The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 460, titled:
Astrology Forecast for September 2024
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on August 31, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released September 26th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrology of September 2024. Hey Austin – welcome.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. How’s it going?
CB: I am doing fantastic. We are back for another jam-packed episode where in the first hour we’re gonna review some news and events that happened over the past month since our last episode and talk about how the astrology correlated with those news stories. But in the second half of this in the second hour, we’re gonna jump forward and look at the astrology of September and do a deep dive into the planetary alignments over the next four weeks.
So before we jump into that, as always, if you wanna skip ahead, you can use the timestamps that are either on The Astrology Podcast website to jump to the forecast section, or below in the description of this YouTube video in order to jump forward.
Let me do a quick overview before we jump into the news stories to give you a preview of some of the astrology of September. So this month, Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co helped me to design some new graphics in order to illustrate some of the major alignments this month, and you can find those at Honeycomb.co/Resources. You can actually download them. So the big thing this month, the centerpiece of September, is a lunar eclipse that’s gonna occur in Pisces right in the middle of the month on September 17th. So we have essentially the beginning of eclipse season opens about a week before this in the first and second week of September, and then that’s gonna carry through into early October where we’re gonna have another Libra solar eclipse on October 2nd. So the focal point of this month is it’s eclipse season again.
The other major thing that’s happening this month is the planet Mars is gonna move into Cancer on September 4th, and this is one of the signs that Mars is gonna retrograde back into once it turns retrograde in December. It’s gonna station retrograde in Leo, and then retrograde back into mid-Cancer. So this is important because this is the build-up to essentially the Mars retrograde period that’s gonna last for quite a number of months, and Mars is gonna return back to Cancer early next year and station direct there in February. And then it’s not gonna depart for Cancer for the last time until the middle of April. So this month in September, we’re gonna see some of those themes with Mars retrograde start to constelate in a major way.
Here’s the whole transit graph designed by Madeline from Honeycomb for the astrological transits for September. And to break things down in terms of individual dates, on the 1st of September, we get two planetary outer planet alignments where Pluto retrogrades back into Capricorn for its final pass through that sign between now and November when it moves into Aquarius for good for the next 20 years. The same day, Uranus stations retrograde at 27 degrees of Taurus on September 1st.
On the 2nd, we get our first lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Virgo. Then Mars goes into Cancer on the 4th. The Sun opposes Saturn on September 8th, and then Mercury moves into Virgo, its home sign, on September 9th.
The following week, we get that lunar eclipse in Pisces on the 17th. The Sun opposes Neptune on the 20th. Libra season begins when the Sun moves into Libra on the 22nd, and the same day, Venus moves into the sign of Scorpio. A few days later, Mercury goes into Libra on the 26th, and then finally we get a Sun-Mercury conjunction otherwise known as a cazimi when Mercury enters the heart of the Sun on the 30th of September.
So those are our major planetary alignments for the month that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode, but first let’s talk about some news and events before we get there.
So first things first, it was a pretty eventful month. Like, this is one of our more tense transit months, but it was notable to see all the different news stories. And you and I were talking yesterday in our planning meeting, and one of the things that both of us noticed was that with all the major planetary alignments last month, especially centered around the mutable T-square of what I was calling the battle of the benefics, of Mars and Saturn and Venus and Jupiter, that there were all of these tensions that were rising, and there was a lot of fear surrounding the possible worse case scenario happening. But then a lot of that didn’t materialize or didn’t turn out as bad as it potentially could have been, I think, right?
AC: Yeah. Well, it was such an interesting configuration because it was both benefics – Venus and Jupiter – and both malefics – Mars and Saturn – all configured very tightly and tensely to one another. And so the best and the worst were both present. The worst case, of course, is much more attention grabbing than possible best cases. But neither really manifested in either case, because it really was a combination of all those. It was everybody fights it out and then you get a result. And, you know, I think that deeply mixed bag of a configuration was even easier to miSunderstand because Mercury was retrograde for much of the month, and about more than half of the constituent planets of that configuration were in Mercury-ruled signs. So they’re very subject to the back and the forth of Mercury. I saw a lot of things looking like they might go one way and then going the other way, or coming as a complete surprise and having a very uncertain trajectory. And so as we’re recording now, Mercury’s been direct for one day. And so we will be seeing, we’re starting to see some of those trajectories stabilize to see where things are going, but a lot got thrown up in the air, and a lot’s still in the air here at the end of the August.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So there was at least three distinct news stories that we noted like that where it was like, as you said, it seemed like the sky was falling and people are having those fears, but then things kind of balanced or leveled out, and it didn’t turn out to be as bad as it could have been potentially. So the first one was at the very beginning of the month, pretty much the same day Mercury stationed retrograde in Virgo, the stock market took a major nosedive in the US and around the world. And people freaked out, like, immediately, but then things recovered like, relatively quickly and seemed to level out for the most part, although we’ll maybe come back to that later.
At the same time as the Mars-Jupiter conjunction was building up and forming in the early part of August, Iran and Israel were widely reported as being on the brink of a major military exchange, and some of the reports were just like, this is imminent; there is gonna be some sort of direct attack of Iran retaliating against Israel for a couple of assassinations that occurred the previous month. And it seemed like it was about to happen, and then all of a sudden, it didn’t. And it seemed like Iran showed some restraint or postponed it or something, because all of a sudden the atack, which was said to be imminent, didn’t really materialize. And while there were still some exchanges between Iran and Hezbollah later in the month, the major exchange that was expected didn’t quite happen, which was really interesting. And then similarly, later in the month, there were fears about the DNC and about it being a repeat of 1968 where in 1968 there were huge protests and violent clashes with the police. But then in the end, the most extreme scenarios didn’t really materialize at the DNC even though there were still some major tensions and major issues. But things didn’t end up being quite as extreme as they could have been. So in that way, in almost all three of those scenarios, the alignment of Mars and Saturn in that square, that tense alignment of the malefics, did manifest in major tensions and major issues and difficulties, but the mixture of the benefics seemed to balance things out and bring a level of restraint in holding things back from the sort of worst case scenario that was possible.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And in most of those scenarios, we’re left with a sort of concerning, lingering “maybe.” Right? Because when there was the flash crash and then recovery in the stock market, people started thinking about a lot of fundamentals that maybe weren’t so secure. And it didn’t end up that those caused a crash this time, but a lot of the analysis that came out was pointing to things that aren’t so great. Right? And it’s like, well, they didn’t cause a crash this time, which doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And then the same thing can be said of active escalations between Israel and Iran, right? Like, it didn’t happen this month. It doesn’t mean that, well, like, we can put that away. Like, that’s not – no one need worry, right?
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: Solved. Another event that happened right on the station that was very surprising and falls into that uncertain outcome category was Ukraine’s very surprising counter-invasion of Russia in the Kursk region. Unlike – in big contrast to previous operations where they were announced and like, publicized and almost marketed ahead of time, this counter-invasion into Kursk had very tight operational security and came as a surprise to even close observers of the conflict. And, you know, throughout the month, it was extremely difficult to get information. Right? It’s a new warzone. But at this point, all of the analysts that I follow are sort of, you know, putting a big question mark over whether it was the most brilliant thing ever or it’s going to look like a tactical victory but a huge strategic mistake. There are very serious states involved in that – the indeterminacy of that trajectory. Like, was it an amazing idea or was it terrible? And so I thought that was interesting because it was both Mercury retrograde in the sense that it was confusing and surprising, but also really showed the Mercury retrograde ruling the Mars-Jupiter conjunction, which had that very fast-moving, triumphant quality. I will also add – I don’t wanna go on about this any longer, but – the last time Ukraine took a big chunk of territory back in that conflict was when Mars was in retrograde last time just before the retrograde. There was a very —
CB: In Gemini last time, you mean?
AC: Yeah – oh, I’m sorry, did I not say that. Yeah, it was in Gemini, last time Mars was in Gemini, right before the retrograde was the last time Ukraine reclaimed or in that case was reclaiming a bunch of territory very quickly. And I thought that was interesting.
CB: Yeah, that’s interesting for sure. I saw a lot of connections, actually, between Mars going through Gemini this time and it connecting events back to that Mars retrograde in Gemini two years ago the last time that Mars was in Gemini. Even including stuff like with Twitter; there was a report that came out that the banks were freaking out about how much money they had invested or loaned Elon Musk to buy Twitter and there were reports about how it was like, a really terrible investment it was turning out that came out while Mars was in Gemini this time. And of course, that connected us back to two years ago because when Mars went retrograde in Gemini two years ago, that was when he bought Twitter and borrowed all this money from different investors and different banks and things like that. So —
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: I saw like, a few instances of that where this Mars just transit through Gemini was directly connecting to the previous transit.
So you mentioned the Mercury retrograde, and speaking of that, there was a ton of Mercury retrograde stories since that was one of the major transits that happened this past month where Mercury stationed retrograde in Virgo and then retrograded back to the later part of Leo before stationing direct later in August. So one of the first things is I mentioned right – I think it was the day Mercury stationed retrograde – the stock market plummeted, just absolutely plummeted not just in the US but also around the world, I believe, right?
AC: It started with the Japanese Nikkei Index falling 12 percent, which then triggered the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 et cetera to all fall as well.
CB: And one of those drops, I think, you wrote was like, the largest drop in a large number of years.
AC: I think it was the Japanese market drop was much higher, but for the American one-day drops, it was only the largest drop in I think three years. You know, things have been rocky lately, but that was in one day, and people thought more was on the way, whereas the Nikkei Index, the Japanese market, recovered 10 percent the following day. And so instead, people thought it was the edge of a cliff, but instead it was a bump in the road.
CB: Right. So that was a major thing that happened right on the retrograde. Additionally, also right on the retrograde station, there was a major judgment against Google in an antitrust monopoly ruling, and I thought this was really notable because they essentially said that Google was a monopoly, which implied if they follow up and take action and are successful that the company could be broken up. This was really notable because in Google’s birth chart, it has Mercury in early Virgo very close to where Mercury stationed retrograde at that time. So that’s part of the reason why this particular Mercury retrograde and station was more important for google than others.
AC: Yeah. That’s a really nice overlap with the chart showing. And what’s the most important planet in a search engine company’s chart, right? It’s gotta be Mercury. Its whole job is to do Mercury things. And we’d also talked about how that has the qualities that we would expect around this Jupiter-Saturn square, right, which is a quarter of the way through the 20-year Jupiter-Saturn cycle. And so we have Jupiter, which is expansion, new frontiers, let’s do more, let’s get bigger, and then Saturn, which is about limiting size, obeying the spirit of gravity, et cetera. So this is a point where Saturn is naturally set up to check excessive growth of Jupiter, and Jupiter of course is in Mercury-ruled Gemini right now, so we would expect that which is being checked to be of a mercurial nature, to be tech, transportation, communication, et cetera.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Elsewhere, there was a major jobs report correction; it was a major Mercury retrograde snafu where something was revised, right?
AC: Yeah. That was really – and that’s a funny reversal slash… It’s interesting because when you mentioned earlier how a lot of things that were feared to be very difficult or gnarly ended up being not as bad. Like, it could have been a lot worse. Whereas the job report came out, it was hey, it was not so bad. And then it was revised. And this was – yeah, this was an unemployment report. And then it was officially revised on the 20th. It came out on the 2nd and was revised officially on the 20th, and they were like, “Oh, there were 818,000 jobs that don’t exist.” And so the actual data was much more negative than it seemed at the beginning of the month.
CB: Yeah. And this seemed also tied in with the Jupiter-Saturn square, which we’d been concerned about in terms of the economy since we’re gonna have three of those, and just those tensions between expansion versus contraction in this instance and potentially the contraction energy winning out a little bit more as Saturn’s in the superior position in the square. But there were some issues in terms of unemployment and announcements about a possible rate reduction, right?
AC: Yeah. The Fed made some general statements that due to unemployment rates and the labor market cooling, they’re likely gonna markedly reduce interest rates in the near future. You know, it’s a bit of a weather report on the status of economic health and direction, which is very much in line with that Saturn-Jupiter square with Saturn in that superior position.
CB: Yeah. And the question now is how soft of a landing is there gonna be in terms of the economy because historically in periods immediately after the one that like, we’re getting out of right now when inflation has been really high, when the Fed starts trying to ease us out of that, usually there’s some sort of recession. So it’s just a matter of how bad that recession is or how much they’re able to pull on different levers in order to make it not as bad as it could be. But it seems like that’s part of what we’re seeing a little bit here with the Jupiter-Saturn square as well, and we’re gonna see – this was just the first preview of that, and we’re gonna see two more of those exact squares, I think, over the next six months or so.
AC: Yeah, that’s about right. Yeah. And that’s part of why there was so much Chicken Littling about the one day drop in the stock market, because there are legitimate medium-term fears. People are like, oh, is it happening now? And just because it’s not happening now doesn’t mean that the threat is no longer present or realistic, just like the escalation of military hostilities between Iran and Israel. Right? Didn’t happen in August; the threat is not gone.
CB: Yeah. Eclipse season is coming up, and we know those have been crucial in terms of that, especially the last ones. We would especially expect that Libra eclipse coming up to be important, but we’ll talk about that more in a little bit here.
So in other Mercury retrograde news, there was a ton of recalls this month. There was a ton of food recalls; there was also a bunch of product recalls. I noticed the food ones, and people on Twitter sort of talking about it actually noted – or people noticing how many food recalls there have been for different things that seem like they’re coming out of nowhere or seem excessive this month. And I thought recalls is such a great Mercury retrograde keyword.
