The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 430, titled:
2024 Year Ahead Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on December 26, 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 31st, 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 entire astrology forecast for the year of 2024. Hey, Austin. Thanks for joining me.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. How’s it going?
CB: It is going very well. I’m very excited about this forecast. We have a big year ahead of us. So let me give people a little overview of what we’re gonna be doing in this episode. So in the first half, we’re gonna do a broad overview of the main planetary alignments and themes this year, basically for the first two hours of this episode. Then in the third hour, we’re gonna go into a more detailed breakdown of each month of the year to give you an idea of the sequence and when each thing will take place that we’re gonna talk about in the first part. First, I want to give people an overview of some of the things we’re gonna be talking about just to give you a preview of what we’re gonna be discussing during the course of this episode.
So here are the major astrological alignments that are gonna take place in 2024. So the biggest and one of the most consequential ones is that Pluto is going to move into Aquarius for good, where it’s gonna transit for the next 20 years, which is a huge shift. At the same time, we have a major outer planet alignment of Uranus trine Pluto that’s coming into very close orb and will get just 2° from going exact this year and will intensify over the course of the rest of the decade. Additionally, Saturn is gonna be getting very close to a conjunction with Neptune in Pisces this year, coming within 10° of an exact conjunction; so we’re getting very close to that alignment, which then will go exact over the course of the next two to three years as well. One of the most positive and interesting aspects of this year is that Jupiter is going to conjoin the planet Uranus in the sign of Taurus and that’s gonna take place later in April. Then immediately after that Jupiter is going to depart from Taurus and it’s gonna move into Gemini, where it will stay for a year. At that point, Jupiter will immediately trine the planet Pluto and intensify and expand some of those Pluto in Aquarius themes, and then Jupiter is also gonna be squaring Saturn off and on this year with two exact hits of that in the middle of the year and then later in the year in August and December.
So we’re gonna see eclipses and a continuation of the Aries-Libra eclipse series during the course of the year, which will include a Great American Eclipse which is gonna take place in April; that’s gonna be a total eclipse that will be visible across the entire half of the continental United States. Then later in the year, we’re gonna get our first eclipse in the sign of Pisces and the start of a new eclipse series, where the eclipses next year will start shifting from the Aries-Libra axis to the Pisces-Virgo axis. Additionally, one of the things I noticed that’s coming up next year is there’s gonna be two comets happening—the first one in April, around the time of the Great American Eclipse, and then another one in October that’s actually gonna take place right before the US presidential election— so we’ll talk about that later. And then finally, at the very end of the year, Mars slows down in the signs of Cancer and Leo. and it stations retrograde at the very end of the year in December; so what leads us into 2025 is a Mars retrograde in Leo and Cancer.
So here are some diagrams, for those watching the video version of this episode. This one’s from Archetypal Explorer, and it shows all of the major outer planet transits that are taking place this year, many of which we will be talking about during the course of this episode. And then here’s a similar graph that was made for me by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co, one of our sponsors; she made this to help visualize some of the same outer planet transits that crest and peak at different parts of the year, but also where they sit in relation to some of the eclipses, as well as the two comets that are gonna take place this year. Strangely, both of the comets are gonna show up right around the same time as the eclipses, so we’ll talk about that more in this episode.
All right, so welcome. We’re back here again. I can’t believe it’s been a year since our last forecast episode. Does it seem like it’s been a year to you, Austin?
AC: I mean, this year went by really quickly, and yet, when I think about where I was and where the world was a year ago, that was a slightly different universe. Saturn was still an Aquarius. No Saturn in Pisces. No Saturn-Neptune in Pisces. No Pluto in Aquarius. No AI panic. Things have changed this year. Things have moved in a different direction.
CB: Yeah, we recorded our last forecast in December of 2022, almost exactly a year ago, and what was interesting is when we did that forecast, ChatGPT had just been released like a couple of weeks earlier, a week or two earlier in late November; and we could see the very beginnings of the AI revolution, and we sort of anticipated that that was gonna intensify a lot once Pluto moved into Aquarius in early 2023. which it did in pretty spectacular ways. And then also at that time, we could see some of the early AI image generation software was really starting to come out and starting to get good at that point, and we were anticipating that that would really accelerate once Saturn moved into Pisces in March of 2023, which it has, and it’s just growing by leaps and bounds. So here we are now, a year later, and so much has changed, and clearly we’re sort of standing at the precipice of entering into an even deeper and more intense phase of what those transits are indicating this year with Pluto moving into Aquarius for good now for 20 years and with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction coming closer than it’s been in decades, and coming within 10°. Clearly, 2024 is gonna be a really important year that’ll see the continuation of many themes from last year, but also a number of new ones as well.
AC: Yeah, 2024 is really interesting. We only had six weeks of Pluto in Aquarius in 2023, whereas the majority of 2024 will be Pluto in Aquarius. And so, that’s a new thing, that’s the very beginning of a 20-year thing, and yet, 2024 also has the very end of some things we’ve been doing for a long time. We get the last full year of Uranus in Taurus, which is a seven-year cycle. We get the very last year of Neptune only in Pisces, which is a 14-year cycle. And so, we’re getting a new big thing with Pluto in Aquarius, just before the beginning of Uranus in Gemini, which is 2025, and Neptune in Aries, which is 2025. And so, 2024 is interesting, right? There’s a changing of the guard, but there’s also seeing basically both Uranus and Neptune wrap up a seven-year and a 14-year cycle, while in the middle of Pluto beginning a new 20-year one. So it’s curiously located.
CB: Yeah, and that was something that came up over and over for me again; when I looked at the major outer planet transits this year, they’re all building into some pretty major stuff in this decade. But this is the first year where they get really intense and we get not just a preview, but we put a full foot in the door of that new era that we’re entering into. So one of them that I was looking at was Uranus trine Pluto, it gets within 2° this year. So we’re gonna find ourselves in this spot where it really starts ramping up before eventually starting to go exact over the next few years. There are so many transits like that, like Uranus trine Pluto, but also, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that you mentioned is huge. So here is a graph with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. That’s gonna be going exact in 2025 and 2026, but it gets so close this year, within 10°. That’s usually the orb at which a transit like that is just unmistakable and in which society really starts reflecting it in very tangible ways that are hard to ignore at that point.
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot going on. It’s interesting because 2024—if it were sort of in a void compared to most years—is pretty dramatic and era-defining. But in the middle of this decade, half of it is just sizzle reel or anticipation for 2025 and ‘26, which are somehow more dramatic—but it’s not because 2024 is chill; it’s because this decade is what it is.
CB: Yeah, for sure. This is a historic decade, and we’re heading into a historic turning point with some of those things you mentioned, like Uranus going into the Gemini and that being the Uranus return of the United States that astrologers have been talking about for over a decade now and are anticipating because that’s coincided with—three times in the past—first, the American Revolutionary War, then the Civil War, and then World War II. So it’s like the US is heading into that similar phase again where the Mars-Uranus conjunction in the US birth chart is gonna become activated again, which usually has correlated with conflicts in the past. And at the same time, we have these other major outer planet alignments that we’ve seen coincide with major turning points in the leadership of other countries around the world at the same time, like the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions that I know you’ve talked about a lot in the past forecast episodes having to do with countries like Russia and their history.
AC: Yeah, the Saturn-Neptune was a huge repolarization and pivot point for Russian history for at least the last 150 years.
CB: Right.
AC: And again, this year is just about right before that’s exact. So the exact Saturn-Neptune is next year—or, excuse me, is 2025—and Uranus into Gemini is next year. But we have so much in 2024 to do, it’s good that we get to wait a little bit. With Pluto in Aquarius, we got like the teaser trailer last year; we got six weeks of Pluto in Aquarius. But 2024—let’s see—it’s about 40-41 weeks of Pluto in Aquarius, the overwhelming majority. The exception in 2024 is we do a little bit more Pluto in Capricorn, but that’s it; we’re getting the full season premiere of the Pluto in Aquarius series. It’s a 20-episode series; we have only seen the teaser trailer so far.
CB: Yeah, well, let’s talk about that. Let’s do a section on Pluto in Aquarius. I did a lot of research recently into Pluto in Aquarius to try to understand what’s happened in the past better, because usually one of the main ways that astrologers can predict the future is by looking back. It’s like if you see a transit coming up, especially a major one, then you just look back into the past and see what happened in the world or what happened in different people’s birth charts the last time a similar transit took place; and I ended up doing a whole literature review of Pluto in Aquarius transits over the past 3,000 years and found some really interesting stuff that I think is gonna be very relevant here. Is there anything you want to say about Pluto in Aquarius—how you’re experiencing it so far, things that you anticipated, and how they panned out this year for you?
AC: Yeah, I suppose. Two things—one, Pluto in Aquarius means Pluto is not in Capricorn, and if your chart has been shat upon by Pluto in Capricorn, what you will actually feel when it goes into Aquarius is the lack of Pluto. For me, late Pluto in Capricorn has just been holding a boot on my neck. And so, during that six weeks, in the second quarter of 2023, I felt the boot lift for the first time in years; and so depending on the chart, you may actually feel less Pluto. As far as what I was expecting—without going into it over long—I was basically expecting ‘sci-fi terror’. Pluto locates our fear of the destroyer. I’m thinking of Ghostbusters where the demon emerges and says, “Pick the form of the destroyer,” and the sign that Pluto is in often picks the form of the destroyer culturally for more than a decade. And so, with Aquarius, I was expecting sci-fi landscapes. We have, “Oh, my God, what is AI going to do?” We have a crazy sort of alien disclosure discourse, I haven’t followed it, but I just see it all of the time; that’s also very classically Aquarian. There’s plenty more, but just the archetypes are right there. What’s the big, potentially unstoppable thing that sort of draws the collective mind into a state of anxiety? Pluto’s really good for that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I was going through and reading historical stuff, and what I came up with was, historically, this placement has been associated with technological advancements, government control of information, and the development of new forms of destructive weaponry. So I traced some different threads, and I found that Pluto in Aquarius in history actually really closely coincided with the development of gunpowder, first, in China over a successive series of centuries, where it was refined at different points. And then eventually the development of guns—the first historical guns that have survived in the time period in which academics think they were first introduced—coincided with the Pluto in Aquarius transit back during the Middle Ages—or what was the Middle Ages in the West—and eventually, the transmission of guns to the West and the way that they started being used as a new sort of weapon of war, that unleashed very destructive and terrible things in terms of the ability to kill humans in new and innovative ways; but also in terms of the power that that gave different governments and different armies to do different things. So that was major.
AC: Yeah, one thing to note is guns are useful, but cannons—which are big guns—totally changed the dynamics of siege warfare. They made building a castle and hiding inside it a much less favorable thing than it had been for a very, very, very long time. And so, before guns were much of a rival for a longbow, they totally changed the dynamics of siege warfare.
CB: Yeah, well, and that was also Pluto in Aquarius timeframes because their development was very closely interlinked. So I think this is very relevant because we have some of that going on in modern times, both in terms of new and innovative weapons being developed. I’ve read that different countries, like the US, are rushing to install lasers on top of boats and planes and things like this, partially as a way to fight drone warfare and to be able to shoot down drones or swarms of drones, which is also a new technology that’s being developed in war. That’s one piece, as well as AI, and the ways in which AI itself will be potentially used as a weapon of war in order for different countries to accomplish different things they want to do, as well as the need to want to control that information. Once a country has a new weapon or something like that, they try to develop a monopoly on it, which is one of the other things that I saw very consistently in the history of Pluto in Aquarius; like governments or large entities attempting to maintain monopolies on things.
AC: That’s interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot to be said there. Again, a lot of the Aquarius stuff seems to fit inside the near-future/sci-fi imaginings that people have been doing for 50 or 60 years when you imagined lasers versus drones. An AI drone swarm versus the auto-targeting laser array—that’s a science fiction story written 45 years ago and then again 20 years ago. Yeah, it seems like the Pluto in Aquarius is the, again, near-future, right? Pluto in Aquarius this time will not be a ‘galactic space opera’ sci-fi—at least I’m not expecting galactic space opera—but all of the cyberpunk dystopia. Both the cool and terrible things about those visions are all finally ready to happen quite literally. Another piece of that—something you have in virtually any near-future sci-fi or cyberpunk thing—is you have the human machine interface to some degree. Neuralink is the company that’s working on that now. Pluto in Aquarius is 20 years, we’ll get that.
Again, we’ve already got drones being used for all sorts of things military and otherwise, the arms race between how to deploy drones and how to defend against drones is happening. AI will be used for better targeting solutions, anything that it can help with, it’s all just about here. And I know that, Chris, we’ve talked about how a lot of this is sort of here, it’s sort of just around the corner but it’s really the trines between Pluto and Uranus. Once Pluto is in Aquarius and Uranus is in Gemini—which is 2025 to 2032—that should be very literal and obvious, but this year is moving towards that very rapidly; we get sort of a prototype version of that with Jupiter in Gemini rather than Uranus trining Pluto in Aquarius. What other themes did you see with Pluto in Aquarius in your studies, Chris?
CB: So here’s my summary. Let me read it so I can get some of it out. So potential themes in 2024 include technological transfers from foreign cultures—I know that’s something you’ve researched a lot, as have I—the use of science for destruction and attempts to control the flow of information. So some of the key things I found that I summarized—I actually used AI to help me summarize some of my 40 pages of notes. Based on what I wrote, the AI said that the five primary themes that I had found were, one, powerful influence of technology. Pluto representing transformation and control meets Aquarius, the innovator and the rebel; expect major shifts in how technology shapes society, both empowering and potentially destructive. Two, information warfare and control; governments and powerful entities will vie for control of information and new technologies, creating monopolies and censorship attempts. Censorship was actually a major thing that happened during the Renaissance and during the early phases of the Scientific Revolution when Pluto was in Aquarius. One of the things that I noticed was that the Church attempted to control and suppress some of the new discoveries that were taking place—including things like the heliocentric model and the discovery that the Sun was the center of the solar system—because of how that impacted theology, but also how that then impacted their control of power over Europe and the world at the time.
AC: That’s really interesting.
CB: So let me—
AC: Oh, yeah, go ahead. We’ll come back to that.
CB: Let me just get the other three out and then we’ll come back. So, three, technological leaps; so breakthroughs will come from both internal research and external sources like cultural exchange or encounters with that which is foreign. In some circumstances you could say that which is ‘alien’, and what that actually means can mean a bunch of different things that we’ll get into. So, number four, science versus ethics; the moral dilemma of scientific advancements used for harm and the tension between curiosity and caution. And then finally, five, globalization on edge; the interconnected world may face challenges, but the exchange of ideas and knowledge remains crucial for progress. But one of the things that we’re seeing right now is a real challenge to the globalized world and economy that was set up in the 1990s, where there was this belief that if trade was globalized then different countries would become more democratic and it would lead to a lessening of wars around the world because everybody becomes interdependent. But that has seen a major shock over the course of the past several years, and now many countries are starting to pull back from that and are starting to try to produce things more in their own country instead of relying on supply chains. So what we may see as an emerging trend is this challenge to the idea of globalization as a trade idea. So those are my main themes based on history.
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot of meat on those bones. So let me go back to the point where I was starting to interrupt you. So with the Copernican discovery or rediscovery of the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun rather than vice versa—this is the 1533-53 span that you’re talking about with Aquarius. What’s interesting about that and the Church trying to basically censor information or science that contradicts the ideology of the Church at the time is that the Catholic Church was literally embroiled in what we could call a civil war. This is the time period that the Protestant Revolution takes place. This is the time period where Henry VIII becomes the first of the kings in Western Europe to say, “I don’t care who you think I’m allowed to marry,” and kicks out the Catholic Church, seizes the property, and then brings the church under the control of the country rather than vice versa. So this was a period that I fixated on because we all learned, “Oh, Martin Luther; there was a Reformation, and that’s why there are Lutherans,” right? But the power dynamic here I think is the Pluto in Aquarius part because it rhymes very nicely with the Pluto in Aquarius at the end of the 18th century.
The Catholic Church in Western Europe at that point was the only authority that sovereigns—kings and queens—had to answer to. The Pope could validate or invalidate territorial claims, as well as having the personal leverage of recognizing or not recognizing a marriage of a sovereign; which of course means that the Pope had some control over the continuation of any dynasty, right? And that’s very important when you do hereditary government, right? Succession is everything. And so, what we had was basically an overthrow of the religious caste in Western Europe, which was up top, and then the kings and queens or the royalty were never under their thumb again. And that’s very interesting to me when I think about it relative to the French Revolution—which is the next Pluto in Aquarius, the end of the 1700s—because the way most historians talk about the French Revolution, it is the growing power of the bourgeoisie and the merchant class who overthrows the royalty and aristocracy, right? And so, you have whoever is at the top of the pyramid—and these are of course Western European examples; but at least in Western Europe, you had this overthrow of whoever was at the very tiptop of the pyramid of power.
And so, that made me think two things. First, it brings up something that, Chris, you and I have talked about, which is that Pluto being in Aquarius means Pluto opposing Leo, right? Leo is the crown, right? It is the ‘golden crown’ of the Sun. It is the figure in which sovereign power is condensed, whether that’s a king, a queen, a Pope, the president, the CEO, whoever is at that central, crowning point. And so, having the dire forces of Pluto arrayed against that in those two previous instances showed a toppling of the group or caste or however you want to put it that was at the top. And so, that’s made me wonder, what is at the top now? It’s much easier to see these things historically than it is now. I can leave that as an open question, but that was the theme both times.
CB: Yeah, so that one you’re talking about—the time period in the 1700s, the last time Pluto is in Aquarius—was such an interesting period both in terms of science and major scientific discoveries, like William Herschel discovering Uranus—expanding our knowledge of the solar system and the first planet discovered beyond Saturn in the history of humanity—but also major political revolutions taking place; the French Revolution was the major one, which was the overthrow of the French monarchy. Even though we often think about and we often talk about the United States as having Pluto in late Capricorn—because of the American Sibley chart and where the American Revolutionary War began—once the war was fought so much of the actual Constitution of the United States and the actual structure of the government and all the checks and balances and everything, having it divided into three parts, was really put together under Pluto in Aquarius; which gives you a good idea of some of the highest aspirations of Pluto in Aquarius in terms of creating the government structure of a type of democracy, but also that gives you an idea of some of the things we’re returning back to during the course of Pluto in Aquarius to revisit and potentially revise.
AC: Yeah, and those documents are a really solid example of that will and successful act of overturning a hereditary aristocracy, right? Like what are we doing instead of hereditary aristocracy? We’re going to do this.
CB: Right. And the presidency even—like George Washington accepting the presidency but then relinquishing it, even that at the time was sort of revolutionary because he very well could have just become king or stayed in power; but instead setting up that precedent of relinquishing power after a period of time held up and has become, at least in our country, our form of democracy over the course of the past few hundred years now.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Again, there was that very obvious opposing Leo opposing the idea of organizing things along those lines.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: I want to bounce back to something you said about science, but in particular, cosmology or a picture of the larger universe in which we are placed. The two things you mentioned—the Copernican revolution, as well as the discovery of Uranus—those both changed the picture of the larger cosmos in which we were situating Earth, right? This is very Aquarius, right? This is very Star card in the tarot, and it’s part of this sort of landscape that you get at least the idea of aliens or alien technology. What’s out there beyond what we can see? What are we imagining the universe is shaped like? And so, I’m not devoutly following developments and debates in physics and cosmology, but from what I hear—and I’m sure there are people who know better—it seems like there are a lot of things about the picture of the universe that have been steady for the last 40 years or so that are beginning to be challenged. I believe that there are issues with the dark matter hypothesis. There are real problems with string theory. People are theorizing the universe might be twice as old or older than people were thinking. Whether any of these are correct or not, this kind of discussion within physics makes a lot of sense given the earlier precedence of Pluto in Aquarius changing the idea of the larger world or the larger cosmos in which the Earth is placed sounds about right. Maybe not. Maybe something else. Maybe something new. Maybe a revision, etc., etc.
