The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 395, titled:
Astrology Forecast for April 2023
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and guest Robert Weinstein
Episode originally released on March 26, 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 Transcription Team
Transcription released April 7th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode we’re going to be talking about the astrological forecast for the entire month of April of 2023. Joining me for today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Robert Weinstein. Hey, both of you.
ROBERT WEINSTEIN: Hey.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.
CB: Hey. Alright. Let me first start by giving you an interview of the astrology of April just to get a snapshot of what we’re going to talk about in this episode. Then we’re going to come back and do a detailed sort of review of the major news stories that have happened over the past month and the astrology that correlated with them in the first hour of this episode. Then, in the second hour we’re going to jump into looking at the astrological forecast for April in more detail. Does that sound good to the both of you?
RW: Excellent.
AC: No, I’d like to change the whole script.
CB: Right.
AC: Let’s do something totally different, Chris.
CB: Flip the script. Flip it all around. Not this time, my friend. Alright. Here we go. Here’s our lovely graphic of the astrological alignments from our year ahead poster that Paula Belluomini designed for us. The first thing that happens in April is we get Mercury transiting out of Aries and moving into the sign of Taurus on April third. Then, a few days later, we get our first lunation of the month, which is a full moon in the sign of Libra on the sixth of April.
The following week, on the same day, we get Venus ingressing into the sign of Gemini on the 11th. And the same day, there’s a very auspicious-looking Sun/Jupiter conjunction at the same time, in the sign of Aries.
The following week we get a solar eclipse in the sign of Aries at the very last degree of that sign on the 20th of April. Later, the same day, the sun departs from Aries and moves into Taurus. The following day Mercury slows down and stations retrograde, on the 21st of April. Then, it will spend the next week three weeks retrograde and moving backwards in the signs of the zodiac rather than forwards.
Those are some of the major alignments this month. There is also a few other minor alignments that we’ll be talking about in terms of planetary aspects. A lot of planets, for example, when they change signs will be immediately aspecting either Pluto or Saturn this month, since both of those planets recently changed signs. We will be talking about that a lot during the course of this episode as we get some of our first activations of Saturn in Pisces and Pluto in Aquarius as different planets change signs and move into an aspect with those planets.
Welcome, both of you! Robert, thanks for joining us today. This is your second time on the podcast. The last time I had you on was back in 2020 when we did the episode on Bitcoin in astrology shortly after a major eclipse that coincided with what was then the high point of the price of Bitcoin when it hit a new high on the day of the eclipse and then shortly after that it sort of skyrocketed over the next year or two. Right?
RW: Yes, especially with Jupiter in the sign of Aquarius one thing we’ve seen a lot of is that Aquarius is a very important sign for cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin so Pluto moving into Aquarius is going to be very interesting for cryptocurrencies.
CB: Yeah. We’ve continued to see over the past year or two how important eclipses seem to be, for some strange reason, coinciding with major turning points in Bitcoin and its continued integration into other world currencies and effect on other world currencies and banking systems. That’s why I wanted to have you on today because there is so much going on with the banking industry over the past month that I thought you would be a good person to talk to about that. We’ll talk about that here soon.
Austin, how are you doing with the recent…now that Saturn is officially in Pisces? We released our Pisces episode together and people have been universally tailing that. I think we’ve been able to pull that one off pretty well given everything.
AC: Thank you! That was the one good thing to do with Mercury in Pisces, was just talking about Pisces for three and a half hours.
CB: Right, exactly.
AC: I had my ideas about what Saturn in Pisces would bring for me short term and long term. Experientially, within the first couple days, I felt a heaviness that I hadn’t felt before. Like a two-ton melancholy barnacle had encrusted my little boat quietly, beneath. It wasn’t about anything in particular, it was a little heavier. A little bit of a weigh-down. I was like, “oh, that makes sense.”
CB: I like that. That would be a good band name: Melancholy Barnacle. Or an album title for this chapter of your Saturn in Pisces book. We’ll be talking about that more, Saturn in Pisces, and some of the things that have happened.
There have been a lot of news stories over the past month so why don’t we talk about some of those and some of the things that they have correlated with astrologically? Since that ongoing process of noting things as they happen is actually useful and illustrative in terms of continuing to add to our collective understanding of astrology as we view events as they happened and connect the planetary alignments that they correlate with.
One of the ones that was huge for, I think this month, is that the Artificial Intelligence thing is continuing to heat up and it’s starting to move faster and faster, I feel like, than anybody expected when it first started to become clear that that was going to become a theme as Saturn was leaving Aquarius and Pluto was moving into Aquarius over the past few months. One of the things that happened is that the group or company, Open AI, released the latest version of their AI program: GPT 4.0.
What happened is they released that this month and then there was a paper published, I think it was 12 hours or 24 hours before Pluto ingressed into Aquarius, which said that they have been researching this new AI over the past several months when it was in pre-release. In their opinion, they said that it shows sparks of artificial general intelligence. This was an actual academic paper that was published where they analyzed it and they put the AI through different tests that were increasingly difficult or complex. They were kind of surprised at what a good job it did in passing some of these tests and doing different things. At one point, one of the statements that they made was, “Given the breadth and depth of GPT 4’s capabilities, we believed it could reasonably be viewed as an early yet still incomplete version of an artificial general intelligence system.”
That phrase, Artificial General Intelligence, is really important because that’s basically the keyword that AI researchers use to refer to this hypothetical idea of being able to create a human-like Artificial Intelligence or a sentience of an Artificial Intelligence. That’s the goal all the AI researchers are working towards. And sowhat I’m pointing out here is that literally almost the day that Pluto ingressed into Aquarius, there’s this group that published a paper saying they’re seeing sparks of things heading in that direction. I think that’s really important to note because even if we’re not there yet what often happens with ingresses, especially outer planet ingresses, is you start to see changes and you start to see these movements towards heading in a new direction with different topics or different themes. Sometimes at the time little events can happen that don’t seem super significant or momentous at the time. But, in retrospect, sometimes years later when you look back you realize that was the turning point where something started to change and head in a different direction, eventually culminating in something more notable later on.
That’s something we’re all, as astrologers, paying attention to right now because there’s been so many outer planet ingresses recently. We’re all paying attention to: what are the little minor things happening either in world events or in our personal lives that are pointing in new directions or new paths that we’re about to start taking? I think this is one of them. There’s something very significant about that.
AC: Yeah. The AI and Pluto in Aquarius are very clearly linked. The Pluto in Aquarius is going to tell us that story. One example I’d like to give of your point, about how sometimes a single event on an ingress can be very illustrative of a pattern change to come. I mentioned on one of our podcasts before that on the day of Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn there was a terrorist attack in Mumbai and these terrorists took over a hotel and held it. I remember thinking about that lie, “oh, it’s Capricorn. It’s not Pluto in Sag anymore, it’s not a plane crashing into something, it’s not a quick hit and run. It’s a takeover.” The omen was not that the terrorists would take over Mumbai. It was that there was a shift, which we saw a few years later with ISIS, where those groups then moved to occupy territory rather than harass from the edges like with Sagittarius.
Thinking about that example is interesting because the pattern is right there but you had to read the right thing about it. In some ways, it’s good to know and look at these ingresses but it’s also easy to permanetize or assume something about that, which isn’t the core of it, will be the dominant pattern. Prophecy problems, right?
CB: For sure. The issue with omens in general. It’s been striking, over the past month, all of the big companies are scrambling and falling over each other to be the first to take advantage of this new emerging technology and capitalize on it. I’m already seeing the way that it’s starting to transform things.
Stock photo sites, for example. I use Adobe stock when I go on to find stock photos. A couple weeks ago I was looking for images for an episode and amongst the usual stock photos that had been either hand done by somebody in illustrator over the years, or what have you, I could start seeing AI-generated images in the stock photo site. I realized that was now completely transforming that entire business model where making a stock image doesn’t require necessarily a single human spending days or hours creating some sort of image from scratch. Now people are starting to use AI to generate those, which is really going to change a lot of things when it comes to people’s income. Different graphic designers, for example, but also the stock photo companies themselves. They don’t want to get left behind in this. Some of them, like Getty Images and Stockphoto, are starting to sign license agreements with different AI companies in order to have their own image generators. It’s one of those things where part of Pluto in Aquarius is going to be this threat of evolving technologically or this pressure to evolve and adopt new technologies or the threat of potentially being left behind in those instances, and the tension of those things as different companies and different individuals have to play that out and make hard choices and decisions when it comes to things like that.
RW: I just wanted to add one thing to your point, Chris. I think that using the Egyptian terms of Aquarius, the initial term is Mercury. That may be one of the things we’re seeing the emphasis on artificial intelligence with the ingress.
AC: That’s really interesting. The first decan is Venus, whereas we have all of the impact on visual adornment that you were just talking about, Chris.
CB: Yeah. It’s that with images but it’s other companies where this is slowly seeping into the business models and into things that people do sometimes to make money. For example, Adobe has recently released some sort of Beta of an audio program that automatically adjusts and improves the audio of podcasts. I’ve seen clips where people will feed in really terrible sounding Audio from a built-in computer microphone where they’ve got an echoey room with all sorts of noise around it. They’ll feed it into this new program by Adobe that will automatically, using AI, get rid of all the background sounds and make it sound like a studio-level recording with a deep $400 podcast microphone just using AI. There’s really crazy technologies like that. Of course, that will in and of itself affect audio editors, for example…
AC: I was talking to my brother. We were talking around Christmas. He’s an audio editor. He was saying, “Yeah, I will be irrelevant soon.”
CB: Yeah. Steven was our former audio editor for many years. He’s moved into working with other big-
AC: Chris fired him and replaced him with a robot.
CB: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs] I, for one, welcome our new robot audio editing overlords and don’t want them to do anything to harm us. But, no, Steven just got a better job but we worked together for many years. He would painstakingly, sometimes spend days going through episodes of The Astrology Podcast editing the audio particularly to make Austin sound good, which is always important. Things like that might be another instance where technology may make certain jobs obsolete because of the ability to automate it. I think we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg there because there’s so many other instances where technology like that could really move into other companies and completely transform things. I think that’s very reminiscent already of Pluto in Aquarius and even though we caught this and started seeing this late last year with Saturn in Aquarius, I’m almost surprised by how fast and rapidly it’s all moving.
AC: I like that you introduced the paradigm or framework of an evolutionary pressure. The adapt or perish. Pluto is often described in evolutionary terms but in a spiritual unfolding sense. I often see Pluto do the very Darwinian: the environment has changed and you ended up having to figure out how to adapt or… what was the word?
RW: Obsolescence.
AC: Yes, or become obsolete.
RW: Pluto sweeps away the obsolete.
AC: Or gives you an environment that will sweep you away if you don’t adapt to it. That kind of pressure and framework is one of the top-tier ones for thinking about Pluto. That being explicitly Aquarian technological makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t thought this until I just gave the example of the last ingress of the Sag into Capricorn. Pluto is really good for tracking the dominant patterns of murder and terror. You can track the history of serial killers in the United States and what kind of crimes are popular by Pluto. You can also, just to give an example of terrorism. It makes sense if we would be dipping our toe in the pool of technological terror or attacks on the virtual where the violence done by the outsiders is directed towards the Aquarian things. We get these much more sophisticated and therefore fragile structures. It becomes inevitable as a point of attack.
RW: Also power struggles. Now you’re seeing with AI this fierce corporate competition taking place over who’s going to have the dominant AI. That also is what we talked about earlier too with China and the US. Also, Pluto in Aquarius, we’re talking about: technology is power. Who has the high tech is going to have the power.
I think we’re going to see a lot of battles over technology. Who has the dominant AI? Who has the microchips? Who has the advanced technologies to win wards and to win economically? I think we’re seeing that playing out.
CB: Or who’s in control of the social media networks is the big one this week. On Capitol Hill in Washington this week they’re questioning the head of Tiktok. There’s been some movements and some corners to try to ban Tiktok in the US or to force their parent company to sell them to a US company because of fears or concerns surrounding what is quickly becoming one of the most popular social networks in the US being controlled by a foreign country or foreign power by China.
RW: Yeah, and I think there’s some law in China where the government can request that they turn over all information that they’ve accumulated. If Tiktok is on government officials’ phones that has intelligence consequences.
CB: I just remembered also, one of the other things is that AI generators are getting really good over the past month. They were struggling a few weeks ago with hands. If you saw an AI image one of the quickest tells that it was AI generated was the hands would have too many fingers on them. Now some of the image generators have figured out a way around that. They’re starting to do hands well. But some of the first political memes, that’s something that happened this week that I think was very relevant to Pluto in Aquarius, as well as Saturn in Pisces, is people had been worried about the potential for some of this being abused for political purposes. There was this image that came out of Trump where he was being arrested on the street earlier this week because he had put out an announcement that he was going to be arrested on Tuesday. While that didn’t happen somebody made an AI-generated image that made it look like he was being tacked by a bunch of police officers or something.
We’ve had one of our first instances this week of AI being used in order to do political propaganda. Influencing things politically or spreading around something that’s not true even if it looks true at face value.
AC: There’s a really easy tie in there between Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius and the Saturn Neptune years. Where it’s like, I don’t know what’s real. It’s the technology that’s enabling that. The effect is very Saturn/Neptune in Pisces.
CB: Right. That was the big thing that we noticed and talked about a lot back in 2017 when Saturn was square Neptune. That was the year of “fake news” and social media being used in “fake news” stories being circulated in order to manipulate both sides of the political spectrum and to manipulate the outcomes of the election.
AC: And Pokemon Go.
CB: Most importantly.
