The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 437, titled:
Astrology Forecast March 2024
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on February 27, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released March 1st, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for March of 2024. Hey, Austin.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. How’s it going?
CB: It is going very well. We’ve got a lot of news to talk about in the first hour of this episode and then in the second hour we’re gonna get into the astrology for March. I’m gonna do a very quick overview of the astrology here at the beginning before we jump into the news segment, and as always, there will be timestamps in the description below this video or on the podcast website for this episode if people want to find the timestamp to jump ahead to the forecast. I can’t unfortunately embed it for the Spotify people, even though they’ve been requesting it. But if you go to theastrologypodcast.com, you can find timestamps there. All right, let’s go ahead and jump right into it, I want to show—especially for the video viewers—our Planetary Alignments Calendar, which shows all the main astrological events for March. So the first thing that happens in March, right at the top, is we get a Venus-Uranus square on March 3. Then later in the week, Mars squares Uranus on the 9th, and the same day Mercury ingresses into the sign of Aries.
There’s a New Moon, which is our first lunation of the month, on the 10th, which is a New Moon in Pisces, then Venus goes into Pisces on the 11th. The Sun conjoins Neptune on the 17th in Pisces, and then the Sun right after that moves into Aries and we get the spring or vernal equinox on the 19th. Then we have a Venus-Saturn conjunction on the 21st. Mars moves into Pisces on the 22nd. We enter into eclipse season, where we have a lunar eclipse in the sign of Libra on the 25th—which then connects back to a set of eclipses that we had way back in October—and that takes place on the 25th. And then towards the end of the month, Mercury starts slowing down and stations retrograde; it doesn’t actually station until April 1, but we’re basically in ‘Mercury retrograde land’ by the end of March. Yeah, so those are some of the astrological things we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. But first, why don’t we catch up and check in on some news stories that have been happening over the past month since we recorded our last forecast. How does that sound to you?
AC: That sounds like accountability, Chris. We talked a lot about, “Hey, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all going to conjoin Pluto, which just ingressed into Aquarius, and we should see a bunch of stuff in the key of Pluto in Aquarius.” And so, we did.
CB: Indeed, we did. So we’ve got a bunch of tech news stories that happened because everything was going through Aquarius. I’m also kind of a tech guy. I have Moon and ascendant in Aquarius and Uranus on the midheaven, so this is some of the stuff that comes across my desk. But we’ve also been paying attention to how some some of these transits are going that are playing out this year that are very tech-oriented with the Pluto ingress into Aquarius, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well, and many of these stories seem to have that theme, so let’s go through them real quick. So at the top of the month, right on February 2, Apple released their VR headset, the Apple Vision Pro; there was a lot of fanfare about it. There were people walking around New York City and other big cities with VR headsets on, because the headset allows you to see through to the outside.
So it was kind of surreal seeing all these people walking around with them on or wearing them on subways and stuff like that, yeah, blending the worlds, or the difference between what’s real and what’s not real as an obvious theme. Also, one of the things that people were showing off in videos was that with the headset on, it creates persistent windows, where a person could put up one screen at their desk that they’re working on and then they would walk to another room and that window would stay there; and they’d go to another room—like their living room—and there would be another window in virtual reality, where it’s on their wall and it’s like a big television. So I guess that’s why Apple’s calling it ‘spatial computing’ because there’s something about creating a persistent virtual space that blends virtual reality with the real world, and I feel like that’s super Saturn-Neptune, right?
AC: Yeah. Well, one of the things that we’ve been seeing recently with all of the Pluto in Aquarius stuff we’ve talked about is we’re brought to ask, “Oh, is this Saturn-Neptune in Pisces where we have this sort of erosion of the boundary between imagination and reality or that boundary is troubled, or is this a ‘Pluto in Aquarius tech thing’?” And most of the time, it’s both, astrologically. Pluto is in Saturn’s sign in Aquarius, and so the ruler of Pluto in Aquarius is Saturn in Pisces with Neptune right there, right? So, yeah, this trajectory of technological change which Pluto in Aquarius is telling us about is working with that Saturn-Neptune in Pisces, so the blending is everywhere. Or it’s really Pluto in Aquarius using Saturn and Neptune’s material to make stuff would be one way to think about it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. In other news, one of the biggest tech stories that happened this month, that also matches those themes, is OpenAI—the company that made ChatGPT that set off the entire AI revolution a little over a year ago—on February 15, they dropped a preview of a new thing that they released, which was an AI text-to-video generator. And this thing is honestly like one of the most jaw-dropping things I’ve seen in the past year. With all of the different AI stuff coming out, this one is up there with the original release of ChatGPT and just doing AI-generated photos, because now they’re able to do lifelike, realistic, one-minute videos from a simple text prompt.
And in looking through some of these videos that they create, I really have a hard time telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not. This video, for example—for those watching the video version—of a bluff or a shoreline in California, with the waves going up against it, is completely AI-generated; it looks like a drone video but it’s completely generated by a computer. So there is some crazy stuff happening right now in terms of that and in terms of the impact that this is gonna have on many different levels of society now that companies are producing these programs that can create lifelike, AI video that you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. I saw one tweet that said: “Trusting your own eyes and ears is no longer an option.” What that’s gonna do in terms of the impact on society, the impact on different peoples whose jobs rely on doing video—either YouTubers or videographers that shoot B-roll video—there’s just gonna be some very massive changes happening.
AC: Yeah. So what changes does this make you think about? I guess on a hopeful or on the more positive side this can be a very fancy new paintbrush for people to create things, right? On the negative side, there’s always been a good business in ‘fake news’ I guess is what we call it now—but in creating a facsimile of reality that is not reality so that people will believe that; as soon as lying was invented this became a game. And so, as far as misleading people for the thousand reasons that people mislead people this seems like a wonderful tool.
CB: Yeah. And especially with politics and stuff like that, the ability to generate fake videos of politicians or people is gonna skyrocket and that could have a real major impact even on the election in the US later this year, so that’s definitely a real danger. And there’s a story that came out today that Tyler Perry was about to invest $800 million in a new production studio for film-making, for movies, but he put that on hold because he’s concerned that this technology is just completely gonna change things. One of the questions is how is it gonna impact the film industry, for example, where animators will probably be put out of work? Yeah, I mean, I always have used stock photo sites to buy images for my websites or podcasts or stuff like that for thumbnails. I was looking for a thumbnail for the episode with Demetra, and I went to my normal stock photo site, Adobe, and I was shocked to actually see that something like 70% or 80% of the results that I was getting while looking for an image were AI-generated. So I felt like that was a good early example of how some of this AI stuff is just shifting things really rapidly and sometimes in ways that aren’t initially expected or controllable.
AC: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that it leads me to think about is there’s this essay that, I don’t know, was written maybe a hundred years ago by Walter Benjamin, and it’s called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and he is, in the piece, trying to have a good think about what happens to let’s say a painting—let’s say a portrait, a beautiful, oil-painted portrait—in an age when you can take a photograph of the same, right?
CB: Right.
AC: That essay is considered a classic because a lot of the points raised in it kind of work every time there’s another quantum leap in mechanical reproduction of images and artworks. And one of the pieces from that is that basically paintings still have their own value, but they become more valuable in some ways while becoming less common; it becomes what we would call now ‘boutique’ or ‘artisan’, where something is special. It’s like, “Oh, somebody actually made this.” In an age of mass production, “Oh, my God, a human being actually spent time creating this movie rather than just telling the AI to make a movie.” It’s not really a pro or con argument, it’s just what happens to an older form—an older and more attention-and-labor-intensive form of creation—when you have something that is more economically-efficient because it requires less attention. And so, I guess what I’m winding around to is a lot of the art formats or image production, movie production, and image production that we’ve grown up as ‘that’s just the way it’s done’ may in the not-too-distant future be seen as sort of boutique or artisan and very inefficiently labor intensive but kind of beautiful because it’s so hard to do. Why would you do it that way when it’s so easy to—
CB: Yeah, I think I mentioned this in the last forecast, but just Pluto in Aquarius—when I did the Pluto in Aquarius study in history—one of the things I noticed is that sometimes a new technology would come out, but it would just completely supplant and decimate whatever the previous approach to that technology was; like paper did, for example, with papyrus.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I think that’s what we’re seeing here in the early stages of Pluto in Aquarius. And what was interesting, you mentioned a quantum leap in art basically, but that’s kind of what happened here, because I was paying attention to the astrology that day and the announcement came out on February 15. It was actually kind of weird because Google put out a big announcement that morning, and then OpenAI—seemingly to compete with Google—dropped this big announcement which completely overshadowed anything that Google had announced that day; because everyone’s jaw just dropped seeing that they could now make lifelike video just from a text prompt of writing a sentence, so it was very surprising. The Moon was in Taurus conjoining Uranus—so we were getting that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction activated by the Moon—and Venus was at 29° of Capricorn. But what happened was by the next day—once the news really got out and everybody had started talking about it—Venus had ingressed into Aquarius where it conjoined Pluto. So I think the main signature for this was the Venus-Pluto conjunction basically, and what you said was kind of striking in terms of that of a quantum leap in terms of artwork. I know you were talking about that in terms of the past and paintings and stuff, but this was kind of our 2024 version of that.
AC: Yeah—or I would say ‘tools’, ‘art tools’, right? The work of art ultimately is about what the one wielding the tools is able to do with them, which is why, I don’t know, Byzantine frescoes are not worse art than digital paintings, right? But as far as the tools, a quantum leap in the power of the tools, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: I don’t know, the ‘robo paintbrush’ that can paint whole camera-pivoting digital scenes. And Pluto things—I’m very fond of reframing the word ‘evolution’ or ‘evolutionary’, which is applied to Pluto, and shifting it back to its biological function, it’s Darwinian connotations, where the environment or factors within the environment change and offer the choice of either effective adaptation to a semi-permanently-altered environment or extinction, right? And if you’re in the field of image production this stuff is, at least at this point, very strongly suggesting an evolutionary threat of an adapt-or-die level.
CB: Right.
AC: Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t adaptations. But I can’t imagine, for example, being a company that does trailers for video games, or a company that is hired by other video game companies to produce cutscenes—high-def cutscenes for a video game—and not using these tools, or having to compete against another firm that uses the tools while you don’t. And then there’s who uses the tools best, etc., etc. But, yeah, image and moving-image production has that. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the movie Melancholia. Did you ever see Melancholia? Lars von Trier.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Right. Where the Moon is just getting closer and closer and closer to the Earth and will eventually crush it, but everybody’s just gazing up at the celestial object, which is their doom inching forward a little bit every day.
CB: Yeah, I think ‘adapt-or-die’ is a good keyword for this because I think this is an early preview. Like the artists are getting hit with this first, but this is something that’s gonna hit all levels of society, where the technology will impact things and force people to either adapt to it or be completely overrun by it in some way in terms of their chosen careers and professions and the way that it integrates or doesn’t integrate into it. I saw one person comment on Twitter saying that this technology with the video is gonna be like “an asteroid hitting the dinosaurs” for those who do YouTube videos and stuff at this point in terms of the potential for that and how it’s gonna impact that whole space where video is key to that entire industry.
AC: Yeah. Or like some sort of ‘Marvel or DC comic book’ thing where the asteroid that hits has some sort of super cosmic radiation and mutates and gives thousands of people superpowers, right?
CB: Right.
AC: The amount of imaginal moving images that people will be able to create on the same budget they’re working with now will be a thousandfold from what they were a year ago.
CB: Yeah, that’s true. That made me think of the classic 1993 movie Meteor Man with Eddie Murphy, a classic. Did you watch that one?
AC: No, no. I think I know that it exists.
CB: Okay. Well, it’s like a meteor and it gives him special superpowers. But I like that analogy ‘cause, yeah, the ‘adapt’ part is we’re all gonna have to find ways to adapt to some of this stuff, so seeing some of these early previews of what that’s like in different industries is illustrative. Moving on to other news, another major announcement that happened is that company Neuralink, owned by Elon Musk, announced their first successful human implant of a device in a patient’s brain that’s allowing them to control a computer, to control a cursor on a screen. So the procedure supposedly happened on January 28, and the news came out on the 29th and 30th, and there were some weirdly-close alignments that day that were within a degree. One was Mercury was conjunct Mars—it was separating but it was still very close in the same degree—and two, Venus was exactly trine Jupiter.
The Moon was in Virgo that day, and it was actually completing a Grand Trine with Venus and Jupiter, but then also connecting and bringing in the opposition to Saturn and Neptune in Pisces. So, again, it’s another of those things of huge technological advancements that are gonna have a huge impact and implications for society in the long term, but also a breaking down of boundaries and barriers. For some people, it’s gonna be people that don’t have motor skills to be able to use their hands or be able to control a computer or a mouse or a phone, but now can, which is a good thing. Obviously, there’s gonna be major pros and cons with this technology just like all the others, but it’s interesting to see the symbolism, the archetype, manifesting in a different way there.
