The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 4, titled:
The Astrology of the 2012 Presidential Election
With Chris Brennan and guest Patrick Watson
Episode originally released on September 19, 2012
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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 September 3, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hello, I’m Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 18, 2012, and this is the 4th episode of the show. You can find the show at TheAstrologyPodcast.com, and you can also find us on iTunes.
My co-host today is Patrick Watson of The Political Astrology Blog and our topic is The Astrology of the 2012 Presidential Election in the United States. During the course of the show, we talk about our work on the 2012 election, including predictions we’ve made about who will win in November. Other topics include things such as a discussion of Obama and Romney’s natal charts, the inception charts of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the Mercury retrograde on Election Day, and the inauguration chart on January 20, 2013. So with that introduction out of the way let’s get started with the show. Patrick, welcome to the show.
PATRICK WATSON: Thank you very much for having me.
CB: Yeah, thanks for being on. We’ve been working a lot together over the past few months. Although I guess I’ve known you since—when was it? About 2004-2005?
PW: I think it was the Sun-Venus superior conjunction in 2005 in Aries.
CB: Oh, okay.
PW: Yeah, it was March-April of 2005.
CB: That’s very romantic. You know our transits for when we first met.
PW: I do. But yeah, we have been working together for the past several months—even the past several years on The Political Astrology Blog.
CB: Yeah, we started The Political Astrology Blog in—what was it—like late 2008, early 2009, just after the 2008 election.
PW: That’s right. That’s right. January-something 2009. It’s on the website.
CB: We have an electional chart for that, don’t we?
PW: We do. We do. It’s a pretty good one. A pretty good one.
CB: Yeah, so I guess we started the blog—The Political Astrology Blog—after the 2008 election, which was just so exciting for astrologers because of, you know, the birth data issues and tracking the candidates, and having such an exciting and unexpected election. You know, Hillary was the frontrunner, but then all of a sudden Obama comes out of nowhere and takes the Democratic nomination. Then there was all this controversy surrounding his birth certificate, which was then subsequently released. It was just a very exciting election. But it definitely underscored the, you know, need for astrologers to collect better data, not just from natal charts, but also times for candidates launching their campaigns or getting the nomination or what have you. And that’s kind of, I guess, what set the stage for our website.
PW: Definitely. Definitely. It definitely brought astrologers into the realm of social media and blogging, I think, with respect to news and world events. I think that’s when we kind of all really got onboard with it. It was a very big happening thing, so we definitely got on at the right time, I think.
CB: Yeah. And you did a lot of work over the past three years in collecting data—chart data—for the launch of the different presidential campaigns and basically just keeping track of whose birth data we had and whose we didn’t and what the source was and how reliable it was. You even scored Paul Ryan’s birth time. And we got a lot of traffic and a lot of press for that a few months ago when you…
PW: I did.
CB: …accurately got Paul Ryan’s birth time in June. And we published on The Political Astrology Blog long before he was selected as Romney’s running mate.
PW: I mean, he had been talked about in the press, but it was definitely a great boon for the astrological community that we were able to get that. And it was fairly easy in contrast to a lot of other presidential candidates’ data out there.
CB: Right.
PW: His was fairly straightforward.
CB: Yeah.
PW: So it was worth a look.
CB: So that brings us basically to our topic today, which is the 2012 presidential election. And so, I thought that I would have you on to just talk about some of the events and some of the astrology surrounding that election, and some of the things that we’ve been researching and focusing on, as well as how other astrologers have been looking at the campaigns.
PW: Indeed. That would be great to talk about.
CB: Okay.
PW: So we released our prediction for the 2012 presidential election.
CB: Yeah, we made our prediction back in late April. We were already planning on releasing it, and we released it to coincide with—we had an interview with that reporter from ABC who contacted us not about the 2012 election, but actually about the 2016 election because there was a lot of speculation about whether Hillary Clinton would run. And she asked us to look at the astrology of the issue, and we did, and it looked actually pretty good for her running again in 2016, I believe.
PW: Yeah, I mean, some of the same techniques we used for that prediction were some of the ones we used for our 2012 election. And then Fox News actually got in contact with us about that ABC article, and they actually interviewed Chris Brennan on Fox & Friends, a clip which you can still see on Mediaite. For some reason you can’t see it on the Fox News website. They didn’t keep it. But the clip is out there if you want to see it.
CB: Yeah, it’s posted on our blog. And that was a very surreal day. And you kind of let me do that one. I represented both of us.
PW: Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty cool. It was pretty surreal to actually see you up on the screen, with your name right there and the link. That was pretty amazing.
CB: Yeah. So let’s get to the 2012 election.
PW: Indeed.
CB: So there’s different approaches. There’s a lot of different approaches that astrologers can take and have taken in order to make a prediction for the outcome of this election. So some of the different methods that have been used to forecast the election this time around, the one that we actually primarily used was to focus on the natal charts of the candidates. So you take the birth chart of the candidate and then you apply different techniques in order to see if their birth chart for that individual looks like they’re about to win the presidency a year or two from whenever you’re looking at their chart.
That’s the approach that we took. But there’s also a number of other ways that you can look at the astrology of an election. One of the things that you can do, that we also took into account, was the announcement times for the campaigns, like the inceptional chart or electional chart for when the campaign actually begins. And I think you were able to collect data for most of the major campaigns. You got Obama and Romney’s campaign launch charts, correct?
PW: Yes, Romney’s, we definitely have. We definitely have Romney’s. Obama’s was more complicated because instead of making a traditional announcement, he released a web video. And I was able to get down to the second when that video was uploaded, but I don’t have the advantage of knowing the exact location of where that video was uploaded. And then we also had to consider the symbolic moment for his reelection announcement, just when the video was uploaded to YouTube or when it was actually distributed and dispersed among reporters and supporters.
So his is kind of hazy. We don’t really have an exact time or location on the day, but we do know it’s April 4, 2011. And the transits on that day by themselves are very interesting and very informative and do have very definite connections and correlations with the inauguration chart and Obama’s chart. But we don’t have the absolute pristine moment that we get when a candidate makes a speech in person. And that’s kind of a consequence of the new media environment that we’re in when candidates can make virtual announcements. I had a similar issue with Newt Gingrich who also did a similar thing releasing his announcements via YouTube, as well as with a few other candidates who announced via Twitter, or they had pre-announcements. So is the pre-announcement the real time, or is the actual announcement the real time?
CB: Right. And then with Paul Ryan?
PW: Right. There were a lot of complications.
CB: With Paul Ryan, Romney actually had an application. Like an iPhone application or something where they promised to release the announcement to the followers first before anybody else made it. So there was this question about when they released that. I think we were able to track down the time when they actually made that announcement. But then like an hour or two later, Romney actually got up and officially announced in front of a crowd that Paul Ryan was his running mate. And so, there’s this question about which chart is the correct chart in that instance and so on and so forth.
PW: Although there’s really interesting information you can get out of getting the precise time of an announcement, you can also get very interesting bits of information just from looking at the general transits from that day and looking at how they fit into a kind of larger narrative. Sometimes astrology isn’t just microscopic, but you can also zoom out and see how things fit into the larger picture. But the precise moment is preferred.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so that’s another approach, the inception or electional charts—for all we know—of the announcement times of the campaigns. I’ve been rereading Joan Quigley’s book—Reagan’s astrologer—and she actually did electional charts for the launch of Reagan’s 1980—and definitely his 1985 successful reelection campaign—presidential campaign. So politicians have been known to use astrologers in some instances. And that’s definitely come up as a question for us with some of these different electional charts for different announcements and the start of different events during this campaign season. You know, to what extent are some of these charts just naturally really good and look like really auspicious electional charts from the standpoint of traditional electional astrology, or to what extent is it actually being rigged? Is somebody actually deliberately going out of their way to select certain times or certain dates to initiate certain things as a result of astrology?
PW: I guess the cop-out answer would be possibly some amount of both. But that’s a very interesting question. I mean, that sort of brings it all right back down to whether you think astrology’s fate or free will.
CB: Joan Quigley says that after Reagan launched his campaign on a certain day in 1985—‘cause I guess it was at a weird time, like 10:00 AM. She says that astrologers across the nation knew that Reagan had an astrologer, but they didn’t know who it was. And she said there was some sort of bulletin in AFA Journal at the time to that effect. I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t followed up if astrologers actually know or knew that Reagan was electing stuff. But there’s this issue where, you know, sometimes it is hard to tell whether something is naturally good because you have some major like a presidential campaign—and potentially a successful presidential campaign—launched at a naturally-auspicious time because it was going to be successful, or, you know, whether it’s being elected. It’s very hard, I think, sometimes to tell the difference unless there’s something like really weird about the way that they timed it.
PW: In that respect, Obama’s announcement was kind of strange because it may not necessarily have been an astrologically-determined time to release the video, but they did choose April 4 because it made the numbers ‘4 and 4’, ‘cause he’s the 44th president.
CB: Oh, okay.
PW: And I think the video might have even been released close to 4:00 AM.
CB: Okay. Well, that’s cute, but that’s not astrological necessarily.
PW: I don’t know if it’s astrological necessarily. But yeah, sometimes the decisions aren’t always made so pragmatically. There could be other weird things to take into account with timing by politicians.
CB: Yeah. Like that didn’t come up so much in the announcement charts for the campaigns, but that definitely started to come up during the conventions.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: That’s the third approach that one could take and that some people are taking to predicting the outcome of the presidential election, which is the nomination charts and the acceptance charts for the national conventions which just took place at the end of August and beginning of September. So this is the time when you either have the nomination chart, which is the time when the party officially nominates and all of the delegates, I guess, ratify the nomination of their respective candidate. And then at the end of the convention, the main candidate accepts the nomination formally and officially becomes the nominee of their party.
And so, we have charts for that because we watched the conventions very closely and got all of those times over the past few weeks. We’ll come back to those and talk about those a little bit later. But those charts definitely—some of those were kind of weird. And even the charts for the start of the conventions themselves kind of raised some questions for some astrologers about whether or not they were elected.
