The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 366, titled:
Astrology Forecast for September 2022
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Catherine Urban
Episode originally released on August 30, 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 September 3, 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, we’re going to be talking about the astrological forecast for September of 2022. Joining me today in the studio is astrologers Austin Coppock and Catherine Urban. Welcome.
CATHERINE URBAN: Thanks for having us, Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
CB: Yeah, thanks for joining me here in person in Denver. The two of you flew in yesterday and you’re going to be attending the big conference for the International Society for Astrological Research that’s taking place this weekend, and we decided to record this forecast in person.
CU: Yeah, I’m attending. I believe Austin is speaking, though.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, I think I’m supposed to.
CB: That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know.
AC: I need to check and see if that’s something I have to do, or if it’s just an option.
CB: Yeah. I love that because it’s like work, you’re actually working this weekend whereas Catherine gets to just hang out and go to lectures and learn different astrology techniques and stuff. You’ve got to actually do your job.
AC: I mean, it’s the expectation. Do I have to? Chris, there’s always a choice.
CU: Mars is in Gemini.
AC: No, I’m sure once I get going I won’t shut up for hours.
CB: Right. Yeah, the Moon in Gemini effect is real.
AC: Yes, indeed. And goaded on by that Mars in Gemini.
CB: Mars in Gemini getting ready to station. We will be talking about that a lot in this episode. All right. So first things first, let me do a quick little overview of some of the transits this month then we’re going to spend some time doing a review of some major news and astrological transits that we’ve observed over the course of the past month since our last forecast. And then after that, we’ll dive into the forecast for September. For those that want to jump ahead to the forecast, just look for the timestamps in the bottom in the description of this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. All right, so here’s the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. We also have a planetary alignments calendar that was put together by Paula Belluomini and some of the major ingresses and stations and lunations this month. We start with a Venus ingress on the 5th of September when Venus moves into the sign of Virgo and departs from a relatively brief trip through Leo that took place last month in August. Then Mercury slows down and stations retrograde in the sign of Libra on the 9th of September. The following day, we have a Full Moon in the sign of Pisces. Then we skip a week and eventually get to the ingress of the Sun into Libra which is the beginning of the fall season in the northern hemisphere on the 22nd of September. The very next day we have a Sun-Mercury cazimi, which is the halfway point to the Mercury retrograde cycle. And on that same day, Mercury retrogrades back from Libra into the sign of Virgo on the 23rd of September. Then we have our second lunation of the month, which is a new Moon in the sign of Libra on the 25th. And finally Venus moves into her home sign of Libra on the 29th of September. So, those are some of the major things that we’re going to be talking about during the course of this episode and over the course of the next month that we’re looking at astrologically here.
All right, so first things first in terms of positive news, are you guys both excited about this ISAR conference? It’s only the second time that there’s been a major astrological conference since the pandemic. The last one was the Northwest Astrology Conference in Seattle in May that I know you attended, Austin, and that was a pretty good time.
AC: Yeah, it was. NORWAC is always good. There was a special excitement or energy from people who hadn’t gotten together or hadn’t seen each other in years. You know, when you’re used to… There are a lot of relationships that you don’t necessarily have to work to maintain because you’re just gonna see each other at the next thing. And that hadn’t happened from through 2020 onward. And so it was just great to reconnect with people, and I imagine that there’ll be a lot of that at ISAR this weekend.
CB: Yeah, I know a lot of the older astrologers said that they used to measure time by time between astrology conferences, especially the United Astrology Conference since it would take place regularly every three or four years. And when we stopped having conferences over the past couple of years, that really threw off my measurement of time as well as a lot of social interactions because all of us are spread out all over the world and that’s usually when you meet up and catch up with friends periodically, like once or twice a year at these conferences.
CU: Yeah, and it’s nice to meet people who you’ve been building community with online because that’s something that’s grown in a really robust way since the pandemic too. So yeah, of course conferences are always fun, but that’s why I’m looking forward to ISAR. Because we haven’t seen each other in a long time, so there’s gonna be an extra special edge to this one of reunion.
CB: Yeah. And I love that because most of my knowledge of specific astrologers at this point from Twitter is just based on my estimation of how good their memes are, their astrology memes. So there’s a lot of people I know. There’s some people like Sylvi Osland who I only knew from online that they make amazing astrology memes until I met them and found out that they were a great person in person as well as in terms of their quality meme content. So I’m sure there’ll be people like that here.
AC: Shout out to Sylvi and her excellent memes.
CB: Yeah. All right. And this conference, it was originally supposed to take place in 2020, so they were planning it way back in like 2017/2018. It’s been put off several times until it’s finally happening now so yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. And there’s something like 500-600 people flying in from around the world this week in order to attend this conference.
CU: Yeah, I’m so looking forward to it. Come say hello.
CB: Yeah. All right.
AC: Oh, and if you come say hello to me and you’re further than 15 feet away and I just squint at you with what seems like derision or hate, it’s just that my eyesight isn’t very good, I’m really trying to make out the facial features and maybe name tag. So, please come within 10 feet. And then if I squint you with derision, I mean it. But if you’re further than 15 feet out, that’s a misunderstanding.
CB: Okay. I’m kind of in-between right now so I’m not going to know during the course of this episode. [laughter]
AC: Oh, you’re close enough.
CB: Okay. You’re squinting at me, or?
AC: You’ll know.
CB: Yeah. All right, the evil eye. Which takes us back, there’s no peacocks of war that were unreleased last month with your background, so this month we’ll have to make do.
AC: Well, you haven’t seen the pattern on my underwear.
CB: Okay, you actually brought them with the wallpaper or you just made it into underwear. Okay, we’ll not go there.
CU: Peacocks of war underwear.
AC: Please be under [Karthikeya].
CB: That’d be a good title of an autobiography; Austin Coppock, The Peacocks of War. All right, so let’s do some review. There’s been a lot of major news over the course of the past month since we did our last episode and we’d like to check in about that sort of thing just in order to follow up on some of the alignments we were focused on when we did the last forecast and how some of that stuff played out once we actually got to that period of time and experienced the events. I was writing down news and events, especially in the first half of the month because towards the beginning of August where we had that Mars-Uranus conjunction on August 1st and then the Mars-Saturn square shortly after that, it seemed like there was just a bunch of crazy stuff happening in the news that was very consistent with some of those really tense aspects that we had focused on, even in the Year Ahead Forecast as being some of the rougher parts of the year. One of the major things that I was writing down that happened around the time of the Mars-Uranus conjunction on August 1st, one of the primary things is that we got a second bonus pandemic. So you got like Pandemic part two where suddenly the Monkey pox cases started shooting up very rapidly around the world, but especially in the US which I think had the leading number of cases of any country in the world. And all of a sudden around late July and early August, a bunch of states started issuing emergencies like public health emergencies. So on August 2nd, California declared a state of emergency over the monkey pox outbreak, and this was following Illinois doing the same on August 1st and New York doing the same on July 29th. Then eventually just a few days later on August 4th, the White House actually declared a National Public Health Emergency for monkey pox because the cases were spreading so rapidly and in order for them to start allocating resources in order to deal with it and develop new vaccines or get a hold of vaccines that were being made in Europe and distributing them and everything else. Weirdly on August 4th, the same day they issued that announcement of the public health emergency, there was this other weird news story that was very Mars-Uranus conjunction which is that three people were killed by a lightning strike near the White House that Thursday and one person was in critical conditions. So I thought that was a weird synchronicity in terms of that and I don’t know fully what the symbolism is, but you don’t hear that happening every day people dying from a lightning strike at the White House the day they signal a public health emergency.
AC: I haven’t studied it in depth but I certainly associated Uranus most with being struck by lightning, because it has all the classic hallmarks of being a massive and irresistible release of energy that happens in a moment.
CU: That would have been when Mars and Uranus aligned with the North Node right there at the beginning of August. That’s pretty literal how that showed up.
CB: Yeah. Especially Mars-Uranus because it’s like a sudden violent thing especially if it’s striking somebody and if it’s hitting them direct enough and hard enough that it’s actually killing, that there’s actually mortalities involved. Let me see if I can share the-
AC: When we had the Mars square Saturn, it was also really tight at that same time. Mars-Saturn is just sort of the classic can-murder-you-if-the-mood-is-right combo, and then adding that to Uranus and the North Node, the fight cards during that early August period were really annoying because interesting and important bouts kept getting ended prematurely by freak injuries. There’d be like, “Freak eye poke. Freak…” Somebody’s knee just goes out in the first round. And so I was like this fucking Mars-Uranus thing! You think you’re like, “Okay, maybe it’ll be an exciting fight.” And it’s like, “No, it’s injury.” People are getting injured but not in the heroic entertaining way that you wanted when you paid somebody dollars to watch the card. [laghs]
CB: Yeah, that was crazy. I know Catherine you and I had talked about the monkey pox and how it was really interesting that it seemed to really ramp up over the past month or two as Mars was transiting through Taurus, and then forming that square with Saturn. Because then you can kind of tie that back into earlier this year when we had our most recent Mars-Saturn conjunction in the sign of Aquarius. And that was when the whole monkey pox thing seemed to really start to spread internationally at that point earlier this year and that was like the beginnings of a new pandemic, interestingly exactly two years after the last Mars-Saturn conjunction when all the lockdowns took place and when the COVID pandemic really exploded all over the world.
CU: Yeah. I remember you and Austin talking about what that might bring about, that Mars Saturn conjunction back in I think that was February, and connecting it back to the first one when COVID came out. And there was a lot of speculation, “What will this Mars-Saturn conjunction bring?” And monkeypox came out. That was a shocker. That was a little bit like, “Oh, we’re doing this again.” But yeah, certainly at this opening square, we did see that ramp up.
CB: Yeah. Because that was one of the things that was so fascinating following where I hadn’t studied the astrology of pandemics much prior to 2020, but then seeing the opening of that pandemic with that pile-up of planets in Capricorn in early 2020 and especially the Mars-Saturn conjunction as well as the Saturn-Pluto, and then at every subsequent hard aspect between Mars and Saturn over the next two years, we got a new development and often new variants in the COVID story. That first square then opposition like the Delta variants, Omicron variants was like Mars in Scorpio, I think. And Delta I think was Mars in Leo, I want to say.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So it will be interesting if we can do sort of a similar thing in terms of tracking this pandemic and how well it’s able to be fought off and suppressed or, you know, made into not a big deal versus how much it continues to spread as a major thing as we get those critical turning points in the Mars-Saturn cycle at the next hard aspects.
AC: Yeah, and I would add to that as far as which horsemen are most active during a given Mars-Saturn cycle. You know, we have pestilence or plague, we also have feminine war this time as well. And so I imagine there’ll be a fair amount of being able to track those via the Mars-Saturn cycle. And so one interesting bit about the Mars-Saturn cycle that will tie into a topic we’re gonna get to later is that while we’re at the square now, it’s going to be– and you get the opposition after Mars does another three signs– but it’s going to be a lot longer than normal because Mars is going to have basically an eight-month pause in one sign before it gets on to the rest of the cycle. So the time distance between the Mars-Saturn square and the Mars-Saturn opposition instead of being six months it’s going to be more like 12 months or 11 months. So we have this pause coming up in that cycle.
CB: And that’s due to the Mars retrograde that we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about in this episode. So here’s a new graphic that StellaGraphia made for me from Reddit that shows the upcoming Mars retrograde and when the shadow period begins, which is actually this month on September 3rd when Mars passes eight degrees of Gemini since that’s the degree that it will later retrograde back to. And then we have the retrograde station itself in late October, the direct station in January, and finally the post retrograde shadow ending in mid-March. Although it’s not until a little bit after that Mars actually leaves Gemini.
AC: Yeah, it’s almost April before Mars leaves Gemini.
CU: Yeah, March 25th.
CB: And luckily for the mutable signs, that’s just in time for Saturn to ingress into Pisces. Yeah, exciting times to be a mutable person. I’m okay with that. It’ll take a little bit of the weight off of the fixed signs that have been getting the brunt of it over the past couple of years with Saturn going through Aquarius and then more recently the lovely set of eclipses that have been taking place that have been sometimes destabilising and causing major endings or major beginnings with a lot of the fixed sign people I know.
AC: A lot of churn.
CB: Yeah, churning. All right, so that is a whole thing that we’re tracking and paying attention to in terms of pandemic part two with a vengeance. Other news stories… One of the interesting things that we talked about a little bit but I don’t know if we articulated in the exact way where we talked about, you know, 12 years ago one of the things I remembered so vividly about Jupiter in Aries and the Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aries was around the time that that happened, there was the assassination of Osama bin Laden. And now weirdly 12 years later, we’ve got Jupiter in Aries again and we’ve seen a rash of assassination suddenly taking place recently over the course of the past month or so, which has been really striking to see.
AC: Right. We had Shinzo Abe who is the former Prime Minister of Japan. We had– was it Zawahiri?
CB: Yeah, Ayman al-Zawahiri who was the leader at this point of al Qaeda after Bin Laden was killed 12 years ago. So it’s exactly one Jupiter cycle later that the next leader basically of al Qaeda was assassinated.
