The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 381, titled:
2023 Year Ahead Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, Leisa Schaim, and Diana Rose Harper
Episode originally released on December 24, 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 January 12, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be giving the Year Ahead forecast for the entire year of 2023. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock, Leisa Schaim, and Diana Rose Harper. Welcome the three of you.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Thank you.
DIANA ROSE HARPER: Great to be here.
CB: Awesome, I’m excited about this. This is our big yearly forecast episode where we look at the major transits and the things coming up in the year ahead, and give sort of a big-picture overview of what’s coming up over the next 12 months. So we’re gonna start by talking for the first 80 minutes or so about the major big-picture transits and shifts that are happening next year. And then after that, we’re going to break down each of the year quarter by quarter looking at each month in detail. Does that sound like a good plan to all of you?
LEISA SCHAIM: Sounds good.
CB: All right, let’s jump right into it. Here is the planetary movements calendar for those watching the video version that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the year, and where they will end up by the end of the year. And here’s some of the major transits that we’re going to be talking about over the course of this episode. So at the very top of the year, Mars is finishing its retrograde period in Gemini and it’s going to station direct on January 12th, and then it’s going to depart from the sign of Gemini and pretty much end that long transit on March 25th. During the first three months of the year, Saturn is going to be in the process of leaving Aquarius and it’s going to move into the sign of Pisces for the next three years starting on March 7th. This is going to begin a sign-based conjunction with the planet Neptune that’s going to culminate just a few years from now once Saturn and Neptune make it into Aries. Then also in March, Pluto is going to move into Aquarius and it’s going to dip into that sign just for a few months between March 23rd And June 11th, but this is going to be a preview of a longer-term 20-year transit as Pluto is going to be moving through Aquarius over the next two decades. After that, the first five months of the year features Jupiter transiting through Aries until May 16th when Jupiter moves into Taurus where it will spend the rest of the year in that sign. This is going to begin a sign-based conjunction between the planets Jupiter and Uranus, which is going to be one of the more notable aspects of both of this year and next year. Then over the summer, Venus is going to go retrograde in Leo from July 22nd through September 3rd. And then finally the other major astrological signature of this year is we have eclipses shifting from the Taurus-Scorpio axis to the Aries-Libra axis with the nodes changing signs in July. So those are the major transits that we’re going to be talking about this year that we’re going to get into over the next hour or so.
I want to start by talking about some recent news stories because it seems like there’s a lot of major things happening in technology right now, especially with the later part of Saturn and Aquarius taking place right now in December, as well as things that are kind of moving us and heading us in the direction of that big shift of Pluto into Aquarius. It’s been a month since we recorded our last forecast episode and some of the things that I was noticing, for example, is we had that big AI-generated art sort of fiasco or instance where in early December when Venus squared Neptune, a lot of people were posting pictures from this app called Lensa, where you feed it a bunch of photos and then it spits out different artistic images of yourself that have just been generated by AI basically. Did all of you see that on social media?
DRH: Yeah, Lensa and also MyHeritage, which I thought was really interesting, that combination of super fantastical but then also pseudo-historical. Super, super interesting.
CB: What was the MyHeritage one? Or what did that do?
DR: That one is… MyHeritage, I have friends who use it for ancestry reasons, like genealogical reasons. And I know that with their AI, it wasn’t so much the use of contemporary artists’ work that was scrubbed into their AI, and instead there were several of them that were using photographs– actual old photographs. And then I don’t know what else went into it but the idea was that the resulting images were you in different time periods like Ottoman princess or Viking or Celtic Warrior or 1920s flapper… That kind of thing.
CB: Okay, that’s fine. [crosstalk]
AC: Starving Dust Bowl farmer.
DR: Yeah.
CB: That’s really funny because one of the ones that Lensa gave me was like train conductor, I think, or that’s what it was going for. I fed it like 10 of my own photos, I didn’t have a lot of selfies to feed it so it didn’t have a lot to work with, but it still generated a surprising amount of funny surprisingly realistic photos. So there’s one of them for those watching the video version.
AC: Kind of World War Two conscript.
LS: Yeah.
CB: They kept trying to give me hair and also make me look really buff and like a superhero or something.
DR: Yeah, there was a lot of body manipulation towards certain kinds of physical ideals. I was a victim of this of being given anime-sized chest, when that is not a thing I have in real life. [laughs]
CB: This one’s my favorite, because I don’t know… I don’t know if I can see that by myself but I definitely would for that picture. Yeah, so it had a lot of positive and negative things. And just looking at the transits for that time, I was just struck by the fact that Venus was squaring Neptune from Sagittarius during that whole period. Let me back it up to… It was like right around this time when Venus was about 21-20, around December 3rd or so, that was when everybody was posting these on social media. And it was such an interesting contrast because on the one hand you had that, there was just this explosion of Venus-Neptune of these images where they weren’t real photos, it was just being generated by a computer of these. And in many instances, it was making people look particularly good or artistic or other things like that and putting them in fantasy scenarios.
AC: Well, there’s a term we might use for a Venus-Neptune configuration nataly or by transit where it’s that there’s a tendency to romanticize things, right? They’re romanticized images.
DR: It was also while Neptune was stationing, which I think is additionally interesting because part of what a lot of people were talking about, especially artists themselves, is how AI obscures the work of the artist. And so it’s both the fog of AI but also this resurgence– maybe not resurgence, just an initial surge more loudly than before of artists being like, “No. No. No. No, these fantasy images aren’t actually coming out of the ether, they are coming out of these algorithms which are designed by humans scrubbing other people’s work.
CB: Right. So the two issues that it raised was one, a bunch of artists suddenly becoming fearful about their livelihood, and people no longer needing to pay for their labour but instead having AI be able to do something almost just as good for almost paying almost nothing for it. That was one legitimate issue that came up that is going to be a recurring theme with AI, is the cost of labour dropping to near zero but also in some ways replacing humans. But then the second one was that people were saying that it was actually ripping off art styles from specific artists that the AI had learned from, and then it was just replicating those.
AC: That’s something that’s already a problem in the art world, it’s literally someone biting your style. You know, somebody has to establish a style of whether it’s use of colour and line or cadence or whatever it is. Comedians talk about that, about somebody who literally just mimics a more successful comedian’s delivery system. And so the AI is basically really good at stealing other people’s style, but as I believe Diana made the point; not generating new styles, just ripping off existing ones very effectively.
CB: Yeah, which then raised the issue because then one of the issues today, for example, the internet in commentary is Fair Use and the concept of fair use is that you can commentate or take something if it’s a derivative work; that you can derive something as long as they create something that’s new even if it’s based or a spin-off of something else. And that’s kind of what a lot of YouTube streamers base their entire model around, it’s that you can show yourself watching somebody else’s video if you’re doing commentary on it or something like that as because it makes it a derivative work. So there’s all sorts of interesting conflicts then over that that are kind of new in terms of whether that’s legal or not legal or morally okay or not morally okay.
DR: It’s reminding me of how Neptune’s biggest discovery was associated with also the discovery of aniline dyes, which expanded artistry and also was poisonous. And so part of the process of being able to incorporate the Neptunian advance is how do we do this without it actually being toxic?
LS: Yeah, one of the things I was noticing is we will be talking about for several years, I’m sure, how we deal with these issues and ownership and so forth. One of the interesting things I saw that popped up around the same time this year was this project called From Numbers to Names, and it was using AI and photography to put names to people in Holocaust pictures for their family members to find them again. And it was a really interesting reverse thing where on the one hand when we’re looking at the ones we were just talking about, it’s kind of blurring the boundaries of individual ownership of art and things like that. In this, it was kind of the reverse of the sort of things coming out of the Neptunian fog and taking form. So that was really interesting to me and it’s also just an interesting example of how all of these things can be used for good or for evil, or for something shades of gray, of course, which I’m sure we’ll have a lot of. But yeah, anyway, it made me think about.
AC: That’s really interesting.
CB: For sure. And it was also Lensa and other things that happened in early December around the time of Neptune stationing direct which Neptune station on December 3rd, which perfect lineup, it was also an interesting contrast compared to, you know, Venus was squaring Neptune then but about a month earlier in early November, Mars squared Neptune and that’s when you had all of those fake accounts all over Twitter of different companies and stuff. And it just created this whole fiasco of fake accounts that were sometimes saying things that were offensive or were causing harm to the company or other things like that and with all of that. It was really interesting contrast.
LS: Right. Like insulin is gonna be free on fake Eli Lilly account, and then of course their stock tanked and it was pretty funny to watch, even though it was obviously going to be problematic.
CB: Or there was a Nintendo character like Mario with fake Nintendo account and it was like Mario giving people the middle finger. It was one of the other images of that time from Mars square Neptune.
DR: Yeah, it was high key goblin mode.
CB: Yeah, so interesting contrasts. All right, so moving on and related to this. Another major thing that happened was on November 30th, and this was around the time that Mercury was squaring Neptune. There was the release of this new AI chatbot called ChatGPT, where this major AI company created a way that you could interact with their AI through conversation. What was really striking about is it’s actually really good at not just having conversations, but it also generates things, like you can tell it to make things. So for example, one of the things that I told it to make was an opening for this Astrology Podcast episode, which I almost read at the beginning but I decided just to do my normal opening. But here’s the opening for example when I gave it the prompt of “Write an introduction to an Astrology Podcast episode where we forecast the year ahead.” And within minutes or seconds it generated this. It said, “Welcome to our astrology podcast. In this episode, we will be looking ahead at the year ahead and making predictions based on the positions of the planets and the stars. Astrology is an ancient practice that uses the movements and positions of celestial bodies to understand and predict events here on Earth. It’s a fascinating field that has intrigued people for 1000s of years and in this episode, we will be using astrology to shed some light on what we can expect in the year ahead. So sit back, relax and join us as we explore the world of astrology and make some predictions for the year ahead.” Is that not both funny and eerie, or is it just me?
AC: I mean, it just kind of sounds like every introduction to every astrology podcast. It’s not creative enough to be creeping me out, just sounds like an average of thousand podcasts that got scraped.
DR: Yeah, it doesn’t sound artful. It sounds like here’s your fifth grade writing assignment.
CB: Yeah. Well, I was struck by how fast AI is advancing because to me that’s really impressive. And as I started playing with and going more and more, I realized one of the things about it is… So even though it’s taking in– because it has a data set, it collected a bunch of data from a bunch of sources from the internet and books and transcripts and podcasts and all sorts of things, but it’s primarily a language learning model and language is its primary focus and ability. What’s interesting is that through combing the internet, one of the things I realized while I was chatting with it is that one of the languages it picked up was astrology. So I started asking it to delineate some placements and it actually does a pretty good job of even delineating astrological placements in a birth chart. For example, here was one of them. I said, “What does it mean when Saturn is conjunct Neptune in a birth chart?” And it says, “When Saturn is conjunct Neptune in a birth chart, it means that these two planets were located in the same sign and at the same degree of that sign at the time of the person’s birth. This can have a number of different effects on a person’s personality and life path depending on the specific positions of the planets and other aspects in the chart. Saturn is associated with structure, discipline and responsibility while Neptune is associated with intuition, spirituality and creativity. When these planets are in conjunction, it can indicate a struggle between the desire for stability and structure– Saturn– and the need for flexibility and open mindedness– Neptune. This person may feel torn between their desire to follow their dreams and the need to be practical and responsible. The conjunction of Saturn and Neptune can also indicate deep spiritual connection and a strong intuitive sense. This person may be drawn to exploring spiritual matters and may be highly attuned to their inner guidance. However, they may also struggle with self-doubt and lack of clarity about their direction in life. Overall, the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune in a birth chart can indicate a complex and multifaceted personality with the need to balance the demands of the material world with a desire for spiritual fulfillment.”
I’m sorry but that’s really impressive, honestly. And I went through and gave it other delineations for transits or multi-planet combinations and it actually does a pretty good job. It still fails in some areas so it’s obviously still developing. But if this is just the start, we’re way further ahead than I realized that we were. And so the way that this is gonna affect the world is not just going to affect artists or people who can code– because you can also tell it to code a website and it’ll just spit out code for a whole website– but it turns out that it’s also going to impact astrology and astrologers at the same time, the development and emergence of AI in the future as we move from the Saturn and Aquarius time period of the past three years into the next 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius.
LS: It makes me think of a couple of things. One, is it scanning books and the same issue with copyright and art, right? Because it’s just like blurring ownership and it’s like you don’t get individual ownership. But two, you know-
CB: Hold on, and that was Austin’s point earlier. But to counter that point, every astrologer their primary basis when they start is their primary teachers, and especially their first primary teacher, their first two primary teachers. Every first few year astrology student does the exact same thing, which is they pretty much repeat pretty closely their primary sources and primary teachers in the same way. So to me, the idea that it’s repurposing stuff from its sources is not really much of a counterpoint because that’s pretty much what humans do as well, especially in the early stages of their learning and development.
LS: Yeah, for sure. Not really going on that angle. It’s partly like, do you want sales of your book, right? Or is it just going to become obsolete? But it’s also– I could see this at least at the current state of development, it’s going to replace or we could easily replace reports, astrology written reports. But that’s all it’s spitting out. It’s still not… And it’s interesting because I played around with it a little too, and with some of the answers it would actually say at the end of their answer, “But this is complex and it depends on other placements in the chart and so you should really talk to an experienced astrologer.” So I totally appreciate it. Right?
CB: Yeah, that it says the delineations. There’s so much stuff about this but what we’re getting into and the reason I’m bringing this up is because one of the themes that has come up really strongly basically in the past month as we’re going through the tail end of Saturn in Aquarius where some of the fruits of all the research that’s been happening sort of behind the scenes over the past two or three years as Saturn’s been moving through Aquarius. And as we’ve been having the Saturn return to the internet and the World Wide Web from back in the early ’90s is just we’re starting to see the next level in AI is starting to emerge and it’s going to start impacting the world in some significant ways. And it does eventually start getting into questions in the long term when we’re talking about in future decades as this advances and moves further about, you know, questions that would point ‘Are they able to develop general intelligence in AI?’ Or are we ever able to get to the point where it can start doing even more complex things and what does that look like?
LS: And this is part of going into the Pluto and Aquarius era. And it was really interesting looking back at the prior Pluto in Aquarius transit, and how many technological advancements happened during that time? How many inventions and patents and things that actually were, you know, people were facing the same things like this is going to change my entire way of making my living, right?Or it has the potential to, and all the struggles around that. So yeah, we’re kind of going into that repetition.
AC: Yeah. And I think the timeframe of Pluto in Aquarius is important to remember, because we just get a taste of it this year. It’s a little over two months so again, just the tip this year. But we’re looking at basically a 20-year arc which begins this year, right? Because it’s not that… Like when we look at the last time which was the last two decades of the 18th century, sorry, quite a bit happened if we look at that as a bloc. Or if we go back before that, we actually had windmills becoming a big thing in a previous iteration of Pluto in Aquarius. But last time you have the Luddite resistance to that wave of the Industrial Revolution. And so when we’re talking about this AI stuff, I think it’s just important to remember that we’re talking about what we can see at the cusp of Pluto in Aquarius now that has 20 years to develop.
CB: Right. And what’s important about that, though, is you’ve always gotta pay attention to what starts happening at the beginning of ingresses because oftentimes that’s a preview of the larger themes that are going to really emerge in full force by the end of that transit. Because I think of Bitcoin, like the Bitcoin white paper was published just before Pluto went into Capricorn and then the very first Bitcoin was mined and created. And we have the birth chart for Bitcoin right after Pluto went into Capricorn, and in the founding documents for Bitcoin the founder refers to the recent financial disaster that happened with the economy and how the banks were being bailed out as part of his motivation for creating Bitcoin. So sometimes it’s these little things that happen at the beginning of major transits like Pluto ingresses that become larger things as we’ve seen, for example, with Bitcoin over the past decade. [crosstalk] Go ahead Diana.
DR: Okay. One thing that I also think is really interesting, for example with the Luddite movement, part of it was like we’re losing some portion of the artistry of our livelihood, but a lot of it was the worker conditions that were a problem. And so I’m thinking about this dip of Pluto into Aquarius like Saturn leaving Aquarius and entering Pisces. Pluto’s retrograde station this year is within minutes of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. Jupiter and Saturn have their opening sextile starting this year, and then Jupiter being co-present with Uranus and Uranus in Taurus being something that’s seen a lot of strikes and workers’ rights stuff. And so there’s something about the combination of these factors speaking about not just advances in technology, but how is it that we make advances in technology continue to respect humanity? Whether that’s human creativity or just literal physical human bodies. I think that’s one thing that I’m very astrologer-good interested to see how that unfolds.
AC: Yeah, there was a study done some years ago that was cited in The Economist. Consistently for the last 200 plus years, the sort of total gains in efficiency of production that were achieved by various waves of industrial revolution generally took about 30 years aka one Saturn cycle to actually be distributed fairly. Like so far, the track record is that all of the gains get hoovered up for decades whenever there’s a new technology
CB: Yeah, and we’ve been going through Saturn in Aquarius for the past three years so this is the tail end of it between now and March, so we’re getting the full emergence of some stuff that was being tested out and doing a lot of trial and error over the past three years. But then with Pluto, we have to remember that one of the primary things that Pluto does is it takes small things and it just blows them up into big things like an atom being split and exploding into a full mushroom cloud or what have you. That’s kind of what we’re looking at here and I think AI is going to be one of the most important things that will develop in the next 20 years as we transition into this sort of machine intelligence era, and start talking about some of the different ways that that impacts society and questions like– because like the Turing test, for example, if you can put a human who talks to a computer and if they can tell the difference between a computer and a human, that’s already kind of been passed and we’re already getting past that point. And now we’re moving into an era at some point where we have questions of superintelligence and the potential for super-intelligence and machines being reached. And if that happens, then the pace of things like scientific advancement is going to explode and could be happening a thousand times faster than other times in history so that you just get this acceleration of a lot of things. One thing related to that that was also recently in the news that we should talk about is the US just announced a few days ago that a fusion reaction was achieved that had a net energy output and gain for the first time in human history, basically. Which was a huge turning point in terms of fusion research because it means that we could be headed towards fusion being a viable manner of generating energy, which is going to generate not just a tonne of energy but it’s also going to do so cleanly with much less environmental impact which would actually be huge in terms of climate change and other things like that.
AC: Yeah. And what’s interesting about that is that the timeframe given basically is Pluto in Aquarius. The super ambitious goal is to have a prototype facility built within 10 years, but if we’re looking at any sort of adoption at scale, we’re looking at 20 years. And so again, it fits into the timeframe very nicely.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And that announcement came on December 13th so I think that’s another one of those Saturn in Aquarius things. But then as Pluto moves into Aquarius, it’s just going to magnify some of that stuff. But that’s one of the most probably honestly subtle stories that have happened in the news recently, but one of the most positive or optimistic things, just because it’s happening at a point where climate change is getting to that tipping point. But with something like that, it could allow for the phasing out of fossil fuels at the same time that we see the rise of and the adoption of electric cars, and some of the major car companies actually starting to really turn those out.
AC: One thing that’s really– I don’t want to dwell too much on December of 2022 but one thing that is very interesting is what we saw over the last month was a lot of, shall we say fake tech things exposed? But then we also saw, you know, what was deemed entirely functional for the waking world. Right? Things like the net positive fusion generation was a real thing. It was not the Metaverse, it was not NFT, right? We have this sort of sorting that we just got done with that we expected with the Mars-Neptune and a few other things.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good point. There was a sorting of that. Because the NFT thing came and went and then just kind of died. I don’t know if that’s going to come back at some point but right now it’s kind of regarded as a joke. There’s been other new stuff. There’s been some more negative… I know Leisa you mentioned what about San Francisco.
LS: Right. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the end of November very unexpectedly approved the use of robots that were armed for police. And there was a big outcry unsurprisingly and so within a week or early December they were like “Oh, no. Actually, will reverse that.” But they remanded it back to a committee to keep discussing it, so it’s something that could still come up. Now, it’s interesting because that feels very Pluto and Aquarius, right? It’s like killer robots and the fears around technology of what could happen when technology sort of gets ahead of humanity. And also how are we societally deciding to use new technologies? Yeah, and one of the things that I thought was really funny about that was– I don’t know if you’ve seen Mary Shelley’s… What was her name? Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein. Have you seen her chart? She had Pluto in Aquarius conjunct the midheaven and was like… Right? It’s perfect. And so it’s like fearful fantasies of non-human things that go out and kill people. Anyway, so it just reminded me of that.
DRH: It’s like the murderous uncanny valley.
LS: Right, exactly.
AC: Yeah, it’s very Terminator franchise. So Pluto does real things as it moves through the signs, but it also shapes and warps and focuses the collective imagination. One of the things you see really clearly is the sight of horror moving with Pluto sign change. Pluto in Scorpio in early ’80s to mid late ’90s, it’s the serial killer. Like the Sex Murderer, the Dahmer, the John Wayne Gacy was all about the intimate, hidden, murderous individual. Then in the latter portion of the 90s up until 2008, you have Pluto in Sagittarius. And then it becomes; one, you have Columbine early on in there, like the first big school shooting. And then you also have 911. And so the figure of horror becomes very Sagittarian. Right? They’re wielding a bow. A bow is in a sense the precursor to the firearm– the murder at a distance thing. They’re going all over the place, the terrorists are over there, we’re gonna fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. That was the Bush administration thing. And then when Pluto moved into Capricorn 2008-2009, the sight of horror becomes the structure that we live in, which is Capricorn, the laws, as well as the past. Instead of Pluto in Scorpio secret sex murders hiding over there, it’s like, “Oh, no, the structure that we live inside of is the site of horror. Literal, structural horror.” And so we’re looking at the movements also of that imaginal focus of horror with Pluto in Aquarius to the future, to imagine the story of the terrible future. Right? I think dystopia is not even a good… It overlaps with dystopia.
DRH: It’s like techno dystopia. Right?
AC: Yeah, it’s very like, “Oh my God, are we headed in this direction? Does this mean this?” And there are real dangers, but then there’s also like Chris said, like Chris quoted Alan, ‘taking a tiny thing and making a big fucking deal out of it.’ We also do that with terror, fear does that as well.
CB: Yeah, and sometimes those fears are well grounded. I mean, Pluto in Scorpio was the AIDS epidemic and then fears surrounding sex as a result of that. And that was the era I think a lot of us grew up in and just being urged growing up right off the bat to practice safe sex or risk something that at the time could be a death sentence. Or Pluto in Sagittarius was fear of religious extremism and terrorism, or Pluto in Capricorn became the fear of the financial collapse and the uncertainty surrounding our financial situation in the world. And now we move into Pluto in Aquarius and the potential for a fear of technology. For example, Ukraine the other day just apparently issued instructions to Russian soldiers for how to surrender to drones, which is kind of an interesting news story connected with similarly like the San Francisco killer drones or killer robots story.
