The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 385, titled:
Astrology Forecast for February 2023
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Bear Ryver
Episode originally released on January 31, 2023
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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 February 1, 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 looking at the astrological forecast for the month of February of 2023. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Bear Ryver. Hey guys, welcome.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.
BEAR RYVER: Hey, thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah, thanks for joining me today. All right, let me give a little overview of the astrology of February here at the beginning, then we’re going to transition to a talk about some news stories that have happened over the past month and the astrology associated with them, before eventually jumping into the forecast for February. So I’ll put timestamps below this video in the description for those that want to jump ahead, as well as on the podcast website entry for this episode. All right, so here’s the planetary alignments calendar from our wall poster for 2023. February starts off pretty early with a full Moon in the sign of Leo on February 5th as our first lunation of the month. Then later in the week, Mercury ends its very long trek through Capricorn because it’s been retrograde in that sign for like a month now, and it finally ingresses or moves into the sign of Aquarius on February 11th. Then the following week, we get a Venus-Neptune conjunction in Pisces on the 15th just the day after Valentine’s Day, followed by a Sun-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius on the 16th of February. Then a couple days later, we get the Sun moving into Pisces on the 18th. Venus moves into Aries departing from Pisces on the 20th, and the same day there is a New Moon in the sign of Pisces on February 20th. So there’s some other aspects and other minor things going on this month that we’ll talk about, but that’s basically the broad or general outlines of the things that we’re going to be getting into in our forecast for this month. All right. So hey, welcome both of you. Bear, thanks for joining us. It’s your first time doing a forecast with us.
BR: It is. Thank you so much for having me.
CB: You and I just recorded the Aquarius episode in the Zodiac series a few days ago with Aerin Fogel, and that was a lot of fun to do so I thought it would be great to have you on for this episode since it’s still Aquarius season.
BR: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a fitting treat as an Aquarius Moon person and I think that was actually my exact precise lunar return, maybe like an arc minute off when we started recording so, keeping the trend going.
CB: I love when stuff like that happens. Austin, how have you been doing since we last saw you at our forecast which we recorded in what? Mid-December?
AC: Yeah. Well, so immediately following that, I went into a nine-day coma in order to restore myself. I was awake and walking around, but I remember nothing and was exhausted.
CB: That was a long recording day.
AC: That was our longest podcast ever. But I don’t know, I’ve been on a sort of trite New Year grind. I’ve just been doing my exercises and doing my mantras and working on my book and teaching my classes, and I’ve been a very orderly fellow. It’s boring, but the useful kind of boring.
CB: Yeah, I think there’s little delay to getting the year started because of those retrogrades that were just finishing up in January. First, the Mars retrograde finished like a weekend to January and then Mercury, the following week stationed direct finally. And I’ve felt the shift as both of those have stationed direct, and it seems like we’re moving forward into new territory finally after a long winter season here.
AC: Yeah. I tried to take that into account for getting back to work and doing New Year’s things. I set some parameters for like, “Oh, you’re going to do this on these days of the week for this many hours,” but then made sure to leave it open to tweak on the Mercury direct station. And I’m glad I did because what I initially set out was kind of unrealistic. And so I was like I’ve got two weeks in, now I know that, and I was able to tweak it into something that was workable.
CB: Yeah, for sure. For sure.
BR: Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about the image of– if you’ve ever driven in the snow– getting stuck where you don’t have traction and having to get one foot out the door and rock the car until you really do get enough friction, and thinking about the slow slow slow chuck out station of Mars; like, still at eight degrees, still at eight degrees but as soon as we get into February, I think we’ll finally feel the momentum pick up.
AC: That’s funny that you mentioned that because during the Mercury retrograde, we had somebody deliver food to our house like a DoorDash person. And they got stuck in the snow and so I had to go out and literally help push them out. And there was some nice rocking, and like that image because when you’re not that stuck, you can just do a straight push out. But other times you do have to kind of get a little back and forth, go in, and then go on it. You know?
BR: Yeah, yeah.
CB: For sure. Yeah, so we’re coming out of that. Why don’t we talk about and do some review at this point about the astrology of the past month and any news stories that have come up, and just some of the things that we’ve seen manifest in world events over the course of the past few weeks since we did the last episode. Were there any major news stories or personal experiences or client stories that either of you had that come to mind in terms of stuff that you saw over the past month?
AC: I have a really simple personal one. I started a particular long-term workout plan the end of last March, and it just so happens that I finally finished the criteria of that, I completed that on the day of Mars direct station. And that was not planned at all, it just so happened that that was the case. I was like, “Hold on, isn’t this the Mars station?” And yeah, so that’s kind of nice. It just shows you that each planet is a clock for its sphere of activity.
BR: Yeah, I had my astrologer good experience of my Profection playing out back when Mars stationed retrograde. Got hit super hard in the elbow, like of course Gemini so it’s down between the fingers and the shoulders, and got a contusion to my ulnar nerve. So the nerve itself is injured, and with the station coming up I was like, “Okay, it’s either going to magically resolve itself or it’s going to peak in intensity and get even worse.” Which did, unfortunately, but that was also when I finally got the various claims and stuff in motion to get the first actual treatment for it. So seeing that kind of timing of like, “Yeah. Oh, still no appointments, still no appointment,” and then the station directs, and seeing that finally get some progress.
AC: Well, it’s good to hear that that’s improving. I know somebody who also had an ulnar nerve issue that was aggravated and made them leave work right after the Mars station. And then speaking of the sphere of Mars and MMA, right around the Mars Retrograde season there was this rash of crazy shoulder injuries that ruined title fight after title fight. And I just heard– and Mars is direct now– that the one that was Jiří Procházka (I’m probably pronouncing it incorrectly) who was the 2005 champion went out during the Mars Retrograde station. And it was reported that he had one of the worst shoulder injuries ever seen in that sport, which is saying something, right? And that he wouldn’t be able to defend his title for over a year. But Mars just stationed direct, and now he’s like, “Yeah, I can fight.”
BR: That’s really lucky.
AC: Yeah. And who knows whether it was overestimated dot dot dot dot, but the physical quality and the number of shoulder wrist forearm injuries that I’ve seen with this Mars Retrograde in Gemini is pretty wild. It really shows you that almost silly-looking Zodiac guy with the sign breaking into the different body regions. That’s science.
CB: Yeah. Because you look at that and you’re like, “Oh, that’s quaint,” and you see illustrations of it like medieval manuscripts, but yeah, now my shoulder. I messed up my shoulder literally on the Mars station in October November doing push-ups and yeah, that’s been annoying.
BR: Last little thought about that with Mars, which is Mars being related to inflammation and the shoulders and elbows and wrists and all of the tendons and nerves through there being particularly susceptible to being put out of commission by inflammation itself. Even if the injury isn’t that bad, the inflammation will pinch a nerve or impingement and put you out.
AC: I mean, that’s what arthritis is. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: That’s tennis elbow, that’s… Yeah.
CB: Yeah, good point. All right. So other news stories and stuff since we last checked in… Where do I start? So one of the things that happened, because this happened right out after we recorded the last forecast, but it was something that we’d actually talked about in the previous Year Ahead forecast for 2022, which was the release of Avatar 2 in theatres when Jupiter retrograded back into Pisces and did its last conjunction with Neptune in Pisces. And weirdly, because we had noticed that the first Avatar movie was really released under a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius way back in 2009, it was weird that it just happened to be that 13 some odd years later, James Cameron ended up finishing and releasing his follow up movie, Avatar 2, on another Jupiter-Neptune conjunction this time in Pisces, and the movie was centered around water and being in the ocean, and there was a lot of innovative use of technology in order to depict computer-generated ocean scenes essentially. So, weird story about that. But the day that the movie came out, and it was under that Jupiter- Neptune conjunction with Mars widely squaring it, and Austin you had used the metaphor of a bubble popping for many months during that time and a lot of that was also tied in with inflation and the attempts for the government to get control of inflation and things like that. Weirdly the day that Avatar was released, this happened; where this aquarium at a hotel in Berlin that was holding 1500 fish just exploded and just burst that day and flooded this entire hotel with fish with this gigantic fish tank, and it was like this weird piece of simultaneous symbolism overlapping on the same day that I thought was kind of weird. Where sometimes even though that stuff seems kind of comical or weird, stuff comes up in the news that sometimes plays out the astrology in these very bizarre ways, roughly sort of coinciding with the transits.
AC: Yeah, when you watch this kind of thing for long enough especially against astrology, you see that reality itself has metaphor as part of its language. And that humans can do metaphors, too, but the metaphorical is a naturally occurring phenomenon which I think when people start to notice that, it does drive some of them mad if they don’t have recourse to astrology. People begin to believe that all of this is planned by human intelligence because they don’t think of the mind of the world doing metaphor, it’s got to be a human mind.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s just that all of these transits and stuff are manifesting in a multitude of different ways in hundreds and thousands and sometimes millions of people’s lives in different ways, but occasionally when we see something that pops up in the news stories that fits that symbolism archetypally, it’s really just showing you the tip of the iceberg. But that’s one of the reasons why it’s okay sometimes to note those one-off news stories because they’re actually representative of a lot of other stories that you’re not seeing that are happening at the same time.
AC: Yeah, totally. Yeah, it stands in for other events. Yeah.
BR: Yeah, if we’re looking at the kind of microcosm-macrocosm, then if we had enough information we should in theory be able to look at any one moment and then tell the story of everything through just the metaphor of that moment. It’s impossibly inaccessible 90% of the time, that’s a Jupiterian everything and that’s the part of Pisces that gets out of control and hard to name and when you talk too much about Neptune and your brain goes foggy. But in theory, yeah that’s there. Whether it’s the friction of not getting friction and seeing oh, okay. That’s expressed with Kevin McCarthy and everything that was going on with Congress, it was just kind of laughing about that like, “Yeah, there’s no friction to be gained to move forward yet.”
CB: All right. Was that during the Mercury Retrograde still? I think Mercury is still retrograde when that was all, and Congress was up and everything was up in the air and they couldn’t pick a speaker of the house for days. Yeah. So that was happening. I saw Avatar 2, it was actually surprisingly… He was able to pull it off. I think everyone was surprised about whether somebody could do a sequel 13 years later that would be worth not just doing a sequel, but also setting it up because apparently he’s also written two or three other movies after this, one of which is already in post-production. So it’s like this is like a whole cinematic universe, but somehow he was able to pull it off making this interesting enough and continuing the story enough to make it worthwhile, but especially like with the first one, primarily in terms of the technology and just taking the technology another leap forward, both in terms of the immersiveness of the 3D effect, which is really what this movie and the previous one was about; was making a movie that feels immersive and gives you a sense of presence of being there, which is a very Jupiter-Neptune thing. But also I noticed afterwards, we had had this whole discussion in the Year Ahead forecast about the upcoming Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus this year and talking about different technological innovations with that, as well as people in the past who’ve had that conjunction and have really focused on pushing forward and pushing the limits of technology, and growth and expansion through technology. And one of the examples I used was Steve Jobs who had a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and he was the founder of Apple computer and helped promote the personal PC revolution of everybody having a computer in their home, as well as eventually the mobile phone revolution with the iPhone. Interestingly I realized afterwards that James Cameron, the filmmaker and director of Avatar 2, also has a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. And I just think that’s really fascinating not just because of that movie, but because he’s just been known for pushing the limits of technology and especially CGI in filmmaking for many years going back to some of his early movies with, you know, Terminator, Aliens 2, The Abyss and stuff like that. But also his first gigantic blockbuster, Titanic which was released in 1997, and some of the CGI and stuff they used in order to recreate the Titanic. It turns out Patrick Watson noticed this, that that movie was also released under a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1997. So the same time that Steve Jobs was releasing his Think Different ad campaign under that same Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that was kind of tied in with his natal signature, James Cameron with that same natal signature was also doing something big and innovative in terms of technology. I thought that was kind of interesting, kind of weird.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So you saw the first Avatar. Right, Austin?
AC: I did, it was a long time ago.
CB: Yeah. Are you still… I think everyone has a vague memory of it being kind of immersive and that 3D experience being kind of unique at the time.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal. People were talking about it non-stop. I was actually living in LA then, so I heard a lot of disreputable people talking about how they’ve got a technology similar and it’s going to change this and they’re going to do a movie. You know, in LA everybody’s trying to pitch you something all the time even if you have no power influence. They can at least absorb your power of belief and try to use that for some purpose. But yeah, I remember it was quite a lot of unasked for and nonconsensual pitch meetings ended up happening as a result of that. [laughs]
CB: Yeah. Well, then there were so many… That started the whole 3D trend for several years where a bunch of movies after that quickly ran to make 3D versions of their own movies, which is often not as good and didn’t work out terribly well.