AC: Is it Zawahiri…? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Forgive me for my lack of pronunciation people who know how to pronounce it. And then we also had the daughter of a prominent Russian political figure. No, he wasn’t an oligarch. He’s sort of a leading intellectual figure on the Russian right, maybe that’s not a bad way to characterize him. Alexander Dugin’s daughter was exploded in a car bomb that people believe was meant for him, which is very high-level assassination within Russia. That’s a lot of assassinations for one month.
CB: Yeah, that is a lot and I kind of associated that a little bit the Jupiter in Aries stuff. I know there’s other things going on in terms of that but that was definitely a crazy one in terms of they obviously attempting to assassinate him. And then supposedly they changed cars at the last minute, and then his daughter was killed. And that seems like– because there’s also speculation about who did that. Was it Ukraine? Was it the US, whether foreign agents? Or was it some sort of internal power struggle that’s taking place in Russia right now that’s sort of a preview of future instability or something like that?
AC: Yeah. As I said to you before and as we’ve talked about on the podcast, the years when Saturn and Neptune are conjunct or co-present have been for the last 100 plus years major pivot point for Russia. Last time was the fall of the Soviet Union, the time before that was the death of Stalin, the time before that was the Russian Revolution. And so we are not at that point yet, but that starts next March. Right, so we’re at the doorstep so some sort of churning and instability or volatilization internally with Russia just makes sense historically if we’re that close to a pairing of planets that at least for the last 100 plus years has reliably meant big change in the internal governance and structure of Russia.
CB: Right. Yeah. And what’s interesting about the target of that one is that this guy, you know, there’s different speculation about the extent to which he wrote a book in 1997 that kind of yearly seems to outline many of the steps that Russia ended up taking over the past two decades, including some of the things it advocated like intervention in the UK and trying to encourage the UK to break away from the EU. It tried to advocate using propaganda means in order to increase internal tensions in the United States in order to sort of sideline the United States and in order to distance it from NATO and its alliances. And then it also mentioned taking Ukraine back and making it a part of Russia again even though it was an independent country in 1997. So that’s one of the reasons that a lot of people are paying attention to what just happened in the attempt to assassinate this guy because of the questions about how much he’s been very influential at the very least in influencing some of Russia’s direction and policy over the course of the past couple of decades.
AC: Yeah. And people sort of abbreviate Dugin as Putin’s Rasputin, which is vaguely not entirely wrong as far as a catchphrase or like something condensed into a hot take. It seems like he’s had a pretty significant ideological impact and perhaps even a strong policy impact, but there’s a lot of like… What I’ve looked into it I’ve seen a lot of argument as to how close or not close he is with Putin and direct influence and all that, but yeah, an important figure certainly in contemporary Russian politics and for some time.
CB: Yeah. And then his daughter was 29 years old so she was Saturn in Aquarius, so that’s kind of even just from a personal human standpoint, kind of a sad Saturn return story from an astrological perspective of a person not nearly living as long as their first Saturn return or Saturn cycle for whatever that’s worth. Anyways not to dwell on that any longer, other news stories or other major things. I guess the other major thing that came up in the news that all the astrologers were paying attention to and talking about was the raid on one of Trumps homes in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the FBI raided his house and broke into or opened up a safe that contains some documents and took them. And the rumours are that it has something to do with having classified documents that he wasn’t supposed to have, and whether that was legal or not legal and whether he’ll run into actual legal issues as a result of that if they’ll pursue legal charges. But all of the astrologers noticed that when that raid took place, Mars was at about 23-24 Taurus, which was exactly on the degree of Trump’s Midheaven at 24 Taurus. So that was a pretty striking astrological transit or an example of an astrological transit where it’s not just conjoining, his Midheaven, but also by extension it would be opposing the degree of his IC. And literally his house was broken into or penetrated by foreign– not foreign but outside forces. And then things were taken forcibly.
AC: Yeah. And if we’re doing Leo rising, we’ve got Mars at the top of the chart– and then in a very prominent public place and this is certainly an event that people have been talking about– but Mars is the ruler of the fourth so Mars is naturally going to– in a Leo rising chart, Mars is going to tell you about the status of the home, and whether or not there are federal agents entering it. People think Mars and soldiers and that’s not wrong, but any sort of armed enforcement agents of any particular group or agency are Mars soldiers. Right. And so it’s not just cops and soldiers.
CU: Yeah. And one of the themes I was seeing around that event was this very Saturnian theme of consequences. So Trump definitely experienced the raid or the search of his home, but I also saw Alex Jones was on trial too and then there was also the trial of Brittney Griner. So what we saw were some big decisions that week with Saturn, being closely involved with the nodes and with Mars squaring Saturn closely configured to the nodes. That was a very palpable theme for me, was this Saturnian theme of consequences and decisions.
AC: Who was Brittney Griner?
CU: She was the WNBA player and she got stopped at a Russian airport with a gramme of CBD or something like that. So a lot of people were critiquing that her sentence was very harsh, but there’s kind of a strategy apparently, the Russians are trying to trade prisoners basically.
CB: Okay. So she’s a basketball, but the timing was just terrible because she was arrested with some marijuana literally the same month or a week before the invasion of Ukraine. It was the worst time to be an American and getting arrested for breaking the law in Russia because the US and Russia, you know, their tensions just came to a head worse than they’ve been in over 30 years at that point, literally the same month. So she ended up being a bit of a political pawn and has been sentenced to I think nine years in prison for that. So there’s a lot of questions right now about whether they’ll be able to trade and do a prisoner swap or whether she’s in trouble for the long term.
AC: Right. So that’s interesting that Saturnian theme. I would add to it that it seems like the topic of what will be the result of these actions or what will be the penalty for these actions seems to have been brought up, but the results in a lot of cases seem I should say up in the air. With the Mar-a-Lago raid, it’s like, “Well, that happened and I’ve heard 20 different scenarios of how it can play out, but it doesn’t seem very clear.” And even with from what I know of the Alex Jones stuff, it’s like, “Well, there’s the sentence, but then there’s this and this. And so it might not be the blah, blah, blah.” And then even though this isn’t a matter of legal justice, another thing that happened last month was the saber-rattling around Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and the boundary testing and the escalation of tensions.
CB: That was also around the time of the Mars-Uranus conjunction?
CU: Yeah.
CB: It was on August 2nd, actually.
AC: Yeah. And so we’ve had this theme where we’re like, “What are the consequences of that?” So all this is getting brought up but I think because we have the sort of unstable who-the-fuck-knows quality of Uranus and Rahu or the North Node in these configurations, it’s sort of like this happened and we don’t know what the result is going to be. It’s almost like you can pretty meaningfully fold in the 30 different things we have on our docket into like, it’s just all escalating instability and volatility and in a very predictable way which we say, “Well, this is all just going to add to the instability. It’s a spike of instability.” And so the consequences of every one of these things, it’s sort of like, “Well, what does that mean?” It actually means more things could happen because it means things are more up in the air and less subtle than we thought. Whether it’s the US and China, whether it’s internal Russian politics, whether it’s monkey pox, it’s sort of like… You know, there’s a very strong who-fucking-knows, because it’s almost like opening up questions via events rather than showing us what outcomes are going to be.
CB: Yeah. And what you’re saying is just reminding me that it’s happening in the backdrop and that Mars-Uranus stuff was really reactivating the Saturn-Uranus Square, which keeps inching closer and closer to the closest it’s gonna get this year over the course of the next month in late September and early October. But just that notion of of instability and opening up some chaos where everything is suddenly up in the air that was previously settled, let’s say?
CU: Yeah, Saturn and Uranus get within half of a degree of one another toward the end of September. So even though we don’t see any more exact hits, it’s still very strong for us right now and then of course moving into eclipse season. So we’re not done with Saturn-Uranus yet.
CB: Yeah. That’s very important, that’s a really good reminder. And then the last thing and then we’ll move on, but about the Trump thing with Mar-a-Lago and notion of consequences was just… It was so interesting last month we had talked about how Mars when it was transiting through the early degrees of Taurus, we saw so much news and focus on the hearings that were taking place about the January 6th commission, basically. And they were dredging up all of those things that had happened the last time that Mars was in early Taurus, which is actually when the January 6th insurrection took place. So a Mars return in this instance back into Trump’s 10th house was kind of re-dredging up and releasing news about something that had happened previously that was not good for his 10th house in his career. But then what was interesting from a technical standpoint just purely as an astrologer was when Mars was early in the 10th whole sign house, but it was when Mars got to the exact degree of his Midheaven at 24 Taurus that the Mar-a-Lago raid took place. And then something potentially more detrimental to his career and the other 10th house life direction things actually took place with the FBI raid. So it’s like a little bit of a distinction that we always talk about as a theoretical distinction where if something’s transiting through your 10th whole sign house, you’ll start sometimes getting significations of that planet; if it’s a malefic, sometimes problems or if it’s a benefic, sometimes good things. But when it builds up and actually hits the degree of the Midheaven, sometimes that’s the most potent time for some sort of major event to take place during the course of that transit.
CU: Yeah, and in this case because this was such a public Mars conjunction with his Midheaven, that event– the search of Mar-a-Lago– that led to a lot of anger. A lot of people reacted to that event in a very angry way and that could be attributed to Mars’s alignment with Algol, because his Midheaven isn’t too far away from it. So a couple days later we saw a couple very Algol events take place, there was the nail gun in Cincinnati.
CB: Explain it.
CU: There was a guy who decided he was going to retaliate against the FBI and he took a nail gun into the FBI building in Cincinnati and thought he could get through the bulletproof glass with it. Shot a bunch of them and then he tried to escape and then there was a chase, and he was ultimately killed by the FBI.
CB: Right, he died in a shootout with the FBI. So there was that. A lot the Conservatives were saying to disband the FBI and other stuff, and that ramped up sometimes a crazy person who actually went in and tried to kill a bunch of FBI members.
AC: Yeah, we’re talking about Algol and losing your head?
CU: Yeah.
AC: Right. Like, I’m gonna fight the FBI with a nail gun and whatever– I think he had a sidearm or rifle. But that’s not a rational calculation. [laughs] Even if you have a legitimate critique of the FBI as an institution, that is not going to be an effective way of facilitating change, other than the change from being alive to being dead.
CU: Yeah, and then there was one other Mars-Algol one. Obviously with Mars being a malefic planet and having a lot to do with injury and weaponry, aligning with Algol you can see some of these pretty explosive acts that are actually kind of shocking. So the other one was that same weekend, a man crashed his car into a barricade near the Capitol and shot a bunch of bullets in the air and then yeah, he shot himself.
CB: Okay. Yeah, so there’s a lot of tensions with the Mars-Uranus and Mars-Saturn stuff last month and it really did end up peaking. So it’s really interesting to witness that and just to document it now in terms of some of the validation of things we said both in the forecast last month as well as in the Year Ahead forecast where that was one of the timeframes we pointed to that just looked very tense. And now we’ve sort of seen some of that. So good news, Mars has departed from that sign. It has departed from Taurus so we’re going to move a little bit away at least from having that trigger of Mars at the exact degrees of Saturn-Uranus and some of the tensions associated with it. We have some new complications we’ll have to deal with with Mars going retrograde and then spending the next 10 or 20 years in the sign of Gemini. But at least that period of the years is over and is moving to the past at this point.
CU: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Well, that was all of the news stuff that I wanted to review for this month. Is there anything else we should mention before we move into the forecast?
AC: I think that about covers it. I mean, what we predicted was basically chaos grab bag and that’s what we got. You know, it was all sorts of things, all sorts of little volatilizing destabilising things. We might want to mention we talked about explosions and there was another large explosion in Beirut, which is just destabilisation on a physical structural level; fits in very nicely with all the other types of explosive and destabilising events that we’ve described.
CB: Yeah. That was like a grain silo that had been damaged in the explosion back in August of 2020 caught fire and then collapsed on July 31st. So it was kind of re-dredging up a lot of the things from what had happened with that two years earlier and was like a very Mars-Uranus type alignment or event. All right, cool. Well, in that case why don’t we transition into talking about the forecast?
CU: Yeah.
CB: Let’s see. Oh yeah, why don’t we mention the software and our sponsor for this episode. People are always asking me what software I use on the forecast episodes so I thought I’d go ahead and mention it here. So we use a software called Solar Fire for Windows, which is a software programme or a whole suite that’s made by a company called Astrolabe at alabe.com. This is what we use to cast natal charts, we also use it to animate charts, to move them forward and backwards in time, and it can also be used to store a large database of charts and have different folders. So you can do research projects and so you can search through the files and search through different placements. This was super helpful for me when I was researching my book because with Solar Fire, you can put it and say, “Show me every chart that has Cancer rising and Venus and Libra,” for example. And then it’ll spit out 10 of the charts that you have in your folder that have that placement. It kind of speeds up research and is a good tool for that. So that’s the programme I use for Windows and you can use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount on that programme at alabe.com. The other programme that I use for Mac when I’m using Mac is made by the same programming company originally, but it’s called Astro Gold for Mac OS. This is also like Solar Fire in that it’s a full suite, but they’ve been integrating both modern and as well as some great traditional astrology techniques over the past few years. So it’ll calculate lots or Arabic parts, it’ll calculate zodiac releasing, annual perfections, and a bunch of cool techniques like that that they’ve been asking me about and then implementing in the programme over the past few years. You can get that programme at astrogold.io, and you can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 all one word to get a discount on that. What programmes do you two use?
