The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 407, titled:
Astrology Forecast July 2023
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kira Sutherland
Episode originally released on June 30, 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 Mary Sharon
Transcription released July 27th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the astrological forecast for July of 2023. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Kira Sutherland. Welcome, both of you.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
KIRA SUTHERLAND: Thanks for having us.
CB: Yeah, I’m going to give a brief little overview of the astrology ahead over the next minute and then we’re going to jump into a review of some of the major news stories and their astrological correlates over the last month since our previous forecast. And then in the second hour of this episode, we’re going to focus on talking about the astrological forecast for July and doing a deep dive into the transits over the next four weeks. So for those that want to jump ahead, there’s timestamps in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. But otherwise, why don’t we jump right into it? So, here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar for July that shows some of the major planetary alignments this month that we’re going to be talking about. Right at the top of the month, the first aspect we have is a Sun-Mercury conjunction on July 1st. Then a couple of days later, we have our first lunation of the month, which is a full Moon in the sign of Capricorn on the 3rd. Then on July 10th, Mars moves into the sign of Virgo. The next day, Mercury moves into Leo on the 11th. We have a New Moon in Cancer on the 17th. Then one of the major aspects of the month is there’s a Mars-Saturn opposition on the 20th of July, followed by Venus stationing retrograde in Leo on the 22nd in the same day the Sun moves into Leo as well. Then the following week, we have our Mercury-Venus conjunction on the 27th, and then Mercury moves into the sign of Virgo on the 28th of July. So, those are some of the major aspects we’re going to be talking about this month. But yeah, first, welcome both of you to the forecast. Kira, thanks for joining us today.
KS: Well, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. 6:00 a.m and all. [chuckles]
CB: Yeah, thank you for getting up early and being a morning riser for this episode. We did the episode on Astrology and Health last week and people have been really enjoying that episode and really enjoying some of the topics we discussed in that
KS: That was good fun. It was really good fun, actually. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And Austin, how are you doing since the last time we checked in a month ago?
AC: Let’s see. I am tired, Chris. I could use some astrology and health. I’ll get the astrology, I suppose, over the next two hours. But I’m all right, but I’m going to need to be taken into the shop here for a couple of days after this.
CB: Yeah, for a tune up. All right, we’ll see what we can do if we can arrange that. Why don’t we first talk about some news stories? So at first this month, it was kind of like a slow news month initially, I thought. And then things started to pick up it seems around the middle of the month. Early in the month, one of the major news stories that I noticed was on June 5th, Apple announced a new virtual reality and augmented reality headset called Apple Vision Pro and I thought that this was very much tied in with the Saturn in Pisces and the build up to the co-presence with Neptune. And one of the things that was interesting about it is it has a little knob where you can turn up or turn down your ability to see what’s going on in reality around you versus the virtual world that it’s projecting onto your eyes. So I thought that was like how literal Saturn-Neptune that can be, and how that’s building us up and taking us into this era of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction over the next few years.
AC: Yeah, also very much part of the Pluto in Aquarius preview. Pluto was in Aquarius until the 10th of June, so we got that. And I’d spoken a plea last month for if we’re going to do Pluto in Aquarius, can we at least get some alien shit to talk about? And we totally got another round of whatever that was. But, you know what? The whistleblower and footage and… I just didn’t feel like Pluto in Aquarius would be complete without staring at the heavens in terror. And I’m so glad that we got that. But that just felt like to complete the symbolic landscape, we had to have alien stuff. And so we got that, too.
CB: For sure. Yeah, that was nice at the very beginning of the month. And then once we got to the middle of the month, Saturn slowed down and made its first planetary station in the sign of Pisces since it moved into that sign earlier this year in March. So there was an intensification of that Saturn transit in Pisces as we talked about on the last forecast, but I was actually kind of taken aback by how literal and how much there was just a string of Saturn in Pisces significations and news stories in the news around that time. The biggest one that happened last week was the sinking of that submarine on June 18th and then the subsequent media and social media focus and fiasco on that whole topic for like a week, basically. That was was huge, I think, right?
AC: Absolutely. It was the most literal possible manifestation of it, right? We have Pisces, ocean, water, deep. And then Saturn, heavy, darkness, tragedy. Like, literally crushed by the weight of the ocean. I mean, that’s… [chuckles]
CB: Right, that’s pretty literal.
AC: You could make it up, but it would be lame if you made it up.
CB: Even the discussion about… Because so much of the discussion for three days was like, “Oh my God, these five people are trapped in a submarine and the oxygen is running out,” and then going to all these scenarios about what that would be like and how terrible that would be. And that in and of itself was very just Saturn and the idea of constrained and constraining in Pisces and the ocean. It was very literal.
KS: The fear of it is just… For so many of us, that’s one of our… You know, everybody has their fears but that Saturn fear of being trapped underwater was just too vivid for me, way too vivid. And then I got lost down the rabbit hole of looking at, you know, they kept talking about, “Oh, it imploded.” How did it implode? And I watched digital videos of what an implosion would look like, I probably should not have gone there.
CB: That’s a good point, though, about fear because we talked earlier this year in the Year Ahead Forecast about Pluto and the fears and setting these different generational fears based on its decade-long transits through certain signs. But Saturn, actually, is also like a core planet about where sometimes a person has fears surrounding different things. And I’d forgotten how much that’s true classically until this week when there was so much discussion about Saturn and different Piscean types of fears.
AC: Yeah. Well, the difference is Saturn is fear of the known, right? Or fear of the knowable. Like, “No, I can imagine what it’d be like.” That’s terrifying. It’s not like, “Maybe the AI will get us. Maybe the aliens will get us.” You do a lot of projecting. You know, Pluto creates that vacuum for us to project into. But Saturn’s like, “Oh, no, that would suck.” One thing about that that just occurred to me is we talk about how Saturn has been in very strong signs for five years and now it’s in Pisces where it has a tangential relationship at best to the significations of Pisces. It’s not a place where Saturn is very strong. And the implosion, the problem there is that the boundary or the wall, the Saturnian boundary wasn’t strong enough. Whereas our complaints have generally been like, “Oh, the walls are too thick. The Saturn is too strong. The boundaries are too strong and heavy.” Whereas this was not enough. Because the shell wasn’t made of metal, it was made of carbon fibre.
KS: Yeah. Literally, the boundaries weren’t strong enough.
AC: So this is a good example of sometimes boundary is good, right? [laughs] They separate us, but sometimes they separate us from the crushing weight of the ocean.
CB: Well, and also it brought up a lot of discussion about regulation and that a lot of this was unregulated or they didn’t get the proper things they could have, or cut corners and different things like that. So that was an interesting additional Saturn theme of rules and regulations and it reminded me of that old saying that safety rules are written in blood because sometimes the reason that you have different safety rules is somebody died or there was some sort of tragedy that happened that caused these other rules to be put in place.
KS: And the ignoring of safety. They had that warning that this was not safe. Safety regulations of the building of this actual structure wasn’t… Weren’t they warned for the last couple years it wasn’t right?
CB: Yeah, there was different people that wrote in to them and said that this design was flawed and that it was known that it could lead to disaster. Even the name of the company was striking symbolically. It was OceanGate, which is literally like ocean, Pisces, and Saturn, gate.
AC: Also the name, you know, we also call a controversy or a scandal a ‘gate’. Right? Like Watergate or blah blah gate. So this was Oceangate.
CB: Right. OceanGate is Saturn in Pisces. So yeah, always remember that. There’s also a lot of discussion about hubris and that being part of the downfall of this from the CEO, and I thought that was really interesting with Mars and Venus transiting in Leo, that you get Mars in Leo and you get a news story about hubris. And Michael on Twitter actually posted a chart for when the dive started for this submarine, approximately based on location. And Mars was right on the Ascendant when it began if his calculations are correct. And I thought that was really interesting also interesting just in terms of that keyword of ‘hubris’, and I think Mars in Leo is a sign that you could associate with that pretty well.
AC: Yeah, I actually have a couple paragraphs, on the second decan of Leo, write up in 36 phases about how hubris is a huge potential pitfall of the second decan. And Mars certainly pushes it in that direction. Yeah. Well, in sort of hubris like to imagine oneself the superior of the gods or the divine. Clearly, they angered the sea king and he rose full fowl in his fury.
CB: Yeah. And then it wasn’t just that though, but it turned out like this month there was tons of different news and tragedies surrounding the ocean stories because there was also that boat of refugees that sank off the coast of Greece on June 14th, which is also very close to the Saturn station. And over 300 Pakistani refugees were killed basically in that, which was another huge tragedy that was occurring at the same time that was also drawing attention again to the ocean and some of the dangers and things surrounding different things related to it. [crosstalk]
KS: Go on, sorry. Oh, I was just saying it was just horrible the difference of focus on a bunch of billionaires and millionaires– five people– and the ends we were going to go to to try to rescue them and so worried about hearing them pounding under the ocean when they thought they were hearing people, versus I didn’t even hear about the refugees until after the submarine thing came out and they were like, “But what about the refugees?” That had totally escaped my… I just wasn’t even aware of it until that happened and there was this comparison going on.
CB: Yeah. Well, and there was so much sensationalism surrounding the submarine thing and the news channels were doing countdowns until their oxygen is gone for days, even though the submarine it turned out had just imploded right at the start and a lot of that just turned out to be media fiasco and hype when this other boat that killed over 300 people had happened just like a week or not even a week earlier.
AC: Yeah, I think the fact that nobody knew how the story ended really sucked people in. And just in terms of everybody experiencing the Saturn station together, how long did how many people spend imagining themselves two miles down, right? People literally put themselves in the Saturn station. People like myself who have planets in early Pisces didn’t need an imaginarium to do that. It felt so heavy for like two weeks. I was shocked at how heavy… Well, not shocked. I had to make adjustments with how heavy it felt. But as far as wrath of the sea, we also got the orcas. Coordinated boat-hunting orcas.
CB: Yeah, this string of new stories of orcas in different areas, not even all in the same area but different areas attacking boats during the course of the month.
KS: Yeah, that was amazing. And supposedly one was harassed by the boat owner originally and that’s why the attack happened, or that’s my understanding of it. And then he’s off teaching other orcas how to. And they’re teaming up, there’s like two and three going at one boat at a time. Right? So that communication happening with them, I find it… Yeah.
AC: Yeah. Well, they’re very coordinated pack hunters and so they just figured out what are the right tactics to hunt boats.
CB: Yeah, and I heard that there can be trends. And in previous years, there’s been observed trends of things that orcas do that catch on and take off, and then many of them start repeating and doing the same thing. And I thought that was really interesting just in terms of the parallels between animal life and humans and how humans often draw distinctions. But there’s so many of our own social things that happen that are natural that we associate as human traits that actually show up in different ways and in different animals.
KS: Especially orcas. There’s a lot of things that are… I’m not saying humans are similar to orcas, but they’re amazing animals. They live really… If we want to go into medical, orcas are the only– I’m probably taking this off base here but orca is one of the only animals that go into menopause and then the grandmothers are in charge of the rest of the pack. They follow a very similar pattern females wise to humans.
AC: That’s interesting. Are they matriarchal? Because one of the explanations I heard for the genesis of the boat hunting was that a matriarch of a particular pack/gang of orcas was killed by a propeller, and then the other orcas in that pod basically sought revenge but then ended up teaching the tactics to other groups.
KS: Yeah, they’re absolutely matriarchal. And once the female orca goes through menopause, she’s then in charge of all the young males is one of her big things. I have a friend who’s a specialist in this area who’s always telling me crazy stories. Yeah, yeah. So I can see that revenge over probably killing or injuring the mama bear.
CB: Yeah, so that was wild that we had all these different areas where the ocean was coming up and themes surrounding fear or danger, or in other instances safety, and how it was coming up. And I think it was just a good demonstration how sometimes planetary stations really do represent an intensification of the significations of whatever that planet signifies at the time and whatever sign it’s going through, and how we’ve shifted now from this three-year period that we were in of Saturn going through Aquarius, and literally at the time there being different fears and different issues surrounding the air and an airborne illness with COVID. And now we’ve shifted into this period of Saturn going through Pisces and the very first time it stations, we have this intensification of discussions and news events surrounding the ocean. And even though that sounds almost too literal, that’s literally what we all just experienced this month.
AC: Yeah, and I think it does matter that it was the first station in Pisces really drawing attention because we’re not used to… Again, we’ve been fearing the air but now Saturn did a redirecting and retention. Everybody imagined themselves crushed by the waters.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Speaking of waters and Moons, that was not actually the only ocean and water-related Saturn news surprisingly. There was another little bit more obscure news story that was still actually surprisingly important, which is a scientific paper was published on June 14th that indicated that scientists had discovered phosphorus in the water that’s being shot out from one of Saturn’s icy ocean Moons. They’ve detected phosphorus in it, which is one of the building blocks that’s necessary for life. And it further sort of deepens the mystery and the suspicions that this may be one of the places that life could also be basically occurring in our solar system. So it’s one of the places they’re going to have to check out and this again weirdly a Saturn story happening right around this first Saturn station in Pisces coming up. And it could have much longer or larger long-term impacts for the future.
