The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 464, titled:
Astrology Forecast for October 2024
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on September 30, 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 October 10th, 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, we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for October of 2024. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock. Hey Austin.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris.
CB: And so for the first hour of this episode, we’re gonna talk about news and events that have happened in the world over the past month since our last forecast and what their astrological correlations were. And in the second half, in the second hour, we’re going to jump ahead and do a deep dive into the astrology of October and all the crazy stuff that is coming up over the course of the next four weeks. So as always, there will be time stamps either below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website if you wanna know when to jump ahead to just the forecast section if you wanna skip the news. But otherwise, yeah, let’s get started.
So I wanna give a brief overview first of the astrology of October before we jump into the news segment just to give you a preview of what we’re gonna be talking about in this episode.
This is the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and then how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. Next we have the astrological transits calendar that was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co where you can actually go to download this graphic for those watching the video version. And this just shows some of the different aspects that will go exact during the course of the month, and especially the different parts of the month where we can see that there’s some clusters of a bunch of aspects going exact at once, especially for example earlier in the month around the time of the eclipse or mid-month around October 13th and 14th.
We are still right in the middle of eclipse season. So we had our first eclipse season earlier this year in March and April, and right now we are right in the midst of eclipse season in September and October again with our next eclipse coming up in Libra on October 2nd. So this is a diagram that Madeline and I were putting together from Honeycomb.co just to show how things really ramp up and how the orb of eclipses is about a week on either side, but that in the middle between the two eclipses, you’re still in this very intense sort of eclipse zone, so to speak, which is what we find ourselves in today.
We are also starting the Mars retrograde shadow period on October 4th, so the ramp up to that begins when Mars hits 17 degrees of Cancer. And finally here’s the planetary alignments calendar. So the main thing that happens at the top of the month is October 2nd, we get a solar eclipse in the sign of Libra, which is a major one. It’s our last eclipse in that sign of Libra for the next 10 years. Then a few days later, Mercury squares Mars on the 6th of October. Jupiter stations retrograde in Gemini on the 9th. Pluto stations direct in Capricorn for its final station in Capricorn of the century on the 11th of October. Mercury moves into Scorpio on the 13th. The Sun squares Mars on the 14th, and the same day, the Sun actually trines Jupiter as well. Then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in Aries on the 17th, and the same day, Venus departs from Scorpio and moves into the sign of Sagittarius. The following week, the Sun moves in Scorpio on the 22nd. And at the end of the month, Venus squares Saturn on the 28th, and the Mars-Pluto opposition is building up and is within three degrees at this point by late october, and it will go exact in the early days of November.
So that is some of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about during the course of this episode. But let’s start first by talking about news and events.
Most of the major news stories focused on eclipse season this month since we already had the first eclipse on September 17th, which is a lunar eclipse in the sign of Pisces. And as I’ve really focused on and talked about a lot over the past year on the podcast, eclipses have this most intense range that starts about seven days before the eclipse – about a week before the eclipse – and about a week after. So that means our most intense eclipse range began around September 10th and lasted until around the 24th, 25th give or take.
So in terms of news stories, the very first news story with that actually happened at the very beginning of that range on September 10th. So the first thing was that the presidential debate took place between Kamala Harris and former president Trump. And this eclipse took place in Harris’s 10th house of career, reputation, and social standing, and she ended up winning the debate just I think everybody pretty much agreed, whether you’re for her or against her, by the end, so that it ended up being a triumph for her and then the polls went up in her favor afterwards after that eclipse took place. So it was really striking manifestation of an eclipse in a person’s 10th house.
AC: And so this was in her 10th, and this was on the North Node or Rahu or the dragon’s head. And something that I see quite commonly with eclipses on the dragon’s head is that there will often, sometimes there will be a jump to a new level that people didn’t think a person was capable of or a surprising or ambitious move. And not commenting specifically on the debate here, but sometimes you see people get in over their head or they’re like, it looks like it’s taking on a new thing. You think of the dragon’s mouth and taking a bite out of life. And often it’s like, a new level or sometimes it’s biting off more than you can chew. Sometimes it’s being able to function at a higher level or under more pressure than you or other people thought you could. And I think in the 10th, that’s a pretty good example, because I try not to follow the electoral politics too closely for my mental health, but it was my understanding that people were surprised by her performance, that they were surprised that she rose to that level and took a bite out of it.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely trepidation given how badly the debate went for the Democrats in June with Biden’s performance and how much that swung things, and people then realizing that this debate – unlike previous debate seasons where people commonly say that debates don’t shift, you know, elections – since we just had a debate where it did and a candidate dropped out almost as a direct result of thing, there was a lot of nervousness about how this would go. Yeah, but she really stepped up to the place and rose to the occasion in this instance, I think, is what a lot of people saw, which is definitely a 10th house eclipse manifestation sometimes of rising to the occasion.
So some of the things that happened – she ended up baiting him, like, a few times, and he kind of freaked out and started talking about just nonsense about people eating cats and dogs. And he did get fact-checked a few times, which is interesting manifestation of the Mercury-Saturn opposition, Mercury opposite Saturn and Neptune by sign, because we had actually talked about that in the last episode and how we thought that tension between those two would be Mercury in Virgo as like, reporters attempting to fact-check things when there’s misinformation that’s being spread around with Saturn conjunct Neptune in Pisces and the inherent tension between those two. So afterwards, he wasn’t happy about being fact-checked by the moderators, but then Democrats were also not super stoked that he ended up talking longer that the moderators gave him more time to talk throughout the debate in the end as well so that nobody was fully happy with the moderation.
So he was kind of crushed so badly that he is currently dodging another debate, so it’s not clear if there’s gonna be another presidential debate or if that will be the only one. But it’s interesting if that is the only one just that it coincided so closely with that eclipse, and now we’re looking towards the next vice presidential debate that’s about to take place on October 1st. And that’s literally the day before the Libra eclipse that’s about to take place on October 2nd, so having both of them occur so close to eclipses is notable. And we’ve been saying for months, I think since the year ahead forecast, that we expected these debates to be crucial because we saw that they were gonna occur so close to eclipse season. So it’s interesting to see that actually play out here.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And you know, you made an interesting statement that often debates don’t seem to shift things with elections or that is commonly said but not true this year. There seems to be a lot that’s normally true that’s not true this year with this election.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we’re supposed to normally in any other election, we’re supposed to be having three debates between the presidential candidates. So even the loss of that, of seeing these two go head to head sort of like, intellectually on a public stage isn’t happening. And that debate that we just had may be the only sort of one of that that we get as a result of Trump his cycle, but we’ll see what happens since there’s been another debate proposed for later in October by the Harris campaign and by CNN. So we’ll see if Trump changes his mind and like, does it, and relents and does it after the VP debate and just depending on how that goes.
So in other news, in the middle of the month, it was around the time of the eclipse. There was another, a second assassination attempt on Trump on September 15th. This was just two days before the Pisces eclipse that took place on the 17th, which was in Trump’s 8th house. And the main transit that I noted for him is just that transiting Uranus stationed retrograde at 27 Taurus, and it’s retrograding back, so it’s very closely square his Mars still in the first house. And I think that’s one of the reasons that things like this have been coming up more from an astrological standpoint is just that close configuration between Uranus and his Mars, which was activated most closely over the summer when there was a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Taurus. But that outer planet transit is still present and still doing stuff there in his chart right now.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s just worth reiterating that the transiting Uranus which is squaring his natal Mars is just sitting on top of his Midheaven. So it’s on an extremely active angle in his chart. It’s not just a Uranus-Mars square.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. So that was major. And then he also like, announced like, a cryptocurrency thing, which I thought was interesting. It’s supposed to be run by his sons, which is another manifestation of the eclipse in his 8th house, and he was having a transit of like, Venus to his Jupiter at the time, which rules his 8th house and his 5th house of children.
So, you know, with the election, that eclipse was like, a final important turning point because Harris has Saturn transiting through her 10th house right now, and so that eclipse was gonna activate not just her 10th house, but was also gonna emphasize that Saturn transit through the 10th, and there was a real question of whether the Saturn transit would be a barrier to what she’s trying to accomplish right now. And the outcome of the debate was really going to be pivotal in terms of telling us how that transit was doing and what sort of obstacle or how much of an obstacle it would have or put in her path at this point. But in terms of where it’s at at this point, the two strongest indications that we have – we have two indications in favor of Harris and one indication of favor of Trump. The two in favor of Harris are that eclipses are taking place in her angular houses, especially her 10th house, which is that Pisces eclipse that just took place, and every presidential candidate over the past 30 or 40 years that’s had an eclipse happen in one of their angular houses around the time of the election has won. So in terms of eclipses, it seems like she has it in favor of her. And then in terms of the other indication is the zodiacal releasing, where her time lord periods both on level one and level two are very positive and very eminent for her at this point, which we’ve talked about on previous episodes. Trump has one strong point in favor of him, which is that he’s gonna start a major zodiacal releasing time lord period, but not until April. So it’s kind of curious, because his chart does become more prominent for some reason early next year, but it’s not clear if that’s, you know, him doing something else that brings him into prominence even if the election doesn’t go the way that he wants it. But that’s sort of the breakdown right now in terms of two of the main things that we’ve always looked at in terms of elections. There’s a number of other stuff, like, you know, transits on election day, inauguration charts, and all sorts of other stuff like that. We did go into a bunch of that in an episode of The Secret Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon. So if people want a more detailed breakdown, they can look to that. But otherwise, we’ll be looking forward to seeing how the VP debate goes and how some of the other transits play out over the course of the next few weeks.
AC: Yeah. Fascinating. What a – I was gonna say, what an unpredictable set of events this election has held so far. And yeah, we managed to get at least – we get some of them, but – and you’ve done a great job, but so many twists and turns. It will be really interesting to see how this plays out.
CB: Yeah. Well, the big thing that we’re gonna talk about in the forecast episode is the Mars-Pluto opposition. Like, that’s gonna be crucial for the election and for everything that happens in between election day and inauguration day, and that’s a pretty nasty combination. So we have a lot of trepidation about it that we’ll get into later in this episode since that aspect is really gonna come into close alignment starting in late October. So we’ll talk about that more later in the episode.
In other news, Israel and Lebanon – there was another major eclipse story where for months now, we’d been anticipating that the next chapter in the ongoing saga of what’s happening with Israel would take place under this eclipse season because everything started a year ago around the time of the first Libra eclipse in October of 2023. Then the next stage was the next set of eclipses in March and April, and that’s when Iran and Israel started having open direct conflict for the first time with missiles being shot from Iran into Israel. And then now, what happened is the very day of the Pisces eclipse on September 17th, Israel set off explosives that were hidden in pagers and other devices that injured something around 3,000 people in Lebanon. And this seemed to be the opening sort of like, attack in what’s like, turning into a full war now between Israel and Lebanon, which has heated up since then and now they’re saying that they may be preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon, which may… It’s almost looking like may coincide around the time of that Libra eclipse that’s about to take place in early October. So we’re seeing the conflict there widening and becoming bigger, and there’s a lot of nervousness about this turning into an even bigger regional war than it already was.
AC: Yeah. One of the – yeah, it was pretty striking to see that happening on the day of the eclipse, and then on the next day and the next day. One of the things that I thought was sort of interesting was that so I’d been looking at Iran’s chart for a while, thinking about the difficulties in the region and the future. And so when that eclipse, or leading up to that eclipse, I was curious about how the fact that the eclipse in late Pisces being right on top of Iran’s natal Mercury and Mars – if we’re using the April 1st, 1979 chart – would manifest. And so it was interesting that the event, like the pager attack, did not occur in Iran but on Iran’s Mercury. And this was in that we’re looking at communication devices, we’re certainly looking at Mercury being the vector for the attack. So it was interesting to me that the astrology seemed to point towards the connections between Hezbollah and Iran, just in the chart, and that it also suggests that, you know, it plays into that eclipse playing into Iran’s chart plays into the escalation of hostilities, which I’m sure all would prefer to not happen but looks like, it seems in large part inevitable at this point.