PW: And then another thing that people use to try to determine the winner is to compare the natal charts against the natal chart of the United States, the country itself. Although there’s a lot of disagreement about what is the true chart of the United States. Everyone has their own opinions. I don’t think I even have one yet. Although I’m partial to July 4, 1776 and sort of consider that to be the birthday of the country, there are other charts out there.
CB: Yeah, the birth chart for the US is like a long-running controversy and there’s a bunch of different charts. I guess there’s two main ones that people use, which are either the Sagittarius rising chart, which is also known as the ‘Sibley’ chart, and then there’s the Gemini rising chart, which is a little questionable because it has a lot of adherence. And apparently there was an astrologer in the 19th century who predicted, I believe, Lincoln’s assassination based on the Gemini rising chart. However, that chart basically stipulates that the Constitution would have been elected and it would have been signed at like two in the morning or something, so it’s somewhat historically improbable. There’s also the Scorpio rising chart for the United States, which has some proponents. And actually a guy on Dell Horoscope recently predicted that Romney would win based on the Scorpio rising chart of the United States. So there are some people that are basing their predictions largely on the birth chart of the United States.
PW: And then there was even the late astrologer, Alan White, who preferred to use, I believe, July 4, 1775, the Declaration of War, of taking up arms.
CB: Right.
PW: Essentially, he called it the ‘War’ chart and considered it to be the United States chart, which was a Libra rising chart.
CB: Right.
PW: Which is fairly eminent, and he did have a lot of very interesting examples. But again, this is a very controversial field.
CB: Yeah. I guess my issue with that approach of using the birth chart for the US is that there’s so much controversy surrounding what chart is used. Ultimately, it becomes somewhat subjective. I guess to some extent you could make that case for any approach, but with this especially because you don’t have an objective, agreed-upon chart that everyone agrees on. It does introduce a higher degree of subjectivity versus, let’s say, the natal charts where, you know, we know pretty well approximately when each of the candidates were born, issues related to ‘birtherism’ aside.
PW: Right, as well as announcement times of campaigns, I mean, aside from the issues we brought up with those. Or the nomination charts of the conventions. A lot of those times are a little more cut-and-dry than national charts are.
CB: Right.
PW: And then what else do people use?
CB: People also use mundane charts. That’s probably, I think, the fifth option. Like, for example, the Aries ingress where you cast a chart for the moment that the Sun ingresses into Aries in order to cast a chart for the entire year. This was like a very popular technique in Medieval mundane astrology around the 8th or 9th century. I believe Nina Gryphon is the primary advocate of this approach at the moment. And she did a study of all of the elections over the past hundred or two hundred years and came to the conclusion that Obama would win based on the Aries ingress chart for this year.
PW: In fact, she presented that finding at the last UAC presentation, where Chris also presented essentially the prediction that we were able to make on the blog.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah, in New Orleans this past May.
CB: There was a panel at the United Astrology Conference in May of 2012. And there were five astrologers on the panel, and I was one of them, and there were different astrologers that represented different traditions. So there was me representing Hellenistic primarily at least. There was Gary Christen who was representing Uranian astrology. Edith Hathaway was representing Indian astrology. There was Nina Gryphon who was representing Medieval astrology, and there was Claude Weiss who was representing modern astrology. And all of us came to the conclusion, based on our differing techniques and approaches and traditions, that Obama would win the election. And I think there were some astrologers that agreed—or a lot of astrologers that agreed with us. Some astrologers I found did not or came to different conclusions that Romney would win. But I’m still in the process of gathering up all of those different predictions for an article on the blog.
PW: So how exactly did we come with our prediction on the blog, Chris?
CB: Well, let’s transition to that in just a second. First, one more approach. There’s one other approach that people take, and I do want to mention this really quick. I’ve seen a few people doing it. It’s come up a couple of times in the past year or two. ‘Cause there’s four branches of astrology. There’s always traditionally been four branches. There’s mundane astrology, which we’ve mentioned. There’s natal astrology, there’s electional astrology, and then there’s horary astrology. And there are some astrologers I’ve seen who are trying to use horary astrology in order to predict the outcome of the election, and I think that this is a mistake.
PW: Bad idea.
CB: Yeah, a bad idea because I personally think that it rests on a flawed understanding of what horary is and what it’s about. And it kind of violates two very important rules in horary because the basic premise is that you can cast a chart for when somebody poses an important question to an astrologer, and the astrologer casts a chart for the moment that they receive the question. And that chart will not only reflect the nature of the question itself, but it can also reflect the outcome of the question. It can give you the answer to the question basically in the chart.
PW: But you can’t just ask any question to an astrologer. You can’t pose the question “Two plus two equals what?” to an astrologer. And you can’t ask questions that are not directly relevant to you or aren’t directly inspired by some urgent matter of no trivial concern that does concern you personally or someone very, very close to you. And so, for that reason the only people who really could ask who will win the 2012 election would have to be Obama or Romney, or possibly their spouses or the campaign manager, but not just anyone. Don’t mean to sound elitist, but I don’t think you can ask questions and expect them to be meaningful.
CB: Yeah, I mean, this is a legitimate debate within the contemporary astrological community about the nature of horary and what works and what doesn’t. But I think there’s a fair amount of people who agree—or practitioners of horary who agree that the question has to be important. It has to be just important on its own. It can’t just be like, “What will I eat for lunch today?” It has to be about important matters. But, two, it has to be personally important and relevant to you. If you’re asking a question about the election that hundreds of thousands of other people are also asking, that’s not personally relevant.
And there’s actually, you know, hundreds of astrologers who’ve asked themselves that same question. Some of them have cast charts and not every one of those charts is gonna be valid. I would argue—and I think there are a decent amount of horary astrologers that would argue—that unless you have a hugely personal investment in winning the election (because you’re actually one of the candidates, like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney), you asking a horary question is not gonna produce a valid or relevant chart.
PW: The chart might only reflect to you thinking about the election or who your preference might be for president, but it can’t provide an actual answer for who will win the election. So I do see it to be kind of fruitless exercise in futility.
CB: Yeah. So there’s some debate about this, but that’s our position on this issue based on our own experience and work with horary over the past several years, but I guess that’s a debate that still is gonna continue to be had. But that’s the last approach that I wanted to mention. Even aside from all those different approaches there’s also different traditions of astrology that have their own unique approach to each of these areas.
So there’s Indian astrology. There’s Hellenistic. There’s Uranian astrology. There’s Medieval astrology. There’s modern astrology. So there’s a bunch of different traditions that will then apply the different branches, like natal or electional or mundane astrology, in different ways. So based on that there’s a number of different angles basically that you could look at this subject from. I think now what we’ll do is instead of talking about all of those different angles, we’ll sort of focus in on our approach and what we looked at when we were trying to make our official prediction for The Political Astrology Blog about the outcome of the 2012 election. Yeah, so let’s get into that. Let’s talk a little bit about our approach. So what was our primary approach in our official prediction, Patrick?
PW: We primarily used a Hellenistic timing procedure called zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Spirit, which times peak periods in a person’s career. And essentially our methodology was that we looked back in a person’s career and looked back at times that they were successful or unsuccessful and then looked for repetitions, and then were able to come to and answer about what would happen to the candidates around the time of the election based on what had happened to them before in their lives.
CB: Right. I mean, our approach was primarily natal. So we weren’t paying attention so much to mundane astrology. We weren’t taking into account or putting our emphasis on the launch times of the campaigns or the nomination charts, since we didn’t have the nomination charts. We primarily focused on the birth charts of Romney and Obama. I guess our primary technique was just that 2nd century Hellenistic timing technique that’s used to time periods of heightened importance and eminence in a person’s career. But a lot of the work that you did in researching it was very useful.
Basically what we did is we looked to see what parts of the person’s chart were activated during the span of time around Election Day, and then we looked at past times in Obama and Romney’s charts, or in their lives, when the same parts of their chart were, again, activated. And what we found was some really interesting correlations where it seemed like the types of periods that Obama is in right now and leading up to the election are very similar to periods in the past in which he’s been successful, or in which he’s won elections. Whereas for Romney, the periods that he’s in now and around the time of the election specifically have correlated with periods of difficulty or loss, or even in one instance, of humiliation in the past. And so, to the extent that the activation of those parts of his chart coincided with difficulties in the past, it seems like a repetition of the same activations will similarly coincide with the repetition of some difficulties in the future at the time of the election.
PW: And even without knowing the exact historical specifics of what happened with each candidate, you’re still able to tell just from the general nature of the planets involved that these periods would need to be very good or very bad for the candidates. So the astrology was able to describe these patterns and periods in their lives without even having to know that Obama won the 2008 election under a similar period that he’s going through at the time of the 2012 election. But, as we also found, it might not be as incredibly simple as last time. We also took transits into account, as well as profections, annual profections, a time-lord technique which organizes transits into ranks of importance, as well as highlighting signs which will become important for the various transiting planets they’re going through. For example, Obama is currently in his Taurus annual profection. So this means that transits through Taurus, as well as transits to and from the planet Venus, will be of heightened importance during the year.
CB: Yeah, so we didn’t just take zodiacal releasing into account obviously. That was our primary technique because it’s so useful for timing peak periods in a person’s career and eminence. But we also looked at transits, of course, which are the mainstay of modern predictive astrology, as well as profections, which is, again, an ancient timing technique, but it’s very useful for determining which transits are gonna be the most important in a person’s life. But even with the transits, you have to be careful with the transits because sometimes you can see difficult transits, but they don’t necessarily mean that the person is going to lose the election.
For example, one of the things that we were concerned about—and that probably would have thrown us off if we only paid attention to transits—was Saturn’s ingress into Scorpio into Obama’s 10th house in whole sign houses. And this is problematic for him because Obama has a night chart, and so Saturn is the more difficult of the two malefics. Whereas for Romney, he has a day chart, so Saturn is not as difficult for him and it’s just ingressing into his 6th house. Basically the conclusion that we came to, of Saturn ingressing, is that it wouldn’t cost Obama the election, but will indicate some difficulties for the first couple of years of his second term. And I guess you’re in the process of working on an article about that, right, Patrick?