AC: Yeah. I actually had the same thought I was thinking. And I was thinking about the “re” cliche, where, you know, what does a Mercury retrograde do? Start listing words that begin with the prefix “re.” Right? Like, rethink, reread, rewrite – and I was like, oh, recall. Hundred percent.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And I thought that maybe I just don’t understand the number of vehicles on the road, but BMW’s recall of more than 720,000 vehicles seemed pretty huge. I don’t know all motor vehicle recalls and their relative sizes throughout history, but that seems pretty fucking gigantic, doesn’t it?
CB: Yeah, that seems like a pretty good recall; I’m not like, an expert on that. But there was even, I mean, with some of the food ones, there were actual like, deaths from, you know, contaminated food with bacteria and that led to the recalls that pushed them to recall all of these foods. Like, one of them was Boar’s Head, which is like, a meat and cheese —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — company that’s supposed to be, like, higher grade quality like, meat and cheese company —
AC: Deli stuff.
CB: Yeah, but they had some major contamination issues and had to recall like, a ton of stuff. So it was interesting seeing that. Because recall is totally – that’s one of the reasons why astrologers in electional astrology usually don’t recommend that you initiate something especially during the early part of a Mercury retrograde because there’s always a danger that you’ll launch something but then there will be an error with it and you’ll have to go back and redo it. And usually the second time you do it, it’s better off; there’s some improvement over the first time. But nonetheless, it can still be this like, frustrating, exasperating sort of experience to have during a Mercury retrograde. And this having food and product recalls is just a very literal, wide scale version of that.
AC: Yeah. That’s a really good example. Another “re” word that was quite relevant for me was repair. We had both the dryer and the stove go out during this one. And the dryer’s especially annoying because, as you know, we have a baby! And so we do easily twice as much laundry as usual, and the need is greater. You know, a lot of things get poop on them, Chris, and you know, as unhygienic as I can be from time to time, I don’t usually get poop on my clothes, so it’s less pressing. So that was fun. And then the stovetop actually went out in the middle of me trying to cook a wholesome meal for my wife and son. The chicken was like, half done and about to be turned, and then the whole stovetop just freaked out and refused to work.
CB: Oh god. I like how you – the caveat with that was you said you don’t usually have fecal matter on my clothes as much as this.
AC: Anything can happen.
CB: There’s a non-zero chance. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Well, yeah, everybody has their own personal little Mercury retrograde stories, and especially people that have mid-mutable placements were getting especially hit this month by the Mars-Saturn square stuff, so we’ll talk about some of that more in just a little bit here.
Other Mercury retrograde news – Donald Trump returned to Twitter with great fanfare after he, of course, was famously kicked off of Twitter back in early 2001 after inciting an insurrection on January 6th. So he came back to – a return to Twitter happened this month, and it was hailed by what was supposed to be this big interview between Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter/X, and Trump, but there were huge, like, technical glitches and it was almost like, a disaster at the beginning where they couldn’t get it to work. So there were actually headlines about like, how glitchy that interview was in major like, newspapers like The Washington Post.
AC: Yeah, it’s a pretty big Mercury retrograde.
CB: Yeah. I’m trying to find one of the headlines that I wrote down from The Washington Post; it said, “Trump’s Return to X Marred by Technical Glitches Ahead of Musk Interview.” So just like, very literal Mercury retrograde stuff there in addition to just the idea of returning to something —
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: — where it was left behind previously. In other Mercury retrograde issues with respect to them, because of course we knew that Mercury retrograde was gonna be more important for them and it was interesting – I saw both Trump and Vance within a week of each other experienced airplane malfunctions and like, technical issues that forced them to land their airplanes early during the course of a flight. And of course, this Mercury retrograde was retrograding over both of their Ascendant degrees, so it was more personally important to them and in some ways they had greater experience with some of those themes of Mercury retrograde than other people might.
AC: Yeah, definitely. I have to say, generally speaking, especially the first part of this Mercury retrograde, with it beginning in its own sign of Virgo was very classical. You know, it was very original recipe. All of the cliches came true, both in my life as well as a lot of those stories that we had that we talked about earlier were all like, first week when it was in Virgo, and I heard reams of anecdotes from students and friends with that, again, that original recipe with the Mercury herbs and spices.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Mercury is – or Virgo is the most technical sign, and if you see a Mercury retrograde happening in Virgo, you know it’s gonna be more technically oriented in terms of technology and things related to it.
AC: Yeah, hundred percent.
CB: All right. So let’s see. The last Mercury retrograde story – right on the Mercury retrograde station, Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate for the vice presidential candidate position and for the presidential election right as Mercury stationed. And when I pulled up his chart – we don’t have a timed chart for him yet; I’m hoping somebody will ask him for his birth time – but he was born, actually, just as Mercury was slowing down to station retrograde. So of course this ended up being a recurrence transit for him then, because he was announced and came to then national attention as the vice presidential candidate as Mercury was stationing retrograde. So it was a good demonstration sometimes that if you’re born with Mercury retrograde, that sometimes those subsequent retrogrades and especially the stations can be really important for you in different ways.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
CB: And then Walz was interesting, because one of the reasons Walz was picked because he was the one that started that trend of referring to Donald Trump and Vance and some of their policies as “weird,” and it was interesting seeing that become this keyword that everyone was using during the Mercury retrograde. And I realized as I was thinking about it, it’s like, Mercury retrograde itself is weird. Like, that’s one of the keywords and that’s one of the things that Mercury retrograde does, and it’s because most of the time, Mercury is moving with the rest of the planets in zodiacal order, like, through the signs of the zodiac in direct order. But then sometimes, somewhat frequently, like, Mercury slows down and then all of a sudden it starts moving backwards, almost as if you’re like a car driving backwards on a freeway, which is odd and is kind of weird. And it gave me a good additional Mercury retrograde keyword, which is just that sometimes Mercury retrogrades can be weird.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s literally moving contrary to what is normal and the motion of the rest of the planets. It’s against the grain. Nick Dagan has a bunch of good material about applying to that the Venus retrogrades, how you get very against-the-grain figures or rebellious or yeah, just not normal. That’s interesting; I wouldn’t have thought to apply “weird” to Mercury retrograde, but that works.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s something we often – we think of like Uranus as modern astrologers, but from a more traditional standpoint if you were looking for that, it’s really Mercury and Mercury retrograde but also just retrogrades in general.
AC: Right.
CB: All right. So that’s all the Mercury retrograde news. In other news, early in the month, I was really struck by Harris and Walz adopted this phrase “joyful warriors,” which seems incredibly like, keyed in to the Mars-Jupiter conjunction. And they started like, talking about this theme or referring to themselves as that earlier in the month as that conjunction was still forming, and then it was even mentioned a few times during the DNC in each of their speeches. And this seemed very coded with the Mars-Jupiter conjunction, especially because it’s happening in Kamala Harris’s rising sign of Gemini. And just in general, it seems like with that conjunction happening in her rising sign but there’s something filtering down from the very top, presumably from her, of the Democrats being surprisingly aggressive. Like, they’re usually not this aggressive in terms of their messaging, and yet this month, I feel like they’ve been the most aggressive in terms of their messaging than I’ve ever seen. Like, right now, Trump is trying to like, back out of the debates, and the Kamala headquarters people are like, openly calling him chicken in social media and stuff like that, which is not a strategy that I’ve ever seen before and it’s an interesting manifestation of that Mars-Jupiter energy.
AC: Yeah. No, I can very much see that Mars-Jupiter coded messaging and language. So I didn’t watch the RNC. Was there a similarity there between messaging and the astrology at the moment? You know, I wonder if you can just kind of pick out the most dramatic configurations while there’s a conference like that and if that’s matched consistently to the tone or the messaging.
CB: Yeah, I mean, because so much of the RNC – because I watched both because I always watch both in order to get the times and just to see what the different candidates are talking about. I’ve been doing that going back to like, 2008, when Patrick Watson and I used to do a political astrology blog. The RNC, though, so much of the focus was that Mars-Uranus conjunction because it’s like, the assassination attempt had just taken place a few days earlier, and a lot of that energy was still very much at the forefront of everything. But there was also some kind of like, I’m trying to think of a better word than “weird,” but there was kind of like, some weird stuff. Like, the Hulk Hogan thing where he like, ripped off his shirt and was like, “Let Trumpomania run wild!” And some stuff like that. Or that the person that led into Trump’s speech, I think if I remember correctly, was Dana White, who is like the head of the UFC. So there was some very prominent like, Mars-type energy going on there in that one as well to some extent.
AC: Okay. Okay, yeah, just curious.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I mentioned the DNC. The DNC ended up largely being successful, although there were tensions over not giving speaking positions to pro-Palestinian voices. And also more recently over the past few days, it’s become clear that a bunch of attendees at the DNC got covid, because it ended up taking place during a major surge of covid, of some sort of new strain that’s been sweeping the country that seemed really centered on the Mars-Saturn square. And I thought that was really interesting from our standpoint, because back in 2020 to 2021 during the height of the pandemic, we kept seeing major surges and especially new variants coming out and then exploding around the time of the hard aspects between Mars and Saturn, including the squares. And at some point, like, after 2022, around 2022 when Mars went retrograde in Gemini, that kind of dropped off and we weren’t seeing that pattern that much. But this time during this Mars-Saturn square, we definitely saw it with that huge surge. And so that ended up being one of the negative things that happened in terms of the DNC in manifesting some of that Mars square Saturn energy.
AC: Yeah. And the Mars square Saturn energy, that yama yoga, was definitely present in other places. We had the World Health Organization officially declaring a new outbreak of mpox, which you may know as monkeypox, and as I went through the timeline, there were more countries were reporting outbreaks pretty much every day after that. And then although it hasn’t reached critical levels, it’s very much like, on theme is that later in the month, the first case of polio in the Gaza strip in 25 years was confirmed. And so you just have this death-dealing Mars-Saturn configuration. And of course, although reliable numbers are not in at this point and it may be quite some time, many observers think that the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region was likely an extremely high casualty operation for both sides, and that this month will look like a big bump in the death toll as far as that ongoing conflict is concerned. Which, you know, makes sense for the tight Mars-Saturn configuration.
CB: Yeah, the World Health Organization declaring that new major public health emergency of mpox on August 13th was so incredibly striking, because I remember so vividly exactly two years ago was the last time that there was this major health emergency and outbreak of this that they were calling monkeypox at the time, and it was under a Mars-Saturn square. I went back and looked at our forecast episodes and the transcripts from two years ago, and we were discussing the exact same configuration, but this time Saturn was still in Aquarius, and Mars was in Taurus. But it was right at that exact square that we were talking about this same outbreak last time two years ago under the exact same alignment, and here we are talking about it, and the square went exact on August 16th. The World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency on August 13th. And then the first case was announced as being detected in Europe on August 14th. So it was incredibly striking like, what a repetition that was.
AC: Yeah. Well, the old Mars-Saturn configurations are pretty reliably dangerous.
CB: Yeah, well, that is the traditional in like, ancient astrology like, plague sort of indicators, those alignments.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was – actually, no, backing up to the DNC – to finish off the DNC, Harris accepted the DNC nomination on the final night on August 22nd right as the Venus-Mars square was going exact. And I was watching this speech and I had the like, astrology clock up in the other monitor, and I was watching it, and literally just minutes after the speech was finished, that Venus-Mars square went from applying to separating. And there was something incredibly striking about that, because it was only the second time in our country’s history that a woman has been the nominee of a major party, and in this instance, it was a black woman who became the nominee of a major party and has the potential to become the first woman president of the United States, as the two traditional planets that are associated with gender and with like, men and women and sometimes the tension between the sexes or between the genders were in that close alignment between each other in that square. And I thought there was something striking about that and to that point, one of the reasons it was striking is because simultaneously the same day that that square was going exact, news reports came out that in Afghanistan that the Taliban had passed a new set of laws that were sweeping and basically removing the rights from women and suppressing women’s rights in really major ways across the country. And so it was striking on the one hand, here in the US we see the elevation potentially of a woman to the highest position of power, and then on the other hand, we see a lot of women losing their rights and losing a lot of self autonomy at the same time.
AC: Yeah, it’s a pretty brutal contrast. And the laws that were passed in Afghanistan were very specifically mercurial, right, because that Mars was in Gemini, a Mercury-ruled sign, this is during a Mercury retrograde, and it was about curtailing women’s rights to speak or sing or otherwise vocalize in public. It was literally policing speech.
CB: Yeah. While also requiring full face-coverings, banning girls’ schools in addition to women’s voices in public, and largely just increasing sort of more restrictive approach to women’s roles in society. There’s just something incredibly striking about that parallel and the simultaneity of those two events happening at the same time around Mars and Venus, and it was just a good reminder to me of sometimes some of the most basic significations of those planets still being relevant today in surprisingly literal ways.
AC: Yeah. Surprisingly. Unfortunately literal in some cases.
CB: Yeah. And then finally also just the strikingness to me with Pluto going back into Capricorn for the last time this month and having Harris become the nominee for the presidency and just thinking about like, where the country started, you know, back at the beginning in the 1700s the last time Pluto was in Capricorn, and the way the country was built on slavery, essentially, and like, the role of black people in early American history, the role of women, and the lack of rights and self-autonomy. And now that we have Pluto coming back to the very final pass through Capricorn and the final pass through the Pluto return, not only are we revisiting some basic things about like, the democracy and if we’re gonna continue to have one in the same way that we have over the past two centuries, but also revisiting the role of different people in society and having those things changed and reconfigured and creating a new era in terms of that. I think there’s something incredibly striking about that, both as the closing of one huge cycle of Pluto, but also the opening of a new cycle of two centuries of Pluto at the same time.