AC: I saw one of the Pirates of the Caribbean, I don’t know which one it was, that they did in 3D. And it gave me a terrible headache and wasn’t enjoyable at all. I remember it ruined the movie. I don’t think it was supposed to be 3D, they just kind of added that. Maybe it was Pirates 4. I watched the movie eight years later and I was like, “Oh, I actually kind of like this movie.” But I didn’t at all in the 3D, it ruined the experience.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Well, it’s worth checking out just for the sake of experiencing a transit. This is literally like a Jupiter-Neptune transit and it’s like that’s what that’s like. It’s weird immersiveness which transports you to a different world in some sense. So that was one of the news stories that happened recently. Other similar news stories is I feel like the Saturn-Neptune conjunction next year is coming in real fast, and I’m already starting to see where that’s headed. And one of the keywords that seems like that’s going to happen for next year is the blurring of the boundary or the distinction between what’s real and what’s not, and also sometimes augmenting reality. And the technology of augmented reality seems like it’s one of the main things that’s coming up over the next year, because remember we were doing the forecast episodes back during the Saturn-Neptune square back around the 2016-2017 timeframe, and that summer was like the summer that the Pokémon GO craze took off where people were using their mobile phones where you could see little creatures running around digitally around parks and stuff, and people were chasing them and there was this interesting blurring between what was real and what wasn’t.
So, Facebook just released a new headset that focuses on augmented reality and supposedly, Apple is getting ready to release their own VR headset that will have both a virtual reality as well as an augmented reality component. And if that happens, then that’s going to be a really interesting way to kick off the Saturn-Neptune co-presence in the same sign that’s going to last for five or six years, if one of the biggest tech companies in the world really moves into the virtual reality space. That may be a sign of something that’s going to become a much bigger trend than it is up to this point.
AC: Yeah, definitely. Quick note, the first Pokémon game came out Saturn in Pisces, so this will be the Saturn Return. And already having shown an interest in doing augmented reality– Pokémon GO was really successful– it would be surprising if we didn’t get the next iteration of that during the Saturn Return. And that is a thing about both January as well as February which we’ll come to is that this is the end, these are the drags, the results of Saturn in Aquarius, we’re just about done. And so yeah, there’s a little bit of a retrospective quality. It’s almost an epilogue, I would say at this point. You know, , we’ve had these sort of big dramatic, climactic, fixed T-Square fixed opposition configurations, but we’re coming up on a conjunction of the Sun and Saturn in Aquarius this month, and it’ll be the last for a long time. But this is the epilogue, this is the results. This is the raising of the shire. Hopefully not. [laughs] In terms of epilogue.
CB: Well, for some people it’s more positive than that. It’s been interesting seeing some of the Saturn and Aquarius people finishing up their Saturn returns and getting to that final stage like you were saying, the epilogue stage, where they’ve kind of made it at this point and it’s winding down. And some of the ones that were success stories where it went relatively well, you’re seeing the results of that at this point now that Saturn’s getting ready to depart from Aquarius here in the next month or two. One of the ones that I had been paying attention to since 2020 was Miley Cyrus, because she has this just amazingly placed Saturn in the 10th house of career. And back in 2020, I made a tweet just sort of trying to call it and just being like, Miley Cyrus is going to be a Saturn Return success story. Because when I looked at her chart, she… Here, I’ll pull it up for those watching the video version of this. She has late Taurus rising with Saturn at 13 degrees of Aquarius conjunct the degree of the midheaven at eight Aquarius, and it’s in a day chart. It’s in its own domicile, it’s in the 10th house, and it also has this very nice Trine from Jupiter which is at eight degrees of Libra trining both the degree of the midheaven as well as Jupiter and thus [bonafying] Saturn, while Saturn is also in aversion to Mars which is down there in Cancer. Anyway, she just released a new single titled Flowers last week and it’s debuted already on the Billboard like number one, and I think has quickly become one of her most successful songs I think ever. So she’s enjoying wild success right now and the music video for it which kind of went viral just shows her dancing gleefully while also expressing coming out of this long-term relationship that didn’t go well for her but that she’s happy to be free of. And I thought that was such a great metaphor for a Saturn Return.
BR: Or even the fact that I guess that that music video she filmed at the location where her ex was persistently cheating on her, and so there’s this kind of like, “All right, yeah. This Saturnian shitty thing that happened, I’m gonna turn that to my advantage and then just put it right there in the 10th house for everyone to see. Maybe there’s something there too about the… I know this for Venus in Capricorn would have the double whammy Venus return because of those retrogrades on [unintelligible] 2022.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And just making something positive out of something that was difficult. Or being able to showcase one’s challenges or trauma or hardships but then to overcome them and still come out on top in the end, that’s a real positive version of the Saturn Return story or manifestation.
AC: Yeah. It is, Chris, a really good example of just a positive Saturn placement and then a return on that. Because when you have Saturn’s favour, you’re confirmed. Right? Your success is confirmed, you’re established. It confirms that she is an established fixture in the music industry. Saturn ensconces, enthrones, enshrines. It puts you in a fortified position, right? A position that’s not easy to assail and that is not fragile or as temporary as most success is.
CB: That’s actually a really good point that’s even more relevant for her, of course, because she was a child star and so many child stars have that struggle sometimes of having success earlier in life when they’re super young. But then sometimes that situation happens when sometimes people peak earlier or like what happens in the scenario where the height of your popularity is earlier in life and then you’re never able to like recapture that. Or in some instances, there’s an extreme drop off where a person really struggles in adulthood to find what to do or what their purpose or focus should be, or what have you. So her having a more positively placed Saturn both had that experience of success very early on, but she’s now been able to reinvent herself and continue to stay relevant in her chosen career field in a way that probably feels fulfilling, I assume.
AC: Yeah, it’s better than most alternatives. Sure.
BR: Interesting that you use the word ‘reinvent’. One of the things I was noticing as I was watching the video was that it was giving me Madonna the Vogue video vibes. The structured shoulders, definitely, and it’s like, “Okay, there’s a little fashion trend coming around there and I’m sure we could deconstruct that.” But it just felt like this very clear statement of, “Yeah, there is enough command of my identity that I can claim it and reshape it and mould it and then present to you this new edifice of my identity.” And that reinvention just felt like it was harkening back to the archetype of the person who can reinvent themselves, I think that’s what felt super Madonna-like to me in watching that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s a really good point. Has either of you noticed either any other Saturn Return stories lately that have come up with the Saturn in Aquarius people? Or does that make you think of any anecdotes from your own Saturn returns? Did you have good Saturn returns or bad Saturn returns?
BR: I had a great Saturn Return.
CB: Yeah, what was the setup versus what was the finish?
BR: The setup was as Saturn entered the sign, I ended on my bicycle, broke two teeth, and ended up not moving far away. And as a result– Saturn rules my seventh house and is in my sixth house– as a result, I ended up taking a random job that really sucked and I immediately realized I wanted to leave it. But I ended up meeting my partner there. And so met somebody through unfortunate circumstances, hated the job, really liked the person, ended up getting married, traveled abroad for the first time… So by the end of that Saturn Return I was like, “Oh, all these other qualities of Saturn is L seven in the sixth ruling my lots, doing other things infigured to everything.
CB: Yeah, that’s great. That’s classic Saturn Return.
AC: Yeah. I also have Saturn ruling my seventh, and so Kate and I got together. We got together just before my Saturn Return, but we moved in together I think within a week of Saturn’s ingress into Virgo. And then I think I tried to get the jump on my Saturn Return because six months earlier, I had made a solemn vow to myself that I was going to be a full-time astrologer and I was going to make a living doing that. And I wasn’t going to take any other jobs, I was just going to make this work, you know, burn the boats. And that was really hard for the time that Saturn was in Virgo. It was depressing, I was super broke, a lot of financial anxiety and shame. But by the end of it, I was doing it. So you know, I got a future wife and a career out of it, so not too bad.
CB: Nice. That’s pretty good.
BR: What about you, Chris?
CB: I mean, I had a lot of stuff I don’t want to go into, but it was a Saturn Return. I have Aquarius rising and Saturn’s up in my 10th so it was a lot of things tied in there at once. But I am excited now since it’s getting towards the end of Saturn in Aquarius, one thing we traditionally do on the Astrology Podcast is we do a Saturn Return retrospective. So I may put out an open call soon for people if they want to share their Saturn Return stories, if they’re finishing up a Saturn Return in Aquarius whether it’s their first or second or potentially even third, just to sort of do some field research to see how that went for everybody, and to understand the full range of different experiences now that we’re coming to the end of that transit and we can kind of learn something about it from hearing different people’s stories.
AC: One set of Saturn Return that’s almost self-explanatory is a lot of the former Soviet bloc nations are having their Saturn Return and the European Union, the chart that I favor, is also a Saturn in Aquarius. And I would say that Europe, both East, West, North and South, has gone through a lot recently. And things are definitely different moving forward.
CB: Yeah, for sure. As well as we’ve talked a lot over the past few years about the Saturn Return of the worldwide web and the internet and some of the different things that have happened with that over the past few years, and the sort of turning point that it’s reached. Go ahead.
BR: This may be an odd Saturn Return after our Aquarius episode, I was looking into the My Stroke of Insight TED Talk that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presented back in 2008, and was realizing that Saturn and Neptune were conjunct when Neptune was discovered 25 degrees of Aquarius, so we’re about to have a Saturn Return of Saturn’s position when Neptune was discovered. It’s kind of like a weird thing but it does feel like there are some Neptunian themes around that augmented reality, blurring of reality like Austin- Like that power of belief, I think Jupiter-Neptune conjunction kind of highlighting it, but also almost a self-conscious awareness of the ways in which technologies redefined the limits of what’s possible, redefined the limits of what we can imagine. The way that Titanic and the submarine that was used to film that movie did, the way that multiple movies that James Cameron has released have done that. And so it feels like in this time in this year, the way in which– at least as astrologers but I feel like even the cultural zeitgeist has its finger with a little bit more self-awareness and to the blurring of things to the alternative facts and all of that. People are more aware of that propagandizing quality of narrative of belief as more structure and solidity to that.
AC: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s interesting. As you were talking, I was just thinking about the Saturn in Aquarius years. I mean, the Saturn in Capricorn and in Aquarius is just the extremely strong Saturn where the things that are heavy and solid and onerous are very clear in a lot of ways. People’s explanations and ideas about them diverge wildly, but there’s this core of hardship, or a core made of many hardships that was actually pretty solid. And I’m wondering as Saturn goes into Pisces and joins Neptune if even that sort of disperses. Not like the center cannot hold, but even moving into a phase where there’s not even a clear thing to argue over. If that makes sense. When you were talking about, especially when you mentioned the submarine, I just imagined being under the water. And one of the things that Saturn when it’s strong does is it orients you by gravity, right? Like a scary thing, a dangerous thing, an onerous thing… Centre your consciousness. Like, “Oh, I have to do this or else. Or I have to do this, but I don’t want to do this.” It’s very clear cut in its own way because it has a center of gravity, but I was just thinking about being in the ocean or any other large body of water where gravity still exists but its influence is far less. And you can get confused. People get confused when they’re deep down between up and down. Which, you know, is one thing that kills deep sea divers. I don’t know, that kind of feels like where we’ll be in not very long.
BR: Yeah, something there made me think about Ender’s Game but also this; I was talking with my partner earlier this morning about like, okay, I’m trying to find a bunch of news and isn’t it strange that back when we didn’t have the internet and 24-hour news cycles, it was a little bit easier to access a broad collection of many news events over a certain period of time. But because there’s so much, there’s a deluge of data that you drown in it. And it’s kind of hard to constantly be digesting or swimming in every single life and death consequential, harsh reality all day every day. Eventually even if that’s true, even if it’s important to know about, you still have to go do some grocery shopping and make dinner. You can’t just try to solve all of the problems all of the time. There’s other stuff that has to get done.
AC: Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because I had that exact same experience over the last couple of weeks. I literally found myself being like, “You know what? There’s a real hole in the market if somebody could just tell me about events that have happened” Because every time I would go to try to learn about a thing that had happened, it was two minutes of reporting and then 15 minutes of fucking opinions and trying to match it to various narratives. I was like, “I don’t care about your mid-level fucking interpretation, just tell me what you could have told me about eight stories in the time that you gave me a bunch of repeated opinions.” I mean, there’s still… Reuters is useful but Reuters doesn’t do a good job of ranking the consequential and the inconsequential. The Economist actually used to be really good for that, they used to be my go to. I feel like they’ve just been sliding and are much more editorial than they were like five years ago. If you find something, let me know.
BR: Yeah, I will. I’ve been trying to find those sources of information but also having this like… Well, it tracks and it makes sense given Neptune being in Pisces, that we would have this casting of the net so broad and so wide that… There’s that, I don’t know who the quote belongs to or who to attribute it to, rather, but that quote lamenting that in this day and age, somebody’s opinion is viewed just as widely as another person’s facts or another person’s collection of real evidence. Until we end up in this weird echo chambery bubble.
AC: Yeah, I want to jump in on that image of the net, right? If we talk about casting a very broad net, if we look at where that’s actually done which is industrial fishing, when these boats cast the gigantic dragnets, I’m sure they’ll get some of the actual creatures they’re looking for but you get tonnes of other shit. You know, you have dolphins and whales and all sorts of species, and it’s very wasteful and confusing. I feel like that’s definitely a Neptune in Pisces thing. I was like, “Okay, I wasn’t really paying attention the news last week, what happened?” And there were some of the actual stories, but I believe dolphins were killed in making many of those YouTube videos. [laughs] I felt like a dolphin being killed watching some of them.
