The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 377, titled:
Intergenerational Healing Through Astrology
With Chris Brennan and astrologer Aerin Fogel
Episode originally released on November 25, 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 December 28, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with astrologer Aerin Fogel about generational healing through astrology. So hey, Aerin. Welcome to the show.
AERIN FOGEL: Hey, Chris, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
CB: Yeah, I’m really happy to have you on the show this time. We actually met, what was it? Three or four years ago when I came and gave a workshop on Hellenistic astrology in Toronto for the local astrology group there, right?
AF: Yeah, I was trying to remember when that was, maybe 2018. I think your book had just come out and I was like, “What’s Hellenistic astrology?” [laughs] So it was like an introduction to it for me, which is really exciting. And I ended up diving into it more after that.
CB: Awesome. Yeah, that was a really fun time, a really good group. Is that group, Astrology Toronto, still around?
AF: Yeah, it’s been around in various formal and informal stages since the ’80s, actually. I’m now one of their official board members but it’s a pretty cool group. They mostly try to support emerging or newer astrology speakers in the Toronto area, and then we do kind of a bigger speaker weekend intensive every year. So you were our bigger speaker for that year and we have Jason Holley coming in June. I’m excited for that.
CB: Nice. Awesome. All right. Cool. Well, where should we start with this topic of intergenerational healing through astrology, and what’s your access point or what was your starting point with this topic for wanting to dive into it?
AF: Yeah. One thing that’s probably helpful to mention before anything else is, when talking about intergenerational themes, there will be definitely some touching on themes of trauma and we might go into some difficult topics. So I just wanted to mention that at the start in case anyone finds that they might want to come back to this later or hit pause and do what they need for themselves if we’re talking about some difficult stuff. But yeah, for myself personally, this is kind of like a research project that’s been developing over the last few years or so. I have a lot of different things that I try to merge in my life under the healing arts umbrella and so in addition to my work with astrology and tarot and stuff like that, I’ve done a lot of trauma healing and trauma-focused work. And so I think a lot about how those fields can come together or how Astrology can be a tool for trauma healing.
And so it almost accidentally happened that I started thinking about it more through an intergenerational lens. I have been doing a lot of work in my own personal life over the last few years around this theme, and I come from a family of Holocaust survivors and so it’s been part of my personal journey to sort of look into what themes in my personal life might be connected to some of those themes in my ancestry. And then because astrology is a huge part of my life, I always try to use astrology in conjunction with that. And then the more I did that, the more they started to merge and I started to see these really interesting parallels between, like some of the recent research in intergenerational trauma and healing, and then a lot of the things that we know about astrology and cycles and different patterns that we notice through astrology.
CB: Right. Okay. So part of it is, I guess, starting point is realizing that people have sometimes individual traumas in their life that shape their lives, but then sometimes there can be broader generational traumas that influence people that that occurred before a person was even born but still have some impact or influence on the present.
AF: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Yeah, there’s different ways that we can look at trauma that’s passed on. One of those ways is through our family systems and looking at experiences that happen to our parents, grandparents, and so on and so forth. And then, like you said, there’s collective traumas that can happen to people based on location in the world, race, culture, gender identity, sexual identity… And those are larger connective traumas that people can go through just based on their identity. And so a lot of the research around intergenerational trauma has started to understand that individuals go through different traumatic experiences in their lives, but then often when you start to look at the generations that come after, like as those people have children, it might be that someone goes through something really challenging in their own life and then they give birth to a child that actually is showing the impact of that trauma, even though they haven’t themselves gone through it. It’s kind of like a way of looking at the connective pieces between different experiences and how they get passed on through the generations.
CB: Right. That seems really important. I guess part of it is even recognizing and part of your work in counseling has been recognizing individual traumas within a person’s life, how powerful those can be in shaping a person’s life and identity and actions from that point forward. And that’s something that you’ve tried to look at through the lens of astrology just in a single life on its own.
AF: Yeah, exactly. I’ve been working with clients for about 11 years now and I find that a lot of the time people come to me with a really beautiful level of self-awareness; like, they know themselves fairly well, they know their personal histories fairly well. But there’s this question of like, what to do with it all. And so I feel like the biggest question that people ask me in consultation is, “Well, what do I do?” Or like, “Okay, I know this. I know where this trigger comes from, I know that this is like a part of my history. But what do I do with that.” That’s something that I find astrology has been really beautiful for, it’s helping us make sense of our experience, but also placing it in a larger context. I think about astrology as a context of us in our larger environment, like we’re part of this much larger system that’s happening in the solar system. But then also, this new sort of lens, or this work that I’m trying to bring in with the intergenerational theory is a whole other context for it as well. It’s like we are small little pieces within these very big systems that we are a part of, essentially.
CB: Right, that makes sense. Let’s expand on that initial thing of individual traumas because I realized now and leading into this discussion that that’s something I’ve never really covered on the podcast, the idea that you can even look at or potentially see some individual traumas that a person might be struggling with through their birth chart or their transits or what have you. What are some of the types of things that come up that you see when you’re dealing with clients that have trauma? What are some different types of trauma that sometimes you see, or ways that those show up in the birth chart? We don’t necessarily want to give signatures per se, but I’m just curious to contextualize the discussion like what kind of things we’re talking about.
AF: Yeah, I think there’s so many ways that we can look at that. But one thing that I like to keep in mind as much as possible when I’m working with people is that I’m looking at their chart and usually talking to them as an adult. But their chart is just their birth moment. And so it’s like whatever we’re talking about in their chart was there in the moment of their birth. And a lot of people do not have easy birth stories and so yeah, it’s probably not super helpful to try to give signatures or anything like that. But even just looking at someone’s chart and trying to imagine, “Okay, what would this be as a birth story? What is Mars doing? What is Jupiter doing?” and try to get some context. It can give you a lot of information about what kind of tone is being set for that person’s life. And then from there, I try to look at the Sun and the Moon as signatures of someone’s early caregiver experience. So a lot of the time, that might be the mother and the father and how absent or present they were, or just other caregivers that were really primary in that person’s life. But it’s also interesting to look at progressions and transits and start to see windows of time. Because I don’t think that any signature that someone is born with is immediately prescriptive, like to say that someone has this aspect means that they’re automatically going to go through some kind of horrible experience with it. It’s more like, “Okay, they have this kind of fabric that they’re working with, and what kind of doorways or sensitive triggers have happened around those aspects in their lives?” So a lot of the time you can start to get a sense of what might have happened when, based on the progressions and transits over the course of their life.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. That brings up a similar debate that I’ve seen recently in recent years in some of the younger generations of astrologers in debates over whether an astrologer can say that a specific signature indicates a mental illness or something like that. And I think it’s often as a pushback against Pop astrology when somebody says something dumb like, all Sagittariuses or something have whatever mental illness or something like that, which is just obviously not true. But then on the other side it raises a question of, “Can astrology be used in a way that’s helpful or moral or what have you in order to help people who are struggling with specific issues of mental illness? And what is the approach to take that is appropriate for things like that?” It seems like it almost gets into a sort of territory like that.
AF: Hmm, absolutely. And I’m definitely in the camp of astrologers that I don’t feel that any particular chart signature or aspect necessitates a specific kind of experience. Even someone having a besieged Venus or something, it’s like you don’t know exactly what that’s going to mean for that person until you sit down and have a conversation with them. But working on someone’s chart before meeting with them for the first time, I can get a sense of what sensitive spots might be or where they’ve had challenges, it’s just that I don’t know necessarily exactly what the details of those challenges are going to be yet. So again, I try to think about it more as context. As astrologers, we have a lot of context by looking at someone’s chart, but that person is an individual who’s been living their whole life. And so I try to hold a middle ground in a consultation between opening the space for someone to share more about their specific experiences if they feel comfortable or if they feel like that’s useful, but also not being prescriptive to them about what I think they’ve been through, unless that’s a conversation they want to have. I think that’s important.
And it sometimes doesn’t matter. I think if there’s a really, really challenging thing that you see in someone’s chart, sometimes the details don’t actually matter. I’ve had a lot of consultations with clients over the years where it’s like I don’t actually know what they’ve been through, but I know they’ve been through something because I can see that there’s some really intense stuff going on in their chart. And it doesn’t necessarily matter for them to show the details of that story for us to be able to talk about how they can find healing or where they can sort of work with those challenges in their life.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so you can identify through tense combinations in the chart some areas where there might be a greater tendency to have some challenges that arise. But sometimes just being able to speak in broad archetypal terms kind of frees you from having to focus too much on the details of that and instead focus on some of the possibilities for how a person might grow or learn from some of those things.
AF: Yeah, exactly. I kind of find that it works the other way around from people saying, “Oh, if you have this aspect or this placement, it means that you’re going to have this experience.” I prefer to work the other way around where someone is coming to me and sharing their story or sharing their experience, and then we can provide an astrology context for what that is. That can be, I find a really useful way of making meaning of the experience, but also yeah, placing it in a larger context where then that person has some level of empowerment or agency over their experience and over what they choose to do with that experience.
CB: Right, that seems so important and that’s something new students don’t often hear, but it’s a good first rule of doing consulting astrology is to make sure whatever you’re doing is helpful to the client and is healing to the client as opposed to is something you say actually going to be detrimental to them or is that information that may actually harm them in some way? In which case that’s not the best route to take. That the primary directive in astrology, like with medicine, should be to do no harm.
AF: Absolutely. I think about this all the time because I started learning astrology and started my practice a little before the resurgence of traditional astrology and Hellenistic work. So I didn’t know about sect or maltreatment or quantification or anything like that when I started my practice. I mostly learned initially through a modern psychological lens. And I did a lot of my learning just from consulting with people and starting with pay-what-you-can readings that was just friends of friends and stuff like that. And so I learned about working with people, I think, before I learned about some of the deeper and more specific techniques that I now bring into my practice. Now I know that there’s no point in telling someone that they have like, a maltreated Venus. Because it’s not going to help my client in any way. Unless maybe that client is a studying astrologer and wants to know those details. 99% of my clients are not astrologers and it’s just confusing to them if I use too much astrology jargon. They only want to know what is going to be helpful for them. Or if I see something challenging, what does that mean for them as a person living their lives and doing their best? Like, how can I work with them and how can I support them in that?
CB: Yeah, I think about that a lot. Because like you and I, this whole first generation of astrologers that started with modern astrology and then learned traditional astrology, I think it’s allowed us to take some of the really great counseling insights and a lot of the great cautions that the astrologers of the 1980s and ’90s who got into depth psychology astrology were so focused on in terms of making sure that you weren’t doing harm to clients, incorporating concepts from psychology and counseling like transference and countertransference and other things like that. So much of this first generation of astrologers that had made that transition from modern to traditional have taken some of the best pieces from the psychological stuff, but then they’re just integrating that with some of the more sophisticated technical models of traditional astrology. But I do sometimes worry about the second generation of astrologers after the traditional revival and whether they won’t, if they start with traditional completely, if they won’t be missing some of those counseling dynamics that were so important in late 20th-century or early 21st-century astrology. That’s something I think about a lot. So, yeah.
AF: Yeah, I also think about that constantly. [laughs] Even just like Demetra George who was one of my favorite astrologers before Project Hindsight, too, and like reading– oh, my gosh. I’m gonna forget the exact name of it– but her book, Mysteries of the Dark Moon goddess? Do you know which one I’m talking about?
CB: Yeah, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, I think.
AF: Yeah, that was one of my favorite books when I was learning astrology. And it’s still grounded in the traditional myths and there’s a lot of really structured technique in it as well, but it’s also like Demetra in her more psychological phase of astrology. I think that really resonated with me because it is about working with people. Obviously not every astrologer is a consulting astrologer, but for me that’s 75% of my practice and so it does come back to this question of, “Am I helping people or am I not helping people? And if I’m not helping them, what is the point of consultation?” And so even just for me, my interest in astrology was sparked because in my early 20s I was looking for something to make meaning of what I was going through at that time. And having my own challenging experiences and feeling more like left brain theory was failing to explain what I was going through, I went for an astrology reading and was like, “Oh.” [laughs] So it just provided a context for what I was going through and ended up being this really helpful tool. But I think at that time, if I think back to what was going on in my life, if I had started studying astrology then looking at added specifically through a Hellenistic lens, I think it would have made things harder for me in a way. Because I happen to have a chart that’s really not great if you’re going to look at it in a more binary way. And so I would have just been like, “Oh, everything’s terrible. What’s the point?” [laughs] And so coming to astrology through a more healing-focused lens, and then later having the context to be like, “Oh, okay, there’s a tonne of really difficult things happening in my chart through these specific techniques,” I was able to be like, “Okay, I’ve been subversive with that. I’ve used that with collective vision.” You know, tried to understand just what the deeper purpose of those challenges were.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, it’ll just be interesting as a generational shift to see how that goes. I think there’s becoming more resources out there now than there were 10 years ago that kind of blend modern and traditional astrology. And I’m excited about that that’s why I’m happy that there’s books like Chani Nicholas’s book, which is really good for beginners that blends both Hellenistic ancient astrology and modern astrology. And it approaches it with both of those worlds in mind in a way that I think that would be helpful for a newer person than if they were in a situation like you were in the early 20s.
