The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 371, titled:
The Venus Star Point Cycle, with Arielle Guttman
With Chris Brennan and Arielle Guttman
Episode originally released on October 13, 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 October 18, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Arielle Guttman who’s here in the studio in Denver with me today, and we’re going to be talking about her work with the Venus Star Point and a lot of other things. So hey, Arielle, welcome to the studio.
ARIELLE GUTTMAN: Thank you, Chris. It’s good to be back. It’s been a big in-between.
CB: It’s been a little bit since last time. Last time I saw you in person was actually mid-March of 2020. I don’t entirely recall what was going on then, do you?
AG: Ooh, nothing like being invited to come to the Denver astrology meetup, and while I’m here, do a studio recording. And then 48 hours before my trip, the Governor closed down all public spaces in Colorado because COVID was descending like a dark cloud over the state, the country, and the world.
CB: Oh, yeah. That’s what it was. There was a pandemic, minor detail. All right. Yeah. You were scheduled to come out to Denver to give a talk for the local astrology group right in the middle of March, it was like March 14th or something of 2020.
AG: The Ides of March, I remember it was that weekend.
CB: Yeah, and then literally the entire country went on lockdown pretty much that week as the pandemic swept through the world, and the US finally started catching up and paying attention to it. And luckily, Leisa was paying attention. Leisa Schaim was paying attention to what was going on with that and was like, “We have to cancel the meeting.” So we canceled the in-person meeting and we switched it to a webinar, but you still came out and we did the interview in person. And that was the last in-person interview that I did for quite some time. And then I actually ended up getting sick a few days later and then I was sick with COVID for like a month. But here we are.
AG: I know. I felt terrible about that. Like, oh, no. I hope that COVID onset for you wasn’t tied to my visit. I really felt bad. But somehow I have fingers crossed, it hasn’t hit me yet.
CB: Good. Yeah, keep it up.
AG: But I’ve been being kind of careful how I’ve been dealing with it, and taking it seriously like I guess a good little soldier. I’ve been following the instructions of all that. And the distancing. I mean, we were really in lockdown those first few months. It was like I wasn’t seeing anybody.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, it was a really weird time. So it’s been two and a half years since then, you’re starting to be able to travel again, obviously, and you’re back in Denver for the first time since then. So we thought we would do a meet-up, and it’s a nice little thing to bring things full circle. It’s actually very fitting this month because this month there’s going to be a really important shift that involves Venus and the Sun and there’s synoptic cycle, where there’s going to be a conjunction of Venus and the Sun. And even though that’s something that happens semi-regularly, this is actually a really important one. Right?
AG: Yeah. I mean, if you’re tracking because cazimis of planets together, it’s really fun to watch planets from cazimi point to cazimi point, because you can really see a pattern. That’s one thing that it’s another dimension of looking at the planet. And when I first started really observing this star, it was from the cazimis. I think a lot of people had talked about or several people had talked about the fact that Venus makes a pentagram in her orbit around the Sun. But I didn’t really know what that was all about. And in 2004 when I began researching something for a tour I was doing on and on The Sacred Feminine and then Venus was going retrograde that spring in Gemini, I started looking, “Okay, let me look at this retrograde. Let me look at the last one. Let me look at the one before that,” and pretty soon I saw there’s the pentagram. Now, you can track the pentagram from any point to any point in the Venus cycle. Venus has a 284-day cycle around, you know, of its own synoptic cycle. So you could go where would you start the synoptic cycle? Do you start it with heliacal rise? Do you start it with retrograde? Do you start it with direct? I chose the cazimi for several reasons and if you want me to explain them, I will.
CB: Yeah. Well, let’s start out with the basics for people. I’m gonna put up a chart right now for those watching the video version of this episode just to show- Here’s the chart of today but I’m going to move it forward to later this month when we get that conjunction, just so we can sort of anchor this discussion on that point first of the conjunction of Venus with the Sun which looks like it’s going to take place later this month around October 22nd-23rd?
AG: 22nd.
CB: 22nd?
AG: Well, in the US time zones. It could be the 23rd in other parts of the world.
CB: Got it. So it’s going to take place at 29 degrees of Libra when Venus which is currently direct in motion conjoins the Sun. And so this happens, these conjunctions with the Sun happen what, twice a year?
AG: Not always in the same calendar year. It’s about every 9.2 months that Venus and the Sun meet up. And each time they meet up, it just so happens that in this calendar year we had a cazimi in January and it was 18 degrees of Capricorn. And we have been in that what I would call that Capricorn vibration. I look at these nine-month periods of the Venus Star Point to be kind of how an underlying drumbeat or heartbeat of what’s going on in the world behind the scenes. We don’t see it normally the Zodiac. We’re looking at the Zodiac, we’re looking at the other planets and their transits, but we don’t always track what Venus, you know, this Venus cazimi and how it’s affecting people. And what was interesting, I was noticing in the news this year that everybody who came up in a big way in the news had an 18-degree Capricorn in their chart for the day or the week or the event of what was happening for them that made some kind of big news. And that was this less cazimi. And because Venus has five points on the star, not just one, I look at the two prior cazimis as well as the current one we’re coming into and the two after that as the sort of hot degrees on the star for our whole period.
CB: Okay, so let’s break that down a little bit further for those that are new to this topic. So there’s a conjunction happening later this month. There was a prior conjunction which is in the sign of Capricorn earlier this year in January. You said that they happen in about nine-month increments, typically give or take.
AG: Approximately, yeah.
CB: Okay. What’s weird about that and what your work focuses on is that they tend to take place then, because they happen in nine-month increments, they create a pattern which is a five-pointed star or like a pentagram across the zodiac where they will stay clustered. These conjunctions will just happen in the same five signs for an extended period of time.
AG: Mhm, over and over. It’s a very slow-moving mechanism, this Venus Star clock that I call it. And for instance, this lever point, it always begins the new star point… When it enters the sign, it always begins with the last degree or two of the sign, because it’s moving more or less clockwise through the zodiac the way the nodes move. So it’s going to enter the sign at 29 degrees. It’s like a beginning and an ending at the same time, beginning of an era and the ending of an era.
CB: So these conjunctions, so basically this conjunction in October at 29 Libra is going to happen in October, and then at some point in the future, there’s going to be another conjunction in Libra but it’ll shift a degree or two backwards.
AG: Right, with an in-between cazimi in four years in zero degrees of Scorpio, which will be the last Scorpio Star Point for 150 years. The last 100 years of this star point have been Scorpio since 1926.
CB: Sure. Okay, so eight years from now basically there will be another conjunction like the one that’s going to occur this October, it will also occur roughly the same part of the year in October. But it’ll shift two degrees earlier to be instead of 29 Libra like this month is, it’ll shift probably to like 27 Libra or something.
AG: Exactly, 27.
CB: And then eight years after that, there’ll be another conjunction in Libra also in October but it’ll shift two degrees earlier. So then it’ll be like 25 Libra or something.
AG: Yeah, exactly.
CB: So that’s the basic thing is that these conjunctions happen in the same spot in the zodiac roughly just minus two degrees, roughly almost the same month and almost the same day.
AG: Yes, a day apart. If it’s two degrees apart, it’s usually a day or two apart. Because remember it’s conjunct the Sun, and so wherever the Sun is, Venus is going to be. So you can always if you know the Sun cycle around the zodiac, you can always track well. Okay, we know when the Sun’s at 29 Libra, it’s basically around October 22nd-23rd, you know, each year.
CB: Okay.
AG: And so, you know, people’s birthdays come up for instance during that. And I’ve had several people come in on social media or email me and say, “Well, my birthday is October 22nd. What does that mean?” And it’s a big deal because as I’ve been tracking this Venus star, when the Venus star– cazimi– activates one of your planets, it’s really waking that planet up. It’s shining an amazing amount of heart energy light, love from Venus. It’s like a really bright, radiant kind of effect. And it’s not always an event that you can say is wonderful. Sometimes it’s shining on your Pluto, sometimes it’s shining on your Saturn, sometimes it’s shining on a difficult aspect pattern that you have a tight square or T-square in your chart between. And if it’s hitting that, it’s hitting all three points or something. So, you know, you’ve got to go dig a little deeper with each chart to see okay, actually how is it activating your chart and what’s it saying now? But pretty much I would say with the research and all the charts that I’ve looked at since I started working with it, which is now 18 years, that it holds pretty true to form in terms of- Yeah, I’ve always said to people if you’re ever thinking of writing your memoir, you could look at your life just through the cazimis of Venus to your different planets when that occurred, because you will have more or less a pretty big event. And that could be like a Chapter, you know? This event when it hit my Mercury or when it hit my Saturn or when it hit my Pluto or whatever.
CB: Okay. I like what you said about it sort of shining a light or putting a spotlight on whatever planets it’s touching in your birth chart. Because it reminds me of the ancient Greek word for Venus, which I think was Lightbringer Phosphorus.
AG: Yeah, Venus Phosphorus is one of her designations. Here’s two Venuses as you recall from the ancients what they gave us. The Venus morning star is Venus Pandemos or Phosphorous, and then Venus evening star is Venus Urania, the celestial Venus. So I always thought, well, that makes sense because in astrology we always assign Venus to two signs; Taurus and Libra. And I think that the Venus Pandemos is much more like Taurus. She’s the Earth goddess, and the morning star’s more like the Earth goddess. And Venus evening star is Libra, it’s like the celestial goddess. Air, she’s up in the air, you know? She is literally up in the air. The evening star is the superior or the exterior conjunction, where Venus is on the far side of the Sun.
CB: Okay. That brings up one of the diagrams, which is that… This is a slide from one of the lectures that you’ve given recently and it shows that upcoming conjunction or that cazimi of the Sun and Venus at 29 degrees of Libra, but then it also shows the other conjunctions like the Capricorn one you were talking about earlier this year.
AG: We just had that one in January.
CB: Okay, January of 2020.
AG: Yeah. And maybe the listeners can relate to 2022 if they have anything around 18 degrees of any sign. This is such a slow-moving thing that I think 18 of any sign is gonna affect it, but especially 18 Capricorn or 18 of the cardinal signs.
CB: Got it. Okay. So what we’re looking at for the audio listeners is just how these conjunctions of the Sun and Venus hover around the same degrees in the same signs, and just makes this five-pointed star for these very extended periods of time. But what’s significant about this cazimi that’s coming up in October is that up until now, these conjunctions had been taking place in Scorpio for a very long period of time, right?
AG: Since 1926.
CB: Okay, so basically every conjunction that had been occurring around this time are as part of this part of the five-pointed star.
AG: Right, this arm of the star. I call them arms, arms and legs, but we could say an arm.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Like an arm of a starfish or something like that?
AG: Yeah.
CB: So all of these basically for a century had taken place in Scorpio, but now all of a sudden it’s shifting as of this month and all of the conjunctions from this point forward are going to take place in Libra for how long? For, like a century?