AC: Yeah, interesting.
CB: Yeah, that was cool. Let’s see other news moving right along. As we talked about on the Year Ahead Forecast and we kind of anticipated, the US Agricultural Department did approve two companies to start selling lab-grown meat in the US. And this is now going to start being offered in restaurants and eventually supermarkets now that it’s been approved. So that’s kind of interesting because we’re starting to get, and by the end of this month, we’ll start really getting in that range of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction building up in the sign of Taurus, and just part of our ongoing sort of very literal manifestations of Uranus moving through Taurus and this idea of lab-grown meat becoming more prominent as a new development and innovation when it comes to food and other things like that.
AC: Yeah, and we have Jupiter doing the classic role of confirming what another planet is trying to do when it comes up on it. Uranus has been messing with money and food since it entered Taurus. And so Jupiter confirming that making that lawful, pushing that forward.
KS: I find that a little bit… I mean, it’s phenomenal with that placement happening and what it comes out with but I find that really scary as well. As a nutritionist, I find that really scary. Uranian ideas around food in Taurus make me very nervous.
AC: Not a great track record.
KS: No. And we just don’t know how we… In medical astrology, we talk very much about Taurus being about how we value food and this is putting a totally different spin on it. Makes me very nervous.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. And that’s one of those shifts that seems like it’s becoming more and more prominent, and especially now that we’re getting to the second half of Uranus in Taurus starting to see more and more of the end result of that transit as we get further into this decan.
KS: Yeah. I mean, I get why we’re doing it and the resources and what’s going on with agriculture, but just that Uranian energy coming in and then with Jupiter on top of it, I get nervous about the signaling and what it’s going to teach the body on an energetic level with that Uranus there. It’s very Frankenstein in some ways for me.
AC: Well, we get to find out.
KS: Somebody else can find that out, I’m going to keep eating my nature-grown food. [chuckles]
AC: Well, an earlier Uranus in Taurus thing that happened to us is we ended up with a whole cow. This was partially by accident, partially by sort of panic, right? Basically we were offered if we wanted a whole cow in early or in May 2020, I think was Taurus 2020. You know, when there was a lot of questions about food supply and this and that, so we signed up for a cow. And then the cow was-
KS: Okay, wait. Austin, are you talking a cow that’s alive that you’re taking care of, or you’re buying like meat?
AC: No, it was a rancher who took care of it. We forgot about it and then a year later, Kait was like, “You remember how we kind of bought a cow? The meat’s getting delivered today.” And so it was almost 900 pounds of beef, so I’m still eating. We’re still very much working on the same cow we’ve been eating for two years now. But that was a very Uranus in Taurus thing, right? Like, surprise beef. We’ve also, as a surprise because we have a lot of beef – it’s great, it’s local, it’s grass-fed – given the gift of beef for someone’s birthday. It’s like, “Here’s 40 pounds of beef!”
KS: That’s awesome.
CB: Austin, if you send me beef for my birthday present, I’m sending it back. [Kira laughs] Just putting that out there.
AC: It’s great beef. You’ve never given the gift of beef, much less received the gift of beef. [chuckles]
KS: Instead of wine. I always think of Taurus and wine.
CB: That’s true. [Austin laughs] Moving on to-
KS: Good wine. Sorry. I’m talking about fancy wine.
AC: Yeah, a wine that would pair well with a nice steak. Or 20 pounds of ground chuck. [Kira laughs]
CB: All right. We’ll talk about… We’ll come back to that later.
KS: We need to move off this one.
CB: So there was already a tonne of major news stories this month, especially around the Saturn station. And then if that wasn’t enough, we got one last major news story just a few days ago, which was the Russian rebellion or coup attempt that took place on June 23rd. And this was a major major story in the news that tied into at least three different transits, three different things that are going on. One is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s building up that I know Austin’s talked about many times on the podcast, but also it was pretty close to the Mars-Uranus square that just went exact today but had been building up over the course of the past week or so that we talked about on the last forecast. And it’s also tied in with the Venus retrograde that’s coming up this summer for reasons I’ll mention here in a second. But Austin, I know you saw this as a major… Because Saturn was stationing, this was obviously a precursor to that Saturn-Neptune conjunction and copresence that we’re building up to over the next few years.
AC: Yeah. The Saturn-Neptune co-presence and then conjunction is, every single time, a massive pivot point in Russian history. Right? Last time was the dissolution of the USSR, time before that was the death of Stalin and de-Stalinization beginning, time before that was the Russian Revolution, time before that was the assassination of Alexander the second and Russia going from very progressive to very backward. And so every time it happens, different types of events, right? But Russia takes a very different direction. In many ways, it’s a lot like Uranus in Gemini for the United States in that you can really tell the story if you just check in whenever that configuration is happening. Of course, this time because Saturn and Neptune will basically have scored each other over the border between Pisces in Aries, instead of being a two-and-a-half-year window it’s a five-year window. And so we’ve been expecting big pivotal things for Russia, but this time we have five years for it to happen. And for this mutiny and… Is it a coup? Is it a… Whatever it is, it’s a big fucking deal. It was Prigozhin marching an armed column towards Moscow, you know, certainly at the very least massively undermining the current regime. One, it confirms that yes, big shit happens in Russia when Saturn and Neptune are in the same sign. And I feel like it speeds up the timetable a little bit for whatever the big thing is this time. Because with a five-year range, you can say, “Oh, I’m confident that within these five years, you will have a complete change in direction.” But it’s one thing to say, “Oh, maybe that’ll be 2027,” versus we’re already seeing– how should we say– loud rumbles here in 2023. So maybe it doesn’t take that long.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s like the focal point. That conjunction goes exact around 2025, but it’s already in effect basically as soon as Saturn moved into Pisces earlier this year. So there’s a two-year lead-up period, and then there’s a two or three-year period after that where it starts to cool down where the exact aspect is moving away but they’re still in the same sign. But now with this event happening, we can start to see some of the things constellating around that pivot point that’s coming up here in a couple of years. And this was an interesting first preview of that that coincided with the first Saturn station.
AC: Yeah, and some quick point I’d like to make that’s just really interesting is that if you look at the hypothetical chart for Vladimir Putin, which I’m very suspicious of, anybody whose career was in intelligence services has plenty of reasons to hide their birthday. I know it sounds right that he has a Scorpio rising blah blah blah, but if he’s born anywhere around that chart, he has the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Right? Which is the Russian conjunction. And so he’s born as Stalin is dying, and so it’s very interesting. And again, if he’s just born that year, he has that. With the chart we have, the Sun is with the Saturn and Neptune which certainly makes sense. Somewhere around there is pretty convincing. Even if it’s a fake chart, it’s symbolically correct to have a very, you know, a Russian leader of historic import to have the Russian signature in the chart with the Sun there. Right? But I’ve been thinking about it and I was talking with this about somebody private or I was talking about this privately with someone a couple of weeks ago, we have the nodes. There are going to be eclipses on top of that Libra conjunction, that early ’50s Saturn-Neptune. Which is interesting and maybe challenging for people who have that, including Mr. Putin. But anyway, I was also just musing about like, okay, when do we have whatever the big change event is? And this isn’t a prediction but this is thinking, I was just looking at that and I was like, “Oh yeah, the second half of our Saturn-Neptune time is going to be in Aries where the Saturn-Neptune co-presence will oppose where it was in the early ’50s.” Right? So we’ll have the Saturn-Neptune in Aries opposite the Saturn-Neptune in Libra, which is in Putin’s chart, and also that was what happened. Does that make sense as musing?
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Not precise predicting, but just looking at that, and that seems somewhat compelling to me.
KS: Well, and South Node is big health transit for a lot of people. Right? South Node hitting any of your personal or outer planets is a big drain on your energy. Big drain. It’s like I always describe it as a bucket with holes in it for somebody on a physical level.
AC: Do you know that there’s actually a… Have you studied Ayurveda at all, Kira?
KS: Yeah, I’ve done a year of Ayurveda but I don’t do Jyotish astrology at all.
AC: Okay, so I believe that there’s actually a health technique where you’re looking for what I believe is called bheda, which I think transliterate is like b h e d a, which literally means a period where a person has a hole in their bucket and their life essence keeps draining out.
KS: Yes. Yeah. And that’s a real South Node thing, right? Is that what you’re talking about? Or you’re talking about a different transit.
AC: No, I agree. I just was like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that from Jyotish class. That’s literally like a technical concept.” But just back to the Russian political situation, one of the things that happens this month that we’re at the cusp of right now is the nodes moving into Libra and Aries. And we’ve talked a lot about eclipses and kings and queens and royalty over the last six months, and if we’re talking about an attempt to eclipse the… You know, if the Sun is getting eclipsed, this is a coup or an insurrection or, you know, it’s a move against whoever the sovereign is, right? It’s a bid for power that undermines whoever’s sitting the throne. Whether it’s successful or not, this one didn’t seem to be successful. Again, it’s a murky situation, I’m sure more clarity will come out. But that certainly seems like an eclipsing of the Sun. If you happen to be the head of a nation-state, you’re very much in the Sun position. So that’s another piece that connects to it.
CB: Yeah, so the Saturn-Neptune backdrop was obviously that makes things much more prominent and suggestive for the next few years of paying attention to that transit. But also the Venus retrograde, because Venus has already moved into her shadow and she’s getting ready to go retrograde this summer. But one of the interesting correlations, Nick Dagan Best and Patrick Watson did a live stream yesterday and they ran through specifically Putin’s history with this specific retrograde cycle that happens every eight years in Leo, and one of the things that they noted that I immediately thought of when this happened as well is that in 1991, there was also another failed Soviet coup attempt in the summer in August of 1991 that was under the same Venus retrograde. So it’s a really interesting repetition of a very similar set of events in Russian history going back in eight-year increments all the way. But even more importantly than that, Nick pointed out in his livestream yesterday that Putin has this tied in very much with his personal chronology because he probably began his career with the KGB under a Venus retrograde in Leo in 1975. That he quit the KGB 16 years later and started his political career in 1991 after that failed coup. So that was two Venus retrograde cycles later he quit that job. And then one Venus retrograde cycle later, eight years later, in 1999, was when he was first named Prime Minister in August of 1999 under the same Venus retrograde. So we had already been paying attention to this Venus retrograde because we know that Ukraine itself was founded under this Venus retrograde in 1991. And Zelinsky also has Saturn there at 28 degrees of Leo so we knew it was going to be kind of big for Ukraine this summer. But it also seems like a weirdly important summer in Putin’s chronology as well for some reason due to this Venus retrograde. I’ll put a link to, or I guess people can check out Nick’s YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/nickdaganbest, and he’s going to post a clip or an excerpt from that live stream of going through Putin’s chronology and tracking the Venus retrograde so people can check that out.
AC: That’s really interesting.
KS: That’s phenomenal. Sorry. Go on, Austin.
AC: Oh, no. As much as, again, I don’t want to be duped into believing a time chart that can’t be verified. That certainly works with a Scorpio rising because it would put that Venus retrograde in the 10th, and those are all major 10th-house shifts.
CB: Yeah, we did the Venus retrograde example or episode earlier this month and Nick was able to show how sometimes even other angles like if somebody has Leo rising or whatever, if Venus retrograde is regularly hitting an angle during certain signs, the chart’s going to respond to that and important turning points in a person’s life are going to happen. So I really hesitate or would caution people against-
AC: Oh, yeah. Not investing in it, I’m observing that that doesn’t contradict that.
CB: Sure. Yeah, I’ve just been seeing people making predictions lately and I would really caution people against using that timed chart too much since we have no idea.
AC: Yeah, you couldn’t have a more or less reliable background for believing. Like, if anybody who’s like I was a spy for decades, they’re like, “Yeah, this is definitely when and where I was born,” no matter which country’s service. That’s not reliable, right? [laughs] You don’t take somebody who’s literally trained in spy craft at their word.
KS: No.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And with the Venus retrograde thing, it was just weird because it made me think of how in history or historians, you always have that idea that history rhymes, and that’s almost a saying in and of itself that you can see sometimes in history. But then with astrology, we can actually see some of the patterns that are coinciding with that rhyming like this Venus retrograde. And I feel like with everybody’s chronology when you’re trying to study the astrology sometimes you see that period and you almost hear the music that starts playing when something important or heroic happens in somebody’s life. Like in Game of Thrones when they would play the heroic music when Daenerys would do something important. But then with some of these, it’s like Venus goes retrograde in a certain part of your chart and you hear the Benny Hill Yakety Sax music starts playing. Like when in Russian history, for example here with 1981 having that failed coup under a Venus retrograde and then having another one here, it’s kind of funny thinking about the times in a person’s life or even in world history where things go awry or things don’t work out as planned.
