The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 394, titled:
Hillary Clinton’s Birth Certificate Released
With Chris Brennan and guests Patrick Watson and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on March 22, 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 Andrea Johnson
Transcription released April 19, 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 gonna talk about the recent release of the birth certificate of Hillary Clinton, which finally after many long years revealed her true birth time. So joining me today are astrologers Patrick Watson and Nick Dagan Best. Welcome, both of you.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks, Chris.
PATRICK WATSON: Thanks for having us.
CB: Yeah, thanks for joining me today. I think this is, for some reason—even though the three of us are close and old long-time friends—the first time the three of us have been on an episode together at the same time in quite a while, right?
NDB: Yeah, Patrick and I were just saying we’re not sure we’ve ever been on an episode together. Like if we had, it’s been a long, long time. Definitely not a video episode.
PW: Right. Yeah, maybe before the video era.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, maybe. But I don’t remember us actually doing it.
CB: There was one that was like the 100th episode, I think, that all of us were on.
NDB: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, okay.
CB: All right, so this is a longstanding topic and a recurring topic, both on The Astrology Podcast, as well as some of my oldest blog posts about this topic. To set the background for anybody that’s not familiar with it, there’s been since the early-to-mid-1990s this mystery surrounding Hillary Clinton’s birth time because her birth certificate wasn’t available and there were several different competing birth times; each had different, potentially persuasive-looking sources for them floating around. So for much of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially 2010s, this was a matter of great interest and great debate within the astrological community what Hillary Clinton’s birth time was. Each of the times were so wildly different that it gave an almost completely different birth chart in terms of shifting the rising sign and the Ascendant and all the house placements of the planets. And then as a result of that it changed many of the statements and predictions that astrologers would make about her political aspirations, since it’s been known for a number of years before she actually ran for the presidency it was suspected that she would run. And so, that was one of the reasons why it was a matter of great interest.
So yeah, that’s part of the setup. There’s been so much discussion about this. There’s several different episodes in the history of the podcast that were actually entirely dedicated to this topic, so I’d recommend going back and listening to those. ‘Cause I went back and listened to some of them recently and it’s actually kind of entertaining and interesting the different things that Patrick and I went through over the years to try to figure out the birth time. And you can listen to Episode 90 of The Astrology Podcast, and also, Episode 91, to hear in particular some of the drama that occurred in 2016 right before the presidential election surrounding different attempts at the last minute to get her birth time, and essentially fake birth times that were put forward at that time that kind of tripped astrologers up as they were trying to make predictions for the 2016 election.
And I think the final thing about why this is so important is many astrologers focus on natal astrology, and they base their predictions on the birth chart that is closely tied in with the birth time. And part of the premise of that is if you have an accurate birth time and a birth chart then you may be able to make accurate predictions about the future; whereas if you don’t have an accurate birth time, or you’re working with the wrong time, the wrong chart, then your predictions potentially are gonna be less accurate. So this is why it was sort of a big deal for everyone. Yeah, so I think that’s part of the setup, right? What do you guys think? Is there anything else I’m missing for just the general audience that has no background on this topic?
NDB: No, that’ll do.
PW: Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
CB: Okay. So I remember, Nick, the first time that I looked at Hillary Clinton’s chart and got interested in this issue was actually in 2006. And I remember being in Cumberland, Maryland, at Project Hindsight with you when we were both living there, when we looked at it for the first time, and we pulled up one of the times that seemed to have some of the best documentation at the time, which was the 8:00 AM birth time which had Scorpio rising. And I just remember you and I looking at that chart and thinking that it looked like a potentially really eminent chart because it made all of the planets in her chart very angular basically and very prominent.
So this is the Scorpio rising chart, which is set for 8:00 AM, just after sunrise, which has the Sun and Venus and Mercury in the Ascendant, and South Node, all in Scorpio in the 1st whole sign house, and it had Mars and Pluto in Sag and Leo in the 10th whole sign house. So part of the genesis for that is one of the very early Astro-Databank entries said—Astro-Databank is where astrologers submit birth times and compile birth data for celebrities and other case studies in order to have accurate, sourced birth data. And one of the earliest entries—it was supposedly from the Chicago Sun-Times, and it was supposed to be based on an interview with Hillary’s mother, where supposedly it said that she was born in the morning, around 8:00 AM, or something to that effect. Is that right, Patrick?
PW: I think that was the original misunderstanding of that article.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah, we had the quote from the article once someone actually found it. At first glance…
CB: I don’t want to say what the correction was yet.
PW: Sure.
CB: I just want to set the premise for people that don’t have the background on what the mystery was and why this is even an episode we’re doing.
PW: Right.
CB: ‘Cause since the mid-to-late-‘90s there’s always been this entry in Astro-Databank that claimed—citing a Chicago Sun-Times article, in an interview with the mother—that Hillary was born “in time for breakfast, in the morning.” And then part of genesis, actually going back to the very beginning, was Nick and I actually attended a lecture in 2007, an NCGR conference in, I think, Baltimore.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And we attended a lecture by astrologer Shelley Ackerman that was on the birth data of the candidates, and she kind of just gave an overview of the different pieces of birth data and what we knew and what we didn’t know for the people who were gonna run in 2008; and when Hillary came up, Shelley kind of just summarized what everyone knew from Astro-Databank. But then at one point, towards the end of that, there was an older woman who stood up very quietly, and then she said very confidently that Hillary was born at eight o’clock in the morning and that she had Scorpio rising. So this is the 8:00 AM, Scorpio rising chart. And I was really curious about that because everyone seemed to take her very seriously, and then she sat down, but she was treated with a lot of respect by the room.
At the end of the conference, Nick and I were checking out of our hotel room and going to leave, and I actually ran into that woman in the hallway, and I asked her–‘cause I was really genuinely interested in this—why she knew that. And she said something to the effect that Hillary was born at 8:00 in the morning, it was Scorpio rising, and she tried to say that she had access to some piece of birth data or something like that. But she told me that Hillary was giving out different times because she didn’t want people to know that she had Scorpio rising or something like that, and that was her explanation. But she seemed to claim that she knew for sure, for some reason, that she was actually born at eight o’clock in the morning. And later it turned out that this was actually a famous birth data collector, an older astrologer, named Frances McEvoy, who had submitted a lot of birth data to Astro-Databank and collected a lot of birth times for different people and things like that.
So that set a precedent for me for about 10 years prior to the 2016 election where I thought that I knew or had been clued in on what later turned out to be a sort of conspiracy theory, that Hillary was actually born at eight o’clock in the morning, that she might giving out false times to throw people off the trail. And that was something that I really came to believe, in addition to the fact that the Scorpio rising chart looked very eminent because it had so many angular planets. And what was further interesting is that in the zodiacal releasing periods, it indicated that she would enter into a peak period in her career between 2010 and 2018.
So that was the other draw to that birth time for me. It held the potential that if she actually ran again—which she was widely anticipated to do in 2016—that she could actually win if that was the correct birth chart. But then the closer and closer we got to 2016, we kept hoping that something would shake loose in terms of getting more validation on things. But the closer and close we got to it, the more things fell apart and the more unclear her birth time became basically, the closer and closer we got to the election to the point where once we got to just weeks before the election there were just huge controversies and miscommunication and all sort of different things going on at that point.
NDB: Yeah, and not least because yet another birth time was introduced into the fray just before the conference and that sort of became very dramatic as well.
CB: Right, so that happened. So the different birth times—there was the 8:00 AM time, which was based on, supposedly, an interview with Hillary’s mother—but then there was also an 8:00 PM time. There had been two or three astrologers, in the late 1990s—according to the Astro-Databank entries—when they had asked Hillary what time she was born, she said 8:00 PM. And I, myself, eventually wanted to find out in person what she would say, so I actually went to a book signing in Colorado in 2014 or 2015, not long before she launched her presidential run. And when it got to the end of that I actually asked Hillary Clinton in person, I was like, “I’ve always wanted to ask what time you were born.” And she sat back and thought about it and she said, “I think eight o’clock in the evening.” And I said, “8:00 PM. Are you sure?” And she said, “Yeah, I think so.”
And so, that left me, unfortunately, before the 2016 election, with this real conundrum. I thought that the chart was 8:00 AM, Hillary herself said 8:00 PM, but then there was this conspiracy theory that this older astrologer had told me, saying that Hillary might be giving out the wrong time or even the exact opposite time from what is correct; therefore, the question of whether you trust that, you trust what the person themselves says, or whether you go with something else basically became the conundrum. So that’s kind of where we were before. Then, as we got closer to the election, there were different reporters that started investigating this.
There was a Wall Street Journal reporter—who’s name I believe was Yogita Patel—who I talked with about a year before the election, and she started doing some investigations into it because she was interested in this controversy in the astrological community and what the basis was. And she tried to find the original Chicago Sun-Times article but she couldn’t find it, which was the original supposed source for the 8:00 AM time that seemed to give it some validation. But instead all she found with the Chicago Sun-Times was an early 1993 article where Hillary’s mother was interviewed, and in that article it said that she had gone into labor like in the morning and was born 12 hours later, which seemed to then actually not validate the 8:00 AM time at all, but instead seemed to confirm the 8:00 PM time, which then would be consistent with what Hillary said herself. I think that’s roughly right, right, Patrick?
PW: Right. The exact quote—you can really see why people might have gotten this confused because the first sentence, the first relevant sentence says, “Early on October 26, 1947, 28-year-old Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham [Hillary’s mother] arrived at Edgewater Hospital, 5700 N. Ashland, to deliver her first child.” That’s the first sentence. So if you were to just read that it sounds like they’re saying, “Early on this day, the mother delivered the child.” But the second sentence says, “Some 12 hours later, Dorothy and Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, 34, then a sales manager for the Barrett Textile Corp., welcomed Hillary Diane into the world.” So for whatever reason only that first sentence seemed to be taken by astrologers to potentially support an 8:00 AM time. But yeah, when you take that second sentence into account, it’s definitive. “Some 12 hours later,” that would have to be sometime in the evening, which would corroborate with what Hillary herself had said.
CB: Right. And that was really important because then all of a sudden it meant that part of the original evidence that we had for the 8:00 AM time suddenly vanished, and then all that was left—the evidence was pointing more towards what Hillary herself said, which was 8:00 PM. But then when we cast that chart for 8:00 PM that day, it moved the Ascendant, and at exactly 8:00 PM it was 29’49” Gemini. So what became annoying about that—especially for those of us that used whole sign houses—is if she was born just a minute later, or I think a few seconds into 8:00 PM—
PW: 47 seconds.
CB: 47 seconds.
PW: 47, yeah.
CB: The Ascendant would switch to Cancer and then all of the signs, all of the house placements would be different. Let me actually animate the chart in order to show what that looks like. So here’s 29, at exactly 8:00 PM. And then you move it forward a minute and the chart switches to Cancer rising, and with whole sign houses all the house placements shift. So this was annoying ‘cause then it meant even with the evidence, we would have like two different potential charts to work with and it could be either of those basically. ‘Cause 8:00 PM is obviously a rounded time at the top of the hour, and so it could really go either way. So there’s two directions we can go: one, explaining the other charts, and maybe we should; and then after that we’re gonna explain why you actually liked and felt like you could validate the Gemini rising
chart pretty early on, right, Nick?