AC: Teenagers hunting made-up creatures in the real world in physical locations.
CB: I’ve got to find it but there’s some augmented reality thing that’s getting ready to launch right now that I actually saw and bookmarked specifically because it reminded me of that and I was really surprised that we might be back in that territory.
AC: Pokemon was released under the last Saturn in Pisces. It seems like a very natural trajectory.
CB: I hadn’t looked into this much but here it is. It’s called Peridot. It’s like an advanced version of Pokemon Go, I think.Saturn in Pisces.
AC: Not my kids.
CB: [Laughs] Yeah, I can’t wait to…yeah.
RW: Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s what. The two ingresses were so close together.
AC: Yeah.
RW: It’s like, what are the correlations? Which one is doing what?
AC: The things that are supported by both would be the most likely to occur, right?
RW: Which were those?
CB: That’s the thing, it’s not one or the other necessarily.
RW: And then Mars going into Cancer too. March was probably one of the more complex months of the entire year because of that double ingress like that.
CB: I think it was understated in some ways.
RW: Huge energy shift. I think we all felt the energy shift. Of course, the banking crisis is the biggest manifestation, but…
AC: I haven’t done polls to confirm this, nor would I, but it seems like the general sense right now, just like the tone I get from the smattering of media and people is that there is a sense that we’ve entered a new thing with a lot of uncertainty. Which is different than the consistent uncertainties and frustrations of the last several years. There does seem to be, even from the people who aren’t tracking the astrology that, “Oh Saturn just changed signs. Pluto is changing signs.” We’re on the cusp of cycles of a variety of lengths, all of which are at least a couple years. We’re just toe-dipping in. It does seem like the level of uncertainty is extremely high.
RW: You know what was interesting too, about March? The story that you didn’t hear about: what I’m seeing is the pandemic is kind of over. Deaths are down, cases are down, hospitalizations are down. When was the last time you saw a big story in the news about the pandemic? I’m really thinking Saturn in Pisces may be the end of that period of Saturn in Aquarius trapped at the pandemic. Not exactly, but pretty tightly. A lot of rules, social distancing, masks, vaccine mandates. A lot of strict rules about social interaction with Saturn in Aquarius.
Now all of the sudden that’s kind of eased. Maybe we didn’t even notice. People aren’t really wearing masks. Nobody’s protesting about vaccine mandates. There’s not that level of concern. Covid is still out there, you can still get it, but I’m thinking the pandemic is really winding down. Maybe due to Saturn in Pisces.
CB: That’s true to a certain extent when it comes to policy and we certainly are at the end where most of the major policies from the early parts of the Covid era have been ended relatively recently and we probably won’t see a return to some of those. But at the same time, Covid itself didn’t end. I know one astrologer that got seriously sick last month. I know one very prominent astrologer that’s actually sick right now and that I’m really hoping pulls through. As well as I was talking to a younger astrologer who just got it last year who’s suffering with severe Long Covid issues that have seriously changed her entire life and seriously hampered her ability to live and do things normally. That’s something I’m still struggling with three years later. Something I want to put in there is: Covid is not over and while most people have rolled back and don’t wear masks and everything and that makes sense, a lot of the public policies have changed. In the long term, I do still think there’s going to be a story that becomes clearer over the next five to ten years about the actual physical and long-term impacts of Covid, and that that might be more serious than people realized in some instances. It has yet to be seen.
RW: I definitely am not downplaying the effects of Covid. I want to make that clear. I’m differentiating between Covid the illness and Covid the global emergency crisis pandemic.
AC: The historical, cultural era.
RW: People are going back to life as normal. People are still getting Covid and getting sick. But, we’re going to concerts again, we’re going to parties again. We’re going to events. Life is returning to normal without the fear. Saturn with dignity in Aquarius seemed to ramp up the fear of “man, I’m afraid to go outside.” That kind of thing is over.
AC: We’re afraid of new things, or different things, right?
RW: We’re not sure if our ATM is going to work, but we’re not afraid of going to the grocery store.
CB: The emphasis in attention on Covid and the fear surrounding it has definitely shifted but part of the way that life is going back to normal is through a lack of awareness of the long term impacts that some people are still getting after being vaccinated or other things like that. I think it remains to be seen if that comes back at some point in greater awareness or what that discussion looks like if it turns out that getting covid still three years later is more harmful or worse for a person’s health than people currently think. It will be interesting to see how that discussion goes.
AC: Yeah, definitely. As far as getting back to normal, I don’t think people feel like they’re getting back to normal. It’s coming out the other side of the thing, but things are different. War is back on the table. We had plague, then war. Famine is threatening in various places. We didn’t pop back out in 2019. It’s very much looking around with a lot of uncertainty.
It’s one of the things about Pluto. Pluto always brings uncertainty and always brings “you can’t see it very clearly”. Clarity of vision and Pluto do not go together. Like, “how deep is this hole?” I dropped a penny down it and I didn’t hear it hit the bottom of the well. Then we fill that well with projections. I don’t mean projections merely in a psychological sense. We try to project what might be downward, or imagine it. That space is also catnip for fears and anxieties. This other side of the tunnel that we’ve come out of is full of unknowns that are necessary to fill with models or ideas of what it might become, but also very easy to fill with anxiety and fear.
RW: Yeah.
CB: It feels like the end of a chapter, that three-year chapter now that Saturn has moved out of Aquarius and into Pisces, and that we’re moving into new territory or at least starting that journey of finishing one chapter of a book and opening up another. It was actually really interesting to see a lot of Saturn in Aquarius people in their late 20’s or early 30’s finishing up their Saturn returns and reflecting on that and reflecting on some of those stories. It was kind of heartening to see, but that goes to the point about things being radically different now on the other side of Saturn in Aquarius compared to what everyone’s life was like when we went in.
RW: I was looking back at the Saturn last ingress into Pisces was I believe in 1964, ‘65. That was right after the Kennedy assassination which was also a generationally changing event. There was this sense of loss. These dreams dashed. Totally different, but we’re also coming out of a really rough period where it was a really depressing period where a lot of dreams were crushed. I see that Saturn themes coming out of a really difficult period with Saturn in Aquarius.
AC: Yeah, and certainly the same was true 30 years before that.
RW: Yeah. [laughs] Into the Great Depression.
AC: Right? Because we had that double Saturn in its own signs was ’29 to ’34. And then yeah, when people talk about the ‘60s, they’re actually talking about the second half of the ‘60s. Right? Because the first half of the ‘60s is Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius, and it looks like the ‘50s. It’s locked down. It’s buttoned down, maybe, rather than locked down.
CB: Yeah, totally.
AC: Yeah, and that emerging into Saturn in Pisces is, you know, it’s a very natural, “So what the fuck is going on? Like, so what is this?” There’s someone in the comments; forgive me for not seeing the name, I just saw it popped up. But it’s sort of the new normal but it feels transitional. It’s a mutable Saturn without a lot of dignity. It’s sort of, you know, it’s in a water sign. Like, yeah, this is how it is for now, but there’s nothing that feels particularly permanent about Saturn in Pisces.
CB: Yeah. So going back and speaking of ingresses, maybe we should talk then about the other really major thing that started happening in terms of world events this month that a lot of the astrologers were associating and connecting with Pluto, which was the banking crisis that came up. And I know a lot of astrologers were talking about it because it was striking that it was happening when Pluto was right in the last degrees of Capricorn, because of course all the astrologers that were around in 2008 remember during the last major financial, also banking, crisis that occurred right when Pluto was moving into Capricorn in the very first degrees of the sign, so there was something very fitting about it sort of starting with a banking crisis and ending with a banking crisis, for some reason. So what’s the short version for people that weren’t paying attention to the news? What’s the synopsis, Robert, of what happened there exactly?
RW: Oh man, it’s such a complex story, but I will try to give you the short version.
CB: Okay.
RW: I mean, first of all, it just kind of came out of nowhere. Right? What was really interesting was that the Fed chair, Chairman Powell, testified in front of Congress, I believe, on, let me just look at…it was Tuesday, the 7th, and Wednesday, the 8th. The banking crisis was not even mentioned one time. That was right at the ingress of Saturn into Pisces, and then all of a sudden it was on Thursday and Friday that the Silvergate Bank, which was the “crypto” bank failed, and then a day or two later, you have the Silicon Valley Bank, which was a really important bank for the tech industry and venture capital, also failed, and then a couple more banks failed, and so whether it was related more to Pluto-Aquarius or Saturn-Pisces, that was one of the things that I think is a little hard to tell. All of a sudden now as we had talked about, “liquidity,” bank liquidity dried up right when Saturn, literally, right when Saturn hit Pisces. Now the causes of the bank crisis are basically three: banks were holding large bond portfolios that got killed, 2022 was the worst year for bonds in 40-50 years. So they’re holding all these bonds, and so their capital is dropping because bond value dropped. You also had deposit flight looking for higher interest. And so all of a sudden, boom, and technology played a big role in that, and that might be the Pluto in Aquarius part, because all of a sudden now, people used to have to go the bank physically, right, to—a run on the bank, you had to actually go to the bank to get your money out of the bank, and now you just swipe your phone and you can move all your funds in a second. And that actually contributed to the speed of the crisis that took everybody by surprise.
CB: Interesting. So part of it is there was a bank run, basically, and that’s part of the reason why Silicon Valley Bank failed, right?
RW: Yeah. Social media and phones kind of teamed up. A rumor gets going on social media, this also happened with FTX last year, you know, a couple of big crypto influencers start posting, “Oh, if I were you, I would withdraw my FTX funds now.” Boom, that started a cascading kind of run on the bank there. So things can move very, very fast in the digital age here.
CB: One person in the comments is saying, and I thought this too, that some of this current banking crisis was partially connected to some of the banking things that occurred in November because of the tie-in with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, right?
RW: That was with the Silvergate Bank particularly, which was a crypto industry bank, so again, this is a really complex story. The government is making a concerted effort to make it much harder for big crypto institutions to bank. So that’s a subplot, but I wouldn’t say that that’s kind of one of the main driving forces. It all goes back to the Fed messing up on inflation. Remember when the Fed said, “Oh, a little bit of inflation would be good”? People remember that back in 2021. Well, that turned out to be a historic mistake. So in order to combat inflation, they raised interest rates the sharpest they’ve raised them in 40 years. Very—
CB: Right. And that was—[crosstalk] all the—
RW: —and that put pressure on the banks, number one because it collapsed the bond market, but number two, bigger picture, it just started removing liquidity from the banking system and the financial markets and the economy to bring down inflation.
CB: Right.
RW: And it showed up, boom, with a banking crisis that nobody expected. So it all goes back to inflation and the Fed, what the Federal Reserve is doing. And I just, there’s a really good documentary on Frontline if you guys like Frontline.
CB: Pause for a second, pause for a second. So, astrologically, to keep this grounded in the astrology—
RW: Sure.
CB: —all the astrologers and us were talking about Jupiter in Pisces, Jupiter and Neptune conjoining in Pisces and associating that with a lot of the inflation that we saw that occurred between 2021 and 2022. What was the time frame on that transit again? Because it was, like, extenuated because there was an early ingress into Pisces, so it ended up going much longer than it normally would, right?
AC: Yeah, it was cut into chunks.
CB: Yeah.
RW: That was, I remember it was in April of 2022 was the conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune.
CB: Yeah. Although there was, I think, the previous year in 2021, there may have been a little dip into Pisces already, so it just extended it—
RW: Right.
CB: —and that really coincided with inflation and all the prices were going up, and that was the big story financially last year, is all the prices on everything were going up due to inflation, with Jupiter conjunct Neptune, which are both planets of sort of like growth and expansion and lack of boundaries. But then during the course of last year, the Federal Reserve in the US was trying to combat inflation by rising interest rates, and especially in the second half of the year, Austin, you were associating the Mars-Neptune square with bubbles bursting or bubbles popping, and it was notable around the October-November timeframe when they were raising the rates a lot that that seemed to coincide with some of the, what looked like at the time, successful attempts to get the inflation under control by sort of popping that inflation bubble, it seemed like.
AC: Yeah. Well, and we also had the FTX event right on, like very close to the exact Mars-Neptune, and you know, last month, I said about this Mars-Neptune that happened in March, well if there are bubbles left, you know, hide your bubbles, and lo and behold, we got another one, right? And obviously, that Mars-Neptune, Mars is the shorter term trigger for popping in an environment created by the longer cycles.
RW: Well and also Mercury was debilitated in Pisces and combust the Sun, and that was something that I’d been talking about. That can create kind of a “panic.” Markets and in general, like, Mercury was in kind of a double jeopardy. And it was also conjunct Neptune at the same time, so that was a mess when Mercury, the Sun, and Neptune conjuncted and they were all squaring Mars, and that’s kind of when the crisis went down, so that was like the shorter term trigger of all those four planets together.
CB: Right. So—
AC: And Robert, as we were saying before we started recording, another simple take on this is that Saturn is in Pisces now, and liquidity is not what it used to be. Right? Like, we have the drying planet, right? The like, slow-moving, drying planet into Pisces which has been so juiced and juicy because of Neptune, and then on-and-off Jupiter since 2021, and then, like, Saturn has come to dry things up.
RW: Totally.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. So where we’re at now, and one of the reasons I was asking about some of the past stuff is just because it seemed like, especially with the eclipses, that sometimes there were major events happening on eclipses, like last November, when the whole Sam Bankman-Fried scandal and financial scandal happened right around the time of the eclipses in November, and that ended up being tied in with some other related Bitcoin thing that happened on eclipses exactly six months earlier. Since we’re coming up on eclipse season again next month, starting with that eclipse in Aries later in April, I thought it would be good to just understand the connections sometimes between events that are happening now or that are coming up and how sometimes they’re not happening in isolation but as part of a sequence with things in other increments that we can track with astrology.