AC: I’m using that right now. Yeah, I’m using that Solar Fire app right now and I’ve been clicking back and forth between the days of August and September.
CB: Nice.
AC: No, it’s great. I daresay it’s kind of just the gold standard for chart software– maybe there’s something else out there that I don’t know about and I don’t mean to insult them, but it’s kind of it’s the baseline, it does everything you need. It’s sort of the baseline professional astrology software. And you can customize the display so that it shows you the points that you want and does not show you the points that you don’t want. Obviously, you can choose house system. But yeah, you can customise it so that it does it the way that you like. I’ve used that as my primary astrology software for I don’t know, five years. I think whatever the last time that Alabe ran a discount, I used the discount and bought it. Or the last time that we advertised a discount. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, you probably used my promo code.
CB: Yeah, I totally used the promo code I wanna say five years ago.
CB: Yeah, I think everybody starts with astro.com– especially from our generation with the three of us, we all start with astro.com, which is a free place but you can only store up to 100 charts so it’s kind of limited. But everybody eventually graduates, especially once you get into professional astrology doing it more seriously into getting a Solar Fire where you can just have so many more options and store an infinite amount of charts.
CU: Yeah, I think for me when I was using astro.com they would only let you have 20 charts. So that’s why I got- I started using Solar Fire 10 years ago. And it’s a super user-friendly software, it’s really easy to just jump right in there and get to chart reading. But I continue to learn new things about it all the time. Like, I just learned how to add those user-defined points. I just learned how to do that not too long ago. So yeah, I’m always learning new things about the software which is super cool.
CB: Yeah. I’ve got a special layout that I designed that’s available. I have a YouTube video about it so if you just search Hellenistic Layout for Solar Fire, you’ll find the video that I put out that has a link to download my exact page file for Solar Fire so you can get your charts to look exactly like this, that shows the Arabic parts and everything else.
CU: I think that’s where I learned how to do that.
CB: Okay. All right, cool. Well, all right, that’s our plug for Solar Fire and Astro Gold. Why don’t we move into talking about the forecast in earnest at this point for September? All right, let me cast a chart for September 1st in Solar Fire. And there’s the chart for the moment, we did a Scorpio rising electional chart today with the Moon applying to conjoin Venus. Very, very beautiful. All right, here’s the chart for September 1st set for about noon. This is where the planets will start out at the very beginning of the month. We see the Sun moving through Virgo so we’re about nine degrees into Virgo season at the beginning of September. I’ve got to record the Virgo episode here pretty soon. Let me make sure that’s showing. Yes, okay. Other chart placements, we see Mars is at six degrees of Gemini. So it’s there in Gemini like we said through March and April basically. But it’s only two degrees away from hitting its shadow degree when it gets to eight degrees of Gemini. That’s the degree that it’s going to retrograde back to. So as soon as we open September, it’s just like then Mars in Gemini show has begun essentially, I think.
CU: Yeah, similar to what you were saying in our example chart earlier. Mars entering Gemini is going to present some themes, so by the beginning of September we are settling into that new energy. And shortly as we get into September, it’s September 3rd when Mars aligns with that degree it’s going to retrograde back to in the middle of January. We should start to have a better idea of what it is that we’re going to be working with during our personal Mars retrograde story.
CB: For sure. Yeah, and that’s the important thing about shadow degrees. It’s that sometimes you’ll do something at that point when Mars passes over the shadow degree or once shortly after it passes over that point in between the shadow degree and once it gets to the actual station in late October, sometimes you’ll do something that you think is just a once-and-done thing or you do something that you think shouldn’t be a big deal and it should be over with once you accomplish it. But sort of similar to a Mercury retrograde when Mars eventually stations retrograde and comes back to those degrees, it’s revisiting something. It’s revisiting a part of your chart that Mars had tread over previously. So sometimes you have to go back and sometimes it stretches out or extends a series of events much longer than it would be otherwise when Mars transits are usually very brief things.
AC: Yeah. And I actually bore witness to a great example of that last weekend with Mars’s ingress into Gemini. Right. So there’s the shadow degrees, which is one way of thinking of the total shape of the Mars retrograde, but then there’s also just the- It’s going to be in Gemini from this last weekend until the 25th of March, right? And so if you have the Moon in Gemini like me or if you have any planet in Gemini, then Mars is going to be hanging out with that planet the entire time. And so you have, just like as Chris you’re probably with Mercury, usually a Mercury story lasts three or four weeks except with a Mercury retrograde where you might have two months of Mercury in the same sign. And if for example you have Mars in Gemini, you are about to have probably the longest Mars return of your entire life, where it’s going to be eight months of Mars in the same sign. And so last weekend literally the day of Mars’s ingress into Gemini, there was a mixed martial arts match between Kamaru Usman and Leon Edwards. Kamaru is largely acknowledged as sort of the greatest pound-for-pound fighter who’s currently active, and everybody was talking about who’s gonna fight next after Leon and next after that? Because it was just assumed he was going to plow through him. He was one away from tying the all-time greatest win streak, and everybody just thought he was going to bulldoze through. And he did, 24 minutes out of the 25. And then at about the 24th-minute mark, he got head-kicked perfectly and was just in another dimension. He was sent to the shadow realm as it were. It was a massive upset and I was looking… And so it literally destroyed the win streak which took 10 years to build, completely changed the story. And I went and looked up Kamaru’s chart– we don’t have a time of birth but we have the day– and sure enough he has Mars in Gemini. And it’s about 25, it’s right where Mars is going to station retrograde. And so instead of the a one and done Mars story like, “Defeat this opponent, fight somebody new in four months, defeat them, et cetera, et cetera,” it’s now going to be this odyssey of “Can he…?” all these questions, Mars questions. Mercury retrograde problematizes or turns statements into questions, and all retrogrades do that to a certain degree. With Mars, it’s Mars questions, right? People thought Kamaru’s supremacy was a certain thing, it was relatively unquestioned. People would be like, “Yeah, but he’s boring. Of course he wins, but he’s boring.” Or, “No, he’s exciting. You just can’t see it.” But now the question is like, “Oh, is this over? Was this hype?” Blah, blah, blah. And from a very simple lived level, his entire life is going to be about the rematch probably for the next eight months.
CB: Right. So he’s going to be going through a Rocky-style training montage over the next several months in order to have a rematch.
AC: Yeah, and it’s a huge question. He hasn’t had questions around his performance or his career like this for 10 years. It’s just been this slow, steady, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win. Right? And we’re talking about the Martial realm here with Mars, right? And in whatever arena of life is Martial, there are dramatic wins and losses. Mars is very harsh to losers and very kind to winners. It’s a polarising planet in that sense. And so yeah, that whole story is different now and from Leon’s perspective and of course when you look at Leon’s chart, he has Mars at 20 Virgo. So squared Mars also going to get transmitted this whole time by a square but it’s the other Mercury-ruled Mars, so of course they’re wrapped up in this story together for like, “Oh, was that just a fluke? Are you the real champion or did you just get lucky for literally one quarter of one second?” Sometimes there are rematches immediately, sometimes there aren’t. In this case, there absolutely will. So it’s again Mars retrograde. What are the things gonna look like at the end of the Mars retrograde? It’s like both of these men’s lives for the next eight months.
CU: Yeah. And 10 years of a winning streak is quite a long time that sort of sets a standard for a person, and very often a Mars retrograde is a question of, “What’s my direction? Where am I going? What’s my plan of attack?” So whether you are this specific fighter or someone listening in the audience, yeah, some of the things that are going to start to come up for us is what is my plan of attack? What direction am I going? Mars will also bring up a lot of themes around what we’re passionate about, what we desire, what we’re going after. And with Mars and Gemini tending to scatter or energy a little bit, that can make it a bigger question of, yeah, which pathway feels the most viable for me at this time? So a lot of those different pathways should be bubbling up for us now.
CB: Yeah. So over the next eight months, all of us will have our own personal Rocky-style trading montage where Eye of The Tiger is playing in the background and you’re having to maybe have some obstacle or in some instances some defeat, and then having to linger on that point and sometimes go back and attempt to win a second round or maybe even a third round in some instances as Mars passes back over certain degrees of the chart, especially if you have anything between eight and 25 degrees of the mutable signs because those are the station degrees of Mars. If you have anything in those degrees then you’re going to have three exact transits or hard aspects of Mars over those placements in your chart over the course of the next several months. So, super good to pay attention to. What are some significations of Mars? Why don’t we talk about because since Mars moved into Gemini, it’s bringing in energy, it’s speeding up the pace of things in some instances at least during the initial phase of Mars moving into that sign, but it’s also bringing some heat, some inflammation. What are other good Mars-type keywords or significations that are relevant that people can think about when they’re thinking about what whole sign house Mars has just moved into where it’s going to stay for the next eight months?
CU: Mars energizes. So think about the Gemini house in your chart, Mars is energizing that. Actually here on September 1st, Mars makes its only sextile with Jupiter in Aries. And to me, that’s like a go-ahead. That’s like this Jupiter and Aries go on, take the risk, and Mars is like, “Yeah, I’m about that.” And so there’s something about wanting to diversify Gemini, like scatter your direction a little bit. So Mars is definitely energizing this area of our chart.
CB: Yeah, I like that sextile on September 1st, it’s a positive sextile between Mars and Jupiter with reception. We see Mercury is trining Mars also with reception, although it doesn’t complete the aspect because Mercury is going to slow down and station retrograde. So that’s emphasizing some other sort of retrograde energy this month that we’ll be talking about more later, but at least initially the first part of the month has something flowing about some of those aspects.
CU: Yeah.
AC: All right. Sorry, I was just jotting a few things down. So yeah, in Gemini, Mars brings that hot and sharp energy to communications and speech. I felt like I fully connected with the Mars in Gemini energy for the first time yesterday when I was stressing about the introduction to mantras talk that I’m giving at ISAR. And I was like, “Oh, Mantra. It’s literally all about the power of speech. You know, what is spoken or articulated and the structure of speech to affect one’s reality as well as perhaps shared reality. And I felt the Mars in Gemini sort of join in with that. It was like, “Yes, this is really- In the beginning was the Word, and the Word is powerful in shaping events.” So, that as a general theme. Also whenever we have Mars and Mercury connection, you have, “How can words be malefic?” Right? So you have criticisms, you have slander and gossip, which is almost a little bit of… The baseline is so high in the age of social media, it seems almost counterproductive to say, “Oh, this is a slander transit.” But it is. It is. And then in terms of sort of Martial archetypes or situations, on a personal level a title of a book comes to mind which is a collection of movement patterns, which is Footwork Wins Fights. Right? Not the punches or the kicks or the wrestling, but the pattern of movement that makes any of those possible or impossible. And then in an explicit warfare context, I think intel and airpower seem like Mars in Gemini.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioning slander, what was the phrase? I don’t know, Mercury in Gemini is like-
CU: It’s giving internet-troll energy.
CB: Yeah. What was funny about that is it just reminded me that the very first tweet on Twitter happened during Mars in Gemini. Twitter has a nice Mars in Gemini signature in terms of that.
CU: Short and sweet.
CB: Not always sweet, but yeah.
CU: Cutting to the point?
CB: Yeah, sometimes just brutally pithy statements that get to the core of something that might be like a difficult thing on the receiving end. But yeah, Mars can be very direct.
CU: That brings me to another funny layer of that. And that’s that the popularisation of Twitter made it sort of more acceptable to not use punctuation or proper capitalization and whatnot. In Gemini, it just kind of puts it out there. That’s one of the things that I like about Mars in Gemini, is that it gives you the freedom to try something out without expectation of it being necessarily polished. Mars in Gemini isn’t afraid to make a little bit of a fool of themselves to fall on their ass and make a joke about it afterwards. It gives us the freedom to try new things or new ways of taking action.
CB: Yeah, shoot first and ask questions later. But sometimes verbally. And that actually brings up or that reminds me in the news just in the past few days, there was an expose of a former security person that worked for Twitter who went public saying that their security standards were really bad and that there were all sorts of internal problems within the company. So that’s actually kind of interesting now thinking about that as a Mars ingressing into Gemini transit as well.
AC: Oh, thank you for saying that because another key Mars-Mercury or Mars in a Mercury sign signification that you find for literally thousands of years in tax is thieves.
CB: Right.
CU: Oh.
AC: Right. The clever, agile, circumventing the defenses, jumping the fence, going under, over, finding the hole and whatever the protective structure is to get the goods.
CU: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and the taking away of something. Because that reminds me of something you were saying when you were talking about that MMA fight, because in that context especially in a fighting context of a one-on-one thing, the attitude that each fighter has to take is you have to lose in order for me to win. Or you have to lose or even die in some instances in order for me to survive. And that sort of mentality is a very Martial-type mentality.
AC: Right, zero-sum games. Not everything’s a zero-sum game, but Mars likes zero-sum games like chess. And yeah, Leon Edwards literally stole what people thought was gonna be Kamaru’s future. He can come back and he can win until he retires, but he’s never beating the win streak. That’s never coming back, he never beats Anderson Silva’s record. There was an entire future that was stolen, a story is gone now.
CB: Yeah, it was kind of snatched in a moment at the last minute.
AC: Well, and literally took the belt. I think they make a new belt, they don’t actually come to your house to take the old belt. But you know, it’s a title and that title is no longer his.
CB: Okay.