NDB: Yeah, yeah. By 2009, I made a YouTube video about how I had weighed in on the Gemini Ascendant and why I did so.
CB: Okay. And then the last thing is that there was also this other stray entry on Astro-Databank about Hillary. There was an astrologer who said that their chiropractor talked to Hillary, and that Hillary said that she had Leo rising or something to that effect, right, Patrick?
PW: Right. I think it was the astrologer Arlan Wise. They said they had a friend who was a chiropractor for Hillary. And apparently, in the session, they were talking about astrology, and Hillary mentioned that she was a Leo rising, which would correspond with a time that is past 10:27 PM basically. So that would be a time which is much later in the day.
CB: Yeah. And actually Arlan was part of the Organization for Professional Astrologers, and I did a workshop and a training retreat with them. At one point, I went out and stayed at Arlan’s house sometime prior to the 2016 election and I asked here about this at one point. And she was actually very genuine about it—that this interaction had actually taken place with her chiropractor and that she thought there was something to it and that Hillary herself may have thought she had Leo rising for some reason. So that was another time that was floating around out there, the Leo rising chart.
So then finally, to make matters worse, about a month before the election, there was supposed to be a big conference that was gonna be hosted by the International Society for Astrological Research in October of 2016, just a few weeks before the presidential election, and at that conference they were gonna host a presidential panel—or actually two presidential panels—where a panel of astrologers would try to make predictions about the outcome of the election based on their own approaches and techniques. So a few weeks before that conference, at one point, ISAR unexpectedly announced that one of the candidates had actually gotten somehow access to her birth certificate or her birth record and they had identified the correct birth time, and it was not either the 8:00 AM or the 8:00 PM time, and they were going to unveil this birth record or this birth time, the true birth time, on the day of the second presidential panel at the very end of the conference.
So they were using it like a marketing or like a promotional tool basically to promote the conference. But then it automatically created a huge firestorm of controversy because then it meant that they would be withholding the birth data not just from the entire astrological community leading up to the election for the sake of marketing, but also that they would be withholding it from the panelists as well until the end of the conference who were basing their predictions on having the correct birth data. And, Nick, you and I happened to be two of those panelists.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, indeed. The good ole 2016 presidential panel at ISAR.
CB: Yeah, the panel was a big mess and that was part of the reason. So there was an astrologer named Marc Penfield that was supposed to be on the panel, that was a data collector, but he was the one that supposedly claimed that he’d obtained some sort of access to Hillary’s birth certificate. But very quickly, through a series of investigations that Patrick and I detailed in Episodes 90 and 91 of The Astrology Podcast and went into in more depth, we quickly realized that Marc Penfield was actually using a birth time that he got from Astro-Databank many years earlier that came from another astrologer who claimed that he was part of the Israeli Secret Service—like he was James Bond or something—and he had found the birth time through—
PW: Sounds legit.
CB: Yeah, sounds legit. And then through further investigations we found out that that same person had continued to—unknown to Marc Penfield—put out different versions of that birth time, at least two other subsequent versions of that birth time over different years where he kept changing it by like an hour or sometimes 30-minute increments. Presumably it was rectified in the first place and he was continuing to adjust his rectification over the years, but people, like Marc Penfield, who took the original claim about the original birth time seriously didn’t realize that this guy was just rectifying it and making it all up.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: But it wasn’t just that, though, ‘cause he also claimed that he had gotten it from the Illinois Department of Public Health—
NDB: Right.
PW: Through a sort of ‘deep throat’ style reporting.
NDB: What word did Bernstein—
PW: Yeah, yeah, getting the employee to just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions to different times as opposed to being, “Well, this is completely preposterous.” And when the director of the department was actually reached to comment on this possibility basically he said that’s impossible and no employee would do that. That’s like a felony. That would be like a tens of thousands dollar fine if they did that; like that was not possible. So when Marc Penfield was finally cornered by The Washington Post reporter—I believe his name was Justin Moyer—he basically gave up his cards and said, “Well, it’s just part of my personality.”
CB: During this whole thing somebody from The Washington Post—you mentioned reporter Justin Moyer—got interested, and he actually interviewed you, and you get cited in this article from October 14, titled, “‘This is not to be trusted’: Astrologers are battling over Hillary Clinton’s true birth time.” And the person who said “This is not to be trusted” was actually our friend Patrick Watson.
PW: Yeah, that was me. And this article came out on the weekend of the 2016 ISAR conference, so I was not probably Ray Merriman’s or Shelley Ackerman’s favorite person at that event, where I gave my first public speech on astrology actually.
CB: Right, so you give a talk. Also, there was some kind of weird synergy between ISAR taking what Marc was saying seriously, as if he had a new time, and then Marc kind of rolling with it, it seemed, but it turned into kind of a fiasco because it was used just to try to publicize the conference; but then due to various reasons it really created a much larger issue. But the point is that eventually Marc backed away from his claim and then also didn’t show up to the ISAR conference in the end, after all of that. So it sort of cast a weird shadow over everything after leaving even more controversy surrounding the birth time and what the true birth time was and whether any of the astrologers at these panels were basing their predictions on an accurate birth chart essentially.
So that is where that all led up to. And in the end, anybody that made predictions on the 2016 election—and especially those that based it on the birth charts of the candidates—then ended up having to make some sort of judgment call basically of which chart they would use. And different astrologers on those panels or a number of different astrologers around the internet ended up using a variety of different birth times ultimately for Hillary Clinton and coming to different conclusions based on that. So going back a little bit, one of the things that ended up happening in the end is Patrick and I ended up—despite the evidence pointing away from the 8:00 AM time—we still ended up using the 8:00 AM time in our predictions, and got it wrong basically, ‘cause the zodiacal releasing was way off using the 8:00 AM birth time.
And one of the lingering questions after 2016 for me was, was I using the right birth time? Was it actually 8:00 AM, but I just read the charts incorrectly and got it wrong through a bad application of techniques? Or alternatively, was I using the wrong birth time to begin with? Therefore all of the techniques that I was applying—like zodiacal releasing, that are very sensitive to birth time changes—were not even being applied in the right way because it wasn’t correct. I wasn’t using correct data. So, Nick, you—going back to 2008 and 2009—had made an argument for the Gemini rising chart, where you thought something like the 8:00 PM chart was correct.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And I guess that’s actually where we have to confirm and set up first that the birth certificate was finally released this week, ‘cause then we can talk, Nick, about why you had actually confirmed that one. So, Patrick, this is something you’d been working on for many years. What was the setup for that in terms of this year and why her birth certificate might become available? ‘Cause I know it’s something you’d been looking forward to for many years up to this point.
PW: Yeah, so most of the time when a state does not provide birth certificates it’s because there’s usually not any way to get it legally. There is a strange quirk though—and it may exist in other states, but Illinois is the only one that I know of—where it is possible for the public to access a birth certificate as long as the person who it belongs to is over 75-years-old. So on October 26, 2022 that was when Hillary turned 75-years-old, and so, legally, her certificate was available to the public. So I had been excited about this for a long time, and I probably talked about it more than I should have. And I can’t take all the responsibility for doing that just because there was a bit of a rush; I guess a lot of people had the idea to get her certificate at that time as well. So there was a bit of a question of whether or not the state of Illinois was actually gonna grant this many requests.
CB: Right.
PW: But it seems that the collector ‘Victor E.’ was able to send an application to the Cook County Records Office and was able to get the birth certificate through legal means, and thankfully, made it available to us.
CB: Right, and submitted that to Astro-Databank just, what, a week ago or something like that. Do you know what day it was?
PW: It was about a week ago.
CB: Okay.
PW: Yeah, more or less.
CB: Or within the past week. And if you listen to our recordings back from 2016, this was something you were aware would eventually happen and were looking forward to. So that’s why it’s a big deal now ‘cause we’ve been waiting for six years at this point—almost seven years—for the birth certificate to come out and to finally have all of this settled, and then it finally has happened as of this week. And this huge thing that we’ve been talking about since 2006-2007, this huge mystery in the astrological community has finally been settled or revealed at least, as much as it’s probably going to be at this point.
Although, hilariously, there’s still some ambiguity now, even once the birth certificate has been released. But let’s take a look at the image that was submitted by Victor to Astro-Databank. It doesn’t show the entire birth certificate, it just shows a snippet of it, but this is what it shows. So it says at the top, “Date of Birth,” and then it’s written out presumably in the doctor or the nurse’s handwriting, “October 26, 1947, born alive on [what looks like] 6:45 PM. Date signed: October 28, 1947.” And then at the bottom, what does that say? “Specimen: May 16—”
NDB: ‘47, yeah.
CB: ‘47, okay. So in the middle it has the birth time, thankfully. Thank God, it actually says something ‘cause there was a scenario, where on some older birth certificates, they don’t necessarily always have a birth time recorded, but it seems to say 6:45 PM. Interestingly, if it’s 6:45 PM, that does put it in the evening; it sort of confirms the notion of the mother going into the hospital in the morning and then Hillary being born in the evening. It’s also relatively close to, although still a little annoyingly far away from the 8:00 PM time that Hillary herself gave me—the rounded time of 8:00 PM that Hillary told me, as well as a few other people—but it’s close enough at 6:45 that it actually produces the same rising sign as one of the 8:00 PM times, which is Gemini rising. So let’s take a look at that chart now.
All right, so this is the chart for October 26, 1947, at 6:45 PM, in Chicago, Illinois. It gives 11° of Gemini rising. Let’s see, the Midheaven degree is at 15° of Aquarius. The Moon is at 28° Pisces in the 10th whole sign house. Uranus is in Gemini in the 1st whole sign house. The Scorpio stellium moves to the 6th whole sign house, with the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the South Node there in the 6th. She has Jupiter in Sagittarius in the 7th whole sign house at 0°, just before the degree of the Descendant at 11 Sag. The Leo stellium would move to the 3rd house, with Mars, Pluto, the IC, and Saturn all in Leo in the 3rd whole sign house. And what else? Neptune in the 5th at 11° of Libra, North Node at 23 Taurus, and Lot of Fortune at 15° of Capricorn, and the Lot of Spirit at 6° of Scorpio.
So basically when this was released this week, it seemed to confirm, finally, the Gemini rising chart, which was one of the possibilities. And some people, like our friend Nick Dagan Best, it turned out got the rectification correct in terms of when you had looked at this before, especially through the lens of transits and recurrent transits. Many years ago, in 2008-2009, you released a video where you thought that the Gemini rising chart was correct, right?
NDB: Yeah, yeah, mostly really just the Mars synodic cycle—that was enough to at least feel confident about where in the zodiac I should be looking, which landed me at the Gemini/Cancer area.
