The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 457, titled:
Astrology Forecast for August 2024
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on August 1, 2024
—
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
—
Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released August 7th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, astrologer Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrology of August 2024. Hey, Austin – welcome.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. How’s you doing?
CB: I am doing great. It has been a crazy, crazy month, so we’re going to talk about it. We’re gonna catch up and spend the first hour of this episode talking about news and events that happened since our last episode and what the astrological correlations were that explain them. And then in the second half of this episode, we’re gonna jump to the astrological forecast for August, where we have a big month that I’m calling “the battle of the benefics and malefics,” because we’ve got Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus all battling it out in like, t-squares all the way across the middle of the month. So we have a lot to talk about. As always, there’s gonna be timestamps in the description below this video on YouTube or on The Astrology Podcast website if you wanna jump ahead to the forecast. But otherwise, let’s get into it.
So first I wanted to show the planetary alignments calendar to give a quick overview of the astrology of August before we get into the news. So right at the top of the month, we have a New Moon in Leo on August 4th, and Venus departs from Leo and ingresses into the sign of Virgo. Then our major transit for the first week of the month is Mercury stationing retrograde on the 5th of August, and it’s gonna be retrograde for three weeks all the way until the end of the month.
On the 7th of August, the retrograde Mercury conjoins Venus in early Virgo. Then we jump to the next week, where we have some of our most explosive combinations of the month, starting with Mars conjoining Jupiter in Gemini on August 14th. The same day, Mercury retrogrades out of Virgo and back into Leo. Then two days later, our other most difficult combination of the month is Mars squaring Saturn on August 16th. Then a few days later, Mercury conjoins the Sun and we have a Mercury cazimi on the 18th of the month. The following day, we have a pretty big Full Moon, where there’s a Full Moon in Aquarius and then there’s several different aspects that all go exact at the same time, including transiting Jupiter square Saturn, transiting Venus squares Jupiter, and transiting Venus in Virgo opposes Saturn in Pisces. So that’s gonna be a huge lunation there on the 19th.
Then a few days later, we have Venus squaring Mars on the 22nd of August, the same day that the Sun moves into Virgo. At the end of the month, Mercury finally stations direct and ends its retrograde period on the 28th, and then Venus moves into the sign of Libra on the 29th.
And that brings us more or less to the end of the month. So those are some of the things we’re gonna be talking about. Here’s the planetary movements calendar. Madeline from Honeycomb.co helped me to design this sort of overview graphic to show how some of those different transits overlap, and especially how they all cluster up around the middle of the month, especially in the late second week and early third week, which we’ll be talking about a little bit later. And this is the Mars-Uranus conjunction that we’re coming off of that we’re gonna be talking about in terms of the news in July and how we transition into talking about some of the other alignments in August.
All right. So hey, welcome. It’s been a crazy month since we last checked in at the end of June. How have you been processing all the news and events?
AC: I don’t know that I’ve completely processed everything. You know, there’s – so much that’s happened possesses a wide range of implications, many of which are mutually exclusive. It sure was interesting to watch it all happen. You know, because we’ve been looking at that Mars-Uranus-Algol conjunction, I don’t know, since at least last fall when we were prepping for the yearly. And so it was interesting to watch it all go down. You know, there’s definitely been a lot of, I guess we call it “astrologer good” or “astrology good,” where the astrology is bang on, and there’s a certain satisfaction in that. But the events foretold are of a bloody, ruthless, chaotic, and destructive character, and so you’re not happy about that. You know —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — so it twists your perspective a little bit sometimes, you know, being an astrologer and expecting things to go a certain way. And then when they go that way and it’s negative, you have a certain satisfaction, and yet, you know, horror is still horror. So there’s —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — been a lot of that.
CB: Yeah. We’d been talking about that Mars-Uranus conjunction and how rough it looked since, you know, our year ahead forecast we recorded back in December. And I actually put together a little compilation on the YouTube channel of us talking about the Mars-Uranus conjunction that would happen in mid-July and just anticipating how rough it would be.
We also anticipated it would be tied in specifically with events with Donald Trump. I said that it would be an explosive week for him, which turned out to be the case, and we’ll get into why in just a moment. But yeah, it’s one thing sort of like, making predictions and seeing the alignments come up, but then just there were so many events, so many news stories that matched that Mars-Uranus in different ways depending on how it was hitting different people’s charts. It was really extraordinary to watch.
AC: Yeah, and it shows the difficulty of making a single prediction out of an alignment that is true for everywhere on earth. You know, with Donald Trump, it hit his Midheaven, but there are other people who did not get shot at who have the Midheaven around those degrees. And also, you know that it’s going to be more than one thing. There may be, there will be a thing that is the biggest thing that will go in the Wikipedia and go in the news, and you know, it’s nice and it would be nice to get that thing. But that alignment wasn’t just that assassination attempt, right? you know, we’ve got the whole list, but you know, it was the Blue Screen of Death. It was an escalation of hostilities and an exchange of explosives between the Houthis and Yemen and Israel. It was a bunch of stuff. And then, you know, 10,000 personal examples.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So there were so many news stories; there was actually too many news stories to cover them all this month. We’re gonna do our best to cover some of the ones that seemed to have the most compelling astrological correlations that we noticed, and we’ll run through a bunch of those now. And then we’ll see if we can get to some additional ones that we’ll mention in passing later. But of course, yeah, we’ll see what we can cover. We’re gonna shoot for one hour for this news section.
All right, so let’s talk about the Mars-Uranus conjunction. I did wanna show a graphic again for that, which is from Madeline at Honeycomb.co where she actually recently put up a Resources page where you can download this graphic and others from Honeycomb.co/Resources. So it just shows the Mars-Uranus conjunction that formed, and it went exact at 26 degrees of Taurus on July 15th. But of course, like all aspects, it had an orb where it was in effect essentially for – and seemed to be at its most intense – leading up to about a week before the conjunction and until about a week after. The three-degree range seemed to be particularly potent, and that range was roughly between July 10th and July 21st. So Austin, you had noted that this was gonna be a particularly difficult conjunction because it was on the fixed star Algol, which was negative often in different astrological traditions.
AC: Yeah. Almost all of them. Algol shows up historically with a great variety of, with high death tolls. Big scary events, high death tolls, and sadly very often it involves the death of innocent people, and that’s part of why Algol stands out in the traditional literature as being associated with evil. Right? One of its names literally translates to “the head of Satan.” Right? It’s also the head of the Gorgon, the Chinese title translates I believe roughly to “trenches for corpses.” But you see it, like, some of the famous instances involve the Guernica bombing, which was massive civilian death toll in the Spanish Civil War. There was a Mars-Uranus conjunction on it with Saturn attending in 1942 when the Soviets carried out extermination of a lot of Polish people. You know, it’s just got a fearsome reputation. It was also the key star that predicted the fate of Princess Diana; she had Venus on Algol. And so, you know, it’s got a well-earned and fearsome reputation. It’s a little bit – it’s certainly more complex if you’re dealing with it in an individual birth chart than just evil, but as sort of a mundane signifier, the combination of that star with a malefic is hardly a good sign that things are gonna go well and nobody’s gonna get hurt.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So our first major event that coincided with that wass that former president Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13th when a lone gunman started shooting at him at a campaign rally, and a bullet grazed and hit Trump’s ear, making him bleed and then drop to the ground where he was covered by Secret Service people.
So in his astrological chart, this was actually hitting him very personally where the Mars-Uranus conjunction at 25, 26 Taurus was actually hitting his Midheaven, the place that has to do with career and reputation, at 24 degrees of Taurus. But also, the Mars-Uranus conjunction was very closely squaring his natal Mars in the first whole sign house at 26 degrees of Leo, which is of course conjunct his Ascendant at 29 degrees of Leo. And that was the part that made it more personally, physically dangerous for him since the first house represents the body. And I had, weirdly, just earlier that week, I had used an example of Archduke Franz Ferdinand who had Mars in the first house in a day chart and he was famously assassinated, and that’s what started World War I. So it was interesting seeing almost an example where you almost had something similar there that same week.
AC: Yeah, it’s pretty striking. You know, one of the – so I got the news that someone took a shot at Trump in the middle of teaching class Saturday a couple weeks ago, and I was actually just talking with students about how to just sort of lean away from that Mars-Uranus-Algol conjunction if it was anywhere near their chart. You know, you can’t dodge everything, but it’s often worth leaning out of the line of fire so to speak if you can. And you know, if you think about what your Midheaven it – you know, the Midheaven is that highest point, it’s the most visible point, it’s the most public point – you know, you could quite accurately imagine it as the podium at the top of the chart where everyone can see you. And there is sort of no – I can’t think of a better way to lean into that transit if it was on the Midheaven than literally being on an elevated podium surrounded by people and being the center of attention. That was sort of striking from a remedial lean-in/lean-out perspective. If that was a client, I would have suggested that they not stand on a podium, you know, literally embody their Midheaven during that time period.
CB: Yeah. Well, and there was other piece of it too – it was like, you know, he was tackled to the ground, but then the shooter was killed. And then Trump himself, he was being pulled away by the Secret Service people, but then he stuck up his fist and he yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” And that was so emblematic of his Mars conjunct the Ascendant. Like, you really can’t get more literal than that – Mars, traditionally, being the planet of war and of fighting and of conflict. And then it was even striking because like, a journalist got this strikingly iconic photograph of him bleeding and like, covered by Secret Service people. And of course, the other transit that he had was Venus had gone into Leo recently, so it was going through his first house and it was opposing Pluto, so that was part of that Venus-Pluto opposition that we had talked about at the beginning of the month that looked rough was this particularly like, grisly photograph of him covered in blood. But then it reminded me, yeah, you know, there was some offsetting benefic influences, like a number of them, for him in his chart at that time.
AC: Yeah. There’s a lot there. And that bloodied head or bloody face imagery is something you see really consistently with Algol.
CB: Right.
AC: There is a famous fighter named Nate Diaz who has Mars conjunct Algol, and there was one moment of triumph when all odds were against him that it’s him with his face covered in blood, and that image is all over the internet if you look up Nate Diaz. And it’s actually a giant mural in his hometown. And I remembered that – yeah, I was struck with the image of Trump, and I was like, “Oh, it’s the bloody, defiant head.” It’s a thing, it’s one of the symbolic motifs of Algol. In this —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — case, Mars-Algol in both of those cases, one by transit.
CB: Right. And then the last piece of things astrologically, because there’s a bunch of stuff and I did a couple videos already on the channel going over some more details, but one of the things I found early on in the research is the shooter – his voter registration was released at one point, and it had his birthdate on it. So we’re actually able to look at the birthdate of the shooter, and it turned out that he was actually born at a Mars-Uranus conjunction back in September 20th of 2003 where Mars was retrograde – it was at zero degrees of Pisces, and it was conjoining Uranus at 29 degrees of Aquarius. Which means that those positions were also being squared, essentially, by the Mars-Uranus conjunction that happened this summer at the end of Taurus. So it was actually a striking example of like, a recurrence transit that sometimes when somebody is born under a specific alignment, that some of the most important events of their life or in this instance the defining event of this person’s life happened when that alignment recurred in the future, yeah, at some point when he was 20 years old.
AC: Yeah. And we’ve seen so many mass shooter events during the Mars-Uranus conjunctions. And, you know, just to reiterate, that was what was striking about this is not only does Algol have a fearsome reputation, but the Mars-Uranus conjunctions which occur roughly every two years are quite fearsome themselves and often come with surprising or shocking violence. Because even though the shooter missed Trump, there were several people killed that day, including the shooter.
CB: Right. Or hit or wounded.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that was the first piece of news, but moving on. That wasn’t all that happened with Trump that week. On the exact day of the Mars-Uranus conjunction on July 15th, two other things happened. One, the declassified documents case was dismissed unexpectedly in court when the judge dismissed it, and that happened – I was looking it up, it happened not just the day of the Mars-Uranus conjunction, but it happened as those two planets were exactly conjoining to the minute on Trump’s Midheaven, which was just really striking because… So the documents case itself, it was the classified documents case, which had originated two years ago the last time that Mars was in Taurus going through his 10th house when the FBI, you know, went to his house and like, pulled out all of these classified documents that they said he shouldn’t have. And then he ended up being charged as a result of that. So some of the reports that I was seeing from like, journalists at the time were saying that this decision from the judge to dismiss it was “unexpected” or “shocking,” and it was striking because it was one of the more serious cases against him right now, and then it was dismissed. So that was kind of like, an unexpected thing, but it was interesting how it was tied in with that previous transit of Mars through Taurus two years ago.
