The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 399, titled:
Astrology Forecast for May 2023
With Chris Brennan and guests Claire Moon and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on April 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 Andrea Johnson
Transcription released May 13th, 2023
Copyright Š 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and youâre listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode weâre gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for the entire month of May of 2023. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Claire Moon. Welcome, both of you.
CLAIRE MOON: Thank you.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hello, hello.
CB: All right, so Iâm gonna do a brief little introduction showing an overview of some of the astrology of the month. Then weâre gonna do a discussion for probably about 45 minutes to an hour looking at a retrospective of some major astrology stories from the past month of the past few weeks since our last forecast. And then after that, about halfway through the episode, weâll jump into the astrology of May. So you can use, as always, the timestamps in the description below this video or the podcast website to jump forward to different parts of the episode if youâd like, but otherwise, letâs go ahead and jump right into the forecast.
So for the video viewers, hereâs our Planetary Alignments Calendar, which shows the major astrological alignments that are gonna happen during the month of May of 2023. We start off the month right at the very top with the outer planet Pluto stationing retrograde in Aquarius for the very first time since its ingress a few weeks ago on May 1. And on the same day there is a Mercury-Sun conjunction marking the halfway point through the Mercury retrograde cycle. Then a few days later we get our first lunation of the month, which is actually a lunar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio on May 5. And that is the second and final eclipse of our current eclipse season, which began a couple of weeks before that. Then two days later, Venus moves into the sign of Cancer on the 7th of May. Then the Sun conjoins Uranus on the 9th.
Mercury stations direct and ends its three-week retrograde period on the 14th. Jupiter departs from Aries and moves into the sign of Taurus on the 16th of May, and then immediately after that squares Pluto in early Aquarius on the 17th. Then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Taurus on the 19th. And the following day, Mars ingresses into the sign of Leo, departing from Cancer, and then immediately opposes Pluto in Aquarius. On the 21st, the Sun moves into Gemini, and Gemini season begins. And then two days later, Mars squares Jupiter and we get one of our last major alignments or aspects of the month. So thereâs some other details that weâll get into during the course of this episode, but thatâs kind of the big, broad outline of what weâre gonna be talking about later in the forecast episode. All right, so, hey, welcome, both of you. Thanks for joining me today.
CM: Thank you so much for having me.
AC: Hey, Chris.
CB: Yeah, thanks, Claire. So this is your first time joining us for a forecast episode, but youâve appeared on the podcast at least twice before. One of our audience members just mentioned one of your first appearances was on the âBecoming a Professional Astrologerâ episode. And we were remarking that we canât believe that was almost two years ago now, right?
CM: Yeah, yeah, itâs been a while, but that was great.
CB: Yeah, and I know that youâre thriving and still doing good in your practice of astrology and getting out there and doing good work.
CM: Yeah, yeah, itâs been slow and steady, a little plodding alongâspeaking of Taurus season. And, yeah, Iâm doing great. Just doing consults and loving my life. Definitely thriving.
CB: Awesome. Keep it up. All right, and Austin, how are you doing? Howâs April treating you?
AC: Oh, pretty good. I donât know, it went by in a blur. Iâve been really busy. Iâm always kind of really busy, but I think that if I measured and weighed it I was busier in April. I was getting my year two and three yearly classes up and going; and so, that takes some lifting and grunting and arrangement. Chugging away on Faces, chugging away on some other projects, getting ready for NORWAC. Watching whatâs going on in the world, occasionally making sense of it.
CB: Occasionally, as we all struggle to do. Yeah, so thereâs so much going on in the world. In terms of astrology though and in terms of news stories directly related to astrologyâwhich is always what I try to focus on in this segmentâthereâs actually been some really interesting ones and some really interesting recent astrology-in-the-news stories. So one of them I wanted to mention and talk about is there was a new text of the work of the 2nd century astrology Claudius Ptolemy that has been rediscovered recently, and it was just announced recently over the past couple of months in a paper, and it sort of hit the news recently. And this was really fascinating âcause in the Middle Ages there was a book of Ptolemyâs that had been written in Greek, and a monk basicallyâbecause paper was so rare during that time period and so expensiveâinstead of writing on a new piece of paper, he sort of just erased over or wrote over this old text of Ptolemyâs. And as a result of that, recently, researchers have rediscovered it and used X-rays in order to actually see the writing underneath that text, and they were actually surprisingly able to recover the actual text of this lost work of Ptolemyâs that otherwise didnât survive.
So hereâs a picture of the text itself and what that looked like, and you can see the writing thatâs on top. But for over a century now scholars have noticed that thereâs Greek writing underneath that, and theyâve wanted to recover it, but some of the efforts actuallyâone of them involved using a chemical solution a century ago and that actually made it worse and made it more illegible; so somebody messed that up. But now due to advances in technology they were able to do X-rays, and then they could clearly see the writing underneath the text and eventually draw it out and see that itâs full sentences in Greek. Once they did that, one of the researchersâespecially a scholar named Alexander Jones whoâs done a lot of really good work on the history of astronomy and astrologyârecognized that it was actually a text of Ptolemyâs that weâd seen allusions to that was describing an astronomical instrument similar to an astrolabe that was used in order to make observations and calculations of astronomical positions, including determining the position of certain planets potentially in the zodiac. So for the video viewers, this is what that instrument looks like roughly. And you can see itâs kind of similar almost to the function of an astrolabe or like an early version of something like that.
AC: Orrery or something.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So that was really cool because literally that was just like a lost work of Ptolemyâs that we were never gonna see or recover or know hardly anything about. And all of a sudden theyâve recovered I think large parts of it or the majority of it so that that device can be reconstructed. And it gives me a lot of hope that there may be other discoveries. And, in fact, Iâve started doing some research and looking through other papers that Alexander Jones had published recently, and I discovered one that he published just in the past year or two that had been kind of overlooked that was another major archaeological find related to astrology. And what this was is that he and a couple of other researchers wrote a paper saying that they had discovered a tombstone from Egypt that was the tombstone of a woman from the 2nd or 3rd century in Egypt, and it has an image of her, like a picture of her thatâs inscribed on this tombstone essentially.
But then below it, in Greek, thereâs a sentence describing her, and it says that her name was Heliodora, and it says that she was a mathematike, which means âa mathematicianâ. But in that time period, in the 2nd and 3rd century, mathematician was the word that astrologers always used to describe their science; there were so many calculations involved in calculating birth charts by hand that astrologers were commonly referred to as mathematicians essentially. So what this discovery meant is this is actually the earliest woman that we know of by name who was a practicing astrologer. And she lived in Egypt, she lived to be about 52 years old is what the description says, and she seems to have devoted her life to that subject of astrology and the mathematical arts.
So this is really amazing because I had previously done a study on this in previous episodes of the podcast, as well as in my book where I pointed out, up until recently, the earliest person we knew of that was a woman, that would have had some astrological training would have been Hypatia, who lived a little bit later in the 5th century. And then after that, the earliest figure that we know of would have been probably Queen Buran, who I did an entire episode on, who lived in Baghdad in the 9th century. But this pushes the date forward and gives us a definite name of the earliest woman that we know of living in Egypt, at the same time roughly as Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemy, and Vettius Valens, and some of those other authors. So itâs really, really interesting and really kind of mind-blowing that thereâs new things being discovered in archaeology pretty frequently that are telling us new things about the history of astrology.
CM: Thatâs super cool.
AC: Thatâs really good. So itâs gonna be the âPentabiblosâ now rather than the Tetrabiblos?
CB: Yeah, maybe.
AC: Pentaâs the Latin, right?
CB: Pentaâyeah, or Greek. Yeah, so Iâm hoping that at some point archaeologists will find the lost works of Nechepso and Petosiris or other texts that we only have little fragments of, like the lost texts of Hermes that was like one of the earliest texts on the 12 houses and different things like that; and itâs kind of exciting. Thatâs what I talked to my last guest about, Ian Moyer, where I just released the episode on Egyptian astrology. And we talked a lot about how archaeological finds in the Egyptian language are still changing what we know about the history of astrology. And I know we also talked about the decans, which I know is something youâre working on in your book right now, right, Austin?
AC: Yeah, Iâm really looking forward to eavesdropping on y’all’s conversation.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, letâs see, any other points about that? Oh, yeah, people can find out more about Heliodora. Just Google the title of the paper, which is âThe Funerary Stele of Heliodora, Astrologer,â and youâll find out more information about that. Or you can search for the paper that outlines the new treatise that was discovered about Ptolemy by searching for âPtolemyâs Treatise on the Meteoroscope Recovered,â and you’ll find more information about that. Yeah, itâs importantâthings like thatâbecause itâs clarifying things that we already knew; like we already knew that women were using astrology and practicing astrology.
And actually recently some texts have been discovered just in the past few years from Demotic Egyptian, which are now some of the earliest horoscopes that survive from the first-half of the 1st century BCE. And I actually noted that the three named clients that those horoscopes were forâthey were all for women basically in the ancient world who were getting their charts cast and then delineated by some of these Egyptian priests where one of their functions or one of the types of divination that they were using was astrology. So itâs like we knew women were using astrology as clients. We knew they were probably learning it and becoming astrologers themselves. But due to just the transmission of texts and everything that happened in the Medieval period, we had little documentary evidence until things like this now.
AC: Yeah, thatâs awesome.
CB: Yeah. All right, so other news, other things that are going on in terms of contemporary events, thereâs a ton of stuff. I keep mentioning this every month because itâs moving so fast, just the explosion of things that are happening with AI, both in terms of the broader things and in terms of the discussions about AI in general. And there have been some calls for oversight and regulation of AI over the past month, which I think is bringing up some of the themes we talked about in the Year Ahead Forecast that we were anticipating in terms of Pluto going into Aquarius and sometimes bringing up fears surrounding some of the archetypes involved in that sign, and one of the things that we mentioned was fear of technology. And I think thatâs kind of interesting âcause, on the one hand, while sometimes those fears can be exaggerated, at other times those fears could actually be legitimate; there can be actual legitimate issues or legitimate threats that come up.
And one of the other interesting numbers thatâs come out over the last month or two is they did a poll, and in terms of AI researchers, it was something like 50% thought that there was a 10% chance that the development of a sentient AI could lead to major negative repercussions for humanity or something like that. So there was actually even fear to some extent even amongst the researchers where they donât fully know where this is gonna go and what itâs gonna lead to. And theyâre aware of some possible downsides, but theyâre still kind of pushing the envelope because of what they think the positive benefits might be for the world or for humanity or what have you.
CM: 10%? Iâm kind of surprised it was only 10%. Thought itâd be more than that.
CB: Well, Iâm not getting that number right. Iâll Google that really quickly.
CM: No, thatâs fine. Yeah, everyone seems very nervous about it.
AC: Well, thatâs 10% of the researchers who are working on itâ
CM: Okay.
AC: Who at least have some fondness for it, if thatâs their livelihood.
CM: Yeah, and they understand it better.
CB: 48% of respondents said that they thought there was a 10%-or-greater chance that the effects of AI would be extremely bad. Yeah, extremely bad. Yeah, just things like that. So itâs like the worst-case scenario. Weâre kind of like in this stage where they were in the 1940s, where they were developing the atomic bomb, for example. And itâs like some of those who were developing it, they were like, âWell, thereâs some percent chance that we explode one of these things and then it ignites the atmosphere and then destroys all of humanity.â But they’re like, âWe donât think thatâs gonna happen, but thereâs a chance.â And so, you kind of have a similar thing here where theyâre developing something where they can see that it has this immense potential and immense power, but they also recognize the potential existential threat that it could cause at the same time.
CM: Yeah, itâs hard when things are like the âblack boxâ where we donât quite know how everything works and yet weâre trying to move forward with it. So itâs a little dicey, but exciting.
AC: Itâs a little dicey. Chris, back to fear and technology and Pluto in Aquarius, you said part of that is looking forward and seeing the potential, or what seems like the potential for catastrophes and then be like, âOh, but maybe thatâs just projection,â or âMaybe thatâs just negative thinking.â âOh, but maybe itâs totally real.â Like that ambivalent, back-and-forth kind of structure of fear is very much Pluto. Its very signature is that it canât be resolved because Pluto brings about fear more through unknowns than knowns. Saturn and Mars can make you afraid, but they do so often by a visible, concrete threat, and so the fear gets decided; like, âOh, I know that this is dangerous. I am afraid.â If a tank rolls up my driveway, I know to be afraid; Iâm certain in that fear. Whereas the Pluto âfearsââweâre talking about a collective one, but this is part of what Pluto brings by transit on an individual level as wellâtheyâre hard to resolve. âAm I crazy? Am I just being paranoid?â Or, âAm I paranoid, or are they really out to get me?â And the type of circumstances that Pluto brings about donât allow for the resolution of that, so thereâs an anxiety as well as a fear.
CB: Right.
CM: Whatâs biologicâoh, sorry, Chris.
CB: No, go ahead.
CM: Oh, I was gonna say just whatâs biologically interesting about that thatâs coming up is whether or not the circumstances are favorable or unfavorableâeven if weâre dealing with a Saturn or a Mars thing thatâs unpleasantâif you have that certainty it feels better in general vs. uncertainty, our brains literally squirt out âunhappyâ chemicals certainty, whether or not weâre right or wrong, we squirt out âhappyâ chemicals. So that Pluto kind of anxiety with the uncertainty added is just like not a great feeling usually.