CB: Yeah, I think we’re gonna look back on this period. I’ve been reflecting more and more over the past few months this period of Neptune in Pisces and how it’s been like the Wild West in terms of this early stage of the internet, especially with YouTube channels and podcasts and everything else that’s allowed on the one hand… The complete likely unrestricted nature of it has allowed a lot of cool things to flourish including astrology and some of the other metaphysical or cool things lately that have exploded over the past decade, but it’s also allowed for the flourishing of a lot of not great things. And I think when Neptune goes into… When it leaves Pisces and it goes into Aries, I think we’re going to look back on this period and realise that there were some really positive ways that that sort of Wild West thing allowed some great things to flourish, but then also looking back on it and realizing what we lost a little bit in that as well. So I guess we’re talking- That’s like what? Two, three years from now, Neptune in Aries?
AC: Yeah. I don’t know. Neptune in Pisces, it’s almost more like that mid phase when corporate interests started moving into the partially organized… There was enough known about the West like, “Oh, there’s a lot of money.” And then you had the Pinkertons come in, and a lot of the very much– how should we say? Grassroots isn’t the right term, but the people there just doing things without a central authority. But you had big interests kind of moving in, tentacling in, but it wasn’t the phase where it’s just America now. It’s sort of that weird middle phase where you have larger, more organizing powers. You know what I mean? You also have that sort of wild whatever that was left over from the first decade. Does that make sense?
CB: Yeah.
AC: It makes it more confusing than if it’s, you know, than the first phase or the phase that followed.
CB: Yeah, I noticed in the last two episodes I did, we talked a little bit about skeptics of astrology and that whole community. And it’s been interesting that for whatever reason over the past decade, during this time where there’s been this simultaneous rise in the popularity of astrology, there was also an unrelated decline in the skeptic community, where the skeptic community is much more all over the place and not organized and had a whole loss of leadership over the past decade. I feel like a lot of that somehow connected to this Neptune in Pisces transit. I remember, Austin, you talked about the last time Neptune was in Pisces coincided with that period of interest in spiritualism and stuff like that in the 1800s.
AC: Yeah, the first year we got the famous Seance sisters. And then doing seances, talking to dead people became a cool respectable thing to do on a Saturday night.
AC: Yeah. I mean, that is still your Saturday nights I think, last time I heard. [laughter]
AC: Yeah, that’s probably the most appropriate night.
CB: Yeah, I agree.
BR: It’s interesting thinking back to the last Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces which I talked about at ISAR. And looking at that period of westward expansion, that is when the Lewis and Clark Expedition happened and one of the things I talked about at that lecture and I’ve been thinking about even today is that whose perspective grounds the story changes very dramatically almost entirely what’s going on, to the extent that it could even be one reporter talking about two different worlds– Lewis and Clark Expedition in particular. Like, if you recenter and you tell that story from the perspective of the indigenous folks who are experiencing the contact that never stops if not the first contact, then it becomes a very different story. Even though it’s still about waterways and expansion and redrawing borders and whatnot.
AC: You almost get more of the tsunami quality of oceanic Pisces. And one of the things that’s really interesting to me that I’ve seen in my own life and read about is that when people dream of floods and it corresponds to events in the world, it often means a big restructuring of society, a massive and disruptive change coming that usually isn’t a flood. For example, Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist dreamed of a giant flood sweeping over Europe right before World War One. And I had all of these weird flood omens right before COVID started. And I didn’t understand. I understood that I was like, “Okay, that’s the third out-of-nowhere flood thing directed right towards me.” Anyway, I’m just thinking about that. You know, like the westward expansion as a devastating flood.
BR: Yeah, there are a lot of tsunamis to track and other mass disasters. And even just in terms of the astrology of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been here in California where it felt like a bad storm relative to my memory of living up in Washington as a kid. Flood from the sky, essentially. There has been massive flooding and huge storm surge that went upriver down in Santa Cruz and people being evacuated and stuff in ways that isn’t normal and doesn’t really have a prior context or precedent.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. So going back to some of the technology talk and the Saturn in Aquarius stuff, to follow up on something I talked about that I just started to discover and which just started happening when we recorded the Year Ahead forecast in early to mid-December, was the whole AI thing. Artificial Intelligence thing has just been blowing up like crazy, especially through this company OpenAI and their product ChatGPT, which is just coming up in news stories over and over again at this point. I kept messing with it. I kept playing with it basically after we did the forecast episode and trying to get it to do different things to see what it could do. And I kept getting it progressively what I thought were harder and harder things to do, but it kept impressing me. At first, and I think I may have shown this on the Year Ahead forecast, I told it to delineate Venus conjunct Mercury in a birth chart and it gave a pretty nice little delineation. So a few days later after the Year Ahead forecast, I was like, “Okay, do a delineation of Mercury conjunct Venus, but put it in the form of a poem.” And I was like it’s not going to do that very well. And then I asked it to do it, and it did it! And it spit this poem out that is actually pretty good. So I posted this on Instagram with the image that made it look like I had written it at first. It says, “Mercury and Venus, conjunct in the chart, bring together communication in the heart. A harmonious blend of words and feeling, diplomacy and understanding, a rare and special healing. A love of beauty, aesthetics, and art. An eye for detail, a creative heart. Luxury and indulgence, the finer things in life. With this placement, so much joy and beauty rife.” So I posted that and I was like, “And that was written by an Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the future.” And half of Instagram was really impressed and the other half was very horrified, basically, which I think is going to be a recurring reaction over the next several years as we continue to see this technology expand more and more. So I gave it that challenge and I thought that was really pretty impressive. Then I was just like, “What’s something absurd to take it to the next level?” And so I said, “Okay, delineate Mercury conjunct Venus, but put it in the form of a rap song by the rapper Eminem.” And about five… It thought about it and five/ten seconds later, it produced this rap song and it says verse one, “Yo, what’s up, y’all? It’s your boy, Eminem. I’m here to drop some knowledge on the astrological scene. Got a question about Mercury conjunct Venus in the birth chart? Well, let me break it down and give you a fresh start.” And it starts the chorus. “Mercury conjunct Venus? Ain’t that some shit. It’s a cosmic alignment, yo. You can’t miss it.” And it just keeps going on and gives two verses and a chorus. “It’s a cosmic alignment, you can’t miss it. It’s all about communication and love, ain’t that combo you’re thinking of? So, what does it mean when these two planets align? Well, it’s all about the way you communicate and shine. You’re natural at expressing yourself and your love life is sure to be off the shelf.” And then it repeats the chorus, and later the bridge is, “But it’s not all sunshine and roses, there can be challenges and challenges. It’s important to find balance and harmony and not let the ego get in the way of unity.” And then it continues with the chorus and it just keeps going on. So I laughed. My initial reaction was I laughed hysterically when I saw that because I did not expect it to actually produce that, but this AI having taken in and searched a huge part of the internet in 2021 when it was trained, of course has access to all of the lyrics of all of the Eminem songs. So it just tried to match and use that to inform while combining with the delineation of Mercury conjunct Venus. I just thought that was wild. We’re in some weird futuristic stages if stuff like that’s true, especially if this is just the beginning. If this is the initial phase of this, where is this going to be in five or 10 or 20 years, you know?
AC: I don’t think ChatGPT is a very dope [MC]. I think [Chuck D] can rest easily and safely, I think it’ll be a while. But one of the things that’s interesting is it does… A lot of this AI output really shines a light on how formulaic a lot of human expression is. There are rules governing their syntax, there’s rules governing a lot of this stuff that is quote-unquote “artistic”.
CB: And in astrology in particular. I think that’s why it’s actually doing so well with astrology, it’s because astrology is a language, and this AI is specifically designed for language models. That’s why it’s actually able to do things relatively effectively.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. Right. And so in some ways, I think it will do a nice job of framing what the human is uniquely capable of, right? Because a machine can replicate patterns that it has had input into it. It’s good. I think in some ways… Because people, if we are talking about works of art, to be trite and derivative is for something to be a not good work of art. Which means that you’re just repeating a formula that was previously established, right? And so it seems like there will increasingly be less room for trite and derivative human artists or would-be artists, which is okay because they weren’t creating the good stuff. They were literally just ChatGPTing better works anyway. It also reminds me of– have either of you read the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin?
CB: No.
AC: It’s the lesser-known sibling of 1984 in Brave New World. It was dystopian fiction from the first half of the 20th century. I remember, I don’t know, 20 years ago. I read Brave New World in 1984 and I was reading something and I was like, “Oh, you really… You’ve gotta read We.” And what’s interesting is We– which is a more Eastern European sort of take on it– in that dystopia, all of the music is basically produced by AI. He doesn’t use the term AI but it’s the same thing that scooped up and sorted through all of the great works of music, and then just creates music that has the structure to evoke whatever specific emotional effect it’s supposed to have. Because you can easily teach using that. Okay, so minor key blah blah blah. This will make people feel melancholy, this will make major keys. I don’t know much music theory but you know, this will make people feel good. And I believe there’s literature that’s also done that way in We, it’s been a long time. But that’s the dystopia that got this piece. It’s a short read, it’s a short good read if you want to complete the classical dystopia trilogy. We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
CB: All right. Yeah, we’ll check it out. Anyway, so that was wild. It was in the news. Interestingly, at the beginning of the Mars Retrograde in Gemini, there were all these different instances in the news of accusations of cheating in chess or in poker and other stuff like that last fall. The more recent one as Mars was stationing direct was stories about students starting to use this AI in order to cheat and write exams or write papers for them, basically, and teachers starting to panic over how do we tell if a student has actually written their term paper versus if they just asked an AI to write it in five seconds. It was an interesting continuation of that with Mars in Gemini in that whole retrograde, but I feel like this whole AI thing it’s not going anywhere. This is basically the future, so I feel like astrologers have to learn how to adapt to and work with and deal with this. Because I think even if we don’t like it, it’s not just going to go away because we don’t like it. So that’s going to be part of the future and especially in terms of the astrological community.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. A few more things about that Mars now that you mentioned it, one big deal in January. Mercury in Gemini is the natural place for games, right? Mercury’s playful, likes competitive games. You know, competitive collaborative, whatever. There was a huge hullabaloo around Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, part of the reason it’s so successful is that they’ve had basically an open licence– the Open Gaming Licence, the OGL– which allows any other company to make adventures and content for the game for free. Like, we could write a D&D adventure using that rule set and publish it and not have to pay D&D anything. That’s been ensconced for decades and it’s part of the reason there’s so much D&D content. So Hasbro now owns Wizards of the Coast which owns Dungeons & Dragons. And Hasbro is a very typical giant corporation and they tried to revoke the open licence, so that anybody doing anything with the D&D rules would have to pay them. And there was an unprecedented and massive revolt against this. The entire tabletop Internet came together and Hasbro was forced to retract the retraction. This is the beginning of the month, retrograde Mars ruled by the retrograde Mercury. They’re like, “Oh, we’ve heard the players and blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re not going to do this, we’ll come back with something else.” So there was that. There was also, again, Mars in Gemini were looking for twinned or doubled forms, and so on season 15 of RuPaul’s Drag Race which premiered during this time, for the first time ever there are a pair of contestants who are twins. Who are identical twins who perform together sugar n spice. And spoiler alert… All right, that’s enough time to turn it off if you’re just catching up. Early on in the season, they were the bottom two and were forced to compete against each other and one got sent home. This was filmed during the Mars Retrograde, you know, Mars in Gemini Mars Retrograde, and premiered right around Mars direct. And so for the rest of the season or for as long as they last, we will see one twin cut off from the other. That’s like Mars trouble in twin town. I’m very excited to see if they rise to the occasion and understand themselves as an individual better, or if they just bleed from their second half or their other half being torn away. Also with Mars in Gemini going direct looking at the sphere of Mars looking at the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, I talked last month on the Yearly about Mars stationing direct on Aldebaran and how Aldebaran is about big, heavy, substantial things from big trains slowly leaving the station, the movement of lots of material and what that’s ended up being. Or unprecedented shipments of heavy equipment from NATO allies to Ukraine. We have Bradleys and strikers and I believe there’s some European main battle tanks, but it’s just a tonne of heavy equipment that’s literally loaded onto heavy trains moving into the Ukraine theatre. And then I suppose if we’re talking of big, heavy, slow things, Russia’s conscription or mobilization which happened around right as the Mars Retrograde was starting or getting ready to start has sort of reached the front line, so you have the massive heaviness on that side as well beginning to move forward. You have Russia right now slowly encircling Bakhmut, and so that big heavy substantial starting-to-move-forward quality is present on both sides now that Mars is direct and conjunct Aldebaran. But that was just very literal.