AG: Till 2133.
CB: Okay, 2133. That’s quite a ways in the future. So we’re talking about a pretty major shift here astronomically and astrologically.
AG: Yes. But I want to interject one point. Though the Venus star cazimi always moves backwards, occasionally it will go forward one degree and then continue its journey backwards. It just kind of wobbles a little like the nodes do. And so in 2026, four years from now, we will have a morning star at this point. But instead of it being 29 Libra, it will be zero Scorpio. And it will be the last point. And it’s interesting because Scorpio came in, the first Scorpio Star Point came in 1926 and the last one will be 2026. So it’s an even 100 years. And that is about the average of Venus star in a sign is about 100 years. Sometimes a little more, 108, it might take that extra eight years to finish it. Or sometimes it’s 96 or a little bit less. But think of it as really a good chunk of time, a century over time.
CB: Okay. So this is kind of like a preview where we’ll get that first conjunction in Libra, the next one in two years will fall back into Scorpio.
AG: Yeah, four years.
CB: Four years. Four years will fall back into Scorpio but then-
AG: Eight years from now back to Libra to stay.
CB: Got it. Okay, so that’s kind of like with the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions and the great shifts in those triplicities where back in 1980, for most of the 20th century, it was all conjunctions and Earth signs. Then in 1980, we had the first conjunction in an air sign in Libra, but then it backtracked and went back into Earth in the year 2000. But now as of 2020, the last conjunction was an Aquarius, another air sign, and it’s going to be all air signs for the next few 100 years.
AG: I mean, it’s really amazing how much air is coming into the zodiac framework over the next decades, several decades, because this Venus star-Libra is going to be around the whole rest of the 21st century, up until 2133 so even into the 22nd century. And we know that– you just mentioned the Jupiter-Saturn, that’s a 20-year Aquarius now, but it’s air for what? 200 to the next 200 years, right?
CB: Yeah, it’ll hit all the air signs basically during that time.
AG: Yeah. So 200 years for Jupiter-Saturn, a hundred plus years for the Venus Star Point. We have Pluto coming into Aquarius and another short bit of time here to add to the mix. It’s going to be quite a shift in ideas, thinking processes, learning processes. The shift in learning already started with the Gemini Star Point that came in the 60s. And I can talk from a historical point of view about all these star shifts because that was the other thing that fascinated me about this cazimi shift from sign to sign, because it embodies a whole 100-year period for each of the major signs that it’s in. You can really track historical trends and cultural preferences. And we know Venus to be like our personal value system, and so when we’re looking at something this big for the collective, it tends to be more of, “What is the collective value? What does the collective want? What is the collective need?” And when it’s a value or a want or a need, we tend to invest in that. Companies get busy investing in certain kinds of things that are going to meet the needs of the time. Because at the bottom line, what is Venus about? Resources, you know. How do we… So with that said, okay, there’s some big shifts ahead for the world, but what about our personal lives? And I think that we are going to be looking at, “Okay, how do we meet the needs of a new Libra Star Point period or a new air period in terms of what we’re doing in the world, how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it.
CB: Okay, so a lot of air themes. I mean, communication is also kind of an archetypal theme, right?
CB: Yeah.
AG: So, we’re not just seeing that with, as you said, the Jupiter-Saturn which was huge in 2020, we’re not just seeing that with the Pluto ingress, but now Venus. And Venus, we’re used to thinking of Venus as a quick personal planet that does transits that come and go over the course of a day, or occasionally maybe we get a longer retrograde period that’s like 40 days and 40 nights. But with this cycle, we’re talking centuries. So Venus, in some ways, then in our transits might have longer-term cultural impact, basically, as part of the implication of this than maybe we’re used to thinking about.
AG: Well, the 40 day 40 night period, which I thought was quite interesting when I found out about Venus that, you know, because there’s so many references in ancient literature to 40 days. Whether it’s biblical or religious texts or whatever culture you’re looking at or reading about, there seems to be a 40-day kind of metaphor. And I do think it’s a metaphor. But it always made me think, “Well, how much did the ancients really know about Venus? How serious did they really track it?” We have some records of it. You’ve translated some really important things about and brought to the world things about what the ancients thought about Venus and I’ve read other things, too. I have a quote in the book from Ibn Ezra about the evening star, the difference and her effect on the world and all of that. And I think it’s was really good. I still use, I’m really very much in touch with how that works for people, and I pretty much talk to them about it. But in the 584-day cycle of Venus, the synoptic cycle, it’s kind of like the retrogrades, the 40-day period of retrogrades are the time where she really stops, turns around, pauses, regroups. That’s what makes the star point cazimi, that’s what’s the interior conjunction happens in the middle of the retrograde. So that’s a star point. And I call that the beginning of that cycle, that 584-day cycle, and then as she goes around and she’ll do an evening star cazimi or a superior conjunction cazimi somewhere else, but that’s halfway through the cycle, until she comes back again. And then she’s at another. By then she’s already traveled through to different star points.
CB: Okay, that’s an interesting point though with the retrogrades, that 40 days and 40 nights that Venus starts out when she stations retrograde in one phase, but then retrogrades hits the cazimi and by the time Venus stations direct, she’s in a different phase in terms of morning star versus evening star.
AG: Right. You could look at the first… If she’s retrograde for 40 days, you could look at the first 20 days of every Venus retrograde as her emptying out of that cycle, you know, of the previous cycle. Of the finishing up of that cycle like a balsamic phase. You know, like emptying out. And then when she hits the Sun and they do the cazimi and she begins her new journey even though she’s still retrograde, because she’s, you know? I think of her as going through the transition process then, “Okay, I’m shifting gears now. Okay.” And I found a lot of companies or things that people are working with, suddenly they’re saying, “Oh, we were doing it this way but now there’s been a memo or email to everybody and now we’re shifting gears and starting, you know, on such and such a date, we’re going to start doing that way.” Or, “We’re not using that.” Even something as simple as we’re not using that text anymore or that font anymore, we’re changing over to this one. And I think, “Okay, this is part of the ship.” So many people in the world are unconscious about the planets and what they’re doing. They don’t have any interest in them and they have no idea what they’re doing, but somehow it’s coming through. It’s what’s fabulous about astrology, I think, because things are happening anyway. Or they get the impulse to make this change just at the appropriate time that you would think from a planetary point of view that it’s due.
CB: Yeah, I was noticing some stuff in the news recently with the Mercury retrograde and the Mars retrograde that’s coming up, where there just seemed to be a clustering of similar events popping up in a number of different areas in the news, which was a perfect manifestation of the astrology. And even non-astrologers were noticing just similar themes coming up in different ways in the news, but it’s really when you know the astrology and you sort of understand archetypally what the energy or what the theme is that’s manifesting during that point in time.
AG: Right. It’s like when the client calls you or emails you, or when you’re on the phone with them or on Zoom or something and they say, “This is so weird. I mean, this has come up three times in the last month and it never has come up for me before.” And I’m like, “Whoa, Mercury or Venus is retrograde right now right on that spot. And it passes over three times.”
CB: Yeah. Or, especially right now, it seems like one of those periods because we don’t just have this month, the Venus cazimi with the Sun and that shift in the star point. But we also have, you know, Saturn is stationing, the Saturn-Uranus square is getting the closest that it’ll get. Basically as part of the square, this is the last final close pass between those two. There’s going to be a solar eclipse in Scorpio followed by a lunar eclipse in Taurus. Mars is going to station retrograde. And it seems like sometimes I noticed when stuff like that happens when you see a cluster of different astrological things falling all around the same time that are major sometimes in people’s lives, everything starts happening at once and you’ll get multiple different parts of a person’s life coming to an important turning point at the same time.
AG: Yeah. Also it’s just damn confusing. It’s like, “Okay, these guys are going forward. These guys are going backwards. These guys are stationing. But then there’s any clips over here. What am I doing?” And that’s usually when you’ll get an influx of client requests too because they’re doing the same thing, like, “What is going on? Which way am I supposed to go with this?”
CB: Yeah, people are just trying to figure out what’s going on and what the timeframes are involved and what the significance is of like a nexus in time where multiple different threads or paths all sort of converge around the same time periods.
AG: Exactly. And October, I’ve been listening to the Astrology Podcast for a long time– I want to take a moment here to acknowledge what a great job you’re doing with this and what great content it is. But I’ve heard it mentioned on the Astrology Podcast, I think maybe in the beginning of the year, but also in my forecasts which I focus on at the beginning of the year based on where the Venus cazimis are and what the star wheel is doing, what the star clock wheel is doing. And because it was 18 degrees Capricorn this year, I thought, “Well, 18 is really a hot degree all the way around. Because there’s a Saturn station at 18. There’s a Uranus station at 18. The Venus Star Point is 18.” There were a couple of other things maybe too at 18 this year, the Nodes passed over 18. I don’t think the eclipse hit 18 but it was close. It was 16 or will be. We’re still in the Scorpio-Taurus set of eclipses so that hasn’t shifted yet, but right after this cazimi coming up, there’s a solar eclipse in Scorpio, early Scorpio. So that’s going to kind of emphasize that last part of Scorpio too, you know. From a regular astrology, it looks like the beginning of the sign but if you’re looking at it from the Venus Star position, or even the eclipses which go backwards like the nodes, it’s sort of more or less the end of Scorpio.
CB: Yeah. Because one of your points is that eight years prior to now, there was a Sun-Venus conjunction and it would have been at one or two degrees of Scorpio, right?
AG: It was. Yeah.
CB: Okay. And that’s exactly where this upcoming eclipse is, which is one to two degrees of Scorpio.
AG: Yeah, that’s a good point. If you look at where that… This eclipse is hitting something that was going on eight years ago.
CB: Right. Okay. And that’s something already that Venus would sort of be highlighting some of that anyways because Venus highlights things in eight-year increments, but for some reason that eclipse is also hitting that Venus degree from eight years ago this month. So for some people, especially if that’s hitting something personal in their chart, it’s going to be reactivating or bringing back or sort of sometimes reminding you of something that happened eight years ago around the same time.
AG: Yeah. 2014. We’ll be looking at.
CB: Okay. Yeah, October. October-November 2014. All right. So that’s one of the ways in terms of personally that people can look at this, since this is a shift or it’s starting to shift the Venus Star Point, one of the things that you look or do is one of the things you look at, like the house placement of where the conjunction is going to take place?
AG: Oh, yeah. Because the sign is, you know, for everybody. It’s the sign universally, 29 degrees Libra. But where is that in your chart? What house? So yeah, the house factor is very important. And if you’re using whole sign houses, which I imagine most of your listeners are doing, right?
CB: Sure. I mean, what system of house division do you use?