AC: Yeah, itâs a special treat.
CM: Yeah, itâs special.
AC: If weâre looking at the biology of it, your body doesnât know what gear to be in. If the tank rolls up the driveway, itâs time to act. It is definitely not time to calm down. Itâs time to get the fuck out of the house and then wish Iâd put together a to-go bag; the course of action is very clear. Whereas with this, âI donât know, should I be afraid? Should I calm down? Should I act? How do I act in relationship to this threat? Is it really a threat?â etc.
CB: Yeah, that’s really interesting because that makes me think of how, in the early Hellenistic authorsâlike in Ptolemy and Valensâthe ancient astrologers have a wide variety of different philosophical and religious perspectives, but the one thing that they repeat over and over again as the purpose or the benefit for doing astrology is to learn about events in the future, so that you know what you have to accept ahead of time so that youâre not completely caught off guard. So maybe for them part of the purpose of doing astrology was to isolate or to fix that anxiety issue by having a better sense of knowing.
AC: Yeah, Stoicism is totally a prescription for low anxiety. It may not help with your depression, but itâll definitely help with the anxiety.
CB: Sure. Yeah, Iâve been reading this new translation of Epictetus that Rob Bailey pointed to me. And Stoicism is all about controlling your perception of events and thinking that free will is an internal component to decide what youâre gonna classify as good and bad, or to accept the things that are outside of your control, but also to control your perception of things to whatever extent you can as the ultimate act of freedom in some way.
CM: Mm-hmm. Good ole Stoicism.
CB: Good ole Stoicism. So going back, I just want to clarify the quote âcause I just found it. Itâs from a Vox article. But it says, â48% of respondents said they thought there was a 10%-or-greater chance that the effects of AI would be extremely bad.â And why I wanted to finish the quoteââcause itâs funnyâit then puts in parentheses, â(e.g., human extinction).â So what they mean by extremely bad is that 1-in-10 researchers think that human extinction is a possible side effect of developing AI over the course of the next few decades. And it goes on and it says, âItâs worth pausing on that for a moment. Nearly half of the smartest people working on AI believe thereâs a 1-in-10 chance or greater that their lifeâs work could end up contributing to the annihilation of humanity.â The title of that article is âAI Experts are Increasingly Afraid of What Theyâre Creating,â by Kelsey Piper on Vox.
So I just wanted to mention that because I thought it was really interesting that thatâs part of the zeitgeist right now and very descriptive and very Plutonian in terms of that Pluto in Aquarius transit that weâve just barely dipped our toe into this month. On May 1, we get the first intensification with that slowing down and that stationing of Pluto, which any planetary station is like putting an exclamation mark after a planet. And so, itâd be interesting to reflect on that as one of the energies thatâs about during this time.
AC: Yeah, thatâs interesting. During previous podcasts, I brought up Pluto and its relationship to the spectacle of terrifying murder. With Pluto in Scorpio, the focal image for that was the lone, deviant serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer. And then Pluto in Sagittarius that became school shooters and terrorists. But you bring up another side of that, which is how are people imagining terrifying murder, but of humanity, on a collective level. And so, because I just watched Dr. Strangelove, my mind is back with the decades-and-decades-long ambient fear of total nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. And it just occurs to me that the detonation of the first nuclear device and many of the hardest parts of the Cold War, as well as the establishment of that nuclear fearâthat was all Pluto in Leo. And so, weâve just entered exactly one-half Pluto cycle away from that. And this not that no one was worried about extinction or devastation for the last 20 or 30 years, but thereâs been a lot less of that since the dissolution of the Cold War. Some of that sort of imagining the end has been clothed in terms of slow-moving but inexorable environmental catastrophe. But correct me if Iâm wrong, or fill in what Iâm missing, but it seems like with AI, whether itâs possible or not, itâs giving people a way to imagine annihilation again for the first time in a while.
CB: Yeah, well, because theyâre trying to create a sentient, new species that would automatically be smarter than humanity, and also faster than humanity and able to think faster than we can just by the limitations of our own biology. And in that way some of them frame it as theyâre almost creating a âgodâ or something like that. Remember, Leisa Schaim pointed out that Mary Shelley, the author who wrote Frankenstein, had Pluto conjunct the degree of her Midheaven in Aquarius, so this was the last time Pluto was in Aquarius. And that was one of the things that she became known for was that idea of creating this machine or alternative thing, this monster, artificial life, that then gets out of control and ends up killing you or something like that; youâve almost got a similar archetype in terms of what people are actually thinking about now. Thereâs this race amongst all these companies now to create this thing that would be incredibly powerful if they pull it off, but the discussion theyâre having is about how to align an artificial intelligence and align its intentions so that it has the same alignment as humans. âCause the problemâ
AC: We need to do a lot better than humans. If it has the same motivations as humansâ
CB: Right.
AC: Then thatâs not so good. Let me just add one thing. So, Chris, weâve both been reading a lot of Firmicus lately, and one of the things that this reemphasized to me is the consistent reference to some signs as âhumanâ or âhumaneâ signs. Meaning that they bring about things that are human-shaped, and Aquarius being the âwater-bearerâ is a âhumanâ sign. And so, with Pluto there, weâre worried about something that resembles us, and Frankenstein also was humanoid in form. And actually, if youâve read Frankenstein, was tragically human in many ways. Some literary people will call Frankenstein proto-existentialist literature because heâs just created and alienated from his creator. And he does do a murder, but itâs more tragic, existentialist than slasher film. But again, we have the object of horror or whatever being human-shaped. âWhat if it can do the human things?â is the source of anxiety and fear around AI projects.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Yeah, like we can either have replicators from Star Trek, which would be great, or we can have âgray gooâ theory; that intersection of what happens when weâwell, maybe it already has happened. AI with nanotechnology. But, Austin, what you said peaked my interest. If Pluto is annihilation, and then we have Pluto in Leo, which is more like annihilation from a central point, like a giant bomb, what is it when annihilation comes from the edges? Like in the case of more environmental climate stuff, the edges of our civilizationâs reaches in the form of glacial melt coming downâthatâs coming from the edges for us already. Granted, that’s longer than Pluto in Aquarius. Side noteâIâve been hearing seemingly an increasing number of stories about that water situation in the last couple of months.
AC: Yeah, water keeps popping up. Itâs gotta be Saturnâs entry into Pisces.
CM: Right. Yeah, thatâs what I was thinking.
AC: Thereâs just concern about water. One quick note on the bomb, so Pluto in Leoâitâs a fire sign. Itâs literally the Sunâs sign. Fission is something that stars do. They also do fusion, but they do both in different phases. So itâs literally an artificial sun destroying everything, whereas with the Pluto in Aquarius, an artificial human.
CM: Mm-hmm. Totally.
CB: Yeah. Anyways, Iâm bringing this up again for yet another month of the podcast just because things seem to be moving very fast. Thereâs so much happening in that area and itâs clearly connected with Pluto in Aquarius. And this is somehow just the start of the next 20 years and some developments that will have a transformative effect on the world and society during the course of that, so itâs very good to pay attention to the early beginnings of that as itâs happening. Yeah, one of the themes that came up this month was just calls for regulation, and that’s coming from even some of the AI companies who are like, âWe would love to be regulated,â because they were like, âWe think this should be regulated because weâre dealing with stuff that could have a huge impact on society.â But they said up till now thereâs been no regulation, so everybody is just sort of creating their own rules. Itâs kind of the Wild, Wild West, and itâs an area that hasnât been explored before.
So thatâs that. In more positive AI news, one of the things Iâve been tracking I mentioned briefly last month, but itâs exploded even more ever since Saturn went into Pisces especially. I feel like when Saturn was in Aquarius, we got the introduction of some of these new technologies. Like we were seeing some of the early image generators last year and we mentioned those in different episodes. But some of those image generatorsâafter Saturn has gotten into Pisces recently, over the past month or soâhave gotten really good, and thereâs just been this explosion of creativity online of different people using these image generators to generate both very creative things, but also very surprisingly lifelike images as well, which the part thatâs startling me is how good theyâre getting.
So Iâve been playing an image generator called Midjourney, which is one of the main ones, and part of it is about learning how to use the language to get the AI to do what you want and what prompts to put into it in order to generate the image that you want to see or something that looks really good. So I borrowed a prompt from somebody online, on Twitter, and I asked it to generate a picture of a cat that was working as a detective in an office with a hat and a gentlemanly suit, and this is what it came up with. It generated this image in about 15 or 20 seconds.
AC: As I remember, Chris, the prompts were âcat working as a detective, gentleman-styleâ.
CB: Yes, gentleman-style, which is very crucial. For those listening to the audio version or not watching the video version, you should check out the video version for this. This looks like a picture that was taken of a cat in an office with a high-definition camera. That looks like a real cat, but itâs not. This is absolutely not a real cat, and I can kind of demonstrate that âcause I have the variations. At first, it gave me four different variations and asked which one I liked, and it created slightly different variations of the cat with different gentlemanly-styled hats. Either a flat hat or more of a top hat. Yeah, anyway, so that was incredible, and Iâve just been playing with it.
And I really encourage people to check it out only because itâs a really good and really tangible demonstration of whatâs going on with the astrology right now, with Saturn having gone into Pisces and the start and the buildup to a several-year conjunction with Neptune, of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and I think weâre gonna be seeing a lot more creativity and a lot more interesting things like that. So I had it swap out like, instead of a cat, letâs do an otter, and it came up with a lifelike otter sitting at a table looking like a detective. And itâs pretty good. Thatâs pretty lifelike. But it can do all sorts of different things. I know both of you created some as well, right?
CM: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, weâve played with it a little bit.
CB: All right, here, Iâll show yours, Claire. What was yours?
CM: Oh, it was Randy Savage in all of his iconic gear trying to destroy the âOne Ringâ at a volcano.
CB: Yes. So we see Randy Savage standing majestically in front of Mount Doom in Mordor, where heâs going on his quest to destroy the One Ring.
AC: Ohhh, yeahhh!
CM: Exactly. I feel like my life is just 10% more complete. Like Iâve unlocked some kind of achievement now that Iâve seen that. Iâve made it in my mind.
CB: Yeah, that was pretty. And then, Austin, you had a couple. You said, âLetâs do Mickey Mouse in the style of HR Giger,â who was like the artist that inspired the artwork for Alien, right?
AC: No, he designed everything for Alien. He didnât inspire it.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, he has a very signature, biomechanical horror style.
CB: All right, well, for the people watching the video version, this is what it came up with, what it generated in about, what, 10 or 15 seconds, which is pretty, pretty good.
AC: No, it was great. Yeah, the upper-left I think is the most faithful to Giger.
CB: For sure. It definitely looks like Mickey Mouse was in one of the Alien movies.
AC: Yeah, yeah. They found on some previously undiscovered planet just a strange temple with Mickey there worked into the strange motifs on the walls.
CB: That would be terrifying. I would be way more terrified by that if thatâs what they found on that planet.
CM: I was just thinking, âIâm not sure. I would be able to decide whether to run away or whether to go say âhiâ.â Iâm not sure.
CB: Yeah, he seems friendly enough. He eats your face.
CM: Whatâs the worst that could happen?
CB: Right. That one with that little mouth that comes out from inside of Mickeyâs mouth.
CM: No.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Oh, thatâs good. Yeah, the little second mouth, and then it whispers the secrets of the creation of humanity into your ear.
CM: Oh, Pluto in Aquarius, Iâm already tired.
CB: Yeah, so a lot of fun stuff you can do. I was even doing some architectural stuff. I wanted to try to imagine the Library of Alexandria, and this is what it came up with which I thought was pretty beautiful. For both of you, yesterday, I invited you into Midjourney to show you how it worked. âCause itâs one of those things you have to try out and you have to have an embodied experience of doing it in order to understand what itâs about. And until you do that itâs hard to really see whatâs going on and understand the implications of it, which are kind of crazy. So, on the one hand, thatâs gonna lead to a huge explosionâit has led to a huge explosion of creativity, as well as, interestingly, a lowering of the barrier to entry where now anybody, even if they donât have the mechanical, creative skill as an artist, or many, many years of training doing digital artwork, they can create something that was in their head and see it realized, which is one of the interesting potentials.
Of course thereâs also many downsides as well in terms of artists whose styles are being ripped off or replicated, as well as the loss of many jobs of digital artists that have built their career creating images like this, but now might be replaced. And so, thereâs also some major challenges and other issues coming up as well in terms of both good and bad things. Iâm not trying to necessarily pass a value judgment in terms of good or bad, but instead, like we always do, kind of documenting something as itâs happening in real-time, and especially noting the correlations astrologically. âCause I just think thereâs something incredibly striking and interesting about that in and of itself.
AC: Yeah. So one of the things that your brief tutorial reemphasized to me isâI guess youâd call it the âcentaurâ hypothesis, or âcentaurâ scenario. And I donât remember where this originated from, I remember reading about it 10 years ago. But people thinking about how the increased ability to mechanize thingsâor to have computers do more and more labor with the development of AIâthe reasonable, non-apocalyptic, likely scenario was that the most effective at any given task would not be a human or an AI, but in fact a human and an AI working in tandem, and you would have the benefits of both. And so, they referred to this as a âcentaurâ, like half one thing, half the other; like an HR Giger biomechanical centaur.