CB: Yeah, that’s amazing. Leisa Schaim pointed out to me last night that Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, when Jupiter went back into Aries in December not that long ago, that was Jupiter going back into Zelenskyy’s 11th house. And he came to the US and gave a speech in front of Congress. And now, of course, we’re into the 11th house of friends and now of course a lot of different countries in Europe as well as the US are re-doubling their efforts to send aid and send military assistance and things like that recently over the past several weeks. That’s kind of interesting like an 11th house transit, positive transit from through the house of friends, and literally having allies sort of supporting you, essentially. We’ll see how that goes in the future. All right, very last news story that I had before I get on the forecast, there’s this funny social media exchange that happened a couple of weeks ago where the actor Andrew Garfield was on the red carpet and he did this really quick interview with a journalist named Amelia Dima Oldenburg. And they were kind of flirting, but there was some astrological lingo dropped during the course of their little brief exchange that went viral. And I thought it was really striking if you watch the exchange, I don’t think I can play it here for copyright reasons, but just to sort of summarise it, he ended up asking her her Sun sign and she replied Aquarius, but then he gave a reaction to it. He was like, “Oh, Aquarius,” sort of a facial reaction. And she says, “That’s your Moon sign?” almost with a question mark. And then he looks at her surprised and he starts to say how did you know that, basically? And then he looks at her knowingly because he realized that it meant that she had looked up his birth chart. Because he only know somebody’s Moon sign if you’ve looked up their actual chart. So it was a funny little astrology flirting exchange by a couple of nerdy Aquariuses, or an Aquarius Sun and Aquarius Moon. He mentioned astrology and people have posted other links where he’s talked about Saturn returns and Sun Moon synastry and other stuff like that. So one of the subtle news stories of that is that Andrew Garfield seems to either know quite a bit about astrology or actually maybe be a part-time amateur astrologer himself, it seems almost, if we can say that. If his knowledge of astrology sort of raises to that level which it almost seems to, which is kind of interesting since he’s a pretty well-known actor for his work in the social network a decade ago. He was one of the actors that played Spider-Man before the current one who’s been Spider-Man for the past few movies. So, funny little exchange. Have either of you done any astrological flirting like that where your astrological skills have suddenly become very useful for having that sort of exchange with somebody? I know, Austin, are you both in relationships with astrologers or people that are astrology friendly?
AC: Yes, I am.
BR: My partner knows what the symbol for Chiron looks like, and I’m very proud of them for achieving that.
CB: Nice, that’s good. That’s a good start. Yeah. Well, and there’s pros and cons– we’ve talked about it on the podcast before of astrologers either dating or having relationships with other astrologers versus not. And there’s definitely pros and cons either way. But this is a very funny and interesting high-profile exchange with astrology. And I think it’s just shown also just how far astrology has come lately in the public consciousness where it used to be just everybody knew their Sun sign but that was it, but now people are exchanging Moon signs and rising signs and all sorts of stuff and it’s kind of interesting the level that it’s gotten to.
AC: Yeah, it reminds me of the 60s where astrology came back into intersection with the counterculture which would become the mainstream shortly. And you know, with Neptune in Pisces, we expected this to some degree but not to this degree. But we may be at the end of the crest of the wave, but there’s a certain level of saturation which will just be here for a while. Like, people just know about it in the way they haven’t for decades.
BR: Yeah, it makes me think about what you said about the rise of spiritualism when Neptune was in Pisces back in the 1800s. And then at some point most people were like, “Oh, yeah, seance. I’ve heard about that. Let’s organize a seance for dinner party!” People are like, “Yeah, let’s have astrology-themed everything; tote bags, blankets, shawls, journals.”
CB: Right.
BR: We are, of course, astrologers. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, and that reminds me of a few days ago Jenn Zahrt was recently– shout out to Jenn Zahrt just got elected for the ISAR board, and is now a board member on the International Society for Astrological Research. But she was doing like a literature review because she wanted to know more about the institutional history of ISAR, so she started going back and reading their old journals at her astrological library that she has been building in Oregon, the Kaylee Institute which I’m actually giving a talk for next month which I’ll plug at the end of this episode. But she found this funny old 2004 article in the ISAR journal by Moses Siregar titled The Future of Astrology, where he’s talking about the Association for Young Astrologers which was recently founded at that point. And he has this interesting little anonymous tidbit from some 19-year-old punk who he doesn’t name at the time, but it sounds very familiar. But listen to this paragraph. It says quote, “I just found out about this group today, the Association for Young Astrologers. I’m 19 and I’ve been studying astrology intensely for about three years now and I’m getting pretty good at it. I was accepted to Kepler College in December and I just finished my first term astrology in mediaeval civilizations. I really love it there and I would definitely recommend it. It’s exciting for me to find a group like this because it’s been really depressing coming to the realization that there aren’t many young astrologers my age out there.” I don’t know why that was anonymous but sounds like me. I think I was the only 19-year-old at Kepler College in 2004 fresh out of high school, but it also just has shown me how far things have come where, you know, I was 19 in the mid 2000s and just lamenting there weren’t any other younger astrologers my age. And then over the past few years, there’s just been a sudden influx of this whole other generation of people. And it’s really heartening to see that and to see astrology continuing to thrive and flourish and be passed on from generation to generation. Yeah. All right, I think that’s good for this sort of view. Oh, do you have something?
BR: Yeah, I guess one small-ish comment. What you said about AI made me think about this idea that– well, both of your comments about AI that there are no original ideas and ChatGPT is basically just remixing a bunch of old tropes and cliches that people fed to it. But then it is really creating anew. Like with the Lensa AI, there’s been a lot of artists who are up in arms about it and it’s really making the conversation around copyright reemerge. And so I just did a quick little look and the first big– maybe not first big copyright case, but a really big copyright case that was relevant to hip hop specifically, thinking about the way that jazz and hip hop are very American and uniquely American art forms that are derivative, that’s part of what that is musically; jazz takes common themes or common melodic sections from music and drifts on it. That’s what big band music is and hip hop is very similar, it kind of takes that jazz approach. In that first big case with Grand Upright Music Ltd versus Warner Brothers was December 17th, 1991 and Saturn was like four degrees Aquarius. So I’m wondering if the combination of AI and, you know, we’re on the verge of the neural net link or uplink or the matrix. We’re very close to being jacked into the matrix, our literal brains. And if people are able to hop online with an implant in their head, and all it takes is thinking thoughts that then get fed into AI’s data collection, then that’s going to blur the line between what is a thought and what is the collection of AI harvesting thoughts? I don’t know, just copyright the augmented reality. What’s an original idea? What’s not an original idea? What does it even mean to be a person having a thought? It seems like all of that may be coming up as Pluto gets closer to that degree.
CB: Yeah. And there’s always a tension in art and creativity between creating something that’s new and unique versus sometimes the creative repackaging or taking influence from earlier things. Star Wars, for example, repackaged a lot of stuff like serials from George Lucas’s youth in a new package, but it was wildly popular. Or even Avatar 2, he really follows the playbook of how you do a sequel, and he hits all the normal beats of if you’ve seen any of James Cameron’s sequel movies, do the same thing from the first movie but then add a little bit to it or add a twist to it. And that’s basically what he did just past the $2 billion mark. So even if something’s derivative or inspired by earlier things, that doesn’t always automatically mean it’s not actually well-received by the public or doesn’t become influential itself. But yeah, there’s always this tension between the past and the future, or creativity versus being influenced by the past when it comes to art. That’ll be a really interesting dialogue that obviously has become really intense lately.
Yeah. All right, I think that’s good for review. I want to get into the forecast for next month. I did need to mention though, first our sponsor for this month, which is our friends over at Archetypal Explorer which is an online astrology program that you can use in order to track your transits as well as track the astrology that’s happening in the world in general. Archetypal Explorer was built for astrology enthusiasts and it provides astrological tools such as a horoscope chart, visual transit timeline, calendar, and it provides reference guides with interpretations. So if you’ve seen any of the transit graphs that we’ve used on the podcast here over the past few years that takes a transit and plots it on a graph that shows the peak of the graph when the two planets are getting close to the exact aspect and then the graph declining as it’s moving away from the exact aspect, all of that’s from Archetypal Explorer. It’s got some really useful stuff, including some delineations from a book by Richard Tarnas that I don’t think he’s published yet, that provides actual very detailed delineations of each of these transits so that you can kind of understand them and maybe get a different perspective from some of the more classic books like Rob Hand’s Planets in Transit, which is one of the only other transit books that’s been out there forever. So it’s great for planning things and you can get- It’s a membership-based program with a free seven-day trial if you want to try it out. So visit archetypalexplorer.com in order to learn more. I think you’ve both used the program before, right?
BR: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, definitely. We’ve benefited immensely from having those visualizations in a number of podcasts, but especially when we were tracking some of the more ominous intense ones over the last couple years like Saturn-Uranus and Saturn-Pluto and the Mars-Saturn. It’s really been an invaluable visualization tool.
CB: Yeah, you were just talking about the Saturn… You just did a Saturn election the other day and you were talking about needing to get distance from the Saturn-Uranus square first before you would do that election, and it just reminded me of that graph that we’ve been using from Archetypal Explorer for two or three years now that just showed those waves of Saturn-Uranus that we’ve been going through.
AC: Yeah, I waited… Sphere and Sundry, Kate and I waited until the very end of the right side when the arc went back into the dirt and Uranus was no longer stirring the capital of Saturn every day before doing some magic.
CB: That’s smart. Yeah. You’ve used it as well, Bear?
BR: Yeah, it’s great. I’m looking to see if I have my… I really like it because I have actually done things like draw a whole little poster trying to plot out the relationship between different synodic cycles. Like with my ISAR talk about the Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions and even some of the… You would have heard, it would’ve have been like an astrologer to hear me talk about these sort of things but I’ve been looking at astrological generations, but through the lens of synodic cycles, not planetary and aggresses. I think those are secondary and only give us detail, and that it’s synodic cycles that define generations. And Archetypal Explorer is great for seeing stuff like that and playing around with that data.
CB: Nice. Awesome. All right, cool. Well, people can check that out at archetypalexplorer.com. So, shoutout to them. Oh yeah, last thing, this is no longer topically relevant but I decided to make a Christmas tree this year but I decided to make it astrologer-nerdy and put some… I found some planetary ornaments like a little Saturn ornament or Jupiter or little Uranus ornament just to make things a little festive, so I just want to share that really quickly. I was pretty proud of that, first time doing a Christmas tree in 20 years.
BR: Yes, strange benefits of astrology’s heyday.
CB: Exactly. Got to make use of it while you can. All right, let’s talk about the astrology of February. I’m going to put up the chart of the moment and I’m going to put up the… I’m going to animate the chart using Solar Fire and I’m going to move it forward to February 1st. All right. So this is the opening of the month on February 1st. We begin the month, of course, on February with the Sun in Aquarius, Saturn in late Aquarius. Mercury is midway through Capricorn but at this point it’s moving fast. It’s moving faster than its average daily motion by the time we open February, so it’s going to cruise right on out of Capricorn here after the first part of the month. Venus opens in the sign of Pisces and spends most of the month moving through the sign of Pisces where it will eventually catch up to and conjoin Neptune. Jupiter now is firmly in Aries and is sailing fully away from that Jupiter-Neptune conjunction that we were experiencing in December. Mars, though, is the one planet that’s still moving extremely slowly and still coming off of it station. It’s taking forever to gain steam. It is up to 10 degrees Gemini by the first of the month, but that’s still only like two degrees off of where it stationed at eight degrees of Gemini. So my condolences to anybody that had anything at eight to 10 degrees of the mutable signs that’s been dealing with that, but your transit will be gone soon. And then finally, the last thing is Uranus recently stationed in Taurus. It’s still moving slowly, it still opens the month at 14 degrees of Taurus where it’s been sitting for quite a while and having an intensification of that transit, but it will quickly move into 15 degrees and will start picking up steam and finally moving out of those mid degrees of the fixed signs finally as it starts moving into the later degrees and the third decan of Taurus this year. That is how the month opens. What should we start with? What should we discuss first? What stands out about the first week of February to either of you?
AC: Well, I would say the first thing is just that although Venus is in a happy place in Pisces, there’s a Venus-Mars square which is just very close and just about the perfect as the month opens. And so you know, Mars-Venus squares are erotic, scandalous and contentious within relationships. It’s really a mix of those three depending on who you are and what you do. But after whatever friction or fire is there, Venus is going to be in a very happy condition in Pisces having passed that square to Mars for a lot of the rest of the month. So even though the relational sphere is troubled at first, that’s initial and then things get smoother and smoother. When Venus is in a strong position such as the exaltation in Pisces, it’s easier to relate to people. It’s also easier to enjoy things generally, which puts people in a better mood which makes them easier to relate to. There’s a lot to be said with Venus and the concept of lubrication; just making things run smoothly, right? No shrieking gears or friction. So once we get past that, there’s enough engine oil for a lot of the month.