AC: Yeah, that’s a really striking point, especially when you consider that the election of Barack Obama occurred just as Pluto entered Capricorn. Right? So beginning that return period. And especially – you know, it’s interesting to reflect on, because Pluto in Capricorn seems very interested in getting we humans to investigate the step pyramid shapes of societies. Like caste and class, if you will. And it’s interesting to think of the American Revolution starting with – beginning a rejection of a caste-based society by starting with rebelling against a hereditary aristocracy, but that taking an entire Pluto cycle to, you know, get to the rest of society, or for that to be truly apparent.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Like, the start of something, and you can see the idealism in some of the early foundational documents of the United States and these notions of like, all “men” are created equal, but then the reality of the way that the country just absolutely did not live up to that at the time because most people did not have rights and self-autonomy. But now, you know, all these years later with the closing of that cycle, like we’ve gotten to a point where despite the continuation of many of those themes of like, racism or classism or sexism, other things like that, that progress has been made compared to where we were when we started as a country. And there’s just something incredibly striking about that, even though that’s not really even the focal point, it’s like, of Harris being a woman or a black woman is not really the focal point of her campaign notably over the past month for the most part. And yet, as astrologers it was just striking for me to step outside of it and look at it from that long-term historical standpoint.
AC: No, that’s really interesting. It makes me curious also about what kind of projects or what kind of arcs take an entire Pluto cycle to achieve? Because, you know, as astrologers, we’re very interested in what the revolutions of the swifter planets mean because they occur multiple times within our life. Right? We talk about what does it mean for Saturn to go all the way around and come back again, both individually and then within a society? Or Jupiter, or you know, Venus, et cetera. But none of us live to see the entirety of a Pluto cycle, or a Neptune cycle, for that matter. And so it’s interesting to think, like, what kind of stories need that much time?
CB: Yeah, exactly. Ones that involve, yeah, changes of power in society and that Pluto can really indicate things like power – and that sounds like such a cliche keyword that we associate with Pluto, but what power actually means in this world has like, such a wide variety of applications and meanings and importance. I think —
AC: And like Pluto, it’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s everywhere and invisible, except when it’s not.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right, so moving on. I have to do a little victory lap, because last month I predicted that I thought Robert Kennedy, Jr. Was gonna drop out of the race when Jupiter returned – speaking of returns – to his natal Jupiter position when Jupiter came back to 17 degrees of Gemini. And indeed, the very last day that Jupiter was at 17 degrees of Gemini, he dropped out of the race and then endorsed Donald Trump as I predicted. So I might – I don’t know if I’ll splice in like, my statement from last month just to confirm that in post here.
[Clip from August forecast]
Kennedy is polling 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.
[End clip]
But I wanted to do a little victory lap for that because I felt pretty – I don’t feel good about that he did that; that’s actually really sketchy even though I’ve been expecting that for more than a year now, but it’s nice sometimes to get the timing right.
AC: Yeah, good job.
CB: Thank you. Let’s see, moving on. Another thing from last month that was a nice little like, prediction we had is we were trying to come up with a keyword or some keywords for Saturn in Pisces, in a water sign, squaring Mars in Gemini, an air sign, and at one point in the last forecast, if you remember, we were like, trying to workshop that. One of the people in the audience said, “hurricane,” that hurricane would be a good keyword. I think we had some other, like, less PG-13 keywords that we might have used as well. But interestingly, in the news around the time of the Mars-Saturn square, there was this billionaire whose yacht sank, and I saw a headline saying that it sank due to a water tornado, which I thought was an amazing new combination of keywords that I was not, you know, was not on the tip of the tongue, is not something you think about all the time, and yet manifested in a major news story this month.
AC: Yeah, that’s pretty good. You know, what does air and water in a destructive and confusing pattern look like? Right? It looks like a water tornado. There are also a lot of very damaging storms and floods and landslides and other disasters throughout the month.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that was interesting. All right. Last two stories – one, Madeline DeCotes actually sent this to me – the oldest woman in the world died this past month. Her name was Maria Branyas, and she passed away this month, and she died on her fourth Saturn return. She had Saturn at 17 degrees of Pisces; she was born March 4th, 1907. And so this was basically her fourth Saturn return, and I thought that was so striking because everybody knows about like, their first Saturn; a lot of people, you know, do the second Saturn return. Not everybody gets to the third Saturn return, but this was a fourth Saturn return, and I was just really struck when I saw that.
AC: Yeah, it’s so interesting. And she was basically a Sun conjunct Saturn in Pisces in the natal chart.
CB: Right.
AC: And that gives me some hope as to my aspirations for longevity, being a March 5th Pisces with the Sun opposite rather than conjoined Saturn. But that would be such an interesting chart to study, assuming we could get a reliable rising sign, as far as what longevity looks like in a nativity. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: Because you see Sun-Saturn, and one interpretation could be, you know, could center on the endurance and longevity of Saturn, but with a different rising you would say, “Oh, Sun-Saturn – that’s really hard on the Sun and the vitality. That’s not going to contribute to long life.” So what an interesting case study, and a Pisces inspiration for me.
CB: Yeah, that would be really interesting to do a longevity study. One of the tricky things is we rarely have the birth time for people, especially that were born that long ago in like, the early 1900s, but I’m hopeful. On Twitter, one of the people who was next on the list, their like, granddaughter or somebody said, “Hey, that’s my relative who’s one of the next people that’s the next oldest,” and I asked them if they had the birth time, and unfortunately they said no, but they gave me the birth data. But hopefully one of these days we’ll start getting some birth times as people get older and older. Because once you get to the 1940s and like, ‘50s, you know, birth times for sure start getting recorded much more reliably.
AC: Yeah. Could you imagine remembering World War One?
CB: No. Or even like – 19 oh – so that’s like, the first airplanes, you know, are starting to fly in like, Kitty Hawk and stuff, versus 50 or 60 years later people are flying to the Moon and there’s humans walking on the Moon for the first time. To see all that in their lifetime and now to see what’s happening now in 2024 – I can’t even imagine.
AC: What a wild century to live through.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right, so I think that’s good for that. The last thing I wanted to mention is this just happened a couple of days ago. The astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius passed away on August 27th. And this is actually really major for the astrological community; Geoffrey Cornelius had been on – I interviewed him in episode 53 way back in 2015. So I wrote out a statement about this, and I just want to read it because what I wrote’s probably better than what I could otherwise say. But I said,
“I just learned that Geoffrey Cornelius has passed away. He wrote The Moment of Astrology, which is one of the most important and influential books on the philosophy of astrology written in the past century. His work challenged long-standing beliefs about the nature of astrology and helped to reestablish its origins as a form of divination. His views came to define the way an entire generation of astrologers would conceptualize the relationship between astrology and science. He was a titan in our field, and yet was still incredibly kind and humble. His work had a great impact on me as well as many other astrologers, and I’m truly grateful for the contributions he made to the astrological tradition. He was one of the great astrologers of our time.”
So that interview, I really encourage people to go back and listen to it about his book, because his book’s so important and so influential. And there’s not a lot of books out there that just cover the philosophy of astrology and delve into the question of the nature of astrology and what it is, but his really did that in a really important way. And we talked about it extensively and talked about the implications of some of his arguments in that interview back in 2015. So this was before I was doing video versions of the podcast, so there’s only an audio version that’s available on the podcast website if you just go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Episodes and scroll down to episode 53. I’ve been meaning for a while now to rerelease that on YouTube so that people that just listen to the YouTube versions can access it, so I’ll probably do that soon. But otherwise, it’s such an important book, and in honor of his passing, it would just be good for people to be aware of it, especially because recently some issues related to like, science and astrology have been coming up in the news again in the past month, and there’s something incredibly striking about that just because that was the core of what originally motivated his book because he saw that there was an issue between the way astrologers were sometimes conceptualizing the relationship between astrology and science in the early ‘90s versus what astrology actually is and how it works. So I think many younger astrologers who haven’t come across his work yet would find it really useful as they’re wrestling with some of those issues.
AC: Yeah, he raises a number of important questions and offers very coherent thinking about those. It’s not like The Book of Answers, but it’s extremely useful to engage with.
CB: Yeah, well, and it’s like, even if you don’t agree with all of his conclusions, which I don’t necessarily, he raises so many important questions and the way that he talks through some of his issues is so thought-provoking that regardless of whether you finish it and you come out agreeing with him, you’re going to provoked into thinking about astrology more deeply and developing a deeper understanding of your own conceptualization of it through his work. And that was one of the things I thought was so brilliant about him as well as, yeah, just his openness to discussing it even if people did disagree with his conclusions. Yeah, he seemed like a really good guy, so that was a big loss for the community. I just wanted to note that here.
AC: Rest in peace.
CB: Yeah. All right, my friend, I think that’s it for this news section. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back.
All right, so our sponsor for this episode is Sphere and Sundry. Sphere and Sundry is an enchanted high-end boutique full of magical oils, perfumes, incense, candles, and talismans that capture the energy of the planets and fixed stars at their very best. Each of these products captures an auspicious election in a bottle, and they are selected by resident astrologer extraordinaire Austin Coppock. Sphere and Sundry is very highly regarded in our community with over 8,000 glowing reviews by clients since opening in 2018. I cannot believe actually that it’s been that long since Sphere and Sundry opened. Starting September 5th, Sphere and Sundry is actually running their first ever sale with up to 30% off. And they’re doing this because they’re redoing all of their labels as part of a major rebranding, so all the pre-wrapped stock has to go. Sphere and Sundry has never run a sale before in their history over the past six years, so this is an amazing opportunity to try it if you’re astromagically curious or to load up on product if you’re already a fan. Visit SphereAndSundry.com starting September 5th for up to 30% off while supplies last. There is a picture of a very furry cat who is cuddling with some Sphere and Sundry it looks like Leo product. I like that. And here is also some other furriness for the other – what series is the Leo or the lion one?
AC: Although there is Sun in Leo materia, that’s actually for Regulus, so that’s the royal fixed star.
CB: The heart of the lion.
AC: Yes. And that cat was none other than podcast producer Sumo Coppock.
CB: Oh, okay, that was a Sumo appearance; I like that. I like – I think you should use more cat background aesthetic just in general. So you are the resident extraordinaire electional astrologer who captures these elections each month, and I love the way that you guys bottle them up into specific products. I’ve been using the bath salts and some of the oils recently. I like the Venus in Taurus series for sleep-related things. You have – can you believe it’s been six years since 2018 since it was started?
AC: I mean, it feels like yesterday/a different universe. You know? I can believe it and can’t at the same time. That was like, the end of a previous world. It was sometime in the last eon, towards the end of the last eon Sphere and Sundry began.
CB: So can you give us any insight into the major rebranding that’s happening?
AC: Well, this was inspired by Mercury’s retrograde through Virgo. Kait’s been wanting to redesign all the labels and make them both upgrade them aesthetically as well as make sure that they very clearly communicate what’s in each bottle as well as looking cool and also be consistently aesthetically coherent with each other. Sounds like a Mercury retrograde – or sounds like Mercury stationing retrograde in Virgo suggesting a variety of improvements, and so that was the inspiration for this. Well, I mean, the inspiration is Kait’s lifelong obsession with quality and making the nicest possible things ever. But that’s what kicked us off, and there’s a bunch of stuff that’s got old labels on it, so it’s gotta go!
CB: I love it. There’s also a new search feature where you can actually search the website to find different products that you’re looking for, so that’s actually also really helpful as well as a new thing. And I love the way that you really integrate fixed stars into your elections as like, a core thing. That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while and we still gotta do an episode on fixed stars, but this is one of the areas where that’s very prominent in terms of the electional work.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. We have a fixed star series where they’re prominent and featured, such as the Regulus one. We’ve done one for the other royal stars as well as a couple others as well. One of the things that’s nice about working with stellar energies or going to that fixed star level is it can be a nice workaround for planets that aren’t so good in the nativity. You know, Antares, for example, is a very martial star, but it’s a separate thing from Mars, and so sometimes a person who’s got Mars trouble can still work with Antares. Or with Regulus, Regulus will act almost like a replacement Sun-Jupiter sort of combo. And so for people who have solar issues, sometimes it’s difficult to work on the Sun directly, but you can go to a fixed star which provides a similar benefit from coming from a different direction. And then generally speaking when I’m electing, if I can strengthen whatever the positive configuration is with a strong benefic fixed star, I can, because the electional criteria for the planetary and stellar elections is so Virgoan. It’s so unbelievably picky that I really need to stretch and get the very best version of something possible, and so all of those series, all the ritual work, takes place in these really, really tight electional windows where it’s gotta be, you know, the planet needs to be in great condition. The Moon needs to be in great condition to support that. The Ascendant lord, and it needs to be in the planetary hour, and so I guess each one being a limited series is a very natural byproduct of, “You have 35 minutes to make this happen.” Or —
CB: Right.
AC: — some of the windows have been as low as like, 10, 15 minutes. It’s like, this is perfect for 10 or 15 minutes, like, go.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. That’s making me realize we need to, we’ve been talking about doing this fixed star episode for like, five years now, so we finally gotta get on that, but I realize maybe we can do a component of that episode where we talk a little bit about using fixed stars in electional astrology, because I think you more than anyone else has really focused on and refined that in terms of your electional work.