DRH: Yeah. What’s also interesting just to kind of continue with what you began with, you know, it’s like the real thing that happened was Pluto in Scorpio was the AIDS epidemic. The real thing that happened with Pluto in Sagittarius there’s two things: One, guns got easier to get. And there was a very legitimate bolstering of certain kinds of religious extremism, including here in the United States with things that maybe I shouldn’t talk about too much on the podcast, but just in terms of a specific form of religious nationalism. And then with Pluto in Capricorn, we did very much see a growing gap between how much money people earned and how much money or how much power that money actually had to buy things. Like, even just thinking about the housing market situation right now is just… [makes hand gestures]
CB: Totally. The wealth inequality gap, that’s a good point.
DRH: Yeah.
LS: And there’s also the uncovering of what’s rotten, what’s underneath. And so with Pluto in Saj, it was that the priest sex scandals. That was all a big story when Pluto went into Saj. Pluto in Capricorn, and there’s been a fair amount of like, the rock comes from the top or sort of people who are helping run the country are actually in a coup type of thing. So it’s always about discovering this sordid underbelly of whatever that sign is.
CB: Yeah. I think another one that’s going to be prominent to bring up another recent news story that I think is going to be important. Remember the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius in December of 2021, one of the major technological things or sort of breakthroughs that happened at that time was that the vaccines for COVID were released at that point. And we had the first public releasing of essentially the mRNA vaccines, which is a new thing. And fundamentally what that was was a piece of technology and advancements in technology that were being used to alter human biology in a sense, or at least to have an effect on our physical biology in some way. I think fundamentally you can describe it that way whether you’re pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine or whatever. One of the ways that that came up recently was Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, announced a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago that it was going to begin human trials within six months of its Neuralink implant, which is a brain implant that they showed a video of how it allowed monkeys to control a cursor and type on a screen and issue instructions using only their mind and using brainwaves. So, one of the Pluto in Aquarius things and the changes and advancements in technology is probably going to also be by engineering and using technology in order to both interface between humans and technology, but also in order to change things about our body in different ways. Some of which will be probably good, and some of which will probably be not so good.
AC: Yeah, there are trials being done for injectable gene editing. We can imagine a thousand different versions of what that means.
LS: And there was just a teenager just recently that was cured of cancer, or at least she’s in remission for several months so far, who it was from gene editing. It was called something like base editing, and it’s a new technology that was just sort of understood as of six years ago. But this was the first actual person that it’s happened to. There’s so many things, and this is why we’re dwelling this long on recent tech news stories is because this is really the segue into more Aquarius, and this is also Saturn getting very close to leaving its shadow period. It will leave in late January. It’ll go back to where it was in June 2022 and then keep going. I saw another interesting story recently about how it’s the good and the bad of these technology and little things, and ultimately it’s just repeated stories of how are we using this as humanity, right? Where people have already had implantable eyes for people who couldn’t see and things like that, and there’s this horrible story recently about how what happens when these venture tech startup companies, what happens when they decide it’s not profitable enough and they move on to something else? And there’s these things left in your body that don’t have updates, right? This is already a thing.
AC: Right. “We’re no longer supporting that product. Yeah, We’re no longer supporting that product.” Yeah, absolutely.
LS: That is exactly what’s happened already. So, you know, it’s…
CB: Or, “The subscription price has increased,” in order to keep-
LS: [laughs] Right. I mean, it’s a really crazy story. People are like, “Well, I’m an engineer. Let me figure out how to change this back because it’s not being updated.” So, you know, these are already things that are happening.
CB: The positive side, though, is paraplegics and people that can’t move being given the ability to do that again. So there’s positive implications of that technology, but there’s going to be good and bad things as with everything.
LS: There are positives about it, for sure. And so it’s really about like, you know, any of these transits– I don’t know how you all fall on determinism– but it’s like there’s a lot of potentials there and it really just keeps coming down to how are we collectively deciding to use this? How are we deciding what we reward and what we punish? All of those things.
DRH: It’s like, cast irons can be used to cook breakfast and they can also be used to bash people’s heads in, but what becomes the norm of how you use the tool?
CB: Yeah. And there’s also going to be, at some point, generational gaps and generational divides. Because if something like needing a brain implant, for example, in order to interface and do things quicker– because one of the things you can do is you can type fast or you can interface with computers faster if you bypass the limitations of your hands and how fast they can move or type, there’s going to be at some point generational choices where some probably older generations like ours might have to have a choice. Many will have reluctance to that or some might go with it, but it will then create generational gaps in the same way that computers did. For example if we remember our grandparents, some of them may have adopted computers and others may not. But then it created a generational barrier in terms of the ability to continue to keep up with current trends to a certain extent.
DRH: Yep, to even work. I remember the point at which I adopted a smartphone because it became an obligation for my office job. And so there is something about personal choice when it comes to certain forms of ubiquitising of technological advances? You know, where it’s like if that’s something you don’t want to do, then you’re essentially being opted out of certain facets of society.
CB: Yeah, and I think that’s where these big generational transits- Like when you get to, for example the Pluto and Scorpio generation is now going to enter into our Pluto square for the first time, that’s when you run into when society is going one way or something and you run into those tensions sometimes that divide generations.
LS: Well, and it’s also about economic stratification, because I feel like Aquariuses also has at least something to do with how do we organise society and how do we think about society. I used to work at the public library and we’d help everyone who didn’t have internet at home who couldn’t afford to, you know? And there was a real technological divide just based on economic stratification. So I can see that continuing to be a question with technological advances.
CB: For sure. All right. So, being the resident Aquarius rising with Uranus on the Midheaven, I could keep talking about this whole tech thing for the next three hours. However, I want to check in on the other most important transits of the year with our resident Pisces, which is especially the Saturn in Pisces transit that’s going to begin a long co-presence and build up to a conjunction between Saturn and Neptune. Austin, as a resident Pisces I want to get your take on Saturn in Pisces. What are we in for it? Give it to me straight.
AC: Okay. Well, thank you. Yeah, Saturn in Pisces is what I’m most excited about this year.
CB: Like, theoretically but not personally.
AC: I think it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay. I checked my transits as well and what happened last time, and damage was done, but I can live with it. One thing that’s really important about thinking about Saturn in Pisces is that it’s the first Saturn sign after Saturn in both its rulerships. It’s the only time that Saturn’s in its own rulership, it does it for two signs in a row. So basically since 2018, we’ve been in Saturn in a Saturn-ruled sign. And if you go back through history, Saturn in Saturn town is always very serious business as you would expect. Big world changing things happen, and the world is very serious. We have the late ’80s to the early ’90s rearranged everything. Not quite as intense, but actually pretty intense especially if you didn’t live in the US. Late ’50s early ’60s, very intense rearrangement. And then certainly the late ’20s through early ’20s, another huge rearrangement. It’s always just so serious. I don’t mean to mark the seriousness, they really are serious world-changing events. And then when Saturn in Pisces-
CB: The energy of those two is like Capricorn is dry sign and Aquarius is a cold sign. So now we’re moving into a water sign which is wet and has some depth to it.
AC: Yeah. And what you see every time is that there’s this sort of culture, there’s this moment where the imagination is called in by Saturn to rethink what’s happened, right? To re-envision the world, to re-envision stories. And so you get these epic landmark works of imagination and literature and entertainment every single time you do Saturn in Pisces. Really quick, in the ’30s you have The Hobbit being published. You also have– not all of HP Lovecraft stories, but the ones that are… Or I should say what are considered his best works. And these are both worlds that people still live in and draw on. And then in the mid ’60s, you got to a pile of things. One of them is Dune, which is again it’s a magical space people still live in. The first book in the Game of Thrones series was published in the mid ’90s during a Saturn in Pisces. And then what else do you have during the ’90s that speaks to right now? You have video games that– and this is sort of the tech connecting part– you have the first game in the World of Warcraft games, which became the first completely addictive [laughs] fake universe. Well, I don’t know if there’s EverQuest but it was a huge thing. You also have the first game of the Elder Scrolls series, which right now is Skyrim, which is probably the most popular completely immersive sandbox game ever. We have the first Pokémon game, and the list literally goes on and on and on and on. But this is a real moment, or Saturn in Pisces is a real moment for the imaginal and for thinking about things in the imaginal. Either one, retreating to the imaginal to understand the world better. Or retreating to the imaginal to get away from the nonstop grimness. You can retreat as a meditative retreat or you can retreat like I’m running away. But Saturn in Pisces is very consistent about this. That’s a quick version.
CB: Pisces always has the escapist tendencies as one of the Pisces things, which can be a good thing or a bad thing.
DRH: But there’s something about Saturn’s participation with it about making it constructive. Like, how do you construct out of your escape place, and create an escape place for others? I think that’s the through line that I’m at least perceiving with the things that you’re sharing, Austin. It’s like, all of these creations endure because the world building is so good. [laughs] [crosstalk] It’s actually building… Like, building something that’s accessible to other people I think is part of it, too. You can insert yourself into these stories and walk around in them, versus just seeing a world that you feel like you don’t get to enter. Even thinking about especially the video game component, and then how Dune… It’s like without Dune, we don’t have Star Wars. There’s something extraordinarily foundational about those sorts of worlds, and then what that facilitates for others.
AC: Yeah, and there really is that dual quality. Because you can do escapism with Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings is also a way of thinking more clearly about certain moral issues and difficult decisions.
DRH: Oh! There’s something… Sorry, this just hit me. There’s this really excellent book that I got a few years ago that I think was probably published during the ’50s-60s Saturn in Pisces, but it’s called The Individuated Hobbit. And so something about the psychological application of the imaginal and how that also facilitates a comprehension of the structures of being. That’s really cool.
AC: Mm hmm. The bad news is that Saturn in Pisces isn’t very good for managing the world. When you look at ongoing problems that are happening in the world to get going during the double Saturn years, they don’t really get fixed during Saturn in Pisces. You have less of that death claws, Saturn-control energy. Which is good if you’re feeling its talons dig into your skin. But you also just have less control. One example for Saturn in Pisces last time is Russia in the mid ’90s. Right? This is the Yeltsin years, the President has a 2% approval rating, showing up publicly drunk, the transition from the USSR into modern Russia is pretty much going disastrously. That’s the Saturn in Pisces lack of control. Or in the mid ’60s… Again, maybe in some ways it’s a good thing to have that lack of control, I think in some ways that’s where the imagining comes from. But as much as people sort of romanticise the mid ’60s United States, you also have the mid ’60s in China, which is the cultural revolution where shit is completely out of hand. And so it’s a more creative period, but it’s also more chaotic. It’s just not, you know, we’re coming out of a heavily rule bound period of time. And as that relaxes, it’s not always for the best. Things kind of go in all directions.
CB: Yeah. I was looking through my Saturn in Pisces files for different examples and one of the things that did come up sometimes frequently, because Saturn is sometimes something that we struggle with on our birth chart, and I know sometimes substance issues or just that tendency towards escapism can be pronounced sometimes nataly. But there were sometimes really good examples of people overcoming that. One of my favourite, for example, of somebody that overcame his substance abuse issues was Robert Downey Jr, who has not just Saturn in Pisces but also Jupiter in Taurus, which is the exact thing that we’re going to be having coming up here. He was an actor and he was famous in the ’90s but then he was really struggling with substance abuse issues. And he started getting in trouble with the law and it seemed like he was somebody whose career was going to be thrown away entirely, but then he was able to turn it around and he was given a second chance. And he got the Iron Man movie and then became the highest paid actor in Hollywood, and was able to really pull things together. So sometimes you’ve got that scenario, but then other times you have scenarios like a not great one was Charlie Sheen with Saturn in Pisces in the 10th house in the night chart, and he was somebody that got really dragged down by some of those issues.
LS: There’s actually a lot of drug news during Saturn in Pisces, I’ve noticed. My actually favourite Saturn in Pisces example, which actually also has Jupiter in Taurus like we’re having in the second half of 2023, is Dr. Albert Hoffman who was the chemist who accidentally discovered that LSD was hallucinogenic. I thought that was perfect, right? Because there’s also this question– he actually thought… He maintained throughout his life that this was a spiritual good, that this was good for humanity if used properly and it was mind expanding to greater worlds. And then, of course, other people had trouble with it and that’s why it started getting regulated at his Saturn return and the mid ’60s. It got really popular in the mid ’60s culturally, but simultaneously the US government at least was cracking down on it and so the laboratory that he worked for stopped manufacturing, stopped shipping it. So you have this interesting double dual thing going on where it’s simultaneously the culmination of that work, but it’s also crackdowns on it. And then in the mid ’90s, the the first group that worked on medical marijuana to get it as a citizen ballot question in California, that was all during 95-96. It was actually on the ballot slightly after that, but all the work was done during Saturn in Pisces. So there’s interesting drug news, I’ve noticed. I like that whole Jupiter in Taurus sextile to Saturn in Pisces which we will have the second half of 2023 like he had. Because he said he had– Dr. Albert Hoffman– he said he had sort of mystical experiences as a child with regard to plants. And that’s perfect, right? And so what they were trying to synthesise is the active chemical components of plants. That’s what he was doing. [crosstalk]
DRH: Sorry, go ahead.
LS: I was just gonna say he did it with some other psychedelics as well.
DRH: Yeah, I was just gonna say I wouldn’t be surprised if this run of Saturn in Pisces features an uptick in both the research and application of medicinal mushrooms like psychoactive mushrooms, because that’s research that’s already happening. Especially, I know that MDMA assisted psychotherapy is also already happening, and is especially useful for combat veterans and addressing certain forms of trauma. So, that seems very apt.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. They’ve held a national conference for that in Ashland, like 20 minutes away from where I am. And that’s been the ground zero. But that also speaks to something that Saturn’s time with Neptune is going to do, which is it’s going to lock in some of the things that Neptune in Pisces has been working on since 2012, and it’s also going to just crush to dust some of the other ones. Saturn does this… Saturn judges whether you get to be real, or whether something gets to be part of the real. And it either gets the stamp of approval so it’s locked in legally, for example, or the structure can withstand time. Or it’s just crushed to dust, “Get out of here. That was a fantasy.”
CB: Yeah, so something we’re talking about here. We’re talking about Saturn in Pisces but for all of us, as soon as Saturn goes into Pisces, it’s also then co-present in the same sign as Neptune, which is essentially the same as a sign-based conjunction and it begins to build up to the exact conjunction with Neptune which is going to take place around 2025 and 2026. And that conjunction doesn’t go exact until Saturn and Neptune conjoin at zero degrees of Aries in February of 2026. However, that’s one of the things as we go through this episode talking about Saturn in Pisces is that we’re also talking effectively about the beginning of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well.
DRH: And that lasts through 2028, basically, that co-presence.
CB: Right, until Saturn departs from Aries and moves into Taurus.
DRH: Yeah. What’s additionally interesting, I just noticed this, is that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in early Aries is where Jupiter and Uranus last met around the Arab Spring. That’s an earmark to see what happens in the future.
CB: I still think about and still remember when we were doing the forecast episodes back in the summer of 2015 timeframe when the last time that Saturn was squaring Neptune. One of the big things that became popular that summer when that square was going exact, I remember because we talked about it a bunch and laughed about it was Pokémon GO. That is one of the first widely adopted augmented reality games where people were running around parks catching imaginary digital animals that they could only see through their phone. And this sort of blurring of the lines between what is real and what is not real.
AC: Right. Pokémon, which is going to be having its Saturn return during Saturn in Pisces. A few just quick Saturn returns; PlayStation, a Saturn in Pisces. The company, Amazon, also going to be having a Saturn return as well as Fox News. And for the nerds out there, the Shin Megami Tensei franchise also Saturn in Pisces.
CB: Interesting. That’s interesting about Fox News because that was the other big thing that came up when Saturn was squaring Neptune last time was the major keyword that year became ‘fake news’, which was originally something that was used to describe news stories that were being circulated through social media on the internet in order to influence politics that were not real stories but people didn’t see that they were fake and they were still circulating them on Facebook and things like that. And it was influencing things like the presidential election at the time in 2016.
AC: One final Saturn return, Dolly the sheep. I don’t think sheep live that long, but Dolly the first cloned beast.
LS: There was one Saturn square before the fake news piece, the Saturn-Neptune opposition. I don’t know how many of you remember or was listening Stephen Colbert’s ‘truthiness’. But the first show that he sort of coined that word on was Saturn-Neptune opposition with Mercury coming to square both. So, Saturn-Neptune things… It makes me grown a little bit that we’re going to be in such a long co-presence. Because well, it’s good for some things, it’s good for imagination. I feel like it’s already been with Neptune going through Pisces for this sort of long, long stretch. And there’s just always been these questions lately of like, how do you know what’s true? How do you know what’s not true? And I feel like there’s a lot of questions about are you seeing through a consensus reality or are you participating in an artifice without knowing that you are doing so? There’s so much around that societally. And I feel like that’s just going to continue to be a theme.
AC: Yeah, right. I mean, all of the technological trends that we talked about earlier, those are going to make it easier to see through things. And are you seeing through one veil into another veil that happens to be a different color, but is also a veil, an equally pierceable piece of fabric?
CB: I like that you used the word color there because I was talking to my friend, Nick Dagan Best, last night, and he pointed out a very interesting thing that happened in the mid 1960s when Saturn was in Pisces, that there was something called the color revolution in television, where in the short span of a few years, especially in 1965 and 1966, all of the major television networks in the US made the push to switch to color programming with NBC being switched to 100% color programming by the end of 1966. So that’s an interesting, again, metaphorical example sometimes of what Saturn in Pisces brings. And initially there were obstacles because it was hard for the networks to switch from black and white TV shows where they could get away with certain things like using black wires in order to hide things that they were rigging up for special effects, and all of a sudden they had to figure out how to do that without it being seen when they switched to color. So there were challenges and obstacles that came up in the process, but still the end result was a very Piscean-type thing.
AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like I was saying, it’s good for art. We’ll see about the rest of society about the trains running on time or the justice system or whatever, but it’s good for the stories, the stories get more interesting.
CB: Yeah. Toy Story was released by Pixar launching the whole computer animation revolution on November 19th, 1995, which is also Saturn in Pisces. Did you want to say something, Leisa?
LS: Just one of my other favorite Saturn in Pisces stories that I found was Rachel Carson, and this kind of speaks to how it could be good or not good for society. Rachel Carson, I don’t know if you all know who she is, but she was a marine biologist environmentalist, wrote Silent Spring that became the environmental movement in large part after that. And she had Saturn in Pisces, and what I loved about that is she was talking about, again, problems with pesticides is like problems with chemicals is an issue with Saturn in Pisces or working with chemicals in some way. But part of how that took off is because the beginning of her book she wrote it in prose, she wrote it as an imagine this, imagine a world in which this is no longer true and in which this problem is terrible and it’s because of the pesticides. But one of the things I liked about that, because obviously there’s the literal piece of problems with chemicals, but it was in addition to that imagine this part which is how it got through. Some real important things can get through if you kind of aim them as storytelling during Saturn in Pisces. But the other thing I really liked about it is with Aquarius we’re going to have Pluto going back to Capricorn then Aquarius briefly, it’s all kind of dry, it’s all kind of serious. Saturn in Pisces her message was that everything was connected, the whole natural world and us, we were all connected. It’s a very Piscean thing. And I thought that was a really beautiful use of Saturn in Pisces. And it turns out then later the first successful trial against DDT happened at her Saturn return, she was no longer alive, and that turned into the EPA eventually. So there’s some good things about that if you kind of aim it in good directions.
DRH: What I love about that is how that’s such an excellent example of the Neptunian or Jupiterian Pisces, is like, “Yeah, we’re all one man,” and Saturn’s like, “No, actually the chemicals that are being used to grow your food are killing the birds and everything which is also going to then kill your food because there aren’t going to be any pollinators.” The very tangible death level interconnection plus the poetic…
LS: Oh, exactly.
CB: We are all one, but you’re killing us.
DRH: Yeah. We’re all one and your actions are killing you as well as everybody you know.
CB: That’s nice.
LS: But the upshot was that it was semi-successful. I mean, yes, we still have lots of problems with chemicals and pesticides, but it was semi-successful in getting through to people about our interconnection which feels like a really constructive use of that Saturn in Pisces.
DRH: There’s something about the way art and story sticks with people way more profoundly than facts do.
LS: Exactly, exactly.
CB: I was rereading Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche last night, where he bizarrely and glaringly doesn’t have a chapter on Saturn-Neptune, but he does later in the book treat it very briefly, but it’s a really powerful treatment that he just crams a bunch of stuff into a few, several pages. But he was bringing up another part that I think is going to be relevant to us which is tensions between ideals, hopes, and beliefs versus harsh realities, as well as intensified secular skepticism and tension with religiosity. He also talks about a widespread sense of discontent and loss of faith pervading the social and political atmosphere. And one of the things that came up that I discovered last night, because he mentioned them separately, but I just happened to notice that they were born on the same day, was apparently Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the exact same day both with a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Sagittarius. And I thought that was really brilliant, I mean, with Darwin that’s so important because of the theory of evolution and him proposing that, and then all of the tensions between scientific and religious communities as a result of that about the implications of evolution and whether that’s true or not true and everything else. And then with Abraham Lincoln and everything that he ended up doing in terms of the country politically and everything else
DRH: What’s interesting with both of those figures is that both of them as individuals but then also the consequences of their beliefs when misapplied has created harm. Social darwinism, applying evolutionary theory to things that aren’t about species changing over time. Or with some of Lincoln’s beliefs, even though he was an emancipator, he was also a racist. And under his purview there was the most significant mass slaughter of indigenous people here in North America.
AC: You can have Neptune camouflaging malefic Saturnian activity, and some of the history of the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions sometimes what you see is if Neptune is dreams, Saturn can be something being worn out, extreme old age where it just doesn’t function anymore. And you see people giving up on an old dream that is not inspiring anybody, not doing any good. The famous example with Saturn-Neptune is the dissolution of the Soviet Union which is that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn which was late ’88 to early ’91. And if you read about the culture in the Soviet Union at the time, there was a name for it. But people were just kind of giving lip service to the like, “Yeah, we live in a worker’s utopia,” when they had to. And then privately everybody’s like, “This is fucking bullshit.” And we really can’t talk about Saturn-Neptune without looking at Russian history because it just moves perfectly with Saturn-Neptune. There’s certain civilizations, certain countries that just have astrological signatures that you can find most of the landmarks. And I don’t want to overly dwell on it, but it’s very clear that Russia is approaching another one of these landmark moments. In a sense, is there any going back from the events of this year? Not really. And so last time we had the Soviet collapse, the ’88 to ’91, the time before that, ’51 to ’53, Saturn-Neptune in Libra, we had the death of Stalin. And the death of Stalin began a very serious reversal of a number of the policies that had characterized the Soviet Union for decades, was de-Stalinization. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction before that was the Russian Revolution. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction before that was the assassination of Alexander II, who was known as Alexander the Emancipator because he oversaw a massive sort of progressive shift in Russian politics or in Russian legislation at the time. And then he was assassinated and then that just reversed and there was sort of a contra-progress or I don’t think they called themselves the retrogressive, but the next couple decades were very retrogressive. And so just going back through the last four, you either have a serious shift in the definition of what the country is or with the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union or you have a shift in leaders that then reverses the direction of the country for decades to come. And so we can’t talk about Saturn-Neptune and look at the news and not be like, “Okay, so we’re going into another one of those periods for Russia.”