PW: And I remember being fairly impressed by what you found. Although at the same time because I was still invested in the Scorpio rising chart, I reasoned that, well, if Mars rules the Ascendant then of course a Mars retrograde would be significant for Hillary. And I also figured since those Mars retrogrades were moving from Cancer back into Gemini that they could equally be applicable to Bill Clinton’s chart because that would be his 10th house. And one of the examples was when Bill Clinton won the presidency and when she got married to Bill Clinton, so I thought that your observations made sense. It was still good astrology, but I sort of interpreted it in a slightly different way that didn’t necessarily put me on the right track with Gemini rising.
NDB: Sure.
PW: Yeah, but definitely props. A tip of the cap to you, sir.
NDB: No, the critique was reasonable enough, except for the first one. I mean, sure, if Scorpio’s rising then Mars transits are gonna be important, yes. But actually a lot of Mars retrograde transits were important in Hillary’s timeline, it was just the ones that went around Cancer and Gemini were the ones that were always a big deal. By ‘big deal’ what I’m always looking for when I’m doing this kind of work—like as a musician, you would recognize you’re going for the one in a measure. You know what I mean? Life has this sort of cyclical pattern to it, and, yeah, you’re coming back to some kind of new starting point. And whenever Mars was doing its retrograde around Cancer/Gemini—which doesn’t happen that often—but by the time I made that video in 2009, Hillary had had four instances of that transit happen in her life, and all four of them were really consequential in her life story. So yeah, there were a lot of Mars retrograde transits that were important, but it was the ones that were just visibly taking her back to one, if you will—easing her to the next level—those were the ones that were happening in that part of the zodiac.
CB: Let’s go through those.
NDB: Sure.
CB: It’s actually private. You might want to make it public again, the original video that you put out for this.
NDB: Can it not be played?
CB: No, it can be, you just need the direct link. And I was just noticing as I was searching for it that I had find—
NDB: I’ve made a lot of my old videos private ‘cause I’m gonna sort of upgrade them and stuff.
CB: Sure. So I have the slides from that, just so we can go through some of what you were talking about in terms of what you looked for and what we’re mentioning here with the retrogrades. So here was the first one.
NDB: Yeah. I did also send you the slides from the press conference, which was the astrology conference, which were better versions of these slides. It’s the same thing, but just nicer-looking.
CB: Okay.
NDB: That was my game in 2009.
CB: Well, yeah, it was just more impressive just because that was so long ago in 2008-2009.
NDB: You can go ahead and put those up. We can look at them. I’m not trying to be fussy.
CB: Okay, so this is from when, again? 2009?
NDB: Yeah, I actually posted it on her birthday as it turns out in 2009. So October 26, 2009, at which point she would have been 62. Turning 62. Yeah, so this is the first event, the election of 1960, Mars is about to go retrograde in Cancer. But the thing is that it doesn’t even have to be retrograde; it’s just sort of slowing down to that eventual station.
CB: Right. It’s like in its shadow period at this point.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, with Mars, you’re in sort of tricky territory using the term ‘shadow period’ ‘cause that’s like a quarter of all time. But anyway, the concept kind of breaks down with Mars. But yeah, it’s the pre-retrograde station period. So what happens is John F. Kennedy is elected US President. Now what happens is in Illinois—it’s pretty well-established now—Illinois and Texas were two states where Kennedy apparently had ‘outside’ help to help him win those states in that election; basically the classic registering dead people to vote and things like that was going on. And Hillary was 13-years-old at the time, a Republican, and sort of getting into politics. And on Election Day, she learned herself in Chicago how the election was being stolen, and it was sort of like a political wake-up call. I mean, you can just imagine this 13-year-old, future secretary of state, future first lady basically seeing corruption in the system.
CB: ‘Cause they were doing vote-stuffing or something like that?
NDB: Yeah, yeah, and she was privy to it.
CB: Right.
NDB: I think she said that in Chicago.
CB: She had seen weird stuff herself.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so on its own it’s not hugely consequential as an event, but you can see how given that this is the first transit of this kind in her lifetime, you can see how it’s sort of shaping her politically, philosophically, what have you.
CB: Okay.
NDB: All right, so then the next event is 15 years later. Mars goes retrograde in early Cancer and goes back into Gemini. And again, it’s about to go retrograde very close to—well, it’s in the 1st house as we now know. But it’s getting ready to go retrograde, and she marries Bill Clinton. So this is obviously consequential, no explanation needed.
PW: Note Neptune would have been transiting around the degree of the—
NDB: Of the Descendant.
PW: Of the recorded Descendant at the time of marriage.
NDB: Right.
PW: She turned him down several times before it finally happened.
CB: So Neptune’s at 9° of Sag here, and the later-recorded Gemini time has 11 Sag on the Descendant.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay.
NDB: And he has Neptune rising.
PW: Rising, yeah.
CB: Venus conjunct Neptune in Libra.
NDB: Yeah, yeah, which is the Neptune part in terms of it being on her Descendant when she marries him, and he’s got it rising. That kind of thing you see a lot with astrology.
CB: Yeah, so Mars was just about to go retrograde in Cancer and Gemini when they got married.
NDB: Exactly, yeah.
CB: Got it, okay. One other point with this—so the difference between these two is 15 years.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So we’re talking about the planetary period of Mars and the actual synodic cycle of Mars, where Mars will actually repeat and go retrograde in roughly the same spot in the zodiac approximately every 15 years. And that’s a specific technique that you’ve actually specialized in.
NDB: Yeah, it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s alternate returns of 15 and 17 years. So that first return, from 1960 to 1975, is 15 years, but then the second return from 1975 to 1992 is 17 years. Welcome to Mars, folks.
PW: It’s rough.
NDB: It’s asymmetrical city. Asymmetrical city. Yeah, so 17 years after marrying Bill Clinton in 1975 we have the next event, which is, ta-da, he’s elected president. And this is the next time Mars is once again just about to go retrograde in the same spot of the zodiac. Yeah, it’s going just through Cancer. But again, Mars almost never goes retrograde in Gemini. It did in 1990. In Hillary’s life, it almost never does, but it occasionally goes retrograde from Cancer to Gemini. Or even just when it’s in Cancer, it’s in that part of the chart—I’ve learned by looking at this technique—that’s as close as it’s gonna come to the Ascendant on this go-around, if you catch my drift. So that’s the thing you’re looking for, even if it’s not gonna cross the actual horizon.
PW: It looks like there could potentially have been eclipses that have occurred across Gemini and Sagittarius in the lead-up to this and after this, which is interesting because that would elevate the topic of partnership and self-hood in her life, which it did very alarmingly so as a political spouse.
CB: So you’re noting the nodes are. 23 Sag is the North Node and 23 Gemini is the South Node, which means that basically eclipses would have shifted into those signs around then.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: Right.
NDB: And the first two years of her term, it was just ridiculous. They were, I mean, just after her before she could do anything wrong. Like it’s a different thing today after she’s held office and she’s made some enemies. But yeah, right from the get-go it was amazing how she was like a lightning rod for derision.
CB: She was the first first lady that held a PhD, and she was also the first first lady that was given an office in the White House, and she was assigned the task to start working on healthcare reform. And that’s what she started working on in 1992 and ‘93 that sort of became suddenly the focal point of a lot of attacks and criticism.
PW: Yeah.
NDB: I thought Rosalind Carter had also been in her husband’s administration. I mean, it wasn’t a job as big as the healthcare task, but Rosalind Carter was, I think, officially in her husband’s cabinet.
PW: Even before the nodes shifted into Gemini and Sagittarius, there would have been a lunar eclipse at the very end of Gemini in December 1991, which was just three months after Bill had announced his run. And then in June of 1992, there was a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. Remember, in the lead-up to the election of 1992, there was the—what was it—‘Jennifer Flowers’ scandal that erupted, and there was that big, dramatic interview that they did on 60 Minutes where she sort of tried to defend him. And so, it wasn’t just that he was running but it really was putting their marriage in the public eye and often in a very unpleasant way.
NDB: June of ‘92 is also when he played saxophone on Arsenio Hall, which is obviously—
PW: The moment he won.
CB: Up there in terms of American history, like the ‘Crossing of the Delaware River’.
NDB: Actually, Chris, I do think Bill Clinton playing saxophone on Arsenio is a bigger deal ‘cause that crossing the river was to ambush a bunch of drunk Germans on Christmas Day. It makes a great painting and all, but it’s not nearly the achievement, not equal. Playing saxophone on Arsenio is definitely a bigger deal. It doesn’t make a nice oil painting, that’s all.
CB: That was not the comeback to my joke that I was expecting, but I’ll take it. I’ll accept that. All right, so, where were we? Oh, yeah, we’re still going through the retrogrades at this point. Patrick, you’ve done a lot of work—
NDB: Yeah, so those—
CB: Hold on really quickly—Patrick, you’ve done a lot of work on her. So that was true, though. The healthcare thing—she started working on that right away, as soon as they got into office in 1992, right?
PW: I forget how soon the announcement was, I know that it was basically 1993. Yeah, I think it was one of the first things they did. I don’t think it actually officially happened until Saturn had entered Pisces in 1993. I can’t remember, but it was very shortly afterwards.
NDB: Saturn didn’t enter Pisces until February of ‘94. Look, it may not have been day one of the presidency, but it was quite early on she got that.
PW: Saturn had briefly entered Pisces in 1993 in the summer and then it came back in early 1994.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: So the first dip was in late 1993. Sorry, I didn’t mean to correct the ‘Human Ephemeris’ but—
NDB: No, that’s okay.
PW: I’m the mini ‘Human Ephemeris’, that’s what I’m aiming for. I’m aiming for second spot.
NDB: There are no mini ephemerises. Every ephemeris is eternal.
PW: I’m aiming for the pocket one.
CB: The pocket ephemeris.
PW: Yeah. You’re like the leather-bound one that you keep by your mahogany books on the—
NDB: I’ll call you ‘Tiny E’.
PW: Yeah, I’ll take that.
NDB: Okay.
CB: So this will be important, though, the 1992-1993 thing because one of the conundrums that I was in with the zodiacal releasing periods—and that Patrick and I actually talked about on one of the episodes before the election—was the choice that we had in the lead-up to the 2016 election. I thought if she had Scorpio rising, and she was born at 8:00 AM, then there was a good chance that she would win the presidency because in zodiacal releasing it showed her peak periods taking place in the 2010s.
But in the other charts—like the 8:00 PM chart, or the Gemini chart—it showed a real focal point starting around 1992, and that her peak in some ways was back during the ‘90s and during different periods like that, and it looked much less likely that she would win the presidency according to zodiacal releasing if the Gemini rising chart was correct. And there was actually a statement to that effect in Episode 90 where I was like, “For me, the thing is if the 8:00 AM time is correct then she has it.” Then I continued and said, “And if she wins, if the 8:00 PM timed charts are correct—and most of the other ones that were proposed, including 2:18—it doesn’t look as compelling. It looks more iffy.” And we’ll get into the zodiacal releasing of that here in just a minute, once we finish going through this. So you had one more—
NDB: One more of these, yes.
CB: Okay.