CU: Well, that’s interesting that we have this signature of a sharp tongue with Mars in Gemini, because our next aspect is Mercury and Libra opposite Jupiter.
CB: Right. That’s going to be tying us into… Let me pull that up here in the Solar Fire just to show the chart. So we see on September 1st, Mercury starts out at five, Libra and Jupiter is at six. So yeah, the very next day, that day on the 2nd and a little bit into the 3rd, Mercury exactly opposes Jupiter from six Libra to six degrees of Aries. So that’s one of our other signatures this month. Early on, and because Mercury is slowing down and it’s going to station retrograde at eight degrees of Libra, it’s kind of gonna hold that aspect and then repeat it when it retrogrades and goes back a second time.
CU: Yeah, we’re gonna be working with this one for over a month here. And the point of my segue here is that I think we’re gonna see some strong debate energy with this one. You know, Jupiter in Aries wanting to speak one’s truth, wanting to put one’s beliefs out there, wear them on their sleeve. And it’s very outspoken, a very opinionated energy. But then you have Mercury in Libra who is really focused on harmonization, keeping the peace, diplomacy, the presentation of language, the curation of language, the cultivation of language. So we have these two forces sort of at odds and we’re going to be working with that all month.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good thing to keep in mind. So Mercury stationing retrograde in the sign of Libra. It’s already past its shadow degree because Mercury is going to retrograde back to 24 degrees of Virgo. It’s going to straddle the axis or the cusp between Virgo and Libra, and Mercury is going to retrograde back and it’s going to station direct opposite to Neptune. So the opening station, the Mercury retrograde station, is going to be opposite Jupiter and then it’s going to station direct opposite Neptune. That’s kind of some tense energies pulling things in two different directions in both instances, and that sort of emphasising that natural tension between the Aries-Libra axis as well as the Virgo-Pisces axis. What are some keywords for that or what keywords do you come up with, Austin, for Mercury opposite Jupiter?
AC: Okay, so Mercury… This one’s complicated because Mercury-Jupiter together… Okay, so Jupiter by planetary nature likes accord, likes situations that everyone can live with. And Mercury-Jupiter together tend to, in natal charts, they create people who have a strength for oratory. For example, Barack Obama as a Mercury-Jupiter opposition for one in seven. Good orator. Abraham Lincoln was a Mercury-Jupiter guy. It’s good for oration. And not ironically, both of those people gave speeches about inclusion, bringing everybody together, trying to get everybody on the same page. Which is like a Jupiter thing. Jupiter is big tent. And so if we just had Mercury-Jupiter in isolation, I would suggest that kind of speech being more common. But Mars is configured to both of them, Jupiter by sextile and Mercury by trine. And Mercury rules Mars, and Mars rules Jupiter. And so Mars can’t really be ignored here, and that contentious element is absolutely a part of this. And so I think you’re going to see attempts to bridge divides or sit down and talk or diplomify a situation with mixed results.
CU: Yeah, I would agree.
CB Yeah, because even Mercury in Libra is very diplomatic and very good at trying to balance both sides, but it’s trying to balance it against Jupiter in Aries.
CU: I feel like Mercury in Libra is going to be hard tasked with trying to smooth things over that come out here, because when Mercury retrogrades back into that opposition with Jupiter, Mars won’t be as closely configured. So when Mercury comes back, that’s going to be on the 18th, then that’s going to be at four degrees Aries Libra. So Mars won’t be a part of that. So I think this first section might be really good for things coming out in the open that maybe you weren’t necessarily intending. But again, Jupiter in Aries, it’s speaking your truth, but Mercury in Libra is going to have that task of trying to sort of smooth things back over afterwards.
CB: Yeah, and the tension of trying to keep the peace versus needing to stay true to one’s self and sometimes go it alone and the delicate balance between the two.
AC: Yeah, I would also add for the Jupiter in Aries side, sticking up for yourself, but there’s also just defending your interests or the interests of your side or party. We’re talking about diplomacy on a larger scale. A diplomat for a nation is speaking on behalf of and trying to preserve the interest of a given group, nation, etc. And so it’s not just self-interest or a matter of confidence or self-defense, but adequately representing the interest of those of whatever organization or people you are put in position to do. And Jupiter in Aries is like, “No, you look out for your own and then see what compromises can be made.
CU: Yeah. And there’s something about the Mars/Aries energy that’s really raw and unfiltered and unrefined, this is what it is, this is what you get. But with Mercury in Libra in which, by the way, Mercury is a triplicity ruler of the air element, so Mercury is very capable here in Libra. Mercury in Libra does very well. And there’s something about this Libra energy that’s very polished, taking the opposite from unrefined. There is something very refined about Mercury in Libra. So it’s not that Mercury in Libra is not trying to tell the truth, it is, there’s just this thought process around how my message will be perceived.
AC: To follow up on that real quick, the decan that Mercury spends the vast majority of this retrograde in, the first decan, a lot of the different images for that kind of all come back to whether or not you’re going to let sleeping dogs lie. There’s one image, which is literally a dude with a horn, the description is like, and this person is loud about the injustice done to the poor and the weak and strong for the dispossessed and the whatnot. Then you have another, if you look at the image of the two of swords in the Rider-Waite deck, you have this very calm by the ocean side at night but blinded image. And a lot of what I get with that is it’s sort of the indecision of staring at the sleeping dog and be like, “Do I wake him up? Do we talk about this? Or do I let the sleeping dog lie?”
CU: It’s a total Libra dilemma, by the way.
AC: It’s a lifelong dilemma for September Libras.
CU: Yeah, I can attest.
CB: So this Mercury retrograde is going to be a major signature for most of this month. It’s going to station retrograde, like we said, on around the 8th and September 9th is when Mercury fully stations retrograde. So we’re going to be dealing with that all the way through until it doesn’t station direct until the first days of October, I believe, right?
CU: Yes, October 2nd. So we’ll definitely be feeling that station here at the end of September. But yeah, on a personal level, since this is part of a big theme for us here in September, I think we’re going to each learn a little bit more about communication this month with Mercury in Libra. A lot of people think of Libra as a relationship-oriented sign. It is, it’s an air sign, and communication is such a huge component of relating. And so I think with this dynamic with Jupiter, we’re all going to learn a lesson or two about how we communicate.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. I guess I think of Libra, there’s the Venus part, but when you compare Venus-ruled Taurus with Venus-ruled Libra, Libra’s much more Mercurial, it’s an air sign.
CB: It’s more social or social consciousness.
AC: Yeah, and it’s also the only sign that literally has a machine as it’s representative. A scale is a machine, and it’s a machine for calculating. Most traditional texts will mention the sort of justice side of the scale, but most people for most of history see scales in marketplaces, and it’s for literally determining what’s a fair trade, what’s a fair price, for how much are you selling me, etc. And so there’s this calculating what the fair balance is that I see planets in Libra and people in Libra doing constantly. There’s a relational outcome, which is the Venus, but it’s very much a result of calculation.
CU: Yeah, a lot of internal calculation around how their idea might be perceived, but also it is calculating a way to get people on board. How can we come up with an idea that everyone can be happy with? Because Libra is also a sign that doesn’t want to upset other people really. So a lot of times there is this idea of how can I get other people on board or see it from my side without upsetting.
CB: Yeah. And what concessions do I have to make in order to attempt to make both sides happy? It kind of reminds me of recently in the news, Biden finally announced $10,000 of financial relief, forgiving $10,000 of debt for college loans. And then there was just sort of pretty much criticisms from both sides of basically liberals saying it didn’t go far enough and it wasn’t enough loan forgiveness or it didn’t meet up to his campaign promises, or conservatives saying that there shouldn’t be any loan forgiveness at all and that it shouldn’t be handed out in the first place. So it’s interesting seeing in instances like that those political attempts to do something or accomplish something that one wants to accomplish, but also sometimes the heavy concessions that you have to make. And in the process, nobody really ending up quite as happy as you might like.
CU: That’s so interesting you bring that up, Chris, because that is happening now as we’re recording this episode, and it’s right now that Mercury is moving into Libra. So this may be revisited at some point through the retrograde as Mercury retraces its steps.
AC: That’s important to bring up because even though the majority of the Mercury retro time is in that first [agon] of Libra, the direct station, the point of, “Okay, we can move forward from here,” is Mercury back in Virgo.
CB: There’s something happening now that Mercury is going to revisit that we’re going to have to revisit during the course of September.
AC: Right, and so with Mercury in Libra is more socially-oriented in the sense of like, “Does this work for you? Does this work for me? etc. Who does this work for? Who does it not?” Whereas Mercury in Virgo is much more interested and focused on facts like, “Okay, well, the projections for this expenditure over time will do.” It’s much more that kind of thinking.
CB: Yeah, the details.
AC: Yeah, data, yeah. And I think that I would have higher expectations for the sort of the moving forward point or conclusion point of the retrograde if moving back into Virgo didn’t bring Mercury back into opposition with Neptune. Because Neptune has a pretty disastrous effect on Mercury if we’re just looking at, are the trains running on time? There are lots of interesting possibilities in a nativity, but in terms of just like keeping the Mercurial things working, Neptune is a spoiler par excellence of the data-driven clarity that Mercury at core likes to operate from. Case in point, so Mercury just opposed Neptune, and there was a train that broke down in the middle of the English channel, which is the 30-something kilometer undersea tunnel connecting France and England. And it was right in the middle. And so there were passengers stranded for six hours, it was kind of a big deal. Mercury in Virgo should be working great opposite Neptune, I was like, “There it is.” And literally under the sea. We’ve got the Neptune part. From what I understand of the story, it wasn’t clear what was happening. They were kind of trying to fix the train for a few hours, and then they were like, “Fuck it.” And then everybody was led through a series of service tunnels which to them was just… A number of the people who participated in this event were like, “Oh, it was this terrifying underworld, we didn’t know where we were going,” the uncertainty and confusion of…
CU: The Psychopomp.
AC: Yeah. They’re like, “Am I going to meet the judges of the dead? Is it my time?”
CU: Gosh, it’s so literal.
CB: Yeah. And just that Mercury in Virgo wanting to be very clear, wanting to be very factual and grounded in reality and in the facts, and it just is such a hard opposition from Neptune because Neptune in Pisces opposing that is just the opposite, it does not want to be encumbered by facts. Reality is subjective. Truth is subjective. There’s so many different ways in which Neptune almost like defeats or just completely clouds things so much by opposing Mercury that it’s hard for Mercury even to function.
AC: It sabotages. Mercury likes clean distinctions. Neptune’s like, “Tell me a story.” And Mercury in Virgo is like, “Well, I woke up at 7:30 and then I brushed my teeth,” and Neptune’s like, “That’s fucking boring.”
CB: It’s like, “Did you wake up or actually are you still dreaming?”
CU: Are we in a holographic universe?
CB: Are you actually plugged into the Matrix?
AC: Yeah, are you a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or are you a butterfly now dreaming of being a man? Are you Chuang Tzu?
CU: Yeah, I think Neptune is just transcendence. If the Mercury in Virgo facts are inconvenient to the chosen reality, a lot of people want to choose their vibration or choose their reality, that’s Neptune land for you. But it’s interesting because this opposition is going to also be very defining for us again at the end of September when Mercury stations within one degree of Neptune. So they don’t come into an exact opposition, but similar to what we saw earlier this year when Mercury stationed in that, was it a conjunction with Pluto? I can’t remember now, but there was just like this Mercury-Pluto aspect at the beginning of the year for two weeks. We’re going to see that similar thing here, Mercury sort of holding this opposition with Neptune for two weeks. So if we thought that was rough with a lot of people were reporting that it felt like Mercury retrograde, technology just misfiring taking forever. I had a lot of issues with Zoom that week. So yeah, get ready because at the end of the month here and beginning of October we’ll be in for it again.
AC: Yeah, I’m really excited to be flying cross country at that time.
CU: Oh, where are you going?
AC: I’m going to my cousin’s wedding. But it’s going to be a small regional airport where I live to a hub, and then probably two different connecting flights. And then from the third or fourth location to a tiny hub in Northern Virginia, and then drive an hour. It’s probably going to be 17 hours if everything goes right.
CU: Okay, good luck.
CB: That reminds me, there was this funny Reddit post recently of this person that was invited to a friend’s wedding, but the requirement was that the wedding was going to be spoken entirely in High Valyrian from Game of Thrones because the two people getting married were huge Game of Thrones fans or nerds. And so they were going to speak in the fictional language of Game of Thrones of one of the family dynasties or people in that world. And all of the guests were required to learn the language a little bit as well. So just imagine attending a wedding and it’s entirely being conducted in a language that you like don’t speak. That’s actually a fantasy language that somebody made up 20 or 30 years ago. That’s going to be Mercury retrograde opposite Neptune towards the end of September.
CU: That’s hilarious.
AC: Is everybody going to wear silver wigs?
CB: Yeah, right, silver wigs and carry dragon eggs.
AC: Yeah, and put purple contacts in.
CB: Yeah, you go and your wedding gift is just three dragon eggs to the newlywed couple.
AC: Well, God bless it.
CB: Yeah. Would you learn High Valyrian in order to attend a casual friend’s wedding?
AC: It would depend entirely on our relationship.
CB: Okay. Wait, would you do that for me?
