The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 441, titled:
Astrology Forecast April 2024
With Chris Brennan and Diana Rose Harper
Episode originally released on April 1, 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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 23, 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. Joining me today is astrologer Diana Rose Harper, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrology of April 2024. Hey, Diana – thanks for joining me today.
DIANA ROSE HARPER: Hey. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be back.
CB: Yeah, I’m excited to have you here. We’ve got a big month to talk about today. So in the first half of this episode, we’re gonna talk about news stories that happened since our last forecast a month ago and check in on some of the astrological correlations that happened with those news stories. Then in the second half of this episode, we’re gonna do a deep dive into the astrology of April. So, as always, there will be timestamps in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website for those who wanna jump right ahead to the forecast. So first, I wanna give a preview, though, of the forecast by giving a quick overview of the astrology of April.
So here is the planetary alignments calendar, which shows all the major planetary alignments this month. So right at the top of the month, we get Mercury stationing retrograde in the sign of Aries on April 1st. Then on April 3rd, Venus conjoins Neptune. Venus then moves into Aries on the 4th of April. A few days later, we get a major solar eclipse in the sign of Aries on April 8th, which is the eclipse that’s gonna cross the entire basically like, half of the United States. Two days after that, Mars conjoins Saturn in the sign of Pisces on the 10th. The Sun and Mercury have a cazimi, a retrograde conjunction, on the 11th of April. Then there’s a little bit of like a spot in the middle of the month where there’s this changeover and things cool down a little bit as we transition into the second half of the month. Then on the 19th, the Sun moves into Taurus, and a retrograde Mercury conjoins Venus. The very next day, we get a major Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that takes place on the 20th of April, and those only take place every 14 years. Then we get our second lunation of the month on the 23rd, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Scorpio. Two days after that, Mercury finally stations direct in Aries and ends the retrograde period on the 25th. Then towards the end of the month, Venus conjoins Neptune on the 28th. Then Venus moves into Taurus on the 29th and Mars moves into Aries on the 30th, setting us up for the following month.
DRH: Quick edit – it’s actually Mars conjunct Neptune on the 28th.
CB: Oh, we got a typo in the – that’s where that typo came from in the document —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: — that’s funny.
DRH: We found the answer, where that came from. Cool.
CB: All right. So I will see if I can fix that in post or maybe I’ll just, yeah, draw a little Mars glyph right there. All right. I’ll come back to that in the future. Thanks for pointing that out.
All right. So major alignments we’re gonna be talking about: Solar eclipse in Aries, Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus, Mercury retrograde in Aries, and even a comet named Comet Pons-Brooks is going to arrive, potentially become visible to the naked eye or, if not, easily visible with binoculars. So we’ve got tons and tons of major astrology, so that this is one of the most astrologically active months of the entirety of 2024. Here’s the calendar that shows the comet showing up – Comet Pons-Brooks. Here’s an image of the astronomy picture of the day – Demetra sent this to me – to give a picture of what the comet looks like right now with like, telescopes, and it has this beautiful greenish color and a sort of blueish tail. And then here’s an image of the eclipse and the path of the eclipse that’s gonna cross the United States on April 8th. So tons and tons of stuff happening this month. We have got a lot to talk about. But first off, welcome – thanks for joining me today to do this forecast episode.
DRH: Yeah. It’s really my pleasure. I’m anxious, as to be expected, but also very stoked to be here with you again, Chris.
CB: Yes. Well, we’ve got some big shoes to fill, because our mutual friend Austin Coppock is currently away on paternity leave, and that’s been kind of fun over the past month for me, because, you know, it’s probably the only time in my life that I’ll ever be able to text a friend asking if the chosen one has taken up their earthly form yet. So I get to joke and make all sorts of jokes like that with Austin right now. And of course, it’s totally not eerie that Austin’s having a baby and right at the same time, a comet is showing up in the night sky, followed by eclipses and even ocean disasters taking place.
DRH: Yeah, I feel like it’s only appropriate for a Coppock child to emerge with such celestial fanfare.
CB: Yeah, of course.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: It’s like, of course. Even I heard like, later this year, that two – in the east coast, two different broods of cicadas are gonna like, show up at the same time, which only happens very very rarely in like, decade increments, so we’ve even got, you know, like, next best thing to like, locusts happening at the same time.
DRH: I was gonna say, “choirs of angels.” Like, you know, the angelic song of cicadas bringing fanfare to the emergence of this child, so.
CB: That is definitely one way to put it; I like that positive spin. In completely unrelated news, I’m trying to get in touch with an archeologist named Carl Bugenhagen, so if anybody has his contact info, let me know.
All right. So let’s move on. So you’re gonna be helping me out with this forecast, and we’ve got so much to talk about. But there’s also been a lot of news that’s happened over the past month, so why don’t we transition to talking about news stories and some of the astrology associated with those stories at this point.
So we’re recording this episode today on March 31st, and this is about a week after the Libra eclipse; the lunar eclipse just took place on March 25th. So there’s a bunch of news stories surrounding that lunar eclipse that we’re gonna mention here right at the top of the episode. And we’re also about a week before the major Aries eclipse that’s about to take place on April 8th. So we’re kind of like, right in that what we call “eclipse season” at this point where there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of major stories. But luckily, some of them have already started to take place. So let’s talk about some of those now. Have you been feeling it with, like, eclipse season lately?
DRH: Oh, a hundred percent. And I really feel like this particular eclipse season had a very long preamble to it, and I know myself and a lot of other people were really feeling it for basically almost a whole month prior to eclipse season, which is, at least in my experience, pretty unusual for it to be so noisy surrounding an eclipse season. But the preclipse was not joking around. I almost feel like it’s easier now that we’re actually in the betwixt eclipse time period than in the pre-eclipse time period.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Just so, so, so much happening. Like, there’s no way we can talk about literally everything that’s happened, just because there’s been so much.
CB: Yeah. And there’s so many stories that were – of course, we’re not gonna be able to get through everything, but we at least wanted to highlight some of the major stories that we have like, a very clear astrological correlation with. So let’s do it. So the first one, of course, because this just occurred in the past few days, was the Baltimore bridge collapse, where a major bridge in Baltimore collapsed after it was hit by a huge container ship that like, slammed into one of the pillars and then collapsed the bridge. I wanted to mention this first, because Austin actually called this on our last forecast episode where, in the last episode that we did for the March forecast, we talked about the Mars-Saturn conjunction buildup beginning on March 22nd when Mars moved into Pisces. And I mentioned the metaphor of like, Mars-Saturn and like, slamming on the breaks, and then Austin said – and I’ll quote him here, maybe I’ll throw in the clip later in post, but he said something like,
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Yeah. I wonder if some of that will be, how should we say, some 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. Like, Saturn likes to clog and slow down Pisces, the water. We’ve already had – 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.
CB: So I thought that was amazing. And I saw – there was a Washington Post story on March 27th that was titled, “See How the Key Bridge Collapse will Disrupt the Supply of Cars, Coal, and Tofu” because it’s not just that, but it was like, I think it was like, the 3rd biggest port on the east coast of the United States, so it’s something that’s affecting, potentially, shipping and the movement of goods by sea and stuff in a larger, global way.
DRH: Yeah. And Baltimore has been a really key port in the United States since its inception. Like, it was actually a primary slave-trading hub back when slavery still existed in the US in the formal way that we understand it. One of the things that I thought was really striking about the imagery of the bridge collapse is how much it really seemed to encapsulate the South Node lunar eclipse in Libra, where here we have this – literally, you know, it’s like a bridge structure which is balancing something on top of other things that’s just collapsing instead of actually being able to sustain. And the fact that it’s also affecting trade, and Libra’s symbol is literally like, the scales that you use to weigh goods at a marketplace – really quite astounding.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: On multiple levels.
CB: Yeah. It’s just incredibly literal. And so here’s the chart for the bridge collapse. It was March 26th. It was actually at 1:27 AM, and it was weird because I was like, going to bed not long after that, I happened to see it. Like, that night on Twitter, they had already posted it. But this was, of course, just a day after the lunar eclipse had just occurred in Libra and the Moon was still in Libra in this chart conjunct the South Node. And Mars was just at two degrees of Pisces, so Mars had just ingressed into Pisces. But one of the things we’ve always emphasized is as soon as two planets move into the same sign, like that conjunction becomes operative, and that’s part of what was happening there is that Mars-Saturn conjunction became operative at that point.
so that’s notable. And weirdly, my friend Patrick Watson pointed out that we actually have the birth chart of the bridge itself, which officially opened and was like, launched in a public ceremony on March 23rd 1977 around 10 AM. So we even have like, roughly a birth —
DRH: Wow.
CB: — time and a rising sign. So the bridge itself had Gemini rising, and it had Mars at two degrees of Pisces in the 10th whole sign house near the Midheaven. It was basically culminating at that time. So that was weird. What’s eerie about it – it was a perfect Mars return for the bridge. Exactly like, 47 years basically since it opened, it had this Mars return with Mars in a day chart in the 10th house, and then the bridge basically dies or like, collapses at that time.
DRH: That’s wild. It’s also the bridge’s Uranus opposition. And the Moon in this birth chart is conjoined the Jupiter in the collapse chart.
CB: Oh wow. That’s a great, great call.
DRH: It’s also the nodal opposition time period for the bridge. That is – and Chiron return time period. That’s wild.
CB: Yeah. So there’s a lot, like, you know, bridgeology that’s gonna be an emerging field in terms of study of the astrology of bridges. But there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. And that 47 year period is interesting because that was something that came up recently on the podcast where I was studying Babylon goal year periods, where we all know like, the synodic periods of the planets – like, eights years of Venus or 30 years of Saturn. But the Babylonians had much longer periods that stretched out further decades where there would be an exact recurrence between the Sun on a certain date and the planet, and 47 years was one of the goal year periods for Mars that they really emphasized and focused on. So this led to a whole discussion Patrick and I had in an episode of The Casual Astrology Podcast I just recorded the other day for patrons I’m about to release. But it got me really into studying this, and it reminded me – because the Antikythera mechanism, which I did just an episode on, the astronomy built into that is based on those goal year periods, and that’s how it was able to calculate planetary positions by taking cycles like that that the Mesopotamian astrologers had discovered into account.
DRH: Wow.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: That’s so cool. Astrology is so cool.
CB: Yeah. There’s so much.
DRH: It never ends.
CB: Right. There’s one other piece to that I just remembered we needed to mention as well, which is in the year ahead forecast when we were talking about the Mars-Saturn conjunction at this time – one of the things that I brought up was discussions about possible water pollution, and I might have a – there’s a clip, and I’m not gonna read it here, but I’ll probably put a clip in in post where we were talking about that and the issue of the water being polluted or poisoned.
AC: Yeah, and the Mars-Saturn cycle, which is a two-year cycle. You know, the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which marks the beginning and end of those, is sort of like a New Moon for double malefic things. And as Chris said, this will be water element, so, you know, we’ll be looking for boat-on-boat violence. We’ll be looking for destructive waves, destructive storms and floods, et cetera.
CB: Yeah, the water being polluted or like, being poisoned. You know, maybe this is when the orcas stage their revolution and start taking over countries. That’s when the ‘Orca War of 2024’ really begins.
And one of the stories I saw from the bridge collapse in the past few days from the Washington Post, it was titled, “What We Know and What We Don’t Know About Pollution from the Key Bridge Collapse.” Containers containing hazardous materials were damaged, and there’s a sheen on the water. So recovery work runs the risk of stirring up toxic sediments.
DRH: Oh.
CB: So there’s a whole issue with like, the water potentially being poisoned or having chemicals or oil or other things out and dealing with that as part of this at the same time.
DRH: Yeah. I wonder what we’ll see about that in terms of the April Mars-Saturn conjunction, which we’ll get to, but yeah.
CB: Yeah. Totally. All right. So I think that’s good for that news story.
All right, so moving on. Another major eclipse story – this happened like, right on the eclipse. The UN Security Council vote where the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and this happened on Monday, March 25th, which was literally the same day as the eclipse. I think it was just like, hours after the lunar eclipse in Libra. So this was important because it actually tied in with stuff we’ve been talking about in the past few forecasts where, on the last forecast we talked about how we expected that eclipse to be connected to Israel and Palestine because it connected back to the Libra eclipse that occurred in October when everything began. So what ended up happening is the US abstained from the vote on the Security Council which allowed the vote to proceed, and this seems to be part of the wider rift that’s starting to form between the Biden administration and Netanyahu’s government that’s becoming more and more apparent over the past month through a few other things as well. So at this point, everyone’s still holding their breath to see if Israel will do a full-scale invasion of Rafah, which would result in a huge amount of civilian casualties and create an even worse humanitarian crisis than already exists. But for that, we’ll have to see what happens with the Aries eclipse that’s coming up on April 8th as well as then there’ll be one more Libra eclipse in early October of 2024, which should tie together the events of the previous two eclipses as well.
DRH: Yeah, and, you know, one thing that I’ve found supportive astrologically when it comes to the ongoing crisis that’s happening in Palestine right now is actually the work of Ali Olomi and how he’s been incorporating medieval, Islamic – mundane astrological techniques into a comprehension of what all is happening here. And I am reservedly hopeful about ongoing shifts that come along with the UN Security Council vote and also what seems to be a growing amount of willingness for various governments to stand against the humanitarian crisis component of this particular circumstance.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Well, we’ll see what happens with this next eclipse coming up just next week, and then, yeah, the broader story that we just keep seeing play out with these eclipses between now and six months from now as well.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So in other news, another big story that was like, all over the news over the past month was Kate Middleton, where there was a lot of controversy and speculation surrounding Kate Middleton and the British royal family where she hadn’t been seen or photographed in months, and speculations about why abounded. So this got particularly intense when a doctored photo of her was released and then retracted by the press in a pretty striking fashion that we hadn’t really seen before. And some of the speculation got really wild and honestly kind of crazy. But she was eventually, as a result of that, forced to release a video where she said that she had cancer and was about to undergo chemotherapy. So this announcement happened on March 22nd, which interestingly was just within 24 hours of the Venus-Saturn conjunction in Pisces going exact. And the Moon was actually moving through Virgo that day – I was watching it – and opposing the Venus-Saturn conjunction when she put out the announcement. So this was another call – Patrick and Nick actually ended up kind of calling this one when they did a Venus-Saturn episode of The Astrology Livestream, which is their new show on YouTube, and they talked about the symbolism having to do potentially with like, Venus, the planet, generally being associated with women in general being exalted in the sign of Pisces and that representing royalty, but then coming into a conjunction with Saturn indicating being sick. And they didn’t get that specific about it, but they ended up thinking that it could have to do with her – that conjunction was coming up about a week away – and then indeed she did release that announcement on that conjunction, so I thought it was kind of striking.
DRH: Yeah. Super striking. And, you know, there’s the additional layers of, you know, Kate herself is an eclipse baby. Like, she was born around an eclipse. And there’s just this super fascinating ongoing relationship between eclipses and what’s happening with the British monarchy specifically. So, you know, even just thinking about, you know, it’s like King Charles is also being treated for cancer, right? Am I getting that correct? I am not —
CB: Yeah.
DRH: — a super royals-oriented person. But yeah, it’s interesting seeing this kind of thing play out with both the eldest section of the family and then the section of the family that’s next in line successively, I guess. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. There’s something crazy going on there because, yeah, both of them were diagnosed with cancer in the past few months, and then —
DRH: Yep.
CB: — we had talked in the last forecast episode about how the Pisces eclipse later this year in like, October would be in William’s 4th house related to the father. But then, yeah, Kate Middleton was also, like William, born very close to or right on an eclipse. Here’s her chart; she was actually born on a lunar eclipse, literally the same day as a lunar eclipse, on January 9th 1982. And then, yeah, like you said, her announcement here was just days before that lunar eclipse in Libra.
DRH: Yeah. Wild stuff.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll have to see how that continues to play out, like with some of these other stories, where we can expect some of the next developments in their sort of family saga will also probably continue to play out with important turning points happening around the time of eclipses in the future – perhaps both connected with this Aries eclipse next week but also especially those ones coming up later this year.
DRH: Yep.
CB: All right. In other eclipse news, Beyoncé dropped a new album on March 29th, and this is just days after that Libra eclipse. And she, of course, famously has a huge stellium of planets in her birth chart in the sign of Libra.