CB: Yeah. Well, that was one of the things that really came up earlier this year, especially around the time of the Aries eclipse when there started being that direct and open conflict between Iran and Israel. And that’ll be something we’ll have to look towards for the next set of eclipses, because this is gonna be the final Libra eclipse here in October. But then there will be one last eclipse as part of this series, which will take place early next year in Aries. Although with this new conflict with Lebanon really accelerating on the PIsces eclipse, it’s tricky because since that’s the first eclipse in that series, it could be opening up a window of another series of eclipses that’s gonna follow through in the subsequent ones in that axis of like, Pisces and Virgo. One of the —
AC: Yeah.
CB: One of the things that I noticed that was notable is that on September 27th, Israel killed the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and that was not too long after the Pisces eclipse. And I pulled up his chart, and it turns out that he was born just before a Pisces lunar eclipse. So it was like, he was – it was another instance that we’ve seen so many of over the past year, especially with this conflict, of people that are born under eclipses having sometimes really important turning points in their life happen subsequently under eclipses like in that instance.
AC: Yeah. And it’s important to note that that eclipse literally foreshadows another two years of eclipses. I don’t think we’ll be done with the Virgo-Pisces eclipses for – I think the last one’s occurring almost exactly two years – and so the nodes, the head and the tail of the dragon, haven’t moved into Virgo and Pisces yet, but we get a taste. You know, a quite literal foreshadowing with this eclipse that occurred in mid-September. And then for the one that occurs in early October, we’ll be in the process of finishing up what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half, but our next set in the spring will feature an eclipse in Virgo and then we’ll be in that cycle. So yeah, some rather dire foreshadowing.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll be paying close attention to what happens on the Libra eclipse that happens on October 2nd, because we’ve been tracking that all along because we know it’s tied in with very closely not just with the sequence of events, but also specifically with the birth chart of Israel, which has Libra rising, and with Netanyahu, who has a stellium in Libra and was born the day of a solar eclipse in Libra. So we’ll have to see what happens there in terms of what this final Libra eclipse is all about and how that marks an ending for things, but also a new beginning, which is always our keyword for eclipses, like major endings and major beginnings. So we’ll see how that plays out over the course of the next couple of weeks.
All right. So moving on to other news. Another major eclipse story that happened right on the eclipse was the downfall of Diddy, who’s the famous rapper, music producer, and music mogul. He was arrested on September 16th, which was the day before the Pisces eclipse. And then after he was arrested, the indictment was unsealed on September 17th, the very day of the eclipse, where he was charged with heading a criminal enterprise that was involved in sex trafficking and forced labor. So this was just another major example of this theme, this trend that we’ve seen over the course of the past year, of like, a downfall of prominent people around the time of eclipse seasons. And actually, not even just the past year – the past few years we’ve noted this that some of the symbolism of the eclipse, which used to be directed towards like, kings and queens in ancient times and still is in some instances where those still exist, but the modern equivalent oftentimes is like, the downfall of a prominent person. And one of the things that I thought was interesting that I noticed is that I remembered that his houses were raided like, six months ago, but I looked back and it turns out that his houses were raided by the Department of Homeland Security on March 25th, which was the exact day of the last LIbra eclipse. So it means that, like, his houses were raided and a bunch of evidence was collected on the last eclipse, and then on the next set of eclipses, he was actually arrested and imprisoned. And they’re currently denying him bail, so it’s like, that may be it in terms of him being in jail now for the rest of his life.
AC: Yeah, and it’s very interesting that not only do we have this eclipse timing, but him being arrested on this one – on the Pisces one – is significant because he has the nodes in Virgo and Pisces. And so this foreshadowing one, this is the first eclipse on his eclipse axis, right? This is like, this is the beginning of the nodal return for him, which is a significant year and half long set of eclipses that everyone gets about every 19 years, every 18.6 years. And so again, the dire foreshadowing.
CB: Yeah. The biggest thing that I noticed – we don’t have a timed chart for him, but in his chart for that day, in the first half of the day, Mars is at 29 degrees of Capricorn. It does ingress into Aquarius, so it’s possible that it’s in Aquarius if he was born in the 2nd half of the day. But I just think it’s incredibly striking because Pluto has just retrograded back into Capricorn over the past few weeks, and it’s gonna station there at 29 Capricorn this month. And if he was born in the morning, then that means Pluto’s stationing exactly on his Mars, which sounds like is a pretty rough transit. And it’s more important in his chart, because his Sun and Mercury are in Scorpio – Sun, Mercury, and Neptune are all in Scorpio, so they’re actually ruled by that Mars. So you know, being arrested and having your downfall take place for past crimes, especially ones, you know, involving sex trafficking and things like that seems like a really fitting Pluto transit to one’s Mars, and it’s striking how closely that lined up.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. That was the first thing I went to as well. It’s worth noting there that with Pluto going over the Mars, when Pluto goes over a planet in the natal chart, you kind of have one of two very different but related effects. One is to hide things or to secret them away where something becomes invisible, and then the other – which we’re seeing here – is the disgorging of what was hidden before. You know, it’s sort of, you know, like, the underworld vomiting out its contents. Like, all of these awful secret things are coming to the surface.
CB: Right. From like, the underworld so to speak.
AC: Yeah. You get the opening of the hellmouth and the like, oh god, all of that happened. Right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: All of what was hidden becomes visible.
CB: Yeah. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens this month when Pluto stations in Capricorn right on top of that Mars and just, you know, when the full reality of what’s happened sort of sets in for him over the course of the next few weeks.
So there was also another major downfall of a prominent person where the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was also indicted around the time of the eclipse, and that was another example of like, a famous people experiencing a downfall around that time. So we’ll have to pay attention and see what happens with other things, other people, when this next eclipse takes place over the course of the next week or two.
Moving on – one other eclipse story was footage from the OceanGate Titan submarine wreck was released for the first time. They actually sent like, an automated submarine down to the bottom of the ocean and they found the wreck. And pictures were actually released on September 17th, which was the day of the Pisces eclipse. And I thought that was really striking because it kind of confirmed what we had said that this Pisces eclipse was gonna do in some instances, which is that it was going to accentuate but also bring light to the Saturn transit in Pisces that’s been happening over the course of the past year and a half. And of course, that submarine disaster was one of the major things that happened the first time that Saturn stationed retrograde in Pisces about a year ago, and that was the major event that everyone was like, talking about that week, so it’s interesting to see it come up again in the news and to actually see the wreckage for the first time on the Pisces eclipse.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. It was very striking. And there was – I stumbled across another similar revelation about a wreck. Researchers found the wreck of the S. S. Erebus, which was sunk I believe in 1826 with all souls lost, and their bones were recovered from it, and a lot of the – it was very similar the nature of the tragedy was understood better. And it was so perfect symbolically that you have, you know, Saturn and Neptune in Pisces with this lunar eclipse. And so with Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, we have the oceanic symbolism, but Saturn like, down at the bottom – tragedy, death, also history in this case. And the Erebus, of course, Erebus is named for the god of primordial darkness – the darkest region of Hades in the ancient Greek cosmology. And so we have that quality. Not only is the bottom of the ocean normally dark, but we have this nodal symbolism, right? This eclipse symbolism where things are darker even than normal, right? And so I thought that was a very appropriate sort of paired undersea discovery.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. So yeah. That continues just our theme, and it’ll be interesting to see that and how that picks up as we move deeper into this Pisces eclipse series next year, which may continue to emphasize that even more.
So in other Pisces eclipse related news, not too long after the Pisces eclipse, Hurricane Helene hit a bunch of states in the United States. And for some places, it was the biggest storm in a century, where for example there was over like, 400 roads that were closed in western North Carolina for example. There were some cities like Asheville that are just completely underwater at this point. And it’s tricky because it’s hit a bunch of rural areas and like, small towns, so I think the full extent and like, scope of the devastation from that isn’t even fully known yet and is still being – we’re still like, finding out more and more.
AC: Yeah. It’s a brutally literal iteration of an eclipse with a malefic in a water sign. Like, all this damage being done through airborne water. When I was looking through global news, I noticed that there were actually like, there was a slew of water-based tragedies this month. There were floods with significant death tolls in Europe, in Nigeria, in India. There were a number of tragic deaths of people trying to cross the English Channel, and there was also a very serious typhoon in East Asia that claimed a lot of lives, like, all right around this Pisces eclipse zone.
CB: Yeah. So it’s crazy how literal that can be sometimes, as we saw earlier this year for example when there was the Mars-Saturn conjunction and there was that bridge collapse, for example, that occurred as well as some other flooding and water-related disasters around that time as well. Sometimes the astrology can just be surprisingly literal.
AC: Yeah, shockingly.
CB: Yeah. All right. Moving on – another major news story that occurred that was more like, in sort of celebrity news was that – and I thought it was notable because we had just talked about him on a previous forecast, but – Kendrick Lamar was announced to be the performer, the headliner, at the next Super Bowl, which is gonna take place early next year. So this was announced on September 8th, and I thought this was notable because it was right after Mars went into Cancer on September 4th, which is right into Kendrick’s 10th house which we’d talked about earlier this year when he was famously in that rap battle with Drake. And Kendrick has his Mercury and Mars conjunction in the 10th house in the sign of Cancer. So we had used him as like, an example of that in our previous episode when we were talking about Mars in Cancer. And what was interesting to me astrologically is that once he was announced to be the headliner, there was a bit of a controversy that broke out about whether because the Super Bowl’s gonna take place in New Orleans whether a local New Orleans rapper should have gotten it to headline since it would be their hometown, and especially that Lil Wayne was a prominent rapper who’s very well known as being from New Orleans, and a lot of people were saying that he should have gotten it. And I just I thought that was so interesting because it was a very Mars in Cancer type of dispute in terms of having a dispute about like, hometowns and who’s from where and who has the right to like, represent different places and different things like that.
AC: Yeah, and that’s so Mars in Cancer. Right? Like, because it’s Mars in the domain of the Moon. You know, Cancer’s about origins; it’s where are you from, like, who raised you, you know, what does home mean and representing and being connected to origins. Right? And you know, it’s – Mars in Cancer brings up what is almost always like, a martial line, right, which is a line not to cross, which is like, “Leave my family out of it.” Like, “Don’t say that about my mom.” Like, very often even in otherwise brutal contests, the Moon and you know, Cancer, like, all those significations are off-limits. Right? But with Mars in that place, it stirs that stuff up, right, which can be hometown pride, also you know, as well as some more aggressive things that come out of that. And so it’s interesting to see somebody who has that just sort of accidentally stir that up. I’ve been trying to, you know, study – once again – study Mars in Cancer in preparation for the fact that we’re gonna do a lot of Mars in Cancer this year. And having an infant has actually been really helpful for thinking about that. Because again with Cancer and with the Moon, we’re talking about that like, most primordial, basic, fundamental like, substrate of feeling and of need, and the sort of preverbal fight or flight need for survival. Because you see that getting triggered when Mars is in Cancer and somebody threatening your home, your family, et cetera, et cetera, does that. And so you get some of the overreactions that Mars in Cancer is famous for, but also just, seeing a baby – like, it’s not like they say, “Hey, you know what, I could maybe go for a snack.” Right? Like, there’s a ferocity to the hunger of an infant because they don’t know that the food is coming until like, the food arrives, and it’s a matter of survival, right? And we all – most of us are not operating on the five- or six-month-old level, but that’s, we’re layered on top of that. Like, that’s still there at the bottom.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, it also over the past month it brought out this – Mars in Cancer brought out this weird string of like, racism and especially like, nativism, and all these attempts to scapegoat like, immigrants and stuff like that was a real dark side of that that seemed to become particularly prominent this month. And that was part of what was surrounding all of the memes about the false claims about immigrants like, eating pets and different things like that as sort of the darker side of what you’re talking about there.
AC: Yeah. No, I mean, that’s very on topic. But yeah, the ferocious nativism.