RW: Well last year’s eclipses, I believe, were conjunct Uranus in both times, right? Both the spring and the fall. Uranus is a planet that rules technology and crypto, cutting-edge technologies, big tech companies, and cryptocurrencies, so usually it’s a friend. But it got eclipsed basically, right? And I know, I think when I talked to Austin at ISAR, you said, “Aw man, when planets get caught up in the eclipse, you know, those planets really suffer.” And I think that that was a key point. Uranus was basically eclipsed. Big tech got crushed in 2022 on those eclipses, not just crypto, but I mean, Netflix fell, like, 50%. Amazon fell 50%. And then those eclipses really took–
AC: Facebook.
RW: Facebook, oh yeah. And those eclipses of Uranus also really hit crypto hard with the collapse of Luna and then FTX in November.
CB: Yeah. The Luna one was right on the eclipse last June, right?
RW: Almost to the day. It was almost to the—oh, I’m sorry, the Luna one, yeah, that was in May, I believe. The end of April or May.
CB: Yeah, okay. And just quickly to summarize, what was that again? It was a form of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, like an alternative to Bitcoin, that just suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed.
RW: Yeah, that’s right. It was an altcoin. A lot of people said, you know, Luna crashed on the lunar eclipse too.
CB: Right.
RW: So sometimes you get those really literal things. But yeah, it was an altcoin, but it had, like, a whole ecosystem, and it had Terra that was pegged to the dollar and it was an algorithmic stablecoin, which was like this supposedly amazing technology, but the whole thing was basically kind of a Ponzi scheme.
CB: Right. And then—
AC: I just want to point out that, these were, so these eclipses right, with Uranus, also square Saturn—
RW: Also square Saturn, yes.
AC: —and in Taurus, right, Taurus is the sign that likes stable stores of value. It likes the food trucks to deliver the bread on time, it likes the money to, you know, to appreciate or depreciate extremely slowly. And as we head into eclipses later this month, it’s not the same eclipses, where one of them will be in Scorpio, one of them will be in Aries, the nodes are still in Scorpio-Taurus, but Saturn is no longer in a fixed sign, and so we’ve got some of those echoes left, right, we’ve still got some eclipses that are at least opposed if not conjoined to Uranus—
RW: Opposed, yeah.
AC: —but we’re turning the corner into a new set of, like a half-new set of dynamics.
RW: It’s a different animal. And that’s a key point too, Austin, thanks for bringing that up. The eclipses were caught in between the Uranus-Saturn square. And that, for financial astrology, is the preeminent financial crisis aspect historically. And by the way, I went back to the crash of 1929, and that also had the nodes in Taurus and Scorpio. North node in Taurus, I believe, south node in Scorpio. And Chiron was involved at that time, it wasn’t Uranus, but the nodes were in the same signs, by the way. But the Uranus-Saturn cycle, if you go back 2008, Uranus-Saturn cycle. 2000, the dot-com, Uranus-Saturn cycle. 1931 through 1933, Uranus-Saturn cycle, run on the banks. The Dutch tulips, you go back to the 1600s, Uranus-Saturn cycle. So Uranus-Saturn cycle is really the cycle of the boom and the bust, the bubble and the crash. And when the eclipses line up with that, then you get a real trigger.
CB: Yeah. And I remember a year ago also with the eclipses, that was one of the first times that the economy really started to shake, sort of in general. So we had that Luna coin crash right on an eclipse in like May and June of last year, and then six months later, right on another eclipse, the FTX scandal and crash happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, and I know that he was being investigated for possibly being connected with the Luna crash, with the Luna crash somehow being connected with what happened then with FTX crashing in November, right?
RW: It’s all connected. I mean, the cryptocurrency space is very small, and all the players are interwound together. After that crash, Bankman-Fried started kind of stepping in and backstopping the market, which is hilarious, right, in retrospect. There were articles, like, “Oh, Bankman-Fried is the new ‘J.P. Morgan’ of crypto; he’s stepping in and he’s buying all these distressed companies and he’s backstopping.” Well, we now know that that whole thing was just a house of cards, another Ponzi scheme. So yeah, it’s really interesting. I don’t remember the exact connection between Luna and Bankman-Fried, but that collapse of liquidity again, in the crypto space, you know, as the tide comes out, the scams get exposed, and FTX unfortunately was just a massive scam.
CB: Yeah. I was just, there’s like a New York Times article from back in December that said, “FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried is said to face market manipulation inquiry; federal prosecutors are investigating whether he and his hedge fund orchestrated trades in a way that led to the collapse of two cryptocurrencies in May.” And it’s talking about Luna and Terra. So I just bring all of this up and the connections between these six-month increments between eclipses because we’re coming up on eclipses again here next month, and it seems like we’ve got some recurring themes having to do with inflation and attempts to fight inflation, Bitcoin and some of the ongoing issues integrating whether Bitcoin is getting integrated with other currencies and how that’s affecting things like banking or other currencies and things like that, and a lot of different related topics that keep coming up in six-month increments here. So I’m curious how that will go.
AC: Yeah. The image that comes to mind, when you were talking, Robert, about like the tide going out exposing things is, you know, what can survive or even thrive in a low liquidity environment? Who are the crabs who do just fine on the seashore, right? And who are the fish who dry out and bake in the sun?
RW: Well, so far, Bitcoin is actually thriving, which is somewhat of a surprise, and that may have to do with Saturn leaving Aquarius where it was potentially holding down crypto. So Bitcoin so far is the winner of this banking crisis. It is outperforming everything else and has flipped into a kind of safe haven. We’ll see if that holds up. It’s going to be interesting.
CB: Right, because that’s one of the things we saw that Bitcoin did really well when Jupiter was in Aquarius, right?
RW: Well, you know, Saturn and Jupiter ingressed together, and 2021, the entire year Jupiter was in Aquarius, you got the two all-time highs, and you also have the Saturn-Uranus squares which was in the mania phase where, you know, everybody was going insane about crypto. So Jupiter in Aquarius was very good for crypto. As soon as Jupiter left Aquarius, at the end of 2021, right, the whole crypto market collapsed, basically.
CB: Right.
RW: And it’s been a bear market the entire time that Saturn was in Aquarius by itself.
CB: Right.
RW: And then as soon as Saturn leaved Aquarius, now Bitcoin is rushing up again, and you know, the bulk of the rally took place with Venus in Aquarius in January. Bitcoin went up 50-60% just with Venus in Aquarius. And then the rally kind of continued, but much smaller after Venus left, so Aquarius seems to be a big factor for crypto, and as well as the modern ruler, Uranus, each of which can really affect the crypto market’s transits from other planets.
CB: Yeah. I just think that’s so interesting studying transits to a sign in something like that that you can study objectively using graphs because it has whatever its perceived value is going up and down and then being able to have some, you know, quasi-objective way to study the history of that thing and the value of it. So this is the chart for Bitcoin, and I believe you use this chart, right, the Leo rising chart set for London?
RW: Yeah. And I pretty much rectified it over the past couple years. I do think that London is definitely, well I’d say high probability the location. And that was based on the eight-degree ascendant, and you can go back and look at Jupiter when it’s stationed at eight degrees and whenever it crossed eight degrees Aries, we got some big rallies, but there were some other factors too. But you can see there on the natal chart, lot of Aquarius: north node in Aquarius, Neptune in Aquarius, and in fact, the all-time high of Bitcoin in October-November of 2021. Look, Jupiter was exactly conjunct the natal Neptune, right? Talk about euphoria. So people who are still doubting the Bitcoin natal chart, I think that’s really great evidence for it.
CB: Yeah. And just to reiterate some history because it’s kind of relevant since we’re talking about Pluto ingresses and Pluto entering and departing from signs and sometimes little things starting at the beginning of an ingress that later become big things, the guy that created Bitcoin, the like, anonymous, mysterious figure that created Bitcoin—
RW: Satoshi Nakamoto.
CB: Yeah. Nobody knows who he is and he’s very, you know, who knows who he is, but he left something in the code for Bitcoin early on that referred to the financial crisis that was occurring in 2008, and he almost sounded like he was partially motivated because he was mad at the bank bailouts that were happening at the time or something like that, so it was very much tied in with that initial Pluto ingress into Capricorn and the financial catastrophe that was happening in real time at that point, but also the seeds of something that would later become very important in the world over the past decade as Pluto’s been transiting through Capricorn, which were Bitcoin were laid at the same time simultaneously, so we’re probably going tosee something very similar like that that we’ve gotta pay attention to right now, which is we see a major change that happens in the world simultaneous with the transit and the ingress of a planet, but then also the seeds of something are laid at that time as well that will later bear fruit years in the future.
RW: True. Bitcoin was, you know, it does have a Saturn-Uranus opposition, and it has the Pluto ingress into Capricorn, so the birth chart really captures that energy of that crisis of 2008. And by the way, he, you know, that quote quoted the Financial Times of London in the Bitcoin Genesis Block, so that’s the more evidence for the London chart.
CB: Right. And could you just expand on that or clarify what that point was that he, what his rationale was for creating that technology at the time? That he said, he referred to something about the financial crisis, right?
RW: Right. Well, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners are gloating right now because they’re saying, “Right, oh, Bitcoin was created for this, you know, for this banking crisis.” So you know, “Oh, Bitcoin’s not backed by anything,” and people are like, but now the banking system is the one that’s in crisis, so it’s kind of interesting. I mean, supposedly Bitcoin was created to be outside the mainstream financial system so that it could give you protection from a larger collapse of the mainstream financial system.
CB: Right.
RW: And so a lot of people are saying, “Oh look, that’s what’s happening now.”
CB: And that’s because you don’t need a bank to store Bitcoin, I guess that’s the core of that, right?
RW: Well that’s the beauty of Bitcoin, and that’s why I’ve always been a Bitcoiner, is it’s outside of the banking system, it’s not controlled by any bank or country or central bank or corporation. It is an independent entity.
CB: Sure. I guess I’m just trying to get to understanding the core things here, because there’s something there to learn about Pluto in Capricorn and what that transit was about now that we’re reaching the end of it, and there’s also something about the seeds of the transit that we’re moving into for the next 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius.
AC: Well, let me just jump in. So we are kind of at the end of Pluto in Capricorn and kind of not. It’s almost like we’re watching a show with multiple character arcs, and with Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius, one of the characters is starting their next season arc, but we still have, like, you know this is a ten-week ingress, we still have well over a year of Pluto being in Capricorn to go.
RW: 18 months.
AC: Okay, 18 months. Right. Because there are three total ingresses into Aquarius before it’s permanent. And so like, this is wrapping up some things, but it’s important that we don’t say “this is the end,” because we’ve got a few more—
CB: Yeah.
AC: —a few more finales, right? Pluto’s going to do more at like 28, 29 Cap before, you know, before it’s wrapped in a bow and sent off.
CB: Yeah, it’s like a standup comedian that does their entire act and leaves but then comes back for an encore, except nobody’s excited for that encore and everybody just groans when they come back like three times.
AC: [Laughs] Yeah.
RW: Well, it’s really a transition. The next 18 months is like the slow transition of Pluto. Pluto into Aquarius isn’t like one day, right? It’s an 18-month transitionary period where we get used to what is the new era that we’re stepping into.
AC: Yeah, that and, like, the final, once Pluto’s actually in, that overlaps with the transition of Neptune and Saturn and Uranus changing signs. Like we’re all kind of heading towards that 2025-ish mass exodus of, or ingress/exodus of outer planets, where we get, you know, we go Neptune in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, with the Pluto in Aquarius, like Pluto is, you know, one of the three big invisibles. But the final ingresses all line up mid-decade.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Thankfully, in a harmonious minor grand trine.
AC: Yeah. My guess is that “harmonious” will not be the term that historians use to refer to that era. “It was 2025 which began the era of harmony.”
RW: [Laughs] Well, at least it’s sextiles and trines, right? It could be worse.
AC: So they’re working with each other, but are they working with each other against us, Robert? [Laughs]
RW: And the Saturn-Neptune conjunction takes place, I believe, at zero Aries, right?
AC: Yeah.
RW: That is, Bill Meridian said, you know, that can cause really huge global events.
AC: We’ll get to see. [Laughs]
RW: [Laughs] So this is all leading up to that. This is all leading up to 2025.
AC: Yeah, I think so. I think Saturn in Pisces is sort of the confusion leading up to that.
RW: But one last thing I wanted to say for cryptocurrencies, I mean, by the way, on the day of the ingress, which was yesterday, the SEC, it was either Wednesday or Thursday, the SEC announced aggressive action against Coinbase. So one of the things I think we’re going to see is, and this was all over crypto Twitter, is aggressive moves by governments to try to stop cryptocurrencies. And there’s going tobe a power struggle over cryptocurrencies with Pluto in Aquarius, so this may be one of the things we’re going tobe seeing. The Gary Gensler, the SEC, the Biden administration, they’ve all taken very hostile stance against crypto. I know we’re not here to talk about crypto, but that’s my specialty, so I think that’s a big theme is the government, it’s trying to at least gain control over crypto if not outright stop it.
CB: Right. Yeah, and that seems like a theme that’s come up in multiple ways here of governments or organizations or people in power trying to gain control or leverage over technology because the people or the person in control of the technology that everyone’s using end up being the people in power, and then that power can be wielded to do a lot of different, either good or bad things, but that’s true of, like, Bitcoin, that’s true of AI. You know, we talked about fusion in the year ahead forecast and how that was a big thing that came out with Saturn in Aquarius and some of the promise of that transforming the global energy scheme potentially over the next 20 years if that becomes more common. I’m sure there’s lots — social media is another one we talked about and the attempts to control that or like, what governments or organizations have control over that, so it seems like that’s going to be a major theme here.
