The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 361, titled:
Generational Astrology, with Nick Dagan Best
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on July 23, 2022
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Mary Sharon
Transcription released July 29, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with astrologer Nick Dagan Best here in the studio in Denver, and we’re going to be talking about generational astrology and long-term outer planet cycles that impact or reflect, describe, correlate, synchronize with entire generations or cohorts or groups of people. All right, so for those wondering, today is Sunday, July 10th, 2022, starting at what is it?
NICK DAGAN BEST: 1:52 pm.
CB: 1:52 pm in Denver, Colorado, with late Libra rising again. This is day three of us recording a series of podcasts here in the studio. All right, so we’re going to talk about generational astrology. I already did a little mini treatment of this topic with Kirah Tabourn several episodes ago where we focused in on one group, which was Millennials and some of the differences between that sub-generation. But I wanted to do a broader discussion about generational astrology with you because it’s actually really interesting and really vast topic that kind of overlaps with that’s a study in and of itself just in sociology or in history, different generations of people that are born and live during specific periods in history. And one of the most famous ones, of course, in the United States, for example, is the Baby Boomer generation.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there have always been generations of people, but in the 20th century you saw a new sort of cultural and economic definition arise for every successive new generation. Because with the sort of cultural and technological acceleration of the post-war years, you got these groups of people that were more distinct than ever from generation to generation.
CB: That’s based on a variety of different social and economic and…
NDB: Demographic.
CB: Demographic, okay.
NDB: Yeah, for sure. Well, the Baby Boomers, the very first thing that defines them, that gives them their name is the fact that there was a lot of them in the post-war years. All these returning soldiers, particularly on the Allied side, came home, in this country they had the G.I. Bill, so a lot of them were going to university, and they’re starting families, are getting cheap homes, suburbs are starting to be built, and they have a lot of kids. You have a generation that has a lot of kids.
CB: And we can see that on the graphs, just this huge spike in the population and in the birth rate. And I think the usual timeframe for the Baby Boomers is mid 1940s to the early ’60s or something.
NDB: Yeah, about that. I’ve seen it go to 1964. Some people argue for splitting that Baby Boom generation in half, sort of from the mid forties to the mid fifties and then the late fifties to the early sixties. There’s so much that defines them. First of all, there were so many of them that they had an economic force. So for instance, transistor radios, television, rock and roll and cinema. So many of these sort of cultural artifacts that were just coming into being at this time when this generation was coming of age was aiming itself at this very large demographic because it made economic sense. And these kids had disposable income, and some of them were even getting cars, and they’re the first generation to have any of this stuff, their own record player as opposed to the family sitting around the radio like their parents would’ve done.
CB: Right. So that’s interesting. So sometimes the generations can be influenced or defined partially by technology and new technological developments that are available to them in certain timeframes that weren’t available earlier or might have become obsolete in later generations.
NDB: Absolutely. I mean, certainly in this 20th-century context and leading into the 21st century, that’s been absolutely true from generation to generation. I’m Gen X. So we played video games in arcades which the Boomers did not do. And then by the time your generation, the Millennials, came along, you were mostly doing that at home on consoles.
CB: Unfortunately, arcades kind of died out there.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. But when I was young, that’s exactly where you went to play video games. I mean, there were the nascent consoles, Atari Pac-Man and stuff, Pong, the kind of stuff that you Millennials would find very quaint.
CB: Yeah, really advanced stuff.
NDB: Right, right. But the arcades were fun, but that was a phenomenon that was sort of a little interval in history that really pertained to my generations’ adolescent years.
CB: I mean, I think about that all the time with the past decade and the rise of mobile phones and how there’s something about this decade where we all have these little tablet-looking devices that we carry around. And that’s been such a revolution with like apps and all websites have converted to mobile and all the different things you can do now that everybody has a walking full-fledged computer in their pocket. But that there’s something about that form factor that I think in a few decades we’ll probably look back on and will look weird or quaint in and of itself.
NDB: Exactly. I mean, all this stuff sort of does. Television, when I was growing up, it had been such a cultural force for both the Baby Boomers and Generation X. But eventually, when you take a step back and you look at its place in a broader history, you realize television was just one stage in this broader transformation that’s been going on that went from radio to silent cinema, to sound cinema, to television, to now what’s emerging on the internet, which is sort of not quite television, not quite cinema, these mediums are even sort of blending as they get phased out or completely they regenerate in a very different sense than they used to exist.
CB: Yeah. I talked about that a lot with Kent Bye in the episode on artificial intelligence and the episode actually on virtual reality, because we were just talking about how it involved the blending of so many different pieces of technology that came apart or came about independently, but then eventually crossed wires and got melded into something new and unique.
NDB: Exactly. Whereas in my day, it just seemed like television’s just it, we’ve arrived, and this is the medium that probably we would’ve imagined would’ve just kept going. Maybe you’d get a few more channels here and there, but it was such a defined medium, and it seems completely… It still exists on the periphery, but it’s not the cultural force that it once was.
CB: Yeah. So, okay. So sociologists or historians sometimes try to define these different generations or these groups or cohorts of people. And one of the things, to bring the astrology in, that’s really interesting is that astrologers and sociologists do that, they sometimes have debates about when one cohort begins and when another ends or what have you. And it can be a little bit up for debate in terms of when those start and end dates are, even if there’s some general agreement about certain groups. But when it comes to astrology, we actually have a tool potentially that can be used to identify generations of people from a different standpoint. And sometimes you do see overlaps between what the astrological generations might indicate and what sociologists are already indicating. So for example, with the Baby Boomer generation, a lot of astrologers associate that with when Pluto was going through Leo.
NDB: Yeah, exactly, very much. And then 1956, Pluto goes into Virgo.
CB: So what was the timeframe on Pluto in Leo in its entirety?
NDB: There’s three ingresses in the late thirties. By 1939, just as the Nazis invade Poland, you have Pluto making its final ingress to Leo, with Saturn, I believe, in Taurus as I recall making a square. But that’s the third and final ingress into Leo. So from late 1939 right up until 1956, Pluto’s in Leo. Specifically the children born during the war between 1939 to ’45 aren’t technically considered Baby Boomers, but culturally, they really belong more to the Baby Boomer culture than say the people born in the 1930s, who are called the Silent or Greatest generation, where they’re at the tail end of that really. That’s the thing, a lot of these things are so broad, they need to be broken down. But Pluto had been in Cancer since the beginning of the First World War. In fact, when I was studying astrology, that was one of the first things that struck me to look at outer planets and just the fact that the First World War began just as Pluto was making its ingress into Cancer. And then the Second World War began just as Pluto was making its ingress to Leo. That was just one of those early things that sort of spoke to me about, “Oh, there might really be something to this astrology business.” And these wars are quite central to how we’ve wound up defining generations the way that we do in present day. I mean, there’s nothing that changed the world more than those two wars.
CB: Yeah. So that’s one of the main access points has been outer planets, slow-moving outer planets, because planets like Pluto, for example, how many years is its complete cycle?
NDB: Oh, I should have that on the tip of my tongue.
CB: 270 or something?
NDB: Something like that, yeah.
CB: So very long, almost three-century long span of time. And it has a highly elliptical orbit, so it actually spends different periods of time in different signs, but regardless it ends up being very long spans of time for the most part.
NDB: Yeah, it’s about two and a half centuries. And yeah, exactly. I mean, if you think about it, Pluto has just done one complete revolution since the time of the American Revolutionary War, where we find ourselves at the return of sort of midway through that Revolutionary War. Pluto moved from Capricorn into Aquarius in the middle of that war, and in 2025 we’re going to be having Pluto move into Aquarius. So that’s how long it’s taken. We’ve gone from powdered wigs to tattoo sleeves in those 260 years or whatever it’s been.
CB: George Washington didn’t have…
NDB: He didn’t have the tats, no.
CB: Blackout sleeve, really gnarly tribal tattoo or something?
NDB: I could imagine Thomas Paine having that, but no, I don’t think even he did.
CB: Yeah, Paine was out there.
NDB: Yeah, exactly.
CB: All right. So I’m finding a premise here which is really basic and fundamental and obvious one to astrologers, but if somebody was a non-astrologer listening to this, one of the premises is if, part of the basic premise of astrology as we know it, for example, Sun sign astrology or what people now know of as mainstream astrology which is your big three, your Sun, Moon, and rising signs, that describes something about your personality. But then those placements, the Moon changes signs every two and a half days, the Ascendant changes signs about every couple of hours, and the Sun changes signs every month. So a lot of the inner planets move pretty quickly, and those placements are a lot more unique for individuals. But the thing once you get to outer planets is that outer planets are spending years and sometimes entire decades in the same signs of the zodiac, and therefore entire groups and entire generations of people share that exact, almost that same placement, which leads to from an astrological standpoint, some sort of commonality between large groups of people just theoretically or abstractly.
NDB: That’s right. For instance, Jupiter takes about 12 years, just under 12 years to go through the zodiac. So you’ll have Jupiter changing sign about once a year on average. Saturn is a 29-year cycle. So you have about I think it’s two and a half years or so that Saturn spends in every single sign. So let’s say like when you’re in school, everyone in your grade probably has Saturn in the same sign as you, and even the kids in the grade before or after you. But if you’re in a school with say five grades, then you’ve got probably two or three Saturn signs covered over the course of all the students in that school. Then we go to Uranus, Uranus takes about seven years. It spends seven years in each of the 12 signs, it has an 84-year cycle. So definitely, over the course of a given decade, all the kids in a given high school will probably have Uranus either in the same sign or maybe in adjacent signs if they’re born in between. But it’s entirely possible to have the student body of a given high school or university or what have you and they all have Uranus in the same sign, that’s entirely possible.
