The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 415, titled:
Astrology Forecast September 2023
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Steph Koyfman
Episode originally released on August, 28, 2023
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released September 13, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode we’re gonna be looking at the astrology of September of 2023. joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Steph Koyfman. Welcome, both of you.
STEPH KOYFMAN: Thank you so much.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hello.
CB: Hey. All right, so first I’m gonna take a look and do a quick overview of the astrology of the month, looking at the calendar, then we’re gonna spend about an hour talking about news and other events that have happened over the past month since our last astrology forecast to sort of catch things up on how the astrology’s played out. Then in the second hour we’re gonna look at the astrology of September and look forward to the future. So, as always, there will be timestamps on the podcast website if you just want to jump forward to different parts of the episode, but otherwise let’s go ahead and jump right into it by pulling out the Planetary Alignments Calendars, which this first one shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month of September and then where they’ll end up in the signs of the zodiac by the end of September.
So here’s the other Planetary Alignments Calendar, and our first astrological event of the month is that Venus is slowing down and finishing her retrograde phase and she’s getting ready to station direct in the sign of Leo on September 3. Then the following day, on September 4, Jupiter stations retrograde in the sign of Taurus. Two days later we get the halfway point in a Mercury retrograde cycle that the month opens with, where Mercury’s retrograde in Virgo and it will conjoin the Sun on September 6. The following week we have a New Moon in the sign of Virgo on the 14th, then Mercury stations direct and ends its three-week retrograde period on the 15th. The Sun moves into Libra on the 23rd and then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Aries on the 29th of September. So that’s some of the astrology, just a preview of the astrology we’re gonna be talking about later in the episode. But first things first, let’s welcome both of you. Steph, thanks for joining us again. This is actually your second forecast. You did the last one a couple years ago I think, right?
SK: It was last May actually. But, yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s good to be back.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s exciting to do another forecast. You’ve been talking about some good Venus retrograde news that I’ve seen on Twitter over the past two weeks, so I wanted to have you join us for this one. Austin, welcome. How’s the Venus retrograde treating you currently?
AC: Good enough.
CB: Good enough?
AC: Good enough.
CB: That is pretty high marks actually. For some people this retrograde is not going as well, but we’ll talk about that. Why don’t we first start by jumping right into the news and talking about some of the stuff that’s been happening over the course of the past month. So in terms of news stories, one of the major things that I know both you and I had noticed Steph was there were some media outlets that have been calling this ‘the summer of breakups’ with the Venus retrograde that’s been happening over the course of the past month or so. There was this point at one point in the retrograde, especially early and halfway through it, it seemed like every other day there was a new celebrity breakup that was announced it seemed, right?
SK: Yeah, I think the point for me came when The Cut published an article titled, “It’s a Great Summer to Break Up,” and I just had to laugh. But if you actually read it, they do give like one line to Venus retrograde, like, “Ooh, could it be that it’s written in the stars?” But I think they have an astrologer on staff writing for them.
CB: Yeah, and then there’s other ones. Like I read a People article, and there’s like a Vogue article. Austin sent me a BuzzFeed article, “26 Couples Who Broke Up This Summer That Prove That Love Is Officially Dead, Buried And Gone” was the title of that, which is a very subtle title. But I think it was still conveying that something was going on that I think a lot of people were noticing in terms of that, and in terms of some people’s experience of the Venus retrograde.
SK: Yeah. And actually there was just something funny that I saw—I don’t know how big of a trend it is—but some people on TikTok are making videos that are like, “Well, apparently everyone’s breaking up this summer, so I have to take precautions,” and it shows them locking their partner in a closet.
CB: Okay, that’s a good idea. I think that’s in actually some of the ancient cuneiform Mesopotamian texts about Venus retrograde. That’s the propitiation ritual.
SK: Yeah.
CB: It’s like the substitute king ritual but for your boyfriend.
SK: For your partner, yeah.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that’s one aspect of the Venus retrograde. And some of the names—it was like Britney Spears, Ariana Grande, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, split up. Kevin Costner, Natalie Portman—just like a long, long list of celebrities that were breaking up, so that was kind of crazy. Even though that’s one aspect of things, sometimes it gets a bad rap because there were other people where the Venus retrograde just acts as an important turning point for relationships, and sometimes there were notable proposals or other things like that that I saw with different friends. Actually a friend of the podcast, Jo Gleason, announced that she got engaged basically, and she has Leo rising. And so, this Venus retrograde’s going through her 1st house, so that was like a really good one close to home.
Similarly, Barack Obama was in the news where some old letters that he wrote to an ex or back and forth with an ex-girlfriend resurfaced and people were talking about them, which is really notable because he has Aquarius rising, so Venus went retrograde in his 7th house of relationships. And one thing that was interesting about that is it led me to go back and research his past history, and I found that he actually proposed to Michelle Obama the day that Venus stationed retrograde in 1991, and that was this same retrograde cycle. So it was a retrograde that would station in Virgo and then retrograde back into his 7th house of relationships in Leo. So that’s a good example or a good one to keep in mind that even though Venus retrograde can sometimes be challenging for relationships, for some people it’s just a very important turning point in relationships and it’s not always necessarily a deal-breaker if something important happens under Venus retrograde.
AC: Yeah. Also worth noting is that he’s a Leo, like Sun in Leo.
CB: Right.
SK: Yeah, I have a friend who’s an Aquarius rising, and this summer she and her husband, without going into too much detail, they’re basically just in phase two of their marriage and it’s a good thing, like they’re enjoying themselves.
CB: Nice.
AC: Yeah, I mean, the Venus retrograde, as we’ve discussed pretty extensively, is a journey through the underworld or the deeper parts of a relationship. And if there are hidden deal-killers or there are things that are serious points of friction or conflict or whatever those will get revealed. But journeying or doing a review of that layer of the relationship doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to find things that weren’t there before, right? It’s just if there are things there then the relationship will have to deal with them, but it doesn’t create those things, right? If you look at those stories it’s, “Oh, blah, blah, blah did this a year ago and I didn’t know about it,” and so then that gets revealed and the impact of that moves outward, right? But the Venus retrograde most of the time doesn’t create. It doesn’t create the relationship event. What the Venus retrograde brings is a rediscovery or a review of some problematic stuff or some points of contention.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s a really good point. And I realized part of the astronomical phenomenon with the retrograde of Venus and one of the reasons why it can sometimes be associated with splits is because in the middle of the Venus retrograde the Sun and Venus come together and conjoin, but then they immediately start moving in opposite directions. So there’s this wrenching-apart motion astronomically between the two of them, whereas when Venus is direct and conjoins the Sun, what happens is you see these two planets literally running in parallel for a period of time, moving in the same direction in the zodiac, almost at the same pace for a while when Venus is direct. But it’s really the retrograde one where they sort of come together at a cross-point but then they end up going in opposite directions.
SK: Yeah, I heard your description of that when you recorded with Kirah. I listened to a bit of that and something really clicked for me when you said that.
CB: Yeah, I’ve done all these Venus retrograde episodes this summer. I feel like it’s been the summer where I’ve come to a much deeper understanding of Venus retrograde than I had before, especially doing that episode on Inanna with Demetra and just showing that in the very earliest strata of our astrological tradition, from 2000 to 3000 BCE, they had these myths that encoded really important astrological information about things like the Venus retrograde cycle. And when we just put some of that down and just started to understand the astronomy better, it started to make sense of some of the events we were seeing in the world around us in terms of some of the different news stories and other things that were happening this summer. Yeah, did you feel like you got any new insights out of this retrograde, Austin?
AC: I’ve been a student of the Venus retrogrades for some time. I definitely understand this one, right? And that’s important ‘cause this is one of five, right? And this has happened before and this will happen again. We discovered quite a bit about how many people were linked to this and what the themes tend to be. I had a pretty cliché event recently with the Venus retrograde in my 2nd, right? So it’s Venus retrograde in the single sign represented by a cat. And so, I’ve had two super sick cats that cost a shitload of money ‘cause we had to take them to a kitty hospital, and it’s double cats and they’re both miserable—and I have to give them pills. Cats really like it when you force things into their mouth. That’s a pro tip for anybody who’s thinking about getting cats, they really like that. And so, I was like, “Oh, yeah, unhappy cats costing way more money, way more than it should.” Have you ever been to an emergency cat hospital? It’s exciting.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really funny ‘Venus retrograde in Leo, in the sign of the lion’ thing; unhappy cats. Speaking of unhappy cats, that actually reminds me, one of the Venus retrograde things recently was the Venus retrograde in Leo was in Trump’s 1st house, and then that mugshot came out of him not looking super happy. And I just thought there was something very literal about that, the Venus retrograde in a person’s 1st house, and a notable news story about their appearance—about a photo being taken of them—and that that’s a new story in and of itself is a very literal manifestation.
AC: Yeah, with this Venus retrograde in Leo having so much to do with visibility and invisibility, and you know therefore, lighting, right? Like what’s seen and can’t be seen. A mug shot is generally, I think we could agree, unflattering light. I think the lighting setup isn’t great. People tend to not get their angles in a mug shot. Another Venus retrograde theme connected to Trump was that there was the big Republican event, and Trump who, as I understand it is, has the most support within the Republican party, was absent. And so, this echoed to me big movies opening without their stars promoting. And so, we have the star of the show in a variety of senses being conspicuously absent, right? That’s been a big theme for this Venus retrograde.
CB: For sure.
AC: That playing with the dynamics that you usually see with Venus in Leo and it’s about visibility, but really playing with that in lots of different permutations, right? Like what if you can’t see what’s supposed to be the most visible part of something, right? Or casting it in a different light, in a criminal light, or whatever.
CB: Totally, yeah. And that’s still connected to the ongoing Venus retrograde and the Actors and Writers Guild strikes. And I just heard terrible news yesterday that Dune: Part Two was just delayed from a November release to March due to that whole thing.
AC: So many shows.
CB: I know. So one of the victims of the Venus retrograde is that, but hopefully those negotiations will go well and will be renegotiated favorably for everybody involved, since it seems like that’s long overdue. In other news, Chani, who I just had on the show for the last episode, recently referred to this as ‘the summer of women’ as well. And there was a post that either she or somebody shared on Instagram from an account called ‘Ellevest’ for women investing, and it was calling this ‘the summer of women causing economic earthquakes’—which I thought had a very ‘Venus retrograde in Leo square Uranus’ vibe—and cited in that were things like the huge Beyoncé and Taylor Swift concerts that were just drawing huge numbers of fans as well as generating revenue obviously. I thought it was interesting that the Taylor Swift tour was called the Eras tour because it’s like a look back and a retrospective on all of her different eras, which is very Venus retrograde.
Similarly, the Barbie movie became an unexpected summer hit, which is very Venus stationing in Leo square Uranus. And it made more than $1.3 billion and ended up being the biggest opening for a woman director in history, which is really striking. Chani actually mentioned in the last episode that somebody from the Barbie marketing team reached out and they said that astrology may have played some role in the marketing or the timing, which was a big question that a lot of us had last month. Obviously it being released literally like the day Venus was stationing retrograde in Leo was so striking astrologically, we weren’t sure if that was deliberate or if that just arose naturally. But one of the things as astrologers that’s tricky is that we get used to seeing both. Sometimes we see astrologers picking things out deliberately to match the transits, and other times we see things just happening organically that fit what’s happening in the sky at that time, so it’s sometimes hard to know the difference between the two.
SK: So they’re suggesting that it was intentional?
CB: I mean, Chani said obviously there’s a lot of factors involved. So one astrologer or whoever was working on it couldn’t be the sole, deciding person in terms of picking out everything and making everything revolve around that, but at the very least that may have been some consideration that went into things at some point. So that’s not a lot but it’s interesting. It’s something, it’s interesting. Maybe we’ll find out more at some point in the future. I know we learned years later that there was an astrologer working for Fox in the 1970s and that the release date of the first Star Wars movie was actually elected by an astrologer; just a famous bit of trivia. So I’m sure there’s other movies like that that we may never find out about, or we may find out about someday that astrologers had a greater hand in. And it just raised this point that Chani and I talked about how we as astrologers put out these forecasts and these elections and predictions and other stuff, but you never really know exactly who’s listening. And sometimes there’s more people listening to it or different people listening to it than you realize or ever find out about.
SK: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. And between ‘this was intentionally elected’ and ‘no it wasn’t’, it sounds like this is what may have happened. Was there astrological input? I remember 10 years ago, maybe when I was living in LA, one of the dudes in my kung fu class was a pretty successful writer of horror movies, and he was like, “The movie’s coming out on ‘X’ day. What do you think about that?” And we just sat and talked about it for a little bit, and it wasn’t an official consultation, and I don’t think they moved the movie based on that conversation. And this person wasn’t even into astrology, but the ease with which that happened—the general attitude of the entertainment industry, it’s not viciously anti-astrology. It’s show business. It’s artists and the people who market artists. They’re not hard-line materialists.
