The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 424, titled:
Astrology Forecast November 2023
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on October 27, 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 November 27th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for November of 2023. Joining me today is Austin Coppock. Hey, Austin.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. How’s it going?
CB: It’s going. It’s been a month, and we have another big month coming up. So in this episode we’re gonna spend the first hour talking about news and recent events since our last forecast episode, and then in the second hour we’re gonna jump ahead and look at the astrological forecast for November and do a deep dive into the astrology coming up over the next four weeks. As always, there’s timestamps either below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. If you want to jump ahead to the forecast section or other sections of the podcast, feel free to use that. So first, before we get into the news, let me give you just a brief preview of the astrology of November using our Planetary Alignments Calendar.
So we start off the month actually coming off of a lunar eclipse in Taurus, which is actually taking place at the very end of October, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about this at the beginning of the forecast. But our first major astrological correlation at the beginning of the month besides that is Saturn is stationing direct at 0° of Pisces on the 4th of November. Then the following week Venus is moving into the sign of Libra on the 8th, Mercury is going into Sagittarius on the 10th. There’s a tough-looking Mars-Uranus opposition which is taking place on the 11th of November. Then we get our first lunation of the month which is a New Moon in the sign of Scorpio on the 13th. Then we have a rare Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio which takes place on the 18th. The Sun moves into Sagittarius on the 22nd, Mars into Sagittarius on the 24th, then Mars immediately squares Saturn in Pisces on the 25th. And then we get our second lunation of the month which is a Full Moon in the sign of Gemini on the 27th of November.
All right, so that’s the quick overview of the forecast we’ll be talking about later in the episode, but first let’s do a little bit of news and other stuff to catch us up on how the astrology has played out over the past few weeks since our last forecast at the end of last month. So of course the big thing that’s been happening over the past few weeks is the war that’s happening in Israel and Palestine. On October 7, there was a massive surprise attack that was launched on Israel by Hamas, and there were 1,400 Israelis killed and 200 hostages taken, and then subsequently Israel retaliated with many air strikes. And there’s been reportedly over 5,000 Palestinian casualties, many of them civilians that have been killed so far. So Israel’s currently preparing to launch a ground invasion into Gaza and has cut off food, water, and fuel for the past two weeks since the attacks, and there’s protests taking place all around the world and calls for a ceasefire.
So that was basically the main thing I think that’s dominated most of the past month. One of the things that was interesting about that from our perspective as astrologers is sometimes we have a tension about whether to say, “Oh, it’s gonna be a really difficult month,” or “There’s a lot of really tough stuff happening.” But last month we didn’t really have that intention. We pretty much agreed unanimously that last month looked like it was really tough due to all of the Pluto aspects, and we were pretty blunt about that I think in the last forecast, right?
AC: Yeah, I don’t remember. I remember trying to be polite about it, but not gilding the lily. Astrologically speaking, it was the classical situation where you have not one but multiple planets or points that all signify difficulty in and of themselves all aligned with each other, in the case of Mars and the South Node conjunct and square that Pluto. And so it’s just a lot of difficulty and we just see negativity—would be an understatement—all focused around a very small timeframe; like 2020 looked like too.
CB: Right. Which is actually interesting ‘cause we had the same thing. But we learned so much in 2020 about when you see really difficult stuff coming up to say that and not pull punches too much, and that ended up kind of coming in handy last month. One of the things we focused on was the Mars-Pluto square which was going exact around the 7th and 8th and 9th of October, and then that ended up coinciding very well with the attacks which opened everything on October 7. Then there was the Pluto station in Capricorn that happened on October 10, then Mars went into Scorpio on October 12, and then finally we had a major solar eclipse in Libra on October 14 which put us in eclipse season. And then we’ve just been in the middle of that eclipse and the upcoming difficult eclipse in Taurus at the end of this month, at the end of October, where everyone’s just waiting for the next stage of this to begin. But it’s been really striking how well a lot of it lined up with the astrology over the past few weeks.
AC: Yeah, yeah, it has been striking. There are times where you don’t want the astrology to be that literal.
CB: Right.
AC: There are times where you’re excited you got a prediction right. But then it’s like “Oh, no,” when you provide a metaphor sometimes or an image or a way of thinking about something, and you get a very literal version of that rather than the preferred metaphorical.
CB: Yeah. And I mean the main thing is just that there’s been an enormous amount of suffering and civilian casualties over the past several weeks. And just the images coming out of all of this conflict right now have been really devastating, seeing children dying on both sides and being murdered and some of the most extreme manifestations of some of those placements. Interestingly, it’s like we tried to interpret archetypally and in some instances actually did a really good job. One of the things I was really interested in was, last month, I used an analogy of being careful of issues where force is used and somebody reacting to something and then using too much force, like an excessive amount of force so that you hurt or kill something. And I used the analogy of Lenny from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in that forecast a month ago, and then it was interesting hearing what happened. There were the attacks on Israel and then Israel’s response, but so much of their response sounded like—so much of the terminology that was being used or the phrases were very much keyed in with that Mars-Pluto stuff of using overwhelming force.
I wrote down some quotes as the news stories were coming out, just about some of the quotes that were being used. And one of the quotes was “mighty vengeance.” Another one said, “They were going to turn Hamas into ruins.” Another said, “They were going to use an overwhelming show of force,” and another said, “They were going to fight back on a scale and intensity that the enemy has so far not experienced.” And another quote said “overwhelming retribution.” And so much of that was just very reminiscent in not very good ways of many of those underlying darker sides of some of those archetypes that we were talking about last month with those configurations.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And with Mars-Pluto you get the language of annihilation, right? Mars alone may use the language of triumph or victory, right? But the language of annihilation, the air was thick with it.
CB: Right, for sure.
AC: And just another note about that—this is not something I mentioned in the podcast last time—with Mars-Ketu or Mars and the South Node combined. I was taught—this is from the Vedic training that I’ve done—that combination can indicate that a person is possessed by the spirit of rage or a wrathful spirit, and that can be interpreted either psychologically or metaphorically or literally. But the concern with that combination under certain circumstances is that the entity or person will act as if possessed by rage and that they will lose themselves. They will seem like they’re someone else for a period of time. And this possession by rage I think is something that we’ve seen a lot over the last several weeks.
CB: And that was connected with which configuration again?
AC: With Mars-Ketu conjunctions.
CB: Okay, got it. Yeah, we’ve done so much research, and I keep seeing Pluto configurations also tied in with that and with the founding charts of different players—of Israel, of Hamas, of Benjamin Netanyahu. All of those have Mars-Pluto either conjunct closely or co-present in the same sign. And it also makes me think of that just because that’s part of what the trigger was here in this instance. So let’s talk about some of that astrology though. I meant to preface this part of the discussion by saying as astrologers we try to make sense of things through the lens of astrology and that’s what we’re gonna try to do here today. But obviously I’m not an expert on geopolitics in the Middle East, but I think like many people I’ve been learning a lot lately, and we’ll try to share some of the observations that I’ve had as an astrologer. But our goal isn’t really to recapitulate all of the news and information and talking points and discussions that have been happening over the past few weeks, but rather to talk about specific points where we’ve noticed a really compelling astrological correlation that provides some insight into the situation. So our goal here is to try to continue to serve that dual function that the forecast episodes always have, which is on the one hand recording and documenting how the astrology played out over the past month since our last forecast as part of adding to the research of the astrological tradition, but then also looking ahead at the month ahead in the second part of the episode.
So one of the things I know a lot of astrologers were focused on and were researching and were very interested in is this is a unique situation from an astrological standpoint because we actually have a pretty solid birth chart for Israel. Because it was founded so recently, because it’s not a country that’s like hundreds of years old before you know video and audio recording and everything else there’s actually pretty good documentation of it. So this is the chart that most people use for Israel, and it has 23° of Libra rising. It’s set for May 14, 1948 at 4:00 PM in Tel Aviv, Israel. And this was for the start of the meeting, when the gavel was first pounded to open the meeting by the first prime minister that basically led to the creation of Israel. So this chart has 23 Libra rising, and it has the Midheaven at 25° of Cancer.
And the thing that everybody immediately noticed when everything started happening this month is that Mars, I think on the day of the attacks, was at 25° of Libra. So it had just passed over the ascendant of Israel. It was squaring the Midheaven. And also transiting Pluto, which was just stationing there at 27-28 Capricorn, was directly on the IC and opposing the Midheaven, so there was like a very strong signature there right away. And then after that, immediately we had the first in a series of eclipses that will take place over the next year-and-a-half. We had the first eclipse in the sign of Libra which ended up being very close to and pretty much right on top of that ascendant for this chart. So it brought in the eclipse component ‘cause it meant the eclipse was taking place right on the ascendant of the chart for the foundation of Israel as a state.
AC: Yeah. And, yeah, it’s worth noting that the Moon at the time of the attack was applying to a square with that Mars conjunct the South Node and square Pluto, which we had identified as the most dangerous part of a quite unsteady month. And the Moon’s application or forming an aspect with a planet, especially a harder aspect like a square, is what brings these things about it. It brings something that’s ready to happen into being, which it did tragically.
CB: Yeah. That happened three times this month: twice in very negative ways, and third, in a positive way that the Moon acted as a trigger for a pre-existing configuration. So here we’re looking at the chart for when the Hamas attack began, around 6:30 AM on October 7, 2023. And what was interesting is like Libra was rising, and we see that Mars right there at 26°of Libra, and we see the South Node there at 24 Libra. But as you were pointing out the Moon was at 20° of Cancer, and it’s applying to that square with Mars and then the opposition with Pluto, which is activating and acting as a sort of trigger.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: So other things that were going on additionally was Venus was at 28° of Leo, which is a really interesting one because that was the shadow degree where Venus retrograded at like 29-28 Leo over the summer. So Venus was just finally returning to the degree it went retrograde earlier this summer. And 28 Leo keeps showing up as a sensitive point in this whole thing because that’s actually the degree of Mars in the Israel chart, 28° of Leo, so there’s lots of interesting connections there. Yeah, so this is the chart of the attack. Did you have anything else with this?
AC: With this chart—I mean we both went down research rabbit holes.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I could say a little bit about the South Node being in Libra and this being the first eclipse in Libra in this cycle.
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: The eclipses in Libra and Aries with the South Node in Libra, which occur roughly every 19 years, have every single time in the history of Israel since its founding shown violent disputes over borders. The first time was actually when the borders, to a territorial extent, were agreed upon with the surrounding Arab states. This was known as the ‘Green Line’ or the pre-1967 borders. And then of course what’s 1967? It’s the first time the nodes come back to South Node in Libra and North Node in Aries. And so the borders get changed to the 1967 borders which is a result of the war of attrition following the Six-Day War. I won’t walk everyone through every one of these, but every iteration since—it’s late ‘60s, late ‘80s, middle of the aughts, and then now—these borders get scuffed or overstepped, and there’s quite a bit of violence for an extended period of time over those borders. And it was really shocking to see that the first agreement around borders was during the period of these eclipses, and then they change the next time and they’re just always up for dispute. And so what’s interesting—
CB: Yeah—
AC: One more point about this I’d like to hand off is that Israel was born in the eclipse cycle right before this, with the North Node in Taurus and the South Node in Scorpio, and the Sun is with the North Node. So Israel was born right after an eclipse. And so Israel has its nodal return, and then the next phase is always this Libra-Aries, which is of course the 1st and 7th house for the nation, which is self and other for a person. It’s very ‘me and you’, ‘me versus you’, ‘me with you’, whatever that dynamic is. And so that’s what it’s looked like historically. Unfortunately it also looks like that now.
CB: Yeah. The occurrence of all this this month and the close coinciding with that eclipse in Libra that was so obvious sent me on a whole research path over the past few weeks trying to study when eclipses have coincided with past important moments of history, because it became really clear that this was one of those, and I wanted to try to understand it better by going back and looking at the context of other major events. Nick Dagan Best and I did a whole episode I just released where we found just so many important turning points in history when an eclipse would happen within just a few days of a really important historical moment. And one of them was, as you just said, the founding of Israel itself. It happened on May 14, 1948. And this was just like five days after a solar eclipse in the sign of Taurus. And then of course we’re getting ready to have another eclipse in Taurus here at the end of October, which is one of the things we’ll talk about here in a moment.
But also interestingly Benjamin Netanyahu—the current prime minister of Israel and the guy that’s kind of in charge of a lot of this right now—was actually born within 24 hours of a solar eclipse in the sign of Libra on October 21, 1949. His son is at 27° of Libra, and his Moon is at about 19° of Libra, and the South Node is right there at 16 Libra. So basically hours after he was born there was a solar eclipse in that sign. And so of course what we’re seeing now is a repetition of an eclipse in Libra happening at a really important event and turning point that he’s directly involved in and will become probably one of the things, one way or another, that he’ll be known for and that his legacy will hinge on, the events that are happening right now. And that’s something we saw over and over again happening in the ‘eclipses’ episode that Nick and I did last week.
AC: Yeah. Chris, could you click back to that chart for a second?
CB: For Netanyahu?
AC: Yes, please.
CB: There we go.