AC: I would do that for you.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I think I would do that for you. I attended your wedding, you didn’t make me learn High Valyrian or like clinging on or Klingon or High Elvish or anything like that.
AC: No, I mean, we wrote our own service and vows, but in human languages.
CB: Okay, I appreciate that. I liked being able to follow it. So yeah, that’s a good visual for Mercury stationing retrograde in Libra and retrograding back into Virgo opposite to Neptune is imagine attending a wedding like that.
AC: It’s funny, because this whole Mercury in Virgo or Mercury in Libra thing is like, “Oh, we’re disputing, we’re disputing. Well, let’s go back to the facts.” And then we just going back to this Mercury opposition Neptune. Again, it’s like, “Ah, I don’t love that.”
CU: I like that fun and playful side of Mercury opposite Neptune, the imaginative qualities. And that was a really great example, by the way, because the Mercury in Virgo part is learning the language, and then Neptune is the fantasy. One of the things I like to surrender into with Mercury in Virgo opposite Neptune is we’re not going to know everything, we’re not going to be able to plan for every answer. Because Mercury in Virgo is a planner, they have a backup plan. They have multiple backup plans for every little variable that could tick. And so with Neptune, that’s just basically the variable that’s saying you can’t know it all, you can’t plan for it all, so just go with it.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
CU: Trust the process.
CB: Yeah, I love that. All right. Well, and it’s also a contradiction because usually when Mercury’s stationing direct like it’s going to do towards the end of September, that’s when things start getting clarified and things start moving forward again and previous confusion or obstacles that arose are usually rectified by that point. But having it stationed in opposition to Neptune is like returning back to something that’s confusing, having to revisit it a second time and it not necessarily being any less confusing. But maybe the fact that it’s like the second time you’ve seen it, you’re kind of anticipating it, you’re kind of a little bit more prepared to deal with the confusion and the lack of certainty than you were the first time.
CU: Or you get clear that like, “Oh, we don’t know what’s going on.”
AC: Yeah, I think that’s really it. I think you got it, where you’re like, “Oh, okay. This is as much clarity as we’re going to get, but we need to start moving forward.”
CB: I’m just going to sit at this wedding. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just going to enjoy it and eat some hors d’oeuvres and ride this out.
AC: And so it’s interesting, we should probably deal with this now. Part of that direct station is that Venus has actually conjunct Mercury in the days leading up to the direct station. So when Mercury goes back into Virgo, it’s not Mercury alone, it’s Mercury with Venus and they actually conjoin opposite Neptune.
CB: Let’s talk about that because that nicely brings us to our first ingress of the month, which is Venus ingresses, it moves into the sign of Virgo on the 5th of September. So Venus moves into that sign. And let me put that up on the actual chart on the screen here. There we go. Moving out of Leo and into the sign of Virgo. So Venus is going to spend pretty much the entirety, most of September, it kind of zooms through Virgo because it’s getting so close to the Sun and is in the middle essentially of that synodic cycle with the Sun this month, and Venus does eventually get to Libra at the very, very end of September, but it basically spends the entire month moving through the sign of Virgo. So that’s going to lead to a few interesting hard aspects during the course of the month. It’s going to square Mars here it looks like around the middle of the month around September 15th, so Venus in Virgo square Mars in Gemini from 13 Virgo to 13 Gemini. And then later in the month Venus is going to oppose Neptune from 23 Virgo into 23 Pisces around September 23rd or so. So Venus opposite Neptune, we were talking about that a little bit last night as a signature. You were saying, Catherine, that can be a good time transit at least for a weekend or something.
CU: Yes, Mercury-Neptune aspects are typically like a love potion.
CB: Venus-Neptune?
CU: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Venus-Neptune is like a love potion. And in a hard aspect, it can be often a situation where you’re seeing things for what you want to see sometimes.
CB: So like falling in love with falling in love in some ways?
CU: Yes, having a willingness to overlook what we might call red flag.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. You have a confluence between Venus and Neptune that you don’t have between Mercury and Neptune. There’s really a deep contradiction between what Mercury and Neptune are trying to achieve and the methods by which they do that. Whereas Venus if we’re looking at Venus as having a nice time connecting with people, the dissolution of distinctions or boundaries that Neptune brings can work with that up to a point. The difference is that Neptune has literally no boundaries, whereas Venus would like to be open up to a point. Venus isn’t self-sacrificing to an extreme like Neptune. Neptune has no limits. You talk about sort of romantic ideas of love with like complete annihilation or sacrifice of the self or the ego, that’s Neptune land. In real relationships with people, you have to set boundaries, and you do nice things for each other, and you’re open to a certain degree, but it’s not just open. And so some Neptune is nice for Venus, but there’s always a point where Venus needs to stop to have it be a working equitable relationship, whereas Neptune is like, “No, let’s do the full myth version.”
CB: Yeah. Maybe that’s because maybe they get along relatively well because, like you said, Neptune is that blurring of boundaries and Venus is the uniting sometimes of two people or the bringing together of two things, which in order to bring two people together, two parties, there has to be a little bit of disillusion of boundaries between them.
AC: Yeah, so here’s an image. So Venus says, “Okay, what if we ordered one milkshake and then shared it with two straws?” And then Neptune gets really excited and doesn’t recognize the boundaries of physical existence. Neptune’s like, “It would be so romantic if we both put ourselves in blenders and then we were poured into the same cup, and then God drank us with one straw.” It’s like, “Okay, as an image it’s a funny thing to say, but let’s just do the milkshake.”
CU: Yeah, there’s definitely more of a willingness or desire to merge with another person. And because this will be a relatively quick opposition, I think it can be lovely for just opening us up, especially I mean, we all have our things, we all have our boundary things, and this can open us in ways that we might otherwise be reluctant to. And sometimes that can be a great thing.
AC: Yeah. I think, honestly, I like this aspect as a transit way more than I like it natally. I think it’s harder to make those distinctions if you have Venus-Neptune natally. People with that really struggle with what’s the appropriate level of openness and differentiating between this works in real relationship, whereas this is inspiring and romantic and makes me feel but doesn’t really work. But as it’s active for a week, it can be nice. And I would also say with Venus-Neptune, Neptune provides the ability to kind of check out of reality. And add Venus, a pleasant checking out is nice, that can absolutely contribute to mental health and endurance as you’re having something fun, a way to just check out for a little while and de-stress as long as you plan on coming back.
CU: Yeah. I like the idea for this aspect of music and dancing and some wine or whatever it might be that helps you just sort of go to a more elevated or magical state that you don’t always regularly make the time to do. You might stay up a little bit later because you get lost in the moment type thing. But another layer here, and this touches on Venus in Virgo, is that seeing this aspect along the Virgo-Pisces aspect or axis rather, we see this theme of idealization. So Venus in Virgo is a bit of a perfectionist. She has an eye for detail. She has a very specific criteria of what she’s looking for. And Neptune is that illusion of, “Oh my gosh, this is it.”
CB: Yeah. Sometimes Venus in Virgo can be more critical in focusing on the details, and sometimes that little tiny minute thing being something that throws everything off or something being out of place or even a minor character defect about a person being unable to overlook it or something like that.
AC: Yeah, and I mean, that’s the fall part of Venus in Virgo. Part of the way I’ve taken to teaching fall in classes is that the sign in which a planet is fallen, it has like a special banana peel just for that planet in there. It’s like one little piece of kryptonite that it’s not a problem for most of the planets when they pass through that sign, but it’s the one thing that ruins the planet’s game. And with Venus in Virgo, Venus is in triplicity dignity in Virgo and has decanic dignity and a lot of it, it’s not just like nonfunctional, but there’s a trick, there’s a little banana peel to make Venus fall and that’s the getting caught on the one thing that’s wrong and then not being able to appreciate the rest.
CB: Yeah. And that’s oftentimes, especially as a natal aspect, something that somebody can struggle with early on or can be a weakness or a sore spot, but eventually some people are able to turn that into a strength. Venus in Virgo reminds me of an interior decorator, interior designer, somebody that’s really good at focusing on the-minute details or even critiquing. I saw a YouTube video recently of an interior decorator where he was critiquing current design trends and talking about the top five design trends that are not going to age well over the next 10 or 20 years or what have you, and focusing in on those things that make sense in the moment as trends, but pointing out the flaws and those things from an aesthetic standpoint that may not stand the test of time.
CU: Yeah. This reminds me of precision haircutting. I’m a former hair stylist, and there are some hair stylists that will do like a two-hour haircut and it’s immaculate. There’s this one, I’m trying to think of her name, she is the main person for, gosh, I’m trying to think of her name, Vogue, but she gets her haircut. She has someone come over every day and work on her bob. Maybe someone knows her name, who I’m talking about. But yeah, someone who gets their haircut every day.
AC: So we’ve got almost an entire month of Venus in Virgo. And so the Venus’s aspects to the different planets kind of emphasize some of these qualities. And so the period of time where Venus is square Mars in Gemini is absolutely going to emphasize the critical can’t let go of the negative, can’t enjoy the thing.
CU: Anna Wintour.
AC: The what?
CU: Oh, sorry. Someone in the chat said Anna Wintour, that’s who I’m talking about.
CB: Oh, that’s the stylist you’re talking about?
CU: Mm-hmm, the celebrity rather.
CB: Oh, was the celebrity who gets their haircut every day?
CU: Yes.
CB: Nice, okay.
AC: But yeah, that Mars-Venus is going to be very critical. Mars in Gemini is very critical in and of itself, and so that’s–
CB: That aspect is September 15th.
AC: Yeah, and it’s going to be building for a while, they’re going to be within orb for a while. And then once Venus clears Mars and starts applying to Neptune, then we’re going to get… In some ways the Neptune in Pisces is a nice, if perhaps overdosed curative for the Venus in Virgo issues. Because it’s like, “Don’t worry about that, it’s Neptune.” And it’s Neptune from Pisces which is the sign of Venus’s exaltation, where Venus is very good at letting go the small stuff to enjoy the rest. But yeah, I would say the first half of Venus in Virgo, much more critical. Second half, much more Neptune.
CB: Yeah, because in this instance with Mars in Virgo– sorry, Mars in Gemini– it’s actually in the superior position overcoming Venus. So Venus already has that critical quality in Virgo, but then Mars is adding to that by creating a more aggressive or cutting sort of energy to Venus that can be, you know, sometimes that aspect can be good. That kind of tension between polar opposites can create something that’s really productive when it’s balanced. But in this instance because Mars is in the superior position, it’s kind of getting the upper hand a little bit and there might be more of a tendency to be divisive or be cutting, especially verbally with both of them being in Mercury-ruled signs around that point.
CU: Yeah, and being ruled by Mercury retrograde, too. Yeah. Venus in a square to Mars, that can certainly come up as a little bit of relational friction. And yeah, I’m thinking a lot about Venus in Virgo and her being in her fall, but also holding triplicity there. I think one of the things that often gets overlooked in relationships is the acts of service, I think Venus in Virgo is totally acts of service. And there are articles on the internet about how many relationships end over dirty dishes. It just builds up over time because yeah, it’s basically a sign of respect too. So I think that that’s one of the sort of overlooked sides of Venus in Virgo is the helpfulness.
CB: I love that. So it’s like people have different love languages and that’s part of where that comes from, and acts of service is one of some people’s love language?
CU: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. People with Venus and Earth signs, they like to do things for other people. But yeah, I’m just thinking if we’re looking at this Venus-Mars square and what might be coming up in terms of disagreements, it might be that critical side of Venus in Virgo saying, “You know, you’re not helping me or you’re not doing this.” But there’s certainly that challenging side of Venus in Virgo too, where sometimes she can just focus too much on the imperfection. And look, we’re all human, we all have flaws, and Venus that can be the thing to look out for; is honing in on that a little too much. So yeah, I think it’s always a question of the varying degrees of that, I guess.
CB: Yeah. And also in terms of varying degrees, Venus-Mars aspects, like hard aspects can sometimes be kind of a sexy aspect in terms of the tension there. But sometimes when Mars is on the upper hand, there’s always that interplay between Mars and Venus between pursuit versus– what’s the opposite of pursuit? Being pursued or?
CU: Being receptive.
CB: Being receptive. And sometimes Mars then on the upper hand, there can be an imbalance of if the pursuit function in exchange is overwhelming or is too dominant, it can throw off the correct mixture of things
CU: Coming in too strong.
AC: Yeah, coming on too strong. And also just thinking of Mars on an elemental level, you know, adding heat. Right? And people usually use heat metaphors for passionate relationships. People want things hot, but they don’t want things scorching where they’re getting blisters and having to go to the hospital for burn treatment. You want things steamy. It’s like I would say the right amount of Mars with Venus is like, “How hot would you like your relaxing bath?” Right? You would like it warm, hot or the hot tub, but you don’t want literally boiling water. And so too much Mars is like, “This isn’t steamy, this is this literally boiling. This is like a reactor core.”
CU: Or you guys were talking about the chicken wings recently on a recent episode. “How hot would you like your chicken wing?”
CB: Hot ones?
CU: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, what happens if you eat the bomb hot sauce or the hottest hot sauce and there’s too many [unintelligible] and your mouth is burning and it stops being a pleasant experience?
CU: Yeah.
AC: Right. Whereas a certain amount of heat makes the aesthetic experience of food better.
CB: Yeah, like cracked pepper on a dish heats it up a little bit.