AC: Yeah, that’s pretty interesting because if we back to what I was talking about last month with the ‘cyberpunk checklist’—which is what Pluto in Aquarius seems to be going down very quickly—this whole family of near-future, dystopian, high-tech visions, there’s always something that gets called a ‘data jack’ or a ‘data port’, where somebody has basically a plugin in the brain so that they can interface with machines; whether that’s a computer, or in a lot of them, a vehicle, so that you plugged into the vehicle systems and are getting a heads-up display and have greater sensitivity and could guide it more effectively or data stuff. And it’s interesting, in a lot of variants of that cyberpunk world you have people in societies making very conscious choices whether to be augmented or unaugmented, right? You have a cultural reaction to that human-machine interface, and so I look forward to seeing how that plays out.
CB: Yeah, those cultural reactions—I think that’s a really important point; that’s gonna be huge. Everyone’s gonna have these decisions that we’ve never had to make before of that choice between ‘to use AI or to not use AI’, to ‘use robots’, and the next one we’re gonna talk about ‘to use the implant or to not use the implant’ and the different cultural implications it ends up having for accessibility and for what you can do in work or in society versus what you lose as a result of that.
AC: Yeah. Another thing—another sort of piece of that cultural reaction in some of these fictional ‘envisionings’ of a place we’re sort of already entering—is religious reactions. There’s Gibson, there’s some Shadowrun, but basically seeing the data port or the mechanization of the human form as like a violation of the divinely-created order and certain religious factions being wholly against modification. For example, let’s take this like 20 years down the road to the end of Pluto in Aquarius, is the Pope not going to have any opinion at all on someone replacing let’s say all of their limbs and half their brain with a machine? It brings up the question of the human condition too much to not have philosophical and religious authorities and groups have strong opinions one way or another.
CB: Yeah, for sure. As well as arguments about bodily autonomy—or somebody in that scenario. Let’s say it was somebody that was blown up in war, in an explosion in a war zone or something and lost huge parts of their body, but then was able to still live and have a full life as a result of those modifications; then the real argument becomes, in your context, religion versus, I don’t know, bodily autonomy and echoes of similar conversations that are happening right now in other areas in this month, very strikingly, with the IVF stuff happening in—was it Alabama? No, it wasn’t Alabama. It was like Oklahoma and embryos and different things like that.
AC: Oh, okay. Yeah, I missed that. But, yeah, the existing cultural institutions are not inert in the face of radical new developments, especially those that intrude on or modify or enhance the human body from the inside out or change the human mind, and that’ll be a big part. I think I mentioned last month William Gibson who wrote Neuromancer and is considered the ‘grandfather of cyberpunk’, although mega nerds will point out the precedence that he drew. When people ask him, “Hey, how did you come up with stuff that basically happened 20 years later?” He said, “I don’t really study technology, I study how people behave around technology,” and I think we need to keep that in mind when we see these new technologies and as we’re tracking the ‘Pluto in Aquarius’ story.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s great advice, especially for astrologers. Like if we go back in history and study archetypes and dynamics and recurring situations that people have found themselves in in history or in society and connect it with the correct planetary alignments at that time, sometimes you can project that out into the future to make pretty good predictions. And actually we’ve got a good example of that—here in a little bit—of a prediction we made last month that already came true this month. Okay, so moving on to the next one, I kind of missed this one. It was in January, but there was a video on Twitter that Elon Musk put out of one of the Tesla robots folding laundry, and this was kind of crazy. Apparently, it’s not fully autonomous, it’s being controlled by somebody, but I was struck by the delicateness with which it was able to manipulate the laundry with its hands, which is, again, taking things to another level and connecting it with the current astrology. There was a report just yesterday on February 23 saying quote, “Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA join OpenAI and Microsoft in backing a humanoid robot unicorn valued at $2 billion, sources say.” So basically all of the huge companies now are evidently scrambling to invest in robots, in robot technology, partially in connection to an anticipation of some of the changes they’re starting to see in AI. Yeah, so that’s starting to happen very, very quickly and that’s gonna change society in a major, major way.
AC: It’ll be interesting. It will be interesting.
CB: So—
AC: Yeah, never mind.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: Oh, just the way that you described how delicate the robot’s touch was—imagine you longing for its gentle caress.
CB: Like a soft caress. I mean, honestly, one of the things that made me think of is another social thing we will deal with later in this century—I’m calling it—which is just what happens when your son or daughter comes home with a non-human entity and says they’re in a relationship with them and what kind of social and other debates does that set off in society. Like I think we’ll absolutely see that in our lifetimes potentially as like a debate that happens.
AC: Yeah, it’ll definitely happen.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I mean, there’s a certain very small sub-population, a micro-niche of people, that are very excited about this and have been trying to do this every time there’s a new technology; we have the ‘sex doll’ crowd. And you saw when ChatGPT first came out there were little stories about people who were trying to turn it into a robo-boyfriend/girlfriend, whatever. Yeah, 100%. A small but very enthusiastic population out there who will definitely give that a run.
CB: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’ll bring up a lot of fundamental questions about what does it mean to be conscious, what does it mean to be human, all those different things. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes, but that’s an early preview of that. So speaking of—
AC: Oh, sorry, one quick point. You kind of nailed it there bringing up fundamental questions about what does it mean to be human. That’s so a part of Pluto moving through what every Hellenistic astrologer would call a ‘humane’ sign. Aquarius is in the shape of a human, so it brings that Plutonian challenge to human things; and in this case—as in a variety of other connected cases—the definition and parameters of what is human are going to need to be thought through and defined with much more detail and more carefully and thoughtfully in response to the threats as human functions are replicated by non-human things. For example, for a while anthropologists were like, “Oh, what differentiates us from the animals is hands (or its tool use),” and then we find animals that use tools. Okay, that’s not the difference; that’s not the defining ‘human’ thing; and so every time there’s a challenge, the definition needs to become better. And what you were just saying—and a lot of these things will force a further definition of what is human.
CB: Yeah. Or like what does it mean to feel love, and what is love? Can love be experienced between different sentient entities? What is sentience, etc., etc.? You said ‘better definitions’, but I would say sometimes definitions just change. Sometimes definitions are expanded or broadened. Some of the discussions that are happening right now about gender or sexual orientation or different things like that—definitions have changed compared to their traditional ones at this point, so it’ll be interesting to see how definitions are either challenged or changed or transform and adapt to whatever our current society is in 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years.
AC: Yeah, adapt, change, expand, contract, react, right? ‘Cause there will probably not be one human definition that is agreed upon. But part of that cultural reaction is everybody’s reacting to the same thing, but have different answers, some of which are better than others, some of which are just different than others.
CB: Sure. So speaking of reaction, actually we had a really great example of that around the time of the Mars-Pluto conjunction, which I think is illustrative of some of those themes that we’ll see coming up in the future, since this is one of our first passes of this. So this happened on February 10 when there was a mob of people in San Francisco that burned an autonomous driving vehicle, where it was set on fire. Let me see if I have a link for that. Okay, here is a link. Apparently, in San Francisco, there’s delivery vehicles that drive around without a person in the car—that are completely autonomous—to deliver food or other stuff, and it’s like these startup companies that are doing this. But for some reason one of them got stuck in the middle of the street, and it was during the middle of a celebration or something, and a bunch of people ended up setting it on fire. Somebody on Twitter said, “When they write the history books, the machines will point to this as their ‘Boston Massacre’.” So after thinking about that a little bit, personally, I for one would like to apologize to our future AI overlords and disavow the actions of the humans here. Austin, are you with me on that, or are you part of the human resistance?
AC: Yeah, I think I’m gonna stick with the human resistance. I will probably celebrate this first act or farsighted early reaction to what will become an unendurable tyranny.
CB: That is the wrong choice, my friend.
AC: I don’t know. Are they done with the Terminator movies yet?
CB: I mean, they’re never done with the Terminator movies.
AC: Does John Connor win? Does Skynet win? Well, the ability to time travel and change what already happened kind of makes that open-ended, right? But, yeah, I guess I’ll side with John Connor—who was about my age in the original movies, like 13 in 1992.
CB: Yeah, like the future scenes are set in 2029 in Terminator 1 & 2, which is funny ‘cause we’re almost there at this point. Anyway, joking aside, an important thing I learned from this fiasco that happened around the Mars-Pluto conjunction is that there are two main autonomous robo-taxi services in San Francisco and one of them has now expanded their service to Phoenix and has plans to move into Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. So I think this is really interesting ‘cause it reminds me of the Jupiter-Uranus—which Jupiter is going into Gemini this year—and then of course Uranus is gonna go into Gemini in a year or two for seven years. And Gemini is associated with short-distance travel and services like that, so I think this is one of the early previews of the complete transformation of how we get around, how deliveries are done, taxis, how food deliveries and other things like that are done, switching to autonomous services. But it was interesting to see both a preview of that, as well as a preview of conflict between humans and machines or reactionary things or like pushbacks to the automation of things here around the time of the Mercury-Pluto conjunction, and I think there’s something illustrative about that that we’ll see again in the future.
AC: Yeah, 100%.
CB: All right, so moving on to other alignments, there was a Mercury-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius on February 5 and a bunch of stuff happened like all pretty much on the same day as this Mercury-Pluto conjunction or very close to it. The biggest one for me that was kind of crazy was last month on the forecast, I had talked about how when I went back and did the “Pluto in Aquarius” episode that I had seen that the volcano exploded and buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE and that this was during a Pluto in Aquarius period. So when we were talking about Mercury conjunct Pluto in the forecast last month, literally in that area of the timestamps of the episode, I noted how there’s these companies that want to x-ray some of the surviving scrolls that have been sort of mummified and can’t be opened, but there were hopes that someday they might be able to x-ray them and read the scrolls and recover the texts that have been lost on them.
But what was crazy is on February 5, the day of the Mercury-Pluto conjunction, a company actually announced that they had been running a contest for somebody to develop an AI program to do that, and they announced on February 5 that it had actually been successful. So here’s an article from Nature, it says, “First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed: Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts unveiling musings on music and capers.” I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna say I called that one, that’s a good one. I might put a little clip from our last forecast—a little two-minute clip—in the post here from when we talked about that. ‘Cause I wasn’t anticipating that that discussion or prediction would come true literally like a week or two after we had it, but it was a pretty, pretty striking one to me.
AC: Yeah, yeah. That’s definitely in the ‘win’ column.
CB: Yeah, you gotta take ‘em when you can get ‘em. All right, so that was one of the announcements that happened on that Mercury-Pluto conjunction. ‘Cause it’s also about recovering lost things basically and that was part of the discussion. Another aspect, though, of Mercury-Pluto that happened that day is on February 5, King Charles announced that he had cancer—and this was also the same day as the Mercury-Pluto conjunction—which was interesting symbolically partially because it was an announcement about his possible mortality. There were then a lot of discussions about whether he would die, whether this meant William, his son, was gonna take over as king soon, and so on and so forth, which is pretty fitting with that, right?
AC: Yeah. Mercury is the announcement or the conveying of information about something, and what is conveyed or announced is characterized by the planet that Mercury is connected to, right? So making public a dire truth or a life-and-death situation, that folds neatly into the Darwinian understanding of evolution that Pluto brings up that I was just talking about. I would also add that sometimes when people try to find a place for Pluto in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, one sort of go-to answer that I like is the Judgment card. Not the Death card, but the Judgment card, which often has an image of the Last Judgment in the Christian mythos, where at the very end of time there’s a decision about who’s saved and who’s not. I like to think of the Egyptian ‘judgment of the soul’ after death, which is just as final a judgment, where the heart is weighed against a feather and it determines your course for the rest of eternity, right? Human life being temporary but the judgment after life having much greater consequences. Pluto likes to present these sort of dire situations where things could go one way or another and there’s a massive difference between the two.
One way that the ‘judgment’ scenes are not quite right is that very often we have a choice to make; the road diverges and the two paths are incredibly different and irreconcilable. We could say with the ‘judgment’ scenes the choices were what you did in life and then you’re judged for them later, but generally we have that stark splitting of the path with the Judgment card and with Pluto, right? Does he beat the cancer? Does he not beat the cancer? They’re not similar outcomes, right? Like they’re very different. They have big meaning both ways.
CB: Yeah, yeah. Well, in terms of that, one of the things I immediately thought of—because I’ve used Prince Williams chart as an example chart over the years—is just that he has Sagittarius rising. So I immediately thought of how later this year, starting in October, we’ll get the first of a series of eclipses in Pisces, and since he has Sag rising, Pisces is his 4th house of parents. And that’s striking because that was of course what was happening—as we saw just a year or two ago—in Charles’ own chart. When his mother Queen Elizabeth died and then he became king, he was getting eclipses in his 4th and 10th houses; for them at least part of it is a parent dying and then all of a sudden them becoming the ruler or becoming the king.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense. And the British royals have—if I’m remembering correctly—a very ‘eclipse-y’ track record of taking office and leaving this mortal coil.