DRH: Yeah. And as we were preparing for this, I was really thinking about how, you know, the South Node passing through a given part of someone’s chart can seem like a lot of things just leaving, but it can also be literal releasing things, like, “Here’s a bunch of stuff that I’ve been accumulating, and now I’m actually letting it out into the world,” and that seems to be the case with this particular album where it’s clear that this has been an album many years in the making with a lot of different influences and collaborations. You know, I saw someone commenting on the fact that with this particular album, the credits for every track are huge, which feels super Libran. Like, we are making art, like, in an ensemble way, even if the headliner is perpetually and forever Beyoncé.
CB: Totally. Yeah, that collaborative approach really makes a lot of sense in terms of that. So here’s her birth chart, for those watching the video version, where Beyoncé famously has the Sun in Virgo, which she references regularly and is mentioned again in one of the tracks on the new album, but then also has Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Pluto all in Libra as well at the same time.
DRH: Yeah. And we don’t have an official birth chart for Beyoncé, like in the terms of we don’t have a birth time for her, but it is interesting looking at the releases of her albums and how frequently the Moon is some sort of technically harshed, right? It’s not a technically – like, the Moon in these release charts are not Moons that you would recommend, generally speaking, for elections, but do seem to link into her own Scorpio Moon in interesting ways.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially this one, because it’s supposedly going against – it’s a country album, which is not her usual genre, but it’s interesting how that plays into some of her transits that she’s having right now. Leisa Schaim pointed out to me that the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction right now in Taurus is opposing her natal Uranus-Moon conjunction in Scorpio, and so that may be part of that drive to like, break out from or do the thing that other people like, say you can’t do or something like that.
DRH: Yeah. And then do it really well.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. It’s actually a really good album. Do you have a favorite song from it?
DRH: Not yet. I tend to postpone choosing a favorite until I’ve had a decent amount of digestion of a new particular musical snack, but —
CB: Okay.
DRH: — I know I will. I really like the fresh Jolene, but that’s in part because I also love Dolly, so. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. My favorite track so far is Bodyguard, but we’ll see how it goes.
DRH: Yep.
CB: All right. Other astrology stuff I tried to look at… So one of the things, supposedly, in the news today that she performed in 2016, that the album is supposed to be partially inspired by or partially a result of a potentially negative experience that speculated that she had in 2016 where on social media she posted that she was inspired by “an experience had years ago where she did not feel welcomed and that it was clear that she wasn’t.” And so people have speculated that this was referring to an incident at the 2016 Country Music Awards where she gave a performance, and that like, she just got major pushback from in terms of the audience there and then online afterwards. And so I was looking up the astrology of this, and apparently it happened November 2nd 2016, and at that time, Saturn was at 14 degrees of Sagittarius. So Saturn right now is at like, 13 Pisces, so this is the Saturn square – the waxing Saturn square – relative to that. And of course, with her Sun at 12 degrees of Virgo, her Sun is like, very tied in with that, because Saturn would have been squaring it then, so it’s opposing it now. And so we see her – this is like a striking comeback or pushback, you know, to that from 2016, and I just found out that she’s actually gonna be performing at the Country Music Awards here just next week right on the eclipse. That performance is supposed to be on like, the 7th I think, and the eclipse is —
DRH: Yeah, it’s like the day before the eclipse.
CB: Yeah. So she’s gonna present like, right on that eclipse.
DRH: This is also really interesting thinking about the Saturn in Pisces of it. You know, Austin has talked about this, and then Jeanna Kadlec, who is another astrologer, obviously, has talked a lot about the art productions that happen with Saturn in Pisces and especially the process of world-building, understanding that world-building is very often an effort that includes dismantling or renegotiation previous conceptions of how the world is structured. And I feel like with this particular album, it’s pointing out the falsity, I guess, of particular kinds of compartmentalizations or divisions when it comes to genre and then race especially – like, race relations here in the United States – as well as an acknowledgment of history, which really brings the Saturn in. It’s just like, can we actually get back into the actual roots of a lot of these things and allow those roots to bear different fruits now? So I think that’s very satisfying, to me, to witness.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good astrology and everything else. I love seeing the way that that’s tied in with everything. All right. And then I tried to look up – because this album came out on an eclipse – I tried to look at if she’d had other albums come out on eclipses, and I only found three. The album B’Day was released on an eclipse or close to one. The album 4 was released right in the middle of a really intense eclipse season, and then the only other one was The Lion King album that she was heavily involved with back in like, 2019 was also released on or near an eclipse.
DRH: Yep. Again, just super fascinated by how harshed the Moon often is in her release charts but how deeply influential her work is – like, successful and influential her work is.
CB: Right. Yeah.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Anything else?
DRH: I don’t think so, no.
CB: Okay. All right.
DRH: I mean, I could keep talking about Beyoncé , but we don’t need to do that.
CB: Sure. Maybe next we’ll have to work on an episode about, because there’s lots of other speculation about like, her birth time and whether any of this like, ties in with that.
DRH: Yeah, I’m a hundred percent sure there are some astro Twitter like, smarties who would have really intelligent and potentially off-the-rocker things to say about this.
CB: Okay. All right. Well, maybe they can drop us a comment on the YouTube video for this. Moving on to other news – another big story is that on March 20th the company Neuralink released a video of their first human trial where they released a video of this guy, his name is Noland Arbaugh, and he is a quadriplegic who was in an accident in 2016 and he can’t move his body from the shoulders down. So they had implanted this device in his brain which is allowing him to control a cursor, and in the video, he was actually playing chess with his mind, which was crazy seeing that this is really happening. So he said that he stayed up the first night after he got it playing a video game until like, 6:00 AM, which I thought was really funny and entertaining. He was playing like, Civilization. And what I thought was notable, though, in terms of the astrology – aside from the fact that this announcement came out within a week of that eclipse in Libra – but in the news stories he said that he’s 29 years old, so this is actually his Saturn return. And it said that he was paralyzed in a freak accident while he was like, a camp counselor, and there was some sort of maybe diving accident eight years ago in 2016, and so that was when Saturn was in Sagittarius. And therefore, the accident happened at his waning Saturn square, and now that he’s, you know, gotten some ability to do this with his mind and control a computer, he’s at his Saturn return almost exactly right now.
DRH: Yeah, and I feel like this is a great example of the way that sometimes the Saturn return is sort of like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again insofar as negative consequences of stuff that happens in your 20s can actually lead to or end with new ways of existing that are facilitating, like, you know, a cheesy line, but it’s like a new lease on life in some way. A new engagement with life.
CB: Totally. Yeah, for sure. And it’s also, like with the parallel with Beyoncé, there’s some sort of parallel there, because for him it’s even more crucial because it’s his Saturn return, obviously. But again, just the connection between like, the sometimes something that happens – for both of them, something crucial happened in 2016 when Saturn was in the middle of Sagittarius, and then, you know, that seven to eight years later when Saturn hits the next square there will be a turning point with respect to what occurred back during that time.
DRH: Yep. Hundred percent.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that was one that we’ll be following since the technology is just moving so rapidly. We’re moving into a very different world, so we’ll have to see —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: — where that goes.
DRH: Oh! Wasn’t this the one too – this is right after the Sun entered Aries, and so this is also the Sun sextile Pluto in Aquarius. And I’m continuing to watch how, like particularly with the Sun as it’s moving through the zodiac and interacting with Pluto, how that seems to be pinging some of the Pluto in Aquarius themes or like, literally Illuminating the Pluto in Aquarius themes. And I think this one is brilliant, too, because it’s literally something that’s implanted in somebody’s head, which is the body part associated with Aries. And it’s allowing for a profound transformation of interconnectivity, which we can tie in with Pluto in Aquarius.
CB: That’s a great point. I like that. All right. So moving on to other news stories real quickly… One of the ones just to mention in passing because I was impressed by the astrology, but Biden’s State of the Union that he gave earlier this month. The Moon was conjoining Mars that night, and I just happened to like, catch the State of the Union. I was watching something else on YouTube, and then it just like, recommended it to me, so I glanced at it. And I was actually surprised at how, like, feisty or like, fiery and energetic he was being that night, and I glanced at the chart at the time, and I noticed that the Moon was literally conjoining Mars. And the speech afterwards was just like, widely said to be “fiery,” and I have all these sort of headlines of like, the Washington Post and other outlets saying things like that in the immediate aftermath. Like, this Washington Post one – “Biden delivers State of the Union with fiery political tone” – and it just has this like, picture of him looking almost like, angry or something. So I thought that was pretty impressive in terms of the astrology of a Moon-Mars conjunction. Leisa Schaim pointed out to me that he also had Mars was transiting his 3rd house of communication, where it was squaring transiting Uranus and making a pretty exact trine to his natal Midheaven. And in fact, both Mars and Uranus were just within two to three degrees of making hard aspects with his natal Mercury at that time, which is at his natal Mercury’s at 21 Scorpio. And finally, transiting Jupiter was exactly opposite his natal Mars, literally almost to the minute. So yeah. Sometimes astrology is very literal. You get Mars transits, you get like, fiery communication and like, speeches.
DRH: Spicy happens.
CB: Spicy happens. That’s good. That’s a good one. That would be a good t-shirt. All right. So that’s all I wanted to mention about that. Other news stories… This is another eclipse story. Kind of crazy how this one’s tied in; we’ve seen this play out over the past few years, but Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on March 28th, which is just three days after the eclipse on March 25th. So his entire story has been tied in with eclipses. Back a couple of years ago, it started with the Luna sort of Bitcoin alternative crashed, and that happened exactly on an eclipse. Then six months after that, Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, there was a scandal, and a huge crash happened right on the eclipse at that time. And this was said to be one of the biggest financial frauds in US history, and it was the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world that crashed at that time and was also a huge hit to Bitcoin’s value and reliability, which just crashed at that time for a while. So his trial ended on November 2nd, and he was found guilty on all seven counts, and that was right on an eclipse. And then six months later, we saw him just now sentenced to 25 years in prison on March 28th on an eclipse. So sometimes, people’s stories just get tied in with eclipses in really striking ways, and for him – yeah – for him, and a lot of other people who lost so much money with that, in a very negative way sometimes.
DRH: Yeah. I’m just so astounded by how literal it’s been, as well as just thinking about how much with eclipses we have a literal obscuration of light which allows other things to be revealed, which can be really useful for the revelation of things like fraud, as well as just like, inversions of right action would be one way of putting it as well.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good one. And also sometimes things that involve like, collectives, because in that case it’s not just him being sentenced to jail, which is like his personal story, but also the impact that that had on many people as a result of the financial fraud and everything else.
DRH: Yeah. I mean, leaders, CEOs, things like that, like, they’re functionally, we can consider them a type of king. And the stories of how eclipses can dethrone kings, I think, becomes more contemporarily applicable when we consider these leaders whose choices do have significant material impacts on other people as, you know, functionally, they’re kings. So here’s one that tumbled pretty hard.
CB: Yeah. That’s a great point. I think maybe broadly symbolically we could connect that also with, you know, in ancient astrology, the Sun is associated with like, the king or ruler or leaders, whereas – and that idea of like, a singular person – versus the Moon is associated with groups and with the masses and with the public. And with eclipses, we see the united of those two bodies so that you get that turning point that involves both a singular person but also how what they’re doing affects large groups of people and affects the masses.
DRH: Yeah. And it’s a real reminder of the… I don’t know, the mythology of individuality? Like, the mythology that your choices are only your choices. Like, there’s actually more or less significant webs of influence out from your own choices, and the more influence you have, the more your choices affect other people.
CB: Yeah. For sure. All right. So somehow we’ve like, zoomed through the news stories and we’re only like – we were shooting for an hour for news and we’re only 40 minutes into this.
DRH: Cool. Good thing we have some extras.
CB: Yeah. I guess we can do some of the extra ones then. So weird stuff that’s happened – one of the things I just discovered that kind of ties in with the forecast but it’s kind of newsy is it’s been speculated recently that there’s a nova that’s gonna appear, like a new star, in the night sky that’s gonna become visible at some point between now and September. But it could become visible any day. And apparently, this thing shows up about every 80 years, and the last time it happened was in 1946. So it should be visible to the naked eye, but it’s like, I was just shaking my head when I first heard about this, because it’s like, if we don’t have enough astrology going on already, now there’s also possibly gonna be like, a new star that shows up in the night sky.
DRH: Yeah. And in one of the articles that I was reading about it, they were commenting on how there’s record of it in some monk’s writing from like, 1216 or something. I’m getting my details a little bit incorrect, but just the idea that there’s this consistent but very like, long – like, there’s a length to its temporality. Like, I don’t know, it almost feels like an inflorescence, like a stellar inflorescence, that appears in the sky. So it’s like, okay, we have eclipses. We have a comet. We have a nova – all happening at once.
CB: All happening. Yeah.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: This is just a crazy year for the astrology, but also just a crazy month for the astrology. Like, it’s truly, obviously like, some major turning points in world events are happening or are about to happen right now. And it’s really wild. I mean, I haven’t seen anything that felt like that since like, 2020, where in late 2019, we did the year ahead forecast, we could just like, see that cluster of all those planets just like, lining up in Capricorn and Aquarius in March and April of 2020, and then everything that happened then. I haven’t sort of had that feeling since then until now.
DRH: Until now. One thing I want to point out is like, this particular nova is happening in the constellation Corona Borealis, which is, you know, it’s not a huge constellation. It’s just like, a little line. But it’s literally a crown. And if we layer this with the fact that it’s like, the April 8th eclipse, which we will talk about at length in a second, you know, that is an eclipse in the sign of the Sun’s exaltation, which, you know, the Sun is already the king of the solar system. Like, we literally don’t have a solar system without the Sun. And the eclipse is a solar eclipse in the Sun’s place where it’s like, the most crowned version of itself. And then we have a nova in a constellation that is a crown, right? And it’s like the story, at least within Greek mythology as I understand it, ties it into Dionysus and Ariadne, but still it’s a crown.
CB: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’d almost wonder if that invokes symbolically themes of like, rulers or leaders becoming relevant in this time in some way, which is already kind of implied by the solar eclipse being in Aries, which is also one of the royal signs in ancient astrology.
DRH: Yeah. And, you know, what’s happening, like we’ve already mentioned the stuff with the British royal family, Beyoncé is without a doubt like, the pop royalty of this time period. I’m sure people will wanna argue with me on that, but she’s Beyoncé.
CB: Who’s gonna argue with that? Like —
DRH: Somebody! Somebody’s gonna try to make that, like, yeah. But yeah, it’s just really – and it’s an election year in the United States. We have so many different protests happening around the world around the wielding of resources that are collected from citizens. Yeah, there’s a very interesting patterning here when it comes to leadership and the people’s trust in leadership, I would say.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Well, I mean, I guess speaking of that, some of the minor news stories that I had set aside – one of the ones that’s weird is there’s this movie called Civil War that’s coming out, and I just found out that it’s about to come out within days of the eclipse. So the eclipse is April 8th, and it’s happening across American, and then on April 12th, this movie comes out, and it’s about what would happen if there was a modern day Civil War. And it’s a little eerie. It was apparently funded by the Obama production company, if that’s true, that’s being reported, who also recently funded another movie called Leave the World Behind, which had somewhat similar themes of some things happening. So it’s almost like they’re trying to… I mean, nobody knows; we’re all like, speculating of like, why that is, but presumably trying to warn people of removing the weird like, glamorization of something like that that some people might have or to warn people about the dangers or horrors of something like that perhaps.
DRH: Yeah. And when we were talking about this earlier, I was also reminded of the way that media will sometimes very creepily reflect what’s actually happening whenever it comes out, even if it was started before those things were particularly obvious, right? So like, one of the examples that I provided was the TV show Station Eleven, which was based on a book also called Station Eleven, which was, you know, production and all of that started way before the the pandemic occurred, but came out during the pandemic, and the themes of that particular storyline are what are the consequences of a particularly fatal pandemic taking out a large majority of humanity on a global scale?
CB: Wow. Yeah. I remember I think there was speculation that the James Bond movie that came out that year also had that as like, a core component, but that they shelved it and like, edited those part out, and then —
DRH: Oh, interesting.
CB: — like, released it later that year. I don’t know if that’s true, because it’s speculation, but yeah. I mean, maybe some of the underlying thing there is just like, sometimes the archetype of the energy of that time which we can see in astrology is sometimes like, bursting forth in different ways in different levels of like, society and culture.