PW: Yeah, essentially Obama will be experiencing a Saturn return of his career choice, in a sense. Saturn returns aren’t just things that you experience at ages 29 to 30, but 29 to 30 years from any given point in your life is a Saturn return for whatever was happening at that time. So 30 years ago, when Saturn ingressed into Scorpio was when Obama’s father died, and he had to get serious about his life and decided to become a community organizer, which is what led him into politics, and is all coming back full circle now at this time and usually indicates a period of trial and judgment for the decisions that he’s made since that time and in his career. Which is really funny because the 10th, you know, does have these associations with one’s career, as well as with one’s father. And Saturn is also indicative of a father figure. So it is interesting that he had all those things happen to him at that time. The last transit through Scorpio was fairly difficult, but ultimately he was able to use it somewhat constructively. We will see how that will turn out for him this November.
CB: So basically it was a difficult period for him, but it was also a very crucial or pivotal period that was important to his overall life direction.
PW: Absolutely. It was when he first moved to Chicago, which was when he first started his work as a community organizer and started working as politician soon after Saturn moved into Sagittarius.
CB: Okay. I mean, just generally speaking, that’s kind of the delineation that one would expect in the most general sense with Saturn ingressing into his 10th whole sign house…
PW: Exactly.
CB: …because it’s the ruler of his Ascendant. He has Aquarius rising, so Saturn is the ruler of his Ascendant, and it’s the planet that’s in some ways setting his life direction or his life course.
PW: That’s a great observation, yeah.
CB: Yeah, so Saturn in the 10th for him is gonna be extremely important and pivotal, but it’s gonna also have some difficulties because it’s the malefic that’s contrary to the sect. Because Saturn’s a ‘daytime’ planet, and he was born with a night chart, which tends to draw out some of the more difficult significations of Saturn.
PW: And there are some things that we’ll be talking about later on that may indicate what those troubles could be about based on the inauguration chart. But we’ll have to get back to that later.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. And speaking of Obama’s 10th house, one of the things we also took into account was the eclipses. And there’s a major eclipse happening in Scorpio in November.
PW: Right. That is correct. I mean, eclipses have generally been associated with the rise and fall of kings and leaders and the fate of peoples. And this pattern is very clear in Obama’s chart, especially because he was born very close to an eclipse himself, but also because it ties in generally with this kind of topic, with the fate of large masses of people, as well as the leaders who lead them.
CB: Obama was an eclipse in Leo?
PW: It was an eclipse on Leo. He was born very close to an eclipse in Leo, which occurred very, very close to his Descendant, I think within a degree. But as far as the eclipses go for the 2012 election, it’s sort of interesting to consider that he won the Super Tuesday primaries in 2008. I mean, the race wasn’t over on that day, but he won those contests, which eventually put him on the road to becoming the nominee, and that happened while there was an eclipse happening on his Ascendant. And then the next eclipse that happened was the following January, very close to the day that he was inaugurated. So there is a very interesting pattern of eclipses which is happening with Obama. And then the same thing is happening with Romney. This past May, he had an eclipse happen on his Ascendant just like what happened to Obama. And at the time of the election—or at least three weeks after the election—there will be another eclipse, which will be very close to a lot of the planets and points in all of the various candidates’ charts.
And for Obama, there’s a very interesting parallel where when he became the nominee in 2008, the nodes were crossing over his Ascendant. So any eclipses that would happen in that time would be happening around his Ascendant or Descendant axis. And now at this time, the nodes are going across his Midheaven. I mean, the eclipses will happen across his Midheaven and IC axis. So we’re seeing an interesting kind of correlation here. Obama started winning in the primaries and he became president while eclipses were happening in his 1st house. And now, as he’s going to become re-elected there will be another eclipse right after Election Day, which will be happening in his 10th. So there’s an interesting correlation going on there between like the two most important houses in his chart and where these eclipses are happening.
CB: Yeah. And the eclipses, well, especially the nodes, came up as being very significant. I was actually very surprised at how significant they became within the context of the conventions, the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention. So yeah, let’s transition into talking about those. So the Republican National Convention took place at the very end of August, and then the DNC, the Democratic Convention took place at the beginning of September. We got a bunch of different charts for that. We got the opening times of the conventions themselves. And the Republican one was really interesting because the convention was delayed by, what was it, Hurricane Isaac…
PW: Yeah.
CB: …which hit. The media was freaking out ‘cause it was about to hit New Orleans on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. And so, that threatened to completely disrupt the entire Republican National Convention. And, in fact, they did not hold any lectures the first day. They basically were supposed to have a bunch of speeches on the first day, but instead they delayed them until the following day.
PW: Yep, they still started.
CB: Yeah.
PW: They still actually decided to start it then, which is very interesting, which is one of those things that kind of makes astrologers scratch their heads. Well, why would they actually put themselves in physical danger to make sure that it starts?
CB: Yeah, it was really weird. Even though they did not have any speeches that day, the head of the Republican National Committee still gavelled into order the convention at exactly 2:00 PM. What was the day? It was like August 27?
PW: Let’s see. I have it somewhere on the blog.
CB: Okay, well, you find the chart. But basically he opened up the convention at 2:00 PM, and then immediately, just a minute later, put it into recess. I saw an article in the media that said that the bylaws or the rules of the convention stipulated that they had to open that day, the day that they had planned for and scheduled, but there’s still something weird about it. And the other thing that’s, you know, curious about it is that it was actually not a bad chart. It was a pretty good inception or electional chart from the standpoint of, you know, general electional rules. It wasn’t great. Like it wasn’t a spectacular electional chart.
The DNC chart was really good from an electional standpoint. The RNC chart was pretty good, but it was only pretty good because that’s all that was available basically in late August when the RNC had their convention. And basically if I was their astrologer, I probably would have picked the same chart. And sometimes when you feel that way, when an astrologer’s like, “Yeah, I would have gone with that chart,” that’s when you start realizing that something’s going on. So yeah, there’s an open question about that and there was a lot of speculation about whether or not the RNC chart was elected. Did you find the chart?
PW: No.
CB: No. Okay.
PW: It was late August. It’s on the blog.
CB: Okay. Actually I have that chart. What am I saying? It opened on, yeah, August 27, 2012 at 2:00 PM in Tampa, Florida. And we have it on The Political Astrology Blog. “The 2012 Conventions Horoscope Comparison” is the title of the article where we recapped the astrology of the conventions basically. Anyway, so this chart, it was an inception chart—maybe it was an electional chart, who knows—but it had Sagittarius rising at 4 Sagittarius rising, which is actually kind of interesting because Ryan, Paul Ryan has Sagittarius rising and Mitt Romney has Gemini rising. And it was curious because I think one astrologer commented on our Facebook page that perhaps the convention would magnify Paul Ryan more than Mitt Romney. I mean, to some extent, certainly that worked out in so much as Ryan did pretty well in his speech. Although I thought, for all intents and purposes, that Mitt Romney did pretty well as far as what he was going for also.
Anyway, so the chart has Sagittarius rising, Jupiter, the ruler of the Ascendant, is in Gemini in the 7th house. Some would say that that’s in detriment, which is true, but it’s not that bad. It’s configured to Mercury, its ruler, by a sextile, and Mercury is up in the 9th. Jupiter’s in a day chart, so it’s the most benefic planet in the chart. It’s not aspecting Mars. Mars is over in Scorpio, so it’s completely in aversion to or unaspecting Jupiter. Similarly, Mars in the 12th is not afflicting any other planets in the chart, so that’s pretty good. The Moon is at 16 Capricorn, and it’s in the 2nd house, and it’s applying to an opposition with Venus in the 8th. So it’s kind of good for financial matters. It’s applying to a benefic across the 2nd house/8th house axis.
I mean, generally speaking, it’s not a bad chart. Basically the ruler of the Ascendant’s doing okay. It’s a benefic. It’s angular. It’s not afflicted. It’s not terribly strong, but it’s still pretty good. The Moon, similarly, is not afflicted, and it’s applying to a benefic. So basically two of the main things that you look for in an electional chart are doing reasonably well. Yeah, so that’s the RNC chart. The DNC chart, on the other hand, for the start of their convention, we didn’t really have any weirdness surrounding the start of that one, right? It just started at 5:00 PM exactly on September 4.
PW: On September 4.
CB: Right.
PW: In Charlotte, North Carolina.
CB: Yeah. And there wasn’t anything that sort of stood out as being particularly weird about the starting time, not like with the RNC where they delayed the convention for a day, but for some reason still opened it for five minutes. But this one, they basically just opened up. And this is a really fantastic electional chart. Some people might charge me as being partisan or something like that, but I say that from the standpoint of somebody that does electional charts for clients and who is often looking to find auspicious electional charts where the ruler of the Ascendant is well-placed and where the Moon is well-placed. By ‘well-placed’ I mean being in one of the signs that they favor—like being in their own sign—or being in the sign of their exaltation.
PW: And making favorable applications.
CB: Yeah, applying to benefics and not being configured to malefics. Being angular or at least being in one of the ‘good’ houses that are configured to the Ascendant rather than being in one of the ‘bad’ houses that are not configured to the Ascendant. There’s like this whole list of things you can go through that you look for in a good electional chart, and this one really fits a lot of them. There’s only one really glaring issue with this electional chart.
PW: Right. Oh, yeah, the Moon’s applying to Mars. But you said that the Moon applied to Mars almost to the exact same time that it applies a trine to Mercury?
CB: Yeah, so let’s give a layout of the chart. So the chart has 20 Capricorn rising. So Capricorn’s rising. So Saturn is the ruler of the Ascendant and it’s placed in Libra in the 10th whole sign house, in the sign of its exaltation, in a day chart. So Saturn is less malefic in a day chart. It’s angular. It’s configured to both Venus, which has a superior square to Saturn, and Venus is Saturn’s domicile lord, so there’s reception. It has a very wide sign-based, superior trine from Jupiter over in Gemini. And it’s in aversion to Mars, the most malefic planet in the chart.