CB: Yeah, and it ties in with your previous point about monarchy and the displacement of that; some of the scientific revolutions displaced humanity as the center of the solar system. For example, if we were suddenly not the only sentient species or if we were not the only planet that had life, that would decentralize long-held beliefs of centrality that a lot of our societies are often based off of or our religions are based off of, and it would expand and create a more clear and more accurate picture of the universe at the same time; and we have developments like that that are gonna be happening during the course of Pluto in Aquarius, especially this year, that may contribute to that. On the one hand, with AI, for example, humans are creating something potentially that is like an alternate sentient species on Earth, almost like a form of alien life that humans may be living with but also learning from because AI will think differently than humans do. For example, they’ve developed AIs that play chess that sometimes do things differently and do moves that had never been done before that then chess masters are learning from and trying to study in order to understand better the way that they’re able to perceive mathematics and the universe and time in ways that are different than humans do, but that may advantage us if we learn from them. And then at the same time I know there’s gonna be some developments in space. For example, this year, they’re gonna launch another probe to Europa, which is the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, not Saturn, Jupiter. And they’re gonna be trying to see, when that probe lands in 2030, if there is life or microscopic life on Europa; which if that was true would have a huge impact in terms of our understanding of life and humanity and our place in the cosmos.
AC: Yeah, and there also might be new biological compounds that could be used for medicine, or God knows what else, right? But, yeah, another thing we both bumped into, especially this time, is the literal alien or at least the imagined literal alien life; but then we also saw, when we look back into the past, we had cultures bumping into each other that were so radically different that you had that same experience of alienness on both sides, and then also alien technology. One of the instances that first got me thinking about alien, not in that little ‘outer space’ way, but different peoples was that during 1530-50-ish one, you had the first Western Europeans landing in Japan, and I believe it was a Spanish vessel that got blown massively off course. Just imagining the mutual shock at that point, right? maybe the Spaniards had heard extremely distorted tales of China from Kublai Khan’s day from reading Marco Polo or something. But landing in Japan, and Japan having these Spaniards land there with firearms—what an incredibly disorienting but interesting moment.
CB: Yeah. I found other examples like that, of a transmission of foreign or almost alien technology between cultures; there were things like the development of paper, and paper was first developed in China. I think one of the earliest fragments of paper that exists shows that it had been developed in a Pluto in Aquarius period, but then over successive periods you see it start to be transmitted to the West. For example, they set up the first paper shop in Baghdad in 793, and this was during a Pluto in Aquarius period, and that’s what led to the House of Wisdom and the proliferation of science and learning and wisdom and the ability to have huge libraries of books when you had paper, where you could actually produce it more quickly and easily and affordably. And then eventually, during successive Pluto in Aquarius periods, paper was transmitted to the West and then eventually this led to large libraries in the West, eventually it led to the printing press. Eventually the printing press then contributes to things like the Reformation and eventually to other things, like development of democracy and things like that. So paper as a technology—even though it’s so simple to us now—was like a revolutionary technology at one point in time.
Another example of that that I found was the development of silk, again, in China, and eventually, China would trade silk for Western goods through the Silk Road. But by the 500s, around 550, the Emperor Justinian in the West—one of the late Roman Byzantine emperors—hired two monks to send them as spies to steal silkworms and bring them back across the Silk Road into the Roman Empire so that they could have control of this technology and create their own silk, and then he set up his own monopoly surrounding it. So it’s like that’s one of the core themes as well—different cultures sometimes have different technologies that give them power, but then sometimes there’s either the transmission or the attempts to steal or take that technology for oneself and what happens as a result of that.
AC: Yeah, so technological espionage. Espionage makes sense as a Pluto theme, right? We’re going to steal the secrets of your alien weaponry.
CB: Yeah, and then that’s gonna give us power that we’ve taken from you.
AC: That makes me think about firearms in Japan. I know that firearms got integrated into Japanese armies very early. And I don’t know if they were inspired by the Spanish designs that they encountered or to what degree the ideas were Chinese imports, but that’s interesting. Even though China did a lot of gunpowder during the Yuan Dynasty, or after the Yuan Dynasty, a lot of the gunpowder weapons were no longer made. China intentionally rolled back gunpowder technology because they didn’t want civil wars using gunpowder. It was great for kicking out the Mongol Dynasty, but they didn’t want anti-personnel artillery for regional disputes. But, yeah, all that makes sense.
CB: Yeah, and that’s relevant for modern times because AI, for example, is a technology and there’s a lot of espionage going on right now between different governments in the East and West surrounding AI, or surrounding even technologies like microchips and how the world’s most advanced microchips and the smallest ones are produced in Taiwan right now, and how that’s creating these huge tensions between China and the US and the different manufacturing things involved; and now the US is trying to bring production of those microchips back to the US and is currently in the process of building a major microchip factory in Arizona. So it’s like there’s interesting parallels or echoes of some of those themes from the past here with contemporary technologies.
AC: Oh, yeah, yeah. And just to tie it back into near-future sci-fi stories that have been written for 50 years, informational technological espionage is a part of all the cyberpunk everything, right? Part of that collective imagining has tons of that—or, excuse me, that is a key feature and often the main theme of the story. Another piece of it—just thinking about it culturally and also transit-wise—again, Pluto in Aquarius will oppose things in Leo. Well, most of our ruling class are of the Pluto in Leo generation here in the United States. The Pluto in Leo people were born roughly 1940 through ‘60, and people refer to him as Boomers. But that’s a whole generation of people that’s going to be having Pluto opposite Pluto, which is a transit that is impossible to live within most human lifespans compared to other points of the Pluto cycle; Pluto in Scorpio is the very fastest part. And so, with that, the Pluto in Leos just happen to have been born as one of the few generations that will get a Pluto opposite Pluto transit; so that’s interesting if you were born ‘40 to ‘60, 1940-1960.
And then it’s also interesting culturally because a lot of Western cultural norms were established by the Pluto in Leo generation; when I think of Leo, culturally, I think of celebrity culture. And certainly people have been celebrated and have been famous before 1962. We have cultural kings and queens, we have the super celebrities, the musicians of the ‘60s, the hyper famous actors—all of this was fueled by Pluto in Leo people during their youth. So it makes me wonder, on a collective level, how culture will change as Pluto goes through Aquarius, ‘cause there’s this deep skepticism of that celebrated person in the center wearing the crown as a style of organization, right? The celebrity which is worshiped. And certainly celebrity seems to be on a decline the last while, but factoring Pluto into an Aquarius opposing everything in Leo into that I think is an interesting thing to think about.
CB: Yeah, I mean, Pluto in Aquarius opposing the natal Pluto placement of the Pluto in Leo generation from the 1940s, the Boomer generation, will be essentially the culmination of the power of that entire generation, where we’ll still have them leading countries. For example, Trump and Biden both having Pluto in Leo and the sort of culmination of that generation’s control of the world and power in the world, but then also eventually the decline and the death of that era and the rise to power of the next generations finally.
AC: Yeah, I would say more last gasp, going out with a boom. Going out with a boom—didn’t plan that. Going out with a ‘boom-er’. But, yeah, that’s interesting. Do you know the term ‘extinction burst’?
CB: Like when a star that’s collapsing has a burst or something?
AC: That’s not a bad application of it. I learned it in a psychological context. Basically, right before someone is about to change a pattern or stop doing a behavior, they triple-down on it. It’s like if you say to yourself, “I’m gonna go on this strict diet on Tuesday,” it’s you, it’s your behavior on Monday around food, where you eat worse than you have ‘cause you’re about to change. Or you see this with addictions, but you just see this with behaviors in general. It’s like an extinction burst of ‘Boomer-dom’, right? They’re gonna be forced off stage soon, but not quite yet.
CB: For sure.
AC: So, yeah, it’s an extinction burst.
CB: So why don’t we transition to talking about some of the other major planetary stuff going. Hilariously, we’re already like 48 minutes into our recording, just to give you a time thing. This is gonna be a little bit more free flowing and perhaps longer than we were planning, but we’ll see what we can do.
AC: So thank you for the redirect.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I did not realize we were that far in.
CB: No, I have a timer going. That’s all right. We’re getting through some good stuff here. We’ve got two hours to do this section. So let’s talk about Saturn conjunct Neptune. Even though that started this year when Saturn first ingressed into Pisces—so that we had the co-presence of Saturn and Neptune in the same sign—by June and July, when Saturn and Neptune station in Pisces, they’re gonna be about 10° apart; so the energy of that is gonna become much more palpable this year on the influence in society. So one of the things I’m nervous about with that transit is typically Saturn represents reality and concrete reality, whereas Neptune represents fantasy and delusion. And when you get a hard aspect between those two planets sometimes the fundamental meeting is having a difficult time telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not, or between what’s true versus what’s false, or what’s fake versus what’s truth. And the last time we had an alignment like this was actually around 2016, when Saturn squared Neptune.
During the course of that year, especially in the US, one of the main keywords that came out was ‘fake news’; that was coined almost as a buzzword that year. Initially, it was developed within the context of how social media was being used and different websites were being used in order to push political propaganda in a way that was new and different than had ever been seen before, so that fake news stories that were pushing a political agenda were more numerous and were being weaponized, so that people were often not able to tell what was truth versus what was not truth. The idea of fake news sort of came out of that, and then Trump by the end of the year sort of took that keyword—which was originally being used almost against him and what some of his political proponents were doing—and he turned it around and made it his own slogan that he applied to everyone else; and so now he calls all the other news ‘fake news’. But I think that provides one of the clearest, especially in a political context, comparison points for what 2024 is gonna be like and what some of the main challenges are gonna be. People are gonna be really struggling to tell the difference between what is real and what is not real this year with that Saturn-Neptune alignment coming into close contact.
AC: Yeah, yeah. The ‘fake news’ precedent is a good one because we have new tools for confusing things. I was reading something the other day, and they were talking about how at this point we have not much trust for images ‘cause we all know images can be manipulated, and that distrust is in the process of moving into video and audio, right? ‘Cause with AI, just where it’s at now, it is really good at mimicking voices, the video stuff is getting better. And so, the amount of media which can potentially be distorted is now almost total, right? And it’s not a new thing, but it’s a new frontier in this ‘march of confusion’.
CB: Yeah, and that’s gonna be huge. We have AI image generators—Midjourney just released version six a couple of days ago—and I saw a progression of image generators and how much they’ve grown over the past year-and-a-half, and it’s just been by leaps and bounds. You can just type a short sentence into one of those image generators now, and it will create a lifelike image that you can’t actually tell if it’s real or not, so that’s gonna be hugely important. But at the same time, with the rise of AI this year overlapping, the use of that for political purposes—to push different political narratives or to control people’s opinions or influence people’s perceptions—I think that’s gonna be hugely powerful and is probably gonna be one of the most significant things that this year will be remembered for. Especially in the US—in the first election in which both the AI image and video generation, as well as the other AI tools can be used to generate and manipulate content—that’s the first year it’s gonna be fully unleashed in a political context, and that’ll be one of the most notable news stories throughout this year.
AC: It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, how people react, how quickly people’s skepticism adapts to that. Like how many “Oops, I guess I was fooled” it takes collectively for us to harden into an enduring skepticism of the voice and the moving picture, as well as the other media that we’re currently skeptical of.
CB: I think it’s gonna take at least a year. I mean, if you remember 2016 when that was happening, people were still reeling from it for like a year, and all of the media didn’t know how to deal with it at first and dealt with it very poorly. It wasn’t until after that—there was like a year-or-two period—where people did start getting more skeptical, but it took a while to realize that you can’t just read a headline on Facebook and assume that that website is reliable. It was a real learning curve for a lot of people, especially a lot of older people.
AC: Yeah, and people are pretty stupid.
CB: Yeah, there’s that.
AC: But, yeah, just Saturn-Neptune and ‘is this real, is this not real’—just looking back at the last couple of conjunctions—Saturn-Neptune in ‘88 to ‘91, Uranus was there, too. But there were a series of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in Capricorn and the whole Cold War thing just kind of stopped overnight. What a strange end that was. It was like, is this real? I’m sure so many people were like, “Is this real?” So many residents of the former Soviet Union were like, “So we’re just done?” I remember a little bit before the Cold War. I had about 10 years of ‘Cold War’ life, and even I remember being like, “Oh, it’s just over?” And then back to the previous one before that, which was in the early ‘50s in Libra, that was the McCarthy-ite era, right? It was like, “There are Communists trying to”—what’s the line from Dr. Strangelove? “Steal our precious bodily fluids.”
That kind of was a real thing—it was also a totally delusional thing, right? That was the beginning of a very real and very potentially deadly rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it was also a totally paranoid, hallucinatory thing, right? And so, like you were saying at the beginning, just comparing the principles of Neptune and Saturn, Saturn is the verifiable, 3D, empirically-true reality, and Neptune is what we imagine. I wouldn’t say it’s inherently delusional, but we can imagine things that aren’t real. We can imagine things that are real, too, but imagination is Neptune’s orbit; it covers a lot more ground than Saturn’s orbit, right? And so, they’re inherently confusing times, and as you said, no doubt some of these newer technologies will help us stay confused.
CB: For sure. But you’re right that one of the good things that will grow out of that is skepticism; and definitely in history a key thing that has arisen during Saturn-Neptune points is skepticism, which can be good or can be bad. But some of the—
AC: Go on.
CB: Some of the notes that I wrote down—just to summarize some of my points from what I was trying to learn from history—were things like increased awareness of manipulative media propaganda and self-deception, a critical eye for recognizing hidden truths and exposing dark realities. Because one of the things is that Saturn is the darkest planet and often indicates the darkest side of life, so when you bring that to Neptune, sometimes it can be negative fantasies or illusions. Skepticism of conventional wisdom leading to ironic detachment and questioning. I think we’ll see a big rise in that as part of that skeptical part. Another facet of Saturn-Neptune that often comes up is a pervasive feeling of sadness, despair, and loss of faith, either due to tragic events or due to major turning points that go in a way that a large group of people aren’t happy with or aren’t expecting that makes them feel disillusioned in things like, for example, the political process. Collective sorrows surrounding water-related disasters, diseases, and death. For example, the Saturn-Neptune opposition back in the mid-2000s and the major tsunami that took place. Also, in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina was during that Saturn-Neptune opposition. And already this year we’ve seen major news stories having to do with water when Saturn stationed in Pisces, which has been some of our early previews of some of the things related to that.
AC: Yeah, I have an example to add to some of those themes.
CB: Okay.
AC: So if we bounce back to the first Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the 20th century, it’s 1916 to 1919 for the co-presence; this is World War I and its aftermath, right? Skepticism—if you read anything that was written after World War I, it destroyed all of these narratives and this vision of warfare as an honorable but terrifying thing where you learn courage and discipline; World War I just nuked all of that. There was, one, tremendous sadness, a tremendous depression, disillusionment, as well as during the war of course, confusion. They thought they were gonna do a glorious 19th century war, and it ended up being just a brutal slog, literally trench warfare, but trench warfare as opposed to something that we know of as awful. Imagine trench warfare. Nobody had ever done trench warfare before. It’s, surprise, trench warfare, right? And then also, surprise, I believe more than half of the casualties were from disease, just sitting in a trench. You’ve got that muddiness with Saturn-Neptune, right? Just being depressed, getting shelled, sitting in a trench with your foot infected, right? Oh, and Julie points out in the comments nerve gas. So with Neptune we talk about things that are gaseous or become cloud-like, and it was an attempt to break through these solid defensive lines in trench warfare where we get the first chemical weapons. We get mustard gas, we get nerve gas, we get all of these literal lethal clouds and people being shelled with those—so all of those themes.
CB: Yeah, yeah, especially water stuff. Though with this one, I think it’ll be important on the positive side. Some of the themes I’ve seen that come up can be things like how confronting suffering can lead to greater empathy, compassion, and service, and sometimes the desire to build a better world can still be present despite disillusionment and hardships. And that was something that we saw come through, or that I saw come through very clearly for that generation of younger people who were born with Saturn conjunct Neptune in Capricorn in the late 1980s; when they had their Saturn return, I kept seeing that theme come up a few years ago over and over again.
AC: Interesting. That’s interesting. One thing that’s really weird about this Saturn-Neptune, or characteristic about this Saturn-Neptune is that we’re in the Pisces part, but there’s just as much Aries; and so we’re doing the water element version and the compassion version, but Neptune in Aries I don’t think will be famous for its compassion or sensitivity. And so, the same series of conjunctions occurs in two very different keys, right? Neptune in Pisces is spiritual, it’s sensitive, it’s compassionate, it’s inherently open, whereas Neptune in Aries is going to be where Saturn will conjoin. Aries is individualistic, it’s fierce, it’s martial, it’s pugnacious, it’s not inherently open and inclusive; it’s oriented towards ‘what can I do’ rather than ‘how’s everybody else doing’, right? And so, another interesting piece of this Saturn and Neptune is this is Saturn coming to join Neptune, with Neptune at the very end of its time in Pisces; and Saturn always gives this sense of endings and boundaries to things. Once this has passed, what will last? What will remain of this? And so, in some way we’re seeing a really focused version of the lasting effects of Neptune’s passage through Pisces over the last decade and up till now. And some things will last, right?
Neptune in Pisces is very good for expanding human rights to more humans. The time before, the abolitionist movement exploded and that of course leads to the Civil War, but also more rights for more people. This time, solidly in the middle of the Saturn and Neptune years, we have gay marriage being legal in the United States. With the spirituality and—excuse me. Slow down, Austin. This time astrology, magic, spiritual things have gotten much, much, much more popular; some of that will stick, some of it won’t. Another piece of that is that psychedelics in the United States are getting legally ratified for use in certain contexts, right? That’s absolutely a Saturn in Pisces thing. And we’ll see which of these things basically get the ‘Saturn’ stamp and get to become part of the future, and which of them we’ll just look back and be like, “Oh, that was the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s and Neptune was in Pisces and that’s just how it was, and it’s not that way anymore.”
CB: Yeah, for sure. I think we’ll see a development of tensions between materialism, represented by Saturn, and the sort of idealism and spiritual inclination represented by Neptune, and the need to balance skepticism with open-mindedness to new possibilities and to not get caught in one, going too far in the extreme of one direction or another, even though that’ll be the tendency I think for many people; and just also finally recognizing the limitations and the potential of both reason, as well as imagination and spirituality, or whatever you want to call it, that’s represented by that Neptune-half of things.
AC: Yeah, you used a term earlier, I think it was ‘disillusionment’.
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: And I think that that’s really the form of or the type of skepticism we’ll see a lot of. ‘Cause there’s skepticism as just like a philosophical or epistemological approach, but I think we’re gonna see a lot of people who kind of got burned by Neptune in Pisces. They’re like, “Oh, I bought into all this, and now I’m gun-shy about buying into anything,” whether that’s political or spiritual. I’ve been watching some documentaries about recent cults—there’s some good ones on Netflix—that are obviously Neptune in Pisces cults. I knew Neptune in Pisces was doing that, too. It’s been fun over here in ‘astrology land’, but those aren’t just things that happen and have no effect. People believe something wilder than they ever have and then in some cases that turns out to not match reality very well or to be a dangerous mismatch; and there’s a skepticism that’s born of disillusionment that I think is that particular Saturn-Neptune skepticism as opposed to others.