CB: Right. So let’s see – one last thing with this was just, you know, we’ve noted how earlier this year, Kendrick was sort of like, engaging in the battle with Drake, but he put a red line down, and he basically said like, “Do not,” like, “Family is off-limits.” And it was when Drake crossed that line that Kendrick really brought out the big guns and brought out the killing blow, basically. And I thought that was so interesting because there was another example that was sent in by a listener as I was preparing for the 3rd house this month where the famous soccer player Zidane back in 2006 in the final game of his soccer career – you know, it’s at the biggest game of the year. It’s at like, the World Cup, and the teams are tied one to one, and they’re like, in overtime, basically. And then what happens is this other player walks by Zidane, and Zidane has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Cancer in the 3rd house of siblings. And this other player walks by Zidane at this point, and then he says something; it’s not fully documented, but he basically insults Zidane’s sister in some way. And then Zidane turns around and he just like, brutally headbutts this guy with his full body, like, in the chest, and knocks him down to the ground. And then he gets a red card, gets thrown out of the game for his final game of his career, and his team ends up losing. But I thought it was so interesting as another example of what we’re talking about in terms of Mars or Mercury-Mars in Cancer, and for him, it was like, his family and specifically having his sister insulted.
AC: Yeah, that’s a perfect example. Another example or another piece of why that’s a perfect example that you see with Mars in its fall or planets in their fall is that they tend to not obey the rules. Like, that’s you know, the equivalent of like, a low blow. Insulting someone’s family is against the rules, right, like, that’s a low blow. And then you know, striking the other player illegally, right? Or, you know, illegally according to the rules of the game. Yeah, like taking the moral low road is often a part of Mars in its fall. Which isn’t always ultimately morally wrong, but like, you know, it’s not taking the high road, right, where you’re like, “Well, I’m not going to be dragged down to that level.” Right? You’re like, “Well, you know, fuck it. I will wrestle with you. I will headbutt you in the mud.” Right? But that’s the energy of like, you know, that’s the reason or it’s part of the reason we have that vertical metaphor with the planets’ exaltation and fall is like, I’m going to try to rise above, or like, fuck it, I’ll get down there with you. Right? And I’ll show you.
CB: Yeah. Well, and in Cancer it’s ruled by the Moon, and just like, you going, doing your initial action based on the emotional impulse of how that hits you versus Mars in Capricorn having some restraint and like, strategy and like, planning surrounding how one reacts to something, especially with acts of aggression.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Operating from that.
CB: So Kaitlin Coppock in the chat points out and made a very good point that the big song that amped up the intensity of the rap battle earlier this year was titled “Family Matters” —
AC: Oh!
CB: — so just tying in those themes once again in terms of the Mars in Cancer stuff. So we’ll have to pay attention to and see how that, you know, works out over the course of the next several months because we have a lot of Mars in Cancer ahead of us. So I’m sure we’ll be talking about this more.
All right. So moving onto other news, this just happened a few days ago, but on September 25th, we got poped. The pope put out an attack on astrology on September 25th. Let me share the actual tweet. It was just like this bizarre tweet that came out of nowhere. It was actually the day of the Mercury-Neptune opposition in Virgo and Pisces. But Pope Francis said, “Our secularized world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritism, astrologers, and satanic sects. If we kick the devil out the door, he tries to return through the window. If we overcome him with faith, he seeks to return through superstition.”
So obviously this didn’t go over super well on astro Twitter with all the astrologers. One of my favorite responses was actually Ali Olomi, who pointed out that previous popes had used electional astrology in order to found like, major parts of the church in Rome and to create major buildings there. And you know, my response that I thought of immediately upon, you know, hearing this is just, you know, the very first book of the Christian bible, of the New Testament, opens with a story about how god supposedly sent an astrological omen to announce the birth of Jesus and then that a group of astrologers actually followed that in order to find him and became some of the first to pay tribute to Jesus in that story and in that narrative. So yeah. This is – you know, there’s a lot of different responses that one could have, but for me it also a little bit just eerie and made me a little nervous as potential confirmation of something I’ve been nervous about for a while now, which is if astrologers would receive more pushback as the Saturn-Neptune conjunction gets closer to going exact. And I feel like we’ve seen little hints of that, little instances, and now we have like, the pope himself kind of taking a shot at astrology.
AC: Yeah. It seems exactly, precisely on schedule to me. Because it’s not only Saturn coming for Neptune, and we know that Neptune in Pisces – which has been the last 13 years-ish – has had astrology and magic and related things sort of bloom, become more popular, and more people have been interested in them and engaged with them than, I don’t know, maybe any time in the last century? The ‘60s would have been the last time there was a meaningful intersection between sort of mainstream culture and astrology. And this one might outstrip that. But it at least rivals it. And so, and you and probably a lot of other astrologers have been wondering about what comes after Neptune in Pisces, because it’s very obviously been correlated to that. And of course, we have Saturn escorting Neptune out of PIsces, which should theoretically and now in practice is giving us a more, firmer boundary between this sort of high point and what comes next, which I don’t expect to be bound to a stake a burned alive, but this sort of condemnation makes a lot of sense, especially with the eclipse just a week before this statement by the pope. Right? Like, the North Node eclipse just amplifying that Saturn-Neptune energy, right, so we get some of that. I would also add that, you know, in addition to Christian stories having divinely sent heavenly omens, there’s also just all of Thomas Aquinas. There’s already like, Catholicism has already thought through the relationship to astrology, and the result was not that it’s Satan. Like, Saint Thomas Aquinas deals with astrology extensively, and basically comes to the conclusion that one, it’s real and can be useful and is licit. As far as mundane astrology goes, you’re allowed to look at the weather and look at, like, the direction of kingdoms. His particular quarrel that became the like, central problem or conflict point between Catholicism and astrology was that if there were claims of, like, total predestination made – that like, you are just going to live according to your birth chart and there’s no wiggle room or choices – then that wrecked the central drama of salvation, where there’s no such thing as salvation if there are no choices to make. Right? It means there are no moral choices; it means the whole thing is pointless. And so that excessive predestination around natal astrology was the core of the problem, not that astrology came from the devil and was a fake trick from the Satan. So.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the most important thing is there’s just nothing that inherently means – there’s been many famous Christian astrologers in history and there’s been —
AC: Sure.
CB: — many famous Christians that have incorporated or used astrology in some way. And there’s no inherent reason that Christianity has to be against astrology. People make those choices, and there’s different arguments you could make for or against. But fundamentally, I think, you know, it would be helpful for astrologers who are Christians to make the case for how astrology can still play a role in your life that is still in agreement in terms of the theological precepts of Christianity, and I think not only have people done that in the past but people will continue to do that in the future. It’s too bad the pope has taken that position there, but yeah, we’ll see how some of those discussions go in the future and how this continues to evolve in terms of our community.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So in more positive news, I had – you know, there’s some sort of feeling I need a hashtag for it when there’s like, a birth time that you really wanna get, and then you finally get it, and just the state of euphoria when you finally get to look at the chart. So we finally got Sean Evans’s birth time from Hot Ones where Sza went on Hot Ones recently in the episode that was just released in the past week, and she asked Sean what his rising sign was and what his placements were. And he said he didn’t know, but he knew he was born at 9:40 in the morning, I believe, is what he said. So he actually gave out his birth time, and his chart is amazing and it fits what he does just absolutely perfectly. So here’s the birth chart. And the main thing that I noticed, the first thing that I noticed, is that he has Cancer rising, Aries is on the 10th whole sign house along with the degree of the Midheaven, along with Mercury being in Aries in the 10th house. And then the ruler of the 10th house is Mars, which is exalted in Capricorn in the 7th whole sign house, the place of one-on-one relationships, and it’s a day chart. And I just think that’s so hilariously literal, because it means the planet that represents his career in the chart is placed in the part of the chart that represents one-on-one interactions with other people, and that the planet is Mars in a day chart, which is a planet that like, is fiery and hot and burns things and is irritating, and he’s literally like, burning the people that he’s interviewing on a daily basis during the course of this interview, which is just such a perfect manifestation. I couldn’t imagine it being any better symbolically.
AC: Yeah, it’s so good. And in addition to that, we have the Sun – excuse me – the Moon-Saturn conjunction in Sagittarius in the 6th house. So the Moon is the ruler of his rising, so the Moon is Sean, and then Saturn is the ruler of the 7th, so Saturn is whoever Sean is talking to in a one-on-one way, and you have those directly like, right next to each other. Right? So you have this really close one-on-one suggested, and it’s in a fire sign – right – so it’s in a fiery place in the 6th, which means that it’s a fiery place which threatens health and wellbeing. So you have this meeting in a fiery place that may not be good for your health, like, between self and other.
CB: Yeah, and what’s crazy is —
AC: You’re like, come on.
CB: What’s crazy is I looked up the first episode of Hot Ones, and Saturn was like, right there in early Sagittarius, so him starting the show was actually part of his Saturn return, which I thought was interesting because it’s in the 6th house of work, and he was working for Complex magazine when they set up the show and started it, which is a very 6th house thing. But also it made me immediately think of also just the fact that some of the health implications of that with Saturn going through the 6th house, which also represents one’s health, and just if there’s been any complications with that in terms of eating such extremely spicy things on a weekly or almost near daily basis for a period of time and if that gives you like, an ulcer or something like that was something I sort of thought about in terms of that being activated there.
AC: Yeah, it’s so good.
CB: Yeah. The last thing that I will note is of course as I’ve talked about, when I put out that call for asking people to ask him his birth time in the August forecast, I noted famously that he was born just after a lunar eclipse in Scorpio which is conjunct Pluto, and that he was born the day of the Chernobyl explosion, which is just so incredible symbolically that he was born the day of like, a nuclear meltdown and then he grows up and hosts an interview show where he’s just constantly eating super spicy, painfully hot hot wings with like, nuclear imagery on the side of them. But what was further interesting is that when I looked up the first episode of Hot Ones, it turns out that he started the first episode just after or around the time of eclipse. There was a Pisces eclipse around the time of that first episode. So he continues to be – he’s another eclipse story, basically, of somebody born on an eclipse and then he starts the show that he would become famous for at the time of an eclipse.
AC: Yeah. It’s so good.
CB: And I forgot to mention like, that’s what funny about that combination is that, you know, you have Cancer rising as well, like, in a day chart. But your Mars is in the 9th house, and you’re giving spicy predictions on a monthly basis and sometimes subjecting people to dark metaphors or Mars-y metaphors, whereas Sean is literally like, burning people with hot sauce on a daily basis with Mars in his 7th house and that’s like, his job.
AC: No, it’s true. Yeah, it’s more of a, yeah, spicy or like, a prognostic meat grinder for me in the 9th.
CB: Right. Yeah. I love it. So shout out to Sza, because that was amazing. She really, you know, helped us out there and it’s amazing having people that can like, go on a show like that and just ask the host directly. My jaw literally dropped. So thanks to everybody who sent that in. I had seen it on my subscriptions, because I subscribe to the show as a fan, but I hadn’t watched it yet, and then everyone blew up my phone saying I had to check it out.
AC: Yeah, that’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. All right. That is actually the end of the news section; I don’t have anything else to mention. So shall we wrap up this section, take a little break, and then transition into the forecast?
AC: Absolutely.
CB: All right. I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is taking place next year in person near Seattle, May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. And it’s happening both in person physically as well as being simultaneously streamed online to a virtual evidence who want to attend from far away. Registration for NORWAC opens on October 1st, and it’s important because the earlier you get tickets, the cheaper it is, where basically the ticket prices go up every few months between now and NORWAC. So it’s one of those things where if you’re thinking about attending either in person or online, it’s always better to get the tickets early – both because the in-person tickets sell out, but also because the price goes up, especially if you buy them like, right before the conference.
So this year, there’s gonna be more emphasis on the virtual component where there’s gonna be a special virtual guest workshop by Richard Tarnas giving a two-and-a-half hour pre-conference workshop. There’s also gonna be a daily virtual Q&A with NORWAC speakers, an in-person livestream hosted by Nicholas Polimenakos, as well as virtual parties. For the people that are attending in person, Leisa Schaim is actually giving a full day pre-conference workshop before the full conference begins, like right before it opens, which is gonna be amazing. And there’s gonna be also workshops and other lectures given by many people who have been on the podcast in the past – many names that you might recognize like Demetra George, our boy Patrick Watson, Gemini Brett, Adam Elenbaas, Nina Gryphon, Laura Nalbandian, Kira Sutherland, Anne Ortelee, Ali Olomi, Christopher Renstrom, Samuel F. Reynolds, Bear Ryvers, Wendy Stacey, Jenn Zahrt, and many, many more. So you can see the full speaker list as well as lecture descriptions to see what talks are gonna be presented, or you can register for the conference at NORWAC.net. So this is gonna be amazing conference this year, so definitely check it out and check out the website for more information so you can see the full layout of like, how many people are speaking and how many lectures are happening. I think there’s like, five or six lectures happening simultaneously something like four or five times a day over the course of that week. So it’s quite an experience.