AC: Yeah, it’s all contested terrain now. Right, like multiple—
RW: And also like obsolete technologies like you said, like gas cars. Maybe gas cars become completely obsolete technology with Pluto in Aquarius.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s going to accelerate with Uranus in Gemini, because if, like I was telling you guys before we started recording, even if fusion becomes widely used, the next step is going to be like everything needs to be switched to electric, not just cars, but also like trucks, boats, planes, and all of that, and there are some major hurdles with converting the entire transportation sector to being able to use electric rather than gas or diesel, and that’ll be a major transformation over the course of the next 10-20 years.
RW: Well the EU has already moved to ban I think all gas-powered cars, right, by like 2032 or something? I might be a little off on the year, but—
CB: Okay.
RW: It’s happening.
CB: That’s the end of Uranus in Gemini.
AC: We’ll see. Europe’s in the middle of some pretty big stuff. We’ll see, I don’t know. I’m kind of waiting to see what things look like in Europe a few years from now. You know, the advent of for real, for real land war in Ukraine has I think changed a lot of trajectories.
CB: Yeah. And we’ve seen some major geopolitical shifts happening over the past month with the ingresses as well. Some things are heating up, seeing for example Saudi Arabia and Iran sign some sort of peace accord or moving towards that with the backing of China. And China being a major player in helping to coordinate that or make it happen, basically, has major geopolitical implications, potentially, if that actually, like, stays in place, which is interesting. Again as an ingress thing of something new or of a new chapter opening up that might not be huge in the moment but in the long term could be significant. Were there similar geopolitical things?
AC: Yeah. You know just to, you know, just to not recap but just to summarize, like, my suspicion that we’re in a very uncertain place, is very much confirmed by the trajectory of the conversation, where it’s like, so here’s 40 things that could be really huge and we don’t know where they’re going. Right? That’s the new normal. Right? It’s not, it’s not a return to the known.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s a good point. Alright, well, we do need to mention before we wrap up this new section really soon. But I did want to mention really briefly — the Oscars since that was a big, in terms of entertainment and in terms of other, like, notable things that everyone was talking about — the astrology of this month where the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars and won just tons of awards as did many of the actors and other people associated with the movie.
There was also a major sort of comeback story with Brendan Fraser who won an Oscar for his role in the movie The Whale, and that was kind of an interesting thing astrologically to some extent. I know, Austin, you’ve associated that, both that and, I think, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which came out during the Pisces stellium last year, was a very, like, Pisces and Aquarius stellium-type movie. Did either of you see it?
AC: You know, Kate and I sat down to watch it one night and it was just, it was moving too quickly and we were both tired. And we both decided that we would like to watch it, but not right now, and then never got back to it. But from what I understand, it sounds very Neptune in Pisces, sounds very appropriate that it was the victor during the Saturn–Neptune era.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Great movie, I enjoyed it immensely. Very fun —
AC: Yeah, heard good things.
RW: Very innovative story. Kind of sci-fi, kind of kung-fu, like, yeah, genre-bender.
CB: Yeah. And although we don’t have a birth time for her, Michelle Yeoh won the award for Best Actress in that movie, and I noticed that she had Saturn in Aquarius. So, this was like the very tail end of her Saturn return, her second Saturn return, which I thought was really interesting since they’re all, so, yeah, just different things, with like age; and I know she mentioned in her, like, acceptance speech, different things about age and, like, not being too late to still win a major award like that, even later in your career — and even though actresses have sometimes struggled with that casting after a certain age or different things like that — so I thought that was interesting that that was part of her second Saturn return story.
AC: Yeah, totally. Well, and, also, Jupiter return, in that movie came out when she was having a Jupiter return in Pisces. Yeah, I remember she, I mean, she must’ve started acting early. I remember seeing her in kung fu movies that were from the early mid ‘80s. She’s been around forever.
CB: Yeah. I mean the big one was like 2000 was Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and that was —
AC: Yeah, but she was big in, like, Hong Kong cinema a decade and a half before that.
CB: Okay.
RW: That was her breakout to the Western audience.
AC: Yeah, but she was like starring roles, you know, 15 years earlier.
CB: Got it. And then, the other one was Brendan Fraser and that was really interesting because we actually do have a timed chart for Brendan Fraser. And what was interesting to me partially, was Saturn had just departed from Aquarius and moved into Pisces. So it’s like he got the role and he did the role while Saturn was in, going through his tenth house. And he’s had this kind of, like, comeback story of this redemption story because he had been a big actor in the ‘90s and early 2000s. But then he struggled with, like, a series of different setbacks in different parts of his life in the late 2000s and early 2010s so that, maybe like six or seven years ago, there was a bunch of different op-ed pieces of just like what happened to Brendan Fraser and why did he just disappear from the map after being one of the leading stars in Hollywood for like a decade. And, yeah, it was like a really notable success story or comeback story. And since he has a timed chart, it’s just interesting seeing some of the different transits going on for him when he won an Oscar here this month.
So, yeah, the Pluto ingress, of course, went into, Pluto trined his Moon in the first house, and that Pluto transit went into his tenth house. And Saturn had just departed from his tenth house and moved into his eleventh. So, it’s interesting seeing somebody get like the rewards of a tenth house Saturn transit and in some ways also him having a Saturn return back to his tenth house where Saturn would’ve been going through Aquarius in the mid-90s, early to mid-90s, when he first had his ascent as an actor. And in his acceptance speech, he also mentioned something about like time and age where he talked about how when he was first big in Hollywood in the 90s, when Saturn was up in the top part of his chart, how it came easily to him and he had something that was there that he took for granted, until it went away, and he didn’t fully recognize or appreciate it until it went away. But now, all of a sudden, he’s back sort of at the top of his chosen career or profession. And he had a much greater appreciation for it I think the second time around of Saturn going through his tenth house; and, yeah, there’s something really striking there about witnessing that transit with somebody.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting also considering that the natal chart has Saturn in its fall in Aries, and that Saturn rules the tenth. So there’s literally a fall from grace, and then getting back up again.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, one thing I don’t want to dwell on this, but looking at Michelle Yeoh’s chart, and seeing the Saturn in Aquarius, and it immediately made me think of debates of who’s the greatest of all time — who are the GOATs of different fields. And of course, while Saturn was in Saturn-ruled signs, in mixed martial arts, everybody was talking about GOATs all the time, and what was really interesting is we transitioned out of that era, like, three or four people who are maybe going to become the greatest of all time, like these champions with great win streaks, all got cut down over the last several weeks. Like, was it two weeks ago, Kamaru Usman, who I think he had 14 consecutive wins, he was about to have the longest win streak ever, blah-blah-blah. And instead of getting his belt back, just got sort of permanently, should we say, second tiered. And it’s happened with a number of different fighters. And I’m just curious of some of the discourse with Saturn and longevity no longer being as important with Saturn moved out of the Aquarius and Capricorn if some of this, like, seeking permanence in the memory of a particular field will sort of drain away. Because again, there was this slaughter of would-be GOATs over the last six months.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Alright, so I think we are definitely more than halfway; we are up to an hour and ten minutes for this episode, so we should make a transition to talking about April. I did first want to mention our sponsor for this episode.
So, there’s this new astrology app that’s coming out right now that’s called StarScribe, which I’m actually kind of excited about and which approached me about doing this because this is an astrologer I know from social media. And what they’ve done is they’ve launched a Kickstarter in order to fund this new astrology app that they’re working on that looks both really beautiful and has some really great things integrated into it for studying and learning astrology. So StarScribe is an astrology journaling app by astrologer Rowan Oliver and software engineer Romina Barrett that launched a Kickstarter just a few days ago. So, StarScribe is a new astrology journaling planner and social app, and it’s in the beta phase, but they’re running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of the mobile app, which is launching for both iOS and Android later this year.
StarScribe is the first astrology app to feature techniques sourced directly from Hellenistic astrology, including annual profections and Whole Sign houses. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited about it. So StarScribe has [an] upcoming astrologer portal that will feature the work of professional astrologers from all backgrounds and connect astrology enthusiasts to knowledgeable and reliable astrologers of different traditions from all around the globe. So if you sign up for the Kickstarter, some of the perks include early and discounted access to the app’s premium features, exclusive astrology merch designed by Zartana, who’s designed some graphics for The Astrology Podcast actually in the past. And also astrology and web development bundles from Rowan and Romina.
So, StarScribe’s Kickstarter campaign is running from March 23rd through April 2nd, and you can learn more and back the project at StarScribe.co/Kickstarter. So, everybody should sign up and fund this because, you know, there’s not actually, even though you would think that there are a lot of different apps for astrology at this point, there’s actually not that many astrology apps out there. We’ve got kind of a limited number of ones, and some of them have, you know, limited functionality compared to others, so it would be really nice to have some more advanced astrology apps out there that have this sort of functionality of being able to do some of the techniques like profections or other Hellenistic and other timing techniques, as well as to have features like journaling features so that you can actually record what happened to you on different days and start building up your own database of, like, experiences and observations in terms of astrology. So I definitely encourage everyone to check that out and I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode.
Alright, so that is our sponsor for this month. Shall we transition into getting into the details surrounding April?
RW: Chris, can I, I have one more tie-in just on Pluto in Aquarius that I wanted to mention. That the previous two ingresses featured the King of England quite prominently. He was in a dispute with the Pope in 1533 and broke with the Catholic Church, and of course, 1777, was the flipside, the colonies broke with the King of England. And just noticed the coronation of King Charles coming up in May during that. One of the kind of the big historical events of the initial ingress and, again, he’s in another dispute, this time of his own son who’s broken off from the monarchy. I don’t know why that’s related to Pluto in Aquarius, but it keeps coming up, so I thought it was interesting.
CB: Okay. Cool. Alright, so let’s move on to April. Here is the calendar again, just to show some of the early ingresses. So one of the things that’s going to come up again, over and over again this month is that now that Pluto is at zero degrees of Aquarius and Saturn is in the early degrees of Pisces, every time like an inner planet changes signs this month, it’s going to hit a hard aspect with one of those two outer planets, and that’s going to give us some of our first previews of what those outer planets really do in those signs.
So here’s a graph from Archetypal Explorer where it shows, for example, on Monday, the third, for example, Mercury will square Pluto. So that will be an activation of Pluto. Then later in the month around 10th and 11th, Venus will trine Pluto. Then Venus will square Saturn on the 13th. The Sun will square Pluto around the 19th and 20th. And so on and so forth. So that’s something I think everybody should pay attention to, even though those are somewhat minor or normally like passing aspects that we maybe wouldn’t dwell on. They might have added importance this month just because it’s the first time of many times that some of those transits are going to take place, in the case of Saturn over the next three years or in the case of Pluto over the next 20 years.
AC: Yeah, I mean, those matter. I don’t know if you want to talk about them now or in order, but, you know, especially for planets in Gemini, right, which usually get to go fast and play and, you know, experience a measure of freedom, immediately hitting a square to Saturn, is a heavy, waterlogged Saturn in Pisces is definitely not going to be, not going to allow for that, like, light, swift, playful energy to thrive very easily.
CB: Right, for sure. Alright, so, for the people watching the video version I’m going to put the chart of the moment up for April first. So this is what we start with at the beginning of the month. One of the most notable things, of course, that we talked about in last month’s forecast is that by the end of March, Mars will have departed from its eight-month transit, eight- or nine-month transit, through Gemini that it started last August and it will have finally moved into Cancer, after that very, very long Mars retrograde period in Gemini that we’ve been experiencing over the past several months. So that’s one of the other distinctly different things that we’re experiencing already at the beginning of April.
RW: Yeah. That’s the third ingress within a few weeks, and just really, I think it accentuates the energy shift that we’re going through in March and April.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Of new beginnings, of old things ending, especially some of the old challenges that the Mars retrograde brought finally being wrapped up, and then by this point in early April, firmly heading into uncharted territory.
RW: I mean ingresses, like, ingresses, you know, they tend to be kind of chaotic —
AC: Mmhmm.
RW: — you know, like that, especially zero degrees, when it changes from twenty-nine to zero degrees, I mean, mostly outer planets, but when you get all of these changes simultaneously, it’s like the old era isn’t quite over. You know it’s like when you move into a new house, but all your stuff is still in boxes, right, it’s like, it’s very chaotic. It has that feeling of like, you stepped into the new era, but it hasn’t really, at the same time, it hasn’t really begun yet. So you’re in the in-between zone, and I think that creates a lot of chaos and uncertainty.
CB: Hmmm. Right. So —
AC: – Yeah, definitely. And also just with planets in cardinal signs. Cardinal signs also have that quality of beginning, of setting things in motion, but, you know, you just kind of see the motion, but not necessarily the trajectory or impacts yet.