CB: For sure. Yeah, I think that’s gonna be really important, especially because we’re dipping into this this year, but then it’s going to be an increasing feeling in the collective the following year, in like 2025 and 2026. In some instances, Tarnas, for example, describes it as like a black cloud that kind of comes in and hangs over the collective emotionally. What a great image of Saturn-Neptune—a black or a dark cloud that’s hanging over things as kind of like a vibe. But on the more positive side of things—or at least entertaining side of things, let’s say, depending on your perspective—Apple is finally gonna release their big virtual reality headset this year. I think they’re planning on doing it around April. So one of the things that we can see coming is the interface between, on the one hand, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction—which we’ve talked about being the difference between what’s real and what’s not real and having a hard time telling the difference between the two—and at the same time the overlapping wave of huge technological changes and innovations that are gonna take place this year, not just with Pluto in Aquarius, but also with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, and then also Jupiter going into Gemini in June. So that’s gonna be one of things—VR potentially taking off and starting to take off in a more widespread way, and in a way it hasn’t really caught on up to this point. Even though companies like Facebook have been trying to make it catch on, it hasn’t really been working, especially due to various technological hurdles that they’ve been encountering where the headsets make people sick. But this one with Apple—if their previous track record of launches of different types of technologies is any clue—it could be the one that makes it take off and makes it work somehow this time.
AC: If it’s going to, it’s gotta be during Saturn-Neptune in Pisces, right?
CB: Right.
AC: If it doesn’t take while Saturn and Neptune are in Pisces then I guess it just never takes. ‘Cause it’s been around, and it’s impressive, but not particularly fun—that’s been my experience of it five or six years ago. I was like, “Oh, this is cool. I don’t want to do this.” It’s cool that this is possible. Take it away now.
CB: Well, the way it might work is instead of being a completely immersive virtual reality experience, it seems like what they’re pushing more is augmented reality and the idea of being able to have overlays and see some digital displays or other things in your sight, but also being able to see parts of the real world at the same time; and I think the main keyword that we’ll end up with for the next two-to-three period is ‘augmented reality’ as one of the things we all remember about that happened in this part of the decade.
AC: Yeah, that smells more like Saturn-Neptune in Aries, right? Like an actionable heads-up display, like The Terminator.
CB: Right. I like that most of our analogies for the past year, but in the long term, often end up coming back around to The Terminator.
AC: The Terminator is a great place to go for Aquarius malefics and Aquarius textures.
CB: For sure, for sure. All right, so let’s transition into talking about one of the other major planetary alignments that actually goes exact this year, which is Jupiter transiting through Taurus, and in April it will conjoin with the planet Uranus in the sky. And this is gonna be one of the most important and one of the most characteristic transits of this year because this conjunction only takes place every 14 years, but it’s one of the more positive and one of the more optimistic alignments of outer planets that takes place; in history, it’s actually coincided with some really important periods of scientific discoveries, developments in art and culture and music. Yeah, it’s one of the more positive ones. If I had to highlight a really positive transit this year, this would be the one I’d want to tell people about and really emphasize. So here’s a graph from Archetypal Explorer that shows you how Jupiter went into Taurus, and so we already started getting some of this over the course of 2023. But it’s not until 2024, specifically in April, that this conjunction actually goes into a full alignment and goes exact; so April is our target timeframe for this one.
So one of the things that I saw recently that I think is tied in with this is Jupiter, which is expansion, and Uranus, which is innovative technology, but it’s taking place in Taurus. So one of the questions we’ve had over the past year is, what does it mean that that conjunction is taking place in Taurus? And how does growth and expansion of technology fit with the symbolism of Taurus? Taurus is a fixed earth sign, and one of the things we’ve talked about is that Taurus, more than any of the three earth signs, often has to do with the earth and soil and material, like the material experience of the universe and being grounded in that.
And one of the interesting news stories that I saw recently is that Google recently published two papers where they announced that they were applying their new artificial intelligence to material science, and after applying AI to material science and telling the AI to go out and try to bind different materials and combine different materials to create new ones, it was able to find thousands and thousands of new materials that hadn’t been discovered before. And then, interestingly, it also told the AI to use robotics to test those materials to see which ones would actually work, and it found I think something like 800 viable new materials that could be used to make advancements in things like batteries, faster computer chips, solar cells, and other things like that. So I think one of the major things of this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is major advances in material sciences that are gonna expand our understanding of some of the basic fundamental materials in the world and finding new and innovative uses for them that go beyond what we’ve had before in the past.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting and dead on with the Uranus in Taurus, right? Uranus in Taurus, historically, is about stores of value, money, commodities, food. It’s about stuff, right? And so, new kinds of stuff that might be useful is right in the ‘Uranus in Taurus’ valley. And what’s interesting about that is there are several things which are bottlenecked around just one materials problem—like why aren’t there Iron Man suits or powered armor? It’s literally just battery capacity; that’s the only thing that’s holding me back from having a powered armor jetpack. They can make these things, and they’ll run for 20 minutes, and there are also plenty of less absurd things that depend on the storage capacity of battery materials. And this is very Taurus, right? A lot of times Taurus things seem like it’s a slightly better material for this, or it’s a slightly better fertilizer, but in Taurus we have all these fundamental inputs into the more complicated impressive things. Changes at that material level, at that fundamental input level can end up creating very large, impressive, new capabilities just downstream.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And what’s crazy is with the AI component now—with Pluto in Aquarius at the same time as this conjunction, and with the Uranus-Pluto trine coming into alignment, which is accelerating both the Pluto and the Uranus side of things—I looked at the numbers and they said that this AI found 2.2 million candidate new materials and that represented the equivalent of 800 years of human research, what it would take us to combine all of these or test all of these out manually as we have since back in the day, since the days of alchemy and stuff. So it’s like these things are just advancing human progress at a rapid rate and allowing us to do things that weren’t possible previously. And that’s just a preview of this because when that conjunction gets closer, there will probably be more important turning points.
I have a huge list of scientific discoveries, but in one of the summaries I found that these periods of Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions often coincide with periods of rapid advancement, liberation, and change, usually with positive, expansive outcomes, although occasionally with negative ones. There’s a ton of different past ones but some of the discoveries were scientific breakthroughs, like Kepler’s discovery of the planets moving in ellipses rather than perfect circles, some of the early developments in the early 20th century with quantum physics and the foundation of quantum physics was during the conjunction that was occurring around 1900, and some of the developments later in the century with Heisenberg’s work on quantum mechanic advancements was during a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.
There were also social and political rebellions, the American and French Revolutions were both Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, in addition to the other outer planet transits that were happening at the time. The 1968 countercultural movement, the Apollo 11 Moon landing in ‘68 and ‘69 there was this nice lineup of Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto, and the Moon all in the sky at the same time, as well as other developments in flight; some of the first flights where Jupiter-Uranus alignments. Even developments in biology back in the Renaissance period—a huge work on biology was written back then. The first time that they started doing dissections and realizing that some of our knowledge of human anatomy that we had inherited since Galen in the 2nd century had been wrong was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. There’s so many sudden expansions of horizons and sudden individual breakthroughs in the history of Jupiter-Uranus alignments that it should be a really exciting time around April.
AC: Yeah, one of the things Jupiter does is to confirm and support. And so, with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions you get a confirmation of something socially or technologically or artistically or revolutionary—it’s like confirming a breakthrough, right? We basically get these every 13-ish years, right. So we had one in 2011—no, 2010.
CB: Yeah, 14 years.
AC: Yeah. So in 2010 in Aries, and then late ‘90s in Aquarius. Basically, every other Uranus sign gets one of these. And so, it’s not like a once-every-hundred-years thing, you get one every decade-and-a-half. And, again, they both support and confirm a breakthrough. The last time that we had a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus—in line with that, Saturn was conjunct—both of them were a little darker in tone. And so, that was 1941. All sorts of great scientific breakthroughs were being made in 1941 because the world was at war, but it was nonetheless a period where material science was very important, and so a lot of those breakthroughs had to be put on the battlefield as soon as possible.
CB: Yeah, yeah, I think scientific discoveries and for individuals. People can write really important expansive works or have sudden insights at this time in whatever their field of activity is. So I think everybody should think of it in terms of what house this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is gonna take place in in Taurus in your chart; there may be a sudden burst of insight or a sudden unexpected moment of growth and expansion where your horizons are broadened much further than they had been before up to that point. It can be a very liberating and a very exciting transit to have in whatever part of your chart that it takes place. Now of course there can sometimes be downsides. The downsides can include things like a sort of naive optimism and excess and an uncritical embrace of progress and rule-breaking, as well as a feeling of indulgence or a fleeting euphoria. The pace of technology and of discoveries is happening so rapidly at those times that it feels like it will just continue on indefinitely, but as with all things, there’s eventually a drop-off.
AC: Yeah. And so, one of the ‘revolutionary-ish’-flavored things that Jupiter will probably be confirming is the spike, since Jupiter went into Taurus, in successful labor movements in the United States. Since Jupiter moved into Taurus in May of 2023, we had the writers’ strike, we had the actors’ strike, we had a big auto workers’ strike, we had a big nurses’ strike with tons of union activity—this is another Uranus in Taurus thing. With Taurus we have revolutionary activity but at the very fundamental Taurus level—the people who make the car that you drive, the people who labor to make whatever, right? And so, this Jupiter-Uranus has been very good for labor; it’s also just shown a big spike of activity in that area. So I would expect that to basically peak around the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and then probably fall off once Jupiter leaves. Another thing I’m curious about—let me frame this. Just like with Saturn’s pending conjunction to Neptune, we’re looking at Neptune’s last full year in Pisces, with Jupiter’s conjunction to Uranus, that also happens during Uranus’ last full year in Taurus. And so, there’s a little bit of similarity in terms of, what do we keep from this? When Uranus in Taurus isn’t the weather anymore, what remains from this? What gets, in this case, confirmed by Jupiter? And one area that I’m very curious about but don’t have a prediction for is cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency was not invented during Uranus in Taurus, but the Uranus in Taurus era, which began in 2018 neatly encloses cryptocurrency not being a niche thing but mattering.
CB: Right.
AC: Mattering to governments, to people, etc., etc., and being a widespread topic of discussion. And this issue with currency and Uranus in Taurus is very consistent throughout history. Banking and currency stuff, what is a store of value, how much value does it store and how securely are questions that come up every time. So I don’t have a prediction, but we should see something around that time with crypto that’s very telling, which would be what the astrology suggests.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really great point. I’ve seen so many people that have Taurus prominent in their chart—especially if they have a fixed sign rising, or if you have Taurus rising—and as soon as Uranus went in, we started seeing them make major, sometimes disruptive or liberating changes in their life. Some people, for example, I saw move suddenly to a different part of the country or a different part of the world that they’ve always wanted to live in but they never could, but they decided to do it at that point. And we saw similar things with Bitcoin, like you said, like the rise of Bitcoin into the popular consciousness as an actual currency that has a huge amount of value. I think when Jupiter goes and confirms and expands some of those things, it will be the final, not bedrock, but final thing that will confirm that some of those changes are permanent and are for good, and it would be that final push that’s needed to really solidify them in the future before both of those transits are over.
AC: Yeah, it’s really interesting what you were saying about liberation and freedom because that absolutely became part of the mindset and rhetoric around cryptocurrency. It was like ‘free yourself from this’, ‘be independent of this’—that’s extremely Uranian language, and that’s been during this Uranus in Taurus period.
CB: Yeah, for sure. What are some other meanings? I mean, another thing with Taurus that I’ve really come to understand and appreciate was Taurus also has a very, not just sensual quality, but a quality where it appreciates getting positive reinforcement and enjoying the finer things in life.
AC: Yeah, Taurus is snobby. It’s got taste. There’s an interest in cultivating taste that very easily becomes snobby.
CB: It’s that, but I’m thinking about just the appreciation of material comforts. One of the things that I really have come to appreciate from Taurus is liking foods, liking leisurely activities and rest, that which supports you materially. There might be something about this conjunction that represents a new development in terms of what it means to enjoy material pleasures and things like that on a personal level, that’s a new development that is hard to anticipate because it’s gonna be something that’s like a breakthrough or is new and innovative or revolutionary when it comes to that.
AC: Like the invention of the Snuggie.
CB: Yes, the Snuggie, but like a 2024 version, where it’s AI-powered and the Snuggie talks to you and reassures you each night as you fall asleep.
AC: A Snuggie that gets recalled because it accidentally kills people because it’s controlled by a rogue AI. But, yeah, comfort and comfort food is very much linked to Uranus in Taurus. The potato chip and the chocolate chip cookie were both introduced during Uranus in Taurus. Well, if you think about food options, my grocery, or every grocery I go to, looks very different than it did six years ago. There’s gluten-free, grass-fed, etc., etc., options that used to be in the corner of the fancier health food stores that are just in normal stores now. The food that’s available, at least in the parts of America that I’ve been in, has changed significantly during Uranus in Taurus’ time.
CB: Yeah, we’ve talked extensively in past forecasts, both monthlies and yearlies, about Uranus in Taurus and new developments in lab-grown meat and alternatives to meat and different ways of consuming different foods and things like that and innovations there, as well as similar to Bitcoin, how during the course of Uranus in Taurus the widespread adoption of those things has taken place. So it may be obviously a continuation and confirmation of some of those trends, but also perhaps a new breakthrough that represents a unique innovation at this time that we’ll, later in retrospect, think back to 2024 and realize that that was an important turning point.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Another less-fun revolutionary breakthrough thing that Uranus in Taurus has done is it’s made the prices of physical goods and foods and energy inputs and agricultural inputs—it’s spiked them and dropped them and spiked them; it’s made them extremely volatile, and the result now is that food is much more expensive than it was before Uranus in Taurus. And there have been a variety of things which were the vehicles for these changes. There was COVID, COVID policies, there’s the Russo-Ukrainian War—but almost all of these have ended up having this huge impact on Taurus things. How much does energy cost? How much does food cost? How much fertilizer is available? And so, it’ll be interesting. I think it’s worth hoping that Jupiter in Taurus helps stabilize some of that volatility. Jupiter does like stability and tries to create a more stable situation wherever it goes, so I hope that Jupiter-Uranus is bringing stability to those prices. I’ll call that a hope not a prediction.
CB: Sure. And what you mentioned just brings up another facet that’s really important about Taurus as an earth sign, which is things having to do with ecology, nature, gardens, and things like that. So something about a new technological development that revolutionizes things having to do with nature and ecology. So maybe things having to do with the ongoing attempts to deal with global warming and things like that or carbon emissions or other things that are affecting nature and affecting the quality of our experience with nature; maybe some sort of development there that ends up being important in terms of helping with that.
AC: Mm-hmm, and I guess one last thing. Culturally, Uranus is sort of the lightning rod for rebellious behavior, right? And so, Uranus in Taurus is kind of strange because a lot of the rebellious, ‘against the grain’ behavior is like, “You know what, I’m gonna get off the internet and go garden,” or like, “I’m gonna do something crazy in punk rock and move out to the country,” right?
CB: Right.
AC: I did that during my Uranus-Uranus opposition. But that’s an interesting and awkward shape for the Uranian punk rock energy, right? It’s like, “I’m going to bake my own bread.”
CB: Yeah.
AC: It has a very rural, back to basics sort of flavor to it—and sort of Luddite, too—that’s not very recognizably Uranian. Cottagecore. Thank you, in the comments. And so, what’s interesting, again, this is the last year of that. Uranus goes into Gemini where Uranus will look like Uranus, right? That’s going to be hacking the mainframe. That’s gonna look very much more traditionally Uranus than, “Well, I’m gonna turn off the internet, that’s my punk rock act for the night.”
CB: Yeah, I like that. Or maybe organic computers could be another version of that or another keyword that comes to mind.
AC: Grass-fed processor? It’s got three times the Omega 3s.
CB: Exactly. All right, so that’s pretty good. There’s more we could say there, but I know we’re gonna come back to that later when we talk about some other transits. All right, I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Honeycomb Collective Almanacs and Calendars. So Honeycomb Collective creates almanacs and wall calendars that are personalized to your natal chart to help you keep track of the celestial movements each year. When you order a Honeycomb, you can customize the start month, the time zone, the house system for your charts and more. Open your Honeycomb to any day of the year and you’ll see the unique transits applying to your specific natal chart, along with the mundane transits that apply to everyone. Your Honeycomb also provides dates of New Moons, Full Moons, and eclipses, along with retrograde and direct stations for the coming year, and retrograde shadow periods for Mercury, Venus, and Mars. You can also select extra features like the Hellenistic plug-in, which will track your zodiacal releasing periods, highlight your annual profections, and assess your chart for traditional planetary conditions.
There’s free US shipping and affordable international shipping options that are available, along with digital additions and gift cards. So six-month almanacs start at just $10 for a digital PDF and $27 for a printed planner, and 12-month printed wall calendars start at $35. So you can create your personal astrological almanac today by visiting Honeycomb.io. Yeah, thanks and a shoutout to Honeycomb for sponsoring this episode and for creating these awesome and very affordable printed almanacs, which I love. I got mine for this year, and it’s actually super useful how Madeline takes graphic art design and finds ways to present the astrological information in new and innovative ways so that you can pack a lot of information into just a single page.
AC: Yeah, when I look at the Honeycomb planners, it gives me a ‘these darn kids are so lucky’ moment consistently. I learned on a little pocket ephemeris; I think it was a Llewellyn one. It had um maybe a quarter of this information; there was no way to get my stuff on. Sure, there is value to calculating things manually up to a point; you don’t want to do that for every single day of every year. And so, having all of that homework done for you according to your own parameters, being able to, for example, choose a Hellenistic plugin—it’s so nice. In addition to being a good scheduling tool, it’s a really good learning tool.
CB: Yeah, for sure. ‘Cause then you can see how some of these transits that we’re talking about in this episode will actually align with and hit your own birth chart. And if you know, for example, that that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is gonna hit your chart in a certain way on a specific date, you’re gonna have a better context for understanding how some of these general transits are actually personalized for you in your personal life. So it’s a super useful tool both for learning as well as planning ahead for the next year. So, yeah, a shoutout to Honeycomb for sponsoring this episode, and everyone should definitely check out and order an almanac or a calendar. All right, so why don’t we transition into the next section?
The next major mundane thing that we need to talk about—that’s the fourth major transit that’s happening this year—is that in May, Jupiter is is going to depart from its year-long transit through Taurus and Jupiter is going to move into the sign of Gemini for a year-long transit through that sign. So this is super important because that’s gonna have specific implications just in terms of what it means each 12 years when Jupiter goes into the sign of Gemini zodiacally, but also because its configurations are gonna change. And one of the things that Jupiter does as soon as it ingresses is that it will immediately trine Pluto, and then during the course of the year as it’s transiting through the sign of Gemini, it’ll square Saturn twice, which is supercritical and super important as well; one of the defining alignments that’s taking place this year is that Jupiter-Saturn square, which goes exact in August and December. So Jupiter in Gemini—how do you feel about that transit?
AC: Well, I like it because it’ll be on my Moon. As far as the rest of the people that don’t have Gemini Moons ruling their ascendant, it’s a really interesting and rather significant change for Jupiter. Jupiter, as we just discussed, spends a little under five months of the year in Taurus with Uranus—getting closer and closer to that conjunction with Uranus—and in a sextile with Saturn in Pisces; it’s in an earth sign; it’s very connected to earth and water planets. But then when it moves into Gemini, one, Gemini is significantly different from Taurus. Whereas Taurus is very concerned with the basics, the fundamentals, their textures, their utility, their value, Gemini is much more abstract, playful, quick, sharp energy; and so just that difference is very significant. It’s the difference between soil in a pasture and a quick windstorm which blows through; the substance of the quick windstorm is very different from the soil of the pasture. And as you mentioned, we’re moving from this sextile—this like loose harmony with what Saturn in Pisces is trying to do—to a hard-edged square, right? The square is a 90° angle. We encounter this angle whenever we come to a four-way stop and there’s a car 90° away from us. Who goes first? If we both go at the same time, there’ll be a car accident.