PW: It’s a pretty slamming Saturn.
CB: Yeah. Basically, from a traditional standpoint, you almost can’t get a better Saturn placement than that.
PW: It might even be in its own bounds. It looks close enough to the end of the sign.
CB: It’s got triplicity. No, it’s in Venus’ bound. Well, it’s in a mutual reception with Venus by bounds or term.
PW: It’s a great Saturn.
CB: Yeah, it’s one of the best Saturn’s you could possibly get. It would be kind of difficult to find something better than that. And the Moon, similarly, is also doing really well. The Moon is in the 5th house. It’s in one of the most positive houses.
PW: It’s approaching its exaltation degree.
CB: Right. It’s in Taurus, so it’s in the sign of its exaltation. It’s actually very close to its exaltation degree. It’s also Venus, which is in Cancer, in the 7th. It’s in a mutual reception with the Moon. So not only is the Moon exalted, but it’s also exchanged signs with Venus, which gives it even more strength by sign. The downside is that it’s applying to an opposition with Mars within about 5°. So the Moon is at 2 Taurus and Mars is at 7 Scorpio. And this is problematic because Mars is the most malefic planet in the chart because it’s the malefic that’s contrary to the sect. It’s a nighttime planet, nighttime malefic in a daytime chart, which really amps up the maleficence of Mars’ significations.
But what’s weird about it, though, is that the Moon’s also applying to a trine with Mercury in Virgo at the same time. And what happened is that the following day—I actually followed and animated the chart and the ephemeris—the Moon completed the exact opposition with Mars at 8°-and-something minutes of Scorpio at the exact same time that it completed the trine with Mercury. It’s really weird. I must say I’ve never seen that before. I very rarely see a third planet complete a configuration with two other planets at the exact same time, like down to the minute. It almost took the edge off of that opposition from Mars because it completed the trine with Mercury at the same time.
Some Hellenistic astrologers like Vettius Valens would also say probably that some of the difficulty of that opposition was taken off as a result of the dignity of the Moon and Mars because the Moon is exalted and Mars is in its own domicile. Valens says that in the charts of eminent people, when they have an opposition or a difficult aspect between dignified planets that it’s not as difficult for the native. And I think that that would apply to electional astrology as well.
PW: All those planets are in good signs, either their exaltation or their domicile.
CB: Yeah, almost every planet. The only ones that aren’t are the Sun and Jupiter. So it’s like Mars is in Scorpio, its own traditional domicile. Saturn’s exalted in Libra. Venus is in a mutual reception with the Moon, or it’s exchanged signs at least, which is a type of mutual reception. And I know there’s some Medieval astrologers who are probably yelling at me that that’s not mutual reception. But I’m using the term ‘mutual reception’ in the sense of an exchange of signs between two planets.
PW: Now what exactly happened at the DNC that might explain what that opposition and trine were about? Wasn’t there a disagreement about what should go in the official party platform regarding whether Israel was a state?
CB: Yeah, I mean, that was what we assumed. And we did a live blog and we assumed that Mars—because it’s in the 11th whole sign house—would indicate strife within the party or some sort of dissent within the party itself ‘cause the 11th is the place of friends. And there was some of that because there was a controversy over—what was it? They voted towards the very beginning of the convention about whether or not to recognize—what was it—to recognize the capital of Israel as the capital of Palestine, and that caused some controversy. Although I’m not privy to all of the behind-the-scenes stuff, definitely when we were watching it live, it was a very contentious moment. It seemed like the measure sort of got pushed through despite the other, very loud opposition to it. But yeah, honestly, I don’t know what the Mars in the 11th is fully about and to what extent that did actually end up indicating major problems or dissension within the party itself.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: But it’s interesting that in the DNC chart, Mars is in the 11th, so it seemed to indicate problems from friends. Whereas in the RNC chart, Mars was in the 12th rather than the 11th, so it was more like problems from enemies. So anyway, just objectively from an electional standpoint, as far as trying to pick one chart over another, I would definitely go with the DNC chart. And I definitely would’ve picked this as an electional chart if I had been trying to elect a chart for that convention. And I think what ended up happening is that, objectively—or at least to whatever extent one can be objective—the DNC did seem to get results and a bigger boost for Obama, a post-convention boost, whereas the RNC did not seem to coincide with as much of a boost for Romney. Is that more or less what you got as well, Patrick?
PW: That is correct. Polling indicated that Obama did get a six-point lead over Romney in the week following the convention, whereas Romney did not see any change in his favorability or unfavorability after his convention. So it is interesting to see these rules of inception kind of playing out—that the better inception did end up having the better or more of the intended effect for the candidate.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and then as far as the other thing that was very important about the conventions was the nomination charts and the final acceptance charts. I mean, the big thing to focus on here, I think, really is not so much the nomination charts but the acceptance charts. Like I personally think that the point at which the nominee, the presidential nominee, officially got up and said that they accepted their nomination for the party, to represent their party, I think that’s the most crucial moment really for at least looking at the broader campaign.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: I mean, the inception charts for the conventions themselves just relate to the conventions and the efficacy or, you know, the degree to which whatever the party was trying to achieve with their convention, whether or not that would be successful and whether the event, for three or four days, would be successful on its own. But the actual chart for when the candidates accept the nomination has a much greater bearing on how successful or unsuccessful they’re gonna be in winning the election in November, on November 6. And from that perspective, again, from just an electional standpoint, it did seem that Obama came out on top as far as the inception chart or the election chart for when he accepted his nomination, as compared to the moment that Mitt Romney accepted his nomination at the beginning of his speech. So let’s look at the charts for a minute for that.
So it was really interesting—as we were following it live for the entire week of the Republican National Convention and the entire week of the Democratic National Convention—all of the major speeches took place between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Eastern Time because that’s when the news networks—all of the mainstream, non-cable news networks—gave each of the conventions one hour to promote their main speakers to the nation. So what this meant is that most of the time, between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, during both weeks—since the conventions were only a week apart—between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, Taurus was always rising in both locations, in Tampa and Charlotte.
PW: Which gave some importance to the planet Venus.
CB: Yeah, it makes Venus the ruler of the Ascendant for every single one of those primetime speeches during that two-week period. So for example, Paul Ryan’s speech had Taurus rising. Mitt Romney’s speech had Taurus rising. Who else? Bill Clinton’s speech had Taurus rising. And Michelle Obama’s speech had Taurus rising and Barack Obama’s speech had Taurus rising. So every single speech—it’s a really interesting study from an electional standpoint because Venus was ruling the Ascendant for every single speech.
The difference, at least the main difference from the standpoint of Venus, is that during the RNC—during the week of the RNC—each time Taurus was rising, Venus was at around 21-22-23 Cancer, and it was applying to a square with Saturn, which was at 26 Libra. So it’s like they had Taurus rising, they had Venus ruling the Ascendant, and it was placed in Cancer in the 3rd house, but it was applying to a square with Saturn in a night chart. So Saturn is the most malefic planet in a night chart. So basically, it was like one of the worst configurations that you could have from an electional standpoint that the ruler of the Ascendant was applying to in those charts.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: And the most important one, of course, is Mitt Romney’s acceptance, when he accepted his nomination, which took place on August 30 at 10:36 PM in Tampa. And at that time, 5 Taurus was rising and Venus was at 23 Cancer applying to a square with Saturn at 26 Libra. And according to my reconstruction of the original aspect doctrine, that’s one of the original seven specific conditions of what was called ‘maltreatment’, or what we call today ‘affliction’. There were actually seven specific definitions for affliction in the 1st century. Yeah, so that was happening most of the week.
PW: And then the difference with the Democratic National Convention, as Chris also pointed out on the blog, Venus was separating from its square with Saturn. So during the RNC, it’s applying towards Saturn, but then during the DNC, it’s separating from Saturn. And then there’s something very interesting about Obama’s in particular.
CB: Right. So like a week after the RNC, the DNC starts, but by this time, Venus has already moved into the very end of Libra. And so, for the first two nights of the Democratic National Convention, for Michelle Obama’s speech and for Bill Clinton’s speech, Taurus was also rising when both of those speeches began. So the most important planet in the chart is, again, Venus, just like it was for Ryan and Romney. But at that point, Venus had switched to late Cancer and it was now separating from the square with Saturn rather than applying to it. And that’s crucially important because one of the primary tenets or rules of electional astrology is that applying aspects indicate the future and separating aspects indicate the past. So from an electional standpoint, Romney’s acceptance speech was indicating difficulties in the future once he accepted the nomination, just generally speaking, whereas the speeches during the DNC indicated a moving away from difficulties in some way or difficulties fading into the past.
And then on the final day of the convention this became incredibly even more stark because what happened is for every single DNC speech, Venus was in Cancer still, just like it was for every RNC speech. But then on the final day of the DNC, Venus moved into Leo, and that was the day basically that Obama gave his speech. And so, he was the only major keynote speaker—out of the entire RNC convention and the entire DNC convention up to that point—he was the only speaker where Taurus was still rising but Venus was no longer in Cancer squaring Saturn. Instead, it was no longer configured to Saturn by square at all, at least by sign.
PW: And it even entered the sign of Leo, the king.
CB: Right.
PW: And he has a bunch of nice planets there in Leo, with his Mercury very close to the beginning of Leo. So that Venus is applying to his Mercury as he gives a, you know, big, eloquent speech.
CB: Yeah, what is it? Mercury’s at 2 Leo for him natally.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: And Jupiter is at 0 Aquarius, so it was exactly opposing his Jupiter. And what’s even more striking about that is that Venus was activated as the lord of the year according to annual profections. He was in a Taurus profection year. So Venus is actually the single most important transiting planet to pay attention to in his chart this year. And of course on the day that he gave, you know, a major speech it ingressed into his Sun sign. What else is important about that is that if you look at the chart, it looks like Venus is then applying to Mars, to a square with Mars in Scorpio. But what happens is actually if you advance the chart and you look through the ephemeris, before Venus catches up to the square with Mars, Venus actually completes a sextile with Jupiter in Gemini. So Venus gets to about mid-Leo and then completes a sextile with Jupiter. So actually the next aspect that Venus herself will make is an applying sextile with Jupiter, and that’s the primary aspect that Obama has in his nomination chart—or the time when he accepted the nomination.