AC: Yeah, it’s a buffet. And I mean, we’ve both been to probably at least a dozen NORWACs each?
CB: Yeah, at least. NORWAC was my first conference and is still my favorite conference because, you know, some conferences get like, gigantic and sprawling, but NORWAC is always in the same hotel and it’s this hotel with this very like, centralized layout. So it’s fun to like, run and bump into people and to have more of like, a community feel.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. There’s – yeah, that hotel has become, I have like, nostalgic feelings about that hotel.
CB: Yeah. I remember many conference nights of staying up late into the night where it’s just like, me, you, or like, Kelly are the last persons that are still up, and that’s actually how we started doing the forecast episodes was Kelly and I like, stayed up at a conference, at a NORWAC, and then like, had so much fun that we came back and decided to start doing forecast episodes. So you know, NORWAC is tied into the very history of the podcast and the very DNA of the podcast.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. So I appreciate that they’re trying to integrate the online component, especially for those of us that can’t attend in person, so it’s a great thing to take advantage of and they continue to integrate more interactive components for people that aren’t there in person, so it should be really good. Found out more information at NORWAC.net, and I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode.
Alright, my friend, let’s transition into talking about the astrological forecast for October. And let’s just jump right into it. This is gonna be quite the month, because even though we’re in the midst of it and we’ve been in eclipse season, it’s like, the first shoe dropped on the first part of eclipse season, but now the second shoe is about to drop right at the beginning of October with this next solar eclipse happening in the sign of Libra on October 2nd. And I have to say, in terms of configurations to the eclipse, it’s not the prettiest looking eclipse because as soon as the eclipse happens, the Sun, Moon, and Mercury all apply to a square with Mars in Cancer very shortly after that so that the square with Mars is the primary signature of that eclipse, which in terms of world events does not sound great given that Mars is the planet of like, war and violence and aggression and anger and different things like that.
AC: Yeah, it’s really rough. The eclipse is rough, and it starts off the month on a tone that is unfortunately quite appropriate for most of the events of the month. We not only have the eclipse being square to that Mars, but we have the growing Mars-Pluto opposition all month. Let’s see, so how do we want to take apart this eclipse?
CB: I mean, one of the things I wanna emphasize is just, you know, eclipses are sometimes a series of events and they represent a series of events over the course of around a year and a half long period. And especially with this one, it’s been a pretty clear year of eclipses in Libra where we had the first one in October of last year just one year ago now. Then we had the next set, which was a lunar eclipse in Libra at the end of March. And then now we have the third and final installment. And you know, it’s not the best example because it’s so dark, but like, for example, how Sean Combs, how Puffy, how Diddy, you know, had his house raided on the Libra eclipse that occurred six months ago and then, you know, was actually went down and was arrested and probably imprisoned for life now under the next set of eclipses. That was just a good illustration about how eclipses are like, a process sometimes —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — rather than a singular thing that happens. And so the fact that this is the later part of a sequence means that for many people, the story of these eclipses should already be clear, and that you’re coming to a culmination of events of both ending some things in your life in that sector of your chart that it falls, but also planting the seeds for some new beginnings in that area at the same time. So I saw somebody who said that they broke up with somebody, they ended like, a long-term relationship recently on the Pisces eclipse. But sometimes when that happens, that relationship has to end, but then the person will like, later start a new relationship which wouldn’t have occurred if that previous one hadn’t been let go of. So I think that’s what we have to think about is the primary thing to keep in mind for this eclipse.
AC: Yeah. This is the last eclipse in Libra for a very long time, for about a decade. So on that note, right, and sort of addressing that from a different angle – you know, we have roughly a year and a half that the nodes will be transiting a pair of houses in the chart or a pair of signs. And it is the nodes not existing but being this very special point of intersection between the Sun-Moon-earth system. In Vedic astrology, they’re called “shadow planets,” right, because they don’t have bodies – the bodies that they have are made of shadow. Right? So you can’t see them unless they’re right in front of the Sun and the Moon. And so the nodes naturally being invisible – that invisibility is their normal state – represent processes and series of events that are usually below the threshold of visibility. Like, there are processes running in the background that this could be psychologically, this can be subconscious changes. In the external world, this can be things happening behind the scenes. But then they have these moments – the eclipses – every six months. On average, you’ll have three sets of eclipses for every time the nodes go through a pair of signs where the invisible becomes visible and all the stuff that had been brewing comes to the surface. It’s like a season of television where it’s silent – like, every episode is completely silent and dark, except for the season premiere, the mid-season finale, and then the season finale. And it’s just like, you can barely see what’s happening between those episodes.
CB: Yeah, that’s a perfect analogy. Well, and you know, harkening back to the earlier story with like, Sean Evans doing the first interview with Hot Ones on an eclipse – like, they didn’t know that that was gonna become like, this wildly successful thing over the course of the next few years. And in the same way, eclipses sometimes you’ll start a new beginning which just seems really humble at the time and that you oftentimes like, won’t recognize as being hugely significant until you look back on it in retrospect and realize that you started something that would come to play a major role in defining your life from that point forwards. So that’s where the hidden or the shadowy eclipse symbolism comes in as well is sometimes the change in your life is not even fully perceptible or recognized.
AC: Yeah. And the – yeah, that like, the contrast between traumatic visibility like a Full Moon, and then sudden invisibility – oh my god, it’s the Full Moon, where’d the Moon go? Like, the contrast from like, the something out of nothing, and then the something into nothing. Right? And so with the something into nothing is oh, it’s something bright like the Sun or a Full Moon that, you know, gets sort of stained and then disappears, right? And that’s very – or the Sun in the middle of the day, where you have a person in the past, a royal or imperial figure, and these days we have people who have a similar amount of attention as well as what kings and queens remain – like, suddenly their star is shadowed and falls from the sky like Diddy. But you have that rise and fall from power or somebody come out nowhere, right, like the dragon which has been slumbering for hundreds of years emerges from the cave. You’re like, “Shit, I didn’t know that cave had a dragon. This changes things!” And —
CB: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, with this one it’s gonna be a fire-breathing dragon, not the calm kind, just because here’s the chart for those watching the video version.
So this eclipse takes place at about nine, 10 degrees of Libra, and Mercury at the time has just separated from the cazimi with the Sun a few days earlier, a couple days earlier, and then Mars is at 15 degrees of Cancer. So all three of those planets once completing these conjunctions with each other earlier in Libra just apply to that square with Mars with Mars in the superior position. So there’s just some element of the major beginning at this time that’s created and the foundation that’s created that’s not entirely smooth where the new beginning or the new ending that has to take place happens abruptly. Things happen quickly. But also things happen in like, a jarring way that can be really unsettling and really in some instances like, actually painful or difficult to deal with because there’s an element of tension and like, conflict underlying it that’s motivating the change or perhaps resulting from it in some way.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, the… Yes. The jarring nature of eclipses. Again, it’s part of the nature of that something from nothing or something back into nothing is that it’s very quick. And it’s quicker than usually we can adapt to or than we had planned for. And so there’s very often an element of shock, even if it’s a good thing, and I don’t think this eclipse is particularly promising for good things, which isn’t to say that it won’t happen to anybody. But even when it’s a positive thing, there’s often a little bit of shock or disorientation.
CB: Right. Yeah. And especially earlier in the month, one of the signatures is verbal altercations, verbal combativeness, foul language, and just getting into arguments and things like that because of that applying square between Mercury and Mars, which eventually goes exact around October 5th and October 6th where Mercury squares Mars at 17 degrees of Cancer. And that’s just a real, you know, “Those are fighting words,” I think is our usual like, keyword for that when Mercury represents the planet of like, communication and speech and messages and Mars is traditionally the planet of war and conflict. So I would pay attention for verbal conflicts around that time, because sometimes you can get in a verbal conflict with somebody where it seems like, you know, it’s just something that won’t be a big deal and you’ll say what you feel like saying in the moment or in the heat of the moment, and it’ll blow over later. But then when something like that happens during eclipse season, sometimes it can set the foundation for a much longer term conflict than you might intend or anticipate. And I think that’s even more so the case, because at the same time by October 4th and October 5th, Mars enters into 17 degrees of Cancer, which is the degree that it will later retrograde back to early next year as a result of the retrograde. So as soon as Mars enters into this zone, it’s entered its pre-retrograde shadow period, which means you’re gonna get three transits of that Mars if you have any personal planets especially around 17 degrees of the cardinal signs.
AC: Yeah. This eclipse and then the week following basically, both the Mercury and then the Sun square to that Mars as and then just after it enters that shadow zone is really setting themes that we’re going to see well into next year. And so, you know, just thinking about what this looks like and what we would, you know, like, some of the shapes of this, right? We’ve got that Mars in Cancer which we were talking about earlier, which is that sort of line-crossing, coming for the family, or feeling threatened at that level, and then the like, home and family – whatever is like, vital and precious and that you care most about being threatened, and then freaking out or having a freak-out reaction to. Like, that’s very Mars in Cancer. And so we see these planets in Libra where, you know, planets in Libra – the LIbra business is to try to keep things, try to keep the boat from rocking too much to try to at least maintain equilibrium even if it’s while driving over rough ground. Like, try to keep some balance, right? Or at least to try to move things back towards balance. And that is so – or, you know, on a literal, try to keep the peace. Right? It’s Libra. To try to keep things fair, balanced, and harmonious and diplomatic. And an eclipse there by itself certainly sends the scales wobbling, and then the fact that that happens in an inferior square to Mars with Mars in the stronger position, looking down on that and in such a reactive place, really speaks to a profound challenge to peace, balance, equilibrium at personal and collective levels.
CB: Did I tell you last month the anecdote that Leisa and I found in the 2nd house episode where Arnold Palmer, who like, the Arnold Palmer drink is named after – which is sometimes called like, half and half because it’s like, half iced tea and half lemonade, that he has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 2nd house in Libra, and Libra being the sign of the scales but also the —
AC: The half and half.
CB: Half and half! Like, two sides of anything. I thought that was hilarious. It’s such a blowoff like, piece of symbolism, but it’s so funny like, how literal again that the astrology can be sometimes.
AC: Yeah, bringing – not having to choose between two delightful drinks, but bringing them into perfect harmony with one another.
CB: Exactly. And you know, Harris was actually talking about that. She was interviewed on a podcast earlier this year. She was asked if she liked astrology or if she hated astrology, which was actually funny because the host didn’t like astrology and had gone viral for a clip before that. But Harris said she vibed with astrology because her and Doug are both Libras and that they will sometimes like, sit down to watch television and have to like, choose between like, what show to watch and then just end up going to different shows forever and not being able to decide on one thing.
AC: As someone married to a Libra, I have no comment.
CB: Okay. You can’t confirm nor deny that statement.
AC: That is the balance I need to strike here.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s funny because I’ve seen world leaders, people complaining about world leaders that have heavy Libra placements and saying similar things about them, that they’re indecisive and that their indecisiveness is causing like, problems in some ways. So I think that’s interesting here, but sometimes that indecisiveness can bring conflict. And I wanted to show the Honeycomb graphic that Madeline made for Mars just to show you what happens here is it’s – the shadow degree gets activated at 17 degrees of Cancer on October 4th. And then on February 23rd, Mars comes back to and stations at that degree. So just imagine it’s like, you have this initial feeling of some sort of fiery or spicy event in your life that occurs during this first pass of Mars which is relatively quick, and you sort of think it’s over. But then Mars comes back months and months later and connects these two separate like, times in your life together by activating the same placement in your chart, especially if you have something around 17 degrees. But that the second time in February, it’s much more important and it lasts for a much longer period of time. That’s just something we’re looking forward to here as part of this retrograde is these extended and drawn out experiences of tension, of spiciness, of sometimes conflict. Other times, though, it may just be a huge expenditure of energy and focus and drive that you end up having to put in more work over a much longer period of time than you think that you will at first. But for some people, that will still be a productive and sort of like, important turning point even if it can be a bit exhausting.