AC: So related to this are the questions of a nodal return, right? So this was a solar eclipse. The one that we just experienced was a solar eclipse on the South Node in Libra, and so that is a return for Netanyahu, right? On a very simple level eclipse returns activate whatever the nodal themes in a person’s life are. Some people are very nodal; they’re born right after eclipses or during eclipses. And so when you have these nodal returns and then eclipses within those, you see a key thread in that person’s storyline, as you said, of how this is handled. The fact that all this happened and then how it is handled is absolutely going to be part of his legacy. Worth noting, he also has the same Mars as the nativity of Israel.
CB: Yeah, at 27. His is at 26 Leo, and Israel’s Mars is at 28. But it means that Venus and the retrograde this summer—where Venus stationed there and then eventually came back there right on the attacks—was activating that for not just Israel but also his chart personally. So it’s also interesting he has that Mars-Pluto conjunction there. It’s a signature I keep seeing come up over and over again. I was trying to research the Israel side of things but then I was also trying to research Hamas—which was the organization that launched the attack on Israel that started the October 7—part of this, and interestingly if the foundation dates are roughly correct, it was founded on a Mars-Pluto conjunction in Scorpio. And December 10 of 1987, there was also a Saturn-Uranus conjunction in Sagittarius at the same time that was not as close, but was also present, so it’s interesting seeing just this repetition of some of these themes come up over and over again in different ways. And even looking at the Israel chart itself, there were two other placements that were interesting and curious: one of them is that very close Saturn-Pluto conjunction.
We’ve spent so much time talking about and thinking about Saturn-Pluto conjunctions over the past few years because of course that was one of the major alignments that happened in January of 2020. It went exact in January of 2020 at the emergence of COVID. And I did an episode talking about that, but also talking about how the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the early 1980s had coincided with the emergence of the AIDS pandemic basically. But this was one that I was never fully sort of clear about, the 1940s conjunctions of Saturn and Pluto which didn’t coincide with the pandemic. But it’s interesting that you have it right here, and one of the big things that happened was the foundation of Israel and how that just kind of bakes in that Mars-Saturn-Pluto conjunction into the chart so that you’ve just subsequently for many decades had these recurring periods of just these explosions of violence and stuff that keep happening over and over again, and it’s interesting thinking about that within the context of that either double or triple conjunction in Leo. As well, I meant to say the Saturn-Pluto conjunction there, and this is 1948. So we’re talking about a country that’s founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust that attempts to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe and how much that’s sort of embedded in the national psyche in different ways in Israel and shows up in different ways. And having that Saturn-Pluto conjunction there in the birth chart seems to speak to that or be reminiscent of it.
AC: Certainly. And the Moon being in the same sign testifies to that being a very felt legacy, right? It’s there but the Moon is there too. Wherever the Moon is we can feel that. It informs experience in a more lived way. But, yeah, the Saturn-Pluto conjunctions just following World War II are in a lot of national charts because we had this reorganization of the world order after World War II. And when you look at those charts you see a lot of nations that have boundaries drawn. This is Leo, right? It speaks particularly to the boundaries of sovereignty. And so you see a lot of nations where there’s been a lot of criticism since about where the lines were drawn. And again there are dozens of nations that—
CB: That’s a great point.
AC: —are part of that. Yeah, where it’s like the boundaries themselves are always going to be problems.
CB: So Saturn is always just classically boundaries, and Pluto being like conflict over that or tensions or extremism or other things like that.
AC: Yeah, just like we saw in 2020, the ‘boundedness’ of that and the widespread discomfort with the boundaries, right? The go-to image or feeling of being imprisoned.
CB: Right, for sure. The only other thing I noticed in the Israel chart was just that I thought it was interesting that Uranus is there at 24 Gemini—‘cause that’s also the same as the United States—and the connection between those two in some ways. But also that means starting in 2025, the US and Israel are both gonna start their Uranus return here just in a couple of years. And for the US I know that’s always coincided with a period of conflict because of it being configured to the US’s Mars, which is in the same sign in Gemini. So we’ve had like in the US the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II under those Uranus returns in Gemini. And whatever that’s indicating coming up for Israel in terms of some sort of major shift there, it’s with respect to the 9th house and different countries, and I don’t know if that relates then to the US or what.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of the United States and Israel having the same Uranus position—and then also the same Venus, which is the ruler of the ascendant in that Israel chart.
CB: Right, in Cancer. That’s a good point.
AC: What’s interesting is, I don’t know, for as long as I’ve paid attention maybe the last 20 some years, I always thought of the US and Israel as always being close allies, and you could see the synastry in the chart. But that wasn’t actually the case for the first several decades of Israel’s existence. But with that synastry, it’s not surprising that came to be the case.
CB: Right. All right, so other things, I was looking back through eclipse history in the eclipse episodes I mentioned ‘cause I was also trying to research ‘peace’ and what the different periods in the past were historically where that was more or less possible or the possibility of peace became almost something that seemed achievable at the time and there were different periods. But one of the big ones that came up that’s related to now was 30 years ago, they were in the process of doing the Oslo Accords, where the Israelis and the Palestinians started trying to strike some historical agreements try to work some things out or at least move in that direction, and some of that happened during Saturn in Aquarius.
But then it was interesting that they were given a Peace Prize for signing the first Oslo Accords and that Peace Prize was given October 14 of 1994, and that was when Saturn was in Pisces actually at the time. Saturn was in early Pisces just like it is now. But what ended up happening is about like a year later the prime minister of Israel who was involved in the peace process with the Palestinians was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli militant who didn’t like the concessions that were being made and other things I guess; and so that happened right at the same time as an eclipse. So that was like one of the examples we used of the death of a world leader that coincided with an eclipse at that time, but then it ended up having a disruptive process on the whole peace process with Saturn in Pisces going through at that time. And I read that Bill Clinton for example at the time called Yitzhak Rabin—the prime minister who was assassinated—a ‘martyr for peace’, which just made me think of that Saturn transit through Pisces at the time and that maybe being relevant or being symbolically significant in some way.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. Can you go back to that chart for just a second Chris?
CB: For the Nobel Peace Prize?
AC: Yes.
CB: Yeah, here you go.
AC: So what’s interesting is we have not a nodal return but we have the nodal opposition for Israel there, where the nodes are actually in the same degree as when Israel was founded but flipped; so we have North on South and South on North. And then the nodal oppositions are different from any other opposition because in the sky it just looks like eclipses in exactly the same place as when the person or nation was born but the dragon is facing the opposite way. And so it’s that other really strong activation of the eclipse axis in the natal chart. So it’s like the same, but opposite.
CB: And tied in with that, look at what’s happening on that node—Venus and Jupiter exactly conjoining. And what’s crazy about this—I almost missed it at first—Venus had just stationed retrograde a day earlier at 17° of Scorpio. So it slowed down and stopped at 17. So what happens if you animate the chart and move it forward is Jupiter actually overtakes Venus like within a day or two of this chart. So they won the Nobel Peace Prize or were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords basically right as Venus and Jupiter were conjoining, and Venus was stationing retrograde all conjunct the North Node.
AC: Oh, yeah. And that’s ruled by Mars in Leo, which is right on Israel’s natal Moon and getting ready to go over the rest of the planets in Leo.
CB: Yeah. Mars is like squaring Mercury too, which is not great. And of course the eventual outcome of that a year later was the prime minister being assassinated partially as a result of that, and then some of the things getting messed up subsequently over the next decade and continuing to devolve, which actually ties us into the eclipse in this same series 19 years ago that preceded this. It was really important that this eclipse just took place in Libra, and eclipses repeat in the same place every 19 years. So if you go back 19 years you end up in October of 2004, and what was happening then is an eclipse in Libra took place and the Israelis moved into Northern Gaza and occupied Northern Gaza at that time. Which is a really striking correlation then because that’s kind of a repetition of what everyone’s expecting right now, and in some ways what’s already been happening over the past few weeks with the bombing of Northern Gaza and with them telling everybody in Northern Gaza that they have to leave and move South. So we’re seeing a repetition there of very similar themes.
AC: Yeah, yeah, unfortunately.
CB: Yeah, so the only other thing that was relevant there that might be relevant here today in terms of repetitions is that on October 11, 2004, around the time of that eclipse in Libra, then prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, outlined his plan to start legislation for a disengagement from Gaza, and he presented that to the Israeli Congress; and later that month, around the Taurus eclipse, the Israeli Congress gave its preliminary approval of that plan. And part of the plan was to start removing settlements from Gaza at that time, which then they actually did, and dismantled a bunch of the settlements in Gaza that existed for a few decades up to that point in 2005, in the summer of 2005. So that’s the only thing that I’m a little hopeful for. There’s different not-good reasons for why they did that, but hopefully there could be some positive things to come out of all of this, if indeed that sort of disengagement from Gaza last time was part of what resulted from this eclipse series 19 years ago.
AC: Yeah, in my research all I’ve seen is patterns that I hope are not consistent. Again, with this installment of the eclipse cycle—which has just begun for us, which is gonna last about another year-and-a-half—in every installment of this in Israel’s history it’s gotten ugly and then it’s stayed ugly for years. It was only the first one where the Green Line was established that didn’t see the continuation of violence for several years. Every other one has had sparks that have continued to burn for several years, and so I hope that that is not the case. These astrological patterns are shockingly consistent but it’s not every single time, right? Things do have to change at some point. But up to this point all I’m seeing with this particular eclipse cycle is something that I hope we don’t do again.
CB: Yeah, I do think something is different about this time, and there’s something different about this eclipse happening on the ascendant to the Israel chart. I feel like in previous decades where there’s been incursions into Gaza by the Israelis, it was like before the advent of smartphones and social media, and I think on both sides this time the extent and vividness of the carnage and the civilian casualties is much more clear to everyone than it has been in previous decades. And there’s something about that that I feel like is almost changing the nature of the dialogue and of the potential for whatever is gonna come out of this because it’s not like previous decades where it was just like a brief snippet in a news report as far as people were concerned or things like that. There’s something more in your face about it than at other times, in addition to just the scale and the scope of the carnage and the civilian casualties.
AC: Yeah, that’s a hopeful point. And I suppose that this is the first time that this repetition has happened since we moved into a different historical era from the triplicity perspective. We just got done with 200 years of Jupiter and Saturn in earth signs, we’re now in the 200 years of air. And these elemental eras have different rules, right? Earth is not the same as air historically, not the same as fire. And so, yeah, maybe there’s a reason to be hopeful for an exception to the established pattern.
CB: Sure. But certainly in the short term there’s a lot of really difficult astrology coming up in the next month that we’re not trying to sugarcoat at all. I mean even just the Saturn station that the month is about to open with, even eclipse aside, it’s stationing at 0°of Pisces—which is opposite, within 3° of that Mars—in the Israel chart at 28° of Leo. So it’s like that sounds very similar to what we are gearing up for if they do a ground war incursion into Gaza and just an even larger amount of casualties on both sides and in a long sort of protracted thing; that sounds reminiscent of that with Saturn stationing opposite that Mars.
AC: Yeah, that certainly suggests that. And then Mars being in Scorpio now through most of November and making a very important conjunction with the Sun. Mars is not only strong in Scorpio but it’s the fixed sign that it rules. And as we described—not thinking about this last month, but thinking about it as an influence—Mars in Scorpio is fierce and determined. Part of its power is that it doesn’t give up, even if it would be better for everyone if it did, or you would prefer there not be so much tenacity. So, yeah, I think if we are going to place our hopes, we won’t be placing our hopes for peace in November.
CB: Yeah. I’m trying to see—any other notes? The only other major notes I had were just continuing the eclipse theme. I believe the current leader of Hamas was born within four days of an eclipse, and the previous leader of Hamas before him, who’s also in the news recently, was also born within a week of an eclipse, and that leader took over at one point when the two previous founders of Hamas were killed in an Israeli air strike which also occurred on an eclipse. So there’s like eclipse stuff all throughout this with all of the major players on both sides, and it’s happening during eclipses. So it’s been a stunning, illustrative—at least from an astrological and sort of abstract intellectual standpoint—lesson about eclipses and how they can both coincide with the birth of people, and then when they do sometimes those eclipses become even more important in their subsequent chronologies.
AC: Yeah, right. It’s that thing with astrology where we’re all affected by all of the planets, but usually if you filter out a biography, you filter out history, nations and people tend to have one or two planets or cycles that really show you the best/the worst, that give you the landmarks of the biography. Over the last couple years we’ve been talking about Russian chronology and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. We’ve talked about Russian history and—or excuse me, American history and Uranus in Gemini. And we see with Russia and with Israel we have leaders like Vladimir Putin who has the Saturn-Neptune just like Russia because of course he does. You have Netanyahu who has the solar eclipse just like the one Israel was born right after. And our friend Nick Dagan Best, who you did the eclipse episode with, has done a stunning job of finding the people for whom particular Venus retrograde cycles tell their story. And this works on a natal level as well as a global power politics level.