And itâs interesting because in order to createâhow should we sayâan interesting, striking, humorous image, you have to have a good premise. And then as you should me, oneâs skill at guiding the image generating AI was very important; guiding it through iterations to get the best possible version of the premise. And the human lacking the artistic skill was not gonna be able to generate that quickly, but the AI couldnât come up with a striking premise and go through iterations to find the best one without some human guidance. Because if weâre going to mentionâhow should we sayâthe apocalyptic scenarios, we should also mention the likely scenarios.
CB: Right.
CM: I was listening to a 60 Minutes interview last night about AI, and it was a Google CEO. And I apologize, I donât remember what his name was. But he was basically saying, yes, a lot of jobs are gonna be changed. They wonât necessarily go awayâwe will still need humansâbut the job descriptions, thereâs a lot of them that are gonna be changing.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Oh, sorry, one reason why I wanted to bring up centaur and why that stuck with me is the first generation of workplace centaurs would likely be the Pluto in Sagittarius generation.
CB: Oh, thatâs really interesting. Yeah, and to your point, just like other technologies in the past, to the extent that humans can use it to enhance things that weâre already doing or capabilities we have, or to do things to augment our abilities in a positive way, so that we can do things that we couldnât do or do things fasterâitâll be like other technologies and other technological shifts and paradigm shifts in the past. But hopefully weâll be able to navigate it over the next 20 years relatively well, but itâll be something to pay close attention to for sure.
AC: Well, when we look at how humans have navigated every other technological revolution, maybe 20 years to get the hang of it, maybe not. A lot of times it takes 30.
CB: Well, and part of itâs also just in the 1990s, people had to learn how to use a personal computer, a mouse, and a keyboard, which is something that takes work to learn and doesnât come naturally. But once you do that, you could do a lot more than you could just with a pen and paper, or at least you can do it faster, letâs say. You can send out a hundred emails in a day, or 50 emails in a day vs. just writing five things. And I think thereâs something to your point in terms of the positive potential and this is why so many companies are working towards it; thatâs just a basic example. But thereâs so many positive things that can come from it and the way that it can speed up advancements in the good parts of humanity. I think thatâs why a lot of companies are so focused on this as a potentially important shift in technology that some of them are saying could be more important than discovering fire or something like that, like huge paradigm shifts.
AC: Yeah, maybe.
CB: Yeah, so weâll see. Weâll see how it goes. Itâll be an ongoing thing. One thing interesting, Austin, you mentioned the triplicity shift. And you and I had been talking about that and talking about Firmicus, âcause I had been researching some of what happened in the 4th century about how the Roman Empire had that pretty swift transformation to adopting Christianity in the Western Roman Empire, starting with the Emperor Constantine, and then his sons. We had an astrologer like Firmicus Maternus who was like right in the middle of that, in the middle of that century, first writing his astrology book in the early 330s, and then about 10 or 15 years later, he had converted to Christianity, and he wrote a really strong, aggressive attack against the pagan religions after becoming a Christian. And so, you can see sometimes in a single lifetime a person having a complete transformation. But you pointed out to me that there was a really major Jupiter-Saturn triplicity shift that was happening in that century. And I thought that was really interesting and really insightful because weâre going through the same thing now as that century where it was shifting from conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in earth signs to air signs. And then recently we had where, in the 20th century, it was all earth signs, and now itâs shifted to air signs for the next couple of centuries, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah. Thatâs one of the things that if you do a little work on it, it makes Firmicus really relatable. âCause heâs living in an anxious phase of late empire where things have been not going so well for a while and big changes are sort of already happening. Again, heâs living through the Christianization of Rome, but heâs also right around the period of time where the Western Roman Empire is going to fall very soon. And all of the Western empire shifted into what we call in retrospectâbut they didnât call it at the timeâthe Byzantine phase. They were just like, âItâs Rome, we just moved the capital,â but that shift into a very recognizable, second or third act for Rome is right around the corner. And when you read his text, which is written to the state governorâor is that loosely equivalent to a state governor, Chris, or would you sub in a different role?
CB: Yeah, something like that. Itâs his friend, Mavortius, whoâs climbing the political ladder and eventually gets up to the highest ladder at some point later, which was consul, I think he eventually became.
AC: Oh, he obtains consular power, which Firmicus gives like 38 different combinations for a nativity that will attain consular or proconsular power. But anyway, I find it very relatable living in the late stages of a Western empire that has either just changed a lot or has big changes right over the horizon and thereâs a sense of anxiety. You also read in Firmicusâand if you read about that time periodâthereâs a lot of, âOh, do we need to go to the founding? Weâve fallen. Weâre lazy and debauched. We need to re-obtain those virtues.â Yeah, you have this concern about the debauchery of late empire. âDo we do something else? Do we return?â Thereâs some very strong, âMake Rome Great Againâ energy in Firmicus. Itâs like that makes sense.
Weâre just over the cusp from an earth period to an air period. Whereas ours is definite in the sense that we are now just doing air for almost 200 years, the 4th century in Rome has an unusual number of going back and forth between earth and air. Are we doing the old thing, the more solid thing, the known thingâearth? Or are we entering this more chaotic, who knows whatâs gonna happen periodâair? And itâs often that thereâll be that one false-positive where it looks like weâre entering the new era, but actually itâs gonna be another 40 years. In Firmicusâ case, Itâs almost the whole century. It takes almost a whole century to decide on which era theyâre living in.
CB: That’s really funny âcause later in the century there was that one random emperor, Julian, who, after the empire had been Christian for a few decades, he tried to reinstitute paganism. But then after his reign was over after a few years, everything just went back to Christianity, and it stayed that way for centuries.
AC: Right.
CB: So I just wanted to bring that up because itâs such a major intellectual shift in terms of world history and in terms of the Western religious and philosophical and intellectual tradition. Everything was like paganism and polytheism up to that point vs. everything after that pointâfor the most part, at least the majorityâbecomes monotheism and Christianity, and this one religion becomes the dominant religion in the empire for many, many, many centuries. Obviously, weâre not necessarily going through that religious shift as far as we know. But in terms of intellectual shifts right now, I think paying attention to what are the emerging intellectual shifts and paradigms that might be shifting at this time that could have a much more far-reaching impact for several centuries might be a good thing to do. Whether thatâs what weâre seeing with technology and some of the implications of that, or whether thereâs other intellectual trends that might shift in a way thatâs dramatic and more permanent or more lasting I think remains to be seen, but itâs something to pay attention to.
AC: Yeah, one, I would say maybe not religious, but I think itâs pretty inarguable that Western culture has had a pretty significant value shift over the last, letâs say, 40 to 60 years, depending on how you want to measure it. We could say since the â60s. And that can be parallel to the transition from an expansionist polytheism with Rome to the moreâhow do we sayâorthodox Christianity that followed it and then continued onward. If weâre examining in terms of what are beliefs and values of the state cultâwhich in Rome looked like which gods were endorsed and which werenâtâI do feel like if weâre looking at Western history, we have lived through a shift in values, and if we named them âgodsâ it would be easier to understand; but a shift in which gods are venerated by the state cult and which are not.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Weâre gonna have to change our minds about so much if this AI technology is part of all of this and the big shifts. If we value certain ways of living or ways of being, or throw in the word âmeritocracyâ, all of that kind of gets thrown out the window with all of the changes in technology. So, yeah, ideologically, what do we value, and how does that change us? Or how do we change with that in a way thatâs skillful vs. skillful? Yeah, itâll probably take like hundreds of years.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. All right, and I just want to quickly also shoutout toâgoing backâthe Twitter user who I got the original prompt from for the cat AI that I sort of tweaked and changed, but their name is ArtichokeAI on Twitter. So if you do a search for them, youâll see their cool AI profile where they show lots of different prompts and different images theyâve generated. Yeah, so I think thatâs that in terms of news stories. Iâm trying to see if thereâs anything else I really wanted to mention. Of course we had eclipses. There was one little, minor news story that I thought was interesting. And, Claire, you had mentioned that there was a solar eclipse, and it was like that day that rocket blew up that Elon Muskâs company, SpaceX, was trying to launch. It blew up shortly after launch.
But then also around the same time, Elon made a major change of removing the blue checkmarks and the verification from Twitter profiles also over the past week, which I think is interesting. Iâm only mentioning it because it was so notable. We all remember that he took over Twitter on that solar eclipse in Scorpio six months ago, at the end of October. So for some reason important stuff is still happening with him on eclipse cycles. Not just related to SpaceX but also with Twitter. And I think he also recently announced the launch of a new AI company. So that could be important as well if heâs trying to get in on that.
AC: Yeah, one quick note on the recent solar eclipse. One thing thatâs interesting about the series which that inauguratedâwhich will have half of its eclipses in Ariesâthis first eclipse, Sun in Aries, was a hybrid eclipse. Weâre dealing with an eclipse of the Sun in the place that itâs supposed to be exalted, which is more of a shift. Weâre not shutting off a dim light, weâre shutting off a bright light, insofar as the Sun has to do with discrete identity. The Sun is how do people know you, how do they see you? Oh, thatâs Claire. Thatâs Chris. The removal of the blue checks opened the gate for lots of impersonations. And identity theft or impersonation is something Iâve seen repeatedly with afflictions to the Sun, especially nodal afflictions to the Sun.
And I would also add, again, with a solar eclipse in the first of a couple of solar eclipses in the place where the Sun is supposed to be exalted, we get sort of a reference to some of the more archetypal âhierarchy, Sun, monarch, leaderâ type stuff. And it was interesting to think that the blue checks are literally a mark of hierarchy and we have the eclipsing of that, so now it removes that visible differentiator. There was only one differentiator of Twitter accounts and that was it, and it was a hierarchy. You had to earn a blue checkmark, blah, blah, blah, blah, you couldnât just have one. And so, we have the eclipse of the Sun there and the removal of that, and that opening the way for a blurring or copying or impersonation of identity.
CB: Yeah. And it did create that hierarchy, but that was like a side effect. Almost an unintended side effect of the attempt to stop identity impersonation, which was the big threat of removing it. And thatâs really a good point âcause thatâs additionally something weâre gonna be seeing a lot of in the future. Myree Mascall on the live chat mentions deepfakes. And that was a really notable thing we saw a month ago, the first big instance of some of this AI technology being used to create something that was fake politically. There was that big thing that Trump announced that he was about to be arrested, and then the day came and went without anything happening, but somebody created an AI-generated image of him being tackled by some cops that went viral and got spread around. So I think that was the first big instanceâIâll have to look at what the day was, it was about a month agoâof AI being used to create something political in order to create a fake news story in a way.
And with Saturn coming up on Neptune over the past three years, and now co-present with it, I think one of the biggest things that weâre gonna see as a recurring theme is the blurring of the difference between what is real and what is not real, and the increasing challenge to tell the difference between the two as thereâs this dissolving of the boundaries between them. âCause itâs like thatâs happening, and thereâs also crazy advances in voice technology. Now you can take a recording of somebodyâs voice and AI can pretty impressively and pretty convincingly just create brand new sentences that that personâs never said before just using AI, and just a lot of things heading in that direction weâre heading. And this is somehow just the beginning of that Saturn-Neptune transit, which is just kind of wild to think about.
AC: Yeah, well, the phrase âfake newsâ was popularized during the 2016 presidential race, which was Saturn square Neptune.
CB: Right.
AC: So now weâre at the next angular configuration of Saturn and Neptune, yeah, weâre back there. Weâre back there but itâs the conjunction this time, or the co-presence rather than just a square, so itâs at maximum volume and increasing for the next couple of years.
CM: Yeah, and I think that âsquareâ story that you just mentioned speaks to, have we adjusted? Have we done the necessary adjustments now? We havenât. But, yeah, the square speaking to adjustment feels right as well.
CB: Yeah, and itâs gonna be a long period for all of us to adjust to. But itâll be interesting to see where weâre at at the end of that and what weâve learned at the end of that process in three years when Saturn finishes up in Pisces; but then is not fully finished until three years after that when Saturn departs from Aries. Saturn and Neptune will move into Aries around the same time, about three years from now. So I think Iâm just gonna focus my Saturn-Neptune energy on continuing to create cat pictures that blur the line between reality and non-reality and weâll see how the rest of the world does. All right, so I think thatâs good for the news segment. Shall we do a mid-show transition at this point?
CM: Yes.
AC: Sure.
CB: Okay, cool. So one of the things is I did want to give a shoutout to our sponsors for this episode. The first one is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is actually happening this month, in May, from the 25th-29th, 2023, just outside of Seattle, Washington. And this conference is a first for them âcause theyâre actually doing a hybrid conference where you can either attend in person or you can attend simultaneously online to a live version that theyâre gonna be streaming at the same time. So I believe thereâs 27 speakers that are each gonna be giving a bunch of different lectures, as well as pre- and post-conference workshops. I believe, Austin, you are one of those lecturers, right?
AC: Yeah, I have two lectures and then I have the pre-conference workshop. So I will be kicking off the whole thing, and that is a discussion of all 35 combinations of the three planets all interacting with each other. And so, weâll be going through all 35, as well as establishing some rules and ways to make that thinkable so itâs not all just a blur. But Iâm really excited, Iâve been working on that. Itâll be, like a lot of my work, as much historical material and research as possible as a trampoline to get into interesting places. And itâs sort of an unofficial sequel to what I did last year with the pre-conference workshop, which was dealing with all of the pairs of planets, so Iâm very excited. I donât believe itâs sold out yet. It sold out last year. So if you want to sign up, please do so now, so that they donât have to turn you away âcause I would feel bad.
