The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 403, titled:
Astrology Forecast for June 2023
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kirah Tabourn
Episode originally released on May 26, 2023
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released June 22, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for the entire month of June 2023. Joining today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Kirah Tabourn. Hey, welcome both of you.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
KIRAH TABOURN: Hello.
CB: Thanks for joining me. So we’re gonna start by I’m gonna give a little bit of an overview of the month ahead—just a brief preview of what we’re gonna be talking about here at the top of the episode—then we’re gonna transition into talking about news and recent events for the first hour of the episode. And then later, in the second hour, we’ll get into a full detailed breakdown of the month ahead forecast for June. So people can go either to the podcast website or to the YouTube channel, and I’ll put timestamps if you want to jump ahead to different segments of the show. But otherwise let’s go ahead and jump right into it by looking at the planetary alignments calendar for the month of June.
All right, so here’s the overview. On June 3, we get our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Sagittarius. The very next day Mercury conjoins Uranus in the sign of Taurus. Then Venus ingresses into Leo on the 5th of June, which is important because Venus is actually gonna go retrograde in that sign this summer, and therefore spend an extended period of time going through that sector of the sky. So this ingress is more important than usual because it’s in some ways the early onset of the Venus retrograde period.
Then later in the month, on the 11th, Mercury ingresses into the sign of Gemini and goes into its home sign, and Pluto retrogrades back into Capricorn after spending the past few months in the sign of Aquarius. Then later, at the end of that week, on the 17th of June, Saturn stations retrograde for the very first time in the sign of Pisces, and then it’s gonna retrograde back into early Pisces before stationing direct later this year. On the 20th, we get our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Gemini. Then the Sun moves into Cancer on the 21st, Mercury into Cancer on the 26th. And finally, at the very end of the month, Neptune stations retrograde in late Pisces on June 30. So those are some of the main, sort of major alignments that we’re gonna be talking about during the course of this episode, among others. But, yeah, so let’s go ahead and transition into the news segment of the show, and, first, welcome you both on. So, hey, Austin. Hey, Kirah. Kirah, thanks for joining us. You’ve been on the podcast before, but this is your first time joining us as a co-host for the forecast episode.
KT: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m stoked to be here.
AC: Yeah, I’m glad you’re here. We were gonna maybe do a podcast last year, but that fell apart.
KT: Yeah.
AC: So I’m excited to have you here.
KT: Yeah, and I will at some point tap you for that again once I get around to it.
AC: Yeah, just let me know.
CB: And we did the Scorpio episode together, from the zodiac series, along with our friend Sam Reynolds last year. And that was one of my favorite entries—and I say that with much bias—of the entire zodiac series, but it was a good episode. Oh, right, I forgot. Oh, yeah, usually when I have somebody and I say that, I don’t have one of the other hosts of the other signs on at the same time. Pisces was also a good episode.
KT: Yeah, Pisces was one of my favorites.
AC: Well, thank you. We talk a lot about the good relations between the ‘nations’ of Pisces and Scorpio—
CB: Right.
KT: Mm-hmm.
AC: With agreement.
CB: You know what’s really funny about that is I forgot to repeat a funny anecdote that my Pisces friend mentioned that I actually mentioned in the episode with Kirah in the Scorpio episode, which is a Pisces-Scorpio dynamic. My Pisces friend said if they meet a Scorpio, just to get their nerves, they’ll say, “It’s not that serious,” and that’s like the ‘Pisces’ thing to say to get on the nerves of a Scorpio.
AC: I will use that.
CB: You should.
KT: It may or may not work on me ‘cause I am a Pisces rising.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, it’s the art of implying that.
KT: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Yeah. So that secret weapon—that was by Mika, the astrologer Mika. So just a shoutout to Mika. All right, so how have you been, Austin, since we checked in last month?
AC: Well, so before we got on the public side of the call, I was describing myself as a ‘tube of toothpaste with just a little bit left’, and I was having to roll it up to get anything out. And I realized that’s literally how I started my day; I realized that my tube of toothpaste was almost gone. I had to pick the crusted caulk out to get any toothpaste. So that’s how I am.
CB: Nice.
AC: And that’s because this paired Mercury retrograde with the eclipses, with Mars in Cancer was a triple-whammy. And so, my parents were scheduled to come for the first time in years and then had to reschedule so that they would arrive right in the middle of the Mercury retrograde. And it was absolutely worth it to see them, but it was terrible timing in general ‘cause I’ve had so much prep to do for NORWAC, and our cat decided to go on a death spiral of rapid, unexplained health decline in the middle of that. And I believe it was the day after Mercury stationed direct, we got a vet to come to the house who recommended a heroic dose of what she referred to as a ‘Hail Mary’ dose of prednisone. And then suddenly the cat—this is our elder cat, Bear—went from being given days to live by the previous vet to being just kind of old and has got some conditions to manage, but totally fine, totally present. And so, all that—kitty in mortal danger, the joy and pressure of having your parents stay in your house when you haven’t seen them in years, lots of work to do. Kait’s also got a huge project that she’s working on. So it requires a lot of toothpaste, Chris.
CB: Yeah. Well, thank you for scraping yourself off the bottom of the barrel in order to come join us today given that. And I know you said you’re having a Mars transit to your Jupiter—
AC: Oh.
CB: And that was part of your astrological correlate for that.
AC: Yeah. So I’m in a Jupiter-ruled year, and Jupiter is the ruler of the 6th, right? So the 6th is where we see pets. And so, for most of May, Mars was getting closer and closer to a conjunction with my Jupiter. As a ruler of the 6th, it’s a malefic, a fallen malefic trying to kill my cat. The eclipses hit Kait’s 6th, so that was hard stuff for pets for her. And the kitty’s ‘almost’ death spiral actually began within a day of the solar eclipse and with the Mercury retrograde, right? The parents’ rescheduling is a good example of a Mercury retrograde. And it was also the endless vet visits that disagreed with each other and gave us potentially actively incorrect information. We didn’t get the right prescription until Mercury was basically direct. So all of the big stars of May’s astrology showed up. And it’s funny ‘cause last month when we were talking about all this stuff, I was like, “I just want to get to the middle-end of the month. I know it’ll be fine then.”
CB: Right.
AC: And I found myself clinging to that during the beginning of the month. But that’s how it happened. Things are fine. Kitty’s been great for almost a week now. Got almost everything done for NORWAC. Had a lovely visit with the parents. All’s well that ends well—but, yeah, that was quite the tunnel.
CB: Yeah, it’s nice to get to the other side of eclipse season. And now we’ve started to have non-eclipse lunations and get out of the Mercury retrograde and everything else and starting to transition into a new phase of the year. All right, so in terms of major news and stuff since the last time, we did a forecast about a month ago. So one of the major things was that Pluto stationed retrograde in Aquarius for the very first time since it ingressed into Aquarius right at the beginning of the month on May 1. And that was right in the middle of the Mercury retrograde, and I know there were at least a couple of major news stories that occurred then. One of them that was notable—and I won’t spend too much time on it ‘cause I know I’ve talked about it a lot lately—but the AI researcher, Geoffrey Hinton, left Google right within a day of that Pluto station. It may have been announced on the day of the Pluto station.
And he was like one of the leading AI researchers, and some people are calling him the ‘father of AI’ or something like that. And he left and then went on this publicity tour about how he was really concerned about where things were headed, and that he had real concerns that this could be a problem that was developing in the future with all these companies starting to pull out all the roadblocks in order to develop this technology quickly that could in some instances have negative impacts. And I thought that was really striking that it happened right on that station. And not long after that, just a few days later, a bunch of CEOs of major AI companies met up for a meeting at the White House, and the vice president, Kamala Harris, said that they have, “a moral obligation to develop AI safely.” And that was on Thursday, May 4. So just, again, right within the vicinity or the orb of that Pluto station in Aquarius. And that seemed so important to me because that was the very first Pluto station in Aquarius, and there’s gonna be 38 of those because we’re talking about Pluto transiting through Aquarius over the next 20 years. So getting one preview and paying attention to some events that were happening during that timeframe seems important ‘cause it could foreshadow some events coming up in the future.
KT: Yeah, can I plug your episode, “Astrology and Artificial Intelligence?” ‘Cause it was really good. And, yeah, I remember you guys talking about the Pluto stations, and this first one being so big. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s really exciting to see. I mean, it’s kind of scary also, but it’s exciting to see how this Pluto ingress has been so clearly about AI. Of course it’s gonna be about other things too, but, yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I did that as the 400th episode. Because usually I’ll do a retrospective and look back into some of my favorite episodes or how different episodes went in the past hundred episodes. But for that episode I decided to get together with Nick Dagan Best and talk about AI and some of the stuff that’s happening and that’s emerging and where it’s heading. And we also tried to look into the future at some major alignments over the next 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius and see if this hypothetical thing of them creating artificial general intelligence—which is what most of the AI companies are trying to do right now, which is create human-level, versatile intelligence in machines—is possible and when that might happen. And we were looking at some of the different alignments that could correlate with that in the future, and I was zeroing in on 2033 and 2040 especially, which is the Uranus-Neptune square around that timeframe.
KT: Wow.
AC: 2033 is that Saturn conjunct Uranus in Gemini in a trine with Pluto in Aquarius.
CB: Exactly. And Jupiter’s also in Aquarius. It’s just gone into Aquarius, and it’s the tail-end of Uranus in Gemini. I’m sure we’re just gonna see such an acceleration of different technologies and transportation because the last time we had that was World War II. And you can just imagine how fast technology started to accelerate during that timeframe, and us seeing something similar coming up over the next decade when Uranus goes into Gemini in just a couple of years, two or three years. So that 2033 timeframe will just be the tail-end of that. So we’ll see some of the final results of things coming through at that time, and I think that’s a good timeframe for some major technological changes.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Uranus in Gemini, and also Uranus in Aquarius—whether it rules it or not—it’s very strong there. And, sure, we get technology that’s not specifically for killing people, but there is a lot of ‘specifically for killing people’ technology that Uranus brings. The previous Uranus in Gemini—or Uranus in Gemini previous to World War II, the Civil War—it wasn’t widely used, but the machine gun, a fully automatic gun, that’s when the Gatling gun was developed and deployed to some degree. There had been rifles for a while but no machine guns until the US Civil War. And then Uranus in Aquarius was World War I, which was planes for the first time, tanks for the first time; artillery with chemical weapons like mustard gas and all that. And then our last Uranus in Aquarius did bring everyone the internet, but you also had a lot of military technologies that were deployed for the first time in the Second Gulf War.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s also hard—
AC: Oh, sorry—the only atomic bombs to be used in a military context were used with Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini the last time.
CB: Yeah, as I talked about in Episode 376, it’s hard to disentangle this period coming up—the next decade—from this also being the Uranus return of the United States when it goes through Gemini and how that’s coincided with those three periods in the past of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and then World War II. So, yeah, that’s also a little nervous-making but there’s that.
AC: Sorry—one more nerdy historical military fact. So the Revolutionary War—and bigger nerds, feel free to correct me. But I believe that one of the big things in the Revolutionary War in terms of equipment was that rifling barrels were a new thing. When you rifle the barrels of a gun, the bullets are much more accurate and are much better at their job, and that was a new thing. I believe it increased the range, the effective range of gunpowder weapons quite a bit, and that changed tactics. It allowed guerrilla tactics to be much more effective ‘cause you could strike from a greater distance. Which if you’re trying to shoot and run away, the greater distance you can do that, the better.
KT: That makes sense.
CB: Fitting with that is actually a news story I forgot and just remembered now as you were going on about major technological innovations in warfare. But also, around the Pluto station, another one that I remembered and took note of at the time—I think it was around May 3 or so—was that drone attack on the Kremlin. There were these two drones—and there were videos of them—that dive-bombed the Kremlin and were destroyed, so I don’t think they did any major damage. But it was one of the first really notable uses of drones in an offensive way on the seat of power of another capital of another country in some sense. I mean, maybe there’s been other stuff, but that was also a little suggestive as well, potentially not in a great way.
AC: Yeah. Well, no doubt probably the tactics and the thinking behind that came out of the last year in Ukraine; we talked about this. One of the major military outcomes of Mars spending so long in Gemini is drones, in a variety of different roles, are just part of warfare now for everybody. Both sides use them—use them, again, not just in role but for surveillance, for artillery spotting, for doing suicide drones. Kind of ominously and hilariously they’ve equipped a lot of civilian models, and they have like a little grabber and they’ll just drop grenades on positions. You just fly your drone over and harass vertically. And so, it hasn’t changed everything, right? It’s not like a whole new ball game; it’s just part of the basic collection forces every army’s going to need from now on.
CB: Yeah. So that was the first Pluto station, and we have got approximately—here’s the list. You can actually generate a list on Astro-Seek, which is pretty cool. And here’s all the Pluto stations that we’ll have over the next 20 years in Aquarius.
AC: I was wondering if you literally counted all of them or if a machine helped you.