CB: For sure. And those were actually two we didn’t include in the episode. But the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the new Russian state in December of 1991 happened within days of an eclipse, and then Vladimir Putin became the acting prime minister of Russia in August of 1999 which was within two days of an eclipse. So, yeah, prominent powerful people, major turning points in world history—eclipses act as triggers. They’re not the only thing, like we saw with COVID for example where eclipses happened in December of 2019 and January of 2020. There’s always background things that are happening, like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that was happening then. But these eclipses can really act as triggers, as flashpoints, and as points where everything just suddenly becomes more prominent and the speed of events starts moving very quickly.
AC: Yeah. One of the ways that I teach nodes with students is that you’ve got the nodes, which are somewhere always, and within a given eclipse cycle you have for example the North Node being in Aries and the South Node being in Libra for about 18 months. And part of the nature of the nodes is they describe what is hidden, obscured, or in psychological language, latent. It’s there but it’s beneath the surface, you can’t see it or feel it. But the eclipses give what is invisible or latent a moment to rise to the surface and change everything at once. And so I find it useful to think of the nodes, the transiting nodes, as like storing up power and getting ready for big shifts to occur, but they need the moments of the eclipses; they need eclipse season to come up to the surface and actually change what things look like.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
AC: And in a less horrible way we also see important changes in perspectives in natal charts. We’re like, “Oh, it all came together, like I’m actually done with this,” or “I’m actually ready to do this,” right? When they come to the surface in an individual’s life, it’s not always assassinations and regime change and transitions of power.
CB: Yeah, that’s true. And, yeah, actually something I want to transition to is talking more about that in eclipses here in a minute. To wrap up this section we mentioned that the Moon keeps triggering other configurations here this month, over the past month. So we’ve already talked about how the beginning of the Hamas attack itself was the Moon swooping in and triggering the Mars-Pluto square. But then also the bombing of a hospital that occurred on October 17, the Moon was at 28° of Scorpio, and it was actually applying, again, within 2° to a square with Saturn, which was at 0° of Pisces, so it was like activating that placement. And then there was one other that fell on the same day that was more positive and was one of the few glimmers of hope during all of this, and one of them was that Hamas released two American hostages on October 20, in the evening, probably somewhere around 9:30 PM, give or take. It was actually a little later than this. But the main point is that this is the part of the month, remember, we talked about in our last forecast, that one of the most positive aspects of the month was this Venus-Jupiter trine where Venus got up to 10°, 11°, and 12° of Virgo and it trined Jupiter at 12° of Taurus. And so one positive event that happened is the Moon came into Capricorn, it completed a Grand Trine with Venus and Jupiter, and two hostages were released out of, I guess, somewhere around 200 that are still being held that were taken during the original attack on October 7.
But then also one of the things that happened is that Israel had been cutting off food and water and fuel to Gaza for the past two weeks which has created an enormous humanitarian crisis. And I think the US and lots of people were protesting and trying to put pressure on Israel to allow humanitarian aid trucks into the country for simple things like food and water, and then eventually the first aid trucks were allowed into Gaza on October 21, around 10:30 in the morning, give or take. And this was also right on the Venus-Jupiter trine which was being completed and triggered by the Moon trining Venus and Jupiter and creating a Grand Trine. So it was a good example, even though this is still paltry in comparison. It was only like 28 trucks, whereas they need something like a thousand trucks in order to support the basic calorie needs of the people in Gaza in terms of food and stuff that needs to be imported. So it’s not actually fixing everything but it was at least a glimmer of hope that sometimes when these positive aspects do occur, even in the midst of other terrible stuff that’s happening, that sometimes there can be little bits of relief or little positive things or little attempts at peace or what have you.
AC: Yeah, it’s something, where there can be very in a situation where there can very easily be nothing.
CB: Right. Yeah, so I thought that was something and something important to keep in mind. When we look at a lot of the difficult aspects that are coming up in November over the next several weeks, we’ll try to also point out some of the occasional times where there’s a glimmer of some positive stuff going on that could be a positive counterbalancing thing or could be helping at least a little bit.
AC: Yeah, I mean on a lived level, we can probably all think of hard periods in life where it sucked for a year, or it sucked for three months, or it sucked for three years. But the bright moments in that, even though they don’t change the overall arc, are irreplaceable, right? A good day in the middle of a bad week, or even a good day in the middle of a rough month is not without meaning.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so it looks like we’re at about 50 minutes. So I want to transition and do just a couple other news topics before we move on to the forecast. Okay?
AC: Let’s do it.
CB: All right, so the only other really major one I did want to mention briefly—even though I don’t have a lot to say about it astrologically, but it seemed crucial because of the weird coinciding—but there were some major earthquakes in Afghanistan; a cluster of four of them this month. And the first two were actually on October 7, which was the same day as the attack on Israel with the Mars-Pluto square which is really striking. And then the next two on October 11 and 15th really clustered around the October 14 solar eclipse in Libra. So that was actually a huge thing where the World Health Organization estimated there were 1,400 fatalities. 2,000 injuries, and 43,000 people affected, and 100,000 requiring humanitarian aid. So it was just weird the coinciding of that with some of the astrology and the other world events that were taking place at the same time under some of those difficult alignments.
The other thing I wanted to mention is there was a thing I saw originally on TikTok a few weeks ago—it was happening at the beginning of October—where the police came and visited their metaphysical store; they have an occult store in Pennsylvania. And the owner of the store—their name is Beck Lawrence, who just turned 26 and owns a store that’s called the Serpent’s Key Shoppe & Sanctuary, a metaphysical store in Hanover, Pennsylvania—got profiled in a local newspaper that was talking about local businesses, and it gave them a positive write-up. And apparently the local police chief saw this profile and then went in and visited them and told them that there are anti-fortune-telling laws that are still on the books in Pennsylvania. And I don’t know if it was supposed to be a threat or if it was supposed to be a warning or what it was exactly, but it created this kind of thing on social media, and even eventually The New York Times published it in an article titled “A Pennsylvania Shop Offered Tarot Readings. Then the Police Came.” And it just sort of highlighted that in many places there are still these archaic laws on the books that are anti-astrology laws or other types of anti-fortune-telling laws that are latent and sometimes not being enforced.
But it reminded me that even as recently as 20 years ago, with all those laws on the books, that sometimes the police would raid metaphysical bookstores. And I heard stories of stores being raided in Denver just 20 years ago and they would arrest astrologers or other readers for some of these archaic laws. And what happened at the time is that there were organizations set up like the Association for Astrological Networking that had lawyers that would fight these laws, and they would always win them on First Amendment grounds, on the right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But it’s interesting, we’ve been talking about over the past few years with the Saturn in Pisces and the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, that one of the things that comes up with that sometimes is skepticism or the potential for pushback against astrology. And with Saturn stationing in Pisces here in the next few weeks, it just really reminded me of that and I worry it could be like an echo of things to come potentially and the need for astrologers to think in terms of that and sort of organize properly to fight things like that if necessary.
AC: Yeah, yeah. That’s a real thing. And we see both, as you said, Neptune-Saturn, with Saturn coming to limit or constrain or potentially condemn whatever Neptune’s been doing in Pisces. And so not only do we have the energy of that pending conjunction but we also have that marking the end of Neptune’s time in Pisces. And Neptune went into Pisces a little bit in 2011 and then strolled in in 2012, and there have been a huge number of cultural changes since then: one of them is that astrology is so much more popular. You and I were both there for it, Chris, and we were very confused for many years. We decided to be astrologers in a very different circumstance. And astrology got, I don’t know, five times as popular starting maybe 2018-2019, a whole generation-and-a-half poured in. Do you remember the quaint discussions that we had about, “Oh, where are the young people?”
CB: Right.
AC: Which is literally absurd now but was a very real concern even in 2012. And so we know that Neptune’s leaving Pisces. We know that Saturn and Neptune are getting closer and closer. And so you and I have been talking about this, I’ve been thinking about this for years. ‘Cause whenever you have a flood, floods don’t last, right? Or high tide never lasts. And so what does it look like when the tide goes out? You mentioned pushback on astrology from skeptics. We also historically have pushback on astrology from religious organizations, right?
CB: Right.
AC: And so one of the things that astrology has managed to survive and will manage to survive is that astrology gets it from both sides. The secular humanists think that we’re lying to ourselves and people, and the fundamentalist religious people think that what we’re doing is real, but clearly verboten and possibly empowered by the Devil or other powers.
CB: Yeah, I was just thinking about that in the ‘eclipses’ episode ‘cause in the Bible, Jesus is not only born under an astrologically-auspicious alignment or some unspecified alignment—where a group of astrologers actually goes and follows it to see his birth supposedly in the Gospel of Matthew—but he then dies, if you read the Bible, under an eclipse, which makes it actually one of the most famous eclipse stories.
AC: Wow.
CB: Jesus actually, it says pretty clearly, died under an eclipse in the middle of a day, which is, again, another astrological correlation. That ties it in with not only the older Mesopotamian astrological tradition—which may have started, I discovered, due to a series of three kings that may have died under eclipses 2000 BCE-3000 BCE—but it even makes it in line with the contemporary tradition, where Nick and I pointed out that the three kings who died in the UK in the 20th century all died around eclipses. So it’s interesting thinking about that and the religious pushback that astrology gets from Christians sometimes when astrology is literally the focal point in the biography of Jesus.
AC: Yeah. Well, we actually had something along this theme happen last month, here around the ‘Coppockia’. In concert with the release of her Thema Mundi series, Kait had contracted with a local bakery to create these super cool, globe-shaped cookies with the primordial continent of Pangea. And this bakery, which I won’t name now that I think about it—it was a very large order of treats. And then they emailed Kait shortly before the launch and the owner said basically, “Oh, I read your website. And in trying to live a Jesus-centered life, a Christ-centered life, I have very strong boundaries around witchcraft and astrology and I can’t work with you.” And so Kait’s super resourceful and she managed to scramble and get it done and come up with an alternative anyway. That wasn’t legal precedent, but if we’re looking at pushback against astrology that was something that happened to us very recently.
CB: Yeah, that’s amazing.
AC: It’s not amazing. I mean it’s a great example. And we were both like, “Oh, yeah, Saturn-Neptune.” We were bumping into one of the boundaries.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And of course there are fortune-telling laws on the books here that aren’t enforced, but that’s the worrying point, right? It’s like how easy or hard is it for there to be pushback, legally speaking? And the laws are still on the books, they’re just not enforced. It’s much easier to just start enforcing an existing law than to go through the whole legislative process of creating new anti-astrology laws.
CB: Right.
AC: And what Leisa Schaim wrote just now—who was the former presiding officer of AFAN—is the Association for Astrological Networking took a case in the ‘90s all the way to the California Supreme Court and won an anti-astrology case, but presumed current safety is based on the honoring of legal precedent and interpretations of the First Amendment. And the current US Supreme Court, since adding the last few members, has not always been honoring legal precedent anymore. So it’s like astrologers, we can’t always rest on our laurels, so that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to mention this. AFAN, I believe this year, was recently merged with OPA, the Organization for Professional Astrology. So you can now find out more information at opaastrology.org. And hopefully if this becomes an issue that astrologers need to deal with again OPA would be able to step up, with AFAN now being part of it, to deal with some of this stuff. And I’ll be paying close attention to what happens with this case, with Beck Lawrence who is the name of the person that runs the occult store in Pennsylvania. And you can find them @thestitchingwitch on TikTok if you Google that. They mentioned recently their Sun is in Virgo, Moon is in Taurus, and ascendant is in Scorpio. So that means this Taurus eclipse that’s about to happen later this month is in their 10th whole sign house, so it’ll be interesting to see how things play out.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And just one point to make, there are so many people who have jumped into astrology in the last five years. And astrology’s wonderful. Just something to think about if you’re continuing in astrology, something I think about a lot, is think about how you represent astrology. Because when astrology is represented poorly—which it always has tons of people who represent it extremely poorly. That’s not going to ever end, but you invite criticism. And unlike the last couple years astrology is a thing you can do in the open. That’s a fragile state which is not true consistently here in the West. Inviting astrology to be targeted is bad for astrology and it makes it harder for the astrologers. It’s important to not take for granted just being able to talk about astrology, do astrology readings, like that’s not a given.
CB: Right. It hasn’t been historically.
AC: No. And I don’t want to and I’m not forecasting a sort of ‘pogrom’ of astrologers, but there will be more pushback. We’ve been in this very temporary state of zero pushback/surprising acceptance and that’s probably not going to be the case for the rest of my life or yours.
CB: And that’s a good point though. Therefore it’s important for astrologers to present things as well as they can, to behave as ethically as you can, and to act in public in a way that represents all of us well because if you don’t then conversely it reflects badly on all of us. And unfortunately the flip side of the coin with some of those laws is that there are scammers out there, and there are sometimes people that aren’t, I don’t think, real astrologers that will try to come in and use astrology to like grift people. I have that issue constantly with Instagram where people will make fake profiles and then reach out to people with my fake Astrology Podcast profile and try to offer them a reading or a fake reading or something like that. So scammers do exist; therefore it’s important for astrologers to recognize and call out when it happens. There is an ambiguity of course of what’s the line between a legitimate astrologer versus somebody that’s not acting legitimately or in good faith that can sometimes be blurry. But nonetheless those are some of the issues that were happening back in the ‘90s in the astrological community when they created some of the ethical codes in the different organizations and stuff and that’s part of the reason why.
AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I’m on my fourth or fifth Instagram doppelganger.
CB: Nice. Do they call people—what’s the phrase? Do they say, “Hello, beloved?”
AC: Oh, it’s so good.
CB: I would love to get a message from you that says, “Hello, beloved.”
AC: Yeah, it starts like that, and it always ends with “Blessed be,” and then there’s tons of emojis. So I don’t use emojis. I do not end my messages to people with ‘blessed be’. And I am not cold-calling people hoping to sell readings; I’m past that in my career at this point. But I’ve never randomly messaged people on the internet and been like, “Oh, my God, I need you to let me give you a reading.” Which a lot of people are like, “Boy, this doesn’t sound like you, Austin.”
CB: Yeah.
AC: Just in case you’re in a confused state of mind and you think it might be me, it is not. Look for the emojis and look for the really positive language, that’s how you’ll know it’s not me.
CB: Right. On the other hand if you get a message that’s like telling you that you’re doomed next month then that might be you. Like you’d actually can’t tell, it could go either way.
AC: Yeah, I see a shadow falling across your life. I see something monstrous arising within it.
CB: Exactly. All right, I like that. Okay, on that note, I think that might be a good concluding remark for our news section. All right, I want to give a shoutout to our sponsor for this episode which is the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs and Calendars. Your Honeycomb almanac or calendar helps you to keep track of both mundane and natal astrology for the year ahead. It is fully customized to your natal chart, preferred house system, and local time zone. Open your Honeycomb to any day of the year and you’ll see the mundane transits perfecting that day, plus the unique natal transits affecting your charts specifically. Your Honeycomb includes a 12-month ephemeris and overview tables for lunations and planetary stations in the coming year. The latest version also lists shadow periods for Mercury, Venus, and Mars retrogrades.
In addition, you can select extra features for your Honeycomb, like the Hellenistic plug-in which highlights the transits of your annual profected time-lord, tracks your zodiac releasing periods, and assesses your natal and solar return charts for the traditional planetary conditions. Honeycomb offers free shipping in the continental United States and affordable international shipping, along with digital additions and gift cards. Six-month almanacs start at just $10 for a digital PDF and $27 for a printed planner, and all Honeycombs now come with a free PDF edition when you order a printed one. To receive your Honeycomb in time for the holidays, place your order by the end of November at Honeycomb.io. So shoutout to Honeycomb, they’ve been amazing. And one of the things, again, we didn’t have when we were coming up as astrologers—I’m very jealous—is the ability to get personalized stuff like this. We had to get the ones that were non-personalized 20 years ago.
AC: Yeah, I had a little Llewellyn pocket calendar for many years in a row. I’d be opening that up and squinting at it.
CB: Exactly, and trying to just guesstimate what your transits are for that day. Not the case anymore with Honeycomb and with other stuff that’s available these days. I’m very grateful for that. And, yeah, a shoutout to them, and visit their website to find out more information.
AC: Yeah, I mean, younger astrologers, Honeycomb is the reason you don’t have to walk 20 miles through the snow like Chris and I did.
CB: Exactly. You can run—what is the phrase? They can run because we walked up the hill, in the snow, or whatever the phrase is.
AC: Yeah. I’m just getting the image of the Segway, the absurd little standing scooter things. Where we trudged through the snow, you will Segway by us quickly in a way that might irritate us but we know it’s for the best.
CB: Yeah. We will shake our fists like old astrology men. All right, let’s transition into talking about the astrological forecast for October at this point—for November. Let’s forget about October. Really we can’t actually, now that I think about it.
AC: Yeah, it’s really not a clean slate.
CB: No, it’s not. And actually we need to talk about that because we’re recording this forecast a little early on October 23d, and as a result of that we’re doing it before the final eclipse of October, which is gonna take place on October 28. Because that’s part of the energy of the month and because the energy of that eclipse is gonna echo into early November for sure, it might be worth revisiting that eclipse and just taking a look at it one more time to refresh ourselves on how not very pleasant that eclipse looks. So I’m gonna pull up the animated chart, and I’m gonna move it to October 28, and we see this configuration right here where the lunar eclipse or the Full Moon/lunar eclipse goes exact at 5° of Taurus opposite to the Sun at 5 Scorpio. And right at the same time there’s a Mercury-Mars conjunction that’s forming with Mercury at 10° of Scorpio and Mars at 11° of Scorpio, and then all of that is opposite to Jupiter, where Jupiter’s at 11° of Taurus, so that there’s a Mars-Jupiter opposition that’s happening simultaneously. So that’s a lot to unpack. But because this is basically like the opening of the month, this is probably the thing we need to start with first.
AC: Yeah. In some ways this just before the beginning of November eclipse is the supercharged version of a lot of the dynamics that we’re going to be doing for the first part of November, right? Like we’re dealing with Mercury, Mars, and the Sun all in Scorpio together, all opposing Jupiter, all opposing Uranus. And so the Moon, just like we talked about earlier, the Moon comes in and makes all of that very clear and very real, with the additional force of an eclipse behind it. But like these are the dynamics, right? And it’s not easy to summarize—we’re gonna try—that Mercury, Mars, Sun in Scorpio opposite Uranus, Jupiter in Taurus.
CB: Yeah. So one of the things I want to talk about that I didn’t make clear enough last month is the solar eclipse that occurred two weeks ago in Libra was the first of that series in Libra that will take place over the next year; it was the first one in Libra. And then this eclipse in Taurus is actually the last of an eclipse series that’s been bouncing back and forth between Taurus and Scorpio for two years. ‘Cause the first one in this series actually started in late 2021, in like November of 2021, when we had our first lunar eclipse in Taurus. So, to me, I think that means that there’s something about this eclipse—for many people in terms of their personal lives—that will be the winding down and the culmination of a series of events and changes that have been happening in that sector of your chart over the course of the past 20 years; or sorry, the past two years. And for that reason for many people it will be the culmination of something and the bringing to completion or the ending of that phase rather than something that’s just like completely new for the most part for many people because it’s a continuation of something that’s two-years-old now.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. This is the last installment. This is the last episode in the series. It’s almost an epilogue because the nodes are done. The nodes have been done for several months now with Taurus and Scorpio, but there’s just one last thing, one last thing in the Taurus-Scorpio axis before we can move on. And even though an epilogue comes after the main events of a story, often it changes the meaning of the story, right? You’re like, “Oh, so they actually ended up happy, even though we ended on this terrible note?” or “Oh, it looked like they won, but then when we looked at them five years later, hmm, maybe that wasn’t really a victory.”
CB: Right.
AC: So it’s got that like epilogue quality. Like after the end but actually the real end.
CB: Or like they destroyed the ring in Mordor but then in the book the scourging of the Shire happens.
AC: Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. Which doesn’t change the total arc of the legend of the Lord of the Rings, but for the Shire inhabitants, not so good.
CB: Yeah. Deep cuts with the Lord of the Rings references here. Only movie watchers will not understand ‘cause they cut that out of the movie. Yeah, so this eclipse series and previous ones have been interesting because one of the things that’s shown up with a lot of them have been these financial crashes over the past two years. Remember in May of 2022 when an eclipse happened—I think it was one of these lunar eclipses—that cryptocurrency coin Luna crashed, and it wiped out like $60 billion dollar worth of value in the cryptocurrency space and really shook up and started leading to a decline in Bitcoin and other stuff like that. And then six months after that, in November of 2022, one year ago, the last time there was a Taurus lunar eclipse, was the FTX crash which centered right on that eclipse. In a matter of days this entire company just like crashed and it became one of the biggest financial, not just debacles but—I can’t think of the word—swindling of a scheme in history that just like collapsed.
AC: And don’t we have the trial of the owner/leader/whatever, head CEO of FTX? Isn’t that trial happening now?
CB: I know he’s like getting charged with stuff, so maybe it is, yeah. I don’t know if those dates are gonna line up. Yeah, somebody in the comments says it is.
AC: And so it’d be interesting to look at the last eclipse in this series which marked the collapse of that house of cards and see how that correlates with sentencing or whatever. Yeah, it’s interesting because these eclipses in Taurus have been with Uranus. And Uranus in Taurus, which we’ve just talked about for a long time, one of the things that Uranus in Taurus always brings, one of the things that it shakes up in addition to food—which this time it’s led to massive inflation in food prices—but it shakes up food and money, right? Taurus connects us to fundamentals which we’d say is basic, but they’re fundamental in the sense that so much rests on top of what money is worth and what food is available.
And so having the eclipses hit the ‘Uranus in Taurus’ project—which cryptocurrency did not begin under Uranus in Taurus, it became huge under Uranus in Taurus. Uranus moved into Taurus for the first time in 2018 and that was the first year ever. It was like, “Holy shit, this Bitcoin thing, let me tell ya, I wish I’d gotten into it back in (blah, blah, blah, blah, blah).” And so we have the eclipses hitting that project. Again, the eclipses on Uranus in Taurus have also completely fucked with global food supply through the vector of the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as COVID logistical things. But the net result that eclipses with Uranus in Taurus have pointed to is this eclipsing or disruption of what are supposed to be givens, right? Food and money.
CB: Right. The most fundamental material necessities sometimes. And in doing the eclipses research, I came to understand better and redefine better my keywords that I always used for eclipses for years, which is that they represent great endings and great beginnings, and I realized like some of where that comes from is, in some instances, some of the things we see with like world leaders passing away. Sometimes there’s no greater end to something than like the death of something either literally or metaphorically, and that’s one of the things that comes along with eclipses. And that can be metaphorical in that it can represent the death of a relationship. It can represent the death of a career or like your job, like doing a specific job at work and beginning a new one; this theme of like endings of things, but then also how that sometimes opens you up for a new beginning in that area at the same time. And one of the analogies I thought of recently was how in nature sometimes when you get a forest that grows up and there’s so much overgrowth that eventually lightning will strike and there’ll be a wildfire, and it’ll burn away so much of the forest. But then in the process it will sort of lay the ground for like new growth, which is like a natural part of the cycle that’s necessary and that can get messed up if that process doesn’t happen periodically.
AC: Yeah. In a lot of regions, like the one I live in, we have hundreds of species that depend on the occasional forest fire to complete their cycle; it’s built in. But, yeah, with endings and beginnings, like one of the oldest and simplest ways of thinking about the eclipses is ‘the king is dead, long live the new king’. When the head of state is decapitated, you need a new head of state, right? It’s the beginning of a new regime. And you saw that quite literally with the history of kingship in England, and Egypt of course.
CB: Right, for sure. Yeah, with pretty much every king in the UK in the 20th century. It was really wild to see that and the end of one era and the beginning of another. So I think people can think of that in their personal lives—in terms of looking at where this eclipse and the Libra eclipse fell—as themes of where one era is ending and another era is beginning. But with the Taurus eclipse, it should be something that’s been building or in the process of happening for a while now in six-month increments. And I’m trying to think, in terms of current world events, this is the one that started two years ago I think when Biden temporarily did that procedure like right on a Taurus eclipse. And I’m a little nervous about him. This is the last time this falls in his 6th house, and he hasn’t been looking very vigorous lately. He’s been looking more tired than usual, probably due to all the traveling. But I hope that he doesn’t have any problems with this falling in his 6th house for the last time, since that one two years ago did coincide with the temporary giving of power to Kamala Harris when he was under for an operation for like a day or something like that. We’ll see how that goes.
AC: Yeah, because he has the Moon so early in Taurus. As we were discussing the other day, of all the eclipses in Taurus, this is the one that is closest to the natal Moon, so there’s certainly reason for concern.
CB: Okay. And we’re having a very rare Mars-Sun conjunction that hasn’t happened very often over the past century coming up in November, and he actually has a Sun-Mars conjunction in his 12th house. So that’s something we might talk about more later when we get to that conjunction.
AC: So one more thing that I think this eclipse connects to. Again, what this eclipse connects to, it also connects to a lot of November, because it’s the same planets in Scorpio and Taurus during the eclipse and then for several weeks after the eclipse. We’ve discussed Jupiter-Uranus both being in Taurus and how that’s correlated with really vigorous organized labor action in the United States and maybe other places too. I know about it happening in the US with the writers’ strike. We’ve got the auto workers strike and obviously the actors’ strike. We have a nurses’ strike. And we discussed last month, and maybe before that, Jupiter-Uranus. So if Uranus likes to change the basic things, Uranus in Taurus—food, money, and then labor, right? Just people working to make sure the trains run on time, the food gets delivered, like all this fundamental, ‘things don’t run without them’. And so Jupiter-Uranus, we’ve got that until the end of next May, so I expect more vigorous organized labor action. But this eclipse on that point and with the opposition from Mars in particular seems like a difficult point for this swell of organized labor movement. It is tempting or hopeful to see the Moon being with Jupiter as a positive thing, but I just think back to when we were looking at a lunar eclipse—or no, we were looking at a solar eclipse right next to Jupiter in December of 2019. And in retrospect we saw—a little bit in ‘forespect’ too—that the eclipse didn’t help Jupiter, and it didn’t benefit from having Jupiter there. In fact, the eclipse kind of ruined Jupiter.
CB: Right.