DRH: Yeah. For some reason, I’m even thinking about how it’s like, you don’t get your natal chart until you’re born, but you are conceived many months before you were born, if that makes sense. So it’s like, the conceptions of these projects, these movies, TV shows, albums, all of this kind of stuff, growing towards an emergence that lines up perfectly with their themes.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. In other miscellaneous sort of creepy news, Trump released a Bible where – he published a Bible and this happened to happen like, right on the eclipse, which I thought was weird because the eclipse was in his third house of communication. And it was kind of a weird, bizarre thing, because it’s like a Bible but he combined it with the US Constitution and a bunch of other stuff sort of erasing some of the principles in those documents about the separation between church and state. And yeah, that might be relevant in terms of things since we’re also all going to be wondering in terms of the things that are coming up later this year and some of the astrology with that with the Mars retrograde that takes place just after the election.
DRH: Yeah. A hundred percent. And yeah, I don’t want to go in that direction, but like, yes.
CB: Yeah. That’s fine.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: That’s fine.
DRH: I did want to bring up the stranded orca that happened in British Columbia that happened literally the day after Mars went into Pisces. And so this orca mom showed up with her two-year-old orca child, and the understanding at this point is that she was in the midst of teaching her child how to hunt seals in the area, but it was an area that has like, really rapid tide changes, and so she ended up stranded. And the local people tried to keep her alive, but whenever they found her, she literally still had a seal in her mouth when she was stranded. So we actually do have a chart for whenever she passed later that morning, but I think with like, the Mars-Saturn Pisces and like, violence but also challenges in the ocean, and I know that you’ve been thinking about Mars-Saturn in Pisces and like, is this when we actually get like, hardercore Orca Revolution happening?
CB: Yeah, that was the joke I made on like, the 2024 forecast, which is funny then that that came up as a literal thing here, just because a bunch of those orca attacks on boats were happening when Saturn was getting activated last year.
DRH: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I think it’s really fascinating to dig into this stuff, and astrologer Alex Mikinaak has actually been doing a lot of research into orca stuff, and there are so many stories related to human-orca relations, especially in like, the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, that are actually tied into the Saturn in Pisces cycle. So yeah, that was really interesting.
CB: Yeah, that is super interesting. It’ll be interesting to see if we have a continuation of those stories with things related to the ocean and sea life and other things like that, both with this Mars-Saturn conjunction coming up, but also continuing to follow that while Saturn continues transiting through Pisces over the next year or so.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Hundred percent.
CB: Other news – somebody sent me a thing saying that Pluto just officially became the state planet of Arizona, which is —
DRH: What?
CB: — interesting and kind of weird. Because I think Arizona is where Pluto was discovered by like, Clyde Tombaugh or whoever that discovered it. I think their —
DRH: Wow.
CB: — observatory was based in Arizona.
DRH: Wow. That’s wild.
CB: Yeah. I didn’t know if —
DRH: I didn’t know states had state planets!
CB: I didn’t know either. I mean, that’s pretty cool. I think, you know, it would be funny if different states did all then scramble to like, pick different planets or other celestial bodies that they call for, like, just like your state flower.
DRH: Yeah. Wow. I feel like there’s so much potential here to like, even just start having a fun time assigning planets to states based on state culture.
CB: Totally. All right. Did you have any other news stories? I only have like, one more.
DRH: Nothing that feels particularly like, urgent or stark in this moment.
CB: Sure. That’s fine. So the last thing I had was from a listener and patron named Cindy who went this in about the Wordle of the day. On March 22nd, the Wordle answer for the day was “decay,” but Cindy said that it seems like a significant number of people guessed that the word was “decan” or “decan,” referring to the ancient, you know, Egyptian and traditional astrology concept of those 10-degree segments of the zodiac or of the ecliptic from 2,000 years ago or actually more. The decans go back at least 3,000 years. So Cindy said that so many people actually guessed “decan” that it was much to the surprised of the New York Times Wordle editor. And she said the editor said that seven percent of Wordle players guessed “decan,” a word that has never been printed in the entirety of the New York Times history, the editor looked up and said later. And the editor later said that they attributed it to the popularity of astrology rather than a misspelling of deacon. So I was looking up the numbers, because they said something about out of a base of 200,000ish people that play the Wordle game, and seven percent of that is something like 14,000 people, so I was really kind of blown away by those numbers of like, 14,000 people guessed “decan.”
DRH: Yeah. I mean, again, it’s like a real testament to how popular traditional astrology is among word game players, I guess? Yeah. It’s super fascinating.
CB: Yeah. It’s really cool. So shout out to Cindy and thanks for sending that in. All right. I think that’s good. That’s all the news that I prepared. There’s other news stories – a lot of other stuff happened over the course the past month, but I tend to just focus on the ones that I have a really clear like, astrological correlation to mention, because otherwise it’s not like a news program; it’s an astrology show. But we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks and if other stuff comes up here between now and our next episode. But why don’t we make a transition then, perhaps, to talking about the forecast?
All right, I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is taking place May 23rd through the 27th, 2024. So NORWAC is an annual conference that happens every year in May, and it’s like that first astrology conference that everybody goes to, and it’s really the main one that’s still around at this point after other conferences were kind of interrupted by covid. But NORWAC has kept going. So NORWAC has more than 30 speakers, 30 different astrologers, and five simultaneous tracks of different lectures that’ll be going at the same time, plus a number of different pre- and post-conference workshops that you can attend to do a full day-long intensive on a specific topic. So the in-person conference for NORWAC is actually sold out; they are just like, completely booked out at this point. However, they’re also doing a virtual conference, which is still open, and there are plenty of spots available.
So with the virtual conference, you can actually attend the conference online through Zoom and still interact and submit comments and questions and watch all of the lectures live, just like you were there in person. So they’re gonna have Zoom room monitors stationed in each lecture room who are ready to pass along questions to the speakers from the virtual attendees in order to incorporate them into the conference. There’s also a virtual conference only perq where they’ve scheduled speaker Q&As during most of the breaks throughout the conference. So virtual attendees will be able to access the Q&A Zoom room through the conference schedule. Nicholas Polimenakos, friend of the show, and Laura Nalbandian will be switching out doing moderating duties for these sessions, and they’re gonna create breakout rooms for each of the speakers, and attendees can self-select who they’d like to chat with. So the same Zoom room will be open throughout the conference and every evening for virtual attendees to gather and chat. So you can find out more information or you can sign up at NORWAC.net, and I’ll put a link in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website at TheAstrologyPodcast.com for this episode.
And you, Diana, are actually gonna be speaking at NORWAC this year, right?
DRH: I am. I’m really excited. I opted out of last year because I was exhausted, but this year I will be presenting a lecture called “Infinite Resourcing: Seeing From the Second House,” which is an outgrowth from a workshop that I put together in 2022 on the first and second houses and identifying and resourcing beyond financial stuff. And then I am a ball of nerves about the fact that I will also be presenting my first keynote, called “The Astrological Practices Love Practice,” which is… I don’t know; I’m really excited about it, because like, I’m really into very expensive concepts of love and how astrology fits into that and that’s what I will hopefully not throw up about while I’m keynoting, so. Yeah.
CB: That’s so exciting; you’re doing your first keynote.
DRH: Yeah. I’m trying not to think of it as a keynote and just a lecture, because if I think about the fact that it’s a keynote, I do wanna curl into a ball and hide under my desk, so. Yeah.
CB: Well, maybe a tip – you know, one of those classic tips usually is like, pretend that the entire audience is naked, but probably our version of that would be pretend that you can see everybody’s birth chart above —
DRH: Ooh!
CB: — their head like, as you’re giving the lecture.
DRH: Yeah. I can see where everybody’s tender spots are via their charts.
CB: Exactly.
DRH: That sounds like thinking too much, but yeah.
CB: Yeah. I would honestly get way distracted if that was the case. I wouldn’t be able to focus.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: All right, cool. Well, that will be awesome to have everybody attend the Northwest Astrology Conference. It’s gonna be a great conference. Lots of really great lectures and lots of speakers. So yeah, like I said, go to the website, which is NORWAC norwac.net.
all right. So why don’t we make a transition into talking about the forecast for April at this point?
DRH: Yeah. Let’s do it.
CB: All right.
DRH: It is the season.
CB: It is time. All right. So here’s a quick glance again at the planetary alignments calendar just showing you the astrology of April once again that we’re gonna be talking about here. And basically where do we start? There’s like, so much happening. There’s so much going on. Shall we take it just chronologically from the top of the month and work our way through?
DRH: Yeah. I think I really wanna start with just mentioning the fact that there’s astrology happening in three consecutive signs. Like, the majority of the astrology is happening in Pisces, Aries, and Taurus, which means that we have astrology happening in ways that will create hard aspects with every modality in the chart. So I think, like, before we’re getting into the specifics, like this is a month where everyone is going to be feeling it somewhere, and probably in multiple areas. So cardinal signs are gonna be getting hit by the Aries stuff. Fixed signs are gonna be getting hit by the Taurus stuff. And mutable signs are gonna be getting hit by the Pisces stuff. Nobody is coming out without a hard aspect from a by-sign perspective. But it also means like, all the water signs are getting trines, all the fire signs are getting trines, all the earth signs are getting trines, too. So there’s something I think really interesting around keeping in mind that there’s not really a place to hide would maybe be one way of putting it. Like, everyone’s charts getting it.
CB: Yeah. That’s a great point that with those hard aspects, everybody’s gonna be getting hit with some sort of change, but then with some of the soft aspects, there’ll be opportunities for like, growth and positive developments at the same time.
DRH: Yeah. Exactly. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, chronological make sense, so.
CB: Sure. In terms of big picture stuff for me, the only thing I wanted to mention is I think there’s a clear distinction between like, the first half of the month and the second half of the month where you can almost draw some kind of dividing line here-ish where you have all the really crazy, let’s say tense stuff in the first half of the month, which is Mercury retrograde, solar eclipse in Aries, and Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces. That’s all the really tense stuff that’s gonna be kind of more challenging and difficult to deal with. Whereas by the second half of the month, Mercury stations direct, so we start seeing the resolution of some of the sort of Mercury retrograde activities that started at the beginning of the month with like, delays, having to go back and look at the past, miscommunication, and things like that, and that turning point takes place around the 11th when the Sun-Mercury conjunction happens. The second half of the month also has the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is the biggest outer planet alignment of the month, but it’s also one of the more positive ones where even though that can be a little bit destabilizing sometimes, it also tends to be a pretty positive growth-oriented configuration that I think for the most part will lean more positive than the more problematic or challenging things or energies at the beginning of the month.
DRH: Yeah. I mean, and then there’s also the Mars-Neptune conjunction at the end, like right towards the end of the month, that’s you know, currently pretending to be a Venus-Neptune conjunction – which, because Neptune is involved, is hilarious. But, you know, that one feels like it has the potential of being a softener, especially hand-in-hand with like, Jupiter-Uranus like, surprising destabilizations that undercut aggression could maybe even be one way of putting it. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So that’s the big picture stuff. Why don’t we dive into and talk about things chronologically starting with the top of the month with our very first aspect, which is… We’re recording this on the 31st, so literally tomorrow, which I think is when I’m gonna release this episode. On April 1st, Mercury is stationary and is going to be stationing retrograde at 27 degrees of Aries. So the month opens up with a Mercury retrograde, which is gonna last for three weeks for the first three weeks of April.
DRH: Yeah, and you know, standard Mercury retrograde stuff applies here as always. Stuff getting weird with communication, stuff getting weird with plans, things being weird with technology – all of those kinds of things. And I think particularly because it’s in Aries, there can be an increased sensation of frustration around it. One of my favorite ways to think about Mercury in Mars signs and Mars in Mercury signs is if you write out the word “swords” and then you put a parenthesis around the S, so words as swords, right? And if you’re trying to wield your words in weapon-like ways but you are being stymied in the process, you’re tripping over your own tongue constantly, there’s the frustration of not being able to say what you mean and then there’s the frustration of also not having clear communication pathways coming towards you and not being understood, like misunderstandings, I think potentially being especially like, spicy and conflictual misunderstandings potentially being heightened with this particular Mercury retrograde. And I don’t know, there’s something very… It’s like, we can talk about the word “headstrong” for Aries. And whenever you’re in a situation where you have to retrace your steps instead of continuing to barrel along the pathway, that is not comfortable for Aries energy. And when we get Mercury involved, it’s like, “Oh, I thought I was gonna go do this, but technology got in the way. I thought we were having this kind of conversation but this huge misunderstanding got in the way.” That kind of stuff.
CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. So this is like, also the Mercury retrograde scenario where it’s like, there’s a miscommunication and maybe you say something in anger, but then later you realize that there was a misunderstanding and you need to walk it back —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: — is a potential scenario for this one.
DRH: Yeah. Getting angry – it’s like, that just reminded me of like, Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Like, misunderstanding what the actual opponent is or what the actual danger is, and having to renegotiate your perception in order to find repair. Like, I’m almost thinking about like, whenever your ego bubble gets popped. Like, you have this inflated understanding of yourself, and you end up in a conflict that’s actually rooted in you not listening, for example, and then you have to re-negotiate your sense of self because you messed up.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. So yeah, misunderstandings. Miscommunications. Lost messages. Of course, another whole category of Mercury retrogrades is technology glitches, which can be things like computer problems, phone malfunctions, software bugs, website crashes – that’s a potential here. We also have travel troubles, like delays, cancellations, transportation breakdown is a potential theme for Mercury retrograde, which now that I think about is kind of tricky when it comes to like, the eclipse where so many people in the US are actually gonna be traveling to see the eclipse.
DRH: Yep.
CB: And I remember when there was the one in 2017 in Denver; I didn’t end up going to see it because there ended up being like, huge traffic jams and stuff with just like, everybody trying to get there on the highways to view it in person. So hopefully people will be careful in terms of that as well as the, you know, Mars-Saturn conjunction and issues related to that in terms of water.
DRH: Yeah. I’m even thinking about how the Mars-Saturn conjunction is occurring after the eclipse. So if people have traveled to the path of totality and then are like, hanging out for a day or two and then trying to travel during the Mars-Saturn conjunction on the 10th – like, that might end up being, especially with Mars ruling the Mercury retrograde in Aries, that might be an interesting and very literal like, blockade to transit for various reasons. Like, in this moment, I’m even thinking about if there are any areas that end up facing significant rain or flooding issues as the reason that particular transit ends up not happening around that section of the Mercury retrograde where Mars is conjunct Saturn.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. Or even just like, you travel half across the country to see the eclipse and then like, it’s overcast, and all of a sudden the plans don’t work out.
DRH: Yeah, you can’t even see it. It’s pouring rain, so you can’t even see the great ball of fire getting eclipsed, and because it’s pouring rain, it’s even harder to get anywhere. So like, if anybody is camping, for example – like, I’ve tried camping when it’s raining real hard. You end up sleeping in the car instead, so.
CB: Yeah. Well, you know, ahead of time, my condolences to those if that ends up happening in different parts of the country because that I know would be a big bummer, and would definitely feel like that Mars-Saturn conjunction.
DRH: Yep.
CB: All right. So other keywords for Mercury retrograde, because I gotta get the standard ones out, are things resurfacing from the past. So this can be like, old friends coming back into your life. This can be exes reaching out, even though that’s more of a Venus retrograde thing, sometimes it still comes up with Mercury or just like, people coming back from the past.
DRH: I call it the dude-arang. It’s like a boomerang, but a dude comes back out of nowhere. Yeah.
CB: Right. I love that. Mercury. Unfinished projects, unresolved issues coming back up and resurfacing from the past.
DRH: Particularly wherever Aries land in your chart and potentially with tie-ins to the places ruled by Mercury in your chart, so Gemini and Virgo. So Jupiter-ruled risings tend to have more of the dude-arang experience because Mercury rules the 7th house, just as an example, so yeah.
CB: Okay.
DRH: Especially like, Sag risings with Aries being the 5th house and Gemini being the 7th, yeah. You might have old lovers reemerge.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. Somebody in the chat’s talking about there’s these new stories going around that there’s like, 300 different couples that are gonna —
DRH: Whoa.
CB: — get married during the eclipse. But it’s interesting, because it makes me think of how, you know, the eclipse and the Mercury retrograde are happening in the same sign, so whatever those themes are intertwined where you have the delays or miscommunications or things resurfacing from the past happening in the Aries house of everyone’s chart, but then you also have this theme of major beginnings and major endings happening as a result of the eclipse in the same house.