PW: And I believe that’s actually coming up in a couple of days, the completion of that aspect between Venus and Jupiter.
CB: Okay, that should be interesting. We’ll just have to see if that coincides with anything in his campaign. Another big thing in the nomination chart or when he accepted his nomination that a lot of people are talking about—and I guess is worth talking about—is that the Moon was actually technically void-of-course not only when he was nominated by his party, but also when he accepted the nomination. So in both of those crucial charts, the Moon was void-of-course. This actually came up back in the 2009 election because Obama was going to be inaugurated on a void-of-course Moon. The Moon was at 29 Scorpio. But then you specifically wrote an article to address that issue, Patrick.
PW: Yes. Well, basically there are two ways you can look at this—one, the void-of-course Moon is either what it has been since Medieval astrologers had begun employing the term. The definition of a void-of-course Moon being that it doesn’t complete another aspect to any other planet before it leaves the sign. There are alternative and earlier definitions where the Moon is only void if it doesn’t complete an aspect with any planet after 30°, which makes it a much rarer condition. But the other thing is that people who were really worried around the time of Obama’s inauguration in early 2009 seemed to conveniently ignore that the Moon was very close to the same position as it was when he first announced his candidacy back in February of 2007 and that the Moon was also void at that time.
CB: Right.
PW: According to the modern definition.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, there’s a bunch of issues with that void-of-course Moon thing. We’re not just talking about it now. Like we’re not just, you know, pulling out these arguments against the void-of-course Moon now. But we’ve actually been saying since 2009 that, A) the void-of-course Moon is not as big of a deal as some people have made it out to be, and B) Obama had done pretty well under void-of-course Moons traditionally. So you can’t automatically take that as being the end of the world for him. And his 2009, or 2008 presidential campaign is the best example of that because, as you pointed out, Patrick, he launched his 2008 presidential campaign under a void-of-course Moon, and then he ran one of the most successful political campaigns in modern history.
PW: And another great thing that Chris noticed was that at the time of the inauguration, the Moon was at 29° of Scorpio. And at the time that he accepted the nomination in 2012, we see the acceptance chart has the Moon at 29 Taurus, the exact opposite degree, exactly conjunct the nodes, which connects it right back to the inauguration chart with the Moon at 29 Scorpio.
CB: Yeah, there’s a ton of really weird connections between Obama’s inauguration chart in 2009 and January 20, 2009 and his nomination acceptance speech at the DNC. It’s very weird. But the other thing to mention, as you mentioned, the other problem with the void-of-course Moon thing is that there’s at least two completely different definitions of the void-of-course Moon. There might even be three definitions actually, I found out in recent months. So the modern definition, as you explained, everybody knows the modern definition. It’s that the Moon is void-of-course as soon as it makes its last aspect, its last major aspect—Ptolemaic aspect (sextile, square, trine, opposition, conjunction)—to a planet, to one of the traditional or even the outer planets. So Sun through Pluto. When it makes its last aspect to a planet before it moves into the next sign, that’s when it’s considered void-of-course in the modern astrological tradition.
However, in the past, I guess, few years—in the past five years—as a result of translations of ancient Greek texts, we’ve actually learned that the original definition of void-of-course Moon is that the Moon does not make an exact aspect with any planet within the next 30° regardless of sign boundaries. That’s a hugely different definition of void-of-course. The original definition is hugely or wildly different than the modern definition. And the ancient definition is actually much more restrictive. It happens much less frequently than the modern definition. And it actually makes more sense why ancient astrologers freaked out about it and said that that was a terrible thing because it happens so infrequently, and because the Moon literally isn’t completing any aspects for a huge span of time—basically for more than two days.
PW: I’ve never seen one, actually.
CB: I’ve seen one. It does happen. Like I’ve seen two or three maybe. So it does happen, it’s just very rare. Yeah, so that was the original definition. And then somehow it became this other definition at some point after the Medieval period. There’s also the potential for a third definition. Sue Ward, in the early 1990s, she wrote a paper where she tried to argue that William Lilly’s definition of void-of-course Moon seemed to be different from the modern understanding. She argued basically that the void-of-course Moon, according to William Lilly, is not within orb of an aspect—of an applying aspect—with any other planets, regardless of sign boundaries. So basically, any time the Moon is not within orb of an applying aspect with any planets, that’s when the Moon is void according to her understanding of Lilly’s definition.
Now that’s kind of controversial. It’s not clear if that’s correct or if she’s understanding that correctly. There’s definitely some astrologers, I think, who agree with her. There’s other astrologers who seem to disagree. But at the very least we could say that there is potentially a third possible definition of the void-of-course Moon. Yeah, so that’s an issue. So there’s the issue about the definition of void-of-course Moon. There’s an issue about the fact that Obama’s done okay with the void-of-course Moon in the past. And then there’s this separate issue, which is that if you actually follow some of the traditional definitions of void-of-course Moon, they say that there’s exceptions. For example, if you open up William Lilly’s text to when he defines the void-of-course Moon, he says that if the Moon is in Cancer or if it’s in the sign of its exaltation in Taurus, or even if it’s in the signs of Jupiter—if it’s in Sagittarius or Pisces—then the Moon is not debilitated as a result of being void-of-course.
So that’s a huge exception that a lot of people are overlooking in this instance because the Moon was void-of-course, but it was void-of-course in Taurus at the time of Obama’s nomination. So now you have a completely separate issue, which is can there be mitigations based on what sign the Moon is in? Can the Moon’s void-of-course status be mitigated as a result of that? That’s a whole other question. So there’s a bunch of issues surrounding that, and for those reasons I’m really not putting a lot of emphasis. I know there’s some people who are now predicting that Obama will lose and Romney will win as a result of the void-of-course Moon on his nomination. I think that’s really a bad idea, though.
Madam Lichtenstein posted a post on her blog recently where she came out and said that Romney would win the election because Obama accepted the nomination and was nominated both on a void-of-course Moon, according to the modern definition. But she quoted Debbi Kempton-Smith who wrote a book called—what’s it called? It’s called The Stargazer’s Journal or something like that. And in it, she quotes a claim from a deceased astrologer named Al Morrison who apparently was the astrologer that really promoted the modern concept of the void-of-course Moon and made it into the big thing that it is today. Apparently, prior to Al Morrison, it was something that existed, but it wasn’t something that people freaked out about when the Moon was void-of-course.
So Debbi Kempton-Smith quotes some passage from Al Morrison—she doesn’t say where it’s from—where Al Morrison claims that every presidential candidate since the year 1900 who’s been nominated under a void-of-course Moon has gone on to lose the election. And based on that passage from Al Morrison, or that claim by Al Morrison—then repeated in Debbi Kempton-Smith’s book—there are some astrologers now who are taking it at face value and predicting that Obama will lose.
The problem with this is that it seems highly improbable that Al Morrison had access to all of the nomination times, the exact nomination times, going back to the year 1900. And in fact, it wasn’t until I think a decade or two into the 20th century that the conventions themselves were even publicly broadcast. Prior to that time they were closed-door things in the first place, so somebody wouldn’t have even necessarily had access to those nomination times. So I’m still researching this and I’m still looking into it, but I kind of want to go out on a limb here and say that claim by Al Morrison is probably pretty faulty, and people should be very careful unless they’ve gone through and specifically looked at every single nomination and been able to verify it. I would be very careful about taking that claim at face value.
PW: There is one other interesting thing, though, to point out about the Moon at Obama’s nomination. It might not be void if we go with the older definition, but it is conjunct the nodes. And Valens didn’t give many electional pointers out, but one thing he did say was to never begin anything when the Moon is in the quadruplicities of the nodes. And in this case, the Moon is not just in the quadruplicity, it’s dead conjunct the node. And I can’t remember exactly what he says that necessarily entails, but that was one thing he was very adamant about, and that even when you’ve reached an annual profection in a quadruplicity of the node that’s like a bad time.
That is a rule that he basically has for electional—that you keep the Sun and the Moon out of the quadruplicities of the nodes to avoid any association with eclipses. But again, that might be unavoidable in a sense just because of what is happening at that time. It’s not just any kind of event, it’s when the President is accepting the nomination of the party. That’s a major, magnified event. The nodes, any association with the eclipses always magnifies things and makes them public affairs. It introduces a public dimension to different things. So that is one way in which the Moon could give you pause, but not because it’s void.
CB: Yeah, the Moon conjunct the nodes could be problematic, and definitely from a Hellenistic standpoint that’s not very good. Another comment—I think her name was Karen—on The Political Astrology Blog pointed out that the Moon is also conjunct Algol, or conjunct some negative fixed star.
PW: I think that might be 26 or 29 Taurus.
CB: It’s like 27 Taurus. It’s a little earlier than that.
PW: Yeah, so a little, tiny bit. But yeah, that is kind of an interesting thing about the Moon. But that could even tie into, again, things that we’ll talk about later with the inauguration for whoever becomes President.
CB: Yeah. And one of the things that I liked about the Moon’s position that I think helps it is the fact that it’s at 29 Taurus, and its next aspect—once it ingresses into Gemini—is a sextile to Venus, which is…
PW: Right.
CB: …the ruler of the Ascendant, and which is the ruler of the Moon. So the Moon’s applying to a sextile with its domicile lord. So I don’t know.
PW: That’s not too bad. Yeah, that’s definitely good. Either way, people are saying it’s void. Probably not the best argument you could use.
CB: I mean, people are free to follow that and I guess this will be it. Seriously, this will be the final test of that. And basically, anybody that wants to place bets, we should set up a PayPal account, and people can start putting down bets on this. And this will be the ‘void-of-course Moon to end all void-of-course Moons’.