CB: Right, for sure. And here’s the chart for November 9th, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. And this was just days after the third and final exact Saturn-Neptune conjunction that would occur that year in 1989. Which is just itself symbolically literally, Saturn, a wall, crumbling and falling down which is Neptune.
LS: I think with both Saturn in Pisces and Saturn-Neptune co-present for so long, a real issue for many people at least will be where do you place your faith and what do you do with your faith or your ideals when it runs up against disappointment. And does it make you dig deeper and have a stronger, more realistic faith in whatever you place it in or does it just demolish your ideals and you go into nihilism? It seems when I was looking through examples both of events and people, that seemed to be an issue. Certainly not everyone’s going to deal with tragedy, I’m not going to say that, with Saturn in Pisces, but there were a fair number of people who have Saturn in Pisces and it seemed to deal in their chart with some sort of tragedy and then what you do with it. It’s a much more internal process than… It’s a Jupiter-ruled Saturn, but it’s not a fire sign like Saturn in Sagittarius. Saturn in Pisces a mutable water sign, so it’s much more internal, much more free flow. And I think I was noticing that when I was looking up birth charts with Saturn in Pisces. So much didn’t seem to be nearly as externally visible compared to some other placements. And I was like, “I bet that’s an internal experience for them.” You could see some events, but yeah, it was much more that way than many other things I’ve looked up. So yeah, both of those I think will be relevant. Certainly Saturn-Neptune can be like that, but Saturn in Pisces can also be like that. And so sort of the double duty of like, how are you going to emotionally orient yourself with regard to your ideals and your faith, especially when it runs up against sort of realistic events or so forth that make you question that.
AC: Yeah. And I think one of the things that Neptune in Pisces is very clearly then about is about stories. What’s your story for the world? People talk about ideologies, but a lot of times it’s maybe more accurate to be like, what story do you think you’re living in? Because people think they’re living in lots of different stories. And when a collective story comes to an end, there is that crisis of it’s not just a crisis, it is a crisis of faith, but it’s also we use stories to place ourself in time. Like, “What’s happening?” “Oh, well, we’re at this stage of…” We locate ourself via an environmental story, we locate ourselves via a political story, etc etc. And when a big story runs out, people need stories. They’re literally like they’re global positioning things. They’re very helpful. The story of what does it mean to be a middle-aged person. If I didn’t know I was middle-aged and that there’s a difference between that and being 20, I would be very confused by how my knees feel. And that’s a larger thing that’s very private and can be very collective. And I have just one example of what a Saturn in Pisces transit can look like when it’s not occurring in the deep imaginable. So I was going through this and I was like, “Okay, what was happening for me?” I broke my foot, I broke three or four toes, and I had my jaw crushed by a foot all during Saturn in Pisces.
LS: Wow.
CB: An actual foot, not a metaphorical foot?
AC: Oh, no, no. My martial arts instructor was literally an Olympic-level face kicker and gave me an Olympic-level face kick without a mouth guard and broke my jaw in two places after I’d been breaking my feet on people for the lead up to that.
CB: All right. Well, I like that both as a literal event as well as a metaphor for Saturn in Pisces.
AC: Yeah, right. Just a little bit on the surface too.
CB: Going back to what you were saying, Leisa, we saw a lot of that with the Saturn in Capricorn Saturn return stories because all those people from the late eighties were born with Saturn conjunct Neptune in Capricorn and this question of how do you implement your ideals concretely. So many of their Saturn return stories had this so much more idealistic tinge to them than I was used to seeing in other people’s Saturn return stories in previous years, I thought that was really striking. I know you have actually a good chart example of a Saturn in Pisces in the second house as well, right?
LS: Karl Marx, yeah.
CB: Do you want to go into that?
LS: Yeah, so Aquarius rising, Saturn in Pisces in the second house of income and personal finances, communist manifesto gets published then at his first Saturn return just three days after Neptune and Saturn start their co-presence in Pisces in 1848, February 21st, 1848, if I’m remembering right. So it’s just kind of a perfect manifestation of obviously his life story was focused on income and finances, but it’s also we are all one, all our finances should be one. It’s pretty literal.
CB: Right. So Pisces and Neptune can sometimes be just the blurring of boundaries or removal of boundaries altogether.
LS: Exactly. And I think I remember also the last Saturn in Pisces. One of the good things about being an astrologer and getting older is you remember the past transits and how they went. So I remember Saturn in Pisces in the nineties and had a particular life experience which I don’t think was characteristic of Saturn in Pisces, but it prompted an upswell of emotions. I literally did not know how to contain them compared to any experience before or for quite a while after. And Saturn in Pisces is how do you put boundaries on the boundless? And so this can be an upswell of emotion or any anything else that is just very free flowing. It’s like, how do you put Saturn in that when it is just this sort of oceanic thing that never really stops? How to you pin that down.
DRH: That actually brings up something that has come up with clients who are having Neptune transits in contact with particularly sensitive points in their own charts, which is to remember that even the ocean has a floor. And so part of the work is figuring out how to remember that there is a floor, even though you feel like you’re just floating in the deepest chasm of the ocean. At some point it does stop.
LS: Right, right. Or how do you put artificial boundaries on it? Like, “I’m going to cry for half an hour and then that’s my crying time today.” Again, not saying that everyone’s going to be crying through Saturn in Pisces, but it is more of an emotional transit certainly compared to the last five, six years of Saturn in Saturn-ruled signs.
DRH: Also this is bringing up one of the things that I’ve been anticipatorily concerned about in the aftermath of the panini press, which is actually navigating the grief of various levels that has been stirred by the past couple of years, whether that’s grief around things that you could have done with that time, if only, or grief around people who you’ve lost. I do wonder if at some point we will actually see more deliberate collective expressions of grief.
AC: Well, that resonates really strongly with the pattern I was talking about with Saturn in Pisces always coming after the double Saturn years where tragic things always happen. And part of that retreat to the imaginable is to deal with all of the real shit that has occurred.
DRH: I know Tolkein’s work he claimed that it had nothing to do with the First World War, and also there’s reasons to believe that it had almost everything to do. Same thing with CS Lewis’s work, which coming out around the same time.
AC: And when you sit down to tell a story, you don’t necessarily know that by talking about the little hobbit that you’re like, “Oh, that resonates with maybe how you felt when you were in the trenches.” That doesn’t have to be conscious to… You don’t have to be conscious that you’re interacting with those deep emotional structures or scars in order to be interacting with them in a meaningful way that can change them. That’s that deep undersea or the dreaming quality, where you can be dreaming about how your dad was mean to you when you were a kid, but there’s a monster and it doesn’t look anything like that. And it’s actually easier to access some of that stuff like you were saying, Leisa, about the story that’s close enough, but isn’t too literal. The being too on the nose the mind will reject it and you won’t end up going there.
DRH: There’s something about coming in through side gates.
LS: Yeah, very much. And Pisces is very indirect like that oftentimes. I also wonder about we have a bunch of transits that are going over recent transits, and so right this year we have Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces, and then next year we have Saturn in Pisces. And I do wonder also with regard to that whether we’ll have some uncovering of like, “Oh, these things looked rosy and fine last year, but we now understand they were not fine.” And it’s kind of taking away that bubble of sort of optimistic imagination.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that while we have Saturn in Pisces, because it’s a Jupiter-ruled sign we’re going to get something very different every year as Jupiter moves into the different signs. So we begin Saturn in Pisces with the last bit of Jupiter in Aries which goes until May, and then it’s Jupiter in Taurus rest of the year and a chunk of next. And Jupiter will not be alone in Taurus, but will be there briefly with the north node, but for the entire time will be there with Uranus. And that’s another one of our important historical pairings. And so it’s not just Saturn in Pisces with Neptune, it’s Saturn in Pisces with Neptune ruled by the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which I think is very interesting. [overlap]
CB: Sorry. I was just going to say that’s a great transition point because I’ve been meaning to move us into Jupiter in Taurus because that’s one last major, major signature transit of this year that we need to talk about.
AC: That was my Pisces coming in from the side to keep us on track.
CB: I appreciate that. I just want to make it more official. All right, Diana, what were you saying?
DRH: I was just going to say Jupiter in Pisces also features two kind of way stations in terms of Jupiter’s relationships with other planets, which includes the square with Pluto which then harkens back to the Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions back in 2020 which like lots of concentrations of wealth in particular directions. And then it’s the opening sextile with Saturn which I think is very, very interesting in terms of seeing how this age of air is fruiting, it’s beginning to show more evident fruit. So it’s not just Pluto in Aquarius showing up around that great conjunction degree, it’s also the relationship between Jupiter and Saturn. They’re getting more room between each other, but they are also affecting each other. The fact that it’s in earth and water, it’s like, what is actually beginning to grow here, feels like a relevant question. Also, what did you put out before the last hard freeze and is now dying with that Saturn influence?
AC: Yeah, that Jupiter-Saturn arc I think is really important. If people can imagine that Saturn is like the Sun and Jupiter is like the Moon just like we get visible lunar cycle as the Moon starts to move away from the Sun and get ahead of it, the opening sextile which Diana mentioned is sort of once the Moon is starting to get some good light, it’s not quite half full, but it’s not just a dirty fingernail, we’re kind of getting moving, we’re most of the way through the first quarter of the cycle, things are beginning to take shape. Only it’s a 20-year month rather than a 29.5-day month.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So let’s talk about two of those alignments though that we’re going to have between Jupiter and other outer planets. So first, as soon as Jupiter goes into Taurus at zero degrees of Taurus, it squares Pluto, which has recently moved into zero degrees of Aquarius at that point. So like Diana was saying, that’s then the continuation, that’s the opening square of the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that occurred back in 2020. And we talked about and observed two major things that happened back during that time. One of them was this huge gap in terms of wealth, where during the early part of the pandemic when the first conjunction took place, there was this interesting phenomenon where after the economy initially or at least the stock market initially tanked, there was a bunch of billionaires that started investing very quickly and then suddenly became mega wealthy and became even wealthier than they already were before everything took place. So they were able to sort of use that to their advantage. And that may be a recurring theme here. We may be returning back to that when we see this square take place. I know there was another one that I was really focused on that year because it kept coming up every time Jupiter conjoined Pluto, which is I kept noticing an explosion of conspiracy theories and ways in which things like that were being used to control and manipulate people. And I would not be surprised if that was another theme here when Jupiter squares Pluto.
LS: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting also any of these first quicker transits, they’re going to be hitting off the Pluto in Aquarius transit. You just watch them because that’s going to be the initial inklings of what is this transit actually going to be about. And so you should watch what takes place when those faster moving planets aspect, Pluto in Aquarius. One of the things we haven’t talked about yet with Pluto in Aquarius, we talked a lot about technological advances, but there were also a bunch of revolutions the last time. There was the French Revolution, there was the Haitian Revolution. And so I think that it does recall some of those Jupiter and Pluto themes like the conjunction in Capricorn, but that was in Capricorn and this is now the square to Aquarius. And so I do wonder if there’ll be some backlash or this power to the people kind of thing. I don’t think it’ll be only that, but I do expect something around that to come up.
AC: Well, especially with it being co-present with Uranus, which is rebel with or without a cause. Uranus would love to be against something.
DRH: And then when you add the Taurean element, which to me there’s very much a salt of the earth kind of person, that describes Jupiter in Taurus or that embodies Jupiter in Taurus. So from the perspective of the people, is this sufficiently disseminated, whatever this might be?
AC: And with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, which is roughly a conjunction every 13 years, you get waves of culture. The last one happened in 2010, it was in Aries. And you have you have Occupy happening, you have the Arab Spring. It’s Martial, what is the proper formation of culture? Oh, it goes out and it does something, it’s active, it’s activist, that’s Aries. The one before that, ’97 in Aquarius, that’s when everyone decided that technology and this internet thing were the future and everybody got really excited about that. That became what everything was about. And when you follow them back, it’s the beginning of a cultural wave. In some ways it’s Jupiter coming in to confirm whatever the crazy Uranian either rebellion or new invention is. And so we’ve had Uranus in Taurus for a while, and so Jupiter’s coming to confirm that and create a little cultural wave around it.
DRH: Yeah. What’s additionally interesting about the most previous one is that it started in Aries, but then there were two more in Pisces. And just even thinking about the sort of wind out of sails that at least some of the revolutions along with the Arab Spring experienced, but that’s not going to be the case for this one, it’s just Taurus. Total side note, but one of the things I’m really hoping will happen with Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus is an invention of another extraordinarily delicious baked good à la the chocolate chip cookie. But I think it’s probably going to be more along the lines…
CB: Was the chocolate chip cookie a Jupiter…
DRH: No, it was a Uranus in Taurus. [crosstalk] Sorry. What I think it’s going to be is fake meats. And that’s the thing that comes to mind, especially because we see Jupiter in relationship with more fatty things. Tofu and tempeh aren’t particularly fatty. So it’s like how do you make a ribeye steak without a cow?
CB: All right. Well, everyone heard it here first, fake meat cookies 2023#.
DRH: Yikes, I rescind my prediction.
CB: No, it’s too late.
AC: No, you’re probably right, but it’ll do other things as well. With it ruling the Saturn in Pisces, Taurus is a Venus-ruled sign, I think that very strongly supports the wave of good or at least better art, better cultural creation. It’s very art for art’s sake, and when you look at the last time we had a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in a Venus-ruled sign, which was early seventies, a lot of great music literally got invented then. It was good for art. And then the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions also have a political dimension. Occupy was not primarily an aesthetic movement even though we’ve also got that, and so I think it’ll probably do a couple things. One thing that I hope it will do that’s within the realm of possibility is a radical pragmatism. Let’s get the food and the energy sorted.
CB: So let me show the chart because I wanted to transition into this discussion, just clarify. So this is the closest Jupiter and Uranus get this year. It’s in September where Jupiter gets to about 15 Taurus when it stations retrograde and Uranus is at 23 Taurus at that time, so they’re within eight degrees of each other. So that’s the conjunction we’re talking about or at least the most intense point of that this year, although really from our perspective it begins in May as soon as Jupiter goes into the sign of Taurus and begins that sign-based conjunction.
LS: Yeah. There were a lot of actually iconic food things that were started during the last Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus, M&M started then. It was actually really close to the exact conjunction. It was like the innovation was the melt in your mouth, not in your hand. And they sent it off to war because it was more temperature stable. So there are innovative food things like that. One of the things that sounds really silly but actually illustrates a good principle is Cheerios also started right around that conjunction. But they had started like the process of cereal extrusion a little bit before that, but then Cheerios came on and became the one that was remembered as the iconic one. And so I think there may be a parallel here where Uranus has already been going through Taurus, it’s already been innovating some of these things, but then Jupiter comes through and someone takes really good advantage of that or does something a little better with that and that’s the one that sticks. I’m not saying a Cheerios fan, I’m just saying the principle.
CB: I think agree that Cheerios is the most rebellious cereal.
DRH: It’s also hilarious that Cheerios are called [cheery-Os], that’s like Jupiter’s coming in being like, “Hey, I have jokes and cereal for you.
CB: Right, it’s true.
AC: How close did they come to being nifty Os?
LS: They were called something else actually, but I don’t remember what it was initially. But the other thing that I love that I hope we’ll have more repetitions of is the last time that Jupiter and Uranus were in Taurus, although granted Saturn was there too I believe, was the implementation of the 40-hour work week with overtime pay otherwise became national. And it was literally like the innovation is more leisure time, it is more time to slow down and be kind of a human being not doing… And I love that and I hope we do more of that being a Jupiter in Taurus person.
AC: I think that’s a great catch. If we’re talking about Jupiter coming in to confirm things that Uranus has been working on in Taurus, Uranus has absolutely been working on labor movement for the last several years. And so I think that’s a really good wholesome parallel to that, it’s a really good call.
LS: Well, and the other piece I love about that is that actually two Jupiter cycles prior when Jupiter was also in Taurus, that first started being implemented, I think it was the Adamson Act for railroad employees. So just initially railroad employees, but then later with the Jupiter and Uranus together, it was like a bigger innovation. So I’m hoping for more of that. I know there’s movements around like the four-day work week and things like that. So yeah, I like that idea because it’s sometimes so hard to sort of typify a Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus because they have some antithetical qualities, but I do think the innovation as rest is pretty perfect.
AC: Yeah, and as you mentioned, the last example of that is interfered with very strongly by Saturn. And also it was in 1941, so kind of everything, almost everything [sub Cheerios] is just about war.
LS: And the M&M’s.
AC: Oh, and the M&M’s.
CB: Speaking of Jupiter conjunct Uranus, some of my favorite natal examples of that are Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers, who had Jupiter conjunct Uranus in the sign of Cancer. Interestingly, he unveiled the “think different” ad campaign on August 8th, 1997, which was also a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. So think different as a slogan for Jupiter-Uranus I think is a significant one.
AC: Well, let me just jump in with one thing, and that’s what I was talking about with the Jupiter-Uranus starts a cultural wave. Apple at that ad campaign you’re talking about concentrated and typified that excitement around tech. It wasn’t just these are new tools, it’s we’re going to be different, we’re going to think different.
CB: Yeah, and they’re also unveiling those fancy iMacs at the time, they were all neon colored and stuff. So that was pretty cool. Similarly more locally related in our community, the company Astrodienst was founded under the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Sagittarius in 1983. They were one of the first astrology companies to get on the internet, and they were the first one to start offering free birth chart calculations through their websites in the late nineties and early two thousands. And that was just a huge technological game changer for astrologers that has influenced a whole generation of astrologers since then. I mean, I think we all started calculating charts on astro.com, right?
AC: 100%.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah, so that’s huge. And then another one that I found last night is Tim Berners-Lee also has a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Cancer, the same one that Steve Jobs had. And he was the founder of the worldwide web, and he came up with the whole idea. He actually proposed the idea while he was working at CERN in Switzerland in 1989. And he made the first proposal within days of the first Saturn-Neptune conjunction, where it was that Saturn-Neptune-Uranus conjunction that was in Capricorn, and he made a proposal for what would become the worldwide web to his boss. And what was funny is the original proposal paper still exists, and it has a note scribbled from his boss that says that the proposal was vague but exciting. And I loved that as a Uranus-Neptune-Saturn conjunction, vague but exciting, and then it turns into the worldwide web.
AC: It’s certainly proven to be exciting.
CB: For sure. So yeah, Jupiter-Uranus, conjunctions and technological innovations are, are major themes. so I, I would expect something like that coming up this year with that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus.
CB: All right. So other things that we need to mention in our very brief overview of the year ahead that we’re doing here at the start that we’ve gone way over time, but I think that’s okay and maybe we’ll mention a couple other things really quickly and then we’ll take a break, so one of them we need to mention is that there’s going to be a Venus retrograde in the sign of Leo this summer. And this is going to be a major Venus retrograde that actually repeats the Venus retrograde from eight years ago. So here’s a graphic with a timeframe. Venus stations retrograde on July 22nd, and it’s retrograd in Leo for 40 days and 40 nights approximately until it stations direct on September 3rd. So there’s a broader timeframe involved that starts way back in June when Venus first goes into Leo, and it ends in October when Venus eventually leaves Leo, and that’s the full timeframe of the entire transit when it’s activating that specific sign of the zodiac. But the most intense period will be that retrograde from July 22nd to September 3rd. So how are you both feeling about Venus retrograde in Leo? I know one of the things I always remember from the last one eight years ago, and it was conjunct Jupiter at the time, but that was when same sex marriage was legalized in the United States by the Supreme Court that summer. And that’s something I always remember from that timeframe.
AC: Yeah. I think the only two things I can remember from then is the legalization and we started doing this podcast together. And I believe you used the Venus-Jupiter as a big part of the election. I remember you scrambling to try to set up a Patreon so you could get the most out of that Venus-Jupiter conjunction. So Chris, maybe that’s a thing for us, because then we also hung out at the previous one which was the previous Venus retrograde in Leo which was at the last Project Hindsight conclave.
CB: Yeah, which started the day of Venus stationing retrograde in Virgo back when this retrograde still started in Virgo and then went back into Leo. Yeah, I think you’re right. So the forecast has a Venus retrograde in Leo stamped to it in some sense then, which is funny because you were just out here for a tarot conference randomly and we asked you if you wanted to join us for the forecast. And then the rest is history, it’s been like eight years now almost.
AC: Yeah, and that’s something that everyone should look, is there an important relationship that is coming up on eight years? Because you see really important benchmarks in that. Kate and I got together right before that one in 2007. Then we got married basically one Venus cycle later right after the Venus retrograde in Leo. Right after it went to [unintelligible] terrible at astrology. And then we may have some more benchmarks coming up. So yeah, and you and I we also have moved close to that cycle as well.
CB: Yeah, Venus retrogrades always have this backwards looking tinge to them because Venus literally slows down, turns around, and the planet of relationships starts moving backwards in the cycle of the zodiac. And I think sometimes there can be this reflective quality of looking back on past relationships and reconnecting with people from the past that you used to have closer bonds with and reevaluating some of those relationships.
AC: Yeah. And also just it’s sort of doing a full Venus cycle with someone or with something else that’s Venusian. Maybe you’ve been painting for just about eight years, but there’s a level of completion to the relationship and then you’re going to do another cycle together. In an ideal world, I would advise everyone to do exactly one eight-year Venus cycle before getting married. It’s not practical in most cases, but there are kind of no surprises in any part of the Venus cycle if you’ve done that.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
DRH: I do also really like that Venus is going to be in Leo for four months, even if it is retrograde for part of that time, and Jupiter’s going to be in Taurus for the second half of the year. And those of us who’ve been getting hit by the Saturn in Aquarius transit for a few years, it’s really a welcome shift of two benefics for at least part of the year versus Saturn, Uranus being very close.