AF: Absolutely. Maybe it feels like very relevant also to our conversation today about intergenerational stuff, because it’s so beautiful that we have all this really grounded technique now from the Hellenistic era to inform the astrology work that we’re doing. Also, hopefully humanity is not exactly in the same place that we were at that time. Or maybe in some ways we are. But we do also live in a different era and in a different time period, and so the kind of changes that happened for astrology and for humans between then and now should also be part of the way we practice. And I think there’s a lot more space for nuance and grey area within that kind of blended practice that really speaks to me that is maybe not quite as binary, I guess.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think we’re getting there, now that it’s been almost a full Saturn cycle since the revival of traditional astrology. I think we’re at the point where the revival is sort of finished in terms of digging it up, and now people are putting it to work and adapting it to modern times and integrating it with some of the counseling and psychological techniques of contemporary astrology. That’s the phase that we’re in now, is the full integration. But yeah, that brings us back to our topic in terms of intergenerational theory. I know one thing you were gonna talk about was epigenetics, which I was curious about.
AF: Yeah. I think epigenetics is a good groundwork to discuss if we’re talking about intergenerational theory, because it’s a little bit like the nuts and bolts of how it works. Full disclaimer, I’m not a scientist. But I have done my best to piece together some fairly grounded understanding of it in order to help me understand what we’re actually doing here is we’re talking about intergenerational trauma and healing. Like, what does that mean? What’s actually happening in our bodies or in our brains when we’re going through those experiences? So, epigenetics is essentially a study of how our environment and our experience can cause changes that affect how our DNA works. Epigenetics is not changes happening to your DNA that’s like a genetic shift, epigenetics is our response to our DNA. It’s basically brain programming that responds to our DNA in different ways. They’re like these little chemical tags that get added or subtracted to our DNA in response to things that are happening in our environment and our experience. That’s basically what epigenetics is. It’s sort of the scientific proof that our experience impacts the way that we are, essentially. But it’s a little bit different from a nurture versus nature debate because a lot of the field of epigenetics has been looking at the impact of family and intergenerational transfer.
So they’ve seen even like if there’s a parent who goes through a traumatic experience and they already have a kid before they’ve gone through that experience, that kid who’s already been born is not going to show any sign of that trauma impacting them directly. But if the parent has another child, after they’ve gone through that traumatic experience, that newer child is going to show actual different responses to their DNA patterning, based on the fact that they’ve been born to that parent after this traumatic event. That’s kind of the way that epigenetics looks at things. And there are tonnes of really interesting universal experiences that they’ve been studying around things like illness and pregnancy and the fascinating ways in which people’s bodies begin to interpret DNA differently after being pregnant and giving birth or going through some kind of chronic illness, like people’s bodies actually start to respond differently. And so those are very relatable experiences that have been widely studied, but then also these different environmental circumstances like trauma or the opposite, or really supportive environments that people have can impact the response to DNA as well.
CB: Okay, so it’s like nature versus nurture is still a thing in and of itself in terms of a person’s individual life, or the role that a person’s inborn traits have versus their upbringing or the circumstances they find themselves in. But then there’s this other element that can carry over not just one generation, but also multiple generations potentially.
AF: Yeah, exactly. It’s like you’re born with the DNA that you’re going to be born with. And I think there’s probably some grey area that started to happen in more Pop psychology stuff now where it’s like, “You can change your DNA through positive thinking!” [laughs] This is not quite that, but it is starting from this understanding that what we go through influences what happens with our DNA. And so it’s like, yeah, you can’t change the people that you’re born to and the genetic imprint that you have as a result of that, but the experiences that you go through will thoroughly impact the way that that does or does not get directly expressed in your experience. That can work both ways, like both in an adverse way where going through trauma can create new imprints and how we’re responding to our DNA, but also it can change the ones that we have for the better. Like, we have the capacity to start to change some of those on/off switches that get built over time.
CB: Okay. And this comes up, especially… I guess it’s especially important when you’re talking about trauma and intergenerational trauma and the potential for some of that to be passed down between generations.
AF: Yeah, exactly. So, intergenerational work is essentially looking at the way that survivors of different traumatic experiences will pass on the imprints of that to their physical offspring. And now that they’ve been looking at this for enough time, we’re now on to third generations and fourth generations where it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not just the children of survivors. It’s their grandchildren, and then their great-grandchildren as well.” The field has been around long enough to see that there is this kind of imprint that gets passed on. And so epigenetics is just the more science-based component of it that’s looking at what’s happening at the DNA level. But it is essentially to say that people who go through trauma and don’t have an opportunity to integrate that or come back to some kind of homeostasis will then pass that on to their children, and so forth and so forth. Also, epigenetics shows us that we have the capacity to start to interrupt some of those familiar neural pathways as well through our environment or through the experiences we’re having.
CB: Okay, got it. Yeah, and I can see why that would be important just because even in individual life or generation, I think everyone experiences to a greater or lesser extent, what it’s like to grow up in an environment where if one of your parents has had or caregivers has had some sort of significant trauma or some part of their life that’s really tricky or delicate in the way that that influences their ability to give and receive love, or their ability to communicate or do different things that affect you sort of growing up in that environment.
AF: Exactly. I think there’s also other perspectives in psychology that look at this too attachment theory and stuff like that, which is like looking at different ways that your parents may or may not have been, and how that impacts your way of connecting with people now. But that, essentially, is like if your parent or caregiver has gone through something difficult and they’re raising you and not fully able to be entirely present and receptive, then that’s going to impact you. But it’s looking at it in a larger context as well. The saying ‘Hurt people hurt people’ comes to mind, where it’s just like this kind of hot potato that can get passed on from generation to generation. And it’s like, “Okay, why was that parent not able to be present? And what was happening before that, and before that?” And kind of looking at this piece that’s getting passed on.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. Part of your work is that you’ve also looked at it not just from that perspective from the more scientific perspective, but also from your perspective as an astrologer as well.
AF: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I really enjoy doing with clients is to do family system charts and to be able to look at the charts of their siblings and parents and potentially grandparents as well as part of consultations that we do, because then we are placing them in context of this larger kind of cycle or pattern that they are a part of. And so again, thinking about someone’s chart as their birth moment or their birth experience provides this whole other layer of context where it’s like, okay, well, they’re born into something that’s already in motion. Like, this is the start of this person’s life. But they’re just being born into this story that’s already been happening. And it’s really incredible to see the connections between what’s happening in that person’s chart and what’s happening in their parents’ charts and grandparents’ charts. And you can see the whole story playing out that way, essentially.
CB: Totally. That’s why it’s been one of the most fascinating things about astrology to me from day one was like starting to look at your parents’ and other family members’ charts, and suddenly having a different access point for understanding them and who they are and why they are the way that they are in different ways, for better or worse. And having a different take on that that’s outside of yourself and is almost independent or, you know, less invested in the way that you are in the sense of having your own particular viewpoint on things and experiences. But also just realizing that your birth chart itself is a transit to your parents’ birth charts, that’s just kind of permanently there in some ways. And understanding what they were going through at the time of your birth can be kind of interesting and insightful.
AF: Yeah, it’s incredible. Exactly that thinking about your chart as a transit to your parents charts is kind of wild. And I can’t tell you– I’m sure you’ve noticed this, so many people are just born during their parents’ Saturn return, and that’s just a very common relatable experience that many– and then okay, then you have the same Saturn placements. So anytime you have a transit that’s impacting your Saturn, your parent is also having that exact same transit. And so that already starts to open up so much interesting thought around the connection between our experiences and our family experiences.
CB: Yeah, already that comes to mind. You mentioned the Saturn return and I was just thinking that before you said, because I think about my parents and my father was going through his Saturn return when I was born. But a year before that, they had had another child, my brother, but he passed away of sudden infant death syndrome as an infant. And then I came along as they were grieving that process, and realizing that my dad had Saturn in the fifth house in a night chart, and so part of his Saturn return was losing one child and then a year later having another child essentially. That’s part of the context then in which I show up in part of that transit in his life at that time.
AF: Yeah, that’s probably such a beautiful but also heartbreaking example of exactly how this works. I would imagine whatever is happening in your chart has some theme of that or some thread of that that in some way that process that happened even before you were born is part of the imprint that’s there from your dad or from your parents or the experience that was happening leading up to your birth as well.
CB: Yeah. It also speaks to– because there could have been somebody else with Saturn in the fifth house and a night chart where they might not have had that exact same experience, obviously, of losing a child during their Saturn return and having another child or what have you, but there could have been some other similar… I had a friend who had Saturn a few years ago that had Saturn in the fifth house and a night chart. And they had two children already, and then all of a sudden he hit a Saturn return. And they didn’t plan on having more children but then they had a third child unexpectedly. And it was kind of a surprise and initially, at least not a welcome one, because they weren’t in a good position financially. So it was a really rough couple of years getting through that, but then they did. That’s, you know, different of an experience where broadly or archetypally they’re still going through something difficult at that time but it’s not that sort of extreme scenario, necessarily, just in terms of speaking to your earlier point about sometimes being able to focus more on the archetype of identifying an area of possible difficulty or challenges without necessarily always going into the specifics of what it could have been, or at least letting the client themselves speak to the specifics of what it was.
AF: Yeah, exactly. We couldn’t sit down with those two clients or people who were theoretically clients and say, “Okay. Well, you have Saturn in the fifth and you have a night chart. That means this is going to happen to you when you start having children.” We can’t necessarily be that prescriptive about it unless there are ten other things loudly screaming about something in particular, sometimes you can zero in. But we do know that Saturn in the fifth in a night chart is not going to be like… There’s going to be some challenge around their experience of children or their creative process or whatever it may be. And so we can talk to them about how we can support them in that part of their life without even necessarily knowing exactly what they’ve been through.
CB: Yeah, and I do want to go back around to an earlier discussion point that that is the useful part in the revival of traditional astrology and ancient forms of astrology is the ability sometimes to zero in a little bit better with a little bit more technical sophistication on the parts that could be more challenging or even more easy or positive, and that is super useful that allows us to use distinctions where… I think earlier in modern astrology, because there was so much of an emphasis on trying to not harm clients and be overly fatalistic or negative, they sort of did away with a lot of technical distinctions including things like benefic and malefic. But a lot of the process over the past decade or two has been recovering some of those things and figuring out how to use them in a way that’s better and more effective technically, while also still at the same time being careful and cognizant or conscientious about our application of those techniques.
AF: Totally. And in this weird way the more I studied traditional astrology, the more of a fatalist I became. [laughs] I was just like, “Well, are we making any choices?” But there was something extremely comforting about it as well in understanding those more nuanced techniques and knowing like, “Okay, well, modern astrology initially gave me this sort of sense of I can overcome anything. Or like, all challenges I can endure.” I’m also a very Saturnian person so I kind of have that in me anyways. But then, integrating some of the traditional techniques was really comforting in challenges in my life that remain challenging and things that I recognized, like, “Oh, this is just a really difficult piece. There is nothing that I could have done or could not have done that would have avoided this. This is just a difficult part of my experience, essentially.” I think in that way, it can actually be very validating as well.
CB: Yeah, because it actually is able to more clearly speak to the person’s actual lived experience, as opposed to rejecting that and saying that that that’s not important or that you didn’t experience difficulty in that area. Sometimes the client or even an astrologer’s ability to acknowledge the areas of difficulty in a person’s life is the most helpful and useful thing, because then it does give an access point for being able to work through some of those things or help or heal them to whatever extent that you can.
AF: Absolutely. Yeah. And given the example that you shared, we can safely say there’s nothing that your dad could have done or could not have done that would have avoided the loss of a child. But then to talk to you as a person who’s part of that family system and who’s also impacted by that experience, it’s like, “Okay. Well, in what way can you engage with Saturn in your life in a way that might be somewhat liberating from that story, or to sort of integrate it a little bit more where possible?”