AC: Yeah. You know, the other day when we were talking, Kait suggested that Uranus seems to benefit Trump. You know, because if it wasn’t for in a sense a random movement a microsecond before the shot was fired, he would have been killed. And then, you know, the Uranus on the Midheaven and like, surprisingly a case disappearing rather suddenly and surprising. And it’s worth thinking about because we have – Uranus doesn’t fall comfortably into the benefic or malefic column but seems to benefit some people and seems to be terrible for other people, and he does have that pretty tight Sun-Uranus conjunction with Rahu. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it was kind of a good week for him in the weirdest way possible.
CB: Yeah. It was like, it was tough because the assassination attempt, obviously, was not good. He was wounded. One of the things I was thinking about after he got shot is like, his ear probably hurts during the subsequent, like, few days of that transit. So it’s like, he’s having a physical thing that’s probably still painful to some extent during that time, so it was not good. But you’re right that at the same time, it was like, miraculously positive that he turned his head at the last minute for him. And part of that was that transiting Mars and Uranus, when they’re conjoining his Midheaven, his Midheaven is almost exactly sextile his Venus in the 12th house of enemies. So sometimes when something even negative hits his 10th house sector, his Midheaven, it’s causing a positive transit to the ruler of his 10th house in the 12th. So I think that’s part of the saving grace that we sometimes see with his transits.
AC: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle on it. That’s gotta be part of it.
CB: Yeah. So yeah, and there’s many other parts. The other major thing that happened on July 15th is that he announced his vice presidential pick where he announced JD Vance as his vice president for the presidential election, which is also the day of the Mars-Uranus conjunction. What was interesting about this is that Vance’s birth time and birth certificate was found, and it turned out that he has almost the same exact Ascendant degree as Trump with his Ascendant at very late Leo at 27 degrees. So let me put that chart up.
So here’s Vance’s chart. 27 degrees of Leo rising, and then the Midheaven at 22 degrees of Taurus. So it’s like, interestingly, like, the Mars-Uranus was also hitting his Midheaven. And I was curious about that, though, because sometimes when you have – it seemed like a positive thing, but sometimes when you have a difficult transit that is constellating, it can sometimes indicate that there will be something negative or that you might regret later on about something that you’ve done or started at that time, and it made me wonder at the time if he would have any regrets or if there would be any conflict between the two of them at some point in the future. So that’s one of my like —
AC: Yeah —
CB: — open questions.
AC: Yeah, on a simple level, like, the election – right? The choice Trump elected to name Vance his official VP candidate, and so the electional chart for that choice – like, the finalizing that choice to the public – has that conjunction in it. Right? And so —
CB: Right.
AC: — you know, like, that was not one of – you know, that’s interesting. I believe I specifically half, 25% jokingly called that day my anti-election of the month last month.
CB: Right.
AC: So yeah, that’ll be interesting to see if that ends up being a problem or disastrous or, you know, ends up being rescinded.
CB: Yeah, and that’s actually one of the open questions actually over the next few weeks just because, as we’ll get into, we’re about to go into a Mercury retrograde in Virgo and Leo in August that’s gonna be really intense over the first couple of weeks of August. And there have been some questions after Biden dropped out of the race and after Harris became the new frontrunner whether Trump had any regrets about picking Vance, because you know, it’s a different composition versus going up against Biden himself and whether he would have picked somebody else, and whether he might regret or even go back on that, which would be a pretty classic Mercury retrograde type scenario. So we’ll talk about some of that more when we get to Mercury retrograde and maybe return to that topic.
AC: Yeah. And well, that kind of ties into the other stuff that happened that week.
CB: Exactly. So moving on – the next major thing that happened in chronological order two days later. So all this just happened in like, super quick succession all around the Mars-Uranus conjunction. On July 17th, President Biden announced that he got covid; he had tested positive for covid. And so all of a sudden, he’s sick. He’s like, in his 80s, and covid hits older people even harder. They were the ones that tended to die in much greater numbers during the pandemic. And this Mars-Uranus conjunction happened in Biden’s 6th house of illness, because he’s Sagittarius rising. So that was the manifestation of the Mars-Uranus conjunction for him. And what was interesting is that the first time that he got covid was two years ago, which was the last time that Mars was transiting through Taurus, through his 6th house of illness. So it’s kind of striking, again, with both Trump and Biden we have these recurrences of the Mars transit through Taurus from two years ago and then something connected with that or something similar coming up this time.
AC: Yeah, and I feel a little bit silly not mentioning Biden when we discussed that conjunction. You know, I remembered his Moon super early in Taurus and it being the 6th, but you know, this conjunction happened in the late 20s. And so, you know, my head was full of things, so I didn’t dwell on it. But I didn’t take the time to note that, you know, he has the sect light – the Sun – and Venus, and Mercury, all in that third decan of Scorpio. So this conjunction directly opposed his Sun like, super tightly. And you know, you’re always trying to play the Sun when you’re trying to be a leader on a national or international stage. And so this – you know, again, I feel foolish in retrospect for at least not pointing that out, because that’s such a direct opposition and, as you mentioned, in the 6th house of illness.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, transiting Pluto’s also in early Aquarius is squaring his Moon at zero degrees of Taurus. We had talked about other 6th house transits over the past two years because we were paying close attention to the eclipses that kept hitting his 6th house and how under one of those eclipses – I think in Taurus – he went for just a routine medical procedure, but he went under anesthesia for a period of time, so Harris actually became the acting president for a period under that transit. So it was interesting that that ended up kind of foreshadowing what would take place later, although I guess I haven’t gotten to that point. So this is just – the covid announcement happened on the 17th, and that was super unexpected. But then over the next few days, that transiting Mars at 27 degrees of Taurus – it opposed his Sun at 27 degrees of Scorpio, but it also opposed his Venus at 28 degrees of Scorpio, which is both the ruler of his 6th house of illness but also the ruler of his 11th house of friends and allies. And over the next couple of days from the 17th and 18th, the calls from high-ranking democrats for him to step down intensified and grew more and more intense, and there was reports at one point that he was angry or frustrated about it, which makes a lot of sense in terms of the Mars transit.
So eventually… Actually, before we get there, so another thing happens with him immediately after that. But that wasn’t actually – there was an intermediate crazy event that took place in the sequence, which is that on July 19th, the largest computer outage in history took place when this antivirus company, essentially, or cybersecurity company CrowdSource, sent an update to Windows computers that ended up crashing all of them and making them not be able to boot up and being stuck on the so-called Blue Screen of Death. And this was the largest computer outage in history. It grounded thousands of planes and flights from all sorts of different companies. It also was something that was very visible that you could actually see where even electronic billboards around the world in different countries had the blue screen of death just because they couldn’t boot up if they were running a Windows computer. So this was happening when Mercury had just come into the square with Uranus, and Mercury was also entering its shadow period in addition to the Mars-Uranus conjunction still being very close at that point.
AC: Yeah, you know what’s interesting about that is when Kait and I have done careful work with Algol star from an astro-magical perspective, we had tons of electrical disturbances. We had like, flickering – I remember Kait’s laptop flickering like crazy, and the electrical system in the house being unexpectedly wacky with no precedent. And you know, I was thinking about relating that to Algol’s symbolism, and again, one of the things that you see, as I said, as a symbol is the bloodied head. You also get both decapitation symbolism and actuality. And you know, thinking about – and another thing you see that’s not as intense but still very much part of that star’s catalog of powers is you see head trauma. You know, for example, Muhammad Ali, right? The self-proclaimed greatest all-time and certainly on the list had Saturn and Uranus on Algol, Uranus very closely. And in his later years, he had kind of heart-wrenching evidence of CTE. And when you think about that, you know, with the computers, it’s like they have head trauma, right? Like, you know, the central processing unit. Like, they can’t organize the information and display it. And so yeah, that seems to link to – because if we think about the head, right, the head is where all of the processing and coordinating power goes. Imagine that flickering out or not being able to display properly, which is, you know, kind of a simplification but a not inaccurate simplification of what happens with head trauma.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So it’s part of that range of Algol symbolism and effect.
CB: Yeah. Well, and even just having a Mars-Uranus conjunction, the basic meaning of that is simply like, a disruption to technology, disruption of electronics. Mars is also the planet of killing, and like, the death of electronics – it’s funny that literally the keyword for this was “blue screen of death,” because like, the computers literally were killed and like, bricked and couldn’t boot up. So there was just something incredibly striking even just with Mars-Uranus on its own. And yeah, with Uranus you often see electronic and technical disruptions.
AC: Yeah, it’s really – and again, this is why we’re so excited, slash, you know, kept pointing at this is that there’s a lot of overlap and mutually supporting significations between Mars-Uranus and that particular star.
CB: Yeah. So that was the 19th. Then two days after that on July 21st, Biden announced that he was stepping aside and that he would no longer be in the race for president, and he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. So this was the conclusion of Saturn having stationed on his IC during the debate the previous month, the debate that was so disastrous. And I was looking at the history of this, and you know, this has happened one other time in recent history where a sitting president announced that he wasn’t gonna seek the nomination anymore, and it was in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek the presidency and he was stepping aside so that Robert Kennedy – he didn’t wanna go head-to-head with Robert Kennedy, basically. And what was fascinating about that is if you look at the date for Lyndon Johnson making that announcement, it happened not long after – just days after – a solar eclipse in Aries, which is just like the solar eclipse that happened in Aries earlier this year, the one that crossed half of the United States and that everybody watched. So we have an exact recurrence of that transit as well as other transits that show a recurrence of 1968 that I’ll actually talk about and get into a little bit more later.
AC: And so, just worth noting with that eclipse path, that I believe that both the Trump event as well as the headquarters of the company – CrowdStrike – responsible for the blue screen of death were both within the eclipse path in the United States.
CB: Oh really? Okay, that’s interesting.
AC: Yeah.
CB: I know that —
AC: I was told that; I didn’t take the time to verify it, so if I’m wrong, it’s somebody else that’s wrong. I’m just passing on terrible information. But sounds legit. Feel free to verify.
CB: Yeah, I mean, the one thing I did see that a few people sent in to me, a few listeners sent in, was just that there was a hurricane. Hurricane Beryl occurred in early July, and that actually did follow the eclipse path very closely. So it’s like, here’s a picture of the eclipse path from April, and then there’s a picture of the path of the hurricane that ended up occurring. So that was a pretty good reminder that we’re seeing – that eclipses sometimes the effect of an eclipse or what it portends can sometimes last for months after the eclipse itself, that it’s putting some things in place or some events in place that sometimes won’t manifest fully until months after.
AC: Yeah. Right. I believe Ptolemy gives six months for a solar eclipse to unpack all of its significations, and yeah, we’ve had plenty of that. You know, we talked about it at the time – the solar eclipse in Aries being the Sun’s exaltation where the Sun is supposed to be strongest and sort of most inspiring and ambitious is particularly rough on leaders, and we’ve had assassination attempts, we’ve had successful assassination attempts in other parts of the world. We’ve had, you know, world leaders indicted. Rahu has declared open season on leaders with that eclipse.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And we may see more of that here because we’ve still got a little bit to go of the range of that eclipse in terms of the six-month range.
AC: Month and a half.
CB: So —
AC: Month and a half-ish.
CB: Yeah, before eclipse season starts again in September. So one of the things that was interesting about Biden’s announcement is it happened right on that Full Moon conjunct Pluto that we spent a lot of time on last month because it looked so complicated and there was all these like, contrasting indications were the Moon was conjoining Pluto, and on the one hand that was interesting in terms of Biden being a Pluto in Leo like many born in the 1940s, and so this was partially the Pluto opposition. And we had talked previously about themes of having to let go and like, people hitting the end of a sort of like, life cycle of trying to hold onto things and sometimes holding on for too long. But on the one hand, it’s like, you have the end or metaphorical death of his presidency with that Full Moon conjoinging Pluto at that time. It was also like, shocking and disruptive. Mercury was squaring Uranus at the same time; Mercury was at 26 degrees of Leo square Uranus at 26 Taurus almost exactly. So it was hugely shocking and disruptive, especially politically for like, the Republicans for example were hugely reportedly surprised and thrown off by it, because their Republican National Convention had just gone on the entire previous week, and they spent most of that week focused on Biden. But then all of a sudden, this announcement takes place a few days later and Biden’s no longer the focal point of the race. So there was that element of it.
