or frustrating and things like that. Something I wanted to mention that I noticed is in terms of eclipse degrees, we have the Scorpio Eclipse there at like 24°-25° Scorpio and Mercury when it retrogrades, it retrogrades from Gemini back into Taurus, and then it stations direct right about there at 25°-26° of Taurus, which is pretty close to where that eclipse degree was of the Scorpio eclipse in mid-May at 25 Scorpio. If anybody has especially fixed sign placements around 25°-26° of any of the fixed signs, which are Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius, those are going to be really sensitive points this month, not just due to the eclipses, not just due to Mercury, but also with Saturn hovering around 25 Aquarius for a good chunk of the month as well. That’s something to pay attention to. Also, could be part of the Mercury Retrograde story because Mercury during its pre-retrograde shadow period will pass over that degree once. It looks like the date on that is around the 25th or so of April.
SK: Well, it’s actually right now. I think Mercury literally just entered its shadow.
CB: Okay. So Mercury has entered its shadow which is the degree, so everything past this point may be things that for some people that get hit by this Mercury Retrograde are things that have to be revisited or where you do something but you end up having to come back to it at some point in the future.
SK: Watch this day watch, what’s percolating right now.
CB: Right. Now, I hope I don’t have to revisit this day next month. All right. That’s the Mercury Retrograde, which is important this month as another overlay of everything that’s going on. Did we talk enough about Mars moving into Aries and joining Jupiter and everything else?
AC: Let’s say some nice things about Mars and Aries. I just talked about it in terms of military action, but most of us are not going to be fighting in a military conflict but we’ll still be having this transit.
SK: I have a nice thing I could say.
CB: Sure.
SK: We just got introduced to Jupiter in Aries, whatever that’s doing in our chart, and then Mars comes in right away. It’s almost like we’re going skydiving on our first date with Jupiter in Aries. It’s just like, “All right, I just met you. This is crazy but,” that song.
AC: That’s really good. I did a podcast with someone like five years ago where we’re talking about planets. We were talking about Mars and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, my Mars is in Aries. I love skydiving. Can’t get enough of it.”
CB: One of the chart examples that I use that I always liked as a chart example was because we have a birth time, but it was Angelina Jolie that has Mars in Aries in the 10th house and how a good chunk of her career has been action movies and she’s known as an actress that does major leading roles in action movies, amongst other things of course. But in terms of how that can manifest constructively if it’s connected with the 10th house, it’s an interesting manifestation.
AC: And the late great Alan White was a Mars in Aries in the first house and was literally a paratrooper, speaking of skydiving.
CB: He had it in the first house and he could be very brash and forthright and honest to a fault of sometimes like cursing or something which can be off-putting. But then also, for his friends is somebody that could be direct and could be courageous and could like do the thing that everybody’s thinking but is too scared to do in the room at that time, which ends up being important and useful.
AC: Honest is also a good keyword for Aries. It may not be appreciated or appropriate, but honestly. Or at least, it’s where they’re really coming from.
CB: We were talking yesterday in an episode recorded with Laura Nalbandian about astrology conferences and giving some of your first lectures and how terribly that will go and the friend that will say, “That was great. You did a great job,” no matter what happens, but just to get positive reinforcement versus the friend who’s like, “Yeah, you did a pretty terrible job,” and be honest about that thing that happened even if it’s maybe uncomfortable, let’s say.
SK: I feel like Aries is also really good at just being very clear and to the point. I guess, more economical about getting places or saying things.
CB: Yeah, Aries is also a spicy sign like leaking spicy things both literally in terms of foods but also metaphorically. That’s a good keyword because it gives you like a neutral, obvious one, where there’s some people that like say spicy foods, or it’s really hot. But there’s other people where that’s not something that they like, but it’s just a matter of taste.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good one in particular for Venus in Aries, which is matters of taste.
CB: Yeah, and liking spicy things. All right. Well, I think that might be all of the major things that we meant to touch on in terms of the transits for this month, right? Is there anything? I mean, there’s this New Moon in Gemini at the very end of the month, but because it’s coming after eclipse season, it’s so much less powerful and amped up or important and it’s also probably going to overlap with the next time we do a forecast episode because it’s so late in the month, so we might be able to put that off until next month.