AC: Yeah. Sometimes the Mars retrogrades, the extended presence of Mars in a pretty limited number of degrees – in this case it’s Mars in the same 23 degrees for six, seven months – it’s a very long project with twists and turns that requires layers of effort. And which is, yeah. And it’s worth noting once again that people who were born with Mars retrograde tend to do a lot better during these periods of time. They don’t afflict – they’re not the same pain in the ass for everyone. I know several people with Mars retrograde who actually finally get a big project done that had been lagging for the previous year and a half during Mars retrogrades.
CB: Yeah. I think I mentioned this on a previous forecast. Nick had found – we were doing a study of major podcasters that we had birth times for, and I found we had Alex Cooper’s birth time who hosts the Call Her Daddy podcast, which is like, the 2nd biggest podcast on Spotify at one point in time recently. Nick found that Joe Rogan had a really prominent Mars and that every time Mars went retrograde, he would have just a major career-defining turning point, like starting his podcast and other things like that. So there’s definitely people if you have a prominent, especially well placed, Mars where it’ll just be an important turning point for you and a pivot point in your life story. But sometimes there can still be tensions that come along with that.
So there’s some positive things, though, this month that I do wanna point – at different points, even under the tense transits this month, the benefics are coming in and trying to balance things out. And there’s some attempt to like, smooth things over or to soothe the burn that takes place both from Venus as well as from Jupiter. So early in the month when some of the like, Mercury-Mars stuff is taking place for example – here’s October 5th. One of the things that happens is Venus is moving through Scorpio, the middle degrees of Scorpio, early in the month, and it makes a trine with Saturn on October 4th and October 5th, which is pretty helpful in terms of as far as aspects go. And then after that just a few days later, it swoops in and forms a trine with Mars with reception. And this is not too long after Mercury has just formed that square with Mars. So there’s these occasional instances where you do get the fiery combativeness of certain aspects like Mercury square Mars, but then immediately afterwards there’s a counterbalancing transit that’s attempting to smooth things over or attempting to hold Mars back a little bit and maybe like, apply some ointment to the burn so that it’s not as bad as it could be or it doesn’t smolder as long as it could.
AC: Yeah, it’s better than nothing. It’s nice to have that help; I think it’s still going to be pretty chafe-y, for lack of a better term. It’ll be difficult to maintain that Libran balance, but a little ointment is better than no ointment at all.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s like, because we get that aspect of Venus to Mars, but then also one of our other major aspects this month is that Jupiter slows down and stations for the first time in the sign of Gemini. And weirdly, that happens around October 8th and October 9th. Mercury comes in as the ruler of Jupiter and trines Jupiter from 21 degrees of Libra on the same day. So that’s another one of those aspects where just a few days earlier we get this really tense and combative Mercury-Mars square, but then a few days after that, there’s a really positive and optimistic Mercury-Jupiter trine that’s taking place with reception and that’s helping to accentuate an already prominent Jupiter that has an exclamation mark next to it since it’s stationing there at 21 degrees of Gemini. So for some people, I think that’s gonna be really helpful; for example, if you have like, a personal planet around 21 degrees of the mutable signs, Jupiter’s gonna be sitting there in that degree for a little bit and helping to give it a bit of a boost. So especially whatever the Gemini house is in your chart is experiencing a little bit of positive expansion this month, especially those later degrees of the early 3rd decan.
AC: Yeah. And so I think that’s a really important dynamic that both Mercury and then the Sun do this harsh square with Mars and then afterwards encounter a restorative trine with Jupiter. Right? Jupiter —
CB: Right.
AC: Like, Jupiter has a reputation for giving the good or like, cash and prizes, et cetera, et cetera, but just as important is that Jupiter has a remedial or restorative function. Right? Like, after a difficult thing has happened, then having literally the best aspect to Jupiter, which is a trine, go direct is nice. And it’s nice because we’re gonna do another hard lunation halfway through the month that is more —
CB: Right.
AC: — rough things, rough fiery, yeah, near lethal capsaicin level Full Moon in Aries. And so we get this little Jupiter trine, this little but irreplaceable Jupiter trine, in between the kind of brutal eclipse and then the excessively spicy Full Moon. And again, I would like a lot more for restoration. This doesn’t make this an easy, cool, or even sort of mixed bag month. Like, it’s a hard month, but at least we get a little help in between these lunations.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the – you can always see the natal, especially in natal charts, those times when a person has a really negative transit but then a positive one at the same time, it always ends up saving them sometimes in the most extreme scenarios. So like, in the 3rd house episode that Leisa and I just recorded this past week, I always love to use the example of George Lucas, who had this really terrible Mars transit that was happening in his 3rd house and he got in this terrible car accident where his car was just absolutely totalled, and it was hit so hard by another car that it flew in the air and spun and then smashed into a tree and crumpled like a can. But the only reason he survived is that he was thrown from the car just before it smashed into the tree. And he was having both a simultaneously really negative Mars transits, but also really positive Venus and Jupiter transits at the exact same time. So it’s like, you get the really terrible, negative event that’s life-changing, but then you also get the really miraculous like, positive thing that sort of like, saves you out of nowhere at the same time, as opposed to the alternative scenario of if you just have negative things, then sometimes it can be like, the worst case scenario happening without any silver lining.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So that’s really what’s happening, especially there in that… I’m glad you mentioned the Sun-Jupiter trine, because that’s one of the other most tense aspects this month that’s building up most of the month. The first part of the month is the Sun applying to the square with Mars. And that eventually completes right here around October 13th and October 14th, but by the time it gets to 21 degrees of Libra and squares Mars at 21 Cancer, the Sun also basically simultaneously trines Jupiter at 21 degrees of Gemini. So you’re literally getting one of the worst transits you can possibly get from Mars to the Sun, and then you’re getting one of the most positive transits you can get from Jupiter to the Sun at the same time. So we’re gonna see people experiencing around that time some extremes of positive and negative, and either… Sometimes there’s the scenario of like, the bad thing that happens, but the good thing that helps to balance it out. Other times, it’s just two things that happen in parallel where you get like, one really good thing that happens one day, but also one really challenging thing that happens at the same time so that they’re independent, but there’s this question of like, whether that balances things out a little bit even though they’re not directly like, counteracting each other.
AC: Yeah. You have the separate like, well, a good thing happened here and a bad thing happened there, and so if you ask me what kind of week it was, well, you know, mixed bag or I guess it balanced out in the end. And then you have the other case that you described, George Lucas being an excellent example, where a bad thing happened but there was literally a saving grace, which is kind of what we’re talking about. A benefic coming in not to negate a difficult thing happening, but to keep it from the worst case scenario.
CB: Yeah, totally.
AC: In George’s case, to make it survivable. Because, you know, thank god he endured to make those wonderful – that wonderful second trilogy. The world —
CB: Hey, I —
AC: — would be a poorer place without it.
CB: All right. You’re a little older than me. I was younger for the 2nd trilogy. I will defend the 2nd trilogy, I don’t wanna say to the death, but I can make a spirited defense for – especially in comparison to the 3rd trilogy at this point. I think they’re looking better these days.
AC: Yeah. I don’t know. I just stopped watching anything Star Wars after I saw the 3rd movie in the 2nd trilogy. Like, was that late ‘90s, early 2000s? I was like, oh, I don’t ever need to pay attention to Star Wars anymore. So I haven’t seen any of the new stuff. George convinced me to quit 20 some years ago.
CB: How dare you. How dare you, my friend. All right. We’ll have to have a separate episode about that at some point. You’re gonna get me worked up.
Let’s go back to the middle of the month where one of our other major, major transits that happens this month starts to constellate around the same time period that we’re talking about, which is like, the 12th, 13th, 14th. You’ll see that what happens is that Pluto slows down and stations direct. Here’s the date – around October 11th, 12th, and 13th. And what’s interesting is like, right about the same time, Mercury gets to the end of its trip through Libra and hits 29 degrees of Libra right before it goes into Scorpio. So it basically like, squares Pluto; there’s a Mercury-Pluto square at the same time that Pluto’s stationing. So that’s really going to amplify and give a microphone to the Pluto station there, and remember – this is the very last Pluto station in Capricorn for the rest of our lifetimes. We’ve been having Pluto transits since 2008, 2009, and we’ve had like, dozens of stations at this point over the course of the past decade. This is the very last time that any of us are gonna experience Pluto going through this sign and this very last station, and then Mercury swoops in in order to amplify that.
So earlier this year, we talked about the detective symbolism of Mercury-Pluto alignments and how sometimes in its best function it can be like, the intrepid detective who’s getting to the bottom of things. And I actually had a funny example of that that I found when I was researching the 3rd house, which is it turns out that the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories was born with Gemini rising and has a Mercury-Pluto conjunction in the 12th house. So I thought that was so perfect, because we’d talked about – and you’d used the example earlier this year of the True Detective series, which I’m glad you mentioned them because I ended up watching it and it was great – but that’s the most positive aspect of things is we may see some like, investigative reporting that gets to the bottom of or exposes some things, especially sometimes dark things that are buried pretty deep down coming to the surface at that time with that Mercury-Pluto square is one possible manifestation. The negative manifestation of that is the same thing, but attempts to use that to control and manipulate people through the releasing of like, information for sort of nefarious purposes is like, another possible manifestation.
AC: Yeah. And there’s also just the sometimes when, you know, when there’s some investigation done and some awful truth comes out, it just sort of gives you sort of a glimpse – just a glimpse – of what you know is a whole underlayer of corruption and horror, and you’re like, oh yeah, that’s out there, just behind what I can see. You know, like in True Detective or like with a lot of this stuff – you’re like, oh, we saw that piece; what other pieces don’t we see? But —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — you know. Yeah, it’s a thing. You know, with Pluto’s last station, it’s such a like – I find Pluto stations create like, sort of sound this deep, resonant, ominous sort of bass note underneath everything. Just like, almost sub-audible. Like an earthquake in the underworld that barely can be felt here, but nonetheless imbues an ominous vibration to things. And it’s really, it is its own vent – like, the station with the Mercury square – and I do think you’re right; I think there will be another prominent disclosure of some point then. But it’s so part of a sequence of things that’s occurring this month and will go on beyond this month, but it’s still part of the sequence of this month because while that’s happening, the Sun is on its way to a square with that Pluto. Mars is on its way to an opposition with that Pluto. And our Full Moon, which happens not that far into the future beyond this, is also gonna be configured to that Pluto. And so, you know, it’s a bass note, but in a song that will go, that has been playing this month and will continue after this. When I joked about – “joked?” – about like, the cardinal catastrophe last month, there’s a lot more of that. Like, the cardinal signs – and I speak as someone who has a cardinal sign rising – are really getting it this month, and the Pluto station is just part of it.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And you know, because it’s not just sometimes disclosures, but other times it’s the attempt to suppress information and to suppress disclosures is like, the flip side of that as well.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Which is —
AC: Sorry, just to hearken back to a much earlier point in this podcast – like, Pluto either sends things to the underworld so nobody can see them, or it disgorges the contents of what was hidden and secreted away. It loves to do both. It’s like a doorway or a hellmouth.
CB: Yeah. And one last thing I missed last month when we were talking about Pluto in Capricorn making its final pass in Capricorn as well as Uranus getting to the end of Taurus is I didn’t see the news that it was like, Russia essentially functionally legalized cryptocurrencies and set that to go into effect on September 1st. And that was actually incredibly striking, because September 1st was the day that Pluto retrograded back into Capricorn, and also the same day that Uranus stationed in late Taurus at 27 degrees of Taurus trining that. So some of those things that we were talking about happened in terms of how at the tail end of those two outer planet transits that have lasted for like, a decade, you see this transformation of the way that money is handled and the way that stores of value are being handled in the world by the tail end of that. And then of course, as I’ve talked about a lot over the past few months, both candidates now have more or less endorsed cryptocurrency, which represents a huge reversal in terms of that. And yeah, it’ll be interesting to see going forward, because now with different countries legalizing it, it creates then more competition between the countries to be the ones who attempt to dominate that sphere essentially.
