The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 428, titled:
Astrology Forecast December 2023
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on November 27, 2023
—
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
—
Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released December 4th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode Austin Coppock is joining me and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for December of 2023. Hey, Austin.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
CB: All right, so we’re recording this today on Saturday, November 25, 2023, starting at 3:00 PM in Denver, Colorado. It’s actually 3:15 PM. In the first hour of this episode we’re gonna discuss some recent news and events that have happened since our last forecast about a month ago, and then in the second hour of this episode we’re gonna jump ahead and look at the astrological forecast for December. So there are timestamps on the podcast website if you want to jump ahead to the forecast about halfway through this episode. So, first, before we get into the news, I want to give a quick overview of the astrology of December just to give you a preview of some of the stuff that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. So let me pull up the Planetary Alignments Calendar here.
The first thing that we start with at the very top of the month is that Mercury moves into the sign of Capricorn and departs from Sagittarius right away on the 1st of December, although Mercury is actually gonna go retrograde this month; so it’s gonna return back to Sagittarius later in the month. Then on the 4th of December Venus goes into the sign of Scorpio. Two days later the planet Neptune stations direct in the sign of Pisces on December 6. Then the following week we get our first lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Sagittarius. On the 13th, the very next day, we have Venus stationing retrograde in the sign of Capricorn and beginning a three-week retrograde period. The following week the Sun moves into Capricorn on the 21st. Then Mercury conjoins the Sun and we get the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle with the Sun-Mercury cazimi on the 22nd. And then the very next day Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius; it makes a retrograde ingress into late Sagittarius. The following week, on the 26th, we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Cancer. Then a retrograde Mercury conjoins Mars in Sagittarius on the 27th of December, Venus moves into Sagittarius on the 29th, and finally Jupiter stations direct in the sign of Taurus on the 30th at the very end of the month, and then that brings us to the end of 2023.
So that’s some of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. But first I wanted to do some news and events since a lot of stuff has happened since our last episode. We recorded the last forecast on October 23 and that was just days before we got our second eclipse of the month, which was an eclipse in the sign of Taurus on the 28th of October and just so much has happened since then in the world; so we want to talk about that and review some of the major things. As always, with the news segment, our goal here is not to cover all of the news since our last forecast, since that would kind of be impossible. But instead our goal here is to focus on news stories that we noticed a really compelling astrological correlation for that we wanted to write down and sort of record for history; that way, as astrologers, we can kind of learn from what happened over the course of the past several weeks. So these forecasts always serve this dual function of both predicting the future in the second-half, but also looking back and reflecting and recording on what happened over the past month and sort of saving that for posterity in the first part of the episode. Does that sound good to you, Austin?
AC: Yeah, let’s try doing that again.
CB: All right, let’s do it. All right, so like I said, the last forecast we recorded was on the 23rd and this was just before the lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus that happened on the 28th; therefore several of the major news stories that I wanted to mention relate to what happened around the time of the eclipse. So the first one of course was in Israel and Palestine. When we last recorded on October 23, Israel had been bombing Gaza for two weeks at that point. And Israel had told the entire population of Northern Gaza to evacuate south, to move south on October 13, which was exactly on the same day of a solar eclipse in the sign of Libra. So at the point when we recorded our last forecast, we were waiting for the ground invasion to begin. And in fact what ended up happening is the ground Invasion started right on the second eclipse, on October 28, and on that day Netanyahu announced that they had begun the ‘second phase’ of whatever they’re doing there. So it began with them cutting off all communications to Gaza—which was really striking—that weekend; that eclipse was taking place at the same time as a Mercury-Mars conjunction, and so the manifestation of that partially was a very literal severing of communications at that time with Mercury, the planet of communication, and Mars, the planet of cutting or severing. I think that’s a pretty literal manifestation, right?
AC: Yeah, and also the phenomenon of blackout in general, of there being no signal where there’s supposed to be some signal—whether that’s light or radio or internet—is also an eclipse signature thing.
CB: For sure.
AC: Just like with a lunar eclipse—it’s supposed to be a bright Full Moon and a portion of it is gone or it’s dark. Or the Sun is supposed to be bright during the day, there’s supposed to be presence, but instead you get a conspicuous absence—it’s a very ‘eclipse’ thing. So suddenly not being able to communicate or hear or see.
CB: Yeah, for sure, and that was another thing I learned last month. But the other thing about the symbolism of eclipses that I understand much better now—doing that and doing the ‘eclipses’ episodes that I did over the past month—was also when one of the luminaries gets eclipsed, it’s like there’s almost this snuffing out of the principle of life. And I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of the negative associations, including associations with things like death and things like that, to the extent that the luminaries are supposed to provide life sustenance; but all of a sudden it gets turned off for a period of time which is part of why that’s ominous. So in line with that, since the time of our last forecast, the number of Palestinians killed has reached more than 11,000 by November 10, and they’ve stopped being able to track the number since that time and thousands more have died since that point; most of which are reported to be women and children.
So Venus went into Libra on November 8 and Mercury went into Sagittarius on November 10, which started a long sextile which we were a little bit hopeful for in our last forecast being associated with diplomatic attempts to broker a ceasefire or broker aid or other things in order to offset all of the terrible death and destruction that was taking place. And what was interesting is in fact I did write down that on November 9 Israel at least agreed to a four-hour humanitarian pause each day, which although it was not much, it was notable that that started right after Venus went into Libra on November 8, and then that was announced on November 9. So during the course of the next few weeks, while Mercury and Venus were sextiling each other, there were ongoing talks of doing some sort of hostage swap which seemed to be off and on most of the month. And then eventually, just this past week, a swap and a ceasefire was finally agreed to for a period of time, for a period of five days; and that whole process just started yesterday.
AC: Yeah, for people’s reference, we’re broadcasting on day two of that ceasefire.
CB: Right. There’s already been a little bit of an interruption but hopefully it continues on, and hopefully the ceasefire broadens and expands in the future and all of this stops because the magnitude of the destruction and the loss of life in Gaza has been really shocking and incredibly sad. I was looking up some stats and some of the stats are being discussed, but at one point I wanted to look up how many people or how many civilians have been killed in the past two years of the war in Ukraine, and it turned out that or at least the UN was saying that it was around 10,000 that had been confirmed, whereas at least that many have died in Gaza just in the past month-and-a-half just to give people an idea of just the sheer magnitude of how many people have been killed. So this has created an enormous humanitarian crisis and the level of carnage is heartbreaking and disgusting, frankly, and calls for a ceasefire continue to get louder and more numerous. So this whole thing is starting to have a much more far-ranging impact on politics within different countries, as well as geopolitics between different states and countries around the world. It seems like it will undoubtedly influence the 2024 election in the US, which is one year away from now, especially since the left has become divided over Biden’s support of Israel and refusal to call for a ceasefire.
So in geopolitics there’s also threats of a larger regional war in the Middle East involving Lebanon and Yemen and Iran, as well as shifting alliances and involvements between different states in the Middle East, as well as other countries such as Russia and China. So it seems to be putting some pieces into place for some things, like the US Uranus return that’s coming up in 2025 through 2032, as well as the eclipse across America in 2025 just after the next presidential election. So some of the concerns that astrologers have been expressing for years is about a broader world conflict that the US could be involved in, just like it was the last time that Uranus was in Gemini during World War II. It’s sort of putting some pieces into place so that we can almost understand how something like that could be possible, although hopefully in the long term it’s avoidable. Yeah, that’s some of what I’ve been thinking about. What do you think?
AC: Okay, so I wanted to respond to or add to a couple points you made. So back to earlier in November, when Venus went into Libra and they began the brief pauses, not the ceasefire that we’re currently in, but the humanitarian pauses. I believe the way that we talked about that last month—and I correct me if I’m wrong—I think we were saying that at least it was something; that it would most likely not bring about peace; but even a good day in the middle of a terrible month is still a good day, but you still wouldn’t trade it for another bad day in a string. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, that did bring about not even a good day but a nice moment or two, but did not reverse the ongoing atrocity. And also, as far as what Venus could do and what some of the nice configurations have been able to do this month, we’re currently in the midst of that ceasefire with an exchange of hostages, and that began on Friday, which is Venus’ day. So it was Venus in Libra, Friday, while the Moon was in Taurus, which is a Venus-ruled sign, with Jupiter. That’s probably the most humanitarian or peace-loving configuration of the month: Venus’ day, the Moon in Venus’ sign exalted with the other benefic. And you and I both expressed concerns as to whether that could last through the Full Moon, which is coming up in a few days which is anything but peace-loving in its significations.
CB: Yeah, it’s definitely underlined the point that we’ve learned about when there’s a brief positive aspect involving benefics going on within the broader scope of a lot of other really difficult aspects that are the more numerous or the more weighty ones that sometimes a brief reprieve in an otherwise bad time can still be something. And I think that’s been an interesting lesson from an astrological standpoint just seeing that work out in a very literal way, and just for us as astrologers to internalize what that looks like—to have really bad stuff happening through the overwhelming majority of the astrological weather that’s happening, but having brief moments of benefic aspects to slightly push back against that temporarily.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s a lesson in nuance, right? ‘Cause you can have a terrible day in the middle of a great week or a great month, and you can have a wonderful day in the middle of a total nightmare of a year and that’s still meaningful. But just ‘cause there’s something that looks good, it doesn’t mean that that’s the entire story arc, and just ‘cause something looks bad doesn’t mean that that’s the entire story arc. You have good nested in bad and bad in good.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Mediocre sprinkled all around.
CB: Yeah, and I think that’s an important lesson also even in natal astrology, that that’s how sometimes to interpret—when you have conflicting positive and negative aspects in your birth chart—how things can work out.
AC: Yeah, yeah. A lot of the timing techniques have a particular time scale, and so they nest relatively naturally within each other. We have our annual profections, which are annual, right? Then we have long things like zodiacal releasing with a 20-year arc; and you can have an awful year in an amazing 20-year arc and vice versa, and then months and days inside of that. And then I guess I also just wanted to point back to how fucking awful that lunar eclipse was, right? I think you and I, and probably a lot of other astrologers, just sort of looked at each other knowingly when we heard that the ground assault was going to begin during that. And it’s like, okay, so worst-case scenario as far as timing goes, like you couldn’t pick a more violent and ominous day. I almost hesitated to add this because it pales in comparison, but you also had a celebrity death the same day that made a lot of people sad; Matthew Perry passed. It’s not on the same scale at all, but just looking at what kinds of things happened at that time. And then I don’t want to go into much detail, but there was a very bad death in my extended family within a day of that as well, like an ugly death.
And so, yeah, just personal over there, ‘world story’ stuff—really obviously malefic, which it was. Like that one wasn’t just an eclipse, ‘cause there are four eclipses a year. If every one of them was that nasty, the world would have run out of steam or the world would have bled out long ago. But that one was configured very tightly not only to Mars, but Mars in an extremely powerful place, Mars in Scorpio. And as I was saying to you earlier, Chris, in the school of Vedic astrology that I’ve had some education in—taught by Freedom Cole in Sanjay Rath’s tradition—the Mars-North Node combination, which that eclipse had, is considered to be an especially potent malefic cocktail. The danger with Mars-Rahu or Mars and the dragon’s head is that you combine the confusion and often emotional dysregulation of the dragon’s head or Rahu with the capacity for violence and anger of Mars, right? So not only do you have potentially lethal force being used, but it’s being misdirected. The polite way to put it is to be not just angry, but angry and confused, lashing out in all directions.
CB: Yeah, it was a good reminder that the planets configured to the eclipse are really important. And sometimes when you have a really powerful malefic that’s right there configured very closely to the eclipse that can influence things and can make things lean in a much more negative direction than other eclipses that are sometimes more mild or can sometimes coincide with more notably positive momentous events.
AC: Yeah, it’s hard to discuss eclipses I would say, one, because the nature of eclipses is to not be able to be seen clearly, right? So part of it’s not our fault, it’s not the astrologer’s fault, it’s literally a thing that is supposed to be confusing; but, yeah, the other part of it is that they’re not all with the same planets. And the first one that comes to mind of having a bunch of malefics with it was the December 2019 solar eclipse, which was in the same sign as Saturn and Pluto and the South Node, right? And Jupiter was there, too, getting just wrecked; but that was like three malefics and then poor Jupiter. Oh, another thing that I think that eclipse signified that we touched on briefly during the last episode was the life and works of President Joe Biden. He has the Moon very early in Taurus, and so the eclipse series in Taurus has been coming closer and closer to his natal Moon. And this particular eclipse was the closest of all of those, and we speculated about physical health because it’s in the 6th house. He doesn’t seem particularly spry, but the visible damage seems to have primarily been to his chances for reelection. He was trending downward in the polls for some time, but the events of the last month seem to have put those prospects, I don’t know, squarely in the grave, but certainly diminished them significantly.