AC: Oh, thank you. I think it comes from the natural desperation you have in trying to maximize a magical election, and knowing the consequences of getting that wrong. And so it’s anything you can use, and if you can bring in Aldebaran on the Moon while you’re doing the solar election, like, all the better. There’s something to be said for the like, the narrowness of the criteria like, really, I don’t know, squeezing the very best out of my toothpaste mind.
CB: Yeah. I love that. All right. Well, people should visit SphereAndSundry.com starting September 5th to get that 30% off while supplies last. And thanks to Sphere and Sundry for sponsoring this episode.
All right, my friend, let’s transition into talking about the future. Let’s talk about September. Let’s get into the astrology of this coming month.
So —
AC: All right.
CB: Let’s zoom out first and talk about the main alignments. The big thing this month really is eclipse season; I think that’s the major thing for me that I’ve been focused on. When we did the year ahead forecast, this Pisces eclipse that’s happening in the middle of the month really stood out to me. Especially because like, last year, a year ago during eclipse season, just everything went crazy and it seemed like the world went crazy, and then again this spring around like, April, when eclipses happened, it again just seemed like things started popping off all over the place in different parts of the world. And again, we are back to eclipse season and this keyword or this theme that I always talk about of like, major beginnings and major endings is even more pronounced here because this is the first eclipse in Pisces and the start of a new series that’s gonna keep bouncing back and forth between Pisces and Virgo all the way until 2027. So more than like, two years now. I think that’s gonna be a major shift, especially for those of us that have major placements in Pisces or Virgo or the mutable signs. I don’t know if you know anybody in your personal life that has any placements in Pisces, but if you do, let me know.
AC: I will. I’m gonna have to think about it.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, it’s a big one for Kait and I. We actually got together on this eclipse cycle.
CB: Oh, right.
AC: It’ll be, you know, when we get to the right point, it will be that 18.6 years in the past. This one brought us together and echoes through our natal charts.
CB: That is incredible. I was noticing when I glanced at the – here’s that image again that was made by Madeline at Honeycomb.co – just the eclipse season and what – you know, last year after the eclipses, I decided to go back because I did a search and I was just like, I was trying to do a Google search of just like, what are some major events in history that coincided with eclipses, and there weren’t a lot of articles that really brought it together as much as I was expecting. So I did that whole research session where I spent a long time research eclipses in history and ending up finding a ton of major events in world history that coincided with eclipses, and ended up developing a whole methodology where what we found with my friend Nick Dagan Best I did the episodes with in that two-part series was that eclipse season really starts about a week before an eclipse, and it lasts until about a week after an eclipse. And when you include the fact that any time one eclipse happens, there’s gonna be another two weeks later, that kind of creates about a four-week window where you have this one-week build up to eclipse season, and then the sort of like, window or portal fully opens at the first eclipse, then two weeks later you get the next eclipse and the next peak in that cycle, and then there’s kind of like a drop off over the course of the next week. But that’s something we’re heading into here this month is eclipse season and some major beginnings and major endings.
AC: Yeah, it’s gonna be exciting. You know, I started referring to that period between eclipses as the bardo, I don’t know, like, 15 years ago. The bardo being the space between lives where you are before you’ve reincarnated but after you’ve died, the imaginal space in which the Tibetan Book of the Dead takes place. Because there is a lot of weirdness during those periods of time.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s such an intense period where you can see, you know, sometimes the death of things. Like, things reaching the absolute end of their life cycle and ending, sometimes metaphorically, other times very literally. And on the other hand, you see the birth of new things and the implantation of seeds that are sometimes like, not readily apparent, that seem like small beginnings that then grow and flourish in the future from very humble origins. So we’re gonna see a lot of that. We also tend to see a lot of it being the pivot point, especially in the lives of prominent people, of some major people heading upwards into greater prominence in the world stage and other people falling downwards out from prominence and not necessarily into obscurity but sometimes into like, infamy or something like that.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And that language of rise and fall is not only what happens during eclipses – an emergence and disappearance – but that is quite accurately derived from what the nodes indicate. They are the point where the Moon will start to rise above the Sun on the ecliptic or begin to fall below the Sun. And if you were to plot the Moon’s sort of sine wave movement above and below the Sun, you get a shape that looks suspiciously dragon-like. And you know, I strongly suggest everyone like, milk that dragon imagery, because it’s stayed around for a very good reason. You know, you have not just in popular television shows such as House of the Dragon draconic symbolism being like, sort of growing around the rise and fall of dynasties, but you find that throughout history in a shocking number of cultures that never talked to each other. This rise and fall and appearance and disappearance quality being represented by the dragon is I wont say universal, but shockingly close to universal thing. It’s no doubt the most popular animal that’s never existed. Right? It has a tremendous existence in the imagination.
I would also add that just thinking about that up and down, dragons swoop down, right? Like, the image of the dragon shrieking down from the heavens to terrorize the villagers or the dragon emerging from the depths, from out of nowhere, coming out of the cave. And so we get these things coming out of nowhere, and then things going from huge prominence to suddenly just disappearing, right? Like, oh, I guess they’re done. It’s a great landscape to think with.
CB: Yeah, for sure. One of my keywords is the death of the old and the birth of the new for this set of eclipses, and I think this is gonna be even more prominent because it’s happening in Pisces with Saturn and Neptune, and in some ways I think it’s going to really accentuate and accelerate some of the changes and some of the themes that we’ve been experiencing in the Pisces sectors of our charts over the past year ever since Saturn went into Pisces in like, March of 2023. So many of us have already experienced some major challenges, some obstacles, some extra weight or burdens or just responsibilities in that sector of our chart, but now for some reason it’s gonna get accelerated by this new series of eclipses that’s gonna start bouncing back and forth between Pisces and Virgo over the next two or so years, almost three years, representing the start of some new threads and the start of some new chapter in our life in that same sector. So I think that’s gonna be a major theme. This eclipse, it’s actually interesting because it’s separating from Saturn when it happens, and it’s applying to conjunct Neptune. So there’s also a major Neptune theme of it now that we’re getting towards the tail end of that transit as well that began more than a decade ago at this point.
AC: Yeah. It’s interesting; the eclipse as well as Saturn are seeing Neptune out of Pisces, and they give us some understanding of kind of what we’re left with after 14 years of Neptune in Pisces. Because we get the first ingress into Aries actually between eclipses in about six months in March-April of 2025. And so it’s interesting like, that we get our first Pisces eclipse here, and then we get the solar in Libra in very early October, and we had the solar in Libra last October, which had quite devastating results. And then our next set of eclipses is also going to be a one toe in, one toe out; we’ll have a solar in Aries, and that’ll be the last, but we’ll have the lunar in Virgo. So for this September as well as next March, we’re sort of halfway between cycles. We’re halfway into Libra-Aries; we’re finishing that up, but it’s not done until end of Q1 next year, and we’re beginning the Virgo-Pisces, but it’s not fully in until next year. It’s very extra windy and confusing, as eclipses should be.
CB: Yeah, for sure. But that’s a good point that we expect to see a continuation of many of the themes from the previous eclipses in Libra and Aries that started in October of 2023 and continued into April and around that time frame of 2024. Like, for example, the continuation of the saga between Israel and Palestine and Iran, especially because that Libra eclipse from last year was so tied in with Israel since the country has Libra rising, and also because Netanyahu was born on a Libra eclipse, so we would expect to see then a continuation of some of those themes from the past year reaching a new critical turning point especially around the time within a week of that Libra eclipse that’s gonna take place at the beginning of October. But we’re talking about it now because eclipse season starts in September, and because if there’s like, a one week window before the eclipse in which it becomes relevant, then that’s gonna start towards the end of September, and then culminate in early October.
AC: Yeah. I mean, really once we get into sort of mid-September, it’s just eclipse season until, you know, until we’re well into October. There’s a little bit of September that’s not eclipse-y, but we start down that grease slide pretty quick.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And then these eclipses also – I’ve been saying this I think since the year ahead forecast last December – that I think they’re gonna be incredibly important for the presidential election, and I think it relates to the debates that I think are about the take place or that people are hoping will still take place, even though it’s still sort of like, up in the air to some extent and a question of whether Trump will go through with it or not. But I think these debates, because the presidential debate that’s scheduled right now is supposed to happen pretty close to the Pisces eclipse, and then the vice presidential debate is supposed to happen pretty close to the Libra eclipse. So I think those debates are actually gonna be more important than usual and are gonna represent a turning point in each of the campaigns. The Pisces eclipse in particular is in Kamala Harris’s 10th house of career and reputation, and Patrick Watson did a study where he went back to the ‘90s and showed how these Pisces eclipses in Harris’s 10th house kept being crucial turning points in her career where she took the next step upwards in terms of her sort of climb to where she’s at today as a politician and in terms of her work. So that’s major thing, and then of course I’ve talked about in the past few months that this eclipse is also important for Biden taking place in his 4th house. And then at the very least then sort of foreshadowing his moving from the White House by January at the latest, but also because it’s the 4th house, which represents endings, that there’s something about like, wrapping things up and bringing things to completion symbolically in his life, that this eclipse seems pertinent to at the same time.
AC: Yeah. Well, and with the North Node or the head of the dragon being in the 4th – excuse me. The 4th house is also the most private place in the chart. It’s, you know, way beneath the horizon. And so when you have eclipses where the head is beneath the horizon, often we’re heading towards or pulled towards or have to deal with something that is more private in nature, whereas with Kamala’s chart where she has the opposite rising from Biden, this eclipse in Pisces that’s off the head of the dragon is pulling her towards a place of greater prominence, of greater visibility. You can see what’s at the top of the chart very easily.
CB: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. So there is gonna be some heaviness, though, with this eclipse. Here’s the actual chart for the eclipse roughly. It’s gonna take place at about 25 degrees of Pisces, conjunct Neptune at 28 and Saturn at 15 Pisces. But we can see that Mercury, which is gonna spend most of the month in Virgo, is coming up for almost exact opposition with Saturn, so that at the time of the eclipse, Mercury’s at 14 degrees of Virgo and it’s opposing Saturn at 15 degrees of Pisces. So even though Mercury’s otherwise well-placed, you would think, in the more technically oriented sign of Virgo which is the sign of its exaltation and is one of its home signs, it’s running into obstacles and difficulties in terms of its basic functions. And one of the basic functions of Mercury is to communicate things clearly and factually, especially in Virgo – it’s a very factual sign. But it’s running into some sort of obstacle or some sort of restraint with Saturn in Pisces at the same time.
AC: Yeah, poor Mercury in Virgo. One of Mercury’s particular jobs, especially in Virgo, is sorting things so that – sorting things into their constituent categories, parsing the data so that you’re not getting confusing results. And so naturally, planets in Pisces are there to confuse and confound this. Right? Signifying things that are difficult to sort out. The first thing that comes to mind is stew. Right? You can’t sort out the stew; everything’s been cooked together. The flavor of everything interpenetrates everything else. It’s very difficult to separate these watery combinations that are Pisces’s signature, because it’s too mixed up, right? And so just Saturn, of course, Saturn being in Pisces signifies difficulties, obstacles that have this difficult to sort nature and then we have Neptune there, which is even better at making things impossible to sort out into their constituent categories. And so the eclipse happening in this area, especially on the North Node, it presents something – it presents, you know, one thing – it presents lots of things. It presents a moment that’s going to be very difficult to figure out for poor Mercury in Virgo and the part of ourselves that love clean, clear data. You know, the —
CB: That’s perfect. I know what that is – about the election stuff, not just misinformation but like, the false, AI-generated stuff that’s hard to tell the difference has really been ramping up lately. So that’s probably part of what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing the tension between the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which we had a long time ago called as being, you know, deception and having a hard time telling the difference between what’s real and what’s false or what’s lies, especially in the like, AI-generated video audio text department. But then on the other hand, you have Mercury that’s coming in through Virgo that’s trying to like, fact-check things; it’s like the reporter who’s attempting desperately to fact-check things, but it’s running up against this Saturn-Neptune opposition at the same time. So with the eclipse accentuating that, we’re probably gonna see an accentuation and then a huge rise in the – not complete inability, but the struggle to parse like, what’s real and what’s not and to fact-check what’s true versus what’s imaginerary.
AC: Oh yeah, a hundred percent. It’s gonna be a note of madness. And by madness, I mean that which drives you mad because you cannot resolve it clearly into the rational. And for some people, that might be a spiritual moment or a spiritual moment that’s entangled with a bunch of sort of personal, psychological stuff and imaginal content – like, very difficult to parse. Like, they’ll be – it’s some piping hot stew with facts and fantasy and all personal and collective content all cooked together in a way that I think will be very difficult for the rational mind to digest around that period. And that is, of course, a preview of Neptune’s movement through Pisces.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: Sorry – the North Node’s movement through Pisces. Neptune’s – we’re not getting a preview; we’re getting a review of Neptune’s movement through Pisces.
CB: Yeah that makes sense. Okay, so I wanted to start there because that’s where the focal point is – eclipse season – and we’ll return to that, but maybe we should back it up chronologically and hit our first lunation of the month, which is already on September 2nd and brings up many of these themes that we’re talking about where we have a New Moon in Virgo on September 2nd, but also gives us an access point for talking about some of the energies that we’ll be experiencing at the beginning of the month.