CB: Yeah, that was what Nick and I found in the “Eclipses” episode. Just like every king basically in the 20th century kept dying—or one king would die and then one would take over on eclipses, it was so striking. So we’ll have to pay attention to that coming up here in the future and see what happens.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, so the other thing with the mortality theme—there was one other story which I thought was interesting. I just saw it on social media briefly a few weeks ago, but it tied in with the ‘mortality’ theme with Mercury conjunct Pluto, although it was an interesting inversion of it. So like with King Charles announcing the day of the Mercury-Pluto conjunction that he had cancer and could potentially die from it, I saw on social media there was a woman named Cat Janice that was like a musician who went into the hospice. She has cancer and she’s dying, but she released a music single in order to try to support her son that she’s about to leave behind—who’s just like a young boy—when she’s gone, and her single went viral and started getting hundreds and thousands, maybe millions of views at this point. And I looked up her chart and she has Mercury at 0° of Aquarius and her Sun at 1° of Aquarius.
So Pluto literally had gone into Aquarius and was conjoining her Mercury and all of a sudden her single blows up, but it’s partially blowing up because of the context of social media that she’s dying basically and that this woman will only last for weeks probably at best if she’s in hospice at this point. It was kind of tragic seeing Mercury conjoining Pluto and then of course Mercury will conjoin her Sun—or Pluto will conjoin her Sun at 1° of Aquarius, and she’s in hospice and will probably pass away. So there’s something very striking about that to me as an inversion of what we saw with King Charles there and starting to see early stories of people with placements in the early degrees of Aquarius or fixed signs getting hit by Pluto and some of the stories that are coming out of that.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great example. and it brings up Pluto’s relationship to scale, right? Pluto can take something tiny and make it huge, and it can make something huge and utterly conceal it, as best expressed by Alan White 20-plus years ago, right? I don’t think I can do the ‘Alan White’ voice but Pluto takes a tiny thing and makes it a big fuckin’ deal, it takes something gigantic and makes it subatomic in scale—paraphrasing. But we have that with attention socially, like Pluto does that with what we would call ‘fame’, right? I’ve seen time and time again one of the things that Pluto does is there’s a near instantaneous rise from complete obscurity to being ‘all eyes on me’ on a cultural level. That happened with the author of, I believe, 50 Shades of Grey. I think I’m thinking of the right—yeah, I believe Pluto went over her Sun as she went from being a fanfiction author to being the author of something that everyone in the culture was reacting to. That said, though, some people might call it a rise from obscurity, that massive change in scale of attention often has lots of negative effects as well. It’s not a freebie from Pluto.
CB: Yeah, Pluto doesn’t usually give things for free, and sometimes that can be good and sometimes that can be bad. Yeah, so that’s another manifestation of that, but I’ll be tracking other stories like that and paying attention to how Pluto is hitting people with early Aquarius placements. So in other ‘Mercury conjunct Pluto’ news, the other major thing that happened around that time that was notable in the news and that a lot of people were talking about was the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson went to Russia and interviewed Vladimir Putin for some reason. I looked up the date and the interview took place on February 6, 2024, which was just after the Mercury-Pluto conjunction while it was still within 1°.
AC: Yeah, really tight.
CB: Yeah. And I know you and I were both paying attention to that ‘cause we’ve of course talked about the Ukraine war a lot over the past two years and everything else.
AC: Well, and just Russia in the context of the Saturn-Neptune cycle, which we’ve been talking about for years. ‘Cause something really interesting and dramatic happens during Saturn-Neptune to Russia, at least for the last 150 years, and so, yeah, we’ve been keeping an eye on it.
CB: Yeah. And it also seemed very ‘Mercury-Pluto’ to me ‘cause it seemed like an obvious attempt on both of their parts to do a bit of propaganda either to influence views in the US about Russia or to influence views about the Ukraine war other things like that, which sort of fit the bill in terms of the Mercury-Pluto conjunction as well.
AC: Yeah, I mean, it’s so Mercury-Pluto that it’s almost hard to explain all the ways that that is Mercury-Pluto in the foyer of how many ways that’s Mercury-Pluto. Mercury’s social role as an interviewer/media person/journalist and then Pluto’s social role is somebody who is incredibly powerful and scary and shadowy, right? Literally, Pluto or Hades is the ‘dark lord’. And so, you have literally the people fitting those social roles together in an interview with Hades, or at least culturally seen as Hades, so there there’s that. Then there’s also the content, right? Like Pluto shows the pressure of power on things; power being often invisible by nature but deforming what is visible—increasing the scale of certain things and then concealing other things—and there were so many power dynamics that went into that interview. It would be absurd to imagine that taking place without all participants having a very clear idea of what they wanted it to be and invisibly, quietly trying to make it what it is. And then you just imagine interviewing any world leader, but especially Vladimir Putin, while Russia’s in the middle of a war and tensions with the West are escalating. Like the amount of security, just the pressure, I don’t know, I’d just imagine you would feel like you were in the Underworld and that death was everywhere, and so on and so forth; and that’s like 2 of the 17 ways that is an extremely ‘Mercury-Pluto’ situation.
CB: Yeah. And I saw it as probably an early attempt—and probably the first, but not the last—but probably a preview of what we’ll see in terms of attempts to influence the US election this year because of how that would affect the outcome of the war between Russia and Ukraine and everything else, so we’ll have to pay attention to if further aspects or further activations of that—of Mercury-Pluto this year—don’t bring up similar things in the future over the next several months. And you mentioned ‘death’ and of course the other major thing that happened in connection with that is just a few days after the interview was released, Alexei Navalny—Putin’s primary political opponent who had been thrown in prison—was mysteriously killed or died in prison, which was sort of widely seen as probably not accidental or not a natural death. Having the death of Putin’s political opponent right after that big interview came out seemed connected or seemed like some sort of message. It’s unclear what the message was but the timing was pretty striking.
AC: It would be very strange if it was a coincidence. But, yeah, I did some research on that; yeah, he basically just collapsed and died. But this is somebody who had been poisoned a few years ago. Who knows who poisoned him, right? There’s pretty meaningful speculation. But, yeah, I don’t know if it’s a reaction to it, but the United States started a whole massive round of new sanctions, which probably have other reasons than Navalny’s death. There’s a massive round of new sanctions that are going into effect on Russia and various entities and individuals that are connected with Russia and financing. Again, I doubt that the entire sanctions package was just made up in response to Navalny’s passing, but that was the thing that was stated. Like you arranged for Navalny’s death, we do this, but it’s part of that ongoing escalation. But, yeah, a massive new sanctions package from the US on Russia and Russian-connected things, mostly targeting military or economic financing for the Russo-Ukrainian War on the Russian side is being done.
CB: Yeah. So Leisa Schaim pointed out that Navalny had Saturn at the end of Cancer, so transiting Pluto had been opposing that. Which is striking in terms of some of the last bits of that transit and different people that have had that placement over the past few years and some of the most extreme manifestations of it.
AC: Yeah. And really quickly, he was poisoned 2020-21, so basically he’s been in prison since the Saturn-Pluto opposite his Saturn. So he got poisoned and then did recovery in Germany, and then went to Russia and then got imprisoned for a short thing and then they added additional charges and he was convicted. It went from like a two-year sentence to a nine-year sentence to a 19-year sentence, but basically he’s been in prison since Pluto directly opposed his Saturn in Cancer, just to add some more to that.
CB: Okay.
AC: And just for Pluto in Aquarius and ‘Saturn-ruled Pluto’ landscapes, he died in a facility in the Arctic that was during Soviet times a gulag, right? So -30° outside; like it’s as remote and frigid and Saturnian sort of landscape as you can imagine.
CB: Yeah, it looks like his Saturn was at 29°55’ Cancer, so basically as late in Cancer as you can get. So Pluto in early Aquarius is still very much opposing that. Yeah, so that is that story. Moving on to other news, the Grammys happened, which is an award show in the US. I needed to mention it because I have to do a bit of a victory lap for another prediction that I made about Miley Cyrus back in 2020. She had such a well-placed Saturn in the 10th house, in a day chart, in its own sign, having a nice trine with Jupiter that I made a prediction back in 2020, “Calling it now, Miley Cyrus as a Saturn return in Aquarius success story.”
And what happened is that during the course of her Saturn return, she released this hit single “Flowers” that was wildly successful, and then this month she just won her first Grammy for it; so she won a pretty major award as a musician and was super happy and excited about that and it was like a huge success story basically, coming out of her Saturn return. So that was one of the Saturn return success stories that I mentioned in the “Saturn return” episode that I just recorded the other day that I’m getting ready to release now. I don’t know if it’ll be out before or after this forecast, but it’s nice sometimes just seeing certain ones coming up, especially when a planet’s very well-placed in a person’s chart and being able to make a good prediction about success and hitting the high point of a person’s career.
AC: Yeah, yeah, perfect.
CB: All right, so that happened. There was one other Saturn thing that happened also at the Grammys, which is Tracy Chapman—who was having her second Saturn return—made an appearance and did a duet at the Grammys. There was this whole situation where last year, a cover of her song “Fast Car” topped the US country charts, and she ended up doing a duet with the guy who did the cover basically and it was like this really striking, really touching cover that they did at the Grammys. But it was striking also because she has Saturn in early Pisces, and Saturn retrograded back to zero Pisces over the winter. So this was partially her second Saturn return, and it was an interesting Saturn return moment that sort of hearkened back to the 1990s, when Saturn was last in Pisces and she was releasing and doing some major work and major albums.
AC: Yeah, a great song. I have another example that’s from something born right around the same time as Tracy Chapman, also having its second Saturn return, Dune. Dune 2 comes out in a week. It’ll be the Sun on Saturn in Pisces; Dune was born with Saturn in Pisces.
CB: Wow.
AC: Part two, the sequel, is misleading; it’s literally just the second-half of the book. And so, even though the first part came out Saturn in Aquarius—which is not Dune’s Saturn return—the actual book gets finished theatrically during Saturn in Pisces, right? So it’s ‘Happy second Saturn return’ to Dune. I’ve mentioned before with Saturn in Pisces that during Saturn in Pisces, we have some real high points for works of imagination, right? The first Game of Thrones book, the premiere of The Elder Scrolls series, Dune, The Call of Cthulhu, a bunch of stuff. Hobbit. So, yeah, Dune, a work of Saturn in Pisces, the first book is complete in cinematic format with the Sun conjunct Saturn in Pisces. Really looking forward to it. Perfect ‘Saturn in Pisces’ story. Without revealing any spoilers, Saturn in Pisces—Saturn is your job, it’s what’s expected of you; it’s what you’re pushed to deal with; it’s necessity. The protagonist is basically struggling with what might be a prophecy about their destiny—very Pisces—or it actually might be all a series of contrived lies and manipulations, right? But the person feels like they are on rails towards an outcome, and half of the time that’s glorious and destined and other times that is horrific; and they are very concerned about where destiny—or maybe it’s not destiny—seems to be taking them.
CB: Yeah, and he’s like a savior figure as well, or set up as like a savior figure in the prophecy at least in that universe.
AC: Yeah, it’s a savior (?).
CB: Right. That’s a good one also and striking because of Saturn in Pisces in terms of world-building. I think that’s a really good ‘Saturn in Pisces’ keyword I’m realizing. You have these people that create these entire worlds, but it also sets up a precedent about what’s possible in terms of fantasy and in terms of creating something or the structure of something in fantasy basically. And Dune is a great example of that because of how it then inspired subsequent people like George Lucas, and Star Wars was very much influenced by Dune. He went off and created his own other universe, but he was sort of inspired by the fact that you could do that through this earlier work; or how Tolkien’s work with The Lord of the Rings and how that ended up influencing and really setting the standard for later fantasy authors like George RR Martin with Game of Thrones, or even the Harry Potter world and everything like that. You can see the influence of these earlier worlds.
AC: Yeah, ‘cause they’re creating a space that then people can enter, travel through, be inspired by. Worth noting there’s no Dungeons & Dragons without Tolkien; that was a huge inspiration in the late ‘70s; Gary Gygax, of course, has tons of important stuff in Pisces. They took wargaming with miniatures rules, and they were like, “What if we have adventures and quests like Lord of the Rings?” That’s basically the genesis of tabletop role-playing games.
CB: Okay. That’s amazing. Let’s project that out then, and let’s say based on that we can predict during this Saturn in Pisces period—that started a year ago and is gonna last for another year or two—somebody will probably create some sort of fantasy world, and they will do a lot of world-building within that which will end up becoming so influential that it’ll set up the paradigm, either as the evolution of a previous fantasy world-type lineage or it will create a new fantasy world lineage that will influence many other types of world-building fantasies in the future.
AC: Yeah, there will be some kind of new classic that is created. I would say ‘published’, but it might not be literary in its first medium. And you see with the previous classics that were born under Saturn in Pisces, they get new reiterations. I don’t know if George R Martin will finish Winds of Winter—I kind of do think he’ll get something out by the end of Saturn in Pisces—but there are a bunch of new Game of Thrones world shows that are going to come out during this time. The next Elder Scrolls, the sequel to Skyrim will most likely come out Saturn in Pisces. We have Dune, which was two Saturn in Pisces ago. You get the longevity of a built world further reinforced or confirmed, as Saturn does during this time, but every other time we’ve gotten new worlds, so that’s great turning that into a prediction. There will be something—and maybe we won’t notice it until years later—but some sort of new world-building will happen during this time that 30 years from now we’ll look back and say, “Oh, what a classic. Of course it happened during Saturn in Pisces.”