CB: Sure. Yeah, that’s a good point. And that actually leads into the next major eclipse story that happened that I wanted to mention, which is that in early October, the House of Representatives in the United States fired the Speaker of the House in the middle of a term, and this was the first time in history that this had happened. And it was interesting ‘cause if you listen to the forecast we did right before that in September, we talked a lot about the US Pluto return and expressed concern about whether it would represent issues related to the breakdown of democracy potentially in the long term, but this really seemed to coincide with the final Pluto return of the United States, which was happening in October, that we’ve talked about several times on past forecasts. And much of the month the Republicans were unable to agree on a replacement for the Speaker of the House, so the position was vacant for like the first time in history, but then eventually, on October 25, they elected Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House. And I quickly looked up his birthday—even though we don’t have a birth time—and I noticed immediately that he was actually born the very day of a lunar eclipse, and he was then elected just three days before a lunar eclipse would take place on the 28th. So it was just this huge principle that has become super-crystallized over the past couple of months in doing the eclipse research that when a person is born on an eclipse sometimes the most defining events in their life then subsequently will happen on an eclipse in the future, and that principle has become really obvious and really strong lately.
So in the October forecast I talked about paying attention to the last Pluto return and one of my concerns, like I said, was that it could coincide with a breakdown in democracy and some of the things involved with it. And, in fact, once Johnson was elected a lot of reports came out that he had actually played a key role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. So he’s now third in line for the presidency after the President and Vice President, and he’s going to be, if he stays in that position, in a critical role during the 2024 election. So since eclipses, as we’ve said, can indicate important things happening that don’t seem important at first, I think that his election on that eclipse could end up being more notable historically than it might seem to us at the present time.
AC: Interesting. Yeah, one of the things I noticed about that was that we had the removal of the Speaker, the decapitation, right around the solar eclipse on the South Node. And so, you have that ‘disappearance’ energy and then you have that absence filled during the next eclipse on the North Node. Yeah, just to reiterate a theme that we’ve been talking about a lot this year and other years, but another thing that eclipses are a big part of is the rise and fall of people in positions of power. Like the best set of images or metaphors for it is the Game of Thrones spin-off, The House of the Dragon, where it’s all rise and fall of rival houses and people gunning, flying, swooping, and all of the machinations in an attempt to seize the throne and to keep it. And what’s nice about that show is that it makes the dragons visible, and what astrology suggests, and the astrology of eclipses suggests, is that dragons are always involved in big power games like that. You see these rise and falls, it’s just that we can’t see the dragons. And so, it’s nice to have a program that makes the invisible but powerful visible. Kind of the go-to paradigm is the dragons make and break the kings and queens.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good metaphor. ‘Cause sometimes with eclipses people come into view and prominent people become more prominent, and it’s almost like a dragon emerging from the clouds and suddenly becoming prominent even though they’ve been flying around the entire time.
AC: Yeah, the dragon emerges from the cave, right? It’s been there, but coiled.
CB: For sure. Yeah, so speaking of that there was one other major eclipse thing. In the previous episode we talked about how the last several Taurus/Scorpio eclipses over the past year or two had been tied in with Bitcoin and different scandals and crashes, like the Luna coin crash which wiped out billions of dollars in currency on a Taurus eclipse and then the FTX scandal a year ago in November of 2022 that also coincided with the Taurus eclipse. So we said that we were keeping an eye out for that with the last Taurus eclipse in late October, and at the time when we recorded that forecast I didn’t realize that Sam Bankman-Fried was on trial and that his trial would end up concluding right after the Taurus eclipse that week, which took place in October 28. So he was the principal founder and the principal architect behind the FTX scandal one year ago on that eclipse that occurred back then in November of 2022, which was said to be one of the biggest financial frauds in US history. And it was the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, so it was a huge hit to Bitcoin value and reliability when that crashed a year ago. And it’s interesting that he was actually found guilty on a Taurus eclipse just a year later after that whole event happened.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Let’s see, there’s a fair amount to say about that chart. The first thing I would say is—
CB: About his chart?
AC: Yeah, and the recent space weather as transits to his chart.
CB: You pointed out to me that we have a birth time for him, which I didn’t realize. So I’ll put that chart up now.
AC: Okay, great. And, yeah, to my great shame, I realized that he was a ‘fellow’ March 5. I was not born in 1992.
CB: Oh, no.
AC: But you don’t see too many birthday twins, then when you do, you’d like it to be anybody else, almost anybody else.
CB: When one of them is being convicted for one of the largest financial crimes in history that’s not a good ‘time twin’. There’s probably a similarly positive one, like a Pisces who’s out there doing humanitarian work, I’m sure.
AC: Yeah. The only one that I know about that has my actual birthday is, God, what’s her name? Riki ‘something’. She’s part of a musical comedy duo, Garfunkel and Oates. So I was born on the same day as Garfunkel.
CB: Nice. I like that. Okay, that’s a pretty good one. That’s up there with my—
AC: Yeah, Riki Lindhome, thank you, thank you. It’s hard to remember which one is Garfunkel or Oates ‘cause neither one is their name, but anyway they’re funny. I thought their Netflix series was very underrated.
CB: That’s up there with my Katy Perry ‘time twin’. Mine’s still better, but that’s still pretty good. All right, here’s the chart. So one of the things you pointed out is we have a timed chart, and he was actually born with 27° of Taurus rising, right?
AC: Yeah, as far as we know this is what’s on the record. Yeah, the chart is just lit up. One thing I’d like to point out is there’s the eclipse, right? The eclipse was in his 1st house, so that that didn’t signify positive things for this person. But the Mars, which was opposite that Mars-Sun conjunction—which also happened over this last month—ended up being right on his Pluto and right on his descendant. And one of the things we talked about with the Mars-Sun conjunction that I brought up was when you’re calculating parts or lots based on the relationship of planets, the Sun and Mars relationship gives you the Lot of Punishment; and we talked about Nancy Grace having that conjunction and punishment being an important part of her life. And so, here as a transit we have those two, which together generate the Lot of Punishment right on Pluto, right on the descendant, and then you have four other things that’s going on.
CB: He could face a hundred years in prison is what he’s looking at, basically, just to give people an idea of the scope of how that was important for him personally being Taurus rising. Having that eclipse take place in his rising sign, right when he was being convicted, he learned he may be going to jail for like a 100 years around that time on that eclipse. But, yeah, this is a tricky chart and obviously it could have gone different ways based on different choices he could have made and things like that. But it’s interesting seeing that happen and coincide with those eclipses and just how it’s tied in not just with the broader scope of Bitcoin and how that was involved in the markets and how it wiped out billions of dollars for thousands or hundreds of thousands of different people, but how it also personally was tied in with his own chart.
AC: Yeah. So when I was researching the situation, I stumbled across the time that the sentencing has been set for, which is the end of March 2024. And what’s interesting about that is that there’s a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces like within a degree of the natal Sun in his chart. So literally the Mars-Saturn conjunction coming for the sect light in the chart is when the actual sentence gets laid down. That’s a pretty rare transit, and that’s even more interesting because you have an extremely tight Mars-Saturn conjunction in the natal chart right on the midheaven. And so, having a Mars-Saturn conjunction on the midheaven doesn’t make you a villain necessarily, but if there’s any villainy whatsoever that is the most public place to have malefic action in the chart. It’s not surprising that someone who’s become a symbol of all the lies and fraud associated with crypto—which isn’t to say that crypto is all lies in fraud, but there’s a lot of bad reputation; and somebody who’s come to symbolize that—and they have this tight Mars-Saturn conjunction right in that most public of places in their chart—will be sentenced for it when there’s that same conjunction, which is a few days every two years right, on top of their Sun.
CB: Yeah, for sure, that’s really striking. And just having that Mars-Saturn conjunction in the 10th house of career and having that be the area of greatest difficulty, now his career has led him unfortunately into jail basically for the rest of his life. It’s interesting, I didn’t realize until now but that was the tail-end of his Saturn return, that all of that was falling apart while Saturn was still in late Aquarius last year into the early part of this year.
AC: Yeah, I looked at that and I just literally thought of your ‘Saturn return stories’ episodes you like to do, and I was like, “Sam, tell us about yours.”
CB: Yeah, that’s a good Saturn return story. I’ll have to include that one. I am still soliciting Saturn return stories; we got some really good ones. If you have Saturn in Aquarius, and you’ve completed your first or second or third Saturn return, email us your story at theastrologypodcast@gmail.com and we might include it in a future roundup of Saturn return stories; many of which I’m hoping are gonna be better than than this one was with Sam Bankman-Fried. All right, so let’s move on, there was one other eclipse story I wanted to mention. You already mentioned it briefly earlier, but the famous actor who was in the most popular American sitcom of the 1990s, Friends, Matthew Perry passed away last month. And he died by drowning in his hot tub at the age of 54, but all the astrologers at the time when this came on the news immediately noticed that the exact day of the lunar eclipse in Taurus was the day that he died. And I looked up his birth chart, and he was actually born near a lunar eclipse; so he was born near a lunar eclipse and then he died the day of a lunar eclipse. And it goes actually even further than that ‘cause he published his autobiography within days of eclipses just a year ago, so he was able to tell his life story on an eclipse. And it just became a really striking example, again, of that principle that if you’re born on an eclipse, really important events in your life—and even in his case, at least the end of his life—coincide with eclipses as well.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I believe the chart has the Moon in early Scorpio, where the Sun and Mars were during the lunar eclipse, and then Saturn in Taurus, where the eclipse was. It’s like the eclipse was bang on his Moon-Saturn opposition, in addition to him being an eclipse nativity.
CB: Right, for sure. And even his last social media post on Instagram was him in his hot tub actually with the almost Full Moon over his shoulder, which was kind of ominous-looking.
AC: Oh, really.
CB: Yeah, actually it’s still up there; it’s kind of striking. But I talked about this example a little bit in part two of the ‘eclipses’ episode I did earlier this month, as well as in the recent episode on death and astrology and to what extent it can speak to death. So I’m repeating some things here though since the audience for the forecast is different sometimes than those other episodes, but you can check that out for more information on some of these stories. So there’s one last major news story that happened recently—and this was not necessarily eclipse-related but it was tied in with the Sun-Mars conjunction or cazimi in Scorpio, which went exact on November 17 and 18th—and this was the fiasco that happened where, on Friday, November 17, the board of the company OpenAI suddenly fired their CEO and founder Sam Altman. So it sparked off several days of high drama in tech circles, and I saw one commenter say that this was the closest thing to a boardroom assassination that they had ever seen—which I thought was really interesting because it was right on that Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio—and one of the keywords we were talking about for that conjunction last month where things like ‘shootings’ or ‘assassinations’ or other things like that. And here, it was more of a metaphorical one, but nonetheless it was an attempt by the board to e take this guy out, basically.
AC: Yeah, a targeted elimination.
CB: Yeah, and the details are still unclear, but it may have actually had to do with some sort of struggle over AI safety, and there are some tensions in the AI world about those who want to push AI growth as fast as they can because they think it’ll ultimately be good for humanity versus those that want to slow it down because they’re concerned about the dangers to humanity. So Altman as CEO may have been one of the people that was pushing for more forward movement more quickly, and there were three or four members of the board reportedly who may have wanted to remove him from the top in order to slow things down, basically. There were also some recent reports saying that a new innovation in AI that the company had developed behind the scenes may have prompted things and may have spooked those board members who then led this coup to get rid of him. So with Pluto having stationed last month in Capricorn, stationing direct in Capricorn, we’re now heading super quickly into Pluto in Aquarius, which is coming back again this January. And it seems like over the past several months that a lot of the AI stuff has been more quiet, as we said in the past forecast a month ago. I think we made this exact comment that it seems like AI news had kind of slowed down or been more quiet over the past several months once Pluto returned to Capricorn this summer. But I suspect that it’s gonna come back in full force again once Pluto goes back into Aquarius early next year just like it did earlier this year when Pluto went into Aquarius in March. And then after 2024 Pluto’s gonna be in Aquarius for good for the next two decades, so that seems pretty huge.
AC: Yeah, so things are being kind of rearranged in preparation for Pluto’s re-entry into Aquarius in a little bit less than two months. And so, for those of you who weren’t watching this, Pluto did a little sizzle reel, a little test drive in Aquarius for basically the second quarter of 2023 and then went back into Capricorn where it’s been since 2008. And so, that basically times the entire freakout/discourse about AI. Like it was that and then Pluto left, and it was like that just kind of got quiet; but that was not an anomaly, that was a preview. And so, once Pluto goes back into Aquarius in January, it has one more dip back into Capricorn—but it’s for like two months in the fall of 2024—but that’s the anomaly. It’s just one last little dip backwards, and then other than that it’s Pluto in Aquarius until the 2040s.