AC: So with the, “History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme,” which is attributed to Mark Twain, I want to hunt that down. So astrology is the rhyme scheme. Astrology is like the metre and the rhyming scheme.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And sometimes that’s very impressive and other times it’s kind of a goofy song that you’re playing in the background [plays Benny Hill Yakety Sax] that you got to be a little nervous, especially… All right. I think those are all the major news stories that I meant to cover. Is there anything else that we wanted to talk about, to review, or any personal anecdotes or other things that happened related to that? I mean, we have the Mars-Uranus square happening today and I think that was actually also tied in with the previous thing with the-
AC: I would say one of the only other news story observations is that Mars goes into Leo and then Venus goes into Leo and then we finally have the start of the much-delayed Ukrainian counter-offensive. Right? Which makes sense. Of course, you’re not going to do a big counteroffensive when Mars is in Cancer, right? This is not the energy. But it’s ongoing. Doesn’t seem to be going particularly well but the start of that timed quite well to the Venus joining Mars in Leo. And of course, I’ve been looking at the Mars-Venus in Leo with Venus coming up on the station as bearing a very, very interesting relationship to the signature under which the Russia and Ukrainian war began, which was Venus stationing direct with Mars. And here we have Mars and Venus again, but Venus is about to station retrograde. And so it just seemed like there should be important stuff that happens, and we’ll get the rest of that by mid-July. But it’s interesting to see.
CB: Yeah. And one last thing actually that was funny about the Russian thing: Aerin Fogel who’s been on the forecast before posted on Twitter today about the Mars square Uranus. And she said, “Some of these explosives may already have erupted since Mars acts early, but what we may realize today is that we go to great – sometimes destructive – lengths just to feel seen and appreciated.” And I thought that was funny with the Russia situation that sometimes if you’re a warlord, what you really want is to be seen and sort of recognized, and maybe that was the downfall for that situation if Putin had only given a little bit more recognition to different warlords.
AC: But well, it was Prigozhin who is the head of the Wagner sort of mercenary group. But I know one thing that led up to it is that there’s been a lot of rivalry between the Wagner group and the normal Russian military and that there was some decree I forget that was going to limit or kind of neuter Wagner that was going to take effect on July 1st and many people think that this mutiny or coup or whatever was a very clear reaction against that. Prigozhin wanted to take over. He wanted to be head of the military and he’s like, “Hey, we’ve been doing a much better job than the standard military,” but they’ve been sort of pecking at each other quite publicly over the last several months. So literally like, “Hey, I’m doing a great job. Why them? Why not me?” Like, that ties into it in a very observable way.
CB: Yeah, I was just joking actually by taking a psychological interpretation of that. [crosstalk] [Kira laughs] I know it’s kind of true, but it’s also just funny.
AC: Also, how many potential coups have you seen announced on social media? It’s a pretty Venus in Leo move.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s reminded me a lot of the Roman Empire because stuff like that’s exactly what happened with Caesar and stuff. You have the empire and you have these different generals that get in charge of these vast military contingents. And then what happens if one of them decides to march on the homeland is basically what led to the Roman Empire and the fall of the republic. So it’s kind of funny because if you imagine if Twitter existed back then, that’s exactly what you would be seeing basically in Rome in the first few centuries BC.
AC: Oh, god, yeah. I was going over Firmicus and Valens delineations for planetary combinations last month at NORWAC, and as I’m going through with people, it’s like so much of the stuff is just perfect for social media. Like that… [laughs]
KS: I love that you guys think about this.
AC: You know, once you get past Augustus and things aren’t so, you know, there’s not so much Pax Romana, it’s just squabbling nobility, and allegations of sexual impropriety. They would have loved Twitter. Late Western Roman Empire would have loved Twitter. It would have been the most popular thing ever. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, I would have liked to see Mark Antony’s Twitter account maybe more than any ancient figure. [laughter]
KS: That’d be amazing.
CB: All right. So I think that’s good for news and announcements. Shall we transition into talking about the second half? And I think we have a sponsor before we get there. Sound good?
AC: Sure.
KS: Great.
CB: All right. So, our sponsor this month is shout-out to Sphere + Sundry. Sphere + Sundry is astrological magic, talismans and materia. And as you kind of know from me talking about elections or good elections can be both hard to find and fleeting even once you have a really good electional chart, but that’s where Sphere + Sundry comes in, where Austin himself actually picks out some of the best and rarest elections available and then Kaitlin captures them in a bottle using astrological magic and ritual based on protocols found in the Picatrix. So this is part of your process each month, right, Austin, is you pick out the different elections coming up in the future?
AC: Yeah, I wish there was one every month. The electional strictures for doing astrological magic, especially if you’re going to cast it as a talisman or bring it into a lasting form or on oil that’s going to be around for years, it’s really strict. And so I would say between three and five a year is what I can find, so it’s really more part of my yearly prep. But every month would be great. [laughs] That’d be nice. But no, you’ve really got to hunt.
CB: So you hunt down these elections and then Kaitlin sort of captures the results, which are then available as anointing oils, bath salts, candles, sprays, incense, and more, which people can then apply to themselves or use in their space to get some of the benefits of great transits whenever you need them. So the Sphere + Sundry website has almost 5000 reviews, which you can check out along with all of their offerings at sphereandsundry.com. Their most recent Thema Mundi project took five years to create and is currently open for preorder. That was a really big announcement over the past month. How did all of that come together, Austin?
AC: Well, so it required getting a great election for all of the planets’ positions at the beginning of… Well in the creation of the universe, the Thema Mundi chart, so we needed a good Moon in Cancer, a good Sun in Leo, a good Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio, Jupiter in Sagittarius, and Saturn in Capricorn. And Kait had this idea I think at the end of 2018 within the first six months of starting the project, she was like, “I can get them all. I can catch them all. If I’d started four years later, I couldn’t get all of these.” But she got all those individual series and then ritually combined them using a seven-day ritual and confinement last year. And so the resulting materia– I guess I’m one of two people who’s used it– is pretty fucking crazy. [laughs] I would say that I’ve guinea piged and utilized all this stuff, but the Thema Mundi stuff, in addition to other qualities, also has an immediately psychedelic effect, which is not a result of any of the plants in there. It’s pretty extraordinary and I’m very much looking forward to that going out and mutating the world, for the better.
CB: For sure. So orders from Sphere + Sundry typically ship the same business day. They’ve got a pretty warm and welcoming client community to help people get started and answer all their questions in each of the products, which I love comes with an in-depth write-up in paper form which are really engaging and informative for people who want to learn more about the stars and the planetary placements in each of the elections for each product. So people can find out more information at sphereandsundry.com.
All right, awesome. Well, why don’t we transition into talking about the forecast for July at this point? Here’s the planetary alignments calendar, which shows some of the major alignments we’re going to be talking about. The main one of course we’re going to focus on is the Venus retrograde in Leo as well as the Mars-Saturn opposition, both of which take place mid to late July. But we’ve got some buildup and some other stuff before we get there. All right, let me pull up a chart for July 1st so we can see where the planets are when we begin the month. All right, there we go. July 1st, so we’re coming off of the Sun-Mercury conjunction in Cancer which occurred at the very end of June. We see Venus and Mars still in Leo moving through the last decan of that sign on July 1st. Jupiter is beginning its build-up to the conjunction with Taurus, or Jupiter is building the build-up to the conjunction with Uranus, which by the end of July, Jupiter will actually be within 10 degrees of conjoining Uranus. So that conjunction is really starting to heat up this month. We see Saturn retrograde still at seven degrees of Pisces but it’s about to fall back to six degrees, and Pluto has retrograded back into Capricorn where it’s going to stay for a bit before eventually moving back into Aquarius I think later this year or early next year. So, where do we start or what should we start with for the top of July?
AC: There are a couple of different places. A number of things are in process, aren’t they?
CB: Yeah, I’m surprised at how much we can already see the Venus retrograde is coming in really hot. And we did a whole episode on that this month with Nick Dagan Best and Patrick Watson where we got into some really interesting stuff about what Venus retrograde means and how you have some of the classic stuff, which can be relationship stuff coming up, old relationships coming back, sometimes Venus-related scandals and things like that because the retrograde can sometimes invert the normal significations of Venus. But also as we talked about earlier, sometimes the Venus retrogrades can just indicate important turning points in a person’s life and a pivot point where something important happens in some other area that’s not necessarily always relationships. Has this Venus retrograde cycle– I guess it’s a repeating one from eight years ago, is this one an important one for either of you or have you seen it show up notably for you in the past?
AC: Yeah, this one’s pretty huge for me. So, got together with Kait like a month and a half before this one started, you know, within the zone. Got together with Kait right before it happened in 2007, we got married right after it happened in 2015, I started doing this podcast with you right before it happened in 2015. You know, big important relationship stuff, but both professional and life partner, romantic.
CB: Yeah, that’s huge.
KS: Yeah. I’m born Venus retrograde so I always find it interesting to watch Venus retrogrades in general and what they trigger off and with it in a fire sign as well. 2015 for me was probably one of the most stressful years in my relationship of… I’m in a 22-year relationship, so my husband at the time had a lot of stress going on so it was interesting how to ride. In 2015, it was kind of like they were so stressed I didn’t have my partner in relationship because I had to be off doing other stuff, whether it was physically in another country, or just mentally not there. So Venus retrogrades for me tend to be really intense, but again I’m born Venus retrograde.
CB: What sign is it in for you natally?
KS: Nataly, I’m in Aries.
CB: Aries. Okay, got it. That’s interesting. That was one of the things we discussed is sometimes people born with Venus retrograde sometimes are responding more to some subsequent retrogrades just as a transit in general.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, and Venus retrograde generally, I’m not having a bad time of it. 2015 was a great year for my career so I can’t really complain, but energetically, I end up a little bit solo during Venus retrograde sometimes. Not in a… I’m an Aries anyway, I can handle that, you know? But it’s a real kind of reset for me and how I’m operating within a relationship.
CB: Yeah, there can be that real reflective or introspective period for that 40 days and 40 nights that Venus is going retrograde where you have an opportunity to rethink things and relook at things and reassess things and decide where you want to go once Venus stations and starts moving forward again.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting to look at because, for my husband, he’s finishing a cycle while this retrograde is going to happen. He’s pretty much finishing a cycle that started at that time, so I’m really interested to look at that. And yeah, he’s a Venus in another fire sign, but not retro.
AC: I find that Venus retrogrades tend to problematize. They bring the same kind of ambivalence that we get during Mercury retrogrades but they bring it to more heartfelt matters where we begin questioning like, “Oh, I thought I liked chocolate and didn’t like vanilla,” but you’re like, “Mmh, chocolates? I don’t know, it’s okay. You know, vanilla? I’ve never had this vanilla bean, maybe I just had the wrong kind of vanilla.” Right? I’m using a silly example but there’s this sort of going inward to question like, “Do I like what I like? Do I dislike? Maybe I’ve been, you know, whatever. [chuckles] Maybe this flavor is not so bad and I’ve just gotten a pattern of thinking that I like this and I don’t like that.” I find that the Venus retrogrades really attempt to pull together conflicting experiences of attraction and repulsion and joy and sadness. You be like, “Oh, this person makes me happy. This person sucks.” So it’s like, “Well, but actually, this person has really good qualities and maybe we just got off on the wrong foot. And this other person, maybe they’re not as good as I thought,” but then back and forth and back and forth. Because it’s a long retrograde. And the process of that is usually like a real depth of emotional clarity about what you like and who you like and who you don’t, but the process of arriving at that clarity is significant muddying of the waters and questioning. Somebody in the chat says, “Have I been wrong about olives the whole time?”
KS: Maybe.
AC: And when things come up for questioning, like, “Maybe I don’t hate doing that. Maybe I thought I liked this and I did once, do I still like it?” There’s something about the form or the shape or the exteriorization of the Venusian desire for joy and pleasure and relationship and all that that kind of crumbles away and we end up seeking what is the more real… Is there a better shape or form for this particular passion? And sometimes you come out of it totally you surely want to keep doing exactly the same thing, but certainly at a deeper level because you took the time to evaluate it.
CB: Yeah, and sometimes you end up reaffirming things by the end of that process.
AC: Yeah. And even though it’s the same, it’s not the same because you went all the way back to the beginning and then worked your way towards you’re like, “No, this is right.” Right? It’s like checking your homework for 40 months and be like, “No, this really is right and I’m certain of that in a way I couldn’t have been before this process.”
KS: You know, if you look at it from a food point of view, going back to your vanilla and chocolate, Venus is all about what’s sweet and it’s all of our sweet foods and it’s sugar in our diet as well. I’m sorry, I’m always going to take it into health. And it’s a great time to reevaluate how you’re doing, what sweets actually work for you, what don’t, what foods you’re in love with, what you’re not. I actually find Venus retrograde really useful for people to reassess their diet. Even though that’s not a Virgo reevaluate, but it’s still your flavors change and sometimes it’s great to find that new pattern of what sweets are actually working. Not that I’m saying to go and find sweets, but yeah, things will really change.