DRH: Yeah, it makes me wonder too about the contract component of marriage, and Mercury having a lot to do with how you are wording your promises. So hopefully all of those couples have taken their vows seriously.
CB: Yeah. That is good advice. Other Mercury retrograde things – confusion and delays, difficulty making decisions, projects stalling, a general feeling of things being slowed down. We’ve seen that majorly in some recent like, presidential elections that involved Mercury retrogrades or Mercury stationing, especially near the day of the election, and the counting of the votes like, taking a long time and not knowing until later on. More broadly, Mercury retrogrades are also a good time for just like, introspection and a time for self-reflection, reassessment, and revisiting old ideas or old things from your past.
DRH: Yeah, there’s a really excellent opportunity with every Mercury retrograde to do I like to call it emotional composting, but I’ve recently heard some people use the phrase “emotional alchemy,” which is even more mercurial, which is deliberately going into the stories of your life and engaging with the narrative but also the emotional content in new and different ways. And I think Mercury retrogrades can really facilitate doing that in amazing ways, especially if you are sufficiently astrologically literate to root it into your chart.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. That idea of like, astrological literacy is important. And it’s interesting how many more people nowadays are astrologically literate and have that ability or have that power at this point – apparently seven percent of the Wordle players —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: — have that.
DRH: Yeah. So good.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I want to jump to the eclipse, but first, let’s move along chronologically because there’s one or two important transits right before that, which is Venus gets towards the end of Pisces where Venus conjoins Neptune, and then – that’s on the 3rd – and then the very next day, Venus goes into Aries where it catches up with Mercury and where the solar eclipse will be. So first, let’s just get some quick like, keywords for that day of the Venus-Neptune conjunction on the 3rd. What are some of your keywords for that?
DRH: Dreamy, fantastical, unrealistic. Future tripping, which is, you know, where you concoct beautiful, fantastical futures with another person that may or may not have any substance to them. It’s also very richly imaginative. Artistically inspired. Like, if I were to… Like, this might even be something I do now that I’m thinking about it. It’s like, an excellent day to like, experience particularly profound forms of art. There is an increased sensitivity to the influence of art with Venus-Neptune contacts, I have found, whether that’s music, painting, that kind of thing, or maybe putting on your favorite album and really letting yourself access your inner interpretive dancer. There’s also so much potential for deliberately cultivating a more wonder-full perspective on whatever is happening. It can be, you know, good to temper that with some amount of realism; fortunately, Saturn is currently in Pisces and that helps. But especially if you’ve been struggling with trying to find joy and stuff like that, I think Venus-Neptune contacts can really open up gates to enjoyment and pleasure again. Yeah.
CB: I love that. That’s really good. Let me see —
DRH: What about you? What do you say with Venus and Neptune?
CB: Some of my keywords that wrote down are similar to yours. Like, the first two are like, deeply creative and profound works of art. Romance, but also like, unclear boundaries, uncertain relationships where there’s some ambiguity or uncertainty about like, you know, “What is this?” or “What are we?” Also, I commonly see over-idealizing a partner is a really common Venus-Neptune theme that comes up. Not having a clear idea of somebody or having them not have a clear picture of you, but both of you having this sort of distorted view of each other like you’re looking through like, frosted glass or something like that.
DRH: Like a soft-focus filter.
CB: I like that; that’s a really good one.
DRH: Like those old glamor shots that you could get done at the mall, you know?
CB: Yeah, I have a —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Well, I have a filter I was using like, a year or two ago. I was going through some Neptune transit – I don’t remember what it was – but you’ll see some of my videos, I had a Halation filter where it was making the light bloom and like, glow a little bit more.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: So that’s a good Venus-Neptune one.
DRH: Yep.
CB: Let’s see – other things… Not having a clear idea of somebody, but also like, finding god in another was a keyword that I wrote down for this. Sometimes that can be good, but sometimes that can also be not good of the idea, again, if it’s like, misplaced in some sense. But that aspect of relationships sometimes that can have that dynamic, if that makes sense.
DRH: Yeah. There can be like, a really shiny pedestalization thing that happens that ends up actually dehumanizing one or both parties. Like, I’m reminded there was this piece of art – I’ll see if I can find it, because I retweeted it at one point when there was a Venus-Neptune thing happening – but this artist put like, in the gallery, there was a pillar and then on top of it there was like, a green glass woman who was like, melting off of the pillar. And that is kind of seared into my head as like, a really good example of the pedestalization component that Venus-Neptune can bring forward where it’s like, the beloved, the other, is like, so perfect and so close to god. So divine, so exquisite, that there’s no room for the other person to actually be human, and that ends up being really ultimately degrading to the relationship.
CB: Totally.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, of course I’m sure with this Venus-Neptune conjunction going exact, we keep seeing the Saturn-Neptune in Pisces stuff activating different versions of some of the things that are happening with like, AI artwork or more recently now video like, starting to move into like, realistic video where you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. And I’m sure we’ll see some additional development in terms of that around this time of this Venus-Neptune conjunction of some artistic expression of that, but also a continuation of the blurring of the boundaries between like, what’s real and what’s not.
DRH: Yeah, and as you were saying that, I’m even reminded of how for a long time now, like, speaking of filters – there have been video filters that influencers have been using for years to make themselves look like they have bodies that are literally physically impossible to have walking around in actual meatspace. Yeah, so just thinking about further consequences of that kind of stuff, especially when we think about how, you know, Neptune has all of these very dreamy, mystical qualities but also has these interesting associations with things that seem really great at first and then turn out to be extraordinarily toxic later. Like, some of the first, what is it? The aniline dyes that came out around the time that Neptune was even discovered, which made for really fantastic new colors being available in the world that were also murderous colors.
CB: Because it was made out of like, toxic materials?
DRH: Toxic materials. Yeah. But you don’t know that they’re toxic. You’re just like, “Wow! This is so pretty!”
CB: Right.
DRH: It’s very siren-like, which is like, another kind of Venus-Neptune thing of like, too good to be true, or leading you to an untimely death.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense.
DRH: But at least there was a pretty song while it was happening.
CB: I mean, as long as it’s pretty while it’s happening, then —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, that connects one level… Two other keywords I wanted to mention – one is new levels of immersion in unreality, but also a really obvious keyword for this would be something like, relationships with those who are not real, and what that means could mean many different things on many different levels, but there’s something core about that archetype but I think will manifest at this time.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So finally, acts of compassion – like, especially with Venus in Pisces and Venus conjunct Neptune. Like, that’s doubling up on two different indications that are often very compassionate and trying to help people or do even charity work or outreach work or things like that, so that may be a signature for that time frame as well.
DRH: Yeah. Totally. It’s like finding parts of your heart that either you didn’t know were there or that you’d forgotten about or pushed aside because it was too painful to access that level of compassion. There can be a greater readiness for tenderness that leads to greater care.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So then, the very next day on April 4th, we have a shift where Venus moves out of Pisces and into Aries, and this is kind of a double-edged sword because on the one hand, Venus then is moving into Aries where it’s gonna temper, I feel like especially for people with night charts, some of the transits that are happening in Aries, like the Mercury retrograde or the solar eclipse. Having a benefic transiting through Aries at the same time I feel like is a little bit helpful in helping to counterbalance or mitigate things a little bit, so that with a mitigation sometimes you receive help from some source. But the downside is that with Venus departing from Pisces, it’s kind of just like, leaving Mars and Saturn there to run amok in the Pisces house of our chart without any mitigation, so it’s gonna make the Pisces part of our chart for that conjunction even more harsh than it was up to that point.
DRH: Almost like Pisces is bereft, and Aries is excited as Venus changes signs.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that brings us to the big event of the month then, which is the solar eclipse in Aries on April 8th. So this is the —
DRH: Spicy.
CB: — the spicy eclipse. This is the Great American Eclipse that’s gonna occur across the United States. Did I already show that thing —
DRH: Yeah, but you could show it again.
CB: All right. Let me show it again just for a reminder so people know where it’s crossing and that it’s literally like, crossing across this whole segment of the United States starting in like, Texas, going across Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and a bunch of other Northeastern states, basically, in terms of the exact path of totality where it will just be daytime and then all of a sudden in the middle of the day it’ll just turn pitch black. And it’ll be so dark out that you can see the stars and some of the planets in some instances.
DRH: Yeah. It’s wild, wild stuff. Yeah. I’ve been calling this the Chiron eclipse, because Chiron is literally within a minute’s conjunction to the exact eclipse moment. Yeah.
CB: Wow. Let me put —
DRH: Yeah. It’s pretty —
CB: — the chart —
DRH: — exceptional.
CB: I’ll put the chart up for the eclipse. Put Chiron in. Let’s take a look at it. So the exact degree of the eclipse in the zodiac is 19 degrees of Aries, and it’ll go exact there, and Chiron is also at 19 degrees of Aries, and that is a pretty close conjunction.
DRH: Yeah, it’s real tight. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about when it comes to like, Chiron’s participation here in Aries especially is thinking about the story of the end of Chiron’s life, which involves the head – you know, the head being, again, the body part that is associated with Aries – of the Hydra, which is a dragon-like creature with very many heads, all of which are very poisonous, and that is slain by the hero Hercules as one of his many heroic acts. And the Hydra head is brought back to Chiron, because Chiron is the teacher – one of Hercules’s like, teacher/mentor figures – and different versions of the story exist, but at some point Chiron gets direct exposure to the poison of the Hydra, which sends him into incredible pain. But he’s immortal, so he can’t be killed by the Hydra’s poison. And so he goes on an adventure trying to find a solution and can’t find a solution and trades his immortality for the release of Prometheus, and Zeus puts him in the heavens as the constellation Centaurus. And so one of the interesting things about eclipses is this inversion of story that can happen; there’s literally an inversion of the expected luminosity of that time of day, right? Whether it’s, you know, a lunar eclipse and then all of a sudden we go from having a Full Moon to no Moon, or a solar eclipse where it’s the middle of the day and we go from having noon light to no light. And so really thinking about what does it mean to expunge poison in some way as part of this particular eclipse story from a thematic perspective.
CB: I lk that. That’s a very vivid metaphor for that, especially with that conjunction being so close.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So there’s definitely – I wrote down there’s a very chaotic energy to eclipses. Like, things start happening very fast. Like, the pace of event starts moving very fast. The lives of individuals, we always see stories in the news of like, some people suddenly moving upwards in life very dramatically and quickly and into public visibility, and other people falling or moving downwards, you know, and falling off the peak of the mountain, so to speak, very dramatically and very suddenly. We see this sometimes with like, rulers. One of the keywords is like, “The king is dead. Long live the king,” because the end of one king’s reign in ancient times was always the beginning of the next king’s reign. And we saw a bunch of examples of that with the British royal family in the 20th century where they kept, like, one king would pass away on an eclipse, and then that would be the beginning of the reign of the next king.
DRH: Yeah. It’s like, so plugged into that particular monarchal story; it’s wild. Yeah. And as we were talking about earlier, it is happening in the sign of the Sun’s exaltation, which really brings in more of those thematics of leadership and the rapid changes in leadership that can feel quite destabilizing. Like, even just thinking about how like, as human beings, we are so reliant upon our heads to navigate the world. Like, we literally don’t exist without our heads. And so to have like, the head of an organization, the head of state, the head of a family, like, all of these sorts of things removed or exchanged creates a time period of disruption and a need to re-establish a new order or a new method of perceiving and moving through the world, because you’ve literally exchanged the top of the literal or metaphorical body.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that, because it reminds me like, what was it? Last week, Nick Dagan Best was talking about this eclipse and just that it always reminded him of one that occurred in 1968, around the time of 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated and that he always associated with Chiron because it was a solar eclipse that occurred in Aries and then Chiron had just recently ingressed into Aries, and so you had some of those themes that you just talking about of this like, tragic loss of a leader and a Chironic type figure at that time very suddenly and very abruptly.
DRH: Yeah. That’s really interesting. It makes me wonder, like I feel like it’s been a minute since we’ve had such a singular leader of a movement as we had in MLK and Malcolm X. And it almost makes me wonder if we’re gonna get a new one somehow emerging with this particular eclipse.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s a good point, because just like we were saying, just as much as it can sometimes indicate the loss or downfall or even death of a leader or somebody in a leadership role, it can also indicate the ascension of somebody as well at the same time.
DRH: Yeah, like a significant elevation beyond expectations.
CB: Definitely.
DRH: Yep.
CB: So that brings up the broader theme. The keyword I always use for eclipses is major beginnings and major endings. So for individuals, you can look at where this eclipse is taking place in your chart and especially what house it’s located in and see this as part of a broader theme of the end of one chapter of your life in that area but also the beginning of a new chapter of your life in that area. And usually that metaphor ends up being strikingly relevant when it comes to eclipses when they’re activated in our charts.
DRH: Yep. Especially if it’s peaking anything by close degree.
CB: Yeah. So especially those that have like, something around 19 degrees of Aries in particular, but even potentially if you have something around 19 degrees of some of the other signs that are configured to that degree.
DRH: Yeah. So especially Libra, Capricorn, and Cancer, because you’ll be getting the hard aspects, and then additionally, fire signs – so Sagittarius and Leo, if you have anything around 19 degrees in those signs, they are more likely to – this particular eclipse is more likely to be notable and noisy for you.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And for some people, you know, the first eclipse – this is part of a series of eclipses in Aries and Libra that just bouncing back and forth between those two signs in our chart, but this series actually started a year ago in April of 2023 when we had the first eclipse in Aries. So for some people, it’s a continuation of a sequence of events and a sequence of big changes and beginnings and endings that started a year ago, and this is actually the middle point and in some ways the focal point of that sequence of events in our lives. But it’s gonna continue through for another year, because this series doesn’t wrap up until about a year from now when we have the final eclipse in the sign of Aries in March of 2025.
DRH: Yep. It’s a very extended process. And as you were saying that, I was just being reminded, so it’s like, last year we had the eclipses in Aries and Scorpio because it was part of that, you know, that… Sometimes the eclipse cycle changes in a really stark way; we just go from one set of signs to the other. This particular round, there’s been much more of like, an ombre effect, I feel, like transitioning from the previous cycle into the new cycle. And so last year, the spring eclipses were ruled by Mars in Cancer, but this year we have Mars in Pisces, which forms a trine with Cancer but also is theoretically more supportive for Mars than Cancer is. So you might even feel like there’s more available to do or to work with with this particular eclipse because of that.
CB: That’s a good point. And that brings in the, you know, that this eclipse is ruled by Mars, but that we also have the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which is pretty much going exact at that time.
DRH: Yep.
CB: Which creates a bit of an impediment for Mars, because there’s almost this like, grinding to a halt suddenly energy of that Mars-Saturn conjunction that’s happening.
DRH: Right. It can also show up as an awareness that whatever is happening in the Aries place and in the Pisces place is going to take time. That can sometimes be frustrating or feel like you’re having the brakes put on when you don’t want them to be put on, but I find that Mars and Saturn together, when supported, can be extremely effective, just in a slower way. Right? Even just thinking about how Mars is exalted in Saturn’s sign of Capricorn and there’s something about like, “the slow and steady wins the race” that emerges, and I don’t find Mars in Pisces particularly hungry for speed in the way that we get it in other signs, so. On a personal level, that could be actually beneficial to have more of that long-term view or to deliberately bring in more of the long-term view if your eclipse story feels like it’s trying to make you do urgent things instead.
CB: That’s a great point. So themes of cultivating, themes of like discipline and determination and endurance is gonna be one of the more positive sort of keywords or cluster of keywords for this eclipse and for that conjunction.
DRH: Yep.
CB: Yeah. That’s good. All right. Other keywords – the end of a lifecycle is something that came up over and over again. I did a whole series on eclipses and how they’ve shown up in world events in two episodes late last year, and the end of a lifecycle or the death of something was very common, but also matters of great importance. Like, I was just struck by how many important turning points in world history took place at the time of eclipses, and sometimes it was like, really chaotic stuff that occurred within a week of an eclipse, like the Titanic sank, for example, within a week of an eclipse. But other times, there were major scientific or other discoveries that took place around that time that ended up changing the world that moved things forward in like, significant ways.