CB: Yeah, for sure. I actually just realized it’s his birthday tomorrow and I’ve never shared this chart. So I’m gonna just flash the chart really quickly as a matter of a thing there. So there’s the chart with Cancer rising and that big stellium of four planets in Scorpio with Mercury, Saturn, the Sun and Venus there. And then my Saturn is at 17 degrees of Scorpio so it’s pretty close to his exact Saturn Return in a night chart. That brings up something though, which is a funny thing I always noticed as soon as I got into astrology– and I think I talked about this in a previous episode with Lynn Bell on Family Dynamics and Threads, where sometimes you’ll see repeating astrological patterns that go across generations. The one that was funny in my life is, you know, I was born with the Sun in Scorpio. My mom was born two days later with the Sun in Scorpio. My dad was born with the Sun in Scorpio. And then my grandfather, my mother’s father, was also born with a Sun in Scorpio on the same birthday as her. So we have this weird pattern of intergenerational Scorpio transits, and I think that brings us back around to our main topic and your take on it, which is that’s not the full access point but that’s a little mini version, to some extent, I think part of what you’re talking about with applying astrology to intergenerational themes, right?
AF: Exactly. Yeah. Because I find that trying to just be like, “Okay, we all have intergenerational trauma. What is it and what do we do with it?” It’s so massive, and also we want to approach trauma work with some element of caution and maybe making sure that we have little pieces that we can work with one at a time so we don’t totally overwhelm ourselves with these huge difficult things. And so looking at astrology in that way can be a really helpful clear access point and be like, “Okay, I know that there’s some intergenerational stuff I’m working with that relates to my family.” Maybe it’s hard to pinpoint what that is and so you start looking at family charts in that way, and noticing those kinds of correlations like, “Oh, okay. Six of us have our Sun at the same degree of Scorpio. Okay, what does that mean?” That’s going to give you so much information about some of the themes that you’re working with. And that’s just looking at one luminary in the chart. And so when you start to see those kinds of threads, I think it gives you a lot of helpful information about what you might personally be connected to in your family’s story versus someone else. And you know, if you look at different sibling charts, obviously there’s going to be some correlation but they’re completely different people. One sibling might really be carrying this part of the story and another sibling is the black sheep and they’re carrying this part of the story. And so you can see the way different people are expressing these different pieces of these ancestral themes that can go way back. I don’t actually have any birth data for people in my family past my grandparents, but I’m sure if I did, it would show the same kind of parallels that I can see in the charts that I do have.
CB: Did you notice anything like that when you got into astrology about little things that were repeating patterns in your own family or family unit?
AF: Yeah, definitely. There are some really common themes in my family charts where there are just like… My brother and my dad have similar charts but reversed. They’re each other’s seventh house, essentially. And there’s a really common thread with similar Moon signs. I also have noticed with myself and a lot of clients that people will often have the Moon sign of their mother’s Sun sign or something like that, where it’s like the Moon is quite literally their mother. Like if someone has their Moon in Libra and then their mother has Sun in Libra. Something like that where it’s just like then the Moon in their chart is quite literally some indication of their mother’s personality. But often, people will have threads of repeated aspects. Like, you might see a family that has a repeated Mercury square Pluto aspect or something like that, and then that’s going to give you a lot of information about some of the particular themes in that family that they’re working with around expression or repression or things that are buried in the psyche.
CB: Yeah, cuz we all sort of grow up knowing that or learning that, “Oh, I got that personality trait from that person or this personality trait from another.” But then seeing it almost objectively sometimes through the birth charts is really fascinating. I think that’s one of the initial hooks for astrology, is being able to sort of identify from a different perspective some of those traits that get passed on.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s also just helpful manageable way to start to digest some of those trauma pieces, because I find that looking at it astrologically can just be a little more digestible than trying to grasp the whole concept at once, I guess.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. All right, we’re talking at this point about explaining the connection between the intergenerational theory and the planets. We’re talking a little bit more locally right now about the initial family unit, but this also can be expanded more broadly to earlier generations or larger generations of people, right?
AF: Yeah, absolutely. And talking about personal imprints that we might have in our chart versus things that might relate to in our family systems, we can do that with broader experiences as well. So obviously, there’s a whole generation of people that were born during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the late ’60s. So they have that personally in their chart, but they were born during a particular time and movement that was happening in the world, especially depending on where they were born. So really, anyone who was born in North America at that time, there was a huge rights movement that was going on, that those people then have that signature in their chart. And so it’s beautiful to also look at the more collective context of the things that people have in their chart, because then we’re looking at intergenerational themes not just in our personal families and in our ancestry, but also the things that were connected to in a broader sense. For instance, I’m born in the middle-late ’80s-ish and the climate crisis was just becoming apparent at that time. And now as an adult, that’s become a large part of my work and focus and something that I care about. And so that is also like an intergenerational theme to me because it’s something that I was born into that obviously was largely out of my control at the time of my birth, but it’s something that impacts me and is part of my story and my focus and my work.
CB: That makes sense. I like that example you gave also of the ’60s because it was such a tumultuous decade. There was just so much going on with civil rights, with politics, there was assassinations of people left and right in the US and other places. There was a lot of– in pop culture and music and everything else– rapid changes. Yeah, just pretty much across the board. And then on the one hand you have people that were experiencing that that were alive at the time as adults or younger people, and the experience of those large-scale generational transits and just the feeling of what was in the air at that time, which was reflected by things like Uranus conjunct Pluto in Virgo. But then you also have people that were born into that and therefore get that signature baked into their charts and then later go on and grow up and almost become like avatars of that generational transit some way in the future. So that’s really interesting to think about, and I think that’s part of what got you started in this research, right, was paying attention to some of the transits– the big ones that were going on over the past few years and how that related to your family to some extent.
AF: Yeah. Actually, it was almost like this accidental process that came out of the recent Saturn-Uranus square that we’ve been going through since early 2021. I was born fairly close to the conjunction in the late ’80s and so it’s something that is sort of part of my personal story in some ways like that Saturn-Uranus conjunction. But then when the square started heating up and I was looking at… Yeah, here we go. This is what we’ve been doing. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, this has been the story for a little bit. [crosstalk] So just for the audio listeners, we’re looking at a graph from Archetypal Explorer that just shows put on a graph the Saturn-Uranus square where there’s been three hits over the past few years, starting in 2021 going into… Most recently it came back and got really close to going exact again but didn’t quite, but I think we’ve been feeling it here in the later part of 2022. Yeah, but that’s been one of the more intense outer planet alignments the past few years.
AF: Yeah. And so I knew like, okay, as the person who has this conjunction in my chart more or less, I’m gonna feel this maybe a little bit differently from someone who has no aspect between Saturn in Uranus. And sure enough, it ended up being this kind of surprising journey. I mentioned earlier that I come from a family of Holocaust survivors, and I ended up uncovering this tape that my grandfather had done with the USC Shoah Foundation, which essentially interviewed as many Holocaust survivors as possible in the ’90s to document their stories. My family knew that he had done this tape but for whatever reason, half of it was lost. It was the whole period between 1935 and 1945 that somehow got lost. And during the Saturn-Uranus square, I ended up finding this remaining part of the tape that documents his experience during the Holocaust. It sparked a lot of process for me and thinking about the connection between that and then going through the closing square of a cycle that began when I was born, and then starting to look back at some of the earlier Saturn-Uranus dates and starting to do research around it. It was just like… I don’t know if you have these moments with astrology where it’s kind of like blowing the roof off or something with the specific correlations of the dates with some of the themes that are unfolding. So for me, looking at my personal relationship with some of the larger collective themes happening during the Saturn-Uranus cycle has been a significant part of developing this work and this research. And then I started looking into other planetary cycles and some of the mundane astrology dates that line up with it and it was like, “Okay, it fits from every angle, essentially.”
CB: Okay. So part of it was realizing that there might be some sort of Saturn-Uranus signature that was keyed into your family’s story in some way. And as you went back and started looking at that in your grandfather’s story, you realize that there was a Saturn Uranus alignment of a conjunction during that time period that he was talking about that he was sharing that story from the late 1930s or early 1940s.
AF: Yeah, exactly. When I went through my family charts, I didn’t necessarily see such strong Saturn-Uranus themes with other people in my family, which actually kind of makes sense because I’m the one that’s been doing a lot of this research. But then when I looked at the actual dates around World War Two and some of the stop-and-start around it, or the building around it and then some of the markers of what followed the Second World War, there I noticed Saturn-Uranus dates. And so it was more like I felt personally connected to that time period in an intergenerational way, I guess. The link was through my family experience, but then it also sparked a lot of thought for me around how I feel personally interested to learn more and do as much research and integration of some of what was happening during that time period as possible. Because it’s almost personal to me because it’s part of my chart.
CB: Right, that makes sense. Yeah, and the Saturn-Uranus has been intense over the past couple of years. And that’s a cycle… I don’t know if we should follow that thread through and talk about some past alignments with that cycle or if… I know we needed to do some setup talking a little bit about planetary myths and the relevance of that at some point, right?
AF: Yeah, maybe it’s helpful to talk about the myth because I feel like that’s a lot of the context for this as well and why I started thinking about astrology and family systems, other than just my personal experience. It might kind of help lay some groundwork for us to come back to some of those dates later.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I don’t know if I did. Maybe I did an episode but it might be best to assume that I didn’t. What is the relationship, or why are myths important in relation to astrology?
AF: I kind of think of them as very foundational to what astrology essentially is, which as far as we understand, essentially began with people just looking up at the sky and being like, “What’s happening? Something is moving or changing,” and then noticing a correlation between that and different events that were happening on Earth. So the myths themselves are the stories that people developed to explain what they were seeing in the sky. And so depending on the time period or the culture that you’re looking at it from, people might have thought that the planets themselves were deities that had their own personality or agency. Or it might have been that they were sort of like mouthpieces of God or of some higher being that were then influencing what was happening on the Earth. And so if you look at any time period in astrology, there’s some set of myths that is associated with them. As I was thinking about some of these intergenerational themes, I started to realize wait a second, the stories that are connected with the planets are family stories! And a lot of the practice that I’m working from is using some of the traditional Greek myths. So maybe it’s just helpful to say that for this episode, because I think you could look into any set of mythology from different time periods and cultures that have been practicing astrology and that would also be an interesting way to do it, but just for the sake of this conversation we’ll sort of talk about the Greek myths.
CB: Yeah, especially because there was a deliberate attempt to, you know, in the Mesopotamian tradition where Western astrology originated, to assign gods to certain planets in a way that spoke to what they thought the planets actually meant, and that there was a connection between the astrological meaning of the planet and the myth that was associated with it. And then when the Greeks and the Romans came along later, there was a deliberate attempt to find gods in their own Pantheon and assign the same God or god that had an appropriate meaning to the same planet so that there was a connection there from a very early stage.
AF: Yeah, exactly. And so starting to think about what that connection is between the planets and the gods that have been assigned to them, I feel like it had not really sunk in until the last few years of my practice that were just like looking at a family tree, essentially. It’s like, “I knew that?” But then it was one of those Aha moments because I had been also in the background thinking about all this intergenerational stuff, and already using astrology through a healing or trying to use it through a very trauma-informed lens. And then it was like something kind of crystallized for me of being like, “Oh, wait a second. Yeah, this is just essentially an intergenerational trauma that’s happening in the planetary gods as well.” It sort of clicked in for me that way. And all of the planets if we’re looking at the Greek myths, all of the planets and both of the luminaries are part of the same family. So it’s actually quite fascinating to look at that as an intergenerational system in the same way that we are looking at it as a solar system, or this sort of related set of planetary bodies.
CB: All right. One of the things I think might be good to talk about as we’re getting into myths is the idea that myths aren’t just stories, but they actually represent archetypes or broader dynamics or broader truths about things that happen in the world that are just put into story form. And that connection with myths being grounded in archetypes may actually be the reason why they’re really helpful and useful when it comes to astrology since astrology also works through the use of archetypes and metaphors and symbolism.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting to think about that if people are ever investigating the different myths through the different time periods and cultures, because it changes slightly. Like, if you look at all of the different stories about Mars through different time periods, it will change based on the culture and who’s telling that story at what time. So I think it says a lot about how those archetypes are taking shape at that time and place. For instance, some of the myths around Mars might show Mars as a completely destructive unbearable force that can’t be reckoned with. And other times Mars is more like someone who will go to war in the name of peace and there’s this sense of ultimate resolution or outcome with Mars. And I think that we’re looking at the same archetype there, but the different versions of it tell us a lot about the time period and the culture that those particular stories are coming out of.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And to some extent being culturally relative on the one hand, but then on the other hand sometimes also still containing, in a way, some universal truths that are being passed down that are still relevant, because they’re tapping into universal archetype in some way.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. In all of the stories, Mars is still Marsing. [laughs] Mars is just gonna do it and in different ways or have different levels of urgency in those stories depending on the culture.