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, I think that’s good. Moving on—I think one of the last things I wanted to mention was I did an episode earlier this month on Proclus. And we had been talking about doing it for years, me and José—he had done his dissertation on Proclus—and, literally, we had been talking about doing that episode for a decade. I finally felt like it was time, and we did it partially ‘cause I was inspired by getting back into Plato after doing the “Lots” episode where we talked about ‘The Myth of Er’; so in the “Proclus” episode, we talked about the Timaeus, and I released the episode. And I was just not paying attention, but I realized a day later after I released it, that I released it basically right on Proclus’ birthday, and he was born over a thousand years ago. So it’s just a great reminder that our charts continue to live on after we die essentially as long as the memory of our lives continues to echo and influence things. I tried to summarize that in a tweet and this is what I came up with. Let me know what you think. I said: “Our birth charts continue to live on after we die because the memory of what we did in life echoes in time.” So that was my attempt to summarize that principle; I’m still working on that and may do an episode on it at some point, but it got me thinking about that topic again.
AC: Yeah, that’s 100% a thing. I just saw that in my work with the chart of Niccolo Machiavelli, the infamous author of The Prince. I actually use Machiavelli’s chart as a test for my year-two class. They had to tell me what happened to this native in 1513, which is when he finished writing The Prince. However, when you look at his situation, let’s say just from zodiacal releasing, it’s great. It’s really supportive of writing or finishing a potentially enduring great work, but it’s not good for success in the world; it’s not good for wealth, reputation, or health. And so, it’s a very tiny publication that year; it doesn’t really have an impact on the world until 18 years later, at which point he’s quite dead but his zodiacal releasing looks fantastic; it’s a better ZR period by far than what he has in life, right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, it’s like he achieves fame and notoriety exactly when ZR said, he just didn’t live to see it.
CB: Yeah, I have an example. My favorite example—and my first one of that—was with Vincent Van Gogh, because he never sold a single painting in life, but it was only after his death that he became famous partially due to the promotion of his work by his wife’s partner—or by his brother’s wife. And his zodiac releasing periods just go crazy once he starts actually gaining notoriety as a painter, but it’s after he already died. So I think this is a whole category I’m calling ‘posthumous astrology’. Jenn Zahrt’s also interested in that and we’re talking about maybe doing an episode one of these days; we’ll see what happens.
AC: Yeah, that would be fun. That would be fun. Feel free to use Machiavelli.
CB: Okay, I will remember that and give you a shoutout. All right, you had another news story. I know this is starting to go long at 1:06.
AC: Yeah, we can do some of this. This is quick and to the point. This is sort of dangerously on-the-nose. So right on the Mars-Pluto conjunction, there was an announcement that US intelligence agencies have some sort of information about Russian space nukes and all the media outlets picked it up. It’s all, “Oh, my God, Russian space nukes.” That’s as Mars-Pluto in Aquarius as possible, right? ‘Nukes’ is Mars-Pluto. And it’s just funny—for anything Pluto in Aquarius, add in ‘space’ or ‘AI-powered’ or ‘autonomous’. You just add the Pluto in Aquarius buzzword and your delineation becomes exactly right. That’s almost like a text generator. Okay, Mars-Pluto (nuclear weapons) in Aquarius (in space).
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect. That couldn’t be more on-the-nose.
AC: Yeah. Let me know if you or anyone in the audience has any ideas. What are the other little phrases you add to make it Aquarius? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in space, AI-powered, fill-in-the-blank, autonomous, fill-in-the-blank. Like if you had autonomous, AI-powered, Russian nukes in space that would be the most ‘Pluto in Aquarius’ thing ever.
CB: Yeah, that’s terrifying. That’s also terrifying if that’s a signature for ‘space war’ or ‘future space wars’; we’ll have to pay attention to that.
AC: Yeah. And part of the ‘Pluto’ part is the Russian government denies it. Maybe they’re telling the truth, maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s real information about it, maybe there’s not. With Pluto, there’s that concealment element. Pluto, as we said, makes things sometimes hyper-visible that were obscure, but it also just as much likes to hide things and leaves you to wonder. Like I don’t know. What kind of nuclear weapon is it? The mind gets to wander and wander and stare into the abyss.
CB: Yeah, for sure. There was other Mars-Pluto stuff. The Super Bowl happened. I don’t have anything to say astrologically about that except for, what the hell is happening in Travis Kelce’s chart right now? Because he seems like he’s having the greatest year ever. He pursued and somehow got into a relationship with the biggest pop star or one of the biggest pop stars in the world last summer, and now all of a sudden he’s the quarterback who won the Super Bowl just now. So I don’t know—I don’t think we have a birth time for him—but it would be interesting to do a chart study of just what happens when somebody’s just like winning in multiple areas of life evidently and what that looks like. Also, at the same time of the Super Bowl, Israel launched a strike on Rafah on February 11 that coincided with the Mars-Pluto conjunction. And there was an announcement shortly after that that you pointed out Austin that they’re supposed to potentially storm Rafah, and this is building up to a lot of stuff of course that we were paying attention to and we mentioned in the year ahead forecast of that Libra eclipse that’s actually gonna happen, that we’re gonna talk about later in this forecast.
AC: Yeah, the announcement from Israel was that the operation would not be complete until they did a thing on Rafah, which is a huge concern because a lot of the Palestinian civilians that have fled from Gaza are in Rafah. And so, it’s a big deal, it has potentially horrific implications. Right now, they’re doing some peace talks, which I wish I had faith would have any real results, but based on statements put out by Israel, it looks like the assault on Rafah is scheduled to occur at the end of March, which is a huge danger zone that we talked about in the yearly; it’s eclipses and Mars-Saturn and Mercury retrograde. And so, I hope that is not the case, but that is the implication. It’s a little chilling to see a statement about an assault go out like, “Oh, we’re probably gonna do this on a Mars-Pluto conjunction, like very tightly.”
CB: Right.
AC: It’s basically within 12 hours of the ‘Russian space nukes’ thing; it’s another exact Mars-Pluto hit.
CB: Right. ‘Cause the Mars-Pluto square was the main signature that happened on the day of the attack in October. But then, also, the Libra eclipse happened right after that in mid-October as well. And so, we know that this upcoming eclipse that’s gonna be in Libra later in March is gonna be in Libra. So it’s gonna connect events from six months earlier that happened in October and represent a continuation or the next turning point and culmination of that, both in terms of ongoing things with Israel and Palestine, but also, we know even in Netanyahu’s chart—who was born the day of a Libra eclipse—that it’s something important for him as well. Yeah, so a lot of stuff going on there.
AC: Yeah. So one more ‘Mars-Pluto’ thing that’s kind of actually a ‘Uranus-Jupiter’ thing. Also, on the exact Mars-Pluto conjunction—I don’t know what the name of the movement is on the internet—the Indian farmers protest, which was a huge deal in 2020-2021, restarted; they basically announced a restart. And this is not a few people standing in a picket with signs; this is columns of people with tractors driving into cities and the police setting up barricades and having riot gear. It was a big deal last time and it’s a big deal this time; that restarted on February 13 and is ongoing. And that, along with the uh the South Korean doctors’ strike—in which two-thirds of the doctors walked out of the hospitals to protest conditions—made me remember that we have this tightening conjunction between Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus, which has very consistently over the last 9 or 10 months since it’s been in effect given us big labor protests.
Sure, there’s Pluto-Mars. But part of Mars moving into Aquarius is coming to square Jupiter-Uranus and therefore activate them, and so we have big, notable labor protests happening right now and they’re not all American. So that’s a thing we get—that Jupiter and Uranus tightens; it gets closer and more powerful throughout all of March and then is perfect in April. That Jupiter-Uranus is still happening; again, there are also farmer protests in various parts of the EU. But that theme didn’t go away because Pluto in Aquarius is putting chips in people’s heads—it’s all happening.
CB: Right. Yes, it is all happening at once. All right, anything else before we wrap up the news section?
AC: I mean, there’s so much. I think that’s a good survey.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Oh, one one last thing in yet another annoyingly on-brand ‘Pluto in Aquarius’ thing. We just had the first commercial vehicle land on the Moon. It was Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Lander. Just throw that into the ‘Pluto in Aquarius’ pile.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that could be really important for the future, probably the first of many.
AC: Yeah, no doubt.
CB: All right, well, a lot of early things happening this month obviously that are gonna be the seeds because they were conjunctions. There were a lot of conjunctions that happened this month, of inner planets with Pluto, and a conjunction always sets the seeds of something that will then grow and develop in the future. So that’s one of the reasons we wanted to do this review of all these news stories as quickly as we could to point this out. These are gonna be themes that we’re gonna be coming back to over and over again over the next 20 years as all of these inner planets continually have this cycle with Pluto and come back and conjoin it periodically over the next 20 years, and we’ll see the further evolution and development of many of the stories that we’ve mentioned here. So it’ll be interesting to come back in the future and keep checking in.
AC: Yeah, I believe we phrased it as ‘the season premiere of the first season of Pluto in Aquarius, and it’s gonna run for 20 seasons’.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Hope you like the show.
CB: Yeah, well, we’ll see if the show gets canceled or if it keeps getting renewed. I think we’re gonna get renewed for 20 years, so let’s see how it goes. All right, I think that’s good for the news section. Let’s take a little break, and we’ll be right back.
[break]
CB: All right. Hey, Austin, did you know that our good friend Chani Nicholas has actually launched an astrology app?
AC: You know, I heard something about that. I have this vague, hazy memory of you reading ad spots maybe 10 or 15 times, but I just kind of zone out and start picking my fingernails, but I’d love to know more.
CB: I don’t recall that, but I’m glad to inform you that Chani has an amazing astrology app, and it’s actually the number one astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. So one of the things that I think you’ll like the most, Austin, is that it will send you push notifications each time there’s a major astrological transit that’s happening in the sky including the New Moon, different ingresses of Mercury and Mars, even Pluto, and other things like that.
AC: That’s very useful.
CB: It is very useful to get that kind of background information. So, for me, I like the app ‘cause it has a nice blend of modern and traditional astrology, it uses whole sign houses; also, it sends you the notifications. Most importantly, it also has an Android version, as well as an iPhone version, so it’s super useful for those of us—I don’t remember if you’re iPhone or Android, Austin.
AC: I tried Android for a little bit. I just have Kait’s hand-me-down phones. I just have iPhones because Kait does, and I get the old ones, and I don’t care enough. I thought I was gonna be an ‘Android’ guy for 10 minutes, and I got one, but it was much easier just inheriting Kait’s phones. But for that 17 minutes that I was on Android, it would have been nice to have the option to keep using Chani’s app.
CB: Exactly. So Chani’s app is designed to make astrology both successful as well as useful. The app combines ancient astrological wisdom with meditation and mindfulness to help you foster your relationship with the sky and support your personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology is impacting you, it features everything you need to navigate life’s ups and downs. So 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 from Chani Nicholas, year ahead forecasts, and more. So the app is free to download on iOS and Android by just going to their app stores. So search for CHANI (C-H-A-N-I) in the App Store and you’ll find it, or you can get information by visiting app.chani.com. All right, shoutout to Chani, and thanks for sponsoring this episode.
CB: Yeah, congratulations on having the number one app.
CB: Yeah, and being such a baller in creating an astrology app, which is like light years ahead of us and other things. We should have created an app a long time ago with the podcast or other things like that.
AC: Maybe you should have.
CB: Maybe I should have, yeah.
AC: I don’t think that was ever in my stars.
CB: You’re not an ‘app’ guy? You could create the decans app. No?
AC: No. Like use the driving app on my phone if I’m going to a place I haven’t been to before and that’s about it.
CB: Okay.
AC: For some reason I have a very emotionally Luddite reaction to apps and phones and all of that.
CB: Yes.
AC: I can’t explain it. I was very techno-philic when I was younger, but, yeah, I just don’t use them for anything. I use them as minimally as possible, and I do it resentfully.
CB: Except for the CHANI App, which has won your heart over and is a sponsor for this episode.
AC: Let’s not fib. What I will say is if I were going to use an astrology app, it would 100% be Chani’s, which is the strongest endorsement I can give to any app.
CB: Yeah, that is a ringing endorsement for you as a Luddite. All right, cool. Well, shoutout to Chani. Let’s transition into talking about the forecast for March, shall we?
AC: Let’s do it.
CB: All right, here we go. So I’m gonna put up the Planetary Alignments Calendar again, just to give people a glance at what we’re gonna be talking about here and to situate the astrological landscape for this month with all of the major alignments and all of the lunations. So we’re recording this—I forgot to give the date—on Saturday, February 24, 2024. We used Cancer rising I think a couple of hours ago.
AC: Starting at Cancer rising in Colorado.
CB: In Colorado, in Denver. So one of the things about recording it today—we had to get it recorded so we could get it out by the end of the month—but this is before the Mercury-Mars-Saturn conjunction, or Mercury-Sun-Saturn conjunction, that’s happening in Pisces here in a few days, right?