CB: Yeah, I think there was an announcement not too long ago that they are filling up, and it probably will sell out just like it did last year pretty soon. So get your tickets if you want to attend in person. But even if you canât or you donât, you can sign up to attend live through their website or afterwards. One of the things thatâs great about NORWAC is they always record all of the lectures and workshops, and then you buy those or purchase those after the conference is over through their website. So you can find out more information about that at norwac.net. And Iâll put a link to it in the description below this video or on the podcast webpage for this episode.
AC: Quick question, Chris.
CB: Yeah.
AC: NORWAC is the only major astrological conference this year, correct?
CB: Yeah, itâs the only major conference âcause thereâs no other big organizations right now that are hosting one. Like the NCGR isnât, nor is ISAR. Nor are they pooling their resources for a mega conference for UAC. So I think NORWAC is kind of it this year for big conferences.
AC: Right. Yeah, so if you want to meet some astrologers thatâs literally your best opportunity.
CB: For sure. And I think Demetraâs doing a workshop there and lots of other astrologers that have been on the podcast in the past, so check it out at norwac.net. Other than that, we also have another sponsor this year of a product that Iâm actually pretty stoked about, which this new oracle fixed star card set and guide called the Behenian Fixed Star Oracle and Guide Set, which was created by astrologer and past guest on the podcast, Ryhan Butler, as well as artist and astrologer Terry Johnson, who put together 15 illustrated cards that illustrate each of the 15 most important fixed stars that were used in traditional astrology and in different branches of it. So the cards and the booklet give a brief history of the Behenian fixed stars and their planetary correspondences and their use in magical practice. In addition, each card can be drawn as an oracle to aid a person in the deliberation of a question. I know thatâs something youâre a fan of, Austin, in terms of using the tarot for deliberations and things like that. And you gave me some advice recently on that that I thought was helpful.
AC: Yeah, yeah. No, cartomancy is great. Thereâs much less competition between astrology andâI use the Rider-Waite tarotâvarious cartomantic methods like this. I often use cards where the astrology ends. Like I can see up to this point, but I still need guidance or information, and then thatâs where the cards start, and vice versa. Sometimes Iâll start with reading cards and then need to get more of Google Earth view from astrology.
CB: Yeah. Letâs see, so the book and the cards provide a three-tiered approach to incorporating them into a personal practice of study, contemplation, and divination. The booklet gives the history, like I said, and explores the symbols, myths, and meanings and correspondences of these fixed stars. But it can also be used as a tool for contemplation where each card features original interpretations of images passed down through the tradition, and includes constellations and glyphs of the stars that invites us to have a deeper understanding of the starâs lore and significance.
So each deck contains 15 illustrated cards and a 68-page study guide, and the illustrations are just incredibly beautiful. For those not watching the video version, Terry just did an amazing job illustrating these cards, and I was actually really impressed just by how pretty they are, in addition to the information that Ryhan packed into the book. So you can find out more information about this, or you can order your deck by heading over to medievalastrologyguide.com/starcards. So medievalastrologyguide.com/starcards. And Iâll put a link to that on the description page for this episode. So the cards are just $38 for a pack, and they literally just got these together and just shipped out the first set of them recently. So itâs pretty exciting seeing an up-and-coming astrologerânot up-and-comingâbut somebody who was an up-and-coming astrologer, Ryhan Butler, who was on very early episodes of the podcast, and was one of the younger astrologers back when me and Austin were coming up. And now weâre all kind of like old people at this point doing these amazing projects with different books or these cards or other things, and itâs really heartening to see.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, itâs funnyâ
CM: Take my money.
AC: Itâs funny to think of someone as âup-and-comingâ. Itâs like, âOh, yeah, in 2012,â and itâs only a few years ago.
CB: Right.
AC: More than 10 years ago. But I would just add one more thing about cardsâcards are an ideal way to just learn things. If youâre divining with them or contemplating with cards, youâre also reinforcing the meaning set and the associations. Theyâre also educational. âCause I know everybody loves educational things.
CB: Yeah, itâs that. And also, glyphs are really important, and thatâs one of the things that came up in the Egyptian astrology episode that I hope people check out. One of the things we talked about is recent research has shownâeven more than past research had in the earlier part of the 20th centuryâhow some of the glyphs or the symbols that astrologers use for the signs of the zodiac were actually derived in some pretty clear cases from Egyptian hieroglyphs, or in some instances, symbols that were used in Demotic Egyptian. So some of our tradition of using just a single pictorial symbol to represent astrological placementsâlike planets and signs of the zodiacâactually derive from that older tradition going back to Egypt of using specific little pictures or hieroglyphs in order to represent words and phrases and things like that. And I think that was really interesting and also of course ties into what youâre working on, Austin, where the decans were originally illustrated with these figuresâthese exotic figures that would represent each of the 36 decansâand those illustrations were meant to convey visually something deep about the symbolic interpretation of that decan.
AC: Yeah, I mean, they werenât just originally illustrated or imagined visually. That conspicuously visual quality of the decans goes for, measurably, thousands of years, and the styles change and the conventions change. But you can look at ancient Egyptian versions of that where the gods in a certain circumstance are associated with a given decan, but then you can go 15-16 centuries, 2,000+ light-years later and youâve still got figures involved in a situation with particular implements often sort of blurring the line between, âOh, this is an image of a person in a situation,â vs. âIs that a god that somebody like scratched the name off of? Like why are they holding a lamp and a huge ax, and why are their eyes on fire?â but, yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And thereâs just something about what an image can convey that sometimes is deeper and more nuanced and wider than words. Like you can try to convey something with words, but you can actually pack a lot into an image that itâs kind of surprising how much meaning and subtlety you can actually get into something. And I think thatâs what things like tarot or oracle cards or even glyphs or things like decans really get to; itâs the heart of something. Yeah, I hadnât thought about it in that way in a while until I was doing that Egyptian astrology episode.
AC: Yeah, itâs almost as if when we have a completely abstracted language, where the letters donât resemble or evoke anything, itâs like the original communication is both an image and a soundâa sort of primordial communication is going to be both. And you can say left and right side of the brain, weâre just hitting different centers simultaneously. And as esoteric as that is and sounds, thatâs also why memes work. That’s why people are like, âOh, thatâs perfect, I have to spread that everywhere,â âcause itâs hitting both sides.
CM: Language is limiting. Itâs limited.
CB: Yeah. And hereâs actually the table that we talked about in the Egyptian astrology episode. This is in an article by an Egyptologist named Andreas Winkler. But he showed how the symbols used in Demotic Egyptian to represent the signs of the zodiac are pretty well tied in with our current glyphs. For example, Taurus and the bull, and the horns of the bull. But specifically, Libra was the symbol for the setting Sun or the horizon. Or Sagittarius is like an arrow thatâs pointed up and to the right. Or Aquarius is like three wavy lines in Demotic Egyptian apparently. Weâve simplified it to two wavy lines, but itâs still sort of the same thing. So you can see those clear parallels and how itâs just really crazy âcause it means some of our basic symbols go back to these Egyptian priest-astrologers that were using this in the temples.
AC: Yeah.
CM: So neat.
AC: So with Capricorn, thatâs an ankh and itâs a little head?
CB: Like a head, or goat head. But, yeah, the problem is that Capricorn is always weird âcause itâs like the âgoat-horned oneâ is what it says in Greek, or in the Babylonian tradition, itâs like the âgoat-fishâ. So itâs like people always kind of struggle to render that, so theyâre like, âUh, this is the best I can come up with.â
AC: In Vedic astrology, the word translates kind of to âsea monsterâ or âwater monsterâ, which often kind of gets interpreted as âcrocodileâ or âalligatorâ, which is sort of aquatic, but not, and monstrous, etc., etc.
CM: Iâd be down with that. Iâd love to be a sea monster. Thatâs sweet.
AC: Right.
CB: Right. Yeah, I like that. Saturn is a âsea monsterâ right now. I thought thatâd be good on the forecast.
AC: Yeah, it certainly was.
CB: Yeah, it was.
AC: And crocodiles work for Saturn in a lot of ways for a Saturnian sign, especially the earth sign, âcause crocodiles just sit there for 99% of their lives when they donât explode into death. Theyâre very low energy. They intervene with situations only as needed.
CB: I like that analogy âcause crocodiles have tough skin and a very soft interior.
AC: And like aquatic kind of, but not like a graceful dolphin or agile fish. They just kind of hang out.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, itâs an earth sign, and itâs mud, but water. Yeah, I like alligator/crocodile. Actually when Kait did the Saturn in Cap series for Sphere + Sundry, there was a sub-variant alligator series where actual alligator bone, and in some cases, swamp mud that alligators had been in was integrated into the material.
CB: Nice.
CM: Thatâs perfect. Last note on that, I was just seeing a meme and it was about how when a crocodile is on the water, you can just see its little eyes and its face and it looks very scary, very competent, and intimidatingâlike a Capricorn. But then you look under the water and they just look kind of silly. Itâs perfect.
AC: When you see them at night, their eyes are hyper-reflective. And so, if you have any light source at all, the eyes appear to glow red-orange.
CM: Nice.
AC: I got to see that in person many years ago. A friend of mine worked at a nature conservancy swamp in Florida, and was like, âHey, come visit me,â and then literally we went spearfishing in alligator-infested waters. And he has an adrenal problem where he doesnât feel fear, and so he led us into extremely physically dangerous situations that made a good story in retrospect.
CM: Cool.
CB: Nice.
AC: Five planets in Scorpio.
CB: That’s good, not feeling fear. Also, alligators are kind of, like you said, sedentary, but they can move quickly when they want to. Like they can do that explosion of energy, which is like that cardinal sign which is really good.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CB: That initial explosion of getting out fast, but just not having a lot of long-term staying power.
AC: Yeah, yeah, the âalligatorâ cardio is not top-notch.
CB: Yeah, itâs those tiny, tiny legs. All right, so I think thatâs pretty good. Shall we transition into talking about the astrology of May?
AC: Yeah, letâs do it.
CB: All right, so Iâm gonna put the graphic up one more time just to show people where weâre starting here at the top of the month. Right at the top of the month we have Pluto stationing retrograde in Aquarius and make its very first station there; the very first station of the next 20 years. And itâs gonna make many, many, many, many more stations over the next 20 years. This is the first one, so this is notable and one to pay attention to. And itâs interesting that it falls right in the middle of that Mercury retrograde cycle where Mercury is gonna conjoin the Sun on the same day. Because what Iâve noticedâespecially over the past 10 years of doing these forecastsâis sometimes thereâs an issue thatâs setup when Mercury stations retrograde at the beginning of the retrograde phase. But by the time you get to the conjunction, there starts to be some turn or some shift towards a resolution of whatever the retrograde issues were. And itâs really interesting that itâs sort of coinciding at that point.
AC: Mm-hmm. One way that change in the quality of the retrograde is addressed in Dorotheus in terms of elections is that if you do something Mercury before itâs had the conjunction to the Sun then itâs got that ahead of it; you have this really dramatic combustion and aspect thatâs in the future. Whereas even if itâs still retrograde, once youâve had the conjunction to the Sun, Mercuryâs not coming back to the Sun at that point; you donât have that in the future. The future looks like itâs rising again rather than returning to the Sun and being invisible.
CM: Right. Like if Mercury retrograde is a story arc, and that cazimi is the middle point, then of course, yeah, the last half, half of itâs over. And if we know that things should be wrapping up in the next few weeks then, yeah, itâs probably gonna be a better outcome or circumstance.
CB: Right.
AC: An outcome thatâs more in accord with what you intend.
CM: Right.
AC: Or if the Mercury retrograde is an underworld journey, the conjunction with the Sun is the bottom. And even though youâre still beneath the surface, the path is leading up and back to the world rather than into the interview with Hades.
CB: Yeah, âcause one of the things Mercury retrogrades can coincide with is doing something once at the beginning of the retrograde and having it fail, or having things go awry and needing to do it over again. And usually by the time of the conjunction, whatever that second or third attempt is, things start to work out. And usually on the second or third attempt, you do a better job of it because youâve had the experience of the first two attempts and youâve sort of learned from those. So even though it can be annoying or frustrating or sometimes kind of painful, sometimes it can also be constructive. So that Mercury retrograde, as we talked about in last monthâs forecast, began on the 21st of April. So people can pay attention if some major things started coming up for them around that time in terms of Mercury retrograde issues and starting to see a resolution of that by the 1st, and then perhaps things not being fully resolved until later in the month when Mercury actually stations direct on the 14th.
AC: Yeah, and itâs worth noting that Mercuryâs reemergence into the world, the going direct being visible again, is relatively dramatic because itâll put Mercury right next to a newly-ingressed Jupiter, which has also recently become visible again. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of this retrograde is pretty nice. Itâs like a well-stocked Easter basket. Iâve tried to stay focused on how much I like where this Mercury retrograde gets us to rather than the process. The process is not so good, but where we end up on the other side of it is pretty cool.