CB: Yeah. So then they sometimes will experience sometimes similar cultural shifts at the same time as a group when there’s other planetary shifts that happen in the sky. And then you can have things like Star Wars being released in 1977 and just that hitting that generation of younger people as it did in the specific way that it did at that time.
NDB: Exactly. I was nine years old when Star Wars came out. My parents were big cinephiles, but it was just beyond them. My parents are about two years younger than George Lucas. So even though they were only just turning 30 and still part of the cultural zeitgeist, Star Wars definitely was for kids. Maybe there might have been some kids a little bit older than me, but not more than three, four years old I would think who were as dazzled by the movie as my generation. This would’ve been kids with Pluto in Virgo, Uranus in Virgo who would’ve been watching Star Wars as I was. And yes indeed, that made this huge cultural impact and in turn triggered all these sort of technical revolutions as well, the introduction of Dolby sound into film cinemas and sort of special effects of course, which just kept getting more and more sophisticated after that.
CB: Right. And then it’s funny we were talking yesterday, I think, privately about how then Empire Strikes Back, the second Star Wars movie comes out a couple years later, and that’s usually experienced by that generation as the height of that series. But then by the time the third one came out, it was three years after that, and then it’s still being targeted at kids with things like the Ewoks, but then some of you guys are getting older and would be over that.
NDB: Yeah, I think for me indeed, I was nine when Star Wars came out, “Wow, this is great. This is the best thing ever.” And then Empire Strikes Back came out when I was 12 or just turning 12, which was it had grown with me because it was a little darker, a little more sophisticated, just slightly more adult than Star Wars. But then by the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was turning 15, I’m like, “I don’t want to watch some movie with teddy bears.” And if you were watching TV at the time, the movie was being promoted with the sets of McDonald or Burger King, plastic cups with the Ewoks on them, it was just this big commercial thing. And by the time you’re turning 15, you’re getting more sort of cynical and you definitely don’t want to be dabbling in kiddy stuff. So yeah, whereas I’m sure the Uranus in Libra kids were the ones who were… Return of the Jedi was still a massively successful film, and you would’ve had the Uranus in Libra kids really latching onto that. Kids who were probably just a bit too small to see Star Wars when it first came out, they might have seen it later on, catching up with it, but not necessarily in 1977.
CB: Yeah. And then we were talking about how then eventually a decade, almost two decades later George Lucas does his prequel trilogy of episodes I, II, and III.
NDB: In the early two thousands, yeah. ’99, 2002 and 2005, I think.
CB: Yeah. But then the earlier generation that had first grown up with Star Wars, a lot of them were super not into that new trilogy and just panned it very hard, whereas some younger people that were just still young at that point like my generation were a little bit more into it than maybe the previous generation was.
NDB: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Because I was turning 31 when Phantom Menace came out. So I went to see it out of sense of nostalgia for the childhood thing, but yeah, it didn’t grab me. I’ve softened on it since, but yeah.
CB: Watch your tone around me old man.
NDB: No, the movie doesn’t need me to… I’m not trying to take shots at it, our point is well made that between the two of us and our different generations, we got on these trains at different stages in our lives, and therefore we’re open or closed to where these things sort of transition to in very different ways.
CB: Cool. I will defend the prequel trilogy with my dying breath.
NDB: That’s fine. We can have a lightsabers fight over it later.
CB: Although, ironically, now that I’m getting older, latest trilogy, didn’t care for it. So now I’m getting to experience some of that.
NDB: Yeah, I’m now raising an 11-year-old and I’m going to probably show her those movies and she’ll probably love them.
CB: Okay. Yeah, you’ll have to let me know how she thinks of it. All right, so before this turns into a two-hour Star Wars podcast, let’s reel it in a little bit. We’ve made our point about it.
NDB: We’ve made our point. I mean, it is sort of this one defining cultural artifact, but there’s all kinds of things. Definitely, if you think about the Baby Boomers just starting to get allowance money and paper route money and all that stuff in the mid fifties, and they’re getting transistor radio or little record players so they can listen to their own music, their parents’ generation were really listening to the same music their parents were. There would be someone on the radio and they would all sort of listen to the same stuff. But when you got to the Baby Boomers, you had this thing where young people have their own movies, their own music, their own marketplace, essentially. Not to commodify art, but that’s where these things merge, and that’s how these things became the phenomenon that they were.
CB: But then the thing about that also is that they experience, you have the generational thing of everybody having that collective same placement, let’s say, in a certain sign of the zodiac or a certain alignment of outer planets roughly in a timeframe that somebody was born, which we’ll go into more in a bit. But also sometimes they experience later outer planet alignments at the same time, and that hits them all generationally in a similar way. Because I’m thinking of how with the Baby Boomer generation that’s also the generation that comes of age around the time of the late 1960s and the hippie movement and the counterculture and stuff. And that’s around the time that we’re having the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo that I sometimes associate with that. They’re all kind of experiencing that generationally around that timeframe.
NDB: Right. And then in turn my Generation X generation, we were in our late teens, early twenties when the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn happened in the early 1990s, which in its own way was really connected to the changes in culture that we were going through at the time. I mean, it was weird. Because the Baby Boomers outnumber Gen X demographically by a large number, through the eighties, even though the Generation X generation was young, the culture was still sort of very much controlled by Baby Boomers. And it was only when you got to the nineties and the Uranus-Neptune conjunction that the, what’s the word I’m looking for, the zeitgeist was wrenched from Boomer hands for good. They no longer were sort of controlling MTV or the movie industry in the way that they had been up until that point.
CB: Yeah, because one of the things I think about actually of that period in the early 1990s is sometimes there can be sudden cultural shifts that people didn’t see coming by individuals that rise up in a generation or somehow become representative in some way sometimes reluctantly of an entire generation for better or worse. But I think of the shift of like Nirvana’s album Nevermind coming out in 1991. And ironically, Kurt Cobain having Virgo rising, so having that Uranus-Pluto conjunction in his rising sign conjunct his Ascendant essentially.
NDB: Right. But there, again, there was also technology contributed to Nirvana’s ascension, because it was right at that moment in 1991 that SoundScan was introduced into record stores for charts, pop charts and record charts for what was the best, the top 10 and all that kind of thing. Up until 1991, those charts were just determined mostly by record store managers who were generally Baby Boomers even at that point. And so they had a bias towards the music that they liked. They would say, “Oh yeah, Phil Collins is selling a lot of records,” and he might have been selling some, but he wasn’t selling as many as they were thinking. And meanwhile, heavy metal was selling a lot of records, but wasn’t being charted because Boomers weren’t into that music, it was sort of the Gen X music. But then boom, you get SoundScan, suddenly when records are sold, it’s being computerized. I mean, to anyone younger than Generation X, you can’t even imagine this, that tracking sales of an item wasn’t done electronically, that only started with 1991 in the music industry. And suddenly they found out, “Oh, kids are listening to a lot of what was called alternative music.” Although, from this point forward, there was nothing alternative about it, it totally became the mainstream overnight. And also they found out Boomers were listening to a lot more country and western than they thought. So suddenly people like Garth Brooks were making the charts, even though he’d probably been selling a lot of albums before that, it was only with SoundScan that they really could track these sales more accurately. So yeah, that’s part of what made the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early nineties what it was culturally. And that’s part of how control over the zeitgeist was wrenched from Boomer hands at that point.
CB: Right. Going back to Kurt Cobain as an individual who somehow…
NDB: Embodied the, yeah.
CB: Can that happen sometimes where you have individuals that have certain generational placements prominent in their chart in some way stand out amongst their peers for some reason?
NDB: Yeah, I think so. Definitely, if you look at the Baby Boomers, you’re going to be looking at people like The Beatles, who had a massive cultural impact in the sixties. We have sort of loose birth time, so it’s hard to say. McCartney might have had a Virgo rising with Neptune right on the Ascendant, and that Pluto-Uranus conjunction may have been crossing over his Ascendant, but we’re not a hundred percent sure that that’s his birth time. But certainly they were still born at points in 1940 and 1942, where their charts were sort of channeled pretty strongly with outer planet transits.
CB: Sure. All right, so that’s one angle on this. And so we’ve been talking about Pluto generations, so really quickly, what are some of the other Pluto generations of the 20th century? We’ve talked about… You said Cancer was?
NDB: The First World War, 1914.
CB: Absolutely. So 1914 roughly to 1939.
NDB: Exactly, yeah.
CB: So Pluto in Cancer generation, that’s1914 to 1939. Pluto in Leo?
NDB: 1939 to 1956.
CB: Okay, and Pluto in Virgo?
NDB: 1956 right up until 1971.
CB: Okay, and then that goes into Pluto in Libra.
NDB: Yeah, which goes right up until, I believe, 1984 if I’m not mistaken.
CB: Yeah, it goes back and forth ’83, ’84.
NDB: ’83, ’84, right.
CB: And then Pluto in Scorpio is ’83…
NDB: Right up to ’95.
CB: Okay, then we have Pluto in Sag starts and that ends 2008, 2009.
NDB: 2008, yeah.
CB: And that one was interesting because that was right around the time of that great recession.
NDB: Yeah, the house market bubble crash, yeah.
CB: Right. And that caused a worldwide financial destabilization, and that’s the one we’re coming to the end of right now because we’re getting towards the end of Pluto in Capricorn, and we’ll have Pluto ingressing into Aquarius as we were talking about in the last episode in 2025. So besides Pluto, there’s also Neptune moving through the signs at different rates, slightly faster.