AC: Yeah,absolutely. Yeah, it was – and people can refer to our discussion about that last month. We were like, that looks good for crypto. We sort of slowly, we began with a few points and then sort of became increasingly interested and positive in what it might look like in September.
CB: Yeah. So all right, so that’s the Mercury-Pluto square. I’m not sure there’s anything else to say about that. Is there anything else to say about Pluto stationing there? Just especially if you have planets late in that sign of Capricorn, you’re getting the very last pass of a transit that you’ve been experiencing already off and on over the past couple of years especially, and one last sort of burst of intensity in terms of that transit. But then by early next year, you know, Pluto’s in Aquarius and it’s pretty much over for the most part. So —
AC: Yeah, I mean, by the second half of November, Pluto’s back in Aquarius.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s so quick. This is literally the like, Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, and we’ve been back and forth between Capricorn and Aquarius for this last year, but this like, right now there are like, 48 days of Pluto in Capricorn left. It —
CB: I love that as a 29 degree Cancer rising that you’re like, counting down the minutes and seconds until this transit’s over.
AC: It doesn’t feel good, Chris. I can point to the meaningful transformations, and I’m glad those happened, but it felt fantastic to me the second Pluto moved into Aquarius. It felt like I was no longer carrying hell on my back. Like, the lightness – what is it, the completely bearable lightness of being that overcame me. I’m looking forward to it. But one last thing to do, one last like, set of insights, lessons, one more big bass note from Pluto.
CB: Right. Yeah. And it’s like, for some people, that last pass is a transformational event in their life that will leave an imprint. You know, like Diddy for example, who’s basically gonna be in jail for the rest of his life even once this transit is over, and this was just like, the turning point where he went from being a free person to being in jail. For other people, it’s more like, your experience of that long note and like, feeling of the sort of transformative power of that that’s somewhat unsettling and then finally having that pass and having a feeling of like, relief or of having finished a major chapter of your life and moved into a next.
AC: Yeah. It feels like finishing a molting process, right? You know, if you look at the creatures that have to shed their exoskeletons, right, like, growth dictates that you have to lose all of your skin and grow a new shell. I’m sticking with Cancer rising, right? It’s not —
CB: Right.
AC: — very comfortable. You feel vulnerable. It’s awkward; it’s not particularly attractive. But yeah, it feels like the new shell is just around the corner. New exoskeleton, better adapted to the environment.
CB: Yeah. Well, I like that interpretation because of course this month we’re also all gonna be holding our breath in terms of if that’s also what America is going through and what the US looks like after this election and once we complete this also being the final transit of Pluto’s Pluto return of it returning back to where it started at the founding of the country in late Capricorn back in the 1770s, and yeah, molting the shell and what exactly that looks like as we move into this new era that’s gonna last for not just the next 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius, but also the next, you know, couple of centuries of Pluto doing another cycle around the zodiac for the country.
AC: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because when you think of, like, different nations – like, you think of let’s say France. You’re like, well, France has been around for, you know, much longer than the United States; what about their Pluto returns? However, very few countries actually have Pluto returns where they have like, the same system of governance, like, the same constitutional rules. And so usually things have changed. Like, there’s been an overthrow, there’s been a revolution of some sort, or there’s a completely different dynasty that seized power by the time you get to that 250 year mark. And so it’s not really a Pluto return, right, because this new, whatever the new like, dynasty or form of governance is is only 60 years old even though the country’s been around for much longer. Whereas the United States still has like, a thankfully revised set of documents, but it’s the same set of documents. And so the amount of research you can do is actually tiny, because it’s a very rare thing to have a country that has basically the same rules get a Pluto return. Does that make sense?
CB: That does make sense. That is, unfortunately, also the scary thing about what’s happening over the next few months and whether we will emerge from the last pass of this Pluto transit with the same country or with a radically changed one in terms of how our government works or is supposed to work or was set up to work at the foundation of it a few centuries ago. And that’s a good —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — reminder. Everyone should vote in this election, because it’s gonna make a big difference having this Pluto return and what the future of the country looks like as a result of the election.
AC: Yeah. Well, and then we go right into – coincidentally, uncoincidentally, you know, we go right into the Uranus in Gemini period, which always remakes the United States, so.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, fingers crossed!
CB: Yeah. Alright. So that is the Pluto station that’s happening in the middle of the month. And then in terms of other transits, let me pull up the planetary alignments calendar so we can situate ourselves. We get that Sun-Mars square and Sun-Jupiter trine on the 14th, and then we basically head into the next lunation of the month, which is that Aries Full Moon that takes place on the 17th. And you know, normally, we would sort of breathe a sigh of relief at this point that we’ve moved out of the tumultuous eclipse season and we’ve moved back into like, calmer waters. But instead, we get kind of a tense Full Moon.
AC: It’s more than kind of a tense Full Moon.
CB: All right, I’m downplaying it like I usually do. We get a pretty rough Full Moon that basically sets us up for the second half of the month and for essentially the transit that we’re gonna be experiencing for the rest of the year, which is the Mars-Pluto opposition.
So this Full Moon takes place here around the 17th of October. We can see it going exact around 24 degrees of Aries. And what sucks about this Full Moon is when it goes exact at 24, it’s just barely coming off of a square with Mars at 22 degrees of Cancer, and then it applies next to a square with Pluto at 29 degrees of Capricorn. So part of what this also means is that by the time we get to the second half of the month, the Mars-Pluto opposition starts coming into a close degree-based orb and starts becoming very potent and very powerful and becomes the dominant aspect that we’re basically gonna be experiencing for the rest of the year because Mars is gonna slow and station in early Leo and then retrograde back into that opposition a couple more times. So this lunation really kicks that off by emphasizing and by squaring both of those two planets as they come into alignment.
AC: Yeah. It’s super tense. It’s combustible. If we look at like, what’s angular to the Sun and the Moon, right? It’s just all malefics, right; it’s the nodes, it’s Mars, it’s Pluto. And so yes, it’s a Full Moon. The silver of the Moon is restored, right? No blood stained Moon, no eclipse. But it’s very intense. And it’s also worth noting that it’s an Aries Moon, so it’s ruled by that Mars. And the Mars and Moon are actually in mutual reception. And so, you know, something to think about, not just for this Moon but that I believe I advised last month and I’ll double down on is pay attention to Mars in Cancer as it’s kind of getting ready to do all the things that it’s going to do. We’re gonna have a very extended – you’re gonna have a lot of Mars in Cancer, and so ignoring it until the, ignoring the itch until it becomes overwhelmingly painful is not the advice. Right? You wanna go to the doctor as soon as there’s some burning and inflammation. Like, pay attention to what issues, even if they’re small, that Mars is stirring up in your life, in your chart, and treat them with special care. Right? And keep an eye on it so that, you know, you’re not surprised if things go from like, kind of a problem to a big issue. Because what Mars is doing right now at the beginning of the month could very well, yeah, could very well get much worse. And so nipping things in the bud or keeping an eye on them is good practice. You know, because again, it’s the punch you don’t see coming that knocks you out. And so keeping an eye on what Mars is doing will be to pretty much everyone’s benefit.
CB: Yeah. And it really brings the Mars-Pluto into alignment, which I’m gonna animate the chart for those watching the video version. We just see inching closer and closer by the end of the month until by the time we close October on like, the 31st on Halloween, Mars is at 28 degrees of Cancer opposing Pluto at 29 Capricorn. And then of course that opposition goes exact here around November 3rd, just before election day so that it’s gonna become unfortunately one of our primary signatures for election day. So given that, we kind of have to just talk about this opposition and its symbolic significance, because that’s gonna become the dominant energy late in the month, especially from the time of this Full Moon on the 17th forward.
So some of the keywords, one of the keywords that came up like, over the past year that you mentioned, Austin, about Pluto and Mars is just “annihilation.” Like —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — Mars has this basic concept of like, severing and separation and like, cutting through things. And sometimes that can be good, sometimes that can be bad. You know, it also has this reputation for like, Mars is the classic significator of like, violence and aggression and things like that or even sometimes violence being done to people. But Pluto has this basic function of taking things to the utmost extreme and taking something small and then just making it huge. Alan White always used that example of like, a mushroom cloud where it starts with an atom and then all of a sudden it blows up into this huge explosion. And that concept of like, annihilation just becomes a really good keyword for Mars-Pluto because of that tendency to take the violence of Mars and just take it to its utmost possible xtreme. So go ahead.
AC: Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, Mars is a malefic. Mars is an asshole. Mars is violent. But when it’s just Mars, usually what you’re looking at is like, somebody who wants to beat people up and be dominant over them. Right? Or like, somebody who wants to win like, who is maybe over prioritizes winning, and that’s obnoxious. But when we’re bringing like, Pluto, that taking it to an extreme, you know, it’s somebody dying in the boxing ring rather than just getting beat up. It’s like, suddenly it’s mortal combat and the crowd is yelling, “Finish him!” Instead of being in an aggressive spectacle, it feels like you’re somehow now we’re in hell. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: And it’s like, it’s not just being the victor. Right? Like, usually there are contests and people get hurt in contests, but like, going that bridge too far is something that Pluto brings out. And conversely, like, you think about, you know, with Mars as fight or flight, the natural sort of rise, a person’s natural desire to protect themselves. When you feel like you’re facing not just aggression or dominance but annihilation – that back against the wall feeling – like, you also get, you know, that is also a different thing than just trying to defend yourself. And so you get these very xtreme cycles, which yeah, anyway.
CB: Right. Like, what a person does when they are facing like, an existential threat and going to all lengths, but sometimes overreactions like going too far – I’m glad you used that keyword, because that’s a major one with Mars-Pluto. Some of the other keywords I was writing down were things like power struggles, power plays, acts of extreme violence, aggression, confrontations, but also issues with like, manipulation, control, having protracted conflicts in which both sides vie for supremacy but also for survival. Having an intense burning sensation or a smoldering sense of anger. Lashing out at perceived enemies, sometimes overtly and other times covertly. Other things are like, ruthlessness and forcefulness. And then we talked in previous months about sometimes how Mars-Pluto can act like, openly and obviously and just like, going too far on a massive scale, but also sometimes Pluto likes to control things from behind the scenes and can sometimes represent the exercise of power that is hidden and not overt, or that like, looks like it’s coming from one place but then instead it’s coming from another place. And that’s gonna be one of the tricky things about navigating this during this retrograde, because we’re not just gonna get one of these aspects; we’re gonna get three of them. So it’s like the same note on a musical instrument being just drawn out over the course of several months of this same energy. And unfortunately, especially for us in the US, that energy is gonna be very much tied in with the election and everything subsequent to the election between then and inauguration day, and even potentially beyond that when we’re still in this range of these two planets being in this close aspect together.
AC: Yeah, we don’t get our final Mars-Pluto opposition until April, which is wild.
CB: That is crazy.
AC: But yeah. Speaking to we were saying about – so sometimes it’s very overt, it’s very obvious Mars-Pluto. Like, you know, someone dies in the ring or, you know, like, overt acts of terror or violence. But then there’s the suspiciously weirdly quiet side, because Pluto again will show you like, has such things to show you and will disgorge things that were hidden before, but then also will conceal things that are very big and important. And so there you get into all of the like, what is going on behind the scenes. Right? In a relationship between people, Diddy is an excellent example. Up until very recently, up until early this year, all of that stuff was under, you know, was beneath the ground. Right? That was like, happening but in the underworld; nobody could see it, and you couldn’t hear it. Like, there were rumors about this and that, but it was hidden. And so with the Mars-Pluto opposition and oppositions in general, there’s sort of a back and forth. And we have Pluto, again, like, hyper-revealing but also concealing, and the fact that this isn’t one Mars-Pluto opposition but one of a series suggests that we’re gonna get both of those. And also, you know, Pluto because of that concealing quality is confusing. Right? It’s confusing for Mars. Like, I don’t know, am I facing annihilation? Am I just super overreacting? Is there stuff going on? It can be very paranoia-inducing, because it’s Pluto, so you can’t see things clearly; half of it is concealed.