CB: Yeah, it looks like that Venus-Mars square goes exact not long before the Full Moon that happens on the 5th of February in Leo. So it seems like that Full Moon, part of the signature really is that Venus-Mars square that you mentioned and some of the tensions between those two planets, not to mention the placement of Uranus which is very closely square the degree of the Full Moon at 16 degrees of Leo, and Uranus is at 15 degrees of Taurus. So on the one hand, that Full moon has that unexpected surprise or that rebelliousness or that drive for freedom type component with a square from Uranus. And then at the same time, we have that tension between Venus and Mars. What were those keywords that used for that, Austin? Those were really good at the beginning.
AC: Oh, what did I say? I said that Venus-Mars is erotic, scandalous, and… There was a third word… Contentious.
CB: Contentious. Okay. Yeah, I think those are really good keywords for that because, you know, Mercury and Mars- Sorry, Mars in Gemini has been kind of argumentative. Gemini is already a very talkative sign, and putting Mars in there there’s just been more of a debate dynamic. Having Venus, though, move into the superior square and trying to smooth out some of what Mars is doing, one of the questions is like how successful Venus can be at getting Mars to calm down and make peace after a period of sort of intense argumentativeness or contentiousness.
BR: Yeah. Looking at the Mars in Gemini, I think it is a pretty obvious and immediate metaphor to reach to and to go to, like Mars in a word-based sign or a sign that has to do with words. So it’s swords or spicy words or fighting words. But I’ve also been thinking about Mars. Like, Mars is construction, Mars is the builder. So Mars has been busy doing the demo part of the remodeling project and now Venus is like, “Great, cool. You tore down that wall, time for the interior decoration. This would make this prettier, thanks for tearing that down, I still need you to knock down that one last wall or haul out this debris.”
CB: Definitely. It’s time to start building something now that you’ve sort of destroyed everything over a period of time, and what does the rebuilding the redecorating effort look like.
BR: One thing that stands out to me is thinking about the fact that the New Moon had Venus– the New Moon in Aquarius that we’ve already experienced– had Venus really close to Saturn. And now with the Full Moon, that Full Moon squares the last eclipse. So we’re midway from one eclipse to the next eclipse, and now Venus is forming a trine to one node and a sextile to the other node. And so it feels like that Venusian artistic, the beauty, the diplomacy, the lubrication, leave that one there with the third decan of Pisces. But the lubrication seems like it’s also very useful to the things that Mars is trying to get us back into engaging.
CB: That’s a really good point.
AC: That’s a really good way to think of it in terms of… So Mars has done all of this stuff, a lot of it demo, but Mars still has and in some cases, the work that is ahead of Mars is now very certain. And so with Venus coming in, they’re sort of like, “What can be decorated? Because this room has been demoed so now we can sweep out the debris.” Versus you know, Mars is again very certain in its course now. Or if you think about it on an individual level if someone is that Mars Retrograde, they spent months kind of figuring out what the way forward was, and now they’re certain and beginning a heavy-footed trudge with a great degree of certainty in that direction. And some of what Venus has to offer will be like, “Well, but what if we just relaxed? Or what if dah dah dah?” Mars is like, “No, going in this direction.” But both sides because Mars is so certain now, it’s like, “Yes, this room can be made livable now. No, leave that room alone. That whole side of the building has to come down.” By the way, it’s really funny that you basically brought the image of a sledge for doing demo. A big part of my Mars in Gemini activity routine has been swinging maces. And to warm up, I use a sledgehammer and then I use heavier maces. But it’s three feet of stick with a heavy on the end. So that’s when I…
BR: Interesting.
CB: I like that you mentioned… So this is the halfway point between eclipses, this Full Moon in Leo. And while it’s not itself an eclipse because it’s the next square after the eclipses that occurred in October and November, this is going to be the next turning point or development that will build into the next set of eclipses, especially the next one in Scorpio three months from now. So whatever was started if there was some sort of major turning point or thing that was begun under the eclipses in October or in November, because usually I say those represent a great beginning or great ending, the next phase in that story is going to happen now at these eclipses which are square to the nodes or at this lunation which is square to the nodes.
BR: And it feels, you know, since November of 2021 the eclipses have been kind of picking up and pulling in parts of the Saturn-Uranus square. And this feels like the last lunation that’s going to really be plugged into that and now we finally get to go like, “Great. Cool, finally done with the Saturn-Uranus square. What do I take forward from this? How do I graduate?” The exit exam is happening now and then we get to be done and await our results.
CB: That’s a really great point. So the lunation itself is happening in Leo so it’s really shedding a light on a part of that fixed sign axis that otherwise hasn’t been emphasised. Of all the fixed signs, Scorpio has been getting hit by eclipses and it has the south node transiting through it. Taurus has Uranus going through it and it has the north node, and then Aquarius has Saturn going through over the past three years. Leo’s the only sign that otherwise is a little bit unrepresented in terms of the fixed signs and all those heavy transits. But here, we have a light being shown or a spotlight on that part of the Zodiac in that part of our charts all of a sudden that’s kind of tying in and maybe showing how that piece of it, while it hasn’t been the main emphasis, that there’s still stuff going on in the Leo sectors of our charts as well that’s tied in with that greater cluster of stuff.
AC: Yeah, it really shines a light on how the Leo sector has been affected by all of the fallout and all of the the cries coming from the other fixed signs. Leo is not the sight of these things, but it’s certainly been affected tremendously by it.
CB: Well, and now that I think of that– and that’s going to be a precursor to this summer when we’re going to get that Venus retrograde in Leo. And then all of a sudden, Leo is going to become, while it may have been underplayed in the past, it will become one of the highlighted signs and highlighted sectors of each of our charts for this entire year. Because that’s going to be a really major retrograde there that will take place over a 40-day period that summer. When is that? June to July or August-ish?
BR: It’s in August?
AC: Well, yeah. I think it’s almost four months of Venus in Leo.
CB: I actually have a graphic, here it is. Yeah, so shoutout to Stella from Reddit who designed this graphic for us. So the whole phase including the shadow periods is June 19th to October 7th but the actual retrograde starts at 28 Leo on July 22nd, and it retrogrades back to 12 degrees of Leo on September 3rd. So this lunation, this Full Moon that’s happening here in February is a nice precursor to that because it’s just a little priming the pump or kind of giving us a little heads up that the Leo sector of our charts is going to be receiving some action this year, and that’s going to get a lot louder this summer.
AC: Yeah. And especially with Saturn leaving Aquarius just in March, any part of the chart that’s Leo, any planets in Leo those have been locked down by Saturn for two and a half three years. Saturn often keeps things from changing quickly or smoothly. Saturn is the slow death, whereas the same planets in Leo have also been getting elephant goaded by Uranus in Taurus to go faster and to go faster change, change, change. And so with Saturn about to leave, the new dynamic for the Leo house planets in Leo is just going to be Uranus. And it’s of double importance because Uranus is in Taurus therefore answers to Venus, and it is Venus that will be in Leo for a third of the year. So the changes that were probably going to happen that there’s abundant evidence of things heading towards those, those are scheduled for this year. And Chris said, there’s a shadow of that during this Full Moon, but then the main show is later in the year in June, July, August, September.
BR: Yeah. It’s interesting that we’re talking about this because the Venus-Neptune conjunction I think is going to be quite important. I was re-listening to the Year Ahead forecast to prep for this and pulling a couple of themes and thinking about yeah, Saturn moving into Pisces is going to be this really significant moment of making the dream real. And Venus joining up with Neptune now seems like it’s this last chance for Venus and Neptune to be super dreamy and idealistic and just in the image and moved and affected without Saturn there harshing the whole mellow.
CB: Totally. So, like a bucket of cold water gets dumped on it in March when Saturn moves into Pisces.
BR: Yeah. So it’s almost like this– it’s not quite the right metaphor, but it feels like this kind of inception quality, like if we can think about the Neptunian impulses that are coming through Venus this first week, then we can spend those four months that Venus is retrograding thinking about, “What is this great work that I’m going to create next year?” So it feels like it’s a lot of subtle premonitions. It’s got that Neptunian, foggy, subtle, impressiony, imagination thing going on.
CB: Yeah, and that Venus-Neptune conjunction in Pisces that you’re talking about actually goes exact around the time that Valentine’s Day. It goes exact actually on February 15th to the day after, but it’s very very close essentially on Valentine’s Day that becomes one of the signatures for Valentine’s Day.
AC: Yeah, and it’s paired with the Sun’s conjunction with Saturn. Which is really interesting because they both occur at the same time, but they’re not relating at all. They’re not like mutually aspecting. It’s two houses on the block and one of them is having, I don’t know, a BR poetry orgy. And then the other is listening to the collected lectures of Henry Kissinger. It’s very Sun-Saturn real politic shit.
CB: That’s so funny that you mentioned that because I actually found a book, I was trying to get a book on AI and I got a book from… Oh yeah, it was one of the past CEOs of Google, Eric Schmidt. I got the book because it had his name on it but then it was like co-written by Henry Kissinger, and it was all about the geopolitical implications of AI and how countries needed to get on top of this because it was going to re-shape the world in terms of whoever was in control of it. Anyway, it’s funny that you mentioned that just because the Sun-Saturn conjunction, you’re right, that’s very much that. But it’s very different than the Venus-Neptune conjunction and this sort of dreamy, sort of erotic or romantic qualities of that that are so different from the harsh reality and the pessimism of the Sun-Saturn conjunction that’s happening over in Aquarius at the same time. It’s weird that we’re also getting some Moon aspects, some very different Moon aspects on the same day on Valentine’s Day. And not to dwell on it too much, but the day begins pretty positively and pretty optimistically with this Moon in early Sagittarius applying to a trine with Jupiter. But once it clears that trine with Jupiter that’s more positive and optimistic, it’s applying to an opposition with Mars all day. So there’s a little bit of a potential for some arguments, some blow ups, some emotionally quick responses on that day. Whereas the the day after is really the day where with that Venus-Neptune conjunction going exact, it’s a little bit smoother. Maybe we can postpone Valentine’s Day this year, do you think people would go for that? Just put it off like one day.
AC: I mean, I’ve tried.
CB: You’ve tried?
AC: I have a very well developed case for why Valentine’s Day is terribly scheduled as a holiday. We should be doing it based on, you know, at the very least it should be like Sun and a Venus-ruled sign. What I initially suggested was how about the day every year where the Sun occupies Venus’s degree of exaltation at the end of Pisces. That St. Patrick’s Day, which already has green and kissing and drinking. So that’s already like a Venusian holiday. Right? We strip out the nation state that it’s associated with. It’s literally like green, which is very often Venus. Like, Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Right? You’re supposed to have an awesome time. And so yeah, I need to talk to the Irish people in government about maybe making that a more universal Venusian day, because that seems a lot more fun than like, “Yay, it’s Sun at the end of Aquarius.” You know, it’s a real party.
CB: Yeah. And it could be like Easter where Easter is what? It’s the Sunday that follows the ingress of the Sun into Aries after X date or something like that. It’s a moving date.
BR: So we should make it complicated enough that they need an astrologer to schedule it for them.
AC: Yeah. I mean, I love a well-calculated, moveable feast. But yeah, it’s first full Full Moon after the Sun does the vernal equinox, and then it’s the Sunday following that. Which if you’re celebrating a resurrection, that’s very well timed. Right? The day has just begun to outpace the night, you’ve had the brightest night with a Full Moon and then you’re going to hit the day of the Sun? Good design. Good design
CB: To celebrate a resurrection, that’s great.
AC: Yeah, why can’t we do that for Venus?
CB: All right. Well, let’s start a petition and let’s see if we can get all the astrologers on the same page about what astrological alignment needs to be on Valentine’s day in the future. Let us know in the comments below this video on YouTube. So going back other aspects, one of the things we also need to talk about because we kind of skipped to the second week is just Mercury’s going to be clearing its shadow degrees and clearing the last decan of Capricorn during the first week and a half of the month. So it’s on the one hand, it’s retreading that old ground for the third time wrapping things up in a nice little picture, nice little bow, but also finishing that Mercury-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn on February 10th. And that’s the one that we talked about that’s always… All those Mercury-Pluto hard aspects often have this really intense quality to their communication, often trying to get to the bottom of things, sometimes having to do with disclosures and other stuff like that. It’s like some of the stuff in the news and it seems like everybody’s having top secret documents found at their private residences at this point; first with Biden, and then now more recently with Pence. And that may be tied to this whole Mercury Retrograde conjunct Pluto combination that’s happening at the same time. What are some of the keywords for this?
AC: Yes. So what’s really interesting about that– I think I mentioned this when we talked about it before but I’ve been thinking about it. So in the triplicity system of reckoning planetary rulers for decans, Mercury gets the third decan of Capricorn and what that looks like in practice is the issuing of an authoritative order or edict. It’s like an executive order, it’s a decree, it’s an edict, it’s official policy. A lot of times I think of that in terms of when I’m going to nail myself to a particular structure of work or I’m gonna get this done by then etcetera, etcetera and nailing that down ritually or otherwise. But what’s interesting is the Mercury Retrograde which began with this… Yeah, which began with Mercury in this decan and is then moving back by the second week of February, it’s about these official documents. The last part of Capricorn is often about official sanctioned power, and Mercury with these documents that are so authoritative, so important that you’re not allowed to do this or that with them is really fascinating.