CB: Yeah, âcause you gotta get through eclipse season basically. Everybody’s gotta make it through this Mercury retrograde and through eclipse season and the intensification of the Pluto transit, with Pluto stationing in Aquarius. So itâs like the first week or so of the month is still kind of tumultuous, and thereâs a lot of things that are still up in the air and not resolved, or even new things that are kind of being thrown up in the air. But then later in the month, youâre right, once Mercury stations direct, we get our second lunation of the month, which is that Taurus New Moon on the 19th. We get our first non-eclipse lunation and hopefully things start to settle down by then.
AC: Yeah, things look pretty good by then, which is two-thirds of the way through the month.
CM: Yeah, the dust settles by the end of the month, but thatâs the end of the month.
AC: Yeah, first-half vs. second-half I think is pretty stark this month. I like the second-half way more. So, Chris, as you mentioned, we basically entered eclipse season and also began a Mercury retrograde within one day of each other.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, one of the things that both of those have in common is that they both have a lack of vision, not in some sort of spiritual or ambitious sense, but like itâs hard to see where youâre going; thatâs what eclipses are. Thereâs supposed to be light that you can navigate by: during the day, Sun, or during the night of the Full Moon, the brightest night of the month. The lunar eclipseâthereâs a removal of light thatâs supposed to be there which allows you to navigate. And then a big part of a Mercury retrograde is that it also becomes invisible. You can no longer see Mercury during the morning, nor in the evening. And so, not being able to see where things are going is its own kind of malefic quality. I was giving an example the other day when I was teaching about how obscurity is malefic, but not like Mars and not like Saturn. When I come to my bedroom, when I stumble into bed a minute before dawn, and itâs dark, I can hurt myselfâand I have several times by wracking my shin on the bed frame. The bed frame is not a weaponâit is not poison; it is not bladed; itâs not actively maleficâbut it acts as if it were malefic, as if it could do harm simply because I canât see where the fuck Iâm going.
CB: Yeah.
CM: And then Uranus being co-present just adds another layer of, whoa.
AC: Of wracking your shin in the dark.
CM: Yeah, suddenly.
CB: Surprise. Yeah, thatâs a really good point. Itâs like the Sun is the source of light in our solar system, and light becomes associated with seeing that which is illuminated; that which we can see when itâs light out vs. when it becomes completely pitch dark and you canât see. And I like those notions of obscurity because one of the things thatâs important that happens with eclipses is sometimes really monumental events happen in our life where you start doing something or thereâs a shift towards something. But under eclipses you donât always realize how monumental it is until some time later, in retrospect basically. So I like what youâre saying with that, Austin, because eclipses can sometimes be really important turning points where something starts to shift and thereâs a major beginning or ending in a personâs life. But itâs not always readily apparent and sometimes itâs only when you look back on it, you realize, âOh, I met that person,â or âOh, I started working on this at that time,â or what have you, and then you realize the full significance of it, but thereâs something almost inherently obscure or hidden about eclipses.
AC: Yeah. One way I think about and work with eclipses is the nodes are transiting signs all the time, but their work is inherently obscure. Theyâre like underground rivers. Theyâre flowing, but you canât see what theyâre doing. And then eclipses bring that energyâfor just an hour or two, four times a yearâinto intersection with the visible world. Itâs like how when a planet stations. Itâs been working on stuff for a while, but thereâs a bit of a pivotal point or an exclamation mark. And eclipsesâthey let what has been collecting and latent make a very temporary dent. They turn that potential energy into kinetic for just a second, which may change the direction of things.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. So weâre talking about all of this because weâve already had one eclipse as we head into the month, which was the one in April, and now weâre coming up on the second one right in the first week of the month. So as soon as that first eclipse happened, itâs like the door to eclipse season has opened, and weâre about to go through the next door here when the Moon hits 15° of Scorpio on May 5 it looks like. So that is our next lunar eclipse in Scorpio. And this oneâs important âcause itâs a continuation of the eclipse series thatâs been taking place, bouncing back and forth, between Taurus and Scorpio over the course of the past year or so. And weâve seen a lot of things thrown up in people’s lives, especially with fixed sign placements, during that time.
AC: And this is the very last eclipse in Scorpio. Thereâs one more in Taurus, so on the axis. But this will beâfor those who dwell in Scorpio or have important investments in Scorpioâthis is the last one in Scorpio.
CB: Okay, I like that. Yeah, so weâll see the closing down of the major shifts and the major tendency towards there being new beginnings and new endings with this eclipse. And then itâs finally fully brought to completion six months later when we have that final one in Taurus in, what is it? October. I believe at the very end of October, on October 28.
AC: Yeah, and thatâll be the lunar in Taurus.
CB: Yeah, so this one, it goes exact at 15° of Scorpio. And then the very next aspect it makes is that opposition to Uranus, which is at 18° of Taurus. So thereâs still a major unexpected or disruptive Uranian element to this eclipse, which I think is madeâas weâve talked about beforeâa little bit more disruptive because itâs happening in those fixed signs of Taurus and Scorpio; which as fixed signs already donât do the best with changes, especially sudden or unexpected ones. And Iâve seen a lot of that happening in different peopleâs personal lives in terms of it just destabilizing certain things in order to make room for other things.
CM: Yeah, and I was noticing tooââcause I always like to look at where the Moonâs headed after a thing that it doesâit hits Uranus, and then itâs also gonna run into Mars and then Pluto and then Saturn. So it just feels bumpy. Even after the eclipse the next day too, it just feels bumpy.
AC: Yeah, one of the things that struck me when I looked at it was how much is going on in water signs and how not great it is. So we have a partial eclipse of the Moon in its fall in Scorpio configured to and in a mutually-received relationship with fallen Mars in Cancer. We also have a malefic in Pisces and then the Neptune in Pisces. And so, what ran through my mind was all sorts of toxic water. There was a song I was listening to the other day where one of the lines references âa raging river of manure at my front doorâ, and so I thought about that. I also thought about a toxic âGrailâ, a toilet desperately in need of flushing. With the South Nodeâitâs the Dragonâs Tail. And if the Dragonâs mouth eats, the Dragonâs Tail poops; thereâs this purgative quality to the South Node. And so, this just looked like âuckyâ water that needed to be flushed, be purged, be sent to the waste treatment facility, whatever.
CB: And I say in all good friendliness and all good intention that right now I regret showing you how to use an image generator yesterday, being reminded of some of your evocative metaphors over the years.
AC: Right, Midjourney. Imagine âpoopâ dragon, gentleman-style.
CB: Yeah.
CM: With different hats.
CB: Right, with a top hat. All right, now I understand what the AI people are feeling like, and what Oppenheimer felt like in terms of developing the atomic bomb and just thinking like, âWhat have I done?â
AC: Yeah, well, Iâve become the God of Death.
CM: Scorpionic tools.
AC: So I would be surprised if there werenât some literal, physical things involving toxic water or sewage. But on a psychological, psychic level, I think this oneâs gonna bring up a lot of feelings, which itâd be good to barf out or to purge, to âcathartâ.
CM: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, and that was something you mentioned earlier, Claire, in terms of just water pollution issues with Saturn in Pisces. It seems like theyâre coming up a lot recently.
CM: Yeah, and just like water erosion, displaced communities from all the water. So, yeah, all kinds of stuff.
CB: Were you gonna say something before that?
CM: Me? I mean, I was just thinking too on that more psychological, âarmchairâ psychologist kind of thing with the water and all of the feelings that could possibly be coming up. And then on the other side of the Moon, over in Taurus, weâve got Mercury whoâs supposed to be kind of the rational person in the group, amongst others. And then in Taurus, which is a sign where itâs earth, itâs material, it’s kind of like we see what is really in front of us. What am I tasting, smelling, seeing? And that faculty is compromised because Mercury is retrograde with the Node, with Uranus. So itâs like weâve got all these feelings happening and perceptions, but what are we perceiving, and is that actually accurate? Feelings are real, they’re not always accurate. So when it comes to practical advice, what do you do during this configuration? I mean, my personal thing is nothing. You donât do anything. Donât do anything, unless of course itâs like taking care of your plumbing. Like take care of that. But, yeah, you might want to pump the brakes with the feelings.
AC: Yeah, drink lots of distilled water or the emotional equivalent of that.
CM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so heightened emotions for sure. I mean, Iâm thinking back to the eclipses in October and just the intensity of some of that towards the end of October when we had our last Scorpio eclipse, and I think we can expect some of that happening here. In addition to that, just going back, having that first Pluto station in Aquarius, for people that have planets in early fixed signsâsome people may have felt that. If you have a planet thatâs getting aspected by Pluto as soon as Pluto ingressed into Aquarius, itâs really those first stations oftentimes that will activate that aspect and make it much more clear what thatâs gonna be about both internally as well as in terms of external events in a personâs life. So I think thatâs a really important thing underlying this eclipse here in that fixed sign of Scorpio as wellâhaving Pluto activated in Aquarius for the first time also at the same time.
CM: Yep.
CB: Have the two of you been seeing anything coming up with Pluto in Aquarius so far in terms of natal things with clients or with other observations?
AC: I was talking to one of my students the other day who has a 0 Sun in Aquarius, and they were feeling it, and it was very classical Pluto stuff. But other than that, itâs been so clear on the collective. But I donât know, I have lots of things in water signs, I usually feel the transits very deeply, but I havenât really felt it on a personal level or seen it up close.
CM: Iâve been noticing itâs the clients with stuff in very early degrees, 0°-1°, that are aspecting that, and theyâre just going through big transitions that were already kind of in the works as Pluto approached that by degree from Capricorn. Like kids moving out to college for the first time and having that big transition with Pluto in the 5th or something. So nothing bad, just very normal, big transitions in that area of their life. But, yeah, very early degree connections are necessary. Well, my Ascendant is atâor, no, my Venus is at 5° of Aquarius. I mean, I plead the 5th on exactly what it is, but I feel like Iâve been noticing, but I need time.
AC: I have Venus at 2 Aquariusâ
CM: Okay.
AC: And I was expecting a little bit more from the inside, but not so far. But when any other planet is 2° away from one of your natal planets that means itâs about to hit. When Pluto is 2° away, it could be two years away from actually conjoining it.
CB: Right.
CM: Right.
AC: And so, the translation from the distance in space on a chart into distance in time from how far from now is that is so different with Pluto.
CM: Mm-hmm. Just a quick side note, Iâve been noticing that with Neptune on my Moon. Like even just a degree away has been a big difference vs. being right on top of it âcause it is so slow.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, letâs check in with all the Aquarius placement people and other fixed sign people after that station and after that second eclipse in Scorpio and see how things are going.
AC: Yeah, Iâll let you know.
CB: Okay. Thereâs one other thing that also happened that, Claire, you mentioned, which is Jupiterâs gonna make a heliacal rising and appear early in the month out from under the beams of the Sun as a morning star. Early in the morning just before sunrise, youâll see Jupiter rise up over the eastern horizon. And itâs within that 15° range of the Sun, so that itâs finally gonna be far enough from the Sun that youâll see it briefly in the hour or so before sunrise as a star over on the eastern horizon. So Jupiterâs completed its passage. And speaking of going into the âEye of Sauronâ and into Mordor, itâs completed its underground journey through the beams of the Sun, and now it sort of emerges in the morning anew and sort of revived at this point.
CM: Yeah, I always like to watch what happens when planets come out from under the beams. In the case of Jupiter, maybe being the spirit of the law, court rulings, opportunities, truths, understandings. Maybe those might be easier to find or probably to find with Jupiter visible vs. that planetâs significations being hidden and not visible. Yeah, itâll be interesting to see if some of those things come up in the next month.
AC: Yeah, part of what Iâm really excited about this month is Jupiter reemerging and then going into Taurus, and Mercury also coming back to that first decan of Taurus to station direct. And so, we have this really fresh Jupiterâlike a purification-by-fire combustion sweat lodge/ready to start a new thing, and then also moving into a new sign to start new work, and then having what will also be a freshly-arisen morning Mercury right there with it in the same decan. It just occurred to me, Claire, that Jupiter in Aries in those last few degrees. Jupiter freshly arising in Aries is so âThe Macho Manâ. Like thatâs very much an, âOhhh, yeahhh!â sort of moment.
CM: It truly is. And that decan too being ruled by Venus and Jupiter and just like flamboyantly so.
AC: And the transition into Taurus is, âOh, yeah, snap into a Slim Jim.â Like literally selling these products.
CM: Exactly what I was thinking when I was making this prompt.
AC: Okay, okay.
CM: And I was telling Chris before the show too, and weâll talk about it in a minute, but that T-square between Pluto, Jupiter, and Marsâonce Mars gets into Leoâthis is where Randy Savage came from. I was intuiting, like, âWhat could that be like?â And I was like, âRandy Savage could be one of those things, but in a spirit sense.â
AC: No, no, that works, the Mars in Leo.
CM: So powerful.
AC: I could see how Mars-Jupiter isâI mean, heâsâ
CM: Belligerent.
AC: We remember him more for his enthusiasm and big presence than his actual combative efficacy.
CM: Totally.
CB: I like that. All right, so thatâs our image for this, especially with Jupiter in the tail-end of Aries and whatever the good things or the positive things or the period of growth expansion that some people are getting from that transit of Jupiter in Aries. This is the very tail-end of it where some of those lessons are short of finalized and, yeah, brought full circle before Jupiter departs and moves into Taurus mid-month.