CB: I got out an ephemeris. I should have said that, that I got an ephemeris and just sat there and counted through the next 20 years. No, I’m lazy and I use technology to my advantage, and that’s what a good Aquarius rising does. So, yeah, 400 episodes. And just a brief aside, thanks everyone for listening for 400 episodes. It’s been an interesting journey since 2012 when I started this. And, yeah, Austin, thanks for participating and doing all these forecasts with me. We’re about to hit the eight-year anniversary, the Venus retrograde anniversary of starting that this summer. And, Kirah, you’ve also been a longtime listener and fan and participant of the podcast, as well as a fellow podcaster yourself. So, yeah, it’s been interesting hitting that milestone.
KT: Yeah, congrats to you. It’s wild. I mean, I’ve mentioned it before a bit when I’ve been on the podcast, but I think I started listening in 2014. And, yeah, it’s crazy that that was nine years ago, and now I’m on the podcast.
CB: Right.
KT: Yeah, congrats on 400-plus.
CB: Thank you. So, Kirah, you had mentioned also there was another news story that was happening around the time of the Pluto station, which was the writers’ strike, and you had something that you thought that was tied into as well.
KT: Yeah, I was thinking writers are obviously symbolized by Mercury, and we had that station so close to Uranus. And thinking about all the strikes that we’ve seen going on around the world over the past couple of years, they’ve been closely tied to the Saturn-Uranus squares, and so I figured that this Mercury retrograde station with Uranus is probably also tied to the writers’ strike. And Austin had pointed out it’s happening in this Venus-ruled sign, and we’re talking about creative industries. So, yeah, I’m curious to see what happens when Mercury finally clears that shadow and makes that conjunction with Uranus.
AC: Yeah, yeah, right. And the other piece about it—and I haven’t studied this exhaustively—but from what I’ve heard about the writers’ strike, one of the conditions that the writers are pushing for is that the studios, the employers, promise not to use AI to replace writer labor. And so, Mercury’s not exactly square Pluto, but it’s in a squared sign, right? They’re angular relative to each other. And Mercury’s direct station was pretty close, like the middle of the first decan of Taurus; Pluto in the first decan of Aquarius. And I sincerely doubt that there’s ever been a large-scale negotiation in an industry where AI was one of the key conditions. It shows you Pluto tying in now to what’s been going on in the fixed signs, right? That Uranus in Taurus and labor has been such a consistent theme. But now we have the Pluto in Aquarius theme, right?
KT: Yeah, that’s such a good point.
CB: Yeah, And just major transformations and major inevitable transformations. Because that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg of many other industries that are going through similar things right now and having similar tensions. All of a sudden this technology is being implemented and threatens a lot of different jobs and stuff, and a lot of different jobs and careers and fields are gonna change as a result of that.
AC: Right.
KT: Yeah.
AC: In a way it’s an uncertain threat. Maybe it threatens this, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it does threaten it, but not for 20 years. Maybe it threatens it next year. Maybe it can never do that, right? It’s almost more ominous to say they might be coming for you than they’re definitely coming for you.
KT: Yeah, ‘cause how do you plan.
AC: Right.
KT: Who knows.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, good to keep paying attention to stuff in the early phases of this, since the early phases of a transit sometimes give that preview or that little inkling of things to come, so we’ll have to pay attention to that.
AC: Yeah, just on that real quick, Chris. When you have a planet that does a ‘toe-dip’ ingress—it comes in, this is just for two months, and then pops back into the previous sign, but with an “I’ll be back,” it’s sort of like, “I’m just gonna leave this here, and you talk about this.” You’re like, “Oh, we need to do this ethically and safely. This could go really wrong.” It’s just enough of a potential threat that you gotta think about it. But it’s not fully formed, it’s hard to articulate a full response, but, “I’m just gonna leave this here, and I’ll be back in six months again.” That’s exactly the feeling of this, and that’s exactly the timing of the ingress and regress.
CB: That’s really funny ‘cause that’s the exact line that Arnold Schwarzenegger became famous for in The Terminator, and he looks around and he just says, “I’ll be back,” and that is the ominous thing. And then he, like a few minutes later, crashes his car through the police station and starts killing everyone.
KT: I didn’t know that. I’ve never seen it.
CB: You never seen The Terminator? Oh, man.
KT: I haven’t seen a lot of movies, but that line makes even more sense now. I love that.
AC: I would just watch Terminator 2, and if you like that watch the first one. Terminator 2 is widely regarded as the best. It’s a very entertaining movie, if nothing else.
KT: Cool.
AC: But what’s interesting—
CB: Hold on—we can’t transition from there. Really quickly, that’s true, Terminator 2 is the superior one. But there’s a big twist in Terminator 2 that you can’t actually understand properly unless you watch Terminator 1.
KT: Okay.
CB: So I recommend still watching 1. All right, now make your transition, Austin.
AC: Yeah, I was just gonna say it’s interesting because Pluto in Aquarius is bringing up all of the horror stories we have about the future, some of which were told during previous Saturn in Aquarius periods. But Terminator—for those of you who have seen it—there might be some spoilers; they’ve been out for 35 and 40 years. But when people talk about SkyNet, the apocalypse to be avoided in Terminator is literally AI takes over, and we have that in a dozen other franchises and novels.
CB: It becomes sentient and then recognizes humanity as a threat and then decides to destroy humanity.
AC: Right. Or The Matrix where the same thing happens, but it decides that humanity would make good batteries. And so, what’s interesting is in none of those timelines do we have ‘is AI developed while everybody has stories about what will happen if AI is developed’. And so, maybe they changed the timeline by freaking everybody out, but, no, it’s bringing up all of this. And it’s like, okay, were these just stories, or are these actually legitimate things to worry about—the Aquarius and future horror, like what could go wrong? And what’s interesting is Aquarius, like Capricorn, is Saturn-ruled, but in a very different way. And so, it’s a fear of order. Just like with Pluto in Capricorn, it’s the cruel pen or cage or prison of order; and with Capricorn there’s a lot of looking to the past. But with Pluto in Aquarius, it’s imagining a new order—an order by inhuman intelligence and us being basically stuck and either used or eliminated by this order which might develop, but from an intelligence not our own. Whereas Pluto in Capricorn seemed to be more looking with regret and horror at what we’ve all done to ourselves and each other.
KT: And the world.
AC: Yeah, yeah, and the world. With Pluto in Aquarius, it’s like something else is gonna come in and do it to us. We have that ‘outsider’ feeling.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I wonder if Pluto in Aquarius will take some of the alien stuff and ramp it up or fully ‘adrenalize’ it. People will get afraid of that form of other intelligence doing something Pluto to us.
KT: Especially from the sky.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah, and that was the interesting thing. I made a comment in the AI episode that the fear that people have about AI is that we’ll create another sentient, essentially alien race of people on Earth that happen to be smarter or more powerful than us, and if they treat us like we treat other sentient entities on Earth then humans might be in bad shape. And somebody made a comment when I said that we’ll create another one. They said that there’s already other sentient beings on Earth, but we just often don’t treat them well, or we don’t treat them as if they have the same level of sentience as we do. But then what happens on the flip side if we create something that has the same attitude towards us in some ways is the concern.
AC: Yeah. Are either of you familiar with the ‘dark forest’ hypothesis?
KT: I don’t think so.
AC: Okay, so the idea is that the universe is quiet and we don’t see signs of life because any civilization smart enough to be able to send signals and see what’s going on in the universe realizes that the universe is full of other civilizations that are threatened. It’s a forested night where things are quiet because there are predators. And so, other civilizations are quiet ‘cause they don’t want to reveal their location and get ‘space nuked’ or whatever. And there’s some really good fiction that has proceeded from that, like The Three-Body—
KT: It’s like Wakanda almost, Black Panther.
CB: Right.
KT: Like how they just are hidden.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you live in the forest, and you have any predators, you know that concealment is probably your best defense. And so, the universe is quiet because everyone knows to hide.
CB: Right. Whereas humanity is like young enough and stupid enough right now that we’re just like shooting off fireworks and making loud sounds and attracting as much attention as possible to us.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, The Three-Body Problem begins close to our timeline where we send out our stupid messages; we’re like, “We know math, and we can make music.” And we get one response ever, which basically decodes to, “I’m a pacifist, most of my people are not. Cease broadcasting and do not respond. Do not answer me. Do not answer this. Do not answer this.”
KT: Wow.
CB: Nice. Good times.
AC: But full Pluto in Aquarius feels, right?
KT: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really curious to see if we’re gonna get some concrete alien proof during this transit.
CB: Yeah, I mean, even biological life—‘cause there’s other places in our solar system where the ingredients are possible—that’s legitimately something that could be discovered in the next 20 years, and that would be an interesting facet of the transit as well. And it would be game-changing scientifically and theologically and all sorts of other things even if just microbial life was found on another planet in our solar system.
AC: Yeah. So Aquarius in the tarot is usually synced up with The Star card, which is this woman receiving light and inspiration from the night sky above and sort of pouring it out into a little pool at her feet. But if we bring Pluto into that, the underworld is that night sky, right? The infernal realms are the source of terror, and potentially death is above rather than below. The unknown, right?
KT: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah. All right, so I didn’t mean to go on a whole other tangent about AI for another month in a row, and I apologize to all the people that are not into that.
AC: We’re talking about aliens, Chris.
CB: That’s true. We’re talking about aliens now, so that’s better; that’s an improvement. All right, let’s transition to another news story. Another thing that happened, not AI-related, was Prince Charles became King Charles and had his inauguration, but he was coronated on May 6, 2023. And I am not usually a major royal watcher, but I was interested in this only because I had used his chart as an example before because he was born with Leo rising and the Sun in Scorpio in the 4th whole sign house. He was born in 1948, so he’s an old man now. So much of his life was spent waiting because his mother lived to be super, super old, and she was the longest-reigning monarch in history or pretty close. And so, there was a huge part of his life that was sort of spent waiting around to see if he would become king at some point, or even if he would die never having become king because his mother ended up outliving him or something.
And so, we’ve learned the final part of that story, which is that it didn’t happen, and his mother passed away last fall. And, interestingly, the night before he was coronated as king in May there was that Scorpio lunar eclipse and that occurred right in his 4th house. So I thought that was really interesting and really fitting just because of that 4th house placement and how, on the one hand, it was providing some culmination and some end to that story in terms of his long wait to become king, and that question of whether he would become king, as well as the other things associated with that, just in terms of his family and his inheritance and all those other things surrounding it. So an interesting little correlation there.
AC: Yeah. Well, if you pop back to the chart for a second—was that his chart you had up real quick?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Okay, yeah. And so, this is literally his nodal return, and he was born more or less on an eclipse himself. He was born a day-and-a-half before a lunar eclipse, and the Moon is with the North Node. Ooh—so that’s real close. It’s right at the edge of being a visible eclipse. But Sun and Moon with the nodes in Taurus in Scorpio—just like what happened a few weeks ago—that’s such a doubling-down on the natal signature.
CB: Well, and if you look in the bottom-right of my chart layout using Solar Fire, it shows the preceding lunar phases. And the two eclipses that preceded his birth were an eclipse in Scorpio and an eclipse in Aries, and that’s literally what we just had. We just had an eclipse in Scorpio and an eclipse in Aries like right around the time of his coronation. So that’s a really striking natal transit correlation there, and it’s just a reminder of one of the oldest principles in astrology—especially in the Mesopotamian astrological tradition that goes back to at least 2000 BCE—that major stuff happens under eclipses. There are changes of rulers, of like kings and queens. Kings and queens die or rise to power around the time of eclipses. And it’s weird that even to this day, in 2023, that’s still happening, and we still have things like that happening in really striking ways.
AC: Yeah, it’s very House of the Dragon, right? I had a few other thoughts on that. Again, I’m not much of a royal watcher, but it speaks to the Babylonian omen-watcher who may have seen people taking on thrones and what are the Sun and the Moon doing. And so, that’s interesting with it being on a lunar eclipse on the South Node in Scorpio that he took the crown because with the South Node we often have absence or loss or having to let go. There are a lot of unhappy planets in water signs during that time. And so, it’s interesting because the ‘star of the show’ is the Queen’s absence. Her absence is probably much bigger than his presence.
And so, I was thinking about it from an electional point of view. From a transit point of view, that’s triggering his Sun and Moon and all that, and that makes sense that that would be around the time that he would be coronated. But then electional astrology is, when do we schedule the thing that’s going to happen anyway? We could pick a Tuesday or a Wednesday, right? And I was just thinking about what does that say that it was done on that lunar eclipse on the South Node? So if the Sun is the figurehead themselves—the one wearing the crown—I was thinking about the Moon as speaking to the dynasty itself; like literally the family that has power. In this case, the Windsors. I don’t know. If I were tending to the Windsor dynasty, I would not do it on a lunar eclipse with the Moon in fall, with its ruler fallen. That seems to speak for a dissolution or a moving towards dissolution for the dynasty itself. Less about him and more what it says about where that family’s going.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah. He gets some interesting transits this year too. Uranus coming for his Sun and chart ruler. See how that goes.