NDB: So that’s three, and then this is the fourth. Mars goes retrograde, once again, Cancer to Gemini. This one, unlike the others, it’s not pre-retrograde; it’s already retrograde. But I remember this day really, really well ‘cause actually Biden was the one who looked like he might sort of take the lead. This was very early in the 2008 primaries. But out of the blue, this was the day that it was like, “Oh, this totally unknown black man just won the Iowa Caucus, and he’s a real contender. He could take this.” And from this day forward—like I can’t state it enough—no one really thought Obama had a shot at the presidency until this day.
CB: What are we looking at, for the audio listeners?
NDB: This is January 3, 2008. Yeah, Mars retrograde in Gemini. And it was the Iowa Caucus, and Obama won, which was suddenly kind of a heads-up. Like everyone kind of presumed it would be Hillary, or maybe Biden in 2008, and then out of the blue Obama sort of shot out like a rocket. So this was sort of the indicator; I mean, not unlike 2016. Hillary was just presumed to be the candidate, and then in comes Obama and that all changes. So yeah, this was like her one really good shot—I mean, a better shot than 2016—and she was thwarted.
CB: So this is January 3, 2008 when Obama wins the Iowa Caucus, and Mars is at 28 Gemini retrograde. So it would be Mars retrograde basically in her rising sign.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So based on all of that up to this point, when you first did this rectification in 2009, you felt like this validated the 8:00 PM time.
NDB: I felt it validated the 8:00 PM time, yeah. Like I said, there’s a Mars retrograde every 26 months and it’ll do its turn around the zodiac. You could see she might have some big Mars retrograde in Libra transits like, for instance, when she started using ‘Rodham’ in her full name: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other Mars retrogrades were clearly important in her life, but it was obvious that this Cancer/Gemini one was the one that was really sort of taking her life back to that starting point that I’m always looking for that sort of—not reset but return.
PW: B1.
NDB: Yeah, exactly.
PW: Yeah, B1 of a measure. That’s good.
NDB: Exactly, yeah, yeah. I don’t want to get into music theory with the audience, but yeah, for musicians who do understand that’s kind of like the idea.
CB: Yeah, and that was part of how you approached things ‘cause you do that with Mars retrogrades. You also do that with the Venus retrogrades—
NDB: That’s right, yeah.
CB: As we’ve talked about in previous episodes. And especially the recurrences every time Venus goes retrograde—every eight-year increment—there’s connections sometimes between those periods.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. Studying these returns overlaid on someone’s timeline really gives you an idea if you don’t know what time they’re born. Those two transits in particular—they happen often enough. It’s not like waiting for Saturn every 29 years. So those transits happen often enough that you have repeated hits and you can—like I did—by the time Hillary was middle-aged, I could even take four of the same Mars synodic returns and demonstrate how they reflect her life at a certain turning point—an identifiable turning point. As simple as that.
PW: It’s so funny looking back on this because my rectification article on Hillary Clinton sort of focused on the transits that occurred across Virgo and Pisces as being relevant for her career, which in the Scorpio rising chart the Midheaven was in Virgo, and so I was convinced that this was a good argument for Scorpio rising. But what I’m not sort of realizing is that since I was looking at the nodes and these eclipse cycles, those would have just as well have happened in her whole sign 10th and 4th if she were Gemini rising.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: So it’s easy to be led astray sometimes. It’s really difficult to isolate sometimes the patterns you think you find, but you definitely looked to the right ones.
CB: Yeah, that’s what makes rectification so hard, especially with public figures, is the potential for false-positives and thinking that you’ve got a correct placement for something. But sometimes there can be other ways that that placement works out from a different perspective. And it’s especially difficult with public figures because you can’t actually sit down with them and talk to them about the life and get the details of like what actually happened and what were the most subjectively important periods or what were the more subjectively difficult periods; you have to make some of those assessments from the outside. And then if there’s—like in this case—like five or six different birth times or different charts then you’re running into an issue with the potential for many false-positives.
PW: Right.
CB: What were you gonna say, Nick?
NDB: Oh, I forgot. It’s not important.
CB: Okay, so you—starting in 2009—thought that she had Gemini rising. There was a little bit of an issue here, which I don’t know if you’ve thought about this. Obviously at the time, in 2009, when you were using a 29° Gemini chart ‘cause it’s 8:00 PM, and you realized it could go either way with Gemini or Cancer, some of those retrogrades were in Gemini. And actually it’s worth mentioning here—I think it’s really worth mentioning, even though I don’t know why this is relevant—is what we just had very recently is we’re coming out of a Mars retrograde in Gemini.
PW: In fact, it happened a couple of days from her birthday, right? The very day that we were waiting for to send this off.
CB: Oh, it stationed. Mars stationed retrograde in Gemini within a few days of her birthday back in October.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: Yeah.
CB: And it’s still there. It’s at 23 Gemini right now. It still hasn’t even left the sign.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. What was I about to say to answer your question, though?
CB: I don’t know if it was a quadrant/whole sign issue.
NDB: Those four retrogrades that I show in the article, they’re all retrogrades that began in Cancer.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Even if they went into Gemini, they started in Cancer and went into Gemini. Actually Mars retrograde in Gemini—like beginning and ending in Gemini—is very rare. Even in Hillary’s lifetime, it happened just now in 2022, 9t happened in 1990. And before that, yeah, not even 1958 ‘cause it was Gemini to Taurus in 1958. So that’s really it. And she’s like in her 70s, and that’s like the only two times that Mars has fully gone retrograde through Gemini—oh, I’m sorry. Oh, no, but ‘43 was before she was born. So yeah, those were the only two times, 1990 and 2022, the only times that Mars has fully gone retrograde in Gemini without being Cancer to Gemini or something like that.
CB: Right.
NDB: Or Gemini to Taurus.
CB: So it’s really rare.
NDB: Yeah, it’s very rare. And those four retrogrades I cited are ones that began in Cancer and wandered back to Gemini, or very close to it in some cases. And like I said, even if it doesn’t quite come to the rising sign, it’s the pass ‘cause the Mars retrograde cycle still goes in a certain sort of zodiacal order. So the idea of that’s the closest it comes to the Ascendant—that’s when you see the one.
CB: Right. So I guess what I was trying to understand a little bit is why you decided Gemini was the correct rising sign instead of Cancer.
NDB: Yeah, why did I say that? I’m trying to think back to why I thought Gemini and not Cancer. It might have just been—
PW: What about the 1990 Mars retrograde? That would have been the year in the lead-up to deciding whether or not Bill Clinton was gonna run in 1992. I would presume that probably would have been important. It didn’t reach a level of public awareness, but I would assume that that period would have been a pretty big deal for her.
NDB: Yeah, I don’t know for sure but that might also be the period where ‘Jennifer Flowers’ stuff is going on, things like that. Like the actual affairs and things like that privately.
PW: Wait—oh, no. Oh, no, I was just trying to think of what was going on in 1990 with the Clintons. I know that the 1988 DNC was Bill Clinton making that speech which was supposed to launch him into consideration for the presidency. But then he took too long with the speech and so people thought he might not really be able to do it. I’m trying to think of what else happened in 1990. I know there was some chatter in 1989 of Hillary, herself, running for governor of Arkansas. But then after doing some testing or doing some polling then she decided against it. So I can’t really remember anything that was specific about 1990, but given that it happened in her rising sign—I don’t know if there was anything else you remember from that.
NDB: Yeah, not specifically. Now that we have the time, I want to go back to my Hillary biographies and comb it out.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Why did I think it was Gemini over Cancer? It might have just been completely arbitrary, like a sense of, “Is it one or the other? I guess it’s this one.” I don’t remember, though. I have to think I had some kind of rationale at the time, but it’s 15 years ago or whatever.
CB: Right, that’s what’s funny about all this. Over the past week, I’ve had to go back and listen to some of those podcast episodes from 2016, and it’s just making remember so many details that I had forgotten about, about the whole saga and drama surrounding all of this for so many years and the different twists and turns in the story that I had forgotten about.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Whatever it was you did end up using that. After rectifying it in 2008-2009, you did end up using Gemini rising later in 2016. So you must have felt pretty good about using that chart, especially when other people, like me and Patrick, were using Scorpio rising based on what we thought was the practical evidence, as well as what we thought was the more eminent chart, the one chart where it seemed like she had a shot with it. And that actually ended up being part of the moral of story for me in retrospect, which is, one, follow the evidence and the majority of the evidence when it comes to the documentation of birth times and what that seems to point to (which in that instance it had always been pointing—or at least towards the end of the election cycle, it started pointing to the 8:00 PM time as the one that seemed to have better documentation) and avoid the tendency for conspiracy theories and stuff like that.
One of the reasons why I oftentimes have such a negative attitude towards those is because sometimes they can lead you astray and you lead you to not pay attention to the evidence if you’re focused on essentially rumors or things like that, or speculations that she’s putting out false birth times deliberately or whatever, which may have not ultimately have ended up being true at all. It ends up looking like that was probably not true.
PW: No, I don’t know if it’s really fair to call it a conspiracy theory. I mean, the source at the time was Frances McEvoy who had been able to collect good amounts of data up to that point. She’s the source of the time for Mitt Romney, for example, which is accurate.
CB: No, ‘cause there was a problem with that. That was part of the thing that we started discovering about Frances too late in the lead up to 2016 that started making me question the time. Remember, with Romney, at least one or two other astrologers had asked Romney, and he said, “I was born around sunrise,” or something like that, which is kind of vague, but it gives you a rough time period of when he was born. But then Frances also heard that but she submitted it as an exact birth time to Astro-Databank instead of a rounded one.
PW: Oh, I thought the source for his time came from a letter that his father had given as an announcement to his employees.
CB: Oh, it wasn’t Romney. Actually I’m thinking of Kerry. Remember?
PW: Oh, Kerry, right, right. Okay. I was gonna say it was tricky to evaluate Frances McEvoy because she had been known to give fairly reliable times fairly straightforwardly.
CB: Right.
PW: But then there were also a couple that were suspect. And so, similarly with Marc Penfield, not everything that he had ever done—
CB: Before we move on from that, that’s a really important point. ‘ Cause that was one that you were personally involved in, which was Kerry, ‘cause you asked John Kerry for his birth time.
PW: Yeah, and the most normal thing that I ever did. The question, he thought, was just the most normal thing he ever heard. I asked him directly.
CB: You were like 16 or 17 or something?
PW: No, I was in college, so I was maybe like 19 or something. But yeah, he did an event at my college, which is in Massachusetts, and I went up to him afterwards and asked him what time he was born. And he looked at me really, really strange—the way everyone else around me was looking at me really strangely—and he said, “Oh, it was around sunrise, I think,” which corresponded with previous quotes and other times he had been asked. But yeah, as far as Frances McEvoy is concerned—
CB: So one or two other people had also said that they had asked him, or asked other people around him, and that sunrise was correct. But then Frances submitted it to Astro-Databank—presumably also after asking him—as an exact time, which was to the minute, and it was about an hour or something on the other side of sunrise. So it was around sunrise, but what we realized she had done is she had taken a statement that, “I was born around sunrise,” and she rectified it to be an exact birth time and then submitted it to Astro-Databank in that way.
PW: Yeah, instead of it being approximate rather than exact.