CB: Yeah, so, here on April third, we get our first actual ingress of the month — aside from already starting with Mars having moved into Cancer — but Mercury changes signs and moves from Aries and into Taurus where it immediately squares Pluto. What are some of our key words? We’ve talked a lot about Mercury, hard Mercury–Pluto aspects over the past several months, because especially, or couple of years actually, because there’s been some notable stations where Mercury has stationed retrograde or direct in a hard aspect with Pluto, and we kept coming up with, or we kept observing at the time, like, exposés or things that were, like buried or hidden being sort of brought up or dug up at different points, so that seems to be one of the core themes of Mercury–Pluto.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah and then, yeah, Mercury has a rough row to hoe here, because we’ve got the square with Pluto and then we’ve got a conjunction with the dragon’s head and then on to Uranus. And Venus will be leaving Taurus before long, which, you know, in Venus’s copresence with Mercury there helps stabilize things, but Venus is soon gone, and, you know, especially if we’re looking at that first decan of Taurus, you know, usually with Mercury there, which is the ruler, we’re looking at trying to make plans. Like the archetype is like thinking about “What do I plant this year?” And so if I’m going to plant, you know, I don’t know, soybeans or tomatoes, like, I need this kind of soil, I need to prepare it this way, and I’m going to buy this many seeds. And so Mercury in Taurus has this like planning for the future, for the future harvest sort-of quality. And it’s very, very difficult to plan here, right — square Pluto, conjunct an eclipse point, you know, coming up on a conjunction with Uranus, and, you know, I think that that’s relevant on a personal level but that also pings a lot of the discussion we were having about finances. Right? Like how do I plan? Where do I plant my coins?
CB: Yeah, and that’s going to become more important because we’re heading into a Mercury retrograde later in the month where Mercury’s going to slow down and station retrograde conjunct Uranus.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So Mercury–Uranus is going to be one of the themes of this month, especially in the second half of April and the early part of May. But it’s striking that it just opens with that square with Pluto.
RW: Well, Mercury —
CB: — So —
RW: Mercury, you know, Mercury in Taurus is like slow, plotting, methodical, kind of approach to things. Taurus has the effect of, like, kind of slowing things down, in general. And then Mercury’s actually going to be slowing down physically as it approaches its station retrograde. So I think there’s some theme here of, like, slowing everything down and, you know, really being very methodical about what you’re doing.
CB: Hmmm.
AC: Yeah, and I think, in a lot of ways, that’s a good default response to a confusing situation if you’re Mercury is like, OK, slow down, there’s a lot here that’s obscure, right. Pluto obscures, the North Node obscures, Uranus brings changes out of nowhere, which means you can’t see the source or you didn’t see them coming, right. There are a lot of relevant factors here for Mercury that are very difficult to see and get information on clearly.
CB: Yeah.
RW: That may relate to the banking crisis. Taurus is certainly related to banking and money. The square to Pluto may be another trigger in some way or …
AC: Yeah, I mean, Mercury, you know, Mercury could almost stand-in for capital here. Right, like, do I go here? Or do I go there? I don’tknow. There’s dragons and death gods and Uranus, and I’m not sure if I want to put my money in any of these places.
CB: Yeah, and Mercury, Mercury–Pluto aspects —
AC: — Oh, and, there’s a sextile to Saturn. Right? So we get another malefic just, you know, it’s a sextile, but joining the party. Sorry, Chris.
CB: Yeah, sextiling both Saturn and Mars a few days later. So just themes of like control and manipulation when it comes to communication and other mercurial activities are things to kind of watch out for that day, and it’ll be interesting —
RW: — Hmmm —
CB: — paying attention to the shift of that energy just because over the past decade, we’re used to having it happening in cardinal signs. But now all of a sudden, it’s happening in fixed signs, so there’s greater themes of, like Robert was saying, of things that are slow or things that are dug in or that take a long time to build up but become very permanent and become very intractable. And what happens when you have something intractable, but when there’s also themes of, like, control or tension there at the same time?
Alright, so that’s what we’re kind of —
RW: — One of the things we haven’t really mentioned with Pluto in Aquarius is like ideological — this kind of fixed ideological battles in the camps really polarizing into these fixed sides. I don’t know, with Mercury there could be something there, like some type of ideological power struggle.
AC: Yeah, so that makes sense to me on a, like an interpretative, symbolic level but on a lived level it’s like hasn’t that just been years and years and years and years. Like, I can barely remember a time before that.
RW: But it gets more and more extreme, right, every year.
AC: Yeah, so far.
CB: Yeah, we’ll see. Astrologers associate like Pluto in Aquarius the last time with, like, the French Revolution and things like that, right?
RW: Mhmm.
AC: Yeah, that definitely happened.
CB: Okay.
RW: Not the ingress, but the transit at the end of the transit.
CB: It’ll be interesting seeing what the parallel is for that in modern times then. And what would have that level of extremeness from the perspective of whatever it is that we’re currently taking for granted societally — or that some country or society is taking for granted and what would be such a radical shift in power that would represent that in our time. I think it’ll be one of the interesting things with Pluto in Aquarius over the next two decades.
Alright, so let’s talk about our first lunation of the month, which is this Full Moon that’s taking place in the sign of Libra on the fifth of April. So, there it is, it’s at 15-16 degrees of Libra. This is when the Sun–Jupiter conjunction is coming up, but it’s not quite there. Jupiter is at 20 degrees of Aries, and the Sun is at 16 degrees of Aries. The Moon is coming off of a square with Mars, which is one of the downsides of Mars shifting into a cardinal sign, is now the cardinal signs have a bit more tension and a bit more conflict due to those hard aspects with Mars. Let’s see, what else is going on here that’s really notable configuration-wise about this lunation?
RW: There’s actually a Chiron cazimi. I don’t know if you– you guys don’t use Chiron too much, but in this particular lunation, I think it is an interesting factor to include.
CB: Okay, there it is. So, Chiron’s at 15 degrees of Aries, so yeah, it’s very closely configured with the Sun and the Moon.
AC: That’s interesting. The, yeah —
RW: Chiron’s been really featured in March. We didn’t really talk much about that because there’s all this other stuff going on, but Jupiter was conjunct Chiron during the banking crisis as well and Jupiter being a prosperity, luck, confidence planet maybe was injured or damaged or weakened somehow — or expanded the Chiron themes of wounding, and so that might be also continuing on this lunation and is something that I’ve been thinking about.
AC: That’s interesting. So, what I focused on with this lunation is that, you know, as with every other Full Moon, we have the Moon in the sign opposite to the Sun, and so there’s always a sort of, always an emphasis on counterpointing or checking or balancing whatever the solar focus is. Right? And, you know, with Aries, right, we have a quick, accelerative, sometimes explosive, like kinetic movement, of a racing forward. In forward, not necessarily like, progress, but just in that direction. Whereas with Libra, right, you know, we literally have the sign of the Scales. The whole modus operandi is to attempt to balance anything which looks like contrariety. Right? The idea is like, okay, so everything’s moving, how do we balance all of this out? How do we slow things down because we’re moving, because some things are moving so fast, which I think is echoed additionally by Venus,the ruler of the Moon here, being in Taurus. Right? And having come off of the conjunction with destabilizing Uranus, right. So I think this Moon is going to try really hard to stabilize things, with, you know, medium success.
CB: Right. What is it applying to? Is it applying to anything? No?
AC: It’s applying to Jupiter.
CB: Okay, that’s good.
AC: But it’s a combust Jupiter.
CB: Right.
RW: Yeah, that’s really key. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot with my followers and subscribers for financial astrology. Jupiter is pretty much combust for almost the entire month of April. This, I think, is a bit worrisome. Of course, you get the cazimi for about 72 hours, which happens the week following this, but this Full Moon does kind of spotlight the Jupiter combustion. And it’s just another, you know, something that I’m going to talk about for April is, like, a crisis of confidence.
AC: Mmhmm.
RW: When we get to the eclipse, when Mars is in fall for the entire month, which can weaken confidence — Jupiter combust. These are all confidence planets. Confidence in the system may be a problem, whether it’s the banking system, I’m not sure, of course, but — and the eclipse in Aries usually exalted — the Sun is also going to be eclipsed. So, we’ve got a lot of factors here that could continue this crisis.
AC: Yeah, well, I like that focus on Jupiter as a planet that provides confidence. It’s sort of, “oh, well, this is something we can believe in; or this is something that reassures and stabilizes,” all of which Jupiter does. And that seems to resonate with Mercury’s situation not knowing, you know, where to farm, or, like, where to plant the seeds. And then, you know, the Full Moon is looking to Jupiter, it’s applying aspect, is to Jupiter, like, for reassurance. But Jupiter’s in a position where it can’t provide confidence now, right. And the, that burning, or combustion of Jupiter is, you know, it’s not a long-term thing, right, like maybe max 30 days. But really we’re probably looking about, you know, a week and a half, or a week on each side, maybe –
RW: A bit longer–
AC: — for full combustion.
RW: Okay.
AC: Yeah, depending on orbs, right, between 30 days and two weeks. And, you know, Jupiter’s role is reassuring, which certainly overlaps with certain monetary institutions. It’ll be like, “Oh, we’re going to do this,” and everybody says, “Oh, okay, well then it won’t be so bad.” And you were just saying, Robert, that people have felt profoundly not assured by some of the official statements. That sounds like, because Jupiter’s going into combustion now.
RW: It is, yeah. Combustion is like an astronomical thing, you know, which is always interesting, right. Because it’s like, can you see it?
AC: Yeah, where’s Jupiter?
RW: Yeah, and if you can’t see it, you can’t feel it, right? That’s the ancient, you know, astrology on combustion. It’s like if the light isn’t visible, then the effect of the planet is really diminished, and there’s like a protective effect of Jupiter that we don’t always talk about, you know. Good luck, good fortune, prosperity, optimism, hope, faith, confidence [are] jupiterian qualities that may be diminished in April, especially as it gets into the maximum combustion. And one thing I’ve observed over the years is, like, markets do not like combustion, and even just Mercury combust, you know, was touch-and-go there for a bit. We weren’t sure if the whole system was going to come down. So, it’s going to be really interesting to see the April tenth, first through the tenth period, as Jupiter goes into that maximum combustion.
RW: And one thing I’ve observed over the years is that markets do not like combustion. And even just Mercury combust was touch and go there for a bit, we weren’t sure if the whole system was going to come down. So it’s going to be really interesting to see the April 1st through the 10th period as Jupiter goes into that maximum combustion. And then it will cazimi, and everybody will be like, “Oh, we’re saved!” For a few days.
CB: One of the things that happens also with planets under the beams is sometimes it just means things that happen that are not apparent, or things happening behind the scenes. So maybe it’s that some of the efforts in order to balance the scales or to shore things up or provide confidence. Or just things that are happening behind the scenes that are not immediately apparent even if there’s something positive that’s going on or some positive attempts that are being made.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent.
RW: Yeah, I mean there’s going to be multiple ways to look at it. But hidden. Yeah, hidden behind the scenes. I like that interpretation.
AC: But yes, so the Moon’s going to try to balance things, with probably mixed results.
RW: It looks nice.
AC: Probably better results for individuals than for you know, empires.
RW: Well, certainly on a more personal level it will bring up kind of relationship issues maybe. With Libra just interpersonal relationship issues. I mean, it’s ruled by Venus which has dignity in Taurus. It’s kind of a nice vibe to it. On the surface, it looks good.
AC: Yeah, and I would say, just point out that that middle decan of Libra, really has contracts and deals as its focal point. It’s really about the deal which stabilizes things. Which includes marriage. But it’s like, “No we’re going to have this relationship,” and that stabilizes things.
CB: Okay. Alright, so that is our first lunation of the month, and just a few days later we get the Sun-Jupiter conjunction or the cazimi that you guys were talking about around 21-22 degrees of Aries.
AC: Right, there is still something to believe in. Right, there is still something to be excited about.
CB: Right, yeah. The Sun conjoining the greater benefic in the sign of its exaltation and renewing the synodic cycle between the Sun and Jupiter for another year. Yeah, that’s one of the more positive aspects this month and is similar to or at least Leisa and I focused our auspicious elections this month largely on Leo rising elections, taking advantage of that Sun-Jupiter conjunction. And that actually might be a good time to mention it, because I believe that is actually our auspicious election for the month.
So, this month we went for an election around I think April 10th, 2023. Around two o’clock, or let’s say 2:10 or so pm, local time. So what you’ll end up with is a chart with Leo rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is the Sun in the ninth whole sign house, exalted and applying to conjunction with Jupiter in a day chart, which is probably one of the most positive situations you can get when it comes to the Sun and the ruler of the Ascendant in a day chart, and in a good house. We also have the Moon in Sagittarius in the fifth house in another fire sign, applying to a trine with the Sun and Jupiter. And Jupiter has a bit of reception because it’s in Jupiter’s domicile, even though it’s not applying directly.
Other things going on in this chart– we have Venus later in Taurus, the very end of Taurus. There’s some other Leo rising charts earlier in the month where you can get Venus in an earlier degree, but this is sort of like the last bit of Venus in Taurus in the 10th whole sign house. And it’s up there with Mercury and Uranus, all in Taurus. So it’s not a terrible chart for 10th-house or ninth-house activities. Ninth-house activities can be things like education, travel, publishing, learning, like signing up for a course or something like that. And 10th house things can be especially with Venus, things relating to art or creativity, and other related themes. With the Moon in the fifth house, it may also be a good chart for like fun and games and leisurely activities in general. What other types of things would you guys use ninth house elections for?
RW: Yeah, long-distance journeys overseas, long trips.