CB: Yeah. So interestingly, so here’s June 6th looking at animating the charts. And as soon as Venus goes into Leo, it has kind of a tense opposition with Pluto as its first opening thing. But then, yeah, you’re right, it does then quickly move into the first square with Jupiter. And then in the buildup to the retrograde, Venus is closing the distance and almost catching up on Mars, which is kind of an interesting inversion from what we saw earlier in 2022 when Venus was retrograde in Capricorn and it was Mars that overtook Venus, but instead Venus slows down and doesn’t catch up to Mars before it stations retrograde. And one of the things that it does while it’s in Leo is it has three squares with Uranus with the first one taking place there in early July at 21 Leo to 21 Taurus where Uranus is at that point. So this Venus retrograde is partially tinged by that square with Uranus.
LS: Which will be setting off some of the same transits as we’ve had with the Saturn-Uranus square at least to the Taurus house for each person. But Jupiter will be there kind of affirming things rather than only destabilizing.
CB: How do you feel about Venus retrograde square Uranus, Diana?
DRH: I mean, it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, and especially when it comes to the way that Venus retrogrades are always going to be disruptive for relationships generally, but also specifically wherever Venus is in charge of things in your own chart. And when you add the Uranian component, one of the things I’ve been thinking about quite a lot is, and this is in part because it becomes relevant in a lot of my own client work, is thinking about how old stories become factors in new relationships and how old stories will erupt into new relationships in really surprising and destabilizing ways. Which then having Uranus and Jupiter together in Taurus forming that square with retrograde Venus, it’s more like really supported stress testing than all of a sudden there’s gnomes laying dynamite in your house. It feels much more constructive than it would be without Jupiter there, but absolutely one of those times where, “Oh shit, I didn’t know I was going to react like that,” might be quite noisy.
AC: Especially the lead up to Venus’s retrograde station, because Venus and Mars are just hanging out in all of the lead up, the shadow. And so the first the first Venus-Uranus Square is also with Mars square Uranus and with Mars right there. So it’s probably going to be front loaded with difficulties, interruptions.
DRH: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting to note that the next Mars-Venus conjunction actually happens at 6 Aquarius, so across the street from where this particular Venus retrograde is happening. And then later in the year there’s a Mars-Sun conjunction opposite Uranus that just in terms of forming a shape with how that interacts with the Venus retrograde, there’s something about relationship arising rooted in the fixed signs, if that makes sense.
AC: Or relationship catching fire.
DRH: Yeah, that too. Like the compost pile where you’ve been dumping all of your unresolved conflicts spontaneously combusting.
AC: Yeah, there you go.
LS: Well, there’s something also to be said for Uranus going through Taurus and going through a house for each person where we don’t like things to move quickly or change much. And so that’s already been a thing for a while here. But with that Venus squaring Uranus three times, well, one of the things that always really happens with Venus-Uranus hard aspects is things move more quickly with interpersonal things. Whether that’s romantic relationship or otherwise, people tend to be much more free and open with socializing and with kind of making quick connections. And that can be a good thing too. Of course, it has that review quality since it’s going to be doing that during the Venus retrograde, maybe people very quickly coming back from your past or things like that or issues from earlier in your relationship very quickly arising to be reviewed. But there can be some constructive things with that for sure.
AC: Yeah. Go ahead.
DRH: After you.
AC: All right. I was just going to add to the idea of things changing more quickly in Taurus than normal, and that having been a thing for the last several years or five years at this point, and we’re going to be pinging that Uranus in Taurus without Saturn to hold it back all year. So all of the Uranus stuff that’s been there but it’s immediately hit a wall like any of the, “Oh, what if I just change the whole way I was doing this? Or what if I this or what if I that?” There’s nobody to hold Uranus back. None of the, “Hold me back, bro.” A lot of things are just going to move.
DRH: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I was just going to add there is something too about thinking about even Venus in retrograde motion is contributing some sweetness to that Taurus situation. And so there’s a phrase, I first heard it from my friend Ari Felix, and I’m not going to remember where they first sourced this in the moment, but just this idea of moving at the speed of trust. And there’s something about Venus in Leo being in deep self sovereignty, a certain form of sovereignty. Adrienne Maree Brown, thank you, Ari. How does that then contribute to moving faster than you could have moved previously, especially in the aftermath of having all of the eclipses in the Taurus-Scorpio axis. The north node passing through Taurus increasing the volume on the Uranian-like speed, speedboat sort of situation. There’s some potential there of that being productively… I don’t know, there’s a generative [aeros] there that’s rooted in clearer sense of self and potentially disruptions facilitating that clearer sense of self that then allows for moving forward.
AC: Well, I think sense of self, idea of self, vision of self is a pretty key thing for this Venus retrograde because it’s all in Leo, and so the way a lot of this stuff will come up is, “Oh, I don’t see myself as the kind of person who lives this way,” or “I don’t see my… It’s like self-image being a major issue in relationships or someone seeing themselves through a mirror darkly, distorted self-perceptions impacting relationships. And the working with the result of good work through that being a more form-fitting, comfortable, flattering self-image that is more connected to who you are.
DRH: Taking off the garments of power and putting on the pajamas.
AC: Which is, by the way, a Saturn and Pisces fashion trend. Garments become looser and comfier consistently in terms of what’s popular and flowier as well.
DRH: The return of the kaftan.
CB: I am tired of the tight pants decade that we’ve been in for a while now.
AC: Yeah. It’s the whole testosterone crisis, it’s just the pants.
CB: Yeah. So I like the Venus direct station where Venus stations direct at 12 Leo in early September, and it’s squaring Jupiter and right around the same time Jupiter stations retrograde. So there’s sort of a positive affirming quality to the end of that retrograde period after the tumultuousness of the sort of obsession of Venus ingressing into Leo and then immediately opposing Pluto where you get this sort of intense smoldering sort of relationship or other person dynamics. And then you get the co-presence with Mars which is energetic but potentially sort of explosive or combustible type of energy as well in terms of personal relationships. You get the instability and the excitement of the Venus-Uranus square early on, but also the sort of instability of it. But then you get this nice affirming quality towards the end of the retrograde when Venus stations direct and starts moving forward again into the future. And then interestingly, immediately after the Venus retrograde and the Venus transit through Leo ends, Venus ingress into Virgo in early October, and then immediately a bucket of cold water is dumped on her head when she opposes Saturn in Pisces. So there’s this interesting sort of chronology to the whole Venus retrograde this summer that will be really fascinating to see how that plays out, taking some of those archetypes and how it works out specifically in people’s lives.
AC: Yeah, we can do a nice play by play during our third quarter analysis.
CB: Yeah. All right, we’re back from a little bit of a break here, and we’re going to move into the second part of this where we go through a quarter by quarter analysis of each of the months of 2023. So first I want to give a shout out to our sponsors. Our first sponsor is the Honeycomb almanacs and calendars, which are custom built with your natal chart and favorite house system. So Honeycomb tracks your natal transits alongside mundane transits so that you can write your own personalized forecasts. You can customize the location for your almanac and find the exact moment when the transits occur in your time zone. There are many ways to personalize your almanac with optional plugins like solar return charts, community artwork, or zodiac releasing. Honeycomb almanacs and calendars are available in print and digital editions starting at just $10 for a six-month almanac. Find out more at honeycomb.co. And we’re getting a little close to the Christmas season, but I know this has become a popular holiday gift or end of the year thing that a lot of astrologers get. I think, Diana, you mentioned you get one every year around this time.
DRH: I get one every single year for the past two years. Somebody has gotten to it before I have and has given it to me as a birthday gift, which has been really lovely. I’m obsessed with them, honestly. If somebody is a little bit beyond beginner astrology, this is one of the most useful things that you can have on hand to continue with your studies. And I don’t know, somebody just put in the chat it’s indispensable, that is exactly what it is. It’s super, super, super, super, super, super, super, super, super useful.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Because that’s one of the most important things when you start learning astrology is following your transits every day or as regularly as you can because that’s when you start to see the planets come alive and you start to see how your birth chart works and how these different symbols actually work in practice in real life. That’s how you connect things is through transits.
DRH: Yeah, and one of the things I love about it is I think it’s part of the traditional astrology plugin. It includes your annual profections and your zodiacal releasing. And so if you’re using it to track your profections, it will highlight every single transit that involves your profected year boss. When it comes to ZR, it’ll tell you when you are switching any levels of those periods, those timing periods. And the fact that it’s paper, I mean, some people love the digital version, I prefer the paper version just because there’s something about the tactility and then it goes alongside… My previous ones all live with my previous year’s journals, so I can whip out my journal and my Honeycomb from that year together. And just the cross referencing is just delightful.
CB: I have my print calendar up behind my computer screen. So when I’m working someday and I get a particularly annoying email and I just can’t understand why I’m irritated, I can glance at it and see I’m having Mars conjunct natal Mercury that day. And then I’m like, “Okay, that’s what’s happening.”
DRH: Yeah.
LS: Yeah. It’s really, really customizable. And also the art, we haven’t talked about the art, right? You can put in which art pieces you want. There’s a few different styles from specific artists, and you can choose which ones you want to illustrate your journal. Super good learning tool, and most astrology calendars just do the general transits, the mundane transits, but it’s really unique in sort of tracking your own.
CB: Yeah, I don’t know how they do that, what the technology is, but somehow they print each one custom to your actual timed birth chart. You have to enter in your full birth data and they spit out one that’s customized to you instead of one of these other ones that’s just for everybody.
LS: Right, and that you can choose your health system and you can choose your location. That’s really cool.
DRH: You can also choose one of the things that I love doing, it’s one of the add-ons is adding the lunation charts. So at the backend of mine, it has all of the lunations for the entire year just all together. So it’s really easy to do certain kinds of assessments. And especially if you’re a practicing astrologer, that becomes really useful to have a very quick glance that’s not meaning you have six different windows open on your screen.
AC: Yeah, and there’s something very irreplaceable in not just learning about astrology, but really knowing how it works by just watching your transits. Because you may be good enough as an astrologer that you can be like, “Oh, when Mars sextiles my Moon from this house, this kind of thing will probably happen.” And even if you’re mostly right, just seeing it happen over and over and over again, having that part of your daily consciousness, allows all of that to sink in to a much deeper level. I haven’t seen anything, any sort of product or aid like Honeycomb that would be nearly as effective. It’s just kind of the best case version of that.
CB: For sure. All right, well, shout out to them because they’re one of our favorite sponsors pretty much ever on the podcast. You can find out more at honeycomb.co, and I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on The Astrology Podcast website for this episode.
DRH: Can I say something about the art really quick?
CB: Please.
DRH: Which is that the art store where you can just get the art itself is closing at the end of this year, and I just finally got some myself this year which I’m trying to show you and failing. It’s on super high quality paper. It arrived and I was shocked at how high quality the paper is. So this is one of those things where if you’re like, “I want more art,” go buy it now because you won’t be able to very soon.
CB: Yeah, those are really beautiful. I like you that you have those up behind you.
DRH: Yeah, they’re so nice.
AC: So nice.
CB: Awesome. And so Honeycomb is our first sponsor. Also shout out to our second sponsor which is the ephemeris.co birth chart pendants, where you can go on their website and actually enter in your birth data and they will send you a custom astrological necklace that displays your planetary placements in your birth chart. So the ephemeris birth chart pendant is a bespoke piece of quality jewelry to help people connect deeply with their birth chart while pieces are unique and handmade in the US and you can choose what zodiac or house system you prefer, and even put a custom engraving on the back for whatever you want to say either for yourself or to who you’re giving it to as a gift. So as a modern look, it’s gender neutral and it looks pretty good with any outfit. You can also get different readings that are available with it. They’ve sold these to more than 20,000 orders and counting, so it’s actually starting to become really popular. And you can actually get a 15% discount with the promo code Astrology Podcast if you purchase one on their website at ephemeris.co. And this is another good sort of gift-type thing, especially during the holiday season. There’s the engraving you can put on the back, and yeah, I think it’s cool. Again, I don’t know how the technology and all this is working at this point, but that you can customize these things to your actual birth chart is just kind of wild to me and kind of crazy compared to where we were 10 or 20 years ago.
LS: Yeah, definitely. It’s a really good gift. You can also do it for things that aren’t birth charts like a significant moment when you and your partner met or charts of important events in your life.
AC: That’s nice.
DRH: It would be really cute to have like a besties chart like best friends necklaces. If you know when you met your bestie to cast a chart for that moment, that’s adorable.
LS: But like a composite chart.
AC: I brought it up before, but I am still waiting for them to offer a Flavor Flav style like one foot in diameter. So everyone knows what time it is.
CB: That’s going to be a special order. So you would definitely wear that for a forecast episode if they made a special one.
AC: 100%.
LS: Putting that in as a request, everyone needs to wear that to the next in-person conference.
DRH: Yeah. Who needs a name tag when you have a foot diameter birth chart on your chest?
AC: It’s okay if it gives me neck problems, I won’t sue. I’ll deal with that.
CB: That’s really funny because that means there’s probably some past life version of you in the medieval period that you wore a big astrolabe on your chest when you walked around as an astrologer in that time period.
AC: I hope so.
DRH: You were the one in the scholars robes that was completely embroidered with astronomical symbols.
AC: God, I hope so.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Love that. All right, cool. Well, shout out and thanks to ephemeris.co. Once again, Astrology Podcast is a promo code for 15% on their website, and I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video or on the podcast website. So thanks a lot for sponsoring this episode. All right, we’ve completed the first half of our journey and now the broad overview of the year ahead of 2023. Now it’s time to get into the details by jumping into the somewhat quicker month by month analysis and quarter by quarter analysis of 2023. So let’s jump into it right away here with January, the month of January. For those watching the video version, here’s the planetary alignments calendar. This is from our wall calendar that’s available on the podcast website in our merch section. So it shows the major transits that we’re having this month. I’ll just read off some of the major ones. Major one is that we start off the year in the midst of a Mercury retrograding Capricorn, and that reaches its halfway point just after our first lunation of the month which is a full Moon in Cancer on the sixth. And then the next day the Sun conjoins Mercury and we get the halfway point in the retrograde. The following week, Mars finally slows down and stations direct ending its long retrograde period in Gemini, after which point it’ll start moving forward again and picking up steam. The following week Mercury stations direct on the 18th of January. Then we get our second lunation of the month which is a New Moon in Aquarius on the 21st. Uranus stations direct on Taurus on the 22nd, and Venus departs from Aquarius where it started at the beginning of the month and moves into Pisces on the 26th. So that sounds already like kind of a dynamic month where we’ve got planets moving forward, three planets all stationing direct that month, Mars, Mercury, and Uranus. How are you guys feeling about that?
LS: Well, I really feel like January the big, big thing is just Mars stationing direct. Because it’s been in Gemini since August 20th, 2022, it’s been retrograde since the end of October. So really finally moving forward with actions that have kind of been held back or things that we’ve needed to redo. And now we’re finally going to move forward with that energy. I think it’ll just feel a lot better personally too. Whatever you’ve been trying to work on or needing to work on and put energy towards, it can finally move in a constructive direction rather than unpacking past things.
DRH: I have a feeling that a lot of the New Year’s resolutions aren’t actually going to pick up or feel possible until after that direct station. So for those of you who are resolution-ers, I don’t know if that’s a word, maybe consider building in quite a bit of grace period for yourself, and just be like, “Throughout January I’m going to figure out how I’m going to implement my plans,” so that way come February you can use Mars picking up speed to pick up speed.
CB: That’s great advice.
AC: We actually said the same thing last month when we were looking at it. It was like, “Oh, maybe not January 1st,” for the edict. I agree entirely that Mars is the big thing. And so it’s worth noting that Mars is right next to a big royal star literally all month. It’s right next to Aldebaran, which is going to supercharge Mars’s direct station. I think it’s going to have a significant impact on world news as well as on personal lives. Almost certainly better on a personal level than on reading the news. I read the news today, oh boy, level, but very powerful. But like Diana was saying, there’s the direct station, but it’s going to take weeks to perceptibly move. It’s like a big old train, it slows down and it takes a while to get any forward momentum. I would also add, not to be a negative Nelly, but the stationing direct of a malefic doesn’t turn it into a benefic. Mars doesn’t stop wanting to burn things down or destroy things because it’s direct. Whereas later in the year we’ll do Venus, Venus is much more positive when direct than retrograde, whereas Mars is going to know exactly it’s going to be a forward march, but it may be a forward march to a battle. On a personal level I’ve seen relationships that were contentious during a retrograde, a Mars retrograde, just end decisively on a Mars direct. And it was for the best, it’s better than being in limbo. But Mars direct isn’t necessarily parade worthy, it’s a serious planet that’s doing a serious station.
CB: Yeah. So some of the conflicts that begin at the beginning of the retrograde in October sort of reached their logical conclusion in January when Mars stations direct and moves forward again. And the ancient symbol, Egyptian symbol, for Mars in some ancient astrological text was a knife. And so sometimes that theme of suffering or separation can become prominent. And when Mars stations direct, you sort of know what to sever or separate. And the necessary use, sometimes surgical use, of Mars can be good at certain points in your life. And I wanted to give a shout out to Stella from Reddit who illustrated this Mars retrograde graphic for us that shows Mars entering its shadow on September 3rd, stationing retrograde on October 30th, stationing direct on January 12th, and then finally leaving its post retrograde shadow on March 15th, which tells us that there’s still going to be a bit of a cleanup phase for several weeks before Mars is fully finished with its business in Gemini.
LS: And there’s been a lot of talk about the Uranus return that’ll be coming up in the US chart in the seventh house. And I just wanted to note that Mars is actually stationing conjunct the natal Uranus in the seventh house of the US chart. So it may bring things up. It’s also very close to Biden’s Saturn in his seventh house since they have kind of similar charts with Sag rising. Not really predicting anything specific around that, although it does make me think about the new congress starting in January and how the house has changed party majorities. And so that seems very Mars conjunct a Saturn in the seventh of like a, “No, you can’t do what you want now.”
CB: Right, because his Saturn’s at nine degrees of Gemini and Mars stations at eight degrees of Gemini.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, all right. So all of that is important. Also important as we mentioned is the Mercury retrograde. So Mercury entered shadow on December 12th. It stations retrograde in Capricorn on the 29th of December, so right at the very end of the year, and it doesn’t station direct until the 18th, and then finally leaves its post retrograde shadow period until February 6th. So we’re going to be dealing with some Mercury retrograde things, which is also important since Mars is in Gemini which is the sign ruled by Mercury.
AC: Yeah, the two are obviously tied together. They’re also in a bi sign contra-antiscia, which gives them a little bit more interaction than they would otherwise have. It’s almost like Mars won’t fully be stationed direct until its ruler Mercury is also direct. Chris, you brought up the knife as an ancient symbol for Mars. And the severing as I gave an example of a relationship is not necessarily a happy thing, but knowing where to cut is way better than flailing around with a knife if we’re comparing the two.
CB: Right. Flailing around with a knife is a good actually metaphor for what we were seeing when Mars stationed retrograde in October and early November with all of the chaos that was happening on Twitter at the time. It’ll be interesting to see if some of that doesn’t start hopefully calming down or moving in a less crazy and chaotic direction. I mean, one of the things that’s also different about January compared to the previous two months is we’ve been going through the tail end of Jupiter in Pisces. But one of the things that’s different that we haven’t talked about yet right from the start of 2023 is Jupiter is now out of Pisces and is firmly back in Aries in a Mars-ruled sign. So that’s providing part of the context for the entire first five months of 2023 as well.
LS: Right. And kind of empowering it to be a little more constructive since Jupiter is sextile Mars while Mars is direct and moving through the rest of Gemini for the first three months.
AC: Yeah, Jupiter’s wanting to confirm that sort of bold Martial activity that’s maybe slow to begin, but very decisive. Again, the forward march may seem slow, but there’s a very decisive backed by Aldebaran, backed by that big red star, a very… I don’t know, it’s a very pivotal pivot about face of Mars definitely going in a direction and taking resources and taking things with it. Sorry, it’s a little inarticulate, but I’ll stick with big old freight train definitely setting out along a course. Slow to begin, but it’s hundreds of tons moving in that direction.
DRH: And once it gets inertia it’s moving.
AC: Yeah, and then it has crazy momentum.
CB: Yes, speed. I mean, that was something we saw last year when we got the initial preview of Jupiter in Aries, is just the speed of of events starts to quicken a lot because that’s a major keyword for Aries, is the need for speed in putting Jupiter in that sign. While Mercury and Mars are stationing direct and starting to move forward again, I think we’ll see the momentum of things start to pick up really fast in early 2023.
LS: Yeah. Also something I wanted to mention that happens just before January starts is the US gets its exact Pluto return one more time. It’ll be close again later in the year, but this is the exact three days before the new year. And so that’s a 27 32 Capricorn. I do also think that’s kind of interesting with regard to the new congress starting. I noticed as Mercury went into its shadow recently and kind of preparing for its upcoming retrograde conjunct Pluto, which is setting off the US Pluto return, there were a number of news stories that seemed really relevant to that. There was one about there was an oathkeepers list that was leaked and they found 300 people who were current or former DHS employees. There were also more of Mark Meadows texts analyzed and some of them were congress people asking him to declare martial law and things like that. So I do think that that’s going to be relevant as we start the year for the US in particular, because it is really setting off that exact Pluto return. It’ll come back within half a degree when it stations again in September.
CB: Yeah, and as we unfortunately once again head into election season in the US and start to see primaries and everything else pick up if assuming that happens depending on the candidates. One good thing is here’s a graphic from Archetypal Explorer that’s very familiar to us at this point because we’ve been watching it for three years now, but it’s the Saturn-Uranus square which we got the last final closest pass of go exact in October. But by this point, Saturn and Uranus are really going to start to move apart and gain distance and finish that square that’s been off and on for three years now. And a lot of that’s just the background and some of the technological stuff that we’ve been talking about recently coming to fruition, but there were also a number of social tensions and different things like that that I think we saw with that square that might at least in terms of that alignment move a little bit more into the background.
AC: Go ahead.
DRH: I’m pivoting, so you go.
AC: Okay, yeah, just a quick… The Saturn-Uranus square had the two planets whose essential meanings are diametrically opposed Saturn ordering control, and then Uranus, chaos, freedom, liberation, those are not easy to square and then when they’re in a position where they are where it’s very difficult for them not to get in each other’s way in a historical period like the one we’re just coming out of. The two exaggerate each other and you have the back and forth you’ve had, where too much chaos creates a clampdown of order which creates, how do we put this, a reactive chaos which creates reactive order, that whole thing. We’re coming out of that coming into the Saturn Pisces years where no one’s in control.
LS: Yeah, I’ll be happy for that to move apart.
DRH: Yes, same.
AC: Let things slide.
DRH: I just also wanted to bring forward something that you were mentioning earlier, Austin, which is this Mercury retrograde that’s ending in Capricorn. All of the Mercury retrogrades this year are in earth signs except the last one starts to tease us into the fire sign Mercury retrogrades. So that’s something that you can potentially even include in your New Year’s resoluting, if you want to, is keeping in mind that Mercury will be retracing and editing stuff in your earth houses.