CB: Yeah, so that was the first clue. And we discovered this at some point in the early-to-mid-2010s in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and I started realizing that there might be a potential problem with some of Frances’ approaches. Even though it otherwise seemed like she had been a good data collector, sometimes she might have a tendency to adjust things a bit. But unfortunately, by the time I realized that she had passed away, and I never got a chance to actually ask her again or have this conversation with her again about Hillary Clinton’s birth time and why she was so certain about that, and some of the things that she told me that I do feel like went a little bit further than what she probably had evidence for in terms of saying that Hillary was deliberately giving out false birth times because somebody told her something bad about Scorpio and she didn’t want people to know that she had Scorpio rising or something like that. I think ultimately that was a speculation on her part.
PW: Sure.
CB: It wasn’t grounded in anything necessarily. It was like a guess or something, an inference.
NDB: Yeah, you know how people can just sort of stereotype all Scorpios and give them the same sort of—
PW: I mean, honestly, you owe Hillary an apology. You didn’t trust her. She wasn’t lying to you. Although, important to know—
CB: And that was really the problem and that’s something I won’t ever not get over, but it’s something I’ve really dwelt on because, in the end, she was being pretty honest. Like most people don’t look at their birth certificate and memorize what time they were born. But she evidently in the end told me roughly the correct birth time from her memory, and I ended up using the exact opposite because I had been told by somebody that Hillary was doing something in order to hide her true birth time. And I ended up ultimately defaulting to that partially through the weight of that, putting confidence in that. Obviously there’s other complications and issues because that was also the one chart where it looked like she could actually win the presidency. And up until that point there was a strong assumption, I think, amongst many people—
PW: Most countries in the world.
CB: Most people. That she was gonna win the election and that it was unlikely that Trump would become the next president.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, come on, that would just be ridiculous.
PW: Well, he didn’t actually win the majority of votes, so it was really through that interesting—
NDB: Uh-oh, hate mail. We’re gonna get hate mail.
PW: Oh, sorry. I mean, I’m just saying the Electoral College, he won. He won the Electoral College and that was how he won, which that’s a less-common scenario, aside from 2000.
CB: Right. So you’re just saying he didn’t win the popular vote.
PW: Right, right, but I’m saying he won the Electoral College. So to all ‘hate mail’ senders, I’m not saying he lost, I’m saying he won the Electoral College.
NDB: Patrick Watson, Michigan, USA. Send the letters.
CB: So let’s look at that really quickly ‘cause I want to contrast the zodiacal releasing periods and what I was looking at. So I’m gonna show the Astro.com ones. I kind of like if you cast a chart in Astro.com, and then you, under ‘Chart Styles’, select ‘Hellenistic’, they’ve integrated a nice set of calculations after Leisa and I did the zodiacal releasing episode several years ago in order to fit some of the specifications that we were talking about, and it generates this chart and it gives you zodiacal releasing periods. You select Fortune, Spirit, or Eros, or some other sign.
So here’s the basic difference. So in the Scorpio rising chart, she has the Lot of Fortune in Aries. So that means the four cardinal signs would be the peak periods. The Lot of Spirit’s in Cancer, so that means we start the career periods from the sign of Cancer. She starts out in a 25-year Cancer period in 1947. Then she goes into a long 19-year Leo period for 19 years, from 1972 to 1991, then a 20-year Virgo period from 1991 to 2010. And then from 2010 to 2018, there was an 8-year Libra period, which is the seventh sign from Fortune, and therefore that should have been a peak period, according to the theory of the technique, and a period of heightened importance and activity in terms of her career and overall life direction if the Scorpio rising chart was correct.
So that ended up being a large part of the basis for the prediction of thinking that she would win if the Scorpio rising chart was correct. The technique showed the 2010s as being the high point in her career and overall life direction. But then it was gonna switch into a bad period in 2018 when it goes to Scorpio, which is angular from Mars and Saturn. And so, I had sort of assumed from that that she would get one term in office but wouldn’t be reelected. Were one of you gonna say something?
PW: I was just gonna say that the other reason why this looked compelling is that if you look at the Level 2 loosings of the bond, they also corresponded with fairly significant times of her life that made it seem more plausible that this sequence matched her life. So for example, if you look at the Virgo Level 1 period—
CB: But we know it’s not correct.
PW: We know it’s not correct.
CB: We don’t want to dwell on that too much.
PW: No worries, yeah. I was just saying this is kind of why we were able to be convinced by it.
NDB: You’ve got to let go of it, Watson.
PW: Oh, no, I have. I let go of it in 2016. That was really when I let go.
CB: Yeah, so anyway the Scorpio rising chart was the one chart that looked good for the zodiacal releasing periods and just showing a peak period around the time of the 2016 election. But the Gemini rising chart—let me pull that up. Let me move things around here. So the Gemini rising chart has the Lot of Fortune in Capricorn, so the peak periods should be the four cardinal signs. The Lot of Spirit’s in Scorpio, so we start the career periods from there. So she starts out in a 15-year Scorpio period from 1947 to 1962. She goes into a 12-year Sagittarius period or chapter of her life from 1962 until 1974. Then in 1974 she reaches Capricorn, which is the sign—
NDB: This is just brilliant, too.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It’s almost to the month of when she’s on the House Watergate committee.
CB: Yeah, let me explain first.
NDB: Okay.
CB: So the Lot of Fortune is in Capricorn. So according to the theory of the technique when her Spirit periods reached this sign—the sign of the Lot of Fortune for 27 years—it means she would theoretically go into a 27-year career peak, which would be a period of heightened importance and heightened activity in terms of her career and overall life direction, and that’s the basic theory of the technique. From 1974, all the way until 2001—to actually January 15, 2001—is when that 27-year peak period ends.
NDB: This is five days before her husband’s presidency ends.
PW: And when she became senator herself of New York.
NDB: Right.
CB: So what’s important about this—and this is what we realized, and why I had that previous quote when we were discussing this right before the election. We were saying if the 8:00 AM time is correct then she might have it, the presidency, but if the 8:00 PM time charts are correct then it doesn’t look as good; it doesn’t look like she’s gonna win the presidency. And the reason that statement was made was because according to the zodiacal releasing technique, this period should have been one of the most active and important periods for her in terms of her career and overall life direction, from 1974 to 2001, with a specific focal point on the loosing of the bond that takes place in Level 2, which is always a major career transition.
And since it’s also angular from Fortune, it should have been a career transition upwards to the highest point in her career. And according to the technique that would take place—that loosing of the bond—October of 1991 through October of 1993, and that perfectly falls in the period in which Bill Clinton was elected. The Clintons—Bill and Hillary—get into the White House and then she starts really working on things like healthcare reform and other things like that.
PW: The exact date of the beginning of that loosing of the bond, October 5, 1991. I believe that is actually the very day that Bill Clinton announced his run. It was in October of 1991.
NDB: Okay.
CB: Okay.
PW: Someone can check me on that, but I think it’s October 5.
CB: Right. Let’s talk more about the dates of that in a second. So the basic contrast that I ran into before the election in October of 2016 was if she’s Scorpio rising, she’s in the biggest peak period of her life now, and there’s a pretty good chance she’ll get elected. But if the Gemini rising—if the 8:00 PM chart is correct, it means that she may have peaked earlier in her life, and that her peak period in her career is actually not right now, and therefore, she will probably not win the presidency. So going back to that, Nick, you said at the very beginning of this period, in June of 1974, the 27-year Capricorn period, that was the start of, what?
NDB: I think it’s in January of ‘74 that she’s appointed to the House impeachment committee. Well, I guess it’s not the impeachment committee but they know it’s gonna be. Then in May the impeachment committee starts and, there you go, she’s on it. So she’s a junior lawyer advisor for the committee that’s investigating the whole Watergate scandal. And so, yeah, it’s like her first political post of any weight. And yeah, so that’s what she does. And this is before she marries Bill. She’s Bill’s girlfriend but she’s not his wife yet.
CB: Oh, yeah, I was actually looking at the Eros periods, and what’s funny is they line up really well their—
NDB: Right, yeah.
PW: Yeah.
CB: So if I click Lot of Eros right here, her Lot of Eros in the chart—this is like a modification of the zodiacal releasing technique that I came up with in 2005 to study periods for love and relationships. Her Lot of Eros—using the Paulus calculation—is in Gemini. So she starts out in a 20-year Gemini period, and then starting July 13, 1967, she moves into Cancer. And again what we look at for identifying peak periods in the technique is when the person reaches a sign that’s angular from the Lot of Fortune. So Cancer, for her, is seventh from Fortune, so that means starting in July of 1967 she started a 25-year peak period for love in relationships.
PW: They met, I think, in the spring of 1973, which would have been in the next—
NDB: No, no, no, no—they were together in ‘71.
PW: Oh, pardon me. Okay. And that was during Virgo.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: Okay.
NDB: Yeah, yeah.
PW: So angular to Jupiter and then marriage by—
NDB: The one in the Capricorn period, yeah.
CB: The one I picked up on was the Capricorn period. It’s this because it’s actually the halfway point through the cycle. When it came all the way around to the actual sign of the Lot of Fortune on the sub-periods in Level 2, she went into a 30-month, or a 27-month peak period for love and relationships, from August 30, 1975 through November 17, 1977, and they ended up getting married during that time. Do you guys remember the exact date? I had looked it up and then—
PW: October 11.
NDB: Yeah, ‘75. I think it’s the same day that Saturday Night Live first premiered on TV.
PW: Yeah, that’s right. That’s how I remembered it. Doesn’t everyone?
CB: So yeah, basically, right after this 27-month peak period begins is when they get married. What’s interesting is that’s a foreshadowing period, and then she would have a repetition of that period in the loosing of the bond between November of 1984 and January of 1987. And I don’t want to get into what happened then but there probably was some major relationship thing that took place during that time period.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, anyway, so that was just a quick digression that with the new, confirmed, actual birth time from the birth certificate, her releasing periods are lining up well with both career periods, as well as relationships.
NDB: Yeah. And you can even see her kind of losing the election as well down there.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Loosing of the bonds with—yeah.
CB: So with the Spirit period, she’s in the 27-year Capricorn period from ‘74 to 2001. The loosing of the bond—which is like the focal point, or the most important point within this entire 27-year period—is from ‘91 to ‘93 when they get in the White House. And then the entire 27-year period closes down and is brought to completion. We have a completion period here in Capricorn from November of ‘99 until January of 2001. That 27-year peak period for career ends 15th of January, 2001, which is when George W. Bush is inaugurated—
NDB: Is inaugurated on the 20th, yeah.
CB: On the 20th.
PW: She became senator of New York, sworn in earlier that month, like on January—
NDB: 1st.
PW: Yeah, the first week of January. So the completion period of the Capricorn period was being sworn in as the senator of New York.
CB: That’s brilliant, ‘cause the completion period—which is when it comes back to the sign it started at—it starts at Capricorn in 1974 to 1976, and then at the loosing of the bond, it skips Capricorn in 1991 and 1992. When you get to a completion period usually they only happen in Capricorn or Aquarius general periods. There’s a sense of things coming full-circle and coming back to where they started, and things being kind of like wrapped up nicely.