AG: Well, I use the Koch system, because I was trained that way and I just have always found good results. But you know what, sometimes I look at the whole sign also, because I’m just wanting to see especially with births way up North, and how it skews the wheel so much. I will look at whole sign houses. So that means your Scorpio house and your Libra house are absolutely two different houses. Right? It not just shifting signs, it’s also shifting houses. But that’s not true for people using other house systems because that cusp might be in the middle of a house.
CB: Okay. Yeah, to me, I think that makes me think about how most people alive at this point, you know, that all of those conjunctions of the Sun and Venus that have occurred their entire life up to this point in Scorpio that it’s going to shift to Libra. And yeah, for some people with the whole sign house topic that is going to be a shift because now a lot of those conjunctions for the rest of our lives are going to take place in this other house in a person’s chart. So you could kind of start to get a sense of what topic shifts you might be seeing or that you might expect in terms of shifts in a person’s life. Let’s say, for me, it’s moving from 10th house so let’s say career things to ninth house, which might be like education or publishing or other things like that.
AG: And I heard it said-
CB: Yeah, I got a book coming out.
AG: There’s something in the works, we’re gonna wait and see.
CB: Yeah, I’m not unveiling yet but I might do something later this month.
AG: No, no, but it’s in process. So, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s really interesting just in terms thinking about that in terms of shifts from one area of life being emphasized to another area of life being emphasized. And this being sort of like the turning point.
AG: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, just 10th house in general and ninth house in general is during transits through the planets, and then in the zodiac the way they normally go which is anti-clockwise, they would go ninth house first. Let’s say Saturn’s in your ninth house, you’re doing all your studying, you’re doing all your… You’re really working on the study part of it to master the craft, whatever. And by the time it gets to the 10th house, you’re called upon to actually do something with it, you know. “Okay, here’s the job offer. Here’s a promotion,” because you’ve just been working on this or something and so it would tend to go that way. But when you’re looking at it going the other way, 10th house you’ve already had all this experience– and still you’re experienced as a writer and a teacher as well, but ninth house might focus more on, you know, ninth-house matters.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That makes sense to me. One of the things that’s interesting thinking about it that when you were talking earlier about trends and changes in trends that sometimes happen in companies or other things like that, it also made me think of– because it’s interesting that the Venus retrogrades that those conjunctions and the retrogrades move backwards like the nodes do, and it’s one of the few things that moves against the order of the signs of the zodiac or against the normal motion of the planets– it makes me think of how sometimes fashion trends move in cycles. And sometimes you’ll see a fashion trend come up from a few decades earlier that suddenly comes back and starts being trendy again. Because I’m starting to see some fashion trends from the 90s or the 2000s that are coming back into Vogue, and it makes me wonder if it’s sort of connected with some of those Venus retrograde cycles or with the Venus conjunctions in some ways.
AG: Mhm, could be. When I was doing my initial research, I did notice that in the fashion world things repeat after a time, and that I did think it was tied to the Venus Star cycle. You know, what’s popular now and what goes out of fashion and then comes back around again. But it’s also interesting that it’s the Moon’s nodes and the eclipses which, I guess we could see the Moon as feminine, right? Generally speaking, as it termed a feminine energy or it has been traditionally. And the Venus star would be the same. It’s just interesting to think about how those two things are going one way around the wheel, and everything else is going the other way. And that’s one point about Venus, thinking about the Venus in the Venus pentagram that way. The other thing is, in astrology we are used to the 4th harmonic; conjunctions, squares, opposition’s, Saturn especially, Moon, lunations, quarters, you know, Full Moons, 3rd quarters, New Moons… And put planets the same. You know, we look at that fourth dimension, 4th harmonic. Venus is on the fifth harmonic. It’s a different way of thinking. It’s a different part of your brain, actually, that’s being used. I think it’s really more right-brained going that way around. So it’s using this hemisphere of the brain, the right hemisphere of the brain, whereas looking at the 4th harmonic is probably more using the left hemisphere of the brain.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s blowing my mind thinking about your point right before that the eclipse cycle, basically, which is really the Moon’s cycle, even though it’s the Sun and Moon coming together. The Moon is the one that visibly often changes the most when it comes to the lunation cycle and its relationship to the Sun, and how the eclipse cycle and the nodes move backwards against the order of signs, and then how you’re pointing out how the Venus Star Point and the Venus retrogrades move backwards in the order of signs as well. That’s super interesting. That makes me wonder if that wasn’t part of the original motivation for some of those ancient distinctions that they said that the Moon and Venus are feminine planets and the other planets like Jupiter and Mars are masculine planets.
AG: I know. I’ve thought about that, too. We wonder how they got those designations, but it is interesting to look at it from that point of view.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s so much of what I found in going back to ancient astrology that I found fascinating that made me want to… made me find that appealing at all, especially coming at it from modern astrology was just that oftentimes there were– once you sifted through the history and the built up tradition, if you went far enough back, you would start to see astronomical rationales for some of the astrological lore and the astrological interpretations that had built up over the centuries that somewhere at the core of a lot of the stuff that we use today that we take for granted, that they were basic often observational astronomical distinctions. So yeah, I mean, maybe that’s one of them or maybe that gets back to the core of something that goes right back to the beginning.
AG: Right. And we identify those quarter Moons by where the Moon is, not where the Sun is. You know, the Full Moon is in Aries, meanwhile the Sun is in Libra. And so we’re identifying it as an Aries Full Moon, or a Capricorn quarter Moon, or Cancer quarter Moon for this month. You know, when the Sun’s in Libra. So we’re actually identifying it and interpreting it from that sign, more or less, that degree as well, those sets of degrees, but generally the sign.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. So the lunation cycle or the synoptic cycle between the Sun and the Moon is often primarily defined by the Moon’s position as primary or as the most fundamental thing even if it’s the Moon’s position relative to the Sun?
AG: Right.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s really interesting. Okay. This is interesting, it’s getting us to some interesting core stuff that I didn’t… This is just arising naturally. It’s one of the reasons why I like having these conversations in person because when two astrologers get together in person, there’s just stuff that arises naturally.
AG: Yeah. We never know where it’s gonna go and it’s always mind-blowing, isn’t it?
CB: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It’s one of the things I miss about astrology conferences that’s nice now that they’re starting to take place again, is having that in-person dialogue and exchange between astrologers.
AG: Yeah, I’ve missed that. Being in Greece, I don’t have a community there of astrologers to really converse with at that level. I mean, there are communities, but I live sort of away from it and all that. So coming to… I flew here to do a conference a few weeks ago. And this is part of my extended tour, that’s how I happen to be in Denver now, because my ticket’s going back out of Denver. And it’s been great to be gathering as astrologers going and having these kind of high-level conversations.
CB: Yeah, cuz you went to a few astrology or a couple astrology conferences, or gave a couple lectures before this.
AG: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Okay. And do you have- I’m actually curious, because somebody’s asking me about what the contemporary astrological scene is like in Greece. And you’ve been living there the past couple of years, but you’re not connected very much with the local astrologers.
AG: I am when I’m in Athens. I have a colleague who lives part-time in Athens and part-time in California– Alexandra Karacostas. She and I actually do tours together in Greece from time to time. The last one we did was last year in 2021. It had been canceled twice because it was scheduled for 2020. Of course, COVID came and everything was locked down. But we did it about a year ago, the end of September to early October ’21 and it was really great. You could feel how happy everybody was to be traveling again and to be in a group like that. And so we’re doing we’re planning another one as well but not immediately. And she’s connected, she’s a fluent Greek speaker. I’m learning Greek. I’m on day 275 in a row of my Greek lessons with Duolingo, which I have to recommend if you’re trying to learn a language at home online. It’s a pretty good course. But a lot of the astrology in Greece is in Greek, and so… But there are a handful of astrologers that do speak English very well. In fact there are OPA satellites or ISAR satellites over there in Greece, so they’re part of that. Also, there’s a huge astrological community in Istanbul in Turkey and I’ve connected with them to a couple of times. So yeah, it is interesting. But I don’t know, here, there’s just a lot more of it and I don’t have the language problem as well. But that’s the other thing when I first learned astrology and I had been traveling around the world. I realized at the first foreign astrology conference I had gone to, this was in France in the ’80s, everybody just wearing their badge with their Sun Moon and Ascendant on it, and some of them even had their chart wheel drawn out or whatever. And I thought, “Okay, I don’t speak French but there you are. I know you and we know each other.” This is a common language.
CB: Yeah, it becomes like the universal language. Even if you don’t have a primary language, something all astrologers share in common if you put them in a room together.
AG: Right.
CB: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. All right, let’s circle back. Actually, I was gonna circle back but you’ve mentioned a funny thing last night, which is we were talking about a topic of astrologers and dating and stuff, and not knowing your partner’s birth chart has been a little bit of a challenge for you recently.
AG: Yes, I partnered with somebody who has no idea when he was born. And none of the remaining family members do either about their own birth. It wasn’t recorded, it wasn’t written down. He was born in England and for some reason it wasn’t recorded anywhere.
CB: So, birth time or even birth day?
AG: Oh, no. He knows the birth date, but not the time.
CB: Got it.
AG: But still it’s frustrating when you want to put it in a wheel, you know, you see all these planets hanging out [laughs] just floating in space. And the wheel, you know, the house kind of grounds it, doesn’t it? It puts it into context on Earth. I always see the houses as actually the environment or the Earth experience you doing more so signs are more, you know, kind of up here. And characteristics way of being whatever. And so it is a little frustrating not knowing, and so many days I’ll go, “Okay, he’s Taurus rising. I know it. Because Mars just hit this degree and something happened to him, and the car blew up or something and all kinds of other things happened simultaneously.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, he’s stars rising or whatever.” But it could be Taurus on any angle. It could be, but whatever. It’s like this constant speculation. And so I was just thinking I wonder how many other people have had this situation too where you’re really close to somebody, could even be your parents because a lot of parents didn’t have their birth times recorded, and you’re forever wondering, “Well, I wonder what their rising is. I wonder what house their Sun is in.”
CB: Right. So you’re constantly somewhere in the back of your mind trying to rectify the chart and try to figure out what the correct Ascendant is and what the house placements would be.
AG: Yeah, exactly.
CB: That’s really funny. So yeah, I think that’s a pretty common thing that different astrologers can relate to in different ways, whether it’s a partner’s chart, whether it’s like you said a family member’s chart, or in some instances, the astrologer’s own chart. Which some people either get into astrology but they don’t know what time they were born, or they only know that it was a range of a few hours so the rising sign could be two or three different signs. Or in some instances, I’ve met a bunch of astrologers who have their Ascendant at like 29 degrees of a sign, so it could be 29 or could be zero degrees at the next sign. So they’re also kind of constantly trying to rectify their chart, or at least that’s a major part of their story with astrology is trying to get to the heart of their own birth chart.