CB: Yeah, so it’s coming in fast. And I forgot to mention why this story is important. OpenAI is the company that created ChatGPT that launched a year ago, and it had for a time the fastest or most number of sign-ups for an app or a website in history, and that was the thing that set off the whole AI craze. And this guy, Sam Altman, was at the head of that, at the head of that company a year ago that launched this, that started everything and started the AI race different companies like Google, Microsoft, and this company over the past year, so it’s a pretty big deal. They tried to remove him from the board, but then over the course of a few days the board ended up getting fired and he was brought back as CEO and that’s currently where it stands. So it was like an attempted removal or assassination that didn’t work. Interestingly, we don’t have his birth time, but he actually has Saturn at 26° of Scorpio in his birth chart on that day, opposite Mars at 27° of Taurus. And of course 26 Scorpio is like right around where that Sun-Mars conjunction took place when this happened.
AC: Yeah, I mean, he was born either the day after or two days after a solar eclipse in Taurus.
CB: Right.
AC: There’s the North Node in Taurus. He just got done with his nodal return.
CB: Yeah.
AC: He was born in this eclipse cycle that we just finished.
CB: Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s like even though it doesn’t seem like this happened weeks after the eclipse, it’s still a few weeks after the eclipse and Taurus and Scorpio seem to be occupying important positions in his chart even though we don’t know the birth time. So, yeah, those eclipses seem very relevant to him for that reason, so it may have still been tied in with the eclipses even though the trigger was the Mars cazimi.
AC: Yeah, well, and as a corporate assassination or a boardroom assassination that was probably not planned a day-and-a-half ahead of time; that was probably in the works for a couple weeks.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, so that’s that AI stuff we’re gonna be talking about a lot next year when Pluto comes back into Aquarius. And I think just to round out the news section, it’s really clear that we’re living in historic times at this point and in some instances really dark times, but we’re gonna continue to do our best to both document the present and what’s happened in the immediate present and past, as well as predict the future as we always do on these forecast episodes each month and in our yearly forecasts. So maybe on that note it’s a good time to transition into talking about the forecast for December.
AC: Yeah, I think so. And let me just say that I wish that you could say ‘living in historic times’ and have that mean anything positive. That almost never means something good for the people living in it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I mean, I guess there are a few instances. It’s just been a long time since that meant anything good. I guess the end of the Cold War was a historic moment. These days, though, it doesn’t seem to indicate anything particularly good.
CB: Yeah, I mean, one of the things we really saw in the ‘eclipses’ episode—both in part one, but especially in part two—was eclipses often tend to be this pivot point in history where things pivot towards good or pivot towards bad, but usually you reach either a high point or a low point at the time of the eclipse. So it’s like in Russia, 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union and the founding of the current Russian state was on an eclipse, but then it’s like Putin came to power in 1999 right on an eclipse. In other instances, there were definitely negative things, like in the history of South Africa and with Nelson Mandela and his fighting against apartheid in South Africa. He kept getting arrested and going to jail and was sentenced to life in prison on eclipses, but then there was a pivot point eventually and he was released from prison on an eclipse and then eventually became president of South Africa on an eclipse. So sometimes they do coincide with some of our darkest moments, eclipses; but sometimes out of those darkest moments it lays the seeds for more positive things that will grow eventually over time.
AC: Yeah, yeah. It’s all a ‘dragon’ roller coaster but there are high and low points. But, yeah, I guess in all of history not everything historical is a nightmare. It’s been kind of a negative month, so I admit that my thoughts have been pushed in that direction.
CB: Yeah, for sure—me, too. And I’ve been not sleeping, so I’m kind of out of it. I haven’t been sleeping for more than a few hours a night for like a month now for some reason I don’t understand, so I’m not as eloquent today. And I meant to mention that, as well as just obsessively watching the news and what’s happening in Palestine and everything for the past month has really affected me; I’m sure it’s affected a lot of people. But hopefully, through some of these forecast episodes, we can still give people some different perspectives on what’s going on and some insight into some of the different energies surrounding some of these major events, and I think in doing that it can be helpful as we go through some of these times.
AC: Yeah, I mean, arguably it’s more important to understand your environment when it’s potentially hostile. If you’re walking around a padded room, you don’t need to worry about bumping into things. When there’s sharp stuff lying around, when somebody spilled some tacks or nails or a glass got dropped, it’s much more important to be aware of your environment when it’s not all friendly.
CB: For sure, yeah. All right, my friend, I think that’s good for the news section. I want to transition into the forecast, but first I want to give a shoutout to our sponsor this month, which is the amazing CHANI App, which is an astrology app that is available for both iPhone and Android by our mutual friend Chani Nicholas. So the CHANI App is an app available, as I said, for iPhone and Android, and it’s designed to make astrology both accessible and useful. The app combines both ancient astrological wisdom with meditation and mindfulness to help you foster your relationship with the sky and support personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology is affecting you, it features everything you need to navigate life’s ups and downs. This includes detailed birth chart breakdowns, daily horoscopes, current sky horoscopes, transit readings, intel on the current Moon phase and sign, weekly sign-specific audio readings by Chani Nicholas, year ahead forecasts, and more.
So, for me, the four things that I’ve really enjoyed about it—as I’ve been using the app personally on my phone—is, one, it has a really nice blend of modern and traditional astrology, ‘cause Chani comes from the same approach or came up with a very similar approach as you and I did, Austin, of starting with modern and then integrating traditional; so it has a blend that’s very familiar if people listen to the forecasts and the blend of astrology that we use here. It also uses whole sign houses, and that’s one of the things that makes the app unique compared to some of the other apps that often default to other house systems. Three, it sends you push notifications when a transit is going exact in the sky, which is one of my favorite features. Because sometimes I’ll be doing something, and I’ll be saying, “Why is everything so annoying right now?” or “Why am I feeling irritated?” and then the app will ping and tell you that Mars is conjoining the Moon right now or something like that, and you’ll be like, “Oh, okay, right,” and it’ll remind you about that transit. And then, four, I love that it’s now available on Android. They finally released an Android version a few months ago. So the CHANI App is available to download on both iOS and Android. Just search ‘CHANI’ (C-H-A-N-I) in the app store and you’ll find it, or you can go to app.chani.com for more information.
All right, why don’t we make a transition into talking about the astrological forecast for December. I wanted to start by showing, just very briefly again, the Planetary Alignments Calendar, just to show you some of the transits that we’re gonna be talking about over the next hour. So here the transits for December. We need to start with a couple of things. Let me put up the chart—for those watching the video version—of where we’re at now. As we’re recording this today, on the 25th, the Mars-Saturn conjunction has just recently gone exact over the past 24 hours, and that Mars-Saturn square is part of the energy that we’re coming into the month with by the time we go to December 1. And, additionally, we noted that Mercury changes signs on December 1 and that’s our very first transit of the month, technically. But one of the things that’s important to note is that Mercury entered its shadow already just a day ago I believe, on November 24 or something like that, because it’s gonna retrograde back to 22°-ish Sagittarius.
So one of the things in the first part of the month is we’re building up to a Mercury retrograde, and Mercury’s already crossing ground that it’s gonna return to because it’s gonna come back to late Sagittarius. One of the things that’s interesting about that—thinking about the Mars-Saturn square—that’s been weird is usually we talk about that in terms of Mars represents motion and forward movement whereas Saturn represents things grinding to a halt, and sometimes when those two energies align you get everything grinding to a halt and sometimes that can be bad. You get the image of, for example, a car crash, where you have a car that’s moving really fast and then it just suddenly and violently grinds to a halt all at once. But other times, like back in 2020, remember, we had the Mars-Saturn conjunction and everything ground to a halt with the lockdowns when COVID was hitting and when all the governments enforced lockdowns all over the world and everybody had to stop what they were doing. An interesting manifestation over the past few days of this Mars-Saturn conjunction, one of the things that to a halt was the ceasefire that’s happening in Palestine right now, in Gaza, and everything sort of grinding to a halt there, but more in a positive way even though it’s very temporary; and I thought that was kind of interesting and surprising.
AC: Yeah, that is interesting. It’s hard to disentangle that from the Mars-Saturn conjunction—or excuse me, Mars-Saturn square—occurring at the same time as a really beautiful Moon-Jupiter with the Venus in Libra. There’s a bunch of benefic stuff and the Mars-Saturn. Yeah, I don’t think we can disentangle that from the last couple of days because Mars-Saturn configurations, like squares, can also be situations where we feel trapped between the thing going fast and the wall that it’s about to hit, right? If you’re between those two that’s the worst possible place, and so that’s another facet of Mars-Saturn dynamics.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But, yeah, I’ll take this version. This version’s good.
CB: Yeah, it was just interesting to be reminded that even though there’s a lot of other contributing factors—including the Mercury-Venus sextile, like you said—there can sometimes be positive manifestations. Obviously, people, like even yourself, that have a Mars-Saturn opposition, find constructive ways sometimes to manage that energy or to express that energy in constructive ways. But it’s also difficult or challenging. Usually it’s associated as a more challenging aspect, and that’s some of the energy that’s gonna be lingering for a decent part of the first-half of this month while Mars and Saturn are still very close, both in mutable signs. And it’s really putting the tension on the mutable signs this month, with Mars moving through Sagittarius, and Saturn still moving through early Pisces.
AC: Yeah, in reference to the potentially constructive facets of hard Mars-Saturn aspects, I tend to think of those as it’s much easier to get to the positive potentials if it’s a natal configuration because you have years and years to figure it out. And if you look at Hellenistic delineations—like Valens and Firmicus delineations—they’re like, “Oh, yeah, this Mars-Saturn person will have these reversals of fortune and frustrations and this and that, but will eventually be a person who has temperate judgment, the principle of excessive action and the principle of excessive stasis canceling each other out and teaching each other and moderating each other over time.” They get to have they become people grim but having good judgment because Mars tries to get Saturn to move and Saturn tries to get Mars to slow the fuck down, and so eventually you get a good result. I find that when it just happens by transit it’s often harder to navigate, unless you’ve been living the Mars-Saturn life. But, yeah, a number of traditional sources basically frame the positive potential as being the two can cancel each other out in a useful way, but it’s not fun or easy.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So I wanted to give some keywords for things people might be feeling with that, especially early in the month of December, while that configuration is still close. So there’s keywords like ‘a conflict between action versus restriction’; so feeling held back from something even though you want to act or move forward. ‘Feeling frustration’ and ‘obstacles’ is a very common feeling around Mars-Saturn alignments, especially hard aspects. There can be feelings of ‘delayed gratification’; so not getting immediately what you want, which is more of a Mars thing, but instead being forced to put it off and do a lot of hard work in order to get where you want to go and things taking longer than you would like. ‘Having a good work ethic’ and ‘perseverance’ is one of the good things that you can do to channel that energy. Sometimes there can also be ‘fears’ and ‘insecurities’, which is a pretty common thing surrounding Saturn, and that can hinder Mars’ tendency to want to take decisive action. So having fears about how things will go or insecurities can be something that will hold you back from acting during this time. And since this is happening in mutable signs, mutable signs tend to be very adaptable and very flexible, typically; so somehow that’s part of the energy as well that’s being integrated into this square.
AC: Yeah, yeah, that’s good. I would just maybe add a few things. One common experience with Mars-Saturn configurations like this is just frustration, which is like, “Oh, I want to do it, but I can’t do that right now,” or “I have to do this and I really don’t want to.” And what did you say?
CB: Delayed gratification.
AC: Delayed gratification. Perseverance, I think you said; perseverance, I would say. Also, there’s a certain Mars-Saturn gear, ‘becoming relentless’, where you just keep coming like the unkillable villain in the horror movie, right? You’re not fast, but you’re like Jason in Friday the 13th—just like one step at a time, still coming for those campers. Yeah, you can be slowed down but not stopped, right? It’s a kind of invincibility that doesn’t feel invincible at all.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Becoming relentless.
CB: I like that. That’s a good picture of the Terminator at the end of Terminator and he just keeps coming.
AC: Yeah, and face all half-ripped-off but still coming.
CB: Right.
AC: Not pretty, not fast, not graceful, but still coming.
CB: I mean, less horror movie-motivated, but I have Mars-Saturn very prominent in my chart in a mutual reception—and some of that’s my Capricorn Mars—but I’ve always had the ethic—when I do videos or something on YouTube or the podcast—to improve just one thing each time. And even though it doesn’t seem like a big jump forward, if you just do that one thing, it adds up over time. And I sometimes think of that when it comes to constructive uses of Mars and Saturn, and that’s kind of similar to what you’re talking about.
AC: Yeah, definitely. It’s that sort of glacial creep, right? It sort of accomplishes martial goals but on Saturn’s time scale, which is invisible in the moment, but when you look back over a year or five years is tremendous.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So speaking of that, some of that energy really gets magnified with Mercury moving into Capricorn right away on the 1st, and then immediately after that, on December 2, Mercury sextiles Saturn. And so, while that’s not a major standout aspect, it just emphasizes some of those themes that we’re talking about here in terms of the energy of Saturn and forward progressive movement at a somewhat slow pace.