AC: But worth noting also is that Jupiter in one system is the ruler of the third decan of Aries. In the other, itâs Venus. But the third decan of Ariesâruled in two systems, in both cases by a beneficâhas much more to do with the flamethrower of charisma rather than an actual flamethrower, which you might see in the first decan of Aries. Itâs very performative. You can think of Jupiter in the third decan of Aries like a preacher at a revival, like a stand-up comedian, like a one-person showâitâs that kind of Aries energy rather than the more literal, martial standard type.
CM: Totally.
CB: Yeah, thatâs a really good point. All right, so other things that we need to mention about that first week of the monthâI think this is looking pretty good so far.
CM: Yeah, the other thing I was kind of wondering about in this first weekâas it leads us into the eclipseâis thereâs gonna be a square between Venus and Neptune. Which the last time we had one of those was early December when all of that Lensa app stuff was going on, and we had all this illusory beauty and romanticized versions of beauty and all these things. So I donât know, relationally-speaking of course, a hard aspect with Neptune does not confer for us to have a good understanding necessarily of what our relationships are doing. And having that leading us into the eclipse, I donât love it. But, yeah, I donât know what your thoughts are on that.
CB: Thatâs a great point. That aspect of Venus-Neptune goes exact the day before the eclipse on May 4, while the Moon is already in Scorpio. So itâs like the emotional intensity of that eclipse is softened, or at least we have this other element thatâs being thrown into the picture of this Venus thatâs super idealizing things and is doing the âVenus-Neptuneâ thing, which is like the idea of being in love with the idea of being love in some ways.
CM: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, or just checking out and doing something pleasurable. So the first week is âseweryâ. Mercuryâs still super retrograde, weâre moving into this eclipse. And whatever foul waters are due to erupt, weâll probably be feeling that for several days leading up to it. But like a good puke, you feel so much better afterwards. I think the positive way to regard that upcoming eclipse is like, yeah, itâs a good shit.
CM: Purgative. Purgative is like the triple-word score word. Love it for that.
AC: Okay. Yeah, thanks. Weâre on to new things after that.
CM: Yeah.
CB: Just really quicklyâbecause thatâs one of our signatures of close aspects with the eclipse, could we just give a couple more keywords of Venus square Neptune? That was a really good instance, Claire, from last year when the Lensa app happened and everybody was making these super idealized and oftentimes much more visually-engaging or beautiful images of themselves. And there was something that was both interesting and beautiful about that, as well as deceptive at the same time. So I guess thatâs the issue. It can be very positive because there can be something very romantic and engaging about Venus-Neptune hard aspects, but also something potentially deceptive. So maybe part of the advice is to enjoy it, and enjoying the ability to get lost in that as something thatâs enjoyable, but also to be careful because you have to realize that your expectations or that your picture of reality might not be the clearest right now, and you might not be seeing things or seeing people for who they are.
CM: Exactly, yeah. And Venus in an air sign too would like to be a little bit more intellectual and fact-based, but that aspect from Neptune is not really supporting that.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I would just say that itâs like watching a television show. It’s entertaining, and hopefully a good TV show is going to be pretty to watch and entertaining, engaging, but donât mistake it for what actually happened. Itâs loosely-based on a true story, but you donât make important judgments or decisions about relationships based on what youâre getting during a Venus-Neptune square.
CM: Bingo.
AC: Itâs only loosely-based on a true story, though it may be entertaining.
CB: Ideally. Although when youâre in the middle of that, that advice always falls flat.
AC: It doesnât always. What are you talking about? Yeah, itâs easy to recognize. Someoneâs like, âOh, this is great. Weâll see how long this lasts.â
CM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
CM: I mean, if Mercuryâs retrograde, and we get intense stuff with the eclipseâin my mind this is not a time to be making sweeping decisions about anythingâ
AC: Yeah.
CM: If you can avoid it.
CB: Yeah, one of the things thatâs been nice since Venus is getting towards the end of Gemini is thatâs really come to have a soothing effect or put on some ointmentâover the past several weeksâon that area that just burned for months with Mars going retrograde there in Gemini. And I feel like for a number of people, weâve seen Venus come in and sort of smooth over the rough edges or sort of put some aloe vera or something on the areas of irritation in that part of their chart over the past several months.
AC: Yeah, speaking as someone whoâs Moon got âMars-edâ for eight months. Venusâ time in Gemini has proved an indispensable part of the âMake Gemini Fun Againâ campaign.
CB: Right.
CM: Mm-hmm. And Iâm kind of hoping tooâto the same pointâVenus going into Cancer, after the eclipse, on the 7th is gonna be kind of a balm for whatever Cancerâs been going through with Mars in there.
AC: Yeah, thatâs one of the things Iâm also really looking forward to later in the month.
CB: Yeah, good point. So Venus into Gemini started April 11, and then it ends on the 9th of May. And then we get Venus in Cancer from the 9th of May forward, all the way into early June. All right, so thatâs good for the first week. That really brings us into transits for the second week where weâre talking at this point about Venus going into Cancer on the 7th. Mars hasnât departed yet. Mars is still in Cancer, so thereâs still some tension. Thereâs still the potential for some irritation or some fighting or some discord thatâs been going on in that sector of our chart ever since Mars went into Cancer, what was it? A month or two ago now. But now Venus is coming in in order to help balance things out a little bit more and help to offset the extremeness of the fieriness of Mars.
AC: Yeah, andâgo ahead.
CM: Oh, I was just gonna say sheâs getting a nice trine from Saturn too when she gets in there.
CB: Thatâs nice, yeah. So as soon as Venus goes into Cancer, it starts applying to a trine with Saturn. And Venus will complete that trine around May 12 and May 13 around the same time the Moon moves into Pisces and conjoins Saturn at the same time. So that timeframe of around especially May 13âMay 12-May13âhas a little bit of a sobering quality with Saturn there. But hopefully itâs like a good type of sobering quality with Venus trining Saturn at the same time. Thereâs like a âcoming down to realityâ and a realistic assessment of things, especially relational things, after the square between Venus and Neptune that we encountered at the end of Venus in Gemini.
CM: My thoughts exactly. I was thinking it was gonna be, yes, somber, but a stabilizing influence, particularly relationally, after all of the kerfuffle of the days prior.
AC: Yeah, thereâs definitely the potential for that. One thing though is that Saturnâs now in Pisces and not necessarily doing a great job being Saturn and objective. The Saturn in Pisces is pretty water-logged. Itâs not that cut-and-dried quality that weâve gotten from Saturn for like five years with Saturn in Cap and Aquarius. It definitely has some gravity and is certainly less fantastical than Venus square Neptune. But Saturnâs not going to ground us anymore âcause itâs not on the ground.
CM: Thatâs fair.
AC: Thereâs an emotional weight to Saturn in Pisces; yeah, itâs a different Saturn. I look forward to Venus departing from trine to Saturn.
CM: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Saturn might not be as helpful as it might have been in trine somewhere else.
AC: Okay, so let me say something nice about the Saturn-Venus.
CM: I mean, you donât have to. You can totally say it.
AC: What comes to mindâ
CB: Donât give him free reign. Donât tell him to only say negative things.
AC: No, I have a positive thought. In my recent rereading of Firmicus and important planetary combinations and what not, I see a lot of Saturn-Venus, especially by trine, indicating excellence in aesthetic crafts. Creating an art thing. Not a fully-imaginal thing, but creating something solid. Firmicus talks about Saturn and Venus making people who make beautiful textiles and then dye things; like royal textile dyer. I was like, âOh, thatâs working in fashion.â We could take craftânot just art, not just ideasâbut craft. Like Saturn anchoring Venusâ aesthetic cognitions into the creation of things that have a weight. Yeah, Saturn is useful for disciplining Venus to get a project done rather than just having a fun idea.
CB: Yeah. One of the things that Iâve gained a greater understanding of after originally reading Firmicus 10 or 15 years agoâand just all the things he says about Venus and Saturn aspects and coming to a better understanding of it nowâis just what do you do when you run into a major difference in a relationship that causes major obstacles for a relationship, even if the relationship itself is something you really want, and the negotiation of that which is a deal-breaker in a relationship that stops one from happening vs. that which can be pushed through to allow a relationship to happen if itâs something you really want. And that might be an interesting thing to think about here with Venus trining Saturn on this dateâjust the ability to push through and identify what is a surmountable difficulty that you can overcome if you really want something to happen, as opposed to those things that might happen if it was like a square or an opposition or something that might be complete deal-breakers or non-starters for a relationship.
AC: Yeah, and Saturn is in the sign of Venusâ exaltation, so heâs willing to work with Venus here.
CB: Right.
CM: Seems like a very tempered expectation. Yeah, it seems reasonable.
CB: All right, so thatâs looking good for that, so letâs move on. We are firmly in the second week and moving forward now.
AC: And this is where it starts getting exciting basically halfway through the month.
CB: That Mars action. Mars starts getting towards the very end of Cancer andâ
AC: Mercury stations before any of this.
CM: Yep.
CB: Okay. Well, thatâs nice. So Mercury is stationing May 14 and 15. Itâs finally direct at 5° of Taurus. One of the things thatâs very nice about that is that immediately after that, the next day, by the 16th, Jupiterâs ingressed into Taurus. So weâre not just getting Mercury stationing direct and the resolution of some of those Mercury retrograde issues that have been going on for the past three weeks up to this point, but also Jupiter moves into that sign where it has that special ability to improve and affirm and sort of just smooth things over in whatever the Taurus sector of our chart is and that specific area of our life and whatever house that coincides with for each of us.
CM: Yeah, Iâm looking forward to that.
AC: Yeah, so when we talk about Aries and we talk about a fresh start, this is its own kind of fresh start, but itâs Taurus. âCause Mercury is, again, like gone through the âpurificatoryâ meat-grinder of the retrograde. Itâs come out the other side, freshly-arisen in the east. Jupiter is freshly-arisen in the east and also freshly-ingressed into a new sign; so fresh, and so clean-clean. And that first decan of Taurus, which is ruled by Mercury in one system, you see it pretty overwhelmingly is about not a new idea, but new plans. Like how am I gonna do all of this? What is the process? The go-to metaphor for me is imagine youâre a farmer, youâve got all this land. What do I plant this season? Is it gonna be corn over here? Serranos over here? What am I gonna plant? How am I gonna subdivide all of my terrain? Is it all corn? Is it all jalapenos? Is it all whatever? That planning. And Mercury boosted with Jupiter is really nice here. The North Node can create problems certainly, but it does give hunger and ambition, which I think can work with this combination; planning something ambitious. Not imagining yourself succeeding at something ambitious, but actually planning something thatâs going to have tangible results, and you have a tangible plan for.
CM: Yeah, and I think itâs nice too âcause Jupiter is that more expansive, wider perspective. Mercuryâs more of the details. Weâve got both of those in the same place working together, which is great. My take on Rahu being there isâto your point of ambition and driveâas long as weâre not getting greedy.
AC: Right.
CM: As long as weâre reading the fine print, not getting ahead of ourselves, it could be really, really cool.
CB: Yeah, I like that idea of growth and expansion in the tangible, material realm. Those are really good keywords for Taurus. And something Iâve come to understand much better over the past yearâespecially after doing the Taurus episode about a year ago in the zodiac seriesâwas just how much Taurus revels in the earthiness of a garden, but also taking delight in the material pleasures of being in the physical world and all of the good things that come along with that, both in terms of tangible, physical things, as well as in terms of nature and the appreciation of nature and the supportive role that that can play to each of us, not just physically, but also psychologically. So Iâm excited to have Jupiter in Taurus for the next while and howâ
AC: Andâoh, sorry.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: I was just gonna sayâand I just looked it upâuntil May 26 next year.
CB: Wow. So it is a full year, okay.
AC: Yeah.
CM: Mm-hmm.
AC: No regresses back into Aries. Just slow, steady, reliable Jupiter in Taurus.
CB: Good.
CM: Let us all go into a forest and walk around, take it in. Itâs gonna be so nice.
CB: Good. And so, itâs really inaugurated here with that Moon also ingressing by May 16 and 17 into Taurus. And then a few days later, we get that New Moon at 28° of Taurus in that sign. So this full lineup or stellium of planets in Taurus, mid-to-late month, before we have the next shift of Mars, but just focusing on that Taurus stuff. The Mercury retrograde that was the precursor to that may have thrown some things up in the air and caused people to go back and have to reevaluate certain things about that part of their life in some instances. But itâs nice to have this grounding, sort of stabilizing set of transits that come in and not just allow things to settle down, but also repair things.
One of the things that is often mentioned with Jupiter in some of the ancient texts is âalliesâ and having friends and allies, but also people that come in and help you and give you a hand when you need it. And that might be of relevant significance here with Jupiter moving into Taurus at this point. The ability of people to reach out and to get help if they need help in a certain area of their life might be a good piece of advice or a good keyword to keep in mind with that ingress, both in May, as well as just as a longer-term transit over the course of the next year.
CM: Yeah, thatâs definitely what Iâve been telling my clients. Wherever Taurus is in your chart, whatever that signifies for you, when Jupiter gets in there, if youâre asking for somethingâand Jupiter is affirmation, a yesâthen that will hopefully be what you find. And then particularly for Saturnâs challenges in Piscesâif youâre having challenges there in the Pisces part of your chart, where is Saturn gonna look for help? Well, now thereâs actually eyes between them and they can see each other and exchange resources. So that was another really cool point about that.