CB: Let me pull the chart back up again. Oh, yeah. So Uranus will get up to 22-23.
KT: 23, yeah.
CB: Okay, so that’ll oppose his Sun. And the eclipses have been bouncing back and forth between Taurus and Scorpio for a little while now, and there was a set last year shortly after Queen Elizabeth died and then there were some preceding it. So it’s just kind of notable. It reminds me that sometimes eclipses—because they happen in the same pair of signs for like a year-and-a-half—sometimes precede or foreshadow events and build up to them, as well as their culmination. But, yeah, that’s a really interesting point about the Uranus transit to his Sun as well.
KT: Yeah.
AC: It’ll be an interesting year.
KT: For sure.
AC: This was the year that was probably always going to happen, but kept not happening.
CB: Yeah, that kept being put off or extended and then it finally came. And, let’s see, that reminded me that I was doing some research on the Mesopotamian tradition. And just seeing that weird correlation of a king being coronated at the time of an eclipse reminded me that in the Mesopotamian tradition they had the longest-running scientific program in history, and we refer to it now as the Astronomical Diaries. The ancient astrologers and skywatchers in Mesopotamia, starting around 750 BCE, set up this program of going out every night and observing the stars in the sky and then writing down the alignments that they witnessed, as well as any astrological omens or anything that was happening.
And they would also sometimes write down things that were correlating on Earth at the time, like the prices of commodities—basically tracking the markets to a certain extent—they would note the level of the Euphrates River, and they would also sometimes note important political events that happened at the time. And one of them that’s really fascinating is that they actually noted way back in the 4th century—we have this tablet that’s been rediscovered, and it’s in the British Museum. It’s a little clay tablet that has writing on it in the wedge-shaped language of cuneiform, and on this tablet it notes an eclipse that took place on September 20, 331 BCE. And one of the things that it records is Alexander of Macedon—or Alexander the Great he’s sometimes called—defeating Darius, the King of Persia at the time, in the Battle of Gaugamela, on October 1, 331 BCE. And the significance of that was basically this was Alexander the Great defeating the Persian king and essentially setting himself up as the new king across Mesopotamia and the Middle East at the time.
AC: Yeah, that was the decisive battle, right? There were several important battles, but that was the decisive battle. And Darius was forced to flee and was basically in exile in his own country, being chased around by the Macedonians.
CB: Right. There’s an amazing article on this. There’s many articles you can find, but there’s one on livius.org that’s titled, “Astronomical Diaries” where it talks about the diaries and the things that they record, but it talks about the record that the astrologer who wrote this tablet made. It says, “On the 24th, in the morning, the king of the world [Alexander] erected his standard and attacked. Opposite each other they fought and a heavy defeat of the troops of the king [Darius] Alexander inflicted. The king [Darius], his troops deserted him and to their cities they went. They fled to the east.” And it also notes the relevant omens from the compilation series, the Enûma Anu Enlil, that were relevant to the specific eclipse that had just occurred right before that, and it gave the interpretation from the Enûma Anu Enlil, which says, “If…either [on] the 13th or 14th…the moon is dark; the watch passes and it is dark; his features are dark like lapis lazuli; [he’s] obscured until his midpoint; the west quadrant – as it covered, the west wind blew; the sky is dark; his light is covered.” So it’s describing this specific type of eclipse. And then it says, “[If this happens] the significance is: The son of the king will become purified for the throne but will not take the throne. An intruder will come with the princes of the west; for eight years he will exercise kingship; he will conquer the enemy army; there will be abundance and riches on his path; he will continually pursue his enemies; and his luck will not run out.”
So it mentions a specific period of eight years. And what’s crazy about that is that after Alexander conquered Mesopotamia and won this battle, he actually did reign for eight years before he fought in wars all the way to westernmost portions of India and then eventually was forced to turn back. He went back to Babylon and then promptly died basically, and his reign ended under mysterious circumstances eight years later. So not only did the canonical series make an accurate prediction about his reign ahead of time, but there were astrologers that were there witnessing it and writing down what was happening at the time. And it just reminded me that I wanted to mention this because that’s part of what we’re doing here and part of the tradition that we’re tied into when we do these forecast episodes.
We spend the first hour basically reflecting on recent events that we’ve seen, noting some of the important astrological correlations that we noticed at the time and adding that to our repository of collected things, and then we move on to talking about the forecast that’s coming up in the month ahead. It’s part of building up that literary tradition of empirical observations of astrological movements in the sky and what they correlate with event-wise on Earth. And that’s been going on for 4,000 years now. But in a way, doing some of these forecast episodes—these are kind of like the tablets that we’re recording in our time period.
AC: That’s beautiful Mercury-Saturn conjunction stuff, Chris.
CB: Thank you.
KT: Totally.
AC: Honestly.
CB: Yeah. All right, so other news. Do you guys have any other news or events that you wanted to mention? No? Okay.
KT: I don’t think so.
AC: I’ve been very distracted.
CB: Yeah, you’ve had a lot going on, but is starting to come out of that period. Lot of Mercury retrograde stuff.
AC: Oh, yeah, I was telling you both earlier this was a full-on, cliché Mercury retrograde; in addition to the big stuff, there was lots of little stuff. There were three different instances where there was difficulty getting an important package from the post office and multiple, seemingly, unnecessary steps had to be taken over and over and over again; you know, just classic stuff.
CB: Nice. Did you have any Mercury retrograde things, Kirah?
KT: Yeah, I had some cute Mercury retrograde. Mercury rules my 7th and my 10th—oh, sorry, my 7th and my 4th house—and was retrograde in my 3rd. And every retrograde without fail I’m reunited with someone from my past, especially the ‘mercurials’. I’ve dated a lot of ‘mercurials’ that I’m still close with. One funny thing that happened, one, I went on a date for the first time in forever, and my business partner has the same name as this guy that I went out on a date with, and they’re both Virgos—just things like that. They both have Venus in Libra. So that’s one thing that happened, and I kept accidentally texting the other ‘cause they have the same name. And then another fun one was I was trying to book an Airbnb in Brooklyn, and the ones I kept trying to request kept falling through. And it’s always third time’s the charm with Mercury retrograde—at least in my experience—so I knew the third one was probably gonna happen, and it did. And it ended up being directly across the street from one of my really good friends in Brooklyn who was one of those Virgo stelliums that fall in my 7th house. So, yeah, I just got to see a lot of my ‘mercurial’ friends and friends in general, run into people on the street, walking around Brooklyn. So, yeah, I enjoy that part of Mercury retrograde as someone who has a Mercury-ruled 7th house. It’s always like I get to see people from my past and it’s always kind of fun.
CB: Yeah, I love that backward-looking notion of Mercury retrograde ‘cause usually the planets move forward in the signs of the zodiac and the degrees. But then when they start moving backwards, it really can be a process of not just revisiting things from the past, but also looking back and reflecting on the past in very tangible ways. But sometimes it’s not until you’re in the midst of that and you’re experiencing that that you truly understand what that means.
KT: Yeah. Yeah, I bet the other Jupiter-ruled people out there have similar things with Mercury ruling the 7th and just like, “Oh, here’s someone I went to school with 10 years ago,” or whatever; someone I used to work with. People keep coming back, yeah.
CB: Yeah. I had that as well with my Mercury retrograde story, which was a retrograde through my 4th house ‘cause it was in Taurus. Towards the end of the retrograde and around the time of the direct station, I had a family visit. So that was like a 4th house thing of meeting up with my mom for the first time in a year. But also, I had this sudden strong urge to go back and visit the city I grew up in, to both visit the old house where I grew up, but also to drive around my old neighborhood. And it was a lot of going back and revisiting and remembering things that I had forgotten about, what seems like a different lifetime, like 20 years ago. And there was this real ‘looking back to the past’ feeling. And I didn’t realize until I was almost done that Mercury was retrograde and stationing in my 4th house, and I thought that was really striking.
It’s also kind of striking because it was retrograde in my 4th house, but that’s also my quadrant 3rd house, and the 3rd house is your neighborhood. And I could kind of see the overlap of both of those, of the 4th house significations, as well as the 3rd. And I was thinking about that a lot this month because with Ben Dykes’ new translation of Firmicus Maternus that I was reading through, it was really evident that Firmicus is sort or wrestling with and is trying to reconcile the whole sign house placements and the degree-based house placements at the same time. And he has this desire to use both, just like Rhetorius did, and you can see him referring to this periodically throughout the text And I thought it was interesting having a real, embodied experience of both as I was doing that this month with that Mercury station in Taurus.
KT: I have that too actually now that I think about it. Well, it’s not the same. But Mercury ruling the 4th, I guess you have a Gemini IC as well then, right?
CB: Right.
KT: ‘Cause, yeah, I went back home too and went to go visit my family and my hometown, and, yeah, lots of that with Mercury retrograde as well.
CB: Nice.
AC: My primary movement through the past—while I wasn’t dealing with drama in the present—was going line-by-line through a particular section of Firmicus in preparation for a presentation at NORWAC and a couple of other projects. And so, whenever I could get away and concentrate, just literally reading a 1,600-year-old text and line-by-line trying to extract all of the conditions under which we get this delineation and thinking about that, and sort of installing a ‘Firmicus’ bot in my brain. And what’s funny is that I didn’t plan to do that project once Ben’s new translation had come out. It’s just ‘Firmicus’ time apparently.
CB: Yeah, it’s ‘Firmicus’ time. And then there was somebody that released a podcast independently on Firmicus Maternus, a different podcast. It was around the same time that Ben’s translation came out and they didn’t realize it; it was just independent. And it just reminded me that I think it’s tied in with whatever Firmicus’ birth chart is, which we don’t have. It must have been getting activated recently ‘cause he’s just coming up in all sorts of different ways, in the same way that in February, for example, Valens was coming up a lot, which I was a part of. I was tied in with his Anthology, publishing that in October, right on that eclipse in Scorpio, which is very close to his Sun. But sometimes people’s birth charts live on for centuries and centuries afterwards, and when their memory comes up, it’s their chart getting activated over again.
AC: Yeah, it seems like Firmicus is having a transit. Something’s popping ‘cause that’s three or four things that are all Firmicus-centric that aren’t tied together; like they could have happened at different times.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then one other that was actually related to that in an indirect way that I meant to mention that was really notable and kind of important in our community. There was an astrologer named Ellen Black who passed away on May 10, not long after the Scorpio eclipse. And she was one of the founders of Project Hindsight actually. She was Robert Schmidt’s wife, and he was the principal translator. But she was the one actually, in the 1980s, that got into astrology first, got a consultation with an astrologer, and was so impressed by it that she started encouraging Schmidt to look into it and to take it seriously.
And I was told by a friend who knew them, Levia Shanken, just a few days ago that one of the first things they did after she got a consultation was that they got a translation of Firmicus Maternus that existed—Bram’s translation that was done in the 1970s—and read it. And Schmidt read the translation—Levia said—and said, “I could do a better job of translating this.” And that was somehow connected to their start and what would eventually become the start of Project Hindsight. ‘Cause by that point they were already doing a translation project for ancient mathematical texts, which was the first version of Project Hindsight in the 1980s. But then in 1992 and 1993, they got together with Robert Hand and Robert Zoller and founded the astrological project to go back and translate and recover ancient astrological texts, which has then reshaped the astrological community over the past 30 years in many notable ways. So I just wanted to mention her and recognize her ‘cause that was a major notable thing that happened this month.
AC: Very ‘butterfly effect’ with that story. Ellen gets a reading and then, “Oh, it’s cool,” and then they buy Firmicus. What a difficult-to-predict string of events, especially without astrology. Like the one decision that then ends up—it’s very much the grain of sand that creates the avalanche 40 years later.
CB: Yeah. And it’s reminiscent of what sometimes happens in eclipses, like we were talking about last month. Sometimes you’ll have an eclipse in a notable part of your chart and something important will happen, but you won’t recognize its significance until later and sometimes it’s hidden or obscure what the notable event was that happened. Like sometimes it’s obvious and you get Charles being coronated or something like that, which is very public and very obvious. But other times similar significant events happen in our lives that coincide with eclipses, but we don’t know until later, in retrospect, looking back, what the significance of that was.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, so I think those were all of the major news stories that I meant to mention, and we’re getting towards the end of our first hour here. Before we transition into talking about the forecast for June, I did want to mention our sponsor, which is the website and the astrology software program known as Archetypal Explorer, at archetypalexplorer.com. So Archetypal Explorer is a web-based astrology program which is built for astrology enthusiasts. And it’s really awesome because it provides astrological tools, such as a horoscope chart, as well as visual transit timelines and calendars that you can use to actually look at the transits that are coming up, both in terms of your personal life and in terms of world events in general.