SK: Well, I think there is also… Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to mention Venus going into Taurus at the end of the month. I saw something S.J. Anderson on Twitter mentioned how there’s going to be a period in June where both Venus and Mars are in domicile and so it’s like the areas of your life that got shaken up by the eclipses, those rulers are going to have a chance to stabilize those topics following the tumultuousness of the eclipses.
AC: Venus is certainly going to try.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense.
AC: Maybe one thing about the New Moon at the end of the month: it’s not an eclipse. In my experience, we don’t really leave eclipse land until we get a lunation that’s not an eclipse. It’s back into the normal cycle of time outside of the Dragon rollercoaster Wormhole.
CB: Yeah, it’s not an eclipse but also, it’s one of the first in the series after a year and a half or two years where we were having eclipses that were bouncing back and forth between Gemini and Sagittarius. One of the nice things about that is for people that were experiencing major events and turning points and major endings and beginnings in that sector of their life over the past couple of years, we finally get a much quieter eclipse where it can just be like a quiet little new beginning. But not all new beginnings or endings have to be hugely momentous. Sometimes it can just be small things.
AC: That’s a nice point. It’s like a little bit of reprieve for Gemini until Mars goes into Gemini for 17 years.
SK: Well, the other thing, the ruler of the Gemini-New Moon is Mercury is going to be stationing direct during that time. It could be not the most peaceful or chill Gemini-New Moon.
AC: Right, it’s Mercury stationing in the condition we described earlier. In those eclipse degrees on our goal, there may be some solid information that Mercury is about to go direct that’s not necessarily pleasant. It might be useful, but it’s not necessarily pleasant.
CB: All right, I wanted to mention also, I forgot to mention the electional chart for this month where the featured electional chart that Leisa Schaim and I picked out was in order to try to get a really good Mars electional chart. This month, that’s actually possible because you have many of the most ideal considerations all present with both of the benefics moving through the sign of Aries and with Mars also moving through its home sign.
Our electional chart for this month if you’re looking for a Mars election that represents or will have many of the same qualities or archetypes of some of the more positive things that we’ve outlined here in terms of Aries and that archetype, then this would be the chart for doing that. The chart is set for May 26th, 2022, starting at about 3:00 a.m. with Aries rising. This is a night chart, and Mars is in Aries in its home sign in the first hole sign house and it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter within about a degree or two. Venus is also still in Aries so it’s co-present with Mars and Jupiter and helping to balance them out and make things even more positive or successful with respect to what Mars wants to initiate at this time.
Since it’s a nice night chart, Venus is actually the most benefic planet in this chart. The Moon is also in Aries in the first house and supplying to a conjunction with Venus a little bit widely, but it’s still nonetheless co-present and applying to that conjunction. That’s basically it. It’s a Mars election with Mars as strong and mitigated as you can possibly get in a night chart. So you’re going to get many of the more constructive things that come with Mars that we’ve talked about in this episode.
AC: Yeah, that’s if you want to time your glorious charge.
CB: Yeah, that would be the time to do it. That’s the election. We’ve also got three or four other electional charts that we released this month to patrons in the Auspicious Elections Podcast. That’s one of the benefits you can get by signing up to support our work through our page on Patreon. You can get access to that there. I think that’s it for this episode mad for this forecast for May. Thank you both people for joining me. Thanks, Steph, for joining. This your first time on the podcast. I really enjoyed this.
SK: Thank you so much for inviting me. Truly a dream come true.
CB: All right. What do you have coming up this month, Steph? Where can people find out more information about your work and some of the things that you’re working on?
SK: My website is ladycazimi.com. That’s also my Twitter and Instagram handle is Lady Cazimi. I don’t have anything… My consultations are open. I guess one thing I’ve been working on since I redid my website over the winter is just adding more resources to my website. A lot of that is just I guess rehashing some of the old stuff that I had in my old one. One of the features that I had was a free birth chart tool, like a free birth chart lookup feature. I’m working on putting that up right now. I redid a lot of the descriptions because I had some just basic delineations like planet and signs kind of stuff. That’s going to be ready soon.
CB: Awesome. Cool, that’s exciting. Are you doing any conferences this year or attending any conference?
SK: Yeah, I’ll be at NORWAC. I’m not presenting, but I will be happy to say hi to you if you’re there.