CB: Sure. That’s definitely true and then there’s always so many other factors involved. Like with that one it was weird ‘cause Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day, but then there was a possible Venus retrograde element to that because Christopher Nolan, prior to that, who directed Oppenheimer, had always released all his movies with Warner Bros. But then in 2020, when they released his movie Tenet to streaming pretty early on, he was pretty enraged and he kind of bad-mouthed them in the press, and then he switched to a new studio. So this movie Oppenheimer was his first time being with a new studio, and coincidentally he set his movie to be released on the 21st, and then coincidentally his old studio released this huge blockbuster movie on the same day as his was competing with it. So there were speculations about whether that was deliberate on the studio’s part, as his ‘ex’ basically kind of getting back at him in a way, which is very Venus ‘retrograde-y’.
AC: Yeah. Oh, speaking of Venus retrograde and the quality of reviewing things or bringing up old shit, there was a documentary released on Netflix recently going back over the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.
CB: Okay.
AC: Which is literally ‘let’s take another deep look at the horrific dissolution of a marriage’, which was extremely public in the first place—I think that was like a year ago—and then just literally going back through it all. That’s very much a quality of Venus retrogrades. Sometimes it’s going through a really intense thing, but very often it’s going back over something. Like going through that under-layer and then being like, “Oh, there’s all sorts of unresolved feelings about this.” And we have that sort of Venus retrograde cliché of rethinking old relationships and sometimes people going back to people they were with before.
CB: Yeah, or like exes reaching out to you. I’ve seen like a bunch of those on Twitter and social media. Interestingly, from relationships that ended four years ago, I kept in my research this summer seeing a bunch of ‘fours’ coming up in addition to the ‘eights’, and I later realized that’s because of the synodic conjunction with Venus that’s the halfway point. So if Venus made a retrograde conjunction with the Sun in the middle of August this summer, that means exactly four years ago, on almost the same day, Venus made a direct conjunction with the Sun. So there’s sometimes connections, not just in eight-year increments which are very obvious with the retrogrades, but also in four-year increments.
SK: Yeah. And also, just something I thought of when you were talking about the Oppenheimer movie, there was kind of like this meta thing happening with the ex. I noticed something similar with the Barbie movie. The Barbie movie itself was very Venus retrograde-coded, but now apparently women are breaking up with their boyfriends because of how they reacted to the Barbie movie. Apparently someone was watching it and the boyfriend’s like, “Are you crying?” He didn’t understand why she was so deeply moved, and so the movie itself is exposing the gap between people’s worldviews. And apparently now on TikTok people are saying like, “What do you think of Barbie as a litmus test for dating?”
CB: Yeah, well, I saw a lot of that too. I know like Leisa saw it. She said that she went into the theater and there was this older couple, and this woman was decked out in pink and she was all excited, and then there was this older guy, her husband, she was with, and then Leisa was sitting there. And then halfway through the movie, she heard the husband like snoring in the middle of the movie. And then afterwards she ran into them in the lobby and the husband said something like, “What do you think of the movie?” or something like that, and then Leisa was like, “I thought it was great.” And he’s like, “Yeah, that Margot Robbie, she’s pretty attractive, huh?” And Leisa was like, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” and she just thought that was such a meta sort of thing about the entire movie. So I could see how it would be raising a lot of those discussions because so much of the movie was about men not doing good things and patriarchy and some of the issues with it, but then sometimes there were some men even watching the movie that didn’t get it afterwards.
SK: Or—sorry, what were you gonna say? I cut you off.
CB: No, that was pretty much it.
SK: I was also gonna say that even beyond the issue of not understanding why that movie might be moving or significant to a woman, there are men who just can’t be bothered to feign interest for a couple hours to watch a movie that might be important to their partner, when probably their girlfriends sat through all of The Godfather Trilogy with them.
CB: Right. For sure I think that was the biggest thing; that movie was definitely driven by women and that was one of the reasons why it was such a huge success. So there’s something notable about this summer that really stands out. Yeah, so that was the Barbie movie and Oppenheimer. I wanted to mention briefly—no, actually I won’t. There’s another ‘Oppenheimer’ effect but I’m gonna skip that. There were some scandals and controversies with the Venus retrograde of course as with any Venus retrograde. One of the ones that’s ongoing right now is that the women’s soccer team from Spain won the World Cup on August 20, but the celebrations were marred in a controversy when the Spanish Soccer Federation’s chief, who was a man, gave an unsolicited kiss on the lips to the star player of the soccer team, on the women’s soccer team, named Jenni Hermoso.
So there was a bunch of drama and controversy that ensued and right now the entire soccer team is now saying they will not play unless this guy resigns or is removed as the head, and I thought that was another Venus retrograde thing. I looked up Hermoso’s chart and Venus was at 16 Leo on the day that that happened retrograde, and it was squaring her Pluto, which is at 16 Scorpio, and her Sun, which is at 18 Taurus. So I thought that was a very ‘Venus retrograde square Pluto’ type transit to have and that’s something that’s kind of ongoing and happening, and it was one of many Venus retrograde controversies that happened this summer.
AC: Yeah, they’re everywhere. And inside the 30-some celebrity breakups, some of those look like they’re going to drag on for months, if not years, and seem extremely complicated and unpleasant and financially insane. Sometimes people do—what did Gwyneth Paltrow call it—a conscious uncoupling usually there are reasons, right? And the reasons are not usually virtuous behavior and that shit comes out.
CB: That’s a great keyword. That’s a great keyword for the retrograde Venus and Sun separating from each other, a ‘conscious uncoupling’.
AC: Yeah. Well, I would say in this case ‘loud, contentious’. Yeah, very conscious. It’s not accidental. But, yeah, the Venus retrograde, because it’s in Leo, everything’s just louder.
CB: Yeah, ‘loud’ was one of our keywords in June or something before the retrograde started. And I thought it was really funny—
AC: Loud scandal. Escandalo. What’s funny is I ended up using escandalo as inspired by Drag Race, which is just Spanish for ‘scandal’, and we have an escandalo in Spain.
CB: Yeah, and ‘loud’ was one of our keywords. But I thought it was funny that when Barbie came out hot pink became one of the colors of summer that you were seeing everywhere. And what is a louder color than hot pink?
AC: Probably some kind of orange might be the only competitor.
CB: Orange.
AC: A really obnoxious orange.
SK: Or like neon green.
CB: Yeah, that’s true.
AC: But, no, your point stands, like hot pink is up there.
CB: Yeah, ‘annoying’ orange makes me think of some other news stories, but there’s another one that was actually really important that connects to one from earlier this summer. The head of the Wagner Group that led the Russian rebellion in June died in a plane crash, which everyone is speculating that he was assassinated basically. And this was connected with the Russian rebellion that happened on June 23 that we talked about so much because it was in the early phases of some of the Venus retrograde that was building up. And there was a connection that actually you and me and Austin were researching and that you noticed between the day it happened and the rebellion, right, Austin?
AC: Yeah. So we don’t have a time but we at least have a date for Yevgeny Prigozhin, and he has Mars-Uranus in Leo. And on the day of the mutiny/half-coup, whatever we want to call it, on June 23, Venus, in the shadow of the retrograde, was conjunct his Mars. And then his plane blew up mid-sky on August 23 with Venus retrograde exactly conjunct his Mars, right? So we see Venus at least as one of the triggers here—and on Mars which makes sense. Like Mars-Uranus is a rebellious energy, so it’s not surprising that that was part of the trigger for the rebellion. And then Mars is also violence. From what I can see it looks like it was a bomb on the plane. There was initial speculation that it might have been shot down with a surface-to-air missile, but the plane exploded, right? And Mars-Uranus is literally exploding, especially in fire signs.
CB: Yeah, we had talked about, I think in the last episode, Mars-Uranus and how the dropping of the atomic bomb was a Mars-Uranus conjunction, for example, or how that’s one of the signatures in the US chart. But that’s so striking that he had that Mars-Uranus conjunction in his chart and then it was activated by Venus, and that Venus was exactly conjunct his Mars both when he did the rebellion and then later, on the other side of the retrograde, when he was apparently assassinated as a result of the rebellion or in retribution allegedly.
AC: You can’t profect from the Ascendant, but if you profect from the Sun, it’s a Leo year for him as well, further emphasizing the Mars-Uranus, right? Did a lot of fighting this year, did a little rebellion, and did a little exploding in the sky, right? Certainly that area was active.
CB: Yeah. And in terms of the Venus phases, the rebellion was on the Morning Star—Evening Star phase of Venus, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah. The Evening Star descending rapidly into the west, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Just plummeting towards the old underworld, but not there yet.
CB: It was a good example of how it’s like sometimes some events happen in the early portion of the Venus retrograde when it’s in the ‘Evening Star’ phase and then sometimes the results or the outcome becomes manifest later, on the other side of the retrograde when it’s a Morning Star, so it’s just those two phases of Venus that become so important in that. And what I call like the ‘Evening Star’ phase is the ‘fuck around’ phase of the Venus retrograde, and the ‘Morning Star’ phase is the ‘find out’ phase in some instances, not always, but in this instance I feel like that’s kind of what we’re seeing here.
AC: I mean, if you were doing transits for Prigozhin, and you were sitting down with him, you’d be like, “Okay, so this Venus retrograde, it’s gonna be kind of a big deal. It’s gonna go over your Venus on the 22nd-23rd, but then it’s gonna come back and then hit your Venus again in August.” And then also if you were reading for him you could also say, “Oh, and then it’s gonna come back a third time,” but he didn’t make it out of the second time. But you would literally just be like, “Okay, so this same area of your life, your Mars, it’s a little malefic; you want to be careful around this,” right? You would have nailed those two dates and been like, “You know, you really need to be thoughtful about your activities.”
CB: Well, if you’re having a consultation with a map of the first rebellion like a week later, he would be like, “Well, I sat down and had a nice lunch with Putin, and he said everything was forgiven, and we’re gonna move on and let bygones be bygones.” But literally part of what happens with the retrograde is you have the first hit of the transit, but then that Venus does a U-turn, comes back and then activates that placement again, so that it sets up a sequence of events that are not finished. And sometimes that’s how you know with a retrograde, if an event happens towards the beginning of it, that that’s not the end of this story; that there’s something still that is left unfinished until that retrograde is complete. Which is good advice for Venus retrogrades. It’s gonna become relevant in this forecast for the Mercury retrograde that’s just beginning as we’re recording this episode as well.
SK: Yeah, and it kind of makes you wonder though just because sometimes even when people aren’t alive, their chart still gets lit up by transits. Like is the third pass of that going to be some sort of revelation around that?
CB: That’s a good point.
AC: I bet people will at least be talking about it.
SK: Right.
AC: Like something will come out, whether it’s certain or not.
CB: So let’s pay attention. We’ll keep an eye out for that when Venus gets back to 14°-15° degrees of Leo, which will be about mid-September.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Wagner chief’s secret emails leaked,” blah, blah, blah.
CB: Right. All right, we’ll see what happens. So let’s see, moving on, in other news, other Venus retrograde news or major news this summer, a really tragic one was the fires that occurred in Hawaii where there were some major fires on the island of Maui on August 8, and these turned out to be the deadliest fires in the US in more than a century, which killed at least 115 people and left around 388 others that are still missing. So the fires moved very quickly and it was very unexpected, so much so that no emergency alarms ever even went off to warn people. And they seemed to be very tied in with the Venus retrograde because on this day Venus was retrograde at 23° of Leo, and it’s squaring Uranus at 22° of Taurus. So it was in that very unexpected, surprising, tense relationship between Venus and Uranus that we had talked about as being one of the more difficult points of this retrograde in terms of the aspects that Venus would make, and it basically happened right when that was going exact. So let’s see, Steph, you had a point that you wanted to make about that, right?
SK: Yeah, I mean, I had a couple things. One was just even before Venus entered Leo there some something in me was just kind of like, “Oh, boy, a summer where fire is emphasized.” Lately, whenever that happens, it’s just mundane astrology. It’s like record-breaking temperatures, wildfires. And so, I kind of just had an intuition that beyond the interpersonal and relational things that in this Venus retrograde might we might be seeing a lot of this kind of stuff. And it hasn’t just been Hawaii. It’s been Greece. It’s been Italy and Spain, and Canada twice. It’s been Algeria. And one of the things that stood out to me too is just like how we’re having this Venus-Jupiter square, this extended Venus-Jupiter square, and it’s normally open activation of the benefics. We like that, but there’s an ugly side to that too, right? We’re seeing Venus-Jupiter as this notion of tourism in the face of tragedy and mass death. Like someone from Maui was recording a video, talking about how there’s people snorkeling in the water where there were dead bodies floating just the day prior. And so, it’s like this idea that leisure and fun can’t slow down to accommodate people losing their homes.