CB: Yeah, so that is our auspicious election for the month. So that’s on April 10th. We found, I believe, three or four other electional charts for this month, which we released just a few days ago on our Auspicious Elections Podcast, which you can find out more information about at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Elections. Alright, so I like that Sun-Jupiter conjunction. It has a feeling of optimism, of growth, expansion, hope. It’s also taking place in the sign of the Sun’s exaltation and themes surrounding exaltation are just doing something, but doing the best version of that that you can. Or sort of raising things up to the highest level that you possibly can, and these themes of excelling or of excellence. Like, what does it mean to achieve excellence in some specific sphere of activity or some specific domain of activity? We all know what it’s like to do something or to learn something, but it’s quite different to do the best version of that thing that you possibly can. So that’s a theme I think, to think about- especially around the time of that Sun-Jupiter conjunction– is those themes of excellence and excelling at something.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, exalted planets have extremely high standards. That, not only is the action effective, but exalted planets also tend to be pretty efficient. They want excellent results without a massive expenditure of energy. Exalted planets wouldn’t be caught dead being try-hards. There’s two sides to it. One more thing about that is because we’re coming into that cazimi, that moment, the beginning-end of Jupiter’s cycle. The point of growth or learning or success, the Jupiter thing, is going to be in a nascent form. It’s getting the idea that becomes the thing. It’s not the point where there’s been a whole cycle, there’s been plenty of time to work and grow. It’s the seed point. It’s the “aha! That’s it.” That’s the point to move forward from. And it’s also worth noting as we’re talking about combustion and related dynamics: the Sun isn’t hurt by combustion, the Sun doesn’t mind devouring all of Jupiter by flame with teeth of fire. And so, what is exalted Sun-ing? For people in leadership positions, it’s being an excellent leader. For the rest of us, it’s self-governance. It’s being autonomous and acting, not reacting. You know, governing your soul, governing your life, being responsible and responsive, and having a vision.
RW: It’s kind of a spectacular cazimi really because the Sun is exalted and then Jupiter is cazimi, is going to have basically dignity as well. So, if it wasn’t for the eclipse, I would say that would be a massive, favorable, and huge turning point into something positive.
AC: Right, right. Good as an election, but next week… Next week on the Days of Our Lives. The weeks of our lives.
RW: Yeah, I mean that week will be great. That is spectacular. And the Sun does benefit from the connection to Jupiter, as you said. Jupiter doesn’t benefit as much from the conjunction to the Sun until it hits exact.
AC: Yeah, much better for solar things. Like, Chris gave the chart a Leo rising.
RW: Fantastic, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So, related to that, before we get to next week. On the same day that we’re getting the Sun-Jupiter conjunction on April 11th, Venus also makes an ingress and departs from Taurus and moves into Gemini where it immediately trines Pluto. So this is one of those other ingresses I was talking about where we have these new aspects to kind of contend with that are a little bit different than what we’re used to. Where Venus goes in and makes a relatively positive aspect or the most positive aspect to Pluto. And we get a trine between two air signs. Although then, not too long, just a couple of days later Venus hits the other outer planet that is now early in the signs, which is a square to Saturn at three degrees of Pisces. And that aspect completes it looks like on the 13th and 14th of April.
RW: And that leads into the eclipse. That’s kind of the last aspect before the eclipse is Venus’s square to Saturn.
CB: Yeah, so why don’t we talk about that just briefly just to give people, especially novices, some delineations of first, what kind of keywords can we come up with Venus trine Pluto in two air signs, in Gemini and Aquarius? I know the hard aspects between Venus and Pluto are usually a bit more difficult for relationships, but here we’re talking about a positive aspect or a flowing aspect, which in air signs I would conceptualize as flowing communication that can deepen the intensity of a relationship between two people, is one delineation I would probably give for that. What other things spring to mind for each of you?
AC: Okay, I like that depth of communication through an air sign. What sprang immediately to mind for Venus in Gemini trine Pluto in Aquarius is, “Oh, our new robot overlords are kind of fun.”
CB: Right. Yeah, they’re doing poetry, you can get it to do poetry for different things. I did that with the astrology delineation back in December, put it in the form of a poem. But I know other people are experimenting with sending people poems and stuff as well.
AC: Yeah. Well, and this one moves almost immediately into the square with Saturn. Because Pluto is so early in Aquarius that there’s no lead-up where Venus is applying to Pluto for more than half a day, quarter of a day. And so, it’s like, “Okay, robot overlords are kind of fun,”immediately applying to the square with Saturn, and that’s depressing.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That’s kind of a bummer, that’s kind of heavy.
RW: Even trines to Pluto can be a little heavy sometimes too.
AC: Yeah.
RW: It’s not always fun and games, even in the trine. It can bring a transformative event that deepens intimacy or connection, but you might have to get through something difficult to get there.
AC: Right. Someone tells you a horrible dark secret about themselves in a really entertaining manner, and now you know them better and you have to figure out what to do with that.
RW: Exactly, sums it up.
CB Or alternatively, it’s almost like communication is increased with Venus going into Gemini and it can be somewhat deep or striking or probing communication with the trine to Pluto. But then there’s something where there’s still a barrier almost on a soul level where Venus walks into, or runs into that square with Saturn. And Venus-Saturn squares are often a feeling of distance or of boundaries between two people that are holding people apart, or keeping them apart, or adding some sort of difficulty or surmountable difficulty in a relationship that either stops it from happening or alternatively, just makes it so that there’s something extra you have to do if you want to maintain this relationship with somebody. And figuring out how to navigate the boundaries of that is usually the challenge.
AC: Yeah. Like what you said, Chris, with Venus-Saturn you often have stuck on the outside, where the boundaries don’t allow for enmeshment. Or, conversely, you often have with Venus-Saturn, “Oh, we’re both stuck in this thing,” like, “this thing that has grown up between us and around us.” Relationship architecture is looking at, “Oh, so this is the space that the sum of our interactions and agreements and disagreements and promises, etc has created and we’re both inside it and can’t leave.” Saturn either locks you out or locks you in, or at least that’s the feeling.
RW: This could have a lot to do with intimacy too.
AC: Yeah.
RW: Like, Venus trine Pluto is the promise of a kind of deepening intimacy. But then the square to Saturn, there’s a fear of that connection, there’s a fear of getting close to someone, there’s a fear of intimacy. And maybe those two things could be related in some way.
CB: That’s a great point. That’s really good.
RW: This also could be a rough day for the markets that week, with that Venus square Saturn leading into the eclipse.
AC: And with Mercury ruling that Venus, they’re actually in mutual reception. But, Mercury’s doing some rough stuff. Mercury’s right in the middle of the Uranus-North Node mix and is getting close to the retrograde, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: So Venus saying, “Hey Mercury, what should I be excited about?” And Mercury’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know where to go”
CB: Mercury is slow at this point. It’s moving slower than its average daily motion by mid-April and it’s only seven days away from stationing retrograde. Oh, that’s actually the turning point. It was right around that time– if you look at the retrograde and stations table at the bottom right, it looks like it switches around April 10th or 11th. Mercury switches from being faster than itsaverage daily motion to slower than its average daily motion. So themes of Mercury and communication and other related things starting to slow down, or grind to a halt eventually, or just taking longer are going to start to increase from that point forward.
AC: And Mercury’s sort of like slowly tip-toeing towards Uranus. Being like, “I don’t want to conjunct Uranus.” And then a little later in the month turn retrograde before conjoining Uranus. But right at the doorstep. Venus’s ruler also isn’t in great shape there.
CB: One thing to mention here, did you both notice… I saw a lot of people noticing, and I kind of noticed, there’s a different vibe ever since Saturn went into Pisces. It’s no longer in Aquarius for the first time in three years and suddenly the fixed signs all feel a lot lighter, especially when the Moon is transiting through those signs. You’re not getting those hard aspects. Like, when the Moon goes through Scorpio, or when the Moon goes through Aquarius. And that’s something I’m noticing here, that we’re going to have another repetition of that, of just the Moon moving through Scorpio and Aquarius without the hard aspects from Saturn for the first time in three years which is kind of a nice, uplifting, but also much different vibe than what we’ve been experiencing.
AC: Yeah. My first sort of catching myself vibing with the Saturn shift was the increased heaviness in one area, but over the next week there were these little moments where I would go to attend to something that was a habitual source of anxiety or stress, and it would just feel lighter. I was like, “Oh, I don’t need to worry about that anymore.” or “Why did I get into a pattern of worrying about that.” I was like, “Oh, Saturn’s not there anymore, it’s over there. It’s the barnacle now, it’s not whatever it was in Aquarius.”
CB: Right. The airborne… virus. Yeah.
RW: [Laughs]
CB: Go ahead.
AC: No, go ahead.
CB: Well, that’s something I was just noticing here around the 15th and 16th just because the Moon will go through Aquarius, but then it will go into Pisces and conjoin Saturn around that time that Venus is coming off of that square. So it’s going to emphasize some of those themes by the Moon sort of swooping in and conjoining Saturn around the same time.
AC: Yeah, this mid–month is very complicated and increasingly so. Because we got the complications of the Venus ingress, the complications of Mercury not in a great position and then slowing into the retrograde, and then the solar eclipse is right around the corner, also middle of the month, late middle.
CB: Yeah. It’s all just building up to that eclipse.
RW: You might want to just mention too that, I believe it’s April fifth or sixth that Mercury enters its shadow. And so we might already start to feel some of the issues coming up for that Mercury retrograde.
AC: Yeah, it’s all kind of headed towards the eclipse.
CB: What’s the direct station degree?
RW: Direct station?
CB: What degree does the shadow start at? Is it two or three?
RW: Oh, five degrees
CB: Oh five, okay
RW: I think it was five, which is interesting because Jupiter will make the exact same retrograde by degrees, from 15 Taurus to five Taurus, make the same stations later in the year. I don’t know how common that is, but it’s kind of interesting.
AC: It’s also interesting that when Mercury backs all the way up into Taurus, Jupiter will be about to arrive or have just arrived in Taurus.
RW: And Mercury is going to go retrograde like two days after the eclipse.
AC: Yeah [laughs].
RW: So that period there is fraught.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting with the cazimi, that’s more of a longer term thing, like get the vision of the good or the thing that can improve, triumph, etcetera. But don’t expect like, “Now things are great.” Jupiter is still combust, we got Mercury issues, we got Venus issues, we’ve got eclipse issues. The Jupiter cazimi is not, “Now things are fine.” It’s like, “Actually, the next couple weeks are pretty fuckin crazy.”
RW: At least Jupiter will be gaining strength so we’ve got something positive we can say. A lot of times it will go cazimi and it will feel like this feeling of euphoria, and then it will drop back into combustion only to realize that the crisis has not been resolved. So, it’ll be interesting. But at least it will be gaining strength after the conjunction.
CB: Alright, let’s get into our primary thing we keep tiptoeing into, which is this eclipse at 29 degrees of Aries on, it looks like either late on the 19th or early on the 20th depending on your time zone. So, this is not just a New Moon, when the Sun and Moon meet up, but it’s actually one of our four eclipses that are taking place this year in 2023. So eclipse season officially begins April 20th with this eclipse in Aries, and then we get another lunar eclipse on May fifth at 14 degrees of Scorpio. So because the nodes are getting ready to change signs, or the nodes are changing signs, the eclipses now are starting to straddle the Aries–Libra and the Scorpio-Taurus axis. And this is the very first set of eclipses that’s going to be starting to take place in the Aries-Libra axis. So it’s notable as another set of shifts because we’ve been having Scorpio-Taurus over the past year or two now.
Alright, so this eclipse, one of the major aspects to it, again because it’s so close to that border of Aries and Taurus- it’s right at 29- is it’s actually squaring Pluto really closely. And immediately after the eclipse takes place, the Moon will immediately ingress into Taurus and then square Pluto at zero degrees of Aquarius. And the Sun will do something similar just hours later when the Sun ingresses into Taurus and then squares Pluto. So again, we just have that theme of really activating and really starting to understand what that Pluto ingress into Aquarius is all about and what larger societal implications it may have for large groups of people since it’s going to be moving through the same sign for the next 20 years. So it’s going to have this long-term generational sort of influence. But we’re going to get really close and intimate here by having an eclipse squaring it at this point in the month.
RW: Well thank God the eclipses are not conjunct Uranus anymore because I think that was just extremely chaotic and turbulent. Trying to put something positive there.
AC: We got one more in the fall.
RW: But not on it, it’s opposing it but not directly conjunct.
AC: Well we have one more in Taurus in the fall.
RW: Is it conjunct Uranus?
AC: It’s in the same sign.
RW: Okay. Alright, so I take that back.
AC: But yeah, almost done.
RW: Alright, we’re almost done.
CB: Right.
RW: First North Node eclipse in Aries in 18 years, right?
AC: Yeah. So, just about eclipses in Aries, right, because this is an eclipse in Aries, the eclipses always have this sort of Game of Thrones dance of dragons, shady contestation of seats of power. That’s been an eclipse thing forever. “Hide the king, there’s going to be an eclipse.” Or “Plan to kill the king when there’s an eclipse.” And it’s always this draconic jostling and fighting over power. And that’s really doubly emphasized with a solar eclipse in the sign of the Sun’s exaltation like we were just talking about. And so the fighting for high position, the people falling from high position. It occurs to me that when one person falls from a high position, now there’s a power vacuum, and that means the dragons come out to see who gets to claim the vacant throne.
CB: Yeah, that was a real theme during the last one in late October and early November is Kanye West had that whole fall that really coincided with I think the Scorpio eclipse, and fell in much of the public’s eyes with some of the things he was doing at the time. It was a really notable fall of a public figure. And around the same time, we also had Elon Musk taking over Twitter during that time, although that was kind of tied in with some of the broader themes of the Mars retrograde in Gemini as well.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And also very Taurus-like, “Kanye, you’re no longer a king of art.” or “Elon, now you’re the king of the Twitter thing.” Whereas when we’re looking at Aries it’s less sort of king or queen of a thing, it’s more of actual positions of power. Like leadership itself.