PW: I mean, if this turns out well that would be three-for-three. That will be, you know, a presidential acceptance—sorry, a presidential campaign announcement with a void-of-course Moon on February 10, 2007. And then it will be the inauguration day of 2009, and then it will be the nomination…
CB: Right.
PW: …to become President. That should end the debate if he gets elected this time. There’s no other way around it.
CB: Like if Obama wins this election, all of the people that are constantly freaking out about the void-of-course Moon will have to just shut up. On the other hand, if, you know, Obama loses this election with the void-of-course Moon, then, you know, Patrick and I will literally eat our shorts as result.
PW: We’ll eat each other’s shorts.
CB: All right. Maybe we should just place bets or something like that.
PW: Yeah, so that’s better.
CB: That’s better? Okay. But I think we’ll be okay. So I think we should probably move on ‘cause the show’s getting a bit long.
PW: Yeah. We’ve moved past the shorts.
CB: We had two last sections that we wanted to mention before we wrap up the show. One is the thing that everybody’s talking about—just about every astrologer who comments on the election—‘cause it’s the most notable thing on Election Day, which Mercury stations retrograde right on Election Day, on November 6. It goes exact like right in the evening on Election Day. So it stations retrograde at 4° of Sagittarius, and then it goes retrograde for the next three weeks until it eventually stations direct on November 26 at 18 Scorpio.
So that’s kind of crazy. Everybody who’s older I guess remembers that the last time that Mercury was retrograde on Election Day was in November of 2000, in the 2000 election of Gore vs. Bush. And that retrograde is what a lot of astrologers attributed to the hung election of 2000 with the ‘hanging chads’ and the recounts. Al Gore called and conceded the election at one point early in the night to Bush when it looked like Bush had one. But then later in the night, he had to call him back and rescind his concession. It was just a very crazy period that lasted for several weeks, until eventually the Supreme Court halted the recount in Florida, which effectively determined the outcome of the election and ended with Bush becoming the President. And that’s because Bush won the electoral college, whereas—what’s his name?
PW: Al Gore.
CB: Gore won the popular vote and actually got more votes than Bush. Yeah, so what we have is that we are now 12 years after that, which is interesting because that’s one Jupiter cycle. Jupiter is back in Gemini, which is where it was 12 years ago in 2000, and it’s one profection cycle. So potentially, whatever was getting activated, let’s say in the US chart—according to annual profections or according to that Jupiter transit—is, again, getting activated 12 years later. And again, 12 years later, we have Mercury retrograde. Except now, instead of stationing direct on Election Day, it’s actually stationing retrograde, and arguably, beginning the retrograde cycle at that point.
PW: Yeah, which is pretty interesting considering. I mean, if the election happening on the direct station in 2000 ended precipitating the mess that happened in 2000, then I can’t even imagine what this time might be about with the Mercury retrograde station actually happening on the day of Election Day. We also noticed some connections to other elections, other than the year 2000, which we thought were kind of interesting and might give us some idea about what we can expect or what other kinds of problems can hold up an election. On the blog, Chris mentioned the election of 1960. There were allegations of voter fraud in favor of Kennedy against Nixon, and this happened during a Mercury retrograde. In fact, it was the Mercury-Venus recurrent cycle before the year 2000. So it’s interesting there was a concern about voter fraud in that election, and there was a planetary connection between those two times.
CB: Right.
PW: And what else did we notice?
CB: I mean, that’s the main thing. What was striking when we were researching this—when I was writing the Mercury retrograde article for this election—for The Political Astrology Blog and researching previous elections in the 20th century, I was really struck by how few elections had Mercury retrograde on Election Day. And more than that, one of the things that you noticed is that the worst ones, there’s only a handful of Mercury retrogrades in the 20th century during Election Day, especially in the last 50 or 60 years. There’s only three or four. But the ones that were the most controversial were ones where Mercury was not just retrograde, but it was also making a hard aspect with Neptune, either a conjunction, a square, or, I think, an opposition.
PW: That’s correct. In fact, one of the most disputed elections in American history was the 1876 election, which took place on November 7, 1876. And Mercury was not retrograde, but it was at 0 Scorpio opposite Neptune at 3 Taurus. And then on Election Day 2000, Neptune was in Aquarius and Mercury was in Scorpio. And now, we are here in 2012 and Mercury will be in early Sagittarius square Neptune in Pisces. So we’re kind of seeing all the familiar ingredients of past elections, which have been extremely disputed, extremely contested. Not only do we have the craziness of a Mercury retrograde, but also the murkiness and the nebulousness of a Neptune influence.
CB: Right. So it’s just Mercury retrograde. It’s also Mercury having hard aspects with Neptune.
PW: Which we should also note is technically a recurrence transit for Obama. Which is interesting because Obama actually has a very positive history with Mercury retrogrades generally, which I attribute to his Mercury being opposed to Jupiter. And it’s also worth mentioning that he was inaugurated on January 20, 2009 right in the very middle, the very heart of an inferior conjunction. Right in the middle of a Mercury retrograde period, which was when, of course, he had the famous snafu of stumbling over the oath.
CB: I think all astrologers remember that Mercury retrograde.
PW: That’s a Mercury retrograde to go down.
CB: It was the Mercury retrograde that was heard around the world.
PW: It was. It was. But what’s interesting, the thing about that is that means that Mercury retrogrades are going to be very important for this administration.
CB: Wait, just to interject, if anyone doesn’t remember, on Obama’s inauguration with the Mercury retrograde, he was being sworn in by the head of the Supreme Court. And the head of the Supreme Court forgot his lines and he messed up, which led them to then have to retake the oath of office the next day just to be safe.
PW: And there’s a book by a guy whose last name is Toobin. He basically wrote a book about the Obama administration and their relationship with the Supreme Court, and he explains a little bit about the prelude to that whole snafu. Apparently, somehow, Chief Justice John Roberts got ahold of a different copy of the oath than Obama did, and there was like a lot of confusion leading up to it and that was the reason why it happened. He has the whole story. And he kind of uses that event as like a backdrop for the ensuing struggles between the Obama White House and the US Supreme Court.
CB: That’s really interesting.
PW: That is really interesting that he kind of saw that as a symbolic moment when there was a misunderstanding between the White House and the US Supreme Court. But that’s kind of an aside from the topic.
CB: Well, no, that’s interesting. It’s interesting ‘cause just this summer, Roberts was the crucial person for the final decision of the healthcare bill.
PW: They have a complicated relationship.
CB: It would be very interesting to look at their synastry to see what that looks like.
PW: We’ll have to find Chief Justice John Roberts data. I wonder if Nick has that.
CB: Yeah, we’ll have to look into that. But that’s one that you need to still write up a follow-up for and take credit for because the Supreme Court decision came through—what was it? It was like the same day or within a day or something of Venus stationing direct?
PW: Yeah, that was an interesting thing that happened. I didn’t actually technically predict something. But basically, what I noticed is starting with the death of Ted Kennedy—I believe that was Venus square the nodes or Venus conjunct the nodes. Basically, there was always an important development that happened with the healthcare case, with the healthcare bill, every time Venus was square or conjunct the nodes. And I wasn’t even keeping track of it anymore after the bill was actually passed, when Venus was squared the nodes, but it is really interesting that the Supreme Court did agree that the individual mandate and all the other parts that hold up the bill were constitutional as Venus was reaching another conjunction with the nodes.
CB: Right.
PW: And it was also, yeah, right by the end of the retrograde cycle. And Venus has an interesting relationship with that topic.
CB: And you also had a separate article. I think it was titled, “Obama, the Tea Party, and Venus,” where you basically pointed out that Obama’s larger chronology seemed to coincide very well with the Venus cycle, and specifically, the stations, when it would station retrograde and conjoin the Sun and then station direct.
PW: Yeah. Venus has a very peculiar relevance to American politics in general just because its cycle of eight years tends to coincide—well, really, four and eight years—coincides with the presidential election cycle. So we unwittingly elect our presidents according to the regular schedule of Venus. Venus is always in the same position every eight years, and on the opposite side of the Sun, in the same part of the zodiac every four years, so we see in every inauguration chart certain similarities regarding Venus. So the pattern seems to hold up with Obama that a lot of very important moments in his presidency tend to have this relationship with the Venus cycles. So that was a very important one for him where his landmark achievement, the signature achievement of his presidency was upheld…
CB: Yeah.
PW: …right under the Venus retrograde.
CB: Yeah. And people should check out this article on The Political Astrology Blog. It’s titled, “Obama, the Tea Party, and Venus.” And I think you’re being modest here. I mean, this is a very long, documented article where you showed very important turning points over the past few years taking place at these periods around when Venus stations or gets within a conjunction of the Sun.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: And this basically perfectly fits that pattern.
PW: Yeah, it did. It really did. It’s very, very cool.
CB: Yeah. Anyway, so to wrap up this section on the Mercury retrograde and one of the things that seems to come up a lot. In the past 50 or 60 years, Mercury’s only been retrograde three or four times. It was retrograde in 2000. It was retrograde in 1980, which was Reagan vs. Carter.
PW: Carter.
CB: And it was retrograde in 1960, which was Nixon vs…
PW: Kennedy.
CB: …Kennedy. However, in those three, there’s only two where Mercury was in a hard aspect with Neptune. It was 2000 and 1960. The 1980 race, which was not very controversial, did not have Mercury configured with Neptune like that. So that seems to be very closely tied into the pattern. And the thing that ties together both the 2000 race and the 1960 race is both of them were extremely close in terms of how close the votes were. And in fact, the 1960 race was even closer than the 2000 race. Also, both times there were issues with voter irregularities or voting irregularities, and there were issues of basically voter fraud. Voter fraud was especially the case in 1960, not as much in 2000. With 2000 you had more issues with irregularities with the hanging chads and with all of that other stuff.
PW: Although this does exist as a real possibility for 2012, there was recently a New York Times article that discusses how last minute appeals to new voter ID laws—both for and against these laws—could cause states to basically postpone their elections or not be able to count their votes until the courts have decided, so we may see some very interesting things.