AC: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. Actually, it was one of the only things we didn’t talk about ahead of time that I was thinking about. I was like, “That’s technically February, but it’s the future from this point in time,” and it’s a pretty rare configuration. We have Mercury-Sun-Saturn all in the same degree, two planets making their superior conjunction to the Sun, both of which individually would be meaningful, giving us a very interesting triple conjunction. I didn’t look at how often that happens, but I don’t think we’ve had a Mercury-Sun-Saturn conjunction for many, many, many, many years this perfect.
CB: Yeah, so that’s really striking. And we’re gonna get the heaviness, on the one hand, of that. Saturn has a very sobering influence or set of significations when it’s conjoining Mercury as well as when it’s conjoining the Sun. On the one hand, we’re opening the month with that heavy emphasis on Pisces and the Pisces planets and emphasizing the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, but also still having Venus and Mars transiting through Aquarius for a good chunk of the first part of February. So those are the two primary dueling energies that are pulling us in different directions.
AC: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. And the emphasis for March—the strong Pisces emphasis doesn’t disappear, it does change as different planets enter and leave Pisces. We’ve still got, minimum, three planets in Pisces all month, right? Now we have four. There will be a period where there will be five. So huge Pisces emphasis, but definite Aquarius emphasis, and then we’ll be getting a growing Aries influence throughout the month. But the focus is definitely Pisces and Saturn-Neptune, which have been there for—it’ll be a year on March 7 that we’ve had Saturn in Pisces, so congratulations to us.
CB: Yeah. The boundaries between what’s real and what’s not are definitely breaking down and all sorts of borders and other things that separate people are starting to break down in different ways, sometimes for good and other times not-so-good.
AC: Yeah. And one of the things that I expected/predicted with the movement of Saturn into Pisces out of Capricorn/Aquarius, where it’s very strong, is this phenomenon of just growing chaos and losing control. Human beings have a very interesting relationship to control, ‘cause we don’t like to be controlled, we don’t like to not have choices. But at the same time we don’t like it when things are out of control, right? And there’s a growing sort of gestalt whenever you look at the news, it’s like things are kind of out of control. There are multiple points of important chaos in the world, like a consequential chaos. And sometimes chaos is a meaningful opponent to unjust order and sometimes it is its own villain, but there’s just this growing out-of-control-ness with Saturn being in a sign where it kind of doesn’t belong and doesn’t have much to work with. Pisces isn’t stacked with tools for creating order.
CB: Yeah. There’s also this indeterminacy to Pisces and the mutable signs that I’ve been reflecting on a lot and getting much more acquainted with the past year Saturn’s been in Pisces. Pisces really thrives in not making a choice and being sort of in-between in the sense of you could do that, you could not do that, but for now let’s not decide and decide later; let’s put off making that decision until later. Which creates this feeling where everything’s like up in the air, especially for other people, but it’s an interesting feeling that we’re really settling into indeterminacy.
AC: Yeah, there’s a deep ambivalence, as you said, to mutable signs in general, but Pisces most of all, right? With Gemini, you might have indeterminacy between two stark, polarized alternatives, whereas with Pisces, it’s like ‘just let both exist’, right? It’s the two fishes chained at the mouth, which can only swim in a spiral; they can’t go in a straight line. If you’re two fish chained at the mouth, you could be wielded as nunchucks.
CB: That would be great. I wish that was the zodiac sign for Pisces.
AC: I mean, it is. It’s just no one has fully grasped it and obtained the power of ‘fishchucks’.
CB: Right. It required a Mars in Pisces to fully envision this.
AC: Yeah. And so, the skies will be doling out ‘fishchucks’ at the end of the month when Mars enters Pisces.
CB: Oh, my God, that’s cracking me up. All right, so let’s look at Mars. ‘Cause there’s some other action before we get to the ‘fishchuck’ section of the month with Mars, where we open the month with Mars at 13° of Aquarius. So it’s just coming off of the Mars-Jupiter square at the end of the month. We’re coming off of the triple conjunction of planets in Pisces. But Mars is heading straight into and Venus is also heading into a square with Uranus at 19° of Taurus so that we open up the month with this kind of unexpected and disruptive energy. First, Venus hits a square with Uranus by March 2 and March 3, and then not long after that we get Mars catching up to and hitting a square with Uranus on March 9 and March 10. So let’s talk about the ‘Venus’ one first and then go into Mars. What are ‘Venus-Uranus’ things when it comes to a square between Venus in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus? There’s like a disruptive, aesthetic quality to it; a disruptive quality in terms of relationships and relating in some sense.
AC: Yeah. So we’re dealing with either a change that is necessary in order to obtain peace or pleasure or something that disrupts peace or accord or pleasure, right? And so, if it’s a disruption then we have to figure out how to adapt to that, or if it’s peace/pleasure—a good Venusian state of peace/pleasure/accord—maybe it’s not present but can be obtained if a relatively radical shift occurs. The Venus-Uranus has this, “Well, this isn’t working, but maybe there is something that can work.” Or, “This was working until this happened. How do we adapt to that? And so, with the two being in a square here it’s a very powerful angle of relationship that’s not to be ignored. The adaptational question is, how do you deal with the change that’s disrupting the thing? Or how do you disrupt the thing so that it works?
CB: Yeah, I like that especially ‘cause Venus is in the superior position earlier in zodiacal order. So it’s like Venus is trying to keep a lid on or figure out how to deal with the disruption of Uranus and still smooth things over. How do you smooth over something once it has been disrupted? And how do you integrate flexibility into your life and the ability to roll with unexpected events and still find a harmonious way to bring things to some sort of conclusion despite unexpected jolts to whatever the program was or whatever you thought was gonna be fixed and stable?
AC: Yeah, yeah. And it’s worth noting that Venus is in kind of a rough condition here, right? Venus is still within orb of Mars. Venus and Mars are opposed in the sense that Venus likes everybody to get along, Mars likes to shake the bottle and get the humans to fight, so it’s disruptive to Venus’ ‘let’s all have a good time’ priority. And then with the square to Uranus, it’s making it harder for Venus to create peace/accord/pleasure/good times, etc., etc. It’s a challenging point for Venus.
CB: Yeah. Well, sometimes Venus and Uranus combinations do very well if you’re just able to figure out that thing that is outside of the norm, that is off the beaten path, that is eccentric or revolutionary or even weird. And sometimes if you incorporate that—especially if you’re doing something with aesthetics or with art, but even in relationships or other Venusian things—usually there can be very positive manifestations of that, even if the transition into it is a little bit disjointed.
AC: Yeah. I mean, I think a good go-to move for hard aspects between Venus and Uranus, if you’re in a relationship, is ‘let’s do something different tonight’. If we go out all the time, let’s stay home. If we stay home all the time, let’s go out. Let’s go to the museum and look at dinosaur bones, just something to shake things up a little bit.
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect. ‘Something to shake things up a little bit—that will be our keyword for those date here, on March 3, especially when that goes exact. Let’s move on. So we’re moving after that to the next alignment, which is the Mars-Uranus square. And this gets us into the territory of our first lunation of the month, where we have a New Moon in the sign of Pisces going exact late on March 9 and early on the 10th basically at about 20° of Pisces. Mercury has just entered into Aries right before that, and Mars has just squared Uranus basically right before that as well. So the Mars-Uranus square is really giving us one of the main signatures of our first lunation of the month.
AC: Yeah, this is a calendar date worth circling in March ‘cause there are three significant things that happen all in the same day, right? Two of them are beginning sort of a new phase: the New Moon, that’s a reset of the lunar month, and then Mercury changing sign. It’s worth noting Mercury is going to be in Aries well into almost the end of April. Actually, it might be the end of April, or it might be past the end of April, but Mercury is going to retrograde in Aries; and so this is not like a quick three weeks in a sign. It’s Mercury in Aries for basically a little under two months and that happens the same day as the New Moon; it happens the same day as the Mars square Uranus. And Mars-Uranus ‘touches angular/touches squares’ are very disruptive because Mars likes disruption and Uranus likes disruption. I believe the kids say, “Shit pops off like firecrackers,” with Mars-Uranus touches. And it’s worth noting that Mercury moving into Aries means that Mercury—as the megaphone, the interviewer, the voice-to-text transcriber—is interested in conveying the messages of Mars and at a time where Mars is doing a pretty interesting thing.
CB: Yeah, so interesting things. So Mars-Uranus square keywords for that can be a ‘sudden, unexpected disruption’. Sometimes that disruption can be violent or jolting, sometimes it can be a technological disruption. Because Uranus has that quality of the unexpected disruption of the revolutionary, whereas Mars has this quality of cutting things off or severing things. Especially when they align in a square, there can be an unexpected severing of two things, either in terms of a relationship or in terms of a situation of some sort having things prematurely cut off in a way that you’re not anticipating at the time.
AC: Yeah. With Mars-Uranus, you’re looking at the surprise attack where it’s like, “Oh, my God. That’s where the conflict is? I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with conflict in this area.” Along with surprise attack, one of the things that we see in the world is random explosions. Not random, but like there was this old weapons depot, and this leaked, and the whole thing went up all of a sudden; or there’s this invisible weakness in this building, and there’s this little bit of stress put on it and the whole thing fell down—like, surprise, Mars. Surprise destruction is a thing with Mars-Uranus.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s usually like a straw breaking the camel’s back. Or is it Jenga where you take out the pieces from the tower?
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s like the one last thing, or the cigarette dropped near the oil drum.
CB: Yeah. Also, internally, there can be this restlessness, because Uranus is not happy just doing the same thing over and over again, and Mars also has this impetuousness to it. So sometimes people may find themselves in a circumstance or a situation under this alignment where they just have the impulse to act and the impulse to act quickly and suddenly, even unexpectedly, without having planned everything out ahead of time. And sometimes that can be good; you can do things that maybe you wouldn’t have done otherwise because you have the sudden insight of how you’d like to move forward rapidly and in a way that has innovation at its core. But in other scenarios that energy can backfire if you charge in sort of recklessly, and sometimes ‘recklessness’ can be a good keyword for a Mars-Uranus square.
AC: Yeah, I would agree. Right. A lack of planning. Action without planning. Because it’s Mars, it’s often consequential action. And then, as you’re saying, internally, there can also be overreactions where that match drop or the cigarette drop near the oil drum is an internal thing. Something happens that triggers and inflames this whole sort of latent complex, which looks people freaking out. What are they freaking out about? Maybe there’s something to learn about freaking out, but that’s the energy.
CB: Yeah. Technological disruptions could be another major one, since we’ve already seen technology stuff being a major theme of some of the transits of the other planets through Aquarius so far, and Uranus is definitely a ‘disruptive technology’ planet as well; so seeing Mars and Uranus coming together here could be some sort of disruption in that sphere of life. So what’s weird, though, is that this is happening at the same time as the New Moon at 20° of Pisces; so it’s kind of like imprinting this entire next month with this signature, so that it may not be something that is just limited to this day, but almost seems to have some carryover over the next few weeks.
AC: Yeah, kind of ‘yes’ and also to a certain degree ‘no’, in that the New Moon here is sort of resetting everything in the same zone as Saturn and Neptune which have been there for a year and are gonna be there for another year plus. And if we look at the chain of who’s influencing who astrology-wise, it’s Saturn that rules the Mars, and it’s Saturn that rules the Pluto. That Saturn-Neptune in Pisces is—that what is real or what is not real—entering a more liquid era where it seems like a whole lot can happen and things are kind of out of control. The Sun and Moon are coming together to be in that space between Saturn and Neptune, which is really in many ways defining of this little micro-era that we’re in. Yes, the Mars-Uranus is happening, but there’s that re-centering in this space, which is sort of underneath the louder and more chaotic surface events that are happening.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’m glad you mentioned that. I’m glad you’re emphasizing how this lunation—because it’s happening right in between Saturn and Neptune—is really accentuating that Saturn-Neptune conjunction; even though it’s a little far away still by degree at this point, this lunation is gonna draw those two planets together. I guess from a personal standpoint, we’ve been talking a lot technologically about how that’s been working out and some of the blurring of boundaries between things and blurring between the imaginal realms and the realms of reality. I’ve been seeing a lot of stories of people just feeling burnt out over the past year. In my space, it’s been like YouTubers that are kind of burnt out from the constant grind of creating content for years and years on end, months and months, and are deciding to take a step back, or they’re deciding to produce less content or finding a way to integrate rest into their lives more. But I feel like I’ve been seeing signs of that in a number of different fields, of people feeling this sense of fatigue, not just physically, but also sometimes mentally or even spiritually on some level. And I know that’s something that Tarnas actually talks about in his studies of Saturn-Neptune, but it’s interesting seeing that coming up in concrete ways, where over the past few months there’s been all these YouTubers announcing that they’re gonna step back or take a break or even stop what they’re doing.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting. That makes sense. I think connected to that is with Saturn-Neptune in Pisces there’s this quality of immersion as in a body of water, where you and the other YouTubers have just just been immersed in this thing. And there’s a real power to getting out of the water. The physics change. You move differently. You can feel the weight. You can also see the water from the outside. That need to step back from immersion makes a lot of sense. I would also just sort of add part of the way I’m thinking about this New Moon—just coming back to Saturn-Neptune—Saturn-Neptune is, again, a two-and-a-half-year micro-era, right? And so, with the Sun and the Moon coming together there, there’s this sense of getting back to the question of, what is this deep, confusing space that I’m in?