DRH: Yeah. I mean, I like to remind people that eclipses are ultimately chaotic neutral, and one of the huge things that I feel like they bring forward is the ultimate lack of control that we have over a not insignificant portion of the world that we walk through. That isn’t to say we don’t have influence or power to participate, but control not being something that we get to grasp onto at scale.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That sometimes during eclipses, and I think that’s why sometimes astrologers can be reticent, among other reasons, about trying to schedule things during eclipses because sometimes just the energy is so chaotic that you can try to schedule things, but sometimes you just get swept up in the energy and the tides of where things start going because everything starts moving so fast, and sometimes you just have to like, ride that wave and see where it takes you at that time.
DRH: Yeah. It’s like if you’re on a teacup ride, and it starts spinning faster than you want it to and you can’t really stop it by yourself; you have to have something else hit you so that you slow down again.
CB: Great metaphor. We’re all about to go into the teacup ride of 2024.
DRH: Yeah, don’t throw up your bits. Try not to eat anything nauseating before you get on the ride.
CB: Yes. Have an empty stomach. So, matters of great importance. Also matters of collective importance. I saw a lot of like, civil rights things happening around the time of eclipses. A lot of like, Nelson Mandela’s story was very tied in with eclipses, and some of the things that were happening with apartheid in South Africa and things that were initially really negative things, like he went to jail and was convicted to like, life in jail on an eclipse, but then eventually he was freed under an eclipse. And then eventually, he became like, president of South Africa on an eclipse. So sometimes even when really negative or difficult events happen on eclipses, you have to realize that it’s laying the seeds of the foundation for something that will potentially grow and sometimes produce more positive fruit later on at some point.
DRH: Yeah. And like, consequences that are just impossible to see from your current perspective. I think that’s one of the humility-generating components of eclipses is you don’t know what the seeds are, and you don’t know how they will eventually fructify.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. All right. Are there other things? I mean, the last thing – I should show the graphic for just the eclipse graphic that shows how this set of eclipses is our first set of eclipses on… We had the Libra lunar eclipse on March 25th and we have the Aries one on April 8th and then six months later, we always get the next set of eclipses that will connect some of the events that are happening right now to some events and developments that’ll happen six months later in mid-September to early October of 2024. So that’s the other thing is just always thinking about and knowing that events that happen now will be connected to events that happened six months ago, but then also it’s part of a continuum and there will be another set of developments after this month six months later this year.
DRH: Yep. It’s the path that winds ever on and on and doesn’t really stop just because there’s a singular event.
CB: Yeah. You made a point the other day that there’s gonna be so much, so many people are gonna be traveling to see the eclipse that if you looked at that from like, a bird’s eye view and a god’s eye view and you could see all the humans, they’re all just gonna be like, clustering around this like, line of the eclipse across America, and it’s really interesting how that’s gonna line up in a way, because it’ll almost create a microcosm/macrocosm thing where the path of the eclipse in the sky will be mapped out on the earth by just like, you know, millions of humans lining up across that at the same time.
DRH: Yeah, there’s going to be like, a densification, right? It’s almost like, as you were saying that, the image that came to mind is like, if you accidentally spill some sugar outside or like a soda, and then you come back out and you realize there’s like, an entire line of ants like, all trying to partake of what you have spilled.
CB: Right.
DRH: Yeah. No, this brings up – I think this is a great time to talk about like, eclipse safety. Do you think?
CB: Sure, yeah.
DRH: Yeah? Because one of the things that I saw that was really interesting is that apparently some of the states along the path of totality have issued sort of warnings to local residents to stock up on things like food and water prior to the eclipse. And some people were like, “Oh no, what terrible thing is gonna happen during the eclipse?” And other people from places where the previous path of totality occurred pointed out that it’s just like, “Nah, there’s gonna be a bunch of people in rural places that don’t usually have the infrastructure for a massive influx of humans dealing with a massive influx of humans,” and that looks like, you know, grocery store shelves getting cleaned out, gas stations potentially getting cleaned out, you know, bottled water not being as available, that kind of stuff. It’s the simple disaster of random and massive influx of population in places that aren’t used to that level of population. So if you’re somebody who is traveling to the path of totality, remember that you are a visitor, and try to be courteous to wherever it is that’s you’re visiting. That might include bringing stuff from where you’re coming from with you, so as not to deplete local resources, and also following, you know, standard courteous campground rules of “leave it better than you found it, don’t trash the place.” And then locals to the path of totality, especially in more rural regions, you know, it’s like, you got about a week to make sure that you’re stocked up prior to, you know, a bunch of tourists running through, so.
CB: Yeah. Just the amount of commerce and like, human interactions that all take place around that time is really astounding in terms of the activity and stuff that will start happening.
DRH: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Yeah. And I know, you know, there’s somewhat of a debate in the astrological community lately about like, look at the eclipse or like, witness the eclipse or don’t in different traditions. And I was surprised when I was doing some of the research, because I wasn’t sure if that was more of a modern or contemporary either magical or sort of New Age thing for a long time, but then as I was researching the eclipses in history episode, was learning about that there are legitimately like, different indigenous traditions in like, the US or in different parts of the world that have these traditions about like, not going outside during eclipses for different reasons that I thought was really interesting. And I don’t know fully what the motivation is for some of those, but it’s interesting how we have this tension in the astrological tradition, because then on the other hand, you have these long traditions of like, Mesopotamian skywatchers, where they would literally go out every day, every night, and record what they saw on the sky, and that was an ingrained part of our tradition and that’s why we have astrology in the first place because of the sort of empirical observations that they built up over many centuries. So it’s interesting to see some of those tensions reflected now in like, the contemporary astrological community.
DRH: Yeah. It is really interesting, and I think it really… You know, so as somebody who’s been like, on Instagram since like, 2017, for example, you know, there are folks who… Like, I would say like, in the more New Agey space from what I’ve witnessed, it seems like there’s more of a tendency to see eclipses as like, super-powered lunations, so either a super-powered New Moon or super-powered Full Moon, to be “harnessed” for whatever your personal manifestation uses might be. And I believe in some of the traditions of astrological magic, there’s a perspective that eclipse magical workings tend towards curse-y rather than bless-y, if that makes sense.
There’s also just, you know, it’s an upending of like, a normal way of being, and this is – like, I forgot to pull this – I’m gonna pull this and send this to you – but there was a study that was done at one point that was monitoring, like, I think they did this during the 2017 eclipse that was here in North America, visible here, but noticing how stressed out plants get, right? So as the eclipse is forming, the plants respond as though it’s night time, but then the sudden reappearance of the Sun without a night time’s duration of darkness really stresses the plants out.
And there are animals that are really stressed out by the experience of eclipses, and I think there’s something to like, the physical animal body component to the disruption of normal light cyclicity that doesn’t necessarily mean that eclipses are definitely terrible, but it is a disruptive experience. And especially thinking about time periods where there wasn’t like, disseminated information on when the next eclipse that was going to be visible from your location was gonna happen, and if it just happened, it’s just like, “Where’d the Sun go? This is a disaster. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.” So yeah, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a lot of different ways to understand why eclipses get a bad reputation beyond the events that occur around them, but literally the physical experience of an eclipse is creepy, to say the least.
CB: Yeah. I went out during the Libra one in October and caught part of it, and I did watch it. Not like, look at it, but I was like, outside, and there is this like, gray cast over everything where it just seems like the color’s been sucked out of the air. And there is some feeling that like, some natural cycle has been interrupted and like something is almost like, wrong at the time, and you feel that just because when we go outside normally, every day of our life we have this experience of “It’s daytime. The Sun is out. Things are visible,” versus “It’s night time,” you know, “The Sun is gone.” But when an eclipse happens you have this thing that’s out of the ordinary, which is that suddenly it becomes nighttime in the middle of the day. And I think that idea of like, disruption or that idea of something out of the ordinary and something extraordinary happening, that that’s part of the symbolism that’s underlying all of it. And there can be good and bad things that are kind of like, tied in with that symbolism.
DRH: Yeah, totally. It’s, you know, the Sun is our most reliable, celestial object. Right? It’s like, the Moon is really reliable but changes every night. The planets are wanderers, and the stars aren’t out whenever we need them to be out as diurnal creatures. So it’s like, the Sun sets up this consistency and this regularity and this reliability, and then to have the most reliable thing in the world – or at least the most reliable thing in the sky – be taken for a moment? Like, that has like, really deep existential implications.
CB: Yeah. Especially to the extent that the Sun is like, the lifeforce. It’s like the heart of our solar system that every planet revolves around and that all life depends on. Yeah, and to have that suddenly snuffed out for a moment like in the middle of the day I think is part of the core of the difficult symbolism there.
DRH: Yeah. Hundred percent. And then, you know, with lunar eclipses, it’s like we have something that’s usually milky white and clear and clean, like, it looks like it’s been dipped in blood and then it’s blotted out and then it’s bloody again, and that’s a different kind of super creepy and discomforting.
CB: Right. For sure. So and then on the other side of that to balance it out, it’s just like, you know, like I said, sometimes extraordinary things happen on eclipses and extraordinary beginnings take place. And actually that’s one thing I should mention is that sometimes it’s very humble beginnings of there’ll be a change in your life, but it’ll be subtle, and you won’t most of the time realize how significant that change is, that thing that you start at that time, until much later because eventually that thing that you start, those seeds that are planted, will grow into a whole tree in your life. Sometimes that can be like, meeting a person who ends up becoming super important in your life, like becomes a partner or a close friend or a work associate. It can be like having some set of circumstances that leads to you like, moving into a new location, into a new place. It could be some set of circumstances that leads to you, if it’s like in your 10th house, moving into a new line of work or getting a new job or career. But sometimes what happens in eclipses is there’s a secondary set of symbolism where the Sun is literally eclipsed, which means to be hidden by the Moon, and similarly the symbolism is that there’s something that starts at that time, there’s a new beginning, but it’s something that’s hidden and is not readily apparent unless you’re paying very close attention.
DRH: Yeah, it’s an obscured implantation, would maybe be one way of putting that.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: I like that. So an obscure beginning or an obscured implantation; that’s good. Okay. Do you have anything else when it comes to —
DRH: Oh!
CB: — eclipses for now?
DRH: If you’re gonna go look at the eclipse, make sure you have high quality eclipse sunglasses, because there are some counterfeits out there, and you know, it’s like, looking at the Sun does do a damage to your eyeballs. So even if the Moon is in front of the Sun, it will still do a damage to your eyeballs, so please use appropriate protection. Please.
CB: Yeah, and I was thinking about that. It made me wonder in history, because in thinking about some of the different traditions of like, not even going outside, like how many humans in history were going along and just like, working outside during the day or like, farming or something, and then all of a sudden eclipse happens and you like, look, and you’re like, “What is happening?” But how many humans might have like, gone blind from that during human history?
DRH: Yeah.
CB: That could be another, it’s not the only reason, but perhaps like, adjacent reason why perhaps there could have been some traditions that were like, you know, don’t even go outside during eclipses.
DRH: Yeah, avoid the baleful rays. Yeah, they will… Yeah, that is really interesting to think about. It’s like, how many people were in the field that day and why is it that only the people that were in the field that day ended up with eye issues? And then everybody’s like, “We’re not looking at eclipses now.”
CB: Right, exactly. And it’s like, so there very well may have been many other, you know, reasons; that may not be the only – you know, I don’t wanna reduce it to that. It almost seems like a sciencey —
DRH: Uh-huh.
CB: — attempt to like, science, you know…
DRH: Like, science and —
CB: Traditions.
DRH: — evolutionary psychology it.
CB: Right, yeah, exactly. So I don’t wanna go like, too far with that, but interesting to think about at least as an interesting scenario that probably occurred quite a bit in the long span of human history. But I love your advice, too; definitely check those glasses and be careful and be safe. Yeah, because we don’t want anybody going blind.
DRH: Yep. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Cool. I think that’s a thorough talk about the eclipse. Do you have anything else?
CB: One last thing to mention about the eclipse is I do wanna mention in the research we did in the two eclipses episodes in October and November, we established that there’s really like, a week window before and after an eclipse where it becomes operative. At least a week, at least seven days. So while the most intense part is gonna be the day of the eclipse, really for like a week before and after, you’re pretty much in eclipse zone, so pay attention to events that happen in your life within a week in terms of ones that are more or less important.
DRH: Yep. Hundred percent. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Definitely take notes. Like, I really encourage people to take notes of even like, the subtle things that seem to happen that are just like, if it catches your attention, even just like a little bit, that is enough to make a note of it. You will be thankful to have that notes whenever the results of the eclipse start to reveal themselves more strongly.
CB: For sure. Yeah. I mean, because those are my favorite. Like, especially note the minor things, because those are the ones that will end up becoming funny later on where you’re like, “And I met this weird guy,” and then years later it turns out that you get married to that person or something like that.
DRH: Right. Yeah. Or just like, “I realized that I love old-fashioned doughnuts,” and then somehow in like, a decade, you inherit a doughnut shop.
CB: Right. Exactly. And you realize that that’s your like, life’s work and passion is doughnut-making.
DRH: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: If that’s you, please call me. I would like to be a sampler.
CB: So speaking of windows, though, of operativeness, we’ve gotta move on and talk about our other very important event that’s taking place just after the eclipse but is already gonna be operative, and we’re already building up to at this point, which is the Mars-Saturn conjunction that takes place on the 10th of April in Pisces.
So this Mars-Saturn conjunction is tricky. Those are, you know, traditionally the two “malefic” planets that tend to indicate more challenging things in terms of our individual lives and in terms of world events, and they’re coming together in the sky at this time. We famously had a Mars-Saturn conjunction, one of the most dramatic ones in like, the history of doing the forecast episodes, happened four years ago right when the lockdowns were taking place in March and April of 2020. Mars and Saturn conjoined in late Capricorn and early Aquarius, and so we always associated those lockdowns and everything basically grinding to a halt suddenly for a several week period of time with that conjunction that took place.
DRH: And then throughout the pandemic, a lot of the news that was coming out around new variants and waves and surges of infections and things like that were linked tightly to this Mars-Saturn cycle. So every – basically, it was almost like clockwork; if Mars and Saturn were squaring, opposing, or conjoining, there was going to be news relevant to the pandemic emerging.
CB: Yeah. There kept being new variants at like, the squares and the opposition and then eventually even at the next conjunction there was something that may have been the next – because there were two. There was a conjunction in 2020 and then two years later I think there was another one in like 2022. And of course when we were looking back, we’re looking at other Mars-Saturn conjunctions, because in ancient astrology they would sometimes associate those with like, plagues and things like that. And Austin and I both remembered one of the conjunctions in Scorpio back in like, 2013 coincided with there was the brief period of like an ebola like, pandemic that they were able to get under control, but there was like, a brief period there were it wasn’t clear if we were gonna have like, a worldwide ebola pandemic. So one of the things Austin and I have been discussing over the past few months with this conjunction is just this is the first time that we’re not having a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius and in that air sign in the past four years, but instead the conjunction’s happening in Pisces, in a water sign, and what that shift is from the metaphorical element of air where we had literally like an airborne disease or like, sickness that spread around the world, to having a Mars-Saturn conjunction in water and what that looks like in terms of… We’ve already seen since Saturn has been in Pisces over the past year, issues with like, difficulties with water, with like, pollution, with shipping and other things like that, but adding Mars on top of that you get this extra potentially difficult or destructive element on top of things.
DRH: Yeah. Contamination of water is something I’m definitely concerned about with just Saturn in Pisces in general, as well as like, water as a vector of disease. So even just thinking about how cholera, for example, was like, a waterborne disease and was eradicated through – or not fully eradicated, but is managed – through appropriate water management, sewage treatment, and separation of unclean water from the general population. So, you know, particularly it’s like, here where I am in southern California, there’s been way more water coming out of the sky than I am used to. And other places where there’s higher risks from increases of water exposure, right, like increased risk of flooding, any kind of infrastructural damage that has been sustained, be it like rendering certain places more risky, we also have the fact that there’s like, ongoing melting of, you know, polar ice caps and things like that. And I know there are trapped in some permafrosts just various kinds of gasses and there’s like, the potential of their being like, bacteria and things like that that can emerge from permafrost that we just as a species haven’t been exposed to for thousands of years. But that’s happening because stuff is melting, which also feels very like, Mars-Saturn conjunction, if we associate Saturn with extreme cold and Mars with heat. Bring those two things together and we have, if not vaporization, then melting of something. Yeah. Erosion being an issue. What happens with like, runoff from massive factory farms and how that affects local water supplies. Even, you know, going back to the Baltimore bridge collapse and what happens when containers, like shipping containers, filled with risky materials up in places that are watery where we need to source our water from. Yeah. All of that.