NDB: Slightly faster. In the 20th century, Neptune was in Leo for much of that First World War period while Pluto was in Cancer. Pluto and Neptune had made their last conjunction in Gemini in the 1890s, in 1892, ’93. So if you think of the two of them being conjunct at about eight degrees Gemini in 1892, and of course Neptune’s a little faster than Pluto, so Neptune reached Cancer earlier in the first decade of the 20th century, and then Pluto would follow there in 1914, by which point Neptune was moving into Leo. Neptune moved into Virgo, I think, around 1927, ’28, which coincided with talkies, the movies going from silent to sound film, which always struck me as very interesting. Neptune going into Virgo, suddenly you had this merging of cinema and sound. And then Neptune went into Libra, I believe, in 1942, between ’42, ’43 in the midst of the war, and made its ingress into Scorpio 1956, the same year that Pluto went into Virgo. It stayed in Scorpio right up until 1970, just a few days after New Year’s Day 1970. So everyone born in the 1960s, for instance, has Neptune in Scorpio, as well as the last four years of the fifties. Neptune from there was in Sagittarius right up until 1983.
CB: I still had it in 84, but just the very tail end.
NDB: I think there’d been an ingress before you. Are you born between the two? Yeah, I think the first ingress was in early 84 to think of it or late 83. Sorry if I’m not specific on that, but close enough. And then it moved into Aquarius in 1996, and then into Pisces… Gosh, when did it move into Pisces?
CB: It’s been there forever.
NDB: 2011, it was the Fukushima in March of 2011 that Neptune went into… I remember, I associate the Fukushima tragedy with Neptune making its ingress to Pisces.
CB: I remember for some reason I thought it was also around a Uranus ingress into Aries or something like that as well.
NDB: Yeah, which was 2010, 2011.
CB: All right. So that means on the one hand, just again, building up the basic premise here, that we have not just one outer planet that’s going through signs that is there for an entire generation, which is Pluto going through the signs very slowly, but we also have Neptune going through the signs. We have two different planets or two different variables in different signs or sometimes in the same sign of the zodiac during different generations. And that can just keep getting added up as you add other variables like other outer planets like Uranus, which also spends about seven years in each sign.
NDB: That’s right. And Uranus being a little faster than the other two planets makes aspects to them more often than they make aspects to each other, Neptune and Pluto that is.
CB: Yeah, that was going to be the next point, which is that it’s not just having planets like different variables in isolation in different signs, but then also another variable with the generations is that those planets will sometimes form alignments or aspects with each other, which in and of itself generates independent meanings.
NDB: Yeah. For instance, I mentioned a few minutes ago, Neptune and Pluto made a conjunction in Gemini in the 1890s, but that’s a 500-year cycle. Neptune and Pluto had not been conjunct prior to that since the very late 1300s, I think 1398 or something. So it’s almost 500 years between Neptune-Pluto, conjunctions. So those really, I mean, think of everything that changed between the late 1300s until the end of the 19th century, it’s still quite a bit of social and technological growth right there even before we get into the age of airplanes and radios and stuff. And Uranus-Neptune, we mentioned Uranus-Pluto in the sixties, Uranus-Neptune in the nineties, those are a little more common. I mean, they still take quite a bit of time, Uranus-Pluto is well over a hundred years, I think, 140, 160 years between conjunctions. But still they can happen almost every century.
CB: And Uranus-Neptune conjunctions are about every 170 years, I want to say.
NDB: Something like that, yeah.
CB: Yeah, because that’s one I had tracked because it shows up in terms of the long-term history of astrology. I noticed every time there’s a Uranus-Neptune conjunction, there tends to be a revival of older forms of astrology.
NDB: That’s right, I remember you doing that.
CB: Merged with whatever the contemporary form of astrology is at the time to create a new synthesis about every 170 years.
NDB: Yeah. So these planets do interact, but it takes quite a while for them to do so. But nonetheless, the aspects they do make to each other, in the same way that we’ve been describing say the 1960s or the 1990s, there are even things like Uranus and Pluto had this really strong opposition when Pluto was in Aquarius, Uranus was in Leo, and these were the years of the French Revolution, for instance. Through conjunction and opposition, those Uranus-Pluto interactions bring about sort of these periods where there is a lot of sort of social upheaval and things change very quickly.
CB: Right. I mean, because that’s another thing as well in terms of mundane astrology is just the discovery of some of these outer planets and sometimes major world type shifts in either technology or consciousness or just social focus happen around the time of the discovery of new planets that are thought to be indicative of what that planet means in general.
NDB: Yeah. Now getting back to the modern age in the 20th century, the post-war generations, that is the Baby Boomers, the Gen X, the Millennials, the Gen Z Zoomers…
CB: Hold on. Before we do that, what are some of the things that happened around the discovery of the three outer planets?
NDB: Oh, okay. Sorry, when Uranus was discovered in 1781, that was the very end of the American Revolutionary War, and it was leading into what would become the French Revolution. One of the things that came about was the discovery of Uranus, the first planet to be discovered that isn’t visible to the naked eye, William Herschel discovered it using a telescope he designed that was sophisticated enough that it could see that that far. There’s also flight, hot air balloons, the Montgolfier brothers in France who were starting to launch balloons into the sky. There had been hot air balloons that had been launched indoors earlier in the 18th century, but it’s in the 1780s that the Montgolfier brothers are starting to launch hot air balloons into the sky, and for the first time people are really flying. And in fact, a hot air balloon was used during one of the battles that France had with either German states or Austria in the Revolutionary War. So even right away had it introduced into a military context doing reconnaissance.
CB: That would have been hard to avoid. Oh, okay, they weren’t flying a balloon into a battle or something?
NDB: No, no, no, no, they were flying it above for reconnaissance, in 1794 this was. So right away you have that kind of people being able to do things that they’ve never been able to do before.
CB: Right, through advancements in technology or in the case of even the discovery of Uranus using a telescope that’s a visually advanced piece of technology in order to magnify essentially the human senses and allow them to do or to perceive something that they couldn’t perceive otherwise.
NDB: That’s right. Neptune was discovered in the 1840s, 1846. I mean, it’s kind of–
CB: Hold on. Was the revolutionary… Is that overemphasized at all or was the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution or the French Revolution as unique as its sometimes portrayed in popular culture as, let’s say, revolutionary or as something that was unsettling the established order or–
NDB: Yeah. No, the French Revolution undid things that had been in effect for hundreds of years. Overthrowing the French monarchy, I mean, it would be sort of reintroduced by Napoleon, but in a very different way, it wasn’t this sort of long-standing hereditary thing or automatically sanctioned by the church. Although, Napoleon sort of forced the church to sanction him. But yeah, I mean, you had for the first time, with the French revolution, the people, so to speak, taking part, you had a democratic movement that was a lot more democratic than what the Americans had done, although they were very much influenced by the Americans, by the spirit of the American Revolution.
CB: Yeah. So it’s similar to Uranus in that when Uranus transits happen in a person’s life, there can be this disruptive quality or this unexpected sort of shake up that comes in sometimes out of nowhere.
NDB: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
CB: All right. So you were saying when was Neptune discovery?
NDB: Neptune was the 1840s. So the first, what are called daguerreotypes, the early models for photography, I think those came about in 1839, but that technology is evolving over the 1840s. Advertising, the discovery of gold in California, California I think of as a very Neptunian place. The United States had only just won it in the war with Mexico in 1846, and they’re literally signing the treaty ending the war when Neptune’s discovered. And gold just right after in 1848 is found in California, which triggers this rush, the sort of the American mythos of going west of, of sort of creating your life, restarting your life, if you will, this idea of going west and defining yourself, finding your fortune, that’s a Neptunian thing. And the fact that it’s California, what will eventually be Hollywood.
CB: Right, that was just really ironic.
NDB: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Hollywood with movies because then the later versions of that is moving to Hollywood to like become a star, get into films or something like that.
NDB: Yeah, that thing just keeps going on and on, but it starts with the Gold Rush, no question about it. And also, in the 1840s, you’re also having a lot of revolutions in Europe. They’ve been contained since after Napoleon was crushed, revolutionary fervor was really repressed. There had been uprisings in Greece, in Mexico, the Latin American states, but largely things were sort of really policed and kept down. And that’s what happened in the 1840s, all these different countries, many German principalities, France, Holland, a lot of countries had these. Hungary had these, Poland had these big uprisings, Ireland, and they were repressed, but they had a long-standing sort of cultural impact. Carl Marx, for instance, wouldn’t have been writing all the stuff he’s writing if he hadn’t seen the 1848 uprisings. Wagner wouldn’t have been writing the nationalist music he was writing if it hadn’t been for those uprisings probably, all this different stuff, Dostoevsky, I mean, I could go on and on, so it really spreads out there. And then Pluto’s discovered in 1930, just a couple of months after the stock market crashes in October of ’29, and the ascension of Nazi Germany and leading to the war years.
CB: Right. And one thing I was looking at with that a lot was like the rise of fascism in Europe, but also how that influenced other fascist movements around the world over the course of the next decade or so basically.
NDB: Sure, Argentina, Iran goes through a real profound transformation during that time absolutely.
CB: Yeah, one of the things we were talking about yesterday just in private was Mike Brown, who I think discovered Sedna or one of the recent minor planet bodies in the outer edges of the solar system, has a team that’s actively looking for another large planet-size body out there in the outer reaches of our solar system right now, and thinks there is one based on gravitational discrepancies on some of the other planets. So it would be really interesting, and one of the things we were theorizing was what could be discovered. If there was a new planet that was discovered, what are some things that are kind of on the edges of sort of our human awareness or consciousness right now that could sort of be confirmed or emerged that might coincide with that in the next, I don’t know, decade or two or however long it takes and just some of the possibilities of that. So interesting thought experiment.
NDB: Yeah. We we were throwing things out there like AI, the deep fake technologies.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the emergence of AI if AI was created, that would be a huge turning point in human history in one way or another. So that’s a really… If that’s possible, because that’s the thing about the discovery of some of the previous things, it’s not that those things didn’t exist entirely sometimes up to that point, but really their full emergence and influence on human history became much more prominent certainly by the time those planets were discovered and then in the wake of that. Like revolutions and some of the revolutionary impulses during the American or French Revolution, for example.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, that spread all over the world, there’s no question about it. I mean, when the Russian Revolution happened, the Bolshevik Revolution, they were modeling their actions after the French Revolutionaries. They were really trying to recreate the French revolution, for instance. And then the Chinese Revolution was very much they were trying to recreate the Russian Revolution. I mean these aren’t abstract influences, they’re very direct, they’re very conscious.