CB: Yeah.
PW: As I was saying before, Obama tends to have really good luck during the Mercury retrogrades, and he tends to kind of benefit from the chaos that surrounds him. Just based on his chronology, we do know that Mercury tends to be a better deal for him because he was born with Mercury opposite Jupiter, whereas Mitt Romney was born with Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars, I believe.
CB: Right. In a day chart.
PW: In a day chart. So that would mean that, you know, Mitt Romney tends to have more difficulties during Mercury retrograde, whereas Obama’s experience with Mercury is a lot more profitable and lucky.
CB: Yeah, so we’re definitely anticipating some problems on Election Day, potentially something that could be a repetition of 2000 or 1960, where the outcome of the election is either contested or is not known for a period. And one of the things that was interesting when we were applying our own completely separate timing techniques is that the technique was showing us something really important in Romney’s chart, that somehow this retrograde is very important to him, and that something that happens on Election Day is not finished until about three weeks later.
Basically, he has this one part of his chart activated according to this timing technique, and then it acts as a precursor because then there’s a repetition of the activation of the exact same part of his chart three weeks later, and it almost perfectly coincides with the Mercury retrograde station. Basically, it stations on Election Day, and he has the activation of this part of his chart on Election Day. And then three weeks later, Mercury stations direct. And on that day, this part of his chart is, again, activated, but in that instance, it shows a coming to terms with or a transition away from something that almost happened on Election Day, but wasn’t concluded or wasn’t finished.
PW: And with Obama, one of his best periods doesn’t end until the Mercury retrograde period is over. So there is a very weird way in which both of their charts are lining up with something that just happens to coincide with the Mercury retrograde. So we are basically seeing a situation where the election is held up and we don’t know the results, at least until the Mercury retrograde is over, and then we think Obama is the winner at that point.
CB: Right.
PW: And we have a very good contemporary example of this in the Australian election.
CB: Oh, yeah, astrologer Kelly Surtees from Australia—who is now living in Toronto—sent us that example.
PW: Essentially, we had a very similar situation where the elections were held at the beginning of the Mercury retrograde period…
CB: The day it stationed.
PW: It was the day it stationed retrograde?
CB: Yeah, like it literally stationed that morning. Like as the polls were opening, it stationed retrograde.
PW: And the results of the election were not resolved until the Mercury retrograde period ended.
CB: Right. And then the inauguration took place like right when it stationed direct. That’s really striking.
PW: And there was even another example in 2010 in the UK election. They had a hung Parliament where the Tories had to create an alliance with the Liberal Democrats in order to convene a government. And this was a big controversy. And the election happened during a Mercury retrograde, and it wasn’t resolved until the Mercury retrograde was over. So we just expect something similar for this time around.
CB: Right. And even aside from that, according to the technique we’re using, both candidates moved into very good, prominent, pivotal periods by the time of the summer. I think Obama’s started in April and Romney’s started on the very day that the Republican National Convention started. That was one of the things that, you know, made it clear to us earlier in the year that he was definitely gonna be the nominee because he was hitting a peak period starting on August 27, which was very compelling. But according to the technique, Romney goes into a difficult period starting in mid-October. I think it begins just before the second debate in October. And he stays in that difficult period all the way through till, I think, the end of November or early December. And that was really one of the main things that we saw ‘cause Obama doesn’t have anything comparably difficult as far as those periods are concerned, and that was the main thing that we saw that led us to believe that Romney would lose the election.
PW: And it’s interesting to consider, too, because he is currently going through a fairly difficult time in his campaign with the release of comments that he’d made behind closed doors, potentially saying that 47% of the country were dependent on the government and that he didn’t have to worry about those people. And that video was released I think very shortly after the lunation that occurred at 23° of Virgo, a Full Moon—sorry, a New Moon—which occurred opposite his Sun, also conjunct Mercury. Yeah, that kind of spells out a bit of his issues, especially because with his Sun, he has Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars. So he gets in trouble for things that he says, and his own words have often been the greatest source of attacks by his opponents.
CB: Right. And even a week before that there was the controversy over his statements regarding the death of the ambassador to Libya.
PW: Oh, yeah. That was kind of the start of the unraveling.
CB: Yeah, that was really the start of what’s been a pretty difficult couple of weeks for Romney. And on that day, I was looking at the transits, and it looked like the main thing was that transiting Mercury was exactly opposite to his natal Sun, I believe is what was happening.
PW: Hmm.
CB: It’s interesting ‘cause Scorpio was activated as the sign of the year according to profections. And that transiting Mars is going through Scorpio and causing some of those problems. But what’s weird is at this point you and I are trying to figure out what the hell is gonna happen in mid-October. Like this is the type of stuff that we really expected to happen in mid-October that would unravel the campaign. And so, it’ll be interesting to see what actually ends up occurring in mid-October starting just before the second debate and if there can possibly be more difficult or worse things that negatively affect his campaign.
PW: Either way, it will be very, very close. And it is interesting that he does seem like he would be in a weaker position just before the election, but it will still be held up. Or at least we strongly suspect that it will be held up and that it will be close. Even if he is having problems it isn’t like that would be the cause of his downfall. It will be whatever happens after Election Day.
CB: Right. Okay, so the last thing that we wanted to mention to wrap this up is just that we’ve looked just a little bit at the inauguration chart. Because the presidents are always inaugurated on January 20, the January after the election. Basically, when I looked at this chart—I started looking at it recently—and it looks really ominous.
PW: Right.
CB: I was actually really disturbed by it when I first pulled up this chart because of how ominous it looks. The Moon is back in Taurus, which I think is actually really interesting. The Moon will be at—let’s see, what is it? It’s 19 Taurus. Which is actually, interestingly, approximately where the Moon was during the DNC, and specifically, during Bill Clinton’s speech. It was right around that area and around the time of when they did the roll call later that night where they gave Obama the nomination. So the Moon is back in Taurus, in mid-Taurus, on Inauguration Day. But it’s at 19 Taurus in the 1st house and it’s applying within about a degree to a square with Mars, which is at 20 Aquarius in the 10th house in a day chart. So it’s a day chart. So Mars is the most malefic planet in the chart, and the Moon is applying to an exact square with it. And it is not intercepted.
PW: It’s just bad. Mars, yeah, is the out-of-sect malefic. You don’t want the Moon applying to it in a square.
CB: Right. I mean, you do not want the Moon…
PW: You don’t want that.
CB: It’s one of the worst afflictions you could possibly have. And it’s Mars, and it’s a much more malefic Mars because it’s a day chart. So you have more of the negative significations rather than the constructive significations coming to the forefront.
PW: It also rules the 7th and 12th. And those are both houses which concern one’s opponents or even enemies. So this is very concerning that the impetus of the inauguration is moving towards a destructive situation that concerns opponents and enemies. And Mars is the planet of aggression and conflict and war, and these are things, I think, we’ve all had enough of.
CB: Yeah.
PW: It is very worrying.
CB: That was the main thing that concerned me when I first saw it ‘cause it reminded me of this anecdote that Lee Lehman and some of the Kepler students would always talk about. For Kepler College, they had their first class in the summer of 2001, and one of the things that they were looking at was mundane charts ‘cause they were doing a class on mundane astrology. They pulled up the inauguration chart for George Bush’s first term—the inauguration on January 20, 2001—and the way that the Kepler students tell it is that Lee made this offhanded remark. She was like, “Well, that’s kind of weird. This looks like a war chart.” And they didn’t know it at the time—it’s funny ‘cause this is the summer of 2001 when they’re looking at this—but that ended up being a very striking statement.
So with that chart, it’s interesting how it compares to this one because that’s actually the closest comparison to a recent inauguration chart that I could make. This inauguration chart for January of 2013 looks much more similar to the inauguration chart for January of 2001 than to Bush’s second inauguration in 2005, or even Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. And the reason for that is because in the 2001 inauguration chart for Bush, Taurus was rising and Saturn was in Taurus in the 1st house. And the Ascendant and Saturn were opposing Mars, which was in Scorpio in the 7th house. And I believe that 7th house Mars in Scorpio on the Descendant was the reason why Lee Lehman remarked that it looked like a war chart. It’s sort of further compounded by the fact that Mercury was at 16 Aquarius square to Mars.
PW: We should also consider that Obama’s inauguration in 2013 would be the 12 years after the 2001 inauguration of Bush. So that’s a full profection cycle. And not just that, 12 years before 2001 would have been 1989, and that of course was when HW Bush was inaugurated, which was also another presidency which started a war. That was in the Gulf. The First Gulf War. The First Iraq War. So we may be seeing another thing in the US chart of a national chart which is repeating in the profections…
CB: Right.
PW: …which may indicate that a President has to go on the attack.
CB: Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t want to be too specific about that, but it definitely struck me. It really reminded me of that statement and that anecdote…
PW: Right.
CB: …that Lee made that it looked like a war chart. And certainly, the 2001 chart looked like a war chart. This chart reminds me of that because of the prominence of Mars in being angular and because of its affliction of one of the major players in the chart, which is the Moon.
PW: Absolutely. And Mars is even on Obama’s Ascendant, transiting on Inauguration Day. Mars is very close to his Ascendant. And it’s interesting to note, too, that when he escalated the war in Afghanistan, it was when Mars was going retrograde over his Descendant. So we do know that he has the capacity to make these kinds of decisions and that this can be a part of his nature and that Mars will be, again, at a very sensitive point in his chart and that it is very prominent in this inauguration chart. Certainly very different from the 2009 inauguration.
CB: Right. And also tying into your comment about this being the 12-year profection and Jupiter return of the 2001 inauguration chart, it’s also worth pointing out that Saturn was in Taurus in that chart…
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: …in the 1st house. And now this is the first inauguration since then that Saturn will be in Scorpio exactly opposite to that. So we’re now basically halfway through the Saturn cycle that began in 2001 at that time.
PW: There is some good news, though.
CB: What’s the good news?