CB: Right. Yeah. I remember under like, Jupiter-Pluto alignments sometimes there can be the explosion of like, conspiracy theories and stuff like that that we experienced a few years ago. But with this, sometimes it’s almost like, that of the paranoia element and the conspiracy theory element, but that then also leads to action or leads to negative repercussions in some sense. I did half of a study – I didn’t finish doing it, but – I was going through and looking at dates of past Mars-Pluto oppositions, and I was very disturbed by the number of like, explosions and especially like, terrorist type incidents that were occurring under some of the previous ones. There was also sometimes instances of the disclosure of horrific acts of violence. Like, back in the 2004 late April Mars-Pluto opposition, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal broke in the United States when CBS News published the first photographs of the US army commiting these like, horrific acts of abuse on Iraqi prisoners. So sometimes you’ve got stuff like that where it’s like, the awareness of things like that coming to the public attention.
AC: Yeah. And also, so we do have one like, reasonable precedent for Mars retrograding opposite Pluto three times, and that was Q4 of 2007, and then into Q1 of 2008. We had Mars oppose Pluto three times. It was in Gemini and Capricorn, so it was interesting that Pluto’s movement into Capricorn was actually accompanied by a trio of Mars oppositions as well. And so that was – drawing from that – that was not great for the economies of many nations. And then sort of going, you know, time traveling back there for just sort of the flavor, right? The Mars-Pluto also just gave a feeling of doom. Right? It was like, oh, like, this whole thing is fucked. How far is the market gonna fall? Like, the Mars-Pluto just like, oh things are doomed. Mars opposite Pluto – there’s nothing that can be done. Right? Mars can be that sparky, plucky individual force, and Pluto is just this collective or historical tide that you can’t do anything about, the feeling of which, right, is like, oh, it’s doom. Like, there’s nothing that can be done. And that wasn’t the end of all things, right, but just kind of thinking about what that felt like for a lot of people.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I was listening to a podcast recently of like, a comedian, Michelle Wolf, who said she was working at like, Bear Stearns like, during the 2008 collapse, and then —
AC: Oof.
CB: — that bank just like, ceased to exist. It was just absolutely wiped out after that. And you know, some people who worked for it, they were encouraged to like, put their retirement into stock for the company, so that it wasn’t just that they lost their job but it was that their entire life savings got wiped out when this company crashed and the stock dropped to zero. So that’s another example; just sometimes like, extremes of the difference between like, you know, losing your job and that really sucks, versus losing your entire life savings and everything you’ve built up over a several decade long period of work.
AC: Yeah, that’s a heart-wrenching and good example. Right? Like, it would be if you lost half of what you’d saved over 20 years in one month, that would be devastating. But just to have it gone.
CB: Right.
AC: Right? Like that, again, like, instead of pain, loss, whatever – just annihilation. It’s just not there anymore.
CB: Yeah. So you know, we have a lot of concerns about how this is gonna play out in terms of mundane stuff, in terms of the election, and you know, conflicts probably presumably related to the results. It’s really weird that Mars stations in early December around the time that the votes are being certified, essentially, and then there’s also some stuff in early January. So I’m sure this is gonna lead to a protracted probably conflict about some of the things related to the election and the outcome of it. But on a —
AC: Yeah. It’s just so hard to imagine that like, that voting happens, they’re counted, there’s a result, and we move forward with the astrology. I would be so excited if that was the case, but it’s just so hard to square the astrology with that sort of clean and clear result.
CB: Yeah. Well, and the other reason for that is like, Mars goes into Leo right before election day, and that’s Trump’s rising sign. So it’s like, we’re looking at a very long transit of Mars going retrograde in Trump’s first house with the election, and that just sounds like him raging and being angry about something. So that one of the scenarios, of course, is if he loses the election, he will say that it was stolen, which is what he did last time. So whether we have this huge like, protracted conflict in the country about him claiming that the election was stolen and then whether there’s a peaceful transfer of power and all that other stuff.
AC: Yeah. There are a lot of possibilities, and I’m not particularly excited about 95 percent of them.
CB: Right, for sure. A lot of possible scenarios. On a personal level, though, to try to relate this to individual listeners outside of the mundane astrology potential terrible repercussions in the world stage, how should be relate this to people? Let’s say like, best case scenario for a Mars-Pluto alignment that’s taking place over the course of months is maybe having an extreme period of physical or even mental exertion that pushes you to your absolute limits, but in which you accomplish like, more than you even thought possible to accomplish during that period of time I think is one of the more positive ways I could see that manifesting.
AC: Yeah. Although I would be careful about sort of advising people to push towards what seems like annihilation. You know, I’ve been thinking about this one a lot because I have a 29 Cancer, 29 Capricorn Ascendant Descendant axis. Right? Like, this – and I’m in a Mars-ruled year. So like, that opposition that we’re talking about is by degree on my Ascendant and Descendant. And so I’ve been thinking about that for over a year now. And you know, so one, I dn’t think that I’m going to be annihilated on November 3rd; I do think that it will be challenging, right? As I’ve been trying to say about Mars, with the Mars in Cancer, it looks like if it’s relationships with people – like, you know, friends, family, lovers, whatever – it’s a bunch of negative feelings getting stirred up. It’s people’s, you know, feeling threatened and insecure like, you know, and handling those feelings in a way that doesn’t make the conflicts worse. If it’s in your first house or if it’s afflicting the ruler of the Ascendant, it’s watching yourself and watching your own reactions. So if you get, you know, you get attacked or you feel attacked, you don’t react in such a way that like, you’re creating the, like, that you’re feeding into a Mars-Pluto doom spiral. You know, just being thoughtful and knowing that there are negative options on offer and that there may be things that you have no control over, but there probably are a lot of things that you do have some ability to steer around. And yeah, being aware of like, of what that Mars trigger looks like and how to not make it worse by reacting to it. Because that is a huge difficulty that Mars in Cancer brings is it tends to react to something negative happening in a way that makes the negative thing worse rather than fixing it.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And to – because Pluto’s tough because sometimes you get swept up in events that are outside of your control, and you —
AC: Sure.
CB: — have to learn. It’s very humbling. Like, Pluto transits can be very humbling because you have those experience of going through events where maybe you don’t have power to change the outcome, and so you have to learn to accept whatever that is, even if it’s something that you really don’t like. But with the Mars part of that, maybe a good meditation throughout this is just to control those things that you can control while at the same time learning to accept those things that are outside of your power or where you’re just in the midst of getting swept up in history. But you still have some control over your immediate environment or your immediate sort of emotional reaction to everything that’s swirling around you.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that during periods – I mean, literally there’s no period of life where there aren’t things out of your control that are important. We’re never in total control. But at some points, we have noticeably less than normal, and that very easily triggers a panic or fear response. And so remembering the things that are in your control, and giving Mars something to do. Right? Mars is not a planet that likes to – it’s not a part of us or a planet that likes to feel powerless, and so remembering those things which are controllable or where we can make a difference, even if it’s remembering to exercise in the evening even if everything else is going crazy and you can’t do anything about it. Like, having some place to put in an effort that makes a positive difference can be very sustaining mentally during difficult times.
CB: Yeah. That’s a really great piece of advice. All right. Other things for Mars-Pluto oppositions – I’m trying to think about personal advice or other mundanes, things we wanna say about that. I did have a few other like, minor transits this month I wanted to mention.
AC: Yeah. I don’t think – yeah, I don’t have anything more to say about that opposition right now. Again, we’re going to be in conversation about this dynamic for the next several months, and then several after that. It’s just part of the background for a while.
CB: For sure. Yeah. So we will revisit that. All right. Well, part of what I wanted to mention – I was trying to look this month to see, since this is October and an election year, if there was some sort of like, October surprise, when would that happen? And especially if there were any Uranus signatures this month, which, Uranus… You know, an October surprise is not always something that comes out of nowhere and is just absolutely shocking, so it doesn’t have to be a Uranian thing. But if there was some Uranian thing this month, a couple of the transits where Uranus does get hit – the one that seemed the most notable was at the very end of the month when Mercury opposes Uranus on October 30th. So let me show that. And that’s pretty late, typically, for an October surprise. Typically they happen a little earlier in the month, although I guess we did have the Hillary emails thing where the FBI announced that probably pretty late in October last time. So here we see Mercury on October 30th at 25 degrees of Scorpio, opposing Uranus at 25 Taurus. So sometimes that can just be like, a shocking or a surprising piece of news comes out of nowhere and causes tension or causes upset around that time is one possibility, both in terms of world events as well as just in terms of personal events, especially if somebody has something around 25 degrees of the fixed signs.
One other transit I saw with Uranus this month is earlier in the month on the 14th, the same day virtually that the Sun squares Mars and the Sun trines Jupiter, Venus actually opposes Uranus on October 14th. So here’s what that looks like. So we kind of need to layer that into our delineation to some extent that the same day that we have this very tense square between the Sun and Mars with Jupiter attempting to counterbalance with a positive thing, there’s also something like, shocking or surprising that’s happening at the same time with Venus hitting 26 degrees of Scorpio and opposing Uranus at 26 degrees of Taurus. And that’s especially one that’s sort of surprising things in terms of interpersonal relationships and different things in that category or that area. But sometimes it can be just surprising things in general.
AC: Yeah. I think – yeah, so that Venus opposition that you’re highlighting as well as the later Mercury opposition definitely bring that potential for surprise to the forefront. It’s also true that our growing Mars-Pluto opposition is also – both Mars and Pluto are relatively tightly aspected to Uranus. And so Uranus is going to kind of get folded, they’re gonna be like, little surprise shock elements that get folded into that Mars-Pluto, and that’s just kind of true for the whole second half plus of the month with those stress points that you pointed out with Venus and then Mercury making exact opposition to Pluto while Venus is also aspecting trine to Mars, sextile to Pluto. We have so much action happening at the very end of water and earth signs.
CB: Right. I just realized it’s like, Mercury’s at one degree of Scorpio this day, so that’s the same degree as Kamala Harris’s Mercury, which is the ruler of her Ascendant, so the news is probably something surrounding her that day.
AC: Yeah. I don’t have any specific idea or prediction, but it is worth noting that that kind of wild Full Moon is her natal Sun and Moon. She was a Full Moon in Aries with the Sun in Libra.
CB: Right. And that’s also around the time of her solar return since she was born on October 20th. So she switches actually from a 12th house profection year, which is Taurus, to a 1st house profection year, which is Gemini on her solar return on October 20th.
AC: Interesting.
CB: Yeah. Where the Moon is also transiting through Gemini and applying to that Jupiter; it’s actually one of the – if you break it down, it’s one of the tricky things about analyzing the transits, because she’s getting that activated with that Jupiter transit near her Ascendant in the first house in a first house profection year at the election while Trump, of course, famously has his Sun very close to there in Gemini, and his Sun is the ruler of the Ascendant. So there’s kind of a toss-up when it comes to some of the transits there and whether it comes out in favor of one of them when it comes to just that single analysis.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Alright. Let me see. Other things. Venus gets out of Scorpio and goes into Sagittarius on October 17th, which is kind of nice, although then it —
AC: Yeah, go ahead. I think it’s kind of nice too.
CB: Okay, well, it’s nice, but then it also starts heading into a square with Saturn. It’s gotta get through this square with Saturn, which goes exact on October 28th first, which is a little bit of a downer and a little bit of pouring, you know, cold water on Venus’s otherwise, like, Sagittarius fire party once she departs from Scorpio.
AC: Yeah. What I like about Venus moving in Sagittarius is that it puts Venus in a whole sign opposition to Jupiter. So it’s Jupiter and Venus looking across the sky at each other; we like configured benefics. And it’s Venus in a Jupiter-ruled sign staring right at Jupiter, and it would just be lovely if not for having to complete the square with Saturn first.
CB: Right.
AC: After Venus clears that, it’s actually a nice silver or like, coppery lining to the very difficult or very tense end of the month, beginning of next month. But at least it’s not opposite Uranus and configured with Pluto and Mars, and… I’ll take the shift into Sagittarius, especially the second half of that journey.