And so, between squared signs, there’s a real difference in quality. Gemini is light, fast, quick, clever, doesn’t like to be pinned down, whereas Saturn in Pisces I’ve experienced as this deep, heavy, abyssal submarine. It’s like a leviathan beneath the ocean made of sadness, it’s very heavy. It’s deep, but it’s very heavy. There’s a melancholy to it, there’s a seriousness to being dragged into deep waters. And so, just contrast that with quick, light, fast, clever, let’s not get too deep, Jupiter in Gemini, right? It’s the sea monster trying to grab the birds, reach up and grab the birds from beneath the ocean surface. It’s what’s quick and light, trying to avoid being dragged down and drowned in those depths, so there’s a really obvious difference in quality.
CB: Yeah, I like that you mentioned the Jupiter-Saturn sextile that we start the year with ‘cause I think that provides a really important contrast about how this year is gonna go. Here’s the Archetypal Explorer graph that just shows that Jupiter and Saturn get super close to a sextile around the January-February timeframe. And I feel that’s a very flowing aspect which, for example, represents on a macro level the economy as doing relatively well in terms of bouncing back from inflation and some of the things that were happening with that and the danger of some of that; it seems like things are flowing relatively well in terms of those two energies of growth and expansion versus consolidation, having a nice equilibrium in the first few months of the year. But then, yeah, as soon as Jupiter changes signs and goes into Gemini in May, suddenly we move into a much different relationship between those two planets and those two opposite impulses of growth versus consolidation when we get our first square, especially in August and then again in December. But pretty much during the entire second half of the year, we have this much different energy where there’s actually a conflict between the forces of growth and expansion versus the forces of consolidation and taking things slower and holding back. And I think on the one hand to whatever extent the Jupiter-Saturn sextile represents the economy and how things are going relatively well during the first part of the year, it seems like there’s some tensions there where maybe things slow down or run into difficulties or tensions due to that square in the second half of 2024.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. Like the sextile—the two are working in loose harmony, right? I don’t know if people would say the economy is going well but it’s moving in the right direction, which is kind of sextile language. It’s not this glorious harmony, but at least it’s moving in the right direction, and Saturn and Jupiter can move in harmony when they’re in sextile. But Jupiter in Gemini hits a square to Saturn, and Saturn is the slower and more immovable force, right? And so, some of the collective and individual growth moves or expansion moves are going to find themselves tethered to that undersea leviathan, right? It’s like, “Yeah, you’re not going that.” Imagine a bird on a string. It’s 100 feet, so it flies around normally until it hits the edge of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So I tried to approach the Jupiter in Gemini partially by understanding—because it’s gonna have that close configuration with Saturn much of the year—that there’s gonna be that tension between the communicative indications of Jupiter in Gemini versus the more imaginative indications of Saturn in Pisces and what the tension is, to sort of situate within the context of that square when talking about Jupiter in Gemini. Some of the keywords that I wrote, based on different natal charts, were that it’s often a powerful force for creativity, innovation, and especially communication, with a number of very imaginative writers having that placement at different points in time. There were also sometimes challenges related to duality, ethical considerations, and the need to balance imagination with practical application. One of the funniest things I found was inventors that had Jupiter in Gemini and Saturn in Pisces, especially Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, and Thomas Edison and some of his work with things like the light bulb and popularizing things like that, as well as movies and video cameras and things like that; those two both had this interesting interplay.
On the one hand, Alexander Graham Bell, when he grew up, his mother started losing her hearing, and it actually affected him very profoundly. So there was this profound sense of sympathy or a challenge that came up related to that, but that ended up then provoking him, helping to send him on his life direction of developing not just the telephone and other things, but also he did a lot of work with deaf people during the course of his career and life, and his wife was also deaf. So there was this interesting tension between a challenge coming up, but the challenge and the sympathy prompting one to focus on the communicative element. There was a similar thing with Thomas Edison, where Edison himself—who also had the same placement—had hearing problems and was completely deaf in one ear and only partially was able to hear in the other. And in his life, interestingly, he was also an inventor, and he patented over a thousand different patents for things; he’s one of the most prolific inventors at the time in the United States. But he ended up going in a direction more of focusing not on sound but on sight with things like the light bulb and visual things related to the emergence of movies and videos and things like that. So it’s a really interesting thing that it can be a very inventive and imaginative combination, and those are my two primary keywords for Jupiter in Gemini and Saturn in Pisces.
AC: Well, inventive in the ‘necessity being the mother of invention’ way. I think both of those examples do a really nice job of illustrating that if Jupiter wants to improve things, if Jupiter wants to make good, it has to answer the question posed by Saturn’s limitations, right? Neither of those examples have the person ignoring the problem, it’s literally responding to the Saturnian difficulty and trying to figure out a way around that.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Yeah, that’s sort of the ideal version of the square between those two. Whereas ‘Jupiter can still Jupiter’, not in a void but in response to.
CB: Yeah, and if it was just on its own—like I was going back and looking through periods of Jupiter in Gemini or just natives that had Jupiter in Gemini without Saturn in Pisces—some of the keywords that came up were inventiveness, inventor, communication, playfulness, a knack for languages, hearing and speaking, having lots of words or being very verbose, Jupiter in Gemini. Having varied interests in a bunch of different areas or knowing a little bit about a lot of different things. Learning by reading on your own or being self-taught through having this internal motivation to just learn everything. Experimenting or being experimental was a major Jupiter in Gemini thing, like trying things out and having the flexibility to test different things and do little short experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. And then finally having a knack for picking up things was a major Jupiter in Gemini keyword that I noticed.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve also seen Jupiter in Gemini positions show both a knack for and also luck with technological things. Kait has Jupiter in Gemini in a very nice trine with Mercury, and we’ve joked for years that she is ‘blessed of the machine spirit’ because I fuck with a printer that’s not working for half-an-hour, she’ll walk up to it, press the same button, and it works fine for her. This is a phenomenon that has been witnessed by several other independent observers who can give testimony, but it’s like, oh, it’s Jupiter in Gemini, right? It’s luck with these little Mercurial things and these little ‘machine spirits’. One thing that’s interesting from an essential dignity point with Jupiter in Gemini is that Jupiter is seen to be in its exile or detriment in Gemini, and so there are problems where Jupiter’s need for a deeper and greater understanding understanding get ignored to do a quick Mercurial understanding; but if we’re doing essential dignity we need to do more than just rulership. The first decan is Jupiter-ruled and the bound of Jupiter is also early in the sign, and so it’s possible to have a quite dignified Jupiter in Gemini in the early part that can do tons of things. And of course Jupiter is a triplicity ruler for Gemini. Yes, it’s in its detriment, but it also has these other positive awards.
CB: Yeah, well, that’s even more important because when Jupiter goes into early Gemini, Pluto’s gonna be in early Aquarius. So that trine is gonna happen right away, and it’s just gonna really empower both of those planets, both Jupiter in Gemini, as well as Pluto in Aquarius, and the things that they individually mean will just be exacerbated and reinforced as a result of that.
AC: Yeah, Jupiter will definitely go to work for Pluto’s agenda, you know, all the things we mentioned earlier. It will help bring about all of the Pluto in Aquarius things.
CB: Yeah, that’s gonna be the real technological turning point this year; it’s gonna be the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in April, and then immediately that’s gonna lead into Jupiter ingressing into Gemini and trining Pluto. That’s the real hot spot that I’m paying attention to most for the biggest technological developments with AI and probably a lot of things that we’re not even expecting, especially in communications. There’s something very much about communications and about things that are social and the social fabric of how communication and technology connects us as human beings that reaches a really critical turning point in that timeframe, around the April-May timeframe, when Jupiter goes into Gemini.
AC: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot there. Also, I would say it foreshadows Uranus going into Gemini and making a series of trines with Pluto.
CB: For sure. So other keywords for Jupiter in Gemini: drive for innovation and invention, ‘versitality’.
AC: Versatility.
CB: Versatility—why am I mispronouncing that word—and adaptability are huge because both Jupiter in Gemini as well as Saturn in Pisces are mutable signs; there’s this huge adaptability and versatility. Also, having two of something, things that seem diametrically opposite, but finding a way to bridge between the two is often a very characteristic thing of Jupiter in Gemini. Openness to new ideas and perspectives is a huge Jupiter in Gemini thing. There also can be a potential for ethical considerations that sometimes come up with Jupiter in Gemini and Saturn in Pisces that can be kind of tricky. There were some things with Alexander Graham Bell patenting the telephone and another person who was patenting it the same day and lingering disputes about who should have gotten that patent and who came up with it first and things like that, and I saw that as a recurring thing; sometimes ethical considerations can come up with this square.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s interesting. What’s funny about the patent dispute is it’s literally ‘who was faster’, right? A classic Gemini thing is speed.
CB: Right. Let’s see, in terms of natives—besides inventors like Edison and Alexander Graham Bell—I noticed three different electronic music artists, one of the most prominent was like Trent Reznor who has Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini. And I thought it was really interesting how over the past decade or so he’s transitioned from doing just music with somewhat of an electronic bent, like rock music, to scoring films. A lot of his major output over the past decade or so has been scoring major motion pictures where you have to communicate something through music, and he’s using electronic music to do that, which is very Jupiter in Gemini; but you then have to elicit an emotion as a result of using music, even if it’s electronic music, which is artificial. and doing that successfully—it takes a knack for that. And I thought that was one of the themes that’s probably gonna become relevant with this transit, that we might think about as being relevant. Two other people like that, that also had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini, were Moby and Bjork, to give two other musical examples.
AC: So that’s people born in ‘66?
CB: Yeah, that 1960s timeframe. Other people—Joseph Pulitzer, who the Pulitzer Prize is named after, he had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini. On the one hand, he had an emphasis on investigative journalism, innovation, entertainment and things like that, but he also pioneered what’s usually called ‘yellow journalism’ or sensationalism as part of what he did at the same time, which is a more negative thing. So there were techniques that involved exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism, so some of that has a negative side. But he also focused on sensational stories that were human interest stories, like crime, disasters, scandal, and sometimes things to push social causes that he thought were important social issues that people needed to be aware of, but he would sort of sensationalize them.
AC: That does a nice job of illustrating the dual moral nature of the Jupiter in Gemini, right? It’s like a little bit of journalistic ethics, a little bit of selling papers. One thing I would just add experientially, Jupiter in Gemini is fun. The Moon will conjoin Jupiter in Gemini 12 times while it’s there, maybe 13. Jupiter in Gemini is fun. It’s not always truthful, but it’s fun, and that’s worth noting what that will feel like when that aspects things. Jupiter in Gemini is going to try to get Saturn in Pisces to have a little fun, and we’ll see if that works at all. But that’s the energy, it’s fun.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s gonna be an explosion of communications, of short communications, of technology, of playfulness, fun, and other things like that. ‘Cause it’s not just Jupiter, but there’s this whole stellium of planets that moves into Gemini at that time, which I know we’ll get to later. But it should be a pretty exciting time where people are gonna be talking a lot and having some sort of enjoyment and playfulness, especially surrounding something new; I’m guessing probably a new technology.
AC: Maybe ‘stimulating’ would be a good word.
CB: That’s a good one. Or even overstimulating. Like being overstimulated by so much news and so much communication or so much going on on social media that you’re kind of overwhelmed.
AC: That’s certainly on the menu. It’s a new kind of digital map.
CB: Right. Coming off of a month like March and April—when things are gonna get crazy with the eclipses, as we’ll talk about in a bit, and then the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction—it’s like what if a lot of people hit a peak point of oversaturation; there’s so much that they have to check out or try to step back from it. And maybe that’s part of the challenge of the square with Saturn—having the communication and the social aspect, but then getting almost burnt out mentally or emotionally or spiritually on the Saturn in Pisces side.
AC: Yeah, I think so. Also, all those planets in Gemini are combust the Sun that whole time pretty much. So there’s literally burnout.
CB: Right. What was the keyword that you used just before that? The duality of ethical considerations or something like that?
AC: Yeah, the moral duality of Gemini. You’ve got ‘good twin’ and ‘evil twin’ born of the same mother.
CB: That’s relevant for two of my other examples, one of them is Lana Wachowski—who was one of the co-creators of The Matrix series—and just how innovative The Matrix was and imaginative in bringing together a bunch of different technologies and previous storylines, as well as ideas about technology and artificial intelligence and a sort of philosophical bent to things and wrapping that up in like the first Matrix movie as an example of somebody who had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini; and the fact that Lana over the past decade is trans and came out as trans—and therefore has become a major person who’s at the forefront of the trans rights movement as a prominent person—representing that duality or ‘trans-ness’ of mutable signs to some extent that we were talking about earlier.
AC: Yeah, and Gemini being both mutable and Mercury-ruled has a much greater range of gender expression, as implied in Gemini, than a lot of the other signs. And thinking about The Matrix and moral binaries, what people remember about The Matrix that gets and has been repurposed in a variety of contexts is ‘blue pill or red pill’, right? It’s literally a moral decision that’s one or the other; that introduced that idiom to the American language.
CB: Right. As well as the Saturn in Pisces theme of if you knew the reality that you enjoy was fake, and you could go to the real world but it was not as good, what choice would you make. And that was actually part of the internal dilemma of The Matrix before ‘red pill’ and ‘blue pill’ got sort of co-opted to mean something else.
AC: Right.
CB: Interestingly, though, the other example that I found that’s a major example of somebody that had Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini was JK Rowling. On the one hand, that’s such a good example of the creativity and the communication and writing aspect of that, of somebody who created the Harry Potter world of wizards and created this entire backstory of this fantasy world and wrote these series of books that just became increasingly longer and longer and more and more wordy in this fantasy world of wizards that was this huge accomplishment. But then, interestingly, for whatever reason, with the same placement now, you also have that tension and some of the ethical things of her movement towards talking about trans issues, and being very vocally against trans rights and things like that evidently has sort of become her thing at this point over the past decade, so it’s weird seeing that theme come up again there as well.
AC: That is interesting. Yeah, I was a little old for Harry Potter, so it’s not part of my fantasy bedrock.
CB: Yeah, it was a little after my time, but I still watched the movies. And it was still a good series for what it was in being similar to other fantasy series—except for children—in terms of creating a world that was very immersive, and I think that fits that theme of Saturn in Pisces and Jupiter in Gemini very well. Like a fantasy author, essentially.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Taking people into that deep reality or fantasy realm, but that Saturn in Pisces as being a whole hidden world that you can be enticed into, whether that’s a fake world in The Matrix, the real world in The Matrix, the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Wasn’t the world of sorcerers secretly inside the normal world?
CB: Yeah, right. Exactly. And they would enter it through a portal at a train station.
AC: I thought buses were involved.
CB: Right.
AC: But, yeah, you can see the themes. The themes are really interesting.
CB: Yeah, and Rowling reportedly has Aquarius rising. So Saturn is in Pisces in the 2nd house, and it’s squaring Jupiter in the 5th house. Jupiter in Gemini in the 5th house—she literally wrote a bunch of children’s books, and then also through marketing and through merchandise became just obscenely wealthy and like the highest paid author in the world at one point, making over a billion dollars, with Saturn in the 2nd house. But then also due to some of the transphobia stuff, there’s like a threat and a tension with that as well with people boycotting her works recently as a result of her political views and things like that, so a lot of those tensions are all relevant there. It’ll be interesting, as we go into this year, if some of those themes become more prominent in the world and some of those discussions become more prominent now that we have the two biggest planets in the solar system both in mutable signs.
AC: Interesting.
CB: All right, so the other things on our list that are major transits this year—we have the Aries-Libra eclipse series continue, and one of the more important ones is in April. The solar eclipse in Aries is actually gonna be a total eclipse, and it’s gonna go across most of the eastern part of the United States. So that’s a super crucial eclipse that’s gonna relate to the US, and it’s also gonna be taking place during the course of an election year. And it’s sort of reminiscent of how the last Great American Eclipse that took place was in 2017, in the aftermath of the 2016 election when Trump was elected, and it’s hard not to see some similarity or resonance between those two.
AC: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. Some things become clear in hindsight. One thing that’s interesting to me about that and just eclipses and the situation in the United States since the middle of the last decade is that when you run Vimshottari dasha on the US chart, you get the United States as being in an almost two-decade-long Rahu period, which sensitizes the US to eclipses. There have been visible eclipses many, many times, but that last one really did come at a turning point, and this next one also seems like it’s going to come at a turning point in a way that the eclipses haven’t always signified turning points quite so clearly in the US. So we don’t need to go into all of that, but basically just running a time-lord system that includes the nodes, the US moved into a nodally-sensitive period about eight years ago, and that runs through the rest of the decade.
CB: Nice. Okay, that makes sense. And this one’s also important ‘cause the next time there’s gonna be an eclipse like this in the US won’t be until 2045, just to give you an idea of the rareness of this. We’re talking about 20 years until there will be an eclipse like this. It’s gonna cross and be visible in parts of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. So if people want to check it out, that’ll be roughly the path of the eclipse. And related to specific events—since it’s gonna be a continuation of the eclipse series from 2023, where the eclipses were taking place in Libra and Aries—it will be a continuation of some of the events that coincided with that, both in terms of our personal lives, but also in terms of world events. Of course the biggest example of that was back in October when the eclipse in Libra took place and coincided with everything that started happening in Israel and Palestine at the time. So it seems clear that this next set of eclipses in Libra and Aries next year will represent a continuation, but also a turning point in terms of that conflict and in terms of what’s happening there. So there’ll undoubtedly be some new and important turning points that will take place with respect to that around the time of these eclipses, first, in March and April, and then again later in the year in September and October. So that’s one of the things that I would pay attention to in terms of those eclipses.
AC: Yeah, and the first installment of those eclipses at the end of March and early April is very chaotic. There are several other things happening at the same time that make it one of our hot spots for the year, and we’ll get into that. But worth noting, it’s that first instance, straddling the equinox, that shit gets a little crazy.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It is gonna be crazy. I’m not sure whether to mention that now—let me wrap up the eclipses section by saying we’re gonna have Aries and Libra, and people should pay attention to where Aries and Libra falls in your chart ‘cause that’ll be a period of major beginnings and major endings for you in that part of your life with the continuation of that series. But then later in the year, in September, we’re gonna have the first eclipse, which is gonna take place in Pisces, and that’s gonna be the start of a new eclipse series where the eclipses are gonna start shifting towards a new set of signs—which is Pisces and Virgo—over the course of the next year or year-and-a-half after that point. So people should pay attention to that. Since it’s gonna be the first of that series, it’s gonna represent a major new beginning or a major ending in a new part of your life that hasn’t been activated yet. So for many people—especially if Pisces is prominent in your chart, like if you have a mutable sign rising—then that eclipse will be very significant for you and one to watch out for.
AC: Yeah, whereas the other three eclipses, in the first instance, will just be Aries and Libra, just like in October of 2023. We start to slip into the next one next year at the end of next year.