AG: Yeah. And that’s the thing that is really kept me from diving deeply into whole sign houses, because somebody comes up with an exact birth time and they happen to be 29 degrees rising. And then it just really messes my mind up trying to figure out, “Well, if you’re 29 degrees and it goes all the way back to zero, then all these planets that are in the first house are gonna go back to the 12th house,” and then how do you… I mean, how do you work with that? You still use the whole sign even if it’s a 29-degree Ascendant, right?
CB: Yeah. For me, that’s one of the things that’s really compelling about whole sign houses, because you can tell the difference if the Ascendant is at 29 degrees or if it’s at zero degrees because all of the planets shift into a different house. And it’s actually that it’s one of the things that makes rectification easier to do because that shift is so stark from one rising sign to another. So you can kind of just go through the process of rectification with that person really quickly and try to see, “Well, does it seem like they have Mars in this house, the seventh house? Or does it seem like they have Mars in the sixth house? You know, does it seem like they have Jupiter in the second house or does it seem like they have Jupiter in the third house?” And if you do that process, it’s actually usually pretty stark and pretty clear. So it’s one of the actually appealing things to me about whole sign houses in terms of rectification. That’s something Patrick Watson and I we’re actually launching a course this month on rectification using whole sign houses and just teaching people how to do that. How to compare two different charts with three different charts and just know how to tell the difference of which one is the correct one for a person.
AG: Exactly. Yeah, that would be fascinating. I think that’s a great course to be studying.
CB: Yeah, is rectification something… I think it’s something that all astrologers have to do to a certain extent at some point in their life. I mean, you’re kind of doing that to some extent with your partner’s chart essentially.
AG: Yeah, a little bit. And I’ve worked on it with astrocartography, because my rule with astrocartography is 10 degrees. A planet can be 10 degrees from an angle, either side of the angle, to be effective in that location. And part of it is because there’s not an exact certainty about the time, it could be a few minutes early, it could be a few minutes later. And there’s a kind of a vibratory influence or vibrational influence of the planet that close to the angle. If it’s just risen, it’s still within 10 degrees of the actual Ascendant, it’s still kind of lit up from that rising point. And even if it’s just sat, it’s still carrying the energy of the light of day and even as it’s moving down into the darker region, into the shadow or whatever. And same with Midheaven IC, you know? Those are powerful points and either side of the line tends to be something that’s strong.
CB: Okay. You said 10 degrees?
AG: Yeah, I go 10 degrees either side.
CB: Okay. Do you find though that when you do have an exact birth time, that people’s lines went an exact… Like astrocartography line runs through a specific city, that that specific city is pretty important for that specific location?
AG: Yeah, when it’s right on, it’s right on. It’s exact. It’s like Jim Lewis used to say, it’s like being plugged into the electrical socket, you really feel it, you know? The juice is running through you, the electric current is running through you. But if you’re a few degrees away, some planets you don’t want to be right on the line. You want to be three to five degrees away. It just depends on how the planet is aspected in your chart, whether it’s dignified, whether it’s a planet that is useful to you. By useful, I mean there are certain planets that your life works better operating with, flowing with, and other planets that just are not really in the picture, not in the equation. They’re not really personal to you, you don’t have any relationship to them exactly the way you do to other planets.
CB: Okay. With astrocartography, you mentioned Jim Lewis. Did you… You knew him when he was alive?
AG: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was one of my major influences in astrology. Even though I think I met him in the early ’80s and I had really begun my practice, my professional practice in 1981. Or was it 1980? It might have been 1980. Yeah, it was 1980. It was January 21st, 1980. It was the first day of Aquarius in the first month of the first year of that decade of the ’80s. That was when I talk about a shift, you know? It’s like, “Here’s the ’80s, now I’m going professional.
CB: That was when you first started offering consultations-
AG: Yeah. Yeah, when I said, “Okay, I’m now an astrologer.” I’d been studying since 1974 and by circumstance in the outer world with the job situation and a person I was working for at the job, I decided I can’t be here anymore. And so I just quit and I decided, “Mh, can I do this?” But by then I had already been doing a lot of people, either friends and family for practice, or certain clients that I would get when people found out. When people find out you’re an astrologer, believe it, they want to have their chart done some way eventually. And so I had a lot of practice already and I thought, “Okay, let’s just see if I can make this work.” And I was gonna give it, I don’t know, I was gonna give it two years to see if I could really make a living at it and I’ve never looked back. It’s never, you know, I always thought of what’s plan B if this doesn’t work, but fortunately I’ve never had to use plan B. So I’ve been very blessed in the astrology work, certainly with clients, but also in the community. And just because it inspires me like nothing else has or does. There’s always new input, I’m always getting new input and kind of trying to keep up with the trends of what’s new and all that.
But yeah, Jim Lewis came along in the early ’80s shortly after I began my practice and I thought, “Wow, I love this. I love travel, I’m interested in travel, I love astrology. It marries these two categories.” And I said to him, “I want to formally study with you, what have you got? What can I do?” And so he did. He created a certification course, a course and an exam. The exam was pretty rigorous, but there were maybe a dozen or so of us that went through that first training course and that he gave in San Francisco over a weekend in, I think it was 1984. And then I got my certificate in early 1985. And then I organized a conference with him in Southern California on astrocartography and we certified more people from that. And then he had a growing list of community of people that were certified in his method. So, I was one of the few in the beginning that was there. What’s interesting, I never dreamed I would have my own thing like that, but I have because I’m following his model, the same model for the Venus Star Point course. I have a course that you can take online. It’s watching a series of videos and then an exam and then a certification process. So that was good. But Jim, actually was such a really good astrologer basically, not just astrocartography. I learned a lot from him just about him how he sees the planets working. He was highly political. He wouldn’t probably survive today, he would be… They would be throwing tomatoes at him for all his political statements because he was very, you know, he just said what he felt. Like, three or four or five planets in Gemini and he just said what he felt and all of that. But put it together really well, and I still use a lot of the methods that he taught me.
CB: So he was the the developer of the astrocartography, astrolocality or locational astrology technique. What was different about his approach or what he developed? Did locational astrology exist prior to that time, or was the entire concept invented, or was it just the idea of mapping it with the astrocartography lines onto like a world map? Was that the main innovation? Was it just a modification of an earlier idea or what was it that was unique about his approach?
AG: I think locational charts, relocational charts were used before he did this. But he-
CB: So that’s where you take your birth chart and you just, you leave the same time and date, but you just set it for a different city.
AG: Yeah. Like, you’re born in Denver, but now you’re moving to London.
CB: Yeah, that’s not a good astrocartography line for me.
AG: Okay. Well, okay, where would you rather be? Athens?
CB: No, it’s actually a good example because I think if you take my chart and you relocate it to London, it puts Mars on the Descendant or something like that.
AG: And Mars is not such a friendly planet for you.
CB: It’s not my best planet because it’s a day chart, so it’s contrary to the sect, and it’s in my 12th house natally. So if we relocate it there, it emphasizes that placement basically.
AG: Right, right, it does, it does. Yeah, open enemies. So don’t go sneaking into the royal quarters late at night or jumping the fence there, you’re likely to get shot.
CB: The British Museum or something?
AG: Yeah.
CB: Okay. I’ll try not to do that.
AG: Don’t do Night at the Museum.
CB: Right, like Ben Stiller sneaking in, okay. So that concept though you’re saying existed, the idea of just moving a person’s chart and setting it in a different city, that that already existed prior to Jim Lewis, some basic notion of relocation astrology.
AG: Right, yeah. And so he devised a way of mapping it. It’s sort of if you have Mars on the Ascendant, let’s say you’re more of an equatorial type Ascendant, Aries or Libra or something like that, Scorpio, Taurus, whatever. If your Mars is rising in Denver, it’s probably rising in Santa Fe and it’s probably rising in Mexico and it’s probably rising in… It goes from North Pole to South Pole all the way down along a certain slope, that’s why he called it a line, because it’s the same Mars in all these places in the world, it’s rising. A better example would be to use the Midheaven or IC position because then it’s just straight line, it’s not sloping. Depending on where you’re born, the rising and setting can be very curved in terms of where the Sun rose or set or where the planets rose or set. But on the MC, IC lines, they’re the vertical axis of the chart. So you could say from the North Pole at, what is this, 105 degrees west longitude?
CB: I’m not sure, something like that.
AG: Something like that, yeah. Same about the same as Santa Fe. And so you would have it on the angle straight down. So what he did was he figured out, “Okay,” and then computerized it, and said, “Well, Mars is rising there, but it’s also rising there and it’s also rising there and it’s also rising there.” So he partnered with a very early computer company, Astro Numeric Service it was called. His name was Greg, and I can’t remember his last name now, but he was the one who initially computerized and drew the maps for Jim. And it was a big fold-out. You’d get a big fold-out map, and it would show all your lines in the world. And it stunned me when I opened my map for the first time because I saw a planet traveling the exact path through seven or eight different countries in Europe that I had traveled a decade earlier not having known astrology then, not having known astrocartography then. But I opened the map and I was just stunned to see all the places I had been and things I had already done, and there were the planets right there to prove what an incredible journey they were and how they were working for me. So he also devised the term Astro*Carto*Graphy with the little asterisks in between so he could trademark it. Because I don’t think he could trademark just those names because astro and cartography, those are words, you can’t trademark words, concepts. I found the same thing when I was trying to trademark Venus Star Point. For the longest time I was wrestling with the US Patent and Trademark office about wanting to trademark that name. But Venus, you can’t trademark, star, you can’t trademark, point, you… But I said, “Well, what about all three together?” And finally I did have to hire a trademark attorney to figure out how it was going to be trademarked and they got it through. So it is a trademark name. But Jim did the same thing with astrocartography, and he had other things that he added to it that were kind of interesting.
CB: So that’s why sometimes when people mention astrocartography it has those asterisks in it because that’s his specific trademark, that concept of doing the relocated lines around on a global map.
AG: Yeah, but he had a very specific way. He only used the 10 planets, he did not use the nodes, he did not use Chiron or any of the asteroids. Back then they were just kind of coming up anyway, but he didn’t use them. The 10 planets, four lines, ascending, descending, Midheaven and IC because formerly he was a sidereal astrologer. And in sidereal astrology, I suppose… I haven’t studied it, but I seem to recall him saying that angular positions were the things that they really took note of in the chart.
CB: Yeah, in that school of siderealists in the late 20th century, probably coming from like Cyril Fagan and some of the–
AG: Yeah, and Donald Bradley, Cyril Fagan, those were who he studied with. And he picked up some things from [unintelligible] and Jayne, Charles Jayne. And these were really sophisticated thinkers of the mid-20th century that were doing some pretty groundbreaking astrology work at the time.
CB: Right. So he trademarked that specific thing of astrocartography, that’s really interesting in terms of being able to trademark that. And I’ll have to keep that in mind, so I just need to throw some wing dings or some emojis or something in order to trademark.
AG: You’re thinking of trademarking something?