And it may be that the answers are not easy to come by and that it’s not possible to understand it wholly because the nature of it is that it’s deep and confusing. Perhaps the more important question is, knowing what I can know about the space that I’m in, what is the best way to navigate it? ‘Cause we have to pick a way of moving through a space with whatever knowledge and ignorance we have of it, right? Like you don’t always get to know everything before you decide how you’re gonna move through a space, that’s actually a delightful luxury when you get that. But I think the Saturn-Neptune in Pisces really tests and points to we navigate a situation that just has a lot of unknowns, where we can fill in some of them, but we’re not gonna get the complete picture; maybe never, maybe just not for a couple years, but certainly not right now while we have business to do and life to live.
CB: Yeah. And there’s this sort of amorphous nebulousness to it at the same time that’s really gonna be accentuated around March 8, because there’s a Mercury-Neptune conjunction happening in Pisces as well. And so, that’s happening just a couple days before the Mercury ingress, then Mercury sort of makes a clean break from some of this stuff. ‘Cause it’s like the Mercury-Neptune conjunction happens on the 8th, and then right after that the Mars-Uranus square takes place and the New Moon takes place. So Mercury-Neptune conjunctions, as we know, often have to deal with communication that’s not clear, sometimes deceptive communication, misunderstandings, but also sometimes empathy, like really empathetic communication or communicating something about the plight of somebody else, something that evokes sympathy and a deep sense of of feeling for the position that people find themselves in sometimes.
AC: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good summary.
CB: All right, so then we make a clean break a couple of days later. Actually, let me share that. We make a clean break to Mercury in Aries by March 10. Let’s just really quickly give some keywords for Mercury in Aries. If only we had somebody who specialized in or perhaps had that placement that might be helpful. Do you know anybody?
AC: Oh, Mercury in Aries?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Oh, it’s me.
CB: Oh, right, yeah.
AC: Yeah, Sun in Pisces and Mercury in Aries. Yeah, this is actually a not-bad match for my own cycle because I’ve got Pisces Sun/Mercury in Aries, and I think I was born about 10 days before Mercury retrogrades. So this is 20 days before Mercury retrogrades here on March 10.
CB: That’s weird. I don’t think there’s anything important happening in your life right now, so that’s odd that that would be happening.
AC: Yeah, right. So what’s kind of useful about the Mercury in Aries—while there’s all this stuff in Pisces—is Mercury in Aries, because it’s Mars-ruled, really wants something pragmatic to do, right? Like Aries is Mars-ruled, so it’s like, “Okay, but what do we do? Yes, the world is infinitely complex, but what’s the next step?” And so, Mercury in Aries will be pushing for a more discrete, defined way of getting through or way of moving through—with Mercury as the traveler—this period. It has a nice priority on clarity that all the Pisces stuff doesn’t. You know, the Pisces stuff—like you were saying earlier about not wanting to make a decision—from the Pisces point of view, you want to understand and feel out the entirety of the question and all of the possible responses to it. Pisces is sort of going big and deep to get the whole picture before that is then shrunk down into the one choice made, which is sort of Aries; it’s sort of the Pisces/Aries transition. It’s like there’s the whole universe, and I’m gonna be just this one person to do just one life, Pisces and Aries.
CB: Yeah, that’s perfect, ‘cause there’s the indecisiveness of Pisces. But then the corrective function of Aries is suddenly extreme decisiveness and just taking action immediately and not necessarily waiting around or floundering around, thinking about it or reflecting on it necessarily, which can be positive or negative in certain contexts.
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you reduce a thousand possibilities to one reality. But there’s a challenge to the Mercury in Aries this time, which is that Rahu, or the North Node, or the ‘head of the dragon’ is there in Aries. The North Node is our eclipse point, which we’re going to see the Sun eclipsed on the 8th of April. Both the eclipse points—the North and South Node—retain their power to obscure and to confuse even when they are not in the act of obscuring the Sun or Moon’s light, and so they’re sort of a mobile shadow. and that makes it trickier for Mercury to see the way forward. Trickier, again, because Mercury is slowly moving into the place of retrogradation at the very end of the month, beginning of April; and so the pathfinding around here is tricky. Again, it’s like, “Mercury gets out of Pisces. Okay, we need to get out of the infinite soup. Like let’s figure out a way through this.” But the terrain is tricky and obscured and there’s gonna need to be some doubling-back, and that’s just sort of setting the stage for later in the month when Mercury is almost retrograde and we start getting eclipses.
CB: Yeah, for sure. One of the things it makes me think about—I’m in the process of negotiating and working out the details of doing an episode with an astrologer named Britten LaRue who has a book coming out, but we’re gonna be talking about “Unshaming the Signs,”—which is a series that she’s focused on—and her statement for Aries was: “Unshaming my Aries has meant having the audacity to start building on a dream before I fully know what I’m doing.” And I thought that was really good because oftentimes we think about the negative quality of Aries being this impulsiveness that just dives into things without knowing what it’s doing or having a long-term plan, but sometimes—especially in the positive manifestations of that and in terms of embracing that—you’ve got to dive in and just make the first effort to start building things, even if you don’t know where it’s gonna go, just because you have the feeling that you need to do something and now is the time to do it; and sometimes just following that impulse to take action can be really important and really crucial.
AC: Oh, 100%. And that goes to a certain degree for all of the fire signs. A lot of times planets in fire signs have the vision before they have the rationale, right? It’s like, “No, this is the right way to go, this is the right thing (or this is the right angle on this).” It only gets proven later why that was a good idea. With my Mercury in Aries, for me, a lot of times I’ll get a picture of things that I can then sort of backtrack and sort of test or look at the astrology and be like, “Oh, that was the right picture.” The picture was trying to tell me things that were true. For me, the first astrological almanac that I wrote—when I was doing yearlies, which was for 2011, it came out in 2010—there was this big cut section that I super regret cutting, but I thought it was just too weird and visionary. I was thinking in terms of the jinn, which are, I don’t know, the sort of animist spirits of the Middle Eastern world, which is where we get the word ‘genie’; the fae, the spirits, the whatever. But I was seeing this uprising of the jinn in the desert and it was really compelling, and I had some kind of literary writing about it. But I was like that’s nice, I don’t know, fantasy RPG content, but I cut that. And then it was around Uranus’ ingress into Aries—sure enough, Uranus moves into Aries and the entire Middle Eastern and North African world erupts into what got called the ‘Arab Spring’ later. And I was like, “Oh, my brain was going in the right direction.” I was using fantasy images, but that spirit of revolt in that place was exactly right. Anyway, that was really instructive for me. I was like, okay, a lot of times there’s something in there even if you don’t understand it ahead of time.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s a great example. I do think there’s gonna be a lot of diving head-first and trying to get things going in March. But because Mercury enters its shadow mid-month—I think by the 18th and will station retrograde at the very end of the month, so that Mercury will turn back and retrace its steps, especially where it was crossing in the second-half of the month—there’ll be a lot of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’, but then eventually having to come back and revise or revisit some things. Especially if some of that initial impulse to act before planning leads to delays or leads to doing things not exactly the right way and needing to come back and do it a second time or a third time in order to sort of perfect it.
AC: Yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of needing to double-back. With Mars and pathfinding, I think of how people have to work their way through thick jungle terrain, where you have to cut a path with a machete and it’s slow-going. And if you end up going the wrong way or pursuing a path that’s a dead-end, it’s extra work, that doubling-back, ‘cause you can’t see that far ahead of yourself and every step requires additional effort because the way is not clear. You have to clear the way that you hope will lead to your desired destination.
CB: Cutting through with a machete—that is such a perfect metaphor for Mercury going through Aries this month, and then, yeah, going retrograde and then having to cut your way back to backtrack, and then maybe turn around one more time to go forward again. You have to do something to clear the way, but it’s like a machete is a short-term ‘cause you can only cut what’s immediately in front of you.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And to see whether this is leading in the right direction, you have to do a bunch of work cutting through the brush to even see if this is a viable route.
CB: Right. And with Mercury, it’s like a lot of that cutting through the brush has to be done through ‘communication’ or through ‘investigation’, through ‘negotiation’, and other Mercury-related keywords like that.
AC: Yeah, yeah. We’ll come back to other things. We’ve got lots of fun stuff to talk about. So are we ready for Venus to enter Pisces?
CB: Yeah, I’m definitely ready for Venus to enter Pisces. So Venus enters Pisces on the 11th and 12th. Venus goes into Pisces and then begins the buildup to a conjunction with Saturn, which is at 11° of Pisces at this point. So we get the buildup to a Venus-Saturn conjunction that will eventually go exact by March 21.
AC: Yeah so—do you want to start? I think there’s a fair amount to say about Venus’ travels through Pisces this year.
CB: I guess the two primary things are just, symbolically, the two things we know to go with there is just, on the one hand, Venus is moving into a sign where she’s doing better in terms of zodiacal dignity. Venus is in the sign of her exaltation, which is usually a sign in which some of her impulses are raised up and actualized to their highest extent, especially in terms of relating or in terms of artistic endeavors and the desire to reach harmony and to reconcile disparate things into one whole, to create a whole. But the other part of that here with Saturn is that Saturn is kind of cooling off everything and usually creates this distance, whereas Pisces and Venus especially want to bring things together, and I think it creates a fundamental tension that we’ll be wrestling with, especially in the buildup to that conjunction.
AC: Yeah, Venus and Saturn have this really interesting sort of ‘melancholy’ relationship; in some ways, they’re very much opposed. You’ll see Renaissance-era woodcuts and illustrations of the god of Saturn clipping off Cupid’s wings or Eros’ wings, like literally cutting the wings off of love; but also when you look at it zodiacally, Saturn exalts in Venus’ sign of of Libra, and you get into this sort of literary territory of melancholy beauty. It also brings me to thinking in Saturn-Venus there’s this funereal sort of perspective where you look back at a life and you think about the person’s successes and failures; even though it’s it’s necessarily sad to a certain degree, there’s this sort of beauty of any life when you look back at it, which includes and incorporates the tragedies, the moments of hubris, etc., etc. In my workshop that I did on the planetary pairs, for Venus and Saturn my nickname for this one was ‘the somber bouquet’.
CB: That’s good—the somber bouquet. That’s beautiful.
AC: Right. As you might receive during your stay in the hospital while you’re getting treated for something serious, or at a funeral; there’s like a show of love. Anyway, that’s the sort of energy that I get from Venus-Saturn.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good. ‘Cause Saturn in Pisces—there is this sadness or this longing.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Pisces, though, especially when Venus is imported into the mix, brings this sense of empathy, and I think ‘empathy’ is a really good keyword for this combination. Sometimes through hardship, especially with Saturn, it creates empathy, because you have experienced the same thing as somebody else. And having experienced loss or hardship or tragedy, it creates a memory—a sort of a Saturnian memory—of what that’s like and what that feeling is, so that when you see it in somebody else those same feelings are invoked in your memory and it creates sometimes a desire then to reach out and to want to help or sooth the pain of somebody that’s experiencing the same thing because you can place yourself in in their position from when you experienced that yourself.
AC: Yeah, well said.
CB: So let’s see the comments. Jane in the comments—in the live chat for patrons that are joining us today as we’re recording this—mentions ‘nostalgia’. I think that’s a really good keyword for this. Vandana says ‘melancholy’. Those are all really good. And Wenda says ‘compassion’. I think all of those are really good keywords for some of this and the sort of feeling that we’re gonna be maybe experiencing for the entirety of Venus in Pisces, which is is pretty much this entire month, once Venus makes that ingress on the 11th; but certainly it’s gonna culminate with the Venus-Saturn conjunction on the 21st, and then later we’ll get another intensification of that at some point when Venus conjoins Neptune. I think that’s like next month.
AC: Yeah, it’s going towards it. But, yeah, the Saturn co-presence is there the whole time, but the lead-up to the conjunction—so the first 9-10 days of Venus’ time in Pisces—definitely has that heavy, heavy compassionate, felt, nostalgic melancholic sort of vibe to it.
CB: Yeah, and we’ll be coming out of Venus in Aquarius, which I think is the creation of new technological things, but it’s not until you get to Pisces that you get the really inspired piece of artworks that speak to people on some deep or some core level. So something I would pay attention to during this time as well is something in the artistic realm that moves people on a core psychological or even spiritual level.
AC: Yeah, on the level of meaning.
CB: Right. Yeah, a level of meaning, as opposed to Aquarius, which is almost like an abstract, sort of rule-based or math- or science-based way of perceiving the universe.
AC: Yeah, like there’s an idea and there’s data, but what does it mean to a conscious being?