CB: Right. And like what happens in the face of tragedy and what the proper response is and improper responses themselves being scandalous because it’s viewed as distasteful.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And around that time we also have Mars and Saturn pretty close to opposed. And Gianna Crest in the comments makes a really useful observation that Hawaii was having its Mars return in Virgo at that time. And so, as I was looking at a lot of things this month there’s a lot of Venus retrograde, but the Mars opposite Saturn and making aspects to other planets was also pretty loud. And one of the things that I was thinking about was while Venus is combust, literally on fire, what you have is Venus does not appear during the morning nor the evening, right? Like, woe, betide us, great Venus is gone. And usually Venus plays this role of balancing Mars, right? If Mars burns things, Venus has a cooling, moisturizing property, right? Venus puts the salve on the wound or on the irritated skin. And when Venus is in the underworld, Venus is not here making things better.
And part of what was going on is just what it is like when Venus isn’t here to help, when you have one of the two benefics out of commission; much like Jupiter was more or less out of commission during 2020. And so, it wasn’t just that there were bad things happening, it’s that there was a real question about what to do when there was a lot of failure around trying to help or trying to fix the problem. And as I understand it there was a lot of mismanagement around the Maui fires, right? There’s just sort of no mercy. If Venus usually provides mercy, a silver lining, etc., etc.—being without relief or being without that ‘Venusian’ balm, what do things look like when there’s no Venus to help?
CB: Yeah, for sure. There was an astrologer from Hawaii named Daisy Finch who sent me a write-up about this to help me understand some of the astrology and what happened a little bit better, and I just wanted to read part of what she wrote me. So she said, “The fires started here on Maui on August 8, with Uranus at 22° of Taurus applying to a square with Venus at 23 Leo. The Moon was also passing through Taurus at the time and was conjunct Uranus around 1:00 PM.” So that’s actually very important. It wasn’t just the Venus-Uranus square but the Moon swooped in, hit Uranus, and activated that square, acting like a trigger in terms of the timing. So she said, “There was a wind advisory in effect that day, but Maui was a windy island so it was a normal day for the most part. When I woke up I got the news that the fire had started nearby in Kula. As the day went on a new fire started approximately every 30 minutes in different locations all over the island and it was intense. Kula and Lahaina ended up having the fires with the most destruction. There were gusts of wind up to 67 miles per hour that day from Hurricane Dora, which was approximately 490 miles away from the Hawaiian island. It was considered a ‘dry’ hurricane here in Maui because we got the wind but no rain which is very rare. There were no hurricane warnings in effect. And usually when a hurricane is that far away it doesn’t affect the island weather very much at all.”
She goes on and says, “We started like a normal day. What started like a normal day ended up being one of the most tragic days in modern Hawaiian history. The Lahaina fire is the deadliest fire in 100 years. Approximately 2,200 structures were damaged, 2,170 acres burned, 4,000 people are in need of shelter. I wasn’t expecting much from the Venus-Uranus square but it coincided with this shocking unexpected event. In hindsight, things do line up astrologically, just in ways that we wouldn’t have imagined. But wildfires seemed like a very fitting event for Uranus in Taurus and during an event such as this where people have to flee their homes or completely lose their homes and family. It becomes glaringly obvious what is of true value. I always think of values and connection when it comes to Venus. For those of us surviving the fires in Maui there’s definitely a reassessment of the things we value. This seems very fitting during a Venus retrograde, and in the days following the events I was contacted by every person in the world who cares about me, including family I hadn’t been in touch with for years, past friends and lovers to see if I was okay, and every person on Maui here had the same experience. There were connections to people from the past along with new connections that were unexpected that came as a result of the events, people in community coming together to help.”
So I wanted to read that ‘cause I thought that was an interesting subtle thing that maybe you wouldn’t understand unless you were there actually experiencing it, but just in terms of the different layers of what’s happening and how it might be tied in with the Venus retrograde in ways that aren’t obvious at first if you’re just seeing the headlines. And I did want to mention also I asked her what would be a good place to donate, and she mentioned donating to Maui Rapid Response where 100% of the donations go directly to local families in need. So you can find out more information about that by just going to the website at mauirapidresponse.org.
All right, so that was one of the more challenging Venus retrograde things that happened. The last major news story that I wanted to make sure we mentioned is just a couple days ago there was a story in the news where Japan dumped radioactive water from Fukushima into the sea. And this I thought was very striking ‘cause it goes back to some of the things we’ve been talking about for the past several months of Saturn in Pisces and some of the weird stuff surrounding water. So the quote from the Associated Press that I thought was interesting says, “Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarizing move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.” So I thought that was super interesting. The Sun was at 0° of Virgo, which means it just started the first opposition between the Sun and Saturn in Pisces that will happen over the next few years as Saturn has recently ingressed into Pisces, so that was pretty striking. And I know Austin, you had been talking a lot about the water and pollution and other things coming up, like we talked about in the last couple episodes.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just a theme, right? We’ve had the angry creatures of the ocean the last month, August. There was a brutal shark attack that was caught on camera in Egypt that made the rounds. There are a dozen other small things, but the collective mind is just drawn towards the dangers of the sea these days. And, yeah, there’s also—I don’t know, it’s hard to tell how much is a ‘YouTube’ hole and how much is astrology—but I just keep seeing more and more things about looking at the food, the air, the water, etc., etc. Like everything is poison, right? Everything is bad for you. It’s like, “Oh, actually that’s why you have this health problem. Everything is killing you.” And that seemed like such a fitting version of Saturn’s ‘this is malefic, this is bad for you, this is poison’ but with the universality of Pisces, especially with Neptune in Pisces. Like the poison isn’t coming from this one thing, it’s in everything. It’s invisible and it’s everywhere.
SK: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Poison and fear are classic Saturn things. Thank you, Vandana.
CB: For sure. And, Steph, you had something about the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that you thought was interesting, since that’s tied in with all this.
SK: Yeah, I’ve been doing a little bit of digging into the Saturn-Neptune synodic cycle, and I found that it lines up pretty strikingly with the climate change phenomenon and climate change entering mainstream consciousness. And so, basically 1988, which was like right before the previous conjunction, was widely considered a turning point in terms of the broader public paying attention to global warming. So that was like the hottest summer on record at the time, and then a scientist testified in front of Congress that he was 99% sure that global warming was happening. And so, basically in 1989, at the exact conjunction, the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And so, I feel like we’re gonna be seeing more of that kind of thing with the Saturn-Neptune as well.
And basically you can find at the square, at the opposition, there were other big things happening. Like in 2015 during the closing square Obama brought the US into the Paris climate agreement and then Trump withdrew from it a year later. In 2006, at the opposition, Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth, and then that was also the year that China surpassed the US as the largest carbon emitter. So it’s pretty on the nose.
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty compelling. And this is just the very early stages of Saturn in Pisces building up to the conjunction with Neptune, so it’s something we would expect to become intensified over the next three to four years as that conjunction gets closer and closer.
SK: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, as a pivotal time for human understanding and then response too, right?
CB: Right.
AC: ‘Cause these are all human things.
CB: Or lack thereof.
AC: Yeah, lack thereof, or saying ‘nah’ is totally a response, right? But that makes a lot of sense. I mean, probably what gets agreed to and established—we’ve got almost five years left of Saturn-Neptune together. A good chance that’ll just be what it’s like for the next 36 years until the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
CB: For sure, for sure. All right, so I’m sure we’ll see more of that in the future, so we’ll keep paying attention to the Saturn in Pisces news stories and Saturn conjunct Neptune news stories. The last one to mention was a few that are kind of interconnected that we had on our list, but I think might be mentioned as a block. We were talking about the 11th house for some of the Libra risings and one of the news stories, and I thought it was really fascinating just seeing different celebrities or seeing different people—depending on what house Venus went retrograde in your chart—we were seeing the topics of that house come up within the context of the Venus retrograde. One of the more fascinating ones, which is a very minor news story that I just thought was interesting, was the musician Doja Cat, when Venus went retrograde in her 11th house. ‘Cause she has Libra rising, Leo is her 11th. She kind of lashed out and pushed back at her fans and ended up alienating a bunch of her hardcore fans, and it led to a ton of people unfollowing her because she said she didn’t want her fans or didn’t need them or something like that. You followed this, right, Steph?
SK: Yeah, this was one of the stories that I picked out, and then I heard you and Kirah already discussed it a little bit. But I just thought that that was interesting because I think first what happened was she was with this guy and he was controversial for some reason; I’m not really following it that closely. So some of her fans were kind of like, “Oh, you shouldn’t be with this guy,” and she was like, “Don’t tell me what to do.” And then I think there was like a second thing where her fan base wanted to name themselves ‘Kittens’, which is just kind of funny for that Leo 11th house.
CB: Right.
SK: And I think she thought that was corny and didn’t like it and was basically like, “My fans don’t call themselves ‘Kittens’.” And then um someone was like, “But Doja Cat, don’t you love us?” and she was like, “I don’t though ‘cause I don’t even know y’all.”
CB: Yeah, she was like, “No, I don’t even know you.”
SK: I think she called some of her fans creepy.
CB: Yeah, she said they should get jobs. She said, “You should get jobs,” or something like that, and that was the one that definitely really pissed off a lot of them. And then you just saw in the analytics there were just like thousands and thousands of people that were unfollowing her accounts ‘cause she was pissing off some of those stan accounts. Thousands of followers were suspending their accounts and stopped promoting her stuff.
SK: Yeah. Well, one thing that I thought was kind of interesting is you can actually see how the South Node in her 1st house is connected to this Venus retrograde by rulership in the 11th because she saw people unfollowing her as a good thing. So she said like, “Seeing all these people unfollow me makes me feel like I’ve defeated a large beast that’s been holding me down for so long, and it feels like I can reconnect [Venus retrograde] with the people who really matter and love me for who I am and not for who I was. I feel free.” So I just thought that was kind of an interesting example of that.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That’s pretty core Venus retrograde, like culling relationships. Like, no, these aren’t relationships that I want, right? And it’s still serving Venus. Like it’s ultimately about wanting to feel connected right, but the action is disconnecting in service of being more connected, right? The action is opposite even though the goal is ultimately the same.
CB: Yeah, go ahead.
SK: Oh, yeah, I was just gonna say that I think it’s kind of an interesting example of how a Venus retrograde in the 11th house can bring up issues around parasocial relationships, like people who think they know you but don’t.
CB: Or they think they’re your friends. Well, that was the thing as to why it was so fascinating to me from an astrological standpoint; your fans, your fan base is the 11th house. And I think that’s really interesting ‘cause we don’t have a text from Vettius Valens that says where your fan base is from the 2nd century, but it just is an obvious extension in a modern context of what the 11th house means if that’s where you would put fans.
SK: Yeah.
CB: And also, she has a tight Sun-Uranus square and Uranus square the Ascendant, and I think that’s also part of it. She doesn’t want to be tied down and put in a box, and I think that’s one of the other things that was coming through in that statement that you read.
SK: Yeah. And also, like how she has her Sun-Ascendant, and I think also her North Node, all at those late degrees of Libra. So the South Node is currently passing over those.
CB: Right. So this brings up something I made a joke about on the last forecast, but I forgot to actually mention and break down, which is one of the notable things when being a stationed retrograde that we were all watching in horror was when Elon Musk did this rebranding of Twitter. Twitter was this site that had just like this amazing amount of penetration into the culture, with some of its basic functionality becoming like keywords that everyone knows, like ‘retweet’ or ‘to tweet something’ and those being things that got into the dictionary. But for some reason when Venus stationed retrograde in Leo in late July, he decided to completely rebrand the site and call it X. So now it’s like the social media site formerly known as Twitter is now known as X. And that was such a good example of something that happened live because rebranding is something that had been mentioned in previous games retrograde episodes. But to see it happening on such a large scale with something that’s become a household name, and to see somebody completely jettison such an established brand name was really fascinating, albeit, horrifying.
SK: Yeah, I feel like it’s like ‘the Axe body spray’ of social media now.
CB: Axe, okay.
SK: X.
CB: Right. So I thought that was interesting, and it was relevant also because you also have Libra rising, right? So Venus is going retrograde in your 11th.
SK: Yeah.
CB: And so, that’s something you’ve been thinking about in terms of some of this.