PW: She helped out Bill. And finally, by the very end, she was able to be her own political figure.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. That was like the start of her own political career, in some ways, independent or separate from him.
PW: Right.
CB: Because there’s a connection between these different periods, they’re not just in isolation. Like this 27-year Capricorn period, while it’s a peak period in terms of career and overall life direction, it’s part of a sequence of three signs on Level 1 that we call an ‘angular triad’, which started with Sagittarius, which is like a 12-year buildup period from 1962 to 1974. Then there’s a 27-year peak period—which is like a period of heightened importance and activity where a lot of the most important activity takes place—from 1974 to 2001. And then it meant that in 2001, she went into a 30-year Aquarius period, which is the third and final sign of the angular triad, where the themes that were initiated during the previous two periods are carried forward and brought to completion. So that’s the main theme of this period is carrying forward and bringing to completion. But also because it’s Aquarius, and it’s now a fixed sign, it’s actually much more difficult. It’s kind of mixed because Aquarius is the sign that’s opposite to her Mars-Saturn conjunction.
NDB: Right.
CB: So some of the most subjectively difficult periods would take place in this 30-year Aquarius period. Although there would also be some of the most positive ones, because it’s also angular from Venus in a night chart, which is in Scorpio.
PW: I would also say that because the MC is present in Aquarius, just the angle being present in Aquarius, would be another reason why her status didn’t necessarily diminish after being first lady. She went on to be a senator, and secretary of state, dealing with foreign countries—the MC’s in the 9th—and a presidential candidate.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, if anything even more of a proper job. First lady isn’t a job, you know what I mean? It’s a title.
PW: Right.
CB: Well, I mean, she made it a job. But, yes, you’re right.
NDB: Yeah, she made it a job, but not officially. It’s a title.
CB: Right.
PW: Send all hate mail to Nick Dagan Best.
CB: But anyway, it’s carrying forward and bringing to completion for 30 years. But also, some of the greatest challenges and difficulties would come up during that period, as well as some very positive things. So the focal point of it would be this loosing of the bond eventually, which would be difficult ultimately. But is that what you were talking about, Nick? The loosing of the bond?
NDB: Yeah, I mean, leading up to the loosing of the bond is when she loses the election—it’s interesting. Yeah, it’s almost like she had the loosing of the bond just a little too late.
CB: Well, it’s afterwards, but it’s a difficult one because it jumped into the sign of Mars and Saturn.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can tell why the other one worked and this one didn’t.
CB: Sure.
PW: Well, I would also imagine that there was still some talk potentially of her running again in 2020. And I wonder if that loosing of the bond coincided with the time when she maybe really did decide like never again after what happened in 2016.
CB: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that does happen in a loosing of the bond in the third and final sign of the angular triad is oftentimes people do retire from and move away from whatever their career or vocation had been up to that point during the previous few signs. Because it’s the final transition at the end—she started in Sagittarius for 12 years, then Capricorn for 27, then Aquarius for 30—and then when you hit this loosing of the bond on Level 2 that’s usually when you sort of end it and move away from the career that you’ve been doing up to that point and start getting ready to transition into something new.
NDB: Okay.
PW: Notice that the 2008 primary would have happened during the Cancer angular Level 2 period, and the 2016 election also took place during an angular Level 2 period. So even within the succedent period, you can see that the angular Level 2 periods are kind of highlighting some of her most high profile activities within that succedent Level 1 period.
CB: Yeah, like January 2008 through—
PW: ‘Cause that was also when she became secretary of state, right? It was after the 2008 election.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really important ‘cause that’s like huge. And it ended up being ultimately one of her most major contributions politically as an independent entity from Bill, being secretary of state, and of the work she had done in that context for several years after Obama was elected. Let’s see, so where do we go with this in order to summarize? So it’s interesting for me just seeing the zodiacal releasing periods and now understanding in retrospect what the story was with that, and obviously wishing we had clarity at the time on the birth time back in 2016.
But now that it’s come out, it’s interesting to actually be able to look at it and start to understand better what the actual story and what the actual narrative is, which is also interesting because now we also know what her story is, at least up till this point over the past few years. Anytime we’re studying celebrity charts for people that are still alive, you always have this issue where sometimes there may be indications in the chart of things that just haven’t happened yet. And sometimes until a person’s story is over it’s hard to fully look at it objectively because there’s parts of their story that just may not have happened yet.
PW: Right.
NDB: Yeah, I think it was Brittany Spears who scared me off doing too many ‘live’ celebrity readings. I mean, it’s different if the person is in their 70s, then at least you’re summarizing a great deal of their life. But I found commenting on younger, living people, yeah, it’s a bit awkward ‘cause their story isn’t over, and it’s unnecessary commentary.
CB: Right. Especially when you’re dealing with celebrities, you’re also dealing with the public’s perception of them or your perception of whatever you perceive of them as a public figure from your vantage point and whatever biases are going into that. In this case, obviously, there’s political biases going into it. But even with other celebrities—you mentioned Brittany Spears—there’s other biases going into it in terms of just the amount of data or information that you have available to you to make up your conclusions about their life and personality about, even though you don’t actually have personal intimate details about understanding the person’s life from a firsthand standpoint.
NDB: Yeah, the kind of work I do today, I go back and I read letters written by notable people, the published books of letters of Kurt Vonnegut or Sylvia Plath or all kinds of different people. And that’s the kind of thing that’s typically only released after the person is gone, but this way you have a far more accurate internal and external record of what the person’s life was like.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Right.
PW: It’s so interesting to see—thinking about this and looking at these two options that we were tangling with. Because one of the things that I couldn’t really understand—one of the things that really drew me rather to the Scorpio rising chart was the Mars-Saturn-Pluto thing being in the 10th place because I know that she’s been such a controversial figure. I would sort of assume, “Oh, well, naturally the greatest difficulties of her life would be 10th house-type of things.” But it’s so interesting ‘cause when you look at the way that Mar-Saturn-Pluto conjunction ends up being in the 3rd house of the Gemini rising chart, it’s kind of interesting. Because I guess if you were to ask her maybe what the most difficult part of her life would be, I would wonder if she would start talking about family.
It hasn’t really been publicized all that much but I guess there has been a lot of family drama with her siblings and people not being on speaking terms, and troubles with cousins who have been kind of exiled from the family, and all of this sort of drama, which wasn’t really taking place on a very public stage, but it’s something that would nonetheless be really true to Hillary herself. I think, as an outside observer, it just shows the way that your own preconceptions can color the way that you interpret certain placements. But often these placements do have a significance that’s often maybe only clearer to the person themselves rather than to an outside observer.
CB: Right. I mean, even this—it’s funny that it moves the Mars-Pluto-Saturn to the IC, but then it’s opposing the Midheaven still.
PW: Sure.
CB: It’s another one of those instances of that issue about false-positives or things like that. Or sometimes the placement that you thought it was—like we thought it was that Mars-Saturn-Pluto in the 10th house and the activation of that coinciding with difficult career periods—you can still kind of get some of that through that placement here on the IC opposing the Midheaven and sometimes activating that.
PW: And Saturn ruled it. Saturn rules it. So then the co-presence with Mars and Pluto would then color the expression of that Ascendant—sorry, Midheaven ruler. So yeah, you’re exactly right. Although it’s funny because, because of that bifurcation of the Midheaven and the 10th place, we also see that the ruler of the 10th house is Jupiter in the 7th. And it’s been her husband, Bill Clinton, who has been in some ways a hindrance but mostly a big help, to have his advocacy and his support and his charisma, I guess.
CB: Yeah, it’s like Jupiter in its own domicile, in the 7th house, ruling the 10th whole sign house. And the Moon, it’s interesting; it’s like contrary to the sect. With the whole Scorpio stellium, there’s a tension there ‘cause Mars and Pluto and Saturn are overcoming those or squaring them through a superior square but the Jupiter is sort of somewhat unencumbered by that. Its primary issue is just that it’s contrary to the sect, so some of the excesses of Jupiter potentially come out a little bit more in that instance; but it’s otherwise a relatively well-placed planet in her chart.
NDB: Like a very horny spouse, possibly?
PW: I mean, Jupiter is known for being a bit of—
NDB: Bill is something of—
CB: Let’s not get into it too much.
PW: Sure, yeah. Direct all hate mail to—
NDB: I wanted to say about Hillary’s Mars-Saturn-Pluto, ironically, that’s the culprit on my end that had me blow the election prediction because I knew whoever won—presuming it was Hillary who won—whoever was president would have to deal with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of early 2020; and Mars would join that as well. So I knew there was gonna be a triple Mars-Saturn-Pluto. I remember saying this at the press conference thing. And so, I thought, well, the country’s gonna get into this probably ultimately forgettable ordeal, but the country’s gonna be in some kind of trouble in early 2020 in Hillary’s chart. Having that Mars-Saturn-Pluto, I just thought she was the one who would have that big recurrence transit and would be dealing with whatever happened in 2020, which as we know turned out to be nothing.
PW: Right.
NDB: I think in part I was guilty of not following my own astrology. I had written Uranus USA, I knew very well that Donald Trump’s chart was very quintessentially ‘American’, with the Sun-Uranus conjunction up at the top of his chart and an eclipse. And then I had done the work on Hillary and I knew very well that the big changes in her life coincided with Mars retrograde transits, and there wasn’t one happening. And yet, I still went ahead and picked her partly, I think, because of just a bias, but partly because I was looking ahead to that Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 2020, and I really thought she would be the one handling that.
PW: Yeah, don’t be too hard on yourself. I mean, some of those observations were kind of independent of the birth time as well, ‘cause I thought that was an interesting point as well about Mars and Pluto.
NDB: As we’ve said, most people in the world got this wrong. But I just got it way more wrong than the rest of you because I actually had—you know what I mean? You guys just didn’t have the information you needed and so it’s understandable. I had everything and I still gave the wrong prediction.
PW: I mean, still, even looking back at those previous Mars events, I noticed that there was a recurrence of the nodes going through Pisces and Virgo, and that was present at the 2016 election as well. So that’s another one of those kinds of signs that I guess, especially in light of the fact that we’ve often remarked on the importance of those eclipse events for the candidates.
NDB: She was in a Pisces profection year in 2016.
PW: Right.
NDB: Just before the election, on her birthday, she went from an Aquarius to a Pisces profection year.
PW: There was like a Neptune-South Node conjunction happening in Pisces on that particular weekend of the election.
CB: Something we’ve got to talk about though that maybe we should have addressed earlier is even though this theoretically should be solving the issue of having her birth certificate finally released, having a time written on it, of course there’s just something surrounding this topic that will constantly make it unclear. And there’s already a debate over what the time is that’s written on the birth certificate.
NDB: Yeah.
PW: Show us that picture again.
NDB: This is funny.
CB: Here’s the picture.
NDB: No, I know what people mean.
CB: No, I do too, ‘cause I noticed it myself as soon as I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh, my God. Like why is this happening?”