AC: Great, and it makes so much sense just historically. All this shit has happened over the last several years, it’s time to rethink solid things. It’s like, okay, not to beat this to death, but okay, what about food? What about energy? What about the basics?
CB: Yeah, for sure. And also worth mentioning Mercury stations retrograde conjunct Pluto as well as Venus. And every time we’ve seen Mercury stationing retrograde in a hard aspect with Pluto over the past few years, we’ve seen some disclosures come to light, disclosures of hidden things that are going on behind the scenes. So that may be a theme of this first Mercury retrograde of the year as well.
LS: Right, disclosures and also it’s finishing up the latter part of Pluto in Capricorn, so it’s setting that off for everyone.
CB: Yeah, so sometimes that’s been financial disclosures of what major billionaires are doing or where they’re moving around money, other times it’s been stuff with the government. It’ll be interesting to see what this one is about. So I think that might be good for January. Shall we move to February?
AC: Did you want to do an electional chart? Is there anywhere you need to do?
CB: Thank you for remembering that. We actually have a very fine electional chart towards the end of January once Mercury stations direct and starts moving forward again that we get it in just after that retrograde period. So here’s our electional chart for January. It’s set for January 25th, 2023 at about 7:20 AM local time. So set up for about 7:20 AM local time in your city, and then adjust the Ascendant until the Ascendant is at about five or six degrees of Aquarius. And that will give you a chart where the Sun is right on the Ascendant having just risen over the eastern horizon at the time of the election. So the election has Aquarius rising with Saturn in its own domicile of Aquarius in the first whole sign house in a day chart conjunct Venus. So this is actually a Saturn election. And one of the reasons we’re recommending is because it’s one of the last great Saturn elections you can get in this entire six-year period where Saturn has been transiting through its own signs. So it’s going to be almost a full 30-year cycle before you can get any amazing Saturn elections at least in its own domicile again like this. So the chart features the Moon in the later part of Pisces, and it’s applying to an out of sign conjunction with Jupiter in early Aries. So it’s a pretty solid chart for Saturn things, for Aquarius things which can be good with technology, communication, things that are slow to start up but then eventually have a pretty solid foundation once they get get moving.
AC: And staying power.
LS: Yes, longevity.
CB: Yeah. What are some of the other good points about this chart that we picked out, Leisa?
LS: Do you want to pull it back up? Yep. Well, I really like that Mars is now direct which it hasn’t been for a bit. Well, so you can use that Mars direct sextile Jupiter. Jupiter’s in the overcoming sextile to Mars with reception. So I really like that in terms of things getting going like we were talking about. It’s towards the end of the month and so Mars is actually starting to move a bit after its station. Then let’s see what else. As you said, just one of the last times that you can use Saturn in its own sign in a day chart before that moves on. Jupiter’s in the third house, so good for things involving communications, particularly sort of rapid communications, efficient communications with that sextile to Mars and things involving neighbors or siblings, immediate neighborhood and so forth.
CB: Yeah. And the last thing I like about it is even though it’s Saturn in the first house election, having Venus there is going to help to smooth over the aesthetic of anything that you start at this time and make it just a little bit more aesthetically appealing and a little bit sleeker which is kind of nice in terms of Saturn elections because you can’t always get that. So that is our major electional chart, our primary electional chart that we recommend for January. We’re going to record and release our January auspicious elections podcast here in the next week, where we’re going to go through and pick out at least three or four other auspicious electional charts for January. And that’s something that we do each month for people who sign up to support the podcast through our page on Patreon. So you can get access to that podcast at theastrologypodcast.com/elections to learn more about it. And Leisa and I also recently launched our 2023 year ahead electional astrology report, where we went through each of the next 12 months and we picked out the single most auspicious or lucky electional date that we could find for every month of 2023.
LS: So really good for planning ahead if you want to plan ahead your year, decide things to launch in September, the summer, what have you. We found I think pretty much a good election for most planets to feature each planet throughout the year. And yeah, I think that’s it.
CB: Yeah. So people can find out more information about that at theastrologypodcast.com/2023 report. And we’re actually running a discount through the end of December until January 1st where you can get a 15% discount on the report if you use the promo code Jupiter during checkout. So check that out for more information. All right, shall we move on to February?
LS: Yes.
AC: Slowly like Mars pulling out of the station, but gaining speed.
CB: Well, thankfully and luckily for us, February is not one of the more explosive or exciting or dynamic months. I don’t think there’s a lot of major alignments this month. The primary things worth mentioning are there is a Full Moon in Leo on the 5th of February. Mercury finally gets out of Capricorn after its extended trip through that sign due to the retrograde, and it moves into Aquarius on the 11th of February. Then we get a dazzling-looking Venus-Neptune conjunction on the 15th, followed by a little bit more sober Sun-Saturn conjunction on the 16th. The Sun moves into Pisces on the 18th as it does around this time every year. And then we actually get a New Moon shortly after that in Pisces on the 20th the same day that Venus moves into Aries. So those are some of the major things about February. Are there any major notable things about this that we want to dwell on?
LS: There was a weird Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day features the Moon opposite Mars that evening, at least in the US time zones, so Moon opposite Mars. And then we go to Venus-Neptune conjunction exact the next day, but the day after that is the Sun-Saturn conjunction. And so they’re both really in effect, all three of those are in effect, not that Valentine’s Day is the most important thing, but some people will celebrate it. So it’s just a conglomerate of sort of disparate energies. The Venus-Neptune is very sort of over the top love, boundless love, but then not necessarily fully realistic. It’s like, “Let’s see what happens the day after.” And the day after is the Sun-Saturn conjunction, so that’s a whole bucket of reality.
DRH: I was going to say it just sounds like a situationship rather than a relationship.
LS: Yeah. I mean, it could be really great if you’re already in a positive committed relationship because then you got the positive Sun-Saturn, and then you can go over the top with the Venus-Neptune. The Moon-Mars opposition could be a little conflictual then.
DRH: Spicy.
LS: Yeah, true.
CB: Yeah, there’s a definite tension or interesting dynamic though between the realism of Sun and Saturn and the practicality of that versus the romantic idealism, especially of that conjunction being in Pisces in the sign of Venus’s exaltation with Neptune.
LS: Yeah.
AC: Another sort of facet of February is that we see with that Sun-Saturn conjunction and also with the Sun’s square to Uranus and Taurus, we really have like the last gasp of the Saturn-Uranus square that we’ve been living under for three years and that has really characterized the sort of background dynamic. And so this reactivates it a little bit, it’s one last activation. It’s not as intense as the activations that we had in 2022, but it’s sort of the Saturn-Uranus square’s last chance to show us if it left anything out.
CB: Look at that Leo lunation, that Leo Full Moon.
AC: Yeah, and the Full Moon makes it very obvious.
CB: Yeah. So the Full Moon for those listening to the audio version is at 16 degrees of Leo, and that’s very closely squaring Uranus at 15 degrees of Taurus. So there’s a little bit of an unpredictability to that Leo Full Moon on February 5th.
DRH: I’m also thinking about that Sun-Saturn conjunction. This is the last Sun-Saturn conjunction in a Saturn sign for a hefty amount of time. So there is something about if you over the past whether it’s just, well, Saturn’s been in Aquarius or the entire time Saturn’s been in Saturn signs, the potential of deliberately cohering, kind of wrapping up for yourself some of those Saturn efforts that you may or may not have been doing intentionally.
AC: And it may end up being a little retrospective too. You’d be like, “Oh, this period’s coming to an end. I endured that, I managed that, that didn’t go so well.” But Saturn at the end of one of the signs there’s always a feeling of like, “Okay, this thing is ending even if you’re not watching astrology.”
DRH: Yeah. There’s something about the idea of a reality check that’s not so much about a forced disillusionment, but an assessment of what’s real, if that makes any sense, has the potential of being very constructive rather than womp womp.
AC: Right. Well, it’s like an inspection where you’re like, “Okay, looks like the foundation’s cracked over here, this wall held up really well, it is what it is.”
CB: Oh right, yeah, because the entire theme that you first came up with, Austin, I think last year with the Saturn-Uranus, one of the biggest themes that just kept coming up over and over was stress testing and shaking something. And if it was built on a solid foundation, it would survive it after a little bit of disarray. But those things that didn’t have a solid foundation just crumbled and collapsed.
AC: Yeah. So maybe looking over some wreckage, but also looking at what made it through. Because it says something about whatever part of your chart Aquarius is. Whatever made it through there still standing has some pretty serious endurance.
CB: Thinking about my Aquarius rising, I don’t know if I have that much endurance, but I made it through and I’m looking forward.
AC: You made it.
CB: I made it, okay.
AC: Well, you endured quite a bit.
CB: Yeah, yeah. I can’t believe how well that lined up just with classically what they say about Saturn going through the first house and health issues. Getting Covid right at the beginning of that when Saturn moved into Aquarius and then hoping that would be a short-term thing, but then it just turning into a long-term chronic sort of illness since that time. Definitely looking forward to Saturn departing and moving into Pisces. All right, I think that’s good for February then. Why don’t we keep moving on briskly to the next month which is March. And this is one of the big months where things start getting serious. One of my favorite aspects, actually it was almost my favorite aspect of February, but it doesn’t complete until March 2nd, is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction that goes exact on the 2nd of March, and that is the same day that Mercury moves into Pisces. Then a few days later on the seventh we get Saturn departing from Aquarius, thankfully, moving into Pisces for the next three years. So this is a long-term transit that’s going to last until 2026. And interestingly, that day also happens to be a lunation where we get a Full Moon in the sign of Virgo also on the 7th of March. So the following week we get a Sun-Neptune conjunction on the 15th, Venus moves into Taurus on the 17th, there’s a Sun-Mercury conjunction on the 17th, Mercury and the Sun move into Aries on the 19th and 20th, then we get a New Moon in Aries, then a little planet called Pluto waltzes into Aquarius on the 23rd, which means those of us with Aquarius placements get an approximately one or two-week break before major outer planet transits happen through that sign. Then Mars moves into Cancer on the 25th, Mercury conjoins Jupiter on the 28th, and Venus conjoins Uranus on the 30th. So March is a big big month.
LS: It’s incredibly dynamic. There’s just so many changes happening.
CB: Yeah, so huge shift of Saturn leaving the fixed signs, Pluto moving into the fixed signs, and then Saturn moving into Pisces, and Mars leaving Gemini, leaving the mutable signs alone. So there’s this really interesting mutable sign shift where it’s like a wrestling match where Mars departs from the mutable signs, but then taps in Saturn and Saturn goes into Pisces then sitting with the mutable signs for the next three years.
LS: Right. Really when the newness starts of the new year, I feel like the first two plus months is just going back over old ground, but then there’s all sorts of newness in March. And I feel like it’s really interesting that the month starts out with that Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Aries because there’s such a strong push towards new initiating. And we can finally kind of use that Jupiter in Aries to be even more initiating once all the old transits are kind of moving on.
CB: Which is fascinating because the ancient in the medieval and especially amongst the Persian astrologers, the new year started in March basically with the Aries ingress and the annual ingress of the Sun into Aries as the start of the solar return year for the world.
AC: Yeah. And our Aries ingress day is particularly interesting this year because we have a New Moon. Within I think an hour or two of the Sun’s ingress into Aries, the Moon catches the Sun. And so we have a New Moon at zero degrees Aries.
DRH: Which also means we’ll have a New Moon at 29 Aries in April which is not part of this quarter, but it’s one of the most… I’m just extraordinarily fascinated by it because it’s kind of a reverse Blue Moon. Instead of two Full Moons in a zodiacal season, we’re getting two New Moons. And yeah, I’m fascinated, I’m very excited to see what that shoots up to be.
CB: Well, and we’ll get to this next month, but the second one is an eclipse in Aries. Okay, so major, major Aries energy going on here, major shifts and new beginnings in the month of March.
AC: Yeah. So Venus-Jupiter conjunctions are good for doing new things, but Venus-Jupiter is also when rewards are distributed for previous actions. The arc between them is how you get the lot of praise and commendation. It’s basically the cash prizes and trophies. And so of course during a Venus-Jupiter conjunction when it’s perfect, that lot is always conjunct the Ascendant. And so what are people getting praised for? Being bold, making the right calls under fire, Martial stuff. Initiating boldness, pioneering, etc. And so it’s funny because it’s both a good time to start things like that as well as a time where past actions that fit the criteria are rewarded.
DRH: Yeah. There’s also this time period. One of the things I’ve been thinking about with March specifically is right around the middle of the month, I’m calling it the ides of March because it’s the ides of March, but there’s a beware feeling there where we have the Mercury-Neptune conjunction followed by a Sun square Mars, followed by Venus square Pluto, followed by Mercury square Mars, followed by that Mercury cazimi all in that center section of March.
CB: Yeah. Look at it right here, it’s all at 25 Pisces and Gemini on March 16th-ish. So word for the audio listeners, Mercury reaches 25 Pisces and conjoins Neptune at 25 Pisces and conjoins the Sun at 25 Pisces and Mars just happens to be at 25 Gemini at the same time.
DRH: And at the same time Venus and Pluto are squaring each other.
AC: And also even outside of all of that extra stuff, it’s also just the third Mars-Neptune square, and those have been really interesting. It was the retrograde Mars-Neptune square where we saw the FTX scandal and a bunch of other Neptune bubbles got wrecked. I mean, it’s maybe hard to believe that any bubbles would remain unpopped, but just in case there are we have a third pass of Mars against that. And as you all pointed out, in this case it’s hyper-emphasized with the Sun and Mercury and all the other kids.
LS: Yeah. I feel like this is the last chance to sort of reveal what was going on that may have been murky before with the Mars-Neptune square, because it’s the third and last time. It’s also right when Mars is leaving its shadow, just that little bit of the end of Gemini before it moves signs. So it’s kind of, I don’t know, just throwing the curtains back of like, “If you missed something before, here’s the last chance.”
CB: Yeah. It’s still referring back to something from probably the October timeframe when Mars first was passing over those degrees. But individually, just delineating some of those pieces, Mercury square Mars is arguments, discordant communication, sometimes bad language or offensive language. Then we can also get Mercury-Neptune conjunction which is unclear communication or sometimes outright lies or deception. What are some of our other keywords for this constellation?
DRH: Well, one thing about the Mars-Neptune square, my partner and I were talking about this and he brought up the concept of the fog of war as a relevant thematic. And when we’re adding in Mercury and the Sun alongside that Neptune, I feel like I’m thinking in terms of code breaking, aggressive breaking through other people’s methods of communication for war-like reasons, that kind of thing is kind of coming up for me.
LS: Yeah. And there’s been a lot kind of talked about with information warfare I feel like since Mars has gone into Gemini. So it really ties into what you’re talking about there.
AC: Yeah. It’s also just going to be kind of messy and confusion. There may be some very clear glimpses in the midst of the fog. But one thing I was going to say is just Mercury’s kind of trashed for the first two-thirds of the month. It’s co-present with Saturn, it’s combust, it’s in its fall, it’s with Neptune. The logistics situation with Mercury is not great until, what is it, the 21st. When does Mercury move into Aries? 20th? 19th?
CB: 19th, by the 19th.
AC: Yeah. So first two and a half weeks, not great for Mercury. The intelligence reports not coming back with good data or with accurate data.
DRH: Communication fumbles also, trying to say something spicy, but getting booed off stage instead.
CB: And then also because I mentioned this earlier, but just the Mars-Neptune square previously coincided with that period right after Elon Musk took over Twitter. And then all of a sudden he changed the verification system which is what allowed people to distinguish actual accounts from fake accounts. And then all of a sudden a bunch of people created fake accounts impersonating just thousands of different people and companies and used that in order to just wreak havoc and say things that were not what the creators of that account would what want them to say in various ways.
AC: Yeah. And that’s a week and a half after Saturn’s ingress into Pisces. And then the next week is it the 23rd that Pluto moves into Aquarius?
DRH: Yep.
AC: So I think invoking the trepidation around the ides is quite appropriate, Diana. It is just chaotic.
CB: It is such a chaotic thing. One thing I was thinking about also with Pluto going into Aquarius is we’ve also never had just a disappearance on a wide scale of technology and at some point if disruptions to certain things like the internet could be a thing that people become aware of at different points. It was something I meant to mention with Pluto in Aquarius as a potential at some point there because that would be consistent with the archetype as well.
AC: Oh yeah, yeah.
LS: And it’s also just going to be the area of Aquarius has so much action in the last few years. So we’ve had the Mars-Saturn conjunction at the beginning of Aquarius, we had Jupiter-Saturn conjunction at the beginning of Aquarius, and Saturn then just for several years. And so Pluto just dipping in and then stationing which we’ll get to, it’s like a deepening of an area that already you’ve done a lot of work on. It’s a deepening, excavating, you already thought you worked on this area, but there’s going to be more.
AC: Sorry, fixed signs.
LS: We won’t get all of it, but you’re going to get a little taste whatever house Aquarius is for you.
AC: Yeah, it’s just two months.
LS: Right, right. It’ll start to build the little tunnels underground.
CB: Nice, all right. So that gets us towards later part of March, we get a lovely Mercury-Jupiter conjunction there around March 27th and 28th which should be much more positive for communication, especially direct, bold, relatively quick or potentially brusque communication, but affirming something.
AC: Yeah, triumphant triumphal language.
CB: Yeah. At the same time, at the very end of March, we get also lovely Venus-Uranus conjunction in Taurus which can have kind of an exciting or electric effect in terms of relationships and one-on-one relationships with other people.
DRH: And that’s at the same degree as the Uranus eclipse from November 7th, so it’s pinging an eclipse degree, it’s not just a Venus-Uranus conjunction.
CB: Okay, nice. And that pretty much closes out the month of March.
AC: Well, there’s Mars moving into Cancer.
DRH: And there’s also the third of three Mars-Saturn trines, the previous two happening in Gemini, Aquarius, but the last one happening in Cancer, Pisces which I think is really interesting.
CB: Okay, I like that. So here’s Mars departing and moving from Gemini into Cancer on the 24th and 25th. And then right after that we get a very stabilizing and affirming trine between Mars and Saturn it looks like on the 29th and 30th.
AC: Yeah. And this really marks Mars’s resumption of normal movement where it’ll be a month and and a half-ish for each sign. We’re done with the eight months in a row of one sign. And Mars in Cancer isn’t a particularly glorious phase for Mars, but it’s sort of back to normal. Mars in Cancer a lot of times as a transiting influence gives kind of a sullen and sometimes I don’t like demotivating sort of energy. But it’s not the same sort of dramatic, chaos-inspiring, nail bomb throwing Mercury retrograde in Gemini that we are going through.
CB: Yeah. One of the keywords that came up with me at that Mars retrograde was shooting yourself in the foot was like Mars stationing in Gemini thing. All right, we’re back after a brief break. Let’s transition to talking about the second quarter of the year at this point starting with the month of April. All right. Top of the month, Mercury goes into Taurus on the third, we’ve got a Full Moon in Libra on the sixth, Venus goes into Gemini on the 11th, and the same day there’s a Sun-Jupiter conjunction which is pretty nice. Then we get our second lunation of the month which is actually a solar eclipse in the sign of Aries on the 20th of April, and then the Sun moves into Taurus the same day. Then the next day we have Mercury stationing retrograde in the beginning of technically our second retrograde Mercury of the year starting on the 21st of April. So that is the major stuff. So at this point we get into eclipse season. Is that our starting point is the biggest thing of the month?
LS: Yeah, I think so.
AC: I mean, that’s not until two thirds the way through the month. It’s the Sun in Aries and it’s with Jupiter. We get our Sun-Jupiter conjunction, and we also have a continuation of some of that triumphal, bold, bombastic stuff that we saw earlier, that we really have seen notes of throughout the year since its beginning since Jupiter’s return to Aries and a nice cazimi moment between the Sun and Jupiter. But the Sun and Jupiter’s conjunction is also a period where Jupiter’s invisible and it’s a rethinking and a reflecting on the Jupiter cycle. It’s much more a let’s look back at how Jupiter in Aries went moment and start imagining what we might be trying to do for the next Jupiter cycle because Sun-Jupiter is a year cycle. And that leads into our first eclipse which is also the first eclipse on the Aries-Libra axis. So as Diana mentioned not long ago, we have two New Moons in Aries. One in the first degree, one in the last, and the one in the last degree is actually a hybrid eclipse, which I didn’t know what that meant, which means that at some points it looks like an annular and others it looks like a total eclipse. But it’s a very serious solar eclipse. And for those who can view it in Oceania, a little bit of I think Southern Thailand and a lot of Northern Australia, it’ll look like a full-on eclipse, it’s not just a little stain on the Sun. There’s a serious blotting out.
CB: Yeah. So right there at 29 degrees of Aries. And I’m going to put up the eclipse chart that Paula Belluomini, who did most of the graphics for this episode, so shout out to Paula as always, our superhero in the graphics department. So this is the eclipse sheet for 2023, and we can see that first eclipse taking place on April 20th at 29 degrees of Aries. It’s going to be followed in May by a lunar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio, then later in the year we get a Libra eclipse in October followed by a Taurus eclipse. So what’s happening at this point is that the nodes are going to shift signs over the summer in July, and as a result of that, all of 2022 the eclipses were taking place in Scorpio and Taurus. So we were seeing major beginnings and major endings happening in the Scorpio-Taurus axis, but now that axis is going to start to shift at this point in 2023 and move more into the Aries-Libra axis at this point.
DRH: And it’s a very ombre effect into the next set of eclipses because I know that historically oftentimes we only just get one sort of blend eclipse season and then we’re fully into the next axis. But here both eclipse seasons are that blend of going from Scorpio-Taurus into Aries-Libra which is super interesting. And then I feel like it makes sense to say this now since we’re already talking eclipse seasons, one thing that I’m finding super interesting about this year’s eclipse seasons is that the first pair are Mars ruled with Mars in Cancer, the second pair is Venus ruled with Venus in Virgo. And we are switching the axis from one Mars-Venus axis to another Mars-Venus axis. So there’s real undercurrent of the Mars-Venus dynamic in the eclipses this year.
CB: For sure.
LS: And this March, April, there’s just a lot of growth going on in the Aries area of everyone’s chart. Because there’s a Venus-Jupiter conjunction at the beginning of March, and then there’s the Sun-Jupiter conjunction mid-April, and then there’s a new solar eclipse, but it’s on the north node side. So it is just growth and growth in this area.