And then there was also another element of it – well, two other elements. One, Mars had just clicked into Gemini, which is Biden’s 7th house of partnership, including business partners, but it’s Harris’s – sorry, it’s Biden’s 7th house of partnership and it’s Harris’s first house, because Harris has Gemini rising. So the other part of this transit that we were trying to figure out last month was it also coincided with the most positive transit of the month, which was Venus at 12 degrees of Leo that day, exactly sextile Jupiter at 12 degrees of Gemini. And so what ended up happening is on the one hand, you get this from the Democrats’ perspective like, this sad event of Biden stepping down and reaching the end of his presidency and the end of like, a 50-year political career that culminated with his presidency. But then on the other hand, things suddenly shifted and all of a sudden, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as his vice president, and all of a sudden, that was that Full Moon then became the start of her political campaign to run for the presidency in November. And very quickly, Democrats ended up coalescing behind her and for the first like, day or two after that announcement while Venus was still very closely square Jupiter, there was just like, jubilation amongst democrats that suddenly Harris was the nominee and all of a sudden a lot of them felt like, hope and optimism for the presidential race. Whereas up to that point, many had started to resign themselves that Biden was gonna lose the election to Trump. So it was really interesting witnessing just the complex ways that all those different combinations worked out in tandem in ways that fit the symbolism and then eventually like, combined together.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting that that candidate switch happens just as Mars crosses into Gemini. And as you mentioned, Kamala’s first house is Gemini, and so as soon as that happened, that was the beginning of a Mars-Jupiter combination in her first. And Mars-Jupiter, you know, Mars-Jupiter’s basically a champion combination. It’s like, the celebrated warrior or, you know, whatever. It’s something you see in a lot of professional fighters’ charts who are like, reigning champions and have that as a reputation. Because Mars in and of itself brings contention, and certainly becoming a candidate for the presidency of the United States means that you’ve, in a sense, entered a war, right? You are a target. But that Mars-Jupiter is very supportive and very enthusiastic.
CB: Yeah. One of the reports I saw said that on the first day that that happened, that she spent 10 hours on the phone calling people up and trying to rally support, which is just like, a perfect manifestation of Mars moving into Gemini in her first house, the sign of communication, and all of a sudden you’re just like, going out there and having to do all this. So that was brilliant. Also, the fact that it happened on a Full Moon – one of the things that happens now as a consequence of that is Harris was born exactly at the moment of a Full Moon. Trump was also born at the moment of a Full Moon, so it means the two leading candidates basically for the presidency right now were both born on a Full Moon, and then the race between them just began on a Full Moon when Biden dropped out and suddenly Harris becomes the challenger for Trump. And then as we’ll see in August, the beginning of the Democratic National Convention on the 19th is also gonna start on a Full Moon. So there’s all this like, weird Full Moon symbolism taking place. This is gonna be the battle of the Full Moons in terms of the presidential election. And weirdly about that – even the third party candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr., was also born within a day of a Full Moon. So I don’t know – I’m not like, a statistician, but that seems like, wildly not statically, you know, probable. But yet here we are.
AC: Yeah, here we are! Here we are. One last thing, one last note on all the American political developments as a result of that Mars-Uranus-Algol, another thing in retrospect why didn’t I talk about this and think about it more – well, because Kait and I are splitting 24 hrs a day of healthcare – or of baby care; I’m a little distracted. But – and I’m imperfect – but the Moon in the Sibley chart for the United States is at 27 degrees of a fixed sign. It’s at 27 degrees of Aquarius. So that Mars-Uranus-Algol was exactly square the United States’ Moon. Kind of a big deal. And it’s worth noting that the, you know, Mars joining Uranus there certainly brought us dramatic events, but Uranus is just hanging out there, right, throughout the rest of the election cycle and beyond. We have a Full Moon on it. We have a Full Moon square it this month. Like, that sector of the sky and disruptions coming from there with a little bonus Algol characterization is not over just because Mars has moved off.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And you know, I was a little bit surprised. I was expecting – and I think I talked about on the previous episodes – Biden to… There’s that eclipse in Pisces that takes place in the middle of September, and it’s in Harris’s 10th house and Biden’s 4th house of endings and Harris’s 10th house of reputation and social status and career. And I’d expected Harris to be elevated at that point. So now I’m wondering if there isn’t some additional step that doesn’t take place in September that elevates Harris further around that time and that brings things more full circle or towards some sort of ending point for Biden around the same time as well. So that’s something we’ll talk more about probably in the forecast and especially the forecast for September once we get there, but that’s something I’m thinking about right now.
AC: It’s very intriguing. Very suspicious, these eclipses.
CB: Yes. Eclipse season. And then finally, I posted a clip on The Astrology Podcast YouTube channel – I’ve been posting more short videos there lately that don’t always go to the audio version of the podcast – but you know, Leisa Schaim had been the first astrologer that I know that really came across that we had a birth time for Kamala Harris and had pointed out way back in 2018 how Harris’s zodiacal releasing periods got really good for like, a decade and became very prominent starting in 2020. And so I posted a clip of us like, talking about that from back then, just because I thought it was such a great additional manifestation of Leisa making that prediction back in 2018 and 2019 and just the manifestation of that now that Harris has become not just the Vice President in 2020 when that period started, but now has become the Democratic nominee at this point in 2024 as that period continues.
AC: Yeah, yeah. Good on Leisa.
CB: Yeah. So shoutout, Leisa. All right. So those are like, the major news stories that we had a lot of astrology to mention for. There were a bunch of other stories, though, that I wanted to mention just briefly if we can in passing that all clustered around the Mars-Uranus conjunction.
So one of them – July 15th, the day of the conjunction, scientists confirm rapid deoxygenation a threat to stability of life on earth in a study published in Nature where they’re showing how not just the ocean but rivers and stuff are losing their oxygenation, which could be a threat to like, all life on earth in the long term. So I thought that was something to pay attention to since that happened right on the conjunction.
Also on July 14th and 15th, the Russian Defense Ministry shared a video of dropping a new three-ton glide bomb on Ukrainian military positions, and I thought this was a really striking manifestation of something you had really emphasized, Austin, about new weapons of war being sometimes a manifestation of Mars-Uranus.
AC: Yeah, we have a lot of instances of new weapons being deployed during Mars-Uranus conjunctions.
CB: For sure. So on July 16th, I got a bunch of listeners who sent in reports that a meteor flew over New York City and caused a loud boom and shaking. So that was really striking that happened like, within 24 hours of the conjunction. Like, that’s very Mars-Uranus, like, a loud boom and shaking.
On July 19th, there was a surprise drone attack where the Houthis from Yemen flew a drone all the way around to Israel, and it ended up carrying a bomb that went off and hit the US embassy or close to the US embassy in Israel. So that was a really interesting surprise, like, technological attack that sort of like, came out of nowhere that sort of fit the symbolism. And then we’ll circle around to that in a minute.
On July 19th, the top UN court says that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal. So there was like, a major court ruling in terms of that ongoing thing that’s happening.
On July 19th, there was an assassination of a political leader in Ukraine. Did you follow that one?
AC: No, I didn’t.
CB: Okay. Well, that was a whole thing. On July 20th, Israel responded and sent their first ever missile attack at the Houthis in Yemen, and this was a large attack on a port that caused – there was just these images of like, huge flames as a result of this missile attack. And this was the very last day of Mars in Taurus conjunct Uranus ended with that.
On July 21st, I noted this but it had been happening for the entire week; there was these protests in Bangladesh where there were anti-government protests that were led by students, but then there was an attempt to like, crack down on them, and it was incredibly tense and turned violent.
On July 26th – so this is outside of the Mars-Uranus range at this point, but – like, on July 26th – actually, I’ll skip that one, but I’ll just say that some of the things surrounding the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and people using fake and AI-generated video stuff that we had always worried about and anticipated even a year ago or two years ago with Saturn-Neptune coming together has finally manifested, and there’s been some really striking instances of that.
And then last thing is July 29th, Biden proposed Supreme Court reform and an ethics code for Supreme Court justices, which is something that all other judges have to adhere to like, ethics codes, but for some reason, the Supreme Court doesn’t have anything like that. So I think this might be a manifestation of Jupiter and Saturn coming into alignment with their square, which is only like, five degrees at this point. And if true, we’re gonna see some ongoing things related to the courts as we have two more of those squares, the next one happening in December.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. I tend to – I guess I was looking at that through the lens of Leo. In that Declaration chart for the United States, the 9th house is Leo, and just as an individual’s 9th house is their beliefs and principles and judgment about what’s right and wrong, the 9th house in a nation’s chart tells you something about their legal system. And we’ve had a number of important rulings and you know, events with the justice department when big things happen in Leo, and we have the first half of our upcoming Mars retrograde will occur in Leo. And so that’s the angle that I was looking at that through.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I mean, it could definitely be connected with that as well. I guess I was just thinking, I was rereading through some stuff in Tarnas about his treatment of Jupiter and Saturn and just Jupiter’s always associated with judges, and sometimes, you know, Saturn of course is associated with putting constraints on things. And one of the things that Biden proposed was term limits for judges, because right now they’re just like, lifetime appointments, and I think he proposed like, an 18 or 16 year term limit or something like that, partially also in order to make it more consistent that each president will appoint a new judge every two years or something like that. So that’s one of the reasons I was connecting with the Jupiter-Saturn, but also I think it means – if that’s true at all – that this is gonna come up again in December when Jupiter squares Saturn. And it makes me nervous about having a recurrence of like, the year 2000 election 24 years ago where the Supreme Court ended up like, deciding essentially the outcome of the election.
AC: Yeah. Well, our two factors that we’re looking at coincide in December. Because we have – Mars moves into Leo deep into the shadow of its upcoming retrograde the day before the election, and then in December, Mars stations retrograde in Leo very early in the month and is retrograde or almost retrograde in Leo all month and for much of the next month as well. But yeah, multiple – like, you can get decapitation from Algol, but you can also get decapitation from the North Node. Right? Like, you can get – it’s often when multiple cycles all point towards issues in the same area or the same type of event, right?
CB: For sure. Yeah. And you know, 24 years later, it’s also gonna be a recurrence of Venus and Jupiter, because Jupiter was in Gemini back in the year 2000, and Venus was transiting through Sagittarius so that there was a Venus-Jupiter opposition on election day in 2000, and that’s what we’re gonna have this year as well is a Venus-Jupiter opposition.
AC: Interesting.
CB: So lots of interesting things. We can talk about more of that in the forecast section. So we’ve actually gotten through the news section in only 50 minutes, so is there anything else you wanted to mention? I mean – or maybe we should just reflect on what a crazy couple of weeks that was, basically, with all the Mars-Uranus stuff, and yeah, just living obviously in historic times, anticipating sometimes the alignments coming up and then seeing the full manifestation. You know, it’s interesting being able to document some of this stuff that’ll be in history books in the future, but also to be able to document in real time what the astrology was has been just fascinating.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. You know what’s funny – I remember waking up on the 13th and being like, “Well, nothing’s really, we’re getting pretty close and nothing’s really happened. Maybe it’s just not that big a deal!” I was like, “Oh, it’s a little sad that I got it so wrong.” And I was like, “But you know, everything that I was expecting was kind of horrible, so you know, learn from this and appreciate the non-death-toll.” And then by the end of the day, I thought differently.
CB: Yeah. Never – that was something I was reflecting on recently that Robert Zoller always used to say, which is like, “The astrology is always right.” And when I was younger, when I was in my 20s and he told me that, I was always really hesitant because I thought, you know, no. Like, sometimes astrologers can be wrong or your interpretation can be off since there’s an interpretive element to things, which is true. But the core of what he was saying was true, which is that the astrology is always right and it’s always showing you something; sometimes you just don’t know or sometimes you don’t see it yet, but you find out in retrospect that something really important did happen. But it’s kind of important to realize that the astrology’s often telling you something more objective about what’s happening in reality than you can see with your limited vantage point as a human.
AC: Yeah, if only the astrologer was always right. Actually, that would be its own nightmare. But one that we aspire to.
CB: Yeah, we do our best. We continue to improve and yeah, it’s been nice going back and sometimes putting together those clip compilations so you can see what we said about things leading up to it and then how things actually turned out lately.
All right. So I think that’s good for the news section. Why don’t we take a little bit of a break?
All right, so we don’t have a sponsor for this episode, so I’m gonna sponsor my own episode. And I’ve just released a PDF ebook version of my book Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, which is this comprehensive, 700-page text on everything you need to know about the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology. So I just finally released an unlocked PDF version of the book that people have been asking me to do for years. I wanted to hold off for a few years after I published it in 2017 due to like, issues with piracy and stuff like that, but I finally feel comfortable putting it out there. It also makes it more accessible in terms of screen readers and other things like that. So it’s also much cheaper compared to the print book because the print book is so thick that it’s like, 700 pages, so it’s a big, thick book. It was meant to be read in print, so that’s still the superior version. But if you want a cheaper or if you want an ebook version to take around with you, you can get a hold of it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Books, and there’s information about how to order it there using a little program that I use called SendOwl, and it will redirect you. You can purchase the book, and it’ll email you the book directly afterwards. So pretty simple and straightforward.