CU: Yeah, I need some spice.
CB: So in this instance in the middle of September, it’s like you’re peppering your dish and then the cap falls off and all of a sudden, you’ve got a whole pile of pepper in the middle of your dish.
CU: The worst.
AC: Or if you’re at a restaurant and you got a scissor and they come around and they’re like, “Would you like pepper?” You’re like, “Sure.” And then they say, “Just tell me when to stop,” and they’re grinding. And you’re like, “Stop,” and they just ignore you. And you’re like, “Please stop,” and they just look at you and quietly say, “Fuck you. Keep grinding.” [laughter]
CB: Yeah, that’s Mars going through middle of Gemini at this point. And they might also dump some hot sauce on top of it at the same time and you’re like, “I didn’t order this.”
CU: Trickster energy.
CB: Yeah. [Catherine laughs] All right. So why don’t we transition into talking about our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Pisces, which takes place on September 10th. So this is a Full Moon that takes place at 17 degrees of Pisces. Looks like September, early September 10th here in Denver. I see the Moon at 17 Pisces, it’s coming off of that square with Mars at 11 degrees of Gemini and coming off of the opposition with Venus at six Virgo, and moving into a pretty close conjunction with Neptune at 24 degrees of Pisces. So it’s activating that whole axis of planets that we’ve been talking about most of this episode up to this point.
CU: Yeah, Jupiter rules this Full Moon and is still in that opposition with Mercury that we’ve been discussing. So we might expect to see another sort of peak point of highlight in that story that’s developing for us.
CB: Right. Yeah, it’s interesting how much Neptune and just the mutable signs are being emphasized so much this month. Obviously, we always have a New Moon and a Full Moon in Virgo and Pisces around this time, but we’re just getting so much action with the mutable signs at this point. And, you know, this is a little bit of a preview or activating a sign that’s going to become much more of the focus next year in 2023 when Saturn ingresses into Pisces, I believe in March, right?
AC: Mhm, I think it’s the day after my birthday.
CB: Okay. So, yeah. Having emphasis with Neptune, we’re sort of laying the groundwork or paving the ground for that upcoming Saturn ingress not too long here, starting with the Mars retrograde in Gemini. So it’s like the mutable signs are getting some churning and some being pulled in different directions of hot and cold and different extremes at this point, both in the short term with the Mars retrograde and then leading into the long two or three-year Saturn transit through Pisces.
AC: Yeah, and we have two months of Jupiter in Pisces this fall or this fourth quarter. Jupiter is headed back. So yeah, the return of mutable emphasis is coming to a sky near you. I generally like the Full Moon in Pisces. all the Full Moons place the Moon in the sign opposite the Sun. So whatever the monthly focus is, the Full Moon counterpoints that. And there’s a certain dryness and factuality to the Sun’s time in Virgo which while useful can get tedious, and so the Full Moon in Pisces is usually at least an attempt to kind of make things a little juicy, more imaginative, more… I’ll stick with imaginative. A little bit more open and bigger. You know, like the meaning of life is not found in the facts but encloses the facts? And the Moon’s pretty close enough configuration to Neptune. It’s about seven degrees away but it’s moving towards Neptune. There’s the Moon at the point of maximum fullness and the next thing it does is conjoin Neptune. I just noticed that during this Full Moon, Neptune and Jupiter will have a by-the-minute Antiscial– actually a contra-Antiscial relationship.
CU: Wow. Wow.
AC: Yeah. Usually with Antiscia, you want within a couple of degrees, you don’t want to spam it. But this is within the minute. And so that’s actually– I wish I’d noticed that earlier– that’s going to soften some of the Jupiter and Aries hardlineness for some of the months that we talked about. That’s also going to give Neptune some extra energy and grand vision or, you know, expansive Jupiterian positivity. Or at least like, “Yeah, this could be real. This could happen. We could do this.”
CU: Yeah, maybe it’s a little bit of a throwback to the energy we had in April when we had the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces near this degree where Neptune still sits. But yeah, this definitely feels very magical, very hopeful, very soulful. That’s the word I really love with Pisces-Moon especially is just this soulful energy. Yeah, that Antiscia is really something.
AC: Yeah, it’s really tight. It’s worth noting that Mars, as Chris mentioned earlier, there is a square for Mars. Mars is at 11 and the Sun and Moon are at 17. And so six degrees is still in effect but both are moving away from Mars. Especially like the day before, there’s going to be some irritation. But when the actual Full Moon hits, there’ll be some dissolution of that irritation.
CB: Go ahead.
CU: I like the idea of perspective with this lunation too just because Full Moons are really great for bringing things to light, showing us something in fullness. And so when we got this relationship between Neptune and Jupiter here, there’s something about big picture. And yeah, this compassionate energy as Austin said, softening some of that sharpness of Jupiter in Aries, bringing that back into this Pisces all-encompassing capacity for love and understanding. So there’s something about big picture perspective and leaving space for the human experience here.
CB: Yeah. This reminds me, Leisa Schaim was pointing out something which is; due to the co-presences and the change of sign with Jupiter, we’ve kind of gotten away from talking about that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. But if you look at it by degree, it’s still within 10 or 15 degrees. And if you’re using a larger Tarnasian, Tarnas-type orbs where he uses 10 to 15 degrees for conjunctions, we’ve really just had this long extended Jupiter-Neptune conjunction all year, even though they’ve been in different signs. And you’re talking about the antiscial relationship, Austin, is just reminding me and maybe emphasizing that further because they have that same range of degrees from the zero degrees Aries point.
AC: Yeah, and Jupiter’s headed back. Jupiter’s going to be back in Pisces and in the same sign and the same decan within like five degrees for a lot of the fourth quarter months.
CB: Yeah, for unfinished business. I’ve been thinking about that recently because this year over the past several months, one of the things that’s become really popular on social media is those computer-generated images. I forget what it’s called, it’s called like Dall-E or something like that– the program name– where you can tell it two concepts or two images from the internet and tell it to merge those and it’ll take those two separate images and then it’ll spit out 10 different options of its best attempt to merge those two concepts into a single image. And it’s actually really surprising how good of a job it does sometimes of creating something that looks real or creating something out of two concepts that have been blended together. Have you guys seen that?
CU: The artistic merging of AI.
CB: Yeah, to create something like a new almost work of art that’s aesthetically or visually appealing just purely being generated by a computer is kind of striking. But that’s one of the Jupiter-Neptune things I’ve seen this year that’s really struck with me or stuck with me.
CU: Yeah, sure. I think another one that we were talking about is the online scams and the impersonation accounts. I think that has so much to do with Jupiter-Neptune in Pisces. We’re not done with that. We’re not done with that theme, folks.
CB: Yeah, the impersonators. And oftentimes they’re reaching out to people on like Instagram, I just had another one the other day. They’re pretending to be somebody but also pretending to offer insight or consultations or spiritual wisdom or what have you, and asking for money in return. And so they’re trying to scam people using something that looks quasi-mystical.
CU: Yeah, with a really flowery language too.
CB: Yeah, ‘beloved’ and all sorts of things. That’s one thing that should raise some eyebrows if I reach out to you by DM and I’m calling you ‘beloved’ and saying, you know, tell you…
CU: Grand rising, beloved. [laughs]
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
CU: Yeah, but I feel like another layer that inserts itself here with this Full Moon is the overwhelming quality that we can sometimes get with Neptune, and especially with it being ruled by Jupiter. Well, Jupiter’s opposite a stationary Mercury. So there’s definitely some questions that might be coming in here.
CB: Yeah, and something that both of you said that made me think recently about how this Full Moon conjunct Neptune and the sort of blurriness to it or the fantasy element to it being opposite to the New Moon that we just experienced in Virgo. It reminded me when I was talking about, you know, watching that video about that internal that fashion or internal decorator that was talking about fashion trends, he kept emphasizing how some trends just wouldn’t age well because they would go out of style and there would be a counter-movement against many of them in a few years or five or 10 years; where there’s things that are new that are fashionable for a period of time, but that there’s always some sort of counter-trend eventually once something becomes too trendy or becomes too common. And it makes me think of the notion of oppositions and how you have a New Moon that starts something like this Virgo one which is very grounded and very Earthy. But then two weeks later, we get this Full Moon conjunct Neptune which is just the opposite and is pulling things in a counter direction.
AC: I mean, as far as this Full Moon, it also seems like a great time to take a load off, detach from worldly affairs and just hang out for the weekend or a night or two. Just let go, get drunk that night with friends or whatever.
CU: I love you, man.
CB: It’s happening pretty much simultaneously as Mercury is stationing retrograde so it might be like going back and revisiting some things from the past, catching up with old friends, and maybe having some sort of creative or internal pursuit that’s productive in terms of exploring more internal or artistic realms.
AC: I wouldn’t try to push on it too hard towards productivity. You know, it’s like Mercury stationing. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going on. We’ll figure that out in a few days.”
CB: Yeah. That is our first lunation of the month right there on September 10th.
CU: Yeah, and I think here’s a good point to highlight that at this point now that Mercury’s retrograde, we have six planets that are retrograde. Which is unusual.
CB: Yeah, that is really unusual to have that many retrograde all at the same time, all of them moving backwards and going back and revisiting degrees from earlier in the zodiac that they’ve already traversed. So there’s some notion of returning back to something, to revisiting something, to looking back or putting your eyes towards the past rather than the future.
CU: Yeah, continuing to marinate on current issues. Like as we were talking about current events for this episode, we were like, “Yeah, it’s a lot of the same stuff.” That seems to speak to this energy of having a lot of planets retrograde. We’re doing a lot of revisiting or just sort of ruminating on stuff that is already on the table.
CB: Yeah, to dwell in the present.
AC: And what we were talking about earlier is how there are a lot of things that certainly have something to say about the future but the trajectories are very uncertain. It’s like that means something, that’ll be part of a story that gets finished later, but I don’t know which part it is. And that uncertain trajectories thing is literally what’s going on with the retrograde planets; where they’re heading now is not where they’re actually going in the future. They’re going backwards but then they’re gonna go forwards again. But you can’t– and when you’re looking at events– if you’re like, “Oh, well, if this trend continues then we’ll be here in two years.” But none of what the planets are doing now are indicative of where they will be in two years.
CB: Yeah, you can’t project things out too far into the future when you know that they’re going to do a U-turn here pretty soon.
AC: Yeah, and so that’s what you can project.
CU: Yeah. And what’s interesting and I know we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but yeah, we’re going to be getting all of the themes coming up in early 2023. I was just looking to see when all the planets will be moving direct next and it’s right after Mars stations direct. You get all the planets moving direct until April when Mercury stations retrograde. So all new themes being ushered in at that time with Saturn moving into Pisces, Pluto moving into Aquarius… Yeah, lots of big changes.
CB: Yeah, so Mars stations direct January 12th. Okay.
CU: Yeah. But for now, this is it.
CB: Right. That brings up Uranus actually just stationed here in the past couple of days, I think like a day or two ago, stationed retrograde in Taurus. And it’s going to retrograde back… Do you guys know how far back it gets in terms of degrees?
AC: No, but I can find out.
CB: Let me see here.
CU: Yeah, it stations direct at 14 degrees 56 minutes on January 22nd, 2023.
CB: Okay. So this is as far as Uranus is going to get in this round forward up to the degree it’s at now which is like 18 Taurus, right?
AC: Yep.
CB: Okay, and then it’s going to retrograde all the way back to 14, and we see it stationing there around 14 degrees of Taurus. So some of the quality then of all these retrogrades going on right now are just going as far as you can go with certain new developments before you have to go back. And I was talking to somebody about this recently about a situation that they were going through that I thought was really appropriate archetypally for just the nature of retrogrades in general, which is that they were a person in their 20s like a young professional, and they moved out years ago and they were living in a different state from when they grew up and pursuing career and other personal goals and stuff. But then they ran into an obstacle and they had to move back home, back to their home state and back in with their parents. Which is an experience that different people have at different points where sometimes you have to go back to where you started, you have to go back to the past in order to move forward again. But sometimes that’s okay and everybody goes through that process at different points. And even though sometimes it feels like you’re walking backwards or you’re going back and doing something you already did and there’s a reluctance or hesitancy or almost a feeling sometimes of like, “Does this mean I’m a failure if I have to go back to where I started?” That’s not really the case. It’s just sometimes part of the process of retrograde planets is sometimes having to move backwards for a period of time because it’s never permanent, the retrograde is never permanent, it’s just like a slice of time until eventually you can start moving forward again.
AC: Yeah, I think of when you lose your keys or something and you’re like, “Okay,” and you have to retrace your steps. Like, “Okay, so I was in the bathroom, let me check the bathroom.” Etc, etc. Or like, “Oh, did I leave it at the restaurant?” But you have to literally go backwards and check everywhere that you were before until you find the thing and then you can move forward again.
CU: Or it’s like the experience if you go back and reread one of your favorite astrology books a few years later and you have a different perspective. So the material in the book might speak to you a little bit differently and you might also internalize it and remember more elements of the book. Yeah, going backwards is not always a setback, sometimes it’s an asset because you get to do things over. You get to reconfigure and you get to sort of do something differently. Sometimes we want a do-over in life, we would have done something differently. So the Retrogrades are that option to.