CB: Right. Maybe it would be useful to talk a little bit about some of the myths are some of the gods connected with some of the planets just to give a taste or a little understanding of how that works to some extent.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. We have this kind of family system in the Greek myths that involves all of the planets as well as the luminaries, and I’m definitely including the outer planets here because I think it’s certainly relevant to the myths. It sort of starts with Uranus at the top, it’s like the original sky daddy. And yeah, here we have our super fun family chart. Uranus was married to Gaia, who we could consider to be planet Earth if we’re going to involve planet Earth in this representation. And Uranus and Gaia fathered the 12 Titans. Uranus was considered to be this very cruel ruler that was impossible to contend with and he had this sort of ultimate control over everything and everyone. And then all of a sudden he has 12 children who, you know, they’re the Titans, they’re incredibly powerful in and of themselves. So he feels a little threatened by them so he decides to banish them all to Tartarus, which is a very dark place full of horrible suffering. And so Kronos, who is the god that corresponds with the planet Saturn, is the last of the Titans and one of Uranus’s children. I just always think it’s funny to think about Saturn as the planet that grew up in a cold, dark place full of suffering because I think that tells us so much about where some of the delineations of Saturn came from, even just that it’s in charge of the winter signs, and Tartarus is a place where there’s no light.
But anyways, so Gaia is like, “Okay, Uranus is out of control. I need to get one of our children to deal with him.” And Kronos is the only one who can be convinced to do something about it. So Gaia convinces Kronos to return, and he castrates his father to sort of de-emasculate him and take power. And when Uranus’s testicles fall into the sea, from the foam that occurs, Aphrodite is born. So, take from that what you will about what that means for Venus as a kind of origin story, that she essentially comes from this battle of the cruel patriarchs and the emasculation of one. So Kronos returns, castrates his father, and now he’s in charge and he’s like the big sky daddy. And he begins his own cruel reign that is essentially not very different from the way his father was. He begins to have his own children with his sister/wife, Rhea. And they father the first of the Olympians. There are several Olympians, but amongst them are Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, which would be Pluto, Neptune, and Jupiter if we’re thinking about planetary correspondence. So there’s this prophecy that’s going around when Kronos is in power that his children are also going to overthrow him, which he does not like because he doesn’t want to lose control and so he’s like, “Okay, well, I’ll just eat my children as soon as they’re born and then they can’t do anything.” And so one by one, he swallows his children at their births.
CB: That’s a pretty good plan.
AF: Honestly, it worked for him up until a certain point. [laughs]
CB: I mean, you got to do what you got to do.
AF: Yeah. And there’s all kinds of famous art about Saturn eating his children. I can’t remember the name of the painter, but there’s one particularly iconic painting of Saturn just going to town on a baby and ripping it apart. But it really did work for him for a while. He had– what was it? [counting] One, two, three, four, five children that he effectively ate and stayed in control. Eventually, Rhea is very sick of this and so when she gets pregnant with Zeus, she goes into hiding throughout her pregnancy and gives birth to Zeus in this hidden place. And she returns and hands Kronos a rock wrapped in a blanket instead of baby Zeus and Kronos is like, “Yeah,” and thinks he’s eating Zeus but it’s just a rock. And so Zeus sort of successfully escapes this nice family theme that’s been happening for the rest of the Olympians and he’s raised in a hidden realm away from Kronos. Then when Zeus comes of age, he’s like, “It’s my destiny to overthrow my father.” So already we can see some parallels happening here, the sons being banished and then returning to overthrow their father.
CB: Yeah, a running theme of paranoia, and then also returning and overthrowing the patriarch.
AF: Yeah, each one being like, “It’s my power now.” And then their child being like, “No, I’m going to destroy you so that it can be my power now,” instead of maybe trying a different approach, whatever that would have been. So Zeus returns and challenges Kronos and tricks him into ingesting this poison and then Kronos proceeds to vomit up his children one by one. I also think it’s funny to think about how Hades, ruler of the underworld, was the first in and the last out in his deep dark time in Saturn’s belly. I feel like that’s very representative. But anyways, this is a victorious moment for Zeus and then he becomes the king of Olympus and the ultimate sky daddy, who as far as we can see is basically the same as his dad anyways. Zeus goes on to have many affairs and children, I honestly don’t even think I know all of the archetypes that are children of Zeus because there’s so many of them. But among them were the twins, Apollo and Artemis, which we can consider to be like the Sun and the Moon. Apollo is the god of the arts and prophecy and medicine, and Artemis is this virgin goddess of hunting in the wild. She’s, in myth, known for being fiercely protective of her chastity. Which, again, take from that what you will, of being born to Zeus who is also known for assaulting different goddesses and sort of just having his way. And so Apollo and Artemis are two of his children, and that’s the Sun and the Moon. There’s also Hermes who is the correspondent with Mercury, and Hermes is the trickster. There’s this famous story of Hermes growing at a ridiculous speed as soon as he’s born and crawling away as a baby to explore the world. He creates this lyre from a turtle shell and then steals all of Apollo’s cattle. And Zeus is like, “Give that back. You can’t take all those cows.” And Hermes convinces Apollo to take the lyre instead of the cattle. That’s actually how Apollo becomes such a proficient musician and he’s forever seen walking around with this, I guess it’s kind of a version of a lute or something like that, like a little stringed instrument. These are kind of sibling issues that are coming up amongst them.
The last child of Zeus to point out would be Aries who in this version of Mars archetypes that we were talking about, for the Greeks, Aries was a purely antagonistic force. [laughs] There was no catharsis with this version of Mars. He just tends to side with the opposing side just for the sake of it, and is always being humiliated and winding up losing. At one point, I think in the battle with the Trojans, he gets injured and he goes to Zeus and he’s like, “Dad, I hurt myself,” and Zeus is like, “Argh, if we weren’t blood-related, I would cast you out or something like that.” Anyway, this is a family story that we are telling.
CB: Yeah, there’s a lot of family dynamics that are very real present family dynamics that actually come up. Even though it’s told in a fantastical way, it’s obviously relaying things that are like people’s actual experiences with different types of family not just dynamics, but also dysfunction. And even here, we can see the idea of passing down some of those dysfunctions across generations. Like, one of the themes with some of the top ones was becoming the things that you hate about your parents. Or you have issues of Zeus like sleeping around and that being an issue on the part of the father or what have you.
AF: Exactly. Yeah, there’s a very clear correlation between like the Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter part of the line, where it’s like cruel destructive patriarchs who sort of cast out or disown their children, and then those children returning to be the good and to overcome the evil of their father, but then essentially just stepping right back into that role themselves. And then that interesting parallel between Zeus’s very assaulting nature and a lot of the harm that he causes to different women and goddesses through these different myths, and then having a daughter who is said to almost violently protect her chastity or her virginity as a result of having a father who is so aggressive about taking that from others. It’s really quite mind-blowing to think about it as just a dysfunctional family story, because if you change the details or the circumstances, you could basically just tell this story as a modern-day dysfunctional story of someone with a very cruel, abusive, controlling father, who then grows up to become that himself and then his children this and that, and so on and so forth.
CB: So literally like an outline for a five-season Netflix show that everybody would be watching and would have a cliffhanger at the end of each season.
AF: Exactly. I’m pretty sure This Is Us is just like a version of the planetary myths or something. [laughs] Or no, Shameless might actually be a better example of that. [laughs]
CB: Yeah. Or I was thinking Game of Thrones or something, because it gets a little seedy and a little HBO-ish at times.
AF: Yeah, Game of Thrones is almost a direct version of this. And then there’s probably some dragons that come out of the Greek myths as well, I’m sure. [laughs]
CB: Right. So those were the gods, and then there’s a separate tree graphic that you made here that just more directly shows the planetary correspondences.
AF: Yeah, this is the same way of looking at it, but as the planets themselves. And Venus is kind of like, I don’t know, she’s doing her own thing over there. Because she’s not exactly a child of Uranus or Saturn, but is born of their battle, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know if she would even be technically related to Uranus. Comes from his testicles somehow.
CB: Right. So for the audio listeners, it’s a tree with Uranus at the top and then below it is Saturn, to the left is Venus. And then below Saturn, we get Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. And then from Jupiter we get the Sun, Moon, Mars and Mercury. That really is pretty much most of the planets, basically, that we use.
AF: Mmh, yeah. Even if you were to look at the asteroids there, there’s somewhat in there as well. I just haven’t sorted all the details of them as exactly, but all of those asteroid archetypes are part of this family tree as well. Just more proximally.
CB: Got it. Okay. All right, we can see then a lot of basic things like dysfunctions coming up through just looking at this family tree and the dynamics involved. And a lot of broader themes that are still very much relevant to us today, essentially, right?
AF: Yeah, exactly. And to your earlier point about myth being this sort of archetypal lens that we have, these are some of the original stories that we have about humanity or about human experience. With astrology, at least, we can trace this back about 4000 years. And it’s like these are stories that we’ve been telling ourselves about human experience for at least 4000 years now, and I think it’s a very interesting correlation and not a mistake that it almost exactly resembles the continued story of human family systems and the dysfunction and intergenerational transfer that happens in our family systems.
CB: Yeah. That’s really important because it shows the connection between modern and ancient times and how things aren’t that different in terms of some of the core dynamics today. That was the big surprise for me when I got into studying ancient astrology is I famously told the story of going to Kepler that I always tell and wanting to study modern astrology, and only studying modern astrology for the first four years of my studies. And then they pretty much forced me to take this class on ancient astrology and I tried to protest and get out of it because I thought it wasn’t relevant. I thought studying astrology from 2000 years ago was not going to have any relevance or usefulness to today, because I had this conception that we’d grown so much in terms of civilization and dynamics and everything was so different and we had new planets that they didn’t even know about 2000 years ago. And how could that be useful or relevant? And it turns out that actually it was useful and relevant because life today and some of the core dynamics of life and the things that people experience is actually so similar in terms of its fundamentals today to the way it was 2000 years ago, that a system of astrology that was developed 2000 years ago that’s why it’s still around today. Because it spoke to or did a good job of speaking to some of those core principles that are still very much present and with us in life today, and many of the dynamics in life are still very much the same.
AF: Absolutely, yeah. I feel like that is exactly how intergenerational theory works. I also as a younger person with a certain kind of hope for humanity will always be like, “Okay, humanity’s making progress. This and that has changed. We’re in such a different place than we were a thousand years ago.” [laughs] The more I learned, I was like, “Oh, okay.” [laughs] And starting to see that we are, in some ways, exactly where we were 4000 years ago. We still have war, we still have dehumanisation, we still have constant struggle over this idea of ownership over land, and all of these different themes that were there right from the beginning. And so, yeah.
CB: Yeah. The past few years, in particular, of events happening in the world has made me really open my eyes and realize that some of the things that we thought were things of the past or things, especially bad things that we learned and grown from collectively as humanity, that those things really aren’t in the past. Even like plagues, we just had a great crash course over the past couple of years that plagues can still break out and just kill millions of people, and that the technology and other things that we have doesn’t make humanity immune to those things, or any less susceptible at this point. Obviously, there’s a counterpoint to that in terms of the development of ways to fight that and some of the amazing technological advances, but just the idea that we’re still dealing with things like that and a number of other things over the past few years. I don’t know if that’s been your experience as well but it’s been one of my experiences recently.
AF: Absolutely. Yeah. I used to have this idea of progress that was maybe kind of linear. Like, “Okay, we are making this progress, and we’re heading in this direction.” Actually, it’s been practising astrology over such a long period of time that has changed my mind about that because it’s placed it in more of a circular context than a linear context. Like, progress is maybe something that’s just moving from one place in a cycle to another place in a cycle, but the cycle itself is still there. It does actually make me think about these myths as well, because Saturn probably thought he was making progress by overthrowing his father and doing things his way. And Zeus probably thought the same thing. And so there’s this false notion of things moving ahead by triumphing over some existing evil, and I actually think that’s a very colonial perspective of thinking. Which makes sense that it would be part of these Greek myths as well. Now I’m more like, “We exist in these larger cycles that are happening unless we’re trying to get from point A to point B,” because I don’t know that we can necessarily as human beings.
CB: Yeah, that was something I struggled with when I first learned the history of astrology at Kepler. One of my main history teachers was Nick Campion, Nicholas Campion, and he was always very down on what he called the myth of progress and the idea that things just always inevitably get better and always go on the straight linear path upwards. He always said, “No, that’s not true. That’s not always true. Sometimes things can go backwards, things can like rise and fall, and it’s not always moving in a specific direction.” And I still have some reservations about that to a certain extent, but then I’ve really understood over the course of the past decade over the past several years that things really can move backwards sometimes, and it’s not always this really clean uphill thing that we always think of it as.