CB: And to your point, because actually just to reinforce what you just said, for them, it was also majorly a financial thing. Kanye lost the Adidas deal and went from being worth a billion or two billion dollars to not. And similarly, with Elon Musk he was kind of forced into the Twitter deal which was just a huge expense and so financially there was a real threat of financial loss. So just to reinforce your point about the Scorpio-Taurus axis eclipses versus this shift we’re moving into.
AC: Yeah, thank you. And just one note I wanted to make, if we look at lunar mansions, either Vedic or Arabic, that first mansion, which this eclipse occurs within, is explicitly associated with medicine. And so I wonder if there will be something with medical authorities that this eclipse is associated with.
CB: Wait, what’s associated with medicine?
AC: The mansion, the lunar mansion, and nakshatra that this eclipse occurs within. And I note that because we had an eclipse on the star Ras Alhague, which is the star of Asclepius, the medicine star, right when the vaccine started getting administered in the United States. And so some of these parts of the sky that are associated with medicine, when there’s something as big as an eclipse on them we should assume that there will be something visibly medical there.
CB: Okay, yeah.
RW: Austin, touching on your theme of Game of Thrones, this eclipse is conjunct President Biden’s Moon, which is at zero Taurus. So it’s out of sign, but it’s very, very close to his Moon. So he may be affected, may keep an eye on-
AC: And so he’s getting the Pluto squares.
CB: Yeah, the Pluto squares.
AC: I knew it was in Taurus, I didn’t realize it was at zero Taurus.
RW: I believe it’s at zero Taurus, I scanned through a couple of charts when I was prepping for the podcast today. So yeah, he may be affected.
CB: Here it is. So it’s at zero. It depends on the time because we’ve got a rounded time of 8:30. But yeah, it’s at zero 59 at 8:30, Taurus. So one way or another, Pluto now that it’s at zero Aquarius is squaring that and the eclipse itself will be at 29 Aries pretty close to that.
AC: Chris, I just want to remember with you briefly, when we were doing the yearly and we kind of started out with this idea of like, “Oh, this is going to be better for the fixed signs, they stop getting nuked by eclipses and Saturn, and Uranus.” And all that’s true, but we kept discovering these moments where it’s like, “Well, it’s going kind of hit the fixed signs too.” It’s like, “Oh, it’s not an eclipse in a fixed sign.” Until four hours later–
CB: Yeah.
AC: –- when that same energy gets carried in. It’s this sort of, I don’t know, this slightly extended torture of the fixed signs.
CB: It was more wishful thinking I think on my part, as a fixed heavy sign person, that we were out of it. But yeah, you’re right. We’ve got the eclipse series is not finished, this ingress of Pluto into Aquarius is bringing way different dynamics that are going to keep getting activated for a good chunk of the year while Pluto is in Aquarius before it goes back into Capricorn. So, yeah there’s still a lot to go around. And we had talked about, to your point, also just advances and changes in technology and how that may affect human biology, and the application because that’s another area actually that companies are scrambling all over themselves to apply AI, is to biological questions like developing new drugs and things like that. And of course, I always think about- famously in 2020- when I think about the zero degree of Aquarius axis, how part of the lockdowns that occurred in March and April of 2020, three years ago, were around that Mars-Saturn conjunction at zero Aquarius. And then later in the year in December, we got the public release of the vaccine when Jupiter and Saturn met up at zero Aquarius. So, with Pluto moving there to zero Aquarius, that is kind of interesting themes of humans attempting to develop technologies in order to fix biological things as one of the things that we talked about Pluto in Aquarius over the next 20 years.
AC: Yeah definitely, definitely.
RW: I mean one of the ways to look at this eclipse is that it’s really activating that Pluto in Aquarius. And it’s not in a gentle way. And you know there’s man, I mean there’s so much to talk about with this eclipse too. I mean it’s going to square the USA Sibley Pluto and –
AC: Yeah.
RW: – at the same time Mars is going to be on the Sibley Sun. On the same day. And Mars is the ruler of the eclipse. So this one has you know a lot of crisis potential. Of course, we can’t know for sure what’s going to happen but we can identify high-probability alignments for a crisis to take place. This one has all of the things that we would look for. A square to Pluto can bring a crisis, a breakdown. Eclipses themselves can be a trigger.
We talked about last year the eclipses were conjunct to Uranus or opposing Uranus and squaring Saturn. So they were either forming the square or the T-square to the Uranus-Saturn aspect. Well this time the new dynamic, it’s conjunct Jupiter and square Pluto. So one thing that’s doing is it’s really emphasizing this upcoming Jupiter-Pluto square that’s still out of sign at the time of the eclipse but it is approaching. And that has a lot of ramifications I think for what’s going on politically and in the financial world.
CB: Yeah, yeah that’s –
AC: One thing I just want to note is that it is the first eclipse in a new sign in a while and you know ‘crisis’ isn’t the wrong word but you know when we think of crisis we think of a lot of the things that we’re already aware of like this is that eclipse energy moving into a new sector. And it looks like it impacts some things, some of the fixed stuff that we’re familiar with. But its source point is over in a different sign.
RB: True.
CB: Yeah, I mean I do worry about –
RB: It’s –
CB: – the extent to which eclipses in the past year or two have been tied in with major financial stuff happening especially in the US. And I do expect some major financial movements, up or down, during this eclipse season because that’s the thing we see in almost eclipse season for the past year or two has been great instability and sudden changes of things moving up or down both in individual people’s lives and individuals rising and falling because eclipses represent great beginnings and great endings but also much larger things in terms of the markets or in terms of the country or things like that.
AC: Yeah well –
RW: And –
AC: – let me just say that like you know if we’re looking for things to stabilize, you know things [RW laughs] don’t really stabilize even in like you know meaningful medium-term level until we get Mercury direct and probably Jupiter visible and back and then ingressing into Taurus, right? Like you know for looking for stability and reassurance, you know we don’t get that until end of the month or beginning of next month. Like this all takes a while.
CB: Yeah –
RW: Well –
CB: – we should mention that because well we’ve got the eclipse and that’s square Pluto that the other component that’s happening almost exactly the same time is that Mercury retrograde station that literally stations only a day or two later very closely conjunct Uranus. So why don’t we generate some keywords here for Mercury stationing retrograde in Taurus conjunct Uranus? I mean Mercury retrogrades themselves are delays, difficulties, things taking longer.
I remember famously there was a Mercury retrograde station during the last election when there were delays counting up the votes for example. But that was square Saturn. But when it’s conjunct Uranus oftentimes the technological snafus and the things coming out of complete left field that destabilize something when that combines with a Mercury retrograde you usually get more that end of the Mercury retrograde archetype.
RW: Yeah –
AC: Yeah I mean –
RW: – you can get travel, you know, you can get some serious like with some of those train derailments. A sudden type of travel-related accidents or shipping of stuff like that.
AC: Yeah Mercury helps the trains run on time, especially in Taurus. And so you know if we’re looking at like the delivery of goods and peoples in a prompt and orderly manner, we’re looking at the disruption of that. You know, Uranus brings a lot of I would say just chaos energy to Mercury. You also may have you know Mercury makes lots of small decisions.
And slowing into that almost conjunction with Uranus, it could be you know, one storyline that will probably play out is, “Oh I need to make a decision about this or I was going to do this at this time. But now this whole thing that I wasn’t expecting (Uranus) has happened so I can’t make that decision until this resolves itself.”
CB: Yeah.
AC: I have to back up for a bit and go back and you know.
CB: Or or some –
RW: I mean just communication disruption like –
CB: Yeah. Like some technological snafu forces you to have to go back and review something or revise something or do something over again because things got kind of like out of whack.
RW: Yeah. It could be larger things like a massive hacking attack. Some kind of bigger political themes.
CB: So this whole thing is kind of really because the Mercury retrograde coincides pretty well with the eclipses. Like you were saying Austin, it’s really centralized in the later part, the last half essentially of April, the last week or two of April, and the first couple of weeks of May, because it looks like the Sun-Mercury conjunction, which is the halfway point in the retrograde cycle, occurs on May 1st, so that’s when we’re halfway through the retrograde and there starts to be some turnaround where you start to see some resolution or at least heading towards a possible resolution to what was brought up during the Mercury retrograde station itself.
And then eventually we get our second eclipse in May. I know this is like going ahead obviously, but it’s hard to talk about the first eclipse without talking about it being the first part in a series of like a one in two that are sort of like back-to-back in terms of eclipse season. We get that other eclipse in Scorpio at 14 degrees on May fifth and then Mercury eventually stations direct here around May 15th.
AC: And Jupiter moves into Taurus the next day after the Mercury direct station and then the Moon hits a day or two after that. So like if we’re looking for the answer we have a visible in the morning sky Mercury-Jupiter-Moon conjunction in Taurus in the middle of May. You know –
CB: Yeah.
AC: – if we’re looking at when do things look stable like that looks very stabilizing.
RW: It’s sort of but then you get that giant alignment right around May what is it 18, 19, 20, 21 with Mars, Pluto –
CB: Mars –
RW: Jupiter T-square. So I wouldn’t put my bet on stability until that is over.
AC: Well, but I would argue that moves quick whereas Mercury and Jupiter are going to hold there for a while. And they’re in that nice morning rising. Mars is going todo a thing and then move on.
CB: I mean certainly Jupiter when it goes into Taurus is going to attempt to reconcile and smooth over some of the things that the Mercury retrograde, the dust that Mercury retrograde sent up into the air and some of the chaos and stuff.
AC: Yeah and I don’t mean some sort of permanent lasting golden era stability. I just mean you know relative to the baseline this year, especially –
RW: Yeah.
AC: –especially relative to the second half of April.
RW: I basically agree with you. I do agree with you that Jupiter moving into Taurus is kind of like, things are starting to improve and I like that sextile that starts to form between Jupiter and Saturn. I mean that’s a fantastic aspect. I’m just worried about that mid- that one crisis point there –
CB: Right.
RW: – which looks very … has some teeth on it.
CB: Yeah it’s like because it goes back to the fixed sign thing. And it’s like Jupiter’s starting to push things back into alignment or starting to make things settle down again after a three-week Mercury retrograde period and after two weeks of the chaos of eclipse season. But then yeah Mars moves into Leo and starts needling things again, squaring Jupiter and opposing Pluto.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s the beginning of the needling that Mars will be doing. You know, I think we really get the Mars needling once Venus moves into Leo. And Mars and Venus hang out together in Leo for months. And then Venus goes retrograde.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Because God hates fixed signs.
CB: That’s true. [RW laughs] Alright –
RW: Just to rub it in you know when Mercury stations retrograde that day, by the way, the Moon is also conjunct Mercury and Uranus. Just to like put a little exclamation point on that Mercury station on Uranus that you were talking about before.
AC: That’s funny. I’ll put a little English on it.
RW: It’s really like okay guys this is going to be an intense day.
CB: Well, I think this is activating the eclipse degree from like November. Isn’t it? Wasn’t that like 16 degrees-ish Taurus?
AC: Yeah well and that gets, you know, I mean the Scorpio eclipse on May fifth is like 14, 15. So you know this begins with, “Oh this is kind of a new eclipse in Aries.” Right? There’s some different themes but it leads right back into the same Scorpio, Taurus, Uranus thing that we’ve been doing for years now.
CB: Is there anything we would advise like not doing when Mercury is stationing retrograde conjunct Uranus? And as far as people’s like personal lives in a day-to-day basis. Like if you have a technological snafu like you’re writing a long email to somebody and your power goes out, the email gets erased, you know you might have to do it over again obviously. But there’s like scenarios like that that are Mercury-Uranus and Mercury retrograde-type scenarios that one might encounter around that time.
And I guess part of the advice is just patience, be patient. Anticipate the unexpected if you can which is very hard to do by definition but also just try to exercise patience and know that sometimes you may have to do things over again or spend more time doing something than you initially anticipated. And the more flexible you can be and kind of rolling with that, the more success you’ll probably have over the course of that month.
AC: Yeah. A hundred percent I would say leave room for problem-solving. Don’t assume that it’s just going to go fine. Like –
CB: Right.
AC: – budget that into your schedule.
RW: The one thing I would not do is mess around with like electrical stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing on that aspect because Uranus is associated with you know electric, electricity, and electric shocks. So that would be a ‘don’t’ unless you’re a certified electrician. But the other thing would be I think this is going to be a hard aspect on the collective nervous system like Mercury-Uranus is like short circuit of the nervous system. It can overload electrical energy into the collective nervous system. And that probably could be tied into the eclipse.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point because both of them have that energy. Both eclipses and Mercury-Uranus hard aspects. Here’s the Archetypal Explorer graph again just to show you sort of how Mercury holds that conjunction with Uranus most of the second half of the month due to that retrograde which is very unique because usually, it’s like, Mercury is such a fast planet that usually when you get a hard aspect with Mercury-Uranus you will have a day that feels kind of like electric and will where communication is happening much more quickly and sometimes you have unexpected communication or what have you.
But like you’re saying Mercury holding that for like several weeks almost kind of like amplifies the electric quality of that energy which might be a little harsh for some people in terms of their like nervous system or what have you.
RW: There’s like a real paradox there because you know we talked about it earlier Mercury’s really slow in Taurus generally and slowing down and stationing but Uranus is like quick unexpected sudden shock.
CB: Right.
RW: So there’s some kind of weird paradox there that I don’t fully understand but it’s going to be interesting to watch.
AC: Well, I mean a shocking event can paralyze onlookers.
RW: Oh, that’s a good combination of those two factors.
AC: Thank you.
RW: Shocking events that paralyze every- that like freezes everybody in place.