Austin —
AC: Very nice.
CB: — what do you having going on?
AC: Well, as always, there are a wide variety of lectures and workshops available for purchase and download on website. I will be doing another round of a limited enrollment for my Fundamentals of Astrology program in mid-September. Just as long as you’re signed up for the mailing list, you will get updates about that, which will not come too frequently. And then with Sphere and Sundry, we actually just released the first decanic series, and this is Capricorn two. That’s the second decan of Capricorn, and it is an extremely practical, constructive, get-your-shit-together, be productive, channel martial energy towards things getting done rather than all the other places martial energy can go. I love it. It’s been – I’ve very pleased to have it be the first decanic series that we’ve released.
And also, Sphere and Sundry will also soon be doing another round of Thema Mundi, which is sort of Kait’s magnum opus composite series, which combines seven individual series for the seven traditional planets, each of which was performed when the planet was in the position it was in in the Thema Mundi, our theoretical chart for the creation of the universe. So yeah, big creation and constructive stuff is sort of on offer right now.
CB: Nice. Awesome. Websites?
AC: Websites – AustinCoppock.com for my lectures. Also, I’m not booking readings, but you will see the people who’ve graduated my program have profiles there; you can contact them for readings. They spent years learning stuff that I know how to do. So AustinCoppock.com for lectures and workshops and my graduates, and then SphereAndSundry.com for the materia.
CB: Great. All right.
All right, let’s transition into talking about the astrological forecast for August. So I’m gonna put the graphics back up just to give a little bit of a reminder here about what we’re gonna be covering and what the overview is. This is another crazy month. It’s crazy in a different type of way, but this was one of the months that we focused in on in the year ahead forecast because it has so much going on and it has so many… Sometimes any one of these alignments would be something that we would say would be the alignment of the month that’s gonna have the most crazy events, but this month, we’ve got like, several of them overlapping each other at the same time. So my big kind of like, overview of this month is that it’s broken up into four parts, and there’s four primary things that are gonna be happening.
The first part of the month, the beginning of the month, especially the first week or two is gonna be dominated by the Mercury retrograde in Virgo. It’s gonna start in Virgo, and then it’s gonna retrograde back into Leo. So first part of the month is all Mercury retrograde stuff, you know, miscommunication, delays, doing things over again, so on and so forth. The second week of the month of August is gonna be dominated by the Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini, the Mars-Saturn square that’s gonna take place between Pisces and Gemini, and this is sort of leading into the Democratic National Convention, and I think there’s gonna be some major events that go down just before that that are gonna be tied in with these two combinations of Mars-Jupiter and Mars-Saturn.
Then the third week of the month is really dominated by the Jupiter-Saturn square that goes exact, and also Venus swoops in and aspects Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars and activates all of those. So that’s why I’m calling this month the battle of the benefics, because really in the middle of August we have both benefics and both malefics sort of vying it out for power with these hard aspects between the four of them, and a lot of tension derived from that.
Then finally the final week of the month, Mercury stations direct sextile Jupiter, so there’s finally some resolution of some of the dirt and stuff that Mercury kicked up at the beginning of the month finally comes to some sort of completion. Then Venus departs from the difficult aspects in Virgo and enters into Venus’s home sign in Libra. And then at the very beginning of September on the 1st, Uranus stations in Taurus and Pluto retrogrades back into Capricorn, which is a huge shift. So I think those are the main things in terms of the outline for this month that I wanted to set up at the beginning.
AC: Yeah. It’s definitely chaotic. One attempt to simplify the pattern that I’ve been thinking about is just that it’s all of this Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and Venus – it’s a mutable t-square and grand cross. It’s all mutable. And mutable in and of itself indicates things that are in a state of change. They’re moving from one shape to another. And so when we combine that with the fact that Mercury will be retrograde for most of the month, you know, we have a similar pattern there as well. It’s very much, how do things shake out, and how chaotic is the process of things shaking out into a form or shape that will hold for a little bit? And so I think things will continue to look very different week to week throughout August. And if you’ve got lots of mutable planets like me, then you know, nail your feet to the deck, because it’s gonna be very easy to be disoriented or pulled this way and then that as the weeks pass.
CB: Totally. Yeah, with Mercury going retrograde in a mutable sign with all the malefics and benefits meeting up in the middle of the mutable signs, especially those middle degrees are gonna be really hot degrees. So here’s another graphic from Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co, which shoutout again – you can go to Honeycomb.co/Resources to download some of these graphics. So this is showing us, you know, we’re coming off of, we’re pretty well off of the Mars-Uranus conjunction at this point, especially once Mars moved into Gemini on the 20th, there’s a definite drop-off that starts happening. But then with Mars in Gemini, we are heading straight into Mars conjunct Jupiter going exact on the 14th and Mars square Saturn on the 16th, and then Jupiter square Saturn on the 19th. So these are really the dominant sort of aspects that we’re gonna be talking about mid-month, but I just wanted to center the discussion initially on those because they’re so looming and so sort of monumental in some ways. But let’s go back to the beginning of the month, and I’m gonna put up an animated chart for tomorrow.
For the record, we started recording this episode today on Wednesday, July 31st, 2024; we started like, an hour ago at like, 11:30 I think roughly. But here is the chart for those watching the video version for tomorrow where we can see Mars is at eight degrees of Gemini, so it’s already applying within six degrees to the conjunction with Jupiter at 14 Gemini. Saturn’s at 18 degrees of Pisces, so it’s really coming into alignment with those two as well. And most importantly, Mercury starts off the month here at three degrees of Virgo, but it’s already moving extremely slowly, and it’s getting ready to station right at the beginning of four degrees of Virgo. So that’s kind of our first aspect of the month is Mercury slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde which it fully does on August 4th and August 5th at four degrees of Virgo.
AC: Yeah, and we have right at the beginning of the month, we have the New Moon in Leo, and then immediately afterwards, Mercury’s retrograde station in Virgo. So we’re really resetting things with that New Moon. And the first, you know, change to the lineup or change to the direction of things is that Mercury station shortly thereafter, as well as Venus’s movement into Virgo right after that Mercury station. So kind of two different things going on – one, the New Moon in Leo is lovely. You know, the Sun and Moon both join in the Sun’s sign. It’s a good moment for all things solar, and it’s especially positive because the Sun has moved away from the sextile to Mars and is about to complete the sextile to Jupiter, and so the Moon does the same. The Moon joins with the Sun, and then its first aspect is the sextile to Jupiter. Jupiter and the Sun are friends; Jupiter and the Moon are friends. Like, that core right there if we don’t look at – and before we look at the Mercury hijinks that will ensure shortly – is really quite lovely.
CB: Right. So with Jupiter, there’s like, this sense of optimism, of growth, of hope, of things – it’s a New Moon, so it’s like, some things are ending, but there’s also a fresh beginning where there’s a sense of optimism. There’s even some excitement, because it’s like, Venus is just coming off of a square with Uranus, which, while it can be somewhat disruptive, it can also be disruptive in a good way, like, you know, going out and doing something new socially. Trying something you haven’t tried before that’s exciting and disruptive. There’s a lot of positive things about this, but just the fact that Mercury’s stationing at the exact same time, there’s another tinge to it that some of that optimism and some of the initial boldness and excitement runs into some sort of issues like, right away, because it’s at the beginning of a retrograde. And I feel like that energy is gonna be really prominent there, especially in this first week of August.
AC: Yeah. Again, the modality of the signs is a big issue here, right? Because for fixed signs, things are clearing up, relative to last month. You know, Mars is well out of there. You know, the Sun is supposed to be in Leo; it does well there, whatever house that is is gonna be going good at first, but there’s this – there are all these questions that are developing in mutable signs. And those questions will be brought back to Leo, but not until the second half of the month. And it’s worth noting also that the potentials and the sort of, yeah, potentials, the opportunities, the sort of ways to work with this and improve things that are signified by Jupiter are subject to that Mercury retrograde. Right? Mercury is the ruler of Jupiter and Mars here, and so Mercury is about to sort of change what Jupiterian opportunities are available. Maybe that, in individual cases, that will be a change for the good, but there’s some potential confusion that’s about to happen there.
CB: Yeah. So I wrote down some Mercury retrograde keywords, just because I feel like sometimes we take for granted what we mean, and sometimes when we don’t fully articulate like, some of the basic things that that means, it’s not as clear, you know, in terms of having called it ahead of time. So some of the themes with Mercury retrograde that we always talk about are revisiting the past where sometimes you go back and revisit the past for some reason. You have encounters with people from the past. You revisit old ideas and situations. You have to do something once, and then having to do it over again later in the month is a very common thing. So redoing, but also sometimes rethinking things if there’s something you had decided especially early or leading up to the retrograde – sometimes you may have to rethink it and redo it.
AC: Yeah. Oh, go ahead.
CB: So here I’ll just say the rest and we can talk about them. So other Mercury retrograde things are like, delays and setbacks. Detours. Things taking longer than expected. We’ve seen this during previous presidential elections when Mercury was retrograde around the time of the election like the last one that took longer to count the votes and determine the outcome than expected, and that was true both in 2000 and 2020. Communication issues. Miscommunication. MiSunderstandings. Technology challenges, like, technical snafus and technological malfunctions. Travel disruptions. And then finally on a personal level, sometimes the Mercury retrogrades can coincide with a period of reflection and introspection when you’re doing this backwards looking and revisiting old ideas or old people from the past thing; sometimes it can become very introspective, and that often coincides also with the Mercury cazimi.
AC: Yeah, very much.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, so that’s a pretty good list. I would add to that something I find with most Mercury retrogrades, and it’s just sort of something I notice as we’re getting closer that’s a more internal thing is I become dissatisfied with the way I’m talking about something or the words that I’m using to describe things. And often I’m led to kind of come back to whatever it is that I am thinking about, whether it’s internal or external, and sort of come up with new or fresh or just different words to describe the things. Right? You know, Mercury is very much about that – how do we put something into words? And so often there’s a returning to center on that, and the return to center is a sitting w/the phenomenon or the thing or the feeling or the experience itself, and then instead of using exactly the same phrases or what might feel like they become cliches to describe something, thinking about how else – what other words could you put to it that might be more direct and evocative and accurate?
CB: Yeah. Sometimes realizing that you’re not communicating as clearly as you would like, or it’s not coming from within you as clearly when it comes out of you in terms of your words and finding a way to do that more effectively can be part of that like, three-week process.
AC: Right. So instead of just describing, you know, the mid-month configurations as a shitshow, instead looking for something more descriptive and perhaps less overused.
CB: Yeah. I’m trying to think of something we could go with there to describe the mid-month. I mean, ironically, I was the one that was gonna use more expletives for this month, so it’d be funny if we switched places.
AC: I think we can do better than “shitshow.” I think it’s more complicated. There will be a show. There will be shit. But there are other crucial elements we need to integrate.
CB: An excrement extravaganza, I think, is what you’re looking for. That’s what you’re describing.
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, with both benefics involved as well as both benefits, I’m imagining the game show booth where someone goes in the booth and then artificially generated winds, you know, sort of tornado dollars around them, and they try to grab it. But there’s fecal matter in there, but there are also cash and prizes. There are – I don’t know, like, maybe little pieces of glass from Mars. Like, there’s a lot of danger, but there are a variety of cash and prizes available in the same booth. The question is whether you’re willing to enter the booth. If we could name the booth, that might be it. But if you’re willing to enter that little micro-hurricane of cash prizes, fecal matter, and glass or not.
CB: That’s honestly very funny that you’re describing it like that, because right now there’s like, a controversy with Mr. Beast who we talked about like a year ago on the podcast about how he sets up contests and whether the situations that he puts some contestants in is like, too extreme and putting them in a bad position because they’re desperate to win the money or something like that. He has Saturn stationing on his Jupiter in Pisces right now, and it seems like that’s not going very well. But it’s funny that you were describing things in that way.
AC: Is this one of his show ideas? Do an episode with the cyclonic chamber of mixed ingredients?