So here’s the chart for the New Moon, which takes place on September 2nd at 11 degrees of Virgo. We can see that it’s opposing Saturn and I believe that’s actually the next aspect the Moon and the Sun make as soon as they complete their conjunction is they both apply to that opposition with Saturn that brings up much of the same energy that we were just talking about in terms of the tensions between the fact-checking tendencies of Virgo versus the imaginary realms of Pisces and Neptune and Saturn there. But in addition to that, Mars at the same time is very closely squaring Neptune and basically goes exact I think the same day on September 2nd, where Mars is at 28 degrees of Gemini in the very last degrees of that sign and that transit, and it’s squaring Neptune at 29 degrees of Pisces. So we have some neptunian issues here that are kind of challenging, where Mars tries to act and it tries to take decisive action, sometimes impulsively, but oftentimes when you have squares with Mars and Neptune, you can take decisive action or impulsive action based on false information or based on like, the fog of war, which later, when the fog clears, you find out that you’ve done something wrong or inappropriate or taking an action that you regret because you didn’t have a clear picture of what was going on.
AC: Friendly fire.
CB: Yeah, friendly fire. I mean, we’ve seen so many like, different cases like that over the past few years as we’ve seen different Mars-Neptune alignments. But here especially with Mars in Gemini, the tendency to kind of like, pop off and say something or initiate a verbal conflict or even one through technology like social media, but then to kind of like, you know, potentially kind of make an ass of yourself because you miSunderstood or you weren’t seeing the situation clearly I feel like is heightened around the time of this New Moon when that aspect is going exact.
AC: Yeah. The Mars-Neptune certainly provides ample opportunities for “old man yells at cloud.” Like, well, the cloud was looking at me! Right? Like, just projecting hostility onto random patterns in the environment and then getting into a contentious situation.
CB: Yeah. That cloud did have a threatening demeanor, to be fair.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So —
AC: Did you see the obscene gesture that cloud was making?
CB: All right. I mean, on the plus side, Mercury at the beginning of September has stationed direct finally, and it’s still moving slowly. It’s only five days away from stationing at the time of this New Moon around 22, 23 degrees of Leo, but it is starting to move forward again. So there is the potential for coming out of some of the period of like, having to revise things, having to revisit things, and starting to be able to move forward again. Although as we’ve experienced during previous Mercury direct stations, there can still be this experience of slowness, of delays in things developing or delays in things getting back to normal or things taking longer than you expect while Mercury is still leaving those stationary degrees.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And so Mercury will take a little bit to pick up speed and then get back into Virgo. Very often in that third decan of Leo, especially with Mercury there, you have figuring out like, messaging, branding, marketing, campaigning if perhaps you’re interested in running for office. It’s getting that solar appearance right, like figuring out what the logo is, so to speak.
CB: Yeah. Although one of the issues during this period is Mercury is going to square Uranus a third time, one last time here, when it passes 27 degrees of Leo around September 6th, and that will peak. But it’s actually even more important now than the previous two squares, because Uranus is actually stationing retrograde at 27 degrees of Taurus on the very first day of September, which always represents an intensification of a Uranus transit, like putting an exclamation mark next to it in a chart. And with Mercury stationing direct and moving so slowly and sort of like extending the square at that time around September 6th and the days leading up to it and maybe a day or two following until it gets into Virgo, there’s the potential for surprises, for unexpected communication, unexpected disruptions. I know during I think it was the first square was when Biden unexpectedly dropped out of the race all of a sudden, and that was the like, shocking sort of surprising news that took place under one of the squares.
AC: Yeah. Uranus’s effect on Mercury is often like, messaging or having to account for something that’s a little out of left field or being inspired to make a change that you hadn’t been planning for, and so there’s a squiggle or a jaggedness to trajectories around that point. Oftentimes there’s a need for a quick pivot from this to that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that Uranus station is very important, because Uranus is now the latest that it’s ever gotten in Taurus, and for those that have very late degrees of fixed sign placements or even like, the first degree of mutable sign placements, Uranus is coming into for the first time like, a hard aspect with those degrees, and even if you’ve seen a buildup over the course of most of the past decade, especially since 2017, 2018 when Uranus went into Taurus into some sector of your chart, if you have fixed placements at the very end of those signs, it’s gonna get one of its first exact transits of Uranus at this time, which can disrupt but also excite that part of your life. Sometimes people just get really rebellious or they try to overthrow like, the constraints or whatever they feel is holding them back at this time. And from a mundane perspective, Uranus stationing here is important because on the very same day on September 1st, Pluto retrogrades back into Capricorn for its final pass through the last degrees of that sign in order to finish up a transit that’s been happening since all the way way back in like, 2009 when Pluto first went into Capricorn and first went into that sector of our charts. And because Pluto’s at 29 Capricorn and Uranus stations at 27 degrees of Taurus, that means the two of them are forming a very close trine within two degrees at this point, which I think is one of the most overlooked but potentially important mundane aspects that’s kind of happening in the background right now, and I think is particularly important in terms of technology and in terms of finances and material things. I saw a report saying that like, Russia this past month decriminalized or legalized cryptocurrencies, and that China – which apparently had been clamping down on it since about 2017, 2018 when Uranus went into Taurus – is thinking about removing some of those restrictions. So I know I’ve talked about this on previous episodes, so not to beat a dead horse about the whole cryptocurrency thing, but I think this is one of the final things that this outer planet transit of Pluto through Capricorn and Uranus through Taurus is really doing is the widespread normalization about cryptocurrencies and digital currencies around the world, which is gonna have important long term impacts.
AC: That’s really interesting. So what do you think, then, about the time toward the middle end of the month when the Sun is in late Virgo and forming a tight trine to both Pluto and Uranus, which also happens to be our eclipse time? Do you think this —
CB: Oh wow.
AC: — eclipse might then have some implications for cryptocurrency? I think you’ve kind of made enough of the argument that I would say probably.
CB: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. Also because then the eclipse is gonna fall – isn’t that like, the middle point roughly between the two? Doesn’t that mean, like —
AC: Yeah, it is.
CB: — 28 degrees. That means the eclipse is gonna fall on the midpoint between those two. And yeah, I mean, what’s interesting right now is that both one, historically, I’ve done a study I released on The Casual Astrology Podcast of how Bitcoin has hit new highs and lows at eclipses historically in the past, going all the way back to the very first time that it hit a new all-time high and hit a price peak in like, the early 2010s. So that historically it does that, but also all the Bitcoin people all summer have been waiting for it the price to skyrocket, because all of a sudden, a lot of – like, in the US especially – ETFs have been approved, which is allowing people to invest their retirement funds into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency related things. But the price hasn’t been budging; if anything, it’s been stagnant or declining over the summer even though there’s all these signals that it should be going up. And I’ve noticed a lot of them talking about why that is and why the price hasn’t skyrocketed yet, especially since there’s supply shocks, because the amount of Bitcoin being mined was cut in half in April. So that eclipse actually could be an interesting focal point for what’s already expected in terms of price to go up here before too long over the next few months.
AC: Interesting. We’ll have to watch that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so we’re talking about the —
AC: We were talking about Pluto’s return to Capricorn, and we talked about that a little bit earlier framing the Revolutionary War and Declaration of Independence in America and us now beginning this final portion of the Pluto return. Right? Pluto’s not going to be in Capricorn long; we just have a few more months. I think it’s about 10 weeks. But that’s a wrap on Pluto in Capricorn, which started initially in 2007 and got going in 2008. And again, it’s the – I don’t know what the word for like, the Pluto centennial – the United States has been around now for one Pluto cycle. And so it is interesting to note that in the Declaration chart, the Sibley chart with Sag rising, Pluto is in the second house, which would suggest that the United States has some Plutonian issues around money and stuff. And with Pluto being in Capricorn, that they’re, oh, I don’t know, is perhaps an invisible hierarchy or an unofficial caste system based on money in the United States, even though that’s a wild thing to propose based on the astrology. But it does suggest that. And you know, somewhat ominously, it is interesting that the last time was during Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn was when we had the worst recession that we’ve had in a couple decades. Right? That’s what began the 2007-2008 significant downturn. Hopefully if there is a downturn, it will not be of that magnitude. But it is not particularly comforting to see Pluto return to the United States’s 2nd house.
CB: Yeah. Well, and also just as we talked about a few months ago that the US dollar is like, the reserve currency of most countries around the world and that the US is fighting to keep that because it then gives the US a great deal of power and influence around the world. But then as I’d noticed a few months ago, it turns out that BRICS and some of those other countries like Russia had been trying to develop some way to develop an alternative to that or to get the world off of the dollar as the primary reserve currency. And while a lot of that hasn’t really bared fruit so far, that there could be something about this final pass of it; I think there’s supposed to be a meeting that’s happening later this year in like, October or something that could be relevant for that in terms of other attempts to do that, to create an alternative currency, and some of these things surrounding like, cryptocurrency could be tied in with that or could dovetail in some striking ways.
AC: Yeah, you’d think. Well, and you know, you don’t have to have a sort of overnight replacement of the world’s currency or the reserve currency for it to have a big effect on markets, right? If there’s a four percent shift in confidence away from the dollar and towards other currencies, that would be huge. Right? Like even small numbers here have massive ramifications.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And even aside from the like, 2nd house Sibley chart Pluto stuff, just with Pluto coming back to where it started for this final pass, it’s taking us back to the foundations of the country of the United States and what was started at that time. And part of what was started at that time was a democracy and returning back to, as we’ve talked about a lot over the past several years as this Pluto return has been going on, revisiting the creation of the country as a democracy and whether that’s gonna continue, and the real threat to that as like, an existential threat of whether the US is gonna continue to be a democracy after this election I think is one of the things that we’re really focused on and is gonna be the big topic of discussion here over the next few months, especially since sort of weirdly or eerily, this Pluto transit through Capricorn ends in the middle of November on November 19th, just after this election is completed and as that Mars retrograde heat up and as we’re starting to sort things out. So I think that’s part of what is being revisited at this time, and as an aside, I meant to mention in the news section, everybody should be registered to vote. Like, this is now the time to get registered to vote. This is an incredibly important election for like, a number of different issues, a wide variety of different issues, and it’s gonna be an extremely close election, especially in some of the swing states. So I’d just like to encourage all listeners of the podcast to get registered so that you can make a choice and so that you can contribute to that in terms of some of these themes that we’re talking about about, you know, democracy, about the rights of different individuals, self-autonomy and different things like that which are all up for a vote in this election.
AC: Yeah, well said. I think, you know, to follow up on the points about the sort of foundational shape of the American project, you know, almost like a Saturn return – right? – if you imagine a Saturn return, there’s a certain crisis around fundamental challenges, issues, projects. Like, am I doing it – like, something I asked myself during my Saturn return that I think a lot of people do is, “Am I doing it right?” Like, is this what I should be doing? I set out to do this, like, there’s a very evaluative, like, “Is this going well?” Like, should I be doing something else? I would say that United States seems to be at a similar place in terms of a crisis of self-evaluation, but on that much longer Pluto time scale. Like, “Is this how it’s supposed to work? Is this what it’s supposed to be?” And you see way across the X, Y, and Z axis politically a lot of agreement that maybe this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Visions for how it’s supposed to be differ widely. But there is this sort of general agreed-upon big question mark that I think is about the foundations of the project, which does seem to be almost universal. And I would say also in the way that the American project seemed to be evaluated by international onlookers as well. Like, is that what you guys are trying to do? Is that on purpose? Right?
CB: Right.
AC: Do you want it to be that way? So yeah, it’s a big one collectively. For those of us who have things late in cardinal signs, it’s also a giant unhappy face on a personal level as well. As a 29-degree rising with a 29-degree Jupiter, I’ve been giving this one the stink eye since Pluto went into Aquarius.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s actually one of your keywords and themes that in our planning sessions you drew out for this month, which is a lot of cardinal stuff happening this month with Pluto retrograding back into Capricorn with the Libra eclipse coming up and with Mars entering Cancer where it’s gonna go retrograde. That actually brings us to our next real aspect of the month after that New Moon we talked about, which is Mars entering Cancer on September 4th and just beginning this huge, elongated transit of Mars through the signs of Cancer and Leo that’s gonna last all the way until like, the middle of nxt year.
AC: Yeah. You know, just as August had a tremendous amount of stress on mutable placements, especially the middle decan of mutable, by the 4th of September, we’ve got a lot of stress on the cardinal. And it’s sort of all over the cardinal axis, because we have both nodes, right? So head and tail of the dragon in Aries and Libra. We’ll have Mars in Cancer forever. And sort of backing in, we have Pluto in Capricorn. Right? So that’s, you know, that’s a lot of trouble-causing points. We’ve got dragons, we’ve got generals, we’ve got all sorts of, you know, we’ve got whatever Pluto is – plutocrats. It’s a lot of trouble on the cardinal axis, and it’s not just, you know, three weeks of that. Like, all of those things will be true until Pluto moves back into Aquarius later in November. So yeah. The mutable signs get to sort of hand the shit stick off to the cardinal.
CB: Beautiful way of putting it. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
AC: Elegant.
CB: Yeah, that was the word I was looking for. All right. So —
AC: Perhaps it’s not an s-word stick. Maybe it’s just the baton of suffering.
CB: Baton of suffering. Yeah, well, you had —
AC: Baton of suffering.
CB: You had another one. You said like, “Big trouble in” somewhere?