CB: Nice. All right, cool. That’s going to be a great conference. It’s sold out I think at this point, or will be by the time this episode comes out. I’m sure that’s going to be a lot of fun. Austin, you are also doing NORWAC this year. Is your workshop sold out?
AC: Yeah. No, actually, I don’t know if it’s sold out. It was sold out and then the capacity was expanded. What’s funny is I’ll be doing the workshop later the day of your electional chart. Which makes sense, Aries is my 10th. I’m going to just talk all day long that Mercury Day. I’m doing a workshop on Thursday and then I have two lectures at NORWAC. If you’re there, come see me. Then I am starting my 2022 Year Two Class at the beginning of May, and my Year Three Class. Year Three, you have to have taken Year Two. Year Two, some people if they’ve got the Year One Curriculum down can jump in without having started with me before. If you’d like to do that, email me. We’ve got a little test you can take and we’ll see what’s appropriate. Obviously, for returning students, just let me know. Then there is a series I elected that was Moon conjunct Jupiter conjunct Fomalhaut from last year actually that will be coming out during the early part of May. Fomalhaut is quite exciting.
SK: I actually really can’t wait for that.
AC: I’m glad you’re excited. I’m a big Fomalhaut fan. They’re four royal stars. I consider the other three rather brash and unsubtle. Fomalhaut has that same excellent power, but it’s much more subtle. It’s the king of the deeps. It’s that royal power that’s beneath the surface that’s not as loud and obnoxious as Aldebaran on or Antares or Regulus can be. I’m a big fan. The Fomalhaut series is going to come out. We try to harvest the very best of each year so there’s a bunch of, as we say, delicious fruit preserves from the last several years that are still available.
CB: I love that. That’s exactly what you’re doing. It’s so funny seeing when a new series is released because it’s from often like eight-nine months ago. Then I remember I’m like, “Oh, yeah, there were some really great electional charts during that time.”
AC: It’s fun to let them marinate.
CB: For sure. All right, so that’s fomalhautseries.com. Then your website is austincoppock.com.
As for myself, I’m just going crazy doing the podcast and recording a bunch of episodes ahead of time, which I’m actually excited about getting ahead with things. I’ve started the new Zodiac Series, and I’m going to be doing the Taurus episode soon. But I recently started my local astrology group again and we held our first meeting like a week or two ago. I recorded that meeting. I’m going to release it as an episode of The Astrology Podcast. I’m also starting to have guests out. I have one out this week, Laura Nalbandian, to start recording more interviews in person. I’ve stocked up a bunch of interviews that I’m going to be releasing first for early access because I’ve got a backlog pretty far ahead of time. I’m going to release them to patrons for early access through my page on Patreon. If people like this work or you enjoy basically the free astrology classes that I’m teaching, when I released four episodes a month or two bonus episodes for patrons, then you can sign up through my page on Patreon and get bonus content like early access to episodes, the ability to attend live recordings or even some private podcast episodes that are only available to patrons. Also, just to help support the work I’m doing and hopefully help to improve the quality of the podcast by starting to have more people out in person to record really high-quality video and audio. This is only possible when we do that. That’s primarily the next stage that I’m moving into is more stuff like that.
Then hopefully with some of these conferences coming up, I’m starting to think about wanting to shoot a bunch of interviews in-person for example at the ISAR Conference that’s happening in August in Colorado. I don’t know that I’m going to be at NORWAC, but I do want to start being able to travel again and start shooting more on-location, in-person interviews. That’s the plan. All right, I think that’s it for this forecast for May of 2022. Thanks a lot, both of you, for joining me and doing this with me.
SK: Thanks for having me.
AC: It was my pleasure.
CB: All right. Well, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Please be sure to drop a comment or a like on this YouTube video. That’s it for this episode. 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 Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Sumo Coppock, Issah 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. 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 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.
Also, 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, and the Astro Gold Astrology App which is available for both iPhone and Android at astrogold.io. There are also two major astrology conferences happening this year. The first is the Northwest Astrological Conference happening May 26th through the 30th 2022 near Seattle, Washington. Find out more information at norwac.net. And the second is the International Society for Astrological Research conference, which is taking place August 25th through the 29th 2022 in Westminster, Colorado. You can find out more information about that at isar2022.org.