CB: Yeah. Last week I recorded year ahead horoscopes for all 12 rising signs, I just noted how much having the eclipses in two pairs of signs this year is really just going to be activating two different axes in the chart in terms of those houses that are opposite to each other. And it’s going to be, on the one hand, wrapping up the themes of the Taurus-Scorpio eclipses and bringing that period of major endings and major beginnings to completion while opening up a whole new area of major beginnings and endings starting with this very first eclipse in Aries. And then that’s going to carry through into 2024, a whole sequence of events that’ll keep happening in six-month increments. So I’m trying to think if there’s anything else about this eclipse that we really wanted to mention. We’ll come back to it of course next month when we continue and we get our second eclipse.
AC: Yeah. I mean, one thing that’s really significant is that Mercury stations retrograde conjunct Uranus the next day, and then the Sun enters Taurus the next day. And then by the time we get to the next eclipse really… The end of April and the first portion of first half of May are really a very discreet thing. The first half of April kind of doesn’t have anything to do with this, but once we get to the 19th of April and then until we’re basically 15th of May, it’s eclipse time with a Mercury retrograde in the same sign around the same sign polarity as the eclipse, and Jupiter enters Taurus where the north node is and where Mercury’s retrograding. It’s almost like a hangover of the Taurus action that we’ve been having for the last couple years. It’s very disruptive, reorganizing emphasis on that same area. And so we’re probably going to see some of the same issue with logistics and shipping and supplies and shortages, but the next version of that.
CB: Yeah. The last Mercury retrograde that stationed retrograde conjunct Pluto at the end of December had this quality of disclosing things which were hidden or getting to the bottom of something. This Mercury, retrograde conjunct Uranus has that more classic technological things on the fritz, unexpected communications and disruptions and just the curve ball that sort of comes out of nowhere type energy which already complements. Because that was something you’ve always said Austin about the chaotic quality of eclipses. And that was really, really evident to me in that last pair of eclipses that occurred in Taurus Scorpio in October and November.
AC: Oh, thank you. I mean, they just churn things up. They do get things moving, but often not along their planned routes. But all this stuff for two, three weeks just all kind of works together. And we were talking, Leisa, you said something earlier about, again, the change, the capacity for change in Taurus, and now this is a very similar set of activations for Uranus in Taurus, but without Saturn standing in the way. Probably a big month for Tauruses, Taurus planets.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so that Mercury retrograde begins right there around April 20th, and then Mercury is walking backwards through that sign for the remainder of the month and it just reaches the halfway point of the retrograde cycle and conjoins the Sun, it looks like, on the first day of the next month on May 1st. Back to the alignments calendar, month of May, very first of the month, as I said, we get the Sun-Mercury conjunction that marks the middle point and usually the turning point of the Mercury retrograde where things start to take a turn for the better. And the things that were thrown up in the air at the beginning of the retrograde start to move towards at least some sort of resolution. Interestingly, on the very same day, we have Pluto stationing retrograde in the sign of Aquarius. So it’s going to begin to make its way back into Capricorn after this point. Then a few days later on the 5th of May, we get our next eclipse, which is a lunar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio on May 5th. Two days later on the seventh, Venus goes into Cancer. Then we get a Sun-Uranus conjunction on the ninth. Mercury stations direct on the 14th of May. Then Jupiter departs from Aries and moves into Taurus for the rest of the year on May 16th. Jupiter squares Pluto on the 17th. We get a New Moon in the sign of Taurus which is interestingly not an eclipse for the first time in a little while at this point on the 19th. Then Mars moves into Leo on the 20th and immediately opposes Pluto in Aquarius the same day. The Sun moves into Gemini on the 21st. And then Mars squares Jupiter on the 23rd. So May sees the continuation of some pretty big shifts and some pretty big changes it seems like as we continue and get the second half of eclipse season.
AC: Yeah. So much gets rearranged in May or end of April and then really well into the first half of May. In Taurus it’s a lot of substantial things being rearranged. It’s not just ideas being rearranged or color palettes, it’s large things like planets, but also heavy and substantial things down here on earth.
CB: Yeah. It looks like the Scorpio eclipse on the 5th is at 14 degrees of Scorpio which is really close to that previous Taurus eclipse that took place in November which is at 16 Taurus.
DRH: Yeah, the Uranus eclipse.
CB: Yeah. So people with the middle degrees of the fixed signs, especially in Taurus and Scorpio, it’s reactivating something from November. But on the interesting and sort of positive side, that’s the final eclipse in Scorpio. And after this point, the eclipse series is essentially finished and is brought to completion. We do get one more eclipse in Taurus later in the year, but there’s no more after this year-long period of eclipses in Scorpio. It’s over at this point.
AC: Yeah. I’m getting a little bit of a like, “Leave Britney alone, leave fixed signs alone,” from this year. Because it’s like, “Oh, Saturn’s finally gone and you’re not going to have to deal with this anymore.” But this is one of a couple pretty major things that happens in fixed signs this year.
CB: Yeah. In our overview, we sort of wanted to say that there’s a shift away from fixed signs and that a lot of the heavy stuff moves on to the mutable or the cardinal signs since the eclipses are moving into cardinal signs and Saturn’s moving into Pisces and into the mutable signs. But there’s still a lot of lingering fixed signs stuff with Pluto going to Aquarius and the continuation of these lingering Scorpio and Taurus eclipses taking place in that axis.
LS: Also being the last Scorpio eclipse in that sign and also on the south node side, it just feels really like what is very and truly dead and just gone. It’s the last one.
DRH: Taking the last bag of clothes to the thrift store after the KonMari process.
LS: Yes.
DRH: Only it smells really bad, so maybe you’re actually taking it to the dumpster and not the thrift store.
LS: They are like mouldy, old clothes.
DRH: Yeah, attacking the last disgusting corner of the basement.
CB: Good times. All right, so going back to the animated chart.
LS: Now Jupiter ingress I feel like is one of the most major things of this month.
CB: Yeah, I mean that’s going to bring some relief for fixed signs aside from the unfortunate immediate after that square with Pluto and then Mars ingressing into Leo creating a kind of a tense T-square between Jupiter, Mars, and Pluto.
AC: And Jupiter will be conjoined Rahu or the north node for that first bit. But Jupiter’s going to hang out in Taurus and try to help and stabilize things long past Mars’s time squaring it. The north node is going to leave within a few months and go into Aries. Jupiter won’t immediately arrive as a savior with all the answers, but give it eight months and you’ll see significant improvement in those areas.
CB: What was the Beirut explosion? Wasn’t that a Mars-Jupiter square?
LS: I think it was a Mars-Jupiter something.
CB: A couple of years ago. Because I’m trying to think about keywords for Mars square Jupiter, but then when you also have Pluto magnifying it. Because Mars itself can be an explosion or gunfire, but Jupiter usually just makes things bigger or more expansive. And then Pluto also has that quality of taking something small and making it bigger.
DRH: For some reason I’m thinking wildfires, especially Jupiter and Taurus I think a lot about forests specifically is a location with Jupiter and Taurus and with Mars in Leo. I don’t know, just something about people thinking that they’re not doing anything major and then Pluto comes in, Pluto being maybe Pluto in Aquarius like an unexpected bout of wind coming in and increasing things.
AC: Yeah, or with Mars, north node, Jupiter, Pluto could be a big attack. It looks decidedly destructive.
CB: Austin, you mentioned the north node being conjunct Jupiter, and I just remember how, at least in the medieval tradition, they talk about the north node increasing whatever it touches. So it’s said to sometimes be good with the benefics because it’s theoretically increasing their beneficence, but I know there’s some debate about whether that’s a good or bad thing because it may just be making it even larger, making Jupiter even bigger, whatever Jupiter is signifying.
AC: So yeah, in the Vedic tradition that I have some education in, Jupiter, north node might be good for money, but it would not be good for happiness. One of the things that we look at from that angle is how the north node and Jupiter disagree quite a bit about sort of spirituality and compassion and a big perspective. That is not what the north node is there for. Rahu doesn’t like the churchy kumbaya part of Jupiter, but it’s fine with the let’s get rich part of Jupiter. So it’s helpful in some ways, but also negative in others. There is, by the way, a funny section in Ficino where he calls out these texts that think that Jupiter and the north node is such a great thing. He literally compares the north node, the head of the dragon, to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He’s like, “Listen, putting Satan on top of Jupiter is not going to give you better results,” which I thought was pretty funny.
CB: That is funny. Well, so that’s a bit of a tense and rocky start to Jupiter’s ingress into Taurus. But otherwise, once we get past that point as we go into future weeks, I think we’ll still see some more positive manifestations of that placement, especially since Jupiter’s now moving into a fresh new spot in the zodiac that we haven’t seen any time in recent years until 12 years prior. So Jupiter also at this point is going to be ingressing into a new whole sign house for everybody in their birth charts. So paying attention to what house Jupiter is moving into as a potential area of growth and expansion over the course of the next, especially the second half of this year.
LS: And I really like, I can’t remember if I already said this or not earlier in the overview, but I really like the Saturn in Pisces once Jupiter gets into Taurus because it’s this nice supportive sextile and not just a sextile in general, but because Saturn can see its ruler then as opposed to Jupiter being in Aries. And it’s also just such a tangible sign, it’s earthy, it has foundation. I feel like that’ll help kind of counterbalance all of the Saturn, Neptune in Pisces. It puts some ground underneath the dreaming.
DRH: Yeah. It makes the ocean floor more palpable.
CB: I was just going to say finally I like the second lunation of the month which occurs around the same time, the New Moon in Taurus only in so much as this is going to be the first time that the fixed signs have a new Moon there in Taurus that’s not an eclipse. And I’ve just seen in recent years what happens when you get that year and a half period where you’re just getting eclipses in a certain sign back to back in six-month increments, and it’s just throwing everything up in the air and indicating these major changes and shifts in that sphere of the chart. But then you eventually get that first month or that first year where lunations start going back to normal and things just kind of slow down a little bit in that sign. And I think that’s a little bit helpful here in addition to Jupiter moving into that sign at the same time and kind of smoothing things over after a somewhat rocky year for Taurus.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. It’s been more than a year.
CB: Yeah, since what was it? Late 2021, November of 2021. I think that was the lunar eclipse in Taurus that started it all.
AC: I think so. So help is coming for Taurus, but slowly, which is maybe very appropriate.
DRH: Yeah. And Uranus will still be there, so it’ll be better, but not maybe back to the perpetual sturdiness that you might prefer.
AC: Yeah, but it’s help you can… Just managing Uranus is a lot easier than managing Uranus square Saturn and both the nodes, one problem at a time.
LS: Right, right. I do think this will change the pace a bit too. Because even though Jupiter is co-present with Uranus, it’s still moving out of Aries and moving out of those transits which is very fast paced, very rapid fire Mars and moving into Taurus. And Jupiter in Taurus is more slow growth. There will be a little bit quicker paced once Jupiter gets closer by degree to Uranus, but I think overall that that sign shift right there mid-month should start kind of slowing things down a little bit and giving you kind of more slower paced kind of moving at your own pace rather than moving at the speed of events.
CB: And we already mentioned the Jupiter-Pluto thing, so maybe we don’t have to repeat it, but just that we noticed distinctly a major transfer of wealth and ideas of wealth sort of exploding back when Jupiter conjoined Pluto in 2020.
DRH: Yeah. And the perspective from the opening square here being potentially more proletarian in some way.
LS: Right. And at the beginning of the month when Pluto stations, that’ll be the very first station in Aquarius, and I always really like to pay attention to the first planetary station once something moves into a new sign, because it’ll just start expressing itself a lot more.
CB: Yeah, there’s an intensification of whatever it is that that planet and that transit signifies.
AC: It’s a little bit like high tide where even though it’s going to pull back from there, the waves will leave behind a little artifact of what Pluto in Aquarius is and does and will be when it comes back
CB: Yeah. It’s been interesting over the past three years a lot of the discussion of Saturn in Aquarius has been about sometimes censorship on the internet and what’s okay to say or what boundaries there should be put on free speech on the internet. And it keeps going back and forth about different levels of that and ways to approach it. I think that this Pluto station in Aquarius will be really important in terms of that as we move into the next phase of social media and everything else and the way that that influences society in different ways as well as society’s attempt to counter or influence the influence of social media itself. So in the previous stage it was about putting rules and restrictions on it with Saturn, in this instance Pluto’s always about control and manipulation. So I’m assuming it’s going to move more in that direction of different attempts by different power players to control and manipulate social media or through social media in some way.
DRH: Yeah, it’s making me think about how social media so many of the apps deliberately have been very, very deliberately built to generate addictive behaviors, addictive relationships with those apps, and what does it mean to in an Aquarian Plutonic way apply that to behavior outside of the apps more intensely.
CB: Yeah. Well, I mean, if we’re thinking about Pluto, Pluto is already a planet that has to do with compulsion and sometimes obsession or addiction. So thinking about that going into a sign associated perhaps with the internet or social media, it doesn’t seem like that would lessen that tendency.
AC: We do have, like we talked about earlier, Pluto likes to expose the rotten moral layer otherwise underbelly of things. And if it’s going into tech land, there’s a tremendous amount to be exposed.
DRH: Yeah. I’m thinking about that documentary that I wish had been better than it was, The Social Dilemma. No, is that what it was called? The social media one? But just thinking about with the exodus of people from Twitter both forcibly and in part by choice, what stories will be emerging around backdrop stuff, where it’s like, “I can’t even get a job in tech, so I’m not going to work in tech. So now I’m going to say this stuff that if I had said it before would’ve prevented me from getting jobs in tech.”
AC: Well, I think that’s really smart because it’s not just Twitter that is shedding employees, Facebook laid off a huge number.
CB: Right, the contraction of tech has definitely been a Saturn in Aquarius thing recently. But also to frame the Twitter thing in a different way thinking about Pluto in Aquarius, literally the richest man in the world just bought one of the biggest social media platforms and is now in control of it and is calling the shots on a day-to-day basis. So even just that existing whatever one’s opinion is of that positive or negative is an objective reality now which is really interesting to think about in terms of that symbolism of Pluto in Aquarius.
LS: Absolutely. And it’s also interesting to think about all of these transits with reference to Neptune in Aquarius, the original ideal of the internet and the ideal of social media. And we don’t need any walls, we just need all the people together and everything will be great. And so Saturn’s been reporting more rules and regulations in that area, and now I think Pluto’s what was rotten about that dream. Not to say that everything was, but I think the aspects that were or you weren’t aware that were will be revealed more.
DRH: It’s also interesting thinking about how Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened in these last gasps of Pluto in Capricorn, and so thinking of it more as someone with a totally incomprehensible amount of resources using that to acquire infrastructure. Whereas when Pluto enters Aquarius, thinking less about a single person owning and more of the disseminated less centralized little social networks have emerged even just since Musk’s purchase of Twitter, whether or not they’re functional, and how much more of that decentralization might occur in response to these things as time progresses.
CB: Yeah. And his purchase was right on that eclipse in Scorpio which is really so striking. There’s also recently, I don’t know if they’re going to do it or if this is even possible, but Congress is talking about trying to ban TikTok in the US, which is interesting because whatever their concerns are that a different country, China, has ability to influence entire generation because TikTok skews much younger. So it’s interesting thinking about Pluto in terms of generations, entire generations of people, and social media having the ability to influence generations with Facebook being typically older people or skews older people, Twitter was more middle-aged at a certain point, and then TikTok skewing younger, and just the different attempts to control or manipulate or influence that in different ways.
LS: Yeah. Since Pluto is often about power dynamics or fear of what power dynamics might be.
CB: Yeah, even to the point of paranoia sometimes, but other times well-founded paranoia about influence and control and manipulation and power plays. All right, well, that’s April.
LS: That was May.
DRH: That was May.
CB: That was May? Okay, sorry. I misspoke. All right, let’s transition into June, shall we? All right, here’s the planetary alignments calendar for June. Full Moon in Sagittarius on the third, Mercury conjunct Uranus on the fourth. Venus moves into Leo and begins the runup to the Venus retrograde period on the 5th of June. Then we get Pluto retrograding back into Capricorn on the 11th, the same day Mercury moves into Gemini. Saturn stations retrograde in Pisces on the 17th, then gets as far into Pisces as it’s going to get during this run. Then we get a New Moon in Gemini on the 18th. Sun moves into Cancer on the 21st, Mercury into Cancer on the 26th. And then Neptune stations retrograde on the 30th of June. So here we get the onset what I like to think of as the beginning of the Venus retrograde because I think of the Venus retrograde as one long extended transit through Leo basically activating a certain whole sign house in a person’s chart and activating a certain sector of a person’s chart. So even though it doesn’t go retrograde technically in this phase, I feel like we get the sort of onset or the sequence of events that will lead to the retrograde and become intensified then starting to be put into place at this point during most of June.
AC: Yeah, we get the lead up, and it’s a rowdy lead up. Because as soon as Venus enters Leo, Mars is there and Venus is co-present with Mars increasingly close, basically up until right around the retrograde station. And so it’s rowdy. Venus-Mars can be fun, Venus-Mars can also be really upsetting.
CB: It opposes Pluto also the same day it ingresses.
AC: Oh, it goes in, so we get a taste of that too.
CB: Yeah, taste of Venus opposite Pluto in Aquarius and Leo just before a Venus retrograde also conjunct Mars. So Venus-Pluto has a sort of obsessive quality when it comes to interpersonal dynamics or relationships and sort of an intense quality, right?
DRH: Yeah, there’s kind of a phantom of the opera vibe with Venus-Pluto.
LS: Yeah, that’s good.
CB: Nice.
LS: Yeah, it could be positively intensifying sort of relationship dynamics, but it can also be the underhanded power play-type of things or the obsession or compulsive activities.
AC: Yeah, Venus opposite Pluto is not generally favorable, you wouldn’t put it in election. But fortunately it doesn’t last very long, we just get a quick hit and then Venus is immediately applying to Jupiter or Venus-ruled Jupiter in Taurus. So that’s kind of re-stabilized. And so there’s maybe a weird undertone to the first two days, but you get that Venus-Jupiter energy immediately afterwards, which is it’s the good life, it’s good times. And then we sort of settle into a month or more of the Venus-Mars leading up to the retrograde.
CB: Yeah. So Venus here by June 20th, 21st gets up to about mid-Leo about 14 degrees of Leo and it’s within four degrees of a conjunction with Mars at 18 Leo at that point. And around this time Mars squares Uranus shortly after that towards the end of the month, so Mars gets to 21 Leo on June 25th and squares Uranus at 21 degrees of Taurus.
AC: And that really is probably the most important configuration for the end of June is Mars and then Venus both squaring Uranus back to back or one after another. If there are going to be relational instabilities and shakeups that the retrograde proper is going to deal with, they’re absolutely going to show up then. It shouldn’t be a surprise if you pay attention at all during the end of June.
CB: Yeah, and that Venus-Uranus square goes exact July 1st.
LS: And at the same time, the second half of the month, there’s kind of this emotional undertow going on at the same time because Saturn stations for the first time since it’s gone into Pisces around 17th, 18th, and then Neptune stations also in Pisces at the end of the month. And so the second half of June, there’s all these sort of combustible things going on that look a lot more active and outward, but there’s also this sort of emotional undertow, potentially a little bit of a melancholic internal mood whether related or not related to all of the Leo-Taurus squares.
DRH: Yeah. And this month also features Mercury and the Sun squaring that Neptune, which it’s not a big deal, but I feel like that adds to that sort of moroseness of just things get muddy.
AC: The Saturn in Pisces is kind of an emotional drag, well, especially right around the retrograde station. If you think about a feckless young planet in Gemini just trying to zip around and do stuff like hitting the square with Saturn, which planets in Gemini will be doing every year for the next couple, it’s like, oh right, that underlying melancholy or I like that, but the undertow, as you put at least, it’s kind of a drag on the quick, light, not too serious Gemini energy.
DRH: There’s a little bit of poison in the fairy core. Somebody in the Waltz of the Flowers actually has a sprained ankle, and so you can’t actually put on the show you want to put on.
CB: I would like to present a counterpoint because one of my favorite aspects of this month is that Jupiter as Saturn is stationing comes up to that sextile and sextiles Saturn from seven degrees of Taurus with reception, which is a pretty positive counterbalancing thing. And I like the keyword that you used Diana of mud, because that’s what an earth sign and a water sign when you put them together that’s what it creates is mud. But I don’t think of it in a negative sense, but actually more in like it creates a fertile or fecund sort of area where stuff can grow rather than something that’s only suppressing things.
DRH: It’s like the extremely biodiverse swamp.
AC: Yeah. Well, I think it’s great for those signs, I just don’t think it helps the planets in Gemini because they’re not benefiting from the Taurus stuff.
CB: Sure.
AC: But yeah, as a combination it’s nice.
CB: Yeah. I’m trying to think of some things. Didn’t we have some examples of some people with natal charts that had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Taurus? What were some of our examples of those?
LS: Albert Hoffman was the one that I mentioned.
CB: Okay, that was a pretty good one.
AC: He grew some interesting things in the fecund swamp of his petri dishes.
CB: Right. Some of my other people like that were Chris Rock has Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Taurus, Robert Downey Jr. One actually that was notable was Rodney King had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Taurus. And one of the phrases he became associated with that I thought was kind of interesting was when he said, “Can we all get along?” Basically during the riots in the early part of the nineties. So there’s some interesting things I think that’ll grow in the sort of fertile soil of Jupiter sextiling Pisces at that time.
AC: Yeah, that’s nice.
CB: I know Nick Dagan Best had done research on Venus retrogrades and some social conflicts that arise like issues of injustice being addressed during Venus retrogrades that sometimes come up, especially in the US. And as we’re heading into the Venus retrograde, especially that summer, that may be relevant at some point as well.
AC: Yep, we look at that in July. We get into that when we’ve got the station.
DRH: I almost wonder if the the June 26th Mars-Uranus square might link something into the Venus retrograde itself.
AC: Yeah. And something that we’ve said before, it’s worth saying again, with this being a Venus retrograde in Leo and also having Mars conjoined for that first part, if things are distasteful, people will not be quiet about them. It’s very extroverted. It’s very not mumbled under the breath, it’s loud.
CB: Yeah, Leo is a very loud sign.
LS: That’s what I find so interesting about that month, because there’s a lot of loudness and extrovertedness going on and combustibleness, and yet there’s the emotional undertow that you probably aren’t seeing. And I feel like that’s something to be aware of. Whatever people are doing or reacting to or whatever during that month, know that that’s a piece behind it, even if you don’t see it. It’s like this submerged pyramids type of thing. There’s stuff going on that you don’t see.
DRH: Right. It’s making me think about how small children will get really upset about something when what they need is a snack or what they need is a hug and that pursuit of connection in an off-kilter way that just creates conflict rather than addressing the unmet need in some way. So it’s like taking that into a personal realm that might be a factor on a personal level is you’re seeing somebody act out, but it’s acting out from a place of emotional storminess that’s not necessarily revealed.