CB: I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see, but so back to the cyclonic… This New Moon – you know, one of the things I wanted to mention is just this New Moon when it happens, Venus is at 29 degrees of Leo, and that’s like, right on Trump’s Ascendant. And I think this is gonna be personally important for him or like, more personally important for him as a result of that. I remember years ago in like, 2020 I think is when he got sick with covid and he announced it; I think Venus was on his Ascendant. He had some other negative transits that were explaining why he got sick, but Venus was on his Ascendant, and there was like, this outpouring of in some instances like, support or sympathy that he got sick during the pandemic, and he got like, the most likes on one of his tweets back then that he ever had in any other day. And obviously, not all of those were actually people wishing him well, but it was an interesting manifestation of that. So I just note that this Venus is right on his Ascendant, and Mercury is stationing retrograde there in early Virgo. And you know, that’s potentially tied in with Vance as well because Vance is about to turn 20 and he was actually born right before a Mercury retrograde in Virgo that is the same cycle as this one, because Mercury repeats every 20 years. So I’m really curious to see how that goes in terms of the two of them, and just what sort of like, rethinking or revisiting or revisioning comes up for the both of them in terms of that, whether if that really is like, Trump revisiting his relationship with Vance and how well that’s been going, or whether it’s just them retooling and scrambling to reconfigure like, how they’re dealing with a new opponent that they weren’t anticipating going against until very recently.
AC: Yeah. Right. I mean, so much of what’s happening is going to call for serious rethinking, right? Certainly in the American political area, but in other places as well. You know, that’s part of all this mutable stuff is some of the things have just been sort of blown into new shapes, which are themselves uncertain, but there’s also like, as things are changing, how do you adapt to something that hasn’t taken its final form? Right? Or something that just changed and then scrambling to figure out, you know, what adaptations you need to make. Something big happens, and like, oh, what does that do to my weekly schedule? Right? Or you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so much of that is going on pretty much all month with various peaks and ebbs.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Because then it continues on, and we get the cazimi on August 18th, for example, is at 26 degrees of Leo, which is conjunct Trump’s Mars in his first house and activating that placement. And then since both of them have the same Ascendant degree, it’s like, Mercury’s gonna retrograde over both of their Ascendants and through their first house. So there’s something going on there, especially in the lead up to the Democratic National Convention. And yeah, for a lot of us personally, having Mercury station retrograde in Virgo but then retrograde back into Leo and trying to pay attention to what decisions you’ve made over the past couple of weeks, especially since Mercury entered its shadow in late July, which is the degrees it’ll retrograde back to. And for some people, if you have personal placements or sensitive degrees in early Virgo and late Leo, there’s gonna be some action that you took that you thought was over and done with, but you’ll actually end up having to revisit and maybe redo over again because you’ll find out that things didn’t go as smoothly as you initially expected or hoped.
AC: Yeah. Adaptation, rethinking, reconfiguration, rebuilds necessary.
CB: Yeah. And part of the other thing is that this Mercury square – with Mercury stationing at four Virgo, it’s not that far from squaring Mars at 10 degrees of Gemini with Mars in the superior position. So I feel like this Mercury retrograde starts off as much more combative, much more conflict-oriented, much more like, angry or oriented towards verbal fights and altercations early in the month, whereas by the end of the month when Mercury stations direct, it’s sextiling Jupiter and no longer has that configuration to Mars. So it’s like, things calm down, and there’s a settling or resolution of some of those verbal conflicts that came up towards the beginning of the month. But it’s very distinct, like, the beginning versus the end of the month with Mercury.
AC: Yeah. Especially with Mercury. Yeah, Mercury settles into a very workable supported position, but there is plenty of conflict. There’s plenty of conflict that heats up as we proceed throughout the month as the other planets make contact with Mars.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so one of the nice little offsetting things that does happen, though, in terms of the Mercury retrograde very early on is Venus ingresses in Virgo, which is not terribly good for Virgo because it will send Venus headlong into some of those configurations with Mars and Saturn this month that are pretty tense at the middle of the month. But Venus does lend Mercury a helping hand very briefly around August 6th and 7th when transiting Venus conjoins Mercury at three degrees of Virgo. And that is one of the like, positive offsetting things that’s trying to counterbalance the Mercury retrograde and will probably add a very brief note of like, sweetness or sort of repair or trying to counteract some of the tensions and some of the miscommunications and other things that come up at the beginning of the retrograde.
AC: Yeah, Venus is at least in a position to help Mercury with the reconfiguration. Which isn’t maybe what Venus would prefer to do with their afternoon, but it’s help for Mercury and help with the first phase of problem identification and, you know, imagining alternate patterns or builds or reconfigurations. But it does pull Venus completely into the Mercury retrograde story as Mercury kind of gets to run the show in Virgo and Venus is, yeah, not in a position to call the shots in the same sign.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. So that aspect goes exact on August 7th, so that’s the target timeframe for that. So moving onto the next aspects. It looks like after that point, after the Venus-Mercury conjunction, we really just start building up to the Mars-Jupiter conjunction after that. Because by this point, by August 7th, Mars is at 12 degrees of Gemini, and Jupiter is already at 15 degrees of Gemini. So that means they hit the three degree point around this time, around August 7th, August 8th. And as we saw last month, it was that three degree range that was really the most potent range when it came to the Mars-Uranus conjunction that happened in the middle of July. So we would expect something similar here. So basically by the time we get to August 7th and 8th, we are in Mars conjunct Jupiter in Gemini land, and that is our next aspect to talk about.
AC: Yeah, just to take a second here. So once we get into the second week of August, Mars is chasing that conjunction with Jupiter while Jupiter is moving into a tight square with Saturn, and then Venus is now moving into square with Mars. So all three are – all four are looking at one member or another, and these are all moving tighter, tighter from the 8th onward. As soon as Venus is done with Mercury, it’s on to Mars, and Mars is on to Jupiter. Jupiter’s on to Saturn. And so like, it’s forming it. Right? The little button that starts the cyclone booth spinning has been pressed.
CB: Yeah. And so that first aspect of Mars-Jupiter goes exact on the 14th. Then right after that, Mars squares Saturn on the 16th, and then Jupiter squares Saturn on the 19th. So it’s just like, really quickly succession – bam, bam, bam – over like, less than a week period there, basically.
So these are really contrasting energies, and that’ll be one of our challenges is how to put all of this together. And I think we have to start by trying to delineate some of it individually at first, starting with the Mars-Jupiter. And what are some of your basic keywords for Mars conjoining Jupiter in Gemini?
AC: So Mars-Jupiter is bombastic, triumphant, doing all the things. In the words of Charlie Sheen, winning here, winning there. You know, Mars takes the sort of gentle win-win quality away from Jupiter but preserves the celebratory and triumphant. And so it’s usually celebration and triumph over or against, right, which is why you see it in the charts of champions in competitive sports, and can be a lot of fun if you’re on the right side of it. It’s not fun to be just part of a champion’s resume, but it’s fun to feel that like, triumphant, enthusiastic, you know, “I can do this, we can do this, let’s kick some ass” energy.
CB: Right. That was one of the birth charts that I found in trying to research people that had Mars-Jupiter conjunctions is I had one is Tom Brady, who was a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini, I believe, and he’s regarded as the greatest quarterback in American football history who’s known for his exceptional leadership, his accuracy, and especially his competitiveness, as well as his longevity having retired at the age of 45. So I thought that was a great example of what you’re talking about there in terms of —
AC: Yeah —
CB: — athletics.
AC: Yeah, and someone who’s literally, whose hands are weighed down by all the championship rings.
CB: Right, yeah. Having success in athletics is a pretty good one. All right, so I wrote down a bunch of stuff as well. So one of my keywords that I’m really looking for for this is two of the fundamental meanings of Mars is that Mars is the planet of war, and Jupiter is the planet of peace. So I think themes of war versus peace are gonna come up and be very front and center this month, of war and conflict. One of the themes that I’m concerned about that it could mean is Mars conjunct Jupiter could be an expansion of conflict. So there could be, you know, things getting out of control. Like, Mars becoming exacerbated by Jupiter, which is a potential and it’s a little scary. I know over the past few days, like, just in the past two days actually, Israel has assassinated two different people – one in Lebanon, and then one in Iran – and so people are getting nervous already about whether that’s gonna escalate or get out of control even further in terms of that war. And you know, tying into that, I remember four years ago the big explosion that happened in Lebanon where there was this huge explosion, and they said it was if not the biggest non-nuclear explosion, it may have been one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions, and it happened in a port in Lebanon, and it happened the day of an exact Mars-Jupiter square. So sometimes with Mars-Jupiter, it can be explosions. Mars is also, as we’ve seen, connected with guns. The military. Fighting for things. So fighting in general can sometimes be expanded, and sometimes that can be bad – like, you know, expansion of war is probably bad for most people, for everybody. But also sometimes it can be used for good things. Like, fighting for justice, fighting for equality. Fighting for some sort of cause, like, fighting with optimism could be the more positive side of like, Mars and Jupiter coming together. Under certain circumstances, it could be attempting to seek a peaceful resolution to a conflict, although having tensions between those two things of like, one side that wants war and one side that wants peace, and how those two reconcile those two conflicting impulses that can sometimes be happening within the same system at the same time, the same person, or the same group of people. Mars also favors bold action and overconfidence, brashness, and bravado. So I’m expecting that we’re gonna see a lot of that during the course of this month. And the last thing is just aggressive expansion is a very basic thing with Mars, so certain things happening very quickly during the course of the month I think is gonna be one of our themes that we would expect from Mars in Gemini. The only thing, you know, that’s tricky about this is because Mars is also simultaneously just after that gonna run into Saturn, Saturn is often contrasting with both of those planets and is bringing in some sort of cooling, counteracting influence at the same time that’s gonna try to squash most of those significations. So that’s gonna be our main challenge here is how that plays out.
AC: Yeah. No, that’s a good run-through. In my observations, Jupiter seems to support and lend Jupiter power to Mars things rather than arguing Mars out of fighting. Jupiter attempts to add a moral justification, right, which may or may not be true. But brings enthusiasm to martial – yeah, I don’t think this is much of a month for peace, especially… If you look at this from Jupiter’s perspective, Jupiter has Mars closing in from one side while headed towards a square with Saturn. Right? So the Jupiterian, anything that Jupiter wants that does not accord with what Saturn or Mars want is going to have a very hard time squeaking through.
CB: Yeah, for sure. There’s different points at which different planets are actually enclosed by either both of the benefics or both of the malefics during the course of this month and some really interesting combinations in terms of that and especially whatever inceptions or sort of birth charts so to speak get born with that and some of those different benefic and malefic enclosures.
I was doing some research about past Mars-Jupiter conjunctions, and some of the events I found were famously one ot the most famous ones I remember from being an astrologer 10 years ago was the death of Osama bin Laden when US forces killed him in Pakistan – that occurred right on a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aries the exact same day. That was also the same day of this famous White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Obama roasted Trump. That Mars-Jupiter conjunction happened the same day, and there’s often been speculation about whether that in any way like, fueled Trump’s drive subsequently to become president and sort of, you know, get back in some ways.
AC: Yeah, and those are – for the victorious parties in both of those, those are big wins. There’s definitely a like, you know, stunting on the opposition quality to Mars-Jupiter.
CB: Yeah. Also like, overconfidence sometimes, but sometimes overconfidence later can backfire.
AC: Which this month with Saturn right there, whatever celebratory moments will quickly change into other moments. You know, enjoy whatever wins you have, but like, be ready for the, you know, the ice bath with Saturn. Like, it’s not just a win that’s going to echo through eternity, right? Get your wins. But like, be ready for other things, because you’re not gonna wait five or 10 years to see the other shoe drop.
CB: For sure. Other things that happened under that same conjunction or pretty close to it within a couple of weeks while Mars and Jupiter were in the same sign, the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in Japan. That was also right after Uranus ingressed into Aries, so there was obviously other stuff going on there as well, but I thought that was interesting. In 2013, the Mars-Jupiter conjunction and copresent coincided with the Edward Snowden leaks, which I thought was really interesting, especially because Gemini is his rising sign. So that was a curious one.
There was a bunch of attempts to goose the economy and major attempts at like, government spending took place under some of the previous ones. Like, especially Obama’s stimulus package during the Great Recession; he signed that into law on February 17th, 2009, where it was like, over 700 billion dollars in stimulus literally the same day as the Mars-Jupiter conjunction, so I thought that was interesting concept in terms of economic stimulus or government spending and attempts to literally like, prod or excite the economy into growth when it was in a period of contraction or recession.