SK: Oh, for me? Yeah, I mean, I don’t think I’ve been beefing too much with my fan base thankfully.
CB: No.
SK: No. So roughly eight years ago I made my astrology social media accounts in November of 2015.
CB: That’s perfect. That’s perfect.
SK: Twitter—you know I’ve held on for dear life, but I do think it’s time to kind of like go elsewhere and maybe just start exploring other options for connecting to people who follow me and like sharing my content. So part of my Venus retrograde story I think is just kind of branching out and experimenting and leaning into the Venus-Uranus of it, right? Like I don’t know which of these is going to stick necessarily but I’m allowing myself just to kind of play.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of astrologers are having the same thing and it’s not clear where everyone’s going. But like rats from a sinking ship, it seems like things are shifting. Because I’m doing so much video content I’m experimenting with moving to TikTok. I know other people are moving to Threads or Instagram or what have you. But it’s interesting, and I’m mentioning it here because it’s one of those generational shifts that does happen, that we’ve seen happen before. Like back in the day, Austin, you and I met through MySpace, and I ran the biggest astrology forum on MySpace back in the mid-2000s. But then there was a point in 2008-2009 where things shifted to Facebook very dramatically and very quickly, and then all of a sudden the locus of activity in terms of discussions in the astrological community shifted from being on one site to being on another. We saw a similar shift with a lot of the younger millennials and Gen Z shifting to Twitter in the late 2010s, in 2016, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, during that renaissance of all these new people coming into the field, especially younger people. But now it seems like we’re at another one of those shifts where there’s a question of where the locus of activity for the astrological community is gonna be in the future.
AC: Yeah, it makes me curious about the astrology of the demise of MySpace.
CB: Right. Yeah, if we have a chart for MySpace or anything like that. Yeah, that would be worth looking into.
AC: We’ll see. Venus is still retrograde. We’re just past the halfway point with the total time of Venus in Leo. Things are changing, but in what direction? Where are they going?
CB: Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, so what time is it? We’re at almost an hour so we’re doing perfect. Are there any final things to mention for news or other retrospective things from the past month before we move on?
AC: I had one thing that I thought was really interesting, that I think we can connect to the Venus retrograde. So after years and years in development Baldur’s Gate 3, which is a computer role-playing game, a DND game, was finally released. And I’ve been watching Baldur’s Gate for a while ‘cause I played the first one two million years ago, and then this one was in beta and unfinished for years, and I was like. “It’s not coming out, it’s not gonna be good. Anything that’s stuck in development and held this long can’t possibly be good.” And apparently it’s the best thing ever. It’s gotten extraordinary reviews, etc., etc. This isn’t the Venus retrograde part. I guess part of it is it’s a surprise they were taking that time to make it good. But the surprise is there’s actually been massive criticism of it within the industry for being ‘too good’. Literally, developers are coming out and saying, “This is setting the bar too high. You can’t possibly expect this out of other developers. It’s unfair how much better this is than everything else.” Like literally being angry about this and posting about it, lots and lots of people within the industry, and that’s some Venus retrograde shit. Usually when something is so good it gets praise, but it’s so good that it’s making people feel bad, right?
CB: Right.
AC: “Think about when you were developing this game. Why didn’t you think about how that would make me look at my development company’, right? It’s so funny. And it made me think about larger Saturn in Pisces themes, right? ‘Cause one of the things that I went on and on about with Saturn in Pisces was that it’s this time where we get really high watermarks for culture and entertainment, especially around immersive fantasy worlds. So Baldur’s Gate 3 absolutely checks that box; a lot of people are calling it a once-in-a-decade thing. That connected me with what’s going on with a lot of Hollywood. Outside of the stunning success of the Barbie movie, a lot of big properties, like Star Wars, Lucasfilm, in general, a lot of things are not making the money they’re supposed to.
And it clicked for me. I was watching something that was talking about, “Well, maybe the money will go to more independent creators. They’ll allocate capital more efficiently than these giant, bloated studios”—just seeing the industry in a variety of a multitude of crises, some of which are pinpointed by the strikes. But I was like what if Saturn in Pisces makes good culture by being a reckoning for the cultural producers that are not doing a good job? I just looked back at the Saturn-Pisces points in time and was like, “Oh, there’s good stuff here.” Again, Baldur’s Gate 3 is apparently a high watermark for fantasy. But I didn’t think of the negative part of Saturn, I just said, “Well, I guess that happens.” But it’s interesting to think that it might be creating good culture by being ‘judgment day’ for bad creation, right? Maybe less the carrot and more the stick, both of which are motivating.
CB: For sure. Those are really good thoughts, I like that. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that come up over the next few years.
AC: Yeah. I mean, the only thing better than more good stuff is less bad stuff, right? And both together is a godsend.
CB: That’s true. That’s good, I like that. That’s a good synopsis. All right, cool. Well, I think that’s it for the news section. Oh, yeah, I meant to mention the astrologer from Maui named Daisy Finch who sent me that excerpt earlier, her website is blackpearlastrology.com. So thanks to her and a shoutout to her for sending that. I really appreciate it.
SK: I had a couple other examples of Venus retrograde that I thought were kind of silly, but there’s that one viral video that’s going around that’s satirizing every Euro dance song from the ‘90s by a comedian—his name is Kyle Gordon—and I think it’s called “Planet of the Bass.” So I actually thought that was a good example of Venus retrograde because it’s this callback to previous trends, but the lyrics themselves are completely nonsensical; like it’s just this total hodgepodge of aesthetics. And I thought it seemed to be specifically referencing pop culture from 1999; so that was a previous Venus retrograde in Leo year.
CB: Yeah. It had a very ‘1999’ feel.
SK: It did. And there’s this whole sequence where the original woman, Biljana, was replaced a couple times with other women. But then in the official music video the original one comes back, she’s resurrected and she’s depicted as this beautiful space goddess who decides to descend into the human realm. And there’s this scene of her deciding to become human, yes or no. So I just thought that was like a little bit Inanna.
CB: Encoded, yeah.
SK: Exactly. And then the other one, the reverse aging billionaire that’s been in the news lately—I think his name is Brian Johnson—who has been getting attention ‘cause he spends $2 million a year on his anti-aging regimen only to look exactly his age or older. I just thought that was a little bit funny because he’s got Sun and Saturn in Leo, so this is part of his own Venus retrograde. He’s being worked by Venus retrograde, and all these people are kind of going like, “Man, you’re spending all this money to look younger and you look like you’re 60, man.”
CB: Right. And he’s doing wild stuff, like taking his son’s—
SK: Swapping blood.
CB: Yeah, he’s taking vials of his son’s blood and injecting himself with it.
SK: Yeah.
CB: So it’s like he’s not just wearing makeup or doing something minor, it’s like he really does not want to age. And when you posted his chart, I laughed ‘cause that was so perfect. It was like a Sun-Saturn conjunction in Leo.
SK: Yes.
CB: ‘Cause aging is a thing for Leo and sometimes the tension of aging.
SK: Well, I was just thinking about the Sun and Apollo, right? Apollo having the power of eternal youth and is immune to all disease. And his Sun is at like 29°—so he’s got this God complex around immortality—combusting his debilitated Saturn, right? Like, “I don’t want to be old. I don’t want to admit that I’m old.”
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, so I’ve actually been following his stuff for a while, and just to be fair there are some cool things about it. He is making everything that he does available to the public. He’s like, “I’m gonna try what everybody says is going to be good for this, (this, and this).” And it’s all open source. So if things work, he’s not trying to sell you the anti-aging packet for $99.99. And he does look like shit, but a lot of his health metrics—like the actual function of the organs and whatnot—are really impressive. And just to go back to the Sun-Saturn, the fear of aging, as I understand it his story was that he was not only looking like shit but seriously feeling like shit and extremely unhealthy in his early mid-40’s, but had made a bunch of money doing tech-something and decided that’s what he wanted to do with it, and that he wanted to make it public service as much as possible.
CB: Okay.
AC: But, yeah, there’s some sort of lasering of the skin he does all the time that makes the skin look terrible. Apparently it’s good for something; I imagine it’s different. But, yeah, his stuff is interesting ‘cause he’s documenting everything, and he’s giving statistics over this amount of time, etc., etc.
CB: Yeah.
SK: Yeah, his skin looks translucent like a vampire, and then he’s like drinking his son’s blood or whatever.
AC: What’s interesting is other than his son’s blood, I believe he’s doing it on a vegan diet.
CB: Okay.
AC: It’s an interesting exception to veganism.
CB: Well, I don’t know, he might have some good stuff, I haven’t looked into it. I am not like snorting lines of his son’s blood, whatever.
AC: I mean, if he’s selling it and it works—
CB: If it works. I mean, I guess if it’ll take 10 years off you might as well. But that is just an interesting topic ‘cause it’s something we see come up sometimes with people that have Leo or Leo rising, like Trump, for example, and some of the stuff that he does in order to try to alter his appearance or look better, and sometimes we associate Leo for that reason with things like vanity and stuff. But sometimes age comes in as a major component of that and it’s something that I think that sign or that archetype can wrestle with especially.
AC: Yeah, I think Leo is naturally attached to the vitality of being in one’s prime, like the Sun.
CB: Right, for sure, and trying to maintain that as much as possible. But the inevitable fight against time, that’s always a losing battle at some point.
SK: Isn’t Martha Stewart a Leo, and then she just had those bombshell photos drop of her looking super good at 80?
CB: Really? I don’t know. I didn’t see them.
SK: I think she’s a Sun-Pluto in Leo.
CB: Okay. All right, good times. All right, I think that’s good for news and announcements from the past month. Let’s move on and talk about the forecast for September. First I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor this month, which is the CHANI app, which is the number one astrological app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. It’s designed to make astrology both accessible and useful. The app combines ancient astrological wisdom with meditation and mindfulness to help you foster your relationship with the sky and support your personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology is affecting you, it features everything you need to navigate life’s ups and downs. This includes detailed birth chart breakdowns, daily horoscopes, current sky horoscopes, transit readings, intel on the current Moon phase and sign, weekly sign-specific audio readings by Chani Nicholas, a host of rituals and altar suggestions, year head forecasts and more. The CHANI app is now available and free to download on IOS and Android. And you can also find out more information about it at chaninicholas.com.
So what’s really exciting about the app is that it’s been out for like three years now on the iPhone and it’s been crushing it, but those of us who use Android phones have been waiting for an Android version forever. Chani finally delivered and answered our wishes, and they have just in August released an Android version of the app, which you can find in the Google Play Store now, so definitely check it out. Because one of the things, like I said, that’s notable about it is it’s literally the first app that I’m aware of, like a major astrology app, that will default to whole sign houses as its default house system. So it gives you interpretations and delineations essentially the same as how one of us would interpret a chart or what we look at when we’re doing forecasts, which makes it very unique and, yeah, something I highly recommend and endorse. Austin, I think you would also like it ‘cause our approach is very similar to Chani’s ‘cause we’re part of that unique generation of astrologers that came up learning modern astrology but then learn traditional and found a way to blend them, so it’s kind of like a unique sort of approach to take.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, one that should be familiar to anybody who listens to the podcast regularly. Yeah, I would also just say it’s such a good practice to have an app like that or an ephemeris to just check in with every day and see what’s the same as yesterday and then what’s very different. That practice of being aware of the nature of time as it passes, as it passed away. Sometimes you might realize that like, “Oh, I really don’t like it when the Moon goes over my Mars every month, which was yesterday, and yesterday was shitty again, and then learning to know what to look forward to, what you like, and that practice of just being aware of time rather than being the fish in the ocean who doesn’t have any observations about water. But time is that ocean, and an app like that or just a practice like that, which is easy to nail to an app is so good for being aware of the currents that push you here and there.
CB: Yeah, that’s so crucial ‘cause that’s like the empirical component of astrology. When you’re learning astrology you want to learn your birth chart and what the placements mean, but it’s through seeing the activation of those placements with transits in real-time, that’s when you really come to understand what those placements mean in your life and what it’s all about.
SK: Yeah, and I’ve actually—oh, sorry.
AC: No, go ahead.
CB: Go ahead.
SK: I was just gonna say I think it’s such a good resource, especially for beginners who are new to astrology. Because now when someone asks me, “Where can I go to learn more about my chart?” I feel like there’s this app that I feel really comfortable pointing people to because I know that it’s good quality but it’s also accessible.