AF: Yeah, I think about that a lot, too, and it’s sort of like a tricky balance. Because I can also think about a lot of examples of things that have changed dramatically over the course of history, even things like civil rights movements and women’s rights and the legalization of queer marriage and gender-affirming health care. These are things that feel like a massive progress as well, but then as we’ve seen in recent times, it also may unfortunately not be a stopping point. There may still be more that unfolds from there. It’s not necessarily a final place of landing, even though it is also like a beacon of hope and change at the same time.
CB: Yeah, that makes me think of… There’s been a few versions of this but you’ll see sometimes, like I know Tad Mann illustrated one in the late 1960s or ’70s, and then more recently there was that astrology documentary that came out earlier this year that did an animated version. But if you imagine our solar system that has the planets spinning around the Sun and doing their cycles that you have the individual cycles of the planets, but then that the solar system is moving forward in time at the same time altogether so that it creates more like a spiral. So that you have the planetary cycle, which is where there’s repetitions and things stay the same. But then also there’s the spiral of the forward movement so that there’s also progress in another third direction or third dimension in some ways.
AF: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. I often think about the spiral as a more representative image of human pathways than anything. A spiral is somewhat directional, it’s not just moving in a circle necessarily. But it’s certainly a different way of understanding our experience than a straight line which is very much like there’s some kind of goal or destination at the end of it. I also love the spiral because there’s a sense of something deepening or getting closer to a centre, whatever that may be.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So it’s this diagram. I’ve got it just from the thumbnail, for the video of viewers, off from the Changing of the Gods documentary. And there’s a still that shows the planets moving around the Sun in a circle, but then they’re also moving forward in time which creates this elongated spiral. Maybe that’s a good middle ground for thinking about the idea of progress or the myth of progress. That on the one hand, you have things where there’s always going to be a repetition of certain themes on their individual cycles like the Saturn cycle, but then it’s also elongated because it’s moving in a specific direction at the same time.
AF: Absolutely. Isn’t that what we’re doing with astrology in the first place? To use it to understand how our experience works or make meaning of our experience. So it would make a lot more sense that our human cycles mirror the path of the planets in the sky, more so than thinking that we work like a straight line whereas the planets are moving in this more cyclical way.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That makes a lot of sense to me. It also brings up, though, that things don’t just move forward and continue moving forward permanently, unless people continue to push for change and push for progress. And if that doesn’t happen, then the issue is that things can very easily relapse or fall back into a state from earlier where things maybe weren’t as good for certain people. I mean, that was one of the things that’s come up over the past month that was really shocking to me was the rise with some of Kanye West’s statements of anti-semitism and stuff, and things that I thought we had learned from and were things of the past. But it really brought back the realization that things have not changed as much or at least there’s the potential for things to go back to a darker place from the 1930s or 1940s if people aren’t reminded or don’t continue to push for progress and change in a positive direction.
AF: Absolutely. I think that maybe in the early stages of realizing how connected these things are and also how cyclical they are, sometimes people experience despair around that. Like, “Well, there’s no point in doing anything if things are just going to be like this anyways.” But we are actually a significant part of that, like you’re saying. And thinking back to– we were talking about the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the ’60s and the civil rights movement, it’s like there was a planetary alignment happening at that time but the movement of what was happening in humanity was a big part of what made that what it was. And that was people protesting and pushing back and pushing for change. To your point about Kanye and some of the pieces of anti-semitism that are still present, it’s the only thing that genocide researchers tend to agree on is that one of the most effective tools for stopping genocide in its early stages before it’s really snowballed is protest. And for people to essentially have some way to signal that they see what’s happening and they do not agree with it. And so these choices that we make absolutely have an impact, it’s just that they are also connected to larger systems and cycles that can be somewhat out of our control. But we’re still part of the process that unfolds with them, I think.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Also just a remembering of history and the importance of passing down history, interestingly brings us back to our topic in terms of passing down history between generations because otherwise there can be a forgetting of things that are important. Almost in some ways, I wonder if myths sometimes serve that function in passing down a core truth that needs to be remembered in a way that can survive the lives of individuals and how short they are by passing on something that’s timeless in a way that can be preserved.
AF: Yes, absolutely. I think myth can be a really important way of helping people remember history and also remember their agency within their communities and their cultures. Certainly, I would say that indigenous cultures have a much stronger more grounded way of weaving that into their perspective, that a lot of the time there will be this perspective of seven generations before and seven generations after, and immediately placing each individual in a context of both their ancestors, as well as the generations still yet to be born. And using myth and story as a really foundational way of raising their children and building community and connection, because it helps to remind people that they are a part of something that is greater than just themselves.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And just the idea of in terms of pre-modern cultures, how to pass on important lessons and important things that humanity had learned collectively prior to the invention of movies or podcasts or other things like that. Is you pass it on through stories and through the oral, or sometimes eventually written passing down of these things through generations.
AF: Yeah, and like our talk about epigenetics earlier, it’s like we know we’re going to be passing something on so we might as well contribute to that in a way that can also be very empowering and grounding and offers some kind of helpful tool or information into what we’re passing on as well.
CB: Yeah, cuz there’s some implicit moral lessons about some of those stories that you were telling earlier, for example, what was happening between Uranus and Saturn, and then that was repeated from Saturn to Jupiter. And those lessons about trying to overthrow the existing establishment but then becoming what you hate or something like that, that were sort of implicit moral stories that somebody could just take the myths on the surface level as being stories that are almost a little entertaining, but then they had deeper meanings, perhaps, that were meant to be passed on.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe in some ways cautionary tales about becoming disconnected in our relationship to power and or being more compassionate towards our children and our family systems. And yeah, there’s also a lot of information in those stories, obviously, about the role of women that seem to have this kind of peripheral context in the myths, but are actually the ones instigating the disruption of power and control and sort of arranging these shifts or changes that happen generationally as well.
CB: Right, for sure. Some of this comes up with planetary cycles and the repetitive nature of planetary cycles and how that ties in potentially with different ancestral and other family cycles. And I think part of your work and part of your premise or thesis that we’re sort of focusing on here is the idea that sometimes some of these signatures, the different planetary signatures can relate to different myths and different dynamics from some of those planetary or family dynamics and myths. But also that some of these signatures can be studied potentially more specifically within the context of different planetary alignments, especially outer planet ones.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, looking at planetary cycles is not a new perspective in astrology but it’s something that I’ve always been very interested in early on with my study. And then in in the last three or four years or so thinking more about some of these intergenerational themes and wondering how that relates to the planetary cycles, I started to notice connections between the cycles and the archetypes of the personalities in the myths essentially, or things that were between specific planets might have some kind of correlation or echo of the myth around those planets or some connection to the story itself. And so it’s been a big part of the research that I’ve been doing to look at the different planetary cycles throughout the last 100 or so years, and then try to correlate what’s happening there with some expression of the myth. And it’s kind of shocking to do that work, because it’s almost like a direct iteration of these mythical family stories just essentially playing out through the planetary cycles when we look at the actual dates throughout history.
CB: Okay, do you want to… Let’s talk about… Do you have some examples?
AF: Yeah, totally. I had mentioned that some of my research and work with this has been largely focused on World War Two and some of the connection with the Holocaust because that is something that is personal to my experience, but it also was a way to just sort of ground some of the examples for our conversation. So, I had been curious to look at what was happening astrologically during the time period of the Second World War, and then also to see what the echoes were from those cycles in where we are now and trying to piece together some of the correlations of what’s happening now with what may have been happening at that time.
CB: Okay. Over the past few years, we’ve talked about there’s the Saturn-Uranus square that’s been happening. We’ve also had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which was pretty major in 2020.
AF: Yeah. I was trying to just look at- I mean, we’ve had so many major planetary conjunctions. [laughs] But yeah, mostly the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 2020 and then the Saturn-Uranus square over the last– it’s almost two years now that they’ve been aspecting each other. And then I also was looking at the Jupiter-Pluto cycle and the Jupiter-Neptune cycle and some of the other conjunctions, but that gets to be a lot of information to go through in the examples. So mostly, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto for this conversation, which we can think of as like grandfather, father, son, grandchild if we’re thinking about it intergenerationally in that way.
CB: Do you want to go into some of the examples from that timeframe or do you feel like going into some of that from the World War Two timeframe right now?
AF: Yeah. So trying to sort of go back a little bit just before the war, there was a closing Saturn-Uranus square which would have been Saturn in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries, around the time that the Nazi party started to gain power. So that would be 1930 to 1931. I have the chart here. This would be Saturn overcoming Uranus in a square.
CB: There it is, Saturn in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries.
AF: Awesome. Yeah. So this is around the time period that the Nazis officially become the biggest political party in Germany. And then it was just a couple of years after this that Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933. So yeah, that’s a Saturn-Uranus square that is sort of mirroring the one that we’re in now because we’re also in a closing square of their cycle. Their next conjunction will be 2032, I think will be the conjunction between them. So yeah, we’re we’re looking at this sort of closing square. If we think about three-quarters of any cycle, it’s usually some kind of setup for a new stage to begin whenever the conjunction takes place after that. That’s the thread or the beginning of some of the transits happening during the Second World War, is it’s closing Saturn-Uranus square and then Hitler rising to power. If we’re thinking about Saturn-Uranus in terms of myth, I think the parallel between Hitler rising into power and Saturn setting itself up for this conjunction with Uranus in another 11 years is really representative of both the Saturn-Uranus story, and also Hitler’s rise to power and the destructive nature of that as well.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. Also the disruptiveness also, you know, for the past few years one of the keywords we’ve seen a lot that’s come up with the Saturn-Uranus square is things that are established structures getting a stress test. And that if they’re not built on a solid foundation, or sometimes even things that you take for granted and you assume are built on a solid foundation, getting shaken and then all of a sudden if they’re not strong, just disintegrating or falling apart almost overnight.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes those stress tests can be very useful if they are against structures that are being built that are ultimately not in the good of the collective. Like in this instance, too much Saturn energy can build a political party on very solid ground that is not strongly enough opposed by any other political party in Germany. Which was part of the issue at that time, was just that he was somewhat unopposed at that point in terms of his political power.
CB: Okay.
AF: Could have used a stress test, I think. [chuckles] So, moving ahead a little bit. In 1939, which is when World War Two officially began although obviously at that point there had been so much movement already in terms of the Nazi movement, and some of the camps had already been started at that time. But when we get-
CB: And really quickly, it’s actually maybe worth mentioning to set the context because Nick Dagan Best and I actually just talked about this in the episode that will come out before this one, where we were looking at the US involvement in World War Two and we had to set that up by talking a little bit about Hitler’s rise to power. That one of the things that he did that I’ve only come to realize over the past few years and understand and have a different perspective on by seeing a recurrence of it in modern times is I always took some of the things of the anti-semitism from the 1930s and 1940s as sort of– when I learned about them in elementary school or something– it was about bigotry or that it was primarily just a form of bigotry, which it was, but there was a vehicle that was used for the bigotry, which was partially like conspiracy theories and stuff. That’s basically what they were using in the 1930s and 40s to gain political power and influence; was conspiracy theories about the Jews running the world or about them being the reason why the Germans lost World War One or other things like that. And that realization over the past few years, as we’ve seen a rise of new forms of conspiracy theories that are influencing public discourse in politics and things like that, it was really eye-opening to me because it was another instance of realizing that some of the same dynamics that led to World War Two and led to things like the Holocaust are actually still very present in our society today and haven’t gone away. They’re just in a different form.
AF: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that conspiracy is something that is often seen really commonly in huge collective trauma or genocide at that level, because it’s like, how else do you get millions of people to agree to an agenda like that other than to have them believe something thing that makes this the only possible way? So yeah, conspiracy was definitely a big part of that, and the context of that time was that there was an economic depression happening. And the promise of Hitler was, you know, I think have seen this pretty recently. I live in Canada, but it’s recent in the states to see someone who comes in and promises like, “I’m going to fix the economy and here’s how I’m going to do it.” The Holocaust was happening and the war was happening, but underneath all of that was this motivation for money and security and land and resources. And that is often one of the common motivations behind genocide is actually just money and land, but skewed in this very hateful way towards certain groups of individuals with this sort of conspiracy theory around it. That’s how you get a whole culture or group of people behind you to mobilize with that agenda.