CB: Yeah. The water getting like, poisoned and becoming, instead of like a source for life, becoming a source for the opposite of life, for death in some ways.
DRH: Yeah. And someone in the chat actually just mentioned the uptick in dengue fever that’s happening in Latin America. And just thinking about how, you know, it’s like here in LA, like not having a huge amount of water usually like, coming out of the sky means there’s not quite so many mosquitoes, but if there’s more water available during breeding season, then there’s more bugs that can serve as vectors – you know, especially bugs like mosquitoes that rely on water in order to breed. And mosquitoes literally transmit via piercing their victims. It’s like dirty syringes being passed around with diseases inside, but they fly and are alive. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Mars-Saturn. So let’s see. Going back to my keywords… Or actually something that made me think of also is just the issue with like, microplastics that we’re starting to like, slowly become aware of, but I was reading some discussion about the things that like, asbestos and like, how ubiquitous asbestos was in like, the mid-20th century —
DRH: Lead too! Like, lead paint and lead gasoline.
CB: Right. And how it was just like, people thought it was this great thing because of what they’re using it for, so they’re putting it in everything. But then it turned out that it was literally like, killing people in both of those instances or causing major health issues. And the questions of just like, what is the thing like that that we’re all like, taking for granted today? And one of the things that I was thinking of, I was just like, microplastics. And it’ll be interesting to see if that or something similar symbolically to that doesn’t become more of the focus over the next couple of years that we’re getting this conjunction in Pisces.
DRH: Yep.
CB: Yeah. So other keywords that I wrote down for Mars-Saturn in Pisces – you have the unstoppable force meets immovable object scenario, and that’s something we already saw with like, with the Baltimore bridge and that boat hitting it. One of the things that a lot of people online like, didn’t understand at first is they’re like, “How did a boat like, knock over a bridge?” But it was like, literally one of the biggest shipping boats in the world, you know, slammed into a bridge, and when you have something that has that much force and that much heaviness, it just, yeah, it destroys whatever it slams into.
DRH: Wasn’t there an issue with its, like, its computer system or its navigation system like, noped out, and that’s part of why that even happened? Like, they didn’t have a failsafe way to redirect the boat after something on its normal system kaput’ed?
CB: Yeah. What they were saying was that it lost power, so it just absolutely lost all ability to steer the ship.
DRH: Yep. Wild.
CB: Yeah. So things metaphorically like that. Other keywords are things like slamming on the breaks, hitting a wall, extremes of hot and cold. Let’s see, pollution, issue with the ocean, liquids, frustration, feelings of constraint, which can sometimes be literal constraint and issues or like, new stories having to do with constraint. But I think in Pisces, it can also be more metaphorical, like emotional or even like, spiritual feelings of constraint. There’s been a lot of stories over the past year of people becoming just like, kind of like emotionally or almost spiritually exhausted, and like, with Saturn going through Pisces, and in like, December, for example, there’s been a string over the past several months of a lot of like, people that are YouTubers saying that they’re quitting or they’re seriously reducing how much they put YouTube videos out on their channel due to a sort of feeling of exhaustion or feeling like it’s no longer fulfilling. And I wonder if some of those stories aren’t going to rise up more and become more prominent or more… For some people, those feelings of exhaustion becoming more acute during this time with Mars moving in there.
DRH: Yeah. I’m also thinking about the phrase “moral injury,” which I don’t love because it feels very clinical and not entirely like, poetically resonant with the sensation. But basically, like an emotional and spiritual and psychological experience that people are having via like, how massively able we are to witness atrocities in places and affecting people that are far away from us, but still sustaining personal sensations of harm through the witnessing of atrocity and oppression and unfairness, even if it’s very far away. And so even just thinking about like, the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces and you know, that injurious quality of both of the malefics together in Pisces, which I consider to be like the sign of unitive consciousness and deep awareness of like, unavoidable interweaving with others in really profound ways. Yeah, and somebody just put into the chat “compassion fatigue” I think is another thing that we could apply to Mars-Saturn together in Pisces.
CB: Yeah. Or those themes and also, yeah, being overwhelmed with social media. Like, sometimes people pulling back from, you know, during covid with all the Aquarius stuff happening, there was this intensification of people moving online and needing to use technology to like, interact with each other socially, and therefore the social media sites just going crazy. But you know, people getting burnt out of those social interactions sometimes and having to pull back perhaps from social media sites at this point.
DRH: Yep. Hundred percent. There’s also something about the – oh, this is, yeah, this is what I was being reminded of – like the sensations of isolation. Like, insufficient connection and the really gnarly emotional effects of not having the kinds of community and connection in an embodied way that feels restorative and nourishing and supportive and safe – like, as safe as it can be. I think one of the consequences of onlineness is not being able to source quite as much safety because you don’t have the literal physical reality of nervous system co-regulation with others when you’re just on the internet.
CB: Right. That’s a good point. That makes me think of… I saved a story recently, you know, because one of the things that’s happening is over the past year, we’ve had Saturn in Pisces coming into a co-presence with Neptune so that we’ve been building up to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which all astrologers prior to this just associated with the blurring between what’s real and what’s not real as the core of that archetype. And then we’ve just seen this rise in that as a theme, both with like, AI-generated art; we’ve seen like, a rise in like, virtual reality stuff with Apple releasing their virtual reality headset and trying to make that a thing, and now with video – fake AI-generated video and stuff. But I saw something recently about even, yeah, people being impersonated online and that becoming a thing or having their identities taken. And I wonder if Mars moving into Pisces isn’t gonna just intensify some of the challenging issues that we’re already experiencing or that we can kind of see on the horizon with that, but is gonna put them much more into focus of what the downsides of some of these blurring of reality versus unreality situations are.
DRH: Yeah. A hundred percent.
CB: Yeah. Because we’ve seen some of the like, positive sort of entertaining sides of that in some instances, but yeah, what are the downsides of some of those new technologies that are emerging, and what are some of the ways in which that can be used for things that are not good?
DRH: Yeah, the insidious, nefarious uses of things that in and of themselves are inherently ambivalent and neutral. It’s really just how are you applying the technology.
CB: Right. Totally. All right. So that’s negative things; there’s a few more negative keywords. Let’s balance it out with some positive —
DRH: Yeah.
CB: — stuff really quickly. So some keywords for Mars-Saturn – discipline. Like, strong focus. Self-control. The ability to channel energy into long-term goals, I think, is a major component of Mars-Saturn, and you know, one of the things in ancient astrology is even though that conjunction was often associated with negative things, it could sometimes be associated with positive or constructive things because Mars, which was symbolically seen to be extremely hot like fire, and Saturn which was said to be symbolically extremely cold like ice, when you put those two extremes together, they can sometimes moderate each other so that it becomes more temperate. And so sometimes, you know, the impetuousness of Mars does get restrained by Saturn in a way that creates more of a self-sustaining focus in the long term than you would have otherwise.
DRH: Yeah. One of the things that I really think about with Mars and Saturn together is, you know, if the dynamic between them can be one that’s almost like, advanced master and like, young acolyte, which you know, I think especially in Pisces, like I’m thinking about almost like religious structure but also like martial arts structure. It’s like, you need the guidance of somebody that’s really experienced and can call you out on your stuff can really help you to hone your skill sets into mastery. And so I think Mars and Saturn together can really have that combination of hard-won wisdom and sort of fuel to continue to pursue the greatest possible achievements, even if it hurts to get there.
CB: Yeah. It’s like that training montage where you’re just doing the repetitive thing every day over and over again that’s like, not enjoyable in the least, but you have that single-minded determination to get to whatever your end goal is, and so you’re willing to do whatever it takes and to make whatever small incremental progress you can each day in order to get there.
DRH: Yeah, there’s something about like, blood, sweat, tears, and belief that this combination has. Especially, you know, I was just checking like, confirming that this is true. It’s happening in Jupiter’s decan and term of Pisces, so the belief component does seem to be quite potent, and this particular configuration is within like, four or five-ish degrees of a sextile with Jupiter in Taurus with the Moon over there at the time that the conjunction is exact. So I feel like there’s something very supported and supportive about potentially engaging with a commitment to mastery around this time.
CB: For sure.
DRH: Can you cultivate the sufficient belief required to sustain you through the blood, sweat, and tears?
CB: Right. Do you have that goal or that core conviction in mind, because especially with Pisces, that’s so important to have some like, higher purpose or higher calling.
DRH: Yep. That’s the thing that unifies it.
CB: And I’m glad you mentioned that about Jupiter, because that’s a major thing and it also creates part of our dynamic between the first part of the month and the second where it’s like, the first half of the month, you’re dealing more with this conjunction being super intense in those two competing directions of like, wanting to move forward versus wanting to pull back, and you know, the internal tension that creates with Mars and Saturn. But then immediately after that conjunction is over on the 10th, Mars begins moving and applying to an exact sextile with Jupiter, which it’ll eventually complete around the time of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction around the 18th, 19th, and 20th.
DRH: Yeah, which I’m super excited about. I feel like that really… It generates the strong potential for very positive surprises. Like, “Oh, I put in some of the work, I like, did some of the stuff that the Mars-Saturn was encouraging me to do, and I’m continuing to do it, and I didn’t expect to experience results this obvious so quickly, but here we are.”
CB: Totally.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So there is like, a light at the end of that tunnel or like, the belief in the thing you had in your imagination about the future that you wanted to achieve there’s a potential for achieving that before too long.
DRH: Yeah, it’s like getting a really solid pat on the back. Like, “Good job, kid – you’re going in the right direction. Keep it up.”
CB: Yeah, I like that. Somebody – Dawn – in the comments in the live chat mentions “being Rocky,” and I think that’s a great, you know, metaphor for this month and for the difference between that Mars-Saturn conjunction and the like, training montage versus, you know, the end, reaching the goal at the end.
DRH: Yeah. I mean, I know like, we’re kind of skipping over some other things and going a little non-chronological here, but as I was just looking at that chart, I was reminded of the structure of deus ex machina from like Greek theater and that we see used to almost cheesy effect in like, The Lord of the Rings whenever like, Gandalf appears at just the right time to make sure things are okay. But that’s kind of the sensation I have around the Mars sextile to the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is like, “Ah! We thought we were royally effed, and here’s Gandalf.”
CB: Right. So —
DRH: Thank heavens!
CB: — this is like the eagles like, flying in every —
DRH: Yeah!
CB: — time, yeah.
DRH: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, yeah. Like, specifically I’m thinking about the section of The Two Towers where Gandalf and Saruman go to it, and that’s kind of the Mars-Saturn situation where it’s like, Gandalf thinks he’s going to get help from Saruman and ends up having a wizard battle, and then imprisoned at the top of a tower, and thanks to the aid of a little moth taking his message elsewhere, one of his giant eagle friends comes and swoops him in. And so he’s having this altercation with Saruman again on the top of the tower; he just leaps off the tower. He takes a leap of faith, wind beneath my winging it, I remember Ursula Rising bringing that one forward for Jupiter in Sag a few years ago, right? Jumps off the tower, and there’s literally an eagle, which is a Jupitarian thing, to catch him.
CB: Oh my god, that’s perfect. You were speaking my language when you start putting astrology metaphors in Lord of the Rings terminology.
DRH: Yeah. Someday I will talk to you about my theory about Ents, but we don’t have to talk about that right now.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I like that though, that there’s an opportunity to free yourself from some of the constraints that comes sooner than you might think later in the month with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which already in and of itself, just that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, is such a different breath of fresh air later in the month that’s emphasizing components of like, freedom and like, liberation and sudden and unexpected and rapid growth, which is just so different than the conjunction earlier of Mars and Saturn which is like, restraint, being held back, patience —
DRH: Poison.
CB: Yeah, poisoned waters. Yeah. That’s such a huge contrast that I just feel like it’s gonna be very palpable this month, the distinction between the first half of the month versus the second.
DRH: Yeah. Hundred percent.
CB: Yeah. So let me… Other keywords – endurance is a major one, physical and mental stamina with a Mars-Saturn conjunction, the ability to withstand hardship and sometimes to withstand more than you thought you could carry.
DRH: Resilience.
CB: Yeah. There’s also sometimes themes, though, of like, rigidity, like inflexibility, having difficulty adapting to things, even being overly controlling or critical can sometimes be a Mars-Saturn thing. And then finally let’s see, other things – obstructions. So delays, setbacks, which is interesting because it kind of overlaps a bit with the Mercury retrograde. Having the sense of having to fight harder for what you want.
DRH: It can also be a really good thing to use for the creation of the boundaries that you desire to exist or enacting boundaries that you’ve been aware of needing to enact but haven’t been because of, you know, especially if we’re talking about Pisces, it’s like, wanting to be nice getting in the way of being genuinely kind to everyone involved. Understanding that setting boundaries and expectations and making clear on so many different levels, like not just in interpersonal spaces, like I think this also applies on a national stage of like, what is acceptable behavior and what is prosocial behavior and what is not. Like, I think Mars-Saturn can be very useful for, you know, in a harsh way, it can look like laying down the law, but in a kind way, it’s being honest about what isn’t working and what needs to change.
CB: That’s a great point. Yeah. I hope we see more of that with this conjunction. All right. Other issues – sometimes you can run into issues of like, pessimism with Mars-Saturn conjunctions. There can be, on the negative side, a potential for adopting like, a defeatist attitude. A lack of self belief or even a fear of failure – that was something we were talking about in the last episode that Austin was making the point that Mars-Saturn combinations can be very aware of the potential points of failure for something to a point of being hyper aware of that, but that can be good if it, you know, allows you to avoid the potential pitfalls because you’re paying attention to it. You know them or you’re aware of them. Whereas in other instances, it could maybe lead you to inaction as a result of fearing of like, making a mistake.
DRH: Yeah, it can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Like, if you firmly believe that the perspective you have is already sufficient and correct and your assessment is that it won’t work, then you also won’t perceive the ways that it could work if you tried.
CB: Right. All right. And then finally, issues of like, repression of difficulty expressing anger in a healthy manner. Having the potential for internalized conflict or even like, resentment as a potential keyword for this Mars-Saturn conjunction.\
DRH: Yeah, as you were saying this and also the previous batch of associations, I was thinking about what I call “the dooms,” which is when there’s a sensation of overwhelm around inability to effectuate positive change in the ways that you desire to, and so instead of doing even a little bit of something that you could do, you just end up in the dooms. You end up in a sad spot that can feel like this is just the new state of being; nothing is worth doing. It’s a sort of nihilistic existential descent. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, and you wanna balance that, because I think Mars has the impulse to want to do everything and do everything all at once and get it done right away, whereas Saturn wants to push things off. And sometimes that can lead people to just feeling like, you know, if I can’t get this done now, then I’m just not gonna attempt to do anything, and leads to a state of inaction. But something to keep in mind is just even doing a little bit of one thing each day, even if it’s gonna take a while to complete it, is still making progress. You’re still moving forward if you’re doing that.
DRH: Yeah. It’s not as satisfying as taking a really big bite of a sandwich, but if you take tiny bites of a sandwich, over time you will have eaten the entire sandwich.
CB: Right. Exactly. That is something I know. I have a Mars, you know, Mars in Capricorn, exalted and in a mutual reception with Saturn, and something I’ve always done with the podcast and learned over the years and observed from other people is I’ve seen sometimes people get paralyzed by inaction, by wanting to know exactly how to do everything the best way from the start, but sometimes you can only learn things by doing it, and therefore you have to just push yourself to start at some point and just learn something new each time and make incremental progress. And eventually sometimes if you do that, sometimes you’ll turn around and all of a sudden you’re recording like, episode 440-something of a podcast and it builds up over time.
DRH: Yeah. I feel like the collection of the – like, the archive of The Astrology Podcast is evidence to this.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on to literally the very next day, a retrograde Mercury conjoins the Sun on the 11th of April, and this is the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle, the cazimi where Mercury enters the heart of the Sun. And usually this represents a sort of turning point where some of the issues that were set up at the start of the Mercury retrograde over that previous week or week and a half, they start to head towards some sort of resolution by this point on the 11th. And even if there’s still ongoing and continuing issues and things are not fully resolved, there’s often some sort of turn where you start to see it turn towards an eventual state of resolution which you’ll see by the end of month when Mercury stations direct on the 25th.