AC: Yeah, I mean, the month begins with Mercury’s ingress into Capricorn. And even though it’s destined to go back, that Mercury in Capricorn quality is very much looking at the lay of the land, like looking at the blueprint of the building. It’s slow, right? It’s Mercury in a Saturn-ruled sign, and Mercury is literally slowing down as it enters. And so, instead of racing about to explore everything, you could see it as analogous to entering a complex, like, I don’t know, an abandoned shopping mall and first trying to find the big layout. Where’s the Bloomingdale’s? Where’s the Radio Shack? And of course they’re all full of zombies, but getting the lay of the land. What is the layout here? What is the structure? And that same sort of blueprint-thinking that Mercury in Capricorn brings also applies to schedule, right? So not just spatially but also temporally. Okay, so next week I’m gonna do x, y, and z, and then the week after that there’s that, and then the week after that—it’s very much getting the layout both in time and space. And there’s something about that that’s causing Mercury to slow down and maybe need to rethink how we’re gonna get through this next bet because the way directly forward is blocked; there’s something that necessitates a turnaround.
CB: Yeah, and what’s interesting is it got out of Sagittarius and out of the conjunctions with Mars as it’s in Capricorn, and it’s applying to this trine with Jupiter, which will be going exact and will be pretty close, ‘cause Jupiter’s at 6° of Taurus around the time of Mercury stationing, once Mercury slows down and stations retrograde around the middle of the month. So the first-half of the month, at least in terms of Mercury’s configurations, are much better, especially around the time of its retrograde station where it’s getting aspects from both the trine with Jupiter, but also a sextile from Venus once it goes into Scorpio. And we’re gonna get a lot more of the positive manifestations of Mercury in Capricorn during that time, like practical communication, strategic thinking, having structured thoughts, maybe a more reserved communication style, but reserved and earnest, and effective in moving slowly in those increments, incorporating discipline into it. And that’s gonna be distinctly different from the second-half of the month.
When Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius, it’s gonna form this conjunction with Mars, and we’re gonna get this weird period late in the month where Mercury’s retrograde, getting ready to station direct, but conjoining Mars at the same time around 24° of Sagittarius. So some of the verbal arguments, the explosive energy related to especially communications but also technology, some of the divisive feeling surrounding communication that we were feeling in October and early November when Mercury was still conjunct Mars—a lot of that’s somehow gonna come back during the course of the retrograde, especially later in December. So as a result of that I’m looking forward to a more positive, peaceful time, communication-wise, towards the early part of the month when Mercury’s at least configured to benefics, despite otherwise getting ready to turn retrograde and start to look backwards and be more reflective rather than forward-looking.
AC: Yeah, I think the word ‘constructive’ is especially useful for this first phase of Mercury in Capricorn ‘cause it is trying to build up a model of where things are and how to navigate them. And there’s such a difference in quality to that careful mapping and sequencing that Mercury in Capricorn is doing—with the aspects it has—to the retrograding into Sag portion. Sagittarius is, by itself, a much more kinetic movement-oriented sign than Capricorn. And not only that, but it’ll be Mercury back in Sag with Mars, which is the planet of combustion and dynamism and go, go, go. Like the quality of it is very careful, circumspect modeling and thinking and weighing and mapping, but it comes back to, fuck it, we’ve just got to go; this just needs to happen, or we need to do this. The quality of the Mercury-Mars in Sagittarius is distinctly uncareful as opposed to a very careful Mercury in Cap.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point, like recklessness. Like there’s a certain recklessness.
AC: Yeah, yeah, recklessness. That third decan of Capricorn—or excuse me, that third decan of Sagittarius in some sources is associated directly with the Greek goddess Ananke, who is ‘necessity’. And a lot of times people who have planets in the third decan kind of Sagittarius—there’s just circumstances where ‘x’ has to be done. It’s not the ideal thing. If you could have planned it, you wouldn’t have planned that, but that’s just what needs to be done. And that push towards necessity is echoed strongly by Mars being there. It’s like, well, we gotta get out there. Something’s going to happen, we need to act now.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that’s gonna be weird ‘cause it’s gonna be tied in with a retrograde, where usually the first part of the retrograde things slow down and you start having to look backwards; you have to start going back and revising something in the past because often there’s mistakes. But it’s a weird dynamic that the first part of the retrograde here is gonna be more positive somehow than the direct part of the retrograde, when Mercury’s finally moving forward and you have the more divisive part of it being the end of the retrograde, which is usually the part where we’re finding resolution to the issues that were up at the beginning of the retrograde or where things start moving forward again and start progressing.
AC: Yeah, yeah, it’s funny, the first part in the lead-up—it’s almost like the careful looking back. It’s almost like there’s this thoughtful constructive process that has this two-or-three-week chaotic interruption in the middle of it, where it’s like, “Actually, back to these other things, this needs to happen right now. We’ll get back to the careful architectural stuff.” But Mercury-Mars Sag, “Gotta move. Gotta deal with this over here.” Because it’s moving back to a different sign, it means that it brings Mercury’s attention back to whatever was happening in that other whole sign house, right? So you were doing Capricorn stuff in the 2nd house, it comes back to Sag in the 1st, and we’ve gotta do this because of completely unrelated things.
CB: Right, for sure. So, yeah, first part of the month, at least in terms of Mercury and communication, much more negotiating, much more peace-oriented, much more about trying to work things out. ‘Cause the other thing we have to talk about is Venus’ ingress, which happens very early in the month, and that’s contributing to some of the positive aspects involving Mercury. We see Venus departing from Libra and moving into the sign of Scorpio by December 3 and December 4. And at that point, because Mercury starts slowing down, Venus actually catches up to Mercury and overtakes Mercury in a sextile around December 10 and December 11, which is a pretty positive aspect that’s taking place. It’s one of the aspects that we were talking about last month that seemed to have to do with negotiations and trying to reach a deal or reach a resolution of something and having pleasant forms of reconciling communication. And all of this is going exact, where Venus is helping out an already positive aspect between Mercury and Jupiter, as Mercury’s slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde on December 12 and 13th.
AC: Yeah, Venus is in Scorpio for a lot of the month. Does it go in on the 4th?
CB: Yeah, depending on your time zone, it’s December 4, basically.
AC: Yeah, and so Venus is not thought to have the best time in Scorpio, but this year being in Scorpio, Venus looks across at Jupiter. And having both Venus and Jupiter configured like that, it’s the two benefics, and it’s Jupiter in Venus’ sign. And so, this is an unusually good year for Venus’ time in Scorpio, and it’s also Venus is not configured to Mars. Venus has wonderful essential dignity in Libra, but the South Node was there, and there was a square with Pluto. And so, the Venus in Scorpio—other than the quick try to Saturn in Pisces—is actually pretty nice this year. You’ll see some of the more positive, pleasant versions of Venus in Scorpio, a goth delight.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Yeah, and as you were saying, they’re both configured to Mercury during this first phase. Unfortunately, even at this period where we have kind of the height of Mercury having a relationship with two benefics, it’s leading into the New Moon which is conjunct Mars. And we talked last month about the Mars cazimi, like the moment when Mars and the Sun are in the same degree—or the same minute of the same degree. But because of the relative speed of the Sun and Mars from our position, whenever you see that it means there’s like months of Mars and the Sun very close together; and so that means multiple New Moons that are conjunct Mars; it means multiple Full Moons that are opposite Mars. And so, we have yet another New Moon conjunct Mars here—what is it—11th-12th?
CB: Yeah. And before we get there, briefly, the Venus-Jupiter opposition is going exact around December 9 and December 10 and that’s one of the more positive aspects between Venus and Jupiter before we get to that New Moon. So I just wanted to make sure we state some of those dates to point out when the good stuff is happening—so that we can sort of offset a little bit of the more challenging or difficult stuff we’re talking about—while the Mercury-Jupiter trine, which is very positive for communication, is going exact on the 7th and 8th. All right, so those aspects mentioned—yeah, here’s the New Moon, which is gonna go exact at 20° of Sagittarius on December 12, and it’s present in a conjunction with Mars, which is at 13° of Sagittarius. So we have that, and then we also have the New Moon taking place in a pretty close square with Neptune, which is adding some nebulousness to the picture at that time in terms of making things not very clear.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that follows where things were kind of getting a little easier, there’s some nice things happening with that Jupiter, Venus, Mercury. But we’re re-centered with the New Moon, and, yes, Mars is still there, and Mercury stations retrograde just right after that. So there’s really kind of a pivot point there around the 11th, 12th, 13th.
CB: Yeah, and Jessica, a patron in the chat, pointed out that Neptune stations direct on December 6; so it’s like that Neptune’s getting amped up and amplified at this time with its nebulousness as well. It makes me think of that Mercury stationing as almost like there’s something good that’s happening. It seems like there’s gonna be a positive brokering between Mercury—the planet of communications, the go-between planet—and the benefics, but then Mercury goes retrograde and it’s like something goes awry; sometimes that’s due to miscommunication as a common Mercury retrograde thing. We also get that a little bit from the Sun and Moon conjunction being square Neptune, like the idea that there’s a misunderstanding or miscommunication that leads to Mercury then going retrograde and going back to that period of conjoining Mars, where there’s more tension and more verbal confrontations.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, more misalignment or nonalignment of parties involved.
CB: Yeah, so your point was really good, though, that anytime there’s a Sun-Mars cazimi that just means that all lunations for a period of time are gonna be having that heavy Mars component, and I think that’s a really great point. It’s a simple point, but it’s a very great observation that kind of makes sense of some of the stuff that’s going on right now.
AC: Yeah, it’s just, “Well, it’s Mars again,” right? We have our Full Moon here in a few days from now and it’ll be opposite Mars, and then the next New Moon is with Mars. And so, you get that going in and coming out; it’s almost a quarter of a year where all the lunations are martial.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so we’ve got that. We’ve got, as we’ve said, Neptune stationing there on the 6th of the month, Mercury stationing retrograde the very day after our New Moon in Sagittarius on the 12th, and then Mercury stationing retrograde on the 13th. Let’s take a look at where we start heading after that point. All right, so moving the chart forward—oh, yeah, a weird thing I noticed is right when Mercury’s stationing, the day after the New Moon, the Moon swoops into Capricorn and conjoins Mercury. And I actually noticed that happening a few times during the course of this month, that some of the most important alignments that are happening this month, the Moon comes in and like triggers them. So that kind of happens earlier in the month when Venus is opposing Jupiter around the 9th; the Moon goes into Scorpio and conjoins Venus at the same time. Then we get a similar thing here with Mercury stationing retrograde in Capricorn around the 13th, and the Moon comes in and triggers that and really emphasizes the retrograde beginning at that time; it’s kind of an interesting point to pay attention to. All right, so what’s our next major aspect that we need to talk about after that? Do we end up jumping forward to next week?
AC: Yeah, I mean, ‘cause once we get the New Moon reset on the 12th, and then Mercury’s retrograde on the 13th, that’s sort of the course things are taking for a little bit, right? Like that’s a pretty significant readjustment. And then, yeah, a week-and-a-half later, towards December 22, we get the Mercury-Sun conjunction, the cazimi, like dead center the retrograde, 1° of Capricorn, and right before Mercury heads back into Sag, and I think that’s our next pivot point.
CB: Yeah, so right here on December 22 we get the Sun-Mercury conjunction, or the Mercury cazimi, which takes place at 0° of Sagittarius. And this is the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle, so this is usually typically the turning point where whatever the problem was that was set up a week-and-a-half earlier when Mercury stationed retrograde you usually start to see it become resolved at this point or at least heading towards resolution and having that turning point where resolution starts to seem possible; this is that turning point on December 22. But what’s weird about it is then the day after Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius, and all of a sudden you very quickly start having this impending Mercury-Mars conjunction that’s coming up, which is that explosive and more divisive energy that we talked about earlier. The Moon is conjoining Jupiter at least, around the time of that cazimi, so things look sort of positive on the surface for a day or two.
AC: Well, that day is nice. We should figure out something to do on that day, Chris.
CB: Oh, yeah, right. That is the day that we picked for recording our year ahead forecast.