AC: And so I would prefer that not to be the case. But seeing this eclipse near Jupiter-Uranus, I guess I can’t bring myself to assume that it’s going to help these things.
CB: We famously disagreed about that one, and I was trying to see it more positively. And I was like, “That Jupiter co-presence, maybe that’ll help this eclipse not be as terrible as it looks,” and we disagreed about that on the December 2019 forecast or maybe like the 2020 forecast. I am here to say today—and I’m gonna be the bigger man—I lost that debate, you were right on that one. That was a good call back then because that ended up being the COVID eclipse. And that’s such a funny constant tension we’ve had over the years with the forecast episodes of like when to lean into the negative stuff when we see it versus when to try to see what the positive side is. I sometimes am—not paranoid—but concerned not to only focus on the negative stuff but to try to see some of the brighter sides of things as well ‘cause I don’t want to go too far in either direction. But it’s interesting seeing that as a tension forecast to forecast how we deal with that, especially in months where things are really hard.
AC: Yeah. And the balance point is why bother doing astrology at all if it’s not going to be useful? It’s not useful to feel trapped in an assembly line of doom where you’re being dragged inexorably towards a torturous future you can do nothing about.
CB: Right.
AC: That doesn’t help you navigate. But then it’s also equally but differently useless to be imagining that around the next corner is the realization of all your hopes and dreams and the cessation of all your difficulties. And so we’re trying to navigate between promising false-positives and creating despair about negatives, right? ‘Cause the thing about negatives is they tend to expand in the mind to fill everything. Even if it’s just a shit couple days and then it’s over it’s a function of the mind that we tend to focus on the bad thing that’s gonna happen. So, I mean, yeah, we’re always trying to navigate that, and I think we have different ideas sometimes of what would be most useful. But I do think that we’re both trying to be of service and to be useful,’cause what’s the point if it’s not useful.
CB: Yeah. And sometimes as astrologers we also have the experience in our personal lives of seeing a difficult transit coming up, knowing what the worst-case scenario might be and sometimes anticipating that. But then it comes and it happens and it’s something bad or annoying but it’s not the worst-case scenario and you sort of get through it. So I commonly want to give room for that so that we don’t overstate the point. But then sometimes years like 2020 happen or months like this past month happen and sometimes it is the worst-case scenario for people, and so leaving room for that or acknowledging that is very important.
AC: Just a note about that. I would say most of the times where things have ended up being bad and they looked bad in the astrology ahead of time, a lot of times we were unable to escape a really difficult interpretation. I remember planning the 2020 yearly with you and Kelly who was our ‘bouquet of positivity’ as a counterpoint for many years. I remember I literally asked Kelly, “Okay, here’s what I’m seeing. Like please put a spin on it. Find the silver lining for me.” And she was like, “Can’t do it.”
CB: Right.
AC: I think it was telling that there was no way around it. And at a smaller scale we had some of the same dynamic last month where it was like, no, this Mars-Ketu square Pluto heading into eclipses—this is going to be hard for a lot of people.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And famously, in our 2020 year ahead forecast, our famous, all-time legendary phrase that ‘there will be no hugging in the third week of March of 2020’, and that ended up becoming very literally true during the lockdowns.
AC: No touchy-feely.
CB: No touchy or feely at all for a good month or two there. So let’s redirect back to this eclipse really quickly, a couple of more points. Mercury-Mars conjunction, I wanted to give some keywords for that ‘cause that’s happening the day of the eclipse, and it goes exact the next day on October 29. So I was writing down phrases like ‘a war of words’, ‘verbal aggression’, ‘using communication systems for fighting or for war’, ‘shooting the messenger’, ‘malicious lies’. Traditionally Mercury-Mars combinations were ‘dishonesty’ or ‘lying’ aspects. And also ‘heated debates’ are some of the things that come up for me with that. And then Mars opposite Jupiter happening at the same time for me more broadly feels like the tension or like a tug of war between war and peace at its most simple. Traditionally the two planets of war and peace are Mars and Jupiter, and those themes of being pulled in those two different directions at that time and obviously how that applies in world events but then also even in personal lives. Like it being unclear sometimes when to be aggressive versus when to make peace and what’s called for.
AC: Yeah, yeah. In addition to the very valid war and peace for Mars and Jupiter, you will also see when they combine together it’s always on Mars’ side. When you have Mars-Jupiter combinations they virtually never end up looking like, “Oh, Mars is helping Jupiter be peaceful and chill and abundant.” It looks like Jupiter giving Mars extra confidence and imagining victory. You see Mars-Jupiter in the charts of champions in warfare and combative sports. It’s Jupiter being like, “Yes, Mars, you can do it, you can crush them all,” which is maybe what we’d not like for world events right now. But even when they do work together it looks like Mars, it doesn’t look like Jupiter. Thank you in the comments. Diana points out Bruce Lee is a good example of Mars in Scorpio opposite Jupiter in Taurus. There’s that champion, ‘I’m the best’ energy.
CB: Yeah. So sometimes Mars-Jupiter can be like the expansion of war rather than the cessation of war.
AC: Yeah. And in Firmicus, when there’s a positive Mars position in a chart, a lot of times Firmicus will tell you to see if it has an aspect to Jupiter. And then if it does, the martial power will be supported by law. Literally in Firmicus it says this person gets an army. And I’m thinking Mars in a night chart in the 9th with any aspect to Jupiter gives the power of ius gladii, which is like the power to judge life and death legally within the empire, right? So you have that Jupiter supporting Mars. Again, we don’t need more martial enthusiasm, I don’t think, this month, but that’s where it is. On a global stage, I don’t love that. On a personal level that can be useful, right? Like Mars in Scorpio for some people right now, for not too few people, is saying here are some really difficult things that you’re going to need to be a badass in order to overcome or solve and some of that Jupiter energy may be helpful there. Not necessarily during the moment of the eclipse, but these hold as a configuration through the beginning of the month.
CB: Right, for sure. Do you have any other Mercury-Mars keywords besides some of the ones that I gave, just as general keywords?
AC: That was a pretty good list. It’s very much the ‘them’s fightin’ words’ combination.
CB: Right, for sure. And then I mentioned also at the end of last forecast the Venus trine Uranus on October 31, on Halloween, which is a brief positive aspect, then we move into the first week of November. The very first thing that happens that’s very important is Saturn stations direct in Pisces at 0° of Pisces on November 4. So this is very important ‘cause this is only our second station of Saturn since it moved into Pisces earlier this year in March. So we’re still getting a feel of what Saturn in Pisces is all about, and it’s especially at the stationary points that suddenly Saturn becomes louder and there’s sort of an exclamation mark behind it. So the last time—or the first time that Saturn stationed in Pisces of course was June, and that was the week where all of a sudden the submarine fiasco happened. There was supposed to be that submarine disaster, and for a week the news was talking about these four or five people trapped in a submarine; it later turned out that it had imploded almost immediately. But there was still just the spectacle of it and just that millions of people around the world were thinking about this scenario of what if you were trapped in a submarine and couldn’t get out. It was such a Saturn in Pisces thing archetypally that I think it’s worth remembering that because we have this station coming up here, and we may see similar themes coming up, broadly speaking. Not necessarily like a submarine, but other things related to what that archetype represents.
AC: Yeah, and that sort of danger from the water element. Like the risk of drowning, the risk of flooding, storms is further attested to by the Mars in Scorpio. We have both malefics in water signs. And so the kinds of things you often see—especially around that Mars conjunct the Sun in Scorpio, which happens later in the month, but this is all, again, part and parcel of sort of the same unit of time. Historically, those Mars-Sun conjunctions had tons of epic storms and floods. And I would probably further extend that to keeping an eye on naval and nautical situations. I would be surprised if both malefics in water signs getting such emphasis doesn’t give us some trouble with boats.
CB: Yeah. And I was thinking—when you mentioned the water aspect in our pre-show chat—one of the first things that came to mind is just that one of the biggest humanitarian crises that’s happening right now in Gaza is there’s no water.
AC: Oh, yeah.
CB: And so there’s headlines right now: “Gaza consumed by a hunt for water.” “Gaza is dying of thirst.” “Tainted water and viruses put Gaza residents, especially kids at further [danger].” Remember, one of the themes we talked about was polluted water in previous forecasts when talking about Saturn in Pisces: or tainted water, poisoned water, and things like that. There were other keywords like that, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t remember which episode it was, but I remember talking about, yeah, don’t drink the water. There’s lead in the water. There’s plastics in the water, whatever. There’s the list of 500 things in the water and how the water safety and potability has been getting more attention since Saturn removed into Pisces.
CB: Somebody in the comments said they love you’re putting eye drops in as you talk about water. Well that’s a good thing ‘cause that’s the counteraction to dryness, which Saturn in Pisces would be about water drying up, a lack of water, being parched. But then the counterbalance of that is that you have to somehow add water or moisture into things or import it from another source in order to counteract that and that’s part of the solution symbolically.
AC: Yeah, half the time, the Saturn in Pisces, you have that quality of there’s not the right amount of water, right? There’s no water coming in. Or to harken back to the submarine tragedy, there’s water, water everywhere. But neither of those serve life, right? Neither of those are the life-sustaining-type and amount of water.
CB: For sure. The other thing I thought about, which I mentioned earlier, was just how it seemed like there’s been different stages, but certainly it was notable to me the assassination of that Israeli president that was involved in the Oslo Accords in the mid-‘90s during Saturn in Pisces and how that represented a real challenge to the peace process. The peace process basically started falling apart after that, even though it almost seemed like it was perhaps within reach for a period of time in the ‘90s. But there’s something symbolic there ‘cause Pisces I feel is the most compassionate sign—I think that’s one of the things we discussed—almost sometimes to its detriment in some instances. And that could be relevant here somehow; themes like peace or how peace is something that’s hard to work for. I was reading a thing where one of the other Israeli prime ministers, Shimon Perez, said something like ‘peace is not always strategic’ and that his tensions with some of the people that were on the right-wing in Israel was that they were thinking strategically. And he said that peace is not always strategically good for you, but it’s the thing that’s more morally- or ethically-motivated or necessary. And that was an interesting distinction to think about: strategy or security as coming from some other sort of motivation versus being motivated by one’s ethics or one’s morals or other things like that.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: Sure.
AC: And you’re right. That Saturn in Neptune—or excuse me, Saturn in Pisces bringing that tension ‘cause Saturn is the strategic. Saturn is like, “Well, in the long run, looking at the numbers, and this and that,” you get a cold realpolitik calculation out of Saturn. But Saturn in Jupiter’s place, trying to do a more moral or ethical calculation but as Saturn, is experienced as a conflict between those two layers of analysis and then what planning or position to take as a result of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that’s one of the things happening complementing that in the first week of the month. Here’s a graphic from Archetypal Explorer. Shoutout to archetypalexplorer.com. Happening around the same time as that Saturn station is that Venus opposes Neptune. So that’s on February 3 and the previous day around February 2.
AC: November.
CB: Yeah, thank you. Why am I saying February? November 2, the Sun is opposing Jupiter at the same time. And then the day after those, we have a Mercury-Uranus opposition on the 4th. So I wasn’t sure about itemizing all of those instead of just doing the big aspects this month, but we get a sequence of early inner planet aspects right in the first few days.
AC: Yeah, yeah. We’ve got Mercury-Mars-Sun all marching through that opposition to Jupiter and then moving on to the opposition with Uranus, while Venus is doing something totally different, right? Opposing Neptune, trining Pluto before a relatively happy ingress into Libra on the 8th.
CB: Yeah. So the Venus-Neptune sounds like what we were talking about though with some of the attempts for peace but the nebulousness of relationships and issues and tensions that arise over boundaries. ‘Cause Neptune struggles with boundaries. It’s ‘boundary-less’. And sometimes that can make human interactions a little bit dicey when boundaries are not clear as one of the themes that’s coming up there on the 3rd. Whereas on the 4th, we get unexpected communications, a message that comes out of left field, a disruption in communication, and other themes like that.
AC: Jarring messages.
CB: Yeah, jarring messages. Disruptions in communication. And then with the Sun-Jupiter on the 2nd, what is that? That’s like, again, that tension with peace that we were talking about earlier, I guess.
AC: Yeah. What’s interesting with Jupiter in Taurus—so the Sun’s opposition with that is basically the halfway point of Jupiter in Taurus. It’ll end right after the Sun-Jupiter conjunction six months from November. And so it’s Jupiter, very bright, opposite the Sun, right? Jupiter is going to be rising at sunset. And it shows attention, right? ‘Cause Jupiter in Taurus is trying to make things better by stabilizing them, by providing the basics, by figuring out how to get the fundamentals in line in order to make the complex parts of life more livable. To at least have the basics taken care of, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: At least there’s food. I don’t have to worry about that.