CB: Yeah, and sometimes that’s a blessing. Because usually the second or the third time you’ve done something, because you’ve had that first experience, you usually do it better the second time than you did the first time around. So although there can be a frustrating component of having to go back and do something you already did, usually you end up doing it way better and there’s progress and growth as a result of that. So that’s a good thing to keep in mind with all of these retrogrades, both with the Saturn retrograde that’s happening right now in Aquarius, and the people that are experiencing Saturn retreading some steps from earlier this year in terms of its degrees in terms of the Mercury retrograde from Libra into Virgo, and also in terms of the upcoming Mars retrograde that we’re just building up to now.
All right, that is the retrogrades. And then moving into the later part of the month, we have that Sun ingress into Libra on the 22nd. We have the Sun-Mercury-Cazimi, which as I said was the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle on the 23rd. And Mercury retrogrades back into Virgo the same day. And then we get to our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in Libra on the 25th of September.
AC: Which is also opposed to that Jupiter in that, “Do I wake sleeping dogs? Or what do I do with the sleeping dogs now that they’re awake?” Between the Mercury-Cazimi in the first agon of Libra and the Mercury stationing in the first degree of Libra, and the New Moon in the first degree of Libra, all of these opposing Jupiter, that diplomatic putting different things on the two sides of the scales trying to get things to balance really does seem like that’s a theme that runs throughout the month and it’s different configurations. And so yeah, you wonder what that’s gonna look like.
CU: Definitely. Yeah. And because we’re working with this opposition between Aries and Libra, sometimes we’re going to see an oscillation between which side is showing up in terms of our dominant expression or what we’re experiencing in that relationship. Because often opposition’s will show up in relationships. But it’s here at the Libra-New Moon that we may see a definite emphasis on the Libran qualities of harmonization, and trying to understand where someone else is coming from or trying to create beauty, trying to sort of conceptualize something that is balanced and aesthetically pleasing for others. Trying to bring into cohesion.
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s really good keywords for Sun and Moon conjunction opposite to Jupiter. So, needing to create balance versus when to go it alone. And I like that term oscillation because oppositions often do teet totter back and forth between trying to seek balance but sometimes being unbalanced during the process initially as a result.
CU: Yeah, a very Libran thing is that it’s almost never balanced but it’s the goal.
AC: Well, to go back to the scale. If you have a mechanical scale and you’re in the middle of life, the scales don’t stay. Life is always putting something on one side of the scale or another. So even if you can get it to balance for a second, tomorrow it will put something else on one side. And you’re like, “Okay. Well, how do I keep it in balance by adding this?” And outside of sort of social-relational interpretation of the Libra Aries stuff, there’s also the balance between trying to live a life of perfect balance versus Jupiter in Aries trying to kick some ass, like trying to get things done. And you’re like, “Yeah, I’m gonna work my ass off, I’m gonna do all this,” and then you’re out of balance. Or you’re like, “I’m just gonna be in perfect balance,” and you’re like, “Oh, I’m in perfect balance and not really getting what I need to get done although my cortisol levels are down and all that.” There’s a balance between seeking balance and answering the call.
CU: Yes, answering the call. That’s such a good one for Aries.
AC: I’ll give that to Cate, Cate says that a lot. And Cate has Mars in Aries.
CU: That’s awesome. Yeah, answering the call, rising to the occasion, running full speed, taking the chance. Yeah, there might be something where we have to be brave, you know? Jupiter in Aries, that’s something we’re working with for a little while here. So that gets a definite shoutout with this lunation. And here again we’re seeing an emphasis on this Jupiter-Neptune theme. Because Venus is ruling this New Moon and she’s in that opposition with Neptune, so we get this expansive principle here again.
CB: Right. Yeah, Venus is very close at this point to that opposition with Neptune. Venus is at 25 degrees of Virgo opposing Neptune at 23 Virgo at the time of the New Moon.
CU: Yeah, maybe like a willingness to make a sacrifice to go the distance in order to keep the peace or to reach a definite state of equilibrium.
CB: Okay. Yeah. And Mercury’s also there by this point at 27 degrees of Virgo opposite Neptune and not too super far from stationing at this point, only six days away from stationing direct opposite to Neptune. So themes of, you know, not necessarily being clear but sometimes like following one’s internal intuition in some sense in terms of feeling out the correct path forward or feeling out the facts even if the facts themselves are not all entirely clear both intellectually as well as emotionally or relationally as the case may be with Venus.
CU: Yeah, and this is a little bit of a contrast as what we were saying at the beginning of the episode with Mars in Gemini and having more of a sharp tongue. Here now we start to see Mercury zooming in on Venus. So these two are mutually applying here at the New Moon, we’re gonna see that conjunction coming up. And so this is the opposite, these are sweet words.
CB: Yeah, it is a soft quality.
CU: Yeah. And in the sign of Virgo there’s a desire to help or to remedy or to solve.
AC: And there’s definitely– I get an overwhelming sense of calibration for this New Moon. There’s not only the calibration of the scales implied by it being in Libra, but then we have reconciling that with the opposition with Jupiter. And then we have the planet that rules the lunation Venus in Virgo conjunct calculating Mercury, Mercury has an almost perfect Antiscia or contra-Antiscia to the New Moon. There’s a lot of fine-tuning and calibration to get this equation to work or to balance or like, “Okay, so this is how I’m going to move forward.” Mercury isn’t quite moving forward, but it’s basically done retrograding. It’s got a degree or two. But this is going to set how we’re going to be for the next several weeks into October. It really brings together a lot of the lines of thought and trends of events that have characterized September up to this point.
CB: Yeah. Something I know that we wanted to mention and we meant to mention especially as we get to the later part of this month is just how close the Saturn-Uranus square is again at this point. Because here showing the graph to those watching the video version of this, the graph from Archetypal Explorer that just shows the closeness where the two planets this year got the furthest away from each other around April and May, the furthest away from that square, but at this point they’ve come back to the closest that they’re gonna get. And even though they don’t perfect or complete the aspect at this time, they get about a degree away or within a degree in late September and early October from hitting that square again. So some of those themes that we’ve talked about in the Year Ahead forecast as well as in many of the monthly forecasts over the course of the past year or two of the Saturn-Uranus significations and some of the loss in some instances of stability or unexpected disruptions in things that we thought were stable or have taken for granted up to now suddenly the foundations of those being shaken and having a question about whether they continue to be structurally sound in our lives.
AC: Yeah, one way to think about it is like if you’re playing Monopoly or chess, you have a game board with pieces. The Saturn-Uranus just kind of jiggles the board, which may or may not change the pieces, might just knock him over but it’s just like that jiggling the board which has happened intensely at a few points during this year and a half into Saturn-Uranus squares, and which certainly happened over the last month. That doesn’t stop. There’s just a low-level constant juggling the board and that will continue really probably through the end of November because as Saturn-Uranus start to get some distance, then we’ll have eclipses which will trigger them. And so the board’s just gonna stay jiggling.
CB: Yeah, we get that Scorpio eclipse October 5th and then we get a Taurus eclipse on November 8th. And Uranus as we said, just stationed this past week so that’s intensifying Uranus. Saturn is retrograding it’s moving back into the square with Uranus and closing the distance between those two so this is really the last hurrah in terms of that destabilization and the tensions or the question of whether the game board is going to be flipped entirely in some areas of our life or in terms of some areas of like world events over the course of the next few months.
CU: Yeah. And that eclipse in November will really be one to watch because it’s in a partile aspect with Uranus. So that will be interesting for sure. But yeah, we have seen a lot of change as a result of this. There’s also just a lot of rising tension, but we have seen change. I mean, the Saturn-Uranus square has shifted the way a lot of us work, a lot of people work remotely now. We’ve seen a lot of moves towards unionization and yeah, something I’ve seen in my studies with this cycle is revolutions for workers. That’s been something that’s strongly been associated with this. So yeah, I suspect we’ll continue to see more of that as well as the shifting of resources. And I know we’ve talked a lot about that here, too.
CB: Yes, the disruptions in the supply chains have been major ones. Even going back the very beginning of Saturn-Uranus really for me was when Saturn first dipped into Aquarius in 2020. We started seeing some of the large-scale protests that were taking place that summer while Saturn was in the early parts of Aquarius. Those are some of the early previews of some of the Saturn-Uranus energy to me and just the energy we were all experiencing at that time. But then yeah, there have been disruptions in terms of the supply chain. I know, Austin, you’ve talked a lot about disruptions in terms of the food chain.
AC: Yeah, food and energy. We’re gonna see what it looks like for power in Europe once it gets cold. And then a lot of the food disruptions that happened earlier in the year are going to start showing more and more. And that’s all like Uranus-Rahu-Saturn and that lasts for a while.
CU: Oh, and like with the extreme weather that we’ve been seeing, that’s been coming up a lot lately too with Uranus on the North Node in Taurus. I mean, that’s been an issue. It’s been a bigger issue with Uranus and Taurus, it’s been an even bigger issue with Uranus and Taurus on the node. But that could definitely affect food supply as well.
CB: Yeah, and other things we’ve seen, we’ve sometimes seen very literal manifestations of the archetype. Like I remember around the time of the first exact Saturn-Uranus Square about a year ago, in Florida there was the collapse of that apartment building that had faulty foundations. There had been reports of it for years but the owners just didn’t do anything and eventually it collapsed and a lot of people died. So that was a very literal manifestation of that of the foundations of something being shaky and then having an unexpected sudden disruption where everything just collapses after a stress test, in some sense.
AC: Yeah. Back to the Monopoly board or whatever, chessboard. If a piece is magnetically connected to the board or if it’s glued down, then you can jiggle it and it won’t move, or it takes a lot more jiggling. But if things are fragile, if they have weak foundations then all it takes is that little stress test and they fall apart.
CU: Jenga. [laughs]
CB: We had that last year when Uranus stationed very close to Uranus stationing in Taurus last summer, was when the US pulled out of Afghanistan and we just saw the complete collapse of the Afghanistan Government at that point and the very chaotic, really unexpectedly fragile thing that the US and the Afghan government had set up there completely collapsing and then the Taliban moving in and taking over again. So that was an example of that on a large governmental level last year. More recently earlier this year, one of the more metaphorical examples yet still somewhat literal of things of the Saturn-Uranus was the Roe versus Wade decision. And then suddenly something lots of people in the United States had sort of taken for granted as settled law for the past 40 years in the country was suddenly overnight just disappears and it’s all of a sudden like, abortion becomes illegal in a bunch of states. That was another example of that as well of something just sort of disappearing almost overnight.
AC: Yeah, like pulling the rug out from under you. Yeah, like rug pulls of various different types. So watch your rugs through the eclipses. [laughs] You know, we just came out of a period where it was intensified by Mars, but now it’s intensified because Saturn-Uranus are really tight in square. And as soon as that loosens then it gets really intensified by the eclipses, so it’s really just open season on rugs.
CB: Right. And one of the things about that when that stuff happens is suddenly, especially when people have that personal experience of something like that, you realize how unstable the foundations of everything are. It can sometimes in the immediate aftermath give you a sense of paranoia of like, “How many things that I’ve just been taking for granted do actually have very unstable foundations or have cracks in it that are just waiting for that little push in order to fall apart?” I know a lot of the Fixed sign people, especially after the eclipses, a lot of Fixed sign rising people I saw were going through major relationship changes or home and living situation changes or career changes, or first house self and body changes. That was that stuff hitting their angles so it’d be interesting to see a continuation of that for some people in the last part of that story as Saturn starts its final run through the later parts of Aquarius.
CU: Yeah. Yeah, the things that are stable, the things that are fixtures in our lives are the ones that are being put in question and creating unrest.
CB: Yeah, although in some instances it’s like when I talked to some people and some of those changes happened, they sort of said, they acknowledged that it was like, “This is something I knew was not stable and I was just kind of kicking the can down the road and putting it off, even though I knew months ago or a year ago that this was not going to last. But now it was finally time to make that change. And it was hugely disruptive and I’m having to start over again and start building a new foundation from scratch, but it was something that was necessary in order to live more authentically and in order to live the type of life that I would want,” which is a very Uranus type statement.
CU: Yeah. Our fixed planets as we know, those of us who have them are usually the most stubborn. So yeah like you said, maybe we knew the issue was there and we just like, “We’re just going to dig her heels and we’re going to work with this. We can make this work.” And now it’s like, “Oh, okay. Now we have an option to shift that a little bit.” And it can be liberating, it’s like the tower card. The structure falls, but it creates more pathways of possibility.
CB: Yeah, I like that. The fixed signs are the most resistant to change out of the three different modalities or quadruplicities, but with Uranus sometimes change can become an opportunity to build something new that’s more authentic, but also something that can last longer than the previous structure did. And that ultimately should be the main aspiration or the most appealing part of making a change for fixed signs is just that idea of creating something that is more grounded with a better foundation.
CU: Yeah, and the idea that– like with Taurus, we want to be comfortable. We want to have our basic needs met and secure. But sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zone to discover a system that might even be more comfortable.
CB: Right. All right, so that is the Saturn-Uranus. That’s going to be a major thing that will continue over into October so we’ll have to revisit that and we’ll have to see how Saturn-Uranus things start ramping up especially in the second half of September. Finally, one of the last major shifts that takes place at the very tail end of the month but we still gotta mention it is Venus moves into Libra. It departs from Virgo and moves into Libra on the 29th of September, and Venus moves into her home sign for a stretch of three weeks or so. Let me put the chart up for that.