So here’s a screenshot I took earlier today that I’m actually gonna be using during our forecast of the type of transit timeline that you can get through Archetypal Explorer. It shows the entire month ahead or year ahead or whatever timeframe you want. And it plots the transits of the planets in a graph that goes up, the closer the aspect gets to going exact, and then as the aspect recedes and moves away, the graph goes downwards. So you can really visualize in an almost three-dimensional sense the transits and see them not just as a singular event or point that occurs on a certain date of the calendar, but as a process, this overlapping process of different transits coming into being or coming into intensity and passing out of that.
So with Archetypal Explorer you can set it up to also give you interpretations of each of the transits from two different exclusive interpretation books, one of which was written by Richard Tarnas and draws on his approach to astrology, inspired by his book, Cosmos and Psyche. And you can get interpretations of some of these transits where it’ll give you a positive side of that or a positive interpretation of that, as well as the negative or what the challenges are that come from that sort of transit, which is super useful if you’re trying to understand what the transits mean for you that are coming up in the near future.
Other features of the program are also a calendar, which you can use to schedule dates and for electional purposes and planning different things. And also, there’s a separate interpretation text drawn from the book, The Archetypal Universe, by Renn Butler, which gives you a second set of interpretations besides Tarnas’ interpretations if you’d like more.
So it’s a super useful program, and it’s one that I use constantly and that you’ll see all the time. I used it, for example, in the AI episode in order to look at some of the outer planets coming up over the next 20 years. And that’s how Nick and I zeroed in on some of those timeframes like 2033 and 2040 because of the ability to see overlapping transits rather than just singular ones in isolation, so that’s a super useful program. It’s membership-based, so you can get a free 7-day trial just to try it out if you’d like at archetypalexplorer.com. So I’d recommend checking it out. And, yeah, thanks to them for sponsoring this episode.
All right, so let’s make a transition into talking about the month of June and talking about the astrology. So I already gave an overview of that. Here’s the Alignments Calendar again that just shows some of the major ingresses and stations and lunations that we’re gonna be talking about. But let me put up the chart for the 1st of the month, so that we can kind of frame where the planets are and where they’re gonna be as we begin the month. So I forgot to say that today we’re recording this on May 21, 2023. We started I think around, what? Probably 1:40 PM in Denver, Colorado. So here’s the chart for June 1 that shows some of the astrological alignments that we start the month out with. So, let’s see, where should we start?
We see Pluto is still barely in Aquarius, but it’s getting ready to retrograde back into Capricorn. We see Jupiter is now 3° into Taurus. Mercury has returned back to its station degree. I think it’s back to 16° of Taurus at the start of the month, which is not super far from where it went retrograde several weeks ago. The Sun is making its way through Gemini. Mars is already 7° into Leo. So it’s starting to finally move out of that square with Jupiter and that opposition with Pluto, which is so exact right now here at the end of May. And we have our first lunation of the month forming on the 3rd, which is gonna be that Full Moon in Sagittarius, which is the second non-eclipse lunation after we start to fully head out of eclipse season here. So where should we start? What’s catching your eye? What are the things that are standing out to you two in terms of the opening of the month?
AC: Let’s see. So one thing worth saying is that June has a lot less change than April and May. We’ve got Jupiter in a new sign by the time June begins. Mars is going to be in the same sign all month. Venus ingresses into Leo early in the month, in Leo the whole month. Mercury spends the first half of June finishing up in Taurus and then is in Gemini. And then Pluto goes back to Capricorn. But we’ve had kind of turbulent, lots of big, important changes over the last few months. End of March, beginning of April, Pluto’s in a new sign for the first time in 15 years. Saturn’s changing signs, and then Jupiter changed signs. And, oh, it’s eclipses and it’s Mercury retrograde. The last two months there’s been a lot going on. And it’s not that nothing happens in June, but we don’t have the same level of big pieces being rearranged. Other than Pluto going back into Capricorn, the big pieces are just where they are in June, and they’re gonna be there for a while.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah, that’s definitely the vibe that I’ve been feeling going into June as well. It’s like we finally get some time to digest everything from the past couple of months and move into a period of adjustment. There’s a lot of squares happening, but, yeah, there’s not these big changes like we’ve been having in April and May.
AC: Yeah, I’m so excited. Literally the plan is just get to June and then pause—
KT: Veg out.
AC: For a second.
KT: Same.
AC: Actively sedate myself.
CB: Yeah, especially for fixed signs, getting out of eclipse season and having things settle down again from the major changes and the period of things being thrown up in the air, which was sort of a side effect or a direct effect of the eclipses themselves in Aries and Scorpio; but also of the Mercury retrograde conjunct Uranus in Taurus and how that was sort of amplifying the disruptive quality of that time. So we get a bit of a break from that here this month. But this month is also setting up some other major changes that are coming this summer with the Venus retrograde in Leo—especially once Venus changes signs and moves into Leo—‘cause it’s gonna spend so much time there over the next several months. But especially around mid-month, around June 19, Venus actually moves into its shadow phase because it’s gonna pass over the degree that it will retrograde back to later during the course of the retrograde period, when it stations direct there on September 3. So the pre-retrograde shadow phase begins on June 19. And, like I said, the precursor to that—which is the ingress of Venus into a new sign when it moves into Leo—is gonna take place on the 5th of June. So already at that point we start to get a shift, and we start to get the buildup to something in the Leo sectors of all of our charts.
AC: Yeah, and we have two things in early June. We get a Full Moon pretty early, and then we get Venus’ ingress into Leo I believe two days after that. And those are both events involving fire signs. There’s so much Venus in Leo to talk about—and we will be taking four or five months to talk about all of the Venus in Leo things—but it is interesting that just before the ingress we have a Full Moon in Sagittarius, which is ruled by Jupiter in a Venus-ruled sign. And we were talking about this earlier—when you look at a lot of what’s going on this month, a lot of the planets end up answering to Venus, right? Mercury’s still in Taurus for the first half of the month looking to Venus for direction. Jupiter is in Taurus now, and will be for a year, looking to Venus for direction. Saturn is in the sign of Venus’ exaltation and looks to Jupiter for direction, which is in Venus’ sign. And so, there’s just a lot that’s kind of coming back to Venus and what Venus has planned.
CB: Yeah. And Venus is getting ready to start looking backwards into the past and bringing up things from the past in order to set a more solid foundation for the future. And so, for some people it’ll be looking back and digging up old things from the past. But for others it will be that important turning point that sometimes happens with Venus retrogrades of setting a new foundation for the future. Yeah, it seems like some people are really tied into that Venus retrograde cycle, and important events are pretty common when those take place.
AC: Yeah. So even though we have the ingress this month, it’s gonna be another six weeks—six or seven weeks until Venus turns retro. And so, we’ve got an entryway, right? We’ve got the ‘road to the retro’ and sometimes those are smoother than they should be and they sneak up on you. But this time, as soon as Venus enters Leo, Mars is right there. And it looks like Venus is chasing Mars, and it looks like Venus is going to overtake Mars, but Venus keeps slowing down and slowing down and slowing down and doesn’t quite make conjunction. But we have the two moving increasingly as a pair all this month and for the first half of July. And so, Venus-Mars conjunctions are, how shall we say, not subtle. The polite way to put it is ‘inordinately passionate’. And then we have this almost Venus-Mars conjunction moving through Leo, which is, again, a sign not famous for its subtlety or tact or lack of drama.
KT: For the record, Venus and Mars finally do come together in Aquarius early next year in February.
AC: Oh.
KT: But, yeah, we have kind of a glaring lack of Venus-Mars aspects this year. We had our final one already. We only have three exact aspects this year, and the last one was a sextile between Venus in Gemini, Mars in—oh, sorry, Mars in Gemini and Venus in Aries. So, yeah, it’s this weird tension with them—Venus kind of chasing Mars through Leo and then having to stop and go backwards—and they don’t get to meet up again till February.
CB: Right. So Venus stations retrograde on July 22; so that’s when that 40 days and 40 nights of Venus retrograde begins. But by that time Mars has already slipped out of Leo into Virgo and sort of escaped the completion of that aspect or that connection or union between the two. So what does that mean? I was watching a livestream of—Nick Dagan Best and Patrick Watson are doing livestreams now pretty frequently, a couple times a week, on Nick’s YouTube channel, which you should check out and subscribe to. And Patrick was talking about how in horary usually that’s a specific type of thing when a faster planet is applying to an exact aspect with another planet, but then the second planet escapes and moves into the next sign. It’s usually indicative of something that’s forming, that seems like it’s about to happen, but then it doesn’t quite come together in the horary question. And we almost have a like a broader, mundane version of that here with the union of Venus and Mars seeming like it’s impending, but then losing that; or that being aborted in some sense at the last minute.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting ‘cause the literal motion is it looks like Venus is chasing Mars and narrowing the distance, but she just gets slower and slower and slower. Like if you looked at it, at most points you’d be like, “Oh, well, she’s gonna catch him.”
CB: Right. She runs out of steam.
AC: Yeah. And then eventually it’s like, “Oh, I need to go back,” and then we get a separation.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, it’s interesting to think of what is the thing that looks like it’s going to come to completion that doesn’t, right? There’s that side of it. But then also it’s two planets close together in the same sign, transiting the same house in the natal chart. You’re gonna get a lot of Venus-Mars fun and drama being generated through June and then into July. They still live in the same apartment, right? They’re still like sharing the same bathroom, lots of interaction, there just isn’t that moment of union.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, on one level, like on a personal level, Venus-Mars in Leo, leading into a Venus retrograde—it’s the potential for dramatizing things, making relationships and moments of relating more dramatic than maybe they need to be. Like a little bit more spotlit and covered in glitter and fire. I think it would be wise—especially if you’ve got fixed anything, especially relational planets—to just kind of watch the drama because the natural tendency is very dramatic, it’s very bright. What does Venus-Mars in Leo look like? It’s very drag. It’s very over-the-top, right? It’s not just appearing. It’s over-the-top, pushing the appearance to make as much of an impact as possible.
This is the sign of the Sun, and the Sun is all about seeing and what’s visible. And if that’s operating on a, let’s say, unconscious or semi-conscious level, the push to dramatize things can be a problem, right? Sometimes you have to make a problem big to see it and address it and then sometimes that just makes it way worse, but it’s very dramatic. And in terms of psychology, I was thinking, what is this about? What kind of triggers are there gonna be for these episodes? The different episodes in the dramatic series. It’s ego issues, and feeling seen. Like, “I don’t feel seen.” Or, “You see me incorrectly.” Or, “I don’t feel valued,” right? So this kind of stuff in relationships when we’re dealing with Leo ‘cause it’s about that seeing or not being seen.
CB: Yeah, and the desire to be recognized and to be centralized or treated as central, and the tensions that come when that’s not happening.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, when we need to be seen for something and we’re not seen, we get angry or resentful. Yeah, there’s just all of those sort of dynamics, which seems to be very present on social media. There’s a whole lot of fighting for the spotlight and envy over a person who’s getting more, and “Oh, but I’m doing this and this,” intentional ‘spotlight’ games where people are competing and also arranging the spotlight so certain things are visible. And speaking of visible, Venus retrogrades always deliver sexual scandals. I expect a double-dose of escandalo during not just the Venus retrograde but the lead-up as well. The stage is set.
KT: Yeah, I feel like especially with celebs. Like all of this Leo energy is giving me lots of celeb drama and scandal, yeah.
AC: Yep. In delineating Venus-Mars connections, Firmicus is absolutely relentless in talking about scandal. It’s just like scandal, scandal, scandal, scandal, scandal.
CB: Right. You had an example. I don’t know if you were gonna use that in your workshop, Austin.
AC: I am.
CB: Okay, so save that one.
AC: The particular Venus-Mars combination where it will make the person blameworthy in sexual matters and their indecency will be publicly exposed.
CB: Got it. Yeah, so that’s Firmicus. And then this Venus retrograde, since it’s a retrograde, it also invokes the past, and it brings up Venus’ synodic cycle where Venus goes retrograde in the same spot of the zodiac approximately every eight years. So this is gonna tie us back into a retrograde and a time period in some people’s lives that happened eight years ago this summer where Venus went retrograde in roughly the same area of the zodiac back in the summer of 2015. Or even eight years before that, when Venus went retrograde in roughly the same area of the zodiac in the summer of 2007. So for some people it will be either looking back to some events that happened in your life back during those two timeframes, or other previous timeframes in eight-year increments prior to that. Or in some instances bringing up and having you revisit things that were started at that time and having to return to them or having to go back and complete something perhaps that was left unfinished.
KT: Yeah, I’m thinking a lot about this for my age group—the people turning 32 this year—because a lot of my friends, a lot of people I grew up with were born under this cycle. I think, yeah, June-July ‘91 we had a Venus-Mars conjunction in Leo. We also had Jupiter there too. It’s interesting now that we have the Jupiter square. But, yeah, just thinking a lot about being born under this star point basically and how it should be an interesting summer for a lot of us, just personally even. Actually the one in 2015—where was Jupiter? Wasn’t Jupiter in Leo too for that one?
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah.