CB: Yeah, exactly. ‘Cause most of the time with different ones I have to be like, “Well, you could use this app but then you need to change the default settings to this,” or “Just remember that it’s gonna give you delineations that are from 40 or 50 years ago, so they’re gonna be kind of out of context.” But it’s like with this, no, it was written with a contemporary approach, with the same exact technical approach that I use, so it’s something that’s much easier to endorse and just tell people to use it by default. Cool. All right, well, people can check that out in the app store or in the Apple Store. And, yeah, shoutout to Chani, thanks for sponsoring this episode. All right, so why don’t we transition into talking about the forecast for September and the astrology of September. I’m gonna put the chart up for the beginning of the month so that we can kind of orient ourselves about where we’re at and where we’re starting here as we transition into the beginning of the month.
So here’s today, August 26, the day we’re recording this, and here is the chart for September 1. So major things you need to know about going into the month, that are kind of like precursors that happen just before the month opens, is that Venus is finishing up the retrograde, and it will station direct very early in the month on September 3rd and 4th, but we’re just coming off the tail-end of that. Also, recently, we had Uranus station at the very end of August at 23° of Taurus on August 28th, 29th, and 30th, so we’re coming in kind of hot off the tail of a Uranus station. And then finally also we’re opening the month with Mercury having stationed retrograde at 21° of Virgo on August 23rd and 24th, so that Mercury is firmly retrograde when we open the month on September 1. Are there any other precursor things that were happening in late August we’re coming into this month with the energy of?
AC: Well, Mars has just moved into Libra. It moves in at the end of August. It’ll still be a little bit fresh.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really great point. So literally tomorrow, from when we’re recording this on the 26th, it’s gonna ingress on the 27th, and it will only be at 2° of Libra—3° of Libra by the time September 1 rolls around. So that’s a huge shift, getting out of that whole Mars in Virgo phase that we’ve been in for over a month now and moving into a month or so of Mars in Libra. All right, so where should we start? We’ve talked a lot about Venus retrograde. The first major astrological thing that happens this month is that Venus stations retrograde on the 3rd.
AC: Direct.
CB: Oh, sorry, it stations direct. It ends its retrograde and stations direct at 12° of Leo on September 3. And virtually at the same time, on the 3rd and 4th, Jupiter is actually stationing retrograde at 15° of Taurus, and it’s pretty closely square Venus. And we see the Moon actually swoop through the sign of Taurus on the 3rd and 4th and conjoin Jupiter and square Venus at the same time. So one of the major things is like we literally open September with Venus stationing direct and ending that 40 days and 40 nights of the retrograde period, which I think is one of the most notable things about the early part of September, the main signature.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Venus stations less often than any planet except for Mars, right? And so, there are two ways to look at it. One is now we are two-thirds of the way through the larger Venus retrograde cycle which began in June; so we’re beginning the last third. Venus fell from the sky, did 40 days in the underworld, and is now emerging to walk through the same terrain again, right? So it’s the same issues but having gained some depth, nuance, changed some things, etc., etc. And so, that’s it as a phase, but then as a moment it’s a reversal of motion. And so, these turnabout or pivot moments, they literally show things turning around. Like, “Well, it was going like this and then it finally turned around,” and some of that will be done regardless of what you’re trying to do. But then also when the Venus retrograde cycle for you is very volitional, where it’s been about stuff that you’ve been doing and choices you’ve been making, it’s a great time to pivot if things are sliding in a direction that you haven’t or to schedule a turnaround. Yeah, it’s that energy of like, “Okay, let’s turn this around and start heading in another direction.”
CB: That’s a great point, especially that Venus during the retrograde is not just moving backwards but oftentimes there’s this ‘looking backwards’ orientation to the past. And so, one of the things that’s happening now is that period of looking back into the past is over, and now all of a sudden our gaze turns from looking behind us to looking forward into the future and starting to plan of what it’s gonna take to start moving forward into the future after whatever we’ve learned or gained from the past couple months of Venus being either retrograde or in its pre-retrograde shadow period.
AC: Yeah, the difference in time orientation is really big there, right? Looking at the past during the heart of the Venus retrograde phase, there’s often such an intense present that it’s hard to look at the future. But that direct station, which correlates with Venus obtaining some nice visibility in the morning, it’s very forward-looking, right? It’s like, okay, so based on all that you experienced and the changes made, where are we going, and how do we get there, and who am I if there have been significant internal changes? Like who am I going forward if I didn’t want to be the person who was doing this? So I didn’t like this and I made these changes, but who am I going forward? Moving away from negating a negative to, okay, so now that we’ve negated what we don’t like, where are we headed? What are we moving towards, right?
CB: Yeah, especially after whatever choice was made during the retrograde. ‘Cause I realized a lot of the retrograde for many people was making a choice about something and now the implications of that choice or the consequences of that choice have to be assessed from the things that were made earlier in the summer. And that’s one of the things I like about, in this instance, Venus stationing direct with that close square from Jupiter which is overcoming it with reception from Taurus. It almost feels like a positive for many people, a sort of resolution to a lot of the retrograde drama or choices or ‘looking back’ phase that happened. That now we’re not just starting to move forward and look forward to the future, but there’s a sense of hope and optimism and maybe perhaps confirmation for many people, that whatever that choice was that was made, that you made the right choice; or at least you made the choice that was right for you and now it’s time to move forward.
AC: With Venus applying—sorry, go ahead, Steph.
SK: No, say what you were gonna say then I’ll follow you.
AC: Oh, I was just gonna say Venus’ direct station has Venus applying to an aspect to Jupiter again. And so, even if the choices weren’t ideal right, it’s being able to see the positives, see the benefit; to be like, “Even so, I can do this, this, and this.” The future holds these opportunities or possibilities for growth, enhancement, enrichment, etc., etc.
SK: Yeah, I had kind of a similar read on things. I think with the Jupiter thing that’s actually one of the things that stood out to me about September in general. It’s like the month of Jupiter coming through with the assist. It’s overcoming Venus by square. It’s overcoming Mercury by trine. It’s overcoming the Sun by trine. So even though Jupiter stationing retrograde it’s doing all these good things for other planets. And Jupiter is actually freshly in its own bound. So like this is the first time since Jupiter entered Taurus that it’s gained any amount of essential dignity. And so, with Venus stationing direct, it feels so different from the way the Venus retrograde started. I think obviously everyone’s mileage will vary but I think this is kind of showing that a lot of us are gonna be feeling pretty good about where things are. There might be some sort of delayed gratification coming home to roost. There might be some sort of reward for our trials. So I think even if it’s not like a ‘happy ending’ I think, kind of what you were saying, we’re gonna be feeling pretty okay with where things landed.
AC: Yeah, like this is workable. Like this is doable.
SK: Right.
CB: Yeah, there’s a path forward. This is also the very first station of Jupiter in the sign of Taurus since it ingressed into that sign earlier this year and that seems notable. Thinking back to June, the very first time Saturn stationed in Pisces after the ingress, that was super loud and that was like the week of like the submarine thing, as well as other ocean disasters, as well as different aquatic animals attacking people. And I think we might want to pay attention to Jupiter here for some very similarly loud significations and events in terms of what Jupiter in Taurus is all about. And one of the things that’s unique about this is usually with Jupiter in Taurus we think of keywords like ‘slow and steady growth’, something that Leisa mentioned to me recently.
But with Jupiter stationing at 15, this is also the closest that it’s gonna get to that conjunction with Uranus all year, which is stationing almost simultaneously at 23° of Taurus, which is putting an exclamation mark next to Uranus. So one of the things we have to think about and kind of grok when it comes to this is that we’re talking about a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus that’s happening right now and some of the keywords that we might associate with that. I know in the year ahead forecast we talked about Steve Jobs having a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in the 11th house and that he released the “Think Different” ad campaign in 1997 under a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. So thinking different while also having slow and steady growth in Taurus and somehow putting those keywords together.
SK: I call it the ‘galaxy brain’ aspect.
CB: Jupiter-Uranus?
SK: Yeah.
CB: I like that.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess I was thinking more about Jupiter on its own and what can Jupiter in Taurus provide relative to what’s needed. I think I would be looking for restoring stability, limiting damage, or providing some relief to some of the difficulties.
CB: Yeah, and that was one of the things Steph mentioned with Jupiter coming through with the assist. Jupiter is helping out not just Venus but the Sun as it’s moving through Virgo, and especially Mercury, as Mercury’s going retrograde through Virgo. We get two trines between Mercury and Jupiter this month, even though we have a Mercury retrograde, and we’re gonna see some tech issues, we’re going to have to go back and revisit old written contracts and things like that. Before we even started recording this episode of course, Austin, you were having some microphone issues. We were like, as astrologers, how literal can that be? But I think it’s going to be mitigated substantially by that Jupiter trine this month.
AC: Jupiter is a really key part of it, but everything in Virgo is also opposed by Saturn and Neptune, right? And so, this is the hard part, and you have to do the hard part but you do get help. It’s not that there aren’t afflictions. There are specific difficulties or ‘very encompassing, hard to pin down’ difficulties with Saturn and Neptune, but there’s also help, right? And with Jupiter ruling Saturn these are really tied together. But with Mercury and the Sun in Virgo most of the month, and Mercury in Virgo all month, we’re really getting both of these. We’re really getting both the Saturn and the Jupiter influence on the Virgo. Virgo is the site where both are impacting. Jupiter is trying to stabilize and smooth out and make bountiful, and Saturn is tying a lead weight to your leg and throwing you in the ocean.
CB: Yeah. How are you seeing Jupiter coming through for the assist significations this month, Steph?
SK: You mean what have I seen/observed?
CB: No. I just know you wrote that phrase in the notes, so I was wondering how you see that manifesting in terms of Jupiter’s role this month.
SK: Well, I think with the Venus retrograde I’ve seen it as kind of one of the central dramas. There was the Venus-Mars part, then there was the Venus-Uranus part, then there’s the Venus-Jupiter. And I think that the relationship between Jupiter and Venus feels a little bit like a sugar daddy spoiling Venus, right? Venus is being indulged, like her whims are being indulged. There’s this theme of taking it all in and do we feel worthy of so much goodness, right? And so, even though Venus-Uranus has kind of created a lot of drama and instability in relationships, I think there’s also this narrative around wanting more, and do I dare to want more. Who am I to have this much?
CB: That’s a great keyword, ‘indulgent’, for the Venus square Jupiter.
SK: Yeah. So I think right now we’re seeing the second of three squares with Venus still retrograde, so it might be a little bit more internal ‘crisis-y’ around that. Like can I allow myself to have this much or want this much? But then maybe by the time it goes direct, it’s more of a confirmation of it.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And also, there’s a positive side of that, of just making it rain, and what is that when you’re just blessed with a sudden financial windfall or something like that; there’s that side of the Venus-Jupiter. And then there’s also the reflection on what happens after you overindulge in something and how do you come out of that and find moderation.
SK: Yeah, I was thinking that it’s kind of like showing us two faces to this theme of entitlement. One is kind of like the version we saw of ‘over tourism’, but then there’s also expanding your ‘having-ness’ levels if you lack a sense of entitlement to having good things happen. Yeah, I think right now the Venus retrograde second square there’s the internal crisis around ‘deserving-ness’ or what feels pleasurable or satisfying. And then when Venus goes direct and Jupiter goes retrograde, the way I kind of see it it’s like, is this just empty hedonism or is it meaningful?
CB: I like that.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: Maybe leaving room to leave yourself open for abundance if that’s something that’s on the table at that time and to just be okay with that.
SK: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: My super abbreviation of Venus-Jupiter combinations is just ‘the good life’, right? And it brings up these questions of the good life, which could be hedonism. It could be a thoughtful, philosophical, platonic inquiry into what is the good life. Is the good life endless vodka cranberries? Is the good life the antithesis of that? Does the good life involve vodka cranberry? But both benefics—it’s like both essential as well as the spiritual and intellective good, which don’t necessarily get along perfectly without some careful mixture and filter. But, yeah, that issue being raised makes a lot of sense. And also, the issue being raised in the context of a question, right? ‘Cause Mercury’s retrograde as we go into this. And I think as Venus stops being retrograde and stops being in such dramatic configurations, I think Mercury is really gonna pull focus this month ‘cause it’s sort of the primary, “Oh, God, what is there to figure out?
CB: Right.
AC: It’s the stuff pulling the attention of the month.
CB: That actually almost confused me at first ‘cause it seems like we’ve been in this Venus retrograde for so long, and it in and of itself is bringing up so much ‘looking back into the past, old things coming back’ energy for many people in many areas. To have a Mercury retrograde hit towards the tail-end of that, it’s weird to have a doubling-up or an extending of that but in a slightly different way.