AC: But, yeah, part of the point I heard you making is usually once you get to the Sun-Mercury conjunction in the middle of a Mercury retrograde, you’re sort of heading out of the woods, right? You’re in the dead center of the woods, so any direction you go you’re now heading out. But the monster, instead of being at the center of the labyrinth, is waiting on the other side when Mercury is about to clear the labyrinth, right? And just to characterize that midpoint of the Mercury retrograde with the Sun, I would say for resolutions, at least at that point, the trouble is very clear. You’re like, “Oh, this is the problem. I didn’t get that package, and I’ve located it. It was sent to a cabin in rural Ontario rather than where I live in Ontario, Ohio,” or “Ontario, Canada rather than where I live in Ontario, Ohio,” like you know what the problem is during that. And so, there’ll probably still be some clarity about why the map or the sequence—whatever the ‘Mercury in Cap’ thing was—or this beautiful model, why that’s not going to work, and Mercury needs to run back and conjoin Mars. It’s like, “Oh, well, it wasn’t updated because of x, y, or z.” Or something has happened which changes the layout and we just need to move.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s like sometimes when you look back into the past, it can dig up old things; and it doesn’t resolve things but instead it just digs up a bunch of bad stuff, which then you have to deal with. Or sometimes going back into the past and digging things up can cause controversies or conflicts that are unexpected and raise emotions or old dynamics that maybe you wish that you hadn’t gone back to or brought up again.
AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sometimes you dig up the hatchet that was once buried, and then you realize that there’s a reason it was buried. You’re like, “Oh, we need to put this back in the ground.” And also, just thinking of Mercury retrograde printers, you would do all of this diagnostic work to figure out why the thing isn’t fucking working. And then when you get to the heart of it and you have an accurately-identified assessment of why there’s a problem, you realize that you’re actually gonna just need a whole new thing.
CB: Right.
AC: I did all this diagnostic work and instead of fixing it, it actually just put a nail in the coffin, right? This will definitely not work, and you’ve got to junk it.
CB: Yeah, so sometimes you end up having to throw the entire thing away and just start fresh, but you may not know until very late in that process.
AC: Right. It takes a lot of investigation and problem-solving to get to the point where you realize that problem can’t be solved. And so, there’s something like this where it’s like this isn’t even gonna fix it, we need to go back to a whole different modality.
CB: Yeah, well, people are gonna be right in the thick of that around the time of our second lunation of the month, which is the Full Moon in Cancer that takes place on December 26, where we see the Moon opposing the Sun around 4° and 5° of Cancer on that day. And what’s interesting is the Mercury-Mars conjunction is super close at that point, with Mercury being at 25° of Sagittarius and Mars being at 23° of Sagittarius, so that’s really one of the signatures for this lunation. And usually Full Moons are already a period of heightened emotions and heightened energy and activity and things sometimes being somewhat tense or reaching a culmination or a boiling point, and then we’re adding on top of that tense energy, communication-wise, between Mercury and Mars at the same time.
AC: This one is such a deeply-mixed bag because the Sun and the Moon are perfectly aligned with Jupiter; it’s the Moon in Cancer, which is the home and domicile. The Sun, Moon, and Jupiter look so wholesome and joyful and bountiful; it’s very Christmas, right? It’s a very ‘postcard’ Christmas, but that Mercury-Mars is so hot and contentious. And if we think about antiscia—if we do a little antiscia/contra-antiscia—that Mercury-Mars maps right onto both the Sun and the Moon, right? This wholesome, supportive, jolly, safe, Sun-Moon-Jupiter with this really pointed, arrow-firing, Mercury-Mars all at the same time.
CB: Yeah, and that Full Moon’s in Cancer and it’s sextiling Jupiter in Taurus. One of the things we talked about with Cancer and Taurus a lot last year was how they’re sometimes associated with food and food that’s reassuring and stabilizing or that reminds you of old memories or things like that. So it’s kind of a funny combination where it’s like people going home for the holidays and experiencing the joy and familiarity of that which from their past feels supportive and feels nurturing on some level with the Full Moon being sextile Jupiter, but then at the same time getting into verbal clashes with people. It’s like people discussing politics at Christmas and getting into fights or something like that.
AC: Yeah, that Mercury-Mars is so sharp. But it’s like comfort food—it’s like country-style breakfast and poison-tipped arrows.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s an odd combination.
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s pretty good.
AC: I don’t know, I think it sounds good, as long as I’m not being ‘porcupined’ with those arrows. Kait, if you’re thinking about what to get me for Christmas—both a country breakfast and poison-tipped arrows would be all right.
CB: Yeah, a blow-dart gun is what I’m imagining. All right, well, that’s pretty good. There’s also a kind of nice—it’s not standout—Venus-Neptune trine that’s happening at the same time, which is kind of dreamy and kind of imaginative or creative that’s happening at the same time. Such a contradictory set of different aspects that are all aligning in the same few-day period.
AC: Yeah, it’s gonna hit different people really differently depending on how charts are configured. If your chart is aligned with the Sun-Moon-Jupiter, it’ll be like, “Oh, that was so nice,” right? It’s just an all-country breakfast. Whereas if you have late mutable stuff, you’re gonna remember the poison darts, like, “Oh, that was tense. That was sharp.” And then that Venus-Neptune, especially in a trine, I would associate that with the most pleasant version of escapism, right? Being able to just lose yourself in a good book, in a ‘blah, blah, blah’, whatever it is.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Very different depending on where you are with these end-of-December charts.
CB: And I forgot to mention that it’s not just Mercury conjoining Mars, but they’re both squaring Neptune at the same time. And Mercury-Neptune has this really classic, not just miscommunication, but false communication signature. Something that’s being done almost deceitfully sometimes is a typical manifestation, whereas Mars square Neptune has this sense of taking action and sometimes taking bold or aggressive action but based on a false idea of what’s happening in reality. And those are really difficult energies to try and reconcile that are gonna lead to probably some arguments or some clashes that are based on false premises, where one or both sides don’t actually have a clear idea of what’s going on even though they think that they do.
AC: Yeah, yeah, the mixture of hostility and misunderstanding, right? Like somebody whispering in your ear, “You see those clouds up in the sky? They were talking shit about you.”
CB: Right.
AC: And then you start looking up at the clouds with paranoia and hostility.
CB: Right, for sure. Paranoia and hostility—that’s a good one based on a mistaken assumption or based on seeing something that you thought was real but it not necessarily being so. Like misinformation that leads to a provocation could be a good way to string that together in a sentence.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And it’s those half-understandings that are the worst, right? You hear something that was said but it’s out of context, so you think they meant that, but really, etc., etc. And it’s worth noting that Mercury-Mars conjunction—because of its position relative to the Sun—that’s gonna start everyday. Mercury and Mars are gonna be visible. They’re gonna be not super bright, but right before dawn, everyday, you’re gonna see Mercury and Mars rise together at the end of December. And it’s also worth noting that this is the second in a series of Mercury-Mars conjunctions we’re getting. The first one was right around the eclipse and that was in Scorpio, this one here at the end of December is at the end of Sagittarius, and then several weeks later in January, we’re gonna get a third Mercury-Mars conjunction in Capricorn.
CB: Okay. What day, again, or when?
AC: Oh, let’s see, like middle of January, middle-end. I don’t have it right in front of me.
CB: Let me move it forward. There it is. Yeah, late January. Yeah, around the 27th of January. And the exact conjunction between Mercury and Mars this month is gonna take place on the 27th and 28th. So that’s the exact conjunction between those two here, which is the height of that energy the day after the Full Moon goes exact. And then Mercury eventually—at the very end of December and the beginning of January—stations direct. And the new year, January 1 and 2nd, actually begins with Mercury stationing direct at 22° of Sagittarius. So that’s the end point of the retrograde when we start to see some resolution, and then Mars will eventually move out of Sagittarius and move into Capricorn in the first week of January.
AC: Yeah, and then I don’t think they get more than 7°-8° apart ‘cause Mercury stations direct and then takes a little time to get moving again. And then Mercury is slowly chasing Mars for pretty much all of January until they hit that exact conjunction.
CB: Yeah, that reminds me of—was it early 2022? The beginning of the Ukraine war was happening and Venus and Mars were chasing each other.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: But back to December—so we get that Full Moon. We get Mercury slowing down to station direct, and Venus changing signs and moving out of Scorpio on the 29th is another big shift because Venus immediately then runs into Saturn the last few days of December and the first day of January. That’s actually one of the closest aspects that’s happening on New Year’s Eve, which is kind of a downer, ‘cause usually Saturn is more of a cold energy and it has a way of dumping a bucket of cold ice water on top of Venus that is otherwise usually trying to bring people together and unify things. Saturn can kind of cool off relationships when those two are squaring each other.
AC: Yeah, and Venus in Sagittarius is usually a very festive influence. So, yeah, hitting that square to Saturn early on is a bit of a bummer. I don’t know, I kind of hate New Year’s as a fake festival, so I’m okay with that. Just do it on the equinox or do it on the solstice, do it on one of the equinoxes. I don’t like how non-astronomical New Year’s is. It’s 10-ish days after a solstice.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Do it like the East Asian New Year, do it the second New Moon after the solstice, but pick something astronomical, which is therefore astrological. The arbitrariness of New Year’s always pisses me off.
CB: Yeah, totally. We’ve definitely gotten away from that. A lot of the older festivals always used to be based on different astronomical alignments ‘cause that’s what the calendar originally was based on and grew out of and was much more closely tied into, and we’ve definitely gotten away from that societally.
AC: Yeah, I mean, almost all of our reckoning of time was based on our relationship to the rest of the universe, like our relationship to the Sun, that’s days and years. Months used to be about relationships to the Moon and still have a similar time scale. But it’s not that hard—I guess it is hard to change calendars. But if we were starting from zero, just stick it on the solstice.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That reminded me—speaking of calendars and different things like that and looking for good days and bad days to do things during the course of the month and when the astrological energies are gonna be a little bit more flowing—I meant to mention the auspicious electional chart for this month, which is actually towards the beginning of the month for reasons that should be obvious at this point. So let me put that up. Sorry, I had a typo. All right, so here’s our chart for the month. We’re gonna give two charts actually on two different days, but one of the days is December 2, 2023, at about 1:35 AM, with early Libra rising. So this chart and the following day—around the same time on December 3, with the same time and the same rising sign—are our two possible electional charts for this month. We’d like to recommend getting in good electional stuff early in the month before that Mercury retrograde really gets going and before Mercury retrogrades back into Sag and conjoins Mars and all of that stuff, so that we can try to take advantage of the period of time in early December before that happens, when Mercury’s still applying to the trine with Jupiter; but also taking advantage of that last little brief bit of Venus in Libra to get some good electional juice out of that placement.
So in order to do that we have a chart on December 2, where Libra is rising, and Venus is in Libra, in the 1st house, or in the 1st whole sign house. The Moon is in Leo, and depending on your timezone, it’s either applying to a square with Jupiter or just barely separating from a square with Jupiter, and the Moon is gonna be trining the Sun in Sagittarius from its position in Leo, in the 11th whole sign house. So this chart is primarily good for things that relate to Venus because of Venus’ condition as the ruler of the ascendant, and Venus being so strong in the sign of Libra. So things that you want to have positive aesthetic appeal so that they appear appealing to other people, things that you want to emphasize Venus’ basic nature of unifying and reconciling things—all of those would be pretty good uses for this chart. It also has Jupiter in the 8th house. This is a night chart, so Venus is also the benefic-of-the-sect, so Venus is the most positive planet in the chart. And by placing it in the 1st house, it kind of emphasizes that what you start at this time will have that more benefic energy of growth and building things up rather than the more malefic energy of tearing things down. Let’s see, you had an election recently involving Venus, right? Like what do you use Venus elections for?
AC: Oh, let’s see—yeah, somebody in the chat said redecorating. Yeah, Venus, especially in Libra, has this quality of being good for design, when something needs to be rearranged into a more pleasing and functional sort of format. Venus elections are also good for any sort of social stuff or getting back in touch with people or arranging something with someone, which could be explicitly social, but also if you’re working together and you have things to figure out. “When are we gonna do the yearly?” which is a conversation we had recently. Things that benefit from easy flow—easy and harmonious social flow, where it’s easy to work together with people benefit from a strong Venus placement.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’ve also been understanding the social component of Venus and Venus in Libra, especially of bringing together two sides that are at odds and being able to find a way to reconcile them. I think Venus in Libra is really good for that, and this chart would also be good for that; whether that’s socially among friends or among businesses or other things like that it could be very useful. So the 10th house is also in good shape. You can use any degree of Libra rising, but try to get the midheaven so it’s around 4°-5°-6° of Cancer; that way, the midheaven is sextile Jupiter in the 8th house. The Moon is the ruler of the 10th house, and it’s in the 11th house of friends, so it’s in a pretty good position in terms of friends, groups, and social movements. We picked out the 2nd as probably the primary day, but December 3 is also pretty good. At that point the Moon will be later in Leo, and it’ll be applying directly to a sextile with Venus, which just emphasizes some of those Venusian themes and also emphasizes the connection between the 11th house of friends and groups and alliances, and Venus’ basic function to unify and reconcile things.