CB: Yeah, I’m just going to start trademarking everything by throwing smiley emojis next to it. I’m going to trademark houses, maybe the trine aspect, maybe–
AG: No, it won’t work.
CB: It won’t work. Why not?
AG: No, because I tried it with Venus and star and point, no go.
CB: No trademarking Venus, okay, that’s tough. I mean, that would’ve been pretty impressive if you pulled off trademarking Venus.
AG: Yeah, exactly. I mean, okay, she gave me a lot of information, but she didn’t say I could own her.
CB: Yeah, you might get in trouble, that’s the point when I think you get smited or something.
AG: And Venus is a goddess that will not be owned, by the way, don’t try to possess Venus. She has her own way and she has her own charm and she doesn’t really need to be owned.
CB: Yeah, well, that’s part of the Venus cycle and the Venus retrograde cycle and the different phases of Evening Star Venus versus that more sort of warrior-like Morning Star Venus.
AG: Yeah. And the warrior idea, I mean, so a lot of the ancient cultures talked about that warrior goddess in the morning star phase, particularly the Maya. And I don’t want to really get political here, but the thing is that when we were in an Aries evening star in 2021, it was Aries, but it was an evening star. And I happened to notice that Biden pulled the troops out of Afghanistan after 20 years of being there or close to. And so the evening star is not going towards war, it’s sort of moving away from it, retreating, peace treaty. She’s the love goddess. And then this year was the Capricorn morning star, and this big war started in the world.
CB: Right, in Ukraine.
AG: In the Ukraine.
CB: That’s a good point. Because the other thing about that makes me think, when you mention that about Biden and Afghanistan, so that was close to a conjunction, is that what you’re saying?
AG: Well, it was in the cycle of the Aries evening star phase, because it started in late March of ’21 and it went all the way through January of this year. And I think he pulled the troops out probably when, summer? Was it summer of last year?
CB: Yeah, August.
AG: August, yeah.
CB: Yeah, cool. Because I was just thinking also of what happened, because I saw some videos recently of just the plight of women in Afghanistan who were recently protesting for education. Because one of the things that happened when the US pulled out and the Taliban came back in is they instituted a lot more severe and strict restrictions on women and to learn. So there were some protests there recently, but then the Taliban opened fire on a group of women and just started shooting them because they were trying to protest to get educated. So it makes me think of that as well.
AG: Right. I’m not saying it was the best decision in terms of what did we have in place to protect those people once we pulled out, no comment about that. I’m just observing the fact that if the ancients thought of the morning star cycle of Venus as the warrior goddess and the time to initiate war or battle and the evening star as not, as the more peacekeeping time, that… And that’s just one example, it’s not like we can’t carry through history because we’ve had wars lasting long periods of time. They go through morning star, evening star, morning star, evening star phase. Were they all begun in a morning star phase and did they all end in a evening star phase? That’s research still to be done.
CB: Sure, yeah. No, I was mainly just thinking of the idea of women coming out more to the forefront versus sometimes in history being pushed back in ways, and that was definitely a step back or a push backwards at least in that country at that time.
AG: It was, but it makes you think that the more a group of people, in this case women in Afghanistan, are being suppressed, the more there’s going to be a reaction to that. There are going to be forceful people on the other side pushing back against it. So this is the struggle we all are under when we get any kind of suppression, told what to do, in America especially. Americans don’t like to be told what to do. We pretty much are law-abiding citizens, but when we’re forced to do something, that’s when you see the people rebel.
CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s coming up really recently over the past month in Iran with the Mercury retrograde that started in Libra and then stationed direct in Virgo, where there’s been some protests that initially started out that were women that were against having to wear head scarves. But then it’s blown up into a much larger, there was a woman that was evidently killed after being arrested.
AG: Right, and big protests ensued.
CB: Yeah, and now it seems to be snowballing into larger protests, but it initially started off with that as the focal point.
AG: Yeah. And think about the Arab Spring some years ago, it started with one little fruit vendor in a farmer’s market type of thing, and it spread then to the whole country and neighboring countries. So it really only takes one incident or one person sometimes to spark a really much bigger thing. But again, it’s like human rights I think are going to be really challenged and really exercised as well. Even now with Saturn in Aquarius these last couple of years, we could see it all during Covid, and we’re also going to see it when Pluto comes into Aquarius. I’ve kept thinking that these last two and a half years was Saturn in Aquarius was sort of a precursor to Pluto in Aquarius, like a preview, a trailer, what’s going to happen in the big movie.
CB: Yeah. As an Aquarius rising who’s excited for Saturn to depart from Aquarius in March, I’m not super excited about that idea, but you’re probably right.
AG: Well, we’ll see.
CB: We’ll see. So that brings up another topic actually that you mentioned and you’ve talked about recently, which is there’s a longer, super longer-term cycle of Venus that actually connects potentially in some ways to the Pluto cycle and the current Pluto return that’s happening in the United States birth chart going all the way back to 1776 when Pluto was in late Capricorn when the country was founded. So what’s the connection there with that and Venus retrograde?
AG: I had always thought of the Venus star moving from… Let’s picture the Venus star as a little animated figure, an emoji or something or a human figure even, with a head and two arms and two legs, okay?
CB: Can I copyright that?
AG: Yeah, you could do that. I mean, whoever got those emojis copyrighted, man, they must be rolling in it, right?
CB: Yeah, that’s fair.
AG: More money than God, as they say.
CB: I’ll have to look that up, who came up with the emojis.
AG: Yeah. There’s got to be a new version though of emojis. I’m kind of tired of the existing emojis, there’s got to be something a little at the next level, 3D emojis or something, I don’t know, animated talking emojis, I don’t know.
CB: Right, yeah. We’ll probably see that in our lifetime pretty soon here with the metaverse and everything else. Because the emoji, just a static one, probably doesn’t look that great in 3D or in virtual reality.
AG: Right. Okay, so were we trying to avoid talking about Pluto? I don’t know, but we got off the subject.
CB: No, let’s go back to that because that’s a really interesting point. So Pluto cycle, a lot of astrology, I think the second exact Pluto return just happened this year in July. I want to say that there’s one more.
AG: Yeah, there is one more. So Pluto has a 248-year orbital cycle. And so we are 248 years from 1776, and I think the last of the Pluto return will be in 2024 if I’m not mistaken. So that’ll take us to the 248 years. The Venus star moving from one arm to the next is 251 years. I used to think of them both as 250 just to kind of round it off, but I heard Nick talking on your show a few weeks ago.
CB: Nick Dagan Best?
AG: Nick Dagan Best, who really follows Venus star cycles very thoroughly, and he’s got all these things in his head about it. And I realized there are three years difference, but still Pluto was in Capricorn in 1776 and Pluto is in Capricorn now and will be, and so we are having the Pluto return, but the US in 2026 when it hits zero Scorpio for the last point of Scorpio, it will be the star point return, the first ever star point return for the US because it’s a one degree Scorpio star point at its first, 1776. I do have a slide that I gave you on then and now, the 1770s and the 2020s, if you want to breeze through those and find it.
CB: Is it this 250-year cycle one?
AG: No, keep going. That one, that one.
CB: Okay. So for the audio listeners, what are we looking at?
AG: We’re looking at, I need my glasses to look at that. Okay, so the 1770s from ’71 to ’83, we’ve got on October 22nd a familiar date to us. We had the first Libra star at 29 Libra. Then four years later in 1775, it was at one degree Scorpio, and that’s the one the US was born with. And then in 1779, 27 Libra. And then in 1783, 28 Libra. See how it goes back, it went forward one degree, but it’s actually really moving backwards. It’s moving forwards and backwards, but generally going backwards. And it’s equal to now, 1771 is equivalent to 2022, the first Libra star point. 2026 is equivalent to 1775. So it made me think about the ending and the beginning of something to do with the United States and the country and the founding fathers and whatever it was that they set up and how we’re looking at that now. Because really only recently we had the Capitol riot, the insurrection at the Capitol. And we’re still on the trial there, we’re still going through the trials and the hearings and all of that about it. And I think this is going to carry through and we have a kind of revolution brewing again or a civil war or some kind of something, where the United States seems so divided right now. Can it go forward as a unified United States? It seems like it’s a very divided states of America right now, and that the two sides are pushing always against each other and there’s not a lot of progress being made. And I think a lot of people are feeling like are we still abiding by the laws? And course the constitution came later. So one of the things that Rick Tarnas said in his video series that came out, Changing the Gods, he’s another one of my influencers in terms of astrology, I really love his work, that history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think what we’re seeing here is we’re going to have a rhyming with that decade of the founding of that nation called the United States when the colonies, the 13 colonies, came together and decided we are now the United States and of course their expansion. But will we have founding fathers again? Maybe it’s going to be founding mothers, maybe it’s going to be a whole diverse group of people that are going to be part of creating this new bill of rights or this new constitution or whatever it is that we need. And certainly it seems like we need something to move forward because how are we functioning as a whole right now?
CB: Right. So looking at this graph, so it seems like we are in the period now that would be equivalent to the several year period leading up to the Revolutionary War with this conjunction that’s about to take place at the end of October this month. The parallel is October of 1771, so several years before the Revolutionary War. And then once we get to the next conjunction in 2026, that’s going to be the one that’s in October of 2026, that’s the parallel to 1775 and 1776.
AG: Yeah. If you just look at those four different dates on the top, they match the four different dates on the bottom in terms of the actual star point, the Venus cazimi, and the Revolutionary War I believe started in 1773, so it was in this Libra-Scorpio transition between the end of the Scorpio star and the beginning of the Libra star. So there was something afoot, there was that energy afoot that we’re in a changing. And I think it’s interesting that Scorpio is a star point for the country because I wouldn’t have guessed that initially when I was working with this and I was looking up countries. I thought, “No, America carries this different kind of mystique and why would it be a Scorpio star point because that deals with other issues.” But then I started thinking about it, and when you listen to politicians on the campaign trail, at least for most of my life listening to them, they’ve always talked about not raising taxes, like they’re going to cut taxes or your taxes won’t go up or that that was a basis for a lot of people to vote for them. And I think of Scorpio as taxes and other people’s money and that whole idea of kind of a wealth component, resources either borrowed or shared. So I mean, there’s other aspects of Scorpio that I can identify with the United States too of course, but that was one of the things that first popped into my mind about… It really is a country that is known for, especially to immigrants, as a way to make it financially, that it’s a country that lets you create opportunities to become financially solvent or to make something of yourself from nothing. All the stories we heard as children about the immigrants coming here very poor, not a penny in their pocket and turning their families into becoming dynasties and so forth. So I think a lot of that has to do with the Scorpio star point as well. And it’s exactly trine the natal Venus of the chart. I think Natal Venus of the 1776 chart is one or two degrees, couple of degrees Cancer, and then this Venus star is one Scorpio. So the two Venuses are really working together and supporting each other.