CB: The necessities.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so having at this point of the Sun opposite that it highlights how important it is to have the basics, which we’re already seeing in the news with a million people or whatever not having the basics. But it highlights how important that is while the Sun is doing the exact opposite thing, and in this case, with Mars. And so it both underscores the importance of what Jupiter in Taurus is trying to show and the benefit of that, while at the same time making it very difficult. But it’s like a lack highlighting the importance of something.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That makes a lot of sense. So I meant to mention briefly, since Saturn stationing at 0° of Pisces, anybody that has Saturn in late Aquarius— especially 28-29 Aquarius—this is actually gonna be the final pass of your Saturn return, even though that’s mainly a sign-based technique. It coming back within 3° could reactivate that again. And that’s why at the end of this episode I’m actually gonna put out a call for Saturn return stories. ‘Cause now, once this station happens, then it’s time to finally do the Saturn in Aquarius retrospective, I think.
AC: So—
CB: Go ahead.
AC: —just one thing. So this Saturn direct station here starts a forward march for Saturn that’ll get it all the way to 19 Pisces during the late second quarter.
CB: Wow.
AC: Basically I think June-July is the retrograde station. But, yeah, it gets all the way to 19.
CB: That’s far. That’s really far.
AC: Yeah, yeah. For those of us with planets at 4 and 14, it was worth noting.
CB: Saturn’s coming for you.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay, that’s good to know. So this is the turning point where that march begins. So that’s kind of the first week, and that kind of brings us to the second week where the major shift that occurs is Venus departs from its month-or-so-long transit through Virgo and it moves into the sign of Libra on November 8. So this is a major shift, and one of the things I noted actually in terms of the astrology that’s really cool and could be a helpful triggering event is that the Moon actually moves into Pisces and conjoins Venus almost immediately after Venus goes into Libra. So we get like a very nice-looking Moon-Venus conjunction, late on the 8th/early on the 9th, right after Venus has gone in on the 8th. So this is something I like and that could be one of those brief, sort of positive event-type alignments that happen especially that night.
AC: Yeah, that sort of ‘good day in a bad week’ sort of energy. But more than that Venus is going to be in Libra for the rest of the month. And so a planet ingress like that is a tonal shift, but it usually needs an aspect from the Moon for that to impact. And so with the Moon conjoining it just the next day after the ingress that facilitates that. We were talking about this before the podcast—it doesn’t turn November into an easy, cool, fun time, but it is notably more positive from a ‘how can Venus in Libra’ help, right? Technically it’s a benefic, and it’s in the sign of its rulership, but it’s like helping to get balanced, right? ‘Cause things can be difficult and they’re only made more difficult if you don’t have equilibrium. If you’re able to remember your center and then manage the wobbling scales from a position of being centered, at least you’re balanced, even if you are going through an obstacle course. It doesn’t necessarily change the terrain, but having equilibrium makes a huge difference in the experience of navigating it as well as our capacity to do so, and I think Venus is offering that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s gonna be cleaning up from that Mars transit that sort of culminated in early October with the Mars-Pluto square, as it was leading things to be unbalanced or leading to different extremes. So Venus going into her home sign and then sort of like cleaning up after Mars and maybe balancing the scales out with Libra as a cold air sign, having detachment that’s somewhat necessary sometimes to cool down—I guess social conflicts especially—and to make sure that there’s balance on both sides.
AC: Yeah. And the word you used, detachment, is especially relevant this year because we have the South Node in Libra. And the South Node, in addition to all the eclipse stuff, gives a quality of detachment which isn’t always helpful. But the South Node gives this depersonalization, it prompts a withdrawal of egoic identification which is good for getting distance from, in this case, a conflict or a difficulty which you’re too inside of to make sense of, or to inside of to figure out how to balance. And so, again, although not classically a benefic, certainly the South Node in this context can be helpful.
CB: For sure. One of the other things I like about Venus going through Libra is we see around November 9 and 10th Mercury changes signs and it will immediately square Saturn, which is a difficult aspect on that day. But it then sets us up for a Mercury-Venus sextile, which eventually completes later on, especially around November 15, around the middle of the month. And that to me feels like an easing of communication and communication moving away from this Mercury-Mars conjunction, which was at the end of October and beginning of November, and this combativeness and this debate and this more polarized sort of communication. You move into this period of more harmonious communication that is flowing a lot better at that point.
AC: Yeah, this is part of a sequence of sort of lightening the load and making things more navigable. And as you pointed out, the first day that Mercury moves into Sag it’s kind of a bummer ‘cause it hits Saturn immediately, the Saturn which just stationed. So looking at the weight of what cannot be changed, what simply must be endured, etc., etc. But as soon as it’s done with that, which is almost immediately, Mercury begins chasing a sextile with Venus.
CB: Right.
AC: Venus just ingressed into Libra. And there, as you said Chris, it’s breaking the Mercury-Mars co-presence. Which in Scorpio, not only does it result in negative communications and communications about negative things, but also it’s a harsh, depressing sort of train of thought. Whereas Mercury in Sag, even though it’s in its detriment, Mercury in Sag is trying to see the positive, right? It’s a Jupiter-ruled sign. It’s trying to find something that’s maybe not so bad. And I will note that the first decan of Sagittarius is a Mercury decan, and so Mercury does have a little power here that it doesn’t have in most spaces in Sag. And not only do we have all those changes, and we have an exact Mercury-Venus sextile, but Mercury and Venus stay in sextiled signs, in Libra and Sag, at least in that relationship for a lot of the rest of the month. And that’s helpful ‘cause we started this month on a pretty brutal note, and so anything that has buoyancy or that can kind of help dig us out a little bit, I’m for right, and this is part of that. It may not be the world’s best shovel but it’s still a shovel.
CB: For sure. And in contrast, I’m so glad you brought that up with Mercury in Sagittarius. ‘Cause optimism is such a core trait, and it’s the corrective trait over Scorpio which has more of a pessimism, but also it has like a paranoia or a suspicion to it. And I say, as a Mercury in Scorpio, the shadow side of the Mercury in Scorpio can be a paranoia. It can be a suspicion run amok partially due to an awareness of vulnerabilities; like an awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities and a paranoia about not having those exploited, as well as seeing the vulnerabilities of others. And I think one of the shifts is we’re dealing with a lot of that and the argumentativeness of Mercury in Scorpio, but then it has to go through some sort of barrier here. It switches signs into Sagittarius on the 9th and 10th and then immediately runs into this wall with Saturn in Pisces, which has just recently stationed, and then it moves into this more optimistic Sagittarius with a sextile with Venus. So it’s like there’s something about that event there of that Mercury running into a barrier or a wall with Saturn. It has to let go of some of that energy for some reason because it runs into an obstacle where those are no longer, I don’t know, tenable traits to continue to maintain. There’s been some sort of change in the script that’s requiring a change in how communication is done at this point.
AC: Yeah. Well I think usually when Mercury ingresses into Sag there’s like a burst of optimism, and that initial burst totally gets stepped on by the square with Saturn.
CB: Right.
AC: But then it’s sort of like, “Oh, there’s nothing to think good about,” and, yes, there is. ‘Cause immediately Mercury begins moving into a sextile with a dignified benefic, right? But it’s not the Jupiterian optimism, it’s the Venusian optimism.
CB: Maybe the ‘hard work of peace’ or something could be the keyword of Saturn in Pisces and Mercury running into that. It’s like Mercury has the optimism of wanting to go in that direction but then realizes it’s gonna be some work. Like there’s gonna be some work to head into that direction and it’s not all just fun and games.
AC: Yeah. It’s like, well, we might not be able to change the larger-scale parameters of this this obstinate thing in our lives, but in this structure that I don’t love, that I would rather do a little architectural revision of, there are a number of things that can be done to make this better, like the Venusian. I don’t love the way this room is shaped, but I don’t have to have a pile of rotting trash in the corner, right? What if I got rid of that? Put some flowers in instead.
CB: For sure. And then I’m trying to think of other Mercury-Saturn keywords for that time around the 10th, but I know in previous years slowness of communication has been an issue. I remember the election a few years ago when Mercury stationed, I think, square Saturn, and it was like the votes took forever to count and so there was delay in finding out the results, so slowness in communication. Precision, or even editing. Saturn can see the faults in something very well. So sometimes Mercury-Saturn combinations can be good at getting to the core of what’s wrong with something and seeing the fault in something, although that can sometimes be productive or not productive.
AC: Yeah. It’s like, okay, you gotta go over it again.
CB: Right. Yeah, you gotta redo the entire manuscript because you found a bunch of typos.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: All right, so that brings us to a bunch of configurations that start happening around our first lunation of the month. Our first lunation is the Scorpio New Moon on the 13th, and right before that Mars opposes Uranus—that goes exact on the 11th—and the Sun opposes Uranus around the same time. So we’ve got some major Mars-Uranus aspects going on here and Sun-Uranus aspects going on here during this timeframe as we get towards the middle of the month.
AC: I mean it’s a blob of Sun-Mars-Moon opposite Uranus, right? We’ve got a couple days of that. So usually I look forward to the first non-eclipsed New Moon or Full Moon after a cycle of eclipses with some level of relief or hope.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And I was clicking through and I was like, “Oh, yeah!” and then, “Ohh.” It’s a Sun-Moon-Mars conjunction and it’s almost exactly opposite Uranus.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So that rocks the boat. We’re trying to get some balance here, we’ve got that Mercury-Venus, there’s been some positive developments, but this is rough. Intense would be the best-case scenario.
CB: Yeah, it’s like communication starts flowing again, and there’s like this diplomacy between Mercury and Venus. But then all of a sudden there’s this sudden, dramatic or almost violent upset between Mars and Uranus especially. That is such an explosive type of energy where Mars is, yeah, explosive and Uranus is sudden, unexpected, the thing that comes out of nowhere. And it’s also happening in an opposition which is the most tense aspect and sometimes manifests in an externalization of the energy through others rather than an internalization of it.
AC: Yeah, there’s some volatile fluids present during this New Moon.
CB: For sure. So that’s very tense. Uranus aspects also make me think of how Uranus is very freedom-oriented; it doesn’t want to be restricted. So the calls for freedom and like the urge for freedom is very intense at this time, sometimes so much so that it’s willing to be combative in order to achieve that end. What else is going on in this New Moon chart that’s relevant here? What other keywords do we have for that? I don’t like that immediately after the New Moon takes place that it’s like the Moon just immediately applies to opposing Uranus and then conjoining Mars basically.
AC: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of all the same night.
CB: Right. And it’s late on the 12th and early on November 13.
AC: Yeah. For western hemisphere, Sunday night/Monday morning.
CB: Right.
AC: So I guess the positive or another angle on that is that’s the last, I don’t know, stick of dynamite that goes off where the Sun and Mars and Mercury have all now opposed Uranus, they’re not gonna go back and do that again. And so we’re headed towards the exact Sun-Mars conjunction, right?
CB: Yeah, I don’t know if that would use that phrase, ‘the last’.
AC: I would say that’s not an unexpected stick of dynamite. That’s like, what does all of this mean? ‘Cause in a sense it’s like a New Moon for the Mars cycle, right? It’s like, okay, here’s where the Mars cycle starts, and it’s gonna go for two years.
CB: Yeah. But I’m nervous about that just because when I was trying to do database research with Nick yesterday, we kept coming up with shootings as a major Sun-Mars correlation and bombs sometimes. I have a bunch of other keywords that are more constructive than that, but I was a little nervous about that Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio because of some of that empirical research that we were doing about that.
AC: Sure. I expect it to sort of set the paradigm. It kind of resets the cycle for Mars things, which is war and violence—and engineering. When I looked at the two previous Mars-Sun conjunctions in Scorpio in the 20th century there were some nice advances in engineering, particularly material science, and there were a bunch of water-based natural disasters. I didn’t see any new wars start. There were certainly installments of violence in ongoing wars, but I think it sets the paradigm for the next two years of military endeavors, which is meaningful for the Russo-Ukraine war. It’s meaningful for what this Hamas-Israel thing is gonna look like. And when I say it’s not like a fresh explosion, it’s like, okay, it’s sort of gathering in all of these explosions and tragedies and what paradigm does that set for warfare and conflict for this whole next cycle.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And I’m not saying that’s good, but it’s more the collecting and distillation of what that means rather than a new installment. It’s more setting the direction.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great point. So it resets the cycle and the relationship between the Sun and Mars. So let’s talk about that; that’s a very important aspect. It’s the Sun conjunct Mars which goes exact on November 18 in Scorpio. It’s happening opposite to Uranus but also trine to Pluto—trine to Neptune and sextile Pluto. It turns out that these conjunctions in Scorpio don’t happen very often. This is the first one in 32 years, I believe you said, right?
AC: Yeah, and then the previous one 32 years before that. And so what’s interesting about 32 is that connects with the Venus cycle. So in both of our previous instances, there were two in the 20th century. It’s 32 years and then 32 years, and then it skipped. So we gotta go basically 60-some years and we’re in the 19th century. But, yeah, the two previous ones both happened just like this year where we had the Venus retrograde in Leo over the summer and then the Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio in uh in Q4.