Yeah, so that’s our best electional chart of December right at the top of the month. And yesterday, Leisa Schaim and I actually released our big annual Year Ahead 2024 Electional Astrology Report that we do every year, where we look ahead at the best electional charts over the course of the next 12 months, and we release that as a report that people can download or purchase in order to get the best electional chart for the next 12 months. So you can use this report to gain insights into the most fortuitous dates, ideal projects to launch on specific days, as well as activities to avoid. The report includes a two-and-a-half hour video workshop that’s available in both video and audio format. It also includes a PDF summary for quick reference, printable PDF charts for all of the elections discussed, a tutorial for adapting our charts to your city or location, as well as another tutorial for aligning your birth chart to our electional charts.
So we’ve been doing this report for five years now, and we found some really great charts for next year that we’re excited about, especially with some of the pileups in Taurus and Gemini that are occurring in the spring. Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced astrologer, the report offers valuable insights and inspiration for planning major life events and ventures throughout the year. So previous customers always rave about the value and clarity of the previous years’ reports, emphasizing their practicality for planning and learning electional astrology. So we’re gonna do a launch sale where it’s actually 15% off for the first month until January 1, 2024. So the initial launch price is just gonna be $54.95 for the entire Year Ahead Report, and then we’re gonna raise the price to $64.95 in January. So if you’d like to get the report at the discounted rate over the course of the next month, you can go to theastrologypodcast.com/2024report, and there you’ll find more information about it, as well as information about how you can purchase it at the discounted rate. So that was a big deal that we finally got out yesterday, using that same electional chart I think that you used, to put some things together as well, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah, the rising was different. We might have at Sphere + Sundry last night.
CB: Maybe. Not to confirm or deny that you did or did not do anything. But, yeah, I think we’ve seen a lot over the past year the value of knowing when the astrological weather is gonna be good and when certain days are gonna be more auspicious for certain types of ventures or activities versus when probably to avoid trying to schedule major things, and sometimes that’s really useful information. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m always excited to put that together for people, to help give them a guide to the same things that you and I regularly put into practice each day in terms of picking what days to do things.
AC: Well, and it’s so nice to look at things six months ahead of time or even a year. Like, “Okay, I know I’m gonna be doing that during the summer. So early, or like mid-July right—or actually it’s worth holding off until September.” And that kind of arrangement and placement in time seems unendurable when you’re closer to it, but when it’s the beginning or end of the year, and you’re naturally thinking in broader time scales, it’s much easier to locate things. But, yeah, you know what? I’m gonna try to get that done by the end of summer rather than it’s June and you’re like, “Oh, I should get it done now.” It’s so much easier to schedule things when you’re not right up against it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, an annual report like that I think is really nice.
CB: Well, especially if you’re doing something that requires long-term planning, like planning a wedding, launching a business, going on a major trip, or something like that; it’s good to know what the weather’s gonna be like ahead of time.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say we get it for free—it’s not free at all. But one benefit from doing all of the research into the yearly every year is that it’s sort of like having a map of the year. Like you’ve already done a tour, right? You haven’t lived all of it yet. But it’s sort of like a level of Mario Bros. It’s like having the camera pan over all of the obstacles and gold coins and power-ups and getting a view of it, and then you start the level rather than just discovering it in the moment and being terribly excited or disappointed and easily confused.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And doing the forecast is important for that, and part of what this is an astrological forecast in addition to picking out the individual charts. Yeah, so people should check that out. And let’s get back to the December forecast just to wrap things up. There was one aspect I meant to mention at the very end of the month, which is that Jupiter is making its final station, its direct station, in the sign of Taurus at the very end of the month, on the 30th, which is one of the actually more positive aspects that’s occurring late in this month, especially if anybody has any placements in fixed signs, or if Taurus is important for you. Like if it was your rising sign or your 10th house or something that Jupiter station could be a positive turning point. How do you feel about Jupiter stationing in Taurus?
AC: I like it. Generally speaking, Jupiter pretty much always has one retrograde station and one direct station per sign. Jupiter’s retrograde is about a third of the year, and so we always have this first direct phase with Jupiter in the sign, then retrograde, and then we have the direct again. So with Jupiter, we have this attempt to improve something or to mitigate difficulty, which is sort of preventing decay which is its own sort of growth; yeah, anyway, we’re trying to get something going, learn something, do something. And then during the retrograde phase, maybe we need to back up a little bit, we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves, or we need to think about things or hold the territory we’ve taken, and then Jupiter stations direct for that last third. And so, the direct station of Jupiter initiates that, in this case, in the last third of Jupiter’s time in Taurus, right? It’s gonna be about another four months. And so, now that you tried and kind of failed or kind of succeeded—maybe figured some things out, figured out what’s in the way or what you need to work around—it’s another whole four months of Jupiter direct in Taurus; it’s sort of what I would sum up or try to concentrate as the work of stability, of trying to stabilize things in the midst of a variety of disruptive factors in the world, going through some things. Jupiter in Taurus seems to focus on the ability to or the benefit of being able to keep things steady even when they’re not steady, like the quality of a shock absorber, right? It doesn’t change the road but it changes your ride, as well as the experience of everyone in the vehicle.
CB: Jupiter went into Taurus back in May of this year and began a period of growth and expansion in each of our charts in whatever house that it went into at that time, whatever whole sign house it went into—whether it was your 7th house of relationships or your 10th house of career or whatever—but when it went retrograde back in September that notion of growth and expansion can be drawn back or can be inhibited a bit. And this direct station, when Jupiter actually starts moving forward in Taurus again—especially for people that have Jupiter activated this year as a time-lord or if it’s in a prominent part of your chart—that more optimistic sense of forward movement and growth and rapid expansion that you may have been feeling between May and September before Jupiter stationed retrograde you’ll see a return of that as Jupiter stations direct here at the very end of December. And oftentimes, very close, within days of when a station happens, you can kind of feel that energy and see an important turning point take place usually related to the topics of the house that it’s stationing in your chart.
AC: Yeah, there’s the sense of there’s progress to be made, or the way is open for progress in that area. Like, “Oh, I was doing really well on x, y, and z up until September and then some stuff happened and that took a while to resolve. And, oh, back to this thing that I was doing.” Like the road is clear to go back to work on that or to get back to making progress on that.
CB: Totally. And also, while the getting is good, once that station happens, the countdown to Jupiter leaving Taurus at the end of May is on. So if that’s an important area for you, and if you start returning back towards finishing something and growing in that specific area of your chart, there’s sort of like a countdown to try to squeeze in and do as much as you can in that area and get as much of that Jupiter transit as you can out of it before the transit is over on May 25-26 when Jupiter departs from Taurus and will move into Gemini.
AC: Yeah, yeah, this is a particularly good one for you. It’s ‘go’ time again. You have four months left.
CB: Yeah. And the final thing is, since it’s stationing there, it’s also stationing with Uranus. So it’s sort of a reactivation of that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which has moved very far away, and we’ve maybe forgotten a little bit that it existed at this point. But I think this station of Jupiter at the very end of the month will remind us of that and remind us of some of the ways in which Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions can represent growth and innovation or growth through innovation, as well as unexpected benefits that sometimes come out of the blue that you can take advantage of at that time. So it’s one of the more positive aspects that we end the year with, even though there’s some other chaotic and intense ones, like that Mercury-Mars conjunction.
AC: Yeah, yeah, nothing wrong with the Jupiter station, or Jupiter’s direct station.
CB: Yeah. All right, well, that kind of brings us to the end of the month. Are there any other final thoughts? I know we’re gonna transition into a different section where we’re gonna reflect a little bit on this year. But before we do that, did you want to say anything more about December? Is there anything we forgot to mention or missed that we meant to mention about the astrology of this month?
AC: I would just say paying attention to the difference in the periods where Mercury is in Capricorn versus in Sagittarius—that difference is gonna be a lot of the experiential difference of the month; like the easier, more constructive, thoughtful portion—like the first-half-ish—is really defined by that, and then there’s certainly a less-planned, intentional, more chaotic quality to the Mercury-Mars. Don’t spend the Mercury direct in Capricorn at the beginning of the month just dreading the end. There’s good mapping and constructing and sequencing and thinking to be done there, and you’re probably gonna get interrupted, but you’ll come back to it and you’ll be glad you did, whatever you did. But just, yeah, I think the main thing is that last, roughly, 10 days has surprises and is a little bit more jagged than it seems like it should be.
CB: Yeah, and that turning point is December 22. That’s the dividing line when Mercury retrogrades back into Sagittarius the day after that. Yeah, so use the first part of the month, when the Mercury aspects are more constructive, to do some of those important things and to make amends and make resolutions. There will probably be some people that use that retrograde conjunction with Mars in the later part of the month constructively, though, because sometimes maybe you have to go back and litigate the past. Maybe there’s things about the past that need to be dug up again and addressed even if that causes controversy. And I’m sure for some people, even though that’s not gonna be an easy process, it may be a necessary process in order to move forward again, which is gonna be represented by Mercury actually stationing direct and starting to move forward in zodiacal order.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So, yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see the dividing line between the first and the second-half of the month, which occurs on December 22. And we will be writing things down and taking notes about the news, and we’ll check in again next month to see how things went and what that actually ended up manifesting in, once you take some of these broad archetypal principles that we’ve been talking about and interpret the symbolism of this. We’ll see how it turns out in concrete terms, in terms of the manifold different ways that these different things can happen in the different lives of people around the world.
AC: Yeah, what it actually looks like.
CB: Yeah. All right, so we wanted to do a little bit of a retrospective here at the very end of this episode since it’s December and since we’ve reached the end of another year. Next month we’re gonna do our year ahead forecast for 2024, which we’re gonna record we said on December 22 with our live audience of patrons and the people that have signed up through our page on patreon.com, and then we’ll release that publicly sometime in the next week, towards the end of December. But since we’re at the end of the month and at the end of the year, Austin, you actually suggested maybe we do a little bit of a retrospective about how things went and what some of the major astrological alignments were over the past year. What were you thinking about in terms of that? What made that come to mind?
AC: Well, just a little look back ‘cause we’re necessarily entirely focused on the immensity, the weight of the oncoming year when we do the yearly, and it’s natural as the year winds down to look back on what happened. Although this is very subjective, this year really felt like it flew by.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I’m probably not the only person that felt that way, but quite a bit has happened over the last year. A year ago we were still in the Saturn in Aquarius era. It feels like Saturn’s been in Pisces for 18 years.
CB: Yeah, for sure, especially for those of us with Pisces placements, I expect. I mean, I want to talk about that, but one of the shifts that happened also was Pluto in Aquarius. Remember when we did the year ahead forecast, ChatGPT had just dropped, and it just rapidly became this huge thing that everyone was marveling at; it seemed like AI was getting closer and closer. And then Pluto went right into Aquarius very early in the year in March, and it just created this explosion of discussion of all these different companies—like Google and Microsoft and everyone else—just falling all over each other to roll out their own AI programs or focus on research with that. And it seemed like a major thing that happened over the past year was, first, the explosion of discussion about AI and some of the issues surrounding it, including discussions about its potential impact on the future. But then Pluto retrograded back into Capricorn and things got quieter, but also there were discussions about regulation of AI; if there should be laws surrounding it, as well as different people taking this new technology and finding different ways to monetize it. Like there’s so many different websites now that have integrated AI in different forms into their programs and that’s been one of the really interesting things to see for me over the past year.
AC: Yeah, yeah. We were very much looking forward to Pluto in Aquarius ‘cause Pluto hasn’t changed signs since 2007-2008 when it waffled back and forth between Sagittarius and Capricorn, and we were looking at that as a preview of the topics of the next 20 years. And I would say that we were quite gratified, right? Everybody was worried about literally the next 20 years. Like, “Oh, my God, what’s this going to do over the next 20 years?” I saw that timeline used a lot by non-astrologers.
CB: Yeah, specific discussions of are we going to create a sentient, new intelligence that’s smarter than humanity sometime in the next 20 years and they become self-aware and that actually being a legitimate discussion really became very strong once Pluto moved into Aquarius way back in March.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know if it was a legitimate discussion but it was happening a lot.
CB: We’ll see, buddy.
AC: It was either AI is going to destroy us, or AI is going to save us, or AI is fake and stupid and we wish people would stop talking about it. Like pick one.
CB: Right.
AC: Everybody picked one.
CB: Yeah, and suddenly everybody has an opinion about that, whereas prior to this year probably that would have been a very small niche area of interest that hardly very few people would even have an opinion on.
AC: When it comes back into the news, I’ll be shocked if it isn’t within a week of Pluto moving back into Aquarius, the intense discussion; like I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t begin again timed that tightly to it. So, yeah, that was interesting and that certainly gave us the preview, right? And again, that all just kind of tapered off super quickly as soon as Pluto wasn’t in Aquarius.
CB: Yeah—
AC: There was also less—
CB: —which was over this summer.
AC: Yeah, and less impactful, but still there in very Pluto in Aquarius theme, was the intensity of the alien disclosure stuff; which, again, if you’ve met people with planets in Aquarius they may seem alien to you, or outside the human world. But that classic association of Aquarius with what is alien or interstellar also intersected with that time.