CB: For sure.
AC: Thatâs a great point. Itâs not only a sign change for Jupiter, but the sign change creates a new and much more favorable angle between Jupiter and Saturn. And, Claire, like you just said, Saturnâs in a Jupiter-ruled sign, so itâs very important. Saturn will be less of a dick if it has a nice aspect to Jupiter, and so it makes those challenges easier to navigate.
CB: Was that Dorotheus I hear you quoting? I think that was an ancient delineation.
CM: Be less of a dick?
AC: It was actually the Medieval Latin translation of Dorotheus.
CB: So there was like a âU-Sâ added to the end or something like that, grammatically?
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay.
AC: It was Church Latin, not Koine Greek.
CB: Okay.
CM: Scholarship.
CB: Right.
AC: And I think thatâs relevant for Jupiter in Taurus. One thing Iâve noticed with a lot of people Iâve known who have a prominent Jupiter in Taurus placement is they love the accumulated weight of good scholarship that people have done. People have already done so much work, why not enjoy that and let that support your own work.
CB: Right.
CM: Right.
AC: Jupiter in Taurus takes knowledge out of the abstract. That 10-volume, 1,200-page set is full of knowledge; itâs right there. Itâs actually hard to carry up the stairs.
CB: Let me avail myself of this, the funny, clichĂŠ of Taurusâone of the negative stereotypes thatâs not necessarily trueâof laziness. But, here, that laziness is just, âI donât need to reinvent the wheel. Let me take advantage of all this scholarship and all this work that other people have done and put it to good use,â in that context.
AC: Yeah, itâs a Venus-ruled sign, take pleasure in it. The Jupiter in Taurus people Iâm thinking ofâjust really take pleasure in well-done work. Like, âUh, itâs such a nice job reviewing the 4th century of Rome.â Itâs not only an âassetâ benefic, but itâs also a pleasure.
CB: Yeah, and also the enjoymentâTaurus and Virgo share this a little bit. Especially with Jupiter thereâthe enjoyment of something thatâs done really well, or done to a high standard, especially of material, physical things. âBespokeâ, is that the keyword for it? Just that trend over the past several years of things being done in a really nice way, or in small, limited batches. Like craftsmen-type things. Like having the ability to do something very well.
CM: My most cherished objects that I value the most highly are all the bespoke ones, for sure.
AC: Yeah, the artisan-crafted whatever.
CB: Right. Okay, so those are the good things that I wanted to make sure we mentioned about the Jupiter in Taurus and the positive things thatâs gonna bring. I have to mention the aspects because thereâs some tense aspects once it goes in that are tied into this whole picture. First, one of the biggest outer planet configurations this month is that as soon as Jupiter goes into Taurus, itâs gonna immediately square Pluto, which is still in Aquarius for a little bit longer at this point before it retrogrades out of Aquarius and moves back into Capricorn in early June. But also, Mars is coming up at this point. Itâs coming up to the end of Cancer, and it finally ingresses into Leo by May 19 and 20, at which point it immediately creates an opposition with Pluto, as well as a square with Jupiter. And aside from some of the eclipse stuff earlier in the month, we get one of our most tense aspectsâthis T-square that occurs between Mars and Jupiter and Pluto around May 20.
CM: Yeah, leading up to this weâve had all this shaky ground with the eclipses and the retrograde, and now things have stabilized a little bit, and hopefully weâll be feeling so fresh and so clean-clean, as you were saying. But the image that I got in my mind was like weâve been used to having this floppy paper plate and not being able to put a ton of food on it. I feel like by the time we get here to this T-square, weâre gonna have this robust stoneware plate, and weâre gonna want to fill it with a bunch of stuffâbut that doesn’t mean that we can actually consume all of it, eat all of it. Itâs just like âeyes bigger than stomachâ, that’s my concern with this. Itâs just like overextending too much.
AC: Itâs very bold.
CM: Yes.
AC: If it was just Mars-JupiterâMar-Jupiter is often favorable. Jupiter often just reigns in Mars just a little bit while also being supportive of assertion and action; your image of âMacho Manâ Randy Savage snapping into Mordor, that hell imagery of Pluto. Let me just say if it was Mars-Jupiter or Mars-Pluto alone, very different. Mars-Pluto is very dark and turbulent. Mars-Pluto will bring up power dynamics in a half-shadowy, uncomfortable way, and then Mars-Jupiter is just raw power enthusiasmâthatâs Randy Savage cutting a promoâand so itâs an interesting combination. One thing I will say is that I would rather have this with Jupiter as part of it than just the Mars-Pluto.
CM: Absolutely.
AC: The Mars-Pluto is just like dark, broody. So with Mars being in such an extroverted sign, prone to explode. Jupiter both supports some of that action and boldness, but tempers it a little bit but doesnât temper it wholly. I think this is one that doesnât have to go one way. I think this configuration will be kind of a disaster for some people and work out really well for other people.
CM: Right.
AC: Thereâs such a difference between Mars-Pluto and Mars-Jupiter in terms of what kind of results we would expect.
CM: Right.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Letâs say Jupiter is the quintessential opportunity making sure that you feel empowered, whoever you are, in pursuing that opportunity vs. if you do sniff around and find anything funky about it then you can be like, âOh, I know astrology. I know Pluto is involved. Iâll be careful.â But that definitely throws a bit of an interesting dynamic into it.
[crosstalk]
AC: Oh, go ahead.
CB: Just those keywords of âpowerâ, and especially âempowermentâ are really good Mars-Pluto-Jupiter keywords in that tension, and thatâs probably one of the major ways to take advantage of that and use it productively around that time. Some people will be able to use it probably for extreme forms of empowerment and forward movement almost to the point of being ruthlessness; like a ruthless focus on oneâs goals and motivations and objectives, almost to the detriment of anything else. And sometimes there can be a useful or a positive way in which to manifest that, and other times that ruthlessness can be not good. Especially with oppositions that can sometimes manifest externally as youâre trying to move forward with something and be enterprising, but youâre having to deal with at the same time extreme levels of pushback and a counter-push from extreme forces that are attempting to get you to do something else, or influence you from the outside.
CM: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, so that Mars-Jupiter is boldness and enthusiasm. And then the question with Pluto is Pluto puts forward this potentially terrifying challenge or environment, which I think you captured Claire with Mordor. Like the threat of annihilation or whatever makes me think ofâwhatâs the fiddle contest with the Devil? Whatâs the name of that song?
CM: Devil Went Down to Georgia?
AC: Yeah, Devil Went Down to Georgia. Itâs a classic, and thereâs a Primus cover thatâs great. But instead of a pro-wrestling match with the Devil, itâs like are you willing to try to suplex the Devil? Will you bet your soul on it? The Pluto is like, are you willing to risk what feels like annihilation in order to obtain whatever the glorious end is? Or does that back you off where youâre like, âIâll suplex maybe a minor devil, but I donât want to face the King of the Underworld?â
CM: Right. And what you were mentioning there about, âDo I? Donât I? How much do I want to get?â thereâs like this kind of wobbly, shakiness to it, that also I feel like is echoed by Jupiter being co-present with Uranus. So whatever ways in which we are trying to grow or expand or have opportunities, with Uranus there itâs like a slightly dangerous opportunity; something out of my comfort zone. So that might be a little highlighted here too, just a little out of the comfort zone maybe. Which is fine, and can be totally awesome in building confidence. And feeling empowered is doing something out of your comfort zone.
AC: So I think just in the news, weâll see people making big moves that are risky.
CM: Yeah.
AC: Do you think thatâs a fair statement?
CM: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah. Even just with Mars-Pluto hard aspects on their own, we often see that. But if you put Pluto in the mix thatâs just gonna amplify that and exaggerate it.
AC: Yeah, Iâd also be surprised if this didnât mark a much more vigorous season of fighting in the Ukraine.
CB: Yeah.
CM: That makes sense.
CB: Just broadly I was thinking Mars-Pluto opposition is tough because thatâs already kind of like violent; Iâve already said ruthless. But also, Mars-Jupiter, weâve seen in the past, can be kind of like an explosive combination. But Iâm hoping that the tense, almost ruthless or violent quality that the Mars-Pluto opposition has, I hope that Jupiter is able to come in and play the role of mediator or peace-broker. And I think weâll see some situations like that where you just have two sides that are just ruthlessly set against each other and unable to find middle-ground because theyâre just completely mutually exclusive. But then having a third party that comes in in an attempt to find some sort of reconciliation between the two of them is one of the potential or broadly positive manifestations I could imagine.
CM: Mm-hmm.
AC: Yeah, itâd be nice.
CB: Yeah. What else? Jupiter-Pluto. Iâve also talked about the manipulation of information in order to attempt to get people to do something which seemed like a previous recurring theme under hard Jupiter-Pluto aspects. So I would pay attention to that also as a potential theme with that Jupiter-Pluto square. We saw a lot of that especially in 2020 when we were seeing the conjunctions between Jupiter and Pluto in Capricorn.
AC: Definitely.
CB: All right, so thatâs the beginning of a couple-month, Mars transit through Leo. So thatâs just the start of a longer-term transit, but it just begins kind of explosively, so itâs not one of those ones thatâll have a slow buildup or something. But itâs just like Mars ingresses, and weâre right into it, and itâs like this is what this transitâs gonna be about. And then a lot of what comes after that is just like dealing with the aftermath of that in some ways.
AC: Yeah, and itâs worth noting that these are all in fixed signs, and fixed signs indicate fixed trajectories. Cardinal signsâlike we were talking about with alligators earlierâitâs like a burst of activity and then, I donât know, kind of a lull. And mutable signs give you this sort of doing a thing and then going and doing something else, and then coming back. With fixed signs you get straight lines, and so thereâs a certainty to the movements that are initiated under fixed sign configurations. Just for reference, even though Mars enters a few days earlier, when the Moon hits Mars in Leo on the 24thâand squares Jupiter and opposes Saturnâif you canât see it by then you need to, like me, get your eyes checked.
CM: Yeah, and that’s a good point too because like it’s not just one day with this one. I mean, even the Jupiter-Mars square is applying and setting itself up before the Jupiter ingress, then Jupiter ingresses. Or maybe thatâs before the Mars ingress. And then even after that, for a few days, then Mars is separating from all that, and then the Moon comes in on the 24th and pings it after all of that. So thereâs like a 10-day swath of time in the middle of Mayâmiddle-endâwhere all of that is gonna be happening.
AC: Yeah, at the same time we have the Mercury-Rahu-Jupiter, there are plans coming together. Oh, is it time to act immediately with certainty? Thereâs a lot brewing.
CM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and something else worth mentioningâMars going into Leo. For some people itâll be just putting in a lot of extra energy and effort, having a burst of energy and a burst of productivity in a certain area of your chart or area of your life. For others though Mars can sometimes bring up strife or conflict or irritations or major setbacks in that area. And one of the things thatâs gonna happen this summer is that Mars is gonna go through that sign and then depart somewhat relatively quickly. But then later in the summer weâre gonna get that Venus retrograde in Leo, which is gonna come in and, on the one hand, hopefully smooth over a little bit of the harshness of what just happened with that Mars transit. But on the other hand, for some people itâs also gonna put a much more extended period of attention on that sign and on that area of our chart at the same time and bring up some relational stuff with Venus, but also doing some looking back and some retrospective looks at that part of our chart or that part of our lives that the Mars transit itself, which begins this month, might first stir up.
AC: Yeah, yeah, Venus is following in the wake of Mars.
CM: Mm-hmm.
AC: Just like you said earlier, Chris, Venus is right nowâand for the first part of the monthâmoving through Gemini, which Mars spent a bunch of time. And then it moves into Cancer, and itâs following Mars there. Although the Venus ingress into Leo doesnât happen this month, Venus will follow Mars into Leo and then stop just shy of the conjunction. And so, yeah, the Mars is a lead-in. Where Mars treads, Venus will follow for the next bit. A quick, quick side note, I just quickly looked it up, and âMacho Manâ Randy Savage had Jupiter in Taurus.
CB: Oh, no. Wow.
CM: He is very robust.
CB: All right, he is our spirit person forâ
CM: Kind of our mascot.
CB: Our mascot for this episode, so Iâm gonna put him back up on the screen. That’s the combination that weâre talking about. And the combination that inspired this image, I think you said, was that specific alignment.
CM: That was what brought him to mind for me, and then I did an AI thing about it.
CB: Okay.
CM: Oh, I love it.
CB: Good. Iâm trying to quickly generate an image of him with the planets in the sky. Itâs not quite working out, but this is the best I could come up with. It looks like heâs standing on Mars, which is not quite what I was trying to get it to depict, but thatâs pretty good.
CM: Is he smiling in one of them?
CB: In one of them, he is. In one of them, he has a weird frown down here on the bottom-right. I donât know whatâs going on there, but good times.
CM: Clearly we have more work to do.
CB: Yeah, weâre still tweaking it, but weâll work on this.
AC: Yeah, see if we can get one with him suplexing the Devil on Mars.
CM: Yeah.
CB: Okay. All right, so weâre now getting into the tail-end of the month and the final things that we wanted to mention. As we get to the very end of the month, what do we have? Where are we at at this point?