CB: Yeah. But even things like electricity sometimes get associated with planets like Uranus. It’s not that that it didn’t exist or that lightning, for example, didn’t exist for all of human history up to that point, but certainly the ability to harness electricity and identify it and then the way in which it’s changed and really supercharged sort of human progress or scientific progress and culture since it’s…
NDB: Since it’s been harnessed, which also started at the end of the 18th century after Uranus had been discovered, it was on its way by the time Uranus was discovered, but you really start to see it managed from that point on.
CB: So I wonder, that’s just an interesting thought experiment to think about things like that that are maybe things that we’re aware of that are trending in that direction, but that in the next decade or two or however long it takes, could reach some sort of culmination or critical turning point where something that was possibility becomes a reality. So AI is one of those things in just the open question of whether you can create an artificial consciousness of some sort however you define that. Another one that we were talking about was that would be a huge turning point in human history and would be interesting if that coincided with the discovery of a new planet was just if any form of biological or alien life was found outside of Earth basically, even in just microbial form. If they find microbes, organic microbes on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter is something that would be a huge discovery and turning point in human history, that life isn’t unique to Earth.
NDB: Yeah, and then who knows, how are these new generations of people going to be different? These definitions will keep changing, Zoomers don’t just sort of go on indefinitely. So yeah, as new planets are discovered, you get these new generations of people who in turn will be defined by the age they were born in.
CB: Right. So, all right, so taking it back to where we started and back to before I interrupted you with that digression talking about the discovery of outer planets, were you going into more planetary alignments? Because one of the things that happens that you were focused on and we definitely want to talk about today is that with generations it’s not just that they have placements, but different generations will experience the sequence of certain transits in different orders if you zoom out of not just our localized past century, but if you even go back further and see the sequence in which certain transits are experienced by different generations of people is much different.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, where to begin with that. One thing I was going to point out about the post-war generations, the Boomers onward, everyone alive today, virtually everyone alive, except maybe people in their nineties, everyone alive today born from say the mid 1940s onward, so maybe not Joe Biden and maybe not the super old, but everyone younger than Joe Biden, including the last few presidents prior to Biden, all of these people and you and myself and people younger than us, we all have Neptune-Pluto sextiles within a few degrees. Because Pluto has this very unusual orbit, asymmetrical orbit, where it spends a really long period of time in Taurus, multiple decades in Taurus, but a relatively short period of time in Scorpio, I think, not more than 12 years or so. So it’s a really uneven orbit. Everyone in the 19th century, the 1800s began with Pluto in Pisces and ended with Pluto in Gemini, so Pluto barely transited a square within that whole century. Whereas the 1900s began with Pluto in Gemini and ended with it in Sagittarius, which is like half of the zodiac as opposed to merely a quarter of it. And that’s because of the inordinate amount of time that Pluto spends in Aries and in Taurus, particularly Taurus, the longest.
CB: Do you know how long it spends in Taurus? I think Scorpio is the shortest, isn’t it?
NDB: Scorpio is the shortest, Taurus is the longest. I used to know this off the top of my head, but I mean, it’s multiple decades. It’s at least 30 years.
CB: And it spends such a short time in Scorpio because Scorpio is the best, I think you agree, right?
NDB: No, it’s like it wants to get the hell out of there. “I want to be here as little time as possible.”
CB: Like a bad neighborhood, just driving through really fast.
NDB: Exactly. “Roll up the windows, dear.” But that’s what makes a difference. So as a consequence of that, we mentioned Pluto made its ingress to Leo in 1939, and then Neptune made its ingress to Libra around ’42, ’43. So that within a few years, because again, Neptune’s a little faster than Pluto, by 1945, they’re within just a couple of degrees of sextile, like within two degrees of each other and sextile. And by 1950, they’re making the first of many, many exact sextile aspects that have continued on and off since 1950 and will continue up until the 2030s, the late 2030s. Which is why I say everyone younger than Joe Biden alive today has a Neptune-Pluto sextile within just a few degrees.
CB: So that’s really unique. And it’s just because of the way that their orbits happen to coincide at this point in history, that a centuries worth of people have Pluto sextile Neptune.
NDB: At this one aspect, yeah. But I mean, think of it. I mean, all of us born in this post-war age, we are very different. I mean, it’s hard to sort of group Boomers and Gen X and Millennials together, but there is something about us as a larger group that’s very different from every other generation of human beings that have existed anywhere prior to now. We have very different lives and very different sort of global outlooks and what have you. And obviously access to very different technology, a lot more.
CB: Right. So everybody has that shared aspect, and then it also sets it up because everybody’s born then with Pluto square Neptune that at some point after they’re born, just with their transits where their birth chart stays fixed, but then the planets keep moving forward through the signs of the zodiac in zodiacal order, eventually for all of those people, Pluto will then catch up to and conjoin the spot where their natal Neptune was when they were born.
NDB: That’s right. That’s another thing that defines us as 20th-century people as opposed to people born in the 19th century. Because remember, Neptune and Pluto made a conjunction in the 1890s. So anyone born before that, they would have their transiting Neptune eventually make a conjunction to their natal Pluto, but everyone born afterwards, it’s the Pluto that catches up with the natal Neptune. And particularly for the Boomers and onward, we all get this transit when we’re somewhere in our twenties. I think my parents it only happened for them, they were born in ’46, they got it when they were about 27. I went through the Pluto in Scorpio age when Pluto’s going a little faster, and so I had it, I think, at 23, 24. I’m not sure what age you would’ve had it at.
CB: My Neptune’s at 29 Sagittarius, so as Pluto was changing signs around 2007, 2008.
NDB: So you were about 23, 24.
CB: I think I know somebody that’s 25 right now and is having it if I’m not mistaken.
NDB: Okay. Yeah, it should start to take a little longer now as we get further and further away from Pluto in Scorpio.
CB: Okay. So that’s another hugely important piece that’s often overlooked of generational astrology, is the sequence in which different groups or generations of people will experience, what part of their life they’ll experience certain transits in, and the fact that everybody in this century for the most part is experiencing that in their mid twenties basically. Is that correct? Whereas in the future, let’s move that forward a bit, there’s going to be at some point where people are experiencing that transit in their thirties or in their forties, right?
NDB: Yeah, and eventually it’s going to be a square. The next Neptune-Pluto square is in the 2060s. So by the time this century ends, you’re not going to have people with the natal sextile anymore. We have another sort of 10, 15 years of people being born with that sextile, but eventually they phase out, and by the 2060s, Neptune and Pluto will reach a square.
CB: Okay. Yeah, so it changes not just their natal signature and alignment of different planets generationally, but also just the timeframe in which they experience certain transits. And then at some point they’ll become far enough that individuals are not going to experience transiting Pluto conjoining natal Neptune at all in their lifetime.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. And they’re going to be very… Today we talk about these generations. I mean, one of the reason we’re doing this episode is because we’re very conscious of these generational divides in our culture. I mean, we talk all the time, whether it’s in politics, economics, or culture, we talk about what Gen X this, Millennial that, Zoomer this, Boomer that, and yet all of us are a lot more like each other than the people who are likely to come around in the 2060s. They will be more different from their parents than Zoomers or Millennials are from theirs. We think there’s a generation gap now, it’ll get very interesting.
CB: Do you know we’ve talked a lot about the Boomer generation and we talked a little bit about Generation X, but do you know or do you remember the timeframes of Generation X, Millennial, Zoomer?
NDB: Yeah, I mean more or less. These things are sort of fluid in my opinion. You usually see Gen X starting in 1964. Although, I would argue it’s a little earlier than that. But again, this is the thing, these terms were really defined by demographics in terms of the number of children being born. Because Gen X is when that number sort of slows down, and then when we get to millennials, it’s when it starts to climb again. But also it’s fairly uniquely American, because if you think about the end of the Second World War, it’s not like everyone all over the world is having a lot of babies, it’s Americans who are having a lot of babies. But then that in turn because of America’s place in the zeitgeist, in pop culture, the rock and roll records, for instance, even kids in Britain or Germany or Denmark who are not living through a baby boom, they don’t have the same numbers in terms of young people that America does proportionately, but they’re influenced by the culture, they’re doing all the things that… They’re listening to the same records or a lot of the same records and watching a lot of the same movies that their American counterparts are because that’s where a lot of the culture’s merging from. So it gets kind of funny that way. I mean, some of it is sort of very strongly defined by American demographics, but then in turn there’s a sort of culture aftershock that spreads this phenomenon and defines these generations beyond American borders. But yeah, you have the Boomers up until 1964 where you have this really large demographic, and then the demographic shrinks and you have the Gen X people, which is ’64 to about 1979, 1980. I tend to think of Millennials starting in 1980. I think people would quibble over that, but that’s more or less where I think of it beginning. And then I think of that lasting 20 years up until the new century, and that’s when we get Zoomers.
CB: 2000s forward?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay, all right. Those are some recent ones, and then we’re about to have that Pluto shift just astrologically, which could be a generational divide there in the end of the past decade, decade and a half basically of Pluto going through Capricorn since 2008.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: All right. So I know in terms of the sequence of experiencing certain transits at certain parts of the life, because that’s what’s so interesting about this and so unique, and just not to belabor the point but just to contrast it again, there’s individual inner planet transits that we all experience really consistently, especially for the visible planets at the same times in our life, just sort of in isolation. The Sun returns back to where it was in our birth chart every year. Jupiter returns to where it was in our birth chart every 12 years. Saturn, eventually returns every between 27 and 30 years, and we have our Saturn return around age 28 or so.