CB: I always associate that retrograde—
KT: That was so beautiful ‘cause we could see it.
CB: Yeah. And that was the one where, in the United States, it was really notable ‘cause the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Leo was forming, and the Supreme Court at that time ended up effectively legalizing same-sex marriage.
KT: That’s right.
CB: And I always remember it for that, that we had a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in the sky and you had such an amazing positive correlation happening at the same time. So I’m curious what that looks like this summer. You have a Venus-Mars conjunction that’s forming in the sky when Venus goes retrograde, and that’s much more challenging and much more tricky in terms of Venus’ significations compared to a Venus-Jupiter conjunction.
KT: Yeah, I think we had another Venus-Mars conjunction two years ago in Leo as well the summer of 2021. I remember that one too. So that might be a nice callback as well. I was thinking, “What happened July 2021?”
CB: Let me pull the chart up for that. Yeah, there it is.
KT: I remember ‘cause I was dating someone that has an exact Venus-Jupiter-Mars conjunction in Leo, and I was visiting him around that time.
CB: Oh, yeah, I remember that. I remember this triple conjunction where the Moon caught up to Venus and Mars at the same time, and it was tricky because there was also the opposition from Saturn at 11° of Aquarius. And this was like that first summer after the 2020 COVID summer. The 2020 summer was pretty tricky and rough still, but the summer of 2021 was the first one where things were a bit more open again. Yeah, a lot of it was centered on that—that Venus-Mars conjunction.
KT: Yeah. And those Uranus squares, we get to have those again.
CB: Yeah, so let’s talk about that ‘cause that’s throwing in an interesting piece to this, as well as Venus’ ingress into Leo at the very beginning of the month. It’s not a clean ingress because as soon as it moves into Leo, it immediately opposes Pluto, which is at 0° of Aquarius. And then Venus moves into a square with Saturn—or with Jupiter—which it completes around June 11. So Venus is moving into and is filling out that T-square that previously Mars occupied when it moved into Leo and hit Jupiter and Pluto this month, in May. So that’s kind of a rough ingress with the Venus-Pluto opposition, which can sometimes through the nature of the opposition itself manifest in relational dynamics and components, but sometimes with extreme tensions of either obsession or issues of control or manipulation or power struggles or things like that in interpersonal dynamics.
KT: Yeah, and we’re also running into the nodes too—that Venus not just hitting that opposition with Pluto, but right after that running into the bendings basically squaring the nodes. And, yeah, just thinking a lot about these ingresses, these fixed ingresses—with the Moon that hit the nodes and Pluto and how disorienting and kind of existential it can feel. And I think this one with Venus—especially people ruled by Venus I think are really gonna feel that shift in the kind of confusion that happens when a planet runs into the bendings.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, ‘confusion’ I think is a very good and will be a very operative word. Like the potential for drama, again, really starts early. You don’t have to wait for Venus to station retrograde for the drama to begin. Like the push/pull from the nodes, in that exact square, the bendings, the South Node says, “Less,” and the North Node says, “Hold on tighter.” The South Node says, “Let it go.” In a sense they’re advocating for the opposite thing. Like you cannot hold tighter and let go at the same time, right? You’ve got two hands: one can be letting go and one can be holding on. But to hold on with both hands, you can’t let go at the same time.
KT: I feel like this is like for me. I have Venus at the bendings natally.
AC: Okay.
KT: I’m like, “Okay, yeah, I can take this. Some therapy for me.”
AC: Yeah, maybe describing it is helpful. Maybe it’s just the walls of the prison. My Moon is in the degree of the bendings and rules my Ascendant, so that’s eternal. The eternal struggle is real—at least one lifetime’s worth. But, yeah, it’s like that and then there’s Pluto, but then there’s Jupiter and that’s nice. Then are we conjoining Mars or not? The lead-in to a planet’s retrograde—especially Venus retrograde—you start wondering what’s going on. And with Venus, a lot of times it’s with relationships. There’s like a very natural sort of accumulation of questions. Like, “Oh, we got into this groove and this is what we’re doing. But do we have to do this? Do I like this? I think I like this, but maybe I’d rather do something else. Maybe there are things I don’t like about this.” And you get the contradictions that start piling up as you get closer to the retrograde.
I’d say the ultimately useful and necessary parts of Venus retrogrades is to really audit all of those contradictions that have built up in relationships and reassess rather than, “Oh, this is the way we do things. It works well enough.” Just like Mercury needs to go back and check work and answer old emails; you can’t just proceed forward forever. But with Venus, it’s hardier, so it’s the same ambivalence and the back-and-forth that you feel about things. It’s not a back-and-forth about information, it’s about the status of relationship. How do you feel about this person? What do they feel about you? And what do you call that connection? Is it the same or is it changing? Like all of that stuff. And so, one piece of advice that I give myself and other people in a lead-up to a Venus retrograde—especially one of those that hits your chart—is holding space for that back-and-forth and that ambivalence. Because the retrograde exists to take you all the way through it and out with a clarity on the other side, trying to get the answer six weeks early almost never works ‘cause you’re not actually done with the process yet.
KT: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah, I’m thinking about that confusion, especially the ingress with that Pluto opposition feels so compulsive. I just keep wanting to tell people—with Mars too, Mars is there right now—to try not to just be compulsive and feel like you have to act or make a decision right away. Yeah, give it a couple of days basically.
CB: Yeah, Mars definitely always throws in this impulsive quality. And Pluto, also having that compulsive or obsessive quality kind of magnifies that.
AC: Yeah, I like ‘compulsive’ for Pluto.
KT: Yeah, it’s very, “I have to do this now or else the world’s gonna end.”
AC: “No, I have to.”
KT: Yeah, I have some Mars-Pluto conjunction, so I am so familiar with that feeling. And I know when it’s coming up, but, yeah, I just get so, “No, you don’t understand, the world is going to end if I don’t do this thing right now.” But of course it hasn’t ended yet.
CB: Right.
AC: That’s only because you’ve done the thing everyday.
KT: I did the thing, yeah.
CB: And sometimes with the Venus-Pluto alignment, the feeling is like, “No, I have to do this. I have to be with this person, or I will literally die right now.” It’s the internal feeling of what’s leading to that compulsion, whether or not you will actually die with or without that person may not be the case.
KT: I also wanted to note we’ve talked so much about relationships with Venus, and it’s definitely gonna be relational, but there’s also the creative component here. I just keep thinking about this retrograde feeling so much like a creative project that people are going to be working on for an extended period of time and just knowing to kind of pace yourself when it comes to that. I’m currently working on an app, and I know that this retrograde’s gonna be about that for me. And so, yeah, just thinking about pacing yourself with the creative process as well.
AC: Yeah, and if you’re involved in a creative project that you know extends through these months, be ready for it to take some turns.
CB: Right.
AC: I know that I will probably almost certainly be in layout for the second edition of 36 Faces during the Venus retrograde. And so, I’m assuming layout, which is literally Venus in Leo—it’s the visual. It’s not the words, it’s how the words are put on the page in relationship to the pictures, etc., etc. I’m definitely giving that the whole Venus retrograde; like I won’t accept that it’s done until the Venus retrograde is over. Just let that twist and turn, right? Let it go where it needs to go.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and that reminds me of our last Venus retrograde—that Venus retrograde in Capricorn in the early part of last year. And there was the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the start of that war, which looked like it was just gonna be the Russians kind of steamrolling Ukraine, and that was their expectation evidently. But then it ended up taking much longer and becoming a much more long-and-drawn-out conflict than they anticipated—or maybe than anyone anticipated—and that was also very keyed in with a Venus retrograde.
AC: Yeah, this Mars-Venus together with Venus about to station retrograde has a weird resonance with the signature of the beginning of the war, which was Venus stationing direct after a retrograde with Mars. And from what we can see from here, the big Ukrainian offensive is due to begin any moment, which I think was probably the Mars opposing Pluto and square Jupiter—our ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage signature that we talked about last month. And this offensive—or whatever it ends up being—this is after the much talked about shipments of new weapons from Western countries. Like they haven’t really used those; they’ve been training on them, etc., etc. We’re going to get to see—and, again, quite dramatic if we’re talking about drama with Mars involved—we’ll get to see what all that is over this Mars-Venus time. And, again, I think, yes, it will probably be quite over-the-top in the results. It’s going to not be—yeah, anyway.
CB: Yeah. And as we’ve talked about in the past, the Ukraine independence chart—the birth chart of Ukraine—has Venus retrograde at 20 Leo, and Zelenskyy has Saturn at 20 Leo retrograde. So there’s some major events coming up that are gonna be tied in with that Venus retrograde for both of those two charts.
AC: Yeah, I would be very surprised if it isn’t regarded historically in retrospect as an absolutely critical act or critical moment in the war as far as deciding the outcome.
CB: Yeah, or a turning point. ‘Turning point’ is a really good keyword ‘cause it takes me back to what you were talking about earlier—the idea of reflecting. Sometimes when we reach a critical turning point in our life, a turning point is like a pivot where you come up and there’s like a U-turn or there’s like a roundabout in the way that you hit that. For a little while you have this feeling of not moving forward and slowing down and being sort of like stuck in place at a crucial moment in time, but that period of slowing down and pivoting or reorienting in your life opens up an opportunity for reflection and for looking back into the past and deciding how you want to move forward in the future and if you want to stay on the same trajectory or if you want to reconfigure or change something about your current trajectory. Whether it’s with relationships, whether it’s your professional life—it kind of depends what area of your chart Venus is going retrograde in—but that process of hitting a pivot point or a turning point allows for the reflection or gives room for a period of reflection.
AC: Yeah, definitely. Like an actual pivot or change of direction on a deeper and more enduring level for a person requires going deep inside yourself to actually change direction; not just act different for a little bit, like a superficial sort of, “Well, I’m going to do this now,” but to change your orientation. To switch your trajectory from southeast to north or whatever that kind of change requires isolation—and what is the word? Solitude of some sort, just like Venus will be invisibly with the Sun. Part of the retrograde of Venus is that Venus disappears from both the western and eastern horizons for a period of time.
CB: Right.
KT: Yeah, I’m kind of thinking about those Venus-ruled houses in your chart and how they’re symbolically kind of going into the underworld in a way, or disappearing for this period of time in order for this shift to happen. It’s like a lot of people pay attention to the house that it’s happening in, but those houses that Venus rules that’s what’s coming up for review and revision, I guess.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a really good point. All right, so, let’s see, other things happening—as we said, we’ve got that Full Moon on the 3rd in Sagittarius. Are there any other things we want to say about that? I know around the same time that Mercury conjoins Uranus on June 4. So that’s interesting because it’s kind of completing an aspect back from when Mercury stationed retrograde conjunct Uranus weeks earlier. And sometimes the pace of communications can suddenly and unexpectedly quicken and things can start moving a lot faster. So having that coincide with the Full Moon in Sagittarius in and of itself is sort of a doubling-up of a similar set of significations.
KT: That, and it’s like the Moon being ruled by Jupiter on the North Node too. Plus, yeah, the Sun being ruled by Mercury with the Uranus, it’s like that feels so hectic and intense, and we don’t get any light from benefics with this Moon. They’re both adverse to the Full Moon. Yeah, it’s like, what is this Moon gonna be? ‘Cause it just feels so ungrounded to me.
CB: That’s a really good point.
AC: I would say it wants to be grounded, but can’t. It’s looking to Jupiter in an earth sign as the ruler of Sag, but it doesn’t have an angle on it.
KT: Yeah, yeah.
AC: And now I’m terrified that my plans to actually relax after NORWAC are going to be ruined. ‘Cause the plan is to just relax and party, right? It’s a Jupiter-ruled Full Moon, Jupiter’s in Taurus, but there’s other stuff going on; specifically Mercury with Uranus, which you also pointed out, rules the Sun. And so, it’s like, “Surprise!”
KT: Yeah, it just feels like too much caffeine or something like that. Took too much of a dose of something and you can’t settle down.
CB: Yeah, which is something both Full Moons and Mercury conjunct Uranus or hard aspects between Mercury and Uranus do on their own. So having those coincide—that’s kind of a frenetic couple of days, especially peaking around the 3rd and the 4th. And then the next day, on the 5th, Venus goes into Leo and opposes Pluto, which is kind of tense, as we’ve talked about. There is some leveling off of that or some sort of mitigation or assuaging of that when Venus then moves into the exact square with Jupiter over the next few days, culminating around the 10th and 11th. So that’s one of our more positive aspects this month—a Venus-Jupiter square with reception. And that’s one of the things—Jupiter being in Taurus—that’s gonna help take some of the edge off of the Venus retrograde. And even if there’s major issues that Venus brings up during the course of the retrograde and its co-presence or conjunction with Mars, there’s some counterbalancing positive influence that’s offsetting things in notable ways with Jupiter in that superior position in Taurus.