AC: Weâve kind of got what we talked about. Everything sort of holds; Mercury’s moving very slowly. So it never conjoins Jupiter or the North Node, but itâs right there for the rest of the month, and then itâs starting to get towards Uranus. But itâs that Mercury-Rahu-Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus. Mars in early Leo departing from the opposition with Pluto. Venus is still in Cancer. This is the shape.
CB: Yeah.
AC: These bold plans for the future. In some cases, bold action pretty immediately from those. In some cases, daring, seemingly, foolhardy, or high-risk with that Pluto energy thrown in. A very sweet Venus in Cancer that feels increasingly loving as it moves into a trine with Neptune in Pisces, and Mars is no longer in the same sign.
CB: Yeah, that trine starts getting pretty close towards the end of the monthâand then goes exact in early Juneâbetween the Venus and Neptune on June 2 at 27 Cancer. I noticed that the Sun hits a square with Saturn on the 27th and 28th of the month. So the Sun hits about 6° of Gemini and squares Saturn on the 6th. And strangely, at the same time, the Moon goes into Virgo and opposes Saturn and squares the Sun at the same time. So weâve got both of the luminaries in Mercury-ruled signs making a hard aspect and creating some tension with that Saturn in Pisces.
CM: Yeah, I was wondering about this one here, this little T-square. That caught my eye too in thinking about the fact that we just had that New Moon at the very end of Taurus, then the Sun enters Gemini. And then this is that first quarter Moon of that lunation cycle. And usually the first quarter Moon is that first square, first little need for adjustment in the month, but then that opposition with Saturn is just emphasizing that point of tension even more. Letâs just say you start a plan in Taurus, this is like the first little speed bump. You gotta take care of this first before âcollecting $200, passing goâ and all of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure âcause Gemini season, with the Sun in Gemini, is usually such a light social energy. But this reminds me that this is the first time weâll have a Gemini season where Saturn is kind of overseeing it and putting a bit of a damper on things by squaring that Sun and forcing there to be a little bit more seriousness and a little bit more reservation to some of the mutable signs than we would see in a normal year, in an average year where Saturn has previously been just doing that to the fixed signs. So having that Sun square I think will be a really interesting initial insight into that and what transits through Gemini are gonna be as we move through the next couple of years, and as Mercury eventually gets into Gemini next month.
AC: Yeah, it makes the Sunâs time in Geminiâespecially the early partâmore dutiful, more obligated, more mandatory, more emotionally-heavy than they would be otherwise. Which may not ruin or destroy what you’re doing, but thereâs a little additional weight. Itâs a little more serious than maybe weâre hoping for.
CB: Yeah.
AC: You have less free time than you were hoping for.
CB: And especially with that Moon hitting the opposition with Saturn at the same time from Virgo. Virgo and Saturn both share that quality of discernment, but also being able to see the errors in things; like errors being really obvious. And so, having that function of being able to see the problems with something starting to arise, but then that being sometimes a good thing that could be used constructively. âCause once youâve identified a problem or something thatâs out of place, you can get rid of that thing hopefully, or at least start working towards that in order to make things run more smoothly.
CM: Yeah, thatâoh, sorry, go ahead.
AC: No, go ahead.
CM: Okay. On that point, when Saturn went into Pisces, that was something I was kind of wondering about myself, just the monthly lunar opposition with Saturn; every month the Moon opposes Saturn. Historically, in the last several years, weâve been having it across Aquarius and Leo, which is just so different. Thereâs not a lot of affinity one way or the other just in a qualitative sense. Leo-Sun, very expressive and outgoing. Aquarius, very objective, separate. And I donât want to dismiss anyone who has placements in Pisces or Virgo. I donât want to dismiss the difficulty of having Saturn there, and then having that lunar opposition across that every month, but there is a qualitative affinity between, like Chris said, the discernment of Virgo and Saturn also being discerning, and both having high standards, but in the name of quality. And that might be kind of a constructive thing, which I donât feel like we had when Saturn was in Aquarius.
CB: Yeah, and especially in Pisces, that Saturn tendency; but sometimes that Virgo tendency of criticalness can be experienced by other people externally. But especially with Saturn in Pisces, I can see that energy being turned internally as well and just being very aware of oneâs faults and oneâs defects in those areas where you have problems that you need to work on. But the identification of that is the first step towards moving towards improvement and self-improvement, especially on an internal level.
CM: Yeah, you gotta see the realistic thingâSaturn. You have to see what is really there. And then with acceptance, Pisces, we can maybe move forward. And then to that point of Valens saying Saturn was âself-deprecatingâ and âhypercriticalâ and pointing that inward, that can be helpful. But staying in the middle of the road with that one, not going into the ditch on either side of just self-loathing, we donât want it to go there necessarily.
CB: Right, for sure. All right, and then immediately after that, Becky in the chat reminds me that I meant to mention our auspicious election for this month, which actually does fall towards the end of the month once we away from eclipse season and then those hard aspectsâthe exact ones at leastâwith Mars and Pluto and everything. So the auspicious election for this month that we picked out is set for May 30, 2023, around 2:45 PM local time. So set the chart for around 2:45 PM locally in your own time, and then adjust the Ascendant until the Ascendant is in early Libra. So what youâll end up with is a chart with Libra rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, which is up there at 24° of Cancer in some of those later degrees of Cancer that Austin was mentioning earlier, where Venus is in pretty good shape at this point in the month, and is moving away from the sextile with Uranus at 20° of Taurus, and itâs moving towards that somewhat flowing trine with Neptune at 27° of Pisces.
So Venus is the ruler of the Ascendant. Itâs up in the 10th house of career, public reputation, and overall life direction, doing a pretty good job and being pretty productive. It has some zodiacal strength and dignity because itâs actually exchanging signs in a mutual reception with the Moon, which is at 15° of Libra. And the Moon is in the 1st house and applying to square with reception with Venus. So thereâs an interchange between the ruler of the 1st house and the ruler of the 10th house of career, which is tying together but also strengthening both of those areas of the chart.
Letâs see, what else is going on here? Weâre well out of the Mercury retrograde. One of the things I would recommend doing if you can in your location is try to pick any degree of Libra rising, but also try to get the degree of the Midheaven if you can in your location to be about 3° or 4° of Cancer. Because if you do that youâll get a nice sextile with Jupiter, and youâll get a nice trine with Saturn, which is gonna help mitigate the 8th house position of Jupiter and make it a little bit more constructive. And itâs also gonna mitigate the 6th house placement of Saturn at 6° of Pisces and make that a little bit more constructive at the same time. So I think this is a really good chart for 10th house matters pertaining to career, reputation, the public, overall life direction and things like because of the ruler of the Ascendant being in the 10th house. Itâs not as good of a chart for 11th house matters pertaining to friends and groups and alliances because it has Mars in the 11th house in a day chart. So if your election or what youâre starting at this time is mainly focused on friends and groups, it might not be great for that. Although there is a little bit of mitigation coming from Jupiter, which is overcoming Mars at this point, and that aspect is separating.
So that is the monthly election for the month, or at least thatâs the best electional chart that Leisa and I were able to find. And we actually have picked out three or four other charts this month that weâre about to record for the Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is available to patrons, where we go through each month and we pick out the four or five most auspicious dates that we can for the month ahead. So you can find out more information about that podcast and get access to it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/elections.
All right, and that kind of brings us to the very, very end of the month at this point. I think weâve actually covered a surprising amount. Weâve covered just about everything. Let me put this ArchetypalExplorer.com transit timeline up that just shows a visual graphic of all the major transits for this month, both the major ones, as well as the minor ones. And it looks like weâve covered just about all of them at this point, yeah?
AC: Yeah, I mean, it only took us two-and-a-half-hours.
CM: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, pretty impressive. Hey, I just released a five-and-a-half-hour podcast episode. So you better thank your lucky stars that I did not turn this into one of those, and we were able to get this month ahead forecast out in a meager two-hours-and-twenty-five-minutes. Yeah, you smile grimacingly slightly.
AC: Oh, Iâm just having flashbacks to recording the yearly. I donât know what the recording time was, but as far as âsitting in the chairâ time, I think it was around seven hours.
CM: That’s a full day.
CB: That was grueling. That was more than a full dayâ
AC: Well, yeah.
CB: Even though it doesnât sound like it. Most normal people think, âSo, what? Everybody does an eight-hour workday?â But talking for that longâI think the way you explained it to me, Austin, recently was youâre using so much brain-computing power to be on for that long, and also thinking and trying to say things and pull up all those memories that your mind-computer is actually running much more than you would think it is. Sort of like those studies of how many calories a chess grandmaster burns while theyâre playing chess ends up being surprisingly high.
AC: Yeah, well, âcause youâre not just talking for six hours. Youâre trying to talk as well as possible while thinking your very best thoughts, and then trying to offer that in a way that is engaging or socially-acceptable or whatever.
CB: Right. Well, Iâm glad to have the ability to do that and sometimes to do those longer episodes. If we were able to do a day-long or a weekend workshop on a topic and just say everything that we know or wanted to say about that topic, thatâs sort of the ability the podcast has afforded me, and us, over the years. So itâs been really cool developing that and having this platform. And I wanted to thank everybody, both in the live chat, and all the patrons that joined us today and gave us some comments because itâs been some actually really useful stuff thatâs actually informed and helped change the scope of the discussion. And thanks to all the listeners as well that listened and support the podcast every month âcause they make it possible. Thank you both for joining me today. Thanks, Claire, for joining us.
CM: Yes.
CB: This was great. You did an amazing job. It was great having you on the forecast. What do you have going on in the future? Where can people find out more information about you?
CM: Yeah, thank you, this has been an honor. Iâm very delighted to be here. What do I got going on? I am on a website, www.aligninglightastrology.com. Bookings are wide open all the time. I am doing a couple of offerings on YouTube every month. I do my own forecast at the end of every month, live on YouTube. I also do more of a student-focused, Q&A on just general astrology, chat-chat time. Itâs likeâwhat is it? The second Thursday of every month, 7:00 PM Central Time over on YouTube. Other than that, I am doing personal exploration/research based on a technique that I got from Ancient Astrology, Volume 1 from Demetra George called âthe Moon under bondâ. Thereâs an offering on my website for research consultation if anyoneâs interested in that. I need help. I need people. So if you want to help me demonstrate that technique, that would be great. But, yeah, I think thatâs about it.
CB: Awesome. And, yeah, your YouTube channel is youtube.com/aligninglightastrologyâall one word, right?
CM: Correct, yep.
CB: Cool. All right, and Iâll put a link to that in the description below the video, or on the description page on the podcast website. How about you, Austin? I guess your main thing is you got that big conference coming up.
AC: Yeah, for me, Iâll be doing the pre-conference workshop at NORWAC on planetary trios. Then I have a lecture on the natural years of the planets, and then a lecture on the Lot of the Father as applied to the charts of the Menendez brothers who quite famously murdered their father, and itâs a sordid tale that the astrology tells beautifully. But much more interesting than any of that is Sphere + Sundry is due to announce on May 23 what I refer to as the âManhattan Projectâ, which is clearly a magnum opus. This is a project Kait has been working on actively since 2018, and itâs finally going to be announced. And I canât give any details about it yet, but itâs fucking fantastic, and itâs sort of a new, high-water mark for astrological magic. So thatâs coming on the 23rd.
CB: Nice. So people can sign up for the Sphere + Sundry newsletter for that at sphereandsundry.com. Is that the best way, or social media?
AC: Or they could just keep the window open and feverishly refresh. There’s actually a countdown timer on the website now.
CB: Oh, nice. Okay, I like that. So you can just watch until it happens, until the mystery is revealed.
AC: Yeah, and it’s a magnum opus, âmagnum Oppenheimerâ, I donât know.
CB: Yeah, and that movieâs coming out, Oppenheimer, this summer. So thatâs funny that this has been like a recurring theme for us in this episode.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully this episode is âthe bombâ, Chris.
CB: Exactly, Austin. All right, well, Iâll put a link to your website in the description page for this episode. Itâs austincoppock.com and sphereandsundry.com. As for myself, Iâm gonna just keep doing the podcastâthat’s gonna be my focusâand continue doing research and episodes. Iâm hoping to do an episode on Heliodora soon, and Iâm also working on an episode on an ancient astrologer. And, yeah, so Iâm basically just gonna keep doing these great workshops on the podcast. And if you want to support that work, or if you listen to the podcast frequently and youâd like to give something back, you can sign up for my Patreon at patreon.com/astrologypodcast, and get early access to new episodes or other subscriber benefits like exclusive podcast episodes. So thatâs it for this forecast. Thanks everyone for watching or listening, and weâll see you again next month.
[credits]
A special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including: Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it then please consider becoming a patron through our page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast, such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information visit Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ‘ASTROLOGYPODCAST’.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code âAP15â to get a 15% discount. For Mac users we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code âASTROPODCAST15â 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.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation in how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theAstrologySchool.com.
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. Thanks also to the StarScribe Astrology and Journaling App, which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign through April 22, 2023 to fund an exciting new mobile app for astrologers. Find out more information at StarScribe.co. Finally, thanks also to the Northwest Astrology Conference, which is happening May 25-29, 2023, just outside of Seattle. This year’s conference is gonna be a hybrid conference where you can either attend online or in person. Find out more information at norwac.net.