NDB: Every eight years our solar return chart has Venus very close to the natal position, sort of repeating the same Venus phase every eight years. So that’s another one that really sort of repeats itself over the course of a human life.
CB: So there’s a tremendous amount of similar repetitions that we all experience on an individual level that are the same, but then there’s something weird about some of these generational transits about how they can shift, and a century worth of people can experience certain transits in one part of their life and another century can experience it in another part of their life. You were talking before about some of the 1800s and things they would experience. Could you mention some of those transits that might have been different for somebody living in the 17 or 1800s versus the 20th century?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there’s those obvious ones with the outer planets that I mentioned already like how Pluto was only in Pisces, Aries, Taurus, and Gemini throughout the 1800s. But then there’s things like the synodic cycle of Venus, which takes 251 years to go all the way around the zodiac. So it’ll spend about 120 years in one sign before gradually wandering into the previous zodiacal sign.
CB: Explain why that is. It’s because every eight years Venus will go retrograde in the same spot in the zodiac, but it’ll subtract two degrees.
NDB: Yeah. It’ll be every eight years minus two days. It’s 2,920 days, which is eight years minus two days. And it’s because of that shift in two days and two zodiacal degrees that the returns happen just two degrees earlier with every successive return. So that in 120 years the returns will have shifted an entire zodiac sign. So if the return used to happen in Scorpio within 120 years, it’ll start happening in Libra.
CB: Give an example of the 2-degree difference though like a recent one for example, we have a Venus retrograde coming up in Leo next year, right? Do you know what degree it’s stationing?
NDB: I forgot. I think 28. I think this is the first one that’s properly in Leo. Because back in 2015, the retrograde station I think happened at zero Virgo.
CB: All right, let’s pick a different one. At least that’s not a good example.
NDB: Actually, it is a good example because it illustrates the shift throughout the 20th century that Venus retrograde used to always happen in Virgo.
CB: Well, let’s take it back incrementally. So it’s going to station next year, what? Summer time? June, July?
NDB: July, yeah.
CB: July of 2023.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: Venus will slow down in the middle of the sky and it will stop and do a U-turn and change directions and it’ll station retrograde at 28 degrees of Leo. Eight years earlier in 2015 and July of 2015 around the same timeframe, it also did the same thing where it slowed down in the middle of the sky, it did a U-turn, but it stationed at 0 degrees of Virgo.
NDB: That’s right. Then eight years prior to that in 2007, it would have been at about 2 degrees of Virgo and eight years prior to that in 1999, at about 4 degrees of Virgo. Then if you keep going back in time every eight years 99 to 91 to 83 to 75 to 67 to 59 to 51 to 43 eventually, you’ll see actually it went from Libra into Virgo if you go back far enough and so on and so forth, I think back in 1911 or something like that.
CB: So there’s like a repetition and that it’s doing that every year is like really close to where it did eight years earlier in the sky, but it’s just off by 2 degrees and therefore there’s a drift. You said it takes how long for that drift?
NDB: 120 years to go through an entire sign. In other words, because it goes backwards like this, indeed people born in the 1800s in the 19th century, there are five Venus retrogrades that have happened every eight years. And in the 19th century, Venus would go retrograde in signs like Pisces, Libra, Sagittarius, Leo, but a different Leo than now like early Leo going into Cancer. Which one have I left out here? I think I said them all, Libra, Sagittarius, Pisces, just catching up.
CB: The point is just that it would only go retrograde basically in five signs.
NDB: In those five signs over the course of most of that century.
CB: Entire century, so that means that it’s leaving out and would not go retrograde in a number of other signs, seven other signs.
NDB: In a number of other signs, right. Then in the 20th century, the one that was in Pisces had wandered to Aquarius, the one that was in Sagittarius had wandered to Scorpio, the one that was in Libra wandered to Virgo, the one that’s now in Leo. There’s one that’s in Gemini these days. In the 20th century, it was in Cancer and then in the 1800s, it was in Leo. So just it all winds around and it takes 251 years for it to cover all the degrees of the zodiac. Anyone born in the 1800s, they would have experienced these transits. Let’s say you’re a Taurus-Sun living your life over the course of the 1800s, you’re going to have Venus go retrograde in your Sun sign every eight years. Whereas if you’re an Aries in the 20th century, you have Venus going retrograde in your Sun sign every eight years.
CB: Okay. Versus there’s going to be some signs where if you have that Sun sign, give me one of them where you’re not going to experience a Venus retrograde over your Sun sign at all currently.
NDB: Currently, there are no Sagittarians who are going to have Venus go retrograde in their Sun sign right now.
CB: Okay. So never experienced a Venus retrograde in their lifetime essentially in their Sun sign?
NDB: That’s right, they won’t.
CB: That’s really significant then because that becomes another consideration or another form of generational astrology of like what transits certain people will experience or won’t experience based on their natal placements and just based on the arrangement of the sky during their lifetime during the course of let’s say a normal lifetime of 70 to 80 years.
NDB: Yep. So yeah, that does change things. That’s another thing that indicates these different ages that successive generations live in. While there might be a huge group of us that’s almost a century old that all have Neptune-Pluto sextiles, there’s some of us born in one century who experienced Venus retrogrades in certain signs and then in the following century, it’s a whole different set of signs that the Venus retrogrades occur.
CB: Right, can we dwell on retrogrades for a moment and why that’s maybe important or what that means? Because one of the things I was thinking about with retrogrades recently is that it’s like holding the same note or repeating the same note three times. Because anytime there’s a retrograde if it’s near a natal planet, that means it’s going to, let’s say, pass over that planet once, then it’s going to station retrograde and will like backing up a car back over it and hit it a second time, and then it’ll go forward again and it’ll hit it one more time. So it’s like if it was music, it was like hitting the same note three times rather than just hitting it once.
NDB: Yeah, or holding the same note over several bars of music even. It depends on how you like to look at it. I mean that is the single most defining factor of outcome of a planet going retrograde is the planet is spending more time in a given sign, in a given area of the zodiac than it spends on the rest of the zodiac. And so, you have this extended period of time where the planets’ significations are playing out over the course of the lives of various individuals.
CB: Yeah, I was thinking about that recently for a few reasons, but one of them like with sect, sometimes when people learn the concept of sect like the night chart people will get depressed about Saturn transits that they get Saturn is the most difficult planet whereas people with day charts Mars is the most difficult planet, but Saturn because it moves so much slower will spend like three years going through the same sect of your chart whereas Mars usually will pass through in like a month or two.
NDB: Yeah, except Mars does have retrogrades which are… And when it does, they’re really long so it’s disproportionate.
CB: Yeah, you spend six or seven months in the same sign.
NDB: In one sign, exactly. And if that’s bad news for you then it can be just as insufferable as a given Saturn transit [inaudible 00:07:00] house in nocturnal chart.
CB: And because Venus goes retrograde, you can have extended long, positive retrograde transit if you have a night chart of Venus, for example.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Venus retrograde in its own does not signify misery or joy. It can produce either depending on the context of the given horoscope involved.
CB: Right. The other thing though that balances out the sect thing that’s unrelated to our discussion, but I was just thinking about how one of the issues I’ve noticed as a day chart person where sometimes I’m not looking forward to those Mars transits is they happen more frequently, and that becomes one of the downsides. Whereas a Saturn transit, you have to deal with that, maybe some stuff happens during and it takes a while, but then eventually it passes on and you can breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not going to experience that transit again, that exact transit again for like 30 years, whereas with Mars you know that that same transit is going to come back about two and a half years later.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, although the retrogrades are a little wackier. The Mars cycle is really asymmetrical.
CB: Yeah, I’m not talking about with retrogrades but just in general as a general point that night chart people should not limit too much because while they get longer challenging transits, they’re less frequent and the day chart people get shorter challenging transits with Mars, but they happen more frequently.
NDB: Right, although my point with its cycle is there’s also a lucky draw or unlucky draw when it comes to Mars because Mars spends a lot more time in Leo than it does in Aquarius by virtue of its cycle like far more, far more time. Mars retrogrades in Aquarius, extended periods of Mars being in Aquarius can happen as infrequently as once every 47 years. We had a retrograde in 2018 Mars retrograde in Aquarius and that was the first one since 1971. Prior to 1971, there had been a very short one at 4 Aquarius wandering into Capricorn in 1939. So it’s really, really infrequent.
In other words, if Mars being in Aquarius, if you’re like the wrong day chart and Aquarius is really strong for you, it’s only once in a lifetime most likely that you’re going to have that misery transit if it happens to be a misery transit for you of Mars going through Aquarius whereas if Mars in Leo is a misery transit for you because of how your chart set up, well that’s going to come around once every 15 years. You could go through three or four of those easily over the course of the human lifetime. It is spread out in this really unequal way, depending on where Mars is most unfortunate for a given individual.
CB: Which is interesting that if you generationally have like let’s say Pluto in Leo and were born in the 1940s.
NDB: Yeah, you’ve had multiple Mars transits to your natal Pluto, exactly.
CB: Or more recently like Millennials with Pluto in Scorpio after that Mars squaring that every 15 years.
NDB: Exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah. It plays out in this very strange way. Let’s think of, okay there’s no one today born with Pluto in Aquarius, but people born back when Pluto was in Aquarius in the late 1700s early 1800s. I guess it wasn’t the 1800s. By the early 1800s, it was in Pisces. But in the late 1700s, people were born with Pluto in Aquarius. Those people probably only once maybe twice, but probably only once ever had a Mars retrograde transit through Aquarius through their natal Pluto as opposed to like we said the Baby Boomers will have that conjunction maybe three or four times over the course of their lifetime.