BR: That is really fascinating. I just keep the word forensic, keeps coming to mind.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s part of that. Yeah, that’s the Pluto part. Right. The hidden ‘is it dead or not?’ And the digging things up from the underworld is very Pluto. I often teach and think about Pluto less as a character like a lot of the planets, but more like a gateway to the underworld like a cave mouth or hell mouth where you can both descend into that sort of universe B, but then there are also things that aren’t part of this world or you thought were long gone, which emerge out of nowhere. And in this case, it’s Mercurial stuff. Communications, especially authoritative communications.
BR: Interesting, just thinking about the fact that that Pluto is, you know, it’s like Pluto Return of the US and there’s been somewhat recently– and I ask everyone’s forgiveness, I cannot remember which specific tribal nation this was and which boarding school, but there’s been more and more use of ground-penetrating radar to to examine the ground around the various boarding schools and residential boarding schools here in North America. And so that kind of exhuming and noticing of the dead in relation to the founding of the US specifically and all of that, I think it’d be curious to see if there are any official edicts especially since there was only this year that the first Alaskan native, at least, was elected to Congress so there’s finally representation for one of the last outposts that was colonised and how much of that stuff is going up further north. But tying into the founding of the US, I wonder if there’s more of that kind of forensics leading to revelations and if we’ll see any official edicts or rulings about that either now or when Mercury is back in Capricorn at the end of the year,
AC: Yeah. Because that’s really, you know, in a lot of cases there will be a lot of circumstantial evidence of institutional wrongdoing, but it’s when you find the order to do X, Y, and Z, that’s really damning. And then it was that Mercury and Pluto like you were saying, and literally finding out where the bodies are buried. With that being in the second house of the US, literally the cost of this. And even if it doesn’t in a sense change things, there’s a changing of perspective into like, “This was the real cost, which changes perspective on where we are and who we are and what this is.” Or at least informs that, even if it doesn’t change it. Like, that wouldn’t surprise me, but like having the actual death toll.
BR: Yeah, and the way that that’s like a part of the material substance in creation of the US or even like, I happen to favour the Howland chart, which gives a late Virgo rising so it’s still the same angularity but thinking about the fact that “Oh, then that would be fifth house. And yeah, it’s about children. It’s not about adults that are being found.
CB: Is that still on July 4th, 1776 with just a different time or is it a different day?
BR: Different time. Howland gives a 10:55 am and he actually cites some Library of Congress research. Basically he was like, “Jefferson was a drunk. It’s more likely that he was drunk and misremembered and that they chose something that happened when there was daylight than doing something late.” He also does some local space lines and connects it back to William’s coronation and Virginia charter. American Histrology is the book, published by AFA. [inaudible] Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of charts for a lot of different events in US history. So it’s a good one for folks who are doing research and mundane work.
AC: It’s interesting just running through it, the Mars in the fourth and then the Sun, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus in the 11th. Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: I don’t have it up right now-
AC: Yes, Saturn in the second, but a strong Saturn in the second. That tracks.
BR: It’s American Histrology, like if you combine the word history and astrology in some beastly abomination.
AC: Yeah.
BR: [whispering] Histrology.
CB: Astrologers and their cute astrology book titles.
BR: Yes.
CB: A long-standing tradition. I’m sure they were doing that in the Mesopotamian tradition with cuneiform tablets. Like, there was some putting together of goofy words that some astrologer put on some tablet back in the day, I’m sure.
BR: Yeah, maybe they were like 12 places, the 12th part. What is wrong with you guys over there?
CB: I’m just trying to cast the chart really quickly while we’re trying to build the…
BR: Definitely. It seems like 28 Virgo rising or 27 Virgo rising.
CB: What time?
BR: 10:55 am local time.
CB: So the chart looks like this-ish, more or less 27 Virgo rising. Neptune would be on the Ascendant in Virgo, the Cancer stellium would shift to the 11th whole sign house with the Venus, Jupiter, Sun and Mercury there. The midheaven would be late… Actually it looks a lot like– what’s his name’s chart? Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chart with late Virgo with Mars up there in Gemini in the 10th by the midheaven. It would put the Mars-Uranus conjunction in the 10th whole sign house, which is very interesting. I was thinking about that Mars-Uranus conjunction recently and just that, that probably being the signature for gun violence in the US and why it stands out so much more here than it does in other countries. And the Moon in Aquarius down in this sixth whole sign house.
BR: Yeah. And even Mercury ruling the chart in the 11th, like if we idolise anything, it’s money. Currency is our God.
CB: Okay.
AC: Well, and just yet. They’re like frantic travel and commerce, right? Like the ‘merc’ in ‘commerce’ is Mercury. But yeah, keeping the mutable rising makes sense because there is a tremendous Jupiter and a tremendous Mercury quality to the American thing.
BR: Yeah. I was just thinking about it the other day and I think I might have even tweeted about it something like, “You know, I don’t think that this Jupiter transit through Aries is an 11th house transit for the US, it seems much more like we are having a very large expansion of eighth house topical experiences– all the shootings that are going on recently, in particular.” Although it is pervasive so it’s hard to pin something like that to current transits when it’s kind of always happening.
AC: Yeah, especially anytime anything happens with Mars, there’s a shooting in the US. Yeah.
CB: Speaking of actually irrelevant, I meant to show… I read this article it was like a month ago now but still relevant, but it was on inflation and it was showing how through the efforts that the Fed has made, how inflation is starting to decline. But I thought it was really interesting because remember Jupiter, we talked so much about Jupiter in Pisces being about inflation. And that started back in 2021 right around here, right? Right around spring of 2021 when Jupiter first dipped into Pisces, and you can just see on the graph the inflation shooting up over the course of the next year from that point. But now by December of 2022, we finally get to the very end of Jupiter in Pisces. Jupiter starts moving away from that conjunction with Neptune and we’re starting to see, hopefully, what will continue as a trend and a decline in the inflation rate. So it’s a pretty nice little astrological correlation there. I like when things line up like that. And you can take an astrological alignment, especially an outer planet one, and compare it to a graph of some objectively occurring data.
AC: Yeah, and it’s nicely matchy matchy.
CB: Yeah, very nice. All right, so we’ve talked about most of the alignments for the first week. Is there anything else in the first week that we need to mention? Are we firmly in week two? We’ve talked about Valentine’s Day. Mercury does complete its journey through Capricorn finally finally finally on February 11th and it moves into the sign of Aquarius. So that’s the beginning of that transit just emphasising the Aquarius stuff that we’ve already been experiencing and talking about, and it will eventually meet up with Saturn at the end of Aquarius before Saturn departs from there. So it’s like we’re getting the last outer planet– the last inner planet conjunctions with Saturn are basically happening over the course of this month, the Sun-Saturn conjunction probably being the most notable and important one because this is going to be the last Sun-Saturn conjunction Aquarius on February 16th for almost 30 years until Saturn goes all the way around the zodiac and comes back to Aquarius. So there’s something about that as being like a final ending point for that transit.
AC: Yeah, I think with Mercury in Aquarius with Saturn right before it’s done, and with all of the big stuff that happens in March, I think that trying to use this time with Mercury in Aquarius to take a very cold look at what’s happening and where we are before things jump into the foreground and get busy and distracting again, would be of great benefit. Mercury does well in Aquarius, it does especially well in the middle decan of Aquarius and of course Saturn is the ruler of Aquarius. Saturn in Aquarius provides this stark winter Vista frozen, silent, quiet– silent and quiet– but unbusy if chilly type of perspective. And Saturn-Pisces is going to be wild and sloppy. So I feel like appreciating the stillness of winter, you know, you go outside during a frozen day and everything is just so stark and you can hear a deer walking through the snow 100 feet away if there’s no street noise. But like that with time, right? And we think of deep time, we think about longer cycles. It’s chilling in the sense that if you go back enough cycles, there are always a multitude of horrors. But there’s also a pulling away from immediate hot emotional reactions. So it’s chilly in that sense, too. Like, if you’re looking at the Earth from space, space is very cold and clear and stark. And it’s less ‘winter is coming’ but what does it mean to be in winter? I was thinking about this, you know, I did some some Saturn work with Kate the other day so my mind was really on Saturn and Saturn in Aquarius. And so in the lead up to Saturn in its two signs that it rules– Saturn in Cap, Saturn in Aquarius– the most popular television show in the world told us repeatedly to remember that winter is coming. Right? And now if astrological winter is the two signs in a row where Saturn’s in its own place and as cold as possible and as hard as possible, what does it mean to be living that? And it struck me something like the momentum, remember death but remember winter. As you leave winter, remember winter. Winter is coming is not appropriate to say on the third day of spring, but like remember winter. Carry the memory of winter with you through the next cycle.
CB: Yeah, because we’re both carrying the memory. It’s like appreciating the stillness of finishing the end of a chapter of a book before you begin the next one, or finishing one season of a television series before you start binge watching another one. We’re finishing this three-year long Saturn in Aquarius transit that started in March of 2020. And it’s like when you place it within that context and realise the closeness to the start of the pandemic and what that meant for so many different people and how that affected different people in so many different ways in different areas of our lives, it really starts to put into perspective, what this month of February is about because as soon as we start in March, basically Saturn goes into Pisces on the 7th already. So that transit is done and February really is the last looking back and setting into motion or completing that which has been set into motion over the course of the last three years in that part of our chart or that part of our life, especially that house, I think, or that whole sign house that it matches with in each of our charts.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Have either of you had personal reflections about what that’s meant for you in terms of your chart or have you seen other people? Obviously, we used the Miley Cyrus example earlier as a 10th house Saturn transit and how that’s gone in terms of her career. And then her looking back potentially now with a sense of accomplishment and success of putting in the hard work and now reaping the benefits of that. For me, it’s been since March of 2020 the ongoing struggle with health issues, and coming to terms with that and trying to find ways to work with that and adjust to dealing with some of that stuff and finding different ways to manage it and stuff like that. That’s what I’m looking back and reflecting on with Saturn completing its transit through my first house over the course of this time period. Do either of you have any reflections like that?
AC: I do. They’re very mundane. It’s my eighth and so with that eighth second polarity, it’s been a lot about getting organised money-wise, dealing with taxes. Right now I’m fully not afraid of tax season coming up because over the last couple of years I went into the abyss and became fully mature and responsible for eighth house; what you owe the government, have an accountant, blah, blah, blah. Which literally was a great source of fear, Saturn, and it’s a bunch of rules you have to comply to, etc, etc. But very very eighth house, and my eighth house is much more mature. And I’m no longer terrified of the doings in that place as I was before the Saturn in Aquarius transit began.
CB: Well, and you’ve also gone through a period in which your spouse and their financial income has changed pretty dramatically, as well as just through the intense amount of work, but also success that they’ve had with Sphere+Sundry, that Kaitlin’s had with Sphere and Sundry. You were telling me just earlier this morning that you started getting up earlier because it’s like she’s working 9:00 to 5:00 on her business and so it helps your schedules to sync better if you’re also getting up early every day even though you don’t have that grounding thing that’s making you do it. But that’s kind of an interesting connection there as well.
AC: Yeah, totally. Yeah. A lot has happened with my partner’s resources, which is the eighth house. Right? And so much has happened that that’s been… Like, Saturn’s like a centre of gravity in life because so much is going on right there and so much has been changing with that Saturn being hit by the Uranus over and over again.
CB: Right. For sure. How’s it been for you, Bear? Or even if not that, if you’ve seen other people or other contemporaries going through some of that transit.
BR: It’s been pretty big for me, and I have my chart ruler in Aquarius and it’s also an eighth house transit for me. I also have a four-planet Leo stellium, so it’s been like the vast majority of my chart being very persistently activated. And I was actually just just realising I think I spoke on Kira’s podcast with Sam about the second eighth house in 2020. Maybe it was early 2021 but it’s been most of Saturn moving through Aquarius and I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I got a really positive response from folks based on that episode but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the derived houses, and especially the relationship between the fifth and the eighth, you know, with my family being indigenous and thinking about like, “Okay, the eighth house is fourth from the fifth. How is the eighth house the home or the roots or the origins of pleasure? How is death the origins of pleasure?” And I was like, “Oh, right. My people have Potlatch. When someone dies, we literally throw a big party, have a feast and gift away their possessions to their friends. You don’t hoard it and inherit it to the next person or to their next descendants. That’s just not how we do things. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that and just zooming back and realising, “Oh, this whole process of Saturn moving through Aquarius has been a lot about me solidifying that understanding and figuring out how to bring… In terms of the eighth house, I’ve been thinking a lot about it as it’s actually our shared investment. Like, yes, there’s the resources and the joint assets, but it’s any type of joint enterprise. It’s like investing your caring. Like, having foxes to give, that’s a deposit into the eighth house as well. So if someone’s willing to give you your their time, their attention, their energy, their caring and all, that becomes eighth house. So I feel like that’s what’s been maturing for me. Yeah, there’s the taxes and there’s the money stuff and I worked as an accountant. On the other side of Saturn’s transit, I think I’m almost successfully completely transitioned out of working for other people, and all of my time and all of my money being my own.