AC: Well, maybe what hits the sweet spot?
KS: Yeah, what pleasure foods are working for you and what aren’t? And maybe it’s time to change it up and evaluate the olives as someone was saying.
CB: I like that idea of changing it up because Venus, one of the things we talked about astronomically is that when Venus stations retrograde, it’s like it’s on one side of the Sun and it appears on one side of the Sun, but then by the end of the retrograde it switched and changed sides. And there’s this real crossing over both in terms of the orientation to the Sun astronomically as well as whether it’s North or South of the ecliptic and sometimes you have a person sort of changing sides and going from one thing to another. But it reminds me also what you were saying, Austin, or what you’re both saying basically is that the flip side of the coin about taste and something that you have a taste for is distaste, and they’re sort of interlinked things of what a person has a taste for or a distaste for are like two sides to the same coin. And sometimes during Venus retrogrades, that idea of taste comes up very prominently both in our personal lives as well as publicly. One of the topics we talked about and Patrick used an example of was sometimes fashion trends changing during the course of the Venus retrograde, and especially old fashion trends from the past coming up again and being re-popularised. So he used the example of Ray-Ban sunglasses being re-popularised in the ’80s after a Tom Cruise movie came out. But I thought that was a really interesting and insightful keyword to think about when visually or in terms of fashion something looks retro, we already have that phrase of if something looks retro, it looks old or it looks from a past fashion trend from a bygone era. And sometimes at first when old retro things come back and are re-popularised again, it kind of goes against the grain and seems distasteful initially. But eventually, when enough people start doing it, it becomes popular again and then the public taste for that changes and is renewed or comes back again in some striking way.
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
KS: So, does this mean we’re about to look at a lot of big hair with the Venus in…
CB: Well, yeah, maybe in Leo.
KS: Are we finally going to get rid of the center part that women have been wearing for the last Lord knows how long? I know you guys probably aren’t into that, but I’m really done with it.
CB: I am not the authority on hair, I have to say, but yeah, that could be one. Leo is definitely one of those signs that’s associated with hair so hair-related fashion trends could be something to look out for.
KS: I’m ready for a change, yeah. Not me, personally, I’m ready to visually see a change. But, yeah.
AC: I would imagine something, or I would just imagine more colorful. You know, during the pandemic and also just every time that we have Saturn in Capricorn or Aquarius, much more like drab, like grayscale stuff and sort of dull Earth-toned and military-looking sort of tones become really popular.
KS: Yeah, I’m ready for that to be over.
AC: Yeah, and I can see it’s easy to… And our last Venus retrograde was in a Saturn-ruled sign, whereas… And also if you look at Saturn in Pisces with fashion trends, it’s much more flowing and colorful and et cetera, et cetera. And I can see the Leo contributing brighter color to that.
KS: Yeah, the big flowy long skirts. I know I’m talking to two guys about fashion but the big flowy long skirts are making a rave comeback at the moment. I noticed it while I was out last night.
AC: So, Chris, this is bad news for us. Maybe the Venus in Capricorn cycle was peak guys in black T-shirts and now it’s over.
CB: Yeah, if that goes out of style I’m hanging it up.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Well, I would like people to pay attention to and let us know in the comments if they do see any fashion trends, especially old fashion trends that come up over the course of this summer and are brought back. Or if you see any new fashion trends that seem particularly tied in with this Venus retrograde especially once Venus stations.
KS: Yeah. Well, we’ve got the big maxi dress as someone said. That’s what I saw last night. Big flowy gauzy colors and big bell bottoms. Big wide pants are coming back in, if everybody’s really comfy with their skinny stuff. The big over-the-top covering your whole foot thing is coming back in. I was in London two weeks ago and the puffies are getting even bigger.
AC: Somebody was telling me that the absurdly large skater jeans that I remember from the ’90s like the JNCO jeans were coming back. This is true.
KS: Yes. This is what I’m talking about. London was like… I was like, “No, I look terrible in these Hammer pants.”
AC: Hammer pants are very comfortable.
KS: They are comfy, but they’re not sexy. Well, to some people they must be.
CB: And parachute pants. All right. Well, yeah, and we’re already in the Venus retrograde shadow. I wanted to show this infographic. Yeah, so the pre-retrograde shadow began June 19th because that’s when Venus passed the degree that she will later retrograde back to and station at. But then Venus is going to actually station retrograde around July 22nd. It’s going to be retrograde for about 40 days until September third when it stations Direct. And then eventually it won’t get out of the post-retrograde shadow and leave all of the degrees that it retrograded at until October 7th of 2023. So this is our full timeframe that we’re working with. And especially if you have a personal planet within those degrees that Venus is going to go retrograde between 28 and 12 degrees of Leo or other, especially fixed signs, that means you’re going to get a triple Venus transit of Venus hitting the same point three times over the course of a few months. That’s part of why Venus retrogrades are so important because you take what is normally a very quick transit and you stretch it out over the course of a long span of time.
AC: Yeah, totally. Well, and so this one particularly being in Leo, bright colors – if we’re looking at appearance and fashion, looks like brighter colors. I would say bolder styles. But then the sign that Venus is retrograde in also just tells us something about which issues will become important in relationship to other people and also in relationship to ourselves. You know, Venus is very often depicted as having a mirror. Right? And though we have a Venusian relationship to ourselves, do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? And the mirror on a physical level, but then we have like, you know, its mirrors all the way down. Do we like the person that we act like? Do we like how we acted in that situation? Do we like how we deal with whatever? That’s also a relationship and it also is loaded with attraction and repulsion or taste and disgust like we’re talking about. And so with it being in Leo, the Sun’s sign, I think that this one is going to have a lot to do with what’s public and what’s private, like what’s expressed and then what’s not expressed. Because there are different portions of us that are photosensitive to different degrees. Some parts of us need sunlight, they need to be seen in order to be healthy. And then other parts of us, [chuckles] those of us who are part fungi are killed by too much light. The different parts have different needs. And so things like, “Oh, I’m getting too much sunlight. I’m being too public about this or I’m getting too much attention for this.” But then this other thing, which actually thrives on sunlight, is off in a shady corner and not getting anything. And I think that sort of public-private, “What do I show?” People say, “Oh, I need to be seen.” Some parts of you need to be seen, some parts of you actually need not to be seen. I know that doing a very public podcast every month, I often have feelings of wanting to not be seen, right? Like, “Oh, I have to get up in front of people.” And so it’s not that we need light or we need darkness, different parts of us need X amount of light or X amount of darkness like all plant life.
CB: Yeah, it’s definitely Leo’s the sign where the spotlight is kind of on you and those themes of the light. Also, one of the keywords that was coming up was ‘loud’, that Leo’s kind of like a loud sign both in terms of fashion, but also just in terms of public presence, and that maybe being a major keyword to focus on with this Venus retrograde.
KS: I like that idea.
AC: So one thing that I like that’s just a public thing that I think is pretty in the Venus retro-crossed hairs is have either of you all heard the scandal about the show The Idol? It’s an HBO Max show.
KS: I don’t know that one.
CB: Just a little bit.
AC: What’s interesting is that it’s apparently the pet project of The Weeknd, the very famous recording artist, and apparently it was delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed. So it’s actually interesting that it comes out right as Venus is in Leo and getting ready to do shadow and station. And one, it’s about a scandalous pop star doing scandalous things. And then there’s also a lot of scandal about the show itself where people are mad at The Weeknd and the showmakers. It’s literally like scandal to the second power. It’s literally public show about… It’s a show about public scandal that has become a public scandal. And it seems to be, again I don’t follow The Weeknd very closely, but it seems to be a gigantic negative on his career and people are like, “Oh, I loved him for a decade and now I don’t ever want to listen to any of his music ever again.” It just seems like a pretty Venus retro in Leo sort of thing.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, the Venus retro and that’s part of it is sometimes something will happen in passing during the pre-retrograde shadow that should just be a passing event or singular thing that happens in your life, but then for some reason, it gets drawn out or it comes back and ends up becoming more important and you see it play out over the course of a few months instead of just a very quick passing thing. So I don’t know how that lines up in his chart because he’s definitely been getting pillared on social media over the past week or so. But it’ll be interesting to see.
AC: I think they’re four episodes in, but it’s HBO so they’re not doing a whole season dump. It’s like Game of Thrones, it comes out one a week. So they’ll definitely be coming out all through the lead-up to the actual Venus retrograde station. That’d be funny if the finale was on the Venus retrograde station itself because it’s definitely leading in that direction.
CB: It’s like his Sun is in late Aquarius, so it’ll be very close to the Venus retrograde station degree.
AC: Right. So he’s got Mars and Venus opposing the Sun.
KS: Well, and I’ve seen that someone’s talking about Lily-Rose Depp, who’s famous for being the daughter of famous actors. I can see that’s been posted. And there’s been tons and tons of things on nepotism at the moment. I’ve found in– I’m not that up on this one show because I don’t have HBO but I keep seeing all this really negative press coming out about all the nepo babies. I’ve never even heard that term before the last year or two but it seems to be, if I’ve been scrolling Tik Tok or Snapchat, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles on nepo babies and how negative it is. And I’m wondering how much of a fall will go down with that.
AC: Yeah, this one just seems to have so much to do with fame and attention. Right? Attention to what people can see. One of the things I’ve heard said about the show is like, “Oh, I really liked The Weeknd as a musical artist, I don’t like watching him as an actor. He’s actually profoundly uncharismatic as an actor and it ruined the illusion or the fantasy that the songs created.” Which is, again, it’s a vision thing. Like in the Sun’s domain, we have all this stuff about what you can see, who can see what, et cetera, et cetera. And I actually had a micro revelation about this the other day when I was watching my cats. So we have a feline representative of the Sun sign. It’s Leo, it’s the lion. And what do cats do endlessly? Cats always want to be where they can see and can’t be seen. Right? We have two cats, so they’re always rearranging each other. They’re always rearranging themselves so it’s like, “Oh, I can see you but you can’t see me.” Then the other one readjusts. There’s constant readjustment and that’s how cats as hunters work in the wild, the big ones too. It’s, “Where can I be that I can see but you can’t see me?” And I was like, “Oh, okay, there’s the visual dynamics for the Sun sign,” in kitty brain form.
KS: I think it’s interesting how you were talking about someone saying they like his music but they don’t want to see him. And that really, to me, goes back to that Neptune in Pisces loving the music and loving how it made them feel, yet then Saturn coming in the reality of not wanting to watch him. Like it’s ruining their vision, the Saturn.
AC: Yeah, and on a personal level, like what parts of yourself do you lead with? Do you lead with your voice? Do you lead with your face? It’s like we’re… How should we say? We’re generally not equally good at appearing in all mediums. I’d much rather appear vocally than I would visually. I remember I dragged my feet as much as humanly possible when Chris introduced the idea of cameras for the podcast. [Kira laughs]
CB: Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s a good point because maybe the theme then is sometimes is changing sides or sometimes when a person attempts to make a leap from a career field from one area of a career or one type of career to another, like in this instance jumping from music to acting. And it’s like we see different people that are either successful or unsuccessful when attempting to make that sort of change or that sort of leap. And sometimes you do get those amazing success stories like Lady Gaga, for example, as primarily a hugely successful musician and singer, but then also successfully makes the jump to also doing acting. And you have people that sometimes are able to pull that off successfully, but then other times you do get instances where there’s an attempt to do something but there’s a failure or it just doesn’t land quite as well as they’d hoped.
AC: Yeah, the one thing that brings up that’s connected to that show is HBO launched a new service where it’s not HBO Max anymore, it’s just Max, right? Rebrand is also very Venus retrograde in Leo. And that seems like a terrible rebrand. It’s like, “No, HBO literally stood for high-budget excellent television for decades, let’s get rid of that. Let’s not remind people of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones and dozen other shows that are some of the best things ever made for TV. Let’s not bring that up. Let’s just call it Max.” Right? [laughs] That’s maybe a pre-Venus retrograde fumble of a rebrand.
CB: Yeah. Well, and getting into some of the details of the early days of the astrology of July, one of the things about this Venus retrograde, the very first part of it, is some of the things that happen could be kind of disruptive or unexpected in terms of some of the initial themes that Venus retrograde brings up in the first part of it. Because here on July 2nd, we can see Venus exactly squaring Uranus from 21 Leo to 21 Taurus. And so we can see Venus as it’s initially slowing down and getting ready to go retrograde kind of stuck in between a rock and a hard place here with Mars on one side and Uranus on the other side. Versus we know that when Venus stations direct, it’s going to be stationing direct square Jupiter, which is a bit more positive and supportive of an aspect. So there may be some unexpected things like that that come up in the initial phase of these things coming up. This also brings us to our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in Capricorn on July 3rd. How are you feeling about this lunation, Austin?