CB: Exactly. So here’s an image with the eclipses. Related to that—and this is somewhat important—I was researching and noticed that there’s gonna be two comets that are gonna appear next year, that are gonna be reasonably bright and maybe visible with the naked eye, and what’s weird is that both of them show up during eclipse season in both cases. So the first one’s gonna be happening around the time of the Aries eclipse in April. So it’s not just that eclipse season is happening, it’s not just that the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is happening during that time, or a Mars-Saturn conjunction is also happening at that time, but also this eclipse is gonna show up and suddenly become visible—or this comet is gonna show up and become visible at that time as well. And there’s something extremely significant about that that led me on a whole research trip over the course of the past month about ancient views on comets and whether they were interpreted as negative or positive and how ancient astrologers understood them and what they understood them to mean that was very interesting. But that’s gonna be one of the additional astronomical and astrological factors that’s layering on top of everything else to indicate a really important time period in world history around April.
AC: And what is the name of that comet?
CB: So that comet is Comet Pons-Brooks, based on the two astronomers who discovered it in the 1800s, and this comet passes by the Earth every 70-to-71 years. Comets have ice and rock and dust on them—that’s what their composition is—and when they get close to the Sun and to the Earth that’s when the ice starts melting and it creates a tail behind them, and Pons-Brooks will have a tail. Interestingly, in trying to read up on whether comets are positive or negative omens in ancient astrology, I was finding indications of both; but one of the things that some of the ancient astrologers said to pay attention to is if the comet passes by any specific planets at that time. And one of the things that’s really interesting is that comet in April may be visible when the eclipse happens. When that total eclipse happens and the sky becomes dark, you may be able to see the comet at that time. And one of the things that’s interesting is at the time of the eclipse, the comet’s actually going to be passing right by the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus at that time, which may be emphasizing or sort of activating that conjunction even more. So the jury is a little bit out on whether it’s gonna be ultimately a positive omen or a negative omen because that will depend partially on the color and visibility and brightness of the comet once it gets here, but there’s at least one potentially positive indication that it could be a factor that’s going to underline and emphasize or intensify the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and all of the things we said would take place relative to that previously.
AC: That’s interesting. It’ll be really interesting to watch that happen and of course to disentangle what the comet means from the rest of the very busy astrological weather that’s happening at the time, but that’ll be really interesting to tease apart.
CB: Yeah. And then there’s gonna be one other comet in October as well that, similarly, may be visible to the naked eye, and that’s also gonna take place right in the middle of eclipse season, right when the presidential debates are taking place. Right before the US presidential election, there’s gonna be this visible comet in the sky, which, again, seems like a very notable, important omen that will be taking place, and we’ll have to pay attention to its color and brightness and visibility.
AC: Hopefully, we don’t get the Game of Thrones Season 2 comet, which signified the ‘War of 5 Kings’.
CB: Yeah, well, I do have a few quotes I wanted to share—very choice quotes—very quickly from ancient astrologers about what comets indicate to show you both sides of the spectrum, and some of them you’re gonna like, Austin, in terms of that. Manilius, for example, the astrologer from the 1st century wrote: “Such are the disasters which the glowing comets often proclaim. Death comes with those celestial torches, which threaten Earth with the blaze of pyres unceasing, since heaven and nature’s self are stricken and seem doomed to share men’s tomb. Wars, too, the fires portend, and sudden insurrection, and arms uplifted in stealthy treachery…Comets also presage civil discord and strife between kin.” So that’s the extreme side of the spectrum.
AC: That’s some quality doomer content.
CB: Did you like that? I thought you would like that.
AC: Hats off to whoever did the translation of Manilius that you read from. The language is really nice.
CB: That is from the GP Goold Loeb translation of Manilius; that’s like one of those books every astrologer needs to have. I found another quote from Shakespeare, in one of Shakespeare’s plays. In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, he says: “When beggars die, there are no comets seen: The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes,” so that’s another more negative one. Also, Levente László of the HOROI Project translated this for me from Latin. This is Servius Auctus on a negative indication for comets, or comets that are negative. There’s a specific one that he points out, and it says: “The star that pulls a crooked flame like a tail [after] itself is called Hippius [which means horse-like].” And Servius says: “If it moves from the west to the east, it shows evils for Persia and Syria. If it moves towards the south, it frees Africa and Egypt from the evils and indicates destruction only for the cattle. If it faces the north, it presses Egypt with wars and miseries. If it moves towards the west, it oppresses Italy and the lands that stretch from Italy to [Spain]. And if it does from the south to the north, it indicates freedom from external wars but signifies domestic insurrections.”
So I wanted to read that to give you an idea of what some negative interpretations of certain comets were; there were some comets that re-occurred, so astrologers started to write down what would occur every time that specific comet happened. But there were also positive comets. So just two quick, and then I’ll wrap up this section of positive comments. So this is from the Christian writer Origen—who was citing an earlier 1st century CE Stoic, an Egyptian priest named Chaeremon—and he says, “It has been observed that at great events and at the most important changes of earthly affairs, stars of this kind [comets] appear which signify either changes of kingdoms, or wars, or whatever may happen among men, which can shake earthly affairs. And we have read in the book on comets by Chaeremon the Stoic how comets have sometimes appeared even when good events were about to happen, and he gives an account of these.”
And I found one other positive account, again, from Servius—translated by Levente László of the HOROI Project—on a positive comet where he says: “There is another comet that is genuinely called Cometes [which means long-haired], for it is girded with hairs here and there. It is said to be pleasant. If it moves towards the east, it signifies cheerful things for this region, and if it moves towards the south, it signifies joy for Africa or Egypt. If it faces west, the land of Italy will participate in its gift; this is said to have appeared at the time Augustus [when he] gained supreme power, and therefore, joy was indicated for all people then. And if it moves towards the north, it signifies universal prosperity.” So there’s all sorts of lore here surrounding comets and their color and direction and different things like that that I think astrologers haven’t done a lot of work on in modern times, but I think there’s some very interesting stuff there. And I’m preparing an episode on comets in order to pull together some of the ancient views, as well as to do some empirical research about what some of these comets have indicated when they’ve appeared at different times in the past.
AC: Yeah, what did they appear next to, what part of the sky, what directionality, what color, were they hanging out with planets—that would be really interesting.
CB: Yeah, exactly One of the things that doing all this research on comets made me realize was in the Gospel of Matthew, when it talks about the Star of Bethlehem, it actually describes it using very similar language to a comet, and that made me realize that they were probably intending to convey the idea that a comet showed up at the time of the birth of Jesus, which I think is very interesting, and I also plan to do an episode talking about that sometime soon. So there’s this sort of idea of comets showing up sometimes at the birth of important people, including religious figures. And I have to note that there is an important birth that is supposed to take place around the time of April. I believe Austin is having a son. So whether that’s a good thing or whether we get the other scenario—
AC: When we get into April’s astrology, you can judge whether it would be a savior or a destroyer.
CB: Yeah, I’m not saying that Austin’s son is gonna be the Antichrist, but I’m not ‘not’ saying that Austin’s son’s gonna be the Antichrist. I’ll just leave it there, and we’ll circle back to that later.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, so those are the comets taking place in April and October. The final things that we needed to talk about—
AC: Well, there are two other yearly things that I think are quite important but can be very briefly discussed. One is just that the first half of the year is just a rampaging pile of planetary pileups. Didn’t mean for that to be so alliterative. We have moments with at least three or four, but often five or even six planets all in the same sign. We get a bunch in Capricorn, a bunch in Aquarius and Pisces and Aries and Taurus and Gemini, and then the planets sort of disperse and go about in more normal patterns for the rest of the year; but I have not looked at a year where there are so many stelliums, so consistently for the first half of the year.
CB: ‘Cause all the planets are gonna be lined up in just a few signs, and they’re actually gonna be visible around the time of the eclipses.
AC: Yeah, and it starts in January and then gets more intense. And then the other thing that’s also a very ‘first half of the year’ thing is that Mars has a very busy and somewhat disturbing schedule for the first half of the year. We get Mars conjunct Pluto in Aquarius—the first Mars-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius—and then we get Mars conjunct Saturn, and then we get Mars conjunct the North Node, or Rahu, the eclipse point, and then just a little bit into the second half of the year then we get Mars-Uranus. And so, Mars is very busy making conjunctions to all of the slower-moving planets. And several of those conjunctions (the conjunction with Pluto, the conjunction with Saturn, the conjunction with Uranus and with Rahu) those are—I guess the nice thing to say—volatile or extremely challenging combinations with Mars, and that’s just part of the character of especially the first half of the year. And then we get a little break from Mars, but then at the end of the year, we start a Mars retrograde; and that Mars retrograde will include in its cycle three oppositions to Pluto. So a lot of notable Mars stuff, more towards the first part of the year but then kicking up again at the end.
CB: Yeah, and that Mars retrograde is serious. We end the year with this crazy kind of cliffhanger where Mars stations retrograde in December in the sign of Leo, and then it’s gonna retrograde over the next month or two back through early Leo, opposing Pluto, and it’s gonna retrograde back into the sign of Cancer the following year in 2025. But what’s crazy about it is because it stations opposite Pluto, it has this extended Mars-Pluto opposition during the entire last two months of the year, the last few months of the year and early parts of the following year. Also, Pluto first ingresses into Leo—the sign that it will retrograde in—just two days before the US presidential election. So that retrograde is gonna be very much tied in with the high drama of the US presidential election and the aftermath of that in the months and weeks following it. So something that’s actually really important in terms of that is it’s gonna be personally relevant of course, and everyone should pay attention to where Mars is gonna go retrograde in Leo and Cancer in their personal charts, but it’s also very important on a more national and global scale as well.
AC: Yeah, a lot of Mars. Some of us are moving into a Mars profected year early in 2024.
CB: Okay, nice. Good times.
AC: But, yeah, those were the two—just the crazy stelliums during the first half of the year, all of the Mars conjunctions during the first half of the year, and then the beginning of that retrograde at the end.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Do we have any other overarching pieces?
CB: No, those are actually all of our overarching pieces, as long as we come back to that Mars piece, because it’s super crucial for things. And there’s a historical cycle I need to mention. I should mention it now so I make sure I get it in. So I was talking with my friend Nick Dagan Best who is the ‘retrograde Mars and Venus’ specialist, and one of the things he pointed out is that Mars goes retrograde in this same cycle every 79 years, and then it just shifts by about 4° each time. So one of the things that’s really important about this that we discovered is that Mars did this retrograde in this same cycle back in the late 1700s in the United States, when most of the states were ratifying the Constitution. So after the Revolutionary War—when they were setting up their system of government in the US, and they were creating the three branches of government with different checks and balances—Mars went retrograde around that time, and it partially had to do with a conflict about some states not wanting to ratify the Constitution, like New York, or taking longer than it should. But it’s very important ‘cause it means there’s something about that Mar retrograde and the foundation of the US that’s very important in terms of the creation of the Constitution.
AC: And that was of course during a Pluto in Aquarius period, right?
CB: Yes, that was also during Pluto in Aquarius. And there’s actually a couple other placements that were occurring as well, but I will skip that for now. So that retrograde recurs every 79 years. The next time it recurred was in the 1800s right after the Civil War, and one of the things that was happening around that time is they were trying to pass the 14th Amendment in the aftermath of the Civil War. And the 14th amendment has actually been in the news recently because the 14th Amendment contained an ‘insurrection clause’, where it said that if a person had sworn an oath to the country, but then later had gone against it and led an insurrection, that they wouldn’t be able to run for a governmental office after that point or hold a governmental position I think in order to punish or make it so people who had fought on the other side of the Civil War, who had tried to break up the Union, couldn’t take major governmental positions after that point, after leading an insurrection, essentially.
AC: No, Jefferson Davis, you can’t be the senator for Virginia, or whatever.
CB: Right, which kind of makes sense. So, again, in the 79-year cycle, that was when that happened. So jump forward 79 more years and you get to this period between 1945 and 1946 when Mars again went retrograde in the same cycle. And just after that retrograde was completed, but when Mars was still in Leo—which is the sign that it went retrograde in—that was when Donald Trump was born, with Mars in Leo at that time. And then what’s gonna happen if you jump forward 79 years later is right as this presidential election is taking place, and in the immediate aftermath of it this year, Mars is again gonna go retrograde in the same spot in the zodiac for some weird reason, and it ties together a theme that runs through US history, for the entirety of its history at this point. So that’s kind of crazy.
AC: That’s interesting. No, it’s good. The thread is very clear. It makes me want to do the 79-year thing with all of the Mars retrogrades and see what pops up.
CB: Yeah, I just discovered that last night, by the way. There was like so much research I know you and I both did in the run-up to this and so many amazing things we found in preparing for this. But one of the ones of course that I tried to focus on and pay attention to was what’s going to happen in the presidential election and that was one of the things that really jumped out. So in terms of the presidential election, I wanted to say some stuff about that. Do you want to wait until later, or is now the time to do that given what I just said?
AC: I mean, yeah, go ahead and do it.
CB: Okay, so we’re gonna have to wait until later in the year to make final statements—‘cause that’s not really where I’m at right at this point—and it will be important to see how certain things fall into place that we don’t know yet, like who will Trump pick as his running mate. Additionally, I don’t usually do major presidential election stuff, because especially with things like this one, it feels too close and too personal. I’m too personally involved to look at it objectively, even though I can see some of these different data points—like that Mars retrograde thing that I just saw—and I have a hard time distancing my personal preferences from looking at it objectively and saying it’s definitely gonna be this or definitely gonna go this way. But with the election taking place and the recurrence of a Saturn-Neptune alignment like in 2016—where the main keyword at the end of the year was ‘fake news’, but with the added development of AI—like we said earlier, what happens probably this year is that AI gets weaponized for political and propaganda purposes in order to control and change and distort political narratives.
So right now in looking at the presidential election, there’s two major factors that are pointing in my mind for each side if it ends up being Biden and Trump as the two candidates, which it very much, at least to me, looks like it is. There’s one indication in favor of Biden and there’s one indication in favor of Trump, besides the Mars retrograde. The indication in favor of Biden is that there’s that eclipse in Pisces that happens in September, and in every presidential election over the past 30 years, the candidate who won had an eclipse take place in one of the four angular houses sometime near the election, and that’s worked pretty consistently as a technique. So none of the Aries or Libra eclipses are in angles for Trump or Biden. However, since Biden has Sagittarius rising, the Pisces eclipse will be in his 4th house, and it will be in the 10th house of Kamala Harris, who has Pisces as her 10th house, so that’s an indication in favor of them.
On the other hand, in terms of Trump, the main thing that stands out is that his time-lord periods—especially his zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Spirit periods—indicates starting a major peak period that will last for 19 years in early 2025, just after the election. And this is one of the things that threw me off in my 2016 predictions because we looked ahead and we saw that; it didn’t make sense for him to be entering a major peak period career-wise in 2025 because we assumed that if he won the 2016 election that he’d be departing from office after eight years by 2024 and 2025. So that’s more of an indication for Trump. He goes into a 19-year peak period, but it activates Leo; so it’s his most active and important period, but it’s also one of his most subjectively difficult ones because his natal Mars in Leo is contained in that sign. So those are the two major indications in terms of things that I’ve looked at, but I know there’s tons of other stuff to look at that we’ll get into in other episodes as things continue to unfold during the course of this year.
AC: Yeah, and something that we looked at that is relevant regardless of who the candidates are is that we have a perfect Mars-Pluto opposition a day-and-a-half before the election, so they’re still very close. And then you pointed out the day that Mars stations retrograde in December—that’s the day that the electors meet. Was that the event?
CB: It’s close. It’s like around that time, basically. The parallel in 2020 was the election happened, but then the results were delayed, and then Trump said that the election was stolen. So there was a lot of drama up until the point when the electors from each state voted in December, and an eclipse in Sagittarius, in Biden’s rising sign, happened on that day; and at that point it was pretty clear that it was locked up and Biden would take over. The parallel for this election is Mars stationing retrograde in Leo when that’s taking place.
AC: Right. And the fact that that meeting of the electors there’s a big Mars event, but then also Election Day is also right off a big Mars event—what it does suggest is that the election is tied into that Mars cycle, which doesn’t station direct until well into 2025, and it takes quite a bit of time to get out of the shadow. So that indication is there. If both Joe and Donald die tomorrow, that’s still what the election looks like, right? It’s still these ominous Mars-Pluto portents around the election.
CB: Yeah, and Mars is conflict, clashes; it’s severing and separation. And then as we learned back in October—when there was the Mars-Pluto square—Pluto just emphasizes and blows up and expands and intensifies Mars’ significations and takes them to extremes. So it’s like extreme conflict and clashes and things of that nature.
AC: Yeah, or secret fights. Secret power.
CB: Power plays.
AC: With Pluto we get power and the hidden nature of power, right? We may not see all of the fights—we probably won’t—but those are the indications.
CB: Yeah. And then on Inauguration Day, the Sun always moves into Aquarius on Inauguration Day ‘cause it’s always on January 20 every four years, and it’s always up in the 10th house ‘cause it always happens at noon. So the Sun is going to be at 0° of Aquarius on Inauguration Day, but Pluto’s gonna be right there as well; so we’re gonna have the first inauguration where it’s a Sun-Pluto conjunction that’s almost exact. So it’s really indicating the beginning of an entirely new era of American history at that time with this Pluto conjunction in Aquarius taking place at the same time.
AC: Yeah, and Mar is still retrograde on January 20. Whatever Mars is doing probably hasn’t been resolved yet.
CB: Right. So we’ll have to continue studying this and paying attention to other indications as they arise over the next several months and see what happens. There’s gonna be some important turning points with things like the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, but especially the debates. Two of the debates—later this year in September and October—fall on eclipse days, and I think those are gonna be super important turning points that are gonna make the election and push it towards one direction or another very strongly or very dramatically. And at the same time we know that whatever happens, we’re about to go into a very crucial phase in American history in 2025 with the entrance of Uranus into Gemini, which has coincided with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. Then at the same time Russia and China will be reaching crucial turning points with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction going exact in 2025-2026 and a little bit into 2027, and the leaders of both of those countries actually have that signature natally, Saturn conjunct Neptune, which makes it an even more important timeframe and turning point in world history for both countries and both of those leaders. So I think that clearly we’re at a very important turning point in world history at this time, and, yeah, we’ll all be watching it together to see what happens.
AC: Yeah, so I’ll add one thing, a little bit of my perspective on the election. What I have been waiting for—or what I’ve been looking at and therefore expecting—is that during the other Uranus in Gemini periods, the United States has had very powerful, very historic leaders. We’re looking at FDR, Lincoln, and Washington, right? And so, again, this is only a pattern of three. If we had 20, and it was all the same, I would feel completely certain—we only have these three precedents—but the suggestion would be that we would have another president that’s powerful in shaping things during a time of crisis that’s significant historically. And I’ve been wondering for years now whether we get that person in 2024 or 2028, and part of my thinking has been the question, does the Saturn-Neptune conjunction delay that leader? Does it ruin it?
And so, just the other day, I went through and looked at all of the presidents—all of the people who were president of the United States during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions—and I was kind of hoping it would give me a clear indication they would all be total losers. There were a lot of total losers—you definitely get several of the bottom 10—but it wasn’t clear enough to satisfy me where Saturn-Neptune definitely cancels out effective leadership in the United States for that period; it doesn’t seem to help. But, for me, my question is, one, do we get another Uranus in Gemini leader who gets us through a crisis? Because it seems like we should. And, two, if we do, do they come in 2024, or do the prevailing conditions delay that person’s election to 2028? Those are open questions for me.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then at the same time as a backdrop—while all this is happening over the rest of this decade—Pluto’s transit through Aquarius is being amplified by the Uranus trine from Gemini, and we’ll continue to see just the complete transformation of the world as a result of the emergence of AI and other technologies that will be developed as a result of that, as well as different tangential things that’ll come out of that in terms of just rapid and pervasive technological transformations over the course of the next decade. So it’s gonna be a really interesting time to be alive, both as a human and especially as an astrologer; very #astrologergood.