CB: Right, that makes so much sense. And there was inflation, which is weird because we’re suddenly dealing with that again today of issues of inflation and economic uncertainty. And then that leads to or is then used as an excuse for… The scapegoating especially of minorities becomes the gateway into some of that stuff.
AF: Mmh, and I think those are very Saturn-Uranus themes as well. Uranus can be a lot of wacky ideas or things that are sort of outside the mainstream way of thinking, which is often how conspiracy starts. It’s something outside of the dominant mode of thinking, and then Saturn is the cementing of that into practice. But Uranus often when I see Uranus in charts that involve some kind of scapegoating or alienation or something like that, it can be an othering force as well.
CB: Okay, that’s really interesting. Yeah, othering and also just the instability or the upstart and the rebellious. There’s some dynamic with Saturn-Uranus about the person who frames themselves as rebelling against the establishment. And there is probably the connection with the myth, sometimes the person that’s able to frame themselves as the rebel or the underdog is able to overthrow something by framing themselves in that way, even if the rebellious role is not always the good one. I mean, in Hitler’s case in the early 1930s, he was able to wedge himself into getting political power, even though the Nazi Party wasn’t very big at the time. And that ended up being the downfall of like the German government at the time, giving him more power than they needed to at the time in order to try to placate him because he was the rebellious upstart in some ways.
AF: Right. Exactly. Yeah. That theme of rebellion is very Saturn-Uranus, and also that sense of banishment both Uranus and Saturn banished their children in various ways in order to not lose grasp on the level of power that they had established for themselves. So there is that kind of theme of the rebel coming back to reclaim power in some way, which is very much what I think probably Germany thought Hitler was doing in the first place.
CB: Totally. Because he had tried to do, you know, in the early 1920s there was a previous coup attempt where he attempted with the Beer Hall Putsch to overthrow the government and lead a political revolution. But he failed miserably and they threw him in jail. So him coming back 10 years later and actually pulling off and getting into power in the early 1930s was also a little bit of, in terms of his life narrative or story or the way it was framed, was a bit of that at the same time.
AF: Oh my God, that’s literally the Saturn story; getting punished or banished to go to Tartarus, which is probably like being in jail in some way. And then coming back with this, “I’m gonna fix it,” kind of energy, and then just doing things in his own way.
CB: Right. This is so interesting because it makes some of the things that happen back then, because they are so long ago and it’s like when we watch it’s like videos that are in black and white and it seems so foreign and how could stuff like that happen, you understand then some of the narratives that were in the air at the time because you understand the energy at the time of knowing that there was a Saturn-Uranus Square, knowing what that energy was like, and then knowing what that looks like when certain individuals seize on that energy and then try to make themselves the representatives of it in some way. It becomes a little bit more relatable at least in understanding what was happening at that time.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. I think the context of it is everything, and trying to imagine what was happening for the average everyday person just living their lives and having families and trying to survive, and then having someone rising into power who’s promising a lot and maybe not knowing the full context of what that means or maybe knowing that and sort of prioritising one’s own survival over the implications of that, I think the context of it says everything about how that actually took place.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, then we we jump forward a little bit. Once Hillary comes to power, he starts some of the different persecutions and some of the different scapegoating. And then we eventually get to the early part of World War Two.
AF: Mhm. Yeah, World War Two officially started in 1939, which was right around the time of a Saturn-Pluto conjunction at that time. So we’re getting the start of another Saturn cycle.
CB: I think you meant a square, right?
AF: Saturn, Pluto… 1939. Oh, yes. Yes.
CB: Yeah, so Pluto was in Cancer and so Saturn was in late Aries and going into Taurus and then it continued over for another sign. So there was an extended Saturn-Pluto square, especially by sign for a long period of time, which is kind of notable.
AF: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Yeah, sorry, not a conjunction. It’s also another overcoming square where Saturn is closing out the last square of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. That’s sort of the early astrology themes of World War Two are these closing Saturn squares with these larger cycles. Which is also like we’re talking about context. It’s interesting because it tells us that World War Two came out of the context of what had been happening through those whole cycles. Like, going back to the last Saturn-Uranus conjunction, the last Saturn-Pluto conjunction, it’s like what’s happening there in the closing squares is part of that larger context too.
CB: Yeah, and that even I’m going back and animating the chart and I can see that, for example, back in the previous period we were just talking about in the early 1930s, Saturn was in Capricorn and it was opposing Pluto in Cancer. So it’s like that was the halfway point in the cycle. And then once you get to the early part of World War Two, then you had this square which is the next turning point with respect to all that.
AF: Exactly, yeah. And at that opposition, you would have seen the development of something that then is coming to a culmination during 1939 in the closing square. And closing squares are often like a culmination or I think of them as a sort of last call for some of the themes of the larger cycle.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes a tonne of sense.
AF: Then we come along to 1942, which is when Saturn closes its cycle with Uranus and they form a conjunction. I believe that was 29 degrees of Taurus. So, this would be 1942. It’s sort of the height of World War Two. Yeah, there they are in late Taurus.
CB: Right. So Saturn in late Taurus conjunct Uranus in late Taurus. And yeah, by this point I think the US got involved in World War Two in 1941. So it’s like by 1942 the entire world is embroiled in this conflict.
AF: It’s sort of at its height and I believe that death camps had also been opened at this point because they realized that originally, people had just been sent to these labor camps, and the idea was like, “Okay, we’re just going to use people in service to labor to jumpstart the economy.” But at that point, they realized there were too many people to deal with and so they had started opening these death camps around that time as well. So, the Holocaust and the war around it is sort of at its height at this time as Saturn forms this meeting with Uranus and kind of brings to completion or fruition something that had started during the closing square. But also something that I found really interesting is 1942 is when epigenetics first made its foray into a larger accepted practice in science. Some of the threads of epigenetics started long before that or some of the research pieces around it, but the term epigenetics and its acceptance into science also happened in 1942. So that’s really interesting to me.
CB: Okay. And with the camps and stuff, it wasn’t just Jewish people that they were killing, but also there were other different groups of people that were being targeted at the same time, right?
AF: Absolutely. For obvious reasons when people think of the Holocaust, they largely think of the Jewish population being affected. But it was also really targeting disabled people and queer people, and also people of color who were living in Europe. I think the targeted populations got broader and broader as the Holocaust progressed, but actually, targeting disabled people was one of the very early stages of the Holocaust as well and this wildly psychotic idea that the Nazi Party had of purifying the White race, essentially. And so they were targeting anyone that they believed to be some kind of obstacle or challenge in the purity of the White race.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and these are all really heavy outer planet things that are going on during some of these really key periods.
AF: Yeah, huge outer planet conjunctions. And then also with that Saturn-Uranus conjunction in 1942, the seed of something that now has become deeply connected to Holocaust research, like a lot of the focus on epigenetics especially in the last 30 years has been specifically on children of Holocaust survivors and trying to understand some of the genetic imprints that they have from their parents, and how that’s gotten passed on. That’s why I’m looking at it as intergenerational trauma is very real, but also intergenerational healing is equally real. And so there’s something that started literally in the midst of the Second World War and the Holocaust, that now as we’re coming into the late ’80s when Saturn and Uranus were last conjunct, that would have been when epigenetics was really starting to progress with some of its research around children of Holocaust survivors and the impacts of it. So we can really clearly see the correlation between that cycle starting back there in the ’40s, and some of the fruitfulness of that that’s coming out of it now.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. The Saturn-Uranus conjunction during that time is interesting because it actually gets extended for this period of time from at least 1940 when Saturn’s in the early part of Taurus, it’s already in a sign-based conjunction with Uranus which is in the third decan of Taurus at that point. But if you just sort of move the chart forward, they eventually do meet up later in Taurus, but that conjunction actually continues into Gemini because there’s that ingress of Uranus into Gemini in the early 1940s. So it kind of extends that conjunction longer than it would be otherwise if you take into account the entire sign-based conjunctions because then it goes across Saturn’s transit through two different signs. And since Saturn takes three years to go through a single sign, that extends it for like six years, which basically takes you through pretty much the entire first half of the 1940s.
AF: Absolutely. Which I think is going to be very fascinating to see during our next Saturn-Uranus conjunction in 2032 because it will also be in Gemini. We’re essentially right now in the Uranus return of the Holocaust and of the Second World War. We have Uranus very close to that third decan of Taurus for the first time since then, because we’re about 80 some odd years later in time. And so yeah, it’s interesting that they carried their conjunction over into Gemini during that time period too because we’ll have our next conjunction in Gemini with these planets in 2032.
CB: Okay. During this period, just to emphasize that in terms of the scope, there was millions of people that were affected by the Holocaust in the early 1940s in the first half of the 1940s, and in terms of just thinking about the impact of that on the lives and the psyches of just huge amounts of people basically.
AF: Absolutely. You know, not all of those people are still living, but many of them are. And so in some way the psychological impact of that is still alive in the world, but also if we’re thinking about this intergenerationally, it’s alive in the children that those people have. I mean, the baby boomers were essentially the children of World War Two. And so a lot of the thinking of the boomer generation is thinking that comes directly out of a post-war environment and people who were being born to parents who had survived the war in some capacity, regardless of what their connection to that might have been.
CB: Yeah, that’s so crucial thinking about having entire generations of people either experiencing this intense sort of– I don’t want to say unprecedented. It was unprecedented but then on the other hand, there was other types of things like this in the past to a certain extent, just never on that scale. But that type of huge trauma, either experiencing it or being bored into that context, becomes really important in terms of just thinking about that there’s other periods of time where there may have been major periods of generational trauma, and just how that’s passed forward becomes actually really crucial thing for understanding sometimes the astrological context of certain charts or certain generational placements.
AF: Absolutely. And then knowing the astrological context of that trauma can be really helpful in knowing either when it might get triggered in future time periods, and also when there are these windows of opportunity to revisit or integrate some of the expressions of that trauma. Like, if someone is born during that Saturn-Pluto conjunction or that Saturn-Uranus conjunction, looking at like future iterations of that cycle can also indicate opportunities for integration or some kind of movement with the trauma that they’re carrying from that time.
CB: Okay. I’m trying to think of so with Saturn, Uranus, and that conjunction going on during this entire period of the early 1940s, I’m trying to think of what the archetype or part of the archetype would be underlying that type of trauma. And I have to think that part of it just from the experience of the recent Saturn-Uranus square, that part of it would be the experience of instability or the fear of instability like the fear that everything you know or take for granted in life can just be sort of taken away or ripped away unexpectedly and irreversibly at any time. And maybe having a fear surrounding that as part of the generational signature that some people would have experienced in different ways more or less intensely.
AF: Absolutely. Themes around instability and also, I think, really big themes around either belonging or alienation and the two sides of that coin. I think that that contributes to a lot of the conspiracy theory piece that we were talking about or just kind of like agreeing to different things along the way with something like the Holocaust, and each stage having to agree with something that’s happening. And underneath that is a very human desire for belonging and to have safety and connection and to remain in some sense of community. So I definitely think that themes around belonging or alienation and sense of connection have been extremely relevant in the last couple years as well.
CB: Yeah, that’s such a good keyword; alienation and just being outcast as major themes.
AF: Mmh, definitely.
CB: Okay, is there anything else about the mythology that’s kind of irrelevant during this in terms of this alignment or some of these alignments? Or should we move on to other later ones?
AF: Yeah. I mean, I could probably talk about this for four days. [laughs] But yeah, it almost feels like. Unless maybe the only other thing is just thinking about the introduction of Pluto with that, and Pluto being the ruler of the underworld, and also Pluto being the next intergenerational piece of this Saturn-Uranus story that we’re talking about. It’s like when we come to that Saturn-Uranus… sorry, Saturn-Pluto square that we have in the late 30s as well, there’s the introduction of this underworld piece into what’s happening, and also the level of suffering and unconsciousness and destruction that kind of came after that.
CB: Yeah, and Pluto takes things to extremes, astrologically, whatever it seems like it touches sometimes. And just the unimaginable scope of it just taken to the utmost extreme in terms of some of the extent of death and suffering and other things that were being experienced by people at that time.
AF: Yeah, exactly. I think that idea of extreme is really relevant as we kind of move ahead a bit because the Saturn-Pluto conjunction after that closing square would have been in 1948. And that’s when Israel was officially established as a country at that time. So it certainly has this theme of extremes at the heart of it. I’ll just wait till we have the…
CB: So it was a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Leo in 1948?