CU: Yeah, she stays there through October 23rd.
CB: Here we go. So Venus ingresses into Libra where she joins the Sun and quickly moves into an opposition with Jupiter, which is at three degrees of Aries at that point. And it doesn’t perfect until October 1st but Venus is applying very headlong into that opposition as soon as she changes signs.
AC: Yeah. One of the things that I think Venus in Libra will do is Venus will help preserve whatever balances were created by the end of September. You know, we had all this emphasis on early Libra stuff and figuring out what’s fair, what’s balanced, what I can live with, what you can live with. Like, what is a stable or balanced way of going about things? There was all this emphasis and trying to calculate that. And so, Venus in Libra being the ruler of Libra will help preserve some of those, you know? Maybe not infinitely but it will help. But one thing to note about Venus’s time in Libra this year is that Venus is very combust. Venus is very close to the Sun from the get-go. What that means visually is you’re not gonna be able to see Venus in the morning, which you’ve been able to for… What? Six months? More than that? Eight months? Seven months?
CB: Ever since especially that Venus retrograde station in Capricorn earlier this year, I remember Venus was so bright and beautiful in the early morning sky.
AC: Yeah, I see Venus pretty much every night just as I head to bed, and so that’s over. Venus is going to be invisible because she’s so close to the Sun, and you get the Cazimi at the end of October. So that’s sort of outside of the realm of our discussion for September, but it’s headed towards that. And so it’s Venus in Libra but it’s also sort of the end of a Venus cycle. And it’s not as bright and energetic and out there. You know, Venus doesn’t get to kind of rock out under her own light, right? It’s hidden by the Sun. So it’s a quieter Venus in Libra, it’s less outwardly social than we would generally predict for Venus in Libra. More internal in terms of balance, more personal in terms of questions of relation and balance.
CB: Yeah, for sure. This actually brings up and it’d be a good segue to mention the two electional charts that Leisa Schaim and I found for this month because they both incorporate that Venus into Libra that ingress. So the main one, and I found this in the year ahead election report that we put out in the fall of last year, but it’s a very quick time window. And it’s a little bit experimental but if you can take advantage of it it’s worth giving a shot. So our electoral chart for this month, it’s set for– there it is– for September 30th at about 6:25 a.m with zero degrees of Libra rising. It puts the Ascendant in Libra and Venus right on the degree of the Ascendant just about rising over the Eastern horizon. We like this chart because one of the things we’re shooting for here is making this a night chart. So it happens just before sunset, and you want to use the election as soon as the Ascendant switches into Libra so that you can keep it a night chart, and therefore make it so that Venus is of the sect in favor so it’s the benefic of the sect, it’s the most positive planet in the chart. It’s right on the Ascendant and it’s the ruler of the Ascendant in the first whole sign house. And Venus is applying to that opposition with Jupiter so it’s applying to a benefic, and it doesn’t have any hard aspects from malefics. The only real downside is it being under the beams but because Venus is in her home sign, she’s kind of ameliorated for that or protected to some extent in terms of her efficacy even if her expression becomes more internalized or hidden in some sons.
This is a very good Venus election. The Moon is also in the sign of Sagittarius and it’s separating from the benefics unless in some time zones it may still be applying to a trine of Jupiter or other things like that. But even if it’s not, it should be applying to a sextile with the Sun, which is pretty decent. You do want to keep it as a night chart if you can, so keep the Ascendant as early in Libra as possible before sunrise. Otherwise, that sign-based opposition from the Moon to Mars is going to become more problematic if it switches from a night chart to a day chart. That’s the experimental part of this because it gives you a very narrow window of basically just zero degrees of Libra rising. But otherwise, it’s a very good chart for Libra or Venus-related activities. Which can be things like artistic expression, art, not just like cleaning but redecorating or making something more aesthetically appealing in some way; anything that needs a positive aesthetic appeal in order to be successful. What other things would you guys use a Venus in Libra election for?
CU: I was thinking with Moon and its joy in the third that this might be a good one for changing your dating profile pic.
CU: Okay.
CB: Yeah, I like that.
CU: You know, Jupiter’s in the seventh. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so update those Tinder profile pics or other social media pictures and things like that. So that’s one version of it. And because it’s such a tight and narrow window really right before sunrise, we also have an alternative chart. This is set for kind of late at night, but it’s on September 30th at about 12:25 a.m so set your chart to about 12:25 a.m local time. If you do that, you should end up with a chart that has Cancer rising. And it moves that Venus placement down to the fourth whole sign house. Try to adjust it so that you get the degree of the IC there around Venus. The ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon which is in the sixth house, but then it’s either applying to a sextile with Venus in the fourth or it’s applying to a trine with Jupiter in the 10th, which really helps to mitigate and make the Moon much more positive in this instance.
AC: Well, this has something that I wanted from the other one, which is the Moon is between aspects from Venus to Jupiter. The Moon is just departing from a sextile with Venus and then moving into a trine with Jupiter. So you have the opposite of a besiegement, or you have the Moon trapped between good and better. Which is very useful for a lot of reasons and it rules the Ascendant. So that’s very nice.
CU: Yeah.
CB: And with Venus in the fourth house shifted from the first to the fourth, that can be good for matters pertaining to the home and living situation or the family. That could be a good chart for redecorating or doing something in terms of I’ve mentioned interior design. But this is actually a really good example of that in terms of an election for completely redecorating one’s home or living situation or something like that.
CU: Yeah, maybe you’re not retailing your bathroom at midnight but you’re ordering the tiles so they don’t come cracked and broken.
CB: I mean, if you’re a night owl like Austin, you might be redecorating at midnight.
CU: Right. You might be redoing your floor.
AC: That’s not what I’m doing at midnight. [Catherine laughs] But yeah.
CB: All right, good times. Those are the two best electional charts that Leisa Schaim and I found for September, but we also found five other auspicious dates during the course of September which we released as part of our Auspicious Elections podcast for people that sign up for our page on patreon.com. People can find the link to our Patreon in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website if they want to get access to some of those other charts for earlier in the month. Yeah. So those are the two electional charts for September. Is there anything else we meant to mention in terms of the forecast? Because that puts us right up. We’re getting into October transits at this point, so that might be it in terms of the astrology of September.
AC: I think that’s it.
CB: Okay, cool. Well, what do you two have going on this month? What are you working on over the course of September? Are you launching any new things? Catherine, I know you’re launching a new course.
CU: Yeah. It’s not necessarily new but we’re doing another rendition of my Foundations course. That’s going to begin on September 7th. It’s an 11-week program and we’ve tried to fit a lot in those 11 weeks. So if you want to revisit foundations or you haven’t gotten there yet, there’s still time to join in. I’ll also be at the astrology gathering. It’s a little conference in Lilydale, New York, Western New York. That one’s a lot smaller than the ISAR conference that we were talking about at the beginning and I will be working at that one, I will be giving a talk on Astrology as Divination. I’m very much looking forward to it.
AC: Very appropriate.
CB: That sounds awesome.
AC: Lilydale is famous for its necromancers.
CB: Right, isn’t there a euphemism for that or is there a prettier way that it’s said instead of necromancers?
CU: Spiritualists.
CB: Spiritualism.
AC: People who speak with a dead.
CU: Yeah, it’s a town of psychic mediums. That’s the kind of the angle I was going.
CB: Right. And what’s your website again?
CU: You can find me at catherineurban.com, and also I’m on the social platforms at AstroCatherine.
CB: Okay. Perfect. Austin, what do you have coming up?
AC: Well, not exactly coming up but literally came out while we were recording; was a new Sphere and Sundry series. Which is a beautiful election with Venus in Pisces from earlier this year during the period where Venus was co-present with Jupiter. It’s the partner to the last one that got released, which was a Moon in Cancer Trine Venus. And so that one was let’s use Venus’s beneficence to get a great Moon election. This was literally the same day but later on the hour of Venus. And Venus was prominent, so let’s use that Cancer Moon to support Venus. So a really nice Venus in Pisces, I don’t think we’ll be able to find a better election for several years. Maybe at least five, I looked for one.
CB: Oh yeah, cuz Saturn is gonna go into Pisces.
AC: Yeah. It’s out for the next two and a half three, and good luck getting a co-presence with Jupiter. So it’s about as good as you can get with Venus in Pisces, which is pretty fucking good. That came out during this podcast, we had similar electional parameters in line. So go check out Sphere and Sundry for that.
CB: All right, that’s at sphereandsundry.com?
AC: Indeed it is.
CB: Brilliant. All right. As for myself, I’m gonna keep doing the podcast. I’m recording some interviews in person. I just recorded one with Nicola Smuts Allsop on Fertility Astrology that I’m going to release early next month and continue just moving forward. I released the Progressions episode with Catherine and also just released a major episode on Transits that I’d recommend people watch because I’ve been waiting until I could do that episode really well and I finally did it with Leisa a couple of weeks ago and it came out really well. And we’re going to do a follow-up at some point on Transits with more examples and do a little bit of a Q&A with listeners. The other thing is you mentioned social media, Catherine, and I’ve been joking about it and it was kind of a joke for a couple of years but I finally actually started a TikTok account. I’m not going to be doing any dances on it necessarily, but I am going to release some clips of the podcast there and other behind-the-scenes content related to the podcast on TikTok in short little 30-second, one-minute or three-minute clips, especially for some of our younger generation of friends where that’s their main social media platform.
CU: I’m pretty sure the last time you all had me as a guest for the forecast, that was the joke of our election chart for June.
CB: Okay, to start a TikTok account?
CU: That Chris would start a TikTok account.
CB: Right. Well, I actually did it. I called everyone’s bluff and I’ve started a TikTok account. You can find that at tiktok.com/@theastrologypodcast or just @astrologypodcast, however you find it there on TikTok. Are you going to do a dance or join TikTok, Austin?
Austin: I’ll just say this. If I do join TikTok, I will do a dance.
CB: Okay. All right, I will hold you to that and see maybe before you leave Colorado, we’ll see if we can get something going maybe. Yeah.
AC: If I join TikTok. Chances are low.
CB: Cool. We will leave it at that. And in the meantime, thanks everybody. It was great doing this episode with you. Thanks both of you for coming out to Denver. Austin, this was your idea to record this in-person. Because it’s been like two years since we recorded an episode in person back what? Before we did the 2020 forecast or something like that?
AC: Yeah, it was end of November 2019.
CB: Yeah, back in the good old days of Jupiter in Sagittarius.
AC: [laughs] It was bad. It was the last party of the Party at Worlds End.
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, this worked out really well and hopefully we’ll start doing these again more often here in person as the world starts to move into whatever the next phase is.
CU: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was fun being in the studio.
CB: Yeah. And actually, you announced recently, worth mentioning on a personal note that you had a life change that sort of occurred?
CU: Yes. So I’m expecting a baby. Yeah, that’s the big news. And then we were talking about your Mars transit.
CB: Right. Yeah. It’s just a weird synchronicity that I just recorded the Fertility Astrology episode a couple of days ago and then you also flew out basically the next day. And I think you’re the possibly the first, I don’t know one hundred percent, but I want to say the first guest on the podcast or co-host that was pregnant at the time.
CU: Yeah. The youngest baby on the podcast. [laughter]
CB: Right. Youngest guest ever on the Astrology Podcast. [Catherine laughs] I like that.
AC: Right. And Chris has Mars in his fifth house of children for the next 18,000 months.
CB: Right. Yeah.
CU: Yeah, and creativity. So that Venus in Libra should help enhance that for you.
CB: All right. Well, maybe for future Mars revisits to Gemini, maybe you can come back and we can get follow-up interviews to see how things are going.
CU: Yeah, sounds great.
CB: Okay, cool. All right. Well, that’s it. So thanks, both of you for joining me. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening. Thanks to everybody that joined us for the patrons in our live audience. This is a great experiment with doing a live studio recording with an audience, so thanks for your support. And that’s it for this episode of the podcast. So thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, shoutout to the patrons on our producers’ 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 and in exchange you’ll get access to bonus content such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the month ahead forecast each month, access to a private monthly auspicious elections report that we put out each month, access to exclusive episodes that are only available for patrons, or you can also get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information, go to patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
The main software we use here on the podcast to look at astrological charts is called Solar Fire for Windows which is available at alabe.com, and you can use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we use a similar set of software by the same programming team called Astro Gold for Mac OS which is available from astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount on that as well.
If you’d like to learn more about the approach to astrology that I outline on the podcast, then you should check out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I traced the origins of Western astrology and reconstructed the original system that was developed about 2000 years ago. In this book, I outline basic concepts but also take you into intermediate and advanced techniques for reading a birth chart, including some timing techniques. You can find out more about the book at hellenisticastrology.com/book. The book pairs very well with my online course on ancient astrology called the Hellenistic Astrology Course, which has over 100 hours of video lectures where I go into detail about teaching you how to read a birth chart, and showing hundreds of example charts in order to really demonstrate how the techniques work in practice. Find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com.
And finally, special thanks to our sponsors including The Mountain Astrologer magazine which is available at mountainastrologer.com, the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs available at honeycomb.co, and the Astro Gold Astrology App which is available for iPhone and Android. You can find out more information about that at astrogold.io.