CB: Yeah. So this is really interesting. I mean, one of my main takeaways here is just that the parallel here is that we’re in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War and then in a few years we’ll go into the period around the time that basically a repetition of the exact same Venus transits that were happening during the time of the Declaration of Independence. So it’s like we’ve already heard echoes of that with a lot of astrologers are comparing that based on the Pluto return and talking about the Declaration of Independence and the founding of essentially democracy or the experiment with democracy, to however the extent the United States is one, started at that time with Pluto in the position it’s come to now, and that we’re having some revisiting of that where both sides have sort of been questioning whether the democracy is kind of under attack or under threat in some sense. So the Pluto return was already bringing some of that stuff up, then we also have a lot of astrologers talking about the Uranus return that’s coming up for the United States when Uranus returns to Gemini here in, what is that, 2025, 2026.
AG: Somewhere along there. Another air component to add to all the air we already are going to be experiencing.
CB: Right, and so that’s the planet Uranus returning back to the place that it was during the Revolutionary War. But also Uranus was there during the Civil War and it was there during World War II, so a lot of astrologers are kind of nervous about that indicating either some sort of internal or external war or conflict of some sort based on the last two times that happened. And then if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that there’s a very long-term 250-year Venus cycle that’s also indicating a repetition or bringing us back to sort of the very early days of the country at this time as well.
AG: Right, exactly. And I think also somehow the Neptune and Pluto cycle are also synced, like every three Neptunes is two Plutos or something, or one and a half Neptunes is a Pluto. And we are also having a Neptune opposition to the United States chart at the same time. I think that’s why so many people are really confused, we’re really like, “What’s going on?” I mean, not that Neptune in Pisces hasn’t confused everybody everywhere, but especially Neptune’s in Virgo in the United States chart. And I think of that as her shining fields of wheat, her abundance, her farming, her agriculture, her land of plenty, the early settlers, the early people that settled here would write back home and say things like, “You can’t believe the abundance of food here in this country,” fruit falling off of trees and just so much growth and productivity. And I think of Neptune in Virgo as not just the harvest and the harvest goddess, but the idea of work and service and work hard and God will reward you kind of element of sort of what we think… You could sort of think of that phrase as sort of the ideology of a lot of people that settled here, the immigrants that first came and even their descendants. And so right now with Neptune in Pisces we don’t have that, jobs seem to be disappearing or people aren’t having the security that they once had, or it’s in a whole different realm. It’s really in cyberspace right now or it’s in, you know, it’s with technology and other things. It’s not on the Earth. I think there’s a real confusion not only about that, but about what does this country represent? What does it believe? What is the prevailing way to move ahead here? And I don’t think people really know. And yeah, we’re all talking about in the coming years, it repeats the cycle of war that happened then, but aren’t we kind of having a war now? I mean, it’s certainly a war of words and a war of ideas and the parties not agreeing at all on anything, basically. Very hard to get legislation passed for anything. But we push ahead, you know? This is just the nature of the times, I think this too will pass and we’ll see what is created. What’s the new vision for the country that needs to be created? That’s part of Neptune’s stop too, is creating a vision and then keeping it, holding that vision, and then moving towards it.
CB: So it looks like looking at your graph that in terms of the period in terms of the Venus cycle once you get a little bit past this point, will be in like 3030, 3034. Basically, the early-
AG: 2030s I’d say we’re on target.
CB: Okay. So early to mid-2030s, we start moving out of this Venus cycle phase?
AG: Yeah. Also another big thing that leaving Scorpio, I have another slide on that, a picture of what happened at the beginning of Scorpio was a petroleum-based industry. Okay? Can we say that Scorpio deals with petroleum there? That one. Transition from the Sagittarius 100 years prior to that, what was the mystique of the country, the Wild West? You know, the Western, the cowboys and so forth. It was the horse, you know? It was like our transportation was by horse, and all the industries supported horses and horse and carriages and horseshoeing. And what did they do when the automobile came in? Suddenly that whole industry dried up for the most part? Well, the petroleum industry really got big. I mean, the car came in before the ’20s but I would say by the 20s, it was pretty much an everyday thing, ’20s and ’30s, for Americans to have at least one car.
CB: Okay, for the audio listeners, part of what you’re showing on this slide is that there was a shift in the Venus conjunctions from Sagittarius to Scorpio then?
AG: Yeah. Yeah. And it happened in the late ’20s or the 1930s. And we’ve been 100 years in the petroleum industry now, big time. And my hope is that Libra delivers to us what Libra wants, and that is clean air, and not petroleum-based world. I mean, sometimes it doesn’t look like that. Libra also wants peace. It wants harmony in the world. You know, are we going to get that? We have a war raging right now that’s pretty pretty nasty, and threats of it getting nastier. We have the coal industries and the petroleum industry not wanting to shift gears yet, they’re trying to hold on for dear life. But I think they sense that there’s only one more Scorpio Star Point and that by the time we get fully into Libra, that the demands of the Earth and the people on the Earth are going to be for clean air industries and not petroleum-based industries. And I just heard the other day somebody told me, I wasn’t following the news but California just– California which is a liberal leader in a lot of these laws– California just instituted a law saying that by 2035, absolutely no petroleum-based cars would be sold. New cars would not be sold. You could still buy used cars, but if the resources to fuel those used cars dry up then what good is buying a used car that runs on gas? Because eventually the gas stations are all going to be not operating. And so we’re already in some of that transition. There’s electric cars here and there, and there’s hybrids that have happened and there’s other technologies happening.
CB: Yeah, it’s really interesting that you mentioned that and how that ties in with that conjunction of Venus and the Sun this month, that first one, and how that’s shifting from Scorpio to Libra. Because I just saw in the news in the past couple of days that OPEC, the oil consortium that a bunch of countries are in just announced, I think led by Russia and Saudi Arabia, that they’re going to cut oil production and so that’s expected to sharply drive oil prices up. And that’s really angered the White House and there’s a bunch of people complaining or saying that this may encourage the push further towards electric cars and things like that in order to get away from oil and in order to get away from being sort of at the mercy of major oil producing countries and them having the power to sort of affect the worldwide economy in that way through controlling or manipulating the price of oil.
AG: Right, and that’s a good point. Things don’t happen because we just think it’s a good idea, it’s usually because there’s a mandate or this thing just stopped. You don’t get this anymore. We’re not printing books anymore, you have to go digital, something like that. Or, Amazon’s here now so all the little bookstores are closing, you know, because they can’t compete. It’s some outside force that creates that so yeah, the bad news is “Oh, my God, oil prices are being driven way up. What are we going to do?” But the good news is it’s going to push for more production of alternative modes of fuel.
CB: Yeah, that’s really wild. Yeah, that might track well in terms of what you were saying some states starting to set timelines in the future for the outlawing of oil cars or cars that run on petroleum or on oil, and as well as pushes to set up, I think there was another announcement recently about funding a national network of electric charging stations along highways or something like that, which is another sort of push towards electric vehicles.
AG: It would have to be. Because right now, you can’t depend on… There’s not enough electric charging stations to do it. Even in Greece where I live in a fairly small town on the Peloponnese, and we have two places in town where you can charge electric cars. But I’ve never seen any cars being charged there. [laughs] So I don’t think they’re quite there yet, Athens probably has a lot more. But again, you go to the small towns in America, are there charging stations? And how long does it have to be charged in order for you to go drive another 250 or 300 miles or whatever it is, to the next fill up of your tank?
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting thing here though just seeing that in real-time and how you’ve connected that with that past shift from Sagittarius to Scorpio of the Venus Star Point, and just the rise of automobiles and of the petroleum industry and the potential of a shift towards or away from that probably in the past decade if that was indeed tied with those conjunctions in Scorpio that have taken place over the past century.
AG: Yeah, because remember every four years the cazimi happens in Scorpio. So it’s a supercharged energy that radiates that light of the Sun and Venus affecting a sign. And it empowers the sign. It gives it strength, it gives it resources, it gives it… That’s why I look at each star point as to, “Okay, what house can I really work on this cycle to… Where is it? What am I doing?” But yeah, so every time it went through Scorpio was another increase in production. And I haven’t studied the cycles of the oil prices going up and down through the times through the last hundred years, but it would be an interesting study to see how it’s correlated with the Venus Star Cycle through Scorpio.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AG: Like, at times when Saturn transited. I noticed when the recession happened for us in America, especially the real estate market, the bubble burst, Saturn was transiting in retrograde exactly where Venus was transiting in retrograde that year when that start point was being made. But Venus was retrograde so was Saturn at the same spot. And boy, everything just collapsed. So you also want to look at… Like for any retrograde cycle, you want to look at other planets that come into play.
CB: Okay. I’m just looking through some of the other slides just if there’s any other major points that might be relevant to this shift that we have coming up later this month with the Venus Star Point moving into Libra.
AG: Yeah, if you wanted to go back to that Libra Star of the two women who work tirelessly for women’s right to vote, they were both Libra Star Points. We don’t have any Libra Star Points yet having been born. If anyone’s expecting a baby, this coming year after October 22 they will be the first of the Libra Star Points to be born in our era. But these two women had Venus Star points in Libra, and they partnered together to push for women’s right to vote. Sadly, they didn’t see it come to pass in their lifetime but about 50 years later, it did happen.
CB: And when you say they are a Venus Star Point, what do you mean by that? Is it that they were born… That the preceding conjunction of the Sun and Venus before they were born was the Venus Star Point in Libra.
AG: Yeah, the previous cazimi to their birth. And that’s how we define the Star Points. It’s like, what’s your Venus Star Point? It’is basically when was the last cazimi of Venus in the Sun. And there are different ways– I have a slide on that too– to look that up. You can find that in an Ephemeris, you can find it… Let’s see where that slide is. Somewhere in there… How to find your Venus Star Point….
CB: I’m not finding it.
AG: Here, there it is. Okay, so you can look in the Ephemeris, you can go to the book, Venus Star Rising, it’s on pages 80 and 81.
CB: So if we looked it up at the Ephemeris, what are the instructions?
AG: Well, you just look for the last time Venus and the Sun made a conjunction.
CB: Prior to your birth.
AG: Prior to your birth. Closest prior to your birth, closest one prior to your birth.
CB: And whatever sign and degree that conjunction was, that’s your Venus Star Point?
AG: Yeah. That’s the easy way to do it for people who have an Ephemeris.
CB: What does that mean then for you? That anytime that repeats, then subsequently those are going to be important times in your life?
AG: Yeah. So you can look it up in the book. And also, I have a table at my website, a PDF you can download and just put on your phone, which a lot of people have done. A PDF of the actual star point dates.
CB: Okay. And the title of your book is Venus Star Rising: A New Cosmology for the Twenty-First Century.
AG: Mhm, there it is.