DRH: Yeah. Mercury retrograde cazimis are… Like, I find them to be – it’s like treasure-hunting, right? If we can think about the first part of the retrograde as like, going to the location where you believe the treasure to exist and it involves some sort of spelunking activity, like caving in some way, and then at the cazimi, you actually get to the thing that you’ve been looking for. But you’re not done yet, because you have to get back out of the cave.
CB: Yeah. You still need to emerge from the cave, from the underworld.
DRH: Yep. Which, hopefully, is positive integration process, but yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah. At the very least, some sort of assessment eventually once you do emerge.
DRH: Yeah. The cazimi can often, it’s like a literal lightbulb moment at times, which is pretty fun when it’s that dramatic and clear.
CB: Yeah, to have that realization moment of clarity, of sudden insight.
DRH: Yep. And that’s happening at 22, I think? Yeah, 22°32’ Aries, so that’s relatively close to where the Chiron eclipse occurred, which is part of why, you know, thinking about this particular retrograde alongside the eclipse, like they are very tied with each other. So revelations might actually – like, this might actually be a point in time where revelations about what your eclipse story really is start to really come forward.
CB: That makes sense. Yeah, because the Moon will have also made an appearance and is started to become visible in the waxing end of the cycle as well, and you just have all these planets, especially the Sun and Mercury, treading over similar degrees or returning back to similar degrees. And eventually we’ll have Venus move up there as well and move over these degrees also, so it’s like if you have a personal planet around 19 degrees, especially of Aries but really any of the cardinal signs, then you’ll just get this continuous reactivation of that point in your chart over and over again this month.
DRH: Yep. You might be a little bruisy and tender by the end of the month, but yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving on… We then have that, like we said, that week where it’s like, there’s not a lot going on. We get a little bit of a drop off, but then we get to our other really busy part of the month, which is the Sun moves into Taurus by the 19th. We get the retrograde Mercury-Venus conjunction that occurs around 16, 17 degrees of Aries, which is again another probably positive resolution point for some of the Mercury retrograde issues that were set up earlier in the retrograde having that benefic contact with Venus helping to smooth things out.
DRH: Like a sweetening of communication.
CB: Yes. And then at the same time, we get Jupiter aligning with Uranus at that conjunction at 21 degrees of Taurus, and we get Mars moving into the same degree of Pisces and forming a sextile with Jupiter and Uranus at the same time.
DRH: I would anticipate, too, that this particular sextile has the strong potential to give us some previews of what the eventual Mars-Uranus conjunction will put forth this summer.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s one of our major aspects of the summer that’s a little bit tense is that conjunction.
DRH: Oh! One thing that I wanted to say about the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in particular is it’s happening in a trine with where the Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions were happening throughout 2020, and the Uranus in Taurus time period has included a lot of retouching the importance of unionization, like labor unions, here in the United States. So it’s like, we’ve seen like, the stuff with Amazon unionization, Starbucks unionization, all of this kind of stuff, and I would anticipate that some of the things that even – like, there were a couple of things that happened in March that are related to labor unions and labor rights, and I’m anticipating seeing more of that getting louder as Jupiter and Uranus come together in Taurus.
CB: Yeah. That would make a lot of sense with how much that’s become prominent over the past year and this being the point where you see the intensification of those energies that have already been present for a while.
DRH: Yeah. I mean, even thinking about like, the Mars-Saturn conjunction as potentially like a labor rights thing that we then see movement around whenever Mars is forming a sextile with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s a really good point. All right. So we’re talking about the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that is going exact later in the month. It goes precise on the 20th, so let’s talk about some keywords for that. Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions are often associated with things like technological breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, periods of rapid progress in different areas of the world, both not just in terms of science and technology but also in other areas just because Jupiter is the planet of growth and Uranus is the planet of sudden changes and rapid developments.
DRH: Yeah. Uranus brings us into revolution of various kinds. Rupture. Like, really unexpected shifts in various places. I think Uranus can also feel very sudden, but sometimes it’s a sudden outgrowth of something that’s actually been transpiring for a while already, but the actual eruption coming either sooner than expected or in a way that was totally unexpected. When we combine that with Jupiter, it can make those eruptions, those outgrowths, even bigger, but potentially also more stabilizing and more positive.
CB: Definitely. That’s good. Let’s see – other things – technological shifts. This conjunction also only takes place every 14 years, so that gives you an idea of how rare it is and how often, you know, it occurs. There can be sudden like, quantum leaps of progress. The leveraging of new technologies in order to find new things. There can be major innovations, major discoveries, as well as just a distinctive period of growth and expansion where there’s a sense of exploration and a sense of optimism about finding and discovering new things. In Taurus, one of the things that came up that we’ve been tracking is like, new developments in material sciences, and I’m kind of paying it special attention to that area where the Jupiter-Uranus represents scientific growth, expansion, and leveraging of new technologies like artificial intelligence and things like that. And then we’ve started to see how some of those new technologies are being applied to discover new types of materials that hadn’t been developed or invented before, and it would be not surprising to see some new development or some new stage in terms of that happening around this time.
Also expecting things with like, food development because it’s in Taurus, and different changes and applications of technology to new developments related to food and things related to that.
DRH: Yeah. And as someone pointed out in the chat, there’s been these ongoing farmers protests in India and now also in Europe. So innovations in how food is produced that might be just straight up technological innovations, but could be innovations in how labor happens when it comes to the production of foodstuffs.
CB: Okay. Let’s see. Another Taurus thing that may be relevant is like, financial shifts here and sudden developments and sudden growth and expansion occurring very rapidly in the financial sector of the world. And finally, because it’s a fixed sign, because it’s Taurus, Taurus is like the most immovable of the four fixed signs because it’s an earth sign, and it just has this feeling of like, disrupting that which was stable and reliable and fixed up to this point as one of the major overarching themes, I think, for this conjunction.
DRH: Yeah, and like, that’s one of the things – like, I remember years ago – I think this was actually at UAC in 2018 having conversations with some folks about like, decentralized currency as it relates to Uranus in Taurus, and thinking about how we understand money to work and disruptions to how money operates.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And seeing an acceleration of that I think at this point. Other themes that are really prominent in past Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions can be issues surrounding like, freedom as you mentioned earlier and feelings of like, a yearning for independence, a rebellious spirit, challenging existing belief structures, and even embracing eccentricity in some ways since being eccentric is a common Uranus theme.
DRH: Yeah, especially, like you say, eccentricities and shifts to beliefs that feel more true to oneself or more true to one’s community if it’s like a shared shift that allows for a greater sense of stabilization because it’s truer for oneself versus a performance of something that allows you to fit in.
CB: Right. So that makes me think of some of the, you know, the positive sides can be there’ll be this sense of excitement and sense of adventure and unexpected opportunities and a feeling that anything is possible, I think, is going to permeate the second half of the month around the time of this conjunction, as well as ideas of progress and pushing the boundaries of what we previously thought was possible, both in terms of technological advancements but also in terms of social change. But also, some of the downsides or negative keywords that can sometimes come up are things like disregard for rules and authority, or acting out without necessarily considering the consequences, which can be good or can be bad depending on one’s perspective. Sometimes a lack of willingness to compromise, because Uranus can be just complete shirking or rejection of the rules and sort of like, regulations of things, which sometimes can be necessary or other times can just be super chaotic sort of energy.
DRH: Yeah, like, I think the combination of Jupiter and Uranus, there can be a sort of, “Oh, it’s gonna be fine; I’m just gonna do what I want,” without actually thinking about it first and having sufficient evidence that it will be fine and you actually can do what you want without there being consequences that end up feeling too expensive in the long run.
CB: Yeah. Sometimes being motivated by the immediate idealism or push for freedom or for some of those other impulses without necessarily thinking things out in terms of what the long term implications are, which is more of a Saturn thing.
DRH: Yeah, and I feel like Jupiter particularly can add too much encouragement to these kinds of situations, right? Like, “This really is a great idea! This is gonna fix everything!” And that commitment to the dreamy vision, the like, castle in the sky allowing one to forget that gravity also exists.
CB: Right. You’re just like, “Let’s just overthrow everything and everything’s gonna be great as soon as we overthrow everything,” but sometimes that can create a much more chaotic set of circumstances than you realized before you’ve done it.
DRH: Yep. And sometimes it actually is true that you should just do it, and figuring that out is why you also need Saturn.
CB: Yeah. Totally. And so all of this, we’re talking about in a mundane sense, but all of this is relevant for people in terms of their personal lives as well because sometimes those motivations are happening. I’m already seeing it happening in some people’s lives, like, the energy of this conjunction becoming more and more intense and just like, overthrowing certain structures and sometimes not having a long-term plan but just having this internal compulsion or belief that this is like, the thing to do at this time.
DRH: Yep. Hundred percent —
CB: Yeah. So I guess you just wanna be careful with the downside, just the chaos element, the disruption for its own sake, or even creating unnecessary turbulence. There’s going to be a real tricky part in terms of determining which of the two that you’re doing and if it’s something that’s ultimately going in a good direction or if it’s just disruption for the sake of disruption.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. As we’ve said, it’s gonna be amplified by Mars sextiling both of those planets at the same time, and also weirdly at the same time, like around the time of that conjunction, this comet that only recurs about every 80 years, like very roughly, is going to cross the ecliptic around that time later in April. And it’s gonna be not very far from the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction when it crosses the ecliptic at one point later in April. So we don’t know yet if it’s gonna be visible, because one of the variability things is comets like this are… They called them like, “cold volcanoes” where they sometimes, once they get close to the Sun, they start having this outgassing, which is part of what creates the tail behind the comet, and so it creates a variability in terms of how bright it will actually get once it gets close. But it’s one of the things that are really interesting, the fact that this comet’s happening and becoming somewhat visible this month; it’s called Comet Pon-Brooks after the people that discovered it in the 18th century. But in December when I was doing the year ahead forecast and researching all this, I was trying to research comets to understand what this one would mean, and a lot of the ancient literature on comets was very similar to the literature on eclipses, which is that it was often viewed as a negative or ominous phenomenon indicating things like the death of leaders or of rules or things like that or the fall of a kingdom. But what was interesting is the more and more I looked into it, that I found that there were some positive instances where certain comets, depending on the color and the appearance, could be interpreted as positive, and this is partially gonna depend on what the color is and if it becomes visible in April, but also things like… Because there was some comets, depending on the color, that get associated with Jupiter, and when it is associated with Jupiter it tends to spin it in a more positive direction. But also what planets the comet is nearby or crosses was also an interpretive principle, and so the fact that this comet crosses very close to the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, I think, would actually be one of the indications that it could be more positive indication, indicating that some of the discoveries – perhaps like, scientific discoveries or other sudden advancements to take place around the time of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction – are even more notable than they would be otherwise, because it’s kind of like putting an exclamation mark next to that conjunction.
DRH: Wow. That’s really… I’m glad to hear that, and I hope it really leans that direction. What are the colors that end up getting associated with Jupiter when it – in comets?
CB: It’s kind of complicated; it goes back —
DRH: Okay.
CB: — to Nechepso and Petosiris texts.
DRH: Okay.
CB: I think I’m gonna do a whole episode on ancient views on comets this month.
DRH: Cool.
CB: And if people would like to see that, let me know; I could use some encouragement because it’s gonna be a big episode to pull all that together, but people can let me know in the comments section. But if I do do that, I’ll do a whole section talking about some of the different interpretive principles from some of the different astrological traditions.
DRH: Yeah. That is super cool. And it’s also really interesting; like, I don’t think I realized that that comet’s cycle was also 80 years, which is about the same as this particular nova that’s supposed to be – will hopefully be visible in the next like, week or so.
CB: Yeah, and it’s a little rough. It’s like —
DRH: Like wiggly.
CB: Yeah, it’s 70-something for the comet; I think it’s actually 76 or something. I’m just rounding it to 80.
DRH: Yeah. It makes me wonder how often this nova and this comet end up being visible in the same year, let alone the same month. Like, that’s wild.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because and that’s also connected with some of the planetary period stuff is just some of these periods that recur over a long enough time scale start falling and happening at the same time, and what happens when you have multiple planetary periods that are aligning at once? That’s kind of what we’re happening this month where we have multiple things that are lining up at once.
DRH: Right. Multiple testimonies meaning that like, yeah, April is not small potatoes.
CB: Exactly.
DRH: Only baked potatoes this month. That’s very actually Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus. Like, I – oh! Ooh! Oh my gosh! What if Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus gives us like, world record-breaking plants this year? Right? Like, you know, when people bring their potatoes or their squashes or whatever to the state fair, the local fair —
CB: Right.
DRH: — and you get like, blue ribbons for their like, gigantic produce? Like, okay – Jupiter-Uranus in Taurus – shockingly gigantic produce.
CB: Shockingly giant – yeah, but it’s like, an AI has like, developed the produce and it’s like brought in by a robot who —
DRH: Ooh.
CB: — grows the huge produce.
DRH: Yeah. Like, maybe there’s some kind of spoof. There’s spoof produce. It’s like the cakes thing, you know? It’s like, is it real or is it cake? Which was a very Uranus in Taurus event. Like, is it a real gigantic cabbage, or is it an AI gigantic cabbage?
CB: Right. Exactly. And with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction happening at the same time, we may never know the difference.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
DRH: It’s like, “I knew somebody’s cousin’s sister who ate some of that cabbage.” Is that a real story? Did that happen?
CB: Right. All right. So I think that’s good. I want to talk a few more things about that, but since we’re at three hours I think —
DRH: Oh yeah.
CB: — might wanna, we should take a break again, just to get —
DRH: Okay.
CB: — one more in and then come back and finish strong.
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All right. So let’s transition into talking about the last week of the month after the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. So the next thing we get is the second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in Scorpio on the 23rd, and then right at the same time, basically, two days later, Mercury is stationing direct in Aries and ending its three week retrograde period.
So let me pull up the chart for that lunation where on the one hand, it’s like we’re finally moving out of eclipse season; we’re out of eclipse season fully by this point by the time of this Full Moon, and so things are starting to settle down now that we’re moving into normal lunation, like normal Full Moon season so that it’s coming down significantly. Although what’s annoying is this lunation is still a little bit tense because it’s like squaring Pluto; the lunation goes exact, the Full Moon goes exact at four degrees of Scorpio, and it’s squaring Pluto at two degrees of Aquarius at the same time.
DRH: Yeah. It won’t be as like, smooth as I like a post-eclipse season lunation to feel, but I also feel like there’s something… It’s going to be some kind of stabilizing regardless. It might not be stabilizing in the sense of like, I don’t know, like smoothing the fur of a cat is stabilizing, but stabilizing as in “This is what’s happening,” like a full acknowledgment, perhaps, of what is shifting and changing, and acceptance being one of the sometimes sweetest and sometimes bitterest medicines that we have available to us.
CB: Definitely. And this, towards the end of the month, one of the things that we noticed is it’s not just this Full Moon that’s activating Pluto, but also early next month at the very beginning of May, Pluto stations retrograde in Aquarius, so there’s this intensification of Pluto, which has made it all the way to two degrees of Aquarius at this point. So it’s really starting to activate anybody that has placements in the first few degrees of the fixed signs – you’re getting the brunt of this Pluto transit, and I think we already see the Full Moon here in Scorpio illuminating that and kind of like, shining a light on the parts of our chart that Pluto is so intensely aspecting at this time and bringing in these deep transformative experiences, some of which can be very difficult in terms of having themes of like, of control, themes of manipulation, themes of like, the end of something or the death of something, but also having very deep and profound and insightful things that are not just like, surface level, but having some of the most profound and deepest experiences of your life with this transit.
DRH: Yeah. Pluto really gets at the roots of things. And like, not just like the roots of the dandelion that you pulled out of your yard, but like, the roots of the mountain – like, really getting into the bedrock of stuff. And one thing that I find really interesting about this last section of April is we get this Full Moon square Pluto, and then when the Moon moves into Sag, it will sextile Pluto. And then when Mars – well, no, it’s Venus first – when Venus moves into Taurus, it will square Pluto, and then when Mars moves into Aries, it will sextile Pluto. And in the middle of that, we also have the Pluto-Moon conjunction. So we have this series of things that are all kind of dancing with or being influenced by Pluto at like, in this early section of Aquarius in pretty quick succession, including two of our inner planet – or two of our more personal planets – moving into domicile.
CB: That’s a great point.
DRH: So there’s something – there’s kind of like a coming home, but you’re coming home to a different place than you’ve ever been sensation to like, the end of April for me.