CB: Yeah, which I think is huge in terms of making the transition to doing astrology full time and that being your primary profession and income source at this point.
BR: Yeah, yeah. And that’s hard and scary and it takes a really long time. I’m sure that will continue to be a long-term process that I’ll talk about and share with folks, but I think getting mature with respect to understanding how much you’re caring, the words you say, to the time that you give to just caring about your friends or your family or their projects, those are just as material in the big picture. And I think that it takes– I don’t know that that’s the type of thing that my 20-something-year-old self could have processed even if somebody explained it well, I think it’s a thing that you have to have enough time with.
CB: Yeah, that’s such a huge component of Saturn transits. It’s something that even if somebody explains it to you, while you may have some understanding of it abstractly or intellectually going into it, the actual experiential value of living through it is so much different than just an intellectual understanding that it can’t be replaced and it can’t fully be replicated. It’s just something you have to learn through an experience.
AC: Yeah, in terms of especially the investment on ones part into the eighth, which is a shared thing in some way, right? Could literally be how much you’re paying attention to what your partner is doing, could be part of a larger project that you’re rolling with other people but you’re giving stuff, resources, or various sorts to that. And as I was thinking about Saturn the other day. Saturn is very time and space, and it really struck me that even if you give up space or territory, in the future you can get territory back, but the difference is you never recoup time. Whatever time you’re giving is a permanent gift. There’s no take backsies with time.
CB: Yeah, I think that was actually a huge part of our digression we had in the Aquarius episode that we just did about Saturn.
AC: It felt very… That felt because it was trying to feel out the difference between Saturn in Capricorn and aquarius, and this is a little bit slightly hyperbolic, but Saturn in Capricorn is much more space and Saturn in Aquarius feels much more like time.
CB: Yeah. Another way we were talking about it was that Saturn in Capricorn seemed like it was more looking backwards in time, and sometimes idealising that. Versus Aquarius was more forward looking in time and idealising some period in the future where everything will be better or great, or what have you.
AC: Or looking back with horror and looking forward with horror too. [Bear laughs]
CB: You know, there’s always that.
BR: Definitely that.
CB: I realised in talking and hearing both of your stories part of what my lesson is right now that I’d been internalising in the past recent weeks and few days especially was just learning my limits and the limits of my physical health and how that has to be respected despite my career aspirations and desire to sometimes have these. I did a series of four or five podcast episodes the past week and some of them were like four or five-hour, or in one case with Rob Bailey, we recorded a new seven-hour lecture on the history of Horary for this new Horary course that we’re building. But I think I’m kind of wrecked after this episode and I need to start maybe doing shorter more reasonable two-hour episodes here, which as I look at the clock right now I realise I’m not doing a good job of because we’re at two hours and four minutes at the moment. But learning to balance that a little bit more in terms of my normal younger person desires to just talk about astrology forever versus my current late 30s Saturn in the first house transit, you know, actual self that needs to maybe put some better limits and restrictions on things.
AC: I’m all for it. I will also add I got one of those from Saturn in Aquarius as well. I’ve been in an Aquarius profection since last March so first house of my profection has been Aquarius. I got the first real injury that I’ve had in a long time shortly after that began. I did like a mild tear of a muscle in my calf. Again, look at the look at the little Zodiac man. Where does Aquarius point to? Points to the shins and calves. I was just overtraining like crazy and then trying to do very athletic things, and in the middle of a kick I landed on the left as the support leg and the tendons were just like, “Fuck you.” So then I walked like Saturn, you know, Saturn is very often walking with a limp or with a crutch. I walked funny for a couple of weeks and it probably took two months to rehab it so that I can actually do normal things with the calf. So thank you, Saturn in Aquarius, for striking the Aquarius part of my body. It made me just reflect on Saturn, the two parts of the body that Saturn rules– knees and then shins down to the feet– those show ageing. It’s the tendons and muscles in the knees on down that people injure as they get older because those get tighter. I learned that the kind of muscle thing that I had was often referred to as a tennis injury that was most common in middle aged people trying to play tennis, where you’re changing directions really quickly. It’s literally like, “Oh, it wasn’t tennis,” but that’s exactly what I was doing. And you know, if you want to cosplay as an old person, you complain about your knees, right? That’s just a given. But I’d never thought about the shins. That area of the body has been specifically related to age in the same way.
CB: For sure. Thanks for sharing those stories. I would love it if people watching this episode could let us know in the YouTube comments what you’ve learned from Saturn in Aquarius, especially how that relates to the house that it’s been transiting through your chart over the past three years, or potentially any natal planets that it’s aspected during that time. That’d be really interesting to see as we were getting towards the end of that transit here. All right, let’s transition into talking about the second half of the month. So those two major conjunctions that fall in the middle of the month, first the romantic Venus-Neptune conjunction on the 15th followed by the more sober Sun-Saturn conjunction on the 16th, those really culminate there. And then in the next few days, we have a pretty major shift where the Sun goes into Pisces on the 18th, and then we get that New Moon in Pisces immediately after that on the 20th which roughly coincides with Venus departing from Pisces and moving into Aries. That really brings us to that second lunation of the month, which is that New Moon in Pisces. So why don’t we talk about that?
AC: Yeah, it’s a really big tonal shift– that last third quarter of the month. It leaves behind a lot of the solar spotlight and focus on Saturn. Mercury is still there so there’s still that older more eternity or more timeline-seeking quality of thought, but the [crosstalk]
CB: It’s hard because it’s also like still three degrees away from Saturn. So it’s really tough because it’s like it’s getting away from Saturn by sign and yet Saturn is not far behind from moving into Pisces.
AC: But it’s very much moving away, right? It’s in a different environment and it’s now in a watery, much less boundaried environment. We’ve still got Venus and Neptune in Pisces, that’s the beginning of the last third… Well, more like quarter of the month where we’re going to have Venus move into Aries shortly thereafter and then it’s Venus-Jupiter time in outgoing Aries. It’s very different from the focus on that sort of cold retrospective with Saturn.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s nice that Venus is still there so we get that Venus in Pisces still kind of baked into the New Moon in Pisces here on the 20th. What else is going on that’s sort of relevant? Mercury is just coming off of somewhat balancing optimistic sextile with Jupiter from 12 Aquarius to 12 or nine degrees of Aries before it heads headlong into that conjunction with Saturn at the end of the month.
AC: Yeah, that Saturn influence is very there, very ambient. But Mercury is heading directly into an almost simultaneous aspect with Uranus and Mars. So there’s like, “Okay, so based on the nature of this moment and this point in the timeline, I need to get this shit done.” With Mars, it’s like stuff we’ve been thinking about doing for a while and like, “Oh, how is this gonna get done? How am I going to handle this?” It’s like Mercury ruling Mars and then again getting cattle prodded by Uranus. It’s very active. [crosstalk]
BR: Go ahead.
CB: No, go ahead.
BR: I was just gonna say if we can kind of use the metaphor of translating light as the Moon does, and think about Mercury there. Mercury’s basically like, “Hey Jupiter, I see you’re in a Mars-ruled sign. You have some ideas about how we can go and how we can expand and get moving? Let me go relay the message to Uranus and see if we can just do it instantaneously maybe if there’s some technology that aids us and deploy the battle strategy.” Like, thinking about Mars if Mars is a General or something or a soldier. And maybe this is like, “Okay, we finished some reconnaissance and we’re relaying the message and then we need to just implement battle strategy. Go, go, go.”
CB: Yeah, totally. I like that. That’s a good point about the translation of light there or the transfer of light from Jupiter to Uranus and Mars, especially because Mars is moving out of that whole sextile with Jupiter and is getting pretty far away. It’s like six degrees now. But then Mercury swoops in and is able to reconnect both of them at this point in February. So the Mercury-Uranus square which happens a couple of days later on February 22nd, though, is a little disruptive in terms of communications in technologies like unexpected messages and other things like that. It happens though, not long. It’s like the Moon goes into Aries not long after Venus does and then we begin to build up to this Venus-Jupiter conjunction, which does not go exact in February but it gets really close by the very end of the month by the 28th and then goes exact on the 1st or 2nd around 11-12 degrees of Aries. So that’s kind of a positive shift in terms of the Aries sector of our chart then at this point in the month after the New Moon that we get not just Jupiter transiting through Aries, but also Venus transiting through and meeting up with Jupiter there.
AC: It’s very glory-seeking.
CB: Yeah. Aries, I’ve been realising lately, likes to win and it likes to receive recognition or awards for being the best or being first or being innovative at things.
AC: Yeah, it’s generally… It’s success, but often in a competitive context. There can only be one who is first.
BR: Yeah, like the two different sides of Mars coming out. The Scorpio brings the passion that you need for success, but it’s like the Mars in Aries that’s bringing the ambition and that drive and all of those key words.
AC: Yeah, and the the doing it in front of everyone. I taught a class recently on the, you know, each planet and its two domiciles just going over basic stuff. And Mars in Scorpio is really in the natural animal world. It’s nocturnal. Almost the vast majority of predators hunt at night to kill, they fight to kill and eat. Whereas Aries, the day side of Mars, you do it in front of everybody. And the point is usually not to kill, it’s all of the battling that animals do for a place and dominance in mating hierarchy, where that needs to be in front of everybody and it’s often not lethal. It’s supposed to be non lethal and it’s supposed to be as visible as possible. That’s Aries, right? It’s not the secret success that Scorpio is, it’s not like the satisfaction of the owl at three o’clock in the morning when it seizes the rabbit.
CB: All right. So you’re telling our listeners to contemplate with Venus going into Aries your place in the dominance and mating hierarchy?
AC: No, I’m just saying. But that’s part of all the shadow that feeds into big public wins, like “Look at how awesome I am, and therefore attractive and therefore a hundred other things.” That’s part of Aries. Like, “Look at how great this thing I did is.”
CB: Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. And seeking success through those things and through being quick, through outcompeting, through being faster or being able to outmanoeuvre somebody– not necessarily in an negative or manipulative way, but just in demonstrating your qualities in a way that excels maybe above your peers. This could be a good keyword for that last part of the month, the last 10 days of the month when Venus goes into Aries and begins to build up to that conjunction with Jupiter. How can you achieve success or recognition for some things or some of your talents through that?
AC: Yeah, it’s a little bit… It’s a point to show off, or if you have something to show off. Chris, I don’t know what your electional chart for this month is but does it involve… Does it leverage that Venus-Jupiter at all?
CB: Of course. I mean, that is the most auspicious thing of the month so that would be worth mentioning now. Thanks for mentioning that. So, this is the electional chart that Leisa Schaim and I came up with for February. It’s set for February 22nd 2023 around 2:00 pm local time. We set it for 2:00 pm here in Denver, Colorado. Basically what you do is take this chart, set it for February 22nd at 2:00 pm, just change the city to your location. What you should end up with is a chart that roughly looks like this with Cancer rising and we have the Moon, Venus and Jupiter all up there in the 10th whole sign house in the sign of Aries. So we’re taking that auspicious Venus-Jupiter conjunction that’s still building up at this point on February 22nd, and we’re putting the Moon right there in the middle of all of that right in the middle of the mix where it’s separating from a conjunction with Venus and applying to a conjunction with Jupiter. And since the Moon is the ruler of the Ascendant, this should really help to accentuate the symbolism of success and achieving one’s desired especially career or other types of ambition goals, since it’s emphasising the 10th house in this chart or in this electional chart, which is the house of career, reputation, and action. So that is the primary focus, it’s just really taking advantage of that Venus-Jupiter conjunction this month and making that the focal point by putting the Moon there, putting the ruler of the Ascendant there and putting all of that up in the 10th whole sign house. So it’d be a very good chart for some of the things that we’re talking about including just like career and public reputation in general this month.
AC: Yeah, it looks like a pretty big flex.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. For just doing something, taking an action, even a bold action. Aries is also a very bold sign and it tends to, when it’s configured well, favour the one who acts boldly and who acts first in order to accomplish something or an in order to open up a new area of achievement and success. So this is a very good chart for that, I would think.
AC: Yeah, especially not only is the Moon conjunct Jupiter, but the Moon is ruling the Ascendant while conjunct Jupiter and Venus in the 10th. So it pulls the– as the ruler of the Ascendant– pulls the person into that glory that’s happening in the 10th.