AC: I would say I feel okay about it. I don’t think it’s spectacularly positive nor do I particularly fear it. We’ve got… The Moon is configured… You know, there’s a trine to Jupiter but there’s a sextile to Saturn. It’s the Moon in Capricorn, it’s Saturn-ruled. Like, it seems thoroughly okay.
CB: Yeah, I really like that trine with Jupiter and the Moon, which is so close around the time that the Moon goes exact at 11 degrees of Capricorn to Jupiter at nine degrees of Taurus. Which seems somewhat supportive and almost like an odd counterbalance to the otherwise kind of destabilizing Venus-Uranus square that is still very close to exact at that time.
AC: That’s a really good point. This Moon may not be like a disco ball of incandescent joy, but it’s very stabilizing. Trine to Jupiter in Taurus, in an Earth sign, sextile to Saturn, it might not be shiny but it’s stable, which might not be appealing if that Venus-Uranus wasn’t so unstable.
KS: I like the idea that that’s going to counterbalance it. It’s going to be practical and it’s not going to be, like you said, it’s not flares and fireworks, but I think it adds some nice stability to what at that moment isn’t an incredibly stable otherwise lineup a planet.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I think I do like it now. I’m sold.
CB: Yeah, so that is not bad. That is our first lunation of the month right there. And what are some keywords for Venus square Uranus that might be good to think about as we have that aspect going exact there on the 2nd of July but still active there and kind of imprinting this lunation at the beginning of the month?
KS: Someone said uncorked champagne. [chuckles]
AC: Yeah, there’s certainly a capacity to destabilize relationships. The positive angle is doing something totally different, getting out of patterns that you’re stuck in. The square is not the easiest angle and I think it’s unlikely that it will hand people the most positive form out of the box. One piece of advice that I would give because sometimes Uranus-Venus makes you feel crazy, like you’re just, “Oh, I don’t know how to relate. This is so charged, I don’t know how to handle this situation.” I think getting space is as close to a panacea as you can get for Venus-Uranus stuff. Right? Because maybe there’s too much energy and it can’t be resolved in the moment, but get a little space. A little space can go a long way if the patterns of relationship are unpleasant or too charged, too heated.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. What do you see, Kira?
KS: Well, on a health note, I would really look at, with that Uranus, I would really look at what everyone’s nervous system is doing. If we think of nervous system, we think Mercury, but that higher octave, the messages being sent, is very Uranian. And I think if, especially right after that Full Moon, if we are as so many people are talking about how exhausted they are and how depleted, if we just keep pushing through, it’s not just going to deplete your adrenals. We forget the adrenals tax that nervous system and I think this is the time, and it being square Venus, that’s uncomfortable. And it’s going to itch and it’s going to aggravate the nervous system on a different level so I would be doing a lot of nourishment, be it through magnesium-rich foods or great herb teas to just calm that nervous system down. Because I think this could get– the word that just keeps coming up for me is itchy. I don’t know why itchy.
AC: Yeah, I get that physiological effect with Uranus stuff all the time. So what you’re saying is go easy on the meth this Full Moon?
KS: No, not so many stimulants. Yes. [chuckles] Pull back on the ADHD meds and just soothe. We need some soothing going on so that this… Yeah, it’s going to make things happen but it’s also going to aggravate and we need to really nourish that nervous system.
AC: I’d like to second, as a person with a 12th house Gemini-Moon ruling the Ascendant with an often overcharged nervous system, magnesium is a godsend.
KS: Oh my god, yes.
AC: I only discovered it like a year and a half ago and now I can’t imagine life without it.
KS: No, no. And yes, someone said epsom salts bath. Absolutely. Externally it works quite well, internally it works even better. I just want to caution everybody if they’re on medications, especially heart medications, blood pressure, you got to be really cautious with what form of magnesium you take. And you’re magnesium-rich foods would be, I shouldn’t say it, but dark chocolate. Almonds, all your dark green leafy veggies are all really high in magnesium. But yeah, magnesium as a supplement would be the most common thing I hand out probably to nine out of every 10 people. We just need it by the bucket full.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s good advice for this Full Moon because the Full Moon already has that kind of high energy, but then when you add a Venus-Uranus square on top of it which has this kind of frenetic energy, it seems like emotions would be running high and energy would be running high in that few day period of essentially that weekend.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that keeps popping up in my brain to say is Venus rules copper, which is antagonistic to zinc. And zinc and magnesium work really well together, so your really high zinc foods… Because if that nervous system just goes too crazy, it’s also going to suppress or really push our immune systems will get a little bit wobbly. So just with the Venus retrograde, it keeps going in my head to what copper and zinc are like a seesaw to each other. I’m not saying to go out and take zinc, but lots of zinc-rich foods will also support that whole system happening. Did that make any sense? Did I connect that enough for everybody? [chuckles]
CB: Yeah. I only learned that a few months ago that if you take zinc supplements, you also need to take copper because zinc depletes copper.
KS: Yeah, they go kind of opposite each other. And yeah, you need to watch it. High copper is also not great. So yeah, you don’t want to take zinc supplements all the time, but you really want to watch zinc. Great way to watch for zinc deficiency is white spots on your fingernails.
CB: Okay.
KS: Are you looking at your fingernails, Austin?
AC: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white spot on there but I was just checking.
KS: Oh, really? Okay. Little white spots on the fingernails are zinc deficiency.
AC: I have strong healthy nails. [laughs] They grow extremely fast.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, it just kept popping up every time we were talking about that Venus retrograde. I would just watch zinc to copper for everybody.
AC: That’s really interesting.
CB: All right, so that is the first week is that lunation, the Venus-Uranus square. Because of course that’s the first Venus-Uranus square but we’re going to get more of those when Venus goes retrograde. So that’s very characterizing the initial phase of the Venus retrograde period is that square and on the one hand, the excitement of that. Because Venus-Uranus hard aspects can actually be very exciting and very liberating, but sometimes it’s a hard energy to keep going permanently. It’s something that has a high burn rate and burns out very fast but the initial wave of that can actually be kind of exciting. So, that’s the first week and then one of our first major shifts that happens in the second week this month, and one of the more important ones is that Mars moves into the sign of Virgo, July 10th. And this is a major shift, Mars departing from Leo and moving into Virgo, partially because it sets us up for one of our most important or most standout aspects this month, which is going to be the Mars-Saturn opposition. So as soon as Mars moves into Virgo, that opposition really starts to begin to build up. And we’re going to see that tension between those two planets start to increase all the way until we eventually get the exact aspect around July 20th or 21st.
So, there’s that ingress right there on the 10th. And yeah, that’s the start of the Mars-Saturn opposition. So, on the one hand, we go from, again, on the one hand this frenetic quality of Venus square Uranus, and then all of a sudden we move into a much different energy in the second half of the month with Mars starting to oppose Saturn and the tension between the planet that symbolically is associated with things that are very hot, very quick and very impetuous with Saturn, the planet that’s symbolically associated with things that are cold, reserved and slow. And what happens when you put those two planets in a tense aspect where they’re trying to draw or pull each other in different directions and the sort of internal tensions that sometimes come along with that. So as a native who has an opposition between Mars and Saturn in Pisces and Virgo, how do you experience or describe that opposition, Austin?
AC: Okay, Mars-Saturn opposite in general, you just have all of that archetypal grind against each other; hot and cold, slow and fast, you know? As we say, like kinetic with Mars and yet needing to be careful and work within a form with Saturn, all of those are in play. I would say when you can reconcile those two, the reconciliation point is sort of like… The energy is, I would describe it as grim competence or you just doing what needs to be done. And sure there’s a lot to complain about, but complaining is just going to make it worse. There’s an energy of persevering and energy of getting through it and getting it done. Getting it over whatever it is, right? Getting through this or getting it to the finish line. You know, it’s… I wrote an article a long time ago that had a word that I liked for Mars-Saturn… Endurance is certainly a term but there’s another one that I’m looking for. Yeah, endurance, durability, persevering… There’s an energy of like, say, imagining what you’re doing like you are inevitable. It’s the energy of the villain in a lot of horror movies like Jason like, “No, I can’t die. I’m just going to keep coming back. I cannot be stopped. I can be relentless!” Thank you. Yeah, I wrote a piece 10 years ago called The Virtue of Relentlessness. And relentlessness isn’t about being fast, it’s not about being flashy, it’s not about looking good, it’s about just being relentless, being fixed in your course. And again, you can be slowed but you can’t be stopped. That being said, Mars-Saturn, you got to be really careful pushing yourself too hard. It’s a really easy… I mean, if we’re just looking at visible planets, that’s the hurting yourself configuration. That’s like trying to lift a little extra weight and blowing out your knee. That’s, you know, 50 other ways to blow out your knee or hurt your back. Again, the relentlessness is you’re going to do it, but you’re not worried about the pace. You’re just always coming. You’re going to kill all the teenagers at Lake Pleasant or whatever it is in the movie, but you’re not in a rush to do that. Like, yes, you’ll achieve the seemingly impossible goal, but you don’t stop, but you also don’t rush. And that’s, as someone who has that natally, it’s something I’ve found a lot of times and then sometimes I’m really like, “Oh, where’s that gear? I’m just slow and stopped and I can’t get moving.” Or I’m rushing and I might have to go do things later, or I’m going to break things that are going to then delay me because I have to repair them.
KS: Oh, I like all of that.
CB: Yeah, relentless, that’s a really good keyword. And also hitting the breaking point of something because there’s always that tension between not knowing sometimes when you’ve surpassed your limit and whether your limit is something that can be pushed, and then your limits expand once you push through the obstacle or the barrier. Or if sometimes you push so far that it’s like the metaphorical rubber band that eventually hits the breaking point and then just snaps unexpectedly.
AC: Yeah, and I think as a rule of thumb with Mars-Saturn, push 110% mentally, push 80% physically. Different rules, right? The mind is much harder to snap than the body. And maybe this is just me in middle age but like you’d be surprised at how far you can push yourself mentally in terms of like, “Oh, this sucks. I don’t want to do this for another few hours,” but the mind adapts. But the body adapts but over a course of months, right? Not over 11 days in July.
KS: Yeah, and being really paced with everything. Right? Not doing that… That Saturn is going to temper that Mars anyway, you’re not going to have the energy to overdo it, hopefully, because that would be a really dangerous place to be. But it is a great time to be… You know, Mars going into Virgo… Sorry, I bring everything back to health. That’s my big filter. But it’s a great time to do study change, but not, you know, be cautious that that Uranian-Venus energy isn’t this massive overhaul that you can’t hold because the Mars-Saturn is going to stop you from doing that. But it’s a great time to do that slow burn, steady, make those little adjustments that in the end all the little things will add up to something big and substantial. And I think that’s a great way to look at how to temper that energy between mental and physical that you were talking about.
CB: Yeah, maybe ‘systematic’ is a good Mars in Virgo keyword.
KS: Yeah, and going at it really thoughtfully. Using that Virgo energy and really assessing what things are of value that you should make shifts on. And Virgo loves a good routine. It loves a good, you know, health is the summation of a bunch of routine in the end. So it’s great time to add that Mars energy to start some stuff, but not overdoing it and not riding that Uranian, “I’m going to overhaul everything at once.” This is not an overhaul month, that would be dangerous.
AC: Yeah, Mars-Saturn is very ‘climbing a mountain’ energy. Nobody just wakes up and is feeling their oats and decides to climb Everest, you’ve got to have a plan.
KS: Yeah. And you’ve got to climatize. Right? Go a bit, acclimatize. Go a bit, acclimatize would be a great way to use the Mars-Saturn together.
CB: For sure. As opposed to just rushing up the mountain and then running out of oxygen and passing out.
KS: Yeah. Well, if you think about like the Western States 100 which is on, which was a 100-mile run that happens in California which is this massive endurance race, it’s one of the hardest endurance races in the world. What a lot of people don’t realize about endurance races is you don’t run up the mountains, you actually walk up the mountains and you run down the other side. Most people just think these people run the whole time, and they don’t. They’re literally walking up the mountains. And I think that’s a really good thing to remember in an endurance race, it’s not about going fast.
CB: One of the other keywords I know we talked about on the Pisces episode, Austin, was between the Pisces-Virgo axis is small things versus big things or small picture versus big picture. And also being able to tell the forest from the trees seems like two of the dynamics that would come up into major focus this month with that tension between those two signs.
AC: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. I was actually just thinking about that. About the difference in scope between Pisces and Virgo, where like in this case with Saturn in Pisces, the goal or the necessity is kind of big. It’s big and it’s like, “Oh, I need a life change. I want to feel different, I want to look different or whatever.” Pisces things tend to come across like more mythic and amorphous even when they have Saturnian weight, whereas the Mars in Virgo is like, “Okay, what is the one executable thing that I can do each day to get closer to that dream of things being, you know, meeting that Saturnian standard?” But yeah, like we were talking about, chunking it down into discrete measurable tasks is the Mars in Virgo excellence.