AC: Yeah, the Jupiterian part becomes potentially forced or requires great effort when Mars is involved. It’s not just sort of easy, natural Jupiter cycle. Right? It’s – Mars pushes things. Trying to get things moving in another direction.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And then there was a similar thing in March 29th, 2020, when the US congress passed a stimulus package of two trillion dollars, and that was during the covid pandemic. But of course, that Mars-Jupiter conjunction was in Capricorn, and it was tied in with all of the other planets including Saturn and Pluto that were all lining up in Capricorn at the same time.
AC: Yeah, difficult to separate that one out.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Although we do, in a sense, we do have a combination of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn here, because they will both very shortly be making squares to Saturn. So there is that, you know, sort of icy shadow falling across the triumphal moments and feelings that Mars-Jupiter is producing. And so but Mars-Jupiter is —
CB: Right, which I’m actually curious about, because I had been expecting in some of the previous forecasts that with the Jupiter-Saturn stuff that it may indicate a contraction of the economy or running into some sort of economic issues by mid-August. But then from some of the recent like, job reports and stuff, like, unemployment seems down, and inflation seems down and other stuff like that. So I’m curious if that trend continues or if there’s something that interrupts it or like, how that works out in terms of the economy.
AC: Yeah. Because you know, the Jupiter-Saturn part of this is very historical cycle. Right? We have Jupiter conjunct Saturn every 20 years, and it’s sort of like a lunar cycle that lasts 20 years rather than 29 days. And so this is the first quarter point, right? Like, the Jupiter-Saturn square is the waxing half Moon of this. We are now officially one quarter into this two-decade time period, which you know, began rather dramatically in the last days of 2020.
CB: Yeah, literally in December of 2020; I remember that great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius that was happening right then. And it’s like, the first glimmers of coming out of the pandemic happened at that time at the end of 2020, and then also the US presidential election was just finally getting finalized. And I believe there was like, an eclipse on the 14th of December in Sagittarius, which is Biden’s rising sign, and that’s when the votes got certified and it became clear that he was definitely gonna be taking over the presidency. And that happened close to that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction as well, so there’s something about that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that was setting a trend for the next 20 years, and we’re revisiting that now at the first square of Jupiter and Saturn.
AC: Yeah, and that’s – you know, between the two, it’s the greater malefic and the greater benefic have a conversation, and that’s the world. Right? It’s what they can both agree on is what the world looks like. The symbolism of the cycle is quite nice. And so yeah, this is halftime. Or excuse me, not halftime; this is the first quarter. And we know we’re in a noticeably different place than we were in December of 2020. And yet, it’s very clear that the – how should we say – it’s not clear where we’re going, and we’re not even at halftime yet.
CB: Yeah. But some of the seeds that were planted in 2020 are going to start to sprout at this point, and the results of things that were started – both good trends, but also bad trends – in 2020 that we didn’t get under control at this point will start to ripen and start to bear fruit.
AC: Yeah. They’re visible, right? More and more light.
CB: Yeah. So let’s talk about Jupiter-Saturn; let’s talk about some basic fundamental keywords. They’re really contrasting forces, and the fundamental meaning I always think of when it comes to Jupiter-Saturn in this square is contrasting forces of growth versus consolidation, versus optimism of Jupiter versus the pessimism of Saturn. Feelings this month and probably dialogue surrounding hope versus fear are gonna be really prominent, especially peaking around the middle of August. Of the new versus the old. Obviously, you know, liberal versus conservative in terms of the discussions is an obvious one, in terms of what’s gonna be happening in August. But like, literally in terms of Jupiter versus Saturn, those are fundamental meanings. Innovation versus tradition. Expansion versus restraint. Rich versus poor. Success versus failure, and privilege versus disadvantage I think are all gonna be major discussion points that are gonna be happening around that square.
AC: Yeah. And you can see how the two have – like, when you describe all of those significations of Jupiter and Saturn relative to each other, like, those are in many ways the big questions of governance of any place or people looking forward. What do we keep, what do we change? I would say with Jupiter looking forward, there’s the like, what are the possibilities? And then Saturn’s part is what are the grim certainties? Right? And yeah so the two are in direct conversation right now. Right? And they are for the rest of the election cycle.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Both in terms of both political parties and their like, fundamental positions and philosophies and orientations towards life, but also even within the political parties and the different, like, wings of moderates versus extreme ends of the spectrums and the tensions between where they’re wanting to pull I think is gonna be very evocative of that Jupiter-Saturn square, and sometimes being forced to find some sort of middle ground or way to compromise and seeing which one wins out in terms of that. So much of this is happening right around the DNC, and I think some of that’s gonna be visibly on display at that time in terms of like, inter-party politics and challenges.
So that brings up some other things like challenges and obstacles; the attempts to find a way through an impasse is very much Jupiter-Saturn. Cutting back after excessive expansion is a common thing with Jupiter-Saturn. Being held back from making progress or even constrained by bureaucracy I can see being a major theme. And also, alternating states of enthusiasm versus pessimism, as well as indecision and vacillation as being something if those two planetary energies end up canceling each other out if they’re not able to find like, a productive compromise. And the last thing is concern with the law and the courts; ethics and morality are very common like, Jupiter-Saturn themes.
AC: Yeah, well said.
CB: Yeah. So that’s like, our big aspect of the month; literally the biggest aspect that’s taking place. And under any normal circumstances, like, that would be it, except there’s one more aspect that happens in between those two, in between Mars and Jupiter and Jupiter and Saturn, which is Mars square Saturn exactly on August 16th, which throws in a whole other thing into the mix in terms of that energy.
AC: Yeah. It might be useful to just do a little bit of sequencing, right? So which of these is perfect first? So Mars-Jupiter is perfect on the 14th of August, and then the day after, Mars has crossed Jupiter and is now on its way to perfect with Saturn, which it does on the night of the 15th – so literally next day we move from completing Mars-Jupiter to now it’s Mars-Saturn. Right? And then our exact Jupiter-Saturn is the 19th of August, and Venus has actually entered the fray. And Venus is exact with Jupiter on the 17th, exact with Saturn on the 18th, and then exact with Mars on the 19th. And so you know, it’s interesting to take the slow planets – the Jupiter-Saturn and the like, we’re a quarter of the way into this world, this 20-year world, that began in December 2020. Like, slow, historical, interesting, makes sense. But then we’re adding both passionate Venus and passionate Mars, though their passions may be of a different color – you know, these more swiftly moving, deeply felt, aroused and enraged planets to this regularly scheduled, historical meeting between Jupiter and Saturn. And it’s all exact within, you know, the same couple days.
CB: Yeah. So I wanna – let’s delineate Mars square Saturn, since that comes first, and then let’s delineate Venus hitting all of that stuff basically the following week, just to keep our sequencing. So Mars-Saturn we’ve talked about is one of the – traditionally, it’s like, the most difficult or negative alignment of planets in ancient astrology because it’s the two traditionally malefic or challenging planets. So you often get these themes of like, challenges and obstacles to put it mildly. Internally, it can be feelings of feeling blocked, feeling restricted, having delays in pursuing goals, having difficulty initiating action, meeting resistance, and facing adversity. So you know, the most famous one of that that we always refer back to because it was so striking was the great Mars-Saturn conjunction of March and April of 2020 when the lockdowns took place and everybody was like, stuck inside and was literally forced to stop or restrained from doing anything for a period of time as a result of that was a very literal manifestation of that energy.
AC: Yeah. And so yeah, we often talk about I believe the favored metaphor on the podcast is the hitting the brakes and gas at the same time. You know, it’s grinding your gears. There’s often a sense of frustration in order to move through Mars-Saturn periods. You know, you need to not stop and just sit there like Saturn would have you as, and you also can’t just fight through it and push with Mars. The periods often call for a lot of discipline, right? Like, go when it’s time to go. Stop when it’s time to stop. But it’s – you know, like, if you try to go when it’s stop time, there are consequences, and if you try to stop when it’s go time, there are consequences. And so yeah, the two in combination are very, very tricky, and —
CB: Well, and it’s crazy that we get Mars-Jupiter right before that, which is more like —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — slamming —
AC: Go, go, go!
CB: — the pedal to the floor, the pedal to the metal, and then a few days later we get Mars-Saturn, which is like, hitting the brakes while you’re hitting the gas. So it’s just like, things are moving fast, and then all of a sudden, there’s a wall that you run into or you hit.
AC: Yeah. And you know, from Mars’s perspective, Mars is just getting closer and closer to that conjunction with Jupiter and then hits it – and then the day after is right there in the crosshairs of Saturn. And so expecting that this month is gonna make it easier than being surprised by it.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there’s still gonna be some things when it happens. One of the things we commonly see with Mars-Saturn is like, fighting back against restrictions, having conflicts with authority figures, sometimes authoritarian force when authority figures then have to clamp down against whatever like, rebellion or something like that, which is the Mars end. Challenges to established rules and structures and sometimes hitting back hard against something. All of it’s very stressful, though, and can sometimes coincide with burnout. You used the term for the Mars-Saturn conjunction earlier this year, which this refers back to – that Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces in April – of stress-testing like, a structure. I think that’s a great metaphor as well.
AC: Okay. Thank you. Yeah.
CB: Like, sometimes stress-testing, but sometimes pushing past one’s limits and what happens when you do that if you have a breakthrough or if you have a breakdown.
AC: Yeah, and I would say, the Mars-Saturn will certainly help you discover your limits. Right? Because sometimes you just need to push, and you can push for a while, and then you know, you hit the wall. Right? Or you realize that your reserves are non-existent. And so, you know, it’s rough. It’s rough to be in a period that’s strongly characterized by these, and so if you have mid-mutable stuff, there may be – you know, the middle of the month might be a little rough and tough. It’s nice that Jupiter is there, but you’ll probably experience that as, you know, Jupiter’s been there for a while, that you’re trying to do the expansions or get the wins or follow up on the opportunities that Jupiter has been offering for a while and that it becomes quite difficult to do that or you need to slow down and move very carefully because the Jupiterian rewards are, you know, in a minefield for this period of time, or they’re in hotly contested terrain.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that, because sometimes some people will experience this period as a very productive time where it’s like, the combination of energy and discipline and having drive and determination and being able to have – even though it’s incredibly stressful and you’re on the verge of burnout – being able to push through that and still make it through and just have a period of hard work, of sustained exertion, and having really aggressive discipline can be really helpful manifestations or constructive manifestations of that energy.
AC: Yeah. I find that when Mars-Saturn is – you’re working it, it’s working with you. There’s a nice relationship. The experience of relentlessness, of becoming or being relentless – which isn’t too fast or too slow, but it’s, you know, being unstoppable even if your progress is measured. It’s like, you know, being the villain in the slasher film who just keeps coming, but it’s you and your goals rather than Jason Voorhees and his victims.
CB: Right. So Mars-Saturn when it comes to like, pushing one’s limits, sometimes one’s limits can be physical and sometimes when you push past your limits or the limits of things like your muscles or your bones, sometimes literal manifestations of that can be really challenging and it can physical injuries like breaking bones, having a physical injury, having an accident or other things like that. So it’s something to watch out for and be careful as well to watch and be cognizant of what your limits are, and if you are pushing through them that you’re not putting yourself in a position that’s, you know, more than you can actually handle.
AC: Yeah, if you’re gonna be pushing physical limits during this time, do it incrementally. This is not the time to take a wild leap. You know, put five more pounds on the bar, not 20.
CB: Yeah. And then one last thing here is the signs that they’re taking place in. So many of the transits and the aspects involving Saturn over the past year and a half since Saturn moved into Pisces, we keep noting these themes with water coming up over and over again. And especially in April when Mars and Saturn conjoined, there were a bunch of news stories literally involving negative things involving water – like water being poisoned, water disasters like that ship disaster with the bridge, floods and other things like that, or a year ago when like, Saturn stationed, there was the submarine disaster. But here, there’s like, this contrasting energy where Mars is now in an air sign, and it’s aspecting and referring back to Saturn in that water sign. And I’m really curious about how that’s gonna manifest and what the potential overlap is or the contrast between the two of like, almost like water disasters versus air disasters, or how that manifests in more literal ways.
AC: Yeah, it seems like transportation problems for sure, especially because Mercury is quite retrograde and combust while this is happening. I think we’d probably be safe in saying that there will be problems with shipping again during this Mars-Saturn.
CB: Nicole in the live chat of patrons says, “Hurricane.” And that’s actually a great example of what like, air and water in a destructive force can be in its most literal form.
AC: Yeah. And we’re coming into that season.