CB: Right, exactly. Yeah, so that is our primary electional chart for this month. We’re also getting ready to on Friday record the next Auspicious Elections podcast, which is one of the podcasts that’s available privately to our members on Patreon. You can find out more information about that at theastrologypodcast.com. And we’re going to release… I think we have at least three or four other electional charts for February that we’re going to release in that podcast episode. Additionally, we also released a few months ago our 2023 Electional Astrology report, where we went through and we picked out the single best electional chart we could find for each of the next 12 months of 2023. That’s for people that want to make long term plans over the course of the next next year. And you can find out more information about that at theastrologypodcast.com/2023report. Finally, we also have our planetary alignments calendar is out and people have been ordering that, where all of the graphics we use in this episode that show the planetary alignments, we actually have that on a high quality wall poster that you can put up in order to look at the astrology of the next month or the next 12 months at a glance very easily, which is very useful for electional and other types of planning. So you can find more about that at theastrologypodcast.com/merch. All right, this is bringing us to the end of the month and the final alignments of the month, which is basically by the end of the month that Venus-Jupiter conjunction starts getting close and going exact, and that Mercury-Saturn conjunction starts getting very close to going exact. So on the one hand, we have this very positive, optimistic, sort of trailblazing conjunction of Venus conjunct Jupiter in Aries. But then on the other hand, we have this very exacting, somewhat pessimistic at the worst but maybe just grounded and pragmatic at the best conjunction of Mercury conjunct Saturn that’s also happening simultaneously. What are some of the other key words for this, or are there anything else? It looks like the Mars-Neptune square is also forming but that’s something that won’t go exact until the first week of March.
BR: It’s making me think about accounting in the way that in order to balance a double ledger down to zero pennies difference at the end of the year, you’re taking this really methodical scrutiny and just dissecting the details that Mars-Neptune square of like, “Mmh, there’s some fogginess. There’s some ambiguity or confusion, let me come with a scalpel and just dissect this until Mercury and Saturn can make a proper accounting of it like a bank reconciliation in accounting parlance.”
CB: Yeah. Yeah, Mercury-Saturn is really good at that and seeing the structural errors or problems in something. Which can be really highly critical in a negative sense of being too negative, but in other times it can be really good for things like that like you said like accounting or doing an assessment, a structural assessment of something, and if it has a solid foundation or if it has some work that needs to be done and needs repairs.
AC: Yeah, what came to mind with the Venus-Jupiter is I don’t know, you got like a raucous lavish party or event, very balls out as they say. But with Mrcury running the numbers, it’s embarrassing with the counting like, “Okay, can we afford this, this, this, and this?” Because the Venus Jupiter’s right before it happens, the Mercury-Saturn is right before it happens. Anyway, Mercury conjunct Saturn is the ruler of Mars which is the ruler of Aries. There’s holding moment like, should I hold back on this lavish, explosive, pioneering spectacle?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. In addition to having been an accountant, I was once a bartender and this is the moment where someone’s like, “Yeah, we planned this elaborate private party and we’re gonna have these bartenders here and you’re gonna make these cocktails!” And then the bar team shows up and they’re like, “So you have no drains? And I don’t know how I’m supposed to have ice, you want me to make cocktails without ice? We have plumbing problems.”
AC: Yeah, right. Also, I’m not wearing this outfit.
BR: Yeah, that’s nonstarter. That can’t happen. “We can’t bartend in a pool. Did anyone consider this?” Or if we’re thinking about Mars is like the builder. Like, “We’ve done all this demo and Venus came in and made it really pretty,” and the building inspector comes and says, “So this great new bar of yours, I’m not going to actually give you a permit to open. You need to tear apart everything you just built and make those drains be two inches further apart.”
AC: “These stairs are too steep and so you can be sued if anyone slips on them. The angle needs to be, whatever. 40 degrees rather than 41 degrees.”
CB: Yeah. Something that Leisa and I have been doing on the Auspicious Elections podcast lately is imagining an electional chart and if it was a scenario or a person, and this alignment of Mercury conjunct Jupiter and Saturn versus Venus conjunct Jupiter in Aries at the same time, that’s like somebody who’s an accountant in their day job and who builds or leverages technology in order to do accounting for a large corporation with Mercury conjunct Saturn in Aquarius, but in their free time they really enjoy skydiving and bungee jumping and extreme sports like that. That would be my imagination of what somebody with that combination has. What would you imagine as a hypothetical person that has that combination?
AC: Okay, I like the.. Oh, go ahead.
BR: I think you described a real person that I work with in construction accounting who climbs rocks like a rock climber. But even a lot of folks into rock climbing end up in these very high positions because of what you have to do to succeed with all that Aries stuff.
CB: Okay, like the risk taking. Needing to have some– not aversion to risk, but whatever the opposite of that is.
BR: Yeah. Risk mitigation, risk tolerance, risk resiliency.
CB: Yeah, tolerance. I like that.
AC: Okay, how about an academic who works on translating historical texts, who in their spare time loves doing HEMA– that was a Historical European Martial Arts– which is some of the times it’s halfway to LARPing, but like somebody who’s translating these things and then painstakingly, reconstructing, for example, one of the incredibly flamboyant [land smacked] Swiss Pikemen outfits and walking around with giant feathers and an 18-foot-pike with friends.
CB: Yeah, that’s like there are historians that specialize in reconstructing the fighting styles of medieval knights and what their actual tactics would be in a sword fight. [crosstalk]
BR: Yeah, that’s the acronym that goes by HEMA. And then there are schools that-
CB: Okay. Sorry, I didn’t know.
AC: But yeah, and then there are schools… I’m going to shut up. But yeah, they actually have reconstructed their manuals like swordsmanship or how to use a mace or whatever manuals, and then people practice those. And then sometimes they dress up in period costumes. Some of it’s more combat-focused like training in historical martial art, and then some of it is more reenactment sort of cosplay flavoured.
CB: I love it. All right. Well, if anybody has that combination, let us know. If they have like Mercury-Saturn stuff in Aquarius and Venus-Jupiter or other Aries placements, let me know what your unique manifestation of that is in your life in the YouTube comments.
BR: Made me think about Adam Savage. Just like the super scientisty, but then like, “Okay, let’s do this exact same thing. We’re gonna machine it, we’re gonna make it super perfect. And then let’s go blow it up.”
CB: Totally. That’s a really good one, yeah. Cuz there’s also an engineering component oftentimes or a mechanic component to Aries that’s often surprisingly prominent.
AC: Yeah. And the signs are in sextile so there should be some connection between the two activities. It’s not one for one, but it can translate.
CB: Totally. That’s good, I like that. Well, that is the energy basically that we end the month with, which is a really interesting combination and especially just with the contrast, because next month is when everything shifts when Saturn goes into Pisces, but also Mars is going to depart from Gemini and move into Cancer, ending a very long transit of Mars going through Gemini since last August. So it’s going to be a month of major shifts. Oh yeah, and we get Pluto moving into Aquarius. So next month is going to be the month of major shifts, and this is the month of reflecting on how far you’ve come with some of those transits. In the case of Saturn in Aquarius, it’s been for the past three years as we said since March of 2020. In the case of Mars, it’s since last August. And then with Pluto, it’s been since what? 2009-2008, basically?
BR: 2008. Yeah, 2008.
CB: Yeah. So a lot of looking back and reflecting on the completion of this chapter of our lives, whatever that means for you, and then next month beginning a new chapter and looking forward to the future.
AC: Well, looking at the future.
CB: The future, yeah. Experiencing the future.
AC: Entering the foyer of the next chapter.
CB: Right. The lobby of this weird astrology convention that you’ve gone to when Pluto goes into Aquarius?
BR: Mhm. Like imagining in the movies where they show some really fancy hoity toity party and they pull up in their vintage Rolls-Royce in the circle driveway and then looking and deciding, “Do I actually want to go into that party? Should we just go right back out the way we came?”
AC: “The animal head masks are making me very uncomfortable.”
BR: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I actually saw one that was like they did the Miss USA pageant or Miss Universe, and there was a really funny one that I shared the other day that was like this is what Pluto moving into Aquarius is going to look like. Miss USA showed up with a big ball strapped onto her head and I think that’s something what it’s going to look like, really over the top next month as soon as Pluto goes into Aquarius.
AC: Well, it’ll be prefaced by an AI becoming self-aware and then presenting that woman’s image as the avatar of the ruthless impermanent overlord.
CB: You know, that actually is really relevant because there was this picture going around on social media week ago. And it was an image that was like four images and it was different women taking selfies at a party. And it just looked like every selfie you ever seen over the past decade of people using their smartphones to take a selfie at a party and it just looked very generic. And then in the subtitle, it said, “This is AI generated and none of these people are real.” And it just was a big eye-opening moment for a lot of people that we’re entering into completely uncharted territory where some of this AI stuff can create stuff that looks realistic, but just never happened. I think that’s us heading really quickly into the not just Pluto in Aquarius for the next 20 years, but also that Pluto or that Saturn transit into Pisces and the build up to that conjunction with Neptune, and just the blurring of what is real versus what is not real over the course of the next five to six years.
AC: Yeah, it’s gonna be a long journey through the uncanny valley.
CB: For sure, for sure. Well, everybody should enjoy then the next month and reflect on things before we move into that new chapter in world history as well as our personal histories together next month in the astrology of March, and we’ll be back again next month to talk about that. Thank you both for joining me for this today. This is amazing. We’ve talked about a lot of stuff, but this is great. Thanks for joining us today, Bear.
BR: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure and a tremendous honour.
CB: Yeah. What do you have going on? What do you have coming up? Tell us more about where people can find information about your work and other offerings and stuff.
BR: It’s pretty easy. It’s just my name if you throw an @ in front of my name, Bear Ryver like the animal in the water, but spelled with Y. Then you’ll find me all over the internet. The most immediate thing I have coming up will be happening on February 12th. It’s a couple Sundays from now. At 6:00pm, I’ll be teaching an in-person class at Raven’s Wing Magic Shop in Oakland, talking about starting a planetary day practice and just practical pointers for how to enter into that. We’ll work with the chart and then that is likely going to turn into a longer seven or eight-week course later on this year. Other than that, I’m working on on a queer astrology project. It’ll be a magazine that gets released later this year, and doing a lot of background research building out some courses and mostly study. So I’ll be mostly behind the scenes this year just writing and being available to students.
CB: Nice. And you do consultations as well.
BR: Yeah, consultations, books are always open. I’ve got a sliding scale donations and I also have pay-by-donation setup, that’s something I’ve been doing all of my practice but since some recent Jupiter work, it is a very permanent part of my practice. So I’m excited about offering those services to folks and figuring out ways to collaborate and create more accessible services.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, people can check out your website at bearryver.com and I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website for this episode.
BR: Excellent.
CB: Austin, what do you have coming up?
AC: We’ll, there is an Antares series that’s coming out by Sphere and Sundry first week of February. Antares is one of the four royal stars, it’s the heart of the Scorpion constellation with the Chinese, like macro constellations. It’s the heart of the Azure Dragon. It’s pretty great. And we got the Moon conjunct at trine Jupiter last year. Antares is the rival of Mars, you know, red star that has similar qualities to Mars although on that stellar level. I’m very excited about that, there’s a lot of drive. We didn’t want to release that when Mars was retrograde, and to make sure that that drive of that intensity would go out once direction was certain. And so Kate created a bunch of cool stuff there, there are a bunch of good sub-series. We’ve got the heart of the emperor Scorpion, the honey badger sub series, as well as the Azure Dragon, as well as vanilla-flavoured Antares. So I’m excited about that. I’ve been playing with that and it’s been really good. Other than that, I’m going to be as invisible as possible because I am driving to get the rewrite/rework of 36 Faces done by April. I’ve got some good momentum and intend to keep that. My students will see me and that’s about it.
CB: Nice. Awesome, I’m really looking forward to that. I’ve seen some of the illustrations from the forthcoming rerelease of that book and they look incredible. So I know people are gonna love it.
AC: Thank you, I just got to actually get it to them. [laughs]
CB: All right, cool. And I’ll put links to your websites, which are austincoppock.com and sphereandsundry.com in the description.
AC: Thank you.
CB: Cool. As for myself, I have got a big month on the podcast lined up. I’ve got an episode I’m working on on the astrology of comedians, which is going to be amazing. Another episode on Egyptian astrology, another episode on synastry and relationship compatibility. I’m also gonna release the Aquarius episode that I already recorded with Bear and Aerin Ryver- Aerin Fogel and Bear Ryver. [laughter] It’s been a long episode, a long week due to all of that, but that episode’s already available for early access through my page on Patreon. And then I’m gonna record the Pisces episodes soon in order to finish this year-long zodiac series that I’ve been doing, and I’m really happy to finally bring that to completion. So if people want to get early access to any of those episodes or just help support the production of the podcast in general, please join my page on patreon.com. You can also join us in the live chat like some of these people have joined us today. We’ve got a bunch of amazing patrons who have been joining us and typing comments and following along with this live recording today, which has just been amazing. Finally, I have an event coming up where Jenn Zahrt of the Kayleigh Institute Library is hosting me for a talk about my new book, which is the translation of Vettius Valens Anthology which came out a few months ago. On February 8th, we’re going to do a free one-hour discussion to celebrate what Jenn calculated as the 1903rd birthday of Vettius Valens who was born on February 8th, 120 CE. And we’re going to talk about about his work, his contributions to astrology, and about this new translation that was recently published by me of Mark Riley’s translation. I’ll put a link to that, but you can find out more information about it at kayleigh.institute. We’ll be doing that for about an hour and do basically a Q&A on that book on February 8th, so I’m looking forward to that. All right, I think that’s it for this episode of the podcast. Thanks everyone for watching or listening and we will see you again next time.