CB: Yeah. And last thing I want to mention here with June with both Saturn making its very first station in Pisces, and so a period of intensification of whatever that Saturn transit is about, and then Neptune only a couple weeks later also stationing in Pisces, I feel like we’re getting a real intensification and we’re going to get our first real preview of what that Saturn-Neptune co-presence is about, especially in the Pisces sectors of each of our charts. So whatever challenges Saturn is going to raise over the course of the next three years in our charts that we have to overcome or maneuver around I think will become very evident around the time of that station.
LS: For sure.
CB: Absolutely.
LS: And I think about when they were going co-present, when they were transiting in Capricorn in the late eighties. And again, it’s useful to be able to remember some of these things. Remember the felt sense of it which was like there was this slow erosion of like, “Is the ground I’m standing on still there?” But it was very, very slow process. And so there were notable outer events when it got closer to the exact aspect, but the very slow buildup to it was just like, “I feel like the sands are shifting underneath me, but I can’t exactly point to where or what.” It’s a sort of vague feeling of unsettledness of like, “I can tell the structure is changing, but I can’t point to what it is yet.”
CB: Yeah. The foundations are slipping a little bit or that the line between reality and non-reality is becoming a little bit blurrier. And all those other Saturn-Neptune themes that we talked about earlier, this is definitely a point in which some of that really comes into focus in late June.
DRH: It’s like, “Is the beach smaller? Has the waterline increased? It’s only been half an inch in the past year, but the beach is definitely smaller.”
CB: Yeah, all right. Shall we move on to July?
AC: We shall boldly.
CB: Boldly go where no astrologers have gone before into the second half of 2023. All right, here’s the planetary alignments calendar for July. On the very first of the month we get a Sun-Mercury conjunction. Then we get a Full Moon in Capricorn on the third. Mars departs from Leo and moves into Virgo on the 10th, followed by Mercury ingressing into Leo on the 11th. New Moon in Cancer on the 17th. Mars opposes Saturn on the 20th of the month. Then a couple days later the Sun moves into Leo and Venus stations retrograde in Leo on the same day. Then Mercury conjoins Venus on the 27th, and then itself moves into Virgo on the 28th. So here we get the full onset of the Venus retrograde period in July. All right, let me animate the chart. Okay. So the very first day of the month is the Venus-Uranus square. So there’s this electric kind of combustible sense to it because it’s also coming off of the Mars-Uranus square at the very beginning of the month. And then Venus starts really slowing down.
AC: And then we have Venus and Mars sort of break apart or Mars crosses a sign boundary that Venus won’t cross for months and months. And the Mars moving into Virgo is its own quite important thing. Because it does break apart the conjunction with Venus, which is important, but it’s also our first real alignment, our first tense alignment between Mars and Saturn in Pisces. And as the last several years have made very clear, Mars-Saturn conjunctions and oppositions bring a great deal of challenge both in personal lives and on the news. And so this is the first like, “Okay, what does Saturn in Pisces have for us when it gets stirred up by Mars?”
CB: Yeah, especially in 2020, those Mars-Saturn hard aspects kept being these important turning points during the course of the year, and especially during the course of the pandemic where we kept getting the turning points in the pandemic and the new chapter beginning every time Mars would form a hard aspect with Saturn because so much of that began under the Mars-Saturn conjunction that coincided in March and April of 2020 with the lockdowns. And then we kept getting new variants every several months every time Mars would square or oppose or conjoin Saturn again. So it’s interesting to think about it in that context of, what is the not pandemic, but broadly speaking, what is the big story or challenge that arises of Saturn in Pisces and the turning points of that being at those hard aspects between Mars and Saturn.
AC: Yeah, exactly.
LS: And when it was doing that, when Saturn was an Aquarius, they were all very discreet fixed things because it was through fixed signs. And so it was like, “This is the new variant or this is the new problem.” And I noticed actually when Mars got into Gemini, it was like, “This is the explosion of thousands of new variants.” So anyway, we’re going to have Mars going through mutable signs every time it hits Saturn. So it’s a really different feel needing to adjust not necessarily being one problem, but a multiplicity of things that you need to adjust around.
AC: That’s a good point about the fixed signs, where when Saturn was in Aquarius, it was sort of just literally the next edition of a problem that we already know about as opposed to mutable signs which give you new stuff. Sometimes it hearkens back to old stuff, sometimes it’s new stuff, mutable signs keep you guessing.
DRH: There’s kind of a juggler quality with the mutable signs with Saturn-ruling clowns. It’s like Saturn is kind of juggling in Pisces and there’s something about throwing balls back and forth and maybe with Mars it’s actually knives and maybe the knives are thrown a little bit too hard. And so it’s creating issues that may or may not be about the hands of the person juggling, but the things that are in the surrounding arena of just accidentally throwing knives while juggling hitting audience members. There’s that kind of energy to it for me.
CB: Yeah. But whatever this Mars-Saturn opposition is about, it’s interesting that it’s happening simultaneously as Venus is slowing down and stationing retrograde. So it seems to be tied in with that Venus retrograde story that’s really ramping up there in late July.
AC: Yeah. And one thing we can say without being super specific is Mars-Saturn just gives a harsh energy. And there’s a little bit of help from Jupiter which is friendly with both Mars and Saturn here, but still there’s just sort of a hardness and a harshness. The mellow is always harshed under Mars-Saturn oppositions.
CB: Yeah. So Mars wants to move forward and Saturn wants to hold back and they’re in an opposition, so they’re pulling in two opposite directions so that sometimes the person if they’re getting hit by that transit can feel a tension where they’re pulled in two different directions. Other keywords that came up a lot during the pandemic with Mars-Saturn aspects were pressing the gas while pressing the brake at the same time and having a feeling of frustration as a result of that.
AC: Yes, we’re all frustrated… Oh, go ahead.
LS: I was just going to say and Mars in Virgo is like, “We got to handle these details in Saturn in Pisces.” It’s like, “No, you’re not seeing the big picture and you’re hurting my emotions and I’m going away. We’re not getting the thing done.”
CB: Oh wait, actually we have somebody here who has a Mars-Saturn opposition in that axis.
AC: We do, we do.
CB: I guess it’s the reverse though beause you have Saturn in Virgo, right?
AC: It’s a fun back and forth. I don’t know if I can summarize it neatly, but I’m looking forward to next July. I’m sure that’ll be fun, Saturn on Mars, Mars on Saturn.
CB: Totally, that’s good times.
DRH: It’s the noble reversal of a planetary configuration.
AC: Yeah. So while we’re grinding the brakes, Venus stations retrograde.
CB: Yeah. And Venus herself hits the brakes, puts the car into reverse and starts backing up because there was something in the past that needs to be revisited. But there’s a tension to that slowing down, so maybe the process of Venus slowing down and hitting the brakes is much more of a halting stop than it otherwise would be.
DRH: I have this whole new circus narrative emerging in my head ever since I said the juggling thing. And I’m imagining Venus in Leo is the extremely attractive lion tamer who has to go back to a previous stop on the circus route because they fell in love. But it’s actually a love that can’t happen and it’s just all complicated, “And now what do we do with the lions?” Don’t mind me.
CB: What if you fell in love with one of the lions and that’s your basic issue?
DRH: Man, that’s complicated.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
AC: Well, it’s worth noting that in the United States political candidates will be conducting carnivals and circuses of a number of varieties. And so some of this obviously loud, dramatic stuff will be very visible in the US politics.
CB: Actually speaking of, that brings up Venus retrogrades have also been important because the last one was important for Russia and the Ukraine actually because the war began under that Venus retrograde in Capricorn with Capricorn being so important to Russia. But relevant to this, when I was doing some research, the Ukraine independence chart has Venus retrograde at 28 degrees of Leo. So that’s the chart for the Ukraine. And Zelensky has Saturn at 28 degrees of Leo, so that’s right where Venus is stationing here.
AC: That’s super relevant.
DRH: That’s fascinating.
CB: Yeah, so super potentially important turning point both for Ukraine in general and as well as for Zelensky. All right, any other Venus retrograde things? One of the things I hope doesn’t come up, I can’t imagine it because it would just be too weird, but I know Congress recently passed the Defense of Marriage Act in order to attempt to put in law the legalization of same-sex marriage because, of course, one full Venus retrograde cycle ago in the summer of 2015 is when the Supreme Court made a ruling that effectively legalized same sex marriage nationally. But then over the course of the past year when the Supreme Court struck down the law that made abortion legal nationally, that suddenly put into question other rulings and whether those things would always be there, always stay there. So Congress recently I think started to act in order to attempt to put some of that stuff on the book so that any future rulings by the Supreme Court couldn’t invalidate same sex marriage nationally and make it something that was put back on the states. So I hope that’s not something that we revisit during this Venus retrograde.
AC: Agreed. And even if the actual ruling isn’t overturned or damaged in any way, it’s election year in the United States, you could absolutely have people yelling about it.
CB: Yeah. All right, so that’s pretty good for July, I believe.
DRH: There’s one last note, and I think this is more interesting for people who are more deeply invested in evolutionary than I am, but the last week of July features Pluto exactly. Square the node, so make of that what you will.
AC: Yeah, we got our nodal ingress in July.
DRH: Yeah, nodal ingress and then Pluto square the nodes. Exactly, so.
CB: Well, both of those are really good points. So July 16th and 17th and 18th, the node switches or at least the true node switches from zero Taurus to 29 degrees of Aries. And by this point, Pluto has already retrograded back into 29 Capricorn, so that’s that square. Nice. And then I see we get a nice Sun-Pluto opposition just a few days later on July 22nd.
DRH: Yep.
AC: Okay, so the Venus retrograde is right next to Lilith. So I think that the loudness is going to be about abortion. The Lilith point was all over the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And having that Venus retrograde right on it, that’s what it’s going to be about.
LS: Well, and other modern things I noticed, I wouldn’t usually bring this in, but Chiron actually stations the day after Venus stations retrograde.
DRH: Oh yeah, I noted that too.
LS: Yeah, I mean, just the proximity kind of jumped out to me a little bit, because sometimes Venus stationing retrograde is there can be something like, “Oh, I don’t like the way that’s going, I don’t like this direction that this is turning.” And Chiron stationing, not for everyone obviously and it depends on if it’s hitting certain points, but it can be a little bit of an ouch, like, “Oh, that hurt.” And so I just noted that they were both stationing within 48 hours.
CB: There it is at 19 degrees of Aries. Wow, all right. All right, so that is July, so lots of stuff going on. Let’s move into August. All right, here we go with August. Full Moon on the first of the month in Aquarius, then we get a Sun Venus conjunction on the 13th, which is the halfway point in the Venus retrograde cycle in Leo. A few days later we get a New Moon in Leo on the 16th. Mars opposite Neptune on the 22nd. Sun moves into Virgo on the 23rd. And the same day around that time, Mercury station’s retrograde. Mars moves into Libra on the 27th. Uranus stations retrograde on the 28th. And then we get a Full Moon in Pisces on August 30th.
AC: Yeah, and so a big part of August’s tone is just Venus retrograde. The Mars-Saturn is already beginning to depart once we get very far into August. It’s there by sign, but it doesn’t have the same grinding intensity as when the two are very close. And then with the Sun in Leo with Venus in Leo, there’s a very clear star to the show.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So just animating the chart, this retrograde we see that conjunction as the turning point and usually that starts to be a resolution point where things aren’t completely finished, but you start to see some light at the end of the retrograde tunnel or at least some resolution in the sight to whatever was thrown up in the air when Venus stationed retrograde.
AC: It’s Inanna reaches the bottom of the underworld and has a confrontation with her sister, Ereshkigal, and they sort of hash out the pleasure and pain of existence, and there’s usually a little bit of equilibrium reached which we can move forward from or at least carry back out of the underworld and then eventually move forward.
CB: Yeah, because Venus will around that time, around August 22nd, get to 15 degrees. It’s still retrograde for another 12 days, but it gets to 15 Leo and it squares Jupiter, but that’s also about when it’s about 15 degrees from the Sun. So it’s going to make a heliacal rising at that time.
AC: Yeah, and Venus is bright enough that 15 degrees away will be very visible.
CB: So Venus emerges from under the beams or emerges from the underworld at that point. It gets that very helpful or positive affirming square from Jupiter.
AC: I think that’s a really nice feature to the direct station. Not only is it affirmed by Jupiter who will generally try to help, but it’s Jupiter in a Venus-ruled sign.
CB: Yeah, with reception.
AC: If we can contrast that briefly with the way into this retrograde which is very upset, very raw, very unstable, Mars, Uranus, all of that, and then with the Mars-Saturn during the first part, that’s really rough. The way down is considerably less pleasant than what emerges through the process. What emerges from the process is significantly more stable and pleasant.
CB: Yeah, and more positive. There is though a little bit of tension at this point in the month, even though we’re getting some resolution of the Venus retrograde story. By the time we get to late August, Mercury slows down and it stations retrograde at 21 Virgo around August 23rd and 24th, and it’s conjoining Mars within about six degrees at that point which is at 27 degrees of Virgo. So we’ve had other types of Mercury retrograde stories so far this year. This one has a Mercury conjunct Mars flavor, which is usually more of a bad words or curse words or a Mercury-Mars thing. It’s sometimes the breaking of something technical or the severing or separating of something technical. Since it’s happening in Virgo, it has this additional technical component to it, I think.
LS: And Mercury and Mars are going to be co-present most of the month. So it’s kind of even though they don’t catch up and make an exact conjunction, so it’s kind of nitpicking words or harsh criticism is pretty good for Mercury and Mars in Virgo. Now it’s great to use that for positive effect, use it for editing, use it for constructive cutting out of words or things like that, but interpersonally it can be a little bit like harsh criticism or nitpicking.
CB: Yeah. It could also be the technological technical things breaking like the hard drive crashing or the car having a part that breaks or something like that at the beginning of a retrograde in that classic version of a Mercury retrograde.
AC: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that they separate only a couple days into the retrograde, Mars moves on to Libra, Mercury’s headed back. And so it’s somewhat parallel to the Venus retrograde. The lead up to it is actually considerably more pretty harsh, whereas once it gets going it is what it is, the rearrangements need to happen. But that Mars-Mercury energy won’t be there for most of the retrograde. But people are going to start asking us whether Mercury is retrograde two weeks before it is because of that Mercury-Mars.
CB: Yeah. There’s going to be also an abruptness, a sharpness to the Mercury retrograde problems at the beginning of the Mercury retrograde, but a lot of that will be removed relatively early on when Mars goes into Libra.
DRH: Yeah. I’m being reminded of my favorite Mars in a Mercury sign or Mercury in a Mars sign thing to do or whatever, which is if you write down the word swords and you put a parenthesis around the first S and then being judicious about how you choose to use your words and your swords. The necessity of having a sharp one ready when you need them, but also not dispensing them when you don’t need to.
AC: Yeah. Well, and even just the uttering of certain words is a threat and changes the dynamic just as just unsheathing the sword. You don’t even have to swing a sword at someone to change the dynamic.
DRH: Just making it clear that you have one can go pretty far.
CB: So one of the things I noticed with Mercury stationing here in later Virgo, of course, is that it’s going to be opposing Neptune. So maybe being careful where you swing your sword and why so as not to have confusion surrounding it could be really important.
DRH: Yeah, don’t tilt at windmills.
CB: Yeah. In a prep meeting you mentioned the fog of war, and I think that came up at one point a year or two ago in one of the transits that happened with Neptune.
DRH: Yeah. And I think that’s definitely relevant again here of just the sensation of wanting to fight is not the same as the need to fight.
AC: Don’t go stabbing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and lakes that you’re used to.
CB: Is that a TLC song? Is that a deep reference?
DRH: Yeah, verbatim.
AC: I have some TLC stories that I will tell you later that relate to my Saturn in Pisces transits.
CB: Okay. Yeah, all right. I look forward to that. All right, we’re back after a little bit of a break, and we’re going to resume with September. But before we get there, we have to talk about the Full Moon at the end of August which is a Full Moon in Pisces. And that is a Full Moon that, Austin, you are particularly interested in.
AC: Yeah. And so this Full Moon, there’s always or almost always a Full Moon in Pisces around this time of year. But this time it’s pretty much right on top of Saturn. And so usually the Pisces Moon is a moment of enchanted or drunken revelry or fantasy amidst a very detail-oriented Virgo season. But this year and for the next couple, these Full Moons in Pisces will be with Saturn. And so the constriction, the constraint, as you put it earlier, Leisa, the emotional undertow, perhaps the feeling of underlying melancholy, will be part of this Full Moon. And so I wanted to mention it because it really shows the tonal shift to how Pisces feels now or how it’s going to feel at that time and for a while.
LS: And it’s really interesting too that the Full Moon is exactly on the degree where Saturn stationed for the first time in Pisces in June. It’s at 7 Pisces.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good point.
CB: Yeah. So it’s really highlighting that degree and highlighting the early degrees of Pisces and shedding a spotlight on Saturn in Pisces and whatever that transit is about for everybody, especially if that’s hitting personal planets in people’s birth charts.
AC: Yeah, and although that Saturnian note is important and will feel it, it does have a nice configuration to Jupiter in Taurus. It’s not an epically awful configuration, but the weight of Saturn is really apparent there.
CB: Yeah, because it’s separating from Saturn, but as soon as the Full Moon goes exact it then applies to that sextile with Jupiter. So maybe it’s a little bit of putting some of the Saturn stuff a little bit in the rear view mirror and at least heading towards Jupiter.
AC: Yeah, benefiting from that same sort of enrichment that we talked about Jupiter in Taurus being able to provide for Saturn in Pisces. It’s not just soggy and sad, you can grow stuff in that soggy and sad, there’s a richness to the soil.
DRH: It feels like a sobering cry fest versus a disorienting cry fest. Saturn’s presence almost like the emotional cup overflowing a bit, but from a place of somebody throwing rocks in your cup. That’s not quite what I mean, but there’s something there of a reality displacing something and that displacement being the cause of the emotional context, the emotional experience.
CB: For sure. All right, I think that’s a good transition point to take us into September. So we open September with two important planetary stations that we’ve talked about a few times already up to this point, which is Venus stations direct in Leo on the 3rd of September, and the next day Jupiter stations retrograde in Taurus on the 6th of September. Then a couple days later we get the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde when Mercury conjoins the Sun, and then we start to see some resolution of the Mercury retrograde issues that began a little bit earlier. We get a New Moon in Virgo on the 14th. Mercury stations direct and ends its retrograde period on the 15th of September. The Sun moves into Libra on the 23rd, and then we get a Full Moon in Aries on the 29th. So the big story this month is Venus ending the retrograde and squaring Jupiter around the same time and there being potentially some sort of positive resolution at this point or some sort of high note at the end of the retrograde period.
LS: I really like that Venus stations direct and then towards mid-month Venus squares Jupiter. It feels much more positive coming out of the Venus retrograde.
DRH: There’s something to look forward to, that sensation of looking forward to.
CB: For sure. Even this Mercury retrograde conjunction with the Sun happens in a trine with Jupiter. So it seems there’s even some resolution coming there in the middle of the Mercury retrograde as well.
AC: And we have a dynamic there where we’ve got the two benefics and fixed signs for a while. And now it’s a direct Venus, a direct benefic. And so some of that help for fixed signs arrives there. No malefics on the axis, sure, Uranus is there, but you’ve got both benefics for a while totally functional in two of the four fixed signs.
CB: Yeah, and only one eclipse left in the fixed signs. All right.
DRH: One thing I find really interesting about September too is that Mercury is the only planet in domicile all month. And it’s retrograde for the first half, but direct for the second half, and so there’s something… My brains are starting to fall out of my head.
CB: I mean, we’ve only been doing this for six hours today, so I personally can’t relate to that.
DRH: Yeah, no, it feels very interesting whenever there’s a month where there’s really only one planet that’s solidly in domicile for the entire month, especially when it’s Mercury since Mercury usually zips through things. And I don’t know, it feels notable. I don’t have smart words in the moment to say about it.
CB: No, look at this, September 24th, Mercury is in its own sign of Virgo where it’s at its most analytical and ability to focus on minor details and communicate them effectively. And it’s trining Jupiter at 14 degrees of Taurus, then it gets a nice trine with Uranus shortly after that. This is Mercury at his most robust, I would say.
AC: Yeah, once Mercury comes out of the retrograde it’s a really enviable Mercury position.
CB: All right, I think that brings us into October essentially.
AC: We should probably mention that Mars moves into Libra.
CB: All right. Let’s back up all the way to actually the late, late August when that happens on the 26th and 27th.
AC: And so as September begins, Mars is in Libra.
CB: Yeah. It’s interesting it’s not really aspecting anything hardly by hard aspect as it’s moving through that sign, and because all the outer planets like Jupiter and Uranus and Saturn are in Pisces and Taurus, they’re all in aversion to it. It will eventually hit that Pluto square at the very end of the cardinal sign.
AC: Yeah, it’s really towards the end of September when it’s coming up on the square with Pluto and it’s coming up on conjunction with the tail of the dragon that it’s going to start acting up. Mars south node conjunctions are often very intense. And then when you add Pluto, there’s a sharper sting there. There’s a convention of representing the dragon’s tail as being stingered like a scorpion in some of the Arabic works. I think that with Mars conjoined and square Pluto you see a little bit of that sting there.
CB: And before we even get there, we get a nice flowing sextile between direct Venus sextiling Mars in Libra here in the later part of September, which is interesting just as a contrast with the beginning of the retrograde where we had that conjunction where things were kind of tense in Leo
DRH: And around that time we have the third of the three squares between Venus and Uranus.
CB: Yeah, right there around the 28th and 29th. All right. And then we see Mars hit the south node early in October here at 24 degrees of Libra, and then it squares Pluto here around October 8th from 27 Libra to 27 Capricorn.
LS: And I feel like that Mars-south node conjunction is kind of setting up that first eclipse in Libra that’ll happen this month as well.
AC: Yeah, and it also rules the Full Moon in Aries that we just popped by.
CB: There’s that Full Moon on September 28th and 29th.
AC: So that’s pretty spicy. The Full Moon in Aries is rarely shy with a chili powder. But with Mars is getting that nice sextile from Venus, but also conjoining the south node and with the squared Pluto coming up and ruling the Full Moon in Aries, which is not an eclipse, but if it were three days later would start being eclipsed. And Mars in Libra when activated attacks with vicious shade. It’s a social Mars, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t words and swords. And so there’s an edge to that Full Moon.