AC: Yeah. To add to that, with Jupiter in Taurus, it’s Jupiter in a Venus-ruled sign. And so, Jupiter’s describing for us sort of what we can learn from. Jupiter makes whatever it touches potentially educational or helps reveal how something could be improved or bettered. Jupiter confirms, but then wants to make things better. Jupiter’s like, “What you’re doing is great. How about this?” Like that would be a way to accomplish what you’re doing more effectively or with less collateral damage or whatever. And so, Jupiter’s teaching lessons from a Venus-ruled place, like offering to make Venus things more about self-improvement or better relationships, etc., etc. Like Kirah, you were saying, with Venus retrogrades don’t just look at the place Venus is stationing retrograde, look at the houses that are Venus-ruled in your nativity; the parts of your life that already run on Venus. And so, Jupiter’s in one of them, like ready to help figure out how this can work better. And so, I think that’s a nice thing.
KT: And this is just part one. We have three of these over the next couple of months.
CB: Of the exact aspects with Venus and Jupiter, you mean?
KT: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Got it. Yeah, and it’s interesting thinking also about mitigations. It’s something that in reading Ben’s translation of Firmicus—and reading Firmicus again for the first time in several years, the entire thing—he’s just constantly talking about mitigations. And he’ll give a really difficult combination and difficult aspect, but then he’ll say, “However, if this placement is there, adding a positive thing, then it will offset it.” So you start to think about scenarios of if something bad or negative or subjectively difficult happens then you’re able to find some sort of outside help that comes in and is able to make things better. It’s like if you get sick but then you’re able to go to a doctor, and the doctor tells you what’s wrong and gives you some medicine and is able to heal you from being sick, that’s like a mitigation.
AC: Yeah, so we’re doing a chapter in my year three program where everyone’s reading some Firmicus. And one of the students said that they’re partner had a configuration—a pretty complicated configuration—that basically proposed life-threatening illness of a very specific nature, and that the person would die from it without an aspect from Jupiter. And their partner had exactly that illness and almost died, but a doctor came in and was able to ferry them through it, and there was a trine from Jupiter too. It was an 8th house configuration. That is one of the things I love about Firmicus—you get a very hyperbolically good or bad result, but blank aspects, then forget about it, right? And sometimes it just mellows it and sometimes it cancels it, but you have both mitigating and canceling conditions for both really good combinations and really bad combinations.
CB: Yeah. And that also times back into what you mentioned, Kirah, which is that there’s gonna be two more exact Jupiter aspects months later or weeks later once Venus goes retrograde, where Venus is gonna return back to that configuration of Jupiter. And that may be the period in which Venus is able to go back and find some of the mitigating things that helped to resolve the situation—especially, for example, in people’s Leo houses, or perhaps in the houses that Venus rules—and find the resolution which offsets or mitigates the dust that was kicked up by Mars transiting through Leo in the first place. So it feels like a large part of June is Mars creating some of the problems in that area of life, or strife or difficulties or conflict, the separations, but then Venus is having to go through that period of 40 days and 40 nights of retrograding back in order to find some of the solutions in order to mend and reconcile some of the problems that Mars created.
KT: Exactly.
AC: Yeah, the more we look at this, there might be a little more bark than bite ‘cause the actual retrograde portion is very configured to Jupiter, right? Venus will be moving backwards towards Jupiter for a lot of that, and Mars will be off somewhere else doing stuff—doing Mars stuff in Virgo. But getting towards the direct station, it’s at 12, Jupiter’s at 15. And so, Venus is coming off of another aspect—that second exact aspect to Jupiter—and then turning around right back into another exact aspect with Jupiter. And by September we do have Mars in a Venus-ruled sign, but in a sextile with Venus. Anyway, it’s interesting. Again, this one might be front-loaded where the actual retrograde isn’t as hard as the road into the retrograde.
KT: Yeah, we even have—this is kind of getting ahead—but Mercury is gonna eventually retrograde in Virgo and will be trining Jupiter three times throughout that August-September period. So it feels like Jupiter’s really holding it down for both retrogrades and feels really like solutions, support-oriented for the summer before Jupiter then goes retrograde and kind of takes a break.
CB: Yeah. The only thing that’s kind of a wildcard factor when Venus is stationing though and throws a little bit of an unexpected wrench into things is just when Venus stations retrograde at 28 Leo, it’s also kind of closely squaring Uranus, which is already made it all the way up to 22° of Taurus at this point, and is 30 days from stationing. So it’s like we have tied in with this entire Venus retrograde—which we didn’t have during the last Venus retrograde in Leo—this square with Uranus, which at the very least is introducing some sort of unexpected or disruptive component. It may just be that it requires unique or novel solutions in order to fix some of the things that came up that were the problems that arose under the Venus retrograde. But some of the twists and turns of that are gonna be somewhat unexpected in terms of writing that script and the surprises that come up in the process.
AC: Yeah, 100%. I think if we’re expecting a calmer retrograde than expected, the smoothing that Jupiter can do in aspect with Venus—that comes after the square to Uranus, right? We’ve definitely gotta get through that first portion ‘cause on a very civil level, Uranus is destabilizing. The many things that Venus looks after, many of them depend on harmony and relational harmony and stability, and the retrogradation is already sort of unpicking that. And Uranus in a Venus-ruled sign is going to further push that.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah, thinking about the past couple of Venus retrogrades and the major signatures of them, we had the last one stationed conjunct Pluto, so that one had a really Plutonian signature. The one before that was stationed square Neptune, so that one had a really Neptunian signature. And I think the one before that was Scorpio, which would have had the Uranus opposition, I think. So I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about how the ‘outers’ have been really influencing a lot of the past Venus retrogrades and how this one has that Uranus flavor—which I think I prefer over Pluto. The last one was really rough, so we’ll see.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Yeah, I know I will prefer it. That was on my Descendant with Pluto. That was fun.
KT: Yeah, it was intense. But, yeah, Jupiter kind of is around this time to help with that.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I’ll take it.
KT: Yeah.
CB: So people should pay attention to that first Jupiter aspect happening there around the 11th and the 12th. We can see it there on the transit timeline and that’s one of the more positive aspects this month. There are other positive aspects coming later. One of the things that happens around that time that’s important is that Pluto’s gonna retrograde out of Aquarius, and it’s gonna move back into Capricorn and bring us back into that transit and bring something back from that time period that we’ve experienced so much of over the past decade since Pluto’s been transiting through Capricorn, ever since 2008. So there’s some unfinished business in that sign that sort of comes sharply back into focus there this month, starting on the 11th of June.
AC: Yeah, back to money and power and the architecture of thrones and the weight of history. You know, all the Pluto in Cap stuff.
CB: Yeah. And some of that arose with the banking crisis that happened around the time that Pluto ingressed into Capricorn in 2008, the creation of Bitcoin, as we’ve talked about before and that going from humble origins to something that’s actually impacting world events. And then of course now, in the US at least, we have these things about the debt ceiling crisis and whether that’s gonna turn into a big thing or disrupt things or not, and that’s something that may be relevant there with Pluto retrograding back into Capricorn.
KT: Sure, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So on the more positive side of things, one of the best transits that I really like this month—and is definitely good for electional purposes and happens actually around the same time—is Mercury departs from Taurus and moves into its home sign of Gemini. We get this nice transit of Mercury in Gemini for a good chunk of June, which I really like. Although it has to pass through a difficult square with Saturn at a certain point, one of its first aspects is a nice sextile with Jupiter—oh, sorry—an aversion to Jupiter, but it has to pass through the square with Saturn around the 15th and 16th, but otherwise it’s a pretty nice transit of that planet through its home sign. And some of the things that are characteristic of Mercury in Gemini is an increase in communication, ‘socialness’, intellectual activities like writing and poetry, speaking and different things that come more naturally to Mercury when it’s in its home sign.
AC: Yeah, and it speeds things up usually.
CB: Right.
AC: There’s just like less resistance. Things can just move quicker. Every year when Mercury moves through Gemini, I generally just see things speed up. Exchanges of information, the conversations, the movement of objects—like things just speed up. Mercury in Gemini is very playful, right? Clever and playful and witty repartee. But that’s gonna be kind of restrained until it gets past that square with Saturn.
CB: Yeah. And it hits a nice sextile—and I meant to say not with Jupiter, with Venus right after that. When it gets to 10 Gemini, it sextiles Venus at 10 Leo. But it’s weird that Saturn’s stationing right at the same time, just after that square between Mercury and Saturn completes. So in the same way that we just had the very first station of Pluto in Aquarius, this month, right in the middle of June, we’re having our very first station of Saturn in Pisces, a long, two-plus-year transit of Saturn going through that sign and stationing many times. So we have an intensification of that Saturn transit. And especially for people that have placements in the mutable signs around 7°, we’re gonna see that as an intensification of that transit.
AC: Yeah. And it’s worth noting this is as far into Pisces as Saturn’s gonna get this year, right? And so, if you have planets at, let’s say, 10 or 11 of a mutable sign, that felt, “Oh, Saturn’s coming. Saturn’s coming. Saturn’s coming.” that tide’s gonna go out. It’s gonna go back to the very beginning of Pisces. And then if you’re lucky enough, like me, to have a planet at 4 Pisces, then that transit which maybe was over, Saturn’s coming back, right? It’s that heavy flow, right? Ocean of lead. It’s liquid, but so heavy and quite likely toxic.
KT: Yeah, us early Pisces risings have definitely been feeling it. I know Moe’s in the audience. We have almost I think the same Ascendant degree. Yeah, very much feeling the heaviness of Saturn in the 1st. Not as bad as my Saturn return in the 12th, but definitely feeling it. And, yeah, again, just picking back off of the Mercury in Gemini piece, Mercury’s also visible and fast right now too. So you were talking about how with Mercury in Gemini things go fast. It’s even more speedy right now as it’s heading towards that direct cazimi at the end of the month. So I’m just excited about the Gemini house in our charts and finally getting a little bit of, yeah, movement and traction, especially after that Saturn square, which feels like a tough decision, like a tough choice to make or something regarding Mercury.
AC: So Mercury and Saturn don’t agree on speed, right? One is the most spry, agile, quick member of the solar system, and the other’s the one that is not only slow but insists on slowness.
CB: We famously had what was a square between them during the last presidential election when it occurred, and then the votes were being recounted, and there was that delay and slowness in counting up the votes until eventually the outcome of the election was known.
AC: Yeah, yeah, great example. And then just looking at signs, Pisces is the place where Mercury is in its fall. And one way of thinking about that is that Pisces’ things are not problems that you can solve quickly and with Mercury, right? You have to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, right? It’s just not something you can skate by, and quick answers and clever answers don’t help at all. And so, sometimes when you have a Saturn-Mercury configuration, Mercury can help figure out a Saturn problem. But it’s a square, which is not the friendliest of aspects. Mercury’s trying to do classic Mercury in Gemini, and Saturn’s so interested in tedious, emotional depth, or really deep issues, or like, “I don’t know, life just feels this way,” or “There’s nothing to be done.” I don’t know—I don’t want to get too morbid. One reaction might be just trying to skate around the big, heavy thing ‘cause there’s nothing to be done about it, if you’re more on the Mercury side, or being annoyed by the light conversation if you’re on the Saturn in Pisces side. But it feels like it’s gonna be very hard for them to interact in a synergistic way.
KT: Yeah, it’s almost like Mercury’s like, “Here’s all of this information. I see you have a problem. Here’s all the facts and information for you to solve it.” And Saturn’s like, “That’s not gonna do it. That’s not gonna work. We need some deep healing here.” And Mercury’s like, “Yeah, but here’s a book you can read.”
AC: Yeah, right. “Here’s a Twitter account you can follow that tweets about deep healing.”
KT: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Saturn—since this is the first station in Pisces—probably says this is gonna take a lot longer to work on than that, and that that may be just the start of a long-term process of working on something over the course of the next few years. All right, so that’s kind of a slow aspect that’s happening there around the 15th. But then right after that, by the 17th, Mercury forms that sextile with Venus, which is nice. And some of that slowness and that dullness of the Mercury-Saturn aspect of previous days is kind of assuaged and moves into the past. Around that time we actually get one of the more positive aspects of this month—even though it’s somewhat subtle and low-key, I kind of like it—and it’s a Jupiter-Saturn sextile that goes exact around the 19th. But it’s one of the—while more understated—one of the more stabilizing aspects that’s happening this month in the sky, and it’s one of the major outer planet configurations that is occurring. So I wanted to mention it partially ‘cause there’s also reception.
It’s like Saturn is stationing in Pisces; it’s stationing at 7° of Pisces. Jupiter comes up and sextiles it at 7° and there’s that reception between them. So it’s like whatever the problems, again, that Saturn is bringing up for people—these are somewhat new problems that it’s bringing up that Saturn is forcing us to start focusing on more on the long term through challenges or surmountable difficulties that arise in that part of our lives or that part of our chart. There’s this offsetting, positive influence from Jupiter there at 7° of Taurus that’s giving us an option for how to resolve those things and how to move past some of the difficulties and make them surmountable rather than just a stop sign, or rather than just a brick wall that you can’t proceed through; perhaps giving us an option to find a way around those obstacles and difficulties.