CB: Yeah, it’s a little frustrating ‘cause you’re looking at the Venus retrograde you’re, okay, it’s gonna be direct and then this stuff is gonna be ready to move forward. It’s gonna be less questioning and reconfiguring. But it’s like, no, actually now it’s a Mercury retrograde. And so, we may have—what’s the song? “My Heart Will Go On.” The heart may be ready to go on but the brain is like, “Yeah, but what is the exact path for going on?” I mean, if we’re gonna go on, we need to figure out what to pack.” Like there’s all this Mercury stuff. And this being a Mercury retrograde in a Mercury-ruled sign, it means it sort of puts all of the Mercury retrograde significations on turbo because Mercury has all the power necessary to reconfigure everything in the Mercury signs. It’s not Mercury staying at somebody else’s house rearranging their furniture, it’s Mercury in their own house, right? And so, there’s a potential for really significant reconfigurations, but then the potential to create chaos and disorganization is equally strong because Mercury is strong and not inherently benefic.
SK: Mercury has access to the admin panel.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Full privileges.
SK: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That’s a brilliant way to describe a planet’s own sign.
SK: Well, it could also be happening in two completely different areas of life ‘cause they don’t witness each other, Leo and Virgo. So maybe your Leo house is getting ready to move on, but something in the Virgo house is going down now.
AC: Right. And to sort of reverse engineer what you were saying earlier, you were talking about Jupiter’s effect on both Venus and Mercury. We could also say that Jupiter is in a situation where it’s being affected by both Venus and Mercury, right? Let’s say Jupiter is your 10th. And so, a lot of what’s going on is trying to preserve stability and increase fecundity in the professional area, and Venus has been getting in the way of that; now Mercury is bringing up questions about that. We have Jupiter having just dealt with a Venus retrograde and now moving into trying to oversee the Mercury retrograde so it doesn’t get too chaotic.
CB: Yeah. The Venus retrograde ending while Mercury retrograde is starting, to me, is the energy of like, “Okay, so we’re gonna get back together as a couple after being broken up,” or something like that. Look at the contract and what that’s gonna look like in the details and maybe work out some of the details of that. Just like today there’s an amazing video that’s going viral of this woman—I think she may be an astrologer—where she just gave birth. And she’s lying in the hospital bed and she’s already looking at the chart on her phone and starting to delineate her kid, and it’s like an amazing ‘that’s a true astrologer’ thing.
But another astrologer posted a video in response to that where she got married. After they were married, in the actual ceremony, they’re signing the contract, and she looks off and she taps her wrist to tell her friend to note the time, which is a great legendary astrologer move. Her name is Shang on Twitter, and I just showed the video of that if people want to check it out. So this is that. It’s like the Venus retrograde and then you get the Mercury retrograde in Virgo, and then it’s like it’s time to sign the marriage contract and to get the details down on paper. Marriage, for example, is not just about the love and the romantic part, but there’s also this other business side of it where it’s like you’re merging your finances and everything else.
AC: And the vows are like, under what terms do we enter this union? What am I promising? What am I not promising?
CB: Right.
SK: Are we doing a pre-nup?
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, that launch was epic. Some of us had Chris Brennan in the audience, in our wedding, very carefully noting the time. Chris, you had times for different stages of the ceremony.
CB: Right.
AC: Chris is really the app you want, but not widely available.
SK: The wedding scribe.
CB: It’s gonna cost you, I have to say. That was a freebie for Austin, he’s a close friend, but, yeah, that costs a lot. So talking about Mercury retrograde in Virgo, some of my keywords are ‘reviewing the details’, ‘sweat the small stuff’. And also, having the trine with Jupiter at the same time, to me, an analogy would be like going back and having an accountant review your old books and finances and finding out that you’re due for like a large tax refund. That’s kind of the energy of this Mercury retrograde trine Jupiter to me. Do either of you have other analogies like that or keywords for some of this?
SK: Yeah. Well, one thing I was thinking about was just the way that Jupiter’s stationing retrograde. The way that I think about Jupiter retrograde is it’s kind of like you’re taking a break from the meal to digest ‘cause Jupiter’s function is meaning-making. And so, pause is something that’s naturally built into that because you have this external progress and growth, but then that slows down so you can integrate and make meaning out of what you’ve done. And so, with Mercury trining Jupiter maybe there’s this active component to Jupiter’s meaning-making ‘cause Mercury is kind of like the busy arm that’s guided by Jupiter, right? It’s not just ‘armchair’ contemplation, it’s going through all your old notes and then reorganizing them in your Google Docs or something like that.
CB: For sure. I like that. That’s really good. So with that Mercury retrograde, like I said, it already started in late August. So for many people, you’re getting hit by the typical Mercury retrograde problems in communication, delays, that sort of mercurial chaos already by the time we get to September 6. The Sun conjoins Mercury, and we get the Mercury cazimi. So that’s already the halfway point through the retrograde, which is the part where there starts to be a turn and things start to turn around. And then after that point you get the second half of the retrograde and the eventual resolution of some of the issues that were brought up at the beginning in late August.
AC: And something worth noting here is that the beginning of the month, closer to the beginning of the retrograde, is when we have the first Mercury-Jupiter connection, which is like a lot of reorganizing of things. It’s for the best, it’s gonna be really good. But then when Mercury gets deeper into the retrograde, passes the conjunction with the Sun, Mercury creeps closer and closer to an opposition with Saturn. It’s not a perfect opposition with Saturn, but the direct station, the point that Mercury can move forward from, is much more connected to Saturn. And so, there’s a sobriety to that analysis.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And then once it gets moving direct towards the end of the month then we have another trine with Jupiter. So it’s like now that I’ve confronted the somber truth about this and made whatever choices or reconfigurations, now I can move forward and get some sort of win or benefit, but we have to go back to staring at Saturn with Mercury. And so, it looks better than it’s gonna be at first, and then it looks pretty somber, and then it looks good again, but it has that Jupiter-Saturn-Jupiter sequencing.
CB: Yeah, I liked your keywords ‘sober’ or ‘sobering’. That was something, when I looked at the archetypalexplorer.com graphs for this month, that really came out in those graphs. It’s like you see at the beginning of the month the Mercury-Jupiter trine happening there around the 4th, and then that drops off as Mercury gets distance from Jupiter. And we see like right in the middle Mercury opposing Saturn and that energy coming up. Even though it’s not exact, it still gets within an operative range of degrees. And that sobering energy of the Mercury retrograde, especially when it’s stationing direct, eventually we get this positive resolution that returns again, or this optimism and hope type thing that occurs at the very end of the month, around the 25th.
AC: Yeah.
SK: Yeah, and I feel like that last trine is just like a really good day for anything Mercury or just to launch something.
CB: Totally. Yeah, totally, I would take advantage of that Mercury-Jupiter trine for sure.
AC: Yeah. And something I’ve been saying to people the last week or so, when people have been talking about like, “Oh, I’m not making as much progress on a thing as I thought I was,” or “I was doing this and then this happened (you know, ‘Venus retrograde’ stuff; ‘Mercury getting ready to station’ stuff)”, in a lot of cases I found myself saying that I think things will look great by the time Mercury’s done with Virgo, right? It’s a lot of Mercury in Virgo. And right now we’re talking about managing the retrograde, which is always more confusing, but the good side of this is that Mercury does 22 out of the 30° of Virgo all over again direct. And so, that’s so much ‘getting shit together and getting shit done’ energy when we look at Mercury in Virgo as like a two-month thing rather than just the retrograde portion.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really excellent point. So really quickly, since Steph mentioned launching stuff, that just reminded me that I wanted to mention our auspicious election for this month. We actually had a lot of good charts, so it was kind of hard to decide what to go with and which one to use. And we ended up actually coming up with like four really core great charts on our Auspicious Elections Podcast this month, but in terms of deciding which one we wanted to really recommend, we decided to recommend one earlier in the month as our main chart of the month’ and then we have some others later in the month that take advantage of that later Mercury-Jupiter conjunction as well. But the one I wanted to highlight for this month is this one, which takes place on September 3, 2023, around 9:55 PM local time in whatever your city is. Just set the chart to about 9:55 and you should end up with a chart that gives you about 12° of Taurus rising. And that’s kind of adjustable but we set it so it would be about 12° of Taurus rising. Try to adjust it so it’s in your location.
What you’ll end up with is a chart with Taurus rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, which is down there in Leo stationing direct in that sign, ending the retrograde period in a night chart. This is 9:00-10:00 at night, so a night chart. So Venus is of the sect in favor; it’s in the 4th whole sign house. And we get some of that positive Jupiter energy with Jupiter stationing at the same time and overcoming Venus. We put that Jupiter in the 1st house in order to fully take advantage of that Jupiter, which is just improving the condition of Venus in the 4th house of the home, the family, the living situation, and private life. And we also emphasized it a little bit more by putting the Moon in Taurus, in the sign of her exaltation, applying to both Venus as well as Jupiter.
So this chart’s primarily good as a home and living situation and private life thing, since it’s so 4th house-focused. It would also be good for other types of Venusian activities, like creative and artistic endeavors or other things of that nature just because it has such a huge emphasis on Venus as well as Taurus. Even though Mercury is retrograde, which is not ideal in terms of mercurial activities, you still get some offsetting of that with Mercury in that pretty close and almost exact trine with Jupiter from 15° of Virgo to 15° of Taurus. So even though it may not be the best chart for communicative, mercurial-type things due to the retrograde, it is a very good chart chart for Venusian-type creative activities if you’re looking to do something of that sort especially with Venus. And this is our auspicious election for the month. So, yeah, what types of activities do the two of you do for Venusian-type elections?
SK: Oh, well, I was just looking at that chart with the 4th house emphasis and thinking that would be great for a dinner party at home or something like that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Or even redecorating/redesigning your home. Redecorating. Creating a new aesthetic that’s much more engaging and sort of exciting at home might be a good thing to do. I would be a little careful ‘cause it does have Saturn in a night chart in the 11th house; I meant to mention that. So it’s a little challenging for friends and groups, but nonetheless could be really good for 4th house activities or things that take place at home.
AC: Yeah, and for 1st house as well with an exalted Moon there and with Jupiter there ruled by that Venus. What I see with that is setting something heavy and certain in motion right. Let’s say you were going to do a lifestyle overhaul. Well, I meant to get back on the diet and start doing this, or I want to start meditating at 3:00 in the afternoon, whatever. Like something that you want to be very consistent at that’s a 1st house thing; like I want to be doing ‘x’ regularly. This chart is not fast but it is certain in its direction, and there’s a lot of stability with both the Moon and Jupiter in the 1st house in Taurus. So, yeah, something like, “I’m gonna be like this in September,” or like “I’m gonna do this for three months.” Or something that you want that slow, but steady, relentless quality for.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point,
SK: I’m gonna commit to doing my gua sha routine every night for my skincare.
CB: Skincare. That would be a good one for sure. Yeah, thinking back to our earlier thing, if you’re gonna take the blood of any relatives like that might be a good election for doing that for your skin care or other routines. All right, so that is one of 13 electional charts that we found for next month, which we just released or are about to release this weekend on our Auspicious Elections Podcast where we find lucky dates for the month ahead. So you can find out more information about that at the astrologypodcast.com/elections. All right, so we’re talking a lot about the early part of the month at this point and the first week of the month. But at some point we should talk about our first lunation, which is once we get into the second week of the month where a few things start happening. The two main ones is that we have that New Moon which takes place at 22° of Virgo or 21-22° of Virgo on September 14. And pretty much at the same time Mercury is actually stationing direct at 8° of Virgo and ending its retrograde period in that same span of days. So we’ve got a pretty heavy concentration on Virgo here right in the very middle of the month.
AC: Yeah.
SK: Yeah, I was—oh, sorry.
AC: Go ahead.
SK: Yeah, I was just gonna say that the New Moon in Virgo and Mercury stationing direct seem like almost part of the same event, right? It’s just like one big reset for your Virgo house. And one thing that I was thinking about too is how it’s a New Moon but Mercury’s going direct. So the solution and the answer that Mercury direct is bringing is kind of just the beginning, right? So the retrograde gave us like this re-engineering of something but then that’s just the setup for a new six-month arc of development.
CB: Right. Six months in terms of this being a New Moon that’ll culminate six months later with a Full Moon in Virgo?
SK: Exactly.