CB: All right, so going back to the two women that you were talking about, what were their names?
AG: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
CB: Okay. And these were early pioneers in the women’s suffrage movement.
AG: Yeah. And so how did I want to link that to the current timeframe is that women’s activism and, you know, right before the Libra star point was a Scorpio but women’s activism has become very strong again in these last years of the Scorpio Star Points. I think when we go into Libra, there’s going to be more of that kind of thing. Equality for all kinds of groups of people. We don’t have… When they were working on it they were talking about two genders, we are in a very gender fluid time right now. And so we’re not just talking about two genders, we’re talking about all kinds of things that are needing to happen and wanting to happen for people who identify themselves across the spectrum.
CB: Okay, so maybe just the broader concept of gender coming up as a discussion.
AG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. And it’s interesting thinking about Venus in that way, even though it classically gets associated with the feminine or with women, that it brings up potentially just the concept of gender in general.
AG: Mhm. I think the Gemini Star Point has a lot to do with it, too, which is still in play for a long time. But the gender fluid decades that we’ve been experiencing really since the ’60s, you know, the gay rights movement first happened in 1969, the first Gemini Star Point happened in ’64. And that was leading into the ’70s and beyond for a whole group of people to be identified and to ask for equality in a lot of different ways. And we have seen that happen, you know, in terms of legalisation of marriage and benefits insurancewise and whatnot. And right now, the big issue for women of course is the reproductive rights. I think that’s the next big fight for women. This whole thing with Roe v. Wade and the backlash to it is probably what this Libra Star Point’s going to address at least at the beginning of the years of the Libras, the first couple of passes of Libra Star Point cazimis. But as we go through the decades, we’ll just have to see what else is, you know, what else is coming up?
CB: Yeah, it’s been interesting seeing over the past few years how sometimes kind of like the planets where most of the time the planets move forward in the long term, sometimes they do that U-turn and start moving backwards and go retrograde and sometimes take a step back. It’s interesting how sometimes with, like civil rights issues, how in the long scheme of things oftentimes progress forward, but then sometimes things go retrograde and you see things taking a step backwards, it seems like for a period of time.
AG: And it’s kind of like how the Venus Star moves, basically in one direction, but occasionally on a star point goes back before it goes forward. That’s what’s happening now. I mean, we’re introducing a new Libra Star Point on October 22nd, but four years from now it goes back to Scorpio one last time. This is the decade at the end. That’s why I saw the retooling of the petroleum industry to happen during this decade, because if we can conclude that if the petroleum industry and cars and all of that began really strongly when the Scorpio Starpoint came in and now it’s ending, is this a logical time for it to end? I mean, it’s a question for me. But frankly, I can’t see… Again, if Venus gets what she wants, and she usually does, in Libra, I don’t think this is what she wants.
CB: Yeah, some of the talk about Libra or hear about the previous history of like the women’s rights movement reminds me of how striking I thought it was seeing that the full ingress of Uranus into Libra back in the 1970s how that coincided really closely, I think it was the final ingress, with the Stonewall riots in New York, which is often talked about as being this important turning point in terms of the gay rights movement.
AG: 1969.
CB: Yeah, ’69, sorry.
AG: And it was an Aries Star Point period when that happened, too. Aries actually has been a hundred years of activism. Aries Star Points tend to be activists. But even in the periods, the little sub-cycles of, you know, when it’s actually time of an Aries Star Point within the whole hundred-year framework, it tends to be a lot of action going on; a lot of protests, a lot of whatever.
CB: Right. Yeah. Cuz that was actually like people fighting back and-
AG: For the first time really in a big way.
CB: That was an important turning point I think for same-sex relationships and for gay rights, but also for trans rights starting to become more of an issue as well because there were trans people that were involved in those riots or leading or organizing it.
AG: Yeah. I don’t recall at the time. I was there witnessing it, but I was here.
CB: You were in New York in 1969?
AG: No, not in ’69. But I was here on the planet witnessing the event and watching it on the news and watching it come forth. And I don’t recall… Yeah, I’m sure trans was part of it, too. But the bigger statement was gay rights. You know?
CB: And then I know other astrologers like Nick Dagan Best who talked about there’s certain Venus retrogrades that have also been tied in with civil rights at different points as well, so that seems like just the broader issue of civil rights seems like it’s a recurring Venus theme.
AG: Yeah, that too. Yeah. So remember, Venus is a… She has a warrior goddess side to her, as well as the love goddess side to her. She’s not all just about love. If she has to create war or fight– let’s just say fight, not war– but if she has to fight for the right to be, that’s part of what she does too. Because I think the wars that we can see during the last Libra Star Point at least in our country; so first, we had the Revolutionary War which was to… What was it over? It was paying taxes on the tea that was coming from England. I mean, certainly America wanted to be self-governing and didn’t want these British overlords, but at the bottom line it was an economic decision. We don’t want to pay taxes to the Crown on all this tea. And so you think about the Scorpio Star Point again, you know, we’re fighting over the right to be sovereign, but also to have our own- to set our own taxes or whatever.
CB: Right. It’s often framed that the issue is about taxation without representation.
AG: Yeah, that’s right. Taxation without representation. That’s what it was. And I can see that that is part of the Libra issue. Then we had the Civil War during Libra. I mean, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a Libra Star Point but he had Libra on one of his arms and Mars, the planet Mars in Libra right on that arm. And so he actually instituted military action to help free the slaves. So it was another moment of a war, but again, around civil rights. Which is a Libra concept.
CB: Okay. So the recurring theme here is civil rights and sometimes turning points-
AG: Human rights, I would say. Not just civil rights. I think Libra is human rights.
CB: Right. Of people not just needing, but people deserving certain rights at birth, and often certain groups or different classes of people being deprived of that. But then different turning points in history where there’s a push for people to get the rights that they deserve, essentially, just as humans.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Okay, we’re getting to some core Venus stuff here as we’re talking about the basis that’s making me understand the archetype a little bit better and how this is operating as a much more significant complex archetype than we’re sometimes used to thinking about when it comes to Venus, where sometimes it just gets flattened down to this thing about love and relationships or finances or what have you. But part of your whole point here is that Venus is much more complex than people often give it credit for.
AG: Mhm. Well, this is a bigger picture of Venus, the whole Venus cycle looking at it this way than your personal natal Venus. And a lot of people ask me, “Well, what’s the difference between my natal Venus and my Venus Star Point? Because often they’re in different signs, and most of the time they’re in different signs.” And I think the natal Venus is where we look for those things outside of ourselves, you know, through relationships, through our job security, through what we’re going to call home or our security or whatever, Taurus-Libra kind of things. But I think the Venus Star Point, the inner Venus Star Point with the Sun because it’s cazimi with the Sun, it’s like the Sun, and then there’s Venus, and then there’s Earth. And they’re all in a line. And it’s the laser beam of light from the Sun, love from Venus shooting to the body, you know, the organism as it’s developing at the cellular level prior to one’s birth that kind of opens it up, activates something inside. It’s in you and you don’t have to go out to seek it. Whatever your star point is, you don’t have to go looking for somebody to get that or something to get that. You already have that within you. You’re born with it. And it operates at a very strong level and also often at a very unconscious level, we don’t know what– I call it a talent or a gift, an innate talent or gift that we have at birth– we don’t always know that we have that. And with clients when they get Venus star readings, I often say, “Well, look. It’s over here!”
Recently I did a reading for somebody who had a tonne of planets in Sagittarius but the Venus Star Point was in Gemini. She didn’t have any other planets in Gemini, in fact her whole life was operating under Gemini. She was operating like a Gemini. She’s a writer, she had varied interests, she was reading all kinds of things, she was doing multiple things at one time. You know, perpetual student, very very adamant about communication style and language and all that. She was very Gemini and so when I explained the whole idea about Gemini and all that, she really related. But that’s just one example, I’ve hundreds of examples that I could cite. But the main overarching theme here is that the Venus star point is not only inside you and it sometimes operates unconsciously, but it can also possess you. At times it can be like, “That’s all I want to do. That’s what I’m doing.” And we don’t realize how much of ourselves is expressed through that particular way.
CB: It’s like a deep internal drive or motivation.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Which is interesting because it makes me think of the Hellenistic and Mediaeval term for cazimi is being in the heart of the Sun. That’s exactly what we’re talking about is Venus being cazimi, which is in the heart of the Sun, but then that conjunction prior to birth setting up something deep internally within a person based on what happened in a person’s chart.
AG: Yeah. We’ve heard of terms like, “Are you doing your heart work, you know? Are you doing the work that is just allowing you to survive, or you’re doing your heart work?” And when people asked me about career guidance in readings, that’s one thing I go to first; well, what have you been doing? And what is your actual heart work? And then how does it connect to your Venus Star and how do you get there?
CB: Okay.
AG: Another thing about Venus, we didn’t go into any of that today, but the Venus cycle being what it is, it’s… Venus to Earth is in a phi relationship– p h i phi, phi ratio– which is what mathematicians and artists and designers and all across the board (the ancients even) called the golden ratio, the golden mean. It’s a beautiful harmonious relationship between the two, their cycles the way they merge. And so it does create harmony. It is something inside of you. It is something you have passion for, but it also has to do with synchronicity. I think the Venus star comes around and activates something in your chart, that’s when events happen. That’s when, “Aha! I finally got it. I finally did it. I finally achieved all these things that I didn’t think I would ever achieve.” But it is also operating on the principle of synchronicity.
CB: It makes me, you mentioned the harmony and the connection with the golden ratio and Venus, and it makes me think going back to the civil rights discussion that that’s part of the issue is Venus seeking harmony and trying to rebalance the scales when there’s a lack of that. There’s a disharmony or a lack of balance that tries to bring things back into balance, but sometimes what’s needed in order to bring things back into balance is pushing back against something or pushing the boundaries of where things currently are in order to renegotiate sometimes social contracts.
AG: Yeah. And don’t Libras do that anyway? I mean, isn’t that an aspect of the sign of Libra? To always… I’ve heard people say to me… Like, somebody I know really well, he has this person in his life that’s a Libra, this woman. And he says, “Aren’t Libra’s supposed to be peaceful? But she’s fighting all the time. She fights with me all the time. She argues with me all the time.” I sort of noticed that about Libras, they argue for something. Because whatever you put out over here, they’re looking at the other side of it and they’re making you… They’re asking you to think about, “Okay, what’s the other side?” Whether they believe it or not, but it’s kind of in their nature to just say, “Hey.” It is a polarity to Aries, and it is so important on the axis on the cardinal points of the wheel. And so sometimes you can get extremes. You can get these two opposite extremes of something happening at a very dynamic level. But I think that is part of their nature, it’s part of their motivation in life, is to question. Okay. Okay, you’re Aries, this is what you say. This is what you’re doing. This is the action you’ve taken. I need to question that now and say why, or I need to make you look at the other side of it.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. Sort of like if somebody steps one foot on a scale, the scale goes down and the other side goes up so there’s an imbalance, and so Libra’s impulse is to put their foot down on the other side of the scale to balance things out.