CB: Yeah. All right. So yeah, so those are some of the things happening that all constellates. Especially in the second week, we get all of those alignments, which as you can see now gets really tricky. I was trying to look for like, previous events during different Mars-Saturn squares, and sometimes it was like, endings of things, like Obama gave his farewell address as president January 19th of 2017 on that square, so that square was also built into the inauguration chart of Trump the following day. In 2019, the Mars-Saturn square was the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi occurred, who was the leader of the Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant, was killed by a military raid in Syria was a striking one. And then there was a similar one like that in 2022 on August 9th when that Mars-Saturn square went exact, the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated during a campaign speech in Japan. So there’s some like, overlapping things here with Mars-Jupiter and Mars-Saturn sometimes with that, prominent people and Mars-related gun violence and explosions and things like that that is the most extreme, negative possible end of the spectrum in terms of possible manifestations. And then obviously can be manifested in less extreme ways as well.
AC: Yeah. There are so many possibilities flying around this little cyclonic chamber of time.
CB: Yeah. So let’s go back to our graphic then and see where we’re at. We’re basically by this point in the… Completed the second week, and we’re into the second and third week of the month. And this is where all of these aspects now culminate. Because Mercury retrogrades back in Leo, where it’s gonna square Uranus around August 18th, and it’s gonna form the cazimi with the Sun around 26 degrees of Leo around August 18th. So that’s the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde cycle where there’s usually like, a turn, and things start to improve or things that got messed up or miscommunicated or delayed or they got thrown up in the air at the beginning of the Mercury retrograde in early August finally start to head towards resolution around this point. But then at the same time, Venus swoops into the middle of Virgo and starts aspecting Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, and activating all of those combinations that we’ve just been talking about in the past like, 30 minutes. So —
AC: Yeah, so – oh, go ahead.
CB: You had started talking about Venus in some of those combinations before I took us back to Mars-Saturn, so where were you going with some of that?
AC: Right. So just to throw Venus in there, at first Venus is chasing the square to Mars for a while, and Mars square Venus is like, scandalous and erotic. You see a lot of sex scandals or the publication of bad behavior; on a personal level, it’s hard to say whether it brings both erotic adventure as well as fights. You know, it raises the temperature on relationships.
CB: Yeah. But in terms of the sequence, it’s like, that’s our last aspect; it culminates on the —
AC: Right, but —
CB: — 22nd.
AC: But Venus, from Venus’s point of view, Venus is applying to Mars until that square with Jupiter. So what’s building, it looks and it’s gonna feel like Venus-Mars, but Venus doesn’t hit Mars until after Jupiter and Saturn. But if you look at the previous weeks, it looks like an applying Venus-Mars and it’ll feel like that, but it’s gonna be interrupted.
CB: Okay. I think to the extent that – because I’m looking at – so we’re already at the second lunation, which is this Full Moon in Aquarius that occurs at like, 27 degrees of Aquarius on August 19th. This Full Moon is gonna be crucial. There’s gonna be a culmination of events and themes around this time, just like there was a culmination last month around the time of Biden making his announcement. And this is also the first day of the Democratic National Convention, which runs from August 19th through August 22nd. And I think so much stuff – there’s gonna be some event that happens in the week leading up to that during some of the aspects we’ve been talking about that’s going to cast a shadow over the convention in the same way that what happened last month cast a shadow over the RNC. But this is the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, and so many of the aspects that we’re talking about all culminate during this week, and Venus goes through each of them in a sequence where it’s like, Venus comes up and opposes Saturn and squares Jupiter at the beginning of the week right on the Full Moon, which is also right after the Mercury cazimi square Uranus. And the Full Moon itself is squaring Uranus, which is very unexpected, disruptive, something out of left field. And then Venus culminates at the very end of the DNC, literally either during or within an hour after Harris will finish her speech accepting the nomination, the Venus-Mars square will go exact and will culminate. So there’s just something about that sequence of which planets Venus hits during the course of that three or four days that I think is super crucial in terms of how it’s gonna be experienced and like, what news stories are gonna be the focus on each of those individual days.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And just to contextualize my point earlier, for a lot of the month leading up to this, it feels like the Venus-Mars, but just as there’s a switcheroo with Jupiter-Mars, it feels like Venus-Mars, feels like Venus-Mars, then it’s Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter all at 17, and then it finishes out the completion of that Venus-Mars just as you said at the end of the DNC. And it is worth noting that Mars at 21 degrees is right on top of Mars in the US chart, in the Declaration of Independence chart. So that is a Mars return for the United States. 21 —
CB: Wow.
AC: — 23 for the Declaration chart.
CB: Wow, that’s a really good point. Here’s the Sibley chart that has Sagittarius rising and Mars at 21, 22, 23 Gemini. That is quite striking. Well, with Mars square Venus, it’s like… Sorry, let me put the animate feature back up. It’s like, one of the themes I was thinking about with Mars square Venus that culminates on August 22nd is just in ancient astrology at least those are the two planets that were associated with it’s almost like the battle of the sexes or of the contrasts of gender that often when themes of gender or even the middle between the two, of like, lack of gender or I’m not thinking of the word right now, but the —
AC: Mercury.
CB: — nonbinary, yeah. The nonbinary concept. Venus and Mars were still often like, the opposed two ends of the spectrum of whatever that is. And I think that’s so interesting that that’s culminating, that that’s part of the energy this month is like, Venus square Mars and almost like, the tensions between the sexes or between genders. And that’s something that’s gonna become – that’s already come up now that a woman is the nominee of the Democratic party and is going up against Trump, and some of the contrast between the two of them and how that’s already becoming part of the focus between them and some of the attacks in terms of Harris’s gender or other things like that or what she represents and how she’s able to bring something different to it because she’s only the second now Democratic nominee in history that is a woman in the primary position for president, with the last one of course being eight years ago now in 2016, which was one exact Venus synodic cycle. And interestingly, it was somebody who always had Gemini rising and Mercury in Scorpio. So both Harris and Hillary Clinton share the same rising sign and ruler of the Ascendant. So it’s interesting that we’re seeing like, echoes of similar themes, and I think that’s part of what’s coming up in terms of the dialogue this month with that tension between Venus and Mars.
AC: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, the – I don’t know – gender-based warfare around this campaign is heating up already and will likely reach a fever peak like, right on that square. Also worth noting, this is a Venus return for her. She’s Venus at 17 Virgo, which is the exact degree that Venus opposes Saturn and squares Jupiter.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So you can really, you know, see the nativity being lit up. And also, that Venus rules her Sun, because she’s Sun in Libra.
CB: Yeah. I’m really curious about that Saturn transit, because that’s one of the ones that’s very close this week with Saturn transiting through Harris’s 10th house in Pisces and opposing Venus during August. And that being one of the tricky things just in general this year of transits that are gonna be obstacles that she’ll have to contend with. One of the things I was seeing, though, is just with Saturn transiting through the 10th house, she’s so much not been the focal point as Vice President over the past few years, but then all of a sudden after the initial like, jubilism on the left once she was announced as the nominee, just the right sort of like, starting to get together their messaging and then just starting to attack relentlessly and attack her character or past or other things like that. And it’s interesting seeing that happening to somebody in real time while Saturn’s transiting through the 10th house and like, opposing the most positive planet in the chart, which also happens to be the ruler of the 12th house of enemies.
AC: Yeah. Well, and also she’s got Jupiter in the first for the whole time Jupiter’s in Gemini, right? But she’s announced as candidate like, just as Mars moves into the first. And while that Mars-Jupiter combination is, you know, being celebrated as the new champion, it’s also Mars in the first. It’s also like, literally the guns pivot to you.
CB: Right.
AC: And so like, that being announced as candidate is both that moment of jubilation, but it’s also like, literally when all the crosshairs of the opposition drift quite intentionally in your direction.
CB: That was actually one of the things that was interesting is the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus last month was on her Jupiter at 24 degrees of Taurus, and that’s the ruler of her 10th house of career, so it was like, this unexpected thing that suddenly happened very rapidly in terms of her career. But also, Jupiter rules her 7th house of partnership, and it was literally her running mate dropped out and suddenly made her the nominee. But it was interesting because her Jupiter – it’s like Trump’s, actually, in that she has the ruler of the 10th house in the 12th house of enemies. And one of the things that was interesting is the Republicans had put out, they’d gone through and clipped out different videos from past speeches of her where either she was laughing or she was saying things about coconuts or like, other things where they were trying to put together attack ads to mock her. But then somehow that’s been reversed, and Democrats have like, embraced a lot of those memes and are using them in her favor now. And I thought it was really interesting example of sometimes – because it’s Jupiter in her 12th house of enemies, sometimes something positive happening to you as a result of something that your enemies are doing. And we’ve seen something similar with Trump where he has Venus in the 12th house, and sometimes he is able to do the same things and turning things around on his enemies. But it’s interesting seeing different manifestations of that placement.
AC: That is a really interesting point. Those are both out of sect benefics in the 12th ruling the 10th.
CB: Right. And then, you know, her Jupiter gets a little bit of help from that Venus at 17 Virgo that’s like, trining it with reception. And yeah, there’s lots of other stuff going on there, but that entire week, like, everything seems to focus on the DNC. And one of the things that I think is gonna be tricky about the DNC is we’re seeing a lot of repetitions of 1968 at this point. And there’s two reasons for that – one of them is the nodes are repeating, and also the Venus cycle is repeating. And with the nodes repeating, that means the eclipses are the same as 1968. So we’ve already seen how that’s connected with Biden and how in 1968 after an Aries eclipse, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek a second term. And then similarly with the repetition of the Aries eclipse this year, we have Biden announcing that he will not seek a separate term. But there’s a bunch of other repetitions as well. One of them that we’ve seen just recently is assassinations, where 1968 famously Martin Luther King was assassinated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated who was running for president at the time, and then just recently we had Trump and that assassination attempt. We’ve also seen a repetition of university protests that were very prominent in both years, so it was especially noted a few months ago that Columbia was a focal point in 1968 for anti-war protests, and then it again became a focal point for anti-war protests this year. We’re also seeing a repetition where the Democratic National Convention is happening in Chicago, which it also did in 1968, and the 1968 Chicago DNC was famously tense and chaotic because of clashes between antiwar protestors and the police. And I think that’s something that we can anticipate may be a potential issue coming up with this DNC at the very least in terms of internal clashes in terms of stances on war and stances on what’s going on in Israel and Palestine and some of the parallels potentially with what happened in 1968. So one of the things I’m concerned about is I hope with the Mars-Saturn stuff happening and the Venus-Saturn stuff that – in 1968, part of the issue is that the police just brutally cracked down on the protestors, and I hope that’s not something that happens or that there’s a more measured approach compared to back then today and that that’s not part of the repetition.
Other repetitions – there is a Kennedy running for president. In ‘68, it was Robert Kennedy; in this race, it’s his son, Robert Kennedy, Jr., or RF Kennedy, Jr. And also, in that race in 1968, a third party candidate influenced the election where George Wallace got 13% of the vote in 1968. Kennedy is pulling between eight percent and 10 percent, but that could still influence things if he stays in the race. Or it’s also speculated that he may drop out and endorse Trump at some point, where it seemed like they had a call last month where that was discussed. And I did notice that Kennedy has Jupiter at 17 degrees of Gemini, which is trining Trump’s Jupiter at 17 degrees of Libra, and so that Mars-Jupiter conjunction and all this stuff we’ve been talking about this month is gonna line up exactly on Kennedy’s Jupiter right in the middle of the month. So it may be related to him and whether he decides to stay in the race or endorse Trump, basically.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting how many of the candidates, how many of the sort of focal people during this time have like, perfect alignments with this mutable cyclone of planets that is due to develop mid, late month. And it’s worth noting that, you know, this configurations will be happening outside of the United States as well, and that the cyclonic sort of centrifugal, uncertain, heated, passionate, violent, upsetting, uncertain stuff kind of sucking people in and spitting them out like a vortex does – that’s gonna be happening, you know, middle of the month everywhere. And we can see it so clearly with the DNC. But the rest of the world is not so settled that it will be unaffected, right, by these hurricane winds.
CB: Yeah, for sure, as we reviewed in the news for this month. Last thing – Nick Dagan Best noticed a 56-year repetition, and that’s the nodal and Venus cycle repetition. And he noticed that that’s in the past coincided not just in 1968, but also in other elections with third party candidates influencing the outcome. And one of the most notable was in 1912, which was 56 years before 1968. Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate, but it ended up undermining his own party accidentally, and it threw the race for the other side. So I’m gonna be curious and paying attention to that in terms of that over the next couple of months and how themes of third party influence the election in different ways.