AC: Yeah, or a way to sort of settle into the years of work that they require.
KT: Yeah, this is the first Jupiter and Saturn sees each other since the conjunction, when they both ingressed Aquarius back in December 2020. So I’m excited about this opening sextile ‘cause that was like a powerful seed moment—that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction—that it’s kind of cool that they’re able to see each other again. It’s like—I don’t know—there’s further developments I guess from that era.
CB: That’s a great point. This is the very first exact aspect that that new, 20-year cycle of Jupiter and Saturn inaugurated back in 2020, in late 2020. This is the first opening, a new chapter in whatever that story was that started at that time, especially in terms of world events that’ll be playing out over a 20-year period, until the next conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn around 2040, but this is an important turning point for that story.
AC: Yeah, I really like that—I like that perspective a lot. I think that this is entering the first notable phase since then. And it’s a soft aspect, it’s a sextile, right? So it seems doable to relate the good to the bad, to see the opportunities and the obstacles as belonging to one landscape rather than experiencing them as disconnected. But when you look at a map, you can say, “Oh, there are monsters here, and there’s treasure here. And if I go through the monsters, I get the treasure.” then the good and the bad get connected in a way. You’re like, “Oh, I can do that,” or “I want to do that,” or “I don’t want either of those. I’m just gonna take the scenic route.” But, yeah, stabilizing, and stabilizing not necessarily in a static way, but if you think of stabilizing the course or stabilizing a trajectory. Like, “Oh, no, we’re definitely going in this direction, and we know how to go in this direction. We’re definitely heading east,” or “We’re definitely crossing the mountains,” rather than, “Oh, where do we go? Should we go there? Should we go here?” like that sort of directional confusion. This feels very, yeah, stabilizing in lots of sense; in a way that a plane needs to have its course stabilized. It can’t be wiggling in the sky.
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect because the keyword I was thinking of was ‘balance’. There’s a nice—with that sextile—balance between the pessimism or pragmatism of Saturn and the optimism of Jupiter and having those two qualities. ‘Cause either of those—if they get too far out of balance or out of whack—if you go too far in the pessimistic realm of Saturn then you’ll never do anything because you’ll always be afraid of the consequences or of making a mistake or not making it perfect; whereas if you go too far in the optimistic realm of Jupiter, you’ll sort of overshoot your mark and not be grounded enough to actually execute things in a way that’s effective. But here with the sextile between those two planets, we get a nice balance of those two qualities, which should be really helpful and useful for people around those times, especially in starting different things around that time in June.
AC: Yeah. One further thing I like about it is I like Saturn having its ruler in a fixed sign because Saturn in Pisces is so prone to shape-shifting and sliding in this direction or another. Having the ruler—Jupiter in this case—in a really stable place I think keeps us from some of the excesses of Saturn in Pisces’ mutability, where it’s like, “I don’t even know what the difficulty is,” or “I don’t know what’s expected of me.” It keeps sliding, right? Stability with Saturn—it makes it easier, for example, to eat well if you have a diet planned out. You’re like, “Okay, these are the parameters I’m going to eat under; and so, I know how to do this; I’m just going to do that,” versus “I don’t know, I should eat better, but I don’t have a plan; I have no fixed course.”
KT: I’m glad you said eating and brought it to food ‘cause this sextile feels so much more notably material and physical than the conjunction in Aquarius. So, yeah, again, it just feels fertile, like we’re able to sort of put things into place for the long term. That feels just, yeah, more tangible and less just ideas.
CB: Yeah. So our electional chart for this month actually really takes that into account so that you can capture the energy of that sextile, so I wanted to mention that election here really quick. So this is the most auspicious date in June that Leisa Schaim and I were able to find in our Auspicious Elections Podcast this month, which is available on Patreon, and I wanted to show this chart. So the chart is set for June 18, 2023, starting around 11:56 AM—1:56 in the morning, roughly just before noon—and you end up with a chart with Virgo rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury up at 12° of Gemini. So Mercury has cleared that square with Saturn that we were talking about earlier, and it was just coming off of that sextile with Venus at 11° of Leo. So this is a great chart for career matters, the public, being in the public, and public reputation because Mercury is in the 10th whole sign house, it’s in its own domicile or in its own sign in Gemini, and it’s generally just in really good shape. So it’s a really strong chart for career matters and other types of 10th house activities involving, additionally, mercurial things like communication, speaking, social things to a certain extent—anything that requires quick but effective bursts of communication and of transferring things essentially.
So other features of this chart are that the Moon is in Cancer in the 11th whole sign house, the place of friends and alliances and groups. So it’s also a very good chart for friends and groups and social movements and doing things that involve friends. The Moon is in early Cancer, and it’s applying to a sextile with Jupiter in Taurus. Jupiter’s in the 9th house of religion, philosophy, education, foreign travel, and is very well-placed. And it’s still applying to that exact balancing sextile with Saturn, which is over at 7° of Pisces in the 7th whole sign house, although it’s in a day chart, so it’s heavily mitigated not just by sect, but also by that sextile with Jupiter. So that creates a good chart also for 9th house matters. And, yeah, generally it’s kind of rare that you find a chart in which both the ruler of the Ascendant and the Moon are in such good shape. So this is our primary election of the month that we wanted to recommend for starting major business ventures or other undertakings in which you want an auspicious date to start things under. This is our favorite chart of the month. What kind of things would you two use a Mercury election for, where Mercury’s in Gemini?
KT: Like a launch where you have to send out emails, communications, social media posts, especially with the Sun up there too in the 10th. Yeah, any sort of launch I think this would be great for. I love that Moon-Jupiter sextile. That’s really sweet.
CB: Yeah, it’s really soft and really balanced in a positive way that I really liked. So that is our primary electional chart for the month. We found I think at least six or seven other electional charts during the course of June that we just released on our Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is available. You can find out more information about it at theastrologypodcast.com/elections. One of the bonus things that you get when you sign up for our Patreon at a certain level is access to that 45-minute podcast each month, where we pick out at least four lucky electional charts for starting different types of ventures and undertakings.
And since we’re also halfway through the year, we recently discounted our Year Ahead Electional Report, where we go through and pick out the single best electional chart for each of the 12 months of the year. And since we’re halfway through the year, we just discounted that at 50% off, so you can get a hold of that at theastrologypodcast.com/2023report. All right, so let’s move back into the alignments and sort of talk about the later parts of the month. We’ve talked about Saturn stationing in Pisces. The later things that we need to talk about in order to bring a close to June is that second lunation that occurs on the 18th of June in the sign of Gemini. It’s probably one of the last major things that we need to mention here, right?
AC: Yep.
CB: All right, let me put that up on the screen. So that occurs just before our electional chart. And we can see that the Moon will conjoin the Sun at 26° of Gemini. And this lunation is a little bit tricky because it’s very closely square Neptune, which is at 27° of Pisces. And Neptune of course is gonna station there only 12 days later at 27° of Pisces. For some reason, this time, around the middle of the month—and especially towards the end of the month when Neptune stations on the very last day of June—we get this kind of intensification of some of that Neptunian energy.
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s intensely mercurial, right? We have Mercury in Gemini and visible, fueling the conjunction of the Sun and the Moon there. And it also happens with Mercury still in a to-the-degree sextile with Venus. So it’s like that playful, fun, inventive, artsy energy that the Mercury-Venus sextile brings is fueling the lunation. But then with that square with Neptune, there is like a strong pull towards escapism to just check out. That escapism—if it overlaps with reality—can be delusional, right? But if it’s kept separate from the rest of life then it’s an escape, but there’s definitely a sort of pull towards the imaginal. The bones of it—like the actual conjunction and its ruler—it’s ‘Gemini’ juice, but with this strong siren song from Neptune in Pisces.
KT: Yeah, it feels like this super, super creative New Moon. For the artists out there, for the people who are creating worlds, and writers writing fiction, fantasy—it just feels like this is such a good Moon to write, to create under. Yeah, maybe not the best if you’re having to write a research paper or something very fact-oriented and fact-based, but it feels like this can just be really great for artists and musicians and things like that.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah. And maybe for people to get in touch with the use of creativity as an outlet sometimes can be really helpful. And maybe if people aren’t in touch with that, this lunation will be very useful to just take advantage of.
KT: Yeah, kind of getting out of the writer’s block that the square to Saturn might have created.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. I think it works socially too. Like it’s fun. A little Neptune is not a problem when you’re just hanging out with people. You make stuff up to entertain each other. Telling stories. Imagining things.
KT: Just don’t drink too much.
AC: Or do that and just be aware there are consequences the next day, but they’re rarely lethal.
KT: Right.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point though in terms of the nature of myth and storytelling as an important part of culture, but also an important part of just the human experience. Tapping into the enjoyment of, like you said, Austin, the imaginal realm as a realm of not just creativity, but also escape—but sometimes escape being necessary in order to recharge internally from the world, whatever your escape is. Better if it’s a constructive version, or at least a non-harmful version of that, but there’s many different ways that we all escape from the world in a way that’s healing or recharges us and prepares us for then going out and doing things that we have to do in mundane reality in a way that’s more effective.
AC: Yeah, that’s nicely put, Chris.
KT: Yeah.
AC: There’s also with stories a sense that going into stories that you know are not literally true but is part of us evaluating what kind of story am I in, and also what kind of story am I in, in this part of my life. ‘Cause sometimes we talk about ‘someone’s lost the plot’, and there are also points where we feel like we’ve found the plot, like “Oh, this is what this part of my life is about.” I can play my role well now that I know what I was cast as, right? I thought I was this, but this is actually this kind of story. And I don’t hate it, I just thought I was in a different story, and so I wasn’t doing a very good job.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, self-narratives and the reflection on what is our narrative and what is our story. It makes me think of the hero’s journey and how you have, historically, that notion that shows up in different cultures about the hero’s journey and the necessary steps that take place during the course of that and how it shows up, but also how each of us internally have our narrative about our life stories and how sometimes the need to embellish on that is a natural tendency. But sometimes during the process of periods of self-reflection—especially a Venus retrograde when you’re looking back on relationships, and we’ve just had a Mercury retrograde. You sometimes rethink your own life narrative and the stories that we tell ourselves about that, whether it’s an accurate story or whether it’s not an accurate depiction of what the reality of this is. The lunation makes me think of that.
AC: Yeah. And I think sometimes you really are one character for a decade or more, and you don’t realize it when life has changed and that actually you’re in a different role now. Like, no, you’re not the dark, brooding, loner. You’re a member of the community now. Or you’re an upstanding member of the community, and now you’re the outcast and pariah—how do you play that role? Things change. I gave dramatic examples, but sometimes those roles shift and it takes us a while to catch up with where we actually are. ‘Cause stories kind of keep repeating until we actually take the time to rewrite them and check them against what’s happening.
CB: Yeah. And we all have to some extent a power to write our own life story and our own narratives and to shape those to a certain extent, to the extent that we can. And sometimes the active shaping of those life narratives is actually really important in order to set an endpoint of where you want your story to go over the next year or 10 years or 20 years or what have you. What narrative do you want to have? And what role do you want to play in that narrative? Do you want to play the narrative of the hero, or the villain, or something in between? So I think that’s relevant for this lunation for what we’re talking about because, literally, the day after this lunation Venus is gonna hit 12° of Leo; and that is the degree that it’s gonna retrograde back to at the end of the Venus retrograde. So somehow this lunation is setting the starting point for a lot of that and some of the themes that we’re gonna return back to in a few months when Venus basically retrogrades back and returns back to this degree right around where we had this lunation in Gemini.
AC: That’s really interesting. I think part of the reason we kind of went into narrative, character, storytelling—these are all the elements of drama, right?
CB: Right.
AC: We’ve got all this solar stuff. The ruler of the lunation is in a perfect sextile with Venus that is going to be the point of the direct station months later. You know, Leo—when we talk about dramatic it’s often in a negative connotation. But this is also Leo thinking of things in terms of a play and characters and roles that are performed, right?
CB: Right. Yeah, and the sort of dramatic component to that. But also, the drama of everyone’s individual life, especially from your own first person perspective; like all the positive and negative experiences that we’re all having because we’re the main person in our own life story. And how those things play out in a sort of dramatic sense is the narrative of our lives.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, well, that kind of brings us to the end of the month and to the close of the month where we just have that Neptune station like we mentioned. Venus squares Uranus, although that really leads us over into the 1st of July. And we get Mercury conjoining the Sun at the halfway point through that cycle and the start of a new synodic cycle of Mercury and the Sun.
AC: Yeah. And so, right after, or a few days after that New Moon in Gemini, the Sun goes into Cancer, and then Mercury follows the Sun into Cancer. With that shift from Gemini into Cancer, there’s a lot of going everywhere and doing everything and thinking everything and saying everything in Gemini, and the movement of planets into Cancer takes them into a more quiet, more internal, more felt, more intimate place. And with Mercury moving swiftly to reunite with the Sun in Cancer, it’s not just the central spotlight of things that’s moving into that more lunar landscape, but also the thoughts, right? Like Mercury goes from thinking everything, going everywhere to really settling on deeply-felt truths and what’s really important to me and who’s really important to me, things like that.