CB: Okay. Yeah, let’s see, I wrote down some keywords for things that were coming up, both things that were coming up empirically and then things that were coming up in terms of just the archetypal meaning of Sun conjunct Mars. Like I said there were some shootings or bombings that came up. One of the shootings, Robert Kennedy, for example, was assassinated close to a Sun-Mars conjunction in 1968. But other interpretations are like ‘things moving quickly’, ‘things that move fast’, ‘happening abruptly’, ‘starting fast’, ‘ending abruptly’, ‘heat’, ‘fire’, ‘hotness’, ‘hotheadedness’, ‘force’, ‘fighting’, ‘combat’, ‘special forces’, especially since it’s in Scorpio. ‘Prosecutors’, ‘detectives’, ‘courage’, ‘ambition’, ‘leadership’, ‘daring’, ‘taking action’, ‘vigor’, ‘impulsivity’, ‘over-aggressiveness’, and ‘forcefulness’—those are some of the keywords. A funny one I found that fit this pretty well when I was looking for people with Sun-Mars conjunctions—the artist with your favorite song, Nelly, was born with the Sun and Mars in Scorpio. And his famous song, “It’s Getting Hot in Here,” I believe is your favorite song, correct?
AC: Yes.
CB: Yes. Okay, so that’s probably a good theme song for this Sun-Mars conjunction. Like what better theme song than that?
AC: It’s getting hot in here, so put on blast-resistant and bulletproof clothing.
CB: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Another person who was born with this Sun-Mars conjunction I believe in 1959, or very close to this conjunction, that I thought was very entertaining was Nancy Grace. She has a complex story ‘cause she’s kind of a controversial figure. Her Wikipedia entry has like 10 pages of controversies because she—I don’t know how to tell her story, but she’s controversial for doing like a CNN show. Her personal life story is when she was 19, her fiance was shot and killed by a former co-worker, so she actually became a prosecutor as a result of this and went into the legal profession and then eventually went into broadcasting because she wanted to be a victims’ rights advocate. But then in her show she would kind of like rile people up about murder cases, and she would in some instances be wrong in terms of who she accused of being a victim, including this one mother she brought on the show at one point who she thought did it and asked her a lot of, in retrospect, inappropriate questions. But later it turned out that the mother hadn’t done it, but sometimes she would still just stick to it dogmatically despite that. Some of the more negative traits like rushing to judgment or assuming people were guilty were some of the things that would come out with that.
AC: Okay, so that’s too good.
CB: Right.
AC: Do you know what part or lot the Sun-Mars relationship gives us?
CB: What’s that?
AC: The Lot of Punishment.
CB: Okay.
AC: So it’s the arc between the Sun and Mars projected from the ascendant. So Nancy Grace has the Lot of Punishment or the Punisher conjunct the ascendant.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.
AC: And so the Sun part is the authority, whether it’s societal or moral. And then Mars is interesting ‘cause Mars is like both the act of punishing but is also the criminal, right? So you have the Lot of Punishment which, when you look at natal charts, can be somebody who is obsessed with seeking the punishment of others, but it can also be a point where one is punished for one’s actions depending on the configuration. And so we find Mars and the Sun in Scorpio much more often than we find that exact conjunction. And so just because we’ve been talking about it, it’s very quick to say the exact conjunction. The last time was in ‘91—it was in November of 1991—and then the previous one, which Nancy Grace was born next to, was on the 29th of October in 1959, and those are the only two in the 20th century.
CB: Right. Yeah, I was trying to research other ones. Some of them were just Sun-Mars co-presence in Scorpio without the exact conjunction. But one that was really close that was interesting was Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, has it in his 3rd house. And I thought it was really funny ‘cause he founded like one of the most controversial, vitriolic—
AC: Contentious.
CB: —contentious communication platforms in the history of the world with a Sun-Mars conjunction in the 3rd house of communication. That’s pretty good. Jonas Salk was one of the more positive ones. He invented the polio vaccine and didn’t patent it. Grace Kelly was tricky. She died in a car accident. Leonardo DiCaprio has a Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio and just had that movie come out. Pat Tillman was another one who famously was a football player, who after 9/11 signed up for the Army, but he ended up getting killed in Afghanistan in a friendly-fire accident. And then another was Robert Kennedy of course who I mentioned earlier, Sun-Mars in Scorpio. And then Chloë Sevigny is an actress that was famous for the movie Kids, and she was also in American Psycho. But then she has that—
AC: Big Love.
CB: Right. And she has that Scorpio stellium in the 1st house. And then she was controversial in the early 2000s where she did that one movie with her then boyfriend who was the director, where they did like a real oral sex scene basically on camera in this movie. And it was one of the first times that that had happened in a major film or motion picture.
AC: I’m pretty sure people have made movies of that before, but not for wide release.
CB: Not for wide release. Not for the theatrical release. So that’s the other side of the Scorpio archetype there.
AC: Let’s just take a second on a personal level. What does that mean, that reset? You’re probably not planning a bombing campaign, but this Mars-Sun still matters, right? And so this is a really intense reset point for the Mars cycle, from a constructive, normal human point of view. So what does this cycle of Mars look like? I think that we can use the language of a campaign, right? It’s one year, it’s two years right. And so there’s this ‘what am I going to work through’ opposition and something that’s going to take a struggle, that’s not gonna be easy, but it’s gonna be worth seeing through over the next couple years.
CB: Right.
AC: And you don’t have to make something up just so you have one during the conjunction because this an important inflection point in the Mars cycle. It’s like this and the retrograde are the two inflection points. As those martial desires to accomplish despite adversity, as those rise up, you may see the shape of a campaign that you want to go on. And if you see that, if you feel that kind of emerging, be like, “Oh, this is gonna be rough, but I’d love to get through to the other side and have accomplished all these things in two years.” Like make a note of that and maybe make a moment of that as we get towards this conjunction in the middle of the month.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That which requires determination and perseverance even in the face of hardship, or that which requires you to have very long staying power to see through to completion.
AC: Yeah, ‘cause this is a very powerful Mars cycle, right? The Mars cycle resets in every sign throughout its cycle, and so this is one of the two—the other one being Aries—where it’s resetting in its natural sign. And with Scorpio of course being the fixed sign, this is the one with the most staying power and determination and dogged tenacity.
CB: Yeah, for sure. One of the last examples I forgot to mention with the Sun-Mars opposite Uranus was Frieda Kahlo. And her injury in the bus accident happened under similar configurations to this whole alignment of Sun-Mars opposite Uranus.
AC: Yeah, she’s Sun opposite Mars, and I think the nodes are there too. Was it Mars-Uranus opposite the Sun natally?
CB: Yes.
AC: It’s Sun-Jupiter-Mars-Uranus in the 12th and 6th.
CB: Yeah, she just has this big stellium opposite to that Mars-Uranus conjunction. So Mars conjunct Uranus and Capricorn with the South Node, and it’s opposite to the Sun and Neptune and Jupiter in the North Node in Cancer in the 12th.
AC: And the transit of it describes the timing of the story-defining bus accident. It has a bunch of shit on top of that, doesn’t it? That axis is super lit up.
CB: Yeah, it ended up being a recurrence of that basically. Okay, so that’s the Sun-Mars conjunction that is occurring there around November 18. You know, I mentioned those other keywords. There’s also just like ‘hotheadedness’ and ‘heat’. Like anything related to heat or any metaphor related to heat would be super relevant at that time ‘cause heat can cause you to be more irritable or agitated. People can also act impulsively when they’re overheated and other things like that. You can have eruptions even, like skin ones or other things like that, all those become relevant keywords.
AC: Yeah. I mean the Mars and the Sun are two hot planets, and together they create quite an excess of heat, right? And too much heat psychologically generally looks like anger.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that starts taking us over into the following week where there is a shift that occurs. The Sun moves into Sagittarius on the 22nd and the 23rd, and then right after that we get Mars moving into Sagittarius on the 23rd and 24th as well, and both of them immediately square Saturn at 0° of Pisces when that happens. So what we get is the opening of a Mars-Saturn aspect or a Mars-Saturn square at this time. Which is an aspect that we are familiar with that we talked about a lot in 2020 because parts of the lockdowns opened with a Mars-Saturn conjunction where everything just suddenly ground to a halt, and like everybody’s lives were just on pause involuntarily. Lots of people wanted to keep doing stuff and want to keep moving forward with their normal lives, but all of a sudden there were just these limitations imposed on everybody that stopped you from being able to act. And that’s very much sort of the energy here that we see with Mars square Saturn. What happens when something that normally moves forward quickly and rapidly suddenly runs into a wall and has to decelerate very quickly?
AC: Yeah, yeah. The first image that popped into my mind with the Sun and then Mars hitting that square to Saturn is hitting an iceberg, right? There’s a slowing down. And with Mars-Saturn, we know that both in theory and practice tight, hard aspects between Mars and Saturn generate a variety of dangers; they timed the emergence of new variants during COVID. When you have that mutual combination that gets called a Yama yoga in Vedic astrology, Yama being the god of death. It’s just harsh. I would say what’s good about this is, because it’s so early in the sign, it happens immediately and then for the rest of the time that the Sun and Mars are in Sagittarius, it’s weakening. We’re like moving away from that.
CB: That’s true. That’s a really good point that the critical point is at the beginning, and then there’s like a coming down from that, sort of like the slope in this graph from Archetypal Explorer that has the Mars-Saturn peaking on the 25th and then gradually declining after that. Just like the Sun-Saturn peaks on the 23rd and then gradually declines after that.
AC: But, yeah, this month has so many stops and starts where it’s like, “Oh, are things gonna get better?” and they get a little bit better, and it’s okay. And then, yeah, Saturn’s still there. It’s like a little bit and then still back to a hard reality that needs to be accepted before moving forward.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And another thing about just the Mars-Sun and just part of the Mars-Sun cycle is that even though we have the exact conjunction of the Mars and Sun on the 18th, Mars is beneath the rays of the Sun. You won’t see Mars rise or set pretty much the whole month and then well into December. We’re gonna need to get well into December to actually see Mars. And when we do see Mars, it’ll be in the morning rather than nighttime, which we haven’t seen for a while. There’s no planet that takes longer to reemerge from underneath the beams of the Sun than Mars.
CB: That’s a really good point. So this is Mars’ journey through the underworld, so to speak, in the same way that Venus went through the underworld to some extent over the summer.
AC: Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause there’s the planning and the ideas and what am I gonna accomplish over the couple years. But because it’s a slower cycle, synodically speaking, than any of the other cycles, it takes a while to see what Mars is going to look like for it to actually reappear. It won’t reappear until towards the end of Sagittarius, or until the Sun’s near the end of Sagittarius.
CB: So as we’re talking about all this it actually brings us to our second lunation of the month which is a Full Moon in Gemini that basically occurs shortly after the Mars-Saturn stuff has gone exact, so that it’s still fully operative in our lunation chart for around November 26-27. We get this Full Moon in Gemini at 4° of Gemini and Mars is opposite to the lunation since it’s at 2° of Sagittarius opposing the Moon, and Saturn is squaring it from 0° of Pisces. Also interestingly at the same exact time, Mercury, which is the ruler of the Full Moon, is at 24° of Sagittarius, and it’s very closely squaring Neptune, which is bringing an element of lack of clarity in communication or even outright deception in communication at this time. And it’s curious that that’s the aspect that’s going exact as the Full Moon’s happening at the same time.
AC: Yeah, yeah, it’s not much help. In a sense the Full Moon in Gemini is like, “Well, let’s think about it. Let’s communicate. Let’s talk about it. Let’s try to look at all the options.” That process or practice of trying to do the mercurial thing where you’re like, “Okay, what are all the moves? What is everybody doing? What could I do?” That Mercury-ruled process is rough because of that incredibly tight Mercury-Neptune square, right? Mercury-Neptune in a sense makes it really hard for Mercury to do the job of separating ‘this from that’, understanding the relationships between things, trying to get accurate information and data, trying to communicate in a way where the information is conveyed. You know, Neptune doesn’t interfere with Mercury in the same way that Mars did at the beginning of the month, by lacing it with so much hostility or delivering bad news. It just makes it very difficult to see things clearly. So the Mercury-Neptune square—or Mercury-Neptune angular to each other—we were trying to come up with a name for that a couple years ago in the same style as the other two planet yogas, and Kait called it a ‘goldfish’ yoga, which is like the goldfish not remembering anything from 15 seconds ago.
CB: Nice.
AC: Which makes it very hard to do a math problem if you forgot what you were doing 15 seconds ago.
CB: I like that. That’s really good, the goldfish. Yeah, so the lack of clear communication around that time is tricky, especially at a moment where emotions are running high and tensions are running high because it’s a Full Moon in and of itself. For whatever reason we always hear those anecdotes about the hospitals being busier during Full Moons. I can imagine that here, especially with Mars being involved as well and just raising the heat and the tension and the anger in some sense around the time of this Full Moon; to sometimes have eruptions of anger or fighting or disagreements as a result of a misunderstanding. I was just watching a clip that just went viral of an old interview between an actor who was doing a movie promotion tour, a press tour, and an interviewer, and they had this little exchange. And it’s really funny because they’re younger, they’re in their 20s, and they’re flirting with each other at first, but then halfway through the interviewer is using cards and using tricks to kind of show off in the interview.