CB: Yeah, and we also had the return of Pluto into Capricorn for some of the last passes of that before it’s done with that for the next two centuries. And there were also the questions we had in the year ahead forecast about that final pass of Pluto returning back to where it was when the country was founded, the US, and what that was gonna look like in October. Like we said, at the beginning of this episode, it was striking that that did coincide with this historic event of the Speaker of the House being fired and that position being vacant the first time in history for several weeks, as well as somebody being put into place there and the questions of if that’ll end up having longer-term implications, for example, for the 2024 election, and that’s something we’ll see here over the course of the next year.
AC: Yeah, I think I’ll be able to much better interpret that Pluto return or those Pluto returns in retrospect. I’m having a hard time knowing exactly what it means with the context that we have now, ‘cause there’s a lot of ‘if this happens, then that meant that’, right?
CB: Right.
AC: But, yeah, it’s interesting. And not to be too dismissive, but with a lot of really dramatic astrological configurations, I want to just get it over with and see what it is and what it isn’t, and just getting the US’s Pluto return over with was something that I was excited about. Let’s just get it over with and see what it is and what it isn’t as best we can.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I guess because it was at the founding of the country, I just assumed it would be something going back to that, that the founding of the country was democracy. And the question of if there’s something about the basic democratic principles that are up for questioning or revision or being bulldozed is my greatest fear, that I hope isn’t the outcome of all of this. But we’ll have to see what happens over the course of the next few years once we’re out of this period and what it looks like in retrospect with some of those decisions and turning points that happened. A lot of stuff was happening in October with Trump getting different charges and going through this process and this drama about whether he’s gonna be convicted before the election, if he’s convicted at all, and if there’s some repercussions for some of the stuff that happened, for example, back in January of 2021, or if there’s not, and depending on where that goes, what implications that’ll have for the country if he becomes president again or what have you.
AC: Yeah, it points to a future that’s still behind the curtain; it will probably become obnoxiously clear in retrospect with Pluto being ominous, foreshadowing clearly in the case of the Pluto in Aquarius AI stuff, and then sort of ominously and pointedly but unclearly in the case of the Pluto return of the United States.
CB: And it was also big in October, it might be worth mentioning as well. I felt like we accurately talked about a lot of the energies that became really prominent in October, and it was largely through seeing that Pluto was prominent and talking about that very bluntly; that was another area where Pluto was very prominent because of that Mars-Pluto square especially that was happening around October 6 and 7th and 8th, as well as both eclipses being tied in with Pluto. Like that solar eclipse in Libra on the 13th of October that was squaring Pluto, a lot of our discussions about the use of power or the misuse of power or going too far and different things like that were based on our basic interpretations of Pluto aspects.
AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. None of that makes sense or would have happened without Pluto.
CB: Yeah.
AC: As I said before, Saturn feels like it’s been in Pisces forever. Saturn actually snuck into Pisces a couple of weeks before we got the Pluto in Aquarius preview. And that’s been really interesting because it moved us out of what will be remembered as the ‘pandemic’ years. Saturn moved into Aquarius, we got a sneak peak of Saturn in Aquarius almost exactly as the lockdowns began in 2020, and then it moved back into Capricorn. And then end of 2020/beginning of 2021, we had Saturn in Aquarius and it was just there square Uranus until last March.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. ‘Cause Robert Weinstein earlier, around that forecast, pointed out that the government in the US at least dropped the remaining COVID protocols around the time that Saturn was departing from Aquarius, which ended up being striking even though COVID is still around and lots of people, actually thousands of people, are dying from it regularly, and the excess death numbers are still higher than they should be than in previous years before COVID existed. It was interesting seeing that there really was a transition this year, as you were saying, to whatever the post-intense COVID period was for those three years when Saturn was transiting through Aquarius.
AC: Yeah, yeah. It had the sense of a new chapter historically or paragraph or whatever sequencing metaphor. And what’s interesting is it’s out of the COVID era—out of Saturn- Uranus into Saturn-Neptune, right? And so, I think having about eight months now of Saturn in Pisces, or nine months, it’s like, so what is this era? I would say it’s appropriately confused. We would expect Saturn in Pisces to be prone to confusion, we would expect Saturn-Neptune to be prone to confusion—or not even an active confusion, but a lack of clarity, right? So it’s like, what are we doing now? I guess we’re not doing that anymore, but what are we doing? And I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think anyone’s given us a clear, “Oh, this is this.” I think if we look back the last 20 years we could probably give each Saturn period a pretty clear name, but like what is it? What’s going on? Where are we going?
CB: Yeah, I think that feeling is just gonna get more and more intense next year as Saturn and Neptune get closer and closer together and that feeling of nebulousness and uncertainty becoming more pronounced. I was really impressed, though, this year how literal many of the water themes were. Like we talked about water being a major theme in our year ahead forecast with Saturn going into Pisces, the sign of the fishes. And it was really funny, like in June, right when Saturn stationed retrograde for the very first time in Pisces, we had that submarine incident. All of a sudden the world was focused for a week—and the media at least was focused—on this question of these 5 or 10 people in a submarine who were trapped there for a week and all of the drama surrounding that. There was simultaneously a big boat that capsized that killed I think like 200 or 300 people in the Mediterranean at the time, there were also all these stories about orcas attacking boats that was happening at the same time—it was really wild how literal it was. And then, interestingly, over the past month, I noticed more boat stories coming up. One of them was that in different parts of the world there were protesters who were trying to stop arms shipments to Israel, and they were going to ports and were blocking or stopping boats from departing from ports that had arms shipments. And that was happening very close to Saturn stationing again in Pisces in November, and it was really striking.
AC: Yeah, yeah. All of the literal liquid metaphors, the shipping lanes. There’s some qualities that that submarine accident had which feels very Saturn in Pisces, like under a lot of pressure and confused.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s like, “I don’t know, we’re somewhere way beneath the surface.” I think it’s fair to say this is a very pressurized period of history. But if we look at the Saturn in Aquarius years, ‘21-‘22, it was pressurized but in a very obvious way, right? There was what was happening, there was the policy and people were for this and angry about this and dying from that, but it was clear. Saturn might be grim, but Saturn gives facts and concrete things, whereas the Saturn-Neptune, it’s sort of everywhere, like, “Oh, what’s going on? It’s historic times. But where is any of this going?” That quality is so overwhelming. And I would add just one more thing to Saturn-Neptune.
CB: Let me add something real quick before you move on from that point, which is just fear. When I came up learning modern astrology, Noel Tyl always emphasized that Saturn in your chart can indicate where you have fears. And it was so striking for me seeing the transition from Saturn in Aquarius and the fear surrounding air and literally the air being contaminated by COVID to fears surrounding water. And all of a sudden in June everybody is thinking about this scenario of what if you were trapped in a submarine and you’re like a mile below the surface and you can’t get out, and just the fear shifting from air to water being very literal in some instances. ‘Cause last year, in the year ahead forecast, we also talked about Pluto being about fears, but it was more like they’re different. They’re very distinctive—Saturn’s type of fear versus Pluto—and we talked about it being almost like terror or shifting in different eras the scope of terror. And it was interesting seeing people having fears or terror surrounding AI with Pluto in Aquarius versus this type of fear that Saturn brings in different signs.
AC: Yeah, I believe I abbreviated that as fear of the unknown for Pluto, where you can project onto it, and then fear of the terrifying known with Saturn, right? The fear of the air during Saturn in Aquarius was people getting a disease from the air, or the fear of the water, it’s like water will crush you—those are knowns. And it’s not that fear of the known or unknown one is better or worse, but they have a different quality.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: But I was gonna add with Saturn joining Neptune in Pisces we were watching Russia, ‘cause Russian history just with shocking reliability pivots dramatically around Saturn-Neptune conjunctions every single time, right? The fall of the Soviet Union, death of Stalin, the Russian Revolution, the assassination of Alexander II, etc., etc., just always big. We’re still some years away from the exact conjunction, but within four months of this one we had Prigozhin’s—I don’t know what to call it—mutiny. Yevgeny Prigozhin drove an armored column towards Moscow and shot down Russian military helicopters before deciding I guess not to do a coup; that’s all still somewhat mysterious But we’ve been looking at Russian history—‘cause that’s what happens during Saturn-Neptune—and seeing those rumblings already I know I was surprised that we got something that dramatic that quickly.
CB: Yeah.
AC: History doesn’t pivot on that one event but, I don’t know, that’s very suggestive.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s ‘cause we’re so early in that transit, and we were expecting it to be closer to the exact conjunction of Saturn and Neptune a few years from now, but that was an early preview. But that one specifically was also tied in with the Venus retrograde that happened this summer because it turned out that there had been similar things on previous Venus retrogrades; and then with this one, I think that happened very early in the Venus retrograde, early in the summer. And then he was killed or more likely assassinated closer to when Venus was direct and passing the same degrees later in the summer, wasn’t he?
AC: Yeah, that’s when his plane happened to fall out of the sky.
CB: Right. Yeah, which is something that happens occasionally I guess if you try to foment a coup in Russia.
AC: Yeah, they’re probably unrelated.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, yeah, Saturn in Pisces—all of my mutable brethren are finally getting some of the wrath, ‘cause the wrath had been focused pretty squarely on fixed signs for a while. But the fixed signs still have to do the Venus retrograde in Leo, right? So that started brewing in June and wasn’t really wrapped up until September. So I actually have a Venus retrograde story that I couldn’t tell at the time. The day of the Venus retrograde station, I was awoken by Kait, and she was putting what looked like a thermometer right in my face, and I didn’t understand what was happening; it takes me like an hour to enter the waking world. This was like Sunday, this was literally waking up with the Venus retrograde station, and it was actually a positive pregnancy test. And what was Venus retrograde about this is that we’ve been trying for a little bit, and Kait had coincidentally had a blood test a week-and-a-half before from the doctor and it was negative. And so, it wasn’t just like some shitty home test that said ‘not this time’, we got the ‘doctor’ blood test. And so, then the retrograde, it’s like, “Oh, holy shit, we’re doing this.” So not all the Venus stations are bad, but it was definitely a surprise. And with Venus and pregnancy, the best take on that I’ve heard is actually from my Vedic teacher Freedom Cole. He said that Venus is about getting pregnant, it’s not about sustaining a pregnancy or any of the other portions, but you look to Venus for whether a person is going to get pregnant or not. And so, it’s funny ‘cause it was a reversal of ‘no’ into a ‘yes’. So thank you everybody in the comments. So Kait’s pretty fucking pregnant right now, and we talked about when we would tell people about it ‘cause we didn’t want to, I don’t know, be tacky and social media about the pregnancy.
CB: Yeah, I gotta say that has been the hardest thing, being privy to that information and not getting to tell everyone on the forecast episodes—when Venus was stationing—that that coincided with that. That was like a nuclear-level secret the past several months.
AC: Yeah, yeah, it was big. We also didn’t want to hide it forever, like secretly having a five-year-old that nobody knew about. And so, we just kind of decided if someone saw Kait, if it was visually quite clear, then that’s the time to stop hiding. When it would be difficult to hide it visually then I wouldn’t conspicuously avoid it in conversation.
CB: Nice. And you found out when Venus stationed direct in Leo.
AC: No, no, the retrograde station.
CB: Oh, right, the retrograde station.
AC: The day of the retrograde station. It was that reversal of like, “No, we are doing this.” It’s sort of always in the future until it’s really happening and that’s a very on/off thing, right? Either someone’s pregnant or they’re not. And so, even if you want to do that maybe next month, it’s still in the land of maybe and possibility. But, yeah, that station was, “Actually, it’s on.”
CB: That was amazing. And Kaitlin says in the comments there was a Venus retrograde reversal component, which is that you were very sure it would be a girl, initially.
AC: Yeah, there were a couple of astrology techniques and there were a couple other things. We were both really sure it was gonna be a girl, and then it’s definitely not a girl, it’s definitely a boy. But it took multiple tests for us to believe that ‘cause there were so many things that suggested it was gonna be a girl, so that’s another station thing that was a reversal.
CB: That’s funny ‘cause it was that Venus retrograde in Leo and it was the summer of women, and the Barbie movie came out right on the Venus station simultaneously and all that other stuff, so it’s kind of funny.
AC: And we just thought that for a long time. We’d always been able to agree on girl names, whereas we’d never been able to agree on a boy name. We were like ready to go with the girl. We had the whole life envisioned, name, etc., etc., and so that was another part of the Venus station.
CB: Nice. Well, congratulations, that’s so exciting. I’m really excited to follow your journey over the next several years—next many years—as you move into being parents and into fatherhood for you and motherhood for Kait.
AC: Yeah, the rest of our lives.
CB: Yeah, that’s awesome.
AC: So, yeah, due end of March. We’ll see when he actually arrives.
CB: Okay, so we’re taking bets on Aries or Pisces at this point?
AC: Yeah, who knows.
CB: All right.