AF: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of the boomer generation. [laughs] It’s like a big part of the generation is this signature. But so this would have been around the time that Israel was established. And it is, as we can see, a country of extremes that was at the time intended to be like a place of refuge for postwar Jews who had nowhere else to go. However, looking at the conjunction that seeded into the beginning of this place and the level of war and destruction that’s still happening there, I think there’s a lot of interesting reflection on that as well. And Israel itself has kind of, in the same way that Saturn returns to end the cruelty of his father but then ends up sort of like taking on his own cruelty, I think that there’s a huge component of that in Israel’s story as well and the continued level of war that’s happening there from a place that was meant to be a closure of war, or a resolution of it in some way.
CB: Yeah, and it really brings up the idea of generational trauma being passed on, sometimes in still motivating present concerns, even decades or almost a century later. Because I know then part of sometimes the saying or the political motivations become, you know, Never Again; that something like the Holocaust could never happen again and therefore we have to do whatever is thought to be necessary or whatever they think is necessary in order to avoid that from happening again. So that there can be things like that that are still motivating things a century later from the intenseness and the extremeness of the trauma that’s experienced much earlier. Whether that’s right or wrong in different instances, sort of a side. But just the fact that that is still a motivating factor in decisions that are being made almost a century later really speaks to everything you’re talking about in terms of epigenetics and generational influences being really actually much more important sometimes than we even realize. Because they’re things that are so ingrained and deep within sometimes our motivations of groups or countries or things like that, that we almost don’t even recognize them because they’re taken for granted.
AF: Absolutely. And speaking of Pluto, it can become this almost obsession that we don’t even necessarily know where it’s coming from. Or it’s coming from this deeper place that we don’t even know how to recognize, which is largely like where trauma gets stored. It’s in the unconscious. And so I think that that seems clear intergenerationally in what is happening right now in Israel and Palestine and the connection to the late ’40s and this idea of Never again. But at what cost? And in the sense that it may have become this obsessive response to an incredibly unmanageable level of trauma to avoid that trauma ever happening again at all costs. And here we are now just after a more recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 2020 and we’re seeing that really quite stirred up again in that place in the world.
CB: Yeah. And it makes me think of some of other things. You know, seeing the pandemic that happened that started really centered on that Saturn-Pluto conjunction in early 2020, and the impact that that had on so many people and millions of people, and how it– in some ways not obviously not as much and intensely as the Holocaust like in the 1940s, but how different people experienced different types of trauma from the pandemic in 2020 in a variety of different ways and how that impacted people and may continue to have residual impacts going forward for many decades, or maybe even a century into the future just from the intensity of that experience and how it affected some people’s psyches in different ways.
AF: Absolutely. The pandemic itself has been its own cause of trauma for so many people. And then if you think about people who are already facing really difficult levels of trauma in their life and the way that that can trigger different responses for them, it makes me think about this idea of epigenetics where our experiences cause these different reactions to something that’s already there in our DNA. And so if we’re already people that have these kinds of intergenerational responses or themes that we’re dealing with, and then this really massive scale, like several-years-lasting other trauma comes along, obviously it’s going to stir up a lot of that stuff in a very deep way.
CB: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And yeah, and people are having their astrological DNA with their birth charts or with other intergenerational things that recur in different family placements or other things like that. And sometimes those astrological placements can bend back way further than anybody would ever expect, which is kind of a fascinating thing to realize as well. It’s just that there are certain astrological signatures that may repeat and that may go back for centuries or what have you, in terms of family or other larger groups dynamics.
AF: Absolutely. That’s one of the ways that I think astrology can be really beautiful in supporting us in this aspect of our lives. You know, when things get stirred up we don’t always have a context for why, or even just a means to understand what we’re feeling. So just looking at other time periods that might be relevant to our family’s experience can help give us information about what we’re feeling. Which is kind of like how I started doing all of this in the first place. I was like, “Why do I feel so stirred up? Ah, Holocaust themes.” And then sort of going back and back through my family’s story and understanding the correlation between what was happening then astrologically and what was being stirred up for me now.
CB: Okay, that makes so much sense. One of the things is we may never actually be able to see or identify the root core starting point of generational trauma or other things or to trace it back to the original astrological signature. But what we can do sometimes is by paying attention to history or paying attention to family histories. If you see a certain alignment or a certain aspect or placement coming up over and over again, you can sometimes infer from that if it comes up enough and seems to be tied to some core narrative or theme that keeps repeating over and over again, that somewhere way back in history there was some core reason why that was tied into that planetary alignment or planetary cycle that goes back to an origin that you may not be able to see but you can kind of infer its existence at a certain point.
AF: Totally, it’s like astrology detective work. [laughs] Like, if everyone in a family has some kind of really intense Uranus-Neptune aspect happening, then you can likely infer that that goes back much further than the charts that you have in front of you or that some kind of major historical event that took place during a harsh Uranus-Neptune aspect may have impacted some earlier generation of that family.
CB: Let’s take things up to the present time. So one of the things that you’re really focused on is how in the 1940s when some of this major generational trauma was happening, there also separately sort of coincidentally was the development of this new line of research of scientific research about how generational traumas and things like that can be passed on through epigenetics.
AF: Yeah, trying to understand the more healing-focused aspect of intergenerational work, I was curious to see what lined up with the more recent dates of the Saturn-Uranus cycle as a kind of signal of where people might be at with these postwar imprints that they have been carrying with them since the ’40s and the dates we were looking at there. One obvious piece that I might have touched on is during the last Saturn-Uranus conjunction in the late ’80s was around the time that epigenetics started to turn the focus of its research over to the children of Holocaust survivors. And then there became this really strong correlation between Holocaust research and epigenetics. That would be that late Sagittarius conjunction. And that was the last time Saturn and Uranus were conjunct.
CB: That’s really fascinating then that we have a planetary cycle repeating itself from the 1940s when the Holocaust happened and when epigenetics was sort of being formulated, and then we have a repetition of the Saturn-Uranus cycle. And then we have researchers going back and actually applying that and talking to Holocaust survivors.
AF: Exactly. It’s so interwoven like were in the early ’40s when the Holocaust was at its height and also when epigenetics first officially began, and those two things are in a way inextricable. And then we come to the next Saturn-Uranus conjunction in the late 80s and here we are, again, with epigenetics having this sort of forward lurch or this change in direction or focus and its connection to the Holocaust. But now, in a way that ideally is more focused on integration and processing some of the trauma rather than establishing the trauma in the first place.
CB: Okay, so there’s a looking back, which is a classic thing about conjunctions especially outer planet or long-term conjunctions, is it’s the beginning of a new cycle but it’s also the end of a previous cycle. And there can sometimes be a looking back and accounting for what happened in the past or reflecting on what happened in the past in some way.
AF: Totally. Yeah, obviously we often think about the beginning of a cycle as the beginning of something. But it’s exactly that. It’s also the closure of whatever the cycle is that we’ve just come through. And for Saturn-Uranus, that’s like a 45-year cycle. So it’s also this closure of the last 45 years and everything that’s happened in that time. It’s like closing this piece with the Holocaust, but also opening this next piece of the Saturn-Uranus cycle that we are still in the midst of, so that late ’80s conjunction was also the opening of a lot of the themes that are current now in our experience and with Saturn in Uranus.
CB: And what did the research, the epigenetic research… It was focusing its attention on the children of Holocaust survivors so it’s focusing on how that’s passed down or how there are certain things passed down through generations, and that component and how it affects things?
AF: Yeah, exactly. It was the first time that I think they started to really see how specific and correlated the physiological experiences are of children of Holocaust survivors to the experience of war that their parents went through. I mean, there were some sort of obvious broader pieces that they noticed such as anxiety, depression, a sense of hypervigilance, a sense of– what’s the word? Imagining or presupposing catastrophe or things falling apart. Like, some of the beliefs that you would imagine come from people who have experienced extreme war conditions. And then when they started to really get into the more genetic component, it’s quite striking. There’s an example that always stuck with me of how people who have experienced extreme starvation during war will undergo these epigenetic adaptations so that their body stops signalling hunger to their brain, because their meals are going to be very few and far between. And so their brain stops responding to natural signals of hunger and all these things, and it changes their experiences of digestion and all these things. Then they started noticing that children who are born to Holocaust survivors or other people who have experienced war conditions have these very mal adopted digestive systems a lot of the time, and they were noticing that that’s actually an imprint that’s carried over from their parents. So that parents actually passed on the imprint of eating small or insufficient amounts of food, so that now if you have a generation that’s actually able to access more food and have a more holistic experience in their diet, their bodies are not actually equipped to be able to eat that much and so it causes digestive issues. Things like that that were starting to become clear in the research around that time of the effects that were being passed on quite directly.
CB: Wow, that’s really wild. So those are real tangible ways that’s impacting things from earlier generations, or impacting the current lives of people that are present that didn’t experience those things in the present, but they’re still having the residual impact of that in some way generations later.
AF: Exactly. I grew up in a Jewish family so there’s always all kinds of jokes about how people in Jewish families often have bad digestion and all these kinds of things and it was sort of a joke when I was younger. And then growing up and learning more about this, I was like, “Whoa, I’m actually starting to consider why that might be something that’s so commonly associated with Jewish families and the actual reason behind it.” It was quite mind-blowing.
CB: Okay. One of the keywords you used just a minute ago was catastrophe and I think that’s a really good Saturn-Uranus keyword, actually, the more you think about it.
AF: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think Saturn and Uranus both have their own versions of catastrophes. [laughs] It’s almost like opposing versions of catastrophe in a way, which when put together can be potentially extra destructive or liberating depending on which way you go with it. But I think some of the historical events during the Saturn-Uranus cycles have been a bit catastrophic, as we’ve seen.
CB: Yeah, I just looked up the definition on Google and it says, “Catastrophe, an event causing great and usually sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.” And then disaster, of course, is an old word that’s tied into astrology because it means bad star, unfortunate star or what have you.
AF: Oh, yeah. Wow, that’s wild. [crosstalk]
CB: Go ahead.
AF: No, go ahead. [laughs]
CB: Well, it’s funny because my brain connects it ironically with the inverse, which is good star. That’s actually what the phrase mazel tov means, it’s a good star, good zodiac sign or what have you.
AF: Yeah, I love that. I love that. It’s like a wishing away of the bad star disaster. But yeah, that idea of sudden disaster, sudden striking is very Uranian. I think there’s always some kind of shock involved with a Uranus transit.
CB: Right, for sure. And sort of falling away of a foundation of something that’s built up, like a building or something.
AF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
CB: All right. That kind of brings us up to the present. When they started with epigenetics identifying and interviewing some of those children of Holocaust survivors and identifying some of those things, like you mentioned, the issue with eating or potential– I don’t know if you can categorize that as an eating disorder or what have you. But what then happens after that? Is there then a way to address that or to heal that? Or what was the next step?
AF: Well, I guess I’m also curious to see how that continues to unfold because epigenetics is relatively young as a scientific field, I guess. But there seems to be some agreement in it that our… It comes back to this idea of our experience in our environment being able to impact what’s happening in those responses to DNA. I don’t know if that’s necessarily to say that someone who’s born with really difficult digestive experiences as a result of having parents in a war can then reverse their digestive experience, but I do think that there is some malleability to these genetic responses that we have through the environment that we cultivate for ourselves over the course of our lives. And so there’s always that X factor where many things are beyond our control, and I’m certainly not a person who believes that we can just ‘positive-think’ our way out of our different struggles and traumas. [laughs] If anything, it requires a deep acceptance of the things that are beyond our control and that we can’t just wish away. At the same time, I think that this field introduces a lot of agency into our experience because as much as it is possible for us to create nurturing, connected healing environments for ourselves, that’s where we can start to reverse some of the detrimental effects of the trauma that we’re carrying through these intergenerational pieces.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and maybe just the recognition that we’re not just a blank slate like a tabula rasa, which is something astrology ironically in and of itself already teaches us with the birth chart. That we come in with certain traits, potentially, or certain predispositions let’s say even most broadly, in some ways some of this with epigenetics is sort of saying something similar that there may be certain things that we’re coming in with but that the identification and recognition of some of those things may itself be helpful because then you can move forward with a greater understanding of some of your own dynamics, and then can make choices a little bit more consciously in terms of how you deal with or how you harness some of those things.
AF: Yeah, totally. We are not blank slates by any means. I like to think about our charts and our experience that we come into the world with as our fabric that we have to work with. It’s like you are handed this particular fabric and you can’t just toss it out the window and go and get a new one, unless you’re starting a new life or something like that. Which is a whole other conversation. But I do think that what we do with that fabric, we do have some agency over and some relationship to it. So for me, it has a lot to do with also recognizing that there are patterns that are happening and being able to identify what those patterns are. And both intergenerational work and astrology, for me, are some of the biggest pattern recognition systems that I’ve found in my experience. It’s like both of those systems, and then also together help us to understand that there are patterns or cycles that are occurring that we are deeply connected to. And then also how might we work with those patterns in our own way and through the environments that we create in our life.