KS: I love that.
CB: Yeah, and also keywords of scope and also depth. Like with Pisces, we’ve been talking about the ocean and just the depth of the ocean and the depth of experience in the Pisces part of our chart, and Saturn there and the fears sometimes of the unknown or the vastness of that. Versus Mars in Virgo and the need to focus on the details of what’s right in front of you and to work slowly bit by bit through something rather than trying to take it all at once in its totality.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
KS: And I think the Mars in Virgo helps. It is going to be like that but I think the Saturn in Pisces it’s tempering that over expansive Pisces as well. So I actually think it’s a great time to really… I think the Saturn there helps that Mars in some ways if that made any sense.
AC: I would say it can.
KS: Yeah, it can know. Not always. It’s not always going to help.
AC: A lot of people also are just going to get hurt by being ground between the two unyielding planets.
KS: Yeah, I was just trying to think of positive change. [laughs]
AC: This is one that if you approach it for what it is and try to make something good out of it, there’s totally the ingredients for something very helpful there. But it won’t be delivered to you as perfectly measured pace discipline, you’ve got to do the alchemy. [crosstalk]
KS: Yeah, and it’s going to… Sorry, go on. Sorry. Sorry, go.
AC: I was just saying the two substances that will be delivered to you are toxic by themselves but they can be mixed in such a way that they will make an excellent medicine. But you have to do the alchemy there.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, that’s beautifully said.
CB: And also to your point, Kira, one of the things I like about this is that even though we’ll have the sort of rubber band at its extreme stretching point moment here around July 20th with the Mars-Saturn opposition going exact, there’s some relief and some counterbalance after that because as soon as Mars completes that opposition with Saturn, it starts moving into this nice supportive trine with Jupiter by the end of the month so that even if people have reached their limits and discovered new limits or where their limits are by the mid part of the month or third week of the month, by the end we start to get some relief from Mars then hitting that trine with Jupiter at 13 Virgo to 13 Taurus by looks like July 31st and August 1st. Yeah, the very last day of July and the first day of August.
AC: Yeah, it is really nice. Go ahead.
KS: And just very supportive on the physical level there with it being in earth and yeah, helping that energy that probably got overstretched. So I like that. Because the earth isn’t going to try to run ahead with it and exhaust yourself, it’s going to ground it and hopefully stabilize what you’ve been through.
AC: Well, and if we’re looking for sort of… So with Mars-Saturn, you get sort of ‘an ordeal’ energy, but the point of a chosen ordeal is to become initiated in something or to become empowered. And sometimes the ordeal lasts a very long time and you wonder when the particular benefits will arrive. But here with Mars-Saturn, like ordeal, ordeal, ordeal but then immediately after, as you were saying Chris, we go right into Mars-Jupiter, which is very much like, “Well, I’m already feeling stronger.” The reward portion or the feeling the benefits comes immediately after, which is I suppose a benefit to having Saturn so early in the sign. If Saturn was at like 22 Pisces, then Mars would just be building towards that opposition for a solid month.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. And you don’t always get that. Sometimes you have a hard aspect like that and you don’t necessarily have that sort of immediate, almost cooling or stabilizing relief afterwards. So it’s kind of nice knowing if you are going through some tensions during that time, that there’s a little bit of space for some relief afterwards.
AC: Yeah, and we’ve been talking about this in certain contexts. For some people, this will just be like it was so fucking crazy at work for two weeks. Right? It’d be like just Mars-Saturn time where you just had to grind. What’s good is again, the configuration climaxes after 10 days and then is immediately going into Mars-Jupiter. And so it’s not like a nightmarish month, it’s just like a rough two weeks, right? Or it’s not six weeks, it’s just that two weeks and then where Mars is going immediately after is positive. It’s triumphant. Triumphant is very much like a Mars… I think of it as a very Mars-Jupiter feeling, it’s triumphant. Right? Like, something has been done and it was great that it was done, and I have the feeling of the person who did that and ready to do more. Ready to be paraded through Rome and anointed as a god for one day is the original triumph, right?
CB: Yeah. So here’s the Archetypal Explorer graph for this month just showing some of the aspects we’re talking about and just the build-up to the Mars-Saturn opposition here around the 20th, which goes exact, but that there’s kind of like a build-up and a cooldown phase on either side of that exact aspect. And this is also bringing us kind of to our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Cancer around the 17th. And that’s something we should talk about since that’s happening in pretty close proximity to our exact Mars-Saturn opposition. And what it also brings into the fold a little bit as well at the same time is this Sun-Pluto opposition that’s building up at that point as well, and that’s one of our closest aspects that that lunation has is a New Moon at 24 Cancer opposite to Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn, which is kind of reacquainting us over the past few weeks with Pluto coming back into Capricorn and departing from Aquarius where we got that initial preview of what that two-decade long Pluto transit is going to be like. And now we’re having some reflections again on the final phases of this almost more-than-a-decade-long, decade-and-a-half-long Pluto transit through Capricorn. So, Sun-Pluto opposition lunation at the same time as Mars-Saturn opposition. That’s bringing in some additional keywords. What are some keywords for like Sun opposite Pluto? I guess there’s things like control and power, and sometimes power struggles can be a topic for Pluto as well as just how one uses or wields power becoming more important than it usually is at other times in our life.
KS: I think it’s going to be an interesting revisit with it having retrograded back into Capricorn. I really see that last little tidy up, especially with that New Moon that those last things on the home front that we need to get organised or get… I don’t know, I see it as a real… Yeah, it’s adding to a bit of work. I actually see it kind of highlighting what needed to get finished, but in that New Moon way, that’s not the culmination. It’s like, “Oh, there’s more to be done and tidy up with that retrograde.”
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. That there’s more work to be done and that you’ve got to go back to something to re-dive back into the depths of something that isn’t finished that you have to go back and do one last dive into.
KS: Yeah, but almost with it being a New Moon, it’s like you have to start it– not that you have to start something again, but there’s something else to be done that was different than what you thought you were doing.
AC: Yeah, like another cycle of work.
KS: Yes. Yeah, that’s what it feels like to me.
AC: Yeah. To me, that seems like with the Sun and Moon conjoining in Cancer opposite Pluto in Capricorn, to like recentering and I’m like, “What do I need to feel safe from history, or safe from the…” Pluto in Capricorn has been very literal and very historical, monetary, physical… Like, “What changes can I do or can I make to insulate myself a little bit from the sort of relentless evolutionary historical pressure of Pluto in Capricorn?” And some of the answer to that may be, “Well, you can’t do anything except with your mind.” But your mind’s relationship to things is very important. But there may be other things like literal things around the home, like, “How do I make my nest just that much more insulated from the world?”
KS: Well, how do you protect yourself? Right? How do you get that… If you think of Cancer and the shell, you know, soft on the inside, hard on the outside. What more do you need to create to protect yourself?
CB: That makes sense, that protective function of Cancer. Especially just thinking literally, I mean we talked about how literal the Pisces stuff was and sometimes how literal Leo stuff was, sometimes very basic core archetypes or keywords like that for Cancer here could be really relevant in terms of protection and the home and other things like that. One of the aspects I really like about this lunation is there is a pretty close sextile with Uranus at 22 degrees of Taurus to 24 degrees of Cancer. So there may be an out in some sense with that Sun-Pluto opposition and the tension that it’s creating, that there’s an opportunity to seek some sort of innovative solution to some of those problems that’s coming from the Uranus aspect that may help us to think outside of the box in order to come up with things that could be helpful at that time to navigate not just the Sun-Pluto opposition, but also the Mars-Saturn opposition that’s happening at the same time.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
KS: The other thing that comes to mind, which probably nobody wants to think about is interest rates rising, people’s homes, what are people invested in, who’s renting versus who’s owning homes? I know in Australia we’re really looking at people stretch too far and with the interest rates rise, I really see that Pluto opposite to that Sun-Moon how to protect yourself moving forward, when we’re going to be a bit more, you know, there’s a bit of instability in the economy lurking. And how do you keep safe? How do you keep yourself safe in your physical home, whether you’re renting or buying or…? Yeah, I don’t know, I see a lot of that coming in at the moment. But again, maybe not.
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, Pluto’s time in Capricorn has coincided basically perfectly with unprecedented historically low-interest rates.
KS: Yeah, and the growth that’s happened for some.
CB: Well, also social disparities have grown a lot more over the past decade. I think than in other times in the past century, and that’s also been really prominent and that’s something now that I think about it that’s come up as a topic over the past month that’s been in discussion again with Pluto returning back into Capricorn and sort of put some of the focus on that again, like even with the submarine thing and the disparity between on the one hand, this boat in the Mediterranean capsizing with over 300 people dying but then the media and everybody being focused on these billionaires that died in an experimental submarine over the course of a week. And maybe that’s part of what this is reemphasizing as well as just some of those major disparities.
KS: Yeah. Well, and I was talking to my husband about the stats the other day of that 1% of the population holding something. I think in the US, 1% of the population hold something like 85% and it’s moving towards 90% of the wealth. I probably have those stats wrong.
AC: Yeah, almost all of that is a 10th of the top 1%. The 10th of 1% actually has… The 1% includes that, but the stat gets wilder when you cut that down by 10 again.
KS: Yeah, and just looking in Cancerian New Moon where we need to, you know? I just always think of the crab carrying its little home on its back, and how are we all going to stay safe?
AC: Yeah. Well, and these Plutonian pressures, these are like gigantic historical things and you can adapt. Like, you can’t change the class structure of a nation with a New Moon meditation, but you can think about how to at least be less vulnerable. Right? And especially if you realize like, “Oh, I kind of left my arm hanging out and vulnerable. There’s a piece of what I’m doing that’s actually super vulnerable to this, I can at least pull that back into the shell,” or make what pivots you can.
KS: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: But it’s hard to negotiate with Pluto, right? Because it’s almost always, especially in the context that we’re talking about, it’s always forces that are titanic and vastly beyond your control. Like, you can’t stop the glacier, but if the glacier is coming, you can make different decisions about where you’ll be.
KS: Yeah, exactly. And I just think, again, I wasn’t by any means saying a New Moon meditation, but just that-
AC: No, no, I didn’t think you were.
KS: I know you weren’t saying that, but just that reassessment of how to be a little bit safer. Because a lot of people have had pretty crazy spending, especially since COVID, and we were all in home and what was going to make home feel good, and some of the habits we’ve got on aren’t going to serve us moving forward.
CB: For sure. So that is our second lunation of the month and the New Moon, and the focus is really put on that even more just because it’s so weird that around the same time that the Mars-Saturn opposition is going exact on the 20th, that we see the Sun hit 27 and 28 degrees of Capricorn and then really completing that opposition with Pluto within a day after the Mars-Saturn opposition goes exact. So those are really-
AC: Yeah, that’s a rough couple of days. I don’t think they will be high vibe.
KS: And then you got the nodes in there as well. Yeah.
AC: Yeah, the nodes changing sign.
CB: Squaring the nodes. So the nodes change signs and are at 29 degrees, at least the true node is, of 29 Aries for the North Node and 29 Libra for the South Node so the Sun is at the bendings right at that exact moment.
KS: Yeah, I’ll stay home that day.
CB: And then that’s also of course the same timeframe when Venus also stations retrograde at the same time. So this is going to be a really important turning point and a pivotal moment for some people, especially if Venus is stationing retrograde in an important part of your chart like an angular house or if you’re in a Venus profection year. I forgot to mention that I actually did a… I worked with somebody to make a Venus retrograde worksheet and I’ll put a link to that in the description for this podcast episode, but it’s a retrograde worksheet that you can use in order to go back and study your chronology and look at past Venus retrogrades and just write down some notes of what they coincided with in your life. Especially focusing on this cycle of this Venus retrograde in Leo that happens about every eight years just by going back in eight-year increments to first 2015, and then going back to the one before that which would be 2007, then 1999, and so on and so forth. And just starting to see some of the patterns and asking yourself the question of like, “What house is Venus going retrograde in? What planets or angles is it aspecting in my chart?” And then sometimes that can give you a great preview of what’s coming up.
AC: Yeah. And similarly useful, you might find out that the Venus retrograde in Leo just isn’t that big a deal for you, so you don’t need to fret about it. You might be like, “Oh, it’s the Scorpio-Libra one that actually gets me every time.” Knowing which ones your life responds to can save you unnecessary worry.
CB: Well, and also sometimes it’s not bad. Sometimes it’s just reconnecting with something from the past. I had one in 2020 where it went retrograde on my IC and I reconnected with some family and learned some stuff about my family background and stuff that was interesting and was fine. And it was just about going back in the past and reconnecting with those types of people and with family. Or in other instances, people get back together or reconnect with an old friend that they lost touch with, or something simple and straightforward like that that fits the symbolism.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sometimes it can be nice. Sometimes it can be, “Oh, that was a little weird.” Other times it’s like, “Oh, that was a storm.” But knowing which ones are which will allow you to either gird your loins appropriately or relax and just know that this one isn’t a big deal for you. Or whatever in between.