CB: Yeah. So immediately after that, I believe that takes us into the month of October. This is when we enter into eclipse season again. So October, Mercury goes into Libra on the fourth, Mars squares Pluto on the eighth, the same day that Venus goes into Virgo. Pluto stations direct in Capricorn on the 10th, Mars into Scorpio on the 12th, eclipse in Libra, New Moon eclipse. Solar eclipse in Libra on the 14th. Then the Sun conjoins Mercury on the 20th. Mercury and the Sun go into Scorpio on the 22nd and 23rd respectively. And then we get our second lunation and eclipse of the month, which is a lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus, on the 28th of October. All right, so Pluto stationing direct, that’s also the closest that we get to the final sort of Pluto return of the US I think at this point. Right, Leisa?
LS: Yes, it’s about half degree pass, so it’s essentially exact again. So you’ll have I’m sure more of those fun underworld things coming up to be reviewed at that time. And just for anyone, even with the US Pluto return, but also for everyone, Pluto’s getting very, very late in Capricorn. And so this is the last lap more or less this year, next year, but it’s very late. So any of those Pluto in Capricorn themes are really developed at this point.
CB: Yeah, so this is taking it back to the founding of the United States and the founding of the Declaration of Independence and all of that and some of the early foundations of the country being revisited.
DRH: I was just going to say, checking in on the the bones of the institutions that built the nation, seeing the rot and trying to get rid of the termites and things like that.
LS: Yeah, and I know last year I was talking a little bit about the founding of the US being breaking away from monarchy. So it revisits those themes. Are we going to be a democracy? Are we a democracy currently? We are a backsliding democracy last I heard. So just revisiting all of that. How much do we prioritize people in charge no matter how much they abuse the system for the rest of us or are we going to do anything about that? That’s very Pluto in Capricorn.
DRH: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: And the Mars being square right as its stations emphasizes that quite a bit. It’s also October in an election year, and so October looks increasingly like a knife fight. That happens before the eclipse, and then we get a pair of eclipses and we get Mars going from kind of a shady and activated and potentially poisonous position in the end of Libra just straight into Scorpio where Mars is very strong and is happy to do battle to lock claws.
DRH: Yeah, strategic attacks and things like that. One thing that’s interesting thinking about it being the American election season…
CB: Which is over the next year from that point.
DRH: Right, exactly. Entering into that, but with those eclipses happening in Venus signs, but ruled by a Virgo in Venus and thinking about how much room there is to nitpick other people’s actions. I don’t want to besmirch Virgo and Venuses because there are many of them who I admire. But there is something about the way that a Virgo Venus can say I am disappointed and is vastly more marrow wounding than anyone else saying that same thing. And so thinking about how the conversations and the [pundit pulpits], how that goes and how intensely people will be listening for reasons to critique as part of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And that brings us right into this eclipse in Libra. So it’s at 21 degrees of Libra. This is the first eclipse in this sign, so it’s the start of a major series of eclipses in Libra that will go through 2024. And just that theme of major beginnings and major endings when it comes to that sector of everybody’s birth chart. And I’m still getting over the eclipses from last year and just seeing how that indicated major changes for a lot of the people with fixed signs when we went into some of those eclipses, and now that is going to fully shift into the Aries-Libra axis at this point. So major endings, major beginnings. Also just things being up in the air is a theme we’ve talked about previously about previous eclipses. So that’s going to be another thing that’s in the air most of October during eclipse season. I mean, major rises and major falls was the major thing, seeing people come into prominence previously who weren’t prominent or seeing people who were prominent suffering a sudden fall is another theme I think that we’ve seen a lot lately with eclipses.
AC: Yeah. With the eclipse in Libra, we now have one eclipse in Aries and one eclipse in Libra, so we’ve actually started the eclipses in that pair of signs, which runs for about a year and a half at a time. So at this point, both sides of that will be fully introduced. Whereas we only got half of it during the second quarter, but this is the other half, and now we can begin that process, the south node in Libra, north node in Aries process. And of course we have to finish up the the Taurus-Scorpio with the very last one on that axis. And so this is the actual completion of the Taurus-Scorpio cycle and the full beginning of the Aries-Libra cycle.
CB: Yeah, I love that because it’s like you take one step into the Aries-Libra axis in April with that first eclipse in Aries, and then the second and final step into that sphere is taken in October with the Libra eclipse. Whereas with the others, it’s like you’re in the process of stepping out of that series with Taurus and Scorpio that completes in October in Taurus. Having one foot in and then taking the other foot in versus one foot out and then taking the other foot out.
AC: Yeah, we get the full changeover for the first time in October.
LS: Yeah. So you can think back to approximately nine years prior, those houses will be churned up again in terms of beginnings and endings. That was the last time we had the nodes in the opposite signs about nine years ago.
CB: All right. So let me put the eclipse back on the screen here, Libra eclipse, 21 Libra.
DRH: One thing that’s interesting about this is that in the lead up to, the Mercury cazimi conjoined the south node. So there’s sort of this continuation of the eclipse in a specifically Mercurial way over the preceding days.
AC: Yeah. And all that’s pretty tightly squared that Pluto. So continuing to hammer those end of Pluto in Capricorn themes.
DRH: Yeah, absolutely. It’s making me think about justice system revelations.
AC: It’s very institutional.
DRH: Yeah. Even just thinking about the Mercury-Pluto dynamics with revelations over time and adding the south node from within an eclipse season, the reverse of obscuring almost being a part of it or maybe potentially that being the initiation of things that come to light later maybe by the time of the next eclipse season.
AC: Well, and the south node eclipses will stir up the ghosts of things, the things that we talk about as soon as we talk about letting go with the south node, but often in order for something to be resolved where it actually can fade away. Something that we have to revisit it, and this is the very first eclipse in Libra on the south node. It’s probably going to be more about stirring up the ghosts that maybe will eventually find their way to the next live, but some things need to be unfucked first.
DRH: Yeah, opening the closet door that’s full of skeletons and getting that whiff of musty skeleton air.
AC: Yeah, of the unquiet dead.
CB: Speaking of the unquiet dead, that brings us into the next eclipse which is taking place like right before Halloween where we get this lovely Taurus eclipse, which is on the one hand conjunct Jupiter at 11 degrees of Taurus while the Moon itself goes exact at five Taurus, but there’s this very tight Mercury-Mars conjunction in Scorpio that’s happening at the same time opposite to that at 10 degrees and 11 degrees of Scorpio. So this eclipse has a real Mercury conjunct Mars flare to it or signature. So Mercury conjunct Mars can be, as we’ve said earlier, can be combative words or aggressive communication. It can also be very piercing since it’s happening in Scorpio at the same time. What are some of the keyword words for that?
AC: Yeah, it’s combative, it can be vicious with the conjunction being in Scorpio. But really these things in combination, the Mercury-Mars opposite Jupiter and the lunar eclipse on top of Jupiter, really challenge what peace, stability, and extra comfortable garments that Jupiter in Taurus has been trying to provide all year. Trying to help, try to stabilize, try to cushion things, and this eclipse in particular is a moment where it’s as if Jupiter wasn’t helping or the help’s not enough.
DRH: Right. It feels like resentment somehow to me as I’m thinking about it. Something about that’s all well and good for you, that kind of energy.
LS: It’s like cutting words in Scorpio.
DRH: And cutting people down to size. Even thinking about that being an opposition to Jupiter and an exalted but eclipsed Moon of that sort of excessive comfort being face-to-face with the relative austerity, almost militant austerity that sometimes Scorpio can have. So, yeah.
CB: Yeah, I like that. Well, on a good note, that’s going to be the final eclipse of the fixed sign series. And whatever it was that began way back in late 2001 with that first eclipse in Scorpio, that series of changes that people have been going through in that part of their life should be over after this point.
DRH: 2021, right?
CB: Yeah, what did I say?
DRH: 2001.
CB: Okay, yeah. Thank you. I remember watching that eclipse in late 2021 and just being the opening of that series and depending on where it was falling in different people’s charts, that theme of major beginnings and major endings. If it was in a fourth house, sometimes people moved or relocated. So it was the end of living in one place and then starting to live in another. Or if that eclipse was in the seventh house, it could have been the end of one major relationship and the start of another or vice versa. But whatever it is, that series of changes in major beginnings and major endings comes to full completion at this point.
LS: Well, it’s really interesting to me that this is the last Taurus eclipse, but it still proceeds by about six months, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus next spring. And so it’s like there’s been multiple wild cards going on in the Taurus area of the chart, but now there’s just going to be one wild card, not two. So there’s still potential for change and unexpectedness in that area, but it feels less completely out of your control and faded and more like, “Okay, what do you want to do now with this fresh ground that’s been plowed?”
AC: Yeah. I think part of the way that that’s going to feel and play out is Uranus has been there since 2018, and now after this point the only thing bearing on it is Jupiter which helps confirm whatever Uranus is doing. So I think that’s going to be like, “Oh, I can finally make those changes that I’ve been meaning to in a constructive and intentional way. I’ve been really wanting to do this, but I had to deal with that and this couldn’t change until this thing was over.” And it’s sort of like, “Okay, now I can just make the changes.”
CB: Yeah, now I have the freedom to do this. Because when Uranus ingressed, I noticed with a lot of Taurus rising people that there was a real liberation feel of freeing oneself from past obligations and things like that and doing something radically different. But yeah, things have been so much up in the air with some of the Scorpio-Taurus eclipses in a more chaotic sense. It’ll be interesting to see Jupiter being able to help make things more stable and sort of confirm things in a way that’s a little bit smoother than before.
AC: Yeah, and there was the Saturn squaring Uranus. Saturn’s like, “No, you can’t change. You’ve got to do this, you’ve got these responsibilities not until X, Y and Z.” And so Saturn’s off writing poetry in Pisces now, so.
CB: Yeah, all right. I think that’s good, and that takes us into the following month into November. So November, Saturn, which has been retrograde for a few months now in Pisces, stations direct at zero degrees of Pisces on November 4th. Then Venus goes into Libra on the eighth. Mercury goes into Sagittarius on the 10th. There’s a Mars-Uranus opposition on the 11th. Then we get a New Moon in Scorpio which is not an eclipse for the first time in quite a while on the 13th. There’s a Sun-Mars conjunction on the 18th. The Sun moves into Sagittarius on the 22nd. Mars into Sag on the 24th, which then squares Saturn in Pisces on the 25th, and then we get a Full Moon in Gemini on the 27th. All right, so big story this month is another intensification of Saturn in Pisces, the second station essentially that we’ve ever gotten in Pisces during this run. So we get an intensification of focus of whatever that transit is about, and especially if people have planets in early mutable signs in intensification and a return to a transit, an exact transit from earlier in the year.
LS: We also sort of have the ingressed Venus into its own sign of Libra. We have some social ethnicities back in terms of interpersonal experiences. We don’t have the overly critical and opposite Saturn Venus which we had just before that. So Venus gets free of the opposition with Saturn and is happy in its own sign. So a lot more of the pleasantries with other people.
AC: And a few days into that Mercury moves into Sagittarius. So we have a nice Mercury-Venus sextile with Venus in a happy place.
CB: November 12th.
AC: Yeah. So once we get going on that, those two hold that for several weeks and that’s nice, a return to decorum or at least not knife fighting.
LS: This is like, “I didn’t mean what I said when Venus was in Virgo.”
CB: All right, or when Mercury was conjunct Mars. Yeah, I like that. All right, I see that aspect holding most of the middle part of November, Mercury sextile Venus.
AC: But I mean, it is worth noting that part of the reason we like that Venus-Mercury thing is that we still have Sun and Mars in Scorpio for quite a bit of the month. There’s just the level of, how do I put this? It’s just like a coal that’s still carrying fire even if nothing is on fire at the time, it’s just carrying around that coal. That’s a very intense, fixed, strong, but also kind of dangerous energy. Things could catch back on fire because the coal’s right there. And it is a resetting of the Mars cycle with a conjunction between the two. And so it does speak to an intense cycle to come.
DRH: Right. And there’s the fact that the New Moon in Scorpio is conjunct Mars and opposite Uranus, so maybe that coal actually does catch fire.
CB: Yeah, Mars-Uranus opposition is kind of tense. Here we go. So New Moon at 20 Scorpio on November 13th, and that’s opposite to Uranus at 21 Taurus. So Mars-Uranus can be unexpected actions, unexpected accidents, sometimes the need to make bold, decisive actions without much forethought which can sometimes be good or sometimes be bad.
AC: Mars-Uranus is for good, bad, and all that in between. It is a very destructive pairing.
LS: Can be, yeah.
DRH: I feel like there’s also something interesting about this coming on the heels of so much Mars in Scorpio, where outwardly it might appear that someone is making a rash or unconsidered decision, but it’s actually been stewing for quite some time. It’s just the external manifestation or the external expression is particularly disruptive or surprising.
CB: Yeah, for sure. The other major tense aspect this month that occurs after that is when Mars moves into Sagittarius by November 24th, 25th it immediately squares Saturn at zero degrees of Pisces.
AC: And unfortunately, we have a Full Moon that turns that into a T-square.
CB: Nice, here we go. So Full Moon in Gemini at four degrees of Gemini.
AC: Wow, Mars, Saturn, Sun and Moon.
DRH: So Mars is inside of both lunations this month.
CB: Interesting, okay. So it’s a really fiery month with some contention. Mars sometimes fights sometimes competitions or contests.
LS: And there’s frustrated action going on right there too with that Full Moon with the Mars-Saturns…
CB: Right, but Mars is in the superior position, so it’s able to like, push a little bit more against Saturn and get the upper hand. So the impulse to push the gas button is potentially overwhelming the restraint button.
AC: Yeah, but it doesn’t make it easy for Mars. It’s like those strongman competitions where somebody will be dragging a bus. Well, it’s amazing that you’re able to make any progress, but that’s a lot of effort for going two miles an hour.
CB: Yeah, all right. So those are the major notes of November, I believe that brings us to our final month of the year.
DRH: Oh, I did want to make one last note about November that I think is interesting, the return of that concept of the fog of war emerging with Mars and the Mars cazimi trine Neptune. That’s the other thing that I was like, “That’s interesting.”
CB: Yeah. I mean, since it’s a trine, perhaps that’s something positive or flowing about being able to use the fog of something in a way that’s strategic or effective. It’s around November 17th. Okay, let’s transition into December. Here’s the alignments calendar. First day of the month, we get Mercury going into Capricorn, then Venus into Scorpio on the fourth, Neptune direct on the sixth, New Moon in Sag on the 12th. Mercury station’s retrograde for the final time this year on the 13th. Sun into Capricorn on the 21st. Sun-Mercury conjunction in that sign on the 22nd. Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius for its only trip retrograde through a fire sign this year. Then we get a Full Moon in Cancer on the 26th. Retrograde Mercury conjoins Mars on the 27th. Venus into Sag on the 29th. And Jupiter stations direct on the 30th of December right before New Year’s.
LS: And striking to me that the very end of December, which is the very end of the whole year, looks very jolly, but everything up to that is a little smoldery, it’s Venus in Scorpio most of the month. Then all of a sudden at the very end, Venus goes into Sag, and then Jupiter stations direct. It’s just a really nice one, two, kind of a bountiful sort of upbeat action.
DRH: And then on the first of 2024, Mercury also stations direct. So there is that sort of moving forward energy, even if it’s not fully captured in 2023.
AC: One final note about the Venus-Jupiter, Venus in Sagittarius and Jupiter in Taurus are also both in mutual reception. So that helps combine the two goods, that’s the the vanilla chocolate swirl where you get both.
LS: Yeah. But there’s a lot of sort of seething before that. Venus in Scorpio is the sexy brooding lover who you wish would brood a little less.
AC: The better in theory than practice relationship. And we also have Mercury, once Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius, we have our, our good friend the Mercury-Mars conjunction again for (s)words.
CB: Yeah, during the holiday season. Retrograde Mercury at 28 Sag retrograding back into Mars, and then Moon opposes it. Moon actually opposes Mars on Christmas it looks like.
DRH: And also on the 26th, there’s a retrograde Mercury square Neptune. So also right around times where people are likely to be holiday hanging.
CB: Makes me think of getting into an argument or getting in a fight with somebody because you misunderstood something or you made a mistake in that awkward scenario that people run into of saying something harmful or hurtful but having it be misdirected due to a sort of similar situation with the fog of war-type thing.
DRH: Right, or saying something completely innocuous and literally having the other person hear different words than the ones that came out of your mouth. And so the fight is about something you actually did not say but that someone legitimately heard, fights of [transition].
AC: “Take it back.” “I can’t, I didn’t say that.”
DRH: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, “I take back the thing that I didn’t say because it hurt you, but you should know I didn’t say it.” It’s just like that, complicated.
AC: “I’m really sorry I didn’t say that.”
LS: There’s also a Venus-Uranus opposition on the 21st which is interesting. You know what it reminds me of? I mean, not just sudden unexpected things with regard to relationships just before holidays, but those movies that are you go back to your small town and then there’s this sudden crush from the past. It reminds me of that.
DRH: Yeah, and it’s actually a really Bad News Bears crush, but it influences the rest of your time at home. It’s like you’re avoiding your family by trying to hang out with somebody who was bad news 20 years ago and is still bad news.
CB: Yeah, emphasized more with the Mercury retrograde happening at the same time in the sense of looking back at something.
AC: I will say that I like the first part of Venus in Scorpio when it’s in a tight opposition with Jupiter. That can be pleasantly [debauched]. It may not be productive or healthy, but it could at least be fun.
DRH: There is also the fact that at this point with Saturn in Pisces, planets moving through water signs are going to experience the trine with Saturn, which I think especially for Venus in Scorpio, there’s something supportive about that interaction. Sort of the reminder that like, “Yes, you could obsess about that thing that makes you feel terrible, but you could also obsess about this thing that would at least be practical for you to obsess about.” I don’t know, I’m excited for water sign trines with Saturn.
CB: Yeah, the benefit of productive obsessions.
DRH: Yeah, productive obsessions I think would maybe be one way to… I love that phrase actually for the Saturn-Venus trine.
LS: Well, and also Saturn in Pisces being like we were talking a while earlier about how do you put containers around this boundless emotional energy. And so maybe you’ve started to learn how to put some containers in place, and so the Venus trine Saturn is like, “Oh, here, this is what I’m going to do with that, I’m not going to brood all day.”
DRH: This is like, “From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM are my obsession hours.” It’s more like 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM, let’s be real.
CB: All right, so that means we end the year sort of with the Mercury retrograde, but it’s about to be direct, and then Jupiter’s also stationing direct at the end of the year as well.
DRH: I think it’s also worth pointing out that Mars and Neptune will square each other at the end of the year too. I don’t know if we already mentioned that.
LS: I don’t think so.
CB: Hold that up.
DRH: I’m deliberately working very hard to stop forgetting Neptune.
CB: Yeah. Well, that was part of the Mercury-Mars conjunction because that happens at the same time square Neptune. All right, that kind of brings us to the end of our major transits for 2023, honestly.
LS: Wild.
CB: All right, my friends, it has been a long journey.
AC: Yeah, I definitely feel like I have been through a time warp.
DRH: We started this conversation last week, right?
AC: Right, it was a couple days ago at least.
CB: All right, this was amazing. We had big plans for this episode, this forecast, we always do. We are always very ambitious. This was definitely one of our most ambitious forecasts ever, and I think we were all able to rise to the occasion. Thank you all for joining me for this today, this was amazing.
DRH: Yeah, it’s always good to talk with you all.
CB: Yeah, all right. So I want to ask each of you what you’re up to this year. Austin, what do you have coming up in 2023?
AC: Okay, well, I will be teaching, I will be doing enrollment for my go at your own pace year one program once a quarter. My year two and year three programs both begin in April. Let’s see. I will, and I’m going to hold myself to this, I will have the second edition of 36 Phases complete with all new illustrations, a ton of new material, edited old material out by the halfway point of this coming year. I will be speaking at the Northwestern Astrology Conference, NORWAC, in May. And as far as my work with Sphere + Sundry goes, right now and hopefully it’ll last a little longer, there’s a beautiful Jupiter in Pisces series out, it’s called Butter Ocean. It’s Jupiter in Pisces with just a hint of Venus in Cancer. And then at a to be announced point in the year to come, Sphere + Sundry’s top secret Manhattan project will be unleashed on the public. So gird your loins and keep your eyes peeled.
CB: Brilliant. And that’s sphereandsundry.com and austincoppock.com, right?
AC: Yep.
CB: Awesome. Diana, what you got coming up?
DRH: At this point, the things that I have in process are not yet at the point where I can talk about them. But I will be continuing to see clients and will probably be doing some kind of teaching stuff. If people want to be informed of things whenever things actually emerge, they will want to be on my newsletter which you can join by going to dianaroseharper.com and scrolling to the bottom of literally any page.
CB: Awesome, cool. Leisa, what do you have coming up in 2023?
LS: In late February, February 25th, I’ll be giving a kind of leisurely introduction to zodiacal releasing lecture for Astrology Niagara which is online, so anyone can join from anywhere in the world. It’s going to be a good two and a half-hour chunk so that there’s plenty of time for questions. So if you’ve been wanting to learn about that technique but haven’t gotten into it yet, that’s a good option. I’ll also be giving two lectures at NORWAC in late May. I do have a bunch of lecture recordings from previous conferences on my website that people can check out. And what else? We’ll be continuing to find and discuss the monthly elections every month here with The Auspicious Elections podcast. And finally I am not quite back to consultations, but I’m really looking forward to getting back to them. Been quite interrupted by family emergencies on and off for quite a while here. So really looking forward to getting back to that. Not open for new ones yet, but if you go to the bottom of my front page of my website, you can join the mailing list. And that’s the only place I will announce when I have new openings available.
CB: Cool. And your website is leisaschaim.com?
LS: It is.
CB: Awesome. As for myself, I recently launched a new course on birth chart rectification and how to find your birth time if it’s unknown or uncertain with Patrick Watson. I’m also working on a new Horary course with Rob Bailey that we’re planning on launching in 2023, and we already have a preview version of it up that’s available now. And if people sign up now, they get grandfathered into the new course before we raise the price. I’m also going to focus on continuing to expand my Hellenistic astrology course, where I teach people how to read birth charts using the original system of western astrology. So you can find out more about that at courses.theastrologyschool.com. You can also support the podcast through my page on Patreon at patreon.com/astrologypodcast, and that’s going to be one of the main things that I focus on in the coming year, is just continuing to expand and improve what we’re doing here on the podcast as we move into episode 400. I think we’re up to episode 380s at this point, so we’re about to celebrate a big milestone here. All right. Guys, I think that is it for this episode of the podcast and for our forecast for 2023. So thank you all for joining me today. Thanks to our live audience of patrons that joined us for the live recording, I appreciate you and thanks for your support. And that’s it for this forecast for 2023. So thanks everyone for watching, and we’ll see you again next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, shoutout to the patrons on our producers’ tier including, Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then please consider becoming a patron through our page on patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections podcast, or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information, visit patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
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.