AG: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t get to go all the way there. And this the magical and sometimes very challenging dance of relationships, you know, because Libra does deal with the whole idea of relating. I think this also coming into this next cycle of this Libra cazimi is we’re going to be looking at relationships differently and reorganizing. Now, this first cazimi is square Pluto pretty closely. It’s 29 degree Libra cazimi square Pluto in like Capricorn, so I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of relationships being reorganized, endings possibly. Pluto tends to bring endings. A restructuring at the very least. But something has to come out, you know, something that’s been hidden from one or both parties in the relationship is probably going to be revealed and then adjustments are going to have to be made, changes are going to be happening to be made. So that’s a big deal.
And I think that not just with individual people like okay, these two people we’ve been working together, okay? But companies, corporations, governments, there’s a shift happening from this last Capricorn cazimi. Political alliances are ending and new ones are beginning, people have died, people are, you know, the Queen has just died by the way. She was born in 1926, the very first year of the Scorpio point cazimi, and she passed as we’re approaching the very end of the Scorpio timeline. So that was kind of interesting for me to think about one of my fellow astrologers pointed that out in one of her postings, and I said to her, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” Because it also brings about questions about the monarchy and how that’s going to change with Charles at the helm. And what we talked about at the beginning of our country in terms of how was it begun, and how was it built? And land that was occupied by people that were already here, and it was forcibly taken. And then importing slaves to actually do the work to build it. I think Libra’s also going to want to balance the scale in terms of this talk of reparations and balancing the scales somehow.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And so the recent discussion of colonialism and post-colonialism and things like that, that it becomes much more prominent?
AG: Right.
CB: One thing I want to mention before we wrap up, because I know we’re getting towards the end of our time is just it’s really interesting-
AG: Time flies. [laughs]
CB: I know. Yeah, it’s like two hours went by.
AG: Already? Two hours, wow.
CB: So one of the things that’s really fascinating, though, about this and about your work with the Venus Star Point is that we’re talking about, like a prenatal astronomic or astrological event or indication because the Venus Star Point by definition is something that happened prior to birth. That’s a really interesting category of techniques. There’s a few- There’s not a huge amount of them or there’s not a huge amount of work done on this but there are some things that have been done on this of just things that happen prior to or immediately prior to a person’s birth, somehow imprinting or somehow being important for what will become in their subsequent life.
AG: It’s an imprint. Yeah, for sure.
CB: Okay.
AG: Now, we’re just talking about one basic star point. I’ve extended the idea here of putting all five star points that you were born around on a wheel. So you are going to see the subsequent ones, the two after your birth and the two prior to your star point. And yours is right in the middle sort of at the head. Then the two that were feeding into it from before are over there on one side, and then the two after are over here on the other side. So actually, it is a technique that is an evolutionary advancement or progression. Let’s say a Venus. Because just like if somebody was being born this year, at the end of the year December, let’s say December first this year, they’re going to have a Libra Star Point. 29 Libra. But, what was the Star Point before them? What fed into that? They’re being born early in the Libra Star Point nine-month cycle, right? So part of the time in the womb, well, right before that was 18 Capricorn. So the way you chart it is you’d put 18 Capricorn on the arm before and 29 Libra on the head. And on the leg before the 18 Capricorn was last year’s five-degree Aries Star Point. So you’re still being affected by those that came before and the two that are going to be coming after which will be your whole star wheel.
CB: So the three conjunctions essentially before-
AG: Yeah, three before and two after.
CB: And two after. Okay. And what does that extend to? What’s the total amount of time roughly to know [crosstalk] being before and after?
AG: Yeah, four years. So half of the… Because, you know, we say that Venus makes a pentagram in eight years, but it’s actually making two full stars in eight years. It’s making a full morning star set and a full evening star set. But it alternates. You’re never gonna get two morning stars in a row. The way Venus does its cazimi is interior conjunction producing the morning star and the following one is exterior conjunction producing the evening star, followed by an interior and then an exterior. It’s always got that rhythm of the heartbeat of Venus. I call it the heartbeat, the cosmic heartbeat. It’s always morning then evening, morning then evening, morning then evening. So you’ve got not only five different signs on your star, you’ve got a couple of morning stars and a couple of evening stars.
CB: Okay, and that’s what these two other diagrams were.
AG: Yeah. And thank you to Maurice Fernandez who did these diagrams that we’re using.
CB: So, this is the morning star, Venus the orange one cycle of conjunctions, which includes the one we’re about to have later this month.
AG: Yeah. Here there.
CB: And then there’s the separate evening star one, which is the retrograde conjunctions.
AG: Mhm.
CB: Got it.
AG: Yeah. Always when Venus is retrograde at the cazimi halfway through, what comes out of that is she’ll appear as a morning star some days after that cazimi. And it comes out very quickly in the morning sky. She appears very, very quickly in the morning sky after the conjunction. Evening star takes a lot longer for her to be seen in the evening sky after the cazimi. You won’t see her immediately following the October 22nd cazimi. I think recently Adam Gainsburg said in this webinar that we did, that she won’t be visible until around December 14th-15th.
CB: Okay, got it. And that just has to do with the speed of when she’s moving retrograde versus direct.
AG: Both the speed and the direction. Because when she’s moving retrograde, the Sun and Venus are moving in two opposite directions so they’re getting apart. They’re distancing themselves from each other a lot quicker. When she’s an evening star at that exterior conjunction, she and the Sun are traveling about the same speed, and it takes a lot longer for her to surpass it. So she’s still in the beams.
CB: That’s really interesting in terms of just the astronomical or the symbolic interpretation. You’re saying when Venus is retrograde, the Sun and Venus are moving away from each other much. And maybe symbolically then that’s why sometimes retrogrades can be for certain people depending on how it hits your charts, this much more gut-wrenching period of sometimes separations that occur in relationships or other things like that.
AG: Right, that’s another way to look at it. It’s also because I see it as the beginning and ending of the Venus synoptic cycle. And so at the end, what’s Venus going to do at the end of her cycle? She’s going to say, “Do I want to continue with this or not?”
CB: Okay, so a time of endings.
AG: It’s not just personal relationships. A lot of people quit their jobs and are separate from something really big that they’ve been a part of for a while.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s a really good point. All right. This has been really interesting. We’ve gotten into some really amazing stuff here and I know there’s a whole lot of other stuff we could have gotten into because there’s just a tonne that’s in your book. What’s the title of your book again, and is that where people can go to learn more about this?
AG: Yeah, there’s two books. There’s the print book, Venus Star Rising, which you have in your hand. And then there’s the ebook, which is also available on Kindle or as a PDF, called The Venus Star Point. Much more abridged edition, the ebook. It doesn’t have all the astronomical charts and graphs that the print book has. This is 400-plus pages and my editor just said, Stop. You know, I had more to say because information just kept coming through about it. And every time I work on a chart, you know how we are as astrologers, we see a new chart and it’s like, “Oh, I could write a book about that!”
CB: Yeah. I mean, my book was 700 pages. I had no editor to tell me when to stop so…
AG: Oh, well. Do you need an editor? Are you a Gemini Star Point by any chance?
CB: I don’t remember, but possibly, I definitely-
AG: I think you are.
CB: Yeah, right.
AG: Maybe we talked about that in the last episode, because everything you did was on a Gemini Star Point cycle. [laughs]
CB: Right. Yeah, that Gemini one was pretty important for me, because the last one was 2020. Yeah. Well, so the print book has 400 pages, the ebook you book you said was a little shorter. It’s how many pages?
AG: Oh, gosh, I don’t remember. But it doesn’t have all the charts and graphs. It’s getting straight to the heart of your chart. So it’s like, “Look up your star point, and then what does it mean? And then who are your… Who do you partner with? Who are your arms and your legs, and how are they working in your life?
CB: Got it. Okay. And people can find more information about that on your website, which is what again?
AG: sophiavenus.com.
CB: Okay, and go to sophiavenus.com/books for more information about the book. You said you also teach a course on this as well, right?
AG: Yeah, I have a training course. Also, you can look at that on the website to see if you really want to get into this more deeply.
CB: Okay.
AG: Definitely.
CB: Brilliant. And you do consultations?
AG: Mhm. I am slowing down on my consultations, I’m not finding the time to do as many as I used to. But I still do. I don’t want to give that up completely. I feel like as astrologers, that’s the real, you know, where you roll up your sleeves and you’re really in the trenches. Because you can have all these theories and ideas and I can write books forever, but if I’m not working with people on the ground and seeing how things are actually working for them, I kind of lose touch with that reality. So I think I want to keep that going too.
CB: Yeah, that’s when the techniques and the theory really comes alive when you sit down and talk to a stranger and you hear them describe their chart perfectly, but through their own life events and experiences.
AG: Yeah. And so much of our writing depends on that. So many of the stories we hear from our friends, family, clients about what’s going on for them, and of course we look at the chart right away and we go, “Of course, that would have happened then.” But you know, there’s that synchronicity. And I didn’t mean to say that Venus is the only thing about synchronicity because the Venus star definitely is, it’s that Fibonacci cycle and that golden ratio, and that is really very harmonious and synchronistic. But I think all astrology is. You know, the planets the way they are. Think about when you were born and if you’re going to live to be 90 years old, everything is pre-programmed. You’re going to have an eclipse at a certain age on your Sun, you’re going to have Pluto transit at a certain age on your Sun or whatever, or whatever or whatever, and that’s all predetermined. That’s not going to change. And so there are certain times in your life where you just know that’s what you’re going to expect. The part that’s the mystery is how are we going to respond to it? What are we going to do about it? What choices are we going to make knowing that that’s coming?
Then what are we going to do about it?
CB: Okay. Yeah. And sometimes how you respond to things can make all the difference, especially internally.
AG: Yeah. Exactly. I loved our conversation, thank you so much.
CB: Yeah, thank you so much for joining me for this. This is amazing. I’m really glad we got to do this and it feels like a nice coming-full-cycle thing where we opened up the past two and a half years, and Venus coming back again and completing one cycle and opening up another.
AG: Well, we really are closing the loop because I didn’t get to the Mercury Cafe the last time. By the way, Santa Fe and Denver for me are my Mercury line. So when you invited me to speak at the Mercury Cafe, I thought, “Well, this is appropriate.” And it didn’t happen then because everything shut down, and here I am coming back to be at the Mercury Cafe again. So,
CB: Right. Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot for joining me today. And yeah, let’s do this again sometime.
AG: Yeah, we will. Thanks so much, Chris. All the best to you and your future programs and the books yet to come.
CB: Yet to come. Soon. All right. Well, I guess that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks, everyone, for watching or listening. 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, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. 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.
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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.
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