AC: Yeah. Just in that larger context, I’m a big fan of thinking about history in the Jupiter-Saturn cycles, which give us these 200-year chunks. And so, just one way to think about now is this is year four of a 200-year thing; we just got into this new age. The equivalent would be if we were in 1807. We had a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in earth in 1803-1804, and we’re four years into a period of history that doesn’t end until the early 21st century, right? We’re that far into things; like 4 out of 200, so much to be seen.
CB: For sure. All right, well, on that note, I think this wraps up our broad overview section where we wanted to look at the year and the big picture issues, as well as some of the timing. Why don’t we take a little bit of a break?
AC: All right, let’s do it.
CB: All right, I wanted to give a shoutout to our second sponsor, which is the CHANI Astrology App, which is available for both iPhone and Android. It’s designed to make astrology both accessible and useful. The app combines ancient astrological wisdom with meditation and mindfulness to help you foster a relationship with the sky and support your personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology is impacting 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, personally, the three main things that I really enjoy about the app are that, one, it has a nice blend between modern and ancient astrology; two, it uses whole sign houses by default, which is the system of house division that I use; three, it sends you push notifications when a transit goes exact in the sky, which is a really great reminder of what’s happening astrologically at any given day or week; and, four, I also love that it’s now available for Android, since I’m an Android user. So the app is free to download on IOS and Android in their app stores. Just search for ‘CHANI’ (C-H-A-N-I) in the app store and you’ll find it, or alternatively, visit app.chani.com for more information. So, yeah, those push notifications are super useful to get a nice little reminder about what’s going on in the sky, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Sort of a nice compliment to the print Honeycomb Almanac. I’m not on my phone all the time, but if I was, I would want reminders of transits, and I would basically want what this app provides on it. I think it’s a really useful compatible thing with astrological practice with astrological education and just sort of staying in that zone.
CB: Yeah, well, sometimes I’ll get so wrapped up in what’s going on in life on a given day—and something comes out of nowhere or something’s irritating or what have you—and I’ll forget about the transits. But then all of a sudden I’ll get a notification from the app, and it’ll tell me Mercury just stationed retrograde. For example, the other day was a really funny reminder, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s why this is happening,” and then it all makes sense; so it’s just good for everybody—whether a new student or an advanced one—to get those little reminders. So definitely check out the CHANI App for more information about that. And thanks to them for sponsoring this episode and allowing us to do this forecast, so we could spend the last month doing the intensive research that was necessary to present all of our findings here to everybody for free on YouTube and on audio podcasts and everywhere else.
AC: Wherever fine podcasts are sold—
CB: Exactly.
AC: —for free.
CB: All right, so I wanted to transition into the next section, and I meant to mention the date. So today we’re recording this on Friday, December 22, 2023, and we started around 1:30 PM, in Denver, Colorado, with Taurus rising, just for the record in terms of when we’re recording this and what the date is. So in the next section, I want to transition. We’re gonna do a quick run through each of the 12 months of next year, 2024, and just give a brief set of highlights of what the astrology looks like in just brief, five-minute increments to give you an idea of the all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about during this episode so far and the sequence and the order in which it’s gonna take place. How does that sound to you?
AC: Sounds good. Sounds like we will do a victory lap, or at least achieve victory at the end of this lap.
CB: Exactly. All right, so I’m gonna show, for the video viewers, the Planetary Alignments Calendar at the beginning of each month, just so you can glance at this. This is from our print calendar, which I have up for the entire year ahead, but this shows just the month ahead. So let’s start with the month of January. What are the major highlights of January, Austin?
AC: So with January it’s important to note that just as January begins, Mercury is stationing direct; as far as starting the new year off and trying to get things moving, it’s a very clear indication. For me, the most important things about January center around Mars’ presence in Capricorn. Mars moves in on the 4th and is there for the rest of January and the first half of February. Mars is very strong and effective in Capricorn and is supported by a trine from a recently-stationed direct Jupiter in Taurus. We also have Venus and Mercury join Mars in Capricorn while the Sun’s in Capricorn—it’s a giant ‘Cap’ party. I really see January as an opportunity to get your shit together. Get your shit together and scraped into exactly the pattern you want and get a good, solid, ideal prototype a month in before all the chaotic bullshit happens, because there’s a whole lot that happens in this first half of the year. And so, I am grateful that the first part really provides an opportunity to at least practice doing it and living as you would like to before you have to deal with getting buffeted and blown off course. So I would say take all that clichéd ‘start your new year off right’ stuff seriously this year.
CB: Yeah, I fully endorse that message. I think that’s a great message. And I also like that we mentioned earlier the Jupiter-Saturn sextile that’s happening at this time—‘cause it’s really going exact in January and February—and you get the full impact of that Jupiter station, especially whatever the Taurus area of your chart is with Jupiter stationing direct there, then beginning its final run through Taurus. Use or take advantage of that to finalize some of the cycles of growth and expansion that have been happening there for the past year. Use this time to really make those permanent—whatever the good growth and expansion themes are in that part of your life.
AC: Yeah, lay the concrete and have it dry by the end of January, and then you’ll have a set pattern that can weather some storms.
CB: Yeah, and Leisa did ask me to mention the auspicious election for January, which is January 12, 2024 at 8:00 AM, with Aquarius rising. If you do that, then you’ll have Saturn ruling the ascendant, and you’ll have Jupiter sextiling that Saturn very closely around 5°, which is very good for an electional chart. So I’m not gonna go into that further. I’ll save that for the Auspicious Elections Podcast that Leisa and I do—that we’re about to put out over the next week—which is available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast who sign up through our page on Patreon. But that’s the election of the month: January 12, 2024, 8:00 AM, Aquarius rising.
AC: Right. And so, we have one thing that happens in January that’s super important that leads directly into what’s important about February, which is Pluto’s—not regress—re-ingress back into Aquarius. And so, the Sun and Pluto make one final conjunction at 29°59’ Capricorn; the Sun moves into Aquarius and then Pluto moves into Aquarius on the 20th. That ingress of Pluto in Aquarius is the anchor for what’s most interesting about February. February brings us a pile of planets in Aquarius, just like we had a pile of planets in Capricorn. But more importantly we get Mercury and Venus and Mars’ first conjunctions with Pluto in Aquarius, and that’s between the 5th and the 16th, right? So over 11 days, three planets all make their first conjunction to Pluto in Aquarius. So if you’re looking for what period of time are we gonna see these themes that Chris and I spent 45 minutes discussing earlier with Pluto in Aquarius, this should give us a pretty quick, I don’t know, preview or beginning to what is Mercury’s relationship to Pluto in Aquarius, what is Venus’, and what is Mars’.
CB: Yeah, and just backing up really quickly, even that Pluto ingress on the 20th of January—when the Sun ingresses at the same time—we should pay attention to what happens on that day as being symbolically important, ‘cause that’s exactly one year from Inauguration Day that’ll take place the next January 20. So it’ll be an interesting sort of omen or preview of what’s to come.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so, as you’re looking at charts, think about what does it mean for four or five planets to be in Cap and then four or five planets to be in Aquarius, and so on as we go through this first half of the year. It’s just overwhelming weight in each sign.
CB: Yeah, that Mars-Pluto conjunction on the 14th looks especially dramatic, intense, and similar to the Mars-Pluto square in October pretty roughly—potentially violent or the abuse or the use of power and sometimes going too far in the use of force.
AC: Yeah, I mean, from a morbid astrologer perspective, I want to see what sort of dangers Pluto in Aquarius will present. I have ideas ‘cause Pluto always presents something dangerous and indicates some horrible things. And so, the first Mars-Pluto conjunction should tell us something about what ‘teeth’ the Water-Bearer has.
CB: Yeah. But to your point, the other conjunctions will tell us some of the more hopefully positive sides of that, like the Mercury-Pluto conjunction on the 5th or the Venus-Pluto conjunction on the 17th.
AC: Yeah, and it’s interesting because we get a Venus-Mars conjunction—which those don’t happen that often—not very many degrees away from that Pluto in Aquarius. So there’s some interesting collective relationship patterns that are likely to be inaugurated. It makes me think of a video game that I played a couple years ago called Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
CB: I like that—Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. That sounds Venus in Aquarius or the Venus conjunct Pluto.
AC: Yeah, Venus-Mars-Pluto altogether, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
CB: I love it.
AC: Great game, by the way.
CB: I’ll check it out. Okay, so that’s good for February. Let’s move into March, which is a really important month, and this is where things really start to ramp up. It’s the beginning of one of the most important months of the year, which is basically the end of March, when eclipse season starts, going into especially the beginning of April, which is the end of eclipse season, and then culminating with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction at the end of April.
AC: Yeah. And so, we have this sort of gathering of the pirate fleet and the whales that all collect for the big Pisces conclave. Starting at the end of February, we’ve got Mercury, Sun, Saturn, Neptune, then Venus—and then eventually at the end of the month—Mars in Pisces; like just a swarm, a school, a pod of planets in Pisces. And then at the end of March—basically, once we hit the equinox—things turn—what’s the right word, Chris? Take a turn for the dramatic.
CB: Yeah, at the very least.
AC: Yeah, so let’s just talk about that, because it’s just everything in Pisces up until the equinox. And so, this is a time where we’ll see an emphasis on all of those themes that Chris and I talked about with Saturn-Neptune, right? All the Saturn-Neptune in Pisces stuff. But then we get the equinox, the Sun goes into Aries, and we get our first eclipse, which is a lunar in Libra on the 25th, and then two weeks later, we’ll get a solar in Aries; and right in the middle, just over the boundary into April, we’ve got Mercury retrograde; meanwhile, Mars is sneaking into a conjunction with Saturn. So we have a Mars-Saturn conjunction—our first one in Pisces, which is by itself dangerous—at the same time as a pair of eclipses; and it’s worth noting that the solar eclipse in Aries is ruled by that Mars. And just for shits and giggles, we have Mercury being retrograde throughout this just because. Why not confusion on top of all the rest?
CB: Yeah, it just reminds me of those years in time where it’s not just one indicator, but it’s multiple indicators all piling up in the same short span of time indicating a really important turning point in world events. That’s what this feels like and it’s reminiscent of when that happened in early 2020, and we just had multiple indications lining up for a major turning point in world history at that time; there’s something reminiscent about that here with just the number of pile-ups that are taking place. And then on top of that, if that wasn’t enough, a comet shows up out of nowhere during this time as well, if those other indications weren’t sufficient. So this first eclipse in Libra at the end of March, that’s the one that’s gonna be the continuation of the series from October; so we should see the next development in that sequence of events that started back then. And then this Mars-Saturn conjunction that happens in Pisces in the middle of April—that starts building up on the 22nd when Mars goes into Pisces. But there’s something very important about that ‘cause this is the very first Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, and it’s the end of that series that we’ve had over the past several years that was in Aquarius, when Saturn was transiting through Aquarius. And of course that started in 2020, with the first Mars-Saturn conjunction that occurred in Aquarius during the lockdowns in the March-April timeframe.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: We’ve talked about this on recent forecast episodes—a plague or a pestilence that was unleashed through the air with COVID with that conjunction happening in an air sign. But here we have some sort of shift where it’s taking place in a water sign and a sort of intensification of some of the difficulties associated with that Saturn transit through Pisces.
AC: Yeah, yeah. The Mars-Saturn cycle is a two-year cycle. The Mars-Saturn conjunction—which marks the beginning and end of those—is sort of like a New Moon for double-malefic things, and as Chris said, this will be water element. So we’ll be looking for boat-on-boat violence. We’ll be looking for destructive waves, destructive storms and floods, etc.
CB: Yeah, the water being polluted or being poisoned. Maybe this is when the orcas stage their revolution and start taking over countries. That’s when the ‘Orca War of 2024’ really begins.
AC: Yeah, or the blue whales just start swallowing ships.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
AC: When the kraken emerges.
CB: Right. Last year, we had the submarine fiasco when Saturn stationed in Pisces and just everybody imagining what it would be like to be stuck in a submarine and then slowly running out of oxygen; something sort of similar to that in terms of the vibes of that conjunction.
AC: It’s a lot—that, with eclipses, and Mercury retrograde. And so, I would just meaningfully contrast that with what I said about January. A great time to get your shit together so that it resembles your intention and plan and pattern. This is not a good time to plan on everything going exactly to plan—there’s a lot of chaos here. This is definitely a time to do what needs to be done and adapt to what’s happening. It would be a very difficult time to try to set down a new pattern ‘cause there’s just a lot going on. The boat is rocking quite violently.
CB: Yeah, and eclipses just have this charged and electric quality. And that’s a lot of what we’re gonna be experiencing during that time—that charge and that electricity and things just suddenly changing, and some major things ending or dying at this time and other major things sprouting up or beginning at that time. I think one of the phrases you used recently was ‘the death of one king and the beginning of another’ as a sort of metaphor. What was the metaphor you used? It was like, ‘goodbye to the old king, and hello to the new one’, or something like that.
AC: Sounds like something I would say.
CB: It does sound like something you would say.
AC: Or the very uncomfortable interregnum before the succession is decided.
CB: Sure. And the Aries eclipse on April 8 is the one that’s gonna be across America, so it seems to relate to America in particular; yeah, that’s gonna be super important. Also, later in the month, once you get out of eclipse season—like a week later—by the middle of April, you run into the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that takes place and goes exact on the 19th. And so, I’m trying to understand and I’ve been trying to figure out, is this all just like one huge thing that’s taking place during all of April? There might be a division, because we start getting out of eclipse season and it might split the month in half. So it’s like all the crazy stuff is happening during eclipse season in late March and early April, and things start to calm down, and then there’s this more positive, counterbalancing and optimistic, revolutionary conjunction and feeling that sweeps over things by the end of the month, because at the same time we also have Mercury stationing direct and ending the retrograde and sort of clearing things up as well.
AC: Yeah, I think that division is right. I like the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction—I don’t know that it’s going to be a tonal shift towards ‘things are mostly good now’. But I do think there’s a very big difference between the peak chaos period—the Mars-Saturn, eclipses, and Mercury retrograde—to getting done with the eclipses. As the Sun moves out of Aries, the other planets, Mercury and Venus, will follow, and we’re going to get a pile in Taurus. For some time we’ll have the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Uranus in Taurus for a good amount of time. I think the spoiler for just Jupiter-Uranus goodness is that at the end of April, Mars moves into Aries—and Mars is very strong in Aries—and this is gonna put Mars with Rahu. It’s gonna put Mars with the same eclipse point that just got activated during the solar eclipse on the 8th of April. We’re gonna have Mars eclipse point energy throughout all of May; that’s also very destabilizing. Mars-Rahu, especially in Aries, is not a stable combination or a peaceful one.
CB: Sure. So this period, from the later part of April forward, is the crazy technological part of the year, where for some reason the pace of technology and communications explodes and really starts advancing. That’s what takes us into May. That conjunction happens and then we go into May, and then already we get the Jupiter ingress into Gemini by the later part of May, and then all the other planets go into Gemini, and things start moving quickly. Communication starts picking up hugely. There’s something going on here technologically and communications-wise that’s very important in the April, May, early June timeframe.
AC: Yeah, especially when we get to the end of May. I think that the Uranus-Jupiter in Taurus certainly has technological implications, but it has a lot of financial implications that aren’t gonna be so abstract. I think the more explicitly tech communication stuff isn’t gonna really hit until we get the migration of all these planets into Gemini at the end of May.
CB: That’s a great point. So we’re talking more about the Taurus stuff. It’s interesting that Pluto stations at the top of the top of May, on top of that. Is there anything else you want to mention about May here, especially the later part of May? I mean, basically, just everything starts moving into Gemini at this time.
AC: Yeah, yeah. May just looks like everything in Taurus except for Mars, which is lighting fires left and right with Rahu.
CB: So the division is here largely. Okay, so the second half of May, Jupiter goes into Gemini, and we get Jupiter trine Pluto at the very beginning of June, on June 2. So there’s this huge empowerment, on the one hand, where Jupiter trining Pluto is empowering Pluto in the transformational effect that it’s having on Aquarius and technologies, but then Pluto also is trining Jupiter and empowering the growth and expansion effect that Jupiter in Gemini is having on communications.
AC: Yeah, there’s a real convergence between what they’re both trying to do.
CB: Yeah, and this week is crazy, ‘cause then Mercury goes into Gemini and conjoins Jupiter, the Sun conjoins Venus and we get a Sun-Venus cazimi, which takes place in the sign of Gemini. And this is actually probably the most important Venus aspect of the year. I think you mentioned something related to that in terms of what we see with Venus or don’t see with Venus.
AC: Yeah, so during a given year you either get a Venus retrograde or you get a Venus-Sun conjunction, a direct Venus-Sun conjunction. So the direct Venus-Sun conjunction—which we get here in early June of 2024—is the reset of the Venus cycle. And one thing I should have mentioned about May and all of those planets in Taurus which are looking to Venus as ruler—Venus is invisible and badly-combust the Sun the whole time, which I think is going to make some of that Taurus stuff a little bit less joyous. There may be a focus on all the good Taurus stuff, but some of it’ll be missing because Venus is not here. Venus is with the Sun; we can’t see Venus. But then, yeah, in early June, we get this reset of the Venus cycle in Gemini, we also get Mercury-Jupiter, and then later in June, we also get a Sun-Mercury conjunction. And it’s worth noting that Jupiter—which the Sun conjoins at the end of May—will also be invisible. We have all these planets in Gemini, and they’re all resetting their cycle in relationship to the Sun and will emerge changed.
CB: That point about them being under the beams, that reminds me of Tarnas, in his work on the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, points out that sometimes major breakthroughs, scientific or other discoveries, take place or are published near Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, but sometimes they aren’t recognized or they fly under the radar during the course of that conjunction itself even though they’re published then; but then later on they emerge into view and become recognized as these huge breakthroughs or discoveries.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good point. I would count on some of the Jupiter-Uranus stuff not getting recognized until later, ‘cause there’s so much going on. It’s coming right on the heels of that April, and Mars is off burning villages. There’s a lot to distract from a well-written paper that advances the art. Speaking of that one thing—
CB: Really quick, I just remembered there’s a spaceship that’s being launched around the timeframe of April, and it may end up being launched around the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. But flight and space travel was one of the things that came up frequently with Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, and there may be something important about space travel where there’s a major development. I think a reusable ship is being launched, and it may help to boost not just taking stuff into space, but also taking people into space, including leisurely trips to space, and maybe that’s part of the Jupiter—
AC: That would be a very Jupiter—
[technical issue]
CB: Right. Yeah, sorry, it just froze for a second. Wouldn’t it? Yeah, that actually would fit very much. ‘Leisurely’ is definitely a Taurus signification.
AC: Yeah, for the purpose of enjoyment. And so, another thing that happens that’s a good thing in early mid-June is that Mars leaves Aries. If you think about it, since February, we’ve had Mars-Pluto, then Mars-Saturn, then Mars-Rahu. And so, Mars into Taurus is a little bit of a lull. There is a rather nasty Mars-Uranus conjunction but that doesn’t occur until the middle of July. And so, the movement of Mars into Taurus on June 9 is a nice downgrade of what has been very intense Mars activity for months.
CB: Yeah, so that begins on June 9, when Mars departs from Aries and moves into Taurus. At the end of the month, I see Saturn stationing here in Pisces. And this is really important because Saturn stations in Pisces and Neptune stations in early July—they station within two days of each other. And this is the point where the conjunction gets the closest that it’s gonna get this year in this timeframe, in late June and early July.
AC: Yeah, very nice, very nice.