AC: Yeah, and you know, I discovered something that points in exactly the same direction with the Mars cycle. The last time we had a Mars retrograde in Cancer, you know, the Mars cycles aren’t an exact match for each other, but the best precedent I could find for the one that we’re gonna be doing this fall was ‘92 – fall ‘92, winter of ‘93 – and that’s when third party candidate Ross Perot interfered – well, or you know, arguably changed the result of the contest between George Bush, Sr., and Bill Clinton. So that’s yet another third party indicator with the astrology.
CB: Yeah. And then that was also of course the case famously in the 2000 election, which had Jupiter in Gemini and Venus in Sagittarius where Nader ran third party and took votes away from the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, which ended up helping as one of many things to swing the election for George W. Bush. So that’s, of course, one of the things everyone’s talking about now in terms of how this may be set up for this race.
AC: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting how we keep finding interesting precedents that point to and describe the nature of this race, and yet none of those seem to be precedents for a simple, clear election. Every time I look up a cycle and you look up, it’s like, oh, it’s like 1968. Oh, like the ‘92 election. Oh, it’s like – you know, and none of them tell us exactly what will occur. But none of the indicators seem to point towards doing it the easy way.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And the biggest thing is just that Mars retrograde opposite Pluto that you keep mentioning that we talked about a lot in the year ahead forecast is gonna just dominate so much of the end of this year and so much of the early part of next year. And Mars is contentious; it’s like, it’s violent. It’s combative. And that energy is just so intense because Mars goes like, into Leo right before election day and opposing Pluto and starts that whole process. So we’re looking at a lot of that later this year.
AC: Yeah, and in combination with Pluto or by itself in Cancer, Mars is also very manipulative under those conditions.
CB: When it’s opposing Pluto?
AC: Yeah. You have the like, secret power with Pluto —
CB: Right.
AC: — and then Mars is Cancer also, for different reasons, has a similarly like, behind the scenes or not wanting to come straight out with whatever actions are taken in order to obtain power.
CB: For sure.
AC: It’s all very positive, and we’re —
CB: All very positive!
AC: — looking forward to it.
CB: Yeah. That was sarcasm for those reading the transcript. I’m just gonna throw that in there.
AC: The transcript. So but at the very end of the month, we have —
CB: Yes.
AC: — at least some things are settled into their shapes, at least for a little bit. It’s less – you may not like those shapes, or you may love those shapes, but some of the chaos has died down by the end of the month.
CB: Yeah. Once we come off of that, it’s really striking, actually. Because once – August 22nd is the day that Venus completes the square with Mars that night just after the DNC speech, and then right after that, it’s like, the temperature for some reason – at least in terms of the transits – like, starts coming down. Mars finally starts separating from all of that; Venus starts separating from all of that. And Mercury stations direct here by August 28th and 29th at 21 degrees of Leo, sextiling Jupiter at 18 degrees of Gemini with reception.so it just feels like there’s a rectification of some of the things that were thrown into disarray or into chaos earlier in the month with the beginning of the Mars retrograde. Some of the tension and the internal and external tensions of like, Mars versus Saturn or Mars versus Jupiter or Venus versus Mars, which are all like, diametrically opposite energies, that tension starts to recede by this point by the last week of the month. And yeah, I feel like that will be a brief like, exhale and sign of relief in some sense. But it’s gonna be a very short-lived like, you know, breath of relief before we get to September.
AC: Yeah. Like, August storm will die down by then, but there are more storms incoming in September and probably October and probably November and December. But August storm is over by the time we get to the end of the month, and Venus also leaves Virgo – like, takes Venus off the mutable axis, enters Libra. You know, that tight configuration which we were discussing about two-thirds of the way through the month is no longer spinning up the winds.
CB: Yeah. That’s really nice for Venus, because Venus – that happens on August 29th; Venus moves into Libra into Venus’s home sign, and then it’ll start a sign-based trine with Jupiter in Gemini, which will eventually culminate at some point with an actual degree-based trine which will be very favorable for Venus and Jupiter just in the same way that the sextile was favorable for Venus and Jupiter the day that Biden stepped down and Harris became the nominee. And also just Venus getting out of that opposition with Saturn that Venus is laboring on during the entire transit through Virgo, I feel like will be lifting a sort of weight off of the shoulders of some of the social aspects of Venus and some of its relational meanings.
AC: Yeah, there are challenges there, but there are some things to look forward to.
CB: Definitely. So even though this is in September, it happens on September 1st, there’s two major outer planet transits that we have to mention because they’re already gonna start to be very prominent by the last few days of August. And one of them is that Uranus is gonna station at 27 degrees of Taurus, which is gonna be an intensification of Uranus and if anybody has planets around 27 degrees of the fixed signs, those are gonna get intensely activated by a jolt of that Uranus transit, which is like, putting an exclamation mark next to Uranus when Uranus stations at the end of August and the beginning of September with a focal point of September 1st. But also interestingly, simultaneously on September 1st the same day, Pluto – which is at zero degrees of Aquarius – retrogrades back in Capricorn for the final trip through that sign of the next like, two centuries, basically. Pluto’s gonna retrograde back into Capricorn, where it’s going to stay in just the last few degrees of that sign until eventually in November just after the election, Pluto returns back to Aquarius for good and completes its – what is it – like, 15 year transit through Capricorn that it’s been doing since about 2008 and 2009.
AC: Yeah. More like 17 – 16, 17. But yeah. And then just a few days later, Mars enters Cancer, and we’re gonna get – I think it’s about five-and-a-half months of Mars in Cancer, broken up a little bit, but it’s gonna be Mars in Cancer until November and then back again – Mars back into Cancer in January, and then Mars in Cancer until May. So it’s a lot of Mars in Cancer, and all those important shifts happen the first few days of September. And so those will be ingredients for the next set of storms.
CB: Yeah. Setting things up in September and that Mars ingress especially setting up the next six months of Mars transiting through and just staying stuck in Cancer and Leo for an extended period of time and having that experience of inflammation. Like, you know, eating a hot sauce where the taste stays in your mouth for like, the rest of the day, kind of like, burning in that part of your chart for an extended period of time, which is what Mars retrogrades are like.
AC: Yeah. That’s the – yeah, I’m thinking of different moments of suffering from Hot Ones.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Right? It’s not just the lips. You know, it’s in the guts. We gotta process the Scoville units.
CB: It still cracks me up that the host of Hot Ones, Sean Evans, was born the day of the Chernobyl disaster, and he hosts like, you know, the hot show where celebrities eat like, super spicy, painfully spicy hot wings.
AC: It’s literally a spectacular meltdown.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Well, and yeah, like we said, the hottest sauce on the show, the only one that stayed constant is The Bomb, which has a radioactive like, sign on the side of it.
AC: Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s – good job, astrology.
CB: Still desperately wanna know Sean Evans’ birth time, so if anybody knows him, you know, shoutout – would like to know what his birth chart looks like, because he’s had like, an amazing run on that show, so I’d be curious.
All right, my friend, that brings us to the end of August. Let me glance and see if there’s anything else about the alignments we meant to mention. I did wanna mention, you know, with Pluto going back into Capricorn, with Uranus stationing there, one of the last things that’s happening is just I noticed everything’s shifting now suddenly with digital currency is starting to be embraced. Trump went and spoke at some digital currency like, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency conference. But immediately once Harris took over as the nominee, her groups started reaching out to some of those organizers and asking people that were in digital currency spaces about how to create a better policy surrounding that. So I just wanted to mention that even though it’s a niche interest at this point that I still think that’s a lot of what Uranus in Taurus and Pluto in Capricorn is about is the emergence and the widespread acceptance of cryptocurrencies now evidently very soon on the part of major governments like the United States government. Because whichever party gets into power, basically, it looks like there’s gonna be a more favorable orientation towards that to varying degrees than there has been in the past, and that’s gonna happen right at the tail end of Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in Taurus. And the entire – you know, Bitcoin was created and that entire genre of cryptocurrency was created at the beginning of Pluto in Capricorn around 2009. So I think there’s just something incredibly stunning and striking about that, and I wanted to mention that for the historical record because we’re seeing it in real time. And while it may not affect us all individually right now because most people don’t use cryptocurrencies yet, in the future, we will have seen this political race as a turning point.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I have always looked at it as a Uranus in Taurus thing that we would see what place cryptocurrency would take by the end of Uranus in Taurus. But those two timelines are very complementary, because if – you know, we have the presidential race this fall, but then if whoever’s administration implements policies regarding that, that will be in Uranus’s last days in Taurus over the next two years. And so like, those as both contributing to that story make a lot of sense.
CB: Yeah. It’s just another stunning example of the astrology, but in a more long-term sense of just looking at over the past decade or, you know, however many years so that we – it’s like, as astrologers, it’s weird to see these historical events both in short term, like, where you live through a historic week, and you see things play out over the course of that Mars-Uranus conjunction just rapid fire with stuff happening day after day after day. Versus sometimes, you know, we see things grow and develop over the course of a decade or two, but still be hugely impactful, but the pace of things with the outer planet transits, it just sometimes moves much slower.
AC: Yeah. Different cycles. And again, as you often point out, like, watching things happen, you know, is a very particular perspective that reveals some things and is also very confusing. But having the short, medium, long, and very long cycles to contextualize those individual events within is pretty fascinating, and I think, you know, makes for a pretty good discussion.
CB: Yeah, it’s incredibly fascinating. I am so happy to be doing this. Like, this is such a cool thing to do, for all of us to witness as astrologers and for us to be able to talk about. I feel incredibly gifted and just happy to be able to have these discussions both here with you monthly on the monthly forecasts as well as the videos that I’ve been doing in between, and just documenting and seeing the astrology play out in real time. Even when it’s sometimes very difficult events, it’s sometimes just fascinating to step outside of it as an astrologer and watch how well the astrology is playing out and to learn things from it collectively. I feel incredibly gifted to be able to do that on a daily basis, and yeah, and wanted to thank everybody in the audience for following along with our progress as we do this each month and as we talk about these things and try to make the most of it of what we can. So thanks everyone for watching, and thanks for joining me, Austin, for doing this. This was an amazing discussion we had today.
AC: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. Consider me heart-warmed by your previous statement. Yeah, sometimes it’s overwhelming and stressful to the point that I may forget to be grateful for the opportunity to do it, but it truly is a gift. Right.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’m not gonna lie; I spent the past week agonizing on the outline for this episode, so I’m glad we got it together as concisely as we did. And I was also just like, following the news events and documenting what was happening and the astrology obsessively for the past two or three weeks since everything started going crazy. But it was really fun and interesting to do that and to see it all play out in real time and to see the manifestation of our predictions from way back in December or from previous monthly forecasts a few months ago to have that connect between, you know, you and I getting together last December and like, looking ahead at this stuff and seeing, like, wow, that Mars-Uranus looks really dicey, looks like it’s gonna be explosive that week, and then to see the manifestation of that is just – I’ll never stop being impressed by that. I’ll never lose that sense of awe-inspiring whatever it is as an astrologer, and I’m glad that I’ve never lost that.
AC: Yeah. That’s really nice. And you know, it’s the audience that sort of makes us do it every month. I don’t mean “forces,” but like, people are interested, and so, you know, it becomes worth doing. And the continued attention is also, you know, brings the accountability, both positive and negative for what we nailed, what we got really close to. What we didn’t quite get, right? And you know, the things we missed as well. And you know, that… Yeah. It wouldn’t be what it is, what it can be, without people watching and giving a shit and sort of following along with history as it, you know, slowly unspirals.
CB: Yeah, as it unfolds. Brilliant. Well, thanks everyone for watching. Thanks to all the patrons that joined us in the live audience for the live chat today; I really appreciate you for supporting this work and being the reason why we can do this each month. And yeah, so I guess that’s it for our forecast for August. Austin, what are your websites again just so people can visit the things that you mentioned earlier during the break?
AC: Okay, go to AustinCoppock.com for lectures and workshops and stuff, and then go to SphereAndSundry.com for materia magica. Bunch of great astrological magic stuff.
CB: Brilliant. And I’ll put links to that in the description below this video or on the podcast website. And as for myself, if you wanna get a PDF of my ebook which is now for sale, you can find it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Books. And I’ll put a link to that in the description below as well.
All right, I think that’s it. So thanks everyone for joining us today; thank you, Austin, for doing this with me. We will be back again one month from now to check in and see how everything turned out, and then to do the forecast for September. So until then, good luck everybody with the astrology of August, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Take care.
[END CREDITS]
CB: If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to some great subscriber benefits, including early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the forecast each month, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is only available to patrons, a whole exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. You can find out more information at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
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 Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, and Kwatsi Alibaruho.
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.