AC: Right because you’re like now I don’t know what to do. Right, I was going to do this and like you know you don’t we don’t know how you haven’t processed what the best response to something is because it happened too quickly.
RW: Yeah, something some kind of shocking news events could come out, right? I mean thankfully it’s not technically exact. There’s a little buffer of a few degrees there.
AC: Yeah. Well and –
RW: That makes a difference.
AC: Yeah it does. And just one thing that we spoke about but not wholly is so the you know shortly after the eclipse the Sun goes into Taurus. And then you know as we’ve been discussing, it’s a lot of Taurus, Scorpio, Aquarius stuff. It’s not the configuration of the last two years but it kind of feels like it. And I think we’ll get a, you know, we’ll get another not a rerun exactly but the continuing stress on supply chains and food and energy. All of this like you know these fundamental Taurus things.
CB: Yeah, that is the Sun going into Taurus. What do we got last part of the month? I didn’t have any major aspects written down in terms of hard aspects.
AC: Yeah, I mean cards are kind of on the table, right? And we’re just between the eclipses. You know, kind of waiting for the lunar and Scorpio to drop. But there’s no more like no other cards get turned over until we get that lunar which is in –
CB: Yeah.
AC: May fifth.
CB: That’s like there’s some –
RW: You know one thing that, I mean people you know may or may not know about eclipses too is like you know the timing of eclipses can take a while to really play out. It’s not like right on the day, right? Like, the orb, almost, of the effect is like for several weeks before and after. It’s like a drama that unfolds, slowly reaches a peak and then continues into that next eclipse.
But you know April 19th is the day of the actual eclipse but the effects are going be felt pretty much throughout much of the month. So even though –
AC: Yeah.
RW: – there’s no heavy aspects right after it, the aftereffect of the eclipse will continue for a week or two after that eclipse in April.
AC: Yeah it’s like the shadow which falls across things during an eclipse is almost like sticky and oily and clinging. Right? Like the shadow kind of [laughs] it’s more like getting sprayed by eclipse. Like a little tar shower. And it takes a while to either get that scrubbed off or for it get set on fire.
CB: Yeah, I would really recommend people especially for this eclipse because it’s the beginning of a new eclipse series, that means it’s going to be falling on a new whole sign house on your chart than the eclipses that fall in quite a while. So there should be some sort of theme of great beginnings or great endings when it comes to whatever the house is that Aries occupies in your chart. And I would just think about that and pay attention to subtle beginnings or subtle endings that start taking place around that time because sometimes they can be big and momentous and obvious, just like an eclipse is obvious in the sky and that’s why ancient star watchers always noted them as being so important. But sometimes eclipses also can start things that have very humble origins and where you start working on something, or you begin a new relationship, or you start working towards some new career goal that doesn’t seem super important at first but then later in retrospect, you realize that that was the beginning of like a major new direction in your life.
So for some people especially if that’s like a prominent part of your chart, that theme of endings and beginnings is going to be really significant so pay attention to it.
RW: Especially in the sign of new beginnings.
CB: In Aries, sure.
RW: But we didn’t talk about the conjunction to Jupiter. What do you guys think about that? We talked about the square to Pluto a lot. But this eclipse is widely conjunct Jupiter.
RW: Which I think is part of that combustion and Jupiter continuing to be diminished.
AC: Yeah, I think it damages Jupiter. I think that it kind of ties in with a couple of things were Jupiter’s not going to be able to do very much until it gets into Taurus. Right? Like there’s the fact that it’s still in combustion and generally having an eclipse right next to a planet damages the planet. It’s combust anyway it’s almost out of shit it’s almost done with Aries anyway.
I think it kind of reinforces that sense that like we’re not going to have a Jupiter to believe in until it gets to Taurus. And then you know we may or may not like what it provides but it’ll be like providing again.
CB: I think for some people depending on how their chart’s set up and as long as there’s not any super difficult or challenging things that are overriding it, I do think that the solar this being the solar eclipse that takes place and the last one while Jupiter is in the same sign, especially for people at day charts that may indicate that whatever the major beginning is or the major ending is that takes place in your life at that time that it may have more of a positive or optimistic sort of growth-oriented direction where things, even if something has to end at that point, it’ll end up a positive thing in the long-term hopefully for some people as long as there’s not major counteracting things.
So just combining that theme of eclipses representing major beginnings and Jupiter sometimes representing periods of growth and expansion and moving forward with something or affirming something, it could be somewhat positive for some people.
Alright, so we are getting close to the end of this episode, are there any major things that we meant to mention in terms of some of the transits besides that? Are there any other, it seems like the Sun-Jupiter conjunction on the 10th and 11th was one of the most positive things that we noted. Are there any other like major positive things that stand out that might be worth mentioning here? To sort of end this on a positive note despite some of the uncertainty and some of the chaos of some of the eclipse and Mercury retrograde things that we’ve mentioned?
AC: I think that Venus in Gemini, once Venus clears Saturn, clears the square to Saturn in Gemini, Venus will be fun. And Venus will actually probably maybe help, I don’t know, maybe help stabilize Mercury a little bit but the Venus in Gemini, when it’s not encumbered, is fun. You know it’s distracting. [Laughs] You know it’s interesting, it’s engaging mentally, intellectually playful etcetera etcetera.
And you know we talked for a while about the kind of bummer of entering Gemini and getting Pluto-Saturn but like that’s over in under a week for Venus and Venus can just kind of gallivant through Gemini for the rest of the time.
RW: We kind of skipped over April seventh has two favorable aspects that day. Especially the Venus sextile Neptune. That’s a nice aspect of falling in love and reading romantic poetry maybe going to see some live music. That’s one of the nicer aspects of April.
CB: Yeah, I had not mentioned the sextiles because usually we skip them but this might actually be a good time to mention some of the sextiles this month for lack of other major positive aspects. So here they are on Archetypal Explorer. You were mentioning which one, Venus-Neptune?
RW: Venus-Neptune on April seventh. And then, yeah, the end of the month has quite a few nice sextiles as well.
CB: Yeah, there’s a Sun-Saturn sextile around the 24th, 25th which is somewhat stabilizing. And you know making positive steps very slowly towards something. There’s a Mars-Uranus sextile on the 29th-ish it looks like, which can be good for innovative action and making action and doing things in a way that’s unique and not conventional. But being able to do that successfully rather than in a way that’s disruptive or backfires on you.
RW: Racing fast cars having a little thrill, a little taste of danger.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know about racing with all the rest of the things going on with Mars-Uranus. Mars also is at its fall in Cancer and there was a question about, what about the Mars-Saturn trine? Right after the introduction. I think that’s interesting. You know we’ve had so much frenetic Mars over the last eight and a half months. With Mars going into Cancer and finally leaving Gemini and getting a trine from Saturn right away, it feels very marshy, it feels kind of muddy. It doesn’t, like there’s a kind of a sullenness to that. But like you know a determined sullenness.
But it’s not great for Mars. It’s not like Mars is going from this nightmare into, you know, something of magnificent. It’s kind of slowed down and a little moody, a little marshy. It’s not, you know, it’s not terrible. But again it’s a little slow and sullen.
RW: I do have one I have one positive okay for April. One really nice positive but I had to go to Jyotish astrology to find it. April 22nd is the Akshaya Tritiya, Golden Day of Success. One of the most auspicious days in Jyotish astrology of the year because both the Sun in Vedic astrology in the sidereal zodiac, both the Sun and the Moon are exalted. And it’s supposed to be a very auspicious election in the Vedic system. So –
AC: My Vedic teachers would probably cancel that as an election with the Sun conjunct Rahu three days after an eclipse. But yeah the double exaltation is totally a thing.
RW: You’re supposed to buy gold on that day. It’s supposed to bring you– it’s the day of undiminished wealth. That’s one of the most auspicious things is to buy gold, it’s supposed to bring consistent wealth if you do that on that day.
CB: I don’t know if that’s good advice this year when Mercury is stationing retrograde conjunct Uranus and we’re talking about all the sort of financial chaos of things that are going on at that time. But [AC laughs] like-
RW: Well again this is Vedic so totally. That was the only thing I could find, I tried to find something really positive to put in there.
CB: I mean, I think for me the most positive thing is going back to just this is the last bit. Next month Jupiter is going into Taurus, as Austin has said, so this the last bit of Jupiter in Aries. So while there will be some chaos that’s getting thrown up in the air by the Mercury retrograde and everything else, there will be some major new beginnings and some people expanding and having positive beginnings in the Aries sectors of their chart.
So I think really thinking about that and thinking about what it is that’s changing in your in that sector of your chart and how you can grow it and nurture something that’s new in that area to grow into something more long-term and more viable will be a really good thing to think about and take advantage of with the Sun-Jupiter conjunction this month. So that’s probably the most positive aspect around especially around the 10th and 11th and everything else.
Alright, well thanks a lot. This is really good. We covered a huge amount of ground here. Obviously this is one of the more significant months coming up and there’s like so much happening. But it’s nice to be able to both review a lot of the new stories that have been happening over the past month and what their astrological correlates have been. As well as to talk about and try to wrangle some of the different things that are coming up next month. So yeah I really enjoyed this conversation. So thanks both of you for joining me.
AC: Yeah this was fun.
RW: This was awesome. I appreciate you guys inviting me on the show.
CB: Yeah so Robert where can people find out more information about you and what do you have coming up in the future?
RW: Oh, sure yeah. Well you can check out my website which is astrocryptoreport.com and that has like a lot of the stuff that I’m doing. I do a financial astrology project on Patreon where it’s really focused on the cryptocurrency markets but we look at all the global markets as well. And that’s kind of my main thing that I’m doing right now. I have some courses in financial astrology on the website but I’m on Twitter pretty active, at @astrocryptoguru on Twitter and we do a lot of financial stuff, a lot of stuff for Bitcoin. So check out my Patreon for that.
CB: Cool awesome. Austin what do you have coming up?
AC: Well what I have coming up is primarily what just happened. My website was redesigned and relaunched. It was actually best birthday present ever from Kate, she surprised me. And so it’s stronger, faster, more navigable, less confusing, clear.
CB: It’s really nice website, by the way.
AC: It really is. She does beautiful work.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And I also have been dig- I haven’t put up any of the lectures or classes or workshops that I’ve done at conferences and such for like five years so I’ve started digging through those and I put up a bunch of stuff that I haven’t made available before. Like I have a thirty hour-ish class on tarot and astrology that I taught a while back that I think is a lot of fun. And there’s lot of smaller stuff too.
And then speaking of communications and all that, Sphere and Sundry will be releasing the Mercury in Gemini series sort of any minute now. Maybe right around the time this comes out to the public. And so it’s a beautiful Mercury Gemini election from last year. This is part of the Make Gemini Fun Again campaign. After Mars has you know, Mars will just left Gemini after extensive depredation. So there’ll be good Gemini energy to restore and –
CB: And I’ve been told that you did not in fact make a Mars in Gemini talisman much to my disappointment.
AC: Yeah, so Robert I accidentally misspoke I was like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this Mars in Gemini series,” right? As if anyone would need any more of that at this point.
RW: I certainly didn’t.
AC: No, I’m good. It was on my Moon for months and months and months and months.
RW: Oh yeah? Me too.
AC: Oh! [Laughs]
CB: Gemini Moons, nice.
RW: Yeah.
CB: What’s your website again Austin?
AC: Oh it’s austincoppock.com
CB: Cool, well I’ll put links to both of your websites in the description below this video on Youtube or on the podcast website for this episode. As for myself, I am working on this revising and expanding my course on horary astrology with Rob Bailey and we’re actually four lectures into it at this point and what we’ve done is we’re just going through and systematically revising and recording new lectures from my old horary course which used to be just four core lectures that I recorded back in 2008 and 2009. And we’re expanding it into a whole twelve-part course.
AC: Wow.
CB: So we’ve already recorded and released in the old course the first three lectures I believe which is a welcome lecture, a very long workshop on the history of horary astrology. And most recently a lecture on the philosophy of horary astrology. So next week we’re going to record our first lecture on basic concepts and techniques that you need to know to practice horary. Then we’re going to upload that to the website and keep adding one new lecture each month over the course of this year.
So by the end of the year it’s going to be a full-fledged huge course on horary astrology. Based using whole sign houses and the earliest techniques of the Arabic astrologers from the eighth and ninth centuries. So if people sign up for that now, they’ll kind of get grandfathered into the current price structure which is much lower now since it’s not finished than it will be once we finish it and raise the price. So if people want to check that out, you can find more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com.
Alright, that’s it for this episode. Thanks everyone for joining me, thanks to our audience for joining us and all your comments in the live chat, it’s been really helpful and it’s helped guide the discussion in different ways so thanks everybody for joining us and for your support to our page on Patreon. That’s it for this episode, good luck in April and we’ll see you again next month for the astrology of May. Alright, see you next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular shout out to the patrons on our producer’s 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 to 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 MacOS 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 second-century astrologer Vettius Valens which is one of the most important sources for understanding the practice of ancient astrology. You can find that by searching for ‘Vettius Valens The Anthology’ on Amazon or other online book retailers.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I’d recommend my Hellenistic Astrology Course which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures as well as guided readings of ancient texts. And by the time you finish the course, you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com.
I also really 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 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 twelve months and we picked out the single most auspicious date for each month using the principles of electional astrology. You can get that theastrologypodcast.com/2023report.
And finally thanks to our sponsors including The Mountain Astrologer magazine which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at mountainastrologer.com.
Finally thanks also to the Northwest Astrology Conference which is happening May 25th through the 29th, 2023 just outside of Seattle. This year’s conference is going to be a hybrid conference where you can either attend online or in person. Find out more information at norwac.net.