CB: All right. We’re getting into some major stuff about retrogrades and even retrograde cycles, which otherwise seems somewhat erratic or temporary sometimes themselves have some consistency to them that can also lend to certain generational experiences. Mars though sometimes it crosses signs. It’s not as clean as Venus in terms of staying retrograde in certain signs for an entire century, right?
NDB: Yeah, I was thinking it would, just to get back to the subject of generations, I wanted to talk about Uranus and its transits to the signs because that’s a seven-year period. That really does mark out our little microgeneration, something that’s a little bit… These are smaller denominations and what we’re used to with say Baby Boomers, Gen X so on and so forth, those demographic designations. But Uranus if you’re talking about in an archetypal sense, when Uranus is in a given sign what it seems to do is it seems to pervert the values of that sign. It takes the things that that sign cherishes and values and highlights them but in a very distorted way, in a way that turns those values on their head. I’ll give you a few examples.
In 1961-’62, Uranus made its ingress into Virgo. Now Virgo we think of the sign of being it’s kind of a culturally snobbish. If it likes art, it loves the Dutch Masters. If it likes music, it loves the great composers. It’s really high-minded in its values for art. So, what happens, Uranus goes into Virgo. In the art world, you get Warhol. You’re literally exhibiting his Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings right as Uranus enters Virgo. You get Marvel Comics. The new literature is this cheap pulp storytelling for kids. And the Beatles, the Beatles start their recording contract right as Uranus is going into Virgo. So suddenly you have the great art of the age being Warhol, the great literature of the age being Marvel Comics, the great music of the age being the Beatles. This is not what Virgo cherishes. Virgo has these very pretentious, high-minded values with regard to the arts. And what comes out is something that does introduce great artistic value, but it’s contrary to the values of the sign. You can apply this to any of the signs in Uranus transit through any of the signs and what it seems to do to the value of those signs.
I think Uranus was in Leo for instance from 1954 or ’55 to ’61 and ’62 and these are the generations, this is like the James Dean, Elvis Presley thing. Uranus in Leo was about like these heroic figures. But what you get when Uranus is in Leo are these rebellious heroic figures. They’re not Great War heroes or anything like that. There’s something else about their values as lone individuals, if you will. The king of rock and roll which Elvis was called is just very Uranus in Leo. Virgo I already explained. When Uranus goes into Libra, this is when divorce becomes this really major phenomenon where you have more couples getting divorced then or staying married, which is starting to happen when Uranus is in Libra.
CB: I always became really fascinated earlier this year researching how the Stonewall riots happened really close to the final ingress I think of Uranus into Libra and that was like the beginning or seen often as the beginning in the US as the fight for rights of LGBTQ community and starting to move towards the normalization and legalization of that that would eventually culminate decades later.
NDB: Yeah, you have this emerging visibility of that community, which was not visible up until that point. Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah, so that’s Uranus in Libra.
NDB: In Libra. And the pop culture, it was while Uranus is in Libra where you had your Sonny and Cher, your Donny and Marie, your ABBA, these married couples who come up and they become stars together and then they blow up and divorce. Later when Uranus was in Scorpio, you saw the same thing with Fleetwood Mac. But I think even that group started when Uranus was in Libra. This all plays out in the culture and you get these micro-generations depending on where Uranus is. I think there’s a huge difference between for instance Gen X, some of us have Uranus in Virgo, some of us have Uranus in Libra and there’s a difference between those two. You can subdivide the Gen X generation by those two Uranus placements.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that just reminded me also of sometimes we get major worldwide… One of the things we focus on a lot over the past couple of years since the COVID pandemic and the emergence of that basically around the time of the last Saturn-Pluto conjunction and Capricorn that really was one of the main outer planets signatures that seemed to coincide with that in addition to a few other things and how astrologers had already then looked back at other ones like that like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Libra in the early 1980s and the AIDS epidemic. So sometimes you have other major cultural things that are affecting generations like that that are outer planet alignments that are indicating major shifts in the world sometimes in terms of health and pandemics and things like that.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Then in turn, my wife’s kids they’re all Zoomers and the twins were in their last year of high school when COVID came about, they wound up doing their entire school year online as did my younger daughter. You have this generation going through something. Who knows how that’s going to shape them as adults, the fact that they had to do entire years of school online as opposed to in a classroom? That also is signified by the lingering power that’s held by the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2020.
CB: That makes sense. Or there’s a lot of talk about Millennials at this point and getting screwed in terms of coming of age during the first housing recession when Pluto went into Capricorn in 2008 and just the terrible things that that did too economically and stuff in terms of people getting jobs, and then the economic situation now then having COVID and the pandemic hit, now that they’re in whatever, they’re in their 30s, late 30s, mid late 30s or early 40s and stuff and other unstable economic conditions compared to let’s say previous generations in the larger sense of stability that maybe the Boomers experienced in the second half of the 20th century.
NDB: Right, right. Yeah, a very different effect. The Boomers they had their Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1947 in Leo so it’s when they were relatively young. Then by the time it happened in the ’80s, they’re entering middle age. So they get to really skip that in terms of they didn’t have it happen when they were in their 20s and their 30s, the years when you’re really establishing yourself.
CB: That’s really interesting. Okay. And the Saturn-Pluto that it had other like the AIDS epidemic was the last one and it’s the one that was so obvious because it was right before and that was the emergence of something that was again new at that time. But there had been other Saturn-Pluto conjunctions earlier in the century that had coincided with some major stuff as well, or in some instances like the 1918 was the flu pandemic, right?
NDB: Right, right, when they were conjunct in Cancer. It was a little bit before the pandemic though. By the time the pandemic happened, Saturn had wandered into Cancer. But it took a little while for that pandemic to spread. They called it the Spanish flu, which was grossly unfair to the Spanish. It really should probably be called the Kansas flu. It probably emerged from an army base there and was spread when the Americans went to war.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I remember there was some retrograde when I was looking at it before and it was that retrograde when they came close back to a conjunction that what they call the second deadly wave happened and that was when the majority of the deaths occurred.
NDB: Yeah, but I would… Even the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Cancer, you can even attach it to things like… One thing that typified the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the First World War like in 1915 and ’16 with the one in the early ’80s is the use of poison gas and warfare. Because mustard gas was used in the First World War, first by the Germans and then by the Allies. Then it was used again in that same period when the AIDS epidemic was introduced, the Iran-Iraq War was happening. They were using deadly gases in that warfare as well. Next to the atom bomb is the next most destructive force and one that’s completely… Like an atom bomb, you just can’t fight it.
CB: Yeah, of just some of the horrors of the 20th century that developed technologically or in terms of advancements or changes in war.
NDB: Yeah, the one in 1947 coincided with the partition of India, which was really brutal in so many ways.
CB: Okay. All right, where should we go from here in terms of generational astrology or what haven’t we touched on that are important foundational concepts for a lot of this? I mean, we mentioned the Saturn-Pluto and I’d give a shout out to Richard Tarnas’s book Cosmos and Psyche, which is one of the best contemporary treatments of that approach to just looking at outer planet alignments in history and things that have happened up till this point.
NDB: Yeah, he’s very focused on the outer planets, and largely Uranus-Pluto.
CB: Then another famous 20th century astrologer who was Tarnas’s predecessor in some ways in developing some approach like that is André Barbault. He was a French astrologer that did mundane astrology and really specialized in that and he developed ideas about a cyclic index of different outer planet cycles coinciding and that indicating important turning points like the outbreak of pandemics and things like that. He was one of the few astrologers that-
NDB: To predict it.
CB: Yeah, even though he actually died just a few years before the 2020 pandemic, he had pointed the 2020 in that timeframe as being one of the next likely periods based on those outer planets’ cycles for a major pandemic.
NDB: Yeah, Tarnas and Barbault are the giants whose shoulders I’m standing on when I’m introducing the cycles of Venus and Mars in terms of how those play out conceptually in a very similar way to the way they point out. But obviously, since they’re faster moving, they have little more interaction year to year with people’s overall horoscopes as opposed to just one specific position in the sky. But still, conceptually, it’s a really great way to study mundane astrology to understand individual planetary cycles, but also the cycles of any two planets when they interact, how often they interact, where they interact by aspect.
CB: Right. I mean it raises a really interesting broader point and discussion about prediction in astrology and about obviously the potential we can already see it here forming for that somebody could make long-term predictions about the future of humanity and important turning points in generations or in world history based on outer planet cycles or taking into account generational astrology and things like that and both the potential for doing that as well as some of the limitations of that if you’re talking about let’s say something that’s happening five decades in the future or six or seven decades in the future like 70 years later that you could identify some really important outer planet alignments or you could identify when certain generations would come to a really crucial turning point. But basically your best approach to that partially in addition to planetary cycles is looking at what happened the last time similar repetitions occurred in history and making inferences that becomes one of the keys to astrology is that by looking back into the past, you can then predict the future by seeing what those cycles correlated with in the past and then extrapolating from that into the future.
NDB: Identifying the patterns and looking for the repeats. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean it’s clear that’s exactly how Barbault for instance anticipated a pandemic in 2020.
CB: Right, by looking back at past alignments of when that happened in the 20th century and earlier seeing the pattern and the repetition and then just extrapolating from that into the future. You can do that. I mean that’s also the key to prediction to certain extent in natal astrology as well, which is sitting down with a client and sometimes identifying and one of the things that you’ll do is you’ll go back, and I remember you doing this with me early on just as friends, there would be an upcoming Venus retrograde coming up and you would ask. You’d say, what happened eight years before that during this part of the summer when the Venus retrograde was happening, or what happened eight years before that. Sometimes that helps you to key into one, if that’s an important retrograde for the person personally, because there’s some retrogrades that are more important to certain people or less important. And then two, if there is a recurring theme that comes up in successive eight-year periods.