CB: That’s a really good point. So it’s setting a foundation for the next six months here with not just the New Moon, but Mercury stationing direct. And then it’s kind of putting the focus also on that Mercury-Saturn opposition that Austin mentioned earlier and some of the sober practical thinking that’s kind of involved and is necessary. And one of the keywords that came up earlier with Saturn was ‘fears’. And right now some of the fears are coming up with very literal things like the ocean or the waters or the fish or what have you with Pisces, and this tension between the nebulousness of some things we might fear in terms of having a fear of the nebulousness or the intangible with Saturn in Pisces, but then Mercury trying to ground that and look at the actual facts and the reality of what’s actually happening to either dissuade or clarify what fears are valid or practical versus which fears are maybe being overblown or unnecessary.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s really good because we have Mercury opposing that Saturn, right? So Mercury is trying to clarify and get some data on the seemingly everywhere Saturn in Pisces fears. And then we also have the Sun and Moon in an opposition with Neptune in Pisces, which is equally if not more confusing and diffuse, right? And so, we have these ongoing Saturn-Neptune issues which we do and we will for years. We have both the Sun and Moon, and we have Mercury independently, all lining up across to try to get clarity about it and figure out what to do. And there is something a little—yeah, I’ll go back to sober or somber about this, not only because of Mercury’s configuration to Saturn. But that third decan of Virgo, where the Sun and Moon conjoin, is also a particularly somber place. It’s a place of grieving. It’s a place of thinking of legacy. And as a thing to do or a nice type of activity to focus on, it’s a place of thinking of the consequences of consequences. That third decan of Virgo is thinking three moves ahead in chess, right? Like if I do this, then that leaves these next couple moves, and then those will leave these next couple moves. It’s a far-thinking place. And there’s a certain coldness which is necessary for that clarity and thinking multiple steps ahead, but it seems like a very useful point to settle on during Mercury’s direct station, and, Steph, like you said, setting a program for Virgo for the next while. There’s not gonna be a better time to figure out the Virgo area for quite some time.
SK: Yeah.
AC: And so, taking into account the difficulties and pressures and settling on a course—what is the word—of an evidence-based way forward seems like a good move.
SK: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And locating this, especially for each of us personally, in the Virgo house in our chart so that we’re talking about some of these Virgo energies. You can kind of locate that or geolocate that in your life by what house that coincides with and that probably be the area of focus for both the Mercury retrograde as well as this New Moon on the 14th that we’re talking about.
SK: Yeah. Something I think about sometimes too with that last decan of Virgo is how it kind of feels like the night crew cleaning up for the morning crew and doing a good enough job that they don’t have to overcompensate for what they missed in some ways.
AC: Yeah, like actually finishing everything, not just like bugging out because the shift’s over.
SK: Yeah.
CB: Right. And with this New Moon opposite Neptune, something made me think—when both of you were talking, and what you were saying Austin—what is it gonna be like when Neptune leaves Pisces? ‘Cause every time we have major stuff happening in Virgo, we have the normal earthy, mercurial, practical and grounded keywords that we often associate with that. But then over the past several years we were just constantly dealing with this tension from Neptune and the nebulousness and just the opposite energy that that’s bringing to all of that, which is sort of confusing things. And it’s like will we ever get back to making Virgo Virgo again at some point?
AC: I think Virgos have been trying so hard.
CB: Yeah. They’ve been holding it together very well, I have to say, for sure.
SK: I’m not gonna know what to do when it’s gone.
CB: Right. I mean, one of the things, hopefully, is they’ll emerge as much more creative and flexible, which they already are, but maybe not just focused on practical things. But open to receiving inspiration and other sort of creative things more maybe, which is more of the Pisces and Neptune traits.
AC: Or in some cases it’ll probably be a glorious return to order where things can finally be as you would arrange them rather than getting constantly rearranged by ‘psychedelic’ tsunamis. The fucking Neptune just washing in and changing everything. It’s like, no, I would just like the couch to not be upside down and floating. Let me just have a little order.
CB: Yeah, I like that. All right, so that’s good with the New Moon. There’s other action that’s happening immediately after that in the next few days, especially on the 17th; there’s a couple things that are really important. One, Venus completes the final square with Jupiter from 15° of Leo to 15° of Taurus on September 17. And one of the things that I noticed actually looking at the sky is that Venus is actually gonna reach maximum brightness on September 17 in terms of its distance from the Sun, and just in terms of now that it’s emerged in the sky as a Morning Star again it’s gonna reach peak brilliance right in the middle of September.
SK: That’s a good one.
CB: Yeah. And I thought it was weird that it happens right at the same time as it’s squaring Jupiter.
SK: Seems pretty good. Yeah, I was also thinking about Venus-Jupiter as being like an upgrade of some kind. I had a friend who I think her partner has some sort of platinum rewards membership, and they just got this hotel room that’s the size of their house, and it’s just like, “What am I doing in a hotel room that’s the size of my house?” So that feels very Venus-Jupiter to me.
CB: For sure.
AC: You may ask yourself—
SK: What?
AC: Nothing. I was just thinking of the old Talking Heads song. You may ask yourself, why am I in this beautiful hotel room?
SK: This is not my beautiful hotel room.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So my keywords for that day are ‘emerging from the underworld’ and ‘reclaiming your brilliance’ or ‘reclaiming your throne’ in the same way that Inanna did at the end at that point in the Inanna myth where she emerges from the underworld. She finds her annoying partner who’s stolen her throne and she banishes him to the underworld and then reclaims things. Or in the way that things happen like that towards the end of the Barbie movie, that’s that phase of where we’re at in the middle of September.
AC: Yeah, it’s definitely triumphant moments and a return to grace or a return to one’s throne.
CB: For sure.
SK: Yeah. I could also see it also just being like a month where there’s like so many things to go to that you’re looking forward to. But it’s just a square, right? So like life is just moving too fast for your wallet. It’s like my favorite artist’s on tour, and, oh, there’s a birthday party, and I gotta go to a wedding. There’s just like so much at the buffet and you’re trying to overextend yourself to take it all in as much as you can.
AC: Yeah. And Venus-Jupiter can be spending.
SK: Yeah, I felt that in June.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Overspending or spending lavishly, or sometimes enjoying the finer things even if it requires extra expenses.
AC: Like goat cheese with black truffles shaved into them.
CB: Right, and caviar. All right, so moving forward in the next few days after that the Sun does different stuff. We don’t usually note a lot of Sun aspects here but maybe we should occasionally in some of the dailies. But I was just noticing that the Sun on September 18th and 19th opposes Neptune, which is kind of a nebulousness in that couple-day timeframe. And then shortly after that, a few days later on September 22nd and 23rd, it ingresses into the sign of Libra. So we get our Libra ingress, Virgo season is over. Libra season begins in one month. And basically immediately after that, on the 24th, we get that second and final Mercury-Jupiter trine from 14° of Virgo to 14° of Taurus. So there’s a lot of relatively big and positive shifts taking place at this time around September 22nd, 23rd, and 24th.
AC: Yeah. So we’ll be seeing a lot of the results of that Mercury retrograde cycle. Okay, so I rooted out the problems and now they’re not here anymore, or now things are working better. You’re seeing the benefits or relief from the work done during the retrograde portion of Mercury’s cycle, which is nice; we’re getting more towards the ‘outcomes ‘phase with Mercury retrograde.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And we’re also in the ‘outcomes’ phase of the larger Venus cycle. Venus hasn’t left the shadow of the retrograde yet but has made a lot of progress. It’s bright in the sky and has the third connection to Jupiter. Things are established, and there’s a little bit left, but mostly we’re seeing the outcomes. We’re seeing really the results of both the shorter Mercury cycle and the longer Venus cycle by the end of the month.
CB: For sure. Now that you did the hard audit earlier in the month during the retrograde and the Mercury-Saturn opposition, now the big financial bonus or the tax return comes back in your favor or something like that.
AC: Yeah. Or you find out that you’re not getting audited, praise God.
CB: Right. The initial fears surrounding something that were kicked up earlier in the month in the retrograde turned out to be much more positive and beneficial than you thought. That’s good, that’s good, okay. This is bringing us later—I know it’s very late in the month—but we should probably jump forward to our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Aries, which takes place early on September 29, or technically in some time zone it’ll be late on September 28. So it’s a Full Moon at 5° of Aries. What’s going on here, and what do we see in this chart that’s relevant in terms of the imprint or the signature of this Full Moon?
SK: For me, it kind of reads like this anticlimactic climax. It’s like, oh, it’s the season finale, but it’s kind of like a hmm. ‘Cause it’s not quite an eclipse, it’s not an eclipse, but it’s ruled by Mars in Libra applying to the South Node. And so, the Sun in Libra and Mars in Libra, there’s this individualistic impulse that might be tempered by compromise or sacrifice of some kind. Yeah, maybe for now, right? ‘Cause like the next lunation in Aries is gonna be an eclipse. But this looks like you’re trying to sever yourself but it’s not a clean cut. Like the blade is dulled for some reason.
AC: Yeah, with this one being ruled by—sorry, something just something just floated into my mouth. Sorry. That’s funny. It brings up the underlying irritations that Mars has been providing in Libra all month. Mars is not really aspecting much this month, just being co-present with the South Node for most of the month, having a loose sextile to Venus, but not really fucking with the other planets. It’s like Mars is going to be half gone but then you’ll hear some passive-aggressive grumbles from time to time for a lot of the month. But once we get the Sun’s ingress into Libra, where now it’s in the same sign as the Sun, and then we have a Full Moon ruled by that Mars, and that Mars-South Node conjunction isn’t 25° away, but is actually narrowing down to 5 or 6, we’re really gonna see that; whatever irritations, whatever compromises are still not getting made. We have this Venus direct. Venus is feeling good, but we still have this sort of relational work to do in Libra, this Venus-ruled area. Although with Venus in Leo one might feel good about themselves and be like, “I’m really happy with who I am, I went through a lot,” but then getting that to work in relationship to people is not the same thing as getting into work in relationship to yourself.
And so, we have Mars there’s a fly in the ointment of finding a balance, and I would say we kind of get the peak of whatever problems Mars has created in that Venus-ruled area right on that Full Moon where the frustrations may overflow. And just a little bit about the Mars-Ketu or Mars-South Node; Mars-South Node together. Mars has a willingness to separate and to be like, “Eh, fuck this, I don’t want to relate; I don’t want to do this,” and South Node is very much about deep negation and just letting go of things and not trying anymore; and so together they’re very ‘purge-y’. So with that energy ruling and opposed to the Full Moon there’s going to be I think a late round of some of these relationships, like the celebrity ones and the non-celebrity ones, where it’s like, “I don’t know. Are we getting divorced? Are we not getting divorced? Oh, Venus is direct and now it’s aspecting Jupiter. Maybe we can do this.” That Mars-Ketu ruling the Full Moon is going to be like, “Actually, fuck this. There’s no way to reconcile this or bring balance or harmony to this.
CB: That’s a great point because Venus is still in her shadow all the way until October 7. So it’s like we’re not fully out of Venus retrograde territory, even though the most intense part of it ends on September 3 once Venus stations direct. She’s still retracing her steps from earlier in the summer, all the way until October 7, including at this Full Moon that we’re talking about where Venus has only made it to like 22-ish° at that time.
SK: And also, it’s the last square to Uranus on the same day, right?
CB: Oh, yeah.
SK: Those two things are coinciding.
CB: Wow.
SK: So that was actually the thing that caught my eye. Like Venus is now ruled by the Sun in fall and the Moon is ruled by Mars in its detriment, right? So it’s like both of these things coinciding feel a little bit like I want to cause a scene, but I have to keep it under wraps for some reason.
CB: Yeah. The two most fiery planets in the sky are being constrained by social etiquette.
SK: Right.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know that this one’s gonna be that constrained by etiquette.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I think it’s maybe where things that have been constrained by desire for harmony, peace, and balance overflow. Not saying that’s not part of it, but this will be a point where if things are gonna boil over it’ll be around them the Moon’s time in Aries at the very end of the month. I don’t love it.
SK: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And the day after, the Moon then will oppose Mars from Aries. So like you’re saying, the Moon is going through areas on the 28th, 29th, 30th. That’s the timeframe for this and the activation of that. I think you used the word ‘passive-aggressive’ Mars earlier in the month. Last month we were talking about editing for example. I said Mars in Virgo is good for an editor who’s cutting things out of the text and paying attention to the fine details. What are some good keywords for Mars in Libra that both of you think of when you think of that placement?
SK: Playing politics.
CB: Playing politics.
SK: Like having to play the game, right?
CB: Bill Clinton has a famous Mars-Venus-Neptune conjunction in Libra on the Ascendant, and he was supposed to be—
2:03:20
AC: Jupiter, too.
CB: Jupiter, right, and that was supposed to be his thing. He was very good at that and very personable I guess, but knew how to play the game or play the politics.
AC: Right. When Mars is efficacious in Libra, it doesn’t look like Mars, right? You never saw Bill Clinton angry. It’s not that he was never angry, but it was like, “Yeah, fuck those people,” but smile, smile, smile.
CB: Right.