CB: Exactly. Perfect. All right, so mid-month is when things start getting crazy and things start really heating up, I think, because two things happen. One we’ve already mentioned is that Mercury enters its shadow by the 18th around 15° of Aries, where it’s actually conjoining the node at that time. So we know then that Mercury’s gonna retrograde back to this point in the future, so that any events that take place basically in the second-half of the month are both a buildup to but a precursor to something we’re gonna return to next month in April, so that’s one thing’ the other thing is that in the second-half of the month, we enter into eclipse season. One of the things that we learned from doing the “Eclipses” episode—which I did when we were in the middle of eclipse season in October and just everything was going crazy in terms of world events; I did that study with Nick—one of the things we found is the operative timeframe for eclipses begins at least a week before the eclipse but sometimes even a little bit before that. So once we hit the middle of the month, we’re in the buildup to that Libra eclipse, which is then gonna take place on the 25th of March. So—
AC: Yeah—
CB: Go ahead.
AC: Okay. I would say, for me, once the Sun ingresses in Aries on the 20th, it’s kind of ‘on’. Because from the 20th until the end of March, the Sun moving into Aries puts it in the same sign as the nodes, as the node that will eclipse it—both the Moon and it, so we have the Sun-node co-presence. Very shortly thereafter we have Mars move into Pisces; so now it’s Mars-Saturn action, which is dangerous. And, as you said, just a little bit before the Sun’s ingress into Aries, we have Mercury entering the shadow of the retrograde; so all of the stuff is either happening or just about to happen. We’ve entered the event horizon of the three factors which together make the end of March and at least the first-half of April very powerful and chaotic to the point that this stuck out to both of us like a sore thumb when we looked at the yearly. We were like, “Oh, shit. What happens in late March and the first-half of April?”
CB: Yeah, stuff starts getting really serious, and we spent a lot of time talking about this. Because it’s like we get this eclipse that happens at the end of March, and then we get the Great American Eclipse that’s gonna take place—a solar eclipse in Aries—in April, and that’s the one that’s gonna cross the entire United States and is expected to be really significant. Also, a comet shows up around that time, which is gonna start being visible here pretty soon in March and April, I believe. And we also get the ingress of Mars into Pisces around this time, so we begin the buildup to the Mars-Saturn conjunction. And this is the first Mars-Saturn conjunction that occurs in Pisces after the past several years of Mars-Saturn conjunctions taking place in Aquarius, going back to March and April of 2020 when we had that famous Mars-Saturn conjunction that took place around the time of the lockdowns, when the entire world just ground to a halt all of a sudden, which was really terrible but also really fitting in terms of the symbolism. We’ve often described Mars-Saturn conjunctions as slamming on the brakes when you’re driving a car and things just suddenly coming to a halt.
AC: Yeah. I wonder if some of that will be slamming on the brakes, things getting halted as a result of sea lane disruption, right? We’ve talked about this with the Saturn in Pisces. Saturn likes to clog and slow down Pisces, the water. When we had Mars square Saturn in Pisces that was the height of the attacks on shipping, and that was Mars-Saturn square. And so, I’ve been looking at attacks on shipping or just things that disrupt normal sea lanes for shipping, not only in the Red Sea, but also potentially other places; that’s just a place we know to look for it. So, yeah, I’m definitely looking at shipping with Mars-Saturn and the conflicts that are currently lit and burning having a greater naval component.
CB: Yeah, that would make sense as a very literal manifestation of that and would fit pretty perfectly. We also had—when Saturn stationed last June for the first time in Pisces—the submarine incident, so other very literal things like that could be relevant here in terms of the Mars-Saturn.
AC: Okay, I have to add something that I wasn’t going to add when you said ‘submarine component’. I was just thinking about how recently a spokesman for the Houthis said basically, “We have submarine weapons. You’ll see them soon.”
CB: Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah, so it could be very literal in terms of that. That would be kind of crazy if we end up with submarine things happening over and over again the entire time Saturn is in Pisces.
AC: I mean, that metaphor of it’s beneath the waves in a dangerous space—it is a great match for the symbolism.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s like super literal. I was thinking more metaphorically since we’ve talked so much about all of the technological stuff that was happening and has been happening that’s moving so quickly, and all the news stories we just discussed when all the planets were going through Aquarius. You know, part of what’s happening now in March with the planets that go through Pisces is I feel like there might be a reflection period on some of that and a period of questioning; especially with the Mars-Saturn conjunction starting to form, we talked about slamming on the brakes. Like what if some of the slamming of the brakes is the initial inklings of some pushback against some of that stuff or some existential questions—What are we doing? Where are we going with all of this? What is the purpose? How is this serving us?—as well as other deeper philosophical reflections and musings like that becoming more acute at this time for some reason.
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, Mars-Saturn conjunctions bring a real security awareness. Like, “Oh, no, in this particular situation this is a real threat, this is something that needs to be thought about.” And you see that in time periods, but you also see it in individuals. People who have Mars-Saturn conjunctions very rarely have a naive perspective on what dangers are. They’re like, “No, no, that can kill you, that can kill you, that can kill you, and that’s why we’re gonna do this so that we don’t get killed by any of these things,” but threat awareness is a huge part of Mars-Saturn. And it’s worth noting that at this point the Sun is in Aries, and so is Mercury, and so is Rahu, or the North Node—that’s all Mars-ruled. So whatever Mars and Saturn are doing—that encountering Saturn position of Mars—Mars is sending all of that to Aries, so that Mars-Saturn is really influential. And that takes well into April to become perfect, but it becomes operant the second Mars enters Pisces.
CB: Yeah, let me check on when the date of that is. So the Mars-Saturn conjunction itself looks like it goes exact around April 10 and April 11. So we’re we’re building up to that exact conjunction where it’s going to culminate around that time, but the series of events—and the general shift that’s gonna be really palpable—is gonna take place on March 22nd and 23rd as soon as Mars goes into Pisces and begins the process of building up to that around that time.
AC: Yeah, it’s a relatively hectic couple of days, right? ‘Cause the equinox Sun enters Aries on the 20th, Mars enters Pisces on the 22nd, and then we have the first eclipse. We have a lunar eclipse in Libra the 24th-25th, depending on your time zone.
CB: Yeah, everything just starts happening really quick. As we know from past eclipses—especially from October, when we were all collectively going through that—the pace of events just starts moving really fast around eclipse season, and also there’s this chaotic quality to it where things start happening fast. Especially in people’s individual lives and individual fates, there’s a pivot point where it starts either moving very rapidly upwards suddenly or very rapidly downwards suddenly, and we often see the rise and fall of prominent people happening around the time of eclipses. We often see the rise and fall of entities, like companies; the Bitcoin FTX fiasco, for example, happened under eclipses.
AC: Oh, yeah. What was that charlatan’s name? Sam—
CB: Sam Altman?
AC: Yeah, he’s gonna get sentenced on that Mars-Saturn conjunction, I think.
CB: Oh, wow, okay. Yeah, well, that’s fitting and also continues the eclipse themes in terms of how that’s worked out for him in the past so far, as well as Bitcoin in general. So, yeah, Mars-Saturn is building up, but really the primary focal point of this is just the eclipse in Libra that takes place. This is not the first eclipse in Libra. We already had a solar eclipse in Libra that took place in October—like right in the middle of October—and that was the first of a series of eclipses in that sign of the zodiac. But because it’s occurring six months later in the same sign, for some people it will represent a continuation of events that started in October, especially a continuation of major changes and what I always call ‘major beginnings’ and ‘major endings’ in the area of your chart, in the area of your life that matches Libra and whatever house that is. So either you’ve already gotten an inkling of what those changes are and you’ll just see a continuation of that at this point, or for some people some of those changes may not have been fully evident to you back in October, but they’ll start to make themselves much more clearer at this point, especially since this is a lunar eclipse as opposed to the solar eclipse from the last one.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Again, this is not an intro to a new thing, this is a very significant second installment to something that began in earnest six months ago; and this will not be the last installment either, but it’s fully underway. Yeah, one of the things that we don’t love but saw when we were looking at things for the yearly is that this last sort of brutal iteration of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict started right on the eclipses six months ago—or six months from the period we’re talking about here—and there will probably be another brutal episode during this period.
CB: Yeah. And especially when Israel went into Palestine afterwards, that really started falling closely on those eclipses. So there was something about—
AC: It was on the eve of the lunar eclipse that was opposite Mars in Scorpio. It was a configuration that kind of said ‘worst-case scenario’. You know, I hope we’re wrong about this, but things are shaping up to look like we’re gonna have another’ eclipse-heavy’ Mars situation here.
CB: Yeah. So somehow it’ll represent a continuation of that and whatever the next phase is that’ll set up a paradigm for the next six months. Because this won’t be the last set of eclipses in these signs, but we’ll actually see a continuation of some of these eclipses later this year.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And, boy, looking at it again I understand why we were so moved by it several months ago. We’ve got Mars-Saturn, which is dangerous, right? It’s serious and it’s dangerous. But Mars-Saturn together aren’t inherently confusing, right? Like something can be dangerous without being confusing. But whenever we have eclipse time things appear and disappear very quickly. The musical chairs, the ‘Game of Musical Thrones’ is very intense and inherently obscured; like the whole phenomenon of eclipses is the obscuration of light. Like, “Oh, I can’t see the Sun during the middle of the day. It’s supposed to be the Moon that the night is brightest. Why is the Moon this sort of dull red, barely illuminating anything?” And so, we add to that Mercury’s retrograde. By the time we’re getting to the eclipse, we’re less than a week out—or we’re about a week out from Mercury’s retrograde station, which is in my observation when Mercury’s retro really starts to kick in. And Mercury is in the same sign as Rahu, the eclipsing North Node. And so, this combination of dangerous Mars-Saturn with all of this confusion—it’s kind of a crazy situation. I would say the potentially saving grace—but I don’t know if it can be relied on—is that we have the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction getting really tight, and Jupiter and Uranus will hand out some surprising, amazing wins; it’s like ‘surprise’ Jupiter rather than ‘reliable’ Jupiter. And for the people who get the best from the Jupiter-Uranus, they will come out of this very happy, right? Like when the smoke clears, they will find themselves in a position of unexpected good fortune. But because Uranus introduces this disruptive, chaotic, unpredictable note to Jupiter, it’s like we can’t rely on ‘winning the Jupiter lotto’ or just having the transit work out as we would expect otherwise.
CB: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a liberatory impulse to that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, like a freedom-seeking impulse, but I feel like that’s not gonna culminate until later in April when that conjunction goes exact. But already by this point, by this first eclipse, we’re gonna start seeing that impulse becoming much more prominent—both in individual lives as well as in the collective—that striving for freedom and breaking out of old situations that are no longer acceptable at that point.
AC: Yeah, yeah. This is all of these factors coming online to contribute to the situation, which is established by the end of March, but runs through at least the first-half of April. Like this is a multi-week period where there’s just a fuck ton going on.
CB: Yeah, especially that two-week period, that two-week period from one eclipse to the second one. So starting on March 25, that eclipse opens up a two-week window or portal where we’re right in the middle of eclipse season and everything gets very chaotic, things start going either upwards or downwards very quickly and the end of things happening; like some things come to a dramatic end. So sometimes this can be metaphorically like the end of a relationship, the end of a career, or other things like that, depending on what house it’s falling in in your chart. In the most extreme sense, the ultimate end of something can also be the death of something, either metaphorically or sometimes literally. We’ve seen notable celebrity deaths happen around the time of eclipses, so that’s always something we should watch out for or pay attention to, since there’s no greater end to something than the physical cessation of life. Yeah, so eclipses are really important and that’s gonna be something we’re gonna be paying a lot of attention to. I might do part three of the “Eclipses” series, honestly, during this eclipse because I think it’s gonna give us a lot of new examples to work with.
AC: Yeah, yeah, 100%. I’ll also point out this period is so disruptive that I will be absent from The Astrology Podcast for the first time since June 2015.
CB: Oh, my God. The light will truly have been snuffed out of my life for once in the past decade. That’s amazing. So there will be an obscuration of a great luminary in our community.
AC: Thank you. And what’s funny is I’m Cancer rising, so the eclipse in Aries is in my 10th, right? Like you won’t be able to see me.
CB: That’s brilliant.
AC: And my Mercury is there, too. So it’s Rahu on my Mercury and Mercury retrograde there. It’s like a recurrence, but with the nodes in my 10th rather than my 9th, where they are in natally.
CB: And yet, a new life literally being born at that time, under the obscurity of that eclipse and under the obscurity of your sudden absence.
AC: Yeah, yeah, and this is something we say about eclipses, right? There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Like the Sun is still there putting out just as much energy, but you don’t see it, or you can only half-see it. So, yeah, big events.
CB: And that’s why I always say eclipses are like great beginnings and great endings, but another way of saying that is ‘the birth of something but also sometimes the death of something’. Also, side note, given some of our long-standing arguments on eclipses over the years, if you end up having an ‘eclipse’ baby that’s gonna crack me up.
AC: Okay. I mean, you and I are both ‘eclipse’ babies.