And halfway through they have this exchange where the actor says, “You know the comic Carrot Top?” And she’s like, “Yeah, he’s terrible.” And then he’s like, “Well, no, but you’re kind of like Carrot Top,” and then she misunderstands that to mean that he was saying that she’s a bad interviewer, but in reality what he was saying is just that she’s using props like Carrot Top did. And it was such a great example of how sometimes a single conversation can flip just based on a misunderstanding. This combination really makes me think of that because then the rest of the interview is really awkward because she’s mad at him for insulting her, and he’s still basically trying to flirt with her or something. And later she gave an interview saying that she was really upset by it, but it was all based on what seemed like a misunderstanding. That is my main image for this Full Moon.
AC: That is more than sufficiently Neptunian.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
AC: Yeah, just a final thought on that one. You know, with the Full Moon in Gemini, the energy is like, “Let’s go fast. Let’s solve all the problems. Let’s go really fast.” And then it’s like with the Mercury-Neptune, it’s like, “Well, but in what direction?” Like how do we solve this problem? The energy has a lot of movement to it, the impetus, but it’s sort of like, “Go really fast through a door you don’t have the key to, or go really fast in what direction?” Like “Let’s get to the restaurant, we’re late.” “But we don’t have directions.” So going really fast doesn’t necessarily get you closer; it could actually get you further away. It’s frustrating. And the Moon is just coming off that square with Saturn.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s not a great Full Moon.
CB: It’s like you’re trying to go fast but you just hit a pothole and that flattened your tire, and so you’re trying to drive fast with one tire flattened.
AC: Yeah, and you may or may not be going in the right direction.
CB: Right, for sure. Yeah, so everybody around the time of that Full Moon, strive for clarity in communication. Understand that even though you may think you understand what was said or what the situation was, you may have a misunderstanding, so that may prompt you to try to move more slower than you’re inclined to. And especially try to be not as quick to anger, or try to reserve judgment until you get out of that. ‘Cause Neptune transits like that are like a nebulous cloud that you can’t fully understand until you’re on the other side of it, and you can look back in retrospect and see that you were actually in a cloud that you didn’t realize at the time. So see if you can hold off for a few days on major things just to gain greater clarity if possible.
AC: Yeah, I would not go fast. Even if there’s no speed limit that’s not a suggestion.
CB: So speaking of that, that actually would be a good time for me to mention our auspicious election of the month, which is around this time towards the end of the month. And our auspicious electional chart for this month is set for November 30, 2023 around 1:55 AM, or around 1:55 in the morning local time. And if you cast a chart for your city and then set the chart for about 1:55 AM, adjust the ascendant until it’s around 6° of Libra or so. Basically make it so that the chart has Libra rising and then you’ll end up at the chart with Libra rising and Venus in Libra in the 1st whole sign house in a night chart, which is very positive and very potent. It is conjunct the South Node there at 23°of Libra. The Moon is in Cancer in the 10th house, and the Moon is around the middle of Cancer. And it’s actually coming off of a sextile with Jupiter at 7° of Taurus, and it’s applying to a square with Venus. So we have very strong rulers of the 1st and the 10th houses here. So it could be good for Venusian-related things—that you need to have a positive appearance or positive aesthetic appeal with Venus in a night chart in the 1st house in Libra. It’s also not bad for 10th house things since the Moon as the ruler of the 10th is so strong in this chart.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Let’s see, downside, it has Saturn in a night chart in the 6th house. So it would not be good for potentially things that involve employees or people that are working for you or potentially some types of health-related things since the 6th house has to do with illness, but otherwise this is our electional chart for the month.
AC: Yeah, I like the Moon here. Also, it’s approaching the north bending, which means it’s higher in the sky than the Sun would be. It’s very aspirational.
CB: Yeah. And I just wanted to take advantage of the most well-placed planet this month, which is that Venus in Libra, by putting it front and center there in the 1st house. And also you will notice that this election takes place at the very end of the month, once we’ve gotten away from a lot of the more tense aspects from earlier in the month and started to get a little bit of distance from those, but also just before Venus departs from her home sign of Libra and goes into Scorpio.
AC: Yeah. So you have the South Node which doesn’t help Venus, but Venus is also right next to Spica. So ‘unhappy face’ South Node, ‘happy face’ support from a Venus-flavored benefic fixed star.
CB: Right, for sure. Good times. So that is our auspicious electional chart for the month. It’s one of several different electional charts that we found for next month that we’re gonna release on our Auspicious Elections Podcast sometime in the next week. So that’s a benefit the patrons of The Astrology Podcast who sign up to our page on Patreon get access to on one of the tiers. So if you’d like to find out more information about that, go to our page at patreon.com/astrologypodcast. All right, that brings us back 8to the forecast and the final week of the month. Are there any other things that we meant to point out? ‘Cause we’re just coming off of the aspects of that Full Moon the last few days. After the Mercury-Neptune square, there’s no real aspects that go exact after that, are there?
AC: Yeah, I mean, that Full Moon is pretty close to the end of the month.
CB: Right.
AC: Let me just click through and think about it.
CB: December. Let me pull up the alignments.
AC: Yeah, Mercury is just about done with Sag, but doesn’t really get done with Sag until December. So let’s leave that for December because it happens in December.
CB: Yeah, December 1.
AC: Yeah, we’re getting ready for that, and that’ll be Mercury trine Jupiter which is nice. Venus is also not gonna be done with Libra in November. So, yeah, I think that’s the news, folks.
CB: Nice. All right, well, so that is our forecast for November. There’s a lot of heavy stuff still coming up, and I’m sure a lot of heavy stuff in terms of the news and in terms of world events that are still yet to happen. But we will, like astrologers have done for thousands of years now, do that dual process of both trying to look and record what events happen under specific astrological alignments each month in our time and write that down so that we can pass it on and share it with you as part of the tradition, just like the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers did on cuneiform tablets 3,000-4,000 years ago, but then also look ahead to the future and try to look at what some of the major configurations are and then let you know what what it looks like is coming up. So, yeah, this was great. Thanks a lot for doing this episode with me. This was a heavy episode that I know we both prepared for a lot and were nervous to get into, but I’m happy with all the stuff that we got into today. And I think we covered a lot.
AC: Yeah, we did, we did. Yeah, we tried really hard to do a good job. It’s not easy stuff to watch happening. It’s not super fun to talk about.
CB: Yeah, for sure, but this is part of the job. And in some months it’s a corner we paint ourselves into by talking about contemporary events, but then it’s also good sometimes to be able to document this and share it with people. Because I do think for astrologers that can be part of the process of not just living through historic times but also sometimes coping with really difficult or really traumatic events. This is how astrologers deal with things, by looking at the astrology of it. And I feel like even when each of us encounters tragedies in our personal lives sometimes we resort to astrology to understand things, and that can sometimes, in some small ways, bring some solace. Even if it’s not a major thing, hopefully that’s helpful.
AC: Yeah, I mean, seeing events as not isolated but part of larger patterns, it can be helpful. Sometimes it’s healing, sometimes it’s not helpful, but it at least is fully contextualizing things. It doesn’t make things worse and sometimes it’s helpful.
CB: Yeah, that’s good. I like that. I’ll take that. That’s a ringing endorsement. I’ll put that on the description of The Astrology Podcast. So what do you have coming up over the next month? What are you working on? What do you have going on?
AC: What do I have going on? I meant to do this last month but October was kind of crazy. So I meant to put up a bunch of lectures and workshops that I’d given and were recorded, finally get those up on the website. I’ll get that done before November, over the next week. So a bunch of stuff: workshops on planetary pairs and three-planet combinations, and lectures on astrological magic and timing techniques. I’ve got just a whole library that I haven’t put up yet. And then further into the future, in December, I’ll be doing a big intake into my year one program. For people who are interested in that, please sign up on the waiting list on the website. The invites don’t go out to just the mailing list and they don’t go out publicly, they just go out to the waiting list. So please sign up to the website if you’d like to join the year one program in December. Speaking of delayed things, the Saturn in Aquarius series that I elected for Sphere + Sundry will finally be out any day now. That was also an October thing that got delayed. Not surprising that an extremely dignified Saturn in Aquarius series would tell us to wait a little bit.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s not shocking. That actually means it’s working. If it were a Mercury in Gemini series then I don’t know if that would be a good sign. But this is Saturn in Aquarius, wait for the right moment. So that will be out through Sphere + Sundry, I don’t know, probably within the next week, maybe week-and-a-half, but any day now. And, yeah, that’s what I’ve got going on.
CB: Awesome. What are your websites?
AC: So it’s AustinCoppock.com and sphereandsundry.com.
CB: Cool. All right, as for me, my primary thing is everybody should watch this ‘eclipses’ episode I just released. A huge amount of research went into it, and I feel like it’s probably one of the most important episodes I’ve ever done, and we discovered a lot of cool things. So the title of that, just Google “Eclipses that Aligned with Pivotal Moments in History,” and you’ll find it. I may do a possible follow-up episode or a Q&A episode ‘cause we’ve already continued to find other eclipses in history. And I’m really encouraging people to take our methodology and start applying that to different areas and let us know if you find other eclipses that we overlooked that coincided with important moments in history in the past, in different areas, like culture, history, the arts, or whatever. I’m sure there’s a ton that has yet to be discovered, and if we get enough maybe we’ll do a second episode. Second, we’re soliciting Saturn return in Aquarius stories.
Basically every few years we’ll do a retrospective where we’ll talk about how the different Saturn return stories went for people that just finished their Saturn return. So if you have Saturn in Aquarius then you should send in your story. Go back and watch the previous episode titled “Saturn Return in Capricorn Retrospective” in order to see what our previous episode was about and how that went and then you’ll have an idea of what we’re looking for. So email us at theastrologypodcast@gmail.com with your Saturn return story. Please keep it concise. So first, write a one-paragraph concise summary of your Saturn return story and what happened, then you can write a longer three-to-four-paragraph page write-up. But submissions with reliable birth times are prioritized. Please include your birth data. Please include an image of your chart from astro.com, preferably cast in whole sign houses. Conciseness and clarity and relevance to the chart are gonna be prioritized. We’re gonna get a lot of submissions, so the best submissions will have the highest likelihood of going to the top. Include your birth data. Bonus if you also include, in addition to your write-up, a one-minute video summarizing your Saturn return story. That may be included in the release of the episode. But this is strict, keep it to one minute only. We’ll disregard any that go over one minute. Yeah, so that’s that for Saturn in Aquarius stuff.
And then finally the last thing to announce is just after many, many years of encouragement, I finally got Nick Dagan Best to release his Solar Fire database which has over 20,000 charts built into it in three different categories, which are natal charts. It’s just thousands of natal charts. He has another file on American history and then a third file on British history. So this is a large downloadable astrology database that can be used in Solar Fire or also in Astro Gold. He told me later that it can also be imported into Astro Gold. It represents over 30 years of research on Nick’s part; we drew on it for our ‘eclipses’ episode. And one of the things that’s cool about it is you can use Solar Fire’s powerful search features in order to search the database for different combinations. So one of the things I did last night was I searched his database for Sun-Mars conjunctions in Scorpio, and all the people that were born with those, and it came up with one of the lists that I used earlier in this episode, so it’s super useful for empirical research. We’re charging just an introductory price of $20 for now after we’ve launched it, but we’ll probably raise the price at some point in the future. So if you want to get in on that introductory price, just go to theastrologypodcast.com/database to get a copy of it and you can download it right away.
AC: That’s awesome. I didn’t know that that was happening.
CB: Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. Well he’s a Leo rising, so we got some eclipses going on in his3rd and 10th house, and this is a big deal finally releasing his 30 years’ of research.
AC: Yeah, and having that Venus retrograde back and forth over Leo.
CB: For sure, for sure.
AC: Visibility is a big part of that. Let us see it, Nick. Let us see the data.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so theastrologypodcast.com/database. And otherwise that’s it. I’m gonna keep doing podcasts next month. I got a lot of good stuff coming up. This was a big month on the podcast already, but I’m gonna keep doing it. So my birthday is on November 1. I’m gonna take a little break and enjoy that, but otherwise back to the podcast on the following days. So thanks for joining me for this, Austin. This was great.
AC: Yeah, yeah, this was good. Not particularly easy, but good. I think I’m happy with what we did here.
CB: Yeah, I think we did the best that we could given the circumstances, and I’m pretty happy with it as well. So we’ll check in again next month and see how it went and see how things turned out. Thanks everyone in the audience. A bunch of patrons joined us for the livestream here today, which is available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast, we appreciate you. Lots of your comments were super useful, I appreciate it. And thanks everybody for all your support of the podcast over the years. It’s the only reason I’m able to do this research and keep cranking out episodes like I do, like the ‘eclipses’ episode and everything else. So thanks a lot, I really appreciate it. All right, that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck next month, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, and Melissa DeLano. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to some great subscriber benefits, including early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the forecast each month, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is only available to patrons, a whole exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast that’s for patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. You can find out more information at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
If you’re looking for a reliable astrologer to get an astrological consultation with, then we have a new list of astrologers on the podcast website that we recommend for readings. Most of the astrologers specialize in birth chart readings, although some also offer synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions and more. Find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code ‘AP15’ to get a 15% discount. For Mac users we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an e-book version available through Google Books.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.TheAstrologySchool.com.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at MountainAstrologer.com, and the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening both in person and online, May 23-27, 2024. You can find out more information at norwac.net.