AC: You were saying stuff like ‘playing the game’. With Mars in Libra I always think of the phrase ‘a charm offensive’, right? Kill them with kindness. And all this sort of fits into or intersects with passive-aggression. When Mars is being effectively martial it’s using Venus’ tools. And then from a strictly martial perspective, it’s being constrained and being like, “Oh, but I’m angry,” or “I’m in a fight, but I have to pretend that I’m not in a fight. I hate this.”
CB: That reminds me of the phrase that some people use maybe in the South but it’s like, “Oh, bless your heart.” And I just looked at the definition of it and it says on Wikipedia, “The phrase has multiple meanings and is used to express genuine sympathy, but sometimes as an insult that conveys condescension, derision, or contempt.” And I think it’s funny conveying insult or derision or contempt to somebody but doing it in a way that appears the opposite, that appears like it’s a compliment or something.
AC: Yeah, or we’re expressing sympathy. Yeah, I mean, I have relatives that say that. That’s a good one ‘cause it’s ambivalent.
CB: Right.
AC: “Oh, bless his heart,” which means this person could use a blessing; the implication is because they’re foolish and denied it. Yeah, it’s nicely ambivalent. You can’t get caught doing it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then you mentioned politicians, and also ones that are smooth or do things in a way that’s smooth. Which reminded me of another famous Sun-Mars conjunction—so that’s part of what we’re talking about—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. who has Sun, Mars, and Mercury and the Midheaven all in Libra in the 11th whole sign house. And over the past few years it’s been entertaining sometimes just seeing her engage in some of these sick burns on Twitter on different opponents, and she often has an ability to be very sharp and pinpoint a weakness and focus in on that, but say it in a very eloquent way; it’s one of the things I’ve seen with that. I don’t know if that’s the right way to articulate that. Have you seen that, or do you know what I’m talking about?
SK: Yeah, there’s kind of like an aesthetic flair to the martial sick burn, right?
CB: Right. Yeah, something like that.
SK: Like an artistry to it.
CB: Yeah, an artistry to insulting somebody or pointing out that somebody’s doing something stupid. The artistry of the sick burn—that’s a good Mars in Libra keyword.
AC: Yeah. And another thing I wonder with the Mars in Libra is if this will be the complicating factor in another round of maybe peace or maybe truce talks in Ukraine. The season of warfare is drawing to a close. There are seasons of warfare and then it’s like, “Do you give?” “No, do you give?” “Well, we would give under these circumstances.” Regardless of whether it’s successful there will be another round of talks. And so, it’ll be interesting. And also, it’s Mars, and Mars tracks very well with ongoing conflicts. So it’ll be interesting to see how the Mars shows up there, with especially the Full Moon. There may be stories about getting closer to maybe reaching an agreement, and then Full Moon, back to cluster bombs.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we definitely saw, as we were expecting, some major stuff happening with Russia with the rebellion, and now the other side of that, this death/possible assassination because of the Venus retrograde going all the way back to like 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of the modern Russian state around the time of some of those previous Venus retrogrades.
AC: And the birth of Ukraine under a Venus retrograde in Leo.
CB: Yes, that’s what I was just about to say ‘cause that’s the other side of it, which we haven’t seen yet, as we were expecting this summer to be a major turning point for that because Ukraine was born during that summer with Venus retrograde in Leo. So that’s a good point that there may be continued developments there that we should pay attention to.
AC: Yeah, I don’t want to go on about it, but I’m very interested in what happens this fall.
CB: For sure, for sure. There also hasn’t been as much LGBTQ stuff as I was expecting, as there was eight years ago, aside from being negative pushback stuff, and I’m still wondering if there won’t be more developments in terms of that. That’s something I’m still keeping an eye out for.
AC: That seemed to be primarily during the Venus-Mars period where Venus was warming up for the retrograde and Mars was right there with her; that seemed to be really the height of that.
CB: For sure, for sure. All right, so that’s bringing us to the very end of the month. Let me see if there’s anything else we meant to mention. Full Moon. Venus last square Uranus. No, I mean, that’s really it ‘cause that brings us to the 29th and 30th, which is the very end of the month.
AC: Yeah, that is some scalding tea unleashed on the last few days of the month.
CB: Yeah, Full Moon opposite Mars, Venus square Uranus. The Venus square Uranus was the signature we were talking about earlier with the fires in Hawaii for some reason. So let’s mention just any other keywords for Venus square Uranus. It’s like ‘unexpected disruptions in relationships’, ‘unique developments in relationships’, ‘thinking outside of the box’, ‘doing something unconventional in terms of romance’. What are some other keywords there?
SK: ‘Breaking into new genres’.
CB: That’s a good one.
AC: And it’s worth noting that this will be the third square. So this will be like the repetition or coming back to stepping outside of the box and thinking about relationships or dealing with a jarring and chaotic thing that affected relationships, or a genre change or whatever, that’s been ongoing since June, right? So this is the last hit of that. So in a sense it robs Uranus of the ‘it’s completely novel’ ‘cause it’s a completely novel thing that you’ve been thinking about for a while, right? Or it’s a totally new thing that you’ve been trying to adjust to or figure out the right way to adjust to for a while now.
CB: Yeah, or maybe it’s like earlier in the summer. It’s like you tried something new and different, then Venus went retrograde and squared Uranus the second time, went retrograde, and maybe it didn’t go very well. Or maybe there was something that was disruptive or upsetting about it but then maybe you revisit it a third time, and this third time is the charm where you’re able to integrate something that’s new and different into your routine or your relationship or whatever part of the chart this is hitting for you, and the third time you’re able to find a more successful way to integrate that.
AC: Yeah, like maybe, oh, I was contemplating a new look and then during the retrograde station or during the retrograde portion I started wearing only hot pink every single day. And now they’re on the third Venus-Uranus, I’m gonna only wear hot pink head to toe on Fridays, right? It’s a maturation of whatever experimentation.
CB: For sure. That would make a lot of sense for Leo risings. Yeah, I’ve seen some interesting makeovers and changes of appearance during this Venus retrograde through people’s 1st houses.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, well, any final thoughts? Were you gonna say something, Steph?
SK: Oh, no. I was just gonna add I feel like if you didn’t pull the trigger before, the third Venus-Uranus aspect might be when you do it.
AC: Yeah, some people might have been waiting and carefully crafting whatever, their Uranian surprise or changes. They’ve gotten all the data (Venus direct, Venus retrograde) and then one more time and like now it’s ready.
SK: Yeah.
CB: That makes so much sense. And then since it was one of the keywords that came up at the beginning, to reiterate, since it might be relevant again at the end of the month—Ellevest on Instagram said ‘the summer of women, women causing economic earthquakes’. There’s something about that archetypally, and there might be a variation or a way that we could rework that that would be more broadly applicable, but I think that would be relevant again in that Venus Uranus Square and that Full Moon at the end of the month. All right, well, my friends, this was amazing. I want to keep talking to you two all day, and I think we could if we wanted to, but I’m gonna cut it off and say this was a great forecast. Thank you both for joining me. Steph, thanks so much for joining us again. This was really great. It was great having your insights.
SK: Yeah, thanks so much for having me back. It was a pleasure.
CB: So you over the past year have been doing astrology like crazy and your business has ramped up and everything else. What do you have going on, and where can people find out more information about your work and what’s coming up?
SK: Absolutely. Yeah, so there’s my website, which is ladycazimi.com. I’m currently on Instagram, Twitter, and newly Substacked as Lady Cazimi. That was part of the thing I mentioned; I’m working on branching out into other platforms. I’m taking clients as I usually do. I was doing a Venus retrograde reading special over the summer. That’s been very fun and very Illuminating. And I decided to keep that open through the end of September just for people who want to process. I will be presenting at the NCGR meeting panel on the astrology of the future on September 29. We’re gonna be doing a series on the astrology of the 2020s. And then I’m also getting ready to offer—I haven’t given it a name yet, but I’m calling it my deluxe client offering. So I’m just kind of teasing that now; it’s gonna be available at the end of the month. But I want to do—it’s not quite coaching, it’s not quite mentorship—but basically I want to take on four clients and get as deep and intimate with their astrology as I am with mine, right? So like being so knowledgeable about someone’s ups and downs that I can guide them to the same level of granular detail that I do in my own life.
CB: That’s brilliant. I love that idea.
SK: Yeah.
CB: It fits very well with the Venus-Jupiter stuff we were talking about, ‘deluxe client offerings’. Normally with clients, a normal astrology session is just like a quick hour and there’s only so much you can get into in that time. You really often need more time.
SK: Exactly, yeah.
AC: Yeah, like having a lawyer on retainer.
SK: Yeah, it’s a little bit like a retainer thing, except I feel like there needs to be some limits.
CB: Right. You don’t want people like tattooing your name on them or something like that. It’s not quite on that level.
SK: Or like calling me at 3:00 AM like, “Help, I can reschedule this hair appointment without you.”
CB: For sure, for sure, but that’s a great idea. Okay, so you’ll have that up at the end of August or end of September?
SK: End of September.
CB: Perfect. Okay, just in time for all those aspects. All right, awesome. And your website is ladycazimi.com.
SK: Exactly.
CB: Cool. All right, Austin, what do you have going on?
AC: Well, I’m gonna reopen enrollment for a limited number of people for the year one program in the middle of the month. It’s gonna be only people who are already on the waitlist. If you want to get on the waitlist, you can sign up on the website. And I’m gonna be doing another much larger open enrollment in December. This one’s gotta be small. I can’t flood the program. For those of you who have been waiting and are on the waitlist, I’ll be doing one right around Mercury direct. And then through Sphere + Sundry—this is kind of exciting—Sphere + Sundry’s gonna be releasing a Saturn in Aquarius series that we grabbed before it left. Electionally, I waited until Saturn was maximum distance from the Uranus square ‘cause I don’t like chaos in my order, and it turned out really beautifully. It’s a nice Saturn in Aquarius. I feel like I should describe it like a ‘winter fresh gum’ commercial. It’s like the cold flowers of deep time. It’s got like a beautiful sort of crystalline structure energy. And I know not everyone misses Saturn in Aquarius, but a lot of people do.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s like it was so much easier to be disciplined. Yes, it was kind of cold but it wasn’t just this Saturn in Pisces mush everywhere. Like I knew the difference between inside and outside.
CB: It was nice when the seas were not trying to kill us.
AC: Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, this was designed and came out really nice. The imagery was really like that crystalline clarity of winter where it’s like, yes, it’s cold outside, but everything is perfectly still and clear and you can hear with great clarity. Anyway, that’ll be out by the end of the month.
SK: That’s beautiful.
AC: I think so. I think it’s gonna be really nice. I’m excited for this one. And of course as Saturn the malefic is dignified with a conjunction to Venus, right? Not great for Venus. It’s not a Venus series, but it helps make Saturn work a little bit better. So super-dignified Saturn with help from Venus.
CB: Brilliant. What are your website URLs?
AC: So classes and recorded things you can buy from at austincoppock.com. And look for the winter wonderland of Saturn in Aquarius announcements probably soon and then out by the end of the month at sphereandsundry.com.
CB: Nice. Brilliant. All right, I’ll put links to both your websites in the description below this video or on the podcast website. So as for myself, I’m working an episode on Mayan astrology, which will be available for early access through Patreon as soon as I get it recorded. I’m starting to release extended show notes through Patreon at the very basic Patreon tier where I release a PDF that has a detailed outline of each of the episodes, as well as all of the research notes that I wrote when I was preparing for it. For example, with the Inanna episode there was a ton of research that I had in the notes that didn’t even make it into the episode just due to time constraints. So I included that in the PDF that I released to patrons for that episode, which is a nice new bonus for people that sign up on Patreon to support the podcast each month.
In other news, Rob Bailey and I just recorded a new fifth lecture for the horary astrology course that we’ve been expanding and revising, and we’re gonna add that to the course now. We’ve got five more lectures to go that we’re gonna be recording each month over the course of the next year. And if people sign up now they can get into the course before we raise the price once we actually finish revising everything, if you get in while we’re still recording it now. So you can find out more information about that at theastrologyschool.com. And then finally, due to the aforementioned Twitter imploding and escaping that to find new ground, I’m starting to post more on TikTok because I already do video content. I’m starting to post short little clips of observations or things that have come up in different episodes or even just clips of highlights of different episodes on TikTok, as well as on Instagram. So if you want to check that out, you can find me on both social media platforms by just searching @theastrologypodcast and you’ll find me there.
All right, thank you both for joining me. This was amazing. I had such a good time doing this forecast. We will have to do this again sometime. And we’ll be back again next month to talk about the astrology of October. So thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
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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.
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