CB: Okay. We don’t have to go into all the charts, but I know you had at least broadly, I don’t know if you want to speak to it, some examples of Venus, Saturn and Uranus themes relating to suffering and struggle with love and healing that are merged in some clients studies that you’ve done.
AF: Yeah, I had a set of example charts from some clients that I work with, who also come from a family of Holocaust survivors. And I’ve worked with both the children of the survivors and grandchildren in that family so I have a pretty good sense of the different generational pieces in that particular family. And yeah, it would be probably a lot to look at the individual charts themselves. But that family they have a lot of Saturn-Uranus themes in all of their charts. The individuals, the grandparents who experienced the war themselves, were born during the Saturn-Uranus opposition. That would have been, I guess sometime around the late ’20s, would have been? I might be wrong if I go back and look at the dates, but it was the opposition that was before the closing square that we looked at in 1939. So yeah, yeah, late ’20s. And Saturn-Uranus themes, and then a lot of Saturn-Venus themes as well. And Saturn in harsh aspects with Venus or Saturn maltreating Venus. In that family, there have been a lot of themes around severing, and this sort of disconnect or scapegoating or banishment that we talked about around Saturn-Uranus themes. And also this struggle for love and healing that I think speaks to the harsh aspects with Venus as well. And so this is one of the ways that I think can be really useful and beneficial to use astrology as a kind of intergenerational healing template, is to be able to look at these family systems and identify some of the repeated themes that are there, and then go back and say, “Where does this actually come from? What is the circumstance from which these difficult Saturn-Venus themes emerged?” This is hypothetical, but possibly if we went back to further generations in that family pre-war, perhaps some of those themes would not even be there. It might actually be something that comes directly out of that experience.
CB: Right, and so the access point for that would be actually talking about the family history of the client. And that perhaps, if you started asking questions like that or had in the back of your mind as a consulting astrologer, that there can be generational traumas that you might ask about the family history if you don’t know the person’s background, and that sometimes through that in that line of inquiry as an astrologer, but also potentially with like telling… I can imagine if you talked about the myth of Saturn-Uranus, some of those themes of banishment that come up in that myth would probably resonate with the client at that point, and that’s where the mythological components comes into play at the same time.
AF: Absolutely. Yeah. And if that client is open to sharing their story, it can often provide a really helpful grounding context. But again, even if we don’t have that story, we can look at the chart and see the Saturn-Venus themes and tell the story of where Venus comes from, and some of the themes happening in the myth. And it immediately bears connection to that person’s experience, even if we don’t know the details of what has played out for them in their direct lived experience.
CB: Okay. What were some of the ways in which the myth became relevant in those instances or in which you’ve seen specifically like the Saturn-Venus myth become relevant?
AF: Well, in the myth itself, Saturn kind of creates Venus but indirectly and through this very destructive act. [laughs] Can we say that Saturn created Venus? I don’t know. Or that even Uranus did. It’s interesting that Venus has this benefic representation as being a planet of love and connection and all things beautiful, but actually if we’re looking at the myth, that comes from a tortured place. It comes from a place of suffering, essentially.
CB: And reluctance that it happened, Venus was created not willfully or deliberately, but through an act that was kind of thrust upon Uranus.
AF: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the other mythological associations with Venus have that theme of reluctance to them right down to Persephone being abducted into the underworld against her will and that kind of thing. And so I think that seeing Saturn or Uranus in relation to Venus can often bring to mind themes like that where there’s some kind of severing or harshness or reluctance or imposition against our experience of beauty and connection.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, in terms of healing and sort of the focus to bring things around with our topic in terms of intergenerational healing through astrology at this point, sometimes it’s the talking about and the identification of some of our core myths or family or intergenerational myths, and being able to recognize and see some of those dynamics that we otherwise might have taken for granted or not realized how they’re impacting us is that that’s obviously the first step, but maybe the most important step and the most useful way that that astrology can be helpful in terms of using this as a tool for healing or helping individuals or clients or even for astrologers to identify some of those things in their own background in a way that might be helpful.
AF: Absolutely, yeah. I think just like you said it, the awareness around the cycles and patterns that we are a part of might be the first piece but also in some ways the biggest piece. And so I think just being able to identify the patterns that are there can be profoundly healing in and of itself. But also holding this sense that while there are many factors largely out of our control and some parts of our experience are just things that we live with and are continued themes in our experience, we also have this malleability around the things that we have inherited, that they are not always entirely stuck. I think that that correlates with the way that I love to practice astrology, which is like, we’re going to have our same chart for the rest of our lives, like, our chart is our chart. But there is a malleability within that where we have some flexibility or some capacity to find these other neural pathways of the chart that can be expressed differently as we build different environments and types of connection for ourselves in our lives. So I think looking at the myth and starting to consider our charts and the charts that we’re looking at through the lens of these intergenerational myths can be really healing, and also looking at the family systems as we’ve been talking about and different family charts. But also, there’s something to understanding what’s ours and what’s not ours, and that there are a lot of aspects of our lives that we might feel but that are not ours. Like, it’s not coming from our experience. And I think astrology can help us understand that as well with some of the pieces of the chart that might relate to the experiences of others or the things that are inherited, and understanding what in our chart is part of our experience but not ours personally, if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I like the realistic approach of saying that we’re embracing and recognizing some of these things, not necessarily in order to transcend them completely because that may not be possible, but that once sometimes some of these dynamics are recognized, that you can maybe choose to play out different versions of that archetype in a way that’s slightly different than you might otherwise if you were just proceeding forward not understanding your own background and not understanding your own history and not being able to learn the lessons from that or to be able to make a choice if that choice was never offered to you. So it might not just completely change and revolutionize everything, but it may help you make choices about your life and where you go forward in a way that is just a little bit more conscious than you might otherwise.
AF: Absolutely. It kind of makes me think about what we were talking about earlier around the planets moving as more of a directional spiral than anything that’s just in a straight circle or a straight line or something like that that it’s like, I don’t really think that it’s about making some kind of ultimate progress where we transcend all difficulty. To the best of my knowledge, no living person has ever really done that. And maybe the closest we get to that is actually like a deep acceptance of a lot of the cycles that we are actually a part of. And so I think there’s a lot of healing that comes from recognizing the patterns themselves, and then also recognizing the larger generational component to them, and then using the tools that we do have to address that in the ways that we’re able to. I find astrology to be a really beautiful way to do that.
CB: I love that, that’s brilliant. That’s really beautiful. The directive then is for each of us to become a spiral rather than a circle, and to repeat some of our patterns, which in some ways is inevitable to a certain extent that some of the inertia that’s built up, not just in our own lives but from the generations that came before us, that inertia is inevitable and can’t just be redirected or stopped or brought to a halt completely, we’re still going to keep going through some of those cycles, and some of those patterns are going to repeat. But with a little bit of effort and a little bit of a push, maybe you can push the overall trend in a specific direction in a more desirable direction so that it becomes a spiral in forward movement rather than just a closed loop.
AF: Yeah. And using those themes that we have to work with in different ways so that it’s not, like you said, the exact same circle that’s happening over and over. Which is often what it can feel like to be stuck in a trauma loop. It’s like reliving the same experience over and over and over, even though it seems like the details of the experience are changing. This gives us a little more spaciousness where there can be some kind of opening within that cycle, or some kind of movement within it rather than it being an entirely closed loop for us.
CB: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. All right, I think that kind of brings us to a good stopping point in terms of this discussion, because I feel like we’ve actually come full circle but we’ve also moved forward several steps at the same time. I feel like we’ve done our own spiral here pretty well.
AF: Totally. We were just setting the example for what we’re trying to explain. [laughs]
CB: Right. Yeah. But I definitely think we will probably start repeating ourselves being on our own loops at a certain point if we’re not careful. All right, is there any other points that you meant to touch on or things before we start to wrap up? I do want to ask you about your work and other things. But anything before we end this part of the discussion?
AF: Yeah, I guess just to say that this is something that I have been working on and researching and integrating for the last few years. But it’s new, and for me will probably be a lifelong process. So I’m very interested to chat with other astrologers who are curious about this or working with this in their own way. My friend, Ari Felix, also has their own beautiful perspective on planets as ancestors and a lot of really beautiful work that they’re doing in this theme as well. But I’m very interested to explore deeper conversation with other astrologers who are curious to learn more about this. So, that’s one thing that comes to mind. The other is I’m open to continuing this conversation and seeing how this develops, especially as the next Saturn-Uranus conjunction comes around in about 10 years.
CB: Yeah, we’ve got some heavy astrology to get through in between now and then which is one of the things I talked about in the previous episode where we were talking about Uranus coming up to Gemini again. And you know that does repeat the timeframe of part of World War Two, which I know has made some astrologers nervous lately wondering how that’s gonna go and where things will go. But it will also be interesting seeing the forward movement and momentum also of closing down some long-term cycles and hopefully, there being some progress and moving forward as well at the same time.
AF: Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully that sense of a spiral where we may see some echo, or we may already be seeing some echo of themes from that time, but that also it’s not in exactly the same place or there is this kind of sense of difference that happens is my hope.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. Where can people find out more information about you? What else do you offer? You do consultations and also teach, right?
AF: Yeah, I do consultations and pretty regular workshops. And in addition to my astrology practice, I work with another modality that is actually looking at people’s repetitive life patterns so this is a big part of my focus. I do tarot as well, and I play music and run a music festival so that’s sort of the other half of my life. But if people are curious to learn more about me, my website is aerinfogel.com. I’m on social media mostly as Queen of Swords, which is my band, so you can find me there in that way.
CB: Yeah. Actually, it’s a really popular music festival called Venus Fest that you organize in Toronto, right?
AF: Yeah, I’ve been doing that since 2017. We work with different marginalized identities within music, and it’s been a really beautiful journey with that.
CB: Awesome. All right, cool. Well, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video on YouTube or on the description page on the podcast website for this episode so people can find out more information about your work and reach out. And yeah, I look forward to seeing more of your research in the future and where you go, and hopefully maybe writing a book or something on this at some point.
AF: It’s been on my mind, yeah, and I am in the process of developing a program around this for my clients and people that I work with. So if people want to sign up for my mailing list, they can hear about that when it comes out. But this conversation is a bit of an overview or part of the development of something that I intend to be, like a deeper part of my offering for sure.
CB: Awesome. Cool. Well, I look forward to seeing that. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today for this discussion. We were putting it together over the course of past few weeks and I wasn’t sure, you know, with the podcast sometimes there’s different versions of the podcasts. There’s an overly prepared version of the podcast, and there’s an underprepared version. And we were somewhere in the middle but we found something during the course of this discussion that ended up being a lot more rich and engaging and surprising and going in directions I didn’t expect, so I really enjoyed it. So thanks for joining me today.
AF: I’m grateful to hear that. I would say my personality tends towards both under and over-prepared at the same time, so that makes sense. [laughs] But yeah, I feel really grateful to have been able to talk about this with you because I feel like it has come alive for me in a whole other way through this conversation. I’m really excited to see where things go after that.
CB: Awesome, cool. All right. Well, thanks for joining me today. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening to this episode of the Astrology Podcast and we’ll see you again next time.
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If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at theastrologypodcast.com/consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ASTROLOGYPODCAST.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at alabe.com. Use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an e-book version available through Google Books. I also recently published a new translation of The Anthology of the second-century astrologer Vettius Valens, which is one of the most important sources for understanding the practice of ancient astrology. You can find that by searching for Vettius Valens, The Anthology on Amazon or other online book retailers.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology, then I would recommend my Hellenistic Astrology Course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts. And by the time you finish the course, you will have a strong foundation in how to read birth charts as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com. I also recently launched a new course there called The Birth Time Rectification Course, where I teach students how to figure out your birth time using astrology when the birth time is either unknown or uncertain. You can find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com.
Each year the podcast releases a set of astrology calendar posters for the coming year, and we’ve just released our 2023 Planetary Alignments and Planetary Movements posters which are now available on our website at theastrologypodcast.com/store. There, you can also pick up our 2023 electional astrology report, where Leisa Schaim and I went through the next 12 months and we picked out the single most auspicious date for each month using the principles of electional astrology. You can get that at theastrologypodcast.com/2023report.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including the Mountain Astrologer Magazine which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at mountainastrologer.com. Finally, thanks also to the Northwest Astrology Conference which is happening May 25th through the 29th, 2023 just outside of Seattle. This year’s conference is going to be a hybrid conference where you can either attend online or in person. Find out more information at norwac.net.