CB: Yeah, so some of the blurring between what’s real and what’s not real, between reality and illusion, between what’s true and what’s false—that’s really intensified around this time in late June and early July.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that takes us into July, where in the middle of the month, we find that Mars-Uranus conjunction, which is very explosive and very unexpected on the 15th of July.
AC: Yeah, and that happens right on top of Caput Algol, which is a star with a fearsome track record as far as history goes. I found a precedent for Mars-Uranus in Algol that’s truly horrible. I’ll just say over 20,000 people died who were not military combatants. Anyway, I don’t want to go into World War II horror, but that was the last precedent; that was the last Mars-Uranus on Algol. It’s a very ugly configuration. We’re not gonna have that energy the whole time Mars is in Taurus, but that middle part of July, that’s worth steering around as a configuration.
CB: For sure. Yeah, so that also makes me think of the military technologies thing that we were talking about as well.
AC: No, that’s a great point. We see a lot of new devastating weapons get their premiere under Mars-Uranus conjunctions.
CB: Really quickly—any other significations? Unexpected conflicts. Unexpected fights. Unexpected severing or separation. Revolutionary-type acts and events. I’m trying to think of something else. The US has a Mars-Uranus conjunction, which explains both the Revolutionary War; but also the gun culture and stuff I often link to that conjunction.
AC: Yeah, and just the US’s dedication to maintaining a technological edge in warfare.
CB: Okay.
AC: The United States has Mars-Uranus in Gemini, so it’s even techier.
CB: For sure. Speaking of that, Mars transits into Gemini on July 20 and that starts bringing us into the following month, which is the month of August, where we get a Mercury retrograde on August 5. I believe this is the one that begins in Virgo, right?
AC: I think it’s for Virgo.
CB: Yeah, and then retrogrades back into Leo. ‘Cause you actually had an observation about the Mercury retrogrades this year.
AC: Oh, yeah, our Mercury retrogrades are predominantly in fire signs, right? It’s April, August, and December. The one in August starts early in an earth sign and then spends most of the time in Leo. But, yeah, mostly fire is our Mercury retrograde pattern this year.
CB: Really quickly, for video viewers, here’s a slide that shows the Mercury retrograde periods, where you have the retrograde station, then the halfway point at the cazimi where the problem set up at the retrograde starts to be resolved, and then you have the direct station. So there’s the dates for those for reference. All right, back to August. We mentioned the—go ahead.
AC: Yeah, just a couple of things. One, it’s Mercury retrograde all month, or almost the entire month. Mars’ movement into Gemini—which occurred late July—puts Mars with Jupiter, which is a much friendlier pairing than any of the other four Mars pairings that we’ve already done. Mars-Jupiter can be nice, especially in Gemini. There’s a boldness. There’s a joyful conquering sort of energy to Mars-Jupiter, but some of that confidence may well go awry or need some refinement of direction, because in Gemini, the Mars-Jupiter is going to be looking to Mercury, and Mercury’s gonna be retrograde pretty much all month. So watch where you’re pointing that confidence, sir.
CB: Yeah, I’m not as optimistic about this one because of what it’s coinciding with, which is that Jupiter and Saturn are also making their first exact square this month between Jupiter being in Gemini and Saturn in Pisces. So the tension between growth and expansion versus consolidation, the inherent tension between those two that’s happening really comes into focus in August. And then Mars swoops in and conjoins Jupiter, so that Jupiter’s getting hit by both the fieriness and the impetuousness of Mars, as well as the coldness and the conservativeness of Saturn; and then Mars squares Saturn on the 16th itself, which is that energy of stop-and-go being, pulled between going fast versus going slow, and being stuck in a rock in a hard place. So I think that Mars conjunction with Jupiter is really gonna exacerbate the broader tensions between Saturn and Jupiter and between Pisces and Gemini at this time.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think that this looks like a lot of the ‘Geminian’, the ‘Jupiter and friends in Gemini’ party that we saw in June really hit a number of stumbling points, right? Because if Jupiter in Gemini get all excited, “Oh, I’m conjoining Mercury and Venus, and everybody’s hanging out,” and that fast, fast, fast, fun, fun, fun, new, new, new—
CB: Communication, social, etc.
AC: Yeah, this is a real ‘slow-down and think about it and navigate the obstacles’ time for Jupiter in Gemini.
CB: For sure. That’s a great point. So luckily at the end of the month, Mercury does station direct in Leo. So we come out of the Mercury retrograde period, and then that takes us into the following month.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that the planets have stopped moving as one giant pack in the third quarter. Now we’ve got Venus well ahead of the Sun; we’ve got Venus in Libra as we enter September.
CB: Venus in Libra. Okay, nice. One of the most notable things at the top of September is that Pluto retrogrades back into Capricorn right on September 1, to begin its final pass through the last degrees of that sign. It’ll be in Capricorn from the beginning of September until the middle of November, then in November, Pluto moves into Aquarius for good and departs from Capricorn for 20 years. So what’s interesting about that is not just that Pluto goes into Capricorn, but that Uranus gets super late in Taurus, as far as it’s gonna get this year, and stations at the same time on September 1. So, in September, the Uranus-Pluto trine comes within 2° of intensity, and that’s a super, super important outer planet aspect. And one of the things that’s interesting about it is there’s other decades that have been characterized by Uranus-Pluto alignments; the late 1960s, for example, was the most famous one, which was the conjunction at the beginning of this cycle, but we’ve also had other decades that have been influenced by Pluto-Uranus alignments as well. I know you talked about the French Revolution, which was another Pluto-Uranus alignment as well, right?
AC: Yeah, that had a bunch of stuff going on. There was also Neptune involvement in that. It’s a little too complicated I think to make a great parallel to the Pluto-Uranus trine.
CB: Sure. Well, I did at least want to make the point—let me find it really quickly—because I wanted to situate it in the context of this broader cycle and what that means, which is that we had the opening of this cycle and this relationship between Uranus and Pluto in the 1960s, and especially the late 1960s, with all the revolutionary things that were happening during that time; but also in terms of a lot of the technological stuff that was happening at that time. Personal computers, the interface we use for computers, like the mouse, the first inklings of the internet, of email, of using a mouse and a pointer—a lot of that was demonstrated for the first time in 1968 and 1969 right under the Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Then the next aspect we had was a Uranus-Pluto sextile in the mid-1990s when the internet emerged, then in the 2010s, we had the Uranus-Pluto square—which is when mobile phones took over basically and everybody got a smartphone—and then now we’re entering the next phase of that, which is the Uranus trine Pluto during the course of this decade.
Yeah, September, for some reason, is when it comes within 2°, and it will be the next development in terms of technology, but also perhaps the form factor that technology takes in whatever the post-smartphone era is. Whether that’s Neuralink and controlling phones with our minds or computers with our minds, that’s part of what’s coming up here, in addition to the continuation of the other liberatory and revolutionary impulses from the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. All right, sorry, I just wanted to mention that really quickly to situate why that Uranus-Pluto trine is so important and why it’s situated in September there.
AC: Yeah, we’re getting really close, right? And it’ll be hot—25-26-27, I think even 28. It gets so close this year; not quite, but very close.
CB: Yeah, and the square 10 years ago, a lot of it geopolitically was about the—sorry, I’m spacing on the name. What was it, again?
AC: The ‘Arab Spring’.
CB: The ‘Arab Spring’, that was it.
AC: As soon as they moved into orb in the same signs, within like two or three days, you had the whole ‘Arab Spring’ thing pop off.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, it was huge and disruptive.
CB: So this is gonna be the next phase of that. Not necessarily in being a continuation of the ‘Arab Spring’, per se, but in the energies surrounding it that are underlying revolutionary movements like that; you’ll see that coming to the forefront again over the next several years, but this trine will be a nice preview of it in September.
AC: Yeah, and there’s a couple other things happening in September, right? On a smaller scale, Mars is done with Gemini and moves into Cancer. And so, this movement into Cancer is pretty important because Mars will be in Cancer from January—excuse me—September 4 until November 4, but then will come back for another four months, like three months, in Cancer in the first part of 2025. So get to know your new friend, Mars in Cancer, which is not the easiest sign for Mars. Not easy for Cancer to host Mars, not fun for Mars to be in Cancer, but there’s a whole lot of that on the way, and this is the beginning.
CB: Yes. And very quickly, for those watching the video version, Paula Belluomini made me a nice little illustration based on our previous illustrations for the Mars retrograde period. So I’m just gonna flash that on the screen really quickly for the video viewers—the Mars retrograde from December 6 through February 23—in terms of those degrees. We’ve got the pre-retrograde shadow period beginning October 5, when Mars passes over 17° of Cancer; and then the post-retrograde shadow period doesn’t end until May 2, when Mars passes over 6° of Leo, which is the degree it retrograded at. So just throwing that in there for a quick reference of those degrees. So we also head into our second set of eclipse season in September as well, and we get the very first hit of the Pisces eclipse series on the 17th of September.
AC: Yeah, and even though its companion will be in Libra instead of Virgo, this is the beginning—this is the first taste of the next nodal cycle of the 2025-into-2026 eclipses in Virgo and Pisces. So this first one occurs very close to Neptune. It’s a lunar eclipse at the end of Pisces conjunct Neptune, and, yeah, this will be on the North Node side. It could be more terrifying as eclipses go, which I’ll take—there’s enough terrifying stuff going on—but it’s still an entry into the eclipse realm and all of the weird ‘roller coaster’ energy of things disappearing, things coming out of nowhere and things disappearing back into nowhere with a greater frequency than we are comfortable with, and framing the equinox, just like our previous set of eclipses this year.
CB: Yeah, so that’s gonna be really important. And that eclipse series in Pisces first and then in Virgo is gonna last for over a year; I think like a year-and-a-half after that point. Do you know when the nodes switch signs?
AC: Is it early 2025? I think it’s the first quarter of 2025.
CB: Oh, yeah.
AC: Under the first quarter.
CB: Yeah, I think you’re right. Okay, so that’s important in terms of that. One of the things that’s crazy is the presidential debates are gonna take place at this time, and one of them falls really close to that first eclipse in Pisces, and then the second one is gonna fall right on the second eclipse in Libra, which is gonna take place on October 2. Just imagine, we’re gonna be in the height of the political election season here in the US, and then we’re gonna be right in the middle of eclipse season at the same time, with the chaotic charged energy that comes with that. Over the past couple of years, especially, we’ve seen a number of instances of prominent people hitting a pivot point and either rising suddenly to the top or having a sudden and unexpected fall to the bottom at that time; and I think that’s one of the things that I’m gonna be paying attention to there in general in the world, but also in terms of those presidential debates especially.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great point about eclipses and races, right? Eclipses often will show a big reversal or setback, like jumping way ahead, falling way behind. People talk about the ‘October surprise’, right? So eclipses are pretty good for an ‘October surprise’. And it’s worth noting that Mars goes into the shadow of the upcoming retrograde just two days after the eclipse.
CB: Yeah, well, and the Pisces eclipse will also be highlighting and supercharging the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which we’ve already talked about blurring the lines between reality and what’s false or fake news and just ramping up all of the propaganda and the illusory things that are trying to influence things at that time, that are making the reality of the situation harder to see. It’s gonna get supercharged by that eclipse.
AC: Yeah, it will be a real festival of narratives.
CB: And then the last point I wanted to mention also is just with that Libra eclipse on the 2nd of course, this is the final eclipse in Libra; so it will be the continuation, but the last leg of whatever it was that began one year earlier with the eclipse in October, especially in terms of the Middle East. We’ll see this eclipse as being a final point in that chapter as well—both the continuation of it, but also the end of that chapter.
AC: Yeah. Unfortunately, in October this year, the first normal lunation that’s not eclipsed is pretty hellacious; the Full Moon in Aries in October is tightly T-squared Mars and Pluto in Capricorn. And so, we mentioned that Mars-Pluto is the signature of this upcoming Mars retrograde; it’s also a thing that happens right before election day-and-a-half. And this Full Moon in October also has the Sun and Moon squaring, making a grand cross with Mars and Pluto in Cancer-Capricorn. And so, usually we like to celebrate the return of the Full Moon without being eclipsed or blood-stained, but this is gonna be a rough Full Moon. October’s a very meaningfully bumpy month.
CB: Yeah, I see Pluto stationing direct there in Capricorn for the final time on the 11th of October; and of course that’s gonna be squaring the Libra eclipse, as well as squaring that lunation in Aries that you’re talking about as well.
AC: Yeah, the square gets really tight with the Libra Full Moon.
CB: Got it, okay. You mean the Libra eclipse?
AC: Sorry, the Full Moon, while the Sun is in Libra, which is in Aries. The non-eclipsed lunation after the eclipses is very rough’ it’s very closely square Mars and Pluto.
CB: Got it, okay. And with that, last year, we came up with Pluto themes of control, manipulation, power plays, intrigue, and other themes like that.
AC: Yeah, just metaphysical darkness.
CB: Gotcha. All right, so that brings us into November. Here we see Mars changing signs and moving into Leo on November 3rd, which is the sign that it will eventually go retrograde in. So even though Mars has already entered its shadow period earlier in Cancer, and it will retrograde and go back to Cancer, this, to me, is when the Mars retrograde stuff really starts to ramp up, because it enters the sign that it’s gonna spend a while in, because it slows down and stations there in December.
AC: Yeah, I mean, I think from that previous Full Moon up to this point there’s gonna be plenty of Mars ‘funkiness’. ‘Cause we have that Mars opposite Pluto in the last degree of Cancer and Capricorn—
CB: Oh, yeah.
AC: —two days before Mars enters Leo. And so, it’s already pretty thick by the time Mars moves into Leo.
CB: That’s a good point, especially with Pluto stationing in mid-October. What are some keywords for that? This is gonna be such a dominant aspect at the end of the year, especially in November and December—and as you just said, even in October. What are some keywords we could generate for Mars opposite Pluto?
AC: Paranoia. Part of the Mars-Pluto dynamic is there’s generally a feeling—especially Mars opposite Pluto—of like, “Oh, somebody is trying to control me,” like a heightened sensitivity around being controlled or manipulated, leading to anger responses or outpourings of rage or frustration and a certain paranoia with that, right? Mars is like, “Somebody’s fucking with me from the shadows.” And of course going into a retrograde portion, Mars tends to inspire more confused, twisted-up behavior and thought patterns anyway, even without Pluto.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Some of the keywords that I was writing down are things like power struggles, confrontation, control, obsession, intensity, raw energy, power dynamics, and power plays or power moves, hidden motives, and sometimes working behind the scenes to wield power.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Let’s see—compulsion, manipulation, secrets. Yeah, those are some of the things. And since it’s an opposition—oppositions often are manifested in relationships and in dynamics that involve other people and the tension between opposites, or the tensions between two people, and the ways in which they try to accomplish something. Mars tries to accomplish things quickly with force, but Pluto sometimes tries to do things with overwhelming power or through behind-the-scenes back channels or through manipulation and control and things like that, and when you put those two things in opposition, it can be really tricky.
AC: Yeah.
CB: It reminds me of some of the keywords we used last October when we were delineating the Mars-Pluto square and the use of power and going too far, overuse or abuse of power. You used the words, at one point, of ‘annihilation or destruction of something’. Mars is the traditional planet of war and killing something. But Pluto, when it amplifies Mars, it’s like the planet of destruction and annihilation.
AC: Right, extermination. Mars wants to win the battle; Mars doesn’t need to salt the earth most of the time.
CB: Right. But Pluto takes small things and blows them up and makes them big or magnifies or over-magnifies them. And so, when Pluto gets involved, it takes things much further than usual.
AC: Right. So we have that first Mars-Pluto November 2-3, and then we get two more Mars-Plutos, but not until 2025; this cycle takes a while to resolve itself.
CB: Yeah, it does. And the Mars-Pluto oppositions, the first opposition is exact in Cancer, November 3, and the second is exact in Leo, January 3, with Mars stationing on December 6. So those are some of the crucial dates where it’s just a transit that otherwise would come and go pretty quickly that’s being extended and drawn out into this long experience. I guess for individuals, they’re gonna be experiencing that as a super-long transit through the Leo and Cancer sectors of their chart, and one of the things you can do is look back 15 years because this Mars transit will be a repetition of that.
AC: Actually the closer parallel to this one is 17 years. The last Mars retrograde in Cancer was fall 2007 and into early 2008. Sometimes Mars does 17, most of the time it’s 15.
CB: But wasn’t there one, also in Leo, 15 years ago?
AC: Yeah, that one was all in Leo. The one in 2007 was mostly in Cancer, with a little bit in Gemini. The majority of this one is in Cancer. So I don’t know, they both are kind of a match. The one in Cancer is a better match but only marginally, just because most of this Mars retrograde is Cancer. Only 6 out of the 20-something degrees are in Leo.
CB: Sure, but it’s stations there. I don’t know. People can look back and compare those two periods. The period for the Mars retrograde in Leo that I’m looking at is December 20, 2009 through March 10, 2010, and that was the Mars in Leo portion. So you can look back and see what kind of things came up, especially in terms of conflicts or severing and separation in that area of your life at that time, and it might give you a preview of some of the things that’ll come up in the Mars in Leo portion; and then, Austin, your periods would relate more to the ‘Cancer’ leg of things.
AC: Yeah, if you’re more worried about your planets in Cancer, look at the end of 2007. If you’re more worried about your planets in Leo, look at 2009.
CB: That makes sense. All right, that brings us back to November. What else do we have to say about November? Election Day is November 5, which is two days after Mars goes into Leo.
AC: Yeah. And so, all this Mars stuff—well, the Sun’s in a Mars-ruled sign, and so what Mars is doing is it’s going to be directing the central spotlight of that period. I guess one thing that’s worth noting is that Venus is just way ahead of everything else right now. The Sun’s going through Scorpio; Venus is already in Capricorn by the middle of November. And probably one of the most significant things in November is Pluto goes back into Aquarius.
CB: Yes.
AC: We had this brief regress of Pluto into Capricorn in September, and now it’s back in Aquarius in late November, and that is it for Pluto in Capricorn. It’s a wrap. It’s Pluto in Aquarius all day, every day for the next 20 years.
CB: I love the palpable sense of relief that you have every time you talk about that. But then for those of us with Aquarius rising, your gleefulness does not come off as well necessarily, but that is a huge shift on November 19.
AC: Yeah, we pass the baton.
CB: Right. Okay, I’ll take that.
AC: It’s a poison baton.
CB: But you did your time.
AC: Yeah, exactly.
CB: So the other thing that’s really weird—aside from Pluto going to Aquarius, which is a huge shift—is Mercury stations retrograde later in November on the 23rd; so we get our third and final Mercury retrograde of the year. And it’s a little weird to me that it’s happening a few weeks after Election Day, ‘cause it takes us into December, and it takes us into the Mars retrograde, when it actually slows down at 6° of Leo and stations on the 6th of December; and Mercury’s only at the halfway point through its retrograde cycle by then, ‘cause it conjoins the Sun at the cazimi on December 5.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So these themes of Mercury retrograde—things being revised, things being up in the air, delays, miscommunications, controversy surrounding communication—get combined at the same time with an intensification of the principle of Mars, which is conflict and clashes and severing and separation all happening at the same time.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that as we’re getting into Mars being actually retrograde, observationally, it’s during the heart of Mars’ retrograde that Mars is the closest to us and the brightest and is visible for the greatest proportion of night, right? So Mars retrogrades have a very handy visual cue. Mars will rise not too long after the Sun sets and be very bright and red all night, every night. And this Mercury retrograde has a trine with the Mars in Leo, and so there’s a direct connection between what is confusing and what is a conflict that has entered a very complicated phase; just a little bit about Mars retrograde as a phase. There’s a saying in boxing—and there’s a variety of versions of this in other combat theaters—but everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face; I believe that was the ‘Mike Tyson’ version of it. I believe the military version is ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’. That’s that confusion after contact is made where a lot of plans disintegrate—that’s the energy of Mars retrograde. It’s its own place where maybe some of the plans survive but it requires its own navigation and is confusing and complicated in a way that the beginning and the end of the conflict aren’t. It’s that ‘complicated’ middle. Like, “Okay, now we’re here. So we’re here in Normandy, huh? I like the planning part better.”