AC: Big trouble in little cardinal signs? I don’t know. I was thinking, I was like, cardinal conundrums and catastrophes.
CB: Yeah.
AC: We’re going alliterative.
CB: I had the battle of the benefics and malefics last month, which turned out to be pretty good. So I want to talk about the timeline —
AC: How about – sorry – the cardinal carnival of catastrophe?
CB: That almost works, except part of the problem is that Mars stations in Leo, so it’s like, kind of hitting the fixed and the cardinal signs during the course of the next eight or whatever months.
AC: But just for a while it’s all in cardinal.
CB: Okay, that’s fair. So I wanna show this graphic again just to give you a full timeline of the Mars stuff that’s coming up. Madeline DeCotes and I workshopped this for those watching the video viewers just showing the Mars ingress on September 4th, just because you have to understand the Mars retrograde is an extended Mars transit. So it’s like, imagine what it’s like to, you know, sometimes you’re cooking and you accidentally place your hand on a hot stove and you pull it back really quickly. But sometimes like, a Mars transit is not – they’re supposed to be quick like that. Like, you get burned, you pull it off, you remove it, there might be some burning sensation still. But with a retrograde it’s just extended. So it’s like eating, you know, like, a packet of the hottest hot sauce that you could and just having that burning sensation linger in your mouth for a period of time. That’s kind of what we’re looking at here for an extended period in the Cancer and the Leo sectors of our charts. And this really begins as soon as Mars moves into that sign of Cancer, because that’s the sign that it’s gonna stay in, and so it’ll stay in that whole sign house and come back to it for such a long time. But then especially if you have planets at or after 17 degrees of Cancer in the cardinal signs, because 17 degrees is when Mars enters its pre-retrograde shadow period. And that’s the degree that it will later retrograde back to and station direct at in mid-February. So with shadow degrees, I think they’re important because it means if you have a planet, you know, let’s say between 17 degrees of Cancer and the end of that sign, it means that whatever natal planet that is, it’s gonna get three separate passes of Mars or three exact transits from Mars, which often then become part of a sequence of events that plays out over a number of months as opposed to just being a one-time event of a quick Mars transit. So the full timeline of things is Mars goes into Cancer September 4th. It passes its pre-retrograde shadow period at 17 Cancer on October 4th. Then on November 3rd, Mars moves into Leo, weirdly right before election day in the US. Mars stations retrograde at six degrees of Leo on December 6th, which weirdly is kind of close to when the election’s gonna be certified like it was last time around December of 2020. Then on January 6th, Mars is gonna retrograde back into Cancer, so it’s gonna return back to whatever whole sign house it had been in in September, October, and the very beginning of November; it’s gonna return back to that so that we’re gonna revisit some of those Mars topics starting January 6th, which is also actually a weird date time-wise in terms of the election. And then February 23rd, Mars slows down, stations direct at 17 degrees of Cancer, begins moving forward again, doesn’t depart from Cancer until April 17th when it moves into Leo. Eventually, finally, Mars exits its post-retrograde shadow degree at six Leo on May 2nd, and then eventually departs from Leo and moves into Virgo and ends the entire cycle on June 17th when it moves into Virgo. So that is what we are looking at as a very long, extended Mars transit, which – let me actually balance that out, because you know, for some people especially if you have like, a night chart, and this is in a good sector of your chart, this could just be a period in which you’re expending a lot of additional energy and focus on some specific area of your life. And that there’s a huge energy output where maybe you’re pushing your limits in terms of that, but nonetheless it could still be a very productive time in your life relative to whatever house Mars is transiting through. For other people if Mars is more challenging for you, like with day chart people, it can be a period of basic Mars concepts of like, conflict or strife. There can be sometimes injuries or like, accidents, especially if it’s hitting a health sector of your chart. There can be frustration or anger in some part of your life from an emotional standpoint. It’s basically whatever a Mars transit is, but just like, extended out for a very long period.
AC: Yeah. A couple things to add to that – one, people born during Mars retrogrades in my experience tend to do a lot better during Mars retrogrades. One thing I see is subjectively, they report very high levels of motivation. It seems to be that return to that part of the cycle that they were born to seems to make it much easier for them to access the positive, “I wanna work hard, kick ass, take names” qualities of Mars. So I know several retro natives who look forward to the retrogrades and consistently get good results. Also, for —
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point, because Nick Dagan Best – I’ve been researching like, prominent podcasters and seeing who we have birth charts for recently, and Nick Dagan Best noted that we have a birth time for Joe Rogan, who has one of the biggest podcasts in the world, and he does not have Mars retrograde – it’s coming off of a station – but he has Mars dignified and very prominent in the chart. And Nick has been doing this research where he’s showed like, almost every major turning point in this guy’s life and especially career has happened during a Mars retrograde period. So there’s some people who really respond to those periods positively if Mars is a prominent planet for them for some reason.
AC: Yeah, well, and what I was gonna add is that if you’re, or for the more sort of straightforward Mars-y types, like, “I’ve got Mars in Scorpio in the 10th, and I kick a lot of ass,” you know, for those types, the quality of the retrograde phase of Mars is often just feels off. There are a lot of ass-kickers who can’t seem to find their boots during Mars retrogrades. You know, like, how does the phase of Mars compare to the natal phase seems to yield pretty consistent results, especially subjectively but also in measurable ways. It’s worth noting that if you remember only one other thing about this Mars retrograde other than it’s late Cancer and early Leo, it’s that there are three exact oppositions to Pluto, and so like, this Mars retrograde doesn’t get very far from being opposed Pluto. Like, that particular shadow and that obscurity and focus on hard to see but easy to feel power dynamics is gonna be a really big theme. Right? We have the first opposition, which is on November 1st, which is Cancer-Capricorn, but then there are two more when Mars retrogrades back to the beginning of Leo and opposes Pluto in Aquarius, and then direct when it comes back into Leo in April and opposes Pluto in Aquarius again. And so that’s just a huge part of this one.
CB: Yeah. Look at the second pass in early January. Yeah. That’s not gonna be pretty. Of course, it evokes – it’s weird that it’s falling in crucial time periods around the time of the election here in the US and of course, you know, a year ago it kind of evokes the beginning of everything in Israel with October started with a Mars-Pluto square and just some of the darkest potential of those combinations can be just like, extreme levels of like, violence and conflict and killing and things like that are worst case scenarios. This is – we’re talking about much later in the Mars retrograde period and not necessarily this month fully when Mars is just ingressing into Cancer, but it’s something we’ve been talking about and wrestling with in terms of how things play out with the election and whether, you know, that sort of tension with Mars-Pluto could be indicative of something similar to what we saw on like, January 6th, for example, back in 2021. Yeah. So how do you feel about Mars, if we could draw out some significations for like, Mars in Cancer just in general as a vibe or as a placement?
AC: So unfortunately, Cancer is the sign where Mars experiences its fall. And one of the ways that I like to discuss falls is that, you know, you fall down into something. A more accurate translation in some of the older language is the depression, meaning like, a pit. And when planets are in their fall, it’s almost like there are these specially dug little booby traps or pit traps that they can fall into. And for Mars, and it’s important to note that a planet in its fall doesn’t just mean it’s weak. That’s not really – like, fall and weak are not the same thing. Planets can actually be relatively strong in falls, but they get stuck or trapped in something. And the trap with Mars, like the mental state that’s the trap, is created by the extreme sensitivity of Cancer, which is useful for a lot of things. It’s necessary for any good caretaking or nurturing, right? In order to take good care of something, you have to be very sensitive to their needs, right? To take care of an infant, right, you’ve gotta be totally zoomed in, and what do you need now? But that same sort of sensitivity tends to drive Mars crazy. You know, in the sphere of Mars, we see the type of activity where you act explosively, powerfully, with certainly because there’s danger. And so this combination of Mars’s easily adrenalized fight-or-flight type of mindset with that sensitivity often sees people with Mars in Cancer experiencing either within themselves or through people in their lives people freaking the fuck out. Right? Because you have that combination of explosiveness with Mars and hypersensitivity with Cancer, and very often with Mars in its fall as well as other planets in their fall, sometimes we try to solve the problem, in this case with Mars, and end up creating more problems. That’s part of the trap, the pitfall, of a planet in its fall is in trying to get out of a trap or struggle out of a problem, they react in such a way that makes it worse. When you were with you – to harken back to your earlier analogy, Chris – the burning your hand on the stove, it’s like that, and then flinging it back and then accidentally punching someone that you’re working in the kitchen with in the face, and they say, “Fuck you, why did you do that?” They hit you. And you know, you get like, a cascade of negative events from your reaction to the first negative event. And so keeping an eye on Mars and keeping an eye on how we react to things, especially if we’re put in the type of sensitive situation that Mars in Cancer suggests, is gonna be a huge thing for getting through this.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I think that it’s like, part of the contrast is Mars has its exaltation in Capricorn ruled by Saturn, and I think that the reason for that, that that’s traditionally considered to be a good placement, is just that Mars benefits from the structure and the restriction that Saturn puts in place. Sort of like, let’s say like, a rambunctious youth who goes to like, the military or something like that and learns discipline and learns to like, control their impulses and to restrain them in some way, versus in Cancer, Mars is ruled by the Moon. And so you get this drive sometimes to give into its impulses based on its emotions and like, a lack of restraint that has to do with doing the first thing that you feel like doing. And sometimes the first thing that you feel like doing might be lashing out or doing something impulsive that you could regret later based on a passing emotion that you were feeling at the time. So that’s why we have things like, a crime of passion where we think about somebody who does something terrible in the moment that maybe they wouldn’t have done if it was like, they thought about it in a longer term or something like that, that they were almost like, swept away by the anger or the emotion at the time.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. You bring up a really good point about the rulership. Right? Mars benefits from Saturn’s dispassionate, cold, long term perspective. Right? Do you really wanna declare war? Like, I know you feel like declaring war, but is that – do you want all the consequences of that? Right? Like, that’s the serious, Saturnian side. Whereas with Mars looking to the Moon in Cancer, you know, the Moon is the constantly shifting tide of feeling, right, and we generally don’t wanna do Mars – we don’t wanna declare war based on how we’re feeling this afternoon. The initiation of conflicts that Mars rules over is an inherently serious thing with more than short-term consequences, and so it being linked to the most rapidly changing planet can often have negative outcomes.
CB: Yeah, exactly, because it gives into Mars – one of its greatest tendencies, which is impulsiveness. And it gives into impulsiveness based on fleeting emotions at the time or in the moment, which is, yeah, something that can get you into trouble for a lot of reasons. You know, the angry email that’s like, sent off or said as the first impulse as opposed to like, sleeping on it for a night and thinking, you know, if you really wanna say that first thing that came to mind.
AC: Yeah, hundred percent. I feel like we should say something nice about Mars in Cancer too.
CB: Yeah. What are some nice things? I know as a prominent Cancer person that you have a greater – I mean, I think of things like aggressive hugging. Like, you know, the nurturing tendency of Mars, but done in a more like, upfront manner that might come off as a little awkward because it’s not our normal way of experiencing Mars or experiencing the nurturing function, but nonetheless can still be done well and done effectively in a way that’s actually helpful.
AC: Yeah, and there’s a very strong, real, protective motivation that comes out of Mars in Cancer. Like the natural desire to fiercely protect, you know, what and who you care about —
CB: Right.
AC: — that, you know, nonetheless can go awry in execution, but the impulse is not a bad one. You know, like that’s, if we look at Mars in the natural world, like, when do people get attacked by bears? When they accidentally threaten their cubs. Right? Like, that increase in ferocity relative to what’s important, to what is to be taken care of, whether it’s territory or young ones or whatever, is a very fundamental Mars thing. It just provokes a dangerous energy surge, but it’s not wrong. We just need to be careful about how we express that energy.
CB: Yeah, it’s like those stories about like, a parent getting in a car wreck and then seeing a loved one like, pinned underneath a car and having this like, superhuman strength in the moment to lift something that’s far beyond their normal capacity in order to save somebody that they care about.
AC: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s that. I would also say that like, that desire to protect – another thing that I’ve experienced and seen as an issue with Mars in Cancer that I think can be channeled in better ways is because again Cancer is very sensitive, Cancer is very aware of vulnerabilities. Like, you need to be aware of vulnerabilities if you’re going to protect and nurture anything. But that vulnerability awareness combined with Mars can make us feel inordinately vulnerable to maybe situations that aren’t entirely likely, and run a much higher level of sort of a much higher baseline of fear than is helpful. And so channeling one – differentiating the possible from the likely is always helpful, but also, you know, channeling that into fortifying your life or being more protective rather than just being freaked out is useful. You know, there are ways to – and when I say “fortify,” I don’t simply mean like, so that your home or apartment is less likely to fall to a siege, but there are ways to fortify our health, fortify our finances, fortify our relationships, by being proactive about strengthening the structures in vulnerable areas of our life.
CB: Right. I was just looking through my files of like, Mars in Cancer natives, and there was one that came up that was relevant in the news this year, which is Kendrick Lamar, who was the one essentially that won the rap battle earlier this year between Kendrick and Drake, arguably. And I thought that was interesting because it ties back with something you said earlier, because I think it was – they were sort of like, going back and forth idly and Kendrick wasn’t putting that much energy into it, and then at some point I think Drake attacked his family. And that was when the gloves came off —
AC: Right.