AC: I was three weeks premature, so who knows. But, yeah, a lot of unknowns; a little curious about the birth chart.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Going to have to get better at not using astrology to create anxiety disorders.
CB: Right.
AC: However good you get at astrology, you have a new challenge of not letting that drive you crazy. Don’t be like, “Oh, but when he’s 23, there’s gonna be this, this is awful.” ‘Cause you could look at a lot of time and it’s even worse than yourself ‘cause you have even less control. So I’m gonna get better at that.
CB: Yeah, I think that’ll be both a good Saturn in Pisces thing for you as a Pisces in developing the responsibility of being a parent, but also exercising the restraint of reeling in the astrology and using it when it’s necessary and maybe not using it when it’s not.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Wisdom sets knowledge—or excuse me, ‘wisdom sets limits to knowledge’ is, I think, a Nietzsche quote.
CB: I like that. All right, well, brilliant. Congratulations. We look forward to hearing more about that. Whenever you want to drop future updates in future forecast episodes, please do. I’m sure everyone will be excited about it, and everyone can wish Austin and Kaitlin good luck and congratulations in the comments. Awesome—so anything else in our retrospective that we wanted to mention about 2023, as we’re wrapping up here? We had all those eclipses that happened. It feels like we’ve talked about that so much at this point, I don’t know if anything bears repeating. I’m a little ‘eclipsed out’ after the past couple of months.
AC: About the Venus—so Kait getting pregnant wasn’t the only thing that happened during the Venus retrograde; it was the most important thing by far. But, yeah, we had, as you said, what was billed as ‘the summer of women’. We had the Barbie movie, right? ‘Barbenheimer’ happened on that same Venus retrograde day.
CB: And the Pantone Color of the Year was pink. And we’ve learned that Venus in Leo, especially Venus retrograde in Leo, is pink and it’s loud, and that was a really cool manifestation of that, if you saw us talking about the archetype in the year ahead forecast. And we didn’t know the Barbie movie was coming out or anything, so it was really interesting seeing that happen once we actually got there and seeing the very literal manifestation of some of those transits.
AC: Yeah, yeah. We had both the writer and actors’ strike and that was a big part of the Jupiter in Taurus. Not just the Jupiter in Taurus, the Jupiter in Taurus with Uranus, right? Uranus in Taurus loves labor movements, historically. And Uranus has been in Taurus since 2018, but Jupiter joined it this year, and there’s been in recent history an unprecedented number of huge strikes. The entertainment industry ones get more press because it’s the entertainment industry, but we’ve had big nurses strikes, we’ve had auto worker strikes—that’s a huge part of Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus. And there’s another four months of that, or five months of that, from this point in time.
CB: Did we even mention that the actors’ strike was finally resolved right after Venus went into Libra in the past month?
AC: No. I think there were some weightier things that consumed our attention. But, yes, that happened, right? We were wondering when does that end ‘cause the writers’ strike began and ended with two Mercury retrograde cycles. The Mercury retrograde in Taurus, it got going, and then with the resolution of the Mercury retrograde in Virgo, it ended. Whereas the actors’ strike, I don’t know if you were, but I was really curious to see if it was going to end when Venus went direct towards the end of the summer, and it didn’t; but it ended as soon as Venus got into a place of strength, Libra, afterwards. It needed to get through Virgo and then get to a traditionally-strong Venus place and then it was just over.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then the last thing was the eclipses. I’m trying to remember what happened in the eclipses at the beginning of the year, in April and May. The only major thing I remember was Prince Charles and the coronation occurring right on an eclipse in Scorpio in May. It was a pretty notable event in terms of Queen Elizabeth having been queen for so long, and she became, if not the, one of the longest-reigning monarchs in history, and then she passed away late last year. And the coronation finally took place in May, right on that eclipse, and that was very notable, bringing up those ideas of transfers of power and pivotal people coming into power sometimes on eclipses or sometimes going out of power on eclipses.
AC: Mm-hmm. And I guess within the larger frame, this year we’ve now moved wholly out of the Scorpio/Taurus eclipse cycle into Libra/Aries, right? And it was sort of half-and-half this last eclipse and the previous one as well. Both of them this year were half-and-half, but now we’re fully into this new cycle. And so, we’re we’re sort of done with the eclipses on Uranus in Taurus, which we had for a year-and-a-half, and those eclipses were extra disruptive around food supplies and logistics; a lot of that was kicked off with or was coincided or entangled with the Russo-Ukrainian War, and then it was also super bad for tech or some tech people in general. But you had a bunch of the big crypto stuff happening, Musk bought Twitter, which is probably in retrospect really bad for Musk. It was all tech and basic food supplies—lunch, grain, fertilizer, Taurus stuff—and so, we’re out of that cycle.
CB: That’s a really good point.
AC: There was a lot of action around Uranus, but it’s Jupiter, not Rahu, not the dragon’s head.
CB: And something I meant to mention is those eclipses last year in Taurus and Scorpio—especially the Taurus ones—kept coinciding with these disasters for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which ended up tanking the price. But then in October, the two eclipses that happened in October ended up coinciding with a turning point where all of a sudden the price of Bitcoin started shooting up, and I actually took a screenshot yesterday to show that. Remember the Libra eclipse occurred on October 13, and if you put that on a graph for the price of Bitcoin, you see that eclipse hit, and then all of a sudden the price just starts shooting upward from being at a low; and it’s like doubled its value or more than doubled its value since that time, and that was the first eclipse in October. And then the second eclipse was two weeks later and then the price just continued to shoot upwards even more. So over the past couple of years we’ve seen some weird things with Bitcoin being very tied in with the eclipse cycle and seeing these pivot points of it going really far up or really far down right on those eclipses.
AC: Yeah, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to crypto in general now that we’re done with eclipses on that Uranus in Taurus. Uranus in Taurus is both historically, as well as this particular go-around, have been very involved with currency. Look back every 84 years with Uranus in Taurus, there’s always big currency stuff, and so this time crypto is part of that story. And so, we’re getting to the end of Uranus in Taurus, but not quite yet, right? There’s a little bit to go. We’ve gotta get to ‘25-‘26 to be fully done with that, but there’s more Uranus in Taurus stuff behind us than there is in front of us by far.
CB: Yeah, and then finally, in October of course, as we’ve talked about a lot in the past two forecast episodes, we had the first of a series of eclipses that will take place over the next year or two in Libra. And that very first one, as we talked about at the beginning of the episode, everything happening in Israel and Palestine was really centered on those two eclipses. And that’s one of the things that we’ll continue returning to since we’re gonna see eclipses come back to Libra a couple more times next year in 2024, and I’m sure we’ll see the continued unfoldment of that story and where it’s all headed.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And even though we’ve had an eclipse in Aries and an eclipse in Libra, we haven’t had them as a pair two weeks apart. We had one during the first-half of the year and then the other during the second-half, but they were packaged with Taurus and Scorpio; so we were, again, kind of one foot in, one foot out of the old cycle and the new cycle. But now it’s just Libra/Aries for the next bet for next year.
CB: That’s a really good point. Yeah, so that’ll be important. We saw how that was tied in with the national horoscope of Israel, and we’ll have to pay attention to that in the future with other countries when we see an eclipse happening in the rising sign of the country if we know a birth time and that being a really important turning point in terms of world history.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, well, I think that’s pretty good for a review. It’s been really interesting. It’s been really fun—sometimes fun—or just ‘astrologer good’, which is sometimes when you see a terrible transit happening, which you have a terrible experience with, you’re so impressed with how literal the astrology was that you’re kind of interested in that abstractly. But it’s been good doing these forecasts with you over the past year, and I’m excited about doing the year ahead forecast with you next month.
AC: Yeah, yeah, me, too. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the yearly. It’s really interesting to check in once a month and just look back and look forward and do it again.
CB: Yeah, it feels like a process of breathing outwards and breathing inwards each month, like that process we’re doing of looking into the future and then also assessing what just happened in the past. It becomes a nice regular thing at this point.
AC: Yeah, yeah, move with the time.
CB: All right, so what do you have coming up this month? Do you have any big projects you’re launching?
AC: Yeah, there are a couple of things. Actually, I had to make notes so I’d remember. So I’ve got a bunch of lectures and workshops that I’ve given over the last five years that are finally up on the website that’s there. I’m doing a big enrollment for my year one program in the middle of the month. If you’re interested in that make sure to sign up for the waitlist on the website. The notifications aren’t gonna go out publicly, just to the waitlist. And then there’s some fun Sphere + Sundry stuff. One, the Thema Mundi is gonna go on pre-sale again at the beginning of December. So if you missed out on that the first time that’s available. And then Kait’s putting out a series, it was from last year, we did a Mars conjunct Jupiter in Aries series. And so, I’m actually gonna be handling the write-up and putting that together. We’ve tried to be really thoughtful about what magic to expose Kait to while she’s got an extra job, and we didn’t think super hot, courageous, triumphant Mars energy was the best idea. So I’m gonna be principally irradiated by that and I’ll do the write-up, but I’m excited for that to come out. We were thinking about what to release at the end of the year, and we’ve been complaining about Mars a lot, and with good reason. But since that cazimi, we’ve just begun another two-year Mars cycle; we’re like hours after the New Moon but for Mars. And so, with Mars-Sun in Sag, it’s a Mars-Jupiter energy but a way shittier version than we caught a couple years ago, so I’m excited to release that Mars-Jupiter in Aries.
CB: Nice. That’s awesome. What are the websites?
AC: So it’s sphereandsundry.com for the talismanic materia creations, and then AustinCoppock.com for classes, lectures, and workshops.
CB: Awesome, cool. I’ll put links to your website in the description below this episode. As for myself, I already mentioned the 2024 Year Ahead Electional Astrology Report that Leisa and I just launched, which is available on the podcast website. I also just released our annual Astrology Calendar Posters. All of the artwork that we use in the episodes each month, we actually put in a single large wall poster that you can use in order to look up the dates and the astrology of the year at a glance. So the calendar shows ingresses, lunations, retrogrades, and major aspects. Like I said, it’s the same calendar we show during the forecast but in a quick poster format for the entire year. I always have one above my desk so I can look up the transits quickly at a glance, especially when we’re doing the forecast episodes, but also even when I’m scheduling things or other stuff like that. So I’m running a sale where you can use the coupon code ‘JUPITER’ during checkout to get a 10% discount on the posters until January 1. So you can find out more information about that at theastrologypodcast.com/merch, and that’s the order page for the posters.
In other news, I’ve been dealing with a thing since June actually where Amazon stopped carrying my book due to some sort of weird algorithm glitch, I think, and I’ve been trying to negotiate getting it back on Amazon. But they finally got back to me over the past few months saying it’s not happening and for whatever reason they can’t change the algorithm. While my book is still available from secondhand sellers, Amazon itself doesn’t carry it and ship it directly anymore, and I don’t know how to get around that, so I’m still trying to figure out how to workaround. If anybody knows anybody at Amazon that can help me out, send me an email and let me know at theastrologypodcast@gmail.com. In the meantime, though, I know a lot of people order my book for the holidays ‘cause I always see a huge uptick in sales, and then I realize in retrospect that it’s people buying gifts for astrologers and buying an astrology book for them. So as a result of that I’m running a sale on my book if you buy it directly from me through my printer, where the book is only $30 until the end of December, which is a big discount from the usual $48 cover price. So I’m gonna put a link to that at the top of the page on the hellenisticastrology.com website. If you go to hellenisticastrology.com/book, at the top of it you’ll see a section there titled ‘Holiday Sale 2023’. And there’s like a long and complicated link to my printer, which is IngramSpark, where you can order the book at a huge discount. So, yeah, check that out there. I’ll put a link to it in the description for this episode for more information.
And other than that I’m gonna be trying to record year ahead horoscopes for each rising sign during the course of December. I’m gonna try to livestream those through YouTube. And then Austin and I, we’re gonna do the year ahead forecast for 2024, and we’re planning on recording it in front of a live audience of patrons on December 22. So if you want to join us in the audience for that live and get early access to it, just sign up through my page on patreon.com for The Astrology Podcast, and then you’ll get access, as well as a notification and webinar registration link as soon as it’s been scheduled. But I think that’s it for this forecast. So thanks a lot for joining me today. Thanks everyone in our live audience who joined us and commented. It’s been really helpful during the course of this and we’ve gotten some good feedback. And, yeah, thanks for joining me today, Austin.
AC: Yeah, my pleasure.
CB: All right, and congratulations once again. I’m super excited for both of you and looking forward to seeing your new journey in the future that’s starting next year.
AC: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s exciting, it’s nerve-wracking, it’s a one-way ticket, right? That’ll be a fact for the rest of our lives.
CB: I like that. All of that also sounds true for the forecast for 2024, as we’ll find out.
AC: It’s a one-way ticket.
CB: Yeah, as we’ll find out next month. All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Take care, everyone.
[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.