CB: For sure. And around that time—just before Mercury does that when it goes into Cancer—Mars does square Uranus from 21 Leo to 21 Taurus. It’s actually one of the tensest aspects this month and one of the most explosive ones. Besides the Venus-Pluto opposition earlier in the month, it’s one of the ones that I think has some of the greatest potential for unexpected challenges to arise. If Mars is gonna kick up dust, Venus then has to go in and clean up afterwards. This is one of those key turning points where Mars is kind of kicking up some dust here around the 25th, 26th, and 27th of June.
AC: Yeah, it’s almost like there are two completely different stories running there. There’s Mars-Uranus and then there’s Sun and Mercury.
CB: Right.
AC: Like the Sun-Mercury is so quiet, intimate, seeking reflection, and then Mars-Uranus is loud and jarring.
CB: Yeah, ‘loud and jarring’ are good keywords for Mars-Uranus square. What are some other good keywords? Unexpected. Fights unexpected. Difficulties. ‘Unexpected separations’ are probably good keywords for Mars square Uranus.
AC: Yeah. And Mars-Uranus—it’ll give you ‘that escalated quickly’ moments.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KT: My mom has that. I’m like, “That sounds exactly right.” It’s like, whoa, when did you get so mad all of a sudden?
AC: And the United States has that, right?
KT: Mm-hmm.
CB: Right. Yeah, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in the 7th house. We’ve talked about it in the past being associated with some of the gun stuff with the United States, and, yeah, some of that stuff coming up in the news. So being quick to anger. Quick to resort to violence or something I guess is one of the things that that could be indicative of, symbolically, in a way.
AC: Yeah, we’ve used a lot of ‘powder keg’ imagery with Mars-Uranus in the past. It’s the, “Who is smoking in the ammo depot again?”
CB: Right.
AC: With Mars-Uranus—it’s that touch-point of it ignites in a second. The gunpowder is either on fire or not. It is not half-on-fire, right? It’s not a coal in a barbecue burning hotter or not or a little dimmer. Like Uranus gives a very on/off quality to Mars’ heating.
CB: Right. And also, a technological component. In ancient astrology, they would just talk about Mars and swords or knives and cutting and things like that. But when Uranus unites with Mars, it sometimes brings this technological component to things, like what a sword is digitally, in a sense.
KT: Yeah, it’s—
AC: Oh, go ahead.
KT: Oh, no, go ahead.
AC: No, I insist.
KT: I was just gonna call back to last summer. It was a really annoying Mars-Uranus conjunction on the North Node August 1. And, yeah, this is that opening square of that. Yeah, just a callback to that.
CB: Wasn’t there something that happened? What was the news thing that happened around that time? So that was 2022, August. I’m trying to remember ‘cause I think something notable was happening back then.
KT: We had a lot. I remember just airplane drama personally. I just remember there was a lot of airline stuff happening around that time.
CB: Right. Oh, yeah, and that was the North Node conjunction at the same time.
KT: Yeah, it sucked. It was squaring Saturn—just ugh.
CB: Yeah, fun times. So we have that square and that’s one of the last major aspects of the month. So it’s a good time just to pace yourself. And if you get into some sort of conflict, don’t dive into something ‘cause, like you were saying Austin, things can go quicker or get out of hand quicker than you expect.
AC: Yeah. So just to bring the technological quality of Uranus back to that, if you are just walking around outside in nature, there are not very many flammable substances, right? Well, I mean, leaves, trees, etc., there are lots of flammable substances, but they don’t go up in a flash. For volatile substances like gasoline or gunpowder, etc., etc., those require intelligent manufacture and alchemical refinement to become that volatile. There’s very little in the natural world that’s that volatile, but we keep inventing more and more volatile substances every Uranus in Gemini and Aquarius apparently.
KT: The last thing I just want to say, we’ve just been having so many ‘Mars’ problems over the past year, honestly. And just thinking about those Mars-ruled houses and how we’re finally out of fall, and Mars is in Leo, there might be a tendency to think that our Mars problems are done and over with. And not that they aren’t, but just kind of be aware that this Uranus square is coming. Yeah, I just think that a lot of our Mars-ruled houses have kind of taken a beating between eclipses and the retrograde and Mars in fall. So, yeah, we’re not quite out of it yet—I don’t know if we’re ever out of it—but I’m just thinking about that for myself. I gotta be aware that that square is gonna come and still cause some instability I guess with Mars-ruled houses.
AC: Or it’ll very much test stability. If you think you’ve got Mars handled, that things are in working order there, that will certainly test it.
KT: Yeah, that’s a good point.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great way of phrasing that. All right, I think that’s like the last major thing that we meant to mention in terms of the forecast for June, right?
KT: There’s that Mercury cazimi if we want to talk about that, on the 30th. Is that the 30th?
CB: Yeah, it’s like right on the last day of the month. So there it is on June 30—Mercury conjoining the Sun at 8°-9° of Cancer where it has a nice trine with Saturn at 7° of Pisces, and a very nice sextile with Jupiter at 9° of Taurus. And that’s the beginning of Mercury’s synodic cycle where it’s cazimi, or it enters the heart of the Sun. And this looks like a pretty positive one relative to other ones we’ve seen over the years.
AC: Yep. We’ve been talking about, in different contexts today, the sort of deep sense-making about things, about our role in life and what’s happened and all that. This seems like the perfect moment for that. This configuration seems to naturally lead to a workable reflection on where we’re at, right? It’s imbibing aspects from both Saturn and Jupiter, like all these difficulties and these ongoing pressures, and Jupiter, these opportunities or the fields that are beginning to flower over here, and that Mercury-Sun just focusing the attention. Mercury’s like a lens focusing the light of the Sun at this point of intimate reflection, even intimate with one’s self. It just feels nice. It almost will do the introspection for you, or like pull you into that place of getting settled with a lot of where things are, even if Venus is about to do a bunch of stuff over there. But as far as Saturn-Jupiter and the Sun are concerned there’s a real settling and sense-making at a deep level there.
KT: I love that. Also thinking about how this is our diurnal team all kind of aspecting each other from these earth and water signs. And it does kind of feel like this blending of the mind and body, spirit and matter. Especially ‘cause this is a superior cazimi too, and Mercury is like out on the other side of the Sun bringing in some intelligence for us. Yeah, it does feel perfect for that.
CB: It’s making me think of I’ve been doing research for an episode and doing a lot of reading on Hermeticism and Gnosticism, and a common word that was super important in those religious and philosophical traditions was the word gnosis, which means ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’, as well as the word nous was really central in their theology, which means ‘mind’. And this notion that they really focused on was that each of us has like a spark of divinity from the original source, the Divine Mind, and that before birth—or our soul’s descent through the planetary spheres—we pick up these qualities from each of the planets that add to our character, until eventually we’re born and we’re incarnated.
But while we’re here occasionally we—through contemplation and through philosophy and other things that involve the mind—can sometimes have these glimpses of our original self, or glimpses of some higher truths about the nature of the Cosmos through this internal process of thinking and through this transmission of that knowledge or knowing. And Valens actually says that the Sun signifies nous. So this conjunction makes me think of that. Of the ability to go internally into oneself and reflect and remember something about who we are at some core level and what we want out of life, or what we are here to accomplish. It seems like a good moment for that here when we have such an auspicious cazimi or conjunction with Mercury sextiling Jupiter and trining Saturn at the same time and finding the balance between those energies.
AC: Yeah, that tracks. I often teach the Mercury’s conjunction with the Sun while direct as Mercury invisible down here. Mercury’s not on the Earth realm. But instead of being invisible because it’s the underworld with Hades and all the tormented souls and lost emails, Mercury’s up, up, up above, at the top of Mount Olympus communing with the gods, right? The mind is not here, but it’s naturally seeking divine inspiration or divine message. And I’ve definitely had some pretty ‘gnosticated’ moments under the Mercury cazimi when it’s direct.
CB: Yeah, just that moment of sudden realization about something, where you have that sudden moment of clarity about something in your life. I think all of us experience that at different points in our lives. And it’s really weird because suddenly you have this realization or this sudden focus of clarity, which is so different. Usually each of us is so focused on our day-to-day lives, and we’re so entrenched in the subjective experience of all of these different things that are happening constantly in our lives that to have a true moment of clarity of purpose sometimes stands out as being unique.
KT: Yeah, I love Mercury cazimi. Nice, good, sweet, sweet clarity is always really nice.
AC: “The moment of realization is worth a thousand prayers.” I think that’s from Natural Born Killers.
CB: Nice. All right, well, I think that’s a good stopping point then for this forecast for June. Thank you both. This was an awesome and interesting episode where we covered a lot of different things. We talked a lot about this being the precursor to the Venus retrograde in setting up so much stuff that’s gonna come over the course of the next few months. And I think it was a good discussion of that and good preparation for some of the things that will develop in people’s lives over the coming weeks and months.
AC: Thank you.
KT: Yeah, thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah. All right, so, Kirah, what do you have going on, and what do you have coming up in the future? What are you working on?
KT: Yeah, I’m working on an app right now, but that won’t be out for a while. It’s gonna be a dating app, which is cool.
CB: Nice.
KT: But regardless of that I have my podcast, Cosmic Guidance for All. I’ve been trying to do weekly forecasts. It’s been hard while traveling, but I’m having a lot of fun doing them. So, yeah, a weekly forecast forecasting your work week and your weekend. And then I also just have my books open for readings in June. And if those get booked up, just get on my mailing list. I open up every month.
CB: Nice. And what’s your website URL, again?
KT: Yeah, it’s kirah.world. Pretty easy.
CB: Perfect.
KT: Yeah.
CB: All right, I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video, and also on the podcast website for this episode. Austin, what do you have coming up?
AC: Well, I’m gonna be giving two talks and a workshop at NORWAC next week. So that’s the end of May. I guess it’s already sold out, so I shouldn’t even mention it. But I’ll see a bunch of you there, come say ‘hi’, which is not just a friendly thing to say. But really come say ‘hi’, I really need glasses; I can’t see faces. If I’ve only met you on the internet—after about 20 feet—you just look like a person who may or may not know. So, literally, come say ‘hi’.
CB: I hate that so much. Have you had that experience of you’re looking at somebody, but you can’t really see them, and you look away, and they think that you’re snubbing them?
AC: I look like this.
CB: Right, exactly.
AC: And I’m kind of irritated ‘cause I can’t tell.
CB: You’re squinting at them.
AC: Yeah, I’m just like giving full, double-stink eye, so there’s that. And then also, by the time this episode is out, Sphere + Sundry will have released its project magnum opus—the big project. I can’t give any details. All the details will be made available early morning on the 23rd of May. It’s fantastic. It’s five years in the making. A number of different elections of mine went into the creation. Can’t say anymore right now. Yeah, you should absolutely check out. Either wake up at three in the morning, early on Tuesday, or check sphereandsundry.com when you wake up. Really exciting stuff. I’m very happy for Kait and proud, and also excited that it’s finally gonna be out ‘cause, again, this has been a five-year project. Finally some crowning.
KT: So exciting.
CB: That’s super exciting. So what are the URL websites again?
AC: I’m austincoppock.com and Sphere + Sundry is sphereandsundry.com.
CB: Brilliant. All right, I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video. As for myself and the things I have coming up, I’ve just started a clips channel for The Astrology Podcast on YouTube. So I can take some excerpts of longer episodes and just post shorter clips of those. I’ll have a link to that. If you just go to the homepage for The Astrology Podcast on YouTube, you’ll see the new channel I have set up for that. Just call up ‘Astrology Podcast clips’. Other than that, I’m working on some great episodes coming on. I’m working on a possible episode on Mesoamerican astrology. I also have another separate episode I’m working on, on astrology and health. So a lot of good stuff coming up. And I’m gonna release those for early access through my page on Patreon.
So I did want to plug that just because I hit 400 episodes, and I’m super happy how far the podcast has come, and I’ve been super grateful. Especially I wanted to give a shoutout and a thanks to all the patrons that have supported this work because it’s what allows me to generate basically free classes on astrology that go really in-depth that I’m able to release to the public for free. So if you want to support that work, if you want to sign up and throw me a few dollars through Patreon, thank you. And thanks to all the patrons that joined us for the live show today. There’s been a lot of great comments in the live chat from patrons that joined the livestream. So thanks for joining and for supporting me over the years ‘cause it’s made a huge difference, and it’s made this work possible. All right, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks both of you for joining me today.
AC: Yep, my pleasure.
KT: Thanks.
CB: All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
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If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ‘ASTROLOGYPODCAST’.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code ‘AP15’ to get a 15% discount. For Mac users we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an ebook version available through Google Books.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.TheAstrologySchool.com.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at MountainAstrologer.com.