PW: The good news, yeah. The good news—and this is actually kind of surprising ‘cause out of all the problems that we have—everyone talks about the economy, but there actually are some very good financial indications in the chart. Jupiter, the benefic of the sect is in the 2nd house, the house of wealth and finances. And not only that, but Mercury, the ruler of the 2nd, which is also the natural ruler for markets and money, is gonna be applying to a trine to Jupiter. So it’s hard to read that any other way than it indicates there’s a free flow of money and that markets are inclining towards growth and that…
CB: Right.
PW: …all these kinds of prospects improve.
CB: Yeah. That was definitely a good observation on your part when you pointed that out. Jupiter, because it’s a day chart, is the most positive planet in the chart, and it’s in the 2nd house, which represents finances. So basically, the most positive planet in the chart in the place of finances. Jupiter is retrograde, but it’s getting ready to station. It actually stations direct about 10 days after Inauguration Day. So that’s pretty close to a station, which is another positive thing ‘cause it’s a direct station. And then Mercury is at 2 Aquarius applying to a trine with Jupiter at 6 Gemini. So it’s not only that the most benefic planet is in the 2nd house, but the ruler of the 2nd house is applying to the benefic as well. So that’s very favorable.
PW: And a little unexpected that that would be the thing that would improve. I feel like that would be the most intractable problem. But according to this inauguration chart that does appear to be a fairly favorably-supported topic.
CB: Sure.
PW: It’s the Mars that we’re worried about.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Definitely to whatever extent the inauguration chart itself can indicate, you know, the state of the economy. And we’re certainly not financial astrologers, or at least, that’s not our primary focus, but it’s one of the general indications that comes through strongly in the inauguration chart. The last thing that we haven’t mentioned is what the ruler of the Ascendant’s doing, and that’s kind of weird as well. That was one of the nice things about Obama’s 2009 inauguration chart, which is that Taurus was rising and Venus was exalted in Pisces in the 11th house. Now it wasn’t all, you know, fun and games because Venus was also applying to a conjunction with Uranus and to an opposition with Saturn. And to some extent that might represent some of the opposition that Obama experienced from his opponents during the course of his first term.
PW: And even his supporters.
CB: Sure. I mean, his supporters started going after him like within a few months of being inaugurated. I remember The Huffington Post running headlines about how bad a job he was doing. But still, even at that, it’s at least dignified. It’s in the sign of its exaltation. It’s in the 11th house. It’s not afflicted by the worst planet in the chart. It’s not afflicted by Mars. It doesn’t have a square or a conjunction or an opposition with Mars. It does have an opposition with Saturn, which is very difficult, but it’s not completely debilitating because it’s a day chart, so Saturn’s not as malefic as it could be. So in comparison, in this chart, in the inauguration chart for 2013, Taurus is rising. Venus is ruling the Ascendant. And now, it’s placed in Capricorn in the 9th house at 14 Capricorn. Its closest aspects are a conjunction with Pluto at 10 Capricorn—so about 4° away, separating—a sextile with Saturn, its domicile lord, in the 7th, and a very wide square to Uranus, which is at 5 Aries.
So it’s not great. It’s not terribly strong. It’s not terribly afflicted. The Pluto thing’s a little bit troubling, and the Uranus thing is possibly kind of destabilizing, but it’s not very close. But the thing that is weird about it is that it’s in the 9th house, which is the place of foreigners and foreign lands and foreign people. And that is the thing, combined with the Mars placement and its square to the Moon, that makes me think about the extent to which this could be representing some sort of overseas conflict because the ruler of the Ascendant’s in the 9th house. And it’s interesting. I think you remarked recently that this is the eight-year Venus return of Bush’s second inauguration. And so, although the prominence of Mars is much more similar to the 2001 chart than anything else, Venus’ placement, the ruler of the Ascendant’s placement, is actually much more similar to Bush’s second term in office than anything else.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: And it’s interesting because of how much that became focused on, the war effort, and the focus on Iraq and Afghanistan and some of the things surrounding that. And I wonder if that doesn’t also become the major focus of Obama’s second term as well in some way.
PW: They always say the second term is the hardest.
CB: Sure. So yeah, that’s it about the inauguration chart. We still have some more work to do on this I think, but those are some of the major themes that stood out. And that kind of wraps up this overall, sort of broad look at the astrology of the 2012 election. We’re calling it still for Obama at this point, and we think that the nomination charts actually reinforced our original prediction that was based on the natal charts in April.
We are looking forward to the debates. We’re gonna do some live blogging of the debates and possibly some predictions about the debates just by studying the transits of the candidates for each debate to see perhaps who we might expect to do better in each debate. Is there anything else that we need to mention about this election? Well, one other thing that I need to mention is pretty soon we’ll have released on the blog a book that’s being written on political astrology. So pretty soon we’ll have an ebook out sometime in the next month. So you’ll have to keep an eye out for that as well.
PW: Absolutely.
CB: Yeah. Unless there’s anything else that you wanted to mention, I think that that’s it for the show.
PW: I think that’s it. Though I should note there is one more thing. One more thing that is kind of interesting, the inauguration in 2009 was during the Mercury inferior conjunction, while Mercury was retrograde at 0° Aquarius. And so, the flipside of that is happening on the 2012 inauguration when the Sun is conjunct Mercury at the superior conjunction.
CB: The superior conjunction. So one is when Mercury is in front of the Sun and one’s when it’s behind it.
PW: Yes. Yes, the inferior conjunction is when Mercury’s in front of the Sun—and that’s in the middle of this retrograde period—and the superior conjunction is when Mercury is behind the Sun. And so, we literally have Mercury essentially in the exact same place, but in 2009, it was in front of the Sun. And in 2013, it will be behind the Sun.
CB: Got it. Yeah, and that’s interesting ‘cause the Sun is at 0 Aquarius, which it always will be, which is conjunct Obama’s Jupiter at 0 Aquarius. But Mercury this time is at 2 Aquarius, which is opposing exactly his Mercury. Although we should mention—that’s one thing we almost did forget to mention—we just learned in the past few days as a result of the bulletins that came through ISAR and the NCGR newsletters that because Inauguration Day falls on a Sunday next year, the official, public inauguration has been moved to the next day, to the 21st. And so, this is causing some controversy ‘cause now there’s an issue about what’s gonna be the true inauguration chart.
Now the inauguration chart that we’re looking at is the one that’s set for noon. And according to, I think, the Constitution, it says by law that the person has to be inaugurated by noon on January 20 following Election Day. And it said in this article that’s been released that they will do some sort of private ceremony on that day, on January 20, presumably around noon, although they haven’t released the time.
PW: And it could be any time if it’s not televised.
CB: Right. Unfortunately, it probably has to be by noon or before noon. I mean, even if they moved it to Pisces rising, which is the only other alternative—Aquarius wouldn’t be good, and Aries wouldn’t be good. If they moved it to Pisces rising that might be okay, but then it just puts Jupiter ruling the Ascendant placed in the 4th. But the Moon is still applying to a square with Mars, so they’re still screwed. But it’s really interesting that if they were able to put everything off and just not do the inauguration on January 20 next year, on January 21 at noon, you have Taurus rising. But the Moon has moved out of Taurus, and now it’s moved into Gemini, and it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter. And that is a far more auspicious Moon placement, to have it applying to a conjunction with Jupiter rather than a square with Mars. So I don’t think we should freak out like some astrologers did in 2009 trying to write, you know, petitions. Do you remember that? The void-of-course…
PW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: They were trying to write a petition. The Moon was void-of-course and Mercury was retrograde, and they tried to start a petition to get him to delay it, which didn’t really work out. But I don’t know if we can go that far because there’s some things you just can’t control.
PW: It’ll come down to whether we think that this symbolic moment that Obama assumes it is the right time, or whether the mandated time of the Constitution is when Obama actually becomes President…
CB: Right.
PW: …at 12:00 noon, on January 20, regardless of whether he’s said the oath or not. It’s a little ambiguous about whether he becomes President by that time, or whether he becomes President once he swears the oath.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah.
CB: That’s a debate that we’re gonna have to have. And I guess it’s something that we’re gonna find out during the course of his term as we get the inauguration chart times. So we’ll have two different times, hopefully. Hopefully, we get the private time and then we’ll be able to follow those charts and see which one works out. But yeah, naturally, I think you and I are in agreement that it’s probably the noon time on the 20th. If that really is the law, then that’s probably the chart.
PW: That probably is it, yeah.
CB: Yeah, I would like to look at that again just to see what most constitutional scholars consider…
PW: Definitely.
CB: …to be official. I mean, ‘cause there’s something weird about that. You know, if that really was the case, then would Obama really have cared if the lines were messed up, were flubbed on the original inauguration? They said they were just doing that to be safe in 2009.
PW: Yeah, they said they were just trying to be safe out of an abundance of caution.
CB: Right.
PW: I mean, that was the time he made the big speech. That was the big rollout.
CB: Right. Yeah, and I remember Wolf Blitzer that day ‘cause it was delayed a little bit. And I remember when noon went by that Wolf Blitzer on CNN was saying, “He’s now officially the President, starting at noon,” and it was actually before the inauguration.
PW: Because otherwise there would be a moment when there is no President.
CB: Right.
PW: And I think what that law is trying to prevent is the possibility that there could be some legal moment when there isn’t like a sitting President.
CB: Sure. All right, well, I think that kind of wraps it up.
PW: We’ll have to see.
CB: Yeah, we’ll find out. I think that’s it. I think we’ll wrap this show up. We’ve almost been going for two hours, but I think we covered just about everything related to the 2012 election.
PW: Definitely.
CB: If people are interested in finding out more, they can check out our blog where you and I have articles. It’s at PoliticalAstrologyBlog.com. And people can contact Patrick through his email address which is listed there and read his articles. Yeah, any closing words?
PW: Thank you so much for having me.
CB: All right, well, thanks for coming on the show, and I look forward to working with you on the rest of the election this year. And it should be a pretty exciting couple of months.
PW: Absolutely. Looking forward to it.
CB: Okay, well, that’s it for this show. So thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.