PW: It’s so funny because when I was listening to a past podcast, I said, “Watch us get the birth certificate finally and there’ll be a big smudge where the birth time is.” Like I said that. And then I saw the birth certificate for the first time and I was like, “Goddammit.”
NDB: Watson, you jinx.
PW: I know, I know. Anyway, sorry for interrupting, Chris. Go ahead. Show that to us again.
CB: We’ve proceeded up to this point—and maybe we should have done this differently—with the assumption that 6:45 is the recorded time and this is a settled thing, and we’ve been looking at the Gemini rising chart with 11° of Gemini, which is what 6:45 PM results in. But there’s a bit of a discussion that’s happening, a bit of a debate that’s happening amongst astrologers right now because when you look at the birth certificate, where it says “Born alive at,” there’s a numeral there which looks like a ‘6’.
But one of the problems is on the line just below that, where it says “Date Signed,” it writes a ‘10’ for October, and that ‘10’ looks suspiciously like the number that’s on the line above that we’re interpreting as a ‘6’, but it could also be interpreted as a ‘1’ and a small ‘0’ next to it, because the doctor almost wrote the number for the birth time in a way that looks like the month, which is October. So basically, this could give a secondary birth time of 10:45 PM instead of 6:45 PM. And, in fact, Astro-Databank now has updated their entry to note this potential discrepancy in how different astrologers are reading it differently. And now on the Astro-Databank entry, they list two different charts as 6:45 PM or 10:45 PM.
NDB: Can you go back to the image? I just want to point one other thing out. Look at the top row, look at the ‘6’ on October 26, and it is a different looking ‘6’.
CB: I know. That’s the problem. That was different. There’s another ‘6’ at the bottom. At the very bottom there’s a ‘16’ and that ‘6’ looks different as well. The problem is that the supposed ‘6’ for the birth time—the ‘1’ is like a straight line. It’s like a straight, sloping line. What’s the thing on the keyboard next to the question mark? What’s it called, again?
PW: ‘Have-a-shit’ button.
CB: It’s like a slash.
NDB: Slash. I think of it as a slash. I know there’s another word for it.
PW: Back-slash.
CB: So it kind of looks like that. It’s like a tilted ‘L’ or a ‘1’, how this was written, and then there’s a ‘0’. So there’s potential that it could be a ‘10’. But the counterargument—I was going over this with Leisa last night ‘cause she thinks it’s a ‘6’—below that, there’s dots for the line. For the entire line there’s pretty regular dots that are spaced apart.
NDB: The whole line is filled in, yeah.
CB: But the line is filled in.
PW: So it’s either a very lazy ‘10’ or just kind of a sloppy ‘6’.
CB: Well, part of the issue here is you can see it in the other ‘1s’. Like the ‘1’ just below on the line, the doctor is putting a little foot on the ‘1’ for some reason and he’s doing it consistently. He’s doing a vertical—not vertical—but a slanted slash that starts in the top-right and it goes down to the bottom-left. But then he’s putting a little foot on it just below. Either he’s leaving the pen there or he’s drawing a circle below it, because he does that for the ‘1’ next to “Date Signed,” and he also does that for the ‘1’ just below, under the ‘16’, where it’s like a vertical slash, but then it goes downwards for some reason.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And that’s the problem. There’s a potential that that’s also what’s happening here with this ‘6’—it could be a ‘1’ with a foot on it. But the problem is that it’s connecting the space that should be below there so much that it actually looks more like a ‘6’ than it does a ‘10’, because otherwise there should be some sort of space between the dots below the number.
NDB: Yeah, I would go with ‘6’.
PW: I’d go with ‘6’.
NDB: It’s very clearly a problem.
CB: Right. So that means that this thing that’s supposed to be settled, that Patrick and I have been waiting for, for years, and was gonna solve all of our problems ultimately is not as settled as we would like it. Because the other problem is that because she said 8:00 PM, whatever she’s basing that on—whether that’s from what her mother told her, or whether that’s from her vague recollection of the birth certificate, who knows—her saying 8:00 PM is pretty much right in the middle between 6:45 PM and 10:45 PM, so it could go either way in terms of that.
NDB: It’s a little closer to 6:45 PM.
PW: I think it’s probably 6.
CB: I think 6:45 is more likely for practical considerations in the sense that the Chicago Sun-Times article, I believe, said that her mother went in the morning—
PW: Early.
CB: Was in labor and then gave birth in the evening.
PW: 12 hours later.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: That’s what it said.
PW: I think it would be less likely to characterize going to the hospital early if it was at 10:00, and then 12 hours later, but I don’t know how precise the journalist was necessarily with that description. So it’s a bit of an open question, but I think it’s 6:45.
NDB: Yeah, I think it’s 6, but it’s definitely a problem. It’s definitely a problem. Welcome to astrology, folks. You know what my sci-fi fantasy is? That we’ll eventually somehow figure out, using DNA—we can retrofit the actual birth time from DNA. And we can even take the DNA of dead people—old presidents or rock stars, whatever—and find out what their proper charts were. That’s my sci-fi fantasy.
CB: I like that.
NDB: That’s how I sleep at night.
CB: I mean, my sci-fi fantasy would be more that in the future humans develop time travel and that’s what they actually use it for. And maybe that’s what all observations of UFOs are. It’s actually humans from the future coming back to observe humanity and collect birth times for when important things are happening.
PW: The Mercury-Neptune applying conjunction is very loud right now in this conversation.
CB: Yeah.
PW: There’s this nebulous document and these interesting theories.
CB: And this is a joke, by the way. I do not want to be quoted for this out of context.
NDB: You’ll never live this down, Brennan.
CB: Right.
PW: Nick ‘Grave Robber’ Best.
CB: Yeah, let me share the chart, though, because this is now gonna be part of legitimate discussion. The rectification quest is not fully over, and now there is a 10:45 PM time, potentially, based on the birth certificate, which would give Leo rising. So an additional, really annoying complication of that from a practical standpoint—remember, Leo rising actually came up at one point, because supposedly the chiropractor was the one who said that Hillary herself told them that she had Leo rising. We don’t know if that’s correct, we don’t know what that was based on, if that actually happened or what, because we’ve unfortunately met other people who’ve talked about scenarios that later turned out were completely made-up justifications for different rectifications.
NDB: It’s just my personality.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Right. So here’s the chart. So the 10:45 theoretical chart gives 4° of Leo rising. It moves the Mars-Pluto-Saturn conjunction to the 1st house, 1st whole sign house. The Scorpio stellium moves to the 4th whole sign house, with the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the South Node there. Jupiter’s in the 5th. The Moon, interestingly, has departed from Pisces and has ingressed into Aries. Depending on the time, it’s either just barely profected a trine with Jupiter by minutes. It’s at 0’39” Aries, and Jupiter’s at 0’38” Sag. Or because 10:45 would be slightly rounded, it could have actually still been applying to a trine with Jupiter very closely with the Moon in the 9th whole sign house. The degree of the Midheaven’s at 19 Aries in the 9th whole sign house. Uranus is at 25 Gemini in the 11th. Neptune is at 11 Libra in the 3rd. And the Lot of Fortune is in Pisces and the Lot of Spirit is in Capricorn. A weird, annoying thing about the zodiacal releasing periods is that this chart still results in a loosing of the bond in 1992 when her and Bill got into the White House, which is a lovely compilation—not compilation.
NDB: Complication.
CB: Complication. Some of the things that made the new Gemini rising time at 6:45 compelling are slightly replicated in this chart, although not as impressively because it’s not a peak period in 1992 in the same way that it is in the Gemini rising chart.
PW: And it’d be a more malefic loosing as well with Leo rising, ‘cause the loosing of the bond in 1992 would have happened to the malefic square. Oh, no, no, I have that wrong.
CB: Let me see if I have it saved.
PW: Well, either way, like you said, it’s not a peak period, so it’s less impressive.
CB: Okay, so this is the new Leo rising chart. We release from Spirit, which is in Capricorn. Fortune is in Pisces. So she would start out on a 27-year Capricorn period from ‘47 to ‘74. Then she would go into a 30-year Aquarius period from ‘74 to 2003. And then, yeah, the loosing of the bond would be October of ‘91 to April of ‘93, and it would be jumping to Leo, which would be mixed. It would be her most subjectively difficult sign with some positives, ‘cause it’s also squaring Venus. But primarily, yeah, it would be her most difficult sign subjectively. And then the peak period though, weirdly, would be when she moved into this Pisces period for 12 years, from December of 2003 until October of 2015. I don’t know. It’s impressive that the loosing of the bond is still ‘91 to ‘93, and then that was the point, as we said, that she started getting a lot of hate and becoming the primary target of political things when she started working on healthcare reform.
NDB: Yeah, Capricorn is 27, which is the same thing as adding the Scorpio and Sagittarius releasing earlier when it was Scorpio. You still get 27 years, you wind up at June 6, 1974, and then you get the loosing of the bond at that same time, you know what I mean? Because before it was—am I making sense?
PW: Yeah, there’s a lot interrelationships and overlaps between—
NDB: It’s the way Scorpio and Sagittarius add up to 27 anyway. So you get the same length of time if you’re releasing from Capricorn is my point.
CB: Right. Yeah. I think that Gemini rising is a little bit more—I mean, it’s interesting if she was Leo rising—but it’s leaning towards looking at the birth certificate because that line is filled in at the bottom. It looks like a ‘6’ to me more than probably a ‘10’; obviously, that’s gonna be open to interpretation. Some of the ZR periods also seem to lean more towards the Gemini rising at this point rather than Leo. But this all just came out, and so at this point I think astrologers are now gonna start really looking at these charts and comparing them and studying her chronology again and coming to their own conclusions.
NDB: Yep, I know I will.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Just when you thought you were done with her.
CB: And even just during the course of this we’ve noticed things as we’ve been going through. Like, Patrick, you pointed out some things with the eclipses and things like that that were relevant or that we just noticed during the process of doing this.
PW: Yeah, I mean, there’s a few other things. One of the things I thought was really interesting is, obviously, during the most famous and notorious period of the marriage between Hillary and Bill, Pluto would have been transiting through those early degrees in 1998 and 1999, the height of the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment, which would have been transiting close to the degree of her Descendant if she was born with the Ascendant in earlier Gemini. And you also see things like Uranus being around 15° of Aquarius at the time that she was elected senator of New York. You see Neptune close to the degree of her Midheaven when she began running for president in 2007. These are all transits that are happening to the Midheaven degree if she were born at this time, around this time, 6:45 PM. So some of those things have been quite validating or edifying in understanding her chart in this new context of having this time.
CB: Yeah, and I think the real thing at this point that this finally gives us some closure is maybe the ability to look at her life, now that we understand most of the story, and being able to look at it within the true context of what her life is in comparison with the chart and then truly understand that on a better level. And in terms of just doing case studies of different celebrities, as well as personal charts, what we do as astrologers is to try to learn things from studying these notable nativities and just seeing what happens in people’s lives, and then we’re able to add to the collective understanding of astrology through that.
PW: Mm-hmm.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: Yeah. All right, can we draw any other collective conclusions either from the debacle or from the process that we all went through in terms of this, or different things like this in order to wrap up or summarize things?