CB: Oh, yeah. No, I know. I’m in favor of ‘eclipse’ babies, especially over the research of the past several months. I mean, one of the things we saw was just so many important people being born under eclipses and then having important events happen under eclipses. One of the great discoveries in some sense of that whole “Eclipse” series was just how important eclipses have been through history, both in the lives of individuals as well as in public events.
AC: Yeah. I certainly have never maintained that eclipses—how do I put this? You definitely get some things from being an ‘eclipse’ baby and there’s definitely a price for that. What gifts ‘strongly-eclipsed’ people have are not free. We could compare it to having a very dignified malefic in the chart, like being a favored child of Saturn, right? You get to be doted on by Saturn and learn all the Saturn things so well. Tell us about ‘Saturn’ school. So being a ‘child of the dragon’, you get to go to ‘dragon’ school, which is not necessarily a peaceful education.
CB: Yeah. You get to be the center of events and sometimes the leader of some of the most important events in the world, but then at the same time you’re the one who shoulders a lot of the most important events in the world and there’s a great heaviness and a great weight that comes with that. It’s like you’re Abraham Lincoln. You’re like one of the greatest presidents in American history, but then it’s like you’re also the president during the Civil War; that would be my analogy.
AC: Yeah, that’s one version of it. You also have people whose work is obscured unfairly during their lifetime. You see people getting credit stolen from them when they have ‘eclipse’ stuff; one of the things that eclipses do is they block people from seeing the light. Again, the work is done, but there’s theft or obscuration. You know, as much as I hate to balance the American president example, we’ve got Lincoln and then we’ve got Trump who was born during an eclipse; certainly an important figure in American politics who I don’t think will be honored as a savior figure, even a deeply-flawed savior figure, such as Abraham Lincoln.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that’s gonna be one of the things that’s gonna be crucial; we know the eclipses this year, both eclipse seasons, are gonna be crucial for the presidential election. And of course we know that Trump was born under a lunar eclipse, the same day as a lunar eclipse, and the last time there was a major eclipse that happened across America was in 2017, just after he had been elected and inaugurated; he had just been president for like a few months at that point when that eclipse happened. So I always associate that eclipse with him, especially ‘cause it occurred right on his ascendant. But, yeah, of course now we have another eclipse going across America, which presumably then has some direct bearing on some important events taking place in the country around this time, especially in the two-week window that opens up starting with the Libra eclipse in late March and going through into early April.
AC: Yeah. An interesting thing that Freedom Cole pointed out to me years ago is that when you run the Vimshottari dasha system on the Sibley chart, you have the United States in a long North Node period or Rahu period when you’re doing time-lords. And so, if we were just treating it like a natal chart, if you’re in a period that’s sensitized towards eclipses then the eclipses that are visible in that country are going to be much more impactful during that time period. And we entered that Rahu period in the early 2010s—early-mid-2010s; it was right before the 2016 election—and we’re not out of it I think until early 2030s.
CB: Okay. I didn’t know this, but Lynn in the comments says that Trump’s election interference trial starts on the 25th. So that’s amazing.
AC: Oh, right on the right on the lunar eclipse.
CB: Literally right on eclipse.
AC: Wow.
CB: And that’s gonna be the deciding point in terms of, does that go anywhere? Is he convicted for anything? Does that stop him from running or even becoming president again? Or does it not go anywhere and then open it up so that at the end of the year—when we get the next set of eclipses—the outcome of the election will be decided at that point?
AC: Yeah, it’s so hard. You know, we’ve talked about this. I’m so hesitant to draw straight lines from now until the end of the year ‘cause there’s so many chaotic configurations between now and then. Also, it’s like what does Uranus-Jupiter throw out that might be a good thing but that we don’t see coming? I’ve got like five or six different what-abouts. But, yeah, chaotic—let me scale this back. The end of the month is kind of crazy, and it’s probably a good idea to have some flexibility in how you approach things ‘cause there will likely be some surprises. I would expect that chaotic period where you are likely going to need to adapt to things that happen rather than impose a plan on things that happen to last really through much of April. There’s the two-week eclipse window, but we don’t get Mercury direct until the 24th-25th of April. I think it’s gonna take a while for what happens between the eclipses’ window to shake out. It’ll take a while for the smoke to clear.
CB: Yeah, the second eclipse, the Aries solar eclipse, is on the 8th of April, and it’s gonna take at least a week after that before I think things start to calm down. And then later in the month, we get Jupiter conjoining Uranus on the 20th of April, so that’s when things get a little bit nicer again and some of the more positive sides of the astrology really start to come into focus just after we get out of this chaotic eclipse and Mercury retrograde and Mars conjunct Saturn period.
AC: Yeah, in the northern hemisphere it’s very like full-on Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring.” It is not a peaceful classical composition.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, we live in interesting times, which is a curse, at least in terms of the astrology. We are documenting some really interesting stuff, and it’s constantly impressive how much some of the ancient interpretive principles apply to these contemporary events that we’re all witnessing and we’re all in the audience privy to.
AC: Yeah. Well, they had war and political strife and injustice, they had all those things. Some of the tools we use are different, but the human situations that we create with our tools and that the world creates for us, the outcomes aren’t all that different.
CB: Yeah, for sure. The dynamics of life are still very, very much the same, very similar. Okay, eclipse stuff, Mercury retrograde stuff. Did we talk sufficiently about Mercury retrograde and just the typical Mercury retrograde keywords of ‘miscommunication’, ‘delays’?
AC: Having to do it over again.
CB: ‘Do-overs’, ‘redos’, all of that.
AC: Yeah, just cutting your way through that jungle while the Sun goes out during the middle of the day, and the distant sounds of naval warfare echo through the forest. And Jupiter seems to randomly airdrop cash and prizes in a fashion that is very difficult to predict.
CB: Yeah. For some people, especially with 20°-23° of fixed signs—where that conjunction is gonna be hitting—the comet will cross that conjunction later in April as well. But with the Mercury retrograde, yeah, just being open. You know, it’s tricky because during Mercury retrogrades, from an electional standpoint, ideally, we try not to start new major things. But because eclipses are gonna be happening during that time, I feel like some people are gonna be sort of pushed into or forced to start new things at that time. And sometimes you just have to roll with it, but just know that sometimes what you initiate, you may have to go back and revise and revisit and redo, ‘cause sometimes it’s the second or third time that you do something over that you really are able to get it right. And while that may be annoying and it might be frustrating, that whole process, usually the end result is you end up doing it way better the second or third time that you do it than you did the first.
AC: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Some things take a couple passes to get right. I would also add that for situations where you can’t change the destination you have in mind, the thing has to happen regardless. Like, for me, I gotta get the second edition of Faces done, right? Nothing’s going to change that being a thing that needs to happen. But even if your destination is unchanging during a Mercury retrograde period, be as flexible as you can about pathfinding. I was gonna take this highway, and I was gonna be there in 3 hours and the destination doesn’t change, but Godzilla’s walking through the highway. So it’s like, okay, I take the back roads, I cut through 38 to then jump on 16, whatever it is. Being flexible about pathfinding is very often an excellent strategy during Mercury retrogrades.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And the last thing is just about doing things better the second or third time; usually, in retrospect, it’s only worthwhile as long as you learn from your mistakes. So having the ability to recognize and take into account if you have made mistakes during the Mercury retrograde, or if there’s something you could have done better if you had a second or third chance, that’s part of it as well. There’s this period of reflection during the Mercury retrograde where you have the option to reflect and to take into account and adjust for any mistakes you may have made, and sometimes people come out of that stronger. But if you don’t go through that period of self-reflection or if you choose to sort of look away from that or pretend that you didn’t make mistakes then sometimes you don’t gain as much from it as you could.
AC: Yeah, third time’s the charm.
CB: Right. As long as you put in the work. And the final thing is everybody of course should really think back to six months ago to what was happening in your life under the Libra eclipse in October and what house it was falling in your chart, since there may be some themes that started at that point that become relevant again here under this eclipse towards the end of of March. So that’s my primary piece of advice to everyone wondering what this period is gonna be about for you. All right, is there anything else? I mean, we kind of just ended on a huge cliffhanger because we just start the first foot of eclipse season at the end of this month, but then the second shoe doesn’t drop until early April.
AC: Yeah, I mean, the month ends on a huge cliffhanger. Did you have an auspicious election for March, Chris?
CB: Oh, my God. Yeah, I do have an auspicious election. So Leisa Schaim and I picked out the best chart we could find—it actually happens right in the middle of the month—in terms of finding an auspicious or a lucky date to start new things or to take different actions or start new ventures or undertakings using the principles of electional astrology. And the best chart we found is on March 17, 2024, at about 12:58 or let’s say about 1:00 PM local time in whatever your city is. So if you cast a chart for 1:00 PM local time on March 17, you should end up with a chart that has Cancer rising and the Moon in Cancer in its own sign, so that it’s dignified. And the Moon is applying to a trine with Venus at 7° of Pisces—so a very nice supportive trine with Venus—and the Moon is also applying to a sextile with Jupiter in Taurus in the 11th house.
So this is a good chart to use before things start to get too crazy later in the month, before we get fully into the Mercury retrograde shadow, before Mars ingresses into Pisces and starts that buildup to the conjunction with Saturn. So I would recommend taking advantage of this chart if you need to start something new or start some sort of new venture, or just do something important during the course of the month; this one would be a good one to take advantage of. It’s especially good for things having to do with friends and groups and alliances because it has Jupiter in the 11th house of friends and groups, and it’s coming up on that conjunction with Uranus. So if you need to do something involving innovation or doing something outside of the box with friends, especially things that are new or inventive, this would be a great chart for that involving friends and groups. Yeah, and I think that’s the election for the month. What do you think?
AC: I think you didn’t have much to work with, but this will do.
CB: Yeah, that’s what we do with electional astrology; we find the best we can do given the astrological weather in a given month. So that’s one of the charts that we found for this month. Leisa and I are currently working on our Auspicious Elections Podcast for patrons, which we’re gonna release in the next few days, where we found five or six other electional charts during the course of the month as well. So we’ll release that in the next few days to people on that tier on Patreon. So you can sign up there at patreon.com/astrologypodcast if you’d like to get access to that.
AC: Nice.
CB: Yeah. All right, I think that might be it for the forecast. What do you think?
AC: I think so. I don’t really feel like there’s anything particularly juicy that we left out.
CB: All right, cool. Well, thanks for doing this last big forecast with me before your paternity leave. Is that the right term for that?
AC: It will be if you pay me.
CB: Okay, okay. So what do you have going on? I mean, I guess we know what you have going on, you’re about to have a baby and that’s what you got going on.
AC: Yeah, it’s basically just working on Faces. It’s funny, ‘cause the rule of my 5th is activated this year, so my ‘book’ baby—that’s basically what I’m doing as much as possible right now—and then my actual baby will be at a significant point with both of these 5th house topics during March. And then I’ll be back, but not immediately.
CB: Okay.
AC: But people can go to my website while I’m hiding. I’ve got just a pile of recorded classes and presentations and workshops. Go to Sphere + Sundry for all of the astral magic that I’ve elected. Kait really wants to get out the Moon and Jupiter in Taurus series that we made last year before go-time, so fingers crossed on that. That should be coming out, I don’t know, first-half of March. I’m hugely looking forward to it. I’ve been playing with the tones and the oils and such and it’s one of my favorite series. It’s luxurious and soothing, which I can certainly use, and I’m probably not the only person. But, yeah, sphereandsundry.com for the magic stuff and AustinCoppock.com for videos of me talking endlessly.
CB: Brilliant. And you have on the decans there. So all those people waiting for the decans book eagerly—it’s like you have teachings on that already on your website.
AC: I think I have like a 20-hour class on the decans up.
CB: Okay, so not very much content on that then.
AC: Yeah, just like a cursory pass.
CB: Yeah, for me, that’s like an appetizer, talking for 20 hours. All right, well, I’m super excited for you. I look forward to hearing how it goes. Good luck to you and Kait in this new journey. We’ll check in maybe. Maybe you can send me a little text update and I can let people know how it’s going in future episodes. I’m going to be doing the podcast. I’m in a really intense phase of working on the philosophy, and I’m finding some really important stuff about the origins of astrology and its connection with ancient philosophy, especially going back to the school of Plato and how some of his his contemporaries and students made major contributions that ended up influencing the history of astrology in major ways.
So I’m pretty excited about that, I’m gonna continue exploring stuff like that. I’m thinking about doing an episode on the Antikythera Mechanism soon, which I’ve been meaning to do forever, as well as other exciting episodes that I’m working on. So I have a Saturn return episode that I did, that I’ll be releasing soon, other episodes on astrologer boards that ancient astrologers used for consultations, stuff on the rulers of the houses, and so on and so forth. So I’ll be releasing all of that to patrons for early access as soon as it’s recorded. So if you want to get early access to that or if you’d like to support my work then you know where to go in terms of that. Otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks a lot for joining me, Austin.
AC: Yeah, this was really fun. Thanks for having me on.
CB: This was great. All right, well, thanks also to our audience of live patrons who joined us in the live chat. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck next month, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Take care.
[credits]
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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.