CB: — he brought out like, the killing blow, basically that’s still haunting Drake to this day. They’re like, playing the song at the DNC and stuff like that; it’s become like, the hit of the summer, this like, song just utterly dismantling this other person. But it was interesting in the music video; it’s like, at one point, he has his wife and son like, dancing in it, and yeah, that Mars-Mercury conjunction on Kendrick’s Midheaven is part of what we talked about in his 10th house of career is part of what we were talking about with that earlier this year.
AC: That is interesting; it’s a good example. Yeah, don’t attack a person with Mars in Cancer’s family. Don’t attack people’s families in general. But you’ll get a big result.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: But so this is the – you know, we have Mars in Cancer for most of this month. It’s not retrograde. It’s not even in the shadow yet. But I think it’s important to, or I think it’d be useful to get a sense of how Mars in Cancer feels, because we’re gonna be doing a lot of it. And when we talk about the various, you know, in my case, the literal pitfalls or the little traps, it’s not to make you paranoid or just, you know, un-smiley face at it. It’s so you can become aware of like, what potential bad things are here so I can walk around them? Right? Like, yes, there are a few booby traps here; I don’t have to walk into all of them and get familiar with how you’re going to manage that. So when we get into the Pluto opposition time and the actual retrograde time, it’s not an entirely novel landscape, right? It’s something that you spent some time getting to know and are able to navigate with some facility.
CB: Yeah, and part of the reason we have to emphasize that is because you need to pick your battles wisely during this time, because something that you could do on impulse as a reaction to initiate or respond to a conflict that you think should even if you do that at the time that it’ll pass by and move into the past quickly, even if you say that hurtful or that impulsive thing at that time, in fact because of the retrograde may end up having much longer term impact and may end up sticking with you much longer than you anticipate so that you need to go into any Mars-related actions knowing that at this time so that you don’t, let’s say, pick a battle that ends up becoming more than you can chew in the same way like with that rap battle earlier this year Drake kind of did with Kendrick.
AC: It’ll be really interesting to see if that’s revisited when Mars retrogrades back into Cancer.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good point. That’s a really good point, actually. So I was actually doing some research on this, because I know you and I were talking about we had a very low-level disagreement about which Mars retrograde this is a repetition of in one previous episode. So I was going back and just researching so people could get an idea of looking back to past times that Mars went retrograde in Cancer and Leo in their chronology to get an idea of a preview of what some topics are that might come up in their life when the same houses are activated by it. And I found that this retrograde is actually unique because it crosses over Leo and Cancer, and that hasn’t really happened in the past —
AC: No.
CB: In the past, Mars has either gone retrograde in Leo, or it’s gone retrograde in Cancer, but it doesn’t usually cross over both. So —
AC: We had Cancer-Gemini back in 2007, 2008, but half of it was in Gemini.
CB: Yeah. So here’s what I’ve got for people to go back and look at. I’ll mention just the dates of the retrograde period itself, so it’s not gonna include the entire extended period of like, the shadow period or the transit through the sign. But for example, in 2009, December 2009 through March of 2010, Mars went retrograde in Leo. So that was 15 years ago, so that’s the direct synodic repetition of the current one where the planetary period of Mars is 15 years, and that’s the closest approximation to the Leo part of this one for sure. So if there were some major events that happened that matched the Leo whole sign house in your chart, whatever whole sign house that is in your chart, this – especially the Leo portion of this upcoming retrograde in November – could be a repetition of similar themes or connecting some specific events in 15-year increments in your life. The one before that, however, as you just mentioned, was a retrograde from November 2007 to January 2008 that started in Cancer and then went back to Gemini, and that’s the last one in Cancer that approximates the Cancer portion of this retrograde. So people should look back and see what events came up in their life at that time, and you’ll get a preview of the Cancer part of this. Other than that, there was like, a Virgo-Leo retrograde January of 1995 through March of 1995, so that was activating the Leo part. November of 1992 through February of 1993, there was a full retrograde just in Cancer. And then interestingly, two or three years from now, the next Mars retrograde between January of 2027 and April of 2027 is gonna be partially, it’s gonna start in Virgo but then it’s gonna retrograde back to Leo. So the Leo part of this retrograde is actually gonna be a preview of something that’s gonna come up in early 2027 as well.
AC: Oh boy.
CB: Yeah. So that’s what you should look for for your history. And last thing I wanted to say about this is just one of the things I learned last year in really tracking the Venus retrograde that started in Virgo and retrograded back into Leo is that it was really clear in a bunch of instances that it ended up connecting the topics of those two whole sign houses wherever it fell in a person’s chart. So for example, if it started retrograding in a person’s 3rd house and then it retrograded back to their 2nd whole sign house, then it was sometimes connecting themes like siblings and money. Or if it started in like, the 8th house and then it retrograded back to the 7th house, it was connecting themes of like, shared resources and partnership, for example. So people should pay attention to that in this instance as a clue for what this Mars retrograde’s gonna be able, because it’s gonna connect those two houses in your chart, starting with the Leo house and then connecting it to the Cancer house, raising both of those topics in parallel, but in some instances overlapping them as well.
AC: Yeah. No, it definitely happens. And sometimes it’s a little surprising how those two topics get connected, but if you see things starting to develop, right, like, in your 2nd house – be like, this money stuff actually might have implications for my 1st house health or happiness. Or this 5th house stuff that’s starting, you know, this thing that’s developing with my children might end up changing the nature of my 4th house home or, you know, whatever. Like, that kind of thinking is worth doing, especially as you start to see things happen. We’re a little far out, but you know, as things emerge, think about how it’s going to connect those two. Because I see that happen every time.
I’m just gonna bring up an unpleasant parallel.
CB: Okay.
AC: So the 2007-2008 one, it shares in the Cancer-ness. That one also was a terrible – never mind. The 2007-2008 one began in Cancer, goes back to Gemini. What it has in common additionally is that it also opposed Pluto three times. And one of those was right after Pluto’s first ingress into Capricorn, and so there is another note of parallel between this Q4 of 2024 and Q1 of 2025 and the end of 2007, beginning of 2008.
CB: Okay.
AC: We did have some economic problems here in the United States of America.
CB: That’s fair. I remember something about that. All right —
AC: Just a note – different signs, kind of, but let’s just say I don’t love that.
CB: So I wanna shift gears. I wanna talk about the most positive aspect of the month.
AC: Let’s do it!
CB: And this goes along with another nice little transit that we’re having, which even though we’ve talked about a lot of the challenges that cardinal signs are having this month, we do have Venus moving through the sign of Libra, her home sign, during the course of much of this month, and Venus applies to a trine with Jupiter, which eventually culminates mid-month that is, I think, the most favorable aspect of the month that culminates around September 14th and September 15th where Venus at about 20 degrees of Libra trines Jupiter at 20 degrees of Gemini. And interestingly, the Moon swoops into Aquarius during that same two-day period and forms a nice little grand air trine at 20 degrees of Aquarius with Venus and Jupiter.
So that is one of my most favorable aspects of the month, and that actually also gives the auspicious election for this month. Which – let me check the data on that again. So the auspicious or the electional astrology chart for this month is set for September 14th at about 12:50 PM local time with Sagittarius rising. So this is the chart I wanted to highlight this month, because I really want people to take advantage of that Venus-Jupiter trine where Venus is still applying to the exact trine with Jupiter at 20 degrees of Gemini in this chart on September 14th. And even though the Moon is in early Aquarius rather than closer to the exact trine with those other two, you could get that on the next day, but then Venus will be separating from Jupiter. So I wanted to recommend this chart, because then Venus will still be applying to the exact trine with Jupiter, which is a little bit more favorable than separating.
So this chart has Sagittarius rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is in the 7th house of partnership in a day chart. It’s ruled by Mercury, which is up there in Virgo in the 10th house in its own sign. Transiting Venus is in Libra in the 11th whole sign house of friends, groups, and allies, and the Moon is down there in Aquarius in the 3rd house of communication, forming nice trines with the partnership-oriented Jupiter and the friendship-oriented Venus.
So this would be a great chart, especially for partnership and 7th house related activities, with Jupiter especially being in the 7th house as the ruler of the Ascendant in a day chart. There’s a little bit of challenge with Mercury is, of course, applying to that opposition with Saturn, but it’s still otherwise extremely well-placed in this chart and should not be a major deal breaker. The area of this chart that has the most difficulties is Mars in Cancer in the 8th house of shared resources, other people’s money, inheritance, mortality, and other topics like that. So there could be some issues, especially surrounding shared resources or things like taxes or debt would be ones that you might wanna not use this chart for or steer clear of. But otherwise, this is my best all-purpose electional chart for this month, just to take advantage of that Venus-Jupiter trine, which is the most optimistic, expansive, social and sort of hopeful aspect of the month. Interestingly, taking place not too long before that Pisces eclipse occurs just three days later on September 17th.
So yeah, that is the auspicious elections for this month. Leisa Schaim and I already picked out and released our electional astrology podcast for September where we picked out I think about 10 other auspicious electional dates during the course of the month as well, so people can get access to that by signing up for our page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast if they’d like to hear other elections besides just this best one of the month I’m highlighting here.
AC: Yeah, very nice. I’m actually using the one on the next day to open enrollment for my year one program.
CB: Nice.
AC: Great minds think alike. Same rising. The Mercury in Virgo in the 10th, ruling the 10th and the 7th, is also not too shabby.
CB: Yeah. I really like that it helps accentuate some of the positive partnership things, because it’s good when you don’t just have a benefic in the 7th or like, the ruler of the Ascendant in the 7th, but when its domicile lord is also well-placed by sign, that really helps ensure that some of the 7th house and partnership related things are gonna be good, and it also helps to not counteract, but to ensure that some of the awkwardness that Jupiter feels in Gemini – since it’s the sign of its detriment or opposite to its domicile – that some of the initial awkwardness that Jupiter might feel there in expressing Mercury significations, even though it’s Jupiter, really get smoothed over so that there’s success ultimately in what Jupiter’s trying to accomplish when its domicile lord is also doing well.
AC: Yeah, it’s really a nice set of moments. Especially in the context of the scalding hot soup of eclipse season, which is due to be served shortly thereafter. And I also like that you brought up Venus in Libra as a nice counterpoint to some of the dire significations I’ve been detailing, especially for my poor fellow cardinal rising people. Because Venus won’t be in Libra to shield us the entirety of Pluto and Mars’s time in Cancer and Capricorn, but for a lot of September, we have this really nice benefic offset. You know, which doesn’t solve all the problems, which doesn’t prevent all the difficulties, but it does prevent and offset some of them. And it’s a very nice consolation prize, and I will take it with gratitude.
CB: Yeah. There’s a few day period in late August and early September when Venus has ingressed into Libra and is all on its own and is in pretty good shape there aside from the conjunction with the South Node. We actually used that today; we used an election today to record this forecast, where today is August 29th and we used Libra rising with Venus having just gone into Libra as our electional chart today, where Venus is just sort of clearly in Libra without too much problems. But then, yeah, as soon as Mars goes into Cancer around the 4th and the 5th, it kind of complicates things through that superior sign-based square, but nonetheless, that is a bright spot this month that eventually culminates on the 14th and 15th with Venus trining Jupiter before eventually departing from Libra September 22nd and September 23rd and moving into Scorpio. But I like it as like, a positive clearing and uplifting of the Libra section of our chart by Venus before things get really serious a few weeks later in early October when that Libra solar eclipse hits.
AC: Yeah. It’s nice. It’s a consolation prize, but it’s a valuable one.
CB: For sure.
AC: The other thing that I like this month is Mercury’s time back in Virgo. It does have to deal with that opposition to Saturn; it’s not by any means unchallenged. But it’s some good, high-quality, high fidelity, high resolution Mercury throughout the month, which I sure could use after the rather chaotic Mercury retrograde. Like, it’s good Mercury energy, and again, it’s not unafflicted; it’s not that there are no problems to solve. But you know, you could even say it’s because there are problems to solve that I’m glad Mercury’s gonna be in a strong position for a while.
CB: Totally. Yeah. I really appreciate Mercury in Virgo and its ability to see the small things and to sweat the small things, but in a good way, as well as its technical facility with things. But like I was saying earlier, it’s like, Mercury in Virgo is like the fact-checker, and it’s playing that important role as like, the reporter and the one who’s seeing if things add up, especially when it’s not just opposed to Saturn but also opposed to Neptune later in the month, and the tension between facts versus imagination or reality. But Mercury in Virgo I often also think of like, Steve Wozniak has Mercury in Virgo with Virgo rising, and he was one of the first – he programmed some of the first personal computers with Apple. And just the technical facility that people with Mercury in Virgo have always really impresses me.
AC: Yeah. And there’s – part of that detail awareness is not merely critical, but there’s a detail awareness when doing it the first time. So oftentimes, you get the not having to do it over because you did it right the first time because you were paying attention. And that’s why Mercury is both exalted and in its own sign in Virgo. You know, it doesn’t sound like the most extraordinary superpower, but being able to do things, to get it right the first time, is absolutely a superpower as far as its effects on your life go.
CB: Totally. Somebody you and I used to know, an astrologer Tem Tarriktar who was the founder of The Mountain Astrologer magazine, he had Mercury in Virgo I believe in the 2nd house, and he started this magazine that was like, the biggest and main astrology magazine for years in the astrological community. But he also not just wrote for it but also helped to edit it as well, and that editing potential of Mercury in Virgo is such an important thing. In this day and age, it’s kind of weird, because like, the role of the editor has fallen away to some extent in the age where everyone’s just like, writing their stuff directly on blogs and social media and things are much less refined than they used to be. But if you’ve ever like, written a book or written an article where you’ve had the luxury of having an editor who can see the details and what you’re trying to write and came help to improve and refine it through a process of critical analysis, you realize the benefit of that and the advantage of that over people that don’t have that. Like, for example, if you self-publish sometimes that can be something that people don’t do that can be an error for first-time publishers is not realizing that you should hire an editor because the end product will be much better if you do.