KS: I find it really interesting to look at the houses that were, you know when it retrograded which house it was that was the bigger? I find that’s often been a bigger trigger for me when it’s bigger issues to do with the retrograde even than the sign. But you know, you can’t separate it, can you? Yeah, just where it’s happening for life. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Like, what house it’s happening in, then sometimes the topics of that house coming more to the forefront in your life at that time.
KS: Yeah.
CB: For sure. I know there’s also some discussion on Twitter. For example, Jo on Twitter was talking about if you have Leo rising and the question that’s debated sometimes about doing a makeover during a Venus retrograde or changing something stylistically. And sometimes astrologers advise against that, and other times astrologers say it’s okay because it actually fits the symbolism. Where do you guys fall when it comes to that?
AC: I’m sorry, what is the question again? Should you do a rebrand during the Venus retrograde? A stylistic rebrand?
CB: Rebrand, makeover, changes to one’s appearance, or other things like that. It seems like sometimes that’s a little rockier and other times it’s something that fits perfectly with the symbolism and that’s just like the window when somebody does that. But whether there’s any…
AC: Okay. Yeah, I do have a strong opinion. I would say experiment while Venus is retrograde, then pick something once Venus stations direct. Don’t do anything that’s permanent during the retrograde. Experiment by all means. Do things that might look terrible but maybe it’s amazing. And I would say the same thing generally with new relationships during Venus retrograde. You don’t have to avoid everybody but be experimental, don’t lock it in. Gather the data and then once it’s stationed direct, okay, guess what? Venus stationed direct in Leo, that’s probably a great time to unveil your new style or to gather the intel from your experiments and figure out what that means.
KS: Yeah, I love it. Someone wrote, “No tattoos”. Yeah, nothing permanent. I’m totally there with you. Play around with it, but don’t make… Yeah, don’t finalize anything till it goes forward. I’d be nervous. But, yeah. People definitely start thinking about making bigger changes to their appearance during that time and you maybe get the great innovative ideas, but yeah, it’s not always going to look like you think.
CB: It seems like especially with this one with those difficult oppositions happening right as Venus is stationing retrograde, that the potential for tricky things to come up in the first part of the Venus retrograde is really heightened with this one where it could be more problematic if you start something major around that time that you can’t take back, or that could be problematic that it’s more likely to run into issues at the beginning of the retrograde. Versus if we fast forward 40 days to the end of it, we see Venus eventually slowing down and stationing direct here about 12 Leo in early September where it has this nice square with Jupiter at around 15 Taurus which is also stationing at the same time. So we get this stationing of both of the benefics at the same time to mark the end of the Venus retrograde in early September.
AC: Yeah. And even just the second half of the retrograde, which I think the cazimi is August 12th or 13th, is much easier than the first half. This one is very, as we’ve been saying, this one’s very front-loaded with sturm und drang and drama and scandal. Like the second half even while it’s retrograde just isn’t nearly as charged up and freaked out.
KS: It’s interesting. I sometimes do surgery charts for people and it’s interesting that even we haven’t hit the retrograde yet, but how many surgery charts for plastic surgery have been coming through?
AC: Ooh, that makes sense!
KS: Yeah, I see it a lot. I see it a lot with strong, I would say, one out of every two charts that hits me up even first surgery is a plastic surgery chart. Because those are re-elective surgeries, right? It’s not emergency surgery. But yeah.
AC: It’s electable surgery.
KS: It is definitely electable. But yeah, I’ve definitely seen an uptake of not, “Oh, I need to have a hip replacement.” It’s all about, “I’m having my nose redone, I’m having my eyes lifted, I’m having a full facelift. Find me some dates.” And yeah, you definitely have seen a lot of that coming. I’ve seen a lot more of it. Yeah.
CB: I was thinking about that recently of the issues, because I was talking to somebody about that about Leo and the idea of aging, and of all the signs, Leo maybe is one of the ones that struggles with the most. And I thought that was really interesting as part of the motivation behind elective plastic surgery or something like that, like the notion of time and trying to hold or slow down the effects of time or other things like that.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. And I do, I see a lot of it based around Leo energetics in people’s charts and then Venus hitting Leo, it’s always on the forefront. It’s funny because I’ve even noticed visually, I’m noticing people’s faces more in the build-up to this. Just last night I was out with my family and I was in an area where people are very done up, and I was just noticing how many fillers and Botox and all of that’s been going on. It’s just more visible to me at the moment.
AC: Speaking of seeing that, I used to live in blissful ignorance, but Kait with the Venus in Virgo and mutual reception with Mercury in Libra has like a perfect eye– not only for photography and a number of other things, but she can pick out work or even well-done work from 100 yards away. And she’s just pointed things out, so now when I watch television I can see all the procedures. And I just want to go back. I would like the… Just wrap me in the blanket of illusion, it’s television. [laughs] I don’t need to know about the chin tuck and the brow raise and all that shit.
KS: I would have fun sitting in a hotel bar with Kait because I love noticing that as well. [Austin chuckles] Not to have a go at it, I’m just fascinated by the detail of what people choose to do.
CB: Yeah. Well, those might be really interesting keywords and ones to keep in mind that might be relevant archetypally that we might expect to come up this summer. You know, Leo’s a very youthful sign. Even in old old age, there’s a feeling of youthfulness to Leo that sort of maintains, as well as a desire to maintain your youthfulness as a keyword. But also one of the things that comes up that it brings to mind with Venus in Leo or Venus going retrograde in Leo is issues of vanity, but also there’s a better term for that because that has negative or almost judgmental connotations. [crosstalk]
AC: It’s a sin, Chris.
CB: Right, vanity is a sin. Okay. [Kira laughs] Well, what’s the less sinful word for the adjacent concept of vanity, or the softer version of that?
KS: Yeah, it’s about feeling good about yourself and your radiance and your vitality. If you think about Leo, it is such a vital sign. So for a Leo energy, no matter the planet, not just the Sun. But for them not to feel vital is really sad. And as much as I’m making jokes about things like this, there’s a lot of connection between how people look and how they feel about themselves and that self-confidence. And I was even reading research the other day– sorry, I don’t know why I’m taking it all back to procedures here– but they were looking at Botox on people’s foreheads. Because originally, that was invented so people don’t sweat. Right? For people that had hyperhidrosis. And so you can, you know, Botox under your arms if you sweat too much and things like that. But they were looking at the research that the inability to frown when you Botox your forehead actually helps your mood. It’s mood-elevating for people. And there’s a whole other thing going on there for people. It’s not, you know? Yeah, self-esteem… [crosstallk] Yeah.
CB: Yeah, self-esteem and self-confidence. [crosstalk]
KS: Who doesn’t want to feel good about themselves internally and externally?
CB: That’s such an important and core human trait that everybody needs and that it’s like a vital part of being a humanist. Having at least some level of self-confidence or feeling good about yourself and sometimes doing things which enhance that or things which you can do to enhance that which means different things for different people is a good thing because it’s self-affirming and helps to affirm a person. So maybe that can be a major keyword here is figuring out those self-affirming things that one can do, which may be appearance-based but there may also be a range of different ways that one could do self-affirming things.
AC: Yeah, I think with the Venus retrograde in Leo, that idea of feeling good about who you are, right, which we call it self-esteem, how do you esteem yourself? But then that’s also linked to your self-image. Sometimes very often, we might not like something about how we see ourselves. But we’re not actually seeing ourselves very accurately and that’s not actually a problem we need to feel bad about. Or I would say that Venus retrograde because it’s spending so much time in that territory and doing the reunion with the Sun, is seeking the truth about something. And to really feel good about yourself, sometimes it’s not trying to say, “No, I’m good,” it’s looking at what is this whole image or concept of yourself. Maybe the concept is off and that’s why the attempts at self-love aren’t sticking. Because we can have a self-image that is only tangentially related to who we are and what we do, and getting that to match. And of course what that takes, what that requires– and this is a very Leo thing like a sort of virtue that can be aspired to in Leoland– is self-knowledge, right? That’s a solar virtue, and that attempts at self-esteem, attempts at feeling good about yourself will fail to the degree that you don’t have knowledge of who you are. Anyway, I feel like with the, again with the retrograde, we want a deeper thing that will really stick. And that’s got to be self-knowledge, I think, which is worth its weight– It’s certainly worth more than its weight in gold because it doesn’t weigh anything, but as valuable as gold and probably more difficult to mine. Self-knowledge is desirable but tricky, right? Because how do you get real self-knowledge? [chuckles]
CB: Or the other. That’s actually, I think, is going to be the thing. So, I like those two keywords, ‘self-love’ and ‘self knowledge’. And with this retrograde station of Venus opening with two major oppositions of not just Mars and Saturn but also the Sun and Pluto, opposition often manifests through other people in our life, and sometimes coming into cross purposes or conflict with somebody else who shows us or tells us something about ourselves that maybe we didn’t see previously or didn’t like. And maybe that is the opening for that, then 40 days and 40 nights of self-introspection and going within oneself in the same way that Venus is going to disappear and go under the beams of the Sun and then conjoin with it through that very internal process of the retrograde conjunction, and then eventually emerge from under the beams of the Sun when it stations direct in a much different condition and a different idea of who we are and what we’re about and how we’re presenting ourselves to the world.
KS: I love that. And I love health and, you know, we’re thinking about ourselves but health overall is that combination of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. It’s all those levels, right?
CB: Yeah, for sure. And for some people, one of those might be more prominent than the other just based on what house Venus is transiting. Maybe if it’s going through your first house, maybe it is more about self or appearance or body. If it’s going through your 10th house, maybe it’s more about your career. If it’s going through your ninth house, maybe it is more going to manifest in the spiritual realm of your beliefs or your politics or something like that.
KS: Yeah. In natural medicine, we have that belief that no matter what level you’re working on it on, if you’re working hard in that one area, the other areas will hopefully join and rise with it. So I also think there’s no shame or no… You know, we get so hassled for, “Oh, you’re just working on…” I’m not saying everyone go out and get Botox, that’s not what I’m thinking here. But being happy to work on your physical, we shouldn’t be ashamed to do that. Your physical health is as important as your mental and emotional and spiritual health. All of us are better at working on certain areas than others, and I think we need to remember all areas need that love and attention.
CB: That’s a really good point.
AC: Yeah, and I really like that you used the word ‘shame’ because I think pride and shame are another huge, very activated duality for this Venus in Leo cycle.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s horrible. Shame is a horrible sensation, right? And yet there’s so much of it that can occur with this. But, yeah. [crosstalk] Maybe we all need to be reading more Brené Brown next month
CB: Because underneath that, those themes of pride and shame is the desire to be authentic. And that’s really a keyword for Leo as well is finding your authentic self and being able to express your authentic self or express yourself in a way that’s authentic. And whether you’re doing that successfully or not. Or whether that’s something that’s stopping you from being authentic, and if you don’t need some sort of makeover or some sort of reassessment and realignment of your life in some notable way in order to express yourself in a way that’s more authentic.
AC: Yeah, authenticity is– [crosstalk] Go ahead.
KS: Oh, sorry. No, you go. That’s okay.
AC: I was just saying yeah, authenticity is a good concept because it has to be rooted in self-knowledge, but then it also suggests a manner of expression. And even if we’re looking at quote-unquote “superficial things”, the way you dress is creating a framework by which you are inviting people to interpret you in a certain way. And we can present ourselves physically, visually in a way that is in alignment with the authenticity we’re trying to express, or we can be using an aesthetic that clashes with the authenticity we’d like people to see. And so yeah, authenticity aligns with both the super invisible self-knowledge part, but also the extremely visible fashion part or self-arrangement.
KS: Yeah. Well, and it’s part of your creativity, isn’t it? How you dress and how you sho… You know, that creative spark comes into play here, doesn’t it? I find it really interesting and I don’t know if I’m taking this off-topic, hopefully not, but I love looking at the way people dress because there’s this whole theory that we dress for our best year. The year in our most recent history where we had just this great year, whatever style we were doing when that happened, we often stick with that for a really long time until we have this other kind of apex year where something big happens and then we change. Maybe this is going back to the other transits we’re talking about, but I’m always fascinated. Has any of you… Maybe it’s a bit of a girl thing for me to be talking about that but yeah, I love looking at people going, “Oh, the fashion they’re dressing, that’s their peak year until they have another peak year.” And maybe that’s a Venus cycle, maybe I just haven’t realized it, for maybe it’s people’s Venus return or the retrograde eight-cycle we were talking about. I don’t know, have a look at what you’re wearing. [crosstalk]
CB: No, that’s brilliant. Because maybe it was like that Venus retrograde seven years ago or 10 years ago when Venus went retrograde in your first house and that person had that makeover or they had that revolution in terms of how they presented themselves. And that, for some people, maybe that’s spaced out more or stays in place sometimes especially like the older you get, versus sometimes coming back and going through that kind of change again.