CB: Yeah, and sometimes a little conflict that you think should come and go and pass by easily becomes extended into a larger conflict, or there’s a sense of irritation that sticks with you for an extended period of time that you can’t get rid of. Kind of like eating a hot pepper and trying to wash it down with water or milk, but the taste hasn’t gone away after a much extended period of time than you expected.
AC: It’s peppery.
CB: It is peppery. So on the positive side, Mercury retrograde is going to end on the 15th of December, right on a Full Moon in Gemini. And then the last really major alignment that happens—it’s kind of a noteworthy alignment—occurs on the 24th of December, when Jupiter will square Saturn exactly for the second time in this year. And so, for some reason that alignment between these two planets and the tension between Pisces and Gemini and between the growth and conservation aspect of this energy comes back into focus again at the very end of the year.
AC: Yeah, yeah. So in one sense, December is very unresolved ‘cause the biggest thing going on is the Mars retrograde and its multiple oppositions with Pluto. And so, yeah, the Mercury retrograde gets resolved, but we’ve got another month-and-a-half of this Mars retrograde into 2025. The Mars stuff is very unresolved. The rest of the planets—a lot of them are doing fine, but not Mars, not Mars and Pluto; they’re getting ready for rounds two and three.
CB: Yeah, and there’s a continuation of a smoldering conflict that isn’t resolved until sometime next year.
AC: Yeah, and 2025 is a hoot, let me tell you.
CB: Yeah, maybe we should save that. We’ve just finished our run through the calendar. I know we were gonna take a break and then make some final remarks. Do you want to save that for then?
AC: Sure. That would be perfect ‘cause literally what comes after 2024 can help contextualize 2024 remarks.
CB: Exactly. All right, I wanted to mention I just released my 2024 Auspicious Elections Report, where I went through each of the next 12 months and I highlighted fortunate dates during the course of 2024 using the principles of electional astrology. So this gives you insights into the most lucky dates in the year, including ideal projects to launch, as well as activities to avoid during different parts of the year using electional astrology. So the report includes a video workshop, plus a written report and a PDF of all charts mentioned. I’ve been doing this report for five-plus years now, and we’ve found some really great elections during the course of next year that you can use and take advantage of to start different types of projects. The report is useful for both beginner and advanced astrologers, and it provides valuable insights for planning major life events and ventures during the course of the year. So the report is currently on sale for 15% off, but only until January 1, 2024. You can find out more or get the report at theastrologypodcast.com/2024report. Austin, what do you got?
AC: Well, of my various projects, one that I’m sort of happiest with is my partnership with Sphere + Sundry, as the electional designer for Sphere + Sundry, which produces the finest talismanic materia. So the Sphere + Sundry Project—we’ve been using the methods of the Picatrix to ritually harvest the finest elections since I guess the beginning of 2018. It’s a great project. We’ve done 40-some elections at this point, and so we’ve sort of ‘ritually pickled’ some of that good Jupiter in Sagittarius from 2018, some of that good Jupiter in Pisces from a little while ago, and have a variety of other elections. And so, this year there are a number of operations planned and we’ve got some in the can already. I’m excited that our Jupiter conjunct the Moon in Taurus that we did this fall will be coming out—and there’s just a bunch of stuff. Literally, the transits that you wish you could get back, we have effectively pickled, so you should check it out. It’s sphereandsundry.com.
CB: Brilliant. All right, people should check that out. All right, so I wanted to transition finally to wrapping this up and say some concluding remarks and final reflections on the year 2024 and just kind of bring this to a completion point, since we’ve sort of run through the astrology of this year as best as we can, giving an overview of everything at this point. How are you feeling at this point, now that we’ve reached the ending point of this journey?
AC: Tired.
CB: That’s a good feeling.
AC: Eventually, I will feel satisfied at some point, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s been nice to discuss all of this in sequence. Because, like you, I’ve spent every spare bit of this month cramming my head full of data and trying to understand its meaning and pattern. So it’s nice to just lay all the cards on the table and talk about the patterns that they form.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It was a tense month of research where I tried to research as much as I could about the astrology of next year and found a ton of stuff. I had 40 pages of notes, and I tried to condense it down as much as I could for this. I’m sure there’s stuff that we’ve overlooked. I’m sure there’s gonna be some interesting things that’ll start becoming more clear as we get into the year, and of course we’ll keep doing these forecasts each month over the course of the next 12 months and checking in periodically to update and confirm how some of our predictions worked out. But in terms of summarizing things, I mean, one, it’s gonna be a huge year of technological change and innovation, and things are gonna start moving so rapidly in terms of those changes and in terms of some of the expansion.
I think a year ago from today, if we compare where things were technologically to today and how vastly different it is—when I think about where we’re gonna be 12 months from now—it’s gonna be even more radically different. With Pluto firmly being in Aquarius, with Uranus starting to trine Pluto very closely, with Jupiter having conjoined Uranus and then gone into Gemini—all of that just screams intense, rapid technological advancement, especially in communications and related technologies to me. And it will be interesting to see as a tech person some of the exciting things about that that I’m genuinely excited for and the ways that artificial intelligence and technology will be used to enhance our capabilities as humans and improve what we do, like many other technologies have in the past; like the invention of paper, or the development of space flight, or even flight with hot air balloons or aviation—there have been so many good technological developments.
At the same time, I’m sure we’ll also start to see the drawbacks and the negative side of technology and the ways in which it can be used to distract us from living in the natural world, as well as the ways in which it can be used as a tool for manipulation and control, as well as starting to widen the gap between—or at least make blurry the gap between what’s real versus what’s not; and I think that’s something that will become very stark this year and that we’ll all struggle with to some extent. Ultimately, even though we’re heading into a very important turning point in world history, I’m still optimistic. Even though there’s many difficult things on the horizon and a lot of major challenges, I’m still optimistic about many of the good things that will come out of this year, and I think it’s gonna be a year with many wondrous things that we’ll look back on very fondly as being an important turning point for certain good things, as well as certain difficult or bad things. What’s your feeling in terms of that?
AC: Oh, I mean, this year’s interesting. For the technology—it gets started this year, but it really gets white-hot 2025, 2026, 2027. This year is interesting because I can’t dismiss it as sort of a non-player, and yet the really big stuff is just around the corner; it’s just past 2024. And so, 2024 has this interesting quality with Pluto in Aquarius beginning a huge new cycle of 20 years, and yet at the same time we’re also finishing up the Neptune and the Uranus. So we’re getting ready to end a 14-year and a 7-year, and the new Neptune and the new Uranus are just past the boundary of 2024. And so, it’s kind of the new thing and the new stuff hasn’t quite happened yet. I think there’s gonna be a challenge with 2024 differentiating between, is this the end of a cycle or is this the beginning of a cycle? Because some of the planets are starting new, some of the planets are just about to start new, but they need to finish the old. And so, there’s a potential for confusion there that I think is gonna run throughout the year and is certainly echoed by just Saturn-Neptune in Pisces being one of our anchor points.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s certainly a stepping stone or a step stool towards the technological developments that will be the, not the cornerstone, but the star on top of the tree of this decade, later in the decade. When Uranus trines Pluto at about 8° of Gemini, it’ll trine Pluto at like 8° of Aquarius in a few years, and that’s gonna be a really important technological turning point. But this is the step stool into it, that Pluto is going into Aquarius for good. And next year, Uranus is gonna go into Gemini for seven years, and that’s gonna be one of the biggest things about 2025 that is gonna cause or correlate with just a complete shift in tone and in chapter and in world history in the year following this one.
AC: Yeah, I don’t expect 2024 to be geopolitically calm, but the storm is ‘25, ‘26, ‘27. 2024 might seem noisy until you meet ‘25 and ‘26. And so, again, I don’t want to undersell 2024 ‘cause there’s a lot going on. It’s not that 2024 is when it gets wild and then it calms down, right? 2025 and ‘26 are wilder. And so, 2024—it’s situated very interestingly. It’s not quite in this new thing and we’re not quite finished with some other things; it’s very one foot in, one foot out. And I think it’s gonna make a lot of things hard to interpret and easy to be misled about, either by our own minds or somebody else’s mind.
CB: For sure. Yeah, and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that gets so close this year will not help with that. And then that’s something in 2025 that also will grow much more intensely than in 2024, and yet 2024 is the most intense we’ve had that energy in a while. So it’s gonna be another stepping stool and transition into what that’s gonna be like and those tensions between reality and unreality.
AC: Yeah, and what you didn’t know could be reality, but is on its way.
CB: Right, for sure. So I do want to say I’m genuinely concerned about the US as a country and the state of democracy and the potential for a serious threat to democracy this year with just all of the astrology indicating this being a really important turning point in terms of American history and the way that that’s gonna go. Obviously, there’s gonna be a lot of high drama over the course of the year, and we’re gonna be checking back in about that and tracking it at different points. But I’m hoping that in the long term, whatever comes from this year—whether it’s positive or negative—that in the long span of history we’re still moving in a good direction, where there’s still gonna be progress made in different areas over the long scope of time, even if there’s setbacks or steps backwards that occur at certain points as well; just like there’s always a retrograde cycle for most of the planets, where there’s this curve and the planet turns around and appears to move backwards for a period of time. But sometimes that process of moving backwards for a period of time is necessary in order to move forward again and achieve true progress.
AC: Yeah, well, just using the pivotal Uranus in Gemini years for the United States, the country’s been in a rough state going into them—‘AKA’, right now—and it’s wild in the midst of the Uranus in Gemini years. And so far, in the last three instances, things have looked way better on the way out than they did on the way in. Sometimes the storm clears the air.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. And sometimes genuine progress is made during those periods of difficulty, even if there’s huge loss and catastrophe and other things in the process, like, for example, during the Civil War when Uranus was going through Gemini; major advancements in terms of civil rights took place during the course of that.
AC: Yeah, I mean, the result was a better United States.
CB: Right.
AC: I don’t think the Revolutionary War was that fun; as I understand there was a lot of freezing and starving. Things ended up better on the other side. And World War II is perhaps history’s greatest nightmare, and yet the United States goes in only half-recovered from the Depression and comes out with better outcomes than any other country and moves into a period where we had the greatest middle class, we made advancements in civil rights. The United States out of World War II is undeniably better than going in, not to say it was perfect or beyond criticism in any of these cases. But so far it looks like we’re on track and looks pretty fraught going in, there’s a storm coming, and then hopefully we’ll do four-for-four, where things look way better—meaningfully better on the other side of it.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good. And you had mentioned the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 2020 at one point and how that set up a new cycle that will last for a long time in terms of the air triplicity shift. But it’s also worth mentioning that this year is the square between Jupiter and Saturn that follows that conjunction. So whatever the foundation was that that conjunction laid for the world and in society at the very end, the culmination of 2020—in December of 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn aligned in Uranus—this is the next step. The foundation was laid at that time, and we’ll reach some sort of challenge or some sort of tension and turning point, but from that tension there’ll also be growth and the progress of that cycle into the future and into whatever the next positive chapter is of that as well. It’ll be pushing humanity forward in some way, whatever that takes.
AC: Yeah, and just while we’re talking about the United States, the end of Pluto in Capricorn does mean the end of the Pluto return for the United States, for whatever that’s worth.
CB: Yeah, which is something I’ve been emphasizing a lot this year, ‘cause I was worried about some of the things that were happening with the democracy and stuff. But researching more about how the Constitution came into being and was ratified during the early phases of Pluto in Aquarius, I’m nervous that some of the things we talked about with that at that time—whether there would be a challenge to the structure of that, whether some of that is actually more localized in the early phases of Pluto in Aquarius, and whether it’s challenges to the Constitution or to the system of checks and balances and the way that the US is set up—if that isn’t what’s coming with the Pluto transit through early Aquarius now.
AC: Interesting. Well, fortunately, historically, Pluto in Aquarius doesn’t like despots, does like choices. If you look at the Reformation, that was basically a move away from hierarchy with a king figure; although the French Revolution had its problems, which verged on atrocity at several points, it certainly wasn’t pro-despotism.
CB: Right.
AC: I think Pluto in Aquarius is certainly not on the side of god emperors.
CB: It’s not in the long term, but in the short term there’s always this last gasp of attempting to control and manipulate and hold on to power and to demolish the checks and balances that keep things level, like, for example, Napoleon. We had the French Revolution, and you had those ideas of democracy and stuff. But then all of a sudden Napoleon sweeps in and he sets up a new monarchy for a period of time.
AC: But he doesn’t get to do that while Pluto’s in Aquarius.
CB: Well, it didn’t get to last; it was meant ultimately to fail. But I guess the point is just sometimes there’s this backwards-and-forward motion of despots and people trying to centralize power and take it in their own hands and control everything and then the masses sort of trying to wrestle that away at the same time and ultimately being successful, but there’s still a struggle in the process.
AC: I think there’ll be plenty of struggle over the next seven-eight years.
CB: Yeah. All right, well, let’s leave it on a positive note. Positive note—I really like a lot of the trines. As I’ve said, a lot of technological development, communication development. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction—there are a lot of good things to be positive about, and there’s gonna be a lot of new beginnings that are good for different people at various stages, even if there’s a lot of craziness that’s going on in the world at the same time. I mean, I think about you and your family and some of the great stuff that’s gonna be happening around that time period in terms of bringing new life into the world. And that’s a great reminder that sometimes even when really crazy stuff’s happening or when old structures are being demolished, sometimes it’s clearing the way for new structures and new life to grow and to flourish.
AC: Yeah. Also, we’ve all got our own charts; this is just the transits this year.
CB: Right.
AC: What is happening in the news is not your life; that is something you can know about—it may or may not affect you. But we all have our own paths, charts, trajectories, luck, misfortune, destiny, etc., etc. We are not the chart of May of 2024 or October of 2024.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. As for us, we’re gonna be astrologers, and whatever happens we’re gonna keep coming back each month and studying it and just marveling at the amazing ways in which the universe and the cosmos and the planets move in tandem with humanity and often reflect in the sky what’s going on down here on Earth, and there’s gonna be a lot of fun and interesting stuff to study this year. So we’re gonna keep coming back every month and doing the monthly forecast episodes and doing that dual process of, on the one hand, reflecting on what’s happened in the past month and how the astrology played out, so that we can record that for history, and then turning around and doing the other part of that, which is to look ahead at the future and try to make predictions about what’s coming up.
And that dual process is something that’s really special that I’ve come to really appreciate over the past few years in the contributions that we’re kind of making to the astrological community, as well as just how fun and interesting it is to study all of this stuff from this vantage point as astrologers. It’s truly a gift, and I feel blessed to be able to do that. So thanks, Austin, for doing this together with me, for partnering with me to go on this journey together to try to predict the future. And thanks to everybody in the audience. We’ve got a great audience of patrons today who joined us, who’ve been chiming in and supporting us through this—which I really appreciate—and have supported my work and research in order to allow me to do this. And thanks to the audience on YouTube and listening at home on podcasts and everything else for joining us on this journey as well, it’s been fun.
AC: Yeah, eight-and-a-half years so far with just this show.
CB: Yeah, we started in 2015—in the summer of 2015. Yeah, we’ve learned so much. I feel like I’ve grown so much as an astrologer, growing and observing all these things, and it’s been really, really fun and interesting. And I can see that this year is gonna be another year we’re gonna learn a ton as astrologers just by watching all this stuff happen.
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot of ‘grab the popcorn’ moments this year, like, “Okay, how’s this gonna play out?”
CB: Right. I’m looking forward to those comets. Comets are gonna be new. I think it’s a new and interesting area of research for astrologers; I’m gonna try to put that episode together. I may also put together a Pluto in Aquarius episode. There’s a lot of good episodes that could just be individual things that we’ve only touched on or brushed past during the course of this episode despite how long it was. But, yeah, there’s lots of other things to research, so we’re gonna be back again here soon to look at some of those things.
AC: Neat.
CB: All right, buddy, well, thanks a lot for joining me today for this episode. What do you have going on in terms of your personal work and things you’re putting together or offerings that you have?
AC: Yeah, so I guess three things. First, I’ve got to get the second edition of 36 Faces done in January and February; I got a super hard deadline, got a kit on the way, gotta get it done. Fortunately, January skies look like they’re going to cooperate with me. Two, I’ll continue to be doing my educational program, The Fundamentals of Astrology. There’s a year one enrollment in June, tentatively scheduled for June 14. And then, third, I will continue to elect for Sphere + Sundry; we’ve got some fun stuff coming out. There’s, as I mentioned earlier, a really nice Moon in Taurus with Jupiter series that we did in the fall that’ll be coming out early this year. The sort of uber project that Kait did—which was taking seven individual projects and elections, one for each of the visible planets and then ritually combining them into one magnum opus, Thema Mundi—that’s available again for a little bit during the first quarter. It’s awesome stuff. They are 30-some series from the last six-and-a-half years, so I strongly suggest that. But, yeah, book, teach, and then elect and magic—those are the three things.
CB: Brilliant. What’s your website?
AC: It’s austincoppock.com and sphereandsundry.com.
CB: Cool. And I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this episode on YouTube or on the podcast website. As for myself, like I mentioned earlier, my electional report is out, and it’s on sale for 15% off until January 1, and that gives you all of the most auspicious or lucky dates for starting new ventures and undertakings next year. You can find that at theastrologypodcast.com/2024report. Elsewhere, I’ve just released my posters, where some of the graphics we used for the monthly breakdown during the later part of this episode I actually released as a print poster that you can put on your wall to easily glance at what the transits are gonna be during different parts of the year. And I’m doing a 10% off sale on that until January 1 if you use the promo code ‘JUPITER’ during checkout. So you can find that at theastrologypodcast.com/merch.
Other than that, I teach my approach to astrology in a bunch of different online courses that I teach through my website at courses.theastrologyschool.com, so if you want to learn astrology, you can go there. And, finally, if you want to support my work on the podcast and my ability to do this research, as well as get access to bonus content, like early access to new episodes or exclusive episodes only for subscribers, sign up for my page on Patreon at patreon.com/astrologypodcast, and then you’ll be able to join us in the live chat every time we do one of these episodes each month for the monthly forecast episodes. So I think that’s it for me in terms of things I have going on. Thanks a lot for joining me for this, Austin. I’m happy to have done the 2024 forecast with you, and I look forward to continuing to do the astrology with you next year over the course of the next 12 months.
AC: Yeah, me too. I’m gonna have to be missing in action for the first time in the history of the podcast March-April because I will be busy.
CB: Right. Well, maybe you can start training your replacement at some point. Maybe they could join you on the podcast at some point or make an appearance at some point during the course of the year.
AC: I’m sure there’ll be an adorable cameo at some point.
CB: Okay, good.
AC: It’ll be kittens and babies. We’ll save it for a really horrid month.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I like that. All right, cool. Well, I think that’s it for this episode then. So thanks everyone for watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck to you next year in 2024, and we’ll see you again for the year head forecast one year from now, for the forecast for 2025, in December of 2024. So good luck this year, have a great one, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Take care. Keep your powder dry, my friends.
[credits]
Shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, the number one astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. You can download it on the Apple App Store or on Google Play, or for more information, visit app.chani.com.
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’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
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.