CB: Yeah. I think on a mundane level, just having this Pluto station there in Aquarius and the build up to it just feels like some of the Pluto in Aquarius themes we’ve seen in the world and this rapid, sudden advancement of technology and some of the things like artificial intelligence and some of the issues surrounding it becoming intensified at this time as well as other technological leaps that are happening because coming off of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that also is like a technological leap symbolic aspect or alignment, those just seem like, too close that they’re almost like, pointing in some similar direction.
DRH: Yeah. It’ll be really interesting to see how that shakes out, especially, you know, coupled with Mars and Venus’s movements interacting with Pluto. It’s like, how like, the attraction-aversion dynamic that comes with the profligation of these technologies more broadly into society, if that makes any sense, of like, “Oh, this is so cool, because we can do this with it! And also this is so awful because what about these applications?” And, you know, the same person having maybe wildly counteractive opinions about the same thing within their own mind, and then how does that translate on a larger scale of just like, “Well, we definitely want this, but we definitely don’t want this, but we can’t have that without this” – that kind of dynamic showing up.
CB: Totally. You know what that makes me think of is seeing here at the Full Moon, we see Mars is at 24 Pisces already, so it’s coming up on that conjunction with Neptune, which occurs on —
DRH: Ooh!
CB: — the 27th and 28th, so it’s like —
DRH: And that’s pinged by a square from the Moon while it’s happening. That’s —
CB: Right.
DRH: — interesting.
CB: Right there.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: In Sagittarius around the 26, 27th. That just makes me think of like, the weaponization of some of those systems, some of those new technologies, and the new technologies that when put in the wrong hands can be used for like, disinformation or to do like, attacks that are hard to pin down and hard to respond to, hard to react to.
DRH: Yeah, it’s like technological guerilla warfare.
CB: Right.
DRH: Like, I’m reminded of the… I forget exactly what they were calling it, but like, basically the program that some people developed to feed into AI that corrupt the AI art generators as a sort of counter-attack to the like, copyright and intellectual property infringement that has contributed to the creation of these AI models, which pings back to something that was happening at the very end of February, early March, which was a couple of folks – or a couple of companies – like, initiating action against OpenAI because of the copyright concerns. Yeah.
CB: Right. That makes sense. And it makes me think as well we’ve talked a lot about 2016 and how that was a Saturn-Uranus square and the issues with like, fake news and like, using social media to manipulate things during a political season, and this just being like, the ramping up of that at this time with the Mars-Neptune conjunction and Pluto stationing of whatever the next version of that is of using and leveraging technology for the sake of manipulating the flow of either information or influencing things in terms of politics.
DRH: Yeah. There’s something about the like, Mars-Neptune I’m thinking – like, the phrase that just came to mind was “violent fantasies” and the like, even using imagination towards violent ends, which would be inclusive of like, hate-generating propaganda, for example, and like seeding people with the sense or idea that something is nefarious whether or not it is. Like, once that’s been planted, it can be really hard to uproot. Like, evidence that a previous shocking bit of news was false doesn’t totally erode or doesn’t totally remove the emotional sensation of negative surprise with whatever that news item is around, if that makes sense. So it’s like, if you find out that, you know, like somebody – I don’t know. I’m trying to think of like, not the worst possible example.
CB: Right.
DRH: I’m trying to think of something that’s like, as kind of silly as possible. Okay. So let’s think toddlers, because I associate Mars with toddlers. It’s like, somebody – like, you’re a toddler, and somebody tells you that your sister stole your toy, and so you’re upset with your sister. And it turns out that your toy was just under the sofa the entire time; nobody took it. But you still hold this like, bad feeling about “Wait, maybe my sister stole my toy, or perhaps my sister is capable of stealing my toy,” and I’ve already gone through the emotional rigmarole of like, my sister is a thief. Even if it turns out she’s not a thief, you still have that emotional association, and that’s one of the ways that like, certain kinds of violent propaganda work.
CB: Yeah. That’s perfect. That really I think encapsulates something core about this. I wrote down something adjacent, which is like, lashing out at the wrong person or for the wrong reason. Or the necessity to act decisively when the situation is not clear.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: We saw some issues of that, I think, in previous years, as well as another keyword is like, the fog of war is a good Mars-Neptune keyword. Let’s see —
DRH: I like the shadow boxing also. Like, the construction – it’s like, a strawman argument, but it’s like, even to a greater degree of like, what does it mean to construct an opponent that doesn’t exist just because you need the sensation of having an opponent? Again, that’s a violent fantasy.
CB: Right. Definitely. And then I wrote down – this is like, too literal, but every time I think something’s like, too literal and I don’t say it, then like, it happens, so I’m just gonna write keywords that are just obvious symbolically. It would be like, battles at sea or conflict in the water.
DRH: Or conflicts over water, I think that could also be operative.
CB: Okay.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: So other broad things that could be negative or positive – idealism, oftentimes as a natal placement. So like, the desire to fight for a higher cause or defend the underdog. A belief in something greater that’s like, driving you to fight is like, a common Mars-Neptune theme, which can be sometimes —
DRH: Can be —
CB: — it can go either way.
DRH: Yeah, it can be super deluded or it can be super inspired.
CB: Right.
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And along with that, you have the like, spiritual warrior archetype and the drive to align one’s actions with one’s beliefs, or to fight for ideals on a like, sort of spiritual or almost like religious level.
DRH: Like hardcore mysticism. Like, I’m reminded of particular forms of like, spiritual warfare that you might find in like, Vajrayana Buddhism and things like that. Like spiritual slaying of demons.
CB: Definitely. And something you said earlier that made me think of a quote is that quote “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
DRH: Yeah.
CB: Made me think of what you were saying earlier. All right. So let’s see – final things. Confusion is a potential issue with this, but also lack of energy, like feeling drained, lethargic, or lacking motivation to act on your desires is a really common Mars-Neptune thing, because Mars is like your impulse to act but also one’s energy and vitality, and sometimes Neptune can just kind of like, sap that in various ways.
DRH: It’s like, the – oh, this is interesting. The image that comes to mind is at the end of The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch is dissolved by a bucket of water, and it’s like, she would like to continue to go on doing her nefarious deeds, but instead she’s like, “Oh, I’m melting, I’m melting! Oh, what a world!” You know, which comes to mind because like, one of the things I got from Austin a long time ago is this idea of Neptune as acid – like, not like, LSD acid, but as in something that erodes pretty completely the integrity of something.
CB: Yeah, that acid is a great Mars-Neptune keyword. You get something that’s like liquidy, but also something that’s corrosive or harmful.
DRH: Yeah, and like, you know, if you get injured by acid, it burns, right? It doesn’t feel like you’re just, you know, it’s not… I don’t know. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. It’s not like a gentle, like, ocean wave that’s like, slowly eroding the rock.
DRH: Yeah. It’s much more intense than that.
CB: Yeah. All right. I think that’s… There’s only one other thing – like, I was thinking about this and looking back at past alignments, but there were things that come up sometimes of natal placements with Mars-Neptune, which is like, sacrificing oneself unnecessarily as a negative one. Yeah, or having a sort of like, martyrdom type complex can sometimes be a thing with that. So that’ll be sort of keywords to pay attention to around that time as well.
All right. So that does bring us to the ingress which takes place the end of the month, which is that Venus goes into Taurus, into Venus’s domicile, and that actually brings us to our election of the month, which I’m glad you reminded me about, where I wanted to mention the most auspicious date that we could find this month takes place on April 29th, 2024 at about 12:55 PM local time. So set the chart for your location and your city and set it for 12:55 PM, and you should roughly get a chart with Leo rising.
So Leo is rising, and the Sun is ruling the Ascendant, and it’s in the 10th whole sign house in Taurus, where it is copresent in a sign-based conjunction with all of those other lovely Taurus planets, which includes the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is still very close at this point at 23 and 22 Taurus. And Venus has just freshly ingressed into Taurus so that it’s in the 10th house with the rest of those planets, forming a Taurus stellium in the 10th house. So this is a very 10th house focused chart, which is very good for like, career, reputation, social standing, as well as one’s overall life direction and accomplishing goals. The Moon is in Capricorn on this day where it’s forming and applying to a nice trine with that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus, which is also very happy and very supportive in terms of electional things.
Because it’s at the very end of the month, Mercury has stationed direct and is now moving forward again, so we are getting away from some of the Mercury retrograde issues and delays and things like that that plagued the first half of the month or the first three weeks, basically, of the month. Even the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which is so prominent this month, is pretty much about as far away as you can get, because Mars is at 29 degrees of Pisces, and while some of the energy we were just describing with the Mars-Neptune conjunction is present there – which can be a little bit tricky about not having decisive action or, you know, moving forward with a plan that’s unclear – for the most part, this chart is a pretty strong one in terms of emphasizing Venus, emphasizing the 10th house, emphasizing the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and the sense of creativity and rapid growth and optimism associated with that. And yeah, it should be a pretty good 10th house electional chart.
DRH: As soon as you brought this up, I was somehow struck with the inspiration of, oh, this would be a really good time to, you know, like, American Mother’s Day is in May, and the 10th house is associated with the gestating parent. And I was just like, “Oh, this would be a good time to like, order a gift for your mom,” or write her a letter or something like that, especially anything that helps to like, stabilize components of a relationship where, you know, the Sun is like your own separate quality as a child gets to be in kind relation with your gestating parent, especially thinking about how that Moon was also aspecting like, giving like, separating from a sextile with Saturn in the 8th. There’s something about gifts there.
CB: Definitely.
DRH: Just a suggestion.
CB: No, that’s great. I love that. Yeah, so that is the auspicious electional chart for April; it’s at the end of the month in order to put it in the best part of the month. But Leisa Schaim and I went through and we found at least five or six other electional charts that you can use at different points of the month. In a month like this, sometimes you can find really good electional charts, but other times it’s also knowing about how to navigate even the difficult times. Like, if you’ve gotta do something earlier in the month when the most optimal times to act are to sort of do it in between some of the more challenging things. So we just released that podcast to patrons a few days ago – The Auspicious Elections Podcast for April – and you can get access to that by going to and signing up for our page on patreon.com/theastrologypodcast.
all right. And I think that’s the election for April, and I think actually that is just about bringing us to the end of the month and the very final ingress which takes place, which is just we’ve mentioned that Venus goes into Taurus, but then also Mars just a few days later moves into its home sign of Aries as well by the end of the month.
DRH: Spicy.
CB: Spicy. So Mars heats up; it gets away from Saturn, so there’s a loss of both the restrictive conjunction that we’ve been experiencing most of the month with that Mars-Saturn conjunction, but also the hazy sort of lacking clear actions conjunction with Neptune at the same time. And all of a sudden, Mars moves into fiery and decisive Aries and really sets us up for a major tonal shift and chapter change that occurs in late April and especially early May.
DRH: Yep. And as soon as it enters Aries, just like with Venus as soon as it enters Taurus, it forms an aspect with Pluto. So I think there’s something that will feel quite… I don’t know, it’s like, not quite like, refreshing, but almost like, catching your wind again as Mars enters Aries of just like really… Getting enough oxygen, somehow, feels appropriate as like, the energetic tone shift. And in combination with the Venus-Pluto square, you’re gonna probably want that sensation of like, “Well, I have enough juice to deal with this.”
CB: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I do think there will be like, a freeing up of the energy and a feeling of a lessening of restrictions once Mars moves out of that co-presence with Saturn, and that’s gonna open us up for a lot of quick movement that starts happening in May where you have not just Mars going through Aries, but also eventually all of the planets – a bunch of planets – moving into Gemini that is just gonna increase the pace of communications and travel and a lot of things all at once. But that is something that’s happening next month and we’ll have to leave it as a cliffhanger there and revisit this again next month to hear more about that.
DRH: Yeah. Definitely such a tone shift by the end of April, though. Like, really. If you get into the dooms in early April, remember that early April is not forever.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s really great advice.
All right. Well, any final words? This was a great discussion. Thank you so much for joining me for this today. This was like, big shoes to fill with the first-time absence of my long-time beloved friend and host Austin Coppock, but I think this was great. I couldn’t have imagined a better person to help me out, you know, with Austin’s absence.
DRH: Yeah, I’m really glad to provide, and I’m also really glad that I quickly relinquished the idea that I actually had to be an Austin. Like, I had –
CB: Right.
DRH: — a moment of such intense anxiety of like, “I can’t be Austin! What?”
CB: Yeah. If you showed up with, like, a peacock wallpaper, then we might have had problems.
DRH: Yeah. It’s always a great time to talk astrology with you, and I feel very honored to join you in this particular conversation, so yeah.
CB: Thank you. Yeah, thank you. It was a huge help this month, and yeah, this was fun. We had so much fun, it was going very fast in the first part of this episode; now it’s been over three hours, so. We have already mentioned that you’re gonna be speaking at NORWAC in May and giving that keynote, which is amazing, and I hope people sign up and attend those lectures. What else do you have going on?
DRH: That’s really the main stuff at this point. It’s like, two lectures is a lot to work on. And so I’m seeing clients, working on those lectures, trying to avoid very much any other projects coming into my field of vision because I like shiny new projects as a very cardinal sign person. Yeah. Just like, chugging away. And it’s been great seeing clients, especially seeing some clients specifically to bolster the Infinite Resourcing lecture, so really digging more deeply into things that I’ve been talking about with clients for years but even more explicitly has been super enjoyable. Yeah.
CB: Brilliant. Yeah. That’s gonna be great. And even though you’re gonna be focused on that, you also have a bunch of lectures that are available for sale, right?
DRH: Yeah. I do. Like, everything from like, starting with my very first NORWAC lecture in 2020 to everything else that I’ve created that is shareable – those are all available in my webstore. And I’m delighted to provide Astrology Podcast listeners with a discount code. Through the end of May, if you use the code TAP24, you’ll get 20% off anything you wanna buy in my store.
CB: Nice. You have a ton of great lectures here. The 12th House, Natal Astrology and Radical Self-Care, which we’ve talked about before but I know you have a more in-depth lecture on that which is awesome. A lot of really good lectures here. So the promo code is TAP24.
DRH: Yep. It’s good —
CB: Brilliant.
DRH: — through the end of May 2024.
CB: And what’s the website URL again?
DRH: If you go to ddamascenaa.podia.com, that will take you to it, but if you go to my website, which is DianaRoseHarper.com, you will be able to find your way to my webstore.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode so that people can go to your website and find out more.
DRH: And then there are also – if people like how I talk about things, I have a decent archive of live chats that I’ve done with my Patreon patrons that is available to Patreon patrons.
CB: Awesome. Cool. Awesome. All right. And as for myself, I’m gonna keep working on the podcast. There’s gonna be a big month of astrology. I’m gonna see about getting together that comets episode. I’m about to release this really important episode that Patrick Watson and I just released just to patrons on planetary periods, like long-term planetary periods, and what we found is that some of these periods are showing these weird recurrences, like the bridge, for example, having an exact 47-year recurrence. All of the planets have different periods like that when things recur, and it activates things. And it’s really opening up my eyes to this deeper level of reality and things sometimes being boiled down to numbers, and like, numbers underlying things and different periods of when planets complete and planets return to where they started. So I’m excited about some of that research. I’m gonna do the comets research, and work on some other episodes. So as always, I release those episodes to patrons early. So if you wanna get early access to new episodes, you can sign up for my page on Patreon.com and get access to that and other bonus content as well as just support, if you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast.
So we had an awesome group of patrons joining us in the live chat today, so thanks everyone for joining us and for your comments. We were able to incorporate some of that into the episode, and it’s always awesome to do these episodes live and have that sort of interaction with the audience and with supporters of the podcast. But I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks a lot for joining me today, Diana.
DRH: Thank you! This was lovely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, let’s do it again sometime. Good luck, everybody, with the astrology of this month. Have a good eclipse. Eclipse well. And we will be back again a month from now to check in and see how everything turned out and to reflect and see some of the different things that we learned from the astrology of April of 2024, which I’m sure will be a momentous month that we’ll all remember. So until then, good luck, and we’ll see you again next time.
DRH: Bye!
[credits]
CB: Shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, the #1 astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. You can download it on the Apple App Store or on Google Play, or for more information, visit app.chani.com.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons: Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, and Sonny Bazbaz.
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 a hundred 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 in 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 23rd through the 27th, 2024. You can find out more information at norwac.net.