CB: Yeah. Totally. It’s one of the few saving graces about election day is that there’s this very close, not like, super close, but Venus and Jupiter are pretty close to an opposition. So it’ll be interesting that when one of them is rising over the horizon that day, the other one will be setting, and that’s one of the cool things about oppositions. So that opposition is a little bit positive in terms of offsetting the Mars-Pluto opposition that’s happening at the same time.
AC: Yeah, and nice for mutable planets. You know, cardinal planets are still gonna be having a time, but for mutable placements, that’s double benefics.
CB: Yeah. So positive things for people with mutable rising, especially planets around those degrees. But there is this one day towards the end of the month where Venus at about 12, 13 degrees of Sagittarius hits a square with Saturn and there may be some tensions in terms of interpersonal relationships and in terms of feeling like a cooling off or feeling colder towards somebody on that day, or having, you know, balancing the sense of like, romance with a sense of not just obligation but also the practical numbers of like, whether a relationship adds up or makes sense is something that people sometimes experience under hard aspects between Venus and Saturn. And it gets accentuated that day by the Moon swooping through Virgo and forming a t-square with Venus and Saturn.
AC: Yeah. And you have some frustration there, right, where it feels like, oh – you know, you should be having a double benefic party, but like, Saturn must be appeased. Right? And sometimes that’s through hearing out that this isn’t, you know, hearing Saturn out, and they’re like, no, this isn’t realistic. Or yeah, this nice thing can happen, but you’re gonna have to wait a little bit or you’re gonna have to consider the cost. You know, there’s – even when Saturn’s being helpful, there’s a like, coming down to earth and you know, yeah, there’s a coldness and a hardness to Saturn which might be helpful but is not fun. It doesn’t keep the party going.
CB: Yeah, I like that. It’s like a tollbooth that Venus has to pay in order to get to Jupiter.
AC: Yeah. But at least there’s the Jupiter aspect on the other side.
CB: Right. Exactly. And it’s just a fleeting aspect, unlike some of the other aspects this month, but still worth noting. Speaking of that, I did wanna mention our auspicious electional chart for this month. It’s kind of hard. Leisa and I just did the electional astrology podcast for October and tried to find the best dates, but with all of these difficult alignments happening with like, eclipse season and all the Mars stuff at the beginning of the month and then the Mars-Pluto opposition towards the end of the month, it’s actually pretty tricky. But our auspicious election for this month, the best date we can find if you do have to do something or launch something important, takes place around this time on October 25th. And there’s a few different rising signs that you could use this day, but the one I like the most is Aquarius rising, which occurs around three PM local time. Whatever your location is, just set it for your city and set it for about three PM. And if you do, you should end up with a chart that has Aquarius rising, and what you should do is you should adjust the Ascendant until the Ascendant is at about 20 degrees of Aquarius in your location.
So this is the chart that you’ll end up with roughly. You’ll have a chart with Aquarius rising, the ruler of the Ascendant is Saturn in Pisces in the 2nd whole sign house in a day chart, showing kind of a focus on financial matters for this chart, which is pretty good. The Moon is in Leo, and it’s applying to a sextile with Jupiter, which is helping to affirm the Moon and indicate positive things coming up in the future as you long can catch that as an applying aspect. If you can’t catch it in your time zone, like, if you’re on the west coast for example of the US, you might be able to back the chart up a day and still get something pretty decent with the Moon applying to Jupiter.
So I picked this specific time because if you pick 20 degrees of Aquarius, you can get a nice, supportive, and protective trine from Jupiter in Gemini down there in he 5th house. And that’s a pretty good, especially for like, creativity and other things related to the 5th house which can also include fun and games and leisurely activities. We also see that Venus is up there in the 11th whole sign house. In our location, we also adjusted the time in order to put Venus not too far off from the Midheaven. So if you’re able to accomplish that in your location, that would be great; although if you can’t, it’s not a huge deal. But Venus up there in the 11th house is doing pretty well for friends, groups, and alliances, especially being ruled by Jupiter. And since Venus is applying to the square with Saturn, but Saturn is the ruler of the Ascendant, that overcoming square from Venus actually becomes helpful in terms of helping to affirm and support the ruler of the Ascendant, which represents you in the chart and what you’re initiating and starting at this time.
So the area of major difficulty in the chart, of course, is Mars in Cancer in the 6th house of work and health at 26 degrees of Cancer, and it’s applying to that opposition with Pluto in the 12th house of self-undoing, enemies, and isolation. So you know, it’s not great; I’m not gonna lie. I wouldn’t normally – if this was like, a huge thing, like, try to schedule something for a close Mars-Pluto opposition. However, if you have to, this is the best chart that I can come up with in order to squeeze the best energy out of some of these alignments that are happening, the most positive alignments that are happening this month, and in order to try to mitigate some of the most challenging alignments that are happening, I think this is the best I can come up with.
So yeah, that’s our auspicious electional chart for this month for October. We found something like 15 other electional charts on different days throughout the course of the month, which we released in our electional astrology podcast through our page on Patreon just a few days ago. So if you’re looking for other dates this month besides just this one on the 25th, you can access those through our page at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
All right. And that is our best chart for the month. You said you used Aquarius rising recently for something?
AC: Yeah, during the Leo Moon a few days ago.
CB: Nice. Exactly. Yeah, just like our electional chart. It reminds me of just like, the best part of J.K. Rowling’s chart, which is, you know, Aquarius rising, Saturn in the 2nd house in Pisces ruled by Jupiter in the 5th house, and becoming a billionaire by writing like, children’s books. And that part of that chart that’s relatively successful or positive, but not necessarily the rest of it. So that’s part of what you’re going for there with a chart like this.
AC: Yeah. There’s a lot that works there.
CB: Speaking of, did you see – this was really funny – on September 4th, Martin, what’s his name? Game of Thrones author?
AC: Oh, George R. R. Martin.
CB: George R. R. Martin like, wrote a scathing blog post like, criticizing the showrunners of House of Dragon for deviating from what he wrote in his book in the script for what they ended up putting up on the show. And that was the day that Mars ingressed into Cancer, which is his 3rd house.
AC: And —
CB: He was having a 3rd house transit.
AC: Yeah, and it conjoined his natal Uranus there.
CB: Right, yeah.
AC: So he has Uranus there, and then Mars hits it. Yeah, and then freaks out – blog is totally a 3rd house thing. We didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but yeah, I also read it before they took it down.
CB: Well, yeah, because he pulled it down because probably he was breaking a bunch of like, agreements and other things with like, HBO, I’m sure, to not criticize the show. It was actually very surprising, because he doesn’t usually – even if he’s not happy with stuff, he doesn’t usually openly criticize it.
AC: Yeah, and it was very Mars Cancer in the sense of like, finally, like, reacting after feelings had been building up for him for probably 10 years, right? And it just so happened that that Mars ingress into Cancer hitting the Uranus was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And then taking it back right away, but you know, sometimes it’s, increasingly it is harder to unsay things, right, when people can screencap it and share it, et cetera, et cetera. I also thought it was sort of a master class in passive aggression, which you know, Mars in Cancer can be.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
AC: Guilty of/also be a champion of.
CB: Yeah. Other Mars in Cancer champions – I think the avatar of Mars in Cancer over the past month has been this baby pygmy hippo in Thailand called Moo Deng. She was born back in like, July with the Sun and Venus I think in Cancer. But for some reason, this hippo just went viral over the course of the past month as soon as Mars went into Cancer in early September, and it’s actually been really funny to watch. She was just parodied on like, SNL like, just a few nights ago even.
AC: Yeah, that’s really funny. It’s extra funny for Kait and I because we’ve been talking about Lucian in pachyderm analogies for a month or two now. He’s a very large child. And so literally like, we call him the flippo because he’s always flipping around on the bed, and he’s mobile – he’s not crawling, but he’s like, rolling to get places – dangerously so – so we talk about the hippopotamus. He’s a pachyderm; we talk about him as the attackoderm because he’s an Aries. But anyway, and so famous baby hippo, we’re like, oh, it’s just something in the air. Adorable, aggressive pachyderms.
CB: Exactly. Yeah. So people have to check that out. I don’t know why it’s happening, but it just seems Mars in Cancer-y to me, which is pretty funny.
AC: Well, it’s like, adorable but like, kind of potentially Mars-y and dangerous. Because I mean, even a tiny hippo is a large creature, right? Like, the pygmy hippopotamus – like, his mom is still like, larger than a bull. You know?
CB: Right.
AC: And hippos actually, I believe, the statistics – like, hippos hurt a lot more people per year than crocodiles. Like, they’re really dangerous animals. And so to have something dangerous in adorable baby form is very Mars in Cancer.
CB: Yeah, it’s just an adorable baby version of that, though, that like, chomps on your knee but it doesn’t really do anything.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So we will leave you all with that as the imagery for Mars in Cancer to —
AC: That’s right.
CB: — balance out our earlier treatment. But I think that’s it for this forecast this month; I think we covered everything pretty comprehensively here as much as we could. You know, we’ll see how world events play out with the rest of eclipse season, and then we’ll start experiencing the Mars-Pluto at the end of the month. And then we will return again next month. Actually, that’s really funny – we’re gonna have to do the next episode like, right as that aspect’s going very close at the end of October. So we will definitely be revisiting Mars-Pluto by the end of the month.
AC: Yeah, hopefully I don’t get annihilated on camera.
CB: Yeah. I’m gonna annihilate some nachos after recording this episode is my plan. So all right, my friend, good job today. What do you have coming up this month? What are you working on? What do you have happening?
AC: Okay. So I’m just working on all my normal things. You can see some of the things I’ve done before. I’ve got all, I’ve got, I don’t know, a hundred hours worth of different recorded workshops and classes I’ve done available for download on my website. I’m not personally taking readings right now, but on my website you can also find the graduates from my program who know how to do a bunch of the stuff I know how to do. And then Sphere and Sundry actually closed between the eclipses; they got overwhelmed by the sale that was announced last month, but will be reopening right after the solar eclipse. The sale is back on. And there’s going to be a beautiful, extremely benefic solar series that is going to debut this month as a counterpoint to all of the rather, yeah, the rather unshiny, unfresh configurations. So look for the Golden Soul announcement and look for Sphere and Sundry to reopen shortly after the eclipse.
CB: Nice. Excellent. That’s exciting. Cool. And as for myself, I just recorded – I spent a good chunk of the past few weeks researching the 3rd house for the next installment in my houses series. And Leisa and I did a huge intensive amount of research on that, and we ended up recording our episode on the 3rd house already. We have over 108 examples in that episode. It’s so extensive, but we found so many good charts of 3rd house placements; it’s really incredible. One of my favorite was it turns out that Billie Eilish has a mutual reception between the ruler of the 10th house of career and the 3rd house of siblings, and she famously, you know, her brother – they work together basically and have produced and won a bunch of awards together for their collaborations. So we found a ton of great examples like that and have already released that and it’s available for early access through our page on Patreon. It’s a very long episode because I decided to make it my definitive treatment of the 3rd house. So as a result of that, it’s actually gonna take me a while to edit and then release. I may not release it until sometime mid to late October possibly; we’ll have to see if I can find it a good election before then. But it will be available for early access to all patrons, and then once I do release it to the public, for patrons I’m gonna release a 75-page ebook as a bonus that will be available just to patrons, which will contain all of our notes that we did in researching the episode as well as charts. And it will contain a bunch of examples that we didn’t get to include just because of cutting them out for time purposes for the purpose of the episode. So that’ll be available on Patreon, and then I’m already starting to research and work on the 4th house, and we’ll see if I’m able to record that at some point later in the month if we’re able to get it all together at some point in October.
AC: Yeah. Love the encyclopedic style work.
CB: Yeah, I like doing definitive things and like, raising the bar on astrological research, and I think Leisa and I were able to definitely do this in this episode, so I’m excited to share it with everybody.
AC: Yeah, it’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. All right. Well, I think that’s it. Thanks, everyone, for watching or listening to this episode. Thanks to the live audience of patrons that joined us in the live chat throughout the course of this; it’s been really fun seeing all of the comments and talking with everybody. And I think that’s it for this forecast. So thanks a lot for watching; we will see you again next month. Good luck with all of the different transits. And otherwise, good luck and take care, and we’ll see you again for our next forecast at the end of October!
All right. Have a good one!
AC: Bye.
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