NDB: That’s right. I mean that’s a method that works best with astrology students, although a large number of my consultations are with people who are astrology students who aren’t just coming in off the street and specific just looking for advice. They’re looking for that, but they’re looking for insight into their chart. They’re learning more about their own astrology chart. So that approach works really well with those people.
The other clients who come to me just from outside the astrology world, I’m a little less likely to use that approach because then I’m just directly trying to help them with the here and now. But with astrology students to really open up their understanding of their chart and in doing so understand their chart, how their chart has responded to the transits of their times. Pulling out things like the Venus synodic cycle works really well because you get a return every eight years. And if you can establish a pattern, if you’re speaking to someone who’s at least in their 20s or their 30s, not only can you look at three or four or five of the preexisting Venus returns that they’ve lived through, but you’re equipping them, you’re arming them to anticipate what the next four or five Venus returns that will occur over the course of their lifetime might mean for them. That’s where it works really, really, really well with astrology students. Because astrology students are already… Part of studying astrology I think anyway involves recreating your timeline, having a really strong understanding of your timeline, of your chronology. The better grasp you have of that the more you’ll gain from studying astrology, studying your life in astrology.
CB: Right, to be able to identify and know when certain events happen in your past so that you can identify what planetary alignments coincided with those placements in the past. Because then, once you get the trajectory of certain things, you can then pinpoint when that theme is going to come up again or echo again in the future. With Venus retrograde, I mean usually it’s staying in the same signs so that’s also happening in the same whole sign house then like every eight years, which simplifies things in terms of activating sometimes the topics of that house. Then there’s going to be some years where Venus might be activated as a Time Lord through perfections or something so it’s going to be more important compared to other years when maybe that’s not activated.
NDB: That’s right. That’s right. When I met you, okay, so you’ve got the Sun in the first half of Scorpio, which is one of the places the Venus retrograde happens. You are born in 1984 so I would have automatically said so 1986 as you were turning two which is a little early for your memory, but then maybe your parents said something to you about the age of two and then 1994 is you were turning 10 years old, and then 2002 is you were turning 18. These are years where your solar return would’ve had Venus retrograde very close to your Sun and conceivably, a pattern would have emerged out of that conversation.
CB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Then I just got very quiet and looked off into the distance probably and I was like, “That’s true. Then, don’t say anything else.” Sometimes the awkward part of the astrologer is just being able to identify certain things. I remember doing an anonymous reading where like five astrologers at a conference read somebody’s chart anonymously and said some stuff. Then the person got up and then they didn’t say anything afterwards, they’re just like, thanks, and that was the end of the thing and we’re all mystified. But then later learned that we had actually really touched on some stuff that’s really true, but they just didn’t feel comfortable talking about it publicly.
NDB: That’s fine actually. When I employ this technique, I always make it clear like, look, maybe it won’t even occur to you now. I’m giving you the information that maybe you’ll be going off for a walk somewhere and you’ll piece it together for yourself. That’s the important thing. It’s not important that I know what it means.
CB: It’s a little annoying if they claim… The common experience is the client is like, “Nothing happened during that timeframe.” Then later in the consultation, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I did get married during that timeframe.”
NDB: I’ve had that happen a few times. Sure, I guess it’s annoying. But the important thing is that you’re equipping the person to understand and be able to track the rest astrological life from their past and project it towards the future so that they have some sense of their place in time, in the times they live in. That’s the main important thing. So sure, it’s nicer for us if we get to be clued into what the story is, but it’s not absolutely necessary. If you think about what’s absolutely necessary, it’s that the subject, the person involved that they understand what that Venus retrograde might mean for them.
CB: Are you trying to say astrological consultations should primarily benefit the client?
NDB: Yeah, I know it’s wild.
CB: I know. I’m a little uncomfortable with that because the astrologer prefer the benefit. Just joking. Well, and so the part of the purpose of that is that you’re helping a client to discover their own biography and their own narrative and their own mythos by applying astrology to their life and chronology and history. And in doing so, you start getting a much clearer idea of what the narrative arc of each person’s life is.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, very often astrology students will come to me and they want to know like I’ve got Venus in such and such sign in the eighth house, what does it mean? My approach is not just to… I mean an astrologer can interpret it in the way they’ve learned. And that can be useful, it usually is. But what’s even more useful is well, let’s look at the transits you’ve had through that sign. You tell me what it means after we’ve looked at how that house and that sign in that planet have interacted with transits over the years. That’ll say a lot more about what it “means” than anything I can say, which will be abstract and true in a general sense, but won’t just perfectly fine tune it, customize it for that one human individual.
CB: Yeah, I love that feeling of that you’re the astrologer and the client, but you’re actually uncovering something together by going into the person’s life history and life story and you’re discovering something almost as a team.
NDB: Absolutely, absolutely. Because they’re the one who lived through it, they’ll understand it far more than you ever will. You just understand it as a system.
CB: It’s like both of you have different pieces of the puzzle. It’s like they have the story and they have access to their memories and you have the astrology and the ability to see the background like the wire framework of everything but then they fill it in like the paint.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, you’re showing them a kind of blueprint and a map. I mean astrology charts have been referred to as maps. I think that’s a legitimate way to think of them. You’re showing them around the map, but the terrain is still theirs.
CB: Yeah, that does bring up though one thing that sucks doing consultations for 20-year-olds because they don’t have as much life history to go back and compare at that point. There’s not as many Venus retrogrades that you can ask them about in eight-year increments.
NDB: No, but you can equip them with knowledge that will prepare them for the rest of their lives. You don’t always have to be asking them about the past. There’s a reason to do that. It’s a little more useful with people who are later in their 20s or in their 30s or onward because there’s more to build on, you’re standing on a higher plateau. But even with younger people, at the very least, you can read their chart, you’re still equipped to read a horoscope, read a nativity and interpret it for the person. Then from there, show them around the blueprint. It’s just they haven’t had as much exposure to the terrain as an older person has to take that metaphor that much further.
CB: Yeah, there’s not as much that’s happened and there’s going to be far more that hasn’t happened in their life most of the time than it has and therefore, some of the things that might be implied or indicated to you as the astrologer sometimes will be things that they haven’t experienced at all yet and may still take decades for them to build up to an experience.
NDB: Yeah, but then it’s your job in that instance to just prepare them for all that, prepare them for everything that’s ahead as opposed to older people where you’re doing that as well, but you’re also doing it on a foundation of everything that’s happened up until then. That’s all. So there’s still a job to do in that case. It just shifts the approach a little bit. You’re doing less of one thing and more of another.
CB: All right, let’s take this back. I don’t remember how we got here, but there might be something about how you can identify individual life stories and life narratives and a person’s mythos through astrology and through their history, but you can more broadly also do that with huge groups of people in generations by looking at outer planet cycles and applying the same processes.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Like we were saying the ’60s or the ’90s or anything like that, you had whole entire generations of people going through something together.
CB: Yeah, or even in terms of long scales history of let’s say two or three centuries. I know one of your articles, for example your article on the ISAR Journal in 2008 was Venus Retrograde: Cycles of Injustice where you showed that in your increments, some of these Venus retrogrades had really coincided with major turning points in terms of racial issues in the United States and things like that.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But that’s less about generations. That’s looking at something that… That’s a pattern that just holds throughout over the course of the history of the oldest Western democracy on the planet, which is something in itself for sure.
CB: I guess I was just thinking of it because then I’d watched that documentary that incorporated some of the Tarnas’s work Changing of the Gods and it was focusing on some of those outer planets’ cycles.
NDB: It was mostly Uranus-Pluto as I recall. I think the whole series was about Uranus-Pluto. They covered plenty just looking at that. They didn’t really get into Neptune or anything. They indicated that that could be done, but they really just focused on Uranus-Pluto.
CB: Yeah. But one of the ones that was impressive was focusing on the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the 1960s and the civil rights movement, but then how it took some of that cycle back in history and showed how there had been other important turning points tied in with that cycle in the past that were tied in with what would eventually become the civil rights movement.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. You had those planets, Uranus and Pluto were making conjunction in the late 1840s, early 1850s. I was mentioning all the revolutions in Europe in 1848 that just preceded that, the Irish Potato Famine and all that stuff so that once those planets were making the conjunction, you had the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance. Or in London, you had the great first World’s Fair where they were introducing all this science and technology to the world. All these cultural, political and technological revolutions coinciding with previous conjunctions as well. I certainly think they mentioned things like the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the famous meeting at Seneca Falls of the proto-feminists of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and people like that, these earlier movements that anticipate what happened in the 1960s.
CB: All right, I’m trying to think of anything else related to generational astrology that we would really want to cover in this introductory overview to the topic or any other conceptual things that are important or even long-term astrological cycles that become relevant to large groups of people.
NDB: We’ve been talking about Uranus, Neptune and Pluto so we haven’t been talking about any of the later planets have been found. But these are very slow moving and I haven’t researched them over the centuries and what have you. Although that’s not to say it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
CB: Aries seems like it’s spending like a century in Aries or something like that.
NDB: They’re very slow moving so it’s a little harder to do this. You’d really have to be looking at a major macro view of history in order for their cycles to make any sense to you whatsoever. But you can still look at say when other planets come along and interact with those bodies. I’m sure there’s something to be learnt from that.
CB: Right. Or you have what used to be the ancient, the traditional medieval approach to historical astrology, which is based on the Jupiter-Saturn cycles that occur every 20 years, but then they’ll occur in the same triplicities for 200. Then eventually it cycles through all of them and comes back to where it started almost a little under like 1,000 years or so.
NDB: Yeah, which is still a totally legitimate way to study history even now. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2020 was also a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2020.
CB: Yeah, we just had to change also the triplicity because that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was in Aquarius in an air sign. Most of the 20th century it was only taking place in Earth signs and now it’s fully switched to air signs for the next like 200 years.