PW: All the evidence, not your preferences or biases. Even if it seems overwhelmingly one way, all of the evidence. And I would also say avoid making predictions for things which you don’t have the birth time for. It’s easier and better and more honorable in some ways in the long term to just say, “I don’t have the information I need to make this prediction.” I think there’s a big pressure to predict.
CB: Right.
PW: But if you really don’t have the information, I think it’s okay to say, “I decline.”
CB: Yeah, for sure.
PW: So those are some of the things that have really stuck with me, yeah, to stick with the evidence and to reserve the right to decline to predict.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
NDB: Yeah, on my end, I would just say if my gut is trying to talk over the astrology, tell my gut to “Shut the fuck hell up and listen to the astrology.”
CB: Yeah, that’s good. And yeah, I think I would just echo Patrick’s sentiments and try to follow the evidence, and try to do your best to not take it for granted. When you’re using a birth time—especially for a celebrity or something—really try to investigate that and figure out if you’re working with solid data. Because if you don’t, the entire foundation of your prediction may be built on a really unstable foundation, and that’s not gonna be good for you personally in terms of your work with astrology and your ability to learn something and take something and make accurate predictions. But also, it really isn’t good for the community if we’re not doing the leg work as much as we can to try to make sure that we’re basing our predictions on solid data, and I think that’s something, as a community, that we all need to work on more.
There has been great progress and great strides have been made in the astrological community through the work of individual astrologers and data collectors like Lois Rodden, for example, who started Astro-Databank, and who created a new system for classifying different pieces of birth data. And that’s take us much further than where we were prior to the 1960s and ‘70s when she started that work, but we still need to keep moving forward and trying to strive to improve the whole approach to data collection and citing our sources and doing things in a much more reliable manner from that standpoint as a community. And there’s a lot that happened, for example, with the 2016 election and just the debacle surrounding—almost the circus surrounding the data collection stuff and using that for promotional efforts and other things like that I think we really need to reflect on and learn from so that we don’t repeat those mistakes again in the future.
PW: I’d also say, don’t be too hard on yourself if you make the wrong call. Astrology’s really, really hard. It’s important to learn things from when things go wrong, but you can’t hold yourself up to a godly standard of divining other people.
NDB: I disagree. I think you should be really hard on yourself and self-flagellate for eternity if you get these kinds of things wrong. And you can be sure that the three of us will.
CB: Yeah, I mean, there’s an interesting balance between, on the one hand, needing to hold yourself accountable, which is actually important, ‘cause sometimes we’ve seen the opposite of that. You don’t want to be that astrologer that’s constantly making predictions that don’t work out and never sits with that and reflects on it and uses that to figure out, “Why did that go wrong?” or “What can I do better next time?” It’s really important to have that sort of internal process. But then, on the other hand, you also need to respect and understand the limitations of astrology, and how it’s this massive thing, and how many different charts are going into any one prediction, and how complicated everything is, and how we’re always just trying to do our best as humans with our limited perspectives and perceptions on things in the limited lifetime that we have to learn and attempt to master some small portion of this art and get as good as we possibly can in that time period. But ultimately we’re all gonna make mistakes along the way and that’s part of the process. And if you don’t ever make any mistakes, if you never venture out—
NDB: Then you’re making a mistake.
CB: Right. Well, it’s like if you never venture out or put yourself in a position where you say something that’s falsifiable, in a way, you’re never really pushing yourself to grow, and you’re never really checking yourself as much as you potentially could, and you might be limiting your growth to some extent by doing that as well. So there’s a delicate balance between those two.
PW: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I got a lot out of what happened. I feel like because of everything that happened during 2016 with ISAR and the data, I feel like that’s really helped me make a lot of breakthroughs in different areas of my practice. And I feel like a lot of good things came out of that, even though it was stressful and existentially painful at times. It was my Saturn return. But that’s why I remembered to say, don’t be too hard on yourself because it’s not worth it, and you need the lessons so that you can learn the songs, but you can’t self-flagellate forever. Right, Nick.
CB: Right.
NDB: I’m gonna give it my best shot.
CB: 2016 was your Saturn return in Sagittarius, Patrick. And then you went out and you tried again in 2020. You put yourself out there and tried making predictions again and was successful in that election in predicting Biden.
PW: And it was only because of the particular way that 2016 happened that I would have been able to take the approach that I did that allowed me to be able to make the prediction more confidently in 2020. And this is probably a function of the fact that my Saturn is ruled by Jupiter in the 9th that it took being kind of falsified for me to realize a bigger, broader truth. So maybe I’m lucky in that respect. Maybe everyone has that sort of potential with Saturn experiences. But yeah, I think very much that my success in 2020 was made possible by what happened in 2016. So I’m grateful for that in the long run.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense.
NDB: On to 2024.
CB: Yeah, so that’s the big looming thing that’s starting to heat up. It’s now early 2023, people are already announcing their candidacies for the next presidential election that’s gonna take place at the end of 2024. And astrologers are already looking forward to some major mundane events, for example, that Nick and I talked about recently in the episode in November on the Uranus return in the birth chart of the United States and we’re building up to that. Uranus is gonna return back to Gemini, where it was in United States history back during the American Revolution, during the Civil War, and during World War II. Somehow we’re gonna have a recurrence or a repetition of that transit here between 2025 and 2032, or 2033.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: We’ve also got some major eclipses coming up that are gonna cross America, I think, in 2025, right?
NDB: Yeah, yeah.
PW: It wasn’t 2024?
CB: Maybe it is 2024.
PW: I can’t remember.
NDB: I thought it was 2025.
PW: I’d check my pocket ephemeris, but I am ‘the Pocket Ephemeris’.
CB: You asked yourself? So yeah, there’s gonna be other chances. And it’s not even that every astrologer needs to issue public predictions about presidential or other political contests, ‘cause I don’t think that’s either necessary, nor is that even really a good idea. The other thing is it really takes a lot to specialize in and study all of the biographies and chronologies and to investigate the different pieces of birth data and what we know and what we don’t know. It’s actually a really complicated thing to specialize in political astrology or in mundane astrology, and not every astrologer can necessarily do that. And if you don’t take the time to do what’s necessary to specialize in it, you can sometimes do a sloppy job, or you can have things not go well because you’re not basing it on a solid foundation. So you don’t have to necessarily issue predictions publicly, but to privately look at things yourself and try to decide what you think might happen based on whatever techniques you use, and then check with yourself again after an event and see how that worked out can sometimes be a useful exercise.
PW: Mm-hmm.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: Did you look it up, Nick?
NDB: Oh, no, I was going to and then I thought we were moving on. Is Watson looking it up?
PW: Uh, yeah. April 8, 2024 is the date of the eclipse that crosses the United States. And it’s quite interesting ‘cause if you compare those two recent eclipses that have gone across the United States then it seems to form an ‘X’ over somewhere in Texas. I don’t know if that’s significant or not, but it’s interesting to look at, for sure.
CB: Yeah, and the last one, the last ‘Great American Eclipse’ of course was one of the ones that happened six months into Trump’s presidency, and that was an early indicator back then.
NDB: Yeah, August of 2017. That was the day I came up with my Venus synodic cycle, ‘red, white, blue, black’ system during that eclipse.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah, on my Mercury.
CB: And we talked about some of that previously.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: We should go over it some more at some point.
NDB: Yeah, we will.
CB: ‘Cause there’s gonna be an important Venus retrograde this summer.
NDB: There is, there is. I have a video out on my YouTube channel that I made in December. That’s a good introduction to the Venus synodic cycle. So yeah, check out my YouTube channel, folks. And yeah, I’m sure we’ll be talking about Venus retrograde soon enough.
CB: Yeah, so let’s actually mention that. So you, as we talked about, specialize in Venus and Mars retrograde periods.
NDB: The synodic cycles, yeah. The whole cycle, yeah.
CB: And you’ve started releasing some videos recently on your YouTube channel connected with that.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. I’ve released the Venus one. I’m working hard on the Mars one and will try to get it out as soon as I can.
CB: So it’s youtube.com/NickDaganBest, right?
NDB: I believe so, yeah. Yeah, that’s my name. If you look up my name on YouTube, you’ll find me, you’ll find my channel.
CB: What’s your website URL?
NDB: NickDaganBestAstrologer.com.
CB: Cool. All right, Patrick, what about you?
PW: My website is PatrickWatsonAstrology.com. And yeah, obviously I’m open for consultations and rectifications and tutoring sessions and electionals and horaries, pretty much the gamut. And I’m also available on Twitter. You can follow me as long as it’s still there, @PWatsonAstro. And currently I’m working on actually getting my NCGR certification. So I’ve been doing a lot of manual chart calculations in preparation for my test. That’s been interesting kind of going back and learning this skill that I probably was supposed to learn earlier on, but that’s been really, really interesting. And I do eventually want to get back into regular blog and video creation. I do have my old videos, which are cringe-worthy and hilarious on YouTube.
NDB: Affirmative. They are both those things.
PW: Yeah, I’m kind of making my plan to get back into video at some point.
NDB: Excellent.
PW: But it’s difficult balancing the time commitments I need to help clients and still find the time to work on video and blog projects and be a father to three kids, etc. But yeah, that’s me.
CB: Awesome. Thanks, guys. This was great. Thanks for joining me to do this and to reflect on this and to bring some sense of closure to this entire saga. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
NDB: Thank you, Chris. It’s been great hanging out with both of you.
PW: Thanks, yeah. Same here.
NDB: And I’ll go back to self-flagellating now.
CB: Okay, good.
PW: Is that in quotes?
NDB: Yeah, you can quote me on that.
CB: All right, this is a family show.
NDB: Oh, okay, all right.
CB: All right, well, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks everyone for listening or watching, thanks to all the patrons for your support, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
A special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including: Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it then please consider becoming a patron through our page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast, such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information visit Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ‘ASTROLOGYPODCAST’.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code ‘AP15’ to get a 15% discount. For Mac users we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an ebook version available through Google Books. I also recently published a new translation of The Anthology of the 2nd century astrologer Vettius Valens, which is one of the most important sources for understanding the practice of ancient astrology. You can find that by searching for ‘Vettius Valens, The Anthology’ on Amazon or other online book retailers.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation in how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.TheAstrologySchool.com. I also recently launched a new course there called the Birth Time Rectification Course where I teach students how to figure out your birth time using astrology when the birth time is either unknown or uncertain. You can find out more information about that at TheAstrologySchool.com.
Each year the podcast releases a set of astrology calendar posters for the coming year, and we’ve just released our 2023 Planetary Alignments and Planetary Movements Posters, which are now available on our website at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/store. There you can also pick up our 2023 Electional Astrology Report where Leisa Schaim and I went through the next 12 months and we picked out the single most auspicious date for each month using the principles of electional astrology. You can get that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2023report.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including: The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at MountainAstrologer.com. Finally, thanks also to the Northwest Astrology Conference, which is happening May 25-29, 2023, just outside of Seattle. This year’s conference is gonna be a hybrid conference where you can either attend online or in person. Find out more information at norwac.net.