KS: Yeah. Well, it’s like people doing the haircut after they have a breakup, you know? More women, it’s talked about, they go and they do this drastic hair change when they have a breakup because they’re now entering this new phase. And that happens a lot with clothing as well, not with breakups but with peak years, I find.
AC: That’s really interesting. I’ve dressed the same my entire adult life, but [Kira chuckles] I’m also vaguely aware of other people who don’t do that. So that’s really interesting.
KS: Yeah. And maybe you do it in a littler way, like you’ve gone from Converse to Vans. Or oh, you’re now doing Doc Martens or I don’t know what kind of shoes you wear. Everybody probably does it on different scales. Some people it’s the whole wardrobe, some people it’s hairstyle, some people it would just be shoes or you get yourself a new backpack or whatever it is you carry your computer around in. But there’s these shifts with apex years that I’ve really noticed in people. But I have never really looked at what the astro cycle is to that, but probably Venus.
AC: Yeah, that’d be really interesting.
CB: And I love that there’s individual versions of that in each person’s life no matter who you are, but then also sometimes there’s broader societal versions of that that we talked about at the beginning, which is the role that’s sometimes overvalued in trends and tastes that change. I was watching this animation recently that showed in the United States state by state the most popular baby girls’ names in each year starting in 1950 and then going through to the present, and how sometimes in certain years you would see this shift where something would happen and all of a sudden everybody’s naming their baby girl Emma or Catherine in the 1980s or other things like that. And sometimes it’s a result of things like trends that are happening in terms of media and books or movies or things like that.
KS: Movie stars.
CB: Yeah, movie stars or even television shows. Like there was a lot of Daeneryses 10 years ago when Game of Thrones was popular and different things like that.
KS: Oh, yeah, huge. I have a daughter and her name is Sierra, but the year she was born Sienna, with the N, was on the top three names. And that was the year of Sienna Miller’s apex in movies and things like that. It was interesting to watch. I remember being in hospital and there were eight babies on the ward, one Sierra and three Siennas.
CB: Nice. Yeah. Well, and it just goes to the point. It’s that each of us is embedded in a much larger social context of trends and tastes that are constantly shifting and changing that we sometimes don’t perceive, but can sometimes be much more important when we’re swept up in them than we realize. And that’ll be an interesting thing to pay attention to and just look out for this summer.
KS: Yeah, and with Neptune in Pisces at the same time, right? That collective… We’re all in that same thing.
CB: Yeah. All right. So as we get into later in the month, we start getting some shifts. I feel like tension starts getting ratcheted down, especially once the Sun changes signs and moves into Leo and starts moving out of that opposition with Pluto on July 23rd. And then eventually we get Mercury conjoins with Venus on July 27th, Mercury-Venus conjunction. And then right after that, Mercury changes signs and moves into Virgo, which is another major ingress or change later in the month. And then as I said earlier, we eventually get that Mars-Jupiter trine which goes exact on the 31st of July or the 1st of August. So we start really moving out of that Mars-Saturn opposition towards the end of the month. That actually also brings up the Auspicious Election that I wanted to highlight for this month, where we had a couple of different options. There were some good charts earlier in the month but the one I wanted to highlight is towards the very end of the month once we start getting past that Mars-Saturn opposition. The best electional chart I could find is set for July 30th, 2023 around 6:35 in the morning, with Leo rising just after sunrise. So if you cast a chart for this time locally in whatever your city is, adjust the Ascendant until the Ascendant is around 13 degrees of Leo, and what you’ll end up with is a day chart just after sunrise with Leo rising and the Sun in Leo in the first whole sign house. So the Sun is applying to a square with Jupiter which is up there at 13 degrees of Taurus in the 10th whole sign house in the day chart, so this is actually a pretty good chart for career matters with that 10th house Jupiter.
We see the Moon over there in Capricorn and it’s applying to a trine with Jupiter, which is another really positive affirming aspect that you get this applying trine all day. Mercury has moved into Virgo where it’s in its own sign. I did try to place the degree of the Midheaven, if you can in your location, around three degrees of Taurus that way it’s trining the Moon and mitigating it from its sixth house position, and also trining Mercury and mitigating it from its second house position. We also find that Venus retrograde in the sign of Leo in the first house as a benefic, and although Venus is retrograde and it’s going to put some of those retrograde energies at the forefront in this election, it’s otherwise a relatively positive sort of general standalone chart for most types of things and starting those types of things around this date, especially in the later part of the month once the Mars-Saturn opposition is separating. So, that is our electional chart for the most auspicious date we can find this month. Leisa and I also found I think five or six other electional charts which we shared as part of the Auspicious Elections podcast, which is available to members of our page on Patreon. You can find out more information about that at theastrologypodcast.com/elections.
All right, I think that’s bringing us to the end of the month. Are there any other major things that we really wanted to touch base on here? At the end of July, I guess we just have that Mars-Jupiter trine, which is one of the last major aspects of the month.
AC: Yeah, I would just add that with Mercury going into Virgo, it’s a good place for Mercury. But Mercury has got a lot to do. There’s a lot going on in that early mutable area, like Mercury’s opposed Saturn and it’s co-present with Mars. And so yes, it’s useful to have Mercury in to help fix the problems and tinker with things, but there are a lot of problems to solve there. You’ve got both malefics there. It doesn’t get easy, I think Mercury there makes some things more soluble. Right? It might bring some like, “Okay, we can do it this way.” But it’s not… Mercury getting into Virgo is not… I don’t think the experience will be ease. Does that make sense?
KS: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. It might just be you have better ideas of how to deal with the Mars-Saturn you’ve been going at.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the Mars-Jupiter is good, but it’s like still Mercury with one malefic and opposite the other. There’s still a lot of pressure. [silence]
KS: Oh, Chris, you are muted.
AC: Oh, Chris, you’re muted.
CB: Oh, thanks. Sorry, I had a trash truck that’s picking up trash right now. I was just saying that Mercury’s going to go retrograde later in August in Virgo, so it’s going to spend a lot of time there and it’s going to mean that we’re going to have a lot of time to think about that Mercury transit, especially the opposition with Saturn that it completes right away on August 1st. And yeah, just reactivating some of those things that we already experienced with the Mars-Saturn opposition.
KS: I forgot about that retrograde coming up. [chuckles]
AC: It’s a pretty challenging month as far as they go this year. It was a lot to handle. Yeah, July.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, that was one-
AC: It’s definitely not like… Well, it’s not mellow. Right? It’s not impossible or catastrophic, but there’s a lot to handle. Just the Mars-Saturn would be a thing to handle, and then that happening just as Venus finally pops. Because a lot of times as we lead up to the retrograde station, there’s a feeling of increasing pressure. And then the retrograde station even though it’s not necessarily a point of celebration, it does relieve the tension. It’s like, “Okay, things are finally moving backwards.” But just the Venus would be a thing to handle and the Mars-Saturn would be a thing to handle, and you know, it’s a lot on the plate. There are two good helpings of things that are going to need some thinking and adapting to handle this month.
KS: The visual I get is it’s a good month to keep your seatbelt on.
AC: Yeah!
KS: Don’t undo the seatbelt. And if you go bike riding, make sure you wear a helmet.
AC: Yeah, you don’t have to avoid using the car entirely, but buckle up for safety’s sake.
KS: Yeah. And maybe a helmet if you go for a bike ride.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. And yeah, while it will be one of the more tense months of this year, especially in the middle of the month when all that’s happening then we’ll transition after that and hopefully get some relief and some clarification on some of those issues as we continue through the rest of the Venus retrograde.
All right. Well, I think that brings us to the end of the forecast this month. Thank you both for joining me today, this was amazing. Thanks, Kira, for joining us for your first time joining us on the forecast. This was a lot of fun. Where can people find out more information about you or your work?
KS: Awesome. Thanks for having me. I was a little bit… Last night I was going to sleep and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what if I’m not very good at this? [Austin laughs] The forecast versus the podcast.” So, thank you for having me and letting me bring in all my crazy super health stuff. Umm, where you can find me? I am… Social media, as well as website, is Astrology of Health or astrologyofhealth.com. I’m very active more on Instagram than I am on Twitter. I actually am not… I also have a science side, so I leave Twitter to my professors in sports science and I don’t do a lot of Astro Twitter. So come find me on Instagram or on my website.
CB: Awesome. Cool. And I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video or on the podcast website. Austin, what do you have going on?
AC: Well, actually while we were recording, Sphere + Sundry released a new Asclepius series. I believe that’s to members only but it goes public tomorrow. So by the time this is up, there’s a new Asclepius series drawing on the power of the star Rasalhague, which is the star of Asclepius, as well as sort of connecting that to the nakshatra Ashwini where a pair of handsome doctors are said to do well. And accidentally in that election, Chiron is also in the first house so literally almost everything medical in the sky both to a star, a nakshatra, and a minor planet, all of them associated with healing. That was the thinking behind that election. So that stuff is available tomorrow to the public, so on the 27th. And then as we talked about earlier, the Thema Mundi, nuclear astro magic sauce is still available for preorder. As for me, I will be taking in a new round of students in September. If you want to be part of that, you have to sign up for the waitlist. I haven’t been doing it publicly because the waitlist is long enough so please just go to the website austincoppock.com and you’ll find the waitlist for classes if you’re interested in that. And I’m not sure if I’ll do it this month but before too well for long, I’m going to put up some of the lectures and workshops I’ve given over the last couple of years. I’ve got a huge backlog. I put up a bunch of stuff in March and I’m probably going to put up another bunch of stuff, either end of this month or next month. I’ve got all the eight hours of stuff I did at NORWAC this year, got some stuff from AstroMagia last year, et cetera, et cetera. So keep an eye out for that.
KS: I’m excited. I’m hanging up to go order my Asclepius as soon as this is over. I did notice it was going live while we were on and I’m like, “Oh, how am I going to order?” [laughs]
CB: That’s funny. Yeah, we need to start separating those electional times so we don’t miss those while we’re recording these podcast episodes for Sphere + Sundry.
AC: The problem is that we’re electing the podcast and we do our best to elect the releases.
CB: Picking the best electional times.
AC: There could be meaningful difference of opinion on elections, but it’s a small range. Right?
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s always funny when you see like 10 different astrologers dropping stuff on the same day and you know that there’s a good election going on.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right. As for myself, I have that Venus retrograde worksheet and I want to give a shout-out to Randy on Instagram @wishthinkerdesign who helped me to design that. I wanted to create more worksheets like that, but it’s really useful and I wanted to shout out them for helping me to make that yesterday. I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. I also wanted to mention on Patreon, I’m starting to do a new thing where one of the bonuses to patrons is to upload my show notes, which I just did for the Venus retrograde episode where it outlines kind of in a PDF that’s several pages long all the different things we put together to prepare for the episode so that you have a concise overview of most of the main points that were mentioned. So with that episode in particular, there was so much that we didn’t get to that it includes some bonus content that wasn’t in the episode itself. So I’m going to start offering that as a bonus for patrons.
I also wanted to announce that… I’m really excited to announce that the Chinese translation of my book Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune has been released, as of this month and it’s trending and is available in all major bookstores in Taiwan and other areas. So if you want to get a copy of that, you just have to go to the website astromages.org/habook. That page has more information about where you can find the book and where you can order it. And yeah, I wanted to thank Maki from the NCGR Taiwan group who put together and has been working on this translation as part of a project and a group over the course of the past few years. It came out extremely well and it was just an amazing not just translation but also just in terms of the design and aesthetics of the book, they put just as much time and effort into it as I did the original publication and it feels really good to have it out there now and accessible for a whole different community of astrologers around the world. So I’m pretty excited about that and wanted to just make an announcement about that.
KS: That’s amazing.
AC: That’s great, dude. Congratulations.
CB: Yeah. And then there’s other translations in Spanish and Turkish and Portuguese coming soon. So hopefully, I have more information about that before too long. All right. Well, I think that’s it for this episode. So, thank you both for joining me. This was great.
KS: Thanks for having me. It was awesome to join you guys.
AC: It was great to have you. You really brought… The conversation wouldn’t have been the same without you. You brought a bunch of… You made us look at things from angles we don’t usually… I’m sorry, I’m very tired. I mean to be more of… [crosstalk]
KS: No, I hear you. I hear you. Thank you for having me.
AC: My effuser is empty. No, but it was great to have you here.
KS: I really had fun.
CB: Let’s do it again sometime. And thanks to all the patrons that joined us in the live audience for this recording, all your comments were really helpful and actually helped us during the course of this episode. Otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So, thanks everyone for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
A special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then please consider becoming a patron through our page on patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast, such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information visit patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at theastrologypodcast.com/consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ASTROLOGYPODCAST.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an ebook version available through Google Books.
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.