NDB: Right, it does an ingress or regress and egress. In 1980, it happened in Libra, the first air sign, breaking the Earth pattern. But then in 2000, it went back to Taurus. It returned one last time to the Earth pattern. Now it’s fully in the air triplicity for the next 200 years.
CB: Yeah, that’s really cool because then you start getting into not just generational astrology, but even broader thing in terms of a box of human history when you’re talking about 1000-year periods or 200-year or 300-year-periods.
NDB: Yeah, that’s what makes that pattern really useful is looking at 200-year increments.
CB: And so, like with human history and with human society in the history of humanity, which is very complicated and has so many different moving parts and variables and things that are going into the different turning points in history, astrology similarly has all these different variables and cycles and things that are operating at different levels at different times that are similarly mirroring the depth and complexity of what’s happening with humanity. All right. Well, that’s pretty cool, pretty extensive. I think we’ve done a pretty good job talking about all of the major foundational things in terms of this. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything else we should mention or discuss.
NDB: I mean not really. I guess in some sense, we could keep going but I’m drawing a blank. At least we’ve certainly touched on how each of the planets plays its own role in this kind of approach to astrology, approach to looking at generations or macro-generations or micro-generations with Uranus. There are different ways to break these down. Again, the titles that we’re used to the Boomer, Gen X, these post-war terms are largely demographic and mostly in a demographic sense apply to the United States, and then by cultural extension apply to the rest of the Western world. But they by no mean defined everyone in quite the same way.
In China, China had a youth revolution during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, the Cultural Revolution, but it was very different from the hippies. It stayed instigated, but in its own way mirrored what was happening in America in the sense that you had young people taking over the culture and stating a strong divide with their elders. But it went in a radically different direction than the American one.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting from my perspective as an astrologer that maybe this is a better way of defining generations or a sharper way of defining generations that maybe is a little bit more universal in some sense.
NDB: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Actually, this is a good point. I’m glad we’re getting to this. That’s exactly the point. The socio-economic model that we’ve used, this demographic model we’ve used for generations.
CB: Of saying like Millennial, Boomer, etc.?
NDB: Yeah, exactly. It’s very Western, very specifically American although it can extend to the West. It’s demographic, but it’s-
CB: What do you mean by demographic?
NDB: Well, it’s initially defined by American demographics and then it gets the cultural associations after the fact, but the actual designations are done by demographics, by booms or shrinkages in the population.
CB: Okay, population numbers?
NDB: Yeah, that’s what I mean by demographic, sorry. But more broadly, I think that the astrological generations will say something more universal and will for instance represent what was happening to young people in China in the ’60s and what was happening to young people in the United States or Europe in the 1960s. There’s something that’s the same and then there’s something that’s wildly different from region to region.
CB: Sometimes that can also be differentiated or accounted for by things like national charts that are operating potentially just theoretically like the United States having its own chart let’s say versus whatever the chart is of China or is of France or Russia or what have you. Different countries charts may be also responding in different ways to different outer planet shifts or to different generational shifts in terms of different people. Maybe there’s say a generation that fits in with a certain country’s chart better or gets a better deal basically for a certain period of time relative to a country’s chart versus another generation where it’s like things are a little bit more rough in the country during that time or what have you.
NDB: Sure, sure. The Chinese Communist chart in October of 1949 is a very different chart than say the French Fifth Republic of January 1959. Indeed, maybe the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo of the mid 60s appears in different places in those respective charts and maybe that says something about the difference in their youth revolutions. To some degree the youth movements in Europe mirrored the United States. A lot of them had to do with being anti-Vietnam as well as what was also happening in the US. Whereas the things happening in China had almost nothing to do with Vietnam, even though the country is adjacent to Vietnam ironically. That might be a thing to do.
But I think going back to just purely defining generations on astrological terms, I think there you really do have the potential to look at these matters globally without getting caught up in the nuances if one doesn’t want to, but just to make the broader statements like Barbault talking about pandemics happening, it’s Saturn-Pluto conjunctions, which are things that can happen everywhere and most certainly did in this instance.
CB: Yeah, for sure and definitely impacted different countries in different ways for better or worse, but then also-
NDB: But visibly impacted everyone.
CB: Yeah, that we shared, that everybody around the globe was impacted by in some way during that period of time, and also captured or spoke to something about the moment and the essence of what the world was experiencing collectively at that time.
NDB: Exactly, which again we can go back to Uranus-Pluto in the 1960s, which also had this broad global impact, even if the outcome was a little different from country to country, that there was something broadly and universally felt around the world.
CB: Yeah. Then also, sometimes there can be like the rise and fall of different countries or different governments like for example in the late 1980s and early 1990s when you did have that cluster of planets in Capricorn which was Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that formed a triple conjunction in Capricorn in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Then you saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and then the rise of the modern Russian state.
NDB: The rise of the modern Russian state, you also saw the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and some of the adjacent African nations declaring independence. Even in Central and Latin America, you had countries also like Nicaragua having suffered a civil war for so many years finding resolution to that. So a lot of things changing around the globe in different ways. But yeah, it was very universally felt.
CB: Yeah. Suddenly, this is all bring me back to recently somebody was asking me who they could go to for a course to study mundane astrology and I didn’t really have anyone to recommend them. Because one of the problems is that mundane astrology is really complicated. I think that’s a nice little thing to get to. I think we’ve gotten to at this point in realizing that mundane astrology is really complicated because there’s so many moving pieces and so many variables and so many different ways you can look at it. Generational astrology in some sense there becomes, even though we’ve been partially talking about it in a natal context of different individuals that are born and part of different generations, there starts to get some real overlap here with mundane astrology at this point and generational astrology becomes one of the complicating factors for doing mundane astrology.
NDB: Yeah, my advice for anyone studying mundane astrology is read a lot of books that aren’t astrology books. Read sociology, read books about demography, read books about war, disease, geopolitics absolutely, study economics, all these things. Every branch of knowledge can be astrologized. Any of these disciplines can be a study in astrology. The better a handle you have on all these things I think the more you can enhance what you’re doing with mundane astrology. It’s not a vacuum. It’s not like a natal consultation where to some degree of a stranger coming to you and all you have is this abstract model of who they are and you bring it to life with your interpretive skills. That’s not mundane astrology at all. Mundane astrology is a little more passive, where you’re looking at all these different areas and correlating information, collecting and analyzing it. So it’s not as aggressively interpretive, it really depends a lot more on receiving many different channels of information and integrating them and looking at them.
CB: Yeah, and then lies the difficulty in needing to be good at all of those different areas are well read and have education in all of the different areas rather than just specializing in one or something like that.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. Really if you’re someone who just reads astrology books, you might make a really great reader of nativities, but that doesn’t in itself prepare you I think for mundane astrology. You really have to be engaged with the world.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the things I love about astrology and one of the things that I’m so grateful that I discovered it when I did in my teens and early 20s is it gave me a reason and a motivation to want to study all of these different fields because of the application to astrology in those fields and that it’s not enough just to know the astrology, you also have to learn that field. It’s the combination of being good at both of those things that can make you good at applying astrology to it, but it becomes the passion for astrology and the interest in just looking up the planetary cycles or wanting to know what’s the chart for that or what’s the astrological correlation with that becomes a reason to study different fields and have exposure to them or study history and biography and other things like that.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah, in itself your passion for astrology can guide you into all these other areas of knowledge that you wouldn’t necessarily have considered relevant to your life until you realize that oh, but if I do study sociology, I’ll understand astrology more, and that in itself motivates.
CB: Right. That was something for you I know that was appealing about astrology to begin with I think that we talked about in the last episode was just that you’re already interested in biography in and of itself as a genre like individual biographies of individuals, whether they’re audio biographies or written by somebody else or some combination of the two just establishing somebody’s life story and that being interesting in and of itself, but then astrology provided a unique angle for approaching biography.
NDB: Yeah. Astrology was very easily attached to my existing interest when I discovered astrology, but also in turn it was like it poured gasoline on my interest and let those flames spread further. It carried me a greater distance than would have happened if I just carried on reading biographies, but never been engaged with astrology for sure. It’s a two-way street.
CB: Right. All right, that’s brilliant. That’s beautiful. All right. Well, I think that’s it for this episode. So where can people find out more information about you and your work? What do you have coming up? What are you working on?
NDB: I’m working on a lot of stuff that I’m not ready to announce because it’s not at that stage, but I am keeping busy and there will be product in the future. But I can be found at nickdaganbestastrologer.com. My books are open for consultations. I absolutely love giving consultations. Especially astrology students like to come to me and I can certainly help them in ways I think that are unique to me as an astrologer. So if that fascinates people, they should feel welcome to reach out.
CB: Brilliant. Well, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below of this video or on the podcast website, but thanks a lot for joining me today.
NDB: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s been a joy. You’re my favorite Millennial.
CB: Your favorite? Okay, you are my favorite Gen X.
NDB: Really, more than Kurt Cobain? No, thank you.
CB: I mean, yeah, he is a Pisces, but I have a soft spot for the Leo rising as an Aquarius rising. All right, that’s it. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast and we’ll see you again next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped us support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, shout out to the patrons on our producer’s tier including Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issah Sabah and Jake 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. In exchange, you 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 outlined 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 out more about the book at hellenisticastrology.com/book. The book pairs very well with my online course on ancient astrology called the Hellenistic Astrology Course, which has over 100 hours of video lectures where I go into detail about teaching you how to read a birth chart and showing hundreds of example charts in order to really demonstrate how the techniques work in practice. Find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com.
Finally, special thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is available at mountainastrologer.com, the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at honeycomb.co, and the Astro Gold Astrology App, which is available for both iPhone and Android. You can find out more information about that at astrogold.io. There’s also a major astrology conference happening this year that’s being hosted by the International Society for Astrological Research and that’s happening August 25th through the 29th, 2022 in Westminster, Colorado. You can find out more information at isar2022.org.