AC: Yeah, there are just certain things you can’t see.
CB: Right. Yeah. That was a thing – Leisa’s Moon in Virgo in editing my book and her superhuman ability to spot typos that are just like, invisible to me after you’ve written enough drafts. If you’ve never done that before, you realize pretty quickly like, how important it is.
AC: Yeah, you go totally blind to it.
CB: Yeah. Alright. We are back to – we are in the middle to later part of the month. Let me put the chart up again. What are we missing? We do have that shift of Venus from Libra and then Venus kind of gets down and dirty in Scorpio September 22nd and 23rd through that transit through Scorpio at this time. Although it does form eventually some pretty nice trines with Mars in Cancer in early October and eventually a nice water trine with Saturn in Pisces as well.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know if I would describe those trines as “nice,” but they’re definitely 120 degree angles.
CB: I mean, I think especially the reception that Venus has with Mars will be helpful in taking some of the edge off of Mars, but obviously that’s really taking us, it’s dragging us into October when those aspects go exact, so we don’t necessarily have to focus on that a lot.
AC: Yeah, it is worth noting that about a week before the end of the month, Venus leaves Libra. You know, puts on the black eyeliner, the black lipstick, heads out to the goth club. Like, Venus in Scorpio is a very different vibe than Venus in Libra. You know, it can be more challenging, because it’s not – Venus in Scorpio’s just not as like, pleasant as Venus in Libra, but there is a certain pleasure in intensity with Venus in Scorpio. And if you can, again, just go goth for a few weeks and try to appreciate, you know, the aesthetics of love and death and the drama therein, you might be all right. But it is tanglier, and it’s yeah, like, thicker and stickier and harder to let go of than the relational context of Venus in Libra.
CB: Yeah, I think Venus in Scorpio is about seeing the hidden beauty in the darker aspects of life, and the ability to find beauty in things that other people don’t usually regard as being beautiful. And sometimes that can be the more things that people consider to be like, morbid or dark or edgy or something like that, but other times it can also just be having a sensitivity to that which can include having a greater sensitivity to, you know, people who are in mourning, for example. People who are like, celebrating the life somebody and seeing the beauty in that, of the celebration of somebody who’s gone or what have you, I think of when I think of Venus in Scorpio as well.
AC: Yeah, that’s nice. Makes me think with Venus in Scorpio there’s also a quality of acknowledging, instead of trying to create the pretty or the beautiful or the balanced like we have in Libra, acknowledging the ugliness and the pain, which can sometimes be a way of moving through it more thoroughly and thoughtfully and integrating it rather than ignoring it.
CB: Yeah, not sweeping those things aside that are, you know, not super happy and fun loving and things like that or social and harmonious, but the attempt to include even that which is unharmonious normally or is seen as unharmonious.
AC: Yeah. Or just downright, you know, ugly and gross. But sometimes – like, you know, you’ve been avoiding looking at that rash on your foot, but it’s time to give that an inspection, because that might need, a doctor might need to see that. You know, avoiding that ugliness isn’t doing any good.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. All right, so that’s bringing us towards the end of the month. Let’s see —
AC: We were – yeah, we’re in that zone between eclipses at this point.
CB: Yeah, we are right in the bardo zone. Crazy, major events are gonna be happening in the news. It’s gonna be in the middle of that, everyone’s gonna be waiting for like, the next shoe to drop, which we’ll be waiting for somewhat tensely for the Libra eclipse. But because there’s gonna be so much activity and sudden shifts of things going rapidly upwards or rapidly downwards at the Pisces eclipse, everyone’s gonna be at this point by later September just waiting for the next phase of that with the Libra eclipse at this point. And while that’s happening, we’re gonna be getting transits like the Sun opposes Neptune on September 20th, which makes things a little bit murky. The Sun moves into Libra and Libra season begins on the 22nd, which is the same day that Venus moves into Scorpio. I meant to note that before Venus goes into Scorpio, it actually squares Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn on the 22nd right before the ingress, so it’s like that last parting shot before it departs from Libra is a really intense, somewhat dark kind of power and control and manipulation type energy before Venus – that sort of inaugurates Venus’s entry into Scorpio.
AC: Yeah, very much so, and we’ll feel that application a few days out.
CB: Yeah. So Mercury goes into Libra on September 26th, and then eventually – so it departs from Virgo and enters Libra, and then eventually we get a Mercury cazimi where it hits the heart of the Sun on September 30th, which also acts as the midpoint between retrograde periods when Mercury has its direct conjunction with the Sun and you have this moment of sort of like, clarity when Mercury is entering the heart.
AC: Yeah, which will be nice, because again that happens between the eclipses. And you know, it’s going to be confusing. You know, there’s a lot that gets going at this point, and of course the primordial visual language of eclipses is the obscuration of light. Right? Things look weird and different, and I can’t see as well because the Sun has been darkened in the middle of the day. Or the night, which is supposed to be the brightest of the whole month when the full Moon rises, is instead marred – there’s a red stain across the Moon and the light is different. And not being able to see things normally is a bit part of the nodal, is what the nodes do, both physically but also on a mental and sometimes spiritual level. And so that clarity, that clarity of the mind which Mercury’s conjunction with the Sun brings, is very helpful, and it’s interesting that it happens on the South Node, so we’re actually focusing on one part of the large and confusing dragon.
CB: Yeah. And it’s also a reset of the Sun-Mercury cycle and the cycles of like, communication that are always indicated by, for example, the Mercury retrograde periods when communication seems to go awry. So a resetting of that cycle between the two and looking at just the chart right now, it looks like once Mercury completes that, it heads into a square with Mars, which is in mid-Cancer at that point. So that’s also then partially our signature for that eclipse which happens two days later on October 2nd is that the Moon and the Sun and Mercury are all heading into that square with Mars as part of the close configuration that that eclipse has. So that’s actually interesting because then it adds more of a contentiousness and definitely a sense of strife, a sense of heat, a sense of impulsiveness and other things to the eclipse energy that’s gonna be happening at the very end of September and the first week or so of October.
AC: Yeah. With Venus’s departure from a cardinal sign and then the Sun and Mercury’s entry into cardinal Libra, we’ve got, you know, the Pluto and Mars and nodal tension all acting on the Sun-Mercury is going to be rough. The end of the month, you know, although the eclipse in Pisces is a big deal, things are not heading towards resolution or getting easier towards the end of the month. Like, the situation is still getting more complicated and contentious as we head into October, and it’s not likely to resolve shortly after the eclipse. The eclipse will be something significant to deal with, at least in the headlines. Individuals will certainly be able to gloss by it, but it’s getting gnarlier and gnarlier as we head into October.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And with the Pisces eclipse, for many individuals, it’ll probably be something new, but for the individuals at least, this Libra eclipse should be the continuation of some themes of major changes in your life and great beginnings and great endings that started a year ago, and you’ll see a continuation of that story or of that saga at this point. And unfortunately for you and I, about one month from now at the very end of September, somewhere at the end of September around the time of that cazimi, we’re gonna have to record the next episode, as we’re just on the cusp of the next eclipse and waiting for that next shoe to drop. So it’ll be interesting to check in again here in four weeks and see where we’re at at that point.
AC: Yeah, we should, I don’t know, maybe we should just schedule it for the cazimi.
CB: Just do it on the cazimi? That could be good. That would be a great election, actually.
AC: Cazimi with a Mercury-ruled Moon applying to Jupiter?
CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s not bad. Oh yeah, because here in this chart at least with Sag rising, the Moon is separating from Saturn and applying to yeah, Jupiter, that’s not a bad election at all.
AC: It’s a thought, right? But yeah, we will be reporting live from the bardo next month, regardless if we pick this one or not.
CB: Yeah, totally. From that in between zone. And people can join us for the live chat and the live recording of that then when we announce it next month for patrons and all the patrons that joined us for this one today.
All right, my friend. I think this is actually bringing us towards the end of this forecast. There was so much to talk about; there are so many big themes. We’re on the cusp of so many major changes and so many major world events that are about to pop off during this set of eclipses. Are there any major things that we forgot to discuss or that we should mention before we start to wrap things up here?
AC: I don’t think so. There’s a lot more to be said, but it belongs more in October and November and December and January and February.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Brilliant. All right. Well, thanks a lot for joining me today for this forecast. What do you have coming up this month? What are you working on? What do you wanna tell people about?
AC: Okay. So I guess the biggest thing is that I’m opening another limited enrollment for my Fundamentals of Astrology program on September 15th. We’re gonna get in before those eclipses. And I think it’s like, 12:30 PM? It’s so close to your election. But if you’re interested, that’s gonna go out to the mailing list, so get on the mailing list, and I’ll send out an email earlier about when it’ll open and then I’ll send out an email once it’s open. We’ve been filling up in about two hours the last several times, so you know, if you’d really like to get in, put it on your calendar.
Additionally, there’s the big Sphere and Sundry sale coming up in early September. Check that out. It’s literally the only sale that’s ever been done, and it’s the only one Kait has plans to do for years. So if you’re curious, check it out. If you’re a longtime client, it’s time to stock up. And I’m gonna continue chugging away on my Faces rewrite, which I made some decent progress on despite the harrowing space weather of August.
CB: Brilliant. All right. And your website is AustinCoppock.com and Sphere and Sundry and SphereAndSundry.com, right?
AC: Yes, sir.
CB: All right. I’ll put links to those in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website as well where people can click them easily. As for myself, I recently recorded with Leisa Schaim an incredible episode on the 2nd house as my second installment in my series where I do a deep dive into the significations of each of the 12 houses, where I think I shared like, over 50 example charts. It was actually really wild all the great example charts I found. I’m gonna release that sometime here in early September, and then I have like, 80 pages of research notes that I’m gonna release to patrons of The Astrology Podcast as a bonus, which will include some content that I wasn’t able to include in the final recording. So you can get access to that through my Patreon at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast, and I may do a live chart reading session with patrons this month where I talk about 2nd house placements in their charts and do some like, interviews with people in order to talk about how the 2nd house has played out in their life, especially with the planets placed there in order to balance out the more celebrity-oriented episode that I did as the official episode by talking to some like, real people and getting their thoughts on how their 2nd house placement manifested.
AC: That’s nice.
CB: Yeah, it’s always fun. So if people’d like to join me for that live recording, you can join my page on Patreon and then you’ll get a link and a notification when I decide to go live with that with a group of patrons.
Other than that, this month I’m also gonna do a live chart reading session with students of my Hellenistic astrology course on zodiacal releasing. So we’ve been working our way through the course and doing chart readings where people share their chart examples of how different techniques work out in their chart, and I look at and talk with them about their chart. We finally made it towards the end of the course in that series, and now we’re finally gonna tackle zodiacal releasing. And I think I’m gonna start the first series talking about the loosing of the bond and sharing examples of that from different students in order to start with one major piece of the technique and then we’ll expand on that and move into other areas over the next few months. So if people would like to join us, last month we did one on annual profections. You can sign up for the course; it’s the Hellenistic astrology course at TheAstrologySchool.com, and then you’ll get a notification when I do that webinar, usually probably around the first weekend in September. But other than that, I think that’s it. So I am just gonna keep doing podcast episodes, and Austin and I will be back one month from now to check in and talk about the astrology of October in greater detail.
So thanks a lot for joining me today, Austin.
AC: Oh, it was a pleasure, Chris.
CB: Yeah, this was incredible. Thank you to the audience and all the patrons that joined us in the live chat today; we appreciate you, and I appreciate all your comments. And I think that’s it for this forecast. So thanks – oh yeah, last thing I meant to mention. I just hit 200,000 subscribers on YouTube just the other day, which was a huge milestone for the podcast. I’ve been doing the podcast in audio version since 2012, but I only started doing video versions in 2017. I pivoted to that after my book came out. So it’s been seven years of working on the YouTube channel, and it was great hitting that Saturn square at that time and hitting that major milestone. So I wanted to thank everybody, especially all the people that subscribe on YouTube and who leave comments and everything else. I really appreciate you, and thanks for your support of the podcast over the years.
So all right. Good luck everyone this month with the astrology of September, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: Take care!
[END CREDITS]
CB: If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to support the production of future episodes, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to a bunch of benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, access to the monthly electional astrology podcast, access to another exclusive podcast called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode.. For more information, visit Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Special thanks to patrons on our Producers tier, including Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, and Annie Newman.
If you’re looking for an astrological consultation, then we have a new list of recommended astrologers on the podcast website. These astrologers offer birth chart readings, synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions, and more. Go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software that we use on The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, and you can get a 15% discount on the software by using the promo code ‘AP15’ when you purchase it through Alabe.com. For Mac users, we recommend the program Astro Gold for Mac OS, and you can also get a 15% discount when you use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ at the website AstroGold.io.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then you should get a copy of my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, which is available in both print and now ebook forms where I’ve started selling a PDF copy of the book through my website at HellenisticAstrology.com/Book.
If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then check out my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology. It’s perfect for beginner and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, including monthly webinars and Q&A sessions, and at the end of the course, if